Montaigne’s Essais , Shakespeare’s Trials and Other Experiments of Moment

Abstract

This chapter develops the suggestion from Burrow and Rothschild that we need a more capacious conception of literary influence in order to account for relations between Montaigne and Shakespeare. Citing Terence Cave, Scholar notes that Shakespeare’s trials have the character of essais; adapting a phrase from A. D. Nuttall, Scholar suggests that the Montaigne–Shakespeare relation, like many other important literary relationships, needs to be thought of as ‘action at a distance’. Scholar joins Burrow in drawing attention to how moments of reflective digression in Shakespeare remind one of Montaigne. Scholar differs from Burrow, however, in demonstrating that some such seemingly ‘Montaignean moments’ predate the likelihood that Shakespeare had read Montaigne in English. Leading up to a discussion of Gonzalo’s evocation of the commonwealth he would found and rule in The Tempest, Scholar adduces two such moments from earlier in Shakespeare’s career as ‘trials’ that resemble essais: the scene in Julius Caesar in which Brutus and then Antony speak over the newly slain body of Julius Caesar, and the actual trial scene in The Merchant of Venice in which Shylock justifies his resolve to exact a pound of flesh from Antonio by reference to a catalogue of irrational human compulsions.