hou liest, thou thread, thou thimble,
Thou yard, three-quarters, half-yard, quarter, nail,
Thou flea, thou nit, thou winter cricket thou;
Braved in my own house by a skein of thread!
Away, thou rag, thou quantity, thou remnant!"
(Taming of the Shrew, Act 4, Sc. 3.)

Joan of Arc speaks of her "contemptible estate" as a shepherd's
daughter, and afterward, denying her father, calls him "Decrepit miser!
base, ignoble wretch!" (Henry VI., Part 1, Act 1, Sc. 2, and Act 5, Sc.
4.) It is hard to believe that Shakespeare would have so frequently
allowed his characters to express their contempt for members of the
lower orders of society if he had not had some sympathy with their
opinions.

Shakespeare usually employs the common people whom he brings upon the
stage merely to raise a laugh (as, for instance, the flea-bitten
carriers in the inn-yard at Rochester, in Henry IV., Part 1, Act 2, Sc.
1), but occasionally they are scamps as well as fools. They amuse us
when they become hopelessly entangled in their sentences (_vide_ Romeo
and Juliet, Act 1, Sc. 2), or when Juliet's nurse blunderingly makes
her think that Romeo is slain instead of Tybalt; but when this same
lady, after taking Romeo's money, espouses the cause of the County
Paris--or when on the eve of Agincourt we are introduced to a group of
cowardly English soldiers--or when Coriolanus points out the poltroonery
of the Roman troops, and says that all would have been lost "but for our
gentlemen," we must feel detestation for them. Juliet's nurse is not the
only disloyal servant. Shylock's servant, Launcelot Gobbo, helps Jessica
to deceive her father, and Margaret, the Lady Hero's gentlewoman, brings
about the disgrace of her mistress by fraud. Olivia's waiting-woman in
"Twelfth Night" is honest enough, but she is none too modest in her
language, but in this respect Dame Quickly in "Henry IV." can easily
rival her. Peter Thump, when forced to a judicial combat with his
master, displays his cowardice, altho in the end he is successful (Henry
VI., Act 2, Part 2, Sc. 3), and Stephano, a drunken butler, adorns the
stage in the "Tempest." We can not blame Shakespeare for making use of
cutthroats and villains in developing his plots, but we might have been
spared the jokes which the jailors of Posthumus perpetrate when they
come to lead him to the scaffold, and the ludicrous English of the clown
who supplies Cleopatra with an asp. The apothe