Abstract

This paper will engage with some of the evidence and criticism on the connection between Montaigne and Shakespeare. It is an unbalanced relationship, where one is read through another; the critical argument focuses on what Shakespeare does with Montaigne. The previous generation described Shakespeare as being in ‘debt’ to Montaigne and aimed to establish precisely what the man Shakespeare read of Montaigne and directly lifted into his own writing. Through compiling evidence they sought to find the origin of Shakespeare’s writing, to trace his mind at work and explain precisely how he came to write what he did. A source, in this sense, is a not only a work supplying evidence, but an origin like a river or stream; the spring from which a flow of water takes its beginning.

Recent criticism has moved away from this evidential source hunting. A source is now a signpost, pointing in the direction of another text, sometimes a general direction, and without any guarantee of reaching the final destination as promised. Yet this paper argues that we have not moved as far away from an evidence-based approach as we think. Rather than seeing them as historical men who read, write and borrow, seeing their names as functions in a text disentangles their individual, creative and subjective minds from the transmission of knowledge in the late sixteenth century and is an important step in understanding their relation as part of a wider intellectual network rather than a definable and measurable derivation.