SHAKESPEAR’S FEMALE CHARACTERS
| The Examiner.] | [July 28, 1816. |
Shakespear’s women (we mean those who were his favourites, and whom he intended to be the favourites of the reader) exist almost entirely in the relations and charities of domestic life. They are nothing in themselves, but every thing in their attachment to others. We think as little of their persons as they do themselves, because we are let into the secrets of their hearts, which are more important. We are too much interested in their affairs to stop to look at their faces, except by stealth and at intervals. We catch their beauties only sideways as in a glass, but we everywhere meet their hearts coming at us,—full butt, as Miss Peggy meets her husband in the Park. No one ever hit the true perfection of the female character, the sense of weakness leaning on the strength of its affections for support, so well as Shakespear—no one ever so well painted natural tenderness free from all affectation and disguise, that
‘Calls true love acted simple modesty’—
no one else ever so well shewed how delicacy and timidity, urged to an extremity, grow romantic and extravagant, for the romance of his heroines (in which they abound) is only an excess of the common prejudices of their sex, scrupulous of being false to their vows, truant to their affections, and taught by the force of their feelings when to forego the forms of propriety for the essence of it. His women are in this respect exquisite logicians, for they argue from what they feel, and that is a sure game, when the stake is deep. They know their own minds exactly. High imagination springs from deep habit; and Shakespear’s women only followed up the idea of what they liked, of what they had sworn to with their tongues, and what was engraven on their hearts, into its untoward consequences. They were the prettiest little set of martyrs and confessors on record.
We have almost as great an affection for Imogen as she had for Posthumus; and she deserves it rather better. Of all Shakespear’s women she is perhaps the most touching, the most tender, and the most true. As to Desdemona, who was alone a match for her in good faith and heroic self-devotion, she had her faults, and she suffered for them. Imogen’s incredulity as to her husband’s infidelity is much the same as Desdemona’s backwardness to believe Othello’s jealousy. Her answer to the most distressing part of the picture is only, ‘my Lord, I fear, has forgot Britain.’ Her readiness to pardon Iachimo’s falsehoods, and his designs upon her virtue, is a good lesson to prudes; and shews (as perhaps Shakespear intended it, or nature for him) that where there is a strong attachment to virtue, it has no need to bolster itself up with an outrageous or affected antipathy to vice. The morality of Shakespear in this way is great; but it is not to be found in the four last lines of his plays, in the form of extreme unction. The scene in which Pisanio gives Imogen her husband’s letter accusing her of incontinency, is as fine as anything could be:—
‘Pisanio. What cheer, Madam?
Imogen. False to his bed! What is it to be false?
To lie in watch there, and to think on him?
To weep ’twixt clock and clock! If sleep charge nature,
To break it with a fearful dream of him,
And cry myself awake? That’s false to ’s bed, is it?
Pisanio. Alas, good lady!
Imogen. I false? thy conscience witness, Iachimo,
Thou didst accuse him of incontinency,
Thou then look’dst like a Villain: Now methinks,
Thy favour’s good enough. Some Jay of Italy,
Whose mother was her painting, hath betrayed him:
Poor I am stale, a garment out of fashion,
And for I am richer than to hang by th’ walls,
I must be ript; to pieces with me. Oh,
Men’s vows are women’s traitors. All good seeming
By thy revolt, oh Husband, shall be thought
Put on for villainy: not born where ‘t grows,
But worn a bait for Ladies.
Pisanio. Good Madam, hear me—
Imogen. Talk thy tongue weary, speak:
I have heard I am a strumpet, and mine ear,
Therein false struck, can take no greater wound,
Nor tent to bottom that.’——
When Pisanio, who had been charged to kill his mistress, puts her in a way to live, she says—
‘Why, good fellow,
What shall I do the while? Where bide? How live?
Or in my life what comfort, when I am
Dead to my Husband?’
Yet when he advises her to disguise herself in boy’s clothes, and suggests ‘a course pretty and full in view,’ by which she may ‘happily be near the residence of Posthumus,’ she exclaims—
‘Oh, for such means,
Though peril to my modesty, not death on ‘t,
I would adventure.’
And when Pisanio, enlarging on the consequences, tells her she must change—
——‘Fear and niceness,
The handmaids of all women, or more truly,
Woman its pretty self, into a waggish courage,
Ready in gibes, quick answer’d, saucy, and
As quarellous as the weazel’—
She interrupts him hastily:—
‘Nay, be brief:
I see unto thy end, and am almost
A man already.’
In her journey thus disguised to Milford-Haven, she loses her guide and her way; and unbosoming her complaints, says beautifully,—
——‘My dear Lord,
Thou art one of the false ones: now I think on thee,
My hunger’s gone; but even before, I was
At point to sink for food.’
She afterwards finds, as she thinks, the dead body of Posthumus, and engages herself as a foot-boy to serve a Roman Officer, when she has done all due obsequies to him whom she calls her former master:
——‘And when
With wild wood-leaves and weeds I ha’ strewed his grave,
And on it said a century of pray’rs,
Such as I can, twice o’er, I’ll weep and sigh,
And leaving so his service, follow you,
So please you entertain me.’
Now this is the very religion of love. Is it not? All this, which is the essence of the character, is free from every thing like personal flattery or laboured description. She relies little on her personal charms, which she fears may have been eclipsed by some painted jay of Italy; she relies only on her merit, and her merit is in the depth of her love, her truth and constancy. Our admiration of her beauty is excited as it were with as little consciousness as possible on her part. There are two delicious descriptions given of her, one when she is asleep, and one when she is supposed dead. Arviragus thus addresses her:
——‘With fairest flowers,
While summer lasts, and I live here, Fidele,
I’ll sweeten thy sad grave; thou shalt not lack
The flow’r that’s like thy face, pale primrose, nor
The azure’d hare-bell, like thy veins, no, nor
The leaf of eglantine, which not to slander,
Out-sweeten’d not thy breath.’
The yellow Iachimo gives another thus, when he steals into her bed-chamber:
——‘Cytherea,
How bravely thou becom’st thy bed! Fresh lily,
And whiter than the sheets! That I might touch—
But kiss, one kiss—’Tis her breathing that
Perfumes the chamber thus: the flame o’ th’ taper
Bows toward her, and would under-peep her lids
To see th’ enclosed lights now canopied
Under the windows, white and azure, laced
With blue of Heav’n’s own tinct—on her left breast
A mole cinque-spotted, like the crimson drops
I’ th’ bottom of a cowslip.’
There is a moral sense in the proud beauty of this last image, a rich surfeit of the fancy,—as that well-known passage beginning, ‘Me of my lawful pleasure she restrained, and prayed me oft forbearance,’ sets a keener edge upon it by the inimitable picture of modesty and self-denial. Desdemona is another instance (almost to a proverb) of the devotedness of the sex to a favourite object. She is ‘subdued even to the very quality of her lord,’ and to Othello’s ‘honours and his valiant parts her soul and fortunes consecrates.’ The lady protests as much herself, and she is as good as her word. There is not a set description of her in any part of the play; and the only thing that tends that way is the equivocal and somewhat luscious dialogue that takes place between Iago and Cassio as an accompaniment to the ceremonies of the wedding-night. We see her visage in her mind: her character every where predominates over her person:
‘A maiden, never bold;
Of spirit so still and quiet, that her motion
Blush’d at itself.’
She is not a painted idol, carved out of the poet’s brain, but is herself a worshipper at the shrine of duty. As Milton dashes the luxurious effect of his descriptions by a moral, Shakespear qualifies it by the interest of the story, as in the scene where Othello takes Desdemona by the hand. The truth of conception, with which timidity and boldness are united in the same character, is marvellous. The extravagance of her actions, the pertinacity of her affections, in a manner arises out of the gentleness of her nature. It is an unreserved reliance on the purity of her intentions, a surrender of her fears to her love, a knitting of herself (heart and soul) to the fate of another. Bating the commencement of her passion, which is a little fantastical and self-willed (though that may be accounted for in the same way from an inability to resist a rising inclination) her whole character consists in having no will of her own, no prompter but her obedience. Her romantic turn is only a consequence of the domestic and practical part of her disposition; and instead of following Othello to Cyprus, she would rather have remained at home, ‘a moth of peace,’ if her husband could have staid with her. Her resignation and angelic sweetness of nature do not desert her at the last. The scenes in which she laments and tries to account for Othello’s harsh usage of her are exquisitely managed. After he has struck her and called her names, she says:
——‘Alas, Iago,
What shall I do to win my lord again?
Good friend, go to him; for by this light of Heaven,
I know not how I lost him. Here I kneel;
If e’er my will did trespass ’gainst his love,
Either in discourse, or thought, or actual deed,
Or that mine eyes, mine ears, or any sense
Delighted them on any other form;
Or that I do not, and ever did,
And ever will, though he do shake me off
To beggarly divorcement, love him dearly,
Comfort forswear me. Unkindness may do much,
And his unkindness may defeat my life,
But never taint my love....
Iago. I pray you be content: ’tis but his humour.
The business of the state does him offence.
Desdemona. If ’twere no other.’——
The scene which follows with her maid and the song of the Willow are equally beautiful, and shew Shakespear’s extreme power of varying the expression of passion, in all its moods and in all circumstances.
One of the finest passages in Mr. Wordsworth’s poems is that where he has given us his opinion of Desdemona:
‘Books, dreams, are each a world; and books, we know,
Are a substantial world, both pure and good,
Round which, with tendrils strong as flesh and blood,
Our pastime and our happiness may grow;
· · · · ·
Matter wherein right voluble I am,
Two let me mention dearer than the rest,
The gentle lady wedded to the Moor,
And heavenly Una with her milk-white lamb.’
We have said enough to explain our idea of the general turn of Shakespear’s female characters. We need not mention Ophelia or Cordelia, both of which admit of little external decoration, and which it would seem impossible to treat in any other way than as Shakespear has represented them, abstracted from every thing but their heart-breaking ties to others, if Tate had not adorned the person of Cordelia with a number of beauties, and finished her story with a lover. Cleopatra, who has certainly a personal identity of her own, and who is described in all the glowing pomp of eastern luxury, is not an exception to what we have said, for she is not intended as a model of her sex. What we best recollect of Cressida, is Pandarus’s description of her after bringing her to the tent, where he says,—‘And her heart beats like a new-ta’en sparrow’—which must be allowed to be quite Shakesperian. Miranda appears to be the most conscious of her charms of any of his favourites (perhaps from the very solitude in which she had lived), a sort of miracle of her father’s island, and the goddess of her new-found lover’s idolatry. Perdita is a very pretty low-born lass, the Queen of curds and cream—but she makes us think of other things more than of her face. There is one passage in which the poet has, we suspect, very artfully rallied the indifference of the sex to abstract reasoning:
‘Perdita. Sir, the fairest flowers o’ th’ season
Are our carnations, and streak’d gilly-flowers,
Which some call Nature’s bastards: of that kind
Our rustic garden’s barren, and I care not
To get slips of them.
Polixenes. Wherefore, gentle maiden,
Do you neglect them?
Perdita. For I have heard it said,
There is an art which, in their piedness shares
With great creating nature.
Polixenes. Say, there be,
Yet nature is made better by no mean,
But nature makes that mean; so o’er that art
Which you say adds to nature, is an art
That nature makes: you see, sweet maid, we marry
A gentler scyon to the wildest stock,
And make conceive a bark of baser kind
By bud of nobler race. This is an art
Which does mend nature, change it rather; but
The art itself is nature.
Perdita. So it is.
Polixenes. Then make your garden rich in gilly-flowers,
And do not call them bastards.
Perdita. I’ll not put
The dibble in earth, to set one slip of them,’ etc.
Here the lady gives up the argument, but keeps her opinion. We had forgot one charming instance to our purpose, which is the character of Helen in All’s Well that Ends Well; and this also puts us in mind that Shakespear probably borrowed his female characters from the Italian novelists, and not from English women.