For many years before the time of Shakspeare, it had been customary
upon the continent to assign to women the female characters of plays.
But we do not find any trace of the employment of women upon the
English stage till 1632. It is a mistake of Colley Cibber that no
actresses had been seen on the stage previous to the Restoration. A
French company that included women appeared in a play at Blackfriars
in 1629, and were soundly hissed for this innovation upon British
prejudice. In 1641, during the Puritan interdiction of plays, the
actors drew up their "Stage-players' Complaint,"--"Our boys, ere we
shall have liberty to act again, will be grown out of use, like cracked
organ-pipes, and have faces as old as our plays." In 1660, a play was
acted entirely by men. In 1661, the same play was acted with the help
of female actors. After women had effected a lodgement upon the English
stage, they still divided for a while with men the female characters.
But, during the life of Shakspeare, squeaking tongues and downy cheeks
used to "boy" the greatness of his female parts.
We can understand how this custom must have helped both the audience
and the actors through the frequently broad dialogue of the coarsest
plays of that period, where things and situations are mentioned with
a frankness and precision which cannot now possibly be reproduced,
except in the sugar-coated fashion of the Offenbachian revival. Women
wore masks when they attended the theatre, and needed not to be at the
expense of blushing. The slight disguise lent to them the illusion
of being neuters in the crowd. The world was then unsqueamish and
forced no scruples on the playwrights, whose coarseness differed from
Shakspeare's in being lugged in for its own sake. His plots always
countenance his freedom and adopt it. There is Shakspearean motive
for every wanton page, as there is, too, genius in it, which other
writers could not ape nor rival. Each feeling is so essential to the
intercourse of his characters that he cannot disguise it: it is a state
of nature that gambols like a child among its elders, more likely to be
smiled at than reproved. The texts of the poet's frankness survive, but
not as deliberate outrages to the modern womanhood which would fain not
speak nor hear them; and they do not justify the expurgated editions
which unfix them from their natural connections with the chastity and
married honor involved on every page and in the drift of every play.
When his plots disguise female characters in the dress of boys and
pages, it was more effectively done because his actors, thus resuming
their natural mien, could so easily sustain the dramatic contrivance
with the advantages of sex. And this is something which our modern
female actors cannot imitate. At least, they do not appear to be
interested to make the attempt, because they are misled by vanity to
set off their little rounded waists and the feminine charm of figure
and movements. Perhaps it is not vanity, but an instinct of womanhood,
which lays this embargo on her mimic power.
An exception must be made of Mrs. Kean; for a play was always the thing
to catch her conscience, and engage it to lend the utmost reality to
the scene. As Wilford, in the "Iron Chest," she never forgot to assume
the perfect stride and motion of a man; and as the disguised Viola,
when the thought hit her that Olivia had fallen in love with her, she
slapped her cap, and threw out her right leg with all the jauntiness of
a boy, as she exclaimed, "I am the man!"
But, in general, the figure, gait, and instinctive movements of the
actress continually betray the Imogen, the Viola, the Jessica, the
Julia, the Rosalind, who may well say, "I could find in my heart to
disgrace my man's apparel, and to cry like a woman." Portia says to
Nerissa,--
"I'll hold thee any wager,
When we are both accoutred like young men,
I'll prove the prettier fellow of the two,
And wear my dagger with the braver grace;
And speak, between the change of man and boy,
With a reed voice; and turn two mincing steps
Into a manly stride."
But, when Shakspeare's smooth youngsters reassumed their characters
as women, how the great poet must have been inwardly fretted with the
incongruous presentation of the tone of masculinity in each passion,
of the boy's smutch on the bloom of each emotion, the elbows wearing
ragged holes through delicate sentiment, the scraggy shoulders and
strong collar-bones working out of every tender phrase! He was forced
to see a Cleopatra without "the entire and sinuous wealth of the
shining shape" that held
"A soul's predominance
I' the head so high and haught, except one thievish glance,
From back of oblong eye, intent to count the slain."
It was Antony's Egypt without the fine malice and insinuation, stripped
of the abjectness of her love which, grovelling for pardon at having
wrecked her lord, makes him arrest her heart again to indemnify him for
all his fortunes that had gone to pieces; as he answers to her cry for
pardon,--
"Fall not a tear, I say; one of them rates
All that is won and lost. Give me a kiss;
Even this repays me."
Could all Shakspeare's training have infected a boy's imagination with
Juliet's ardent frankness, which tipped those lines with the sparkle of
first love, and launched it from the balcony into the night, to be one
star the more? And what boy or man could have returned to Shakspeare
that motherhood of scorn which whitened the lip of Constance,--could
have picked up and handed back to him the gauntletted verses of her
defiance? His imagination must have wilted in that dryness of the
actors; it was a limbo for the infants of his soul, out of which they
never graduated: the tender grace of Perdita, doting over flowers as
if they had natural instincts like her own, which ought not to be
dismissed but rather claimed; the moan of distracted Ophelia, using
flowers for tokens; the airy coquetries of Beatrice and Rosalind; the
concealment preying on the bud of Viola's cheek; the gathering madness
discharged in showers of pity on Cordelia's; the fell chastity of eye
which made Iachimo's looks peruse the ground. All the distinctive
temperament in the gestures, tones, allusions, of Shakspeare's women;
all the difference of sex to which the verses strive to connect each
emotion as it rises, to hold it a moment on the face, to detain it
in the eyes, to send it scurrying by; that struggle of shyness with
desire, the tremor of a heart that has a secret threatening to climb
into sight, the anxious reticence that reaches to pull it down; the
love that whets itself upon ambition's stone to the point of murder,
and makes its hands of one color with the husband's; the swaying,
queenly gait, the sinuous arms that would embrace when words were
done, as Hermione descends slowly from the pedestal; the impromptu
charm of Miranda's modesty when she would not wish any companion in
the world but Ferdinand; the reverie of Desdemona, as she unpinned her
dress to the tune of "Willow, willow, willow," and started at the
wind, thinking it was Othello's knock, expectant but bodeful,--all the
generic traits which differentiate Shakspeare's women from all the
other women of literature, according as women themselves naturally
furnish those traits, could never have been personated by any man.
How fortunate it is for a grateful posterity that it has been
enabled to repay to Shakspeare a portion of its heavy debt to him,
by committing his female characters to women of various talents and
temperaments, some of whom are the brightest offspring of their age!
Could he have foreseen, when the women of his fancy were consigned to
the beardless tenors of London, that the true woman would eventually
route these wretched eunuchs, claim the scene, appropriate her own
verse, and infuse the whole unsuspected genius of her sex into his
conceptions, to give them new births in the travailing of her bright
endowments? That was a perfect forecast of the imagination which, with
only youths for actors, whose chief advantage was the callowness upon
the cheek, could have written the parts which have laid an attachment
upon the finest women of the last two hundred years, and taxed all
their passion, wile, and infinite variety. He must have written in a
divining sense that Nature, piqued by the revelations of her deepest
mystery, would have to summon at length its representatives to mediate,
and, taking these things of heaven, show them unto men.
In some respects, the conceptions of Shakspeare have not found the
later actors and actresses to be profitable allies, in so far as they
have put a private stamp upon their favorite characters, and have
levied duty upon his fancy that prefers free-trade even to direct
dealing clear of middlemen with every heart. So does every sect
hang over the great stream of the Bible, see its own face reflected
there, and languish for it. Shakspeare's pages surprise actors with
their own temperament, and make them long to embody it. So that our
Shakspearean impressions are decided for us, and descend to our
children through the style or school of great histrionic families,
in the same way that congenital traits travel out of the past into
the future: the traditional studies of great theatrical performers
propagate themselves. Their excellences cannot be ignored, and they
quite plausibly vindicate themselves as pure Shakspearean intentions.
We accept these renderings, and soon become disturbed to have them
challenged and displaced. It is a great but willing tribute which we
pay to the genius of the artist when we confide the imagination of
Shakspeare to his interpretations; just as we despatch our diamond to
be ground and set. He sends it back to us flashing from facets which
describe his individual skill.
But, in consequence of this genial submission of the spectator to the
impressive portraiture, there arises a prejudice that Shakspeare could
not have conceived otherwise, and that the character cannot and ought
not to be repealed. In this way, for instance, some famous women have
accustomed us to a Lady Macbeth who is full of grandeur, in whose
solid and sombre person a suppressed cruelty smoulders. The verses
protrude like claws of tigers; they clutch and rend: you may expect to
overhear the lapping. The lower jaw of this conception is too square:
the teeth of it are too relentlessly closed upon a victim. There is
not an unoccupied space on cheek or brow where love can colonize; for
all the space is pre-empted by a ravin to glut a lust for power. The
woman's husband is only a lackey who must be whipped with scorpion
phrases up to the deed that makes a queen of her. She detects a flavor
of the milk of human kindness in him; and it makes her scowl till she
shrieks to have the ministers of darkness turn her own milk to gall.
She is the woman to carry back the daggers with the bluff composure of
a butcher, and hoping to find that Duncan still bleeds, so that she may
gild the faces of the grooms. You would not come upon her rampaging at
midnight with a candle, rubbing at imaginary stains, and conning her
secrets with fixed glassy eyes; for she is firmly constructed to know
the blessedness of a bed and the balm of being conscienceless. Of such
a wife Macbeth might well have said, "She should have died hereafter;"
but she would not have found any time at all for such a weakness. I
cannot discover the Lady Macbeth of Shakspeare in this too robust
delineation.
Another kind of misrepresentation has issued from another quarter
whence it should have been least expected. Some of the noblest women
of modern times have filed a complaint against Shakspeare's women,
and brought them into the court of the latest ideas, charged with the
crime of being characterless, mere puppets of the will of the dominant
sex; not the tutors, indeed, but the feeders of his riot, complaisant
creatures who accept the purpose of the universe to keep men supplied
with love, and whose most prominent traits are those which protect and
confirm the union of the sexes. It is alleged that Shakspeare "never
foretold a better woman than he saw," because "he lacked an ideal of
humanity and life:" he withheld from her the personal consequence
which belongs to strong individualities who detach themselves from
their age to view, scrutinize, and remodel it. It is astonishing to
read what Mrs. Farnham,[16] whose life was most unselfish and heroic,
has said about Shakspeare's ideas of women, that "he authorized in his
sentiments all manner of passional, sensual, and drunken usurpation of
man over woman, every kind of force to degrade her which the law did
not punish; and only felt bound to satirize and speak coarsely of _her_
after it had been exercised; men, who repeated such experiences never
so often or basely, being no less heroes for his dramas, fit to lead in
council, rule in honorable war, and receive the homage of society. The
leading characteristics of woman, as he portrayed her, are sensuality,
and fickleness, its uniform attendant in either sex; capriciousness,
vanity, desire to be loved, more for the power than the pure
happiness of it; a disposition to exercise that fleeting, petty power
tyrannically,--so far, to play the man on the child's scale; weakness,
helplessness indeed, against temptation, and a paramount selfishness
which is only modified, or very rarely turned into generosity,
towards the man whose love permits her to love in return; for which,
and chiefly, in its narrowest, most material sense, she seems in his
estimation to have been created."
It is not possible to misread the plays of Shakspeare more profoundly
than this. They have been viewed in the color of some exclusive ideas
concerning the nature and the mission of woman, in whose advocacy the
writer spent a noble life. Not finding in any of the plays precise
statements that reflect the most advanced sentiments upon the Woman
Question, and discovering that Shakspeare was neither morally nor
politically a partisan, and that neither position nor reflection
impelled him to anticipate modern ideas on social subjects, the writer
declares that he was not the poet of woman because he was not her
prophet. A criticism more destructive than this of the Shakspearean
delineations cannot be made. In fact, no _doctrinaire_ of ethics,
politics, theology, can suitably approach Shakspeare with a critical
purpose.
Nature seems to have draughted many of her women in the mind of
Shakspeare before she embodied them to play their parts. Already there
existed Antigone, Medea, Electra, and the ensky'd Beatrice; but these
did not exhaust her capacity of womanhood. They seem only sketches of a
few single features, portraits of isolated qualities that waited to be
combined. Medea was the hate of a mortified and neglected love; Electra
was the unsleeping persistency of a daughter's revenge; Antigone, the
divine constancy of a daughter's affection; Ismene, the weakness of a
common mind; Alcestis, the extravagant submission of a tender wife:
they are all single strings of the old Greek lyre, never tuned to sweep
into a perfect octave. The note which Alcestis emits is merely her
willingness to die. Imogen sounds the same at the command of a husband
who suspects her honor. But it wakes the harmony of other strings,
and we listen to a chastity that is as spirited and deadly as it is
submissive; to a love that is as eager as it is refined; to an honesty
that exposes the discord of double dealing by chiming with a simplicity
that scarce knows how to suspect; to a purity that is as unconscious as
a girl, while it is as haughty as a man. The chords are rich and solid,
and support the theme of her character through all its movements.
So women began to exist for the first time in literature. Shakspeare
discovered woman, and took note of her generic peculiarity which
upholds the specific differences of individual women. They all came
forth to him as surely as flowers to the sun. He solicited each
jealously interfolded sheath, and drew out of it the heart of its
color. All of them are rooted in the common ground of sex; but each
one lifts into the blossom her signals of a temper and modulation that
are peculiarly her own. So that, although "each woman is a brief of
Womankind," she is also a woman who must be designated by some one of
Shakspeare's famous names.
In fact, genius was never penetrated with the varieties of woman's
temperament till Shakspeare, picking up a few rustic specimens in
Stratford, ran away with them to London, taking down there honest,
red-fisted Audrey; Phebe, the village coquette, a little above her
condition, who reads and quotes tender love-lore, and learns to
despise a swain; Mopsa and Dorcas, doting on ballads, watchful after
pedlars to chaffer with across the hedge for tapes and ribbons; and
Juliet's gossipy, free-spoken, easy-minded Mrs. Gamp. With this humble
retinue, his imagination travelled down to the great city, and seemed
to have introduced them soon, past all the barriers of etiquette,
into Elizabeth's circle of ladies, where they went into the service
of high-born qualities, and retailed to him the very heart-secrets of
their mistresses. The dames of wealthy citizens sat in full costume
for his "Merry Wives;" the noble partners of his friends and patrons
yielded each to him a whisper of their chasteness, their high-spirit,
their control, their tenderness.
"In the blazon of sweet beauty's best
Of hand, of foot, of lip, of eye, of brow,"
he mastered Beauty of the form and soul, and gave to each her portion,
from Imogen to Cleopatra,--
"The worser spirit, a woman color'd ill."
One could not, of course, claim for Shakspeare that his pages include
all the varieties of women which Nature is capable of producing. He has
no daughters of the people, like Egmont's Clara and Faust's Margaret:
they are conceptions of a later date. But they are implied in the
quality of his women; and we incline to think that Nature will not be
able to invent a fresh style of woman, or to modify the standard types,
unless she sets out with that essential peculiarity, the Womanliness,
which Shakspeare has described. As all the instruments of an orchestra
are tuned upon a single pitch, and as all future modifications of
the instruments must defer to the same if they mean to take rank in
harmony, so all the women who are still possible to Nature must accord
with her influential note. Shakspeare is content to strike that.
Through all the chords which cluster around his different characters,
we detect it: he seems to be making tuning-forks on the same pitch,
but of various materials, to emphasize it to the ear. His plays take
from it a consonant vibration that extends through scenes and lapses
of time during which no woman's face appears. The tonic of her heart
is diffused beyond the limits of her person; as when Ophelia's bloom
clings to the fate of Hamlet, even while she waits in death for him
to reach her funeral-rite. So the beautiful soul of Cordelia, that
is little talked of by herself, and is but stingily set forth by
circumstance, engrosses our feeling in scenes from whose threshold
her filial piety is banished. We know what Lear is so pathetically
remembering: the sisters tell us in their cruellest moments; it mingles
with the midnight storm, a sigh of the daughterhood that was repulsed.
In the pining of the Fool we detect it. Through every wail or gust
of this awful symphony of madness, ingratitude, and irony, we feel a
woman's breath.
Since Shakspeare's day, new countries have been discovered and peopled;
new colonies have carried his mother-tongue around the earth; the
language of woman, like the girdle of a goddess, is a zone drawn round
all other climates to hold them in the clasp of her charm. The wider
culture and the opportunities derived from modern wants have already
increased the number of her gifts, and set her person in fresh shadings
of character. Perhaps Macaulay's New Zealander, who is expected to
meditate in the future over the ruins of London, will turn out to be
a woman, of a variety which Shakspeare has nowhere precisely drawn.
But, if all his plays should by that time have shared the fate of an
extinguished England, there would she sit, the survivor in the direct
line of descent from his essential Woman; by virtue of her sex the
Sibyl foretelling the women who will be possible to Nature.
"Magnus ab integro sæclorum nascitur ordo:
Jam redit et Virgo."
Woman, as she resembles man, was of less consequence to Shakspeare than
woman in herself, apart from what she can do, can earn, or can aspire
to. He merely received the feminine side of Nature into his recreating
thought, the essential Woman, without respect to the exigencies of any
period or style of culture,--the only She, such as woman must remain
to the end of time underneath all her activities and requirements. Her
sex is the unalterable decree which she can cast no ballot to vote
away from her, and assume no profession to raze it from the eternal
tablets of her distinction. All the purely modern questions which
relate to her career; the efforts to equalize with man's her wages, to
multiply her opportunities, to claim her interest in the politics of
human rights, to secure her alleviating presence in the rude scenes
of republicanism,--successful as these tendencies may be,--cannot
transform Woman; and she will not step out of her Shakspearean Self. On
the figured coast of his page her Essence stands, as yet without the
right of suffrage, limited to household cares, or raised to queenly
ones; as learned as Portia can become, but not yet admitted to the
profession which she mimicked; provided for by the various dexterities
of man, and still undriven by the modern threat of starvation into
risking a single quality that is her birthright. There she stands; the
modern world, stooping at her feet, will have to yield some of the
reputed exclusiveness of men, but only such traits of it as Imogen,
Cordelia, Beatrice, Portia, will select. In all this complicated period
of over-crowded cities, over-stimulated competition, vices overfed,
employers over-purse-proud, and politicians over-careless, there is
no strait cruel enough to compel the essential woman to choose a
career which would have unsexed one of Shakspeare's plays. I have no
fear. Stand aside: cease that frantic bracing of the masculine back
against so many doors of prescription. Throw them wide open, and let
Shakspeare's stately crowd pass up and down to scan the vista through
them. Come, patient, chaste, obedient, high-spirited Imogen, too docile
Ophelia, frank Perdita, warm Julia, bright and witty Beatrice, whose
tongue is a pen already, or the etcher's tool; come, thou accomplished,
grave, acute, and self-possessed Portia; thou unsophisticated Miranda,
who would fain share thy lover's toil; thou shifty, prompt Maria, hater
of humbug; thou tender Viola,--come, choose how many of these men's
garments you will continue to wear, preferring to be women. Not one
of them, I venture to declare, which your eternal instinct will feel
to cramp or to disguise the form. "Dost thou think," says Rosalind,
"though I am caparison'd like a man, I have a doublet and hose in my
disposition?"
Perdita, I think, if she were not discovered to be a king's daughter,
might take to floriculture, and earn a living by it. She would no
longer keep her dainty pique against the gilly-flower, but learn to
marry
"A gentler scion to the wildest stock,"
and thus mend Nature. She would prefer to be "Flora peering in April's
front," along meadows which Proserpine might have roved through, far
from the university and the din of scholarships. And pray restrain
Ophelia from the commission of suicide by joining a nunnery; but do not
save her life to put her to a trade that turns upon any other knack
than simple beauty. A woman who can enthrall a Hamlet will esteem it no
derogation to pluck from his memory a rooted sorrow. It is a profession
quite as sanative as Helena's, whose father had taught her the use of
curious drugs, and bequeathed to her "prescriptions of rare and prov'd
effects." But let Ophelia be simply beautiful, be surprising like the
first May-flowers, be winning like unobtrusive violets; let her exhale,
like slopes that are brown with needles of the pine. Preserve the maid
who held Hamlet's princely heart in the hollow of a moist and rosy
hand: let her survive among us to hold others, to unwrinkle brows of
speculation with a finger-tip, to unknot the snarls of business and
ferocious care with kisses which the street will not overhear. Out of
all her craze may she gather up again and redistribute the flowers of
her shy disposition, "for remembrance; pray you, love, remember;" and
some for herself too, "we may call it herb of grace o' Sundays."