But this was
going too far, even for a friend of Essex. To grant such a request might
have got the College into trouble with the influential Warwickshire
family of Arden, and so it was refused; but the grant was "recognized,"
and Shakespeare's peculiar ambition was satisfied.
Every single incident in his life bears out what we have learned from
his works. In all his writings he praises lords and gentlemen, and runs
down the citizens and common people, and in his life he spent some
years, a good deal of trouble, and many impudent lies in getting for his
father a grant of arms and recognition as a gentleman--a very pitiful
ambition, but peculiarly English. Shakespeare, one fancies, was a
gentleman by nature, and a good deal more.
But his snobbishness had other worse results. Partly because of it he
never got to know the middle classes in England. True, even in his time
they were excessively Puritanical, which quality hedged them off, so to
speak, from the playwright-poet. With his usual gentleness or timidity,
Shakespeare never tells us directly what he thought of the Puritans, but
his half-averted, contemptuous glance at them in passing, is very
significant.
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