Description:
Through sustained close-readings of Montaigne's essays and Shakespeare's plays, Platt explores both authors' approaches to self, knowledge and form that stress fractures, interruptions and alternatives.
Brief description: Peter G. Platt is Ann Whitney Olin Professor and Chair of English at Barnard College. He is the author of Shakespeare and the Culture of Paradox and Reason Diminished: Shakespeare and the Marvelous, and the editor of Wonders, Marvels, and Monsters in Early Modern Culture. He has written articles about Shakespeare, Renaissance poetics, and rhetoric. Shakespeare's Montaigne, an edition of selections from John Florio's 1603 translation of Montaigne's Essays, was co-edited with Stephen Greenblatt.
Review Quotes: It was Nietzsche who in 1876 declared that Shakespeare was Montaigne's "best reader"; but we've had to wait for Peter Platt's Shakespeare's Essays to show in all its complexity how and why this was so. Platt brilliantly illuminates Shakespeare debt to Florio's translation of Montaigne, revealing how profoundly the Essays would shape his thinking from Hamlet to The Tempest. This is a deeply rewarding and insightful book, the product of sustained reflection, one that enables us to see afresh how the greatest Renaissance dramatist was challenged and inspired by the greatest essayist of the age.-- "James Shapiro, author of 1599: A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare"