Montaigne and Shakspere

by J. M. Robertson

VI.

What then is the general, and what the final relation of Shakspere's thought to that of Montaigne? How far did the younger man approve and assimilate the ideas of the elder, how far did he reject them, how far modify them? In some respects this is the most difficult part of our inquiry, were it only because Shakspere is firstly and lastly a dramatic writer. But he is not only that: he is at once the most subjective, the most sympathetic, and the most self-witholding of dramatic writers. Conceiving all situations, all epochs, in terms of his own psychology, he is yet the furthest removed from all dogmatic design on the opinions of his listeners; and it is only after a most vigilant process of moral logic that we can ever be justified in attributing to him this or that thesis of any one of his personages, apart from the general ethical sympathies which must be taken for granted. Much facile propaganda has been made by the device of crediting him in person with every religious utterance found in his plays—even in the portions which analytical criticism proves to have come from other hands. Obviously we must look to his general handling of the themes with which the current religion deals, in order to surmise his attitude to that religion. And in the same way we must compare his general handling of tragic and moral issues, in order to gather his general attitude to the doctrine of Montaigne.

At the very outset, we must make a clean sweep of the strange proposition of Mr. Jacob Feis—that Shakspere deeply disliked the philosophy of Montaigne, and wrote Hamlet to discredit it. It is hard to realise how such a hopeless misconception can ever have arisen in the mind of anyone capable of making the historic research on which Mr. Feis seeks to found his assertion. If there were no other argument against it, the bare fact that the tragedy of Hamlet existed before Shakspere, and that he was, as usual, simply working over a play already on the boards, should serve to dismiss such a wild hypothesis. And from every other point of view, the notion is equally preposterous.

No human being in Shakspere's day could have gathered from Hamlet such a criticism of Montaigne as Mr. Feis reads into it by means of violences of interpretation which might almost startle Mr. Donnelly. Even if they blamed Hamlet for delaying his revenge, in the manner of the ordinary critical moralist, they could not possibly regard that delay as a kind of vice arising from the absorption of Montaignesque opinions. In the very year of the appearance of Florio's folio, it was a trifle too soon to make the assumption that Montaigne was demoralising mankind, even if we assume Shakspere to have ever been capable of such a judgment. And that assumption is just as impossible as the other. According to Mr. Feis, Shakspere detested such a creed and such conduct as Hamlet's, and made him die by poison in order to show his abhorrence of them—this, when we know Hamlet to have died by the poisoned foil in the earlier play. On that view, Cordelia died by hanging in order to show Shakspere's conviction that she was a malefactor; and Desdemona by stifling as a fitting punishment for adultery. The idea is outside of serious discussion. Barely to assume that Shakspere held Hamlet for a pitiable weakling is a sufficiently shallow interpretation of the play; but to assume that he made him die by way of condign punishment for his opinions is merely ridiculous. Once for all, there is absolutely nothing in Hamlet's creed or conduct which Shakspere was in a position to regard as open to his denunciation. The one intelligible idea which Mr. Feis can suggest as connecting Hamlet's conduct with Montaigne's philosophy is that Montaigne was a quietest, preaching and practising withdrawal from public broils. But Shakspere's own practice was on all fours with this. He sedulously held aloof from all meddling in public affairs; and as soon as he had gained a competence he retired, at the age of forty-seven, to Stratford-on-Avon. Mr. Feis's argument brings us to the very crudest form of the good old Christian verdict that if Hamlet had been a good and resolute man he would have killed his uncle out of hand, whether at prayers or anywhere else, and would then have married Ophelia, put his mother in a nunnery, and lived happily ever after.[162] And to that edifying assumption, Mr. Feis adds the fantasy that Shakspere dreaded the influence of Montaigne as a deterrent from the retributive slaughter of guilty uncles by wronged nephews.

In the hands of Herr Stedefeld, who in 1871 anticipated Mr. Feis's view of Hamlet as a sermon against Montaigne, the thesis is not a whit more plausible. Herr Stedefeld entitles his book[163]: "Hamlet: a Drama-with-a-purpose (Tendenzdrama) opposing the sceptical and cosmopolitan view of things taken by Michael de Montaigne"; and his general position is that Shakspere wrote the play as "the apotheosis of a practical Christianity," by way of showing how any one like Hamlet, lacking in Christian piety, and devoid of faith, love, and hope, must needs come to a bad end, even in a good cause. We are not entitled to charge Herr Stedefeld's thesis to the account of religious bias, seeing that Mr. Feis in his turn writes from the standpoint of a kind of Protestant freethinker, who sees in Shakspere a champion of free inquiry against the Catholic conformist policy of Montaigne; while strictly orthodox Christians have found in Hamlet's various allusions to deity, and in his "as for me, I will go pray," a proof alike of his and of Shakspere's steadfast piety. Against all such superficialities of exegesis alike our safeguard must be a broad common-sense induction.

We are entitled to say at the outset, then, only this, that Shakspere at the time of working over Hamlet and Measure for Measure in 1603-1604 had in his mind a great deal of the reasoning in Montaigne's Essays; and that a number of the speeches in the two plays reproduce portions of what he had read. We are not entitled to assume that these portions are selected as being in agreement with Shakspere's own views: we are here limited to saying that he put certain of Montaigne's ideas or statements in the mouths of his characters where they would be appropriate. It does not follow that he shared the feelings of Claudio as to the possible life of the soul after death. And when Hamlet says to Horatio, on the strangeness of the scene with the Ghost:

"And therefore as a stranger give it welcome! There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, Than are dreamt of in our philosophy"—

though this may be said to be a summary of the whole drift of Montaigne's essay,[164] That it is folly to refer truth or falsehood to our sufficiency; and though we are entitled to believe that Shakspere had that essay or its thesis in his mind, there is no reason to suppose that the lines express Shakspere's own belief in ghosts. Montaigne had indicated his doubts on that head even in protesting against sundry denials of strange allegations: and it is dramatically fitting that Hamlet in the circumstances should say what he does. On the other hand, when the Duke in Measure for Measure, playing the part of a friar preparing a criminal for death, gives Claudio a consolation which does not contain a word of Christian doctrine, not a syllable of sacrificial salvation and sacramental forgiveness, we are entitled to infer from such a singular negative phenomenon, if not that Shakspere rejected the Christian theory of things, at least that it formed no part of his habitual thinking. It was the special business of the Duke, playing in such a character, to speak to Claudio of sin and salvation, of forgiveness and absolution. Such a singular omission must at least imply disregard on the part of the dramatist. It is true that Isabella, pleading to Angelo in the second Act, speaks as a believing Christian on the point of forgiveness for sins; and the versification here is quite Shaksperean. But a solution of the anomaly is to be found here as elsewhere in the fact that Shakspere was working over an existing play;[165] and that in ordinary course he would, if need were, put the religious pleading of Isabella into his own magistral verse just as he would touch up the soliloquy of Hamlet on the question of killing his uncle at prayers—a soliloquy which we know to have existed in the earlier forms of the play. The writer who first made Isabella plead religiously with Angelo would have made the Duke counsel Claudio religiously. The Duke's speech, then, is to be regarded as Shakspere's special insertion; and it is to be taken as negatively exhibiting his opinions.

In the same way, the express withdrawal of the religious note at the close of Hamlet—where in the Second Quarto we have Shakspere making the dying prince say "the rest is silence" instead of "heaven receive my soul," as in the First Quarto—may reasonably be taken to express the same agnosticism on the subject of a future life as is implied in the Duke's speech to Claudio. It cannot reasonably be taken to suggest a purpose of holding Hamlet up to blame as an unbeliever, because Hamlet is made repeatedly to express himself, in talk and in soliloquy, as a believer in deity, in prayer, in hell, and in heaven. These speeches are mostly reproductions of the old play, the new matter being in the nature of the pagan allusion to the "divinity that shapes our ends." What is definitely Shaksperean is just the agnostic conclusion.