Rozpravy o životě a smrti: Sidneyovi, Mornay a Shakespeare (Discourse(s) of Life and Death: The Sidneys, Mornay and Shakespeare)

• Main Author: Martina Kastnerová
• Format: Article
• Language: ces
• Published: Ostium 2019-03-01
• Series: Ostium
• Subjects: William Shakespeare; Philip Sidney; Philippe Mornay; Mary Sidney Herbert; Countess of Pembroke; Francis Bacon; Michel de Montaigne; Renaissance literary culture; stoicism; scepticism; readiness for death; fear of death; human suffering; mercy; glassy essence (of human)
• Online Access: http://ostium.sk/language/sk/rozpravy-o-zivote-a-smrti-sidneyovi-mornay-a-shakespeare/

On 25th May 1572, Queen Elizabeth granted the then 17-year-old Philip Sidney permission to travel to Europe. Placed under the care of Elizabeth’s important courtier and envoy Sir Francis Walsingham in Paris, Sidney was there to witness the St. Bartholomew’s Day massacre. Sidney shared his experiences of the bloody episode with his mentor Hubert Languet and Philippe de Mornay, an aristocratic French Protestant theologian and political theorist. To purge himself of his own memories of the fateful night, Mornay later penned the treatise Excellent discours de la vie et de la mort (1576), a Christian-Senecan meditation on life and death, which Sidney’s younger sister Mary Sidney Herbert, Countess of Pembroke, subsequently translated to A Discourse of Life and Death (1592) as a way of dealing with the grief of losing a father, mother, brother and child all in the one year. As its three later reprints testify, her translation became very popular. We know that Shakespeare read it, as certain textual associations can be traced in Measure for Measure, Much Ado About Nothing and Hamlet. As well as addressing the more well-established knowledge that Shakespeare was influenced by the scepticism of Michel de Montaigne’s Essays (courtesy of John Florio’s translation), as can be observed especially in Hamlet, this paper will investigate how Mornay’s and the Sidneys’ ideas of stoicism inspired Shakespeare and informed his own meditations on life and the fear of death. This will help to elucidate a broader discourse on the theological impact of Mornay and the Sidneys on Shakespeare’s engagement in a kind of private therapy, helping him to address the themes that concerned him: human suffering as a part of everyday life, doubt, mercy and the fear of death.