SHAKESPEARE AND THE "WORKING CLASSES"

New Zealand Listener, Volume 8, Issue 207, 11 June 1943, Page 3

SHAKESPEARE AND THE "WORKING CLASSES"

Sir,-"The Pariah" is quite a Peter Pan. I expect to hear that he has run away to sea as a cabin-boy. When I was young we got over our attacks of "Revolt against authority for the sake of revolt" in our late ‘teens and early twenties. By

the time we reached 34 we had shouldered enough responsibilities to make us feel entitled to wield a little authority ourselves-on strictly democratic lines, of course. We were not so concerned with revoltsas with trying to find the culprits who had seized the authority belonging to the people and shelved their own responsibilities. In the struggle those things for which Shakespeare and other immortals stand are all that are left to some of us. Personally I cannot recall instances where Shakespeare showers scorn and contumely on those of lowly birth, but I do know that his plays would lose much of their liveliness for me if the lower characters were removed. I take it that the quotation from Ernest H. Crosby means that Shakespeare toadied to aristocrats and not that he was an aristocrat. He might have been a toady, but he would probably be more at home among a mob of British working men than either Tolstoy or Bernard Shaw. "The Pariah," I am sure, enjoys the company of intelligent, cultured, travelled people and it is probably owing to the fact that he lives in the twentieth century instead of the seventeenth that he hasn’t to toady to meet such company. Shakespeare may not have shown princes and noblemen their kinship with the working man, but he showed working men that princes and noblemen thought, felt, and acted as they did, and that laid a wonderful foundation for later

reforms.-

LLEW

(Dunedin).