480 SCHELLING— THE COMMON FOLK OF SHAKESPEARE. 



for all his scenes of the pomp and circumstance of war, forget its 

 terror, its sorrow and its pathos. In the third part of " Henry VI.," 

 that unhappy king is seated alone on the field of battle as the 

 struggle surges away from him. And there enters " a son that hath 

 killed his father dragging in the dead body," and later "a father 

 bearing his dead son." Poignant are the words of these common 

 men in their common woe, the battle woe of all ages and all times 

 in the grip of which the least are as the great and the greatest as 

 the poorest. 



In the taverns, the brothels and the jails, Shakespeare found the 

 foulmouthed, the ignorant and the dishonest and he represented them 

 in all these particulars in a faithful, if at times, forbidding, reality to 

 life. Moreover, his prejudice against evil is pronounced in the very 

 repulsiveness of such scenes. He knows that there are impostors 

 among beggars, that trial by combat is only a somewhat cruder 

 method of getting at the truth than trial by jury, that there are 

 corrupt and incompetent magistrates and fools abounding in all walks 

 of life. Moreover, he depicts in his plays a feudal state of society, 

 for such was English society in his day. But there is nothing in 

 these honest dramatic pictures of English life, from the king on his 

 throne to Abhorson with his headsman's axe, to declare Shakespeare 

 prejudiced against any class of his fellow countrymen. Wherefore, 

 our obvious generalization as to Shakespeare's attitude toward com- 

 mon folk, whether they be learned or unlearned, is this : he found 

 among them the stupid, the ignorant, the pretentious and the absurd ; 

 but he found likewise in each class the earnest, the honorable and 

 capable, and honored each after his kind as such. For their follies 

 he ridiculed them ; for their virtues which he recognized, he loved 

 them, deflecting neither to ridicule nor respect because of station in 

 life. 



