Montaigne can be called many things: a stoic, a sceptic, a humanist, a satirist of humanity, or an advocate of natural living, depending which of his essays you read and how you read it. But really he is a climate of the mind, a way of thinking (and of thinking about thinking) so fresh and so challenging that it required the invention of a new kind of writing: the ‘essay’, or ‘trying out’, a form of writing which is free to go anywhere, and which dramatizes – so to speak – the very process of thinking, the spontaneous unregulated movement of the mind from thought to thought.
When Montaigne died in France, Shakespeare was writing his first plays. There is a free translation from one of the Essays in The Tempest, but it is very likely that Shakespeare read Montaigne earlier than that, in mid-career, at the time he was writing Hamlet. Hamlet’s habit of self-reflection, his intensely conscious inner life, coincides remarkably with Montaigne’s attention to the movements of his own mind; in these two figures, you might almost say, the modern self is born. And the tragedies that follow, Othello and especially King Lear, also seem to recall and respond to ways of thinking that Shakespeare encountered in Montaigne.
In our class discussions we shall be comparing these two great writers and thinking about the light which each throws on the other. This will be a matter of differences as well as similarities, for Shakespeare sometimes appears to be resisting or reacting to Montaigne as well as echoing his insights. The inconstancy of life, the difficulty of attaining certainty, the foolishness of human beings, the boundary between humans and (other) animals, and the fragility of civilisation against the pressure of natural impulse, are among the matters that will come into focus during our discussion.