Reviewed by:

• Shakespeare's Essays: Sampling Montaigne from Hamlet to The Tempest by Peter Platt
• Alan Farmer (bio)

Peter Platt's compelling new book, Shakespeare's Essays: Sampling Montaigne from Hamlet to The Tempest, is the culmination of over two decades of research on Shakespeare's thinking and his later plays. Platt's first book, Reason Diminished: Shakespeare and the Marvelous (University of Nebraska, 1997), focused on Shakespeare's late plays and the concept of wonder, while his next book, Shakespeare and the Culture of Paradox (Routledge, 2009), looked at the way logical opposites could be juxtaposed in order to question such concepts as justice, love, knowledge, and truth, a pervasive intellectual maneuver in the works of both Montaigne and Shakespeare. Most recently, Platt co-edited with Stephen Greenblatt an edition of John Florio's 1603 translation of Montaigne's Essays (New York Review of Books, 2014). One motivation for Platt's writing Shakespeare's Essays can perhaps be found in Greenblatt's introduction to this edition. In it, Greenblatt claims that, apart from some "passages in King Lear and The Tempest, the attempts to establish the direct influence of Montaigne on Shakespeare have never seemed fully and decisively convincing"(xxxi). After all, there is uncertainty about when Shakespeare may have read the Essays, either in French or in Florio's translation, and therefore about when Montaigne's influence can first be detected. But there is also the "more intractable problem" of Shakespeare and Montaigne sharing the same "historical moment," which could have led to "a shared grappling with pressing questions of faith, consciousness, and identity"(xxxii). Why assume Shakespeare was influenced by Montaigne rather than their both being shaped by the same currents of thoughts circulating in Europe and England in the late 16th and early 17th centuries? Shakespeare's Essays can arguably be seen as Platt's extended reply to his co-editor.

Platt opens the book with an important question: "Why do critics and audiences feel that there is something 'different' about the plays that Shakespeare wrote after 1603?" (1). According to Platt, stylistic and thematic features that mark Shakespeare's later plays—"the darkness of their comedy" and "the general pessimism of the largely tragic period that followed," their exploration of "doubt, contingency, uncertainty, and mutability" along with "instabilities of self, knowledge, and form" (1)—can be traced back to Shakespeare's reading of Florio's translation of the Essays. Understanding Shakespeare's plays after 1603 thus means understanding the influence Montaigne had on Shakespeare. And there [End Page 274] is no doubt that Shakespeare read Florio's translation. As the late 18th century Shakespeare editors Edward Capell and Edmund Malone demonstrated, at least one speech by Gonzalo in The Tempest was closely patterned on a passage in Florio's translation of Montaigne's essay "Of the Caniballes." Subsequent scholars built upon this initial observation, so much so that, by 1876, Friedrich Nietzsche could confidently proclaim that Shakespeare was Montaigne's "best reader" (2). One of the most important scholars for Platt is George Coffin Taylor, who in Shakspere's Debt to Montaigne (1925) catalogued verbal echoes of Montaigne that can be found in Shakespeare's plays. This kind of linguistic evidence allows Platt to pursue more ambitious questions about "larger thematic and structural parallels" between Montaigne and Shakespeare, about "connections and resonances that swirl throughout the essays and plays, especially those concerning the problems of knowing and being" (12). Although "resonances" and "thematic and structural parallels" may not show a "direct influence," they can also be seen as the likely result of Shakespeare's close engagement with Montaigne. Verbal echoes show that Shakespeare repeatedly turned to Florio's translation when he was writing plays after 1603, so it would be surprising if the playwright's thinking somehow remained unaffected by the ideas he found in Montaigne's Essays. It is this intriguing, if perhaps ineffable, type of influence that Platt details in Shakespeare's Essays.

According to Platt, after reading the Essays Shakespeare came to adopt...

审阅者：

• 莎士比亚散文：从《哈姆雷特》到彼得·普拉特的《暴风雨》的蒙田样本
• 艾伦·法默（简介）

彼得·普拉特引人注目的新书《莎士比亚散文：从《哈姆雷特》到《暴风雨》的蒙田样本，是二十多年来对莎士比亚思想及其后期戏剧研究的巅峰之作。普拉特的第一本书《理性减弱：莎士比亚与奇迹》（内布拉斯加大学，1997 年）重点关注莎士比亚的晚期戏剧和奇迹的概念，而他的下一本书《莎士比亚与悖论文化》（劳特利奇，2009 年）着眼于莎士比亚的晚期戏剧和奇迹的概念。逻辑对立的方式可以并置，以质疑正义、爱、知识和真理等概念，这是蒙田和莎士比亚作品中普遍存在的智力策略。最近，普拉特与斯蒂芬·格林布拉特 (Stephen Greenblatt) 共同编辑了约翰·弗洛里奥 (John Florio) 1603 年翻译的蒙田散文集(《纽约书评》，2014 年)。普拉特写作《莎士比亚散文集》的动机之一也许可以在格林布拉特对该版本的介绍中找到。格林布拉特在其中声称，除了“《李尔王》和《暴风雨》中的一些段落之外，试图确定蒙田对莎士比亚的直接影响似乎从未完全且果断地令人信服”（xxxi）。毕竟，莎士比亚何时可能读过《随笔集》（无论是法文版还是弗洛里奥译本）都存在不确定性，因此蒙田的影响力何时能首先被察觉还不确定。但还有一个“更棘手的问题”，即莎士比亚和蒙田共享同一个“历史时刻”，这可能导致“共同应对信仰、意识和身份等紧迫问题”(xxxii)。为什么假设莎士比亚受到蒙田的影响，而不是他们都受到 16 世纪末和 17 世纪初欧洲和英国流行的相同思潮的影响？《莎士比亚文集》可以说是普拉特对他的合著者的延伸答复。

普拉特在书的开头提出了一个重要问题：“为什么评论家和观众觉得莎士比亚在 1603 年之后写的戏剧有些‘不同’？” (1). 根据普拉特的说法，莎士比亚后期戏剧的风格和主题特征是“他们的喜剧的黑暗”和“随后的悲剧时期的普遍悲观主义”，他们对“怀疑、偶然性、不确定性和可变性”的探索以及“自我、知识和形式的不稳定”（1）——可以追溯到莎士比亚对弗洛里奥散文集翻译的阅读。因此，了解 1603 年之后莎士比亚的戏剧就意味着了解蒙田对莎士比亚的影响。[完第 274 页]毫无疑问，莎士比亚读过弗洛里奥的译本。正如 18 世纪末莎士比亚剧编辑爱德华·卡佩尔和埃德蒙·马龙所证明的那样，贡萨洛在《暴风雨》中至少有一次演讲与弗洛里奥翻译的蒙田文章《食人者》中的一段话密切相关。随后的学者们基于这一最初的观察，以至于到了 1876 年，弗里德里希·尼采可以自信地宣称莎士比亚是蒙田的“最好的读者”(2)。普拉特最重要的学者之一是乔治·科芬·泰勒（George Coffin Taylor），他在《莎士比亚对蒙田的债务》（Shakspere's Debt to Montaigne，1925）中对莎士比亚戏剧中可以找到的蒙田的言语回响进行了分类。这种语言学证据使普拉特能够追求更雄心勃勃的问题，关于蒙田和莎士比亚之间“更大的主题和结构相似之处”，关于“贯穿散文和戏剧的联系和共鸣，特别是那些有关认识和存在问题的联系和共鸣”（12 ）。尽管“共鸣”和“主题和结构的相似性”可能不会表现出“直接影响”，但它们也可以被视为莎士比亚与蒙田密切接触的可能结果。言语上的呼应表明，莎士比亚在 1603 年之后创作戏剧时多次转向弗洛里奥的翻译，因此，如果这位剧作家的思想在某种程度上没有受到他在蒙田《随笔集》中发现的思想的影响，那将是令人惊讶的。普拉特在《莎士比亚散文集》中详细描述的正是这种有趣的、甚至难以形容的影响类型。

根据普拉特的说法，莎士比亚在阅读了《散文集》后开始采用......