Shakespeare's Montaigne: The Florio Translation of the Essays: A Selection

✍ Scribed by Montaigne, Michel de

• Book ID: 108502272
• Publisher: New York Review Books
• Year: 2014
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 927 KB
• Category: Fiction
• ISBN-13: 9781590177228

✦ Synopsis

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...