"Some things though they be honest, very goodly and right excellently vertuous, yet have they not their effect but in a co-partner."
Whether it was Shakspere's reading of Montaigne that sent him to Seneca, to whom Montaigne[99] avows so much indebtedness, we of course cannot tell; but it is enough for the purpose of our argument to say that we have here another point or stage in a line of analytical thought on which Shakspere was embarked about 1603, and of which the starting point or initial stimulus was the perusal of Florio's Montaigne. We have the point of contact with Montaigne in Hamlet, where the saying that reason is implanted in us to be used, is seen to be one of the many correspondences of thought between the play and the Essays. The idea is more subtly and deeply developed in Measure for Measure, and still more subtly and philosophically in Troilus and Cressida. The fact of the process of development is all that is here affirmed, over and above the actual phenomena of reproduction before set forth.
As to these, the proposition is that in sum they constitute such an amount of reproduction of Montaigne as explains Jonson's phrase about habitual "stealings." There is no justification for applying that to the passage in the Tempest, since not only is that play not known to have existed in its present form in 1605,[100] when Volpone was produced, but the phrase plainly alleges not one but many borrowings. I am not aware that extracts from Montaigne have been traced in any others of the English contemporary dramatists. But here in two plays of Shakspere, then fresh in memory—the Second Quarto having been published in 1604 and Measure for Measure produced in the same year—were echoes enough from Montaigne to be noted by Jonson, whom we know to have owned, as did Shakspere, the Florio folio, and to have been Florio's warm admirer. And there seems to be a confirmation of our thesis in the fact that, while we find detached passages savouring of Montaigne in some later plays of the same period, as in one of the concluding period, the Tempest, we do not again find in any one play such a cluster of reminiscences as we have seen in Hamlet and Measure for Measure, though the spirit of Montaigne's thought, turned to a deepening pessimism, may be said to tinge all the later tragedies.
(a) In Othello (? 1604) we have Iago's "'tis in ourselves that we are thus or thus," already considered, to say nothing of Othello's phrase—
"I saw it not, thought it not, it harmed not me.... He that is robb'd, not wanting what is stolen, Let him not know it, and he's not robb'd at all."
—a philosophical commonplace which compares with various passages in the Fortieth Essay.
(b) In Lear (1606) we have such a touch as the king's lines[101]—
"And take upon's the mystery of things As if we were God's spies;"
—which recalls the vigorous protest of the essays, that a man ought soberly to meddle with the judging of the divine laws,[102] where Montaigne avows that if he dared he would put in the category of imposters the
"interpreters and ordinary controllers of the designs of God, setting about to find the causes of each accident, and to see in the secrets of the divine will the incomprehensible motives of its works."