 It is difficult to resist the thought that Cavendish is writing in part with an eye to Hobbes and the problem of the fool (Hobbes 1651, 90). To the subject who thinks that it is rational to break the covenants of civil society, and who thinks that he can get away with it, Cavendish is suggesting that a capable sovereign would make sure that subjects have reason to believe that the eyes and ears of the sovereign are ubiquitous and that situations in which a subject concludes that he is under the radar are likely to be situations that the sovereign has had skillfully and majestically staged. Perhaps Cavendish is also suggesting that there is no good Hobbesian response to the problem of the fool in that she is fleshing out what a sovereign would have to be to make the behavior of the “fool” count as irrational, and how a sovereign cannot realistically be anything close to that.