Essays of Montaigne

The first translation of Montaigne's essays into English was John Florio, tutor to ShakespeareÂ’s patron, the Earl of Southampton. In 1603 he published the essays in three volumes. In The Tempest. One of Gonzalo's speeches closely matches Montaigne's essay Of the Canibales. Montaigne praises the society of the Caribbean natives. However, the ultimate source of Montaigne's passage is an account of Gonzalo Oviedo published in English for the first time in Richard Eden's 1555 Decades of the New Worlde, with which Shakespeare was evidently familiar. George Coffin Taylor matched passages in the plays of Shakespeare with MontaigneÂ’s writings in 1925. He found fifty-one passages in Hamlet, twenty-three in King Lear, seven in Antony and Cleopatra, and four in Othello that resembled the Essais, but many of these parallels were circumstantial. However,The Tempest reference seems unmistakable and may validate some of the others. Picture and data courtesy of the Yorck Project, under Creative Commons Attribution-Share- Alike License (Wikipedia)