ot more of Christian faith than Hamlet,[172] and
in which there is no hint of any such faith on the part of the
dramatist, but, on the contrary, a sombre persistence in the presentment
of unrelieved evil. The utterly wicked Iago has as much of religion in
his talk as anyone else in OTHELLO, using the phrases "Christian and
heathen," "God bless the mark," "Heaven is my judge," "You are one of
those that will not serve God, if the devil bid you," "the little
godliness I have," "God's will," and so forth; the utterly wicked Edmund
in LEAR, as we have seen, is made to echo Montaigne's "sceptical"
passage on the subject of stellar influences, spoken with a moral
purpose, rather than the quite contrary utterance in the APOLOGY, in
which the essayist, theistically bent on abasing human pretensions,
gives to his scepticism the colour of a belief in those very
influences.[173] There is here, clearly, no pro-religious thesis. The
whole drift of the play shows that Shakspere shares the disbelief in
stellar control, though he puts the expression of the disbelief in the
mouth of a villain; though he makes the honest Kent, on the other hand,
declare that "it is the stars ... that govern our conditions;"[174] and
though he had previously made Romeo speak of "the yoke of inauspicious
stars," and the Duke describe mankind as "servile to all the skiey
influences," and was later to make Prospero, in the TEMPEST[175] express
his belief in "a most auspicious star." In the case of Montaigne, who
goes on yet again to contradict himself in the APOLOGY itself,
satirising afresh the habit of associating deity with all human
concerns, we are driven to surmise an actual variation of opinion--the
vivacious intelligence springing this way or that according as it is
reacting against the atheists or against the dogmatists. Montaigne, of
course, is not a coherent philosopher; the way to systematic philosophic
truth is a path too steep to be climbed by such an undisciplined spirit
as his, "sworn enemy to obligation, to assiduity, to constancy";[176]
and the net result of his "Apology" for Raimond Sebonde is to upset the
system of that sober theologian as well as all others. Whether
Shakspere, on the other hand, could or did detect all the
inconsistencies of Montaigne's reasoning, is a point on which we are not
entitled to more than a surmise; but we do find that on certain issues
on which Montaigne dogmatises very much as did his predecessors,
Shakspere