Montaigne's "Cannibals" and The Tempest Revisited

Shakespeare's borrowing in The Tempest from Montaigne's essay "Cannibals" has been generally assumed to be concentrated in one short passage as given in John Florio's English translation (1603). This article demonstrates that the second half of Gonzalo's utopian speech in fact derives not from this famous passage but from another substantially longer one found two pages later in Florio's original folio text. It also proposes that Shakespeare had inspirations for the name and characterization of Sycorax as well as the setting of Prospero's island from this Montaigne-Florio essay; and that this essay should be reconsidered as a far more important literary source of The Tempest than heretofore acknowledged.