That Shakespeare essayed ‘Of the Affection of Fathers to Their Children’ (2.8) in writing King Lear has been noted before. Leo Salingar made the first sustained connection, arguing that ‘Of the Affection’ was ‘particularly relevant’ to the intellectual preoccupations of King Lear, ‘which recall the frequent topics of the Essays, raising similar questions if not reaching the same answers’. Salingar notes a greater pessimism in Shakespeare, who in King Lear ‘is much less confident about rationality’ than Montaigne in his essay. Stephen Greenblatt concurs: ‘Why should arguments that seem so reasonable and even ethically responsible appear in King Lear as the center of something horrible? Here, as in The Tempest, it is as if Shakespeare thought Montaigne had a very inadequately developed sense of depravity and evil.’ But I would suggest that the focus on the two writers solely at the locus of the linguistic parallel can obscure the deeper, less purely verbal affinities between essay and play.

On one hand, of course, it is hard to argue with these positions, especially since Shakespeare has Montaigne's claims about the need for elderly fathers to distribute their money to their children voiced by the villain Edmund. Even worse, Edmund suggests that these are his brother Edgar's ideas, using these views to convince their father, Gloucester, that Edgar has evil designs on Gloucester's wealth and indeed his life. Taking Edmund's Montaignian ideas as Edgar’s, Gloucester disowns his elder son and sets off down the road to family disintegration, blindness, and tragedy.

But as I have been arguing throughout, Shakespeare's negotiations with Montaigne are rarely if ever clear-cut: Shakespeare rarely fully endorses or critiques a Montaignian principle. Rather, he essays Montaigne, testing out ideas from the Frenchman's book. Here, I would argue, Montaigne is both more optimistic and more pessimistic about the love between parents and children than Shakespeare in Lear: he both argues for the natural bond between parents and their offspring and anatomises the treacheries and missed opportunities for achieving this bond that happen in the real world, beyond ideals. Further, the greater connection between essay and play is the shared fascination with nonbodily creations. In ‘Of the Affection’ Montaigne ultimately argues that ‘what we engender by the mind, the fruits of our courage, sufficiency, or spirit, are brought forth by a far more noble part than the corporeal and more our own’.