The Social Hierarchy

The third distinct social class in the play, the fairies (the lovers and the rude mechanicals are the other two), are introduced at this point. A Midsummer Night's Dream marks one of several instances in which Shakespeare explores  the social structure of Elizabethan England.

    Even today commentators insist that to understand twentieth-century England it is necessary to admit the pervasiveness and depth of the class system, and the hierarchies that influence social practice in our time are a legacy of the distinct levels of status that obtained in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Discrete and workable categories for the different groups that populated early modern England are difficult to establish, however. Lawrence Stone describes the problem as follows:

If the historian is to reduce his evidence to intelligible order he is obliged

to use abstract concepts and collective nouns. In discussing society he deals in groups labelled peasants, yeomen, gentry and aristocracy; or ten- ants and landlords, wage-labourers and capitalists; or lower class, middle class and upper class; or Court and Country; or bourgeois and feudal. Some of these categories, like titular aristocracy, are status groups; some, like capitalists, are economic classes with similar incomes derived from similar sources; some, like "Court," describe groups whose income, interests and geographical location are all temporarily based on a single institution. Every individual can be classified in many different ways, and the problem of how to choose the most meaningful categories is particularly difficult when dealing with mobile societies like that of seventeenth- century England. ( Causes 33)

These subtleties notwithstanding, it is true that in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries a man or woman was born into a family that inhabited one of several levels of society, and that people did not easily move from one class to another.

For purposes of outlining the social system in Shakespeare's England, we may divide the population into the following groups. Aristocracy: persons of noble birth who possessed large estates in the country but who also often took their place in London at court or in Parliament. Gentry, sometimes known as minor gentry: descendants of the aristocracy whose holdings were smaller but who still possessed considerable wealth, as well as persons who through commercial enterprise (such as ownership of a monopoly) had managed to amass property and prestige and thus were entitled to be called gentlemen. Citizens: mostly urban tradesmen or shopkeepers, who either made products for public consumption or sold them, e.g., leather goods, books, cloth, dairy products, wheels for carriages, and the like (this group would probably also include innkeepers). Yeomen: the rural equivalent of citizens, who owned (or in some cases had the use of) agricultural or grazing lands from which they made more than a subsistence wage --sometimes even handsome profits. Servants, laborers, or peasants: persons who owned little but made their living working for others, either-on farms or in households (those who lived in the city tended to be better ,off financially than their rural counterparts). The indigent: beggars and others who, from geographical or social circumstances, injury, or personal temperament, found themselves unable to work. As the historian's reservations suggest, these groupings are inadequate. Where do we put lawyers, for example? A small professional class was emerging, but by 1600 it was not large enough to be reckoned significant. How to classify prostitutes? Or sailors? Or criminals? Finally, there were small, marginal categories such as "masterless men" or vagrants, some of them ex-soldiers, who moved from place to place picking up work as they could, stealing, or preying on the gullible. Among those who defied easy categorization, actors -"players" ~ were foremost. In fact, their dubious position necessitated that they put themselves under the nominal protection of an aristocratic patron.

Social conditioning tended to keep people in their places, and one aspect of the patriarchy that reinforced class boundaries was the paternalistic treatment of the lower classes by the upper. Theoretically, aristocrats took it as their duty to behave charitably and humanely toward those considered their social inferiors. As Derek Hirst has pointed out, most people did not seem to object to the class system per se, but rather to the injustices that it could breed. Even in food riots that occurred in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, the participants complained not so much about the wealth of their neighbors as about such abuses as grain hoarding or price gouging, about, in other words, the attempt to take unfair advantage (51). But social ordering was not merely traditional and psychological: laws existed to enforce social order, as a glance at royal proclamations from any five-year period between 1540 and 1640 will reveal (see pp. 293 and 295). Of such strictures, the sumptuary laws described in Chapter 7 are perhaps the most fascinating. In theory, a person's clothing revealed at a glance the social class to which he or she belonged: for example, only countesses and ladies above that rank could wear purple silk. But the regulatory statutes were frequently broken. Finally, the lack of easy geographical mobility helped to keep the population in place literally, for one could not simply decide to move from one part of the country to the other. An exception to this rule was London, which attracted a large number of industrious people hoping to make their fortunes, including William Shakespeare himself.

It is not surprising that the class system, despite its long history and the conditioning that helped to enforce it, was the source of tension and resentment. From the royal court to the alehouse, people objected to the behavior of others on grounds of status: either the adversary was called unworthy of the class represented, or the plaintiff thought himself equally important. Because, practically speaking, people were most immediately affected by local government, they had fairly direct means of redress against perceived injustices, and object they did. The records of local courts teem with complaints against others for what amount to violations of the social order. Public drunkenness, abusing the right to public land, quarreling, disputes about preferential seating in church -many of these common complaints involve issues of status and importance in the community, and the rhetoric in which these complaints were recorded attests to a colorful repertoire of class-based insults. "Henry Weavers claimed superiority when he told Mr. Miles Lynn, a parson, in 1613, that 'I am a better man than thoU art, knave parson, a turd in thy teeth' " { qtd. in Amussen 212). Such class-connected language provides a useful context for Kent's contemptuous speech to Oswald in the second act of King Lear.

How fixed were these social structures? It is difficult to give an all-purpose answer, but to some extent the boundaries between classes became more permeable as the sixteenth century passed into the seventeenth. Apprenticeship was one means of social and economic ascent. A bright and industrious young ~ man from a poor family or the younger Son of a gentleman could apprentice  himself to a craftsman and eventually set himself up in that trade. If the master had no children, the young man might inherit the business. The increasing availability of education also made for social and economic mobility. Once again the cardinal example is William Shakespeare, who parlayed his grammar school education into a career in the theater, a coat of arms for his family,  and substantial real estate holdings in the town of his birth. For women the  opportunities for social advancement were more limited, although some women were occasionally apprenticed in what were considered appropriate trades. In the city, where social lines were quicker to disintegrate, young women from humble backgrounds were able to better themselves economically (although less often socially) through advantageous marriages. Movement up the social and economic scale was not easy, but the history of the Tudor and Stuart period indicates that changes were occurring at large. As the yeomanry grew in number, as merchants began to exploit the possibilities of consumption, as the aristocracy began to lose its grip on real estate and similar financial resources, and as the population continued to increase, the rigid social boundaries were put under pressure and the familiar lines began to blur. The old feudal order that had dominated England until the end of the fifteenth century was gradually being supplanted by an early capitalist system that depended more heavily on individual ownership and allowed greater mobility largely on the basis of financial success.