Except Nick Bottom.
Well, I have just written the thing that the critics are calling the best thing that they’ve ever seen.
The people are loving it, can’t get enough of it, everyone even including the Queen.
She…recently invited me
To her…castle where she knighted me
And privately she told me that you’re
Not any good!
Not any good!
Not any good!
Not any good!
And she told me that all of your plays make her vomit,
And nothing’s as good as my musical, “Omelet!”
While it is true that most members of the gentry have coats of arms, the reverse - that having a coat of arms makes the bearer a member of the gentry - is not true; it certainly isn’t true today, and I doubt it was true in Shakespeare’s time. In England today, anybody can (for a hefty fee) apply to the College of Arms for a grant of arms, and if the proposed design for the arms complies with the rules of heraldry and is not too similar to an existing design, then the application will be granted. But that won’t make the bearer a member of the gentry. The crucial criterion for membership in that class is landownership.
It was all rather more complicated than that. Quite a few of Shakespeare’s contemporaries were very worried that terms such as ‘gentleman’ or ‘gentility’ were too ambiguous. If they couldn’t be clearly defined, how could social climbers (including the Shakespeares) be prevented from claiming that status for themselves? Also, this was rarely about the ownership of land per se, because the nouveau riche could always easily buy land. Often such status was conceived instead in terms of ancestry or breeding, even although those concepts had their own ambiguities. It was also accepted that certain types of other people, such as university graduates, lawyers or royal officials, might gain such a status.
One argument sometimes used was that the simplest rule would be that any man with a coat of arms was a gentleman. It wasn’t so much that having or being granted a coat of arms made one a gentleman, as that coats of arms were (in theory, at least) only granted to men who were already gentlemen. Anyway, many at that time do seem to have used this as a rough guide in judging whether someone was a gentleman. Shakespeare himself seems to have started calling himself a gentleman only after his father was granted arms.
Thanks APB. So would it be correct to call Shakespeare a member of the gentry?
The Shakespeare Authorship Page (Dedicated to the Proposition that Shakespeare Wrote Shakespeare) says yes. "William Shakespeare was a member of the landed gentry, very far indeed from being a “near-peasant.” If I have questions about Shakespeare I would surely start there, old but exhaustive.
That page doesn’t address the actors, but since actors were among the dregs of society in status it would be quite odd for any to be noble. Sorry, Duke old boy, but I’m running away to be an actor, wouldn’t cut it in Elizabethan times.
Thanks Exapno_Mapcase. That closes the book on that question for me.