SOURCE: "Blood Will Tell in Shakespeare's Plays: The Best Blood," in Graduate Studies, No. 28, January 13, 1984, pp. 9-27.

In the following excerpt, Berkeley examines the theory of class bias associated with heredity—or "blood"—as it exists in Shakespeare's dramas.

"bloud Has Degrees—royalty Down"

Some have described the conventional outlines of Renaissance physiology in relation to psychology,¹ and others have focused upon Shakespeare's reflection of "the sympathies and concordances between body" in Galenic naturalism.² Here one departs mind from and the oft-translated Galen and his English Renaissance redactors and from modern describers of Shakespeare's body-oriented psychology to suggest how the poet bends the inherited mix of physiology and psychology, neutral in class matters, to enhance his gentle characters and to shed a bad light on other ranks.

Persons of Shakespearean plays are compounded, as everyone knows, of the four humors, usually in a state of imbalance: blood (like...