I have often pointed out that the playwright found the common man amusing at the best, unprincipled at worst and inane as the rule. Both Oxfordians and Stratfordians find the fact disconcerting. To Oxfordians, generally speaking, the Earl of Oxford's historical reputation for arrogance, selfishness and worse, is the result of a centuries-long smear campaign. To the Stratfordians, for whom he would have to be perceived as a pretentious traitor against his class, it is all a great misconception and every available passage must be interpreted as necessary to avoid such a fate.
For these reasons Shakespeare has been persistently and willfully misunderstood in the matter. The purported Shakespeare of the play Sir Thomas More, somehow infused with the unique social tone of early 19th century Socialism, having recently been accepted in spite of a century-plus of deep scholarly skepticism and worse, would seem, tellingly, to be the go-to text for Stratfordians in the matter. The desperate competition for Authorship headlines is making a mess of the scholarly record.
The texts that each of the combatants might better go to in order to show Shakespeare's compassion are best exemplified in the play As You Like It.
Oliver. I will not long be troubled with you: you shall haue some part of your will , I pray you leaue me.
Orlando. I will no further offend you, then becomes mee for my good.
Oliver. [to Adam] Get you with him, you olde dogge.
Adam. Is old dogge my reward: most true, I haue lost my teeth in your seruice: God be with my olde master, he would not haue spoke such a word.1
The evil brother, Oliver, has dismissed the good brother, Orlando, the hero of the play. With him he has cast off an old family servant worn with labor for two generations of the family. The playwright clearly encourages the audience to share his sense of Oliver's cruelty to the man.
The two wander hoping to come upon some opportunity in the forest. Adam tires and is faint.
Adam. Deere Master, I can go no further :
O I die for food. Heere lie I downe,
And measure out my graue. Farwel kinde master.
*
Orlando. Come, I wil beare thee
To some shelter,and thou shalt not die
For lacke of a dinner,
If there liue any thing in this Desert.
Cheerely good Adam.2
Orlando will risk approaching a party of forest dwellers to get food for his hungry servant. Luckily, they too are exiled nobles and gentlemen. Men of honor, that is to say. In their case, from the court of the local Duke.
Of course, there are factors we've yet to discuss. Absolutely essential factors.
The key word repeated in Adam's passages is “master”. This is representative of another pattern in Shakespeare's plays. Like many of this character type in the plays, “Old” Adam has been a dutiful, obedient menial servant of the family for decades. The dutiful, obedient menial is a character type close to Shakespeare's heart.
Not all servants in Shakespeare are so dutiful as Old Adam, however. Each is treated, by and large, in accordance with his or her dedication to their masters.
The nurse in Romeo and Juliet, for one example, is amusing and likable. Her character has been prominent in Western literature from the Golden Age of the Greeks, which passed her along to the Latins (most notably Seneca), which passed her along to the Italian novelists, the latter two which passed her along to the Elizabethans. She was a stock character already for millennia.
But only in the Italian tradition that arrives at Bandello's novella, and Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet, for which it is a source, is she transformed into a busybody chatter-box stock character. Beginning in ancient Greece she was a repository of genuine feminine wisdom. A waiting woman of service since the main female character was a child more in the fashion of Luce in The Winters Tale or Emilia in Othello. She is foil to her mistress often expressing that mistress's internal debate. Only in Romeo and Juliet is she fully, lovably human for all her tragic limitations as an uneducated wet-nurse. She having been a dutiful family servant for decades.
This is not to say that servants uniformly escape portrayal as clownish (however much naturally crafty). As the numerous historical books and manuscripts of instructions to new heads of noble families make clear, few servants were so dutiful as Adam. Most, in fact, were more like Speed and Launce, in The Two Gentlemen of Verona, and Lancelot in The Merchant of Venice, their speech laden with malapropisms and heads with schemes.
Gobo. I haue here a dish of Doues that I would bestow vpon your worship, and my suite is.
Lance. In verie briefe, the suite is impertinent to my selfe, as your worship shall know by this honest old man, and though I say it, though old man, yet poore man my Father.
Bassanio. One speak for both, what would you?
Lancelot. Serue you sir.
Gobo. That is the verie defect of the matter sir.3
Others were much darker like the paid haunchman Borachio in Much Ado About Nothing. There was little difference in the behaviors of these various less dutiful types and the hustlers that made their livings as freemen in the stews that so attracted Shakespeare's interest as evidenced in such plays as Measure for Measure. A few still more laughable than the rest, from the playwright's perspective — for being empowered with positions of authority over their betters, at times, as the case with constables — were not only ignorant but an impediment to the order they were tasked to maintain.
The author of the works of Shakespeare displayed throughout those works the perspectives and behaviors of the English nobility as well as the flaws that came with them. He was not ahead of his times in his evaluation of the common man. He ignored the changes that were reducing the status of the nobility. His protagonists and antagonists were noblemen and kings, (and... um... wealthy Italian merchants) and their families. By these he measured his world.
1New Variorum As You Like It (1891), I.i.75-83.
2Ibid. II.vi.1-3, 17-21.
3New Variorum. The Merchant of Venice (1916). 129-37.
Also at Virtual Grub Street:
Ben Jonson and the Dedication to the Shakespeare First Folio. December 12, 2022. “Country hands reach foorth milke, creame, fruites, or what they have:...”.
On the Oxfrauds Needing Better Lawyers. December 10, 2022. "I have pointed out that the Oxfraudian claim in their so-called “Prima Facie” brief, that Heminges and Condell actually wrote the letters..."
- Edward de Vere and Marlowe’s Dido of Carthage. July 5, 2022. “It was an historical effort and an historical two years for Elizabethan theater.”
- The Death of Sir Edward Vere, son of the 17th Earl of Oxford and Anne Vavasour. May 8, 2022. “Mr. Sedgwick wrote to me for a prayer for Sir Edward Vere.”
- How Shakespeare gave Ben Jonson the Infamous Purge. November 7, 2021. “Of course, De Vere could not openly accuse Jonson of having outed him as Shakespeare.”
- Check out the Shakespeare Authorship Article Index for many more articles and reviews about this fascinating time and about the Shakespeare Authorship Question.
- Check out the Letters Index: Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford for many letters from this fascinating time, some related to the Shakespeare Authorship Question.
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