قراءة كتاب Montaigne and Shakspere
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id="Page_27" class="x-ebookmaker-pageno" title="27"/> IX. The nervous protest of Hamlet to Horatio on the point of the national vice of drunkenness,40 of which all save the beginning is added in the Second Quarto just before the entrance of the Ghost, has several curious points of coincidence with Montaigne's essay41 on The History of Spurina, which discusses at great length a matter of special interest to Shakspere—the character of Julius Cæsar. In the course of the examination Montaigne takes trouble to show that Cato's use of the epithet "drunkard" to Cæsar could not have been meant literally; that the same Cato admitted Cæsar's sobriety in the matter of drinking. It is after making light of Cæsar's faults in other matters of personal conduct that the essayist comes to this decision:
"But all these noble inclinations, rich gifts, worthy qualities, were altered, smothered, and eclipsed by this furious passion of ambition.... To conclude, this only vice (in mine opinion) lost and overthrew in him the fairest natural and richest ingenuity that ever was, and hath made his memory abominable to all honest minds."
Compare the exquisitely high-strung lines, so congruous in their excited rapidity with Hamlet's intensity of expectation, which follow on his notable outburst on the subject of drunkenness:
Even the idea that "nature cannot choose its origin" is suggested by the context in Montaigne.42 Shakspere's estimate of Cæsar, of course, diverged from that of the essay.
X. I find a certain singularity of coincidence between the words of King Claudius on kingship:
and a passage in the essay43 Of the Incommodity of Greatness:
"To be a king, is a matter of that consequence, that only by it he is so. That strange glimmering and eye-dazzling light, which round about environeth, over-casteth and hideth from us: our weak sight is thereby bleared and dissipated, as being filled and obscured by that greater and further-spreading brightness."
The working out of the metaphor here gives at once to Shakspere's terms "divinity" and "can but peep" a point not otherwise easily seen; but the idea of a dazzling light may be really what was meant in the play; and one is tempted to pronounce the passage a reminiscence of Montaigne. Here, however, it has to be noted that in the First Quarto we have the lines:
And if Shakspere had not seen or heard the passage in Montaigne before the publication of Florio's folio—which, however, he may very well have done—the theory of reminiscence here cannot stand.
XI. In Hamlet's soliloquy on the passage of the army of Fortinbras—one of the many passages added in the Second Quarto—there is a strong general resemblance to a passage in the essay Of Diversion.44 Hamlet first remarks to the Captain: