Dreams, whereby sleeping senses are mis-led. [103]
—which hasten and prolong their flight, according as they are followed. The fruit and scope of their pursuit is to pursue. As Alexander said, that the end of his travel was to travel.
Nil actum credens cum quid superesset agendum.
Who thought that nought was done,
When ought remain’d undone. [104]
As for me, then, I love my life and cherish it, such as it hath pleased God to grant it us. I desire not he should speak of the necessity of eating and drinking. [105] And I would think to offend no less excusably in desiring it should have it double. Sapiens divitiarum naturalium quæsitor acerrimus. A wise man is a most eager and earnest searcher of those things that are natural. [106] Not that we should sustain ourselves by only putting a little of that drug into our mouth wherewith Epimenides was wont to allay hunger and yet maintained himself. Nor that we should insensibly [107] produce children at our fingers’ ends or at our heels but rather (speaking with reverence) that we might with pleasure and voluptuousness produce them both at our heels’ and fingers’ ends. Nor that the body should be void of desire and without tickling-delight. They are ungrateful and impious complaints. I cheerfully and thankfully and with a good heart accept what nature hath created for me, and am therewith well pleased and am proud of it. Great wrong is offered unto that great and all-puissant Giver, to refuse his gift, which is so absolutely good, and disanull or disfigure the same, since he made it perfectly good. Omnia quæ secundum naturam sunt; estimatione digna sunt. All things that are according to nature are worthy to be esteemed. [108]
Of philosophy’s opinions, I more willingly embrace those which are the most solid, that is to say, such as are most human and most ours. My discourses are suitable to my manners, low and humble. She [109] then brings forth a child well-pleasing me when she betakes herself to her quiddities and ergos to persuade us that it is a barbarous alliance to marry what is divine with that which is terrestrial; wed reasonable with unreasonable; combine severe with indulgent; and couple honest with unhonest; that voluptuousness is a brutal quality, unworthy the taste of a wise man. [110] The only pleasure he draws from the enjoying of a fair young bride is the delight of his conscience, by performing an action according unto order, as to put on his boots for a profitable riding. Oh that his followers had no more right or sinews or pith or juice at the dis-maidening of their wives than they have in his lessons. [111]
It is not that which Socrates, both his [112] and our master, sayeth. He valueth rightly as he ought corporal voluptuousness, but he preferreth that of the mind, as having more force, more constancy, facility, variety, and dignity. This, according to him, goeth nothing alone—he is not so fantastical—but only first. For him, temperance is a moderatrix [113] and not an adversary of sensualities. [114]
Nature is a gentle guide, yet not more gentle than prudent and just. Intrandum est in rerum naturam, et penitus quid ea postulet, pervidendum. We must enter into the nature of things and thoroughly see what she inwardly requires. [115] I quest after her track; we have confounded her with artificial traces. And that Academical and Peripatetical [116] summum bonum or sovereign felicity, which is to live according to her rules, by this reason becometh difficult to be limited and hard to be expounded. And that of the Stoics, cousin-german [117] to the other, which is to yield unto nature.
Is it not an error to esteem some actions less worthy forsomuch as they are necessary? Yet shall they never remove out of my head that it is not a most convenient marriage to wed pleasure unto necessity, with which (sayeth an ancient writer) the gods do ever complot and consent. To what end do we by a divorce dismember a frame contexted with so mutual, coherent, and brotherly correspondency? Contrariwise, let us repair and renew the same by interchangeable offices: that the spirit may awake and quicken the dull heaviness of the body, and the body stay the lightness of the spirit, and settle and fix the same. Qui velut summum bonum, laudat animæ naturam, et tanquam malum, naturam carnis accusat, profecto et animam carnaliter appetit, et carne incarnaliter fugit, quoniam id vanitate sentit humana, non veritate divina. He that praiseth the nature of the soul as his principal good and accuseth the nature of the flesh as evil assuredly he both carnally affecteth the soul and carnally escheweth the flesh, since he is of this mind not by divine verity but human vanity. [118]
There is no part or parcel unworthy of our care in that present which God hath bestowed upon us; we are accountable even for the least hair of it. And it is no commission for fashion-sake for any man to direct man according to his condition; it is express, natural, and principal, and the Creator hath seriously and severely given the same unto us. Only authority is of force with men of common reach and understanding and is of more weight in a strange language. But here let us charge again. Stultitiæ proprium quis non dixerit, ignave et contumaciter facere quæ facienda sunt: et alio corpus impellere, alio animum, distrahique inter diversissimos motus? Who will not call it a property of folly to do slothfully and frowardly [119] what is to be done, and one way to drive the body and another way the mind, and himself to be distracted into most diverse motions? [120]
Which, the better to see, let such a man one day tell you the amusements and imaginations which he puts into his own head and for which he diverteth his thoughts from a good repast and bewaileth the hour he employeth in feeding himself. You shall find there is nothing so wallowish in all the messes of your table, as is that goodly entertainment of the mind—It were often better for us to be sound asleep than awake unto that we do—and you shall find that his discourses and intentions are not worth your meanest dish. Suppose they were the entrancings of Archimedes himself, and what of that? There touch not nor do I blend with that rabble or rascality of men as we are, nor with that vanity of desires and cogitations which divert us. Only those venerable minds which through a fervency of devotion and earnestness of religion elevated to a constant and conscientious meditation of heavenly-divine things, and which by the violence of a lively and virtue of a vehement hope, preoccupating the use of eternal soul-saving nourishment, the final end, only stay, and last scope of Christian desires—the only constant delight and incorruptible pleasure—disdain to rely on our necessitous, fleeting, and ambiguous commodities, and easily resign the care and use of sensual and temporal feeding unto the body. It is a privileged study. Super-celestial opinions and under-terrestrial manners are things that amongst us I have ever seen to be of singular accord. [121]
Æsop, that famous man, saw his master piss as he was walking. “What” (said he), “must we not &c. [122] when we are running?” Let us husband time as well as we can. Yet shall we employ much of it, both idly and ill. As if our mind had not other hours enough to do her business, without disassociating herself from the body in that little space which she needeth for her necessity.
They will be exempted from them and escape man. [123] It is mere folly: instead of transforming themselves into angels, they transchange themselves into beasts; in lieu of advancing, they abase themselves. Such transcending humours affright me as much as steepy, high, and inaccessible places. And I find nothing so hard to be digested in Socrates his life as his ecstasies and communication with dæmons, nothing so human in Plato as that for which they say he is called divine. And of our sciences those which are raised and extolled for the highest seem to me the most basest and terrestrial. I find nothing so humble and mortal in Alexander’s life as his conceits about his immortalization. Philotas by his answer quipped at him very pleasantly and wittily. He had by a letter congratulated with him and rejoiced that the oracle of Jupiter Hammon had placed him amongst the gods; to whom he answered that, in respect and consideration of him, he was very glad; [124] but yet there was some cause those men should be pitied that were to live with a man and obey him who outwent others and would not be contented with the state and condition of mortal man.
——Diis te minorem quod geris, imperas.
Since thou less than the gods
> Bear’st thee, thou rul’st with odds. [125]
The quaint inscription wherewith the Athenians honored the coming of Pompey into their city agreeth well and is conformable to my meaning.
D’autant es tu Dieu, comme
Tu te recognois homme.
So far a God thou may’st accounted be
As thou a man dost re-acknowledge thee. [126]
It is an absolute perfection and as it were divine for a man to know how to enjoy his being loyally. We seek for other conditions because we understand not the use of ours, and go out of ourselves forsomuch as we know not what abiding there is. We may long enough get upon stilts for be we upon them, yet must we go with our own legs. And sit we upon the highest throne of the world, yet sit we upon our own tail.
The best and most commendable lives, and best pleasing me, are (in my conceit) those which with order are fitted and with decorum are ranged to the common mould and human model, but without wonder or extravagancy. Now hath old age need to be handled more tenderly. Let us recommend it unto that god who is the protector of health and fountain of all wisdom, but blithe and social: [127]
Frui paratis et valido mihi
Latoe dones, et precor integra
Cum mente, nec turpem senectam,
Degere, nec cithara carentem.
Apollo grant, enjoy in health I may
That I have got, and with sound mind, I pray;
Nor that I may with shame spend my old years,
Nor wanting music to delight mine ears. [128]
Selected Bibliography
PRIMARY SOURCES
Cotgrave, Randle. A Dictionarie of the French and English Tongves. London, 1611.
Florio, John. Firste Fruites. London, 1578.
——. Qveen Anna’s New World of Words, Or Dictionarie of the Italian and English tongues, Collected, and newly much augmented by Iohn Florio, Reader of the Italian vnto the Soueraigne Maiestie of ANNA, Crowned Queene of England, Scotland, France, and Ireland, &c.... London, 1611.
——. Second Frutes. London, 1591.
——. A Worlde of Wordes, Or Most copious, and exact Dictionarie in Italian and English, collected by Iohn Florio. London, 1598.
Montaigne, Michel de. The Complete Essays of Montaigne. Translated by Donald M. Frame. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1958.
——. Les Essais. Edited by Denis Bjaï, Bénédicte Boudou, Jean Céard, and Isabelle Pantin. Paris: Librairie Générale Française, 2001.
——. The Essayes or Morall, Politike and Millitarie Discourses of Lo[rd]: Michaell de Montaigne. Translated by John Florio. London, 1603.
——. The Essays of Michel de Montaigne. Translated by M.A. Screech. London: Penguin Press, 1991.
Shakespeare, William. The Norton Shakespeare. Edited by Stephen Greenblat. New York: W.W. Norton, 2008, second edition.
SECONDARY SOURCES
Acheson, Arthur. Shakespeare’s Lost Years in London 1586–1592. New York: Brentano’s, 1920.
Bakewell, Sarah. How to Live, or, A Life of Montaigne in One Question and Twenty Attempts at an Answer. New York: Other Press, 2011.
Bate, Jonathan. The Soul of the Age: The Life, Mind, and World of William Shakespeare. New York: Viking, 2008.
Boutcher, Warren Vincent. “Florio’s Montaigne: Translation and Pragmatic Humanism in the Sixteenth Century.” PhD dissertation, University of Cambridge, 1991.
Bradbrook, Muriel. The School of Night. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1936.
Bullough, Geoffrey, ed. Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare, 8 vols. New York: Columbia University Press, 1961–1975.
Burke, Peter. Montaigne. Oxford University Press, 1981.
Cave, Terence. The Cornucopian Text: Problems of Writing in the French Renaissance. Oxford University Press, 1979).
——. How to Read Montaigne. London: Granta, 2007.
Chambrun, Clara Longworth de. Giovanni Florio. Paris: Payot, 1921.
——. Shakespeare Actor-Poet. New York and London: D. Appleton and Company, 1927.
Desan, Philippe, ed. Dictionnaire de Michel de Montaigne. Paris: Champion, 2007.
Engle, Lars. “Shame and Reflection in Montaigne and Shakespeare.” Shakespeare Survey 63 (2010): 249–61.
——. “Sovereign Cruelty in Montaigne and King Lear.” In Shakespearean International Yearbook 6: Special section, Shakespeare and Montaigne revisited. Edited by Graham Bradshaw, Thomas Bishop, and Peter Holbrook, 119–39. Aldershot: Ashgate Publishing Limited, 2006.
Frame, Donald M. Montaigne: A Biography. London: Hamish Hamilton, 1965.
Frampton, Saul. When I Am Playing with My Cat, How Do I Know She Is Not Playing with Me?: Montaigne and Being in Touch with Life. New York: Pantheon Books, 2011.
Friedrich, Hugo. Montaigne, Edited by Philippe Desan. Translated by Dawn Eng. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991. Translation of the 1949 German edition.
Gillespie, Stuart. Shakespeare’s Books: A Dictionary of Shakespeare Sources. London: The Athlone Press, 2001.
Grady, Hugh. Shakespeare, Machiavelli, and Montaigne: Power and Subjectivity from Richard II to Hamlet. Oxford University Press, 2002.
Hamlin, William M. “Florio’s Montaigne and the Tyrrany of ‘Custome’: Appropriation, Ideology, and Early English Readership of the Essayes.” Renaissance Quarterly 63 (2010): 491–544.
——. “The Shakespeare-Montaigne-Sextus Nexus: A Case Study in Early Modern Reading.” In The Shakespearean International Yearbook 6: Special section, Shakespeare and Montaigne revisited. Edited by Graham Bradshaw, Thomas Bishop, and Peter Holbrook, 21–36. Aldershot: Ashgate Publishing Limited, 2006.
Henderson, W.B. Drayton. “Montaigne’s Apologie of Raymond Sebond and King Lear.” Shakespeare Association Bulletin 14 (1939): 209–25 and 15 (1940): 40–56..
Jeanneret, Michel. Perpetual Motion: Transforming Shapes in the Renaissance, from da Vinci to Montaigne. Translated by Nidra Poller. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001. Translation of the 1997 French edition.
Maguin, Jean Marie, and Kapitaniak, Pierre, eds. Shakespeare et Montaigne: Vers un Nouvel Humanisme. Paris: Société Française Shakespeare, 2003.
Matthiessen, F.O. Translation: An Elizabethan Art. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1931.
McFarlane, D., and Maclean, Ian, eds. Montaigne: Essays in Memory of Richard Sayce. Oxford: Clarendon, 1982.
Muir, Kenneth. The Sources of Shakespeare’s Plays. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1978.
Oxford English Dictionary. 2nd ed. 20 vols. Oxford University Press, 1989.
Quint, David. Montaigne and the Quality of Mercy: Ethical and Political Themes in the Essais. Princeton University Press, 1998.
Salingar, Leo. “King Lear, Montaigne and Harsnett.” The Aligarh Journal of English Studies 8 (1983): 124–66.
Scholar, Richard. Montaigne and the Art of Free-Thinking. Oxford: Peter Lang, 2010.
Starobinski, Jean. Montaigne in Motion. Translated by Arthur Goldhammer. University of Chicago Press, 1985. Translation of the 1982 French edition.
Taylor, George Coffin. Shakespeare’s Debt to Montaigne. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1925.
Wyatt, Michael. The Italian Encounter with Tudor England: A Cultural Politics of Translation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005.
Yates, Frances. John Florio: The Life of an Italian in Shakespeare’s England. New York: Octagon Books, 1968. Reprint of 1934 edition.
——. A Study of Love’s Labour’s Lost. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1936.
Appendix: Floriolegium
1. Life in itself is neither good nor evil; it is the place of good or evil according as you prepare it for them. (1.20/1.19)
For there is nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so.
(Hamlet, II.ii.244–45)
2. To conclude, they are inimaginable effects to him that hath not tasted them, and which makes me wonderfully to honor the answer of that young soldier to Cyrus, who enquiring of
him what he would take for a horse with which he had lately gained the prize of a race, and whether he would change him for a kingdom. (1.28/1.27)
A horse! A horse! My kingdom for a horse!
(Richard III, V.vii.7)
3. It is a nation, would I answer Plato, that hath no kind of traffic, no knowledge of letters, no intelligence of numbers, no name of magistrate, nor of politic superiority; no use of service, of riches, or of poverty; no contracts, no successions, no dividences, no occupation but idle; no respect of kindred, but common; no apparel, but natural; no manuring of lands, no use of wine, corn, or metal. The very words that import lying, falsehood, treason, dissimulation, covetousness, envy, detraction, and pardon were never heard of amongst them. (1.31/1.30)
I’th’commonwealth I would by contraries
Execute all things. For no kind of traffic
Would I admit, no name of magistrate;
Letters should not be known; riches, poverty,
And use of service, none; contract, succession,
Bourn, bound of land, tilth, vineyard, none;
No use of metal, corn, or wine, or oil;
No occupation, all men idle, all;
And women too—but innocent and pure;
No sovereignty—
All things in common nature should produce
Without sweat or endeavour. Treason, felony,
Sword, pike, knife, gun, or need of any engine,
Would I not have; but nature should bring forth
Of it own kind all foison, all abundance,
To feed my innocent people.
(The Tempest, II.i.147–56; 159–64)
4. The first fit of an ague or the first guird that the gout gives him, what avail his goodly titles of majesty? (1.42)
O be sick, great greatness,
And bid thy ceremony give thee cure.
Think’st thou the fiery fever will go out
With titles blown from adulation?