Surely the real test, not of
Democracy, which was not a live political issue in Shakespear's time,
but of impartiality in judging classes, which is what one demands from
a great human poet, is not that he should flatter the poor and
denounce the rich, but that he should weigh them both in the same
balance. Now whoever will read Lear and Measure for Measure will find
stamped on his mind such an appalled sense of the danger of dressing
man in a little brief authority, such a merciless stripping of the
purple from the "poor, bare, forked animal" that calls itself a king
and fancies itself a god, that one wonders what was the real nature of
the mysterious restraint that kept "Eliza and our James" from teaching
Shakespear to be civil to crowned heads, just as one wonders why
Tolstoy was allowed to go free when so many less terrible levellers
went to the galleys or Siberia. From the mature Shakespear we get no
such scenes of village snobbery as that between the stage country
gentleman Alexander Iden and the stage Radical Jack Cade. We get the
shepherd in As You Like It, and many honest, brave, human, and loyal
servants, beside the inevitable comic ones. Even in the Jingo play,
Henry V, we get Bates and Williams drawn with all respect and honor as
normal rank and file men. In Julius Caesar, Shakespear went to work
with a will when he took his cue from Plutarch in glorifying regicide
and transfiguring the republicans. Indeed hero-worshippers have never
forgiven him for belittling Caesar and failing to see that side of his
assassination which made Goethe denounce it as the most senseless of
crimes. Put the play beside the Charles I of Wills, in which Cromwell
is written down to a point at which the Jack Cade of Henry VI becomes
a hero in comparison; and then believe, if you can, that Shakespear
was one of them that "crook the pregnant hinges of the knee where
thrift may follow fawning." Think of Rosencrantz, Guildenstern,
Osric, the fop who annoyed Hotspur, and a dozen passages concerning
such people! If such evidence can prove anything (and Mr Harris
relies throughout on such evidence) Shakespear loathed courtiers.

If, on the other hand, Shakespear's characters are mostly members of
the leisured classes, the same thing is true of Mr Harris's own plays
and mine. Industrial slavery is not compatible with that freedom of
adventure, that personal refinement and intellectual culture, that
scope of action, which the higher