605,[100] when VOLPONE was produced, but
the phrase plainly alleges not one but many borrowings. I am not aware
that extracts from Montaigne have been traced in any others of the
English contemporary dramatists. But here in two plays of Shakspere,
then fresh in memory--the Second Quarto having been published in 1604
and MEASURE FOR MEASURE produced in the same year--were echoes enough
from Montaigne to be noted by Jonson, whom we know to have owned, as did
Shakspere, the Florio folio, and to have been Florio's warm admirer. And
there seems to be a confirmation of our thesis in the fact that, while
we find detached passages savouring of Montaigne in some later plays of
the same period, as in one of the concluding period, the TEMPEST, we do
not again find in any one play such a cluster of reminiscences as we
have seen in HAMLET and MEASURE FOR MEASURE, though the spirit
of Montaigne's thought, turned to a deepening pessimism, may be said to
tinge all the later tragedies.

(a) In OTHELLO (? 1604) we have Iago's "'tis in ourselves that we are
thus or thus," already considered, to say nothing of Othello's phrase--

"I saw it not, thought it not, it harmed not me....
He that is robb'd, not wanting what is stolen,
Let him not know it, and he's not robb'd at all."

--a philosophical commonplace which compares with various passages in
the Fortieth Essay.

(b) In LEAR (1606) we have such a touch as the king's lines[101]--

"And take upon's the mystery of things
As if we were God's spies;"

--which recalls the vigorous protest of the essays, THAT A MAN OUGHT
SOBERLY TO MEDDLE WITH THE JUDGING OF THE DIVINE LAWS,[102] where
Montaigne avows that if he dared he would put in the category of
imposters the

"interpreters and ordinary controllers of the designs of
God, setting about to find the causes of each accident, and
to see in the secrets of the divine will the
incomprehensible motives of its works."

This, again, is a recurrent note with Montaigne; and much of the
argument of the APOLOGY is typified in the sentence:--

"What greater vanity can there be than to go about by our
proportions and conjectures to guess at God?"

(c) But there is a yet more striking coincidence between a passage in
the essay[103] of JUDGING OF OTHERS' DEATH and the speech of Edmund[104]
on the subject of stellar influences. In the essay Montaigne sharply
derides the habit of ascribing human occurrences to the interference