Montaigne and the Essais

I've known about Montaigne and his Essays for a long time but only recently have I gotten around to reading them.  It's quite likely that I would have held off even longer had I not picked up a new(ish) book called Shakespeare's Montaigne (NYRB), which points out just how influential Montaigne was on Shakespeare's later plays, particularly King Lear and The Tempest.  Stephen Greenblatt makes the argument that Shakespeare probably would have had access to the equivalent of a pre-print copy of the Florio translation of Montaigne's Essayes (originally published in 1603) and points out further examples where it appears Shakespeare is borrowing directly from Montaigne.  While he isn't the most faithful of translators, Florio is by far the most influential, since his translation was read by Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, John Donne and Francis Bacon among many others.  In order to understand how these authors experienced Montaigne, the NYRB book reprints key selections taken from the Florio translation.

In addition, I have a more up-to-date Selected Essays translated by J.M. Cohen (Penguin).  There is surprisingly little overlap between the two volumes.  While I had started with Cohen, I have decided to switch to the Florio for now.  In addition, Project Gutenberg has the entire set of Essays translated by Charles Cotton here.  I picked out another 10* that looked pretty interesting on top of the 30 or so in the other two books, and that will get me a bit over 40% of all them.  I probably will eventually read all the Essays but right now I wanted to get a good sampling of them.

There are a few things that do intrigue me about Montaigne.  First, he kept adding to his Essays, even after they were published.  In some cases, he even added material that contradicted his earlier arguments.  He was a bit of a magpie, borrowing pretty heavily from the Romans and occasionally the Greeks, to shore up his own thoughts.  He generally comes across as well-read but not a pedant.  There is relatively little that he considered off-limits to write about.**  He would have been a natural as a blogger...  I am a little sorry not to have read him previously, but better late than never.

It can be a little hard to know just how serious he is at times.  Here is Montaigne discussing the education of children (1.25): "If the pupil proves to be of so perverse a disposition that he would rather listen to some idle tale than to the account of a glorious voyage or to a wise conversation, ...I can see no other remedy than for his tutor to strangle him before it is too late, if there are no witnesses.  Alternatively, he should be apprenticed to a pastry-cook..."  Incidentally, the Cotton translation jumps straight to the apprenticeship option and leaves murder out of it altogether.


* For anyone truly interested, they are Of Sorrow (1.2), Of Fear (1.17), Of Pedantry (1.24), Of Moderation (1.29), Of Solitude (1.38), Of Sleep (1.44), Of Drunkeness (2.2), Of Conscience (2.5), Against Idleness (2.21) and Of Vanity (3.9).

** One of the more astonishing topics is his discussion of performance anxiety-related impotence and how to overcome it!