The Use of the Self in the Works of Machiavelli, Montaigne and Shakespeare
By Victor Greto
The use of the self within the literature of sixteenth century humanism may be partially traced from the works of Niccolò Machiavelli, which define the state and the prince in terms of individuality and self-preservation; to the essays of Michel de Montaigne, where the ultimate goal both acknowledges the human limits of knowledge while prioritizing the study of the self beyond any other pursuit; to the dramatic art of William Shakespeare, in whose mature plays and sonnets each character’s sense of self dramatically becomes the pivot upon which its personal and social meaning derives. Humanism, as Paul Oskar Kristeller writes, “was at its core neither religious nor antireligious, but a literary and scholarly orientation.”[1]
It provided sixteenth century intellectuals with a scholarly method that “enriched the subjective vocabulary of the individual’s despairs and hopes while accepting the traditional social limits of his actions.”[2] Humanism led to “the affirmation of the complete autonomy of art, politics, science and history…to the abandonment of the typically medieval conception of the world according to which no branch of human activity could be considered independently of its relationship to life as a whole.”[3]
Beginning with Machiavelli, we will pursue these artists’ use of the self, as it shifts from its power as an example of the interests of the state and the prince’s actions, to its virtually measureless exploitation by Montaigne, who through skepticism and his own peculiar biographical circumstances transformed this humanistic tool into the end of his ethical cogitations. Shakespeare’s works will be used as dramatic examples of the self; like Montaigne, his use of the self becomes the fundamental characteristic of a view of a world enmeshed within various social obligations in the process of fragmentation. “We continue to see in the Renaissance the shaping of crucial aspects of our sense of self and society and the natural world,” Stephen Greenblatt writes.
The humanist’s self is “a construct, a thing made, as temporary, time-conditioned and contingent as those vast European empires whose power Freud drew his image of repression.”[4] It is within the curious unbound nature of its late sixteenth century manifestation where the self takes upon the defining characteristic of the modern age and how we have come to view our place in the world.
Kristeller created a five-tiered structure to demonstrate humanism’s “pervasive influence” upon Renaissance culture: its emphasis upon man; “the tendency to express, and to consider worth expressing, the concrete uniqueness of one’s feelings, opinions, experiences, and surroundings”; “the taste for elegance, neatness, and clarity of style;” “its fundamental classicism” and “ubiquity of classical sources”; and finally, “the repeated attempts to revive or restate the philosophical doctrines of particular ancient thinkers or schools.”[5] We can fit our authors within most of Kristeller’s framework.
Building upon the foundation poured by older Renaissance historians such as Kristeller and Jacob Burckhardt, however, recent scholarship stresses the role of the text and its complex rhetorical construction over the impulse to discuss the personal and social histories of the men and women who penned the texts. For example, Burckhardt suggestively insists in The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy that “one of the chief propositions of this book [argues] that it was not the revival of antiquity alone, but its union with the genius of the Italian people, that achieved the conquest of the western world.”[6]
Stephen Greenblatt transforms this aspect of Burckhardt’s point-of-view into the textual language of modern scholarship (specifically what Greenblatt calls the Renaissance author’s conscious act of “self-fashioning”). He states that Burckhardt’s true crucial perception was that the political upheavals in Italy in the later Middle Ages, the transition from feudalism to despotism, fostered a radical change in consciousness.
The princes and condottiere, and their secretaries, ministers, poets and followers were cut off from established forms of identity and forced by their relation to power to fashion a new sense of themselves and their world: the self and the state as works of art.[7]
There exists a similar textual and rhetorical transformation in Montaigne-criticism. Donald Frame’s 1965 biography of Montaigne is laced with observations of the Frenchman’s personality and growth as an individual; many of Frame’s conclusions rest upon what he sees as Montaigne’s (the man’s) “final step in the growth of his confidence, in the humanization of the humanist.”[8]
Gerard Defaux, among other statements, decries this tendency in historians, and argues that the text itself must reacquire “a supremacy over the man that it should never have lost”; “where once prevailed the ultimately sterile obsession with the referent, there now reigns henceforth the unique, clear-sighted, and unambiguous concern for the letter.”[9]
Unique, perhaps – clearsighted and unambiguous, probably not – for intellectual history, trapped within the texts of a sophisticated and enduring literature, needs no encouragement to remain within the black and white prison of an author’s words. The discipline has often been accused of being irrelevant to the social reality in which its canon of texts was produced – as well as immaterial to the society that newly critiques it.
We will attempt to touch upon the best of both worlds, without becoming either excessively suggestive or analytical. Although it is a truism that both history and the individual are, in Montaigne’s words, “marvelously vain, diverse, and undulating,”[10] the role of intellectual history will be construed here as a discipline that attempts to touch upon the limits of a particular diverse and complex time through the texts which it studies.
The use of the self in Western literature is not, of course, new with the sixteenth century. “The discovery of the individual” and its “search for the self” has been pursued by, among others, Colin Morris, specifically from the period 1050-1200. Both individualist and humanist traits we will observe in the sixteenth century Morris traces to “a movement observable at Rome about 50 B.C.,” and cites the work of such poets as Sallust and Suetonius, as well as the classical writers Cicero and Seneca.[11]
Morris asserts that twelfth-century society was “disturbed by the rapid emergence of a whole series of new groups or classes” that “created a conflict of values, and faced the individual with choices which in the year A.D. 1000 would have been unimaginable,” igniting the nascent humanism of such men as Saint Bernard and Peter Abelard.[12]
The sixteenth century saw the accelerating disintegration and creation of new classes and governments push the development of at least one tool of the humanism discovered and nurtured in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries to the point of virtual boundlessness. Although France dominated the Renaissance of the twelfth century, Italy’s political turmoil and economic vigor propelled its domination of the Renaissance of the fifteenth century.
* * *
Niccolò Machiavelli’s life (1469-1527) spans the maturity of Italian humanism. As an intimate observer of the intense rivalries of Renaissance Italian politics, he used what he conceived to be the great power of humanistic study to interpret the anarchic conditions of the Italian peninsula. He developed its study by creating a new discipline aimed at the realities of politics, with only minute references to religion and conventional morality.
Burckhardt speaks of the realities of Italian politics as well as Machiavelli when he writes: “The deliberate adaptation of means to ends, of which no prince of that time outside Italy had any idea, joined to almost absolute power within the limits of the state, produced men and modes of life of a peculiar character.”[13]
This suggestive “peculiar character” is anatomized by Robert Hariman, who claims Machiavelli’s innovation in the art of writing for princes was “that he repudiated the genre’s most basic assumption – its belief that politics is circumscribed by words.” In modern scholarly language, “The Prince is presented as sheer text, directly communicating unencumbered experience.”[14]
Machiavelli’s innovation, however, is both generated and circumscribed by the language of humanism and its powerful tool, the self. Kristeller’s five-fold structure detailing the influence of humanism may be read within Machiavelli’s texts: the latter’s emphasis on man conjoined with individual expression and a fundamental classicism, which incorporates the pragmatic strategies of Caesar or Alexander the Great, produce a starkly individualistic and self-oriented view of politics and, through deliberate generalization, the world.
Hariman concludes that this truly sovereign individual in the work [of Machiavelli] is the author’s persona, which is created explicitly as the assertion of an individual against the medieval community maintained through the rules of generic composition and the common sense of decorum…the individual then becomes the sole means for holding together what has been broken by his arrival: the personality of Machiavelli is the means for overcoming the contradiction between the language of texts and the world of actuality…the individual becomes the principle of cohesion by default, whether within a text or a polity. Thus, in the modern conception, the state is defined not as a collectivity but as a supreme individual.[15]
As with all three men’s works under study, Machiavelli balances this defining use of the self and the individual within the structure of society. His language manifests these two essential factors for political success as a considered balance between Fortuna and virtú.
Quentin Skinner traces the history of the idea of Fortuna in his book Machiavelli from its origins in Roman moralists, who saw it “as a good goddess, bona dea, and a potential ally it is well worth trying to attract.” The Romans’ representation of Fortuna as a goddess opened the possibility of a man to attract her favors by “the vir, or true manliness.” Yet after the Christian Boethius’ Consolation of Philosophy in the sixth century, “the goddess is now depicted as a ‘blind power,’ and hence completely careless and indiscriminate in her bestowal of gifts,” whose symbol becomes the wheel of fortune, not the cornucopia.
With the fifteenth-century Renaissance and the onslaught of humanism, the inexorability of this Christian idea of Fortuna was perceived to threaten man’s freedom, and thus “was in turn challenged by a return to the earlier suggestion that a distinction must be drawn between Fortune and Fate.”[16]
Skinner also usefully defines Machiavelli’s use of the term virtú “as that quality which enables a prince to withstand the blows of Fortune, to attract the goddess’s favour, and to rise in consequence to the heights of princely fame, winning honour and glory for himself and security for his government.”[17] In the incessant conflict of these two terms in Machiavelli’s works, we see the fundamental delineation of the individual or the self against external circumstance.
The ambiguity of Machiavelli’s use of the term Fortuna has become the subject of much debate; especially contentious is his loaded metaphor of Fortuna as a woman. The metaphor may obviously be traced to its form as a goddess, yet Machiavelli deliberately humanizes this goddess in his texts. In one of the more famous statements in The Prince, Machiavelli stresses his passionate feelings toward the concept:
But I do feel this: it is better to be rash than timid, for Fortune is a woman, and the man who wants to hold her down must beat and bully her. We see that she yields more often to men of this stripe than to those who come coldly toward her. Like a woman, too, she is always a friend of the young, because they are less timid, more brutal, and take charge of her more recklessly.[18]
Hannah Fenichel Pitkin views this feminine Machiavellian metaphor as another term for “‘the other’ for Machiavelli, opposed to manhood and autonomy in all their senses: to maleness, to adulthood, to humanness, and to politics.”[19] During the Italian Renaissance, “Human autonomy and civility are male constructs painfully won from and continually threatened by corrosive feminine power.”[20]
Her point is well taken, but Machiavelli’s metaphor also fundamentally points toward both the foundation of the self in his texts, as well as the worldly nature of the self’s foil or antithesis. In the passage quoted above, Machiavelli humanizes the Roman goddess, thus making her manipulable on a human scale.
That is, through the inextricable concomitance of Fortuna and virtú, Machiavelli commits one to an understanding of politics and, by generalization, the world in terms of the self in conflict or alignment with an outside, perhaps unknown, but non-metaphysical force. Fortuna, then, although a powerful indicator of a woman’s place in Renaissance society, was as much a general counterpoint to the self; to Machiavelli and, more generally, to Italian humanists, it became “an embodiment of the uncontrollable forces determining the course of events….”[21] When reading the texts of Machiavelli in this light, we note a continual power struggle in terms of the self and circumstance, of self and others.
Machiavelli’s overt sense of self in his texts also is revealed when he discusses the question of whether a prince should be loved or hated. Obviously forming his opinion in terms of the vantage point of the self, he claims that love is a link of obligation which men, because they are rotten, will break any time they think doing so serves their advantage; but fear involves dread of punishment, from which they can never escape. [Therefore, he later concludes,] that since men love at their own inclination but can be made to fear at the inclination of the prince, a shrewd prince will lay his foundations on what is under his own control, not on what is controlled by others.[22]
The basis of human action for Machiavelli lies solely within the relation of the self to external circumstances. Within the power of the self, its virtú, lies the measure of the individual; the manifestation of the individual’s manliness or vir depends upon its ability to either manipulate or align itself properly (i.e. pragmatically) with forces outside its control.
As with most perpetually relevant thinkers, Machiavelli’s thought shows its innate complexity throughout all of his works, including Discourses on the First Ten Books of Titus Livius, Belfagor, the Devil Who Took a Wife and The Life of Castruccio Castracani. In the first, Machiavelli exhibits a grasp of the complexity and necessity of outside structures to contain the individual’s often invidious disposition.
As Montaigne will later complain of the arrogance of religious reformers, Machiavelli argues that “from the moment [men] have the option and liberty to commit wrong with impunity, then they never fail to carry confusion and disorder everywhere.”[23]
As with the other two writers under study, Machiavelli’s work unflinchingly acknowledges the power of the structure that both contains and provides the individual with his opportunity and meaning. Through the medium of the self and its perpetual conflict and alignment with the outside structure or circumstance, our three authors incorporate within their visions a form of egalitarianism, after they assume and incorporate their subject’s degree or place in society.
“I say, then,” Machiavelli affirms, “that individual men, and especially princes, may be charged with the same defects for which writers accuse the people; for whoever is not controlled by laws will commit the same errors as an unbridled multitude.”[24]
It perhaps ought to be emphasized that this egalitarian effect we find in all three authors’ fundamental use of the self is neither revolutionary nor democratic in the modern sense. Machiavelli makes this point using language we have noted earlier. He finds “…as an incontrovertible truth, proved by all history, that men may second Fortune but cannot oppose her; they may develop her designs, but cannot defeat them.”
This attitude seems rigidly “Boethian,” but the humanist Machiavelli tempers this manifestation of Fortune by emphasizing its foil, the self. Elaborating upon this disparaging comment, he continues that “men should never despair on that account; for, not knowing the aims of Fortune, which she pursues by dark and devious ways, men should always be hopeful, and never yield to despair, whatever troubles or ill fortune may befall them.”[25] Because of the omnipotence of Fortune, Machiavelli’s humanism opens the door to the cultivation of the self as an end in itself.
Beyond his political works, we may find the possibilities of self-cultivation emphasized, in the long run, even over its political manifestations. In the novella, Belfagor, the Devil Who Took a Wife, Machiavelli shows in a few pages his philosophy of the self and its relation to others and circumstance. Belfagor is a demon sent to earth by Pluto to tease out the common complaint among men that it is their wives who drive them to misery and hell. Given life as a man, the demon takes upon vain and frivolous characteristics and drives himself into debt because of both his and his wife’s vanity.
Fleeing creditors, he is saved by a peasant named Gianmatteo, whom Belfagor gives the power of exorcism (with Belfagor as the possessor) until the peasant becomes rich. Refusing to leave the body of a king’s daughter in need of exorcism, however, Gianmatteo fools the demon into believing his wife is “‘coming to reclaim you!’“ Belfagor flees the possessed woman. “Thus,” Machiavelli finishes, “Belfagor, on his return to Hell, testified to the evils that a wife brought into a household. And Gianmatteo, who knew more about such things than the devil, returned home a happy man.”[26]
If the demons in this tale are easy grist for Machiavelli’s mill because of their inherent evil, they also point to the stupidity and irrelevance of the “other world” when dealing with human reality. The peasant, “who knew more things than the devil,” returns home happy (and richer) within his peasant-state, showing the ability to adapt and manipulate his surroundings for his own benefit without fundamentally changing them.
More didactically, The Life of Castruccio Castracani incorporates in an idealized individual the values Machiavelli had stressed in The Prince and The Discourses. Fortune is immediately placed on the child Castracani’s side at his birth, “at a time when Prudence can have nothing to do in the matter.” He becomes a foundling in the house of a nobleman where he subsequently shows “ability and prudence”, begins to “occupy himself with weapons”, reveals “strength of mind” – and, of course, like a good humanist and realist, “he read, nothing pleased him except those accounts of wars or of the deeds of the greatest men.”[27]
Machiavelli gives Castracani a streak of humility in the face of the nobility that helps raise him to greatness; yet after Fortune has delivered Castracani into the hands of nobles, the boy’s virtú unceasingly bubbles to the top.
Beyond the opportunity provided by fortune, Machiavelli’s emphasis upon humility, ability and humanistic study stresses the cultivation of the self through the exercise of one’s virtú over the sport of Fortune. When Fortune becomes a term for a structure that one cannot change, its foil, the self, takes upon the burden of cultivation and development – or simply naked defense. His own helpless rejection after the return of the Medici to Florence in 1512 marks simultaneously the end of Machiavelli’s political career and the beginning of his serious cultivation of humanistic scholarship.
Although statecraft never leaves his politically saturated mind, the final words of Castracani as he lay dying at the brink of victory are relevant to Machiavelli’s mature situation and philosophy: “It is very important in this world to know oneself,” he tells his son (who will lose all he has conquered), “and to know how to measure the strength of one’s mind and one’s condition, and anyone who is not suited to deeds of war ought to try to reign with the arts of peace.”[28] Toward the end of Machiavelli’s work, the cultivation of the self acts as a solace to haphazard Fortune, an individual’s defense against the despair he may feel over that which he has no control.
* * *
Michel de Montaigne (1533-1592) cultivated a sense of self that surpassed any text before his essays appeared. He fulfills Kristeller’s requirements for a full-fledged humanist in his work, while the peculiarities of his biography reinforce this humanistic bias. “He was born at a moment when the moderate, peaceful reform sought by Erasmus, Lefèvre d’Etaples, and their admirers were widely popular in France,” his biographer Frame writes, and was taught to speak only Latin, the key to his later humanistic immersion, during his early and most formative years.[29]
The instability of France during Montaigne’s lifetime played as great a role in forming his opinions: “Sixteenth-century Frenchmen were themselves apprehensive about the instability of their times, and it is for this reason that they were proccupied with the models of antiquity.”[30] In terms of his family’s background, Montaigne’s life may be partially seen as representative of a new and rising bureaucratic class of aristocrat-magistrates:
[Montaigne’s] great-grandfather had bought the Montaigne estates in 1477 with the profits from his trade in wine and fish at Bordeaux. His father, who had fought in the Italian wars and lived nobly on his estates, had seen the to the completion of Montaigne’s legal education at Toulouse. Montaigne had bought office in the cour de aides at Périgueux in 1554 and subsequently obtained a place in the parlement of Bordeaux when the Périgordine cour de aides was incorporated within that court. His two uncles had also acquired venal office before the religious wars. The Montaigne family assumed the status of ancient nobility when in fact its recent origins were in commerce, law, and office.[31]
Montaigne’s service as magistrate and his subsequent early retirement at 38 deserve mention. J.H.M. Salmon shows that the magistracy took upon itself a “corporate pride” and was “prepared to claim both integration within the traditional aristocracy and also the possession of distinct attributes which in some ways provided it with a moral superiority.” For the self-appointed magistrate-theorist André Tiraqueu, while “the essence of noblesse turned out to be virtue”, “the office of magistrate [exhibited] the worthiest kind of virtue”; he placed it “theoretically on at least a basis of equality with the high nobility of the sword.”[32]
Although I do not intend to explain and reduce the use of the self in Montaigne’s essays to its author’s role as magistrate (or his later role as Mayor of Bordeaux), we must see his biographical circumstances as important to the sense of self exhibited in the essays. Although Frame’s claim that Montaigne’s “desire to be a proper nobleman leads to much of his apparent anti-intellectualism”[33] may be a bit much to affirm,
Montaigne’s obsession with the Order of St. Michael, his devotion of an essay in defense of his role as mayor of Bordeaux (“Of husbanding your will”) and his pride in becoming a “citizen of Rome” provide evidence he took these circumstances both seriously and thoughtfully.
If we consider ways of unlocking fundamental aspects of Montaigne’s essays in terms of a combination lock and not a key, we can more readily appreciate their complexity and irony. Aside from his biographical circumstances, another movement and click of the tumbler to consider is his humanism. Montaigne’s essays utilize its author’s “fundamental classicism” as a framework or backbone.
Each essay exhibits evidence of the influence of ancient authors, and Montaigne does not tire of sprinkling his text with their quotes. Thematically, the earliest essays of the 1570s, published in 1580, use as subjects stoic concerns. A good example is the essay “That to philosophize is to learn to die,” where he discusses what perhaps may be the ultimate stoic concern.[34]
Alongside such stoical poses as “He who has learned how to die has unlearned how to be a slave,” however, innocuously sits the ultimate core of the essays’ themes: the self. “Life is neither good nor evil in itself: it is the scene of good and evil according as you give them room,” he glosses later within this essay.[35]
While this later gloss may point to the development of Montaigne’s thought as he grows older, it as importantly indicates the inextricable tie between classical humanism and the use of the self. Later additions to the original text surreptitiously comment upon and in some cases deconstruct what has come before, radicalizing a concern latent within the text but not emphasized in its original form. From stoical platitudes, this particular essay moves into a radical or rooted position concerning the self.
Montaigne portrays this radical self throughout his essays consistently and increasingly until, by the third book, it crescendos into an omnivorous rhetorical creation, encompassing everything and everyone it chooses to discuss. As Jules Brody comments, by the time of the later essay “Of repentance,” Montaigne’s “first-person interventions” have become “the literary representations of an authorial Self that turns out to be coordinate at every point, in choice of language and in rhetorical effect, with literary representations of other people in the same essay: an anonymous magistrate, Alexander the Great, Socrates and a common thief.”[36]
One of the more interesting experiences one feels while reading Montaigne derives from the text’s power to overcome and convince the reader of its point-of-view. Although subtle, it is an intensely radical and self-centered point-of-view that simultaneously shutters out all outside light as artificial, while emitting enough light from its own vantage point to encompass and overcome the latter’s artificiality. One is forced to realize that everything is an aspect of Montaigne’s self.
Montaigne works hard at creating this effect upon his reader: his conservatism, humility, skepticism and humanism act as more idiosyncratic clicks upon the tumbler that will unlock his self. Montaigne’s conservatism is well-known, from his support of the French monarchy to his disgust with Protestantism. Both aspects join within his essay “Of custom”:
…the wise man should withdraw his soul within, out of the crowd, and keep it in freedom and power to judge things freely; but as for externals, he should wholly follow the accepted fashions and forms. Society in general can do without our thoughts; but the rest…we must lend and abandon to the common opinions, just as the great and good Socrates refused to save his life by disobedience to the magistrate, even to a very unjust and very iniquitous magistrate. For it is the rule of rules, and the universal law of laws, that each man should observe those of the place he is in….[37]
In this passage, Montaigne tellingly places Socrates, the greatest hero within the text of the essays, under the rule of the magistrate and the state. Both the irony and determination of this passage should not escape the reader. Its determination climaxes two paragraphs down, where “disgust with innovation,” particularly Protestantism, is revealed.
Its irony resides in the figure of Socrates, whom the essays eventually transform into the paradigm of the perfect man. Montaigne’s use of Socrates as a way of praising the courage to declare one’s ignorance of things outside the self is, as one historian states, “strikingly different from his humanist predecessor[s] in using a purely human ‘transvaluator’ and rejuvenator of man in order to propound a man-affirming ignorance that could avoid the disputations of both the learned philosophers and their modern counterparts, the rebellious Protestants.”[38]
As we have seen with the humanization of Fortune in Machiavelli’s works, Montaigne’s use of the Socratic paradigm irreversibly humanizes and limits the scope of one’s actions and point-of-view. For the staunchly Catholic Montaigne, Socrates replaces Christ as the ultimate example for human action. By doing so, the essays paradoxically sidestep the political and religious turmoil of its time by overtly and implicity (through the symbol of Socrates) supporting the inherited religion and government of France, freeing the text to declare and express a peculiar self that, through its paradoxically humble yet ubiquitous point-of-view, encompasses and rules all it ponders.
Montaigne’s self in the essays is portrayed ideally as free-floating and numb to the outside world, while it insists upon its universality and power: “But say what we will,” we read, “the custom and practice of ordinary life bears us along. Most of my actions are conducted by example, not by choice. At all events, I did not really bid myself to do it, I was led to it, and borne by extraneous circumstances….anything at all…can become acceptable through some condition or circumstance: so inane is our human posture.”[39]
Of course, the irony lies in the text’s own complex posturing; yet it is a posture that purports to understand its own ignorance and this, simply, makes everything better: “I study myself more than any other subject. That is my metaphysics, that is my physics,” he proclaims in his final essay. Through the essays the self becomes both circumscribed and rounded.
Like an expanding universe that is both limited and boundless, we can know nothing but ourselves: “The range of our desires should be circumscribed and restrained to a narrow limit of the nearest and most contiguous good things; and moreover their course should be directed not in a straight line that ends up elsewhere, but in a circle whose two extremities by a short sweep meet and terminate in ourselves.”[40]
Montaigne’s self-circumscription and declaration of ignorance to all things outside this self provides interesting contrasts to Machiavelli’s use of the self. As we argued earlier, Machiavelli’s The Life of Castruccio Castracani hinted toward the importance of self-cultivation when confronted with a powerful and omnipotent Fortune.
From only a hint in Machiavelli, we note a way of life for Montaigne; his use of the idea of Fortune in the essays borders on abject subservience and even indifference, whether Fortune is seen either in the Machiavellian sense (societal forces outside our control) or in the religious sense (the unknowable purpose of God). Montaigne denies Machiavelli at several points in the essays. The cultivation of the self has taken primacy over any political action:
If [Fortune] had brought me into the world to hold some rank among men, I should have been ambitious to make myself loved, not to make myself feared or admired. Shall I express this more insolently? I should have thought as much of giving pleasure as gaining profit….I mean to say, then, that if we must thus owe something, it should be by a more legitimate title than the one I am speaking of, to which the law of this miserable war [one of the French wars of religion] binds me; and not with so great a debt as that of my total preservation: that overwhelms me. [41]
Montaigne longs to be unbound from the “laws of this miserable war,” revealing a contingent understanding of Machiavelli’s pragmatic reasoning, while giving the reader a sense of what he considers “legitimate” in terms of his self. Although acknowledging the pragmatic reasoning within a state of war and the defense of his “total preservation” – which tellingly overwhelms him (i.e. he loses his freedom to act) – Montaigne contrasts this with what he ironically labels an insolent claim: he would prefer to give pleasure than gain profit. Machiavelli chooses that the prince should instill fear rather than attempt to be loved, for love is freely given and depends upon another’s choice.
As stated earlier, this shows a psychology based upon the self but inextricably tied into the reality of political expediency. With Montaigne, the political expediency, if real enough, is inherently artificial or illegitimate because it resides outside the self. The essays’ self-centered universe continually refuses to compromise with any force outside itself. The humanist tool of the self in the works of Machiavelli has become a way of looking at the world in the essays of Montaigne.
Along this same line of vision, when Montaigne touches upon something the reader might suppose speaks solely about another subject, he creates a vision of the self in contrast that both defines and encompasses any understanding of this subject. For example, in the essay “Of the art of discussion,” Montaigne questions the role of one’s judgment of others and quotes Plato: “‘If I find a thing unsound, is it not because I myself am unsound?’“ “Not only the reproaches that we make to one another, but also our reasons and arguments in controversial matters can ordinarily be turned against ourselves; and we run ourselves through with our own weapons.”[42]
Is it possible that the essays purport to argue that all opinions, judgments and actions one thinks, makes and takes are comments upon oneself? In the limited but unbound universe that Montaigne creates in the essays, it is more than possible: he has created a rhetorical environment that can know nothing alien. Everything and everyone outside the self becomes a gloss upon that self.
This is humanism run amok, evidence of the humanist tradition’s use of the self taken to a logical extreme. DeFaux calls this contact of Montaigne’s self and the other “a studied devalorization of all that has to do, within this writing, with the ‘message,’ with the ‘ideological content,’ i.e. with the signified; parallel to this, the indubitable valorization…within writing, not with the subject itself, the argument, the theme that is treated, but with the act of judgment, with the intellectual performance for which this subject, transformed into an object, becomes the pretext….”[43]
The self is both conduit and transformer, an instrument that powerfully infuses meaning into anything it ponders and judges. Thus shrouded within the humility of such a point-of-view of ignorance of things outside the self undulates a quivering and pointed arrogance that devours and makes part of itself every thing and every one.
Within this point-of-view, Montaigne discusses what Machiavelli had (through his silence) judged irrelevant to his work: God and theology. In these discussions, Montaigne reveals the conservatism, humility, skepticism and humanism mentioned above as part of the combination to understanding his self.
These aspects are most clearly shown in Montaigne’s longest essay, “Apology for Raymond Sebond.” Undeniably conservative in the essay’s intent to defend a Catholic theologian’s work that Montaigne claims is “capable of serving as a start and first guide to an apprentice to set him on the road to [faith],” it also acts as a thesis for skepticism.
For the common herd, not having the faculty of judging things in themselves, let themselves be carried away by chance and by appearances, when once they have been given the temerity to despise and judge the opinions that they had held in extreme reverence, such as are those in which their salvation is concerned. And when some articles of their religion have been set in doubt and upon the balance, they will soon after cast easily into like uncertainty all the other parts of their belief….[44]
Montaigne supports these two central theses by shattering the shells of both humanism and theology through skepticism. In terms of theology, Catherine Demure situates “this apology for skepticism in a paradoxical problematics: even if it is impossible, knowlege about God is still necessary.” Theology, as a work of human reason, may be compared with mathematics or logic: no human discipline can speak for “happiness and the good”; yet the learned disciplines are necessary for they signify the extent of our reach. Thus she argues that “Montaigne legitimates theology by the very absence in which we find ourselves of any contact with God.”[45]
If we can show theology as just another science, we prove its human legitimacy while disproving its pertinence to faith. Within this paradox, the essay argues against the arrogance of Protestantism and any human endeavor that attempts to reach beyond its stringent bounds. Humanism as well provides material for the deconstructive use of skepticism.
Toward the end of the Apology, Montaigne confronts his humanistic heritage and rejects it: “‘O what a vile and abject thing is man,’“ he quotes Seneca, “‘if he does not raise himself above humanity!’“
That is a good statement and a useful desire, but equally absurd [Montagne finishes]. For to make the handful bigger than the hand, the armful bigger than the arm, and to hope to straddle more than the reach of our legs is impossible and unnatural. Nor can man raise himself above himself and humanity; for he can see only with his own eyes, and seize only with his own grasp….It is for our Christian faith, not for his Stoical virtue, to aspire to that divine and miraculous metamorphosis. [46]
Frame labels the Apology “Montaigne’s declaration of complete intellectual independence….The Stoical humanists, once his heroes and in some measure his teachers, have proven inadequate and become his targets. Free of their tutelage at last, he is ready to look within himself for instruction.”[47] In this interpretation, Montaigne more or less “clears the decks” of those who came before him, keeping what he judged to be their best and discarding what he considered their arrogance toward God.
The fusion of the relentless skepticism and shattering paradox of the limits of human knowledge and the power of revealed faith elicited in the “Apology” acts as a concentrated beam of light aimed directly inward at the self.
The skeptical rejection of humanism’s claims works its spell upon the reader, however, as much as we can vaguely guess it had worked upon Montaigne, the man. Perhaps it is within this essay that we first come to realize the drift or theme of the complete text of the essays, its central and consummating point. The self understands its limits and is humbled; whether it is ours or Montaigne’s or neither or both becomes as problematic and useless (and necessary?) as human theological speculation.
Toward the end of the essays, Montaigne generally avoids stoic and religious concerns. Although his subject had always been the self, he revels in this subject as the essays progress toward the third and final book. “The world always looks straight ahead,” he says in “Of presumption,” an essay situated just after the “Apology”; “as for me, I turn my gaze inward, I fix it there and keep it busy…I look inside of me; I have no business but with myself; I continually observe myself, I take stock of myself, I taste myself…I roll about in myself.”[48] With the publication of the third book of essays, Montaigne frankly offers us a humanism derived from and aimed at the self:
I set forth a humble and inglorious life; that does not matter…Each man bears the entire form of man’s estate…no man ever treated a subject he knew and understood better than I do the subject I have undertaken; and…in this I am the most learned man alive…no man ever penetrated more deeply into his material or plucked its limbs and consequences cleaner, or reached more accurately and fully the goal he had set for his work. [49]
Using the language of humanistic study, Montaigne places his self on rhetorical display, consciously reversing the idea of the self as a tool of humanism to the use of humanism as a tool to study the self. The limitations of human knowledge direct Montaigne in the third book to look at his habits, bodily functions, vanities and experiences until he has created a picture of his self he can assert without skepticism.
“For Montaigne,” Jean Starobinski writes, “the importance accorded to the self (moi) and the attention of which it is the object necessarily calls for the epistemological primacy of knowledge (connaissance) through “feeling” – with regard to the body as well as to the soul.”[50]
Turning from the stoical point-of-view we saw in the essay “That to philosophize is to learn to die,” Montaigne affirms life over the stoic’s obsessive “meditation on death”: “death is indeed the end,” he admits in “Of physiognomy”, “but not therefore the goal of life; it is its finish, its extremity, but not therefore its object. Life should be an aim unto itself, a purpose unto itself; its rightful study is to regulate, conduct and suffer itself.”[51] Through his exuberance for life, shorthand for the self, Montaigne turned the grave and stodgy dignity of classical stoicism inside out.
While discussing the dimensions of the life within this creation of the self, Montaigne provides a balancing act between body and spirit: “Let the mind arouse and quicken the heaviness of the body, and the body check and make fast the lightness of the mind,” he writes in his closing essay. “Between ourselves,” he whispers, “there are two things that I have always observed to be in singular accord: supercelestial thoughts and subterranean conduct.”
They want to get out of themselves and escape from the man. That is madness: instead of changing into angels, they change into beasts; instead of raising themselves, they lower themselves. These transcendental humors frighten me, like lofty and inaccessible places….The most beautiful lives, [he concludes,] to my mind, are those that comform to the common human pattern, with order, but without miracle and without eccentricity. [52]
Montaigne ordered and patterned the self he created, limiting its knowledge of things and people and God, while expanding its compass beyond what anyone dared do before him. Montaigne’s essays’ legacy of skepticism; their conservative defense of the Catholic faith and French monarchy; and their profound continuation and transformation of the humanistic tradition, contribute to the combination of tumbler-clicks which help unlock the complexity and irony of a great text.
The text’s irony and complexity, however, rightly shroud as much as reveal the self its author created over the course of his lifetime. Yet it is surely the “self” we see when we open ourselves to the core of the essays. Although it is a textual creation of a man who lived hundreds of years ago, it breathes as heavily and as pertinently as Machiavelli’s prince, both imprisoned and free within the dialog of the reader and the text.
* * *
While Montaigne lay dying at his chateau in 1592, William Shakespeare (1564-1616) probably began his career as playwright and poet in London. In his first plays and poems, he presents the knowledge of a literary humanist, utilizing classical themes and situations. The Comedy of Errors,[53] considered by some to be Shakespeare’s first play, as well as the horrific Titus Andronicus, would have “come naturally enough to a grammar-school man competing, at the outset of his career, with the university-trained playwrights.”[54]
As with our other two authors, Shakespeare was well-versed in classical literature. His first long poem, Venus and Adonis, which he considered “the first heir of my invention,” obviously deals with a classical theme; its source was probably Ovid’s Metamorphoses.[55]
Shakespeare’s claim that this poem was his first invention points to the outward belief that the few plays he had penned up to that time (1592-1593) were not considered legitimate, if only because they ill-fitted the stringent traditions of classical and humanist literature, as well as to the probability that he had spent a great deal of time and effort upon this poem’s composition.
Another long poem, The Rape of Lucrece, drew as well upon humanist sources. By at least the year of this poem’s registration (1594), the author had become “sweet Mr. Shakespeare” to many university students. Shakespeare, no doubt sincere, fed his audience with the food they had requested, as he would do later in his plays.[56]
The fundamental classicism Shakespeare exhibited in his early plays and poems coincides with the Englishman’s glorification of the monarchy. The three parts of Henry VI (1592) serve the legitimacy of monarchy as well as Shakespeare’s fellow players.
As we move from these relatively primitive but comparatively sophisticated history plays into Richard III (1593?), Richard II (1594-95), the two parts of Henry IV (1597-98) and Henry V (1599), we take note of the evolving sophistication and sense of self exhibited by the characters within the framework offered by Shakespeare’s historical sources.
If the vessel of classical allusion and the power of the English monarchy were assumed and set by the time he began to write prolifically in the 1590s, Shakespeare’s use of characterization was certainly not. In one of his first history plays, Henry VI, Part II, we find what may be considered at least a sketch of Shakespeare’s ideal individual.
In the dialog of the character Alexander Iden, a “Kentish gentleman,” Shakespeare provides in a few lines an individual both part and separate from the order and chaos of the society that surrounds him:
Lord, who would live turmoilèd in the Court,/ And may enjoy such quiet walks as these?/ This small inheritance my father left me Contenteth me, and worth a monarchy./ I seek not to wax great by others’ waning,/ Or gather wealth, I care not with what envy. Sufficeth that I have maintains my state/ And sends the poor well pleased from my gate. (4·10·17-25)
After this opening soliloquy, Iden runs into the villain of the play, Jack Cade, and kills him. He presents himself before the king humbly, identifying himself as “A poor esquire of Kent, that loves his King” (4·10·75). Iden,
Although only a sketchy character, contains an ideal of the self that reminds us of the level of self-cultivation discussed above: he seeks “not to wax great by others’ waning,” ignoring or implicitly discarding the powerful metaphor of the wheel of fortune; he gathers wealth without envy; he creates a world within his own garden and home, a “state” from where he sends away the poor well-pleased; he knows no envy of the monarchy, finding in his place contentment and no ambition outside of this degree.
But he acts with vigor and determination when met by Cade, who represents anarchy (a person unwilling to recognize his place in society) and disloyalty to the monarchy. Iden rests contentedly in a place both dictated by society and cultivated by himself; he represents a medium between the loyalty the monarchy demands for its very existence and his own circumscribed but heroic self.
A state unto himself, his existence depends upon the state outside him. As a fine historian notes of Shakespeare’s work, “the concrete individual exists only in relation to forces that pull against spontaneous singularity and that draw any given life, however peculiarly formed, toward communal norms.”[57]
The situation where the self finds definition through its interaction with an outside force or structure has been stressed above. According to Stephen Greenblatt, it is one of the major themes of Shakespeare’s history plays. “It has been traditional, since Jakob Burckhardt,” he writes, “to trace the origins of autonomous individuality to the Renaissance, but…individual identity in the early modern period served less as a final goal than as a way station on the road to a firm and decisive identification with normative structures.”[58]
The self cannot exist without something to surround it and give it meaning, to define itself against. This aspect of self-definition becomes essential, at least in Shakespeare’s history plays, for the ultimate victor is the institution of the Tudor monarchy. The surface plots of the history plays ride a historical course of inevitability, until by Henry VIII (1613) they consummate in the proclamation of the birth of Elizabeth (5·5·15-77) and the dawn of a new age of stability, a longed-for goal that haunts and pushes the plots of each of these dramas. Once stability is achieved, history, at least for Shakespeare, requires no more comment.
In Henry IV, Part I, Prince Hal – the future Henry V – shows the realization of his identity as king when he tells his father he will join him in his fight against the rebellious nobles and “Be more myself” (3·2·93),[59] rejecting the carefree life of the tavern he had lived up to that point. Shakespeare’s use of Falstaff as foil to Prince Hal’s discovery of himself shows us the perils of a socially tenuous self-definition: “Rare words!” Falstaff mutters after listening to Prince Hal’s verbally well-crafted determination to defeat the traitor Percy: “Brave world! Hostess, my breakfast come!/ Oh, I could wish this tavern were my drum!” (3·3·229-231)
Falstaff’s identity is enmeshed with tavern life; he recognizes the legitimacy of no other. This helps explain his “catechism” against “honor” (recognized as only a “brave word” without relevance) on the battlefield later in the same play (5·1·131-143), as well as what many readers and playgoers see as the intolerable rejection of Falstaff by Henry V at the end of Henry IV, Part II (5·5·51-75), where the latter tellingly claims he has “turned away from my former self.” If we view both characters’ definitions of themselves in terms of their place in society, this rejection seems inevitable.
Yet the pathos that results within us from this denial betrays an irony that reaches beyond either’s definition of himself and points indirectly toward a more generalized sense of humanity and the self that bypasses one’s degree. For a moment the audience feels the power of both characters’ sense of self, although one is considered base, the other regal.
As with Montaigne’s device of defining everything outside himself in terms of his own self’s shortcomings or virtues, we see the legitimate and encompassing worlds of both Falstaff and Henry V, note their incompatibility, and watch as the one with the most power defines our view and commits us to political stability. If Shakespeare forces our hand in choosing Henry V’s world over Falstaff’s, it is only after he has shown us a glimpse of the latter’s, implicitly valorizing its existence and recognizing its humanity.
As Machiavelli and Montaigne assumed the great political systems around them, so Shakespeare understood the need for their recognition. In Henry V, Shakespeare makes this quite clear when the king speaks for the system he upholds.
Every subject’s duty is the King’s, but every subject’s soul is his own. Therefore should every soldier in the wars do as every sick man in his bed, wash every mote out of his conscience. And dying so, death is to him advantage, or not dying, the time was blessedly lost wherein such preparation was gained. (4·1·185-191)
Henry’s soliloquy on “idle ceremony,” which immediately follows, stresses the fact that men are fundamentally equal in themselves but as fundamentally separate in degree and place in society. The balancing act between these two major assumptions we have already noted in Montaigne. The necessity of the balance, however, cannot be ignored. Ulysses’ famous speech on degree in Troilus and Cressida (1603) relates the profound impact of a view of the world that loathes social disorder: “Take but degree away,” Ulysses warns, “untune that string,/ And hark, what discord follows!”
Then everything includes itself in power,/ Power into will, will into appetite,/ And appetite, a universal wolf,/ So doubly seconded with will and power,/ Must make perforce a universal prey,/ And last eat up himself. (1·3·119-124)
Through Ulysses, Shakespeare sounds the consistent warning that Montaigne had before him: political radicalism is wrong; there exists an order beyond the individual as there exists an order within the individual. Both beliefs must implicitly be accepted or chaos and tragedy reign.
While within the history plays it is the social fabric that strains with discord because men reach beyond themselves to change it, in the tragedies Shakespeare’s vision directs itself more fully inward, and discord results from the inability of self-contained men to reach beyond to others. In the major tragedies and “problem plays,” which generally follow the early histories and comedies, Shakespeare is more interested in the self as the pivot upon which the plot turns.
In fact, the great tragic heroes, from Hamlet to Othello, Lear and Macbeth, are presented as worlds unto themselves, seemingly all-encompassing, but who fall when pushed by circumstance against something with which they do not understand and cannot cope.
As the philosopher and historian Walter Kaufmann put it, there exists in the great tragedies “a radical distinction between the hero and the other figures in the play.” The most crucial feature in a Shakespearen tragedy is “that the hero is never understood by any other character in the play.”[60] Within the circumstances of each of the four great tragedies, Shakespeare has created an omnivorous self, generally admirable and noble, but apolitical, superhuman and – outside the self – appallingly naive.
A particular tragic character’s naiveté allows Shakespeare to explore the self in a dozen different situations and contemplations. Hamlet’s inability to act; Othello’s hopeless anger at an unchecked fiction; Lear’s unqualified generosity when dividing up his kingdom; Macbeth’s utter desolation at what he is driven to do – by his wife or the weird sisters’ revelations or his own ambition – point to plots dependent upon the main character’s sense of self disembodied from the structure or system around him.
Deliberate or not, Shakespeare takes Montaigne’s omnivorous self and dramatically places it in situations that demand either compromise or a realization that might propel it toward a transcendence beyond its own contained nature. The tragedy or “fatal flaw” of these characters thus derives from their inability to transcend themselves.
Hamlet realizes the tragedy of his flaw when he relates to Horatio the ideal love he feels for him:
….For thou hast been/ As one in suffering all that suffers nothing,/ A man that fortune’s buffets and rewards/ Hast ta’en with equal thanks. And blest are those/ Whose blood and judgment are so well commingled/ That they are not a pipe for fortune’s finger/ To sound what stop she please.[61] Give me that man/ That is not passion’s slave, and I will wear him/ In my heart’s core – aye, in my heart of heart,
As I do thee. (Hamlet 3·2·70-79)
Although Hamlet is never passion’s slave, because of the powerfully contained nature of his self, fortune takes him (as it will Othello and Macbeth) easily along, until the time-constraints placed by his self on the ability to act allow action only in spurts of passionate but ill-timed behavior. Perhaps nowhere is the contrast of this dichotomy of the involved self and passionate action more evident than in the graveyard scene (5·1).
At one moment Hamlet somberly ponders the brevity and meaninglessness of life while holding Yorick’s skull, while in the next he jumps and grapples in Ophelia’s grave with Laertes, crying “I’ll rant as well as thou” to her brother’s expression of grief. Although he cannot be Horatio-like, Hamlet’s nobility lies within the omnivorous power of his self; but while his immaturity and youthful distance provide him space to philosophize and ponder within, the world crumbles without.
The persona or self Shakespeare utilizes in at least two of his 154 sonnets also reminds us of Montaigne’s vision of the self.[62] Sonnet 94 celebrates a vision of the self-contained individual and points to the possibility of tragedy we find in the tragic heroes mentioned above. Husbanding nature’s riches from expense, the ideal self expressed here reveals both the greatness of such an individual in the poet’s eyes, as well as the corresponding danger when this self is “with base infection” met. Akin to Isabella’s cry in Measure For Measure (1604) that “it is excellent/ To have a giant’s strength, but it is tyrannous/ To use it like a giant” (2·2·106-108), Shakespeare puts forth and ideal self that is both disciplined and powerful.[63]
In sonnet 121, Shakespeare interprets and defines criticism in Montaigne-like terms, asserting with a godlike certitude, “I am that I am, and they that level/ At my abuses reckon up their own.” Although its cry may be derived from artistic bitterness, the particular self of this sonnet is similar to Montaigne’s omnivorous self, interpreting others’ thoughts of the self as really glosses upon their own selves.
Perhaps nowhere is the self under more Shakespearean scrutiny than in Othello (1603?). In the character Iago, Shakespeare portrays a master manipulator who consciously asserts a denial of self. Coleridge’s famous remark that Iago represented a “motiveless malignity”[64] is telling to the character’s essential mystery.
Yet its mystery is bound within the character’s command of language, as well as its foil, the character of Othello, one of Shakespeare’s more obvious “noble” and self-contained men. Iago’s opening speech tells us immediately how he understands who he is.
Heaven is my judge, not I for love and duty,/ But seeming so, for my peculiar end./ For when my outward action doth/ demónstrate/ The native act and figure of my heart/ In compliment extern, ‘tis not long after/ But I will wear my heart upon my sleeve/ For daws to peck at. I am not what I am. (1·1·57-65)
Iago’s reversal of God’s declaration from Exodus 3·14, as well as the reversal of Shakespeare’s own assertion in sonnet 121, is the bold declaration of the antithesis of the Shakespearean ideal. Thus we have in Othello the ultimate battle of a noble and contained self against a self-conscious manipulator; the play acts as an exegesis upon Sonnet 94.
Greenblatt’s understanding of this particular statement is pertinent.
Man can only exist in the world by fashioning for himself a name and an object, but these…are both fictions. No particular name or object can entirely satisfy one’s inner energy demanding to be expressed or fill so completely the potential of one’s consciousness that all longings are quelled, all intimations of unreality silenced.[65]
“I am not what I am” suggests that this elusiveness is permanent, that even self-interest, whose transcendental guarantee is the divine “I am what I am,” is a mask. Iago’s constant recourse to narrative then is both the affirmation of absolute self-interest and the affirmation of absolute vacancy; the oscillation between the two incompatible positions suggests in Iago the principle of narrativity itself, cut off from original motive and final disclosure. The only termination possible in his case is not revelation but silence.[66]
Iago’s implicit denial of “transcendence” and affirmation of narrative in Greenblatt’s sense may be the play’s ultimate irony. Iago is silent at the conclusion of the play, and he has stymied and transformed Othello’s great discursive powers into incoherent epileptic seizures. Tellingly, however, Othello does not remain silent after Iago is found out. Even in the presence of the master manipulator, he begs those around him to “Speak of me as I am, nothing extenuate,/ Nor set down aught in malice.” (5·2·342-343)
If there is something inherently false about people based upon the way they choose to present themselves, this artificiality remains in Othello’s final speech. But like our glimpse of both Falstaff’s and Henry V’s legitimate but incompatible worlds, the humanity of the playwright has infused the final suicidal act of Othello in the presence of Iago as a final act of legitimacy. Unlike the conclusion of Henry IV, Part II, however, we do not choose and are certainly not given Iago’s world; he is rendered powerless.
Tragedy thus lies in the fatal flaw of Othello’s naive self-containment – not in his discursive artificiality. If the play, then, is a comment upon the fiction of all self-fashioning on one level, it as importantly acts as a pragmatic warning against the foolish and naive arrogance of a self-contained individual in a world inhabited by other people in various stages of self-hood. Everyone chooses his agenda, legitimate or not, according to one’s point-of-view, and no one is released from the give-and-take of everyday life.
The ultimate point for our purposes may lie in the fundamental and subtle recognition that the self has become paramount in Western literature’s view of the world. No more a tool of humanism, it has become the rooted source of our vision of the world.
NOTES
[1]Paul Oskar Kristeller, Renaissance Thought, New York: Harper & Row, 1955, p. 74.
[2]J.R. Hale, Renaissance Europe: The Individual and Society, 1480-1520, New York: Harper & Row, 1971, p. 182.
[3]Federico Chabod, Machiavelli and the Renaissance, New York: Harper & Row, 1958, p. 184.
[4]Stephen Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1980, p. 174.
[5]Paul Oskar Kristeller, Renaissance Thought, pp. 20-21.
[6]Jacob Burckhardt, The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy, (Trans. by S.G.C. Middlemore), New York: The New American Library, 1960.
[7]Stephen Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare, pp. 161-162.
[8]Donald Frame, Montaigne: A Biography, San Francisco: North Point Press, 1965, p. 302.
[9]Gerard Defaux, “Readings of Montaigne,” in Yale French Studies, No. 64, New Haven, Conn., 1983, p. 77.
[10]Michel de Montaigne, The Complete Essays of Montaigne, (Trans. by Donald Frame), Stanford, Calif: Stanford University Press, 1958, 1965, p. 5.
[11]Colin Morris, The Discovery of the Individual: 1050-1200, New York: Harper & Row, 1972, p. 14.
[12]Ibid., p. 47.
[13]Jacob Burckhardt, The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy, p. 43.
[14]Robert Hariman, “Composing Modernity in Machiavelli’s Prince,” in the Journal of the History of Ideas, Vol. L, No. 1, pp.18-19.
[15]Ibid., p. 25.
[16]Quentin Skinner, Machiavelli, New York: Hill and Wang, 1981, pp. 26-27.
[17]Ibid., p. 35.
[18]Niccolò Machiavelli, The Prince, (Trans. by Robert Adams,) New York: WW Norton & Co., 1977, p. 72.
[19]Hannah Fenichel Pitkin, Fortune is a Woman: Gender and Politics in the Thought of Niccolò Machiavelli, Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1984, p. 109.
[20]Ibid., p. 136.
[21]Felix Gilbert, Machiavelli and Guicciardini: Politics and History in Sixteenth-Century Florence, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1965, 1973, p. 269.
[22]Niccolò Machiavelli, The Prince, pp. 48, 49.
[23]Niccolò Machiavelli, The Prince and The Discourses, (Trans. by Christian E. Detmold), New York: The Modern Library, 1950, p. 118.
[24]Ibid., p. 261.
[25]Ibid., p. 383.
[26]Niccolò Machiavelli, Belfagor, the Devil Who Took a Wife, in The Portable Machiavelli, (Trans. by Peter Bondanella and Mark Musa,) New York: Penguin Books, 1979, p. 429.
[27]Niccolò Machiavelli, The Life of Castruccio Castracani, in The Portable Machiavelli, (Trans. by Peter Bondanella and Mark Musa), New York: Penguin Books, 1979, pp. 520-521. This comment upon reading may be an allusion (or an intertextual reference) to a famous letter Machiavelli wrote to Francesco Vettori in 1513, seven years before the creation of Castracani, where he puts forth the humanist ideal of self-immersion eloquently: “On the coming of evening, I return to my house and enter my study; and at the door I take off the day’s clothing, covered with mud and dust, and put on garments regal and courtly; and reclothed appropriately, I enter the ancient courts of ancient men…I am not ashamed to speak with them and to ask them the reason for their actions and they in their kindness answer me…entirely I give myself over to them.” (Niccolò Machiavelli, The Prince, (Trans. by Robert Adams), p. 132.)
[28]Niccolò Machiavelli, The Life of Castruccio Castracani, in The Portable Machiavelli, p. 541.
[29]Donald Frame, Montaigne: A Biography, pp. 36ff.
[30]J.H.M. Salmon, Society In Crisis: France in the Sixteenth Century, London: University Press, Cambridge, 1975, p. 14.
[31]Ibid., p. 97.
[32]Ibid., pp. 110-111.
[33]Donald Frame, Montaigne: A Biography, p.118.
[34]In the introduction to his translation of Montaigne’s complete essays, Donald Frame offers a “handy” breakdown of the periods of Montaigne’s development: “‘stoical’ period (1572-74), skeptical crisis (1576), [and] ‘epicurean’ period (1578-92),” giving the reader proper warning that the divisions are “less useful than they might be.” (p. xii) He is correct. Montaigne’s essays can only be partially interpreted chronologically; each partakes of the other. The author’s incessant glosses and corrections make a usual “evolutionary” reading problematic.
[35]Michel de Montaigne, The Complete Essays of Montaigne, pp. 60, 65. The “gloss” mentioned reminds us of the danger of chronological interpretation. In the introduction to his translation, Frame shows the reader the approximate time period of every passage published in the essays, labeling passages as A (before 1588), B (1588) and C (after 1588). (Note on Translation, pp. xiii-xiv)
[36]Jules Brody, “Du repentir” (III:2): A Philological Reading,” in Yale French Studies, p. 271.
[37]Michel de Montaigne, The Complete Essays of Montaigne, p. 86.
[38]Joshua Scodel, “The Affirmation of Paradox: A Reading of Montaigne’s ‘De la Phisionomie’ (III:12), in Yale French Studies, p. 226.
[39]Michel de Montaigne, The Complete Essays of Montaigne, p. 648.
[40]Ibid., p. 773.
[41]Ibid., p. 741.
[42]Ibid., p. 709. Also, in the next paragraph: “A hundred times a day we make fun of ourselves in the person of our neighbor and detest in others the defects that are more clearly in ourselves, and wonder at them with prodigious impudence and heedlessness.” See also Shakespeare’s sonnet 121, as well as its interpretation below.
[43]Gerard DeFaux, “Readings of Montaigne,” in Yale French Studies, p. 90. (Italics in original)
[44]Michel de Montaigne, The Complete Essays of Montaigne, p. 327, p. 320.
[45]Catherine De Mure, “Montaigne: The Paradox and the Miracle – Structure and Meaning in “The Apology for Raymond Sebond” (Essais II:12), in Yale French Studies, pp. 195-201. (Italics in original)
[46]Michel de Montaigne, The Complete Essays of Montaigne, p. 457.
[47]Donald Frame, Montaigne: A Biography, p. 180.
[48]Michel de Montaigne, The Complete Essays of Montaigne, p. 499.
[49]Ibid., p. 611.
[50]Jean Starobinski, “The Body’s Moment,” in Yale French Studies, p. 278.
[51]Michel de Montaigne, The Complete Essays of Montaigne, p. 805.
[52]Ibid, pp. 855-857.
[53]According to G.B. Harrison, this play’s source “is a Roman comedy by Plautus called Menechmi – The Menechmus Twins.” This quote (p. 270), and all references to Shakespeare’s plays, are from Shakespeare: The Complete Works, (G.B. Harrison, Ed.), New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, Inc., 1948, 1952.
[54]S. Schoenbaum, William Shakespeare: A Compact Documentary Life, New York: Oxford University Press, 1987, p. 162.
[55]Shakespeare: The Complete Works, (Ed. G.B. Harrison), pp. 1544ff.
[56]S. Schoenbaum, William Shakespeare: A Compact Documentary Life, pp. 176ff.
[57]Stephen Greenblatt, Shakespearean Negotiations: The Circulation of Social Energy in Renaissance England, Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 1988, p. 75.
[58]Ibid., pp. 75-76.
[59]Greenblatt uses this remark to note that this idea of self “means to perform one’s part in the scheme of power rather than to manifest one’s natural disposition, or what we would normally designate as the core of the self.” (Shakespearean Negotiations, p. 46)
[60]Walter Kaufmann, From Shakespeare to Existentialism, Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor Books, 1960, p. 40. Kaufmann’s points are generally philosophical and stress Shakespeare’s alleged anti-Christian point-of-view.
[61]This foreshadows the metaphor of the recorder Hamlet asks Guildenstern to play when describing his and Rosencrantz’s attempted manipulation of Hamlet for the king. After Guildenstern admits he hasn’t the “skill” to command the recorder to speak, Hamlet cries, Why, look you now, how unworthy a thing/ you make of me! You would play upon me,/ you would seem to know my stops, you would pluck/ out the heart of my mystery, you would sound me/ from my lowest note to the top of my compass -/ and there is much music, excellent voice, in this little organ – yet cannot you make it speak. ‘Sblood,/ do you think I am easier to be played on than a pipe?/ Call me what instrument you will, Although you can/ fret me, you cannot play upon me. (3·2·366ff) The irony, however, lies in the resultant tragedy; despite Hamlet’s intelligence, he cannot act and is played upon by many of the characters in the play.
[62] Sonnets in n G.B. Harrison, Ed., Shakespeare/The Complete Works.
[63]There is a philosophical discussion of this sonnet as well as its relation to Isabella’s remark in Walter Kaufmann, From Shakespeare to Existentialism, pp. 5-6.
[64]Quoted in G.B. Harrison, Ed., Shakespeare/The Complete Works, p. 1058.
[65]Stephen Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning/From More To Shakespeare, p. 219.
[66]Ibid., pp. 236-237.
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© 1993 Victor Greto