N. A MOS R OTHSCHILD Learning to doubt: The Tempest, imitatio, and Montaigne’s “Of the Institution and Education of Children” Inherited standards of scholarly rigor may be obstructing our efforts to understand the intertextual connections between Shakespeare’s The Tempest and Montaigne’s Essais. 1 Early twentieth-century scholars declared direct textual parallels the only legitimate evidence of connection between the two texts, and their exacting criteria still endure. 2 For example, Alan de Gooyer begins a recent attempt to relate the Essais to The Tempest by conceding that “connections other than verifiable borrowings are difficult to confirm and when suggested they are always in danger of falling prey to charges of vagueness” (513); he goes on to assert that “against such criticisms there is little to be said, except that if we relate the two works in order to complicate and deepen our sense of the play […] we have done [it] some service” (ibid.). There is, however, another reply to such criticisms. While earlier scholars provided a necessary check on vague and far-reaching claims about Montaigne’s influence on Shakespeare, they also imposed their own modern definitions of allusion on works that participate in an early modern cultural conversation about the relations between texts. In Tudor-Stuart discourses on imitatio, “verifiable borrowings” were a contested subject of some significance. Following Erasmus, many English humanists ridiculed the strict (and readily identifiable) imitation advocated by Ciceronianism as cultivating intellectual servility and shallow learning; instead, they encouraged thorough assimilation of another’s words and ideas as productive of intellectual liberty and true erudition. 3 The modern, ‘smoking gun’ standard of 1 For a survey of proposed links between The Tempest and the Essais, see Grady (2006). Capell is credited with discovering in 1784 Gonzalo’s paraphrase from Montaigne’s “Of the Caniballes” (2.1.148-65). On Shakespeare’s use of Montaigne’s “Of Cruelty” in Prospero’s forgiveness speech (5.1.20-32), see Prosser. For a possible link to Montaigne’s “Of Diverting and Diversions,” see Paster. 2 See Grady (2000, 133) and Ellrodt (37) on developing standards for ‘verifiable’ allusive connections between The Tempest and the Essais, including the Montaigne scholar Pierre Villey’s assertion about determining an allusion’s legitimacy: “a hundred ciphers add up to zero” (cited in Ellrodt 37). 3 On the conflict between strict, Ciceronian imitation and incorporative, Erasmian imitation, see Greene (181-9). N. A MOS R OTHSCHILD 18 allusion that has long been applied to analysis of intertextuality in The Tempest and other Renaissance texts thus validates only the rote borrowing that such early modern humanists disparaged, while it elides the incorporative imitation that they extolled. In fact, by limiting the scope of intertexual inquiry, current conceptions of allusion enshrine the value of the modern text’s ‘originality’ while devaluing and obscuring the possible meanings of what Michel Jeanneret has called “the linguistic and stylistic hotch-potch” (270-3) of the imitative early modern text, reducing copia to copying and imitatio to slavish repetition. 4 I will argue here that the detrimental effects of this modern critical practice are compounded in the case of The Tempest because the play - in what amounts to a complex tissue of unrecognized allusions - incorporatively imitates a text that explicitly addresses imitatio and its stakes: John Florio’s 1603 translation of Montaigne’s essay “Of the Institution and Education of Children.” 5 Montaigne’s essay is characteristic of early modern writing about imitatio in combining questions of textual interrelations with questions of education. 6 Only “indiscreet writers,” the essayist suggests, stoop to “intermingle and wrest in whole sentences taken from ancient Authors, supposing by such filching-theft to purchase honour and reputation to themselves” (108). Such wholesale textual recapitulation signals not only an incomplete understanding of the original material, but also an unquestioning acceptance of textual authority and a servility of mind. By contrast, Montaigne claims that writers who “alter, transforme, and confound” textual “peeces borrowed of others” in order “to shape out of them […] worke, altogether [their] owne” (114) demonstrate both a more thorough understanding of the texts they engage and a healthy skepticism of textual authority that preserves their own “vigor and libertie” (113). For Montaigne, the relationship between scholar and texts is both corollary to and part of the relationship between student and teacher. When a tutor strives to impress upon a student the absolute “authoritie” (ibid.) of teacher and text, he perpetuates the philosophical error of dogmatic rashness (propeteia). 7 Instead, he should “make his scholler narrowly to sift all 4 On the devaluation of imitative writing through the critical terminology of allusion and intertextuality, see Machacek. On the incompatibility of imitatio with modern critical notions of originality, see Cave (76-7). 5 On the essay’s original composition, see Wiesmann (151). On John Florio’s 1603 translation of the Essais and its transmission in England, see Boutcher (2002, 260). 6 Greene notes that “Imitatio was a literary technique that was also a pedagogical method and a critical battleground”(2). 7 “Dogmatic rashness” is Hamlin’s translation of Sextus Empiricus’ adaptation of the form of error Aristotle terms propeteia. Hamlin clarifies that, for Montaigne, “Assertion and dogmatism […] are signs of depravity, ignorance, [and] presumption. Indeed they are proof” (207). Propeteia, then, is a state of unexamined and rigid belief in the comprehensiveness of one’s own (or one’s text’s) “authoritie.” Learning to doubt: The Tempest, imitatio, and Montaigne 19 things with discretion, and harbour nothing in his head by meere authoritie, or upon trust” (113). 8 In Montaigne’s view, then, to educate is not to impart authoritative knowledge, but to cultivate myriad-minded skeptical awareness - doubt. 9 Rote textual borrowing and dogmatic pedagogy are linked problems for the essayist, as both affirm unquestioned authority. In arguing for the relevance of Montaigne’s essay to The Tempest, I expand upon Paul Yachnin’s claim that Shakespeare was “deeply involved in a humanist incorporation of Montaigne” (159). Yachnin argues that both The Tempest and its long-established source text “Of the Caniballes” are “products of a formative entanglement” of “incorporation in terms of both intellectual digestion and marketplace appropriation” (170). However, The Tempest’s engagement with Montaigne’s “ideal of literary incorporation” (159) is even more vexed than Yachnin suggests. 10 Shakespeare’s play not only absorbs and creatively transmutes material from the essays scholars already acknowledge as its intertexts - “Of the Caniballes,” “Of Cruelty,” and perhaps “Of Diverting and Diversions” 11 - but also attempts to incorporate Montaigne’s ideal of textual assimilation itself. I would submit that The Tempest undertakes this (meta)intertextual engagement through a series of incorporative imitations of “Of the Institution and Education of Children.” To consider the possibility that The Tempest has absorbed aspects of this essay’s treatment of textual incorporation and education is to enrich our understanding of the play’s staging of the processes and problems of learning. 12 In particular, two figures that Montaigne critiques, the overly studious scholar-pupil and the choleric and punctilious tutor, may offer surprising insight into Prospero, The Tempest’s self-proclaimed “schoolmaster” (1.2.172). Links between these figures and Prospero suggest that his approach to edu- 8 Likewise, Montaigne recommends that a “diversitie of judgements be proposed unto” a student, such that, “if he can, he shall be able to distinguish the truth from falsehood, if not, he will remaine doubtfull” (113). As Hamlin explains, a Montaignian “tutor’s job is not to pronounce dogmatically, but to expose the pupil to a wide range of opinion” (201). 9 Hamlin contends that the philosophical “doubt” that Shakespeare would have encountered emphasized “judgmental suspension [epoché] in the face of diverse opinion […]. It was an antidote rather than a substitute for dogmatism” (199). Thus while Boutcher may well be right that “it makes more historical sense to associate [the Essais with the issues] surrounding […] human learning, than with a more abstractly conceived rise of skepticism,” we must remember that a Montaignian education is an education in skepticism (2003, 22). 10 Yachnin defines this ideal as “the responsibility laid upon readers of taking in and making part of themselves the words of another” (159). On the broader importance of “digestive metaphors” in the discourses of imitatio, see Pigman (7-9), Jeanneret (131-9). 11 See note 1 above. 12 Scholarship on education in The Tempest has tended to treat Prospero as a provider of knowledge with little to learn rather than as a recipient of instruction. See, for example, Winson (19-29); Carey-Webb (11-9); and Boutcher (2002, 262-4). N. A MOS R OTHSCHILD 20 cation - whether his withdrawn bookishness, his testy demands for Miranda’s attention during his history lesson, or his emphasis on rote repetition in his instructions for Ariel - marks him in the early acts of the play as blinded by a self-deceiving dogmatism (propeteia). The Tempest presents an educator in need of instruction, a domineering pedant who must learn to doubt. In its later acts, then, the play dramatizes the process by which Prospero learns to forsake his narrow-minded and dogmatic rashness. Shakespeare reprises Montaigne’s discussions of imitatio’s textual and pedagogical valences to represent key events in Prospero’s learning process: his struggle with worldly ephemerality and theatricality in the wake of his masque’s disruption, his abjuration of his magic, and his acknowledgement of Caliban. Through these incorporative intertextual imitations, The Tempest stages a philosophical re-education in which Prospero comes to recognize the limitations of his own (and his book’s) authority and to embrace the myriadminded doubt so important to Montaignian learning. 13 In fact, the play finally not only represents, but also enacts a Montaignian education by exploiting the judgmental suspension created by theatrical spectacle in order to induce watching playgoers to incorporate the lesson that they have witnessed Prospero learn. “[A]ll dedicated / To closeness”: Prospero and bookish myopia The Tempest announces an interest in education and the relationship between scholars and books when Prospero relates to Miranda the circumstances surrounding the loss of his dukedom. A variety of historically studious rulers suggest analogues for Prospero; 14 however, his descriptions of himself “transported / And rapt in secret studies” (1.2.76-7) and “neglecting worldly ends, all dedicated / To closeness and the bettering of [his] mind” (1.2.89-90) may also align him with Montaigne’s “over-indiscreet” (126) scholar. The essayist’s recommendations concerning overzealous study can enrich our understanding of the magician’s bookishness and its problematic results: Yet would I not have [a scholar] pent-up, […] [or] corrupted with keeping him fast-tied, and as it were labouring fourteene or fifteene houres a day poaring on his booke […] neither doe I thinke it fit, if at any time, by reason of some solitarie or melancholy complexion, he should be seene with an over-indiscreet application 13 This philosophical education (from propeteia to doubt) is related to but separate from the moral education (from vengeance to virtue) that traditional humanist readings of the play understand Prospero to undergo. 14 Kastan sees the politically troubled and bookish Rudolph II as a possible analogue for Prospero (98). Wilson argues for Sir Robert Dudley (221-2), while the Arden editors suggest King James I (2011, 39). Learning to doubt: The Tempest, imitatio, and Montaigne 21 given to his booke, it should be cherished in him; for, that doth often make him both unapt for civill conversation, and distracts him from better imployments. (126-7) Montaigne’s critique, like The Tempest, participates in a classically derived cultural conversation about the opposition of the active and contemplative lives. However, Montaigne’s engagement with this well-worn debate is informed by the essayist’s peculiar pedagogical approach. Montaigne encourages “civill conversation” because its social interchange fosters an exposure to differing opinions and a skepticism of personal (and textual) authority. “There is”, he writes, “a marvelous cleerenesse, or as I may terme it an enlightning of mans judgement drawne from the commerce of men, and by frequenting abroad in the world; we are all so contrived and compact in our selves, that our sight is made shorter by the length of our nose” (119). Thus when Montaigne describes the scholar “pent-up” and “fast-tied” while “labouring foureteene or fifteene houres a day poaring on his booke,” he suggests that the confinement of “over-indiscreet” (126-7) study cultivates a shortsighted, belligerent dogmatism founded on an erroneous belief in the infallibility of bookish authority. In The Tempest, the choice between active engagement and retired contemplation involves substantially higher stakes than the quotidian dilemma in Montaigne’s essay. After all, the “better imployment” that Prospero neglects is his civic duty as Duke, and “over-indiscreet application given to his booke” (ibid.) brings him magical power. Nonetheless, Montaigne’s insights about the ramifications of excessive study can still enhance our understanding of Prospero’s condition. While the magician surely intends the claim that he was “all dedicated / To closeness” (1.2.89-90) to mean that he was committed to seclusion and secret study, the word “closeness” also connotes a closed or shut up condition and perhaps a severe and narrow rigor as well. 15 Although Prospero claims that his withdrawn studiousness contributed to the “bettering of [his] mind” (1.2.90), The Tempest suggests that “closeness” and “bettering” may not be so readily reconcilable. Rather, the magician’s fondness for “closeness” may imply - like the “pent-up” and “fast-tied” condition of Montaigne’s “over-indiscreet” (126-7) scholar - that the blinkeredness of excessive study contributes to a corresponding narrowness of mind. 16 15 The OED defines “closeness” as “secrecy” or “concealment” and as “retirement” or “seclusion,” but also as a “closed or shut up condition.” Indeed, via the adjective “close” in the sense of “narrow” or straight,” the word might also connote a “strict,” “rigorous,” or “severe” comportment. 16 For a glimpse of “Prospero’s always off-stage book,” see Mowat (2001, 1). N. A MOS R OTHSCHILD 22 “[T]utors not so careful”: Prospero’s choleric instruction of Miranda Ordering Miranda to “Sit still and hear” (1.2.170), Prospero concludes his story of usurpation and exile with a concise summary of the life that they have shared together on the island. His account stresses education above all else: Here in this island we arrived, and here Have I, thy schoolmaster, made thee more profit Than other princes can that have more time For vainer hours, and tutors not so careful. (1.2.171-4) These lines advance Prospero’s tale in time so that it nearly reaches to the play’s present moment, but they also suggest that the narrative is less a story than a history lesson. Indeed, in the first scene in which he appears, Prospero delivers three such lessons: one to Miranda, one to Ariel, and one to Caliban. Considering each of these interactions in turn reveals how the play relies on Montaignian notions of education to suggest that the self-proclaimed “schoolmaster” (1.2.172) is himself “not so careful” (1.2.174) a tutor as he supposes. 17 If the tale that Prospero tells Miranda aligns him with Montaigne’s overzealous scholar, the way in which he tells it aligns him with the essayist’s pedantic instructor. Prospero’s order that Miranda “Sit still and hear” (1.2.170) is the last of many similar utterances. He begins his history lesson by insisting, “The very minute bids thee ope thine ear,” followed immediately by a command to “Obey and be attentive” (1.2.37-8). Thereafter, Prospero interrupts his narrative on five more occasions (six counting his final order) to demand Miranda’s attention: “I pray thee mark me”; “Dost thou attend me? ”; “Thou attend’st not! ”; “I pray thee, mark me”; “Dost thou hear? ” (1.2.67; 78; 87; 88; 106). While the scene might be played so that Prospero checks real inattentiveness on Miranda’s part, his daughter’s replies - “Sir, most heedfully”; “O, good sir, I do”; and, most emphatically, “Your tale, sir, would cure deafness” (1.2.78; 88; 106) - surely suggest she is listening. Prospero’s testy demands for attention thus must convey something about the magician himself, and perhaps more than “increasing agitation as he recalls the circumstances of Antonio’s treachery” (The Tempest, Vaughan and Vaughan 176). Montaigne offers a warning about vociferous teachers that could supplement our understanding of Prospero’s behavior. His essay counsels against “carelesly cast[ing]-off” one’s children “to the heedlesse choler, or melan- 17 Reading Prospero as a schoolmaster figure reinforces the idea that his domineering behavior towards his pupils serves to emphasize his flaws. As Bushnell notes, it was a commonplace in early modern educational discourse that such behavior indicated a serious flaw in a teacher (30). Learning to doubt: The Tempest, imitatio, and Montaigne 23 choly humour of the hasty Schoole-master” (126) or employing tutors that “never cease brawling in their schollers eares (as if they were still pouring in a tonell)” (112). This advice is a matter not of sentimentality but of practicality. The choleric schoolmaster and the brawling tutor betray precisely the error of dogmatic rashness that Montaigne would have his pupils question; the excessive volume and verbal aggression of “brawling” suggests a conviction (or at least an effort to establish) that their own authority is unquestionable, while the attempt to convey information “as if they were still pouring in a tonell” (112) implies a belief that the information conveyed is likewise authoritative, an absolute beyond which inquiry is unnecessary. The pedagogical approach of such educators would seem to have much in common with Prospero’s own didactic bent. After all, the magician tells Miranda, “The very minute bids thee ope thine ear” (1.2.37), and he then proceeds by “pouring in” his lengthy history lesson, punctuated by “brawling” insistences that she miss not a word. Moreover, like Montaigne’s bad tutor, Prospero also appears utterly confident of the information he intends to convey. Indeed, when he prefaces his lesson by addressing Miranda as “my daughter, who / Art ignorant of what thou art, naught knowing / Of whence I am” (1.2.17-9), he implies that his lesson’s content will invalidate even her understanding of her own identity. Prospero’s account of the past might thus be understood as not just an awkward exposition, but also a clever bit of characterization suggesting the magician’s similarities to the very negligent tutors Montaigne disparages. 18 “To th’syllable”: Prospero, Ariel, and the danger of strict imitation Montaigne supplements his counsel against “brawling” tutors with a cautionary word about teachers who insist that their students “follow their booke” and “repeat what hath beene told them before” (112). He laments that such emphasis on rigid, non-transformative imitatio makes students’ minds “move at others pleasure, as tyed and forced to serve the fantasies of others” and warns that when students are thus “brought under by authoritie, and forced to stoope to the lure of [a tutor’s] bare lesson,” their “vigor and libertie is cleane extinct” (112-3). The damage done by enforced recapitulation is related to the damage done by excessive bookishness, but more extreme. Like the scholar “pent-up” with and “fast-tied” to his book, the student “tyed” by the constraints of rote imitation suffers a reductive circumscription of mind “under” an unquestioned textual “authoritie.” However, whereas dispropor- 18 Montaigne also disparages teachers who “undertake with one selfe-same lesson, and like maner of education, to direct many spirits of divers formes and different humours” (112). Prospero, of course, strives “to direct” diverse “spirits” of a different kind. N. A MOS R OTHSCHILD 24 tionate studiousness creates a myopic dogmatism, repetition leaves the student “blind, senselesse, and without spirit” (114). As Montaigne puts it, “in barring [a student] of libertie to doe any thing of himselfe, we make him thereby more servile and more coward” (ibid.). Tellingly, Prospero stresses the importance of rigid imitation during several exchanges with Ariel in The Tempest’s first three acts. The magician greets the spirit’s first appearance in the play by asking, “Hast thou, spirit, / Performed to point the tempest that I bade thee? ” (1.2.193-4, emphasis added). Likewise, after listening to Ariel’s account of the storm, Prospero notes approvingly that his “charge / Exactly is performed” (1.2.237-8). Moreover, Prospero later reminds Ariel to “exactly do / All points of [the magician’s] command” (1.2.500-1) if the spirit would be freed. While it is true that in these cases Prospero does not necessarily demand that Ariel literally repeat words, the spirit’s replies - “To every article” (1.2.195) and “To th’syllable” (1.2.501) - blur the distinction between performing scripted actions and repeating set words. 19 Of course, Prospero also calls upon Ariel to perform literal linguistic repetitions. After Ariel plays the harpy in act three, Prospero praises the “grace” of the spirit’s performance, but also beams, “Of my instruction hast thou nothing bated / In what thou hadst to say” (3.3.85-6). Perhaps more tellingly, when Ariel makes a timid attempt to “remember” the magician that he has “promised” the spirit freedom (1.2.243), Prospero responds with a second lesson in which he demands his servant rehearse a history of their original meeting. “Speak; tell me” (1.2.260), he demands, and the account he expects the spirit to produce is clearly preestablished, as Prospero complains that it is a narrative he “must / Once in a month recount” (1.2.262-3). The magician’s reiterated insistences that Ariel follow his orders exactly and repeat his words verbatim thus might suggest a dangerous pedantry. Moreover, Ariel’s condition might be fruitfully regarded as a dramatization of Montaigne’s discussion of the harm wrought by a pedagogical program that stresses slavish imitation. The rehearsal of Prospero’s prescribed version of their shared history accomplishes a striking deflation in Ariel. As the retelling proceeds, the spirit is reduced to utter passivity, every cowed reply - “No”; “I do not, sir”; “No, sir”; “Sir, in Algiers”; “Ay, sir”; “Yes, Caliban, her son”; “I thank thee, master” (1.2.252; 257; 260; 261; 268; 284; 293) - an indicator that the process renders Ariel “more servile and more coward” (Montaigne 114). Finally, the lesson concludes with Ariel’s lackluster expression of submission, “Pardon, master, / I will be correspondent to command / And do my spriting gently” (1.2.296-8), a statement that reveals a being whose “vigor and libertie” are at least very nearly “cleare extinct”— a spirit 19 For a relevant account of the performative manifestations of textual imitatio in Tudor classrooms, see Potter. Learning to doubt: The Tempest, imitatio, and Montaigne 25 “without spirit” (Montaigne 112-4). In insisting on the retelling, Prospero provides more than a simple reminder; he solidifies a “history” that emphasizes his own role in Ariel’s past liberation, closing off any other interpretation and thus more firmly establishing the spirit’s present enslavement. While Ariel’s current condition may be an improvement upon the narrow confines of Sycorax’s “cloven pine” (1.2.277), the spirit remains constrained by the less tangible confines of Prospero’s imagination, “forced to serve the fantasies of [an]other” (Montaigne 112-3). A man in the hail: Prospero and propeteia The preceding accounts of Prospero’s exchanges with Miranda and Ariel coupled with the well-established postcolonial critique of Prospero’s efforts to educate Caliban should strongly suggest that the lessons Prospero enforces on the island’s other inhabitants in the play’s early acts betray the educator’s own dogmatic rashness (propeteia). Even if Prospero’s attempts to instruct derive from noble motives, The Tempest implies that such efforts may be twisted to tyranny so long as the magician fails to recognize the limitations of his learning. Perhaps the most striking evidence that Prospero suffers from a Montaignian version of the philosophical error of propeteia is the tempest with which The Tempest begins. Montaigne sums up the philosophical fault of propeteia in a memorable aphoristic phrase involving tumultuous weather: “He on whose head it haileth, thinks all the Hemispheare besides to be in a storme and tempest” (120). The man in the hail embodies the error that a Montaignian education would correct. He is unable to conceive of an experience outside of his own, and that shortcoming prompts him erroneously to deem his own limited experience authoritative and universal. Montaigne completes the thought when he returns to the image of the storm later and asks, “Is it not [Philosophy], that cleereth all stormes of the mind? ” (124). Thus Montaigne figures the propeteia that the man in the hail exhibits in responding to the literal, exterior storm that surrounds him as itself tantamount to a metaphorical, internal tempest. Shakespeare’s Prospero might be understood to incorporate Montaigne’s man in the hail. In act one, scene one, Prospero calls down a tempest not on his own head, but on the heads of those on board the ship. In act one, scene two, he reveals that he is nonetheless a victim of the man in the hail’s error, as he cannot recognize - as Miranda does - that there is mental “harm done” (1.2.15) to those on board regardless of the fact that he knows the storm is illusory and will cause no physical injury. Consequently, Prospero betrays that the same learning that allows him to summon the tempest also leaves him “compact” (Montaigne 119) in himself, his mind circumscribed by his N. A MOS R OTHSCHILD 26 own prodigious learnedness. Though he is not within the exterior magical tempest he has summoned, he has within his head a storm of the mind that only a philosophical re-education can abate. 20 Only in the play’s later acts does Prospero begin to understand the fallibility of his own (and his book’s) authority. Then, ironically enough, it is the very students Prospero subjects to his dogmatic pedagogy who ultimately, and sometimes inadvertently, help their instructor learn to doubt. The interrupted masque as inverse lesson The play’s most spectacular inverse lesson occurs when Caliban’s insurrection interrupts Prospero’s masque. Taken together, the masque and its disruption dramatize both the awesome power and the painful insufficiency of Prospero’s learning. The spectacle that the magician directs his spirits to perform is plainly intended both to showcase the powers his own education has produced and to instruct Miranda and Ferdinand. Conversely, the rebellion that interrupts the masque is possible in the first place because Prospero’s pedagogical program is not as all-encompassing as the magician believes it to be. That a former pupil seeks the magician’s murder is a testament to this fact, if not a case in point. Indeed, even as the attack draws nearer, Prospero rages that his past efforts to instruct Caliban are “all, all lost, quite lost! ” (4.1.190), and the speech seems a non sequitur unless it suggests that the magician himself understands the actions that Caliban attempts in terms of his failed education. 21 By forcing Prospero to consider the disparity between his masque (a would-be vehicle of instruction) and his servant (a onetime beneficiary of his tutelage), Caliban’s actions thus prompt the magician to confront the limitations of his learning. Incorporative imitations of Montaigne’s essay within Prospero’s famous “revels” speech reinforce that Prospero grapples with a dawning recognition of his own propeteia in the wake of his interrupted masque: You do look, my son, in a moved sort, As if you were dismayed. Be cheerful, sir. Our revels now are ended. These our actors, As I foretold you, were all spirits and 20 Montaigne’s “stormes of the mind” might be added to the “intricate, and intricately linked, set of infracontexts” (30) that Mowat indentifies as relevant to The Tempest’s storm (2000). 21 Prospero connects Caliban’s actions to a failed education, but initially blames that failure on Caliban’s uneducable and demonic “nature,” not on his own teaching (4.1.188-92). However, in his famously ambiguous acknowledgement of his servant, Prospero may reassess the role his instruction played in forming Caliban’s character (see my discussion of Caliban and Prospero’s acknowledgement below). Learning to doubt: The Tempest, imitatio, and Montaigne 27 Are melted into air, into thin air; And - like the baseless fabric of this vision - The cloud-capped towers, the gorgeous palaces, The solemn temples, the great globe itself, Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve, And like this insubstantial pageant faded, Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff As dreams are made on, and our little life Is rounded with a sleep. (4.1.146-58) The relevant passage from Montaigne’s essay warrants consideration at some length: This great universe […] is the true looking-glasse wherein we must looke, if we will know whether we be of a good stamp, or in the right byase […] So many strange humours, sundrie sects, varying judgements, diverse opinions, different lawes, and fantasticall customes teach us to judge rightly of ours, and instruct our judgement to acknowledge his imperfections and naturall weaknesse, […] The pride and fiercenesse of so many strange and gorgeous shewes: the pride-puft majestie of so many courts, and of their greatnesse, ought to confirme and assure our sight, undauntedly to beare the affronts and thunder-claps of ours, without seeling our eyes: So many thousands of men, low-laide in their graves afore us, may encourage us, not to fear, or be dismaied to go meet so good companie in the other world; and so of all things else. Our life (said Pithagoras) drawes neare unto the great and populous assemblies of the Olympike games, wherein some […] there are (and those be not the worst) that seek after no other good, but to marke, how, wherefore, and to what end, all things are done: and to be spectators or observers of other mens lives and actions, that so they may the better judge and direct their owne. (120-1) Textual links between the two works are few but present. The essay’s “great universe,” “gorgeous shewes,” and “Our life” may find reprise in the play’s “great globe” (4.1.153), “gorgeous palaces” (4.1.152), and “our little life” (4.1.157). Furthermore, the “pride-puft majestie” of the essay’s “courts” seem to possess a rhythmic (and perhaps a metonymic) resonance with the play’s “cloud-capped towers” (4.1.152). Additionally, a line that appears just before this long excerpt - “this worlds vast-frame is neere unto a dissolution” (Montaigne 119) - anticipates the central image (and especially the verb) of Prospero’s “the great globe itself, / Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve” (4.1.153-4). Moreover, connections between the rhetorical movements of the two passages also suggest that The Tempest may incorporate aspects of Montaigne’s essay. While the juxtaposition of a spectacle with lived experience prompts Prospero to contemplate human smallness and limitation, contemplation of human smallness and limitation brings Montaigne to juxtapose life with a spectacle. During the course of the revels speech, Prospero comes to N. A MOS R OTHSCHILD 28 “acknowledge his [judgment’s] imperfections and naturall weaknesse” (Montaigne 120) by comparing his condition with that of the airy actors of the shattered masque much as Montaigne’s “spectators and observers” learn to “better judge and direct their owne” lives and actions by taking in the multiplicity of lives and actions on display at the “Olympike games” (ibid.). In each case, spectacle is instructive because it takes one out of oneself and thereby brings one both to recognize the potential validity of the eye of the other and to “acknowledge” that one’s own convictions may not be authoritative, as they are flawed by the distortions of personal and cultural prejudice. Fittingly, Prospero concludes his oration with a confession that his “old brain is troubled” and a plea that his daughter and her betrothed “Bear with [his] weakness” and “infirmity” while he walks “A turn or two […] / To still [his] beating mind” (4.1.159-63). His self-descriptions bespeak his effort to abate his internal storm, to grapple with the realization that his learning may not comprehend an authoritative worldview. 22 This philosophical lesson concerning the abandonment of propeteia for a myriad-minded doubt opens the way for the often-examined moral lesson in which Ariel helps the magician choose the “rarer action” of virtue over vengeance (5.1.16-30). 23 “I’ll drown my book”: dramatizing the abjuration of pedantry When, in the wake of these lessons, Prospero renounces his magic, The Tempest repeatedly links that renunciation to matters of imitatio. First, the very speech in which Prospero abjures the magical aspects of his erudition is also perhaps the most glaring instance of textual borrowing in the play: a now well-established and then readily recognizable paraphrase of Ovid taken from the mouth of the sorceress Medea. 24 Scholars have long sought to parse the significance of the speech’s Ovidian intertextual engagement. Some focus on the speech’s dramatic significance and suggest that Prospero signals through the allusion his rejection of black magic for white, of all magic for life, or of the demonic and vengeful feminine other for the godly and forgiving masculine self. 25 Others treat the metatextual implications of the speech, 22 Prospero’s “beating mind” at 4.1.163 recalls Miranda’s plea from 1.2.175-7: “now I pray you, sir, / For still ‘tis beating in my mind, your reason / For raising this sea-storm? ” Thus Shakespeare links an external storm with “stormes of the mind” in much the same manner as Montaigne (see note 20 above). 23 I pass over this second inverse lesson, as Kirsch treats in depth its connection to Montaigne’s essay “Of Cruelty.” 24 See Carroll for an account of the Medea speech’s sources (n. 283) and cultural recognizability (237-8). 25 See Carroll (237) and Bate (252) on various critical approaches to the Medea speech. Carroll contends that Prospero renounces “not only the black magic always associated with transformation, but the artistic dream of controlling transformation at all” (240). Learning to doubt: The Tempest, imitatio, and Montaigne 29 positing that, through the allusion, Shakespeare bids farewell to a favorite source text or even attempts to “put Ovid in his place” (Caroll 236-7; Lyne 160). 26 Montaigne’s essay may offer a way to fruitfully complicate these critical approaches to Prospero’s Medean speech. In the essayist’s discussion of writers who borrow from others’ texts, a less than subtle “filching-theft” (108) from a work about Medea features prominently. Montaigne scorns “The Philosopher Chrisippus,” who was wont to foist-in amongst his bookes, not only whole sentences and other longlong discourses, but whole bookes of other Authors, as in one, he brought in Euripides his Medea [so that] if one should draw from out his bookes, what he had stolen from others, his paper would remaine blanke. (108) Shakespeare’s intertextual borrowing from Ovid’s Medea (via Golding) might be understood to involve as well a complex and playful engagement with Montaigne’s discussion of Chrisippus’ borrowing from Euripides’ Medea. 27 In filching the entirety of “Euripides his Medea,” Montaigne suggests, Chrisippus betrays through his unthinking importation of text a servility and smallness of mind. By borrowing from Golding’s and Ovid’s Medea, however, The Tempest may convey quite the opposite. It has been argued both that Prospero performs the expulsion of his Medean/ Sycoraxian other and that Shakespeare strives to outdo or bid farewell to Ovid/ Golding when the magician voices the appropriated words of the Medean speech. If the identities of the character (Medea) and the author (Ovid) from whom Shakespeare borrowed the lines for Prospero’s speech might inform its significance, so too might the speech’s recognizable status as a borrowing. As Michel Jeanneret notes, in some instances of imitatio, “the referential element is combined with a reflective element” (259); 28 in other words, the reprise references not only the spur, but also the practice of imitation itself. Indeed, any such “reflective element” could only be emphasized when the spur in question deals explicitly with issues of textual interrelation. Thus when, with a winking nod toward Montaigne’s brazen plagiarist Chrisippus, Prospero abjures the necromantic powers of Medea - powers Thomas Greene has linked to imitatio and the resurrection of past texts (cf. 32-3; 37-8; 92-3) - The Tempest may also enact an abjuration of unincorporated textual borrowing itself in a bravura piece of intertextual and (meta)intertextual play. Such a dream of control is also, of course, the fundamental fantasy of the dogmatic pedagogue. 26 Carroll (236-7) detects a farewell to Ovid, while Lyne (160) suggests a more competitive stance. 27 Bate suggests strong diachronic intertextual connections between the three writers when he claims that “Euripides taught Ovid what Ovid taught Shakespeare” (239). 28 For more on the “reflective” aspect of imitatio, see Greene (16-7). N. A MOS R OTHSCHILD 30 Moreover, Ariel’s song celebrating imminent freedom also dramatizes the abjuration of pedantry and Montaigne’s ideal of transformative imitatio. “Where the bee sucks, there suck I” (5.1.88) may obliquely reprise Montaigne’s version of a well-worn trope for textual borrowing and incorporation: the bee gathering pollen to make honey. 29 Montaigne notes that “Bees doe here and there sucke this, and cull that flower, but afterward they produce the hony, which is peculiarly their owne” in order to argue that the student who has “borrowed of others […] may lawfully alter, transform, and confound [the pieces they have borrowed], to shape out of them a perfect peece of worke, altogether his owne” (114). The essayist prefers the creative incorporation and individualized invention involved in this metaphorical honey-making because it feeds a pupil’s “understanding power,” while mere rote learning, Montaigne maintains, leaves a pupil “blind, senseless, and without spirit” and “bar[s] him of libertie to doe any thing of himselfe” (114). Thus Ariel’s bee song and the liberty it anticipates might be understood to reprise Montaigne’s bee metaphor and its emphasis on the freedom fostered by transformative imitatio and heuristic learning. “This misshapen knave”: books, deformed sons, and Caliban One other trope for imitative writing that appears in Montaigne’s essay may hold relevance for The Tempest. Montaigne opens his essay with an extended metaphor in which he plays with the well-established topos of the book as son: I never knew father, how crooked and deformed soever his sonne were, that would either altogether cast him off, or not acknowledge him for his owne: and yet […] it may not be said, but he plainly perceiveth his defects, and hath a feeling of his imperfections. But so it is, he is his owne. So it is in my selfe. I see better than any man else, that what I have set downe, is nought but the fond imaginations of him, who in his youth hath tasted nothing but the paring, and seen but superficies of true learning: whereof he hath retained but a generall and shapelesse forme. (107) Montaigne does not figure his text as a conventional child of the mind who will allow the author/ father immortality by guaranteeing everlasting fame. 30 Rather, he represents his book as a figure nearly antithetical to that perfect ideal: a “sonne” both “crooked and deformed” whose existence does not guarantee renown but instead necessitates an acknowledgement of shortcoming. Indeed, the essayist links the “defects” and “imperfections” of his 29 On the extensive classical tradition that used the bees’ production of honey as a trope for imitation and textual incorporation, see Pigman (4-7) and Greene (98-9). 30 On the topos of the book as child who guarantees the author/ father immortality and fame, see Curtius (132-4). Learning to doubt: The Tempest, imitatio, and Montaigne 31 text/ son directly to his own flawed learning as author/ father. He identifies his shortcomings as deriving from a failure to properly incorporate text; having “tasted nothing but the paring” in his studies, he possesses but the “superficies of true learning,” if even that. Consequently, to “acknowledge” his text/ son “for his owne” is to recognize and admit that its deformity mirrors, even manifests, the “shapelesse forme” of the incomplete learning that he as author/ father “hath retained.” Understanding The Tempest to incorporate and reprise Montaigne’s lively version of this traditional topos could do much to enrich certain aspects of Prospero and Caliban, particularly their vexed relationship with one another. In some respects, the “savage and deformed” Caliban (according to “Names of the Actors”, Vaughan and Vaughan 2011, 162) could be understood to render monstrously literal the vehicle of Montaigne’s metaphor, a “crooked and deformed” “sonne” (107), even as the familial ties involved are otherwise transformed: Caliban is not Prospero’s offspring, but he is the child of the magician’s problematic other, Sycorax. 31 Likewise, the play may also absorb the tenor of the essayist’s metaphor. Prospero’s book is the primary tool with which the magician seeks to reshape the “misshapen” (5.1.268) Caliban. In fact, the pedagogical relationship that links Prospero and Caliban as instructor and pupil in some ways combines aspects of the connection between author and book and characteristics of the bond between father and son. To consider whether The Tempest incorporates and reprises the beginning of Montaigne’s essay is thus to open the possibility that what the Arden editors call Caliban’s “woefully imprecise” (2011, 33) deformity is to some extent connected to the defective education that Prospero provided. Indeed, the essayist’s insistence that an author/ father must always “acknowledge” his book/ son “for his owne” (Montaigne 107) might illuminate Prospero’s famously enigmatic declaration “this thing of darkness I / Acknowledge mine” (5.1.275-6). Prospero may not only grudgingly admit that his instruction does, in fact, bear some responsibility for Caliban’s “canker[ed]” mind (4.1.192), but also reluctantly recognize that his former pupil’s “disproportioned[ness]” (5.1.291) mirrors and manifests his own disproportioned learning. Caliban might thus be understood to embody Shakespeare’s textual incorporation of Montaigne at its most creatively self-reflexive. The playwright cannibalizes and incorporates the very image that the essayist uses to represent his text - the “deformed sonne” - and then winkingly “acknowledges” (Montaigne 107) the deed by incorporating as well the essayist’s mon- 31 The description of Caliban as “A saluage and deformed slaue” may be the scrivener Ralph Crane’s “interpretations of what he saw in performance rather than Shakespeare’s descriptions of what he envisioned, although they could be both” (Vaughan and Vaughan 2011, 127). N. A MOS R OTHSCHILD 32 strous figure of textual incorporation - the cannibal 32 - in his character’s masticated name. Epilogue and epoché : theater and learning to doubt Montaigne concludes “Of the Institution and Education of Children” with a lengthy discussion of the educational efficacy of stage plays. The essayist lambasts those who “disalow such kindes of recreations” and “refuse good and honest Comedians, or (as we call them) Players, to enter our good townes” (139-40). He reasons that Politike and wel ordered common-wealths endevor rather carefully to unite and assemble their Citizens together; as in serious offices of devotion, so in honest exercises of recreation. Common societie and loving friendship is thereby cherished and increased. […] And if I might beare sway, I would thinke it reasonable, that […] in populous and frequented cities, there should be Theatres and places appointed for such spectacles; as a diverting of worse inconveniences, and secret actions. […] There is no better way than to allure the affection, and to entice the appetite: otherwise a man shall breed but asses laden with Bookes. With jerkes of rods they have their satchels full of learning given them to keepe. Which to doe well, one must not only harbor in himselfe, but wed and mary the same with his minde. (140) The same properties that grant stage plays social and political utility, Montaigne suggests, also give them pedagogical potential. According to the essayist, plays work to counteract the “inconveniences” of social unrest and the “secret actions” of political sedition by cultivating qualities of “Common societie and loving friendship.” In fostering those same qualities, theater also combats dogmatic rashness (propeteia). After all, if there is, as the essayist avers, an “enlightning of mans judgement” to be “drawne from the commerce of men,” then playgoers are particularly well situated to embrace a myriad-minded skepticism of singular authority; they both engage in interpersonal exchanges with one another, and - like the observers in Montaigne’s description of “the Olympike games” (121) - reflect on a multiplicity of “lives and actions” presented in the spectacle before them “so they may the better judge and direct their owne” (ibid.). For Montaigne, stage plays thus offer an education antithetical to the pedantic instruction carried out with “jerkes of rods” (140). Where the pedant “brawls” to enforce rote repetition and a singular authority, stage plays strive “to allure” (ibid.) and present by their very structure a multiplicity of perspectives and vying authorities. Where the pedant’s pupil confronts in essential solitude a nonhuman and unitary text, 32 On the cannibal as Montaigne’s focal figure for reflecting on “literary incorporation,” see Yachnin (166). Learning to doubt: The Tempest, imitatio, and Montaigne 33 the playgoer consumes through playful social interchange a text sundered and embodied by actors. Perhaps most importantly, the pedant’s methods and the pupil’s means of consumption fail to force any learning more profound than reiteration and thus “breed but asses laden with Bookes” (ibid.); stage plays, however, can foster the ideal of textual incorporation by “entice[ing] the appetite” of playgoers to “wed and marry” (ibid.) the theatrical text before them with their minds. Montaigne thus presents the theater as an ideal vehicle for skeptical education. Prospero’s epilogue emphasizes The Tempest’s potential as just such a vehicle of playful instruction. The magician’s words echo many of the Montaignian concepts with which Shakespeare’s play is so intimately involved: Now my charms are all o’erthrown, And what strength I have’s mine own, Which is most faint. Now, ’tis true I must be here confined by you, Or sent to Naples. Let me not, Since I have my dukedom got And pardoned the deceiver, dwell In this bare island by your spell; But release me from my bands With the help of your good hands. […] As you from crimes would pardoned be, Let your indulgence set me free. (EPILOGUE 1-20) When audience members watch The Tempest, they agree to suspend their disbelief and to consider the action on stage, in some sense, real. Nonetheless, they are simultaneously aware, of course, that the spectacle before them is a contrivance. An epilogue - existing as it does in a liminal position between both of these perspectives - approximates wonderfully the philosophical stance of judgmental suspension (epoché) so crucial to Montaigne’s pedagogical approach. 33 It is perhaps unsurprising, then, that Shakespeare exploits the precarious position of Prospero’s epilogue to turn one of The Tempest’s most Montaignian conceits upon the audience. Through a slew of bondage-related imagery evoked by words like “confined,” “release,” “bands,” and “free,” the speech pointedly recalls the idea that imposing one’s own viewpoint on another as rigidly authoritative is an act akin to enslavement. The Tempest thus implies that the viewer who insists on an absolute distinction between the world represented on the stage and the wider world beyond the theater suffers from precisely the dogmatic rashness (propeteia) that plagues Prospero for much of the play. Maintaining such a distinction, then, amounts to working a metaphorical “spell” that both enforces this sort of bondage on the 33 See note 9 above. N. A MOS R OTHSCHILD 34 former magus and preserves the viewer’s own misconceptions. When Prospero solicits applause, he asks the audience to signal not only approval, but also understanding. The former magician entreats playgoers to neither accept the play as unimpeachable, nor dismiss it as merely theater. Rather, he reminds them of his own re-education and queries whether its essential lessons might apply to them as well, whether they too might be blinkered by an erroneous conviction of their own authority in maintaining so rigid a separation between what transpires within The Globe and what passes upon “the great globe itself” (4.1.153). The Tempest thus attempts to enact a playful, Montaignian education; it strives to entice the appetites of playgoers so that they might incorporate what they have seen, and thus depart, like the “spectators or observers” in the essayist’s “Of the Institution and Education of Children,” having learned from the “lives and actions” staged before them to “better judge and direct their owne” - having learned to doubt. Learning to doubt: The Tempest, imitatio, and Montaigne 35 Works Cited Bate, Jonathan. Shakespeare and Ovid. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1993. Boutcher, Warren. “Humanism and Literature in Late Tudor England: Translation, the Continental Book and the Case of Montaigne’s Essais.” Reassessing Tudor Humanism. Ed. Jonathan Woolfson. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002. 243-76. . “Marginal Commentaries: The Cultural Transmission of Montaigne’s Essais in Shakespeare’s England.” Shakespeare et Montaigne: Vers un Nouvel Humanisme. Eds Pierre Kapitaniak and Jean-Marie Maguin. 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