It is fair to ask, after reading this book, what a pre-Montaignian Shakespeare would look like. One could reasonably argue that even in his pre- 1603 plays Shakespeare was interested in the mutability of the self; the multiplicity of truth claims and scepticism in a variety of forms; and a fascination with cultural others. There is no question that these interests and patterns were present in Shakespeare's earlier work; indeed, they can be seen as intellectual through-lines of his plays. But I think the difference is that the encounter with Montaigne gave Shakespeare a new set of tools for essaying these issues and changed his approach to them in his later dramas.

If soliloquies are a gauge of inwardness, the pre-1603 soliloquies are less concerned with exploring self-knowledge than they are with getting the soliloquist in touch with the audience, akin to the way the character of the medieval Vice did. For example, in his opening soliloquy, Richard III is much more interested in talking with us – seducing us the way he will seduce Anne in the next scene – than he is in exploring the intricacies of his ‘inner life’:

But I, that am not shaped for sportive tricks,

Nor made to court an amorous looking-glass,

I that am rudely stamped, and want love's majesty

To strut before a wanton ambling nymph,

I that am curtailed of this fair proportion,

Cheated of feature by dissembling nature,

Deformed, unfinished, sent before my time

Into this breathing world scarce half made up,

And that so lamely and unfashionable

That dogs bark at me as I halt by them –

Why, I in this weak piping time of peace,

Have no delight to pass away the time,

Unless to spy my shadow in the sun

And descant on mine own deformity:

And therefore, since I cannot prove a lover,

To entertain these fair well-spoken days,

I am determinèd to prove a villain

And hate the idle pleasures of these days.

There is a cynical self-knowledge here but not a questing one, and Richard wants us to align ourselves with his ‘unfashionable’ self and pity his being ‘Cheated of feature by dissembling nature’ and reduced to ‘descant[ing] on [his] own deformity’.