Lars Engle, Patrick Gray, and William Hamlin have enlisted a formidable group of contributors to their massive volume on Shakespeare and Montaigne, and such a topic would seem to warrant it. It's hard to imagine a more complex and consequential purely academic topic than this of how, as Engle puts it, “thinking about Shakespeare reacting to Montaigne can help us see Shakespeare thinking, thinking about thinking, and possibly even thinking about the ways many of us think now” (29). And indeed, deep and broad learning has been lavished on the collection, with worthy insights to be gleaned throughout and innumerable opportunities to think with both authors. Ultimately, the book is valuable and a success.

Its flaws are considerable, however, and in the Montaignian spirit of admitting a slanted view, I will assay them. Faced with nearly five hundred pages, including a preface, two introductions, and two afterwords, we don't even reach chapter 1 until we're eighty pages in. Nearly everything in Shakespeare and Montaigne could be shorter. Engle's own offering, one of the best, tackling superbly the volume's sine qua non—The Tempest's engagement with Montaigne—quotes Engle's own quoting of Colin Burrow from introduction number two (310, 36). The redundancies aren't only in the book's wanton self-referencing, though; the dead horse of subjectivity is beaten many times, with post structuralist flourishes that feel thirty years old or more. It's a tad tedious—and, in these days of unreason, a tad frustrating—to read about the deconstructing of shadow and substance (101), the narrativizing of identity (108), or the “fundamentally anti-essentialist” character of selfhood (247) and its geopolitical significance. Easier to take but still excessive is the relentless methodological apologetics. Shakespeare and Montaigne are fruitfully set next to each other—we hardly need to defend flexibility about what constitutes a source or lay out models of intertextuality.

Ironically, many of the freshest, most thought-provoking readings appear in essays that, like Engle's, take source in a fairly strict sense. Grounding on the known correspondence between Florio's translation and The Tempest allows Engle to explore how Prospero and Gonzalo correspond to Montaigne himself and convey an ambivalent attitude toward him and his aloof perch. Alison Calhoun's riffs on the grim theme of flaying—a warning, for Montaigne in “Virtue” and “Experience” and for Shakespeare in King Lear, against the dire consequences of philosophical rigidity—benefit from precise references to ancient sources informing both writers; she observes, fascinatingly, of 4.6, “this scene in Lear could be a gloss of the Antigonian fragment, inspired by Shakespeare's reading of Diogenes Laertius or, more likely, Montaigne's borrowing of that fragment in his essay ‘Of Vertue’” (188). Singularly skilled in describing paradox, Peter Platt offers a rich interpretation of All's Well based on specific connections to “We Taste Nothing Purely.”

Farther reaching but similarly moored to specifics is Richard Hillman, who argues that reading Montaigne inflected Shakespeare's concept of genre and convinced him of the interpenetration of tragedy and comedy, a bold claim reinforced with a number of intriguing parallels, most impressively a “neglected analogue” between “Three Good Women” and Winter's Tale (272). Of course, more indirect comparisons are also illuminating, and two of the finest spotlight Falstaff: Anita Gilman Sherman calls attention to Falstaff's defusing of violence through personality, addressing the problem broached in “Physiognomy”; Gray's huge and magisterial discussion of historical patterns of appropriating Shakespeare and Montaigne centers on Falstaff to drive home how each writer eludes a pat mapping-on of values. We perpetually want to know, as Gray crisply formulates it, “whose side are Shakespeare and Montaigne on?” (358); and we need to be at least as skeptical of the romanticized Falstaff as we are of the devilish one.

These two essays epitomize two points that stand out from the collection as a whole. Sherman invites us to consider how Shakespeare encountered Montaigne with a scrutinizing, critical eye—one perhaps more charitable, as Hamlin contends, toward “the believing temperament” (210). And Gray admonishes us that we should strive for a similar care and mindfulness in our own encounters with both of them, rather than assuming the Shakespeare and the Montaigne congenial to our own sensibilities.