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- Title
"Some subtleties o'th' isle": Shakespeare's Tempest and Montaigne's Apologie of Raymond Sebond.
- Authors
Geddes, Sean
- Abstract
A remarkable fact about William Shakespeare's The Tempest is that characters do not always see or hear the same thing. But while this estrangement of knowledge thins out the boundaries between character and environment to recognizably great dramatic effect, the aporetic energies underlying that estrangement are not yet fully understood. This article explores their significance by examining the connections between The Tempest and Michel de Montaigne's An Apologie of Raymond Sebond (long suspected to be related). It proposes a new verbal parallel between the play and the essay but does not confine its argument to such a criterion. Rather, it is a case study in the Renaissance practice of imitation that works from a number of aspects—shared matrices of thought and feeling, similar metaphors, networks of texts—to reconstruct the presence of a locus classicus of Renaissance skepticism in Shakespeare's late play. Along the way, it triangulates these works with a discussion of King Lear and examines the presence of Vergil and the possible presence of Seneca. It argues that Shakespeare used Montaigne's essay to make his island epistemologically strange and that this sensitive use of a philosophical source is notable for being so deeply dramatically embedded.
- Subjects
IMITATION in literature; TEMPEST, The (Play : Shakespeare); SHAKESPEARE, William, 1564-1616; ENGLISH essays; MONTAIGNE, Michel de, 1533-1592; RENAISSANCE literature; KING Lear (Play : Shakespeare); ENGLISH literature; LITERARY criticism
- Publication
Studies in Philology, 2021, Vol 118, Issue 2, pN.PAG
- ISSN
0039-3738
- Publication type
Article
- DOI
10.1353/sip.2021.0012