innkeepers demanding to be paid for his food and lodging, and make him
as free of economic difficulties as Amadis de Gaul. Hamlet's
experiences simply could not have happened to a plumber. A poor man
is useful on the stage only as a blind man is: to excite sympathy.
The poverty of the apothecary in Romeo and Juliet produces a great
effect, and even points the sound moral that a poor man cannot afford
to have a conscience; but if all the characters of the play had been
as poor as he, it would have been nothing but a melodrama of the sort
that the Sicilian players gave us here; and that was not the best that
lay in Shakespear's power. When poverty is abolished, and leisure and
grace of life become general, the only plays surviving from our epoch
which will have any relation to life as it will be lived then will be
those in which none of the persons represented are troubled with want
of money or wretched drudgery. 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