HUGH GRADY

                    SHAKESPEARE'S LINKS TO MACHIAVELLI AND MONTAIGNE: 

                    CONTRUCTING INTELLECTUAL MODERNITY IN EARLY MODERN EUROPE

In the famous "To the Reader" of the first and all subsequent editions of the Essais, Michel de Montaigne specifies:  "This book was written in good faith, reader. It warns you from the outset that in it I have set myself no goal but a domestic and private one . . . Thus, reader, I am myself the matter of my book; you would be unreasonable to spend your leisure on so frivolous and vain a subject."  With this bit of characteristic indirection, Montaigne announces himself as one of the key pioneers of an epochal shift in Western culture productive of new ways of constituting and thinking about the private, the domestic, and the subjective—a shift that is now commonly seen as one of the crucial characteristics of an emerging modernity in the Renaissance.

To be sure, it took perhaps two or three centuries before Montaigne’s audacity and constitutional relation to the cultivation of modern subjectivity was appreciated. Although Montaigne was praised by many of his contemporaries, it was largely as a "French Seneca," a wise philosopher of Stoic sensibility, that he was celebrated. His ground-breaking treatment of subjectivity was generally seen as an eccentric weakness by his contemporaries, and the classical absolutists of the immediately following generations found this quality largely incomprehensible, as have many readers and commentators since.  The present climate of Anglophone early modern studies, however, with its revived interest in the origins of modernity and its poststructuralist-inspired attempts to overcome the subject-object split associated with post-Cartesian philosophy, seems to me particularly propitious for an appreciation of the very qualities of Montaigne that seemed scandalous to his own age, and even more so to subsequent absolutists and positivists of every persuasion. I am surprised that he has not been more central in the rewriting of the Renaissance that has been so vigorously undertaken since about 1980 in an English studies now more open than ever to the contributions of comparative literature. In what follows I want to contribute to a project of redefining Montaigne’s place in the reconfigured disciplinary map of early modern culture produced by new historicists, cultural materialists, and feminists by examining his kinship to several of the themes and modes of thought attributed by such critics to William Shakespeare.  This operation in turn can help illuminate aspects of Shakespeare that I believe have been ill-defined by some of the pioneering practitioners of the new historicism and cultural materialism in Shakespeare studies. The case of Richard II will serve here as an instance of a more general situation.  In what follows, I argue that, because neither King Richard nor Montaigne completely fits certain key aspects of the paradigms of subjectivity that currently dominate English Renaissance studies, we must rethink those models accordingly.  My way into this revaluation will be oblique, however; it will require a side journey into some of the famous, or infamous, concepts of another seminal Renaissance initiator of modernity, Niccolò Machiavelli, whose work, or its widely disseminated ideas, I will argue, constituted an intellectual crisis for both Montaigne and Shakespeare that was one of the starting points of their meditations on modern subjectivity. In the confluence of these three celebrated Renaissance authors, then, we can witness a significant episode in the development of intellectual modernity.

I will argue that Shakespeare’s plays indeed display a multivalent reaction to both Montaignean and Machiavellian themes. In particular, Shakespeare’s plays go beyond the logic of The Prince to critique certain of its premises and to explore the cultural crisis of meaning that its logic creates. In Richard II, to take the work at issue here, Machiavellianism produces a crisis because, on the one hand, Machiavellianism is successful, while, on the other, it creates the characteristic ethical void of instrumental reason within modernity. From this Machiavellian crisis emerges what is perhaps Shakespeare’s first consistent representation of "modern" subjectivity—a subjectivity that in turn, I will argue, demands a "supplementation" of Machiavelli with Montaigne, since Shakespeare’s concept of Richard’s subjectivity veers from the ideas of  The Prince into those of Montaigne’s seminal texts. Shakespeare goes beyond Machiavelli and borrows from or recreates Montaigne in depicting subjectivity as something of a dialectical negation of power, not a mere effect of its operations; as an orientation to multiple potential selves or identities, not merely the production of a unitary one; as a mental space critically distanced from, and not entirely defined by, circulating ideologies and discourses of institutions of power. In making these distinctions, of course, I am suggesting that the Foucauldian power orientation of much new historicism needs a Montaignean modification—that new historicists, in effect, have been too Machiavellian, and not Montaignean enough.