‘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!