Hamlet sits paradoxically at the centre and on the edge of the Montaignian Shakespeare. When linking Hamlet to Montaigne, critics have typically turned to ‘An Apologie of Raymond Sebond’, with its cataloguing of and arguments for scepticism. But I want to claim that ‘Of Diverting or Diversion’ speaks to Hamlet just as strongly, even though its seeming lack of verbal sources causes it rarely to be discussed with the play. While there are in fact verbal connections between ‘Of Diverting’ and Hamlet, the main connection between essay and play is the anatomy of diversion that Hamlet and Hamlet share with Montaigne. In essay and play, diversion as an essentially human way of managing grief, passion, and despair coexists in the same work with diversion as the epitome of human delusion and escapist fantasy. Linking theatre to diversion, both authors show us an ambivalence towards playing that Shakespeare foregrounds in Hamlet's ambivalence towards action, whether vengeful or dramatic. Diversion provides possibilities in both texts, but essay and play are ultimately equivocal about whether these possibilities are fruitful or destructive.

These connections between essay and play help make the case for Hamlet's centrality to this book, and I will turn to them shortly. But because of the dating of the various versions of Hamlet, some critics have contested the idea that the play could have been shaped by the Essays. The first part of this chapter, then, will show the ways in which Shakespeare could have essayed Montaigne before writing some of the texts of Hamlet.

George Coffin Taylor clearly thought Hamlet was a Montaignian play and produced the data to prove it. He asserted in 1925 that not only the verbal echoes – Hamlet shares the lead in most ‘Montaigne words to the page’ and has far more Montaigne words in total than any other Shakespeare play – but also ‘the date, the philosophical nature of the play and the general consensus of substantiated and unsubstantiated opinion of those who have heretofore interested themselves in the subject of Montaigne and Shakspere [sic] at all’ make ‘a strong case … for Hamlet as the play of all plays marked by the Montaigne influence.