Wit, Humor, and Shakspeare: Twelve Essays

by John Weiss

"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.