dangerous innovator. He is not even the author of the idea -- merely a coy copyist employing the
quote in a context apparently devoid of any direct political implication.
Such moments of radical doubt, of course, occur in Shakespeare: who can forget the line,
perhaps inspired by the above passage from Montaigne, "the king is a thing…of nothing” (Hamlet
4.2.28). Unlike Montaigne, however, who truly believes that political existence is possible
without monarchy, in Shakespeare the absence of the monarch prefigures social chaos. "Untune
that string, and hark what discord follows,” as Ulysses says (T&C 1.3.110).
It is quite obvious for many reasons that Edward de Vere's personal sympathies were contrary
to those espoused by Montaigne in his Essaies and identical to those expressed over and over
again, including in the Sonnets, by Shakespeare. De Vere's extant correspondence reveals him as
a moralist and rhetorician of royalty and the Aristotelian "great chain of being.” Like Portia, for
whom "Mercy….becomes a throned monarch better than his crown” (4.1.184-89) he can hold
forth on the attributes which produce an ideal monarch, as in his May 7, 1603 letter to Robert
Cecil: "Nothing adorns a king more than Justice, nor in anything doth a king more resemble God
than in justice, which is the head of all virtue, and he that is indued therewith, hath all the rest”
(Fowler 1986 771). As a member of the "blood royal" who could trace descent back to two of the
seven sons of Edward III -- John of Gaunt and Thomas of Woodstock -- Edward de Vere would
spontaneously have chosen David as his sacred role model in thinking and writing about the
social and theological obligations of a poet king such as Richard II.
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