pere was working over an existing
play;[165] and that in ordinary course he would, if need were, put the
religious pleading of Isabella into his own magistral verse just as he
would touch up the soliloquy of Hamlet on the question of killing his
uncle at prayers--a soliloquy which we know to have existed in the
earlier forms of the play. The writer who first made Isabella plead
religiously with Angelo would have made the Duke counsel Claudio
religiously. The Duke's speech, then, is to be regarded as Shakspere's
special insertion; and it is to be taken as negatively exhibiting his
opinions.

In the same way, the express withdrawal of the religious note at the
close of HAMLET--where in the Second Quarto we have Shakspere making the
dying prince say "the rest is silence" instead of "heaven receive my
soul," as in the First Quarto--may reasonably be taken to express the
same agnosticism on the subject of a future life as is implied in the
Duke's speech to Claudio. It cannot reasonably be taken to suggest a
purpose of holding Hamlet up to blame as an unbeliever, because Hamlet
is made repeatedly to express himself, in talk and in soliloquy, as a
believer in deity, in prayer, in hell, and in heaven. These speeches are
mostly reproductions of the old play, the new matter being in the nature
of the pagan allusion to the "divinity that shapes our ends." What is
definitely Shaksperean is just the agnostic conclusion.

Did Shakspere, then, derive this agnosticism from Montaigne? What were
really Montaigne's religious and philosophic opinions? We must consider
this point also with more circumspection than has been shown by most of
Montaigne's critics. The habit of calling him "sceptic," a habit
initiated by the Catholic priests who denounced his heathenish use of
the term "Fortune," and strengthened by various writers from Pascal to
Emerson, is a hindrance to an exact notion of the facts, inasmuch as the
word "sceptic" has passed through two phases of significance, and may
still have either. In the original sense of the term, Montaigne is a
good deal of a "sceptic," because the main purport of the APOLOGY OF
RAYMOND SEBONDE appears to be the discrediting of human reason all
round, and the consequent shaking of all certainty. And this method
strikes not only indirectly but directly at the current religious
beliefs; for Montaigne indicates a lack of belief in immortality,[166]
besides repeatedly ignoring the common faith where he wo