The intense self-awareness in the soliloquies of Shakespeare's Hamlet (1599) is a breakthrough that was given tremendous impetus by the playwright's interest in a new literary form, the essay. Although Montaigne, the form's originator, published his first volumes of personal essays in France in 1580. English writers such as Shakespeare did not discover Montaigne until the late 1590s. Shakespeare could easily have turned to the essay earlier in his career--his French was good enough to read Montaigne in the original--but he didn't. Only at the end of the century, a cultural moment marked by a deepening interest in how subjective experience could be expressed, did Montaigne begin to speak to Shakespeare and other English writers with great immediacy.