rming of all his women, young or old, is the Countess of Rousillon
in All's Well That Ends Well. It has a certain individuality among
them which suggests a portrait. Mr Harris will have it that all
Shakespear's nice old women are drawn from his beloved mother; but I
see no evidence whatever that Shakespear's mother was a particularly
nice woman or that he was particularly fond of her. That she was a
simple incarnation of extravagant maternal pride like the mother of
Coriolanus in Plutarch, as Mr Harris asserts, I cannot believe: she
is quite as likely to have borne her son a grudge for becoming "one of
these harlotry players" and disgracing the Ardens. Anyhow, as a
conjectural model for the Countess of Rousillon, I prefer that one of
whom Jonson wrote

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