An NYRB Classics Original

Shakespeare, Nietzsche wrote, was Montaignes best readera typically brilliant Nietzschean insight, capturing the intimate relationship between Montaignes ever-changing record of the self and Shakespeares kaleidoscopic register of human character. And there is no doubt that Shakespeare read Montaignethough how extensively remains a matter of debateand that the translation he read him in was that of John Florio, a fascinating polymath, man-about-town, and dazzlingly inventive writer himself.

Florios Montaigne is in fact one of the masterpieces of English prose, with a stylistic range and felicity and passages of deep lingering music that make it comparable to Sir Robert Burtons Anatomy of Melancholy and the works of Sir Thomas Browne. This new edition of this seminal work, edited by Stephen Greenblatt and Peter G. Platt, features an adroitly modernized text, an essay in which Greenblatt discusses both the resemblances and real tensions between Montaignes and Shakespeares visions of the world, and Platts introduction to the life and times of the extraordinary Florio. Altogether, this book provides a remarkable new experience of not just two but three great writers who ushered in the modern world.