Central to an exploration of Shakespeare's essaying of Montaigne is an examination of their epistemology and ontology, their approaches to knowing and being. As Ayesha Ramachandran would have it, the world ‘is also the most frequently repeated and powerfully suggestive analogue for the self, offering an external parallel for the endless variety and vast spaces within. The wonder with which Montaigne encounters le moi is the same wonder with which he encounters le monde.’ These discursive fields – of knowledge and the world on the one hand and of the self on the other – will swirl in and out of Shakespeare's words, as they do Montaigne’s.

For these two authors shared, at the very least, an interest in multiplicity: a sense of perspectivism in their epistemology and a sense of a discontinuous self in their ontology: ‘And there is as much difference found between us and our selves, as there is between ourselves and others… . Esteem it a great matter, to play but one man,’ as Montaigne says. In anatomising their approaches to knowledge and the self, I will explore the sceptical background that shaped Montaigne's thinking and that Shakespeare essays; the multiplicity and theatricality of being that lie at the heart of the ontological explorations of both authors; and finally the current literary-critical and philosophical interest in these writers’ approaches to knowledge and selfhood. The intellectual world of Montaigne and Shakespeare is a world of doubt, contingency, uncertainty, and mutability – a world that is at once early modern and (post-)modern.

Montaigne, Shakespeare, and Ancient Scepticism

Whether or not their scepticism was identical, Montaigne and Shakespeare shared a sceptical approach to truth and knowledge. But what did ‘scepticism’ mean for these two authors? It did not mean, as we might think today, ‘a series of doubts concerning traditional religious beliefs’ but instead was a philosophical system with roots in ancient Greece.