To end at the beginning, I now turn to Montaigne's presence in The Tempest, which contains the one indisputable example of a Montaigne– Florio citation in a Shakespeare play. Although Shakespeare's direct quotations from ‘Of the Caniballes’ – first noted by Edward Capell in 1780 and Edmond Malone in 1790 – concern an ideal commonwealth put forth by Gonzalo in 2.1, it has long been assumed that Montaigne’s essay influenced the topics if not necessarily the ideas of The Tempest as a whole. Allan H. Gilbert was one of the first to suggest a wider influence of essay on play than just the Gonzalo passage. And Kenji Go has recently pointed to more persuasive links between ‘Caniballes’ and Tempest. Too, Eleanor Prosser convincingly laid out parallels between the opening passage of ‘Of Crueltie’ (2.11) and Prospero's reconciliation speech in 5.1. Interestingly, she did not note that this same essay includes an allusion to the cannibals – and presumably his own earlier essay: ‘The Canibales and savage people do not so much offend me with roasting and eating of dead bodies, as those, which torment and persecute the liuing. Let any man be executed by law, however deseruedly soever, I cannot endure to beholde the execution with an vnrelenting eye.’ Shakespeare clearly had cannibals – as well as themes of nature versus art, cruelty, justice, and mercy – firmly in mind when composing The Tempest. The importance of Montaigne's essay to Shakespeare’s play goes well beyond Gonzalo's borrowing.

It is, of course, important that there is a ‘smoking gun’, found in the direct quotation of Florio's Montaigne here, and whether Shakespeare is challenging Montaigne's seeming idealism when Sebastian and Antonio mock Gonzalo's ‘commonwealth’ is a crucial issue. Let us revisit the key passage in The Tempest borrowed from ‘Of the Caniballes’: