The fact, then, is this:—Shakspeare thus views the world; and he frames his idea of the drama accordingly.
What, then, does Pope mean, when he says that Shakspeare "lays his scene amongst tradesmen and mechanics?"
Surely he does not include under tradesmen, great merchants. Not, for example, the "Merchant of Syracusa," the grave and good old Ægæon, condemned to death in the "Comedy of Errors" because Ephesus and Syracusa have war. He and his fortune are as far away as a king with his—from the 'prentices of London. It is not the Venetian merchant, the princely Antonio, with his argosies, spice and silk laden, that Pope regards as letting down the dignity of the sock; nor, we hope, the Jew and usurer, Shylock; the sublime in indignation, when he vindicates to his down-spurned race the parity of the human tempering in body and soul; the sublime in hate, when he fastens like a devil his fangs—or prepares to fasten—in the quivering, living flesh of his Christian debtor.
No! these are not yet the key to the enigma—"tradesmen and mechanics."
In the "Midsummer Night's Dream," "a crew" of six "rude mechanicals," "hard-handed men," "that work for bread upon Athenian stalls," enact TWO scenes wholly to themselves—ONE, which mixes them up with the fairies; and ONE, in the presence of Theseus, Duke of Athens, and of his fair warrior-bride Hippolyta, Queen of the Amazons; to say nothing of ONE, or possible TWO fairy scenes, which include one of the said "swaggering hempen homespuns," transformed by faëry.
Is this that "laying" of the "scene amongst tradesmen and mechanics," which has afforded our critic his absolute description of Shakspeare's comedy?
We greatly suspect, that it had too much to do in suggesting the strange misrepresentation.
And is this all?
No! It is not.
There is one play that, by its whole invention, lies nearest the reality, which must be taken as habitually possessing the understandings of an English—a London—audience, in the reign of Elizabeth. It is that one comedy which haunts upon English ground—"The Merry Wives of Windsor." The complexion and constitution of the play lay it in the bosom—the manners are those—of MIDDLE English life.