Shakespeare was a man of his time. His works reflect the attitudes and assumptions of most members of his audience, and that meant acceptance of the rigid class structure that we see illustrated in this picture of the gentleman and the beggar. Most English people lived on the edge of economic disaster, lacking land of their own or independent means of making a living. There was a high rate of crime in the cities, which concerned the authorities, and unrest in the country as more tenant farmers were forced off the land to make way for the profitable business of raising sheep, attractive because it didn't require much human labor. In his plays Shakespeare never questions the basis for these arrangements. The only acceptable solution to poverty was individual charity in the form of noblesse oblige, the concept that the upper classes have a responsibility to care for those beneath them. In the few places in the plays where Shakespeare shows the lower classes rising up against their oppressors, the results are always chaotic and unjust. Generally lower class characters are less worthy of consideration than other characters in the plays. . Often the lower class characters do not have proper names but are identified simply as "Porter" or "Shepherd," as if the job these characters performed was their whole identity.

And yet, Shakespeare was in some aspects the victim of the same kind of class prejudice. His early plays were scorned by other playwrights. Because he did not have the advantage of a university education, he had to work even harder to prove his worth by using lots of classical references in his plays. Eventually he was able to buy his way out of the social class into which he was born by purchasing respectability through a coat-of-arms.

The fact is that Shakespeare needed both the gentlemen and the beggars if he was to make his theater profitable. He had to fill a theater with 3,000 patrons every day during the season, and he could not do that catering just to the gentlefolk. Almost every Shakespearean play has at least a couple of scenes that appeal directly to the common people who made up the bulk of the audience. It is part of Shakespeare's genius that he was able to integrate both the upper and lower class elements in a single coherent work. But the tension between classes is always just below the surface in the plays

Shakespeare recognized the inherent contradictions in the concept of the courtly gentleman, a system of idealized behavior imposed on imperfect human beings. The failures of people who tried to live up to perfection often form the basis of conflicts in the plays, as with Lysander and Demetrius in A Midsummer Night's Dream. Sometimes commoners would try to masquerade as courtly gentlefolk's with disastrous results, as the Nurse in Romeo and Juliet.