This episode started as an article, but it turns out you would all prefer to listen to stuff, so now it’s a podcast episode!

You want to listen to stuff, not read stuff, and I respect that. So, I dug out a little article I wrote after doing some research and recording on The Tempest and have created an audio version of it for your listening pleasure.

In this episode, I look at Michel de Montaigne’s “Of Cannibals,” one of the essays in his classic larger collection of essays. I had seen references that this particular work influenced The Tempest, and I was curious to see if the influence in the play was readily apparent.

While we can’t give Montaigne full marks for his understanding of native Brazilian culture, we can at least give him props for serving it back to the Europeans who read his work.

Further Reading

The version of Essays I have sitting on my bookshelf is the Penguin Books edition translated by JM Cohen

Find it free on Project Gutenberg.

And, of course, you could always try reading The Tempest itself.

Credit where credit is due

Art by Halie Branson

Music recording by josdvg