dunces: one foresees a day when the German appreciators of Shakespeare (to whom we continue to owe so much) will on this ground also set up a claim to intellectual affinity with our poet.
The prejudices of the country-bred youth persist also in Shakespeare’s treatment of the various classes of English society. He has the old-fashioned rustic’s fondness for lords and ladies and for country squires, and for all the functionaries that go in their train: footmen and porters, hostlers, tapsters, gardeners, and pedlars.[1] The plain tiller of the soil gets loving treatment, from Costard in Love’s Labour’s Lost to the charming Egyptian Clown in Antony and Cleopatra; and he offers conspicuous homage to the Cotswold shepherds in As You Like It and in The Winter’s Tale.
The denizens of the city, on the other hand,—with honorable exception of the tavern drawers,—seldom evoke Shakespeare’s interest. The Lord Mayor and Aldermen, the livery companies, law clerks, and apprentices, the Puritan sectaries, and cut-purses, and street-singers—all the picturesque and bizarrely differentiated types that made up the pride, pomp, and circumstance, as well as the bustle and romantic uncertainties, of Elizabethan London—whom Dekker painted so lovingly and Jonson with such microscopic fidelity—are by Shakespeare referred to little and dispraisingly. The ‘velvet-guards and Sunday citizens’[2] and the whole shop-keeping class, from the apothecary in Romeo and Juliet down, arouse at best his pity and almost invariably his scorn. They are used most to barb the point of his contemptuous metaphors. The rude mechanicals, or city artisans, are dull and pompous, and the great body of citizens is the mobile vulgus
- ↑ Note the groom in Richard II.
- ↑ 1 Henry IV, III. i, 260.
