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قراءة كتاب Montaigne and Shakspere
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"Those who attempt to shake an Estate are commonly the first overthrown by the fall of it.... The contexture and combining of this monarchy and great building having been dismissed and dissolved by it, namely, in her old years, giveth as much overture and entrance as a man will to like injuries. Royal majesty doth more hardly fall from the top to the middle, than it tumbleth down from the middle to the bottom."
The verbal correspondence here is only less decisive—as regards the use of the word "majesty"—than in the passages collated by Mr. Morley; while the thought corresponds as closely.
VI. The speech of Hamlet,32 "There is nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so"; and Iago's "'tis in ourselves that we are thus or thus,"33 are expressions of a favourite thesis of Montaigne's, to which he devotes an entire essay.34 The Shaksperean phrases echo closely such sentences as:—
"If that which we call evil and torment be neither torment nor evil, but that our fancy only gives it that quality, it is in us to change it.... That which we term evil is not so of itself."... "Every man is either well or ill according as he finds himself."
And in the essay35 Of Democritus and Heraclitus there is another close parallel:—
"Therefore let us take no more excuses from external qualities of things. To us it belongeth to give ourselves account of it. Our good and our evil hath no dependency but from ourselves."
VII. Hamlet's apostrophe to his mother on the power of custom—a passage which, like the others above cited, first appears in the Second Quarto—is similarly an echo of a favourite proposition of Montaigne, who devotes to it the essay36 Of Custom, and not to change readily a received law. In that there occur the typical passages:—
"Custom doth so blear us that we cannot distinguish the usage of things.... Certes, chastity is an excellent virtue, the commodity whereof is very well known; but to use it, and according to nature to prevail with it, is as hard as it is easy to endear it and to prevail with it according to custom, to laws and precepts." "The laws of conscience, which we say are born of nature, are born of custom."
Again, in the essay Of Controlling one's Will37 we have: "Custom is a second nature, and not less potent."
Hamlet's words are:—
No doubt the idea is a classic commonplace; and in the early Two Gentlemen of Verona38 we actually have the line, "How use doth breed a habit in a man;" but here again there seems reason to regard Montaigne as having suggested Shakspere's vivid and many-coloured wording of the idea in the tragedy. Indeed, even the line cited from the early comedy may have been one of the poet's many later additions to his text.
VIII. A less close but still a noteworthy resemblance is that between the passage in which Hamlet expresses to Rosencrantz and Guildenstern the veering of his mood from joy in things to disgust with them, and the paragraph in the Apology of Raimond Sebonde in which Montaigne sets against each other the splendour of the universe and the littleness of man. Here the thought diverges, Shakspere making it his own as he always does, and altering its aim; but the language is curiously similar. Hamlet says:
"It goes so heavily with my disposition that this goodly frame, the earth, seems to me a sterile promontory: this most excellent canopy, the air, look you, this brave o'erhanging firmament, this majestical roof, fretted with golden fire, why it appears no other thing to me than a foul and pestilent congregation of vapours. What a piece of work is man! How noble in reason! how infinite in faculties! in form and moving, how express and admirable! in action, how like an angel! in apprehension, how like a God! the beauty of the world! the paragon of animals! And yet to me what is this quintessence of dust? Man delights not me."
Montaigne, as translated by Florio, has:
"Let us see what hold-fast or free-hold he (man) hath in this gorgeous and goodly equipage.... Who hath persuaded him, that this admirable moving of heaven's vaults, that the eternal light of these lamps so fiercely rolling over his head ... were established ... for his commodity and service? Is it possible to imagine anything so ridiculous as this miserable and wretched creature, which is not so much as master of himself, exposed and subject to offences of all things, and yet dareth call himself Master and Emperor of this universe?... [To consider ... the power and domination these (celestial) bodies have, not only upon our lives and conditions of our fortune ... but also over our dispositions and inclinations, our discourses and wills, which they rule, provoke, and move at the pleasure of their influences.]... Of all creatures man is the most miserable and frail, and therewithal the proudest and disdainfullest. Who perceiveth himself placed here, amidst the filth and mire of the world ... and yet dareth imaginarily place himself above the circle of the Moon, and reduce heaven under his feet. It is through the vanity of the same imagination that he dare equal himself to God."
The passage in brackets is left here in its place, not as suggesting anything in Hamlet's speech, but as paralleling a line in Measure for Measure, to be dealt with immediately. But it will be seen that the rest of the passage, though turned to quite another purpose than Hamlet's, brings together in the same way a set of contrasted ideas of human greatness and smallness, and of the splendour of the midnight firmament.39