Dark Lady of the Sonnets | Page 7

Sidney's sister: Pembroke's mother: Death: ere thou has slain another,
Learnd and fair and good as she, Time shall throw a dart at thee. But

Frank will not have her at any price, because his ideal Shakespear is
rather like a sailor in a melodrama; and a sailor in a melodrama must
adore his mother. I do not at all belittle such sailors. They are the
emblems of human generosity; but Shakespear was not an emblem: he
was a man and the author of Hamlet, who had no illusions about his
mother. In weak moments one almost wishes he had.

Shakespear's Social Standing
On the vexed question of Shakespear's social standing Mr Harris says
that Shakespear "had not had the advantage of a middle-class training."
I suggest that Shakespear missed this questionable advantage, not
because he was socially too low to have attained to it, but because he
conceived himself as belonging to the upper class from which our
public school boys are now drawn. Let Mr Harris survey for a moment
the field of contemporary journalism. He will see there some men who
have the very characteristics from which he infers that Shakespear was
at a social disadvantage through his lack of middle-class training. They
are rowdy, ill-mannered, abusive, mischievous, fond of quoting
obscene schoolboy anecdotes, adepts in that sort of blackmail which
consists in mercilessly libelling and insulting every writer whose
opinions are sufficiently heterodox to make it almost impossible for
him to risk perhaps five years of a slender income by an appeal to a
prejudiced orthodox jury; and they see nothing in all this cruel
blackguardism but an uproariously jolly rag, although they are by no
means without genuine literary ability, a love of letters, and even some
artistic conscience. But he will find not one of the models of his type (I
say nothing of mere imitators of it) below the rank that looks at the
middle class, not humbly and enviously from below, but insolently
from above. Mr Harris himself notes Shakespear's contempt for the
tradesman and mechanic, and his incorrigible addiction to smutty jokes.
He does us the public service of sweeping away the familiar plea of the
Bardolatrous ignoramus, that Shakespear's coarseness was part of the
manners of his time, putting his pen with precision on the one name,
Spenser, that is necessary to expose such a libel on Elizabethan
decency. There was nothing whatever to prevent Shakespear from
being as decent as More was before him, or Bunyan after him, and as
self-respecting as Raleigh or Sidney, except the tradition of his class, in

which education or statesmanship may no doubt be acquired by those
who have a turn for them, but in which insolence, derision, profligacy,
obscene jesting, debt contracting, and rowdy mischievousness, give
continual scandal to the pious, serious, industrious, solvent bourgeois.
No other class is infatuated enough to believe that gentlemen are born
and not made by a very elaborate process of culture. Even kings are
taught and coached and drilled from their earliest boyhood to play their
part. But the man of family (I am convinced that Shakespear took that
view of himself) will plunge into society without a lesson in table
manners, into politics without a lesson in history, into the city without a
lesson in business, and into the army without a lesson in honor.
It has been said, with the object of proving Shakespear a laborer, that
he could hardly write his name. Why? Because he "had not the
advantage of a middle-class training." Shakespear himself tells us,
through Hamlet, that gentlemen purposely wrote badly lest they should
be mistaken for scriveners; but most of them, then as now, wrote badly
because they could not write any better. In short, the whole range of
Shakespear's foibles: the snobbishness, the naughtiness, the contempt
for tradesmen and mechanics, the assumption that witty conversation
can only mean smutty conversation, the flunkeyism towards social
superiors and insolence towards social inferiors, the easy ways with
servants which is seen not only between The Two Gentlemen of
Verona and their valets, but in the affection and respect inspired by a
great servant like Adam: all these are the characteristics of Eton and
Harrow, not of the public elementary or private adventure school. They
prove, as everything we know about Shakespear suggests, that he
thought of the Shakespears and Ardens as families of consequence, and
regarded himself as a gentleman under a cloud through his father's ill
luck in business, and never for a moment as a man of the people. This
is at once the explanation of and excuse for his snobbery. He was not a
parvenu trying to cover his humble origin with a purchased coat of
arms: he was a gentleman resuming what he conceived to be his natural