Our plays of poverty and squalor, now
the only ones that are true to the life of the majority of living men,
will then be classed with the records of misers and monsters, and read
only by historical students of social pathology.
Then consider Shakespear's kings and lords and gentlemen! Would even
John Ball or Jeremiah complain that they are flattered? Surely a more
mercilessly exposed string of scoundrels never crossed the stage. The
very monarch who paralyzes a rebel by appealing to the divinity that
hedges a king, is a drunken and sensual assassin, and is presently
killed contemptuously before our eyes in spite of his hedge of
divinity. I could write as convincing a chapter on Shakespear's
Dickensian prejudice against the throne and the nobility and gentry in
general as Mr Harris or Ernest Crosbie on the other side. I could
even go so far as to contend that one of Shakespear's defects is his
lack of an intelligent comprehension of feudalism. He had of course
no prevision of democratic Collectivism. He was, except in the
commonplaces of war and patriotism, a privateer through and through.
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