Shakespeare's Montaigne ─ The Florio Translation of the Essays

An NYRB Classics Original

Shakespeare, Nietzsche once wrote, was Montaigne’s best reader. It is a typically brilliant Nietzschean insight, capturing the intimate relationship between the ever-changing record of the mutable self constituted by Montaigne’s Essays and Shakespeare’s kaleidoscopic register of human character. For all that, how much Shakespeare actually read Montaigne remains a matter of uncertainty and debate to this day. That he read him there is no doubt. Passages from Montaigne are evidently reworked in both King Lear and The Tempest, and there are possible echoes elsewhere in the plays. But however closely Shakespeare himself may have pored over the Essays, he lived in a milieu in which Montaigne was widely known, oft cited, and both disputed and respected. This in turn was thanks to the inspired and dazzling translation of his work by a man who was a fascinating polymath, man-about-town, and master of language himself, John Florio.

Shakespeare’s Montaigne offers modern readers a new, adroitly modernized edition of Florio’s translation of the Essays, a still-resonant reading of Montaigne that is also a masterpiece of English prose. Florio’s translation, like Sir Robert Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy and the works of Sir Thomas Browne, is notable not only for its stylistic range and felicity and the deep and lingering music of many passages, but also for having helped to invent the English language as we know it today, supplying it, very much as Shakespeare also did, with new words and enduring turns of phrase. Stephen Greenblatt’s introduction also explores the echoes and significant tensions between Shakespeare’s and Montaigne’s world visions, while Peter Platt introduces readers to the life and times of John Florio. Altogether, this book provides a remarkable new experience of not just two but three great writers who ushered in the modern world.

Michel de Montaigne (1533–1592) was one of the most influential writers of the French Renaissance, known for popularizing the essay as a literary genre, and commonly considered the father of modern skepticism.

John Florio (1553–1625) was an Anglo-Italian linguist and lexicographer, a royal language tutor at the Court of James I, a possible friend and influence on Shakespeare, and the translator of Montaigne’s Essais into English.

Stephen Greenblatt is the Cogan University Professor of English and American Literature and Language at Harvard University. He lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and in Vermont. His most recent book, The Swerve: How the World Became Modern, won the National Book Award for Nonfiction.

Peter Platt is Professor of English at Barnard College, where he is also the department’s chair. He is the author of Shakespeare and the Culture of Paradox and Reason Diminished: Shakespeare and the Marvelous and the editor of Wonders, Marvels, and Monsters in Early Modern Culture.