 at our Mechanics Institute online program, Shakespeare's Essays, sampling Montan from Hamlet to the Tempest with author and scholar Peter Platt, with in conversation with Philippa Kelly, dramaturg in residence at the California Shakespeare Company. I'm Laura Shepard, Director of Events and Mechanics Institute. And tonight we're very pleased to co-sponsor our program with the California Shakespeare Company. For those of you who are new, Mechanics Institute was founded in 1854 and is one of San Francisco's most vital literary and cultural centers in the heart of the city. It features a general interest library and international chess club, ongoing author and literary programs and our Cinema with Film series on Friday nights. So please visit our website. Also, please note that the library is open Monday, Wednesday, Friday for a few hours every day. So you can make your reservation and come down to the library. It's a thrill to open our doors to our members once again. You know, after this talk, we will have a Q&A. So hold your questions and put them in a chat and we look forward to engaging with you. Also Shakespeare's Essays, Sampling Monten from Hamlet to the Tempest by Peter Platt, is available at EdinburghUniversityPress.com and we have that in the chat on the side and books are at 30% discount with a discount code, NEW30. So Peter Platt provides a detailed history of the literary critical interest in the Montena Shakespeare connection from the 18th century to the present day. He explores both author's approach to self, knowledge and form that stress fractures, interruptions and alternatives. While the change in monarchy, the revived interest in judicial rhetoric and the changes in Shakespeare's acting company helped shape plays such as Measure for Measure, King Lear and the Tempest. His book contends that Shakespeare's reading of Montenya is one of the driving forces in his later plays and we are delighted to have two great experts and great minds to discuss this. So please welcome Peter Platt and Philippa Kelly and I forgot to give you their bios. So once more I'm gonna give you, give a few minutes dedicated to their bios. Peter Platt is the Ann Whitney Olin Professor and Chair of English at Barnard College. He is the author of Shakespeare and the Culture of Paradox and Reason Diminished, Shakespeare and the Marvelous and the editor of Wonders, Marvels and Monsters in Early Modern Culture. He has written articles on Shakespeare, Renaissance, Poetics and Rhetoric and Shakespeare's Montenya and in addition of selections from John Florio's 1603 translation of Montenya's essays was co-edited with Stephen Greenblatt and Philippa Kelly is resident for Dramaturg for California Shakespeare Theater. She has published 11 books and 98 articles and her latest book that she edited is called Diversity, Inclusion and Representation in Contemporary Dramaturgies, Case Studies from the Field. She is proud to lead a year round of the Community Theater Group entitled Berkeley Theater Explorations, the purpose of which is to make dramaturgy foundational to community theater appreciation. In other words, to make theater going an active practice rather than a passive form of consumption, hooray, hooray. So please welcome Peter Platt and Philippa Kelly. Take it away. Thank you. It's great to be here. I want to say I don't want this to be like a Renaissance text where there are 20 pages of free ambles but I do want to thank everybody out there for coming. It's overwhelming to see the people I am seeing who are not necessarily in San Francisco at all and I can't see more than 20 of you. If we were doing this at the Mechanics it would be preferable in many ways but there'll be a lot of people who are here now who couldn't be here, here. And I am in the Mechanics Institute because I have an office here and I have written three books here and Laura and Pam have hosted me for all three of them and I'm incredibly grateful. I'm also grateful to my office mate, Bill Libman, who listened to me talk about this in this office for 10 years and to Philippa Kelly for taking time out from an incredibly busy schedule to actually read the book and because we've talked a little bit about it, she's read it carefully and thoroughly and I'm incredibly grateful. I have to thank my wife Nancy and my son Jordy for living through the Montaigne Shakespeare years with me. My brother Jeff, the same, my mom and my dad for making me interested in books and scholarship. My colleagues at Barnard for always being there with me and talking through these ideas with me, especially William Sharp and Peter Connor who have spent hours with me on this. My friends in the world of Shakespeare and Montaigne, especially Leonard Barkin, Stephen Greenblatt, Jim Shapiro and a man in the center of my screen, Will Hamlin, and finally my editors and promotional people at Edinburgh University Press. If you wanna write an academic book, it's the place to go, I'm incredibly lucky. And now I will stop with that and let's fill up a rip away. Let me know, what do you wanna talk about? You're muted, my friend. Okay, I'm sorry, hello everybody. It's just an honor to be here with you all and Peter, you thanked me for reading the book but it was such an honor and a gift to read the book. I loved it and it's written everybody in such a personable style. But I wanted to begin by, well, first of all, giving a shout out to Professor Greenblatt who wanted to be here this afternoon but is hosting another event of his own as well as Professor Shapiro. And I know both of them have been key collaborators in your academic career, Peter. But first of all, how did this particular project come about? Well, I think it's a good place to start and the mechanics was part of that too because it ended up being a two-part project. Originally, I was gonna do a sort of casebook for the classroom where I would talk about the history of the Montaigne Shakespeare connection and then have case studies where I would get into the conversation pairing essays and plays and then that would be one part and the other part would be sort of an addition of the translation that Shakespeare read and the hybridity of it, although hybridity is good, Montaigne and Shakespeare love hybridity, they love mixture and messiness. The publishers didn't. They basically said that's not gonna, that's great idea, but it doesn't fit a market. And another one of my great colleagues at Barnard and Columbia, Gene Howard said, do two things, do an addition and then do the monograph. And Gene's almost always right. In fact, I probably always write about these things. So I listened to her and the problem was that Stephen Greenblatt was doing an addition of Florio's essays as well. And they weren't gonna coexist. I mean, his was gonna win the day. And so knowing him from the way back, I asked him if he wanted to collaborate and he did and that was part one. And that's in 2014, the mechanics was nice enough to have me give a presentation on that, which is called Shakespeare's Montaigne, which is a selection of slightly modernized translation of Montaigne that John Florio did and that Shakespeare and his contemporaries read. Then I finished that and I sort of started writing the other book and that's what we have now. What Shakespeare's essays is, is that other part, which is the history of the connection between the two writers, which in print didn't start until the 18th century. Let's talk about a little bit in a minute. And then the second, the bulk of it is, paired essays and plays that will eventually get to the tempest, which is the obvious one, the smoking gun, the one that has to be in there. But I think a lot of the pairings I've done are not original, then barely new. Making the case for the importance of Montaigne to post 1603 Shakespeare. So that's the origin of the project. It was going to be one thing and then it became two things. This is a little bit of an odd question, but I just wanted to know for our audience, what did Montaigne look like? I don't have a slide, I have a slide in the translator. Wait a minute, I can pull this out. The reason he's not, goodness. Fortunately, I'm in my office, Phillip, so I shouldn't be too hard. Where's Will? He looked a lot like, Lori, this is, you must have thought I was gonna have a slide here. Where's the biography? Okay, that is what he looked like. Oh, that's... That's one of portraits, and that's gonna have to do. That's another one, which is fairly recent. How about that? If I were in this office, I'd be doomed. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. That's what Montaigne looked like. So that's for that one. And I can, while we're at it, I can practice my screen-sharing skills. That's not the one. No, I don't want that one, sorry. That's what John Plurio looked like. And he was the amazing translator, dictionary maker, language manual creator, probably translator of Boccaccio's Cameron as well, who took on the project of translating Montaigne's essays from French into English. That's Flurio. Well, thank you for that, Peter, and sorry to discombobulate our process. But so then I have another question. Shakespeare didn't write any essays that we know about. And I'm just wondering, I'm showing everybody the book here. How would you explain the title? So the title being Shakespeare's Essays, Sampling Montaigne from Hamlet to the Tempest. Great, that's a good one. And I can also say that part of the reason that I couldn't easily find a portrait is that I decided not to put portraits on my cover. I instead wanted to do the places where the two men worked. So one is the incredible ceiling of Montaigne's tower, which I recommend everybody here go to see, but make sure you have a reservation in Castillon because they don't take very many people. And if you go in the summer without a reservation, you can go a long way in your pilgrimage and not get there. Montaigne's favorite quotations were on the beams. The other, the inset is the earliest illustration we have of either the curtain or the theater early Shakespearean stages. So I didn't put their cells there, which would have been easier for that first question, but I put their workplaces. And now to the language part of the title. Right, Shakespeare didn't write essays. Montaigne didn't think he was writing essays either, which is really interesting since their note, once he did write them and call them essays, they became a literary genre, right? And Francis Bacon, inspired by Montaigne, called his essays, essays. But in that moment, and we're lucky enough, Florio has an incredible two dictionaries, English, Italian, but in a kind of parallel project was done by a man named Randall Cockrave. And then in 1611, he published a dictionary of the French and English tongues. And he's really useful many, many, for many reasons, particularly when you're dealing with Montaigne and Shakespeare and French and English in this period. But he defines essay, the verb to what we think of as to try, but essay in French, still has in English the sense that was very prominent then of essay, right, weighing, sampling. But as Cockrave said, to essay, to essay, try, prove, taste, attempt, take a taste, make a trial of to feel beforehand. And so for me, there's a pun there, it's a play, it's tricky, right? It's not overly clever, I hope. But the idea is both to be destabilizing, wait a minute, Shakespeare didn't write any essays, but then to remind us that essays cut both ways. Shakespeare's essays are the Florio translation, right? That book of essays that I think were really important to him. But more interesting linguistically, I hope, is the idea that Shakespeare essays, tastes, samples, tries out, Montaigne's essays. That doesn't mean he always agrees with them. It doesn't mean that he mirrors him or steals from him, though sometimes he does, he negotiates, he tries things out. And I was really frustrated at a certain point in this project and Will Hamlin knows this because I couldn't, there was, there's a, I tried to find a middle ground between finding verbal echoes, which you have in the Tempest. But that's kind of barren in the end. Between verbal echoes on the one hand, very, very precise and minute. On the other hand, and anything goes link, which gets very sloppy. They both were skeptical. They both were interested in selfhood. They both were interested in cultural others. All these things are true, but how to get in between that so that this was a kind of, their negotiation could be made clear. And for me, the essay, the verb essay, essaying was the key. So Shakespeare's essays are Florio's translation, but also Shakespeare's samples. And I also kind of liked the hip hop thing. I kind of liked that echo of hip hop and sampling because Montaigne takes texts from all over the place. Renaissance writers did that. Sometimes they were accused of plagiarism by bitter people, but that was weaving a text out of other people's texts, sampling in that sense was also part of the game. Yeah. Oh, that's fascinating. It's also really intriguing that the philosopher Frederick Nietzsche claimed that Shakespeare was Montaigne's best reader. Is there one piece of clear cut evidence that Shakespeare actually did read Montaigne? Yeah, there's at least one. And that's what I would want to focus on because even the skeptics, because there are people that say, well, almost everything that Shakespeare talks about that seems Montanian is part of a commonplace culture, you know, a bag of classical ideas and aphorisms that anybody could have had access to. I think that's really, it's very negative. I don't buy it. I respect it and I have to negotiate with that and answer it. But even that type of critic can't deny that there's a smoking gun. And I just want to show it to you. We got Florio again coming up, but the next slide is the page from of the cannibals where Shakespeare actually did quote in the voice of his character Gonzalo from the Tempest, in the Tempest, from of the cannibals. And this is a passage right here. That's not so good. You just have to believe me, but this is better. It is a nation what I answer Plato that has no kind of traffic, no knowledge of letters, no intelligence of numbers, no name of magistrate, nor of politics superiority, no use of service, of riches or of poverty, no contracts, no successions, no dividends, no occupation, but idle, no respect to kindred, but common, no apparel, but natural, no manuring of lands, no use of wine, corn or metal. That's Montaigne via Florio. And here's Gonzalo, written by Shakespeare. Had I a plantation of this aisle, my Lord, in the Commonwealth, I would by contraries execute all things for no kind of traffic would I admit, no name of magistrate, letters should not be known, riches, poverty, and use of service, none, contracts, session, born, bound of land, tilts, vineyard, none, no use of metal, corn, or wine, or oil, no occupation, all men, idle, all, and women too, but innocent and pure, no sovereignty. So I'm gonna stop sharing now so that I can see more people. And there you are again, happily. But that's a case where to me, it's fascinating. I need and want that evidence, take that doubters, there it is. But what's more interesting is, and I think we're gonna go a little bit chronological, I think, and we'll talk about the tempest towards the end. But I think the S saying of the cannibals is more interesting than that verbal echo. It's fascinating, Shakespeare wants to think about starting a Commonwealth or a state from scratch and what that would mean, and he draws on Montaigne, but I think there are many more things going on in of the cannibals, not the least of which is the title and the near anagram of Caliban, that is even more interesting than the direct echo. But that's what I would say, Nietzsche is right, Nietzsche wanted a broader reading, I totally agree with him, he didn't pick it apart, he just threw it out there, I think he's right, and my book tries to prove that Montaigne was sort of everywhere, particularly in the late place, close 16 or three plays, and we'll talk about dating if we get there, yeah. Yeah, which reminds me, Peter, could you say a little something about the dating of Shakespeare's plays, about how we work out, given that there weren't document, there wasn't documentary evidence of the plays after he was there? Yeah, and this is hard stuff, and I'm not, this has become quite a science now. I wanna say a couple of things about dates and that's definitely answer your question. One is that although the A key date is 1603, right, that's when the translation came out. It's amazing how quickly the educated, literate, Elizabethan, Jacobians gravitated towards those essays. As Will Hamlin shown, the playwright who drew on Montaigne most and most early was John Marston, a contemporary of Shakespeare. Ben Johnson alludes to people stealing from Montaigne as early as 1610-11 in Volpone. I think it's 1011, 1011, 1213, somewhere in there. So those are early uses of Montaigne, but people didn't, at least in print, I mean, until Montaigne was out there in English culture, people were dying to have it. Some of them could probably read French, but then the English translation came out and it was a big deal. But when did people start linking Montaigne, and I promise I'm gonna get to the place, I just, while we're on dates, I just thought we'd line things up a little bit. When did people start to notice that Shakespeare himself drew on Montaigne or drew on Montaigne's ideas? And the first time in print, it was noted, was in 1780. And this is what Laura mentioned the 18th century. A man in Edward Capel linked that text that I just showed you in the Tempest to Montaigne. Though he assumed Shakespeare could read French and this is another thing we may or may not have time to talk about. In 1790, Edmund Malone, the great editor of 18th century editor of Shakespeare, said, he laughed at Capel, he was very mean, that people could be mean, that barbed wit at 18th century. And he said the passage was pointed out by Mr. Capel who knew so little of his author as to suppose that Shakespeare had the original French before him, so he almost literally followed Florio's translation. Well, that's 1790. So the link between Shakespeare, Tempest and Montaigne is 1780, Shakespeare, Tempest and Florio, 1790. So those are important dates. And now, what about dating of plays? That's not, that's a great question. That's not my job. A lot of it's done by stylometrics and computers now people get in bloody verbal, well, they would probably hurt each other if they got in the same room, but they're verbal spats and disagreements about the dating of plays. Some of the people involved in that discipline are not particularly kind. And it's a kind of slightly macho one-upsmanship. But it does matter, dates do matter in this area, which is why Philip is asking me this, I think. It matters because what happens, when can you, if you assume Shakespeare did not know French and it's interesting to me that my French colleagues across the world think he did, why do you have to start at 1603? Shakespeare obviously knew French. He was throwing on Montaignean ideas before that. I said, man, I wish you could tell my Shakespeare people that. They're incredibly empirical and positivist about this. So that's, I think they're right, but for the purpose of this argument, I had to start at 1603. Then the question is, aha. And people will say to me, you put Hamlet in there. Well, most people do put Hamlet in there because of the attention to skepticism and the problem of knowledge and the problem of the self and the problem of knowing other minds. All that stuff seems completely Montaignean. And yet we know there were versions of Hamlet performed before 1603. So what do we do with that? I have to argue and I do, though I realize I'm vulnerable on this, that the later versions of Hamlet revise the earlier version of Hamlet and there is what the so-called Q1 or first quarter of Hamlet is a very different play. And if Shakespeare, if that's the earliest version of Hamlet and that would be very interesting, it's definitely a less sophisticated, much shorter version. I love it, but it's more of a pure revenge tragedy. Shakespeare's Hamlet gets deeper, more complicated, I would say, more Montaignean in the revisions of the second quarter of 1604 and the first folio of 1623. People disagree a lot about this. I look at the whole problem of the Hamlet text. It's the one part of the book that's a little slow and scholarly, but I had to do it because I have to convince people that that's a possible starting point for the Montaignean Shakespeare. So people, you know, I am not... I don't have the technology or the skill to date Shakespeare's plays, but I have to pay attention. And all's well that ends well is a play that I just, in terms of its sensibilities, its languages, its ideas, seems to me a quintessential Montaignean play. There used to be an argument that it was an early, an early Shakespeare play and like a 1590s play. The latest research suggests not only is it not that early, but it's in the sweet spot, 1603 to 1607, perfect for me, makes my instincts, or validates my instincts on this. And that the new stuff is that maybe Thomas Middleton added to it in the 1620s after Shakespeare's death. That's where there's contest about all's well that ends well. So for us, for my purposes, the plays I look at are post 1603. So Hamlet, all's well that ends well and measure for measure, 1603, 1604 for me, maybe it's late as 1606. King Lear, 1606, 1607, 1608 with the revision, 1623, that ended up in the 1623 folio, sorry. And then The Tempest, which is a late play, 1610, 11, something like that. And you also have a little, you have a little scintilla of The Winter's Tale. So just to kind of add that to your pile. Yeah, I wish that. So I'm wondering, what do you think, one question we have right now that is asked a lot. And I just heard George Saunders talking about this a couple of days ago. What do you think Montaigne and Shakespeare thought about human beings capacity to change? Oh boy, yeah, that's a big one. It's a really, really important one. I think a key term in the period and the way I think about it is and a real interest in human mutability. And the idea of a discontinuous or a kind of multiple self, that gets connected in Montaigne to the idea of a performed self or the theatricality of a self and a shape-shifting kind of a sense. Shakespeare is really obviously really interested in that as a man of the theater and as someone who took the theater of his every day and thought about it as a theater of the world or theater of life in an early-ish essay in the first edition of Montaigne's essays in constancy of our actions. Montaigne, and this is in Florious Translation which is a little bit hard to get, but I love it. And it responds to this. Montaigne says, we are all framed of flaps and patches and of so shapeless and diverse a texture that every piece and every moment plays its part. And there is as much difference found between us and ourselves as there is between ourselves and others. That's an astonishing thing for someone to say in the 16th century, it seems to me. There's as much difference in me, in between versions of me as there is between you and me, right? And there's a sense of tailoring there, clothing, flaps and patches, shapeless and texture but also theater, every moment plays its part. Montaigne finishes that little bit by saying, esteem and a great matter to play but one man. It's hard to be one. It's hard to be singular. And I think both Shakespeare and Montaigne at different moments in different plays and different essays think that that singleness is good or that singleness is limited. That multiplicity and mutability is exciting and that multiplicity and mutability are scary. That constant change. That idea that as one anti-theatricalist who also wrote plays, Anthony Mundy said that you could be as variable in your heart as you are in your part, right? That there, how could you know somebody if they could constantly change clothes and therefore self? So there's that capacity for change which I think again, they alternately found exhilarating and frightening. And then just the general beauty of a recognition of human mutability and mortality. So you're constantly in change and then you died. So there's a beautiful part in Montaigne's longest essay called Apology of Raymond Saban, book two, essay 12 if you wanna look it up. But this is just one of my favorite bits in one of Florio's most lovely renderings. The flower of age, dais, fetus and fleetus when age comes upon us and youth end is in the flower of a full grown man's age, childhood in youth and the first age, dais and infancy. I mean, that's Beckett, right? And yesterday, end is in this day and today shall die in tomorrow and nothing remain as or ever continuous in one state. So if that's sort of the grounding and that's sadder, it seems to me, more poignant but also incredibly realistic. And more often than not, both in Montaigne and in Shakespeare the ability to change shape is a positive thing, or at least a powerful thing particularly when you get into politics. The people who are single often roam at single and that means unified one thing, univocal as we say in the trade sometimes. Those people are more limited particularly in the world of politics. There might be a kind of grandeur to them and they often are Roman, but there's also a kind of limit. Endless change is also scary because as I said before how can you know somebody if they're constantly in flux? So there's a lot of change. They wrote about it, thought about it. The theater gave Shakespeare a way in a kind of practical on the way to philosophical and Montaigne as a philosopher grew on theater a lot. So they really did, they really were connected I think on that topic. That's fascinating, Peter. And just thinking about, so just for the benefit of our audience, there was an Italian called Castelloni and he wrote about decorum. And so in that period, the idea of some people actually laws predominated so that you, your task in life was to fashion yourself into the correct and integrated version of who you were ordained to be. And so just thinking about that, it's interesting, isn't it that in our time when we have so much more of an idea of an internal core that is our true self. And so ideas like trauma, you know, not parts of the self that can't be integrated. And then being too faced is another way of that we have of not really being comfortable with shape shifting. And that's what's so beautiful about what you're saying because I feel that in a way, maybe Shakespeare and Montaigne and I think Professor Greenblatt would certainly argue this might have been much more comfortable with that idea that we are as different from versions of ourselves as I am from you. Yeah, I think that's right. And Castelloni was definitely involved in the idea of the self as a work of art and it's something that needed to be practiced so much so that you couldn't then see the hard work behind it, the spread satura. But for him, and I think the good courtier and Shakespeare gives you good courtiers and bad courtiers but the good courtier uses all that performativity and skill but also tells the prince when he's doing a bad job. So there's a kind of moral quality to it. There's fear and you get that in the more Machiavellian side of things that morality goes away with shape shifting and I don't think it has to. I don't think it has to at all. And also, because we're up against it here already but this is something that Shakespeare rings changes on in his transvestite plays, his cross-dressing plays where that was just fundamental part of the theater. The boys played women but he used that to meditate on and had people switch several times sometimes in the classic plays like 12 Night End as you like it to think about gender and gender performativity too. And so it was long, and it was, Judith Butler's great, but Judith Butler didn't invent it, right? And Laura says we have 10 more minutes. So this is all very exciting stuff and I need to reign it in. So I know you have more questions. Well, I'm loving the fact that you're letting it loose. Relationship to what you've been saying, Peter. So there's a quote from Montaigne, the weakness of our condition causes that things in their natural simplicity and purity cannot fall into our use. And it makes me wonder, and this is actually page 82 of Peter's book. It makes me wonder about the idea of skepticism and where Montaigne and Shakespeare sit on the continuum of skepticism. Yeah, this is, you're touching all the bases. This is big stuff and really, really important. The essay that comes from is, I think to me, my favorite Montaigne-Shakespeare link, which isn't the tempest one in the cannibals, but is, we taste nothing purely because Montaigne talks about the blended nature of the world in terms of cells and morality and philosophy that my mom just entered the waiting room. That's just really wonderful. And the kind of blendedness of the world and that gets, it definitely does get into skepticism and Montaigne absorbed a certain strain of ancient skepticism and disseminated it. I think arguably more than anybody else in that part of the 16th century because sexism, I'm trying not to go too far into the weeds here, but Sexist Empiricus wrote in about 200 CE, but his outlines of Pyranism, an intense form of skepticism, didn't come out in Latin until 1562. And he was drawing on the ideas of Piero, who was from the late fourth and early third centuries BCE. And Montaigne was really, really interested in that particular form of skepticism. He said that they're in the sabonde essay, the big one with, it's almost a book, it is a book length essay, 212. Montaigne says, whoever seeks for anything, come at that last to this conclusion and say it's that one, either he has found it, the philosophical quest is over. And he called these people, including Aristotle and Lucretius, we might love too, dogmatists, because they thought they had an explanation of how things work, the end of knowledge, that it cannot be found the other extreme, what Will Hamlin calls anti-dogmatists, but the idea that you can't find truth at all. The idea is, I know what truth is, I can't find truth at all. And what Montaigne preferred was this third term, the Pyranus, outlines of Pyranism, what sex this was getting at, which was that he is still in pursuit after it. So Montaigne, although broke with the Pyranus view in lots of different ways, that ongoing inquiry was crucial to his skepticism. Doubt everything except God. And I really do believe Montaigne when he says he was a practicing Catholic. And if you go to his tower right beneath his library and his workspace, there's a little chapel. You know, to believe that was just performance. But this idea of doubting the doxa, doubting the common way of looking at things. So Shakespeare and Montaigne, I think, share a paradoxy, right, against the doxa. Their skepticism is not nihilism. And it's also not as hopeless as what got connected to Cicero, that second group, right? Where all I know is that I know nothing. But there was, I don't think I can get it. I don't know if I can get it, but I'm gonna keep asking. And I'm gonna keep pushing. And it was that kind of skepticism that I think is liberating and exciting and Montaigne and Shakespeare both gravitate more towards that kind of freeing skepticism, endless inquiry, later in their careers. I think it comes out more in book three of the essays and then in Shakespeare's later place. Gosh, you know, there's so many things I want to ask you, including ideas of women's roles, of men's perception of women. But I'll just go to the chat and see whether we've got questions here because everybody, I have already gotten Peter's agreement to come and talk with me out at the Cal Shades Grove when we actually have our production out at the Bruns in August. And so I'll get the chance to ask even more questions then. But I want to give you a chance to have a voice. Elaine says, another translation of essay is Rehearse, which is useful for writers of books and of plays. What of the relationship between Thomas Moore and Montaigne and how Moore may have extended onto Shakespeare? Well, that's a tough one. That sounds like two. I mean, the rehearsal thing's really, really interesting. I'm not sure how Thomas Moore fit in, though. I think of Thomas Moore, the connection I think of is when Thomas Moore talks in the utopia. And we can still talk about women and we can still talk about the tempest because I think I'm gonna do the chat, but let's take it. Moore's really interesting in maybe this is where the question was going, but he and Raphael dispute whether you can be a courtier where you can play the game. And Raphael says, now I'm taking my knowledge and I'm leaving, the court is corrupt. I want nothing to do with it. And the Moore character says, you have to play. You have to play that part. You have to engage because that way you can change the theater. That way you can change the theater of state. That way you can change the prince's ideas. So Moore in that way, I think is much closer to Castiglione. And that put aside how Moore dealt with people and that he disagreed with religiously. But that's how I would think about it just quickly. I think I like the woman idea and really before we go to the chat, I mean, maybe it's in the chat, we got to talk about the tempest before we say goodbye, but just to say about the women, Phillip, but it's such a big question because I would say that's where Montaigne is less our contemporary. We had a Shakespeare Association seminar about Montaigne and Shakespeare. And one woman said, you know, who was running, it said, no one's really taken Montaigne to task for his attitude towards women. And it's true, we've got to give him a pass. He's much more enlightened, shall we say, or much more philosophically open to thinking about cultural others, Brazilian Indians, religious conflict, even, you know, the idea that God has to look like a human being. He's fascinating if, he's fascinating on animals and whether animals have consciousness. He's sort of the father of the animal studies movement. He seemed to be the father of the animal studies movement. He's so radical and wide open, but he's not particularly generous at least at times to women, even though he had, he loved his daughter, one daughter survived. He had a female executor who took care of his book, his publication of his book after he died and got late revisions in. Doesn't say too much about his wife. Some of the things he says about sex are a little bit crude and not particularly generous. Shakespeare takes Montaigne's ideas of going against the grain. And in many plays, not all plays, he can be misogynistic too, troubles the idea of patriarchy. And I don't think Montaigne does that. They're different and that's one place where I think they're different. I think Shakespeare takes Montaignean strategies and pushes them into gender in a way that Montaigne doesn't or at least doesn't very often. And maybe the theater gave him that angle, the performativity of gender and things like that. Also, I just have to squeeze in something about, well, firstly, about the sonnets. Would there be anything you would want to say about the sonnets? Obviously, most of them being written before the 1603 translation, but any particular relevance of the sonnets to Montaigne? I think there's some ideas in there which may be Montaignean's some skepticism and some nature, culture, tension, but I haven't done a lot of work on it. And I think the soliloquy in Shakespeare changes, which isn't quite the same thing, but it's related to kind of a poem that's sort of a solo project. I think the soliloquy in Shakespeare changes after he reads Montaigne. And Leonard Barkin and I talked about this a lot that the kind of complex inwardness that you get in Hamlet and Macbeth and Lear soliloquies are just different from those that you get earlier. That doesn't mean Richard II soliloquies aren't incredible. And they also think about some of the same ideas, but I'm not sure about the sonnets. I am more sure about the soliloquy that that changes post 1603. And then we have to say something about the tempest a little more because it's so fascinating, your treatment of it. Yeah, well, thanks, that's very daunting because there's so much good work that's been done on it. What the standard take is, which I disagree with now I have to say, the standard take is Montaigne's very kind of, I think radically, this is not a take, this is true. He's radically critical of Europeans and celebratory of the Brazilian Indians that he's met. He turns it into a nature culture tension and talks about the falsity of culture and civilization. And the idea that there's nothing in that nation he says that is barbarous unless you talk about what you don't understand and don't know is barbarous. I mean, is that kind of incredible stuff in that essay? And the idea is that the typical take, which I used to agree with and disagree with, I think more now, is that Shakespeare's too wise for that. So he turns his cannibal, Caliban, into somebody who you can't put into that natural, enlightened, noble savage position earlier before the letter because Caliban's complicated and Montaigne's Brazilian Indian is simple and Montaigne therefore is naive and Shakespeare is sophisticated and clever. And I just don't, I don't buy it anymore. I think both of them, Montaigne highlights the violence of the cannibals, the vengeance of the cannibals. He definitely sees them, he wants to take down European pretension through the cannibals, but they aren't saints. And similarly, Caliban is a would be rapist, but he is also an incredible poet. He's arguably the best poet in the Tempest. He's multi-linguist and he's mastered Jacobean blank verse. Montaigne talks about the beautiful songs and poems of the cannibals. So for me now, what I would say is that both of them meditate on the beauties and violence of nature and unadorned civilization. They meditate both on the beauties and violence in nature and the beauties and violence of civilization and culture. Shakespeare is not gonna say, and I don't think Montaigne says so, he's hard on Europeans and what he sees as over-adornment and ruining of the natural world, but he sees the beauty of art Montaigne does, Shakespeare does too. Caliban can threaten Miranda's virginity, but he can also write one of the most beautiful speeches. He can speak one of the most beautiful speeches in Shakespeare when he laments what is lost. He laments, he wants to go back to sleep so he can dream again. And so to me, they're closer together in their double approach to the cannibals and the Calibans than I used to think. Montaigne's very, it's an early critic. He's an early critic of European colonialism. He's even harder on Europeans of coaches, which is his later essay that takes up a similar topic. Shakespeare draws less on that than he does on the cannibals, I'd say. I just find that fascinating, Peter, that when you talk about, so the way that, and we think about this a lot right now, the labels that we give each other are often so contrary to the views we might have of ourselves. And it takes me back to your point from Montaigne about different versions of ourselves conversing with each other and sometimes finding enmity with each other. And we can see that in the way that different versions of Caliban's self are presented to himself by the other characters in the play. And one senses that he really doesn't know even how to respond to those. I mean, when Prospero accuses him of trying to rape Miranda, he says, well, I wish I had peopled the whole aisle with Caliban's. He's not repentant. And I think on some level, he doesn't know, I mean, that's a case where that law, that custom just doesn't apply. I'd say another example to take it out of that cultural other space is Hamlet, who hates versions of himself that we might find valuable, right? Hamlet another is a self-divided person in the way that you were talking about it, right? There's the Hamlet that is the skeptic that hesitates to commit violence, that hesitates to murder, that Coleridge thought was weak. Hamlet himself thinks that he's weak. Part of him hates that version of himself. So you do see, and Harry Berger's been great about this, characters having arguments with themselves. I don't think Caliban does that, but Shakespeare allows us to see multiple versions of him, for sure. And it's interesting, isn't it, that at so many of the clothes Shakespeare's great tragedies, written in that first decade of the 17th century, he has the protagonist doing battle with the different versions of himself, right up at the end of the play. Yeah, that's good. I like that. So now, Laura, should we, we've gone over, but we needed to get to the tempest, I thought. We're ready for questions from the audience. So if you have questions from our audience, please put your questions in the chat, and Pam will read them out. Otherwise, we'll go back to more conversation with both of you. Well, the first question I see is actually from Laura. Which play has the most influence from Montaigne, and specifically what themes or characters? That's a hard one. I mean, I think for me, I mean, it's hard not to say the tempest, because as I suggested early on, I think there's so much in the tempest that is shaped by of the cannibals, and the verbal echo is just the start, the meditation on the Brazilian Indians, and the idea of nature and culture, the tension between unadorned nature and culture of poetry civilization. There's also beautiful discussions of islands, which are relevant to trying to situate the tempest, quite literally situated. And the larger just meditations on people that you don't know, people that are utterly different from you. Having said that, as I suggested earlier, to me, the linchpin essay is we taste nothing purely because that could be a watchword for both of these authors, right? There's nothing that is pure, simple, certain. That's why Montaigne didn't like the dogmatists, right? That's why Shakespeare, particularly in the later plays, I think of Anthony Cleopatra, takes down the Romans and dares to celebrate the variety and the complexity of Cleopatra, a woman from Egypt, right? As opposed to, I mean, she's by most definitely the character that gets the power in that play and is the most appealing, even to Enobarbus. So I would say we taste nothing purely as an essay, and then those problem plays that I link to them, which are blended things themselves, measure for measure and all of it ends well. That pairing, I think, is probably the one I lean on, can't ignore the tempest, and then something like Anthony Cleopatra comes in and picks up on a lot of these ideas later. Also, could we also add Othello in the anthropophagy, the cannibals that each other eat, the anthropophagy and men whose heads do grow beneath their shoulders? Right, and Othello knows that if you don't have that in your traveler's tale, people won't believe you. If you don't have a marvelous creature as part of your traveler's tale, this Sir Walter Raleigh put this in his Guiana text. He said, the Blemie, the guys with the heads in the chest, I didn't see them, but I talked to a guy that I believe, just down the road, and he says they're here, right? So there's that quality too that there's something marvelous that has to be there for the truth, but Montaigne actually met these Brazilian Indians who were cannibals. So that gives it an extra layer, Othello counts for sure. There's a question from Nancy Fee. Are there passages or scenes in Shakespeare's play that seem particularly informed by Montaignean and possibly more Catholic notions of virtue and vice? Well, I live with that person and we've never had this conversation, but the one I'd say, and not to be a dead horse here, but the one that strikes me fully, and it's not a Catholic one, but it is the, we didn't get to talk about political power, but the King in all's well that ends well has an amazing speech in which he self-consciously talks about the limitations and the fictions of royal power. The King in all's well, and this to me is a Montaignean idea, but it's just shocking to have a King say, look, if you put royal blood and noble blood and common blood into a bucket, you could not tell the difference. We are all similar. Montaigne has lots of rifts about this and we didn't get to talk about it, but he talks about the difference between a commoner who might be an actor and a King is clothing. The King in all's well that ends well says, there's no difference. If you put it, there's blood, it's indistinct. I can make this woman, because Bertram doesn't want to marry Helena, he says, because of her class. I can elevate her class. The main thing you need to think about, and this is where Nancy's question is pertinent, is her virtue, right? She's a good person. The blood thing doesn't matter. Now Bertram tries to deny him. He says, yeah, but I just don't love her and I never will. And then the King says, okay, I'm the King, you have to marry her. He eventually has to play the royal card, but it's clear that it's conventional. It's clear that he, as people might have said 20 years ago, deconstructs the idea of blood, deconstructs the idea of nobility and royalty. He's left it in pieces, and then he has to put it back together and exert royal power. So to me, that King's speech is one of the great moments of Montaigne and Shakespeare, at least ideal-wise. Not linguistically there. They're not linguistic echoes, but they're deep-seated parallels of ideas. Okay, there's a question from Newstock. You've helpfully discussed the near-direct quotation of Floral's Montaigne in The Tempest. Can you speak a bit more about Montaigne's practice? A weaving quotations in his prose and how that practice either resembles or differs Shakespeare's practice quoting favorite sources, whether directly or indirectly. Yeah, they're in different genres. That's a great question. And I think that's Scott. And thanks for coming, Scott. Yeah, Scott's written an incredible book about all this. They're different genres. I think Montaigne is more overt in his pastiche. It's harder to find sources in Shakespeare. Montaigne put it right out there, sometimes by flagging them and sometimes not by doing that. Shakespeare's writing a play, so you don't want to do that all the time. Montaigne's not necessarily showing off, but partly showing off. It's kind of a proverb of performance. That's where I think the sampling comes in, is he's putting together flaps and patches. You stitch together a self. You stitch together a text. And I think that Shakespeare is a playwright and he stitches together parts. That, to me, is the parallel. And yet Shakespeare clearly alludes to, particularly in the Roman plays, but he clearly alludes to other texts as well. It's the stitching that I think is more similar than the way that they quote, but that's a great question. A question from Carol Verberg. Along with the similarities between Shakespeare and Montaigne, how did your comparison of them enlarge your view of one or both ideas? Sorry, what's the idea? I thought you were going to say the odd. One or both ideas. Sorry, what's the idea? I thought you were going to say the odd. One or both? Let me see. Make sure I'm reading. Of one or both ideas? Both ideas. I got it. Yeah. That's great. That's a very good question. I think that by the end of the project, I think of Shakespeare learning first and foremost a method from Montaigne. And what I talk about in the epilogue are ideas of Shakespeare is that we're always there. Even before the, even before the essay, before the essays come out in English. And then how some of those ideas get transformed. I think what links them and what was more clear to me after doing the project that links them is a resistance to dogmatic thought. Resistance to what I've called before the doxa, the way received wisdom and truth. And a sense, as I also suggested earlier, that there's a kind of peace with unknowing, a kind of peace with an ongoing inquiry that, that definitely shows itself at the end of Phillip's favorite soon to be on stage Winner's Tale where there, where everyone goes off with unanswered questions. It seems to me that ending is very Montaignean. We don't know even the audience doesn't know exactly. And so I think that's a good point to remind me in those 16 years that the Leontes is going to ask a lot of questions offstage. And that's the kind of, the kind of view that Montaigne gives you particularly in, of experience in the later essays and book three, that, that there's, that, that inquiry goes on until we die. And then we can't ask questions anymore. There's no end in our inquisitions, he says, our end is in the other world. And that if you, if you stop doing that, you're not living. If you stop questing, searching, accepting ambiguity, doubleness and multiplicity, then you're not, then you're only half alive. And I think that connection between them, and I think Shakespeare shares it was more clear to me after doing a deep dive into this project. So another question again is from Nancy Fee. Could you comment on Montaigne's concept of play as individual whimsy, caprice or exploration, or as a mode of interaction between characters and Shakespeare's plays? If that's relevant. Yeah. I just say what I said at the beginning, which is something that will Hamlin has worked on a lot. And that I agree with, which is that there are a lot of theatrical metaphors in Montaigne. And he uses, he uses the theatrical metaphor to think about selfhood and also to some extent, the uncertainty of the world and the imperfection of knowledge. So he, he draws on, he draws on the theater, not so much in the central play, but he draws on the theater and acting and shape shifting as a way of talking about selfhood. So there's not a sense that, that theater is absent from Montaigne at all. He uses, he talks about actors and, and play acting a lot on the way to thinking about the self. Okay. I noticed that Rosalie Weaver has her hand up. Oh, excuse me. She stepped away. When she comes back, we'll, we'll. Here I am. Okay. Rosalie. Yes, I'd like to get the birth and death dates of both writers, please. Sure. Montaigne was 1533 to 1592. And Shakespeare 1564 to 1616. Birthday tomorrow. Yeah. Birthday and death day supposedly tomorrow, St. George, St. George's books, dragons, all kinds of things. And Ms. Weaver also Florio, interestingly, 1553 to 1625. Florio lived, outlived both of them. And I think the people that do these style, style of metric things now, analyses. Think that Florio didn't stop with translating Montaigne, but went on to translate a cautious to Cameron, which if, if he did was his, was his final masterpiece. He's, he's an amazing man. And we need, I can't do it. I don't have long enough left in me to, to write a Florio biography, but we need a new one. Francis Yates is great. But we need a new Florio biography because he's, he's one of the most interesting men of his generation. He's right up there with these guys. He's just, he's a, he, he was an amazing man of letters. That's a pitch for John Florio there. So I don't see any further questions in, in the, in chat. Okay. I mean, I could take another from Phillipa or we can say good night. I'm, I'm, I'm tired, but I love this stuff. So whatever, whatever the bosses think. Laura, you're, you're mute, you're on mute Laura. So Phillipa, do you have a last question that you're burning to ask? I have so many questions that I'm burning to ask. I guess if I had to choose one, I would ask about, if you have a comment about the limitations of human power that could usefully compare the two. Yeah, I that, that is something that they both very much very, very, very, very much interested in. I talked a little bit about it with, I wanted to, I had a quote here. Is page 98, is it Peter? I stingled it out for the group just in case we got into power. Let's see. I don't see. The king, the king in, in all as well is, is, is an example. And this is a case where Shakespeare, I think, edited on these ideas before, before he read Montaigne, and I think Montaigne probably gave him, again, the toolkit in a way of, of, of honing his ideas, because Shakespeare, particularly through the theatrical metaphor, talked about, was interested in as early as that second group of history plays, the way in which kings perform their power, and that's something theatrical about, about it. And that, you know, you think about how talking about ceremony. The only difference between him and a commenter is that he's got the accoutrements of power. The king in all as well, definitely, the king in all as well definitely makes that point about blood. And I had some really great quotations from, from one of Montaigne's essays. I am not finding it at the moment. It was, it was, it was great, but Montaigne does talk about the fact that you don't know the difference, you wouldn't know the difference between a king and a commenter without, without the props, without the, the displays of, of, of kingship. So it's fragile, it's performative. There's a, there's a real challenge to the idea of the divine right of kings, right? If you're, if you're thinking about that. And both the king himself in that blood speech and, and Helena's challenges to the king when she's trying to get him to listen to her suggests that the divine right of kings is, is potentially a fiction, which is dangerous stuff. I mean, nobody singled out the particular king or that, that could have been, that could have been more of a problem. Yeah, I think I've got this from your book in the right place. And sit we upon the highest throne of the world, yet sit we upon our own tail. Yeah, that is a great one from, from book third, from book. I'm tired now, book three essay 13 of experience, right? Towards the end. I mean, Montaigne and Montaigne talks about, you know, even if you're on the throne, you're on your ass, right? And in, and in Oswald at Enswell, I think significantly, the king has a terrible problem that's threatening to kill him, which is almost certainly a fistula in anal. So that, you know, if you want to link those, you can, but the king can't sit on his throne. Montaigne's king at the end of, of experience sits on his throne, Montaigne, Shakespeare's king and Oswald at the beginning until Helena cures him can't sit on his throne. And so I think that that's key and I have found my, my, my other quotations just because they're interesting. I think this is from of the inequality that exists between us. Montaigne says, whereas if we consider a cottager and a king, a noble and a handy craftsman, a magistrate and a private man, a rich man and a poor, an extreme disparity does immediately present itself unto our eyes, which as a man may say, differ in nothing but in their clothes. And he goes on to say, for as actors, you shall see them now on the stage play a king, an emperor or a Duke, but they are no sooner off the stage that, but they are base rastles, vagabond objects and portedly hirelings, which is their natural original condition, even so the emperor, whose glorious pomp doth so dazzle you in public, view him behind the curtain and you see but an ordinary man. It's like Shade the Wizard of Oz, right? But you see an ordinary man and per adventure more vile and more silly than the least of his subjects. It's contingent. It's chance. It's convention that brings power and what that's Montaigne. I think Shakespeare found that and loved it. But the fact that he has a king of France say almost, say something very similar is astonishing. That's why to me that that moment and also the end was incredibly radical. We have time for just one more question. And that's from Trish Gorman. It's about how we know what we know and whether Montaigne and Shakespeare were unusual in their day to be thinking about that question. Great question. I don't think they were unusual. I think that Montaigne's essays hit home the way they did because he articulated those questions about the problem of knowledge in a way that particularly in Florio's lovely English hit home. I think they found articulation in his essays. And then I think also in Shakespeare's plays. So those ideas were around. Anybody that wants to challenge my ideas or certainly the originality of these ideas certainly can do it. There were all kinds of books that books out there and resuscitations of classical thought that that were skeptical in nature and raised the question of the problem of what we know and how we know. Montaigne put it on a metal right says what do I know. It's fundamental. But both of these writers in their different genres. I think. Made those questions. Hit home and resonate. Probably easier to do in the theater where you have an audience and get all that energy. But Montaigne's essays have been selling since he published them. So he's he resonates as well. That's a great question. My sense is people people ask those questions. But they they articulated them. Better than anybody else is why we care about him. I think. Well I want to thank Peter Platt and Phillipa Kelly for an illuminating conversation tonight. And I want to encourage everyone to keep questing. Keep inquiring. Keep coming back to our programs. Go to cow shakes and get on their e-list. So you know all about what's happening there in the theater. I know that the theater will be opening up soon. And we look forward to going to the theater and being with you Phillipa on site in the future. Can't wait. And Peter thank you for all your great work your scholarship and your your delving into all these incredible questions. Thank you. I say to everyone a fairly well until next time. It's one one thing. Just one thing I apologize for the price of the book. There is a 30% discount available. But it's also going to come out in paperback late this year early next year if you want to wait. I can't control this, but this is the first time I've ever written a scholarly book where there is a paperback built in. It's coming later if you want. And thank you for coming. I really, really appreciate it means a lot. How about some applause? Everybody can unmute and say goodbye. Say their goodbyes. And what a wonderful audience. It's just so I'll be listening to this recording and thinking about all the questions and just wondering what questions people might have asked one. Yeah, thank you. And we'll be, we'll be reading Shakespeare with a new, new, new hearts and minds after this discussion for sure. Well, it's clear that Montaigne wrote Shakespeare. No. Thank you. Good night, everyone. Thank you. Okay. Good night. We're closing the doors. All right. Bye.