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Shakespeare's The Tempest and Human Worth

Shakespeare's The Tempest and Human Worth MAURICE HUNT A challenge facing anyone wanting to analyze Shakespeare's representation of human worth is the playwright's skepticism, his unrelenting qualification of absolute or categorical values. The playwright's near contemporary, the French essayist Michel de Montaigne clearly states this challenge that underlies so much of Shakespeare's work. Several passages from Montaigne's essays provide a basis for the plausibility of the only major booklength study of human worth in Shakespeare's plays, one with which however I will disagree in my analysis of my subject in The Tempest. The position on human worth that Montaigne articulates, and that most Shakespearean commentators would say resembles the playwright's opinion, leads into an account of the metaphysics that condenses Prospero's human worth. Ironically, it is an "un-Montaignean" metaphysics that the French essayist actually endorses in some key passages in the Essays rarely, if ever, quoted by commentators on the relevance of Montaigne's thought for the understanding of Shakespeare's plays. Prospero's reason seizes upon a spiritual, Judeo-Christian prompting to break an impasse between hatred and love so as to realize his human worth in a tradition stretching back as far as Aquinas. The 20.1 (2013): 58­71 DOI: 10.3366/bjj.2013.0067 © Edinburgh University Press www.euppublishing.com/bjj Near http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png Ben Jonson Journal Edinburgh University Press

Shakespeare's The Tempest and Human Worth

Hunt, Maurice
Ben Jonson Journal , Volume 20 (1): 58 – May 1, 2013
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References (1)

Publisher
Edinburgh University Press
Copyright
© Edinburgh University Press
Subject
Articles; Literary Studies
ISSN
1079-3453
eISSN
1755-165X
DOI
10.3366/bjj.2013.0067
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Abstract

MAURICE HUNT A challenge facing anyone wanting to analyze Shakespeare's representation of human worth is the playwright's skepticism, his unrelenting qualification of absolute or categorical values. The playwright's near contemporary, the French essayist Michel de Montaigne clearly states this challenge that underlies so much of Shakespeare's work. Several passages from Montaigne's essays provide a basis for the plausibility of the only major booklength study of human worth in Shakespeare's plays, one with which however I will disagree in my analysis of my subject in The Tempest. The position on human worth that Montaigne articulates, and that most Shakespearean commentators would say resembles the playwright's opinion, leads into an account of the metaphysics that condenses Prospero's human worth. Ironically, it is an "un-Montaignean" metaphysics that the French essayist actually endorses in some key passages in the Essays rarely, if ever, quoted by commentators on the relevance of Montaigne's thought for the understanding of Shakespeare's plays. Prospero's reason seizes upon a spiritual, Judeo-Christian prompting to break an impasse between hatred and love so as to realize his human worth in a tradition stretching back as far as Aquinas. The 20.1 (2013): 58­71 DOI: 10.3366/bjj.2013.0067 © Edinburgh University Press www.euppublishing.com/bjj Near

Journal

Ben Jonson Journal – Edinburgh University Press

Published: May 1, 2013

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