sham, the merchant's son, and another, entitled "The
History of Richard Whittington, of his Low Birth, his Great Fortune";
but he carefully avoided such material in seeking plots for his dramas.
Cardinal Wolsey, the butcher's son, is indeed the hero of "Henry VIII.,"
but his humble origin is only mentioned incidentally as something to be
ashamed of. What greater opportunity for idealizing the common people
ever presented itself to a dramatist than to Shakespeare when he
undertook to draw the character of Joan of Arc in the second part of
"Henry VI."? He knew how to create noble women--that is one of his
special glories--but he not only refuses to see anything noble in the
peasant girl who led France to victory, but he deliberately insults her
memory with the coarsest and most cruel calumnies. Surely the lapse of
more than a century and a half might have enabled a man of honor, if not
of genius, to do justice to an enemy of the weaker sex, and if Joan had
been a member of the French royal family we may be sure that she would
have received better treatment.

The question of the aristocratic tendency of the drama was an active one
in Shakespeare's time. There was a good deal of democratic feeling in
the burghers of London-town, and they resented the courtly prejudices of
their playwrights and their habit of holding up plain citizens to
ridicule upon the stage, whenever they deigned to present them at all.
The Prolog in Beaumont and Fletcher's "Knight of the Burning Pestle"
gives sufficient evidence of this. The authors adopted the device of
having a Citizen leap upon the stage and interrupt the Speaker of the
Prolog by shouting

"Hold your peace, goodman boy!"

Speaker of Prolog: "What do you mean, sir?"

Citizen: "That you have no good meaning; this seven
year there hath been plays at this house. I have observed
it, you have still girds at citizens."

The Citizen goes on to inform the Speaker of the Prolog that he is a
grocer, and to demand that he "present something notably in honor of the
commons of the city." For a hero he will have "a grocer, and he shall do
admirable things." But this proved to be a joke over too serious a
matter, for at the first representation of the play in 1611 it was cried
down by the citizens and apprentices, who did not appreciate its satire
upon them, and it was not revived for many years thereafter. It will not
answer, therefore, to say that the idea of celebrating