The Project Gutenberg EBook of Characteristics of Women, by Anna Jameson This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.net Title: Characteristics of Women Moral, Poetical, and Historical Author: Anna Jameson Release Date: July 31, 2008 [EBook #26152] Language: English Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1 *** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK CHARACTERISTICS OF WOMEN *** Produced by Suzanne Shell, Josephine Paolucci and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net. CHARACTERISTICS OF WOMEN MORAL, POETICAL, AND HISTORICAL BY MRS. JAMESON _From the last London Edition_ [Illustration] BOSTON AND NEW YORK HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN AND COMPANY The Riverside Press, Cambridge 1889 PREFACE TO THE NEW EDITION. In preparing for the press a new edition of this little work, the author has endeavored to render it more worthy of the approbation and kindly feeling with which it has been received; she cannot better express her sense of both than by justifying, as far as it is in her power, the cordial and flattering tone of all the public criticisms. It is to the great name of SHAKSPEARE, that bond of sympathy among all who speak his language, and to the subject of the work, not to its own merits, that she attributes the success it has met with,--success the more delightful, because, in truth, it was from the very first, so entirely unlooked for, as to be a matter of surprise as well as of pleasure and gratitude. In this edition there are many corrections, and some additions which the author hopes may be deemed improvements. She has been induced to insert several quotations at length, which were formerly only referred to, from observing that however familiar they may be to the mind of the reader, they are always recognized with pleasure--like dear domestic faces; and if the memory fail at the moment to recall the lines or the sentiment to which the attention is directly required, few like to interrupt the course of thought, or undertake a journey from the sofa or garden-seat to the library, to hunt out the volume, the play, the passage, for themselves. When the first edition was sent to press, the author contemplated writing the life of Mrs. Siddons, with a reference to her art; and deferred the complete development of the character of Lady Macbeth, till she should be able to illustrate it by the impersonation and commentary of that grand and gifted actress; but the task having fallen into other hands, the analysis of the character has been almost entirely rewritten, as at first conceived, or rather restored to its original form. This little work, as it now stands, forms only part of a plan which the author hopes, if life be granted her, to accomplish;--at all events, life, while it is spared, shall be devoted to its fulfilment. CONTENTS. Page INTRODUCTION 8 CHARACTERS OF INTELLECT. Portia 53 Isabella 83 Beatrice 99 Rosalind 110 CHARACTERS OF PASSION AND IMAGINATION. Juliet 119 Helena 153 Perdita 172 Viola 181 Ophelia 187 Miranda 207 CHARACTERS OF THE AFFECTIONS. Hermione 219 Desdemona 240 Imogen 259 Cordelia 280 HISTORICAL CHARACTERS. Cleopatra 302 Octavia 341 Volumnia 345 Constance of Bretagne 357 Elinor of Guienne 387 Blanche of Castile 389 Margaret of Anjou 396 Katharine of Arragon 407 Lady Macbeth 437 CHARACTERISTICS OF WOMEN. INTRODUCTION. _Scene--A Library._ ALDA. You will not listen to me? MEDON. I do, with all the deference which befits a gentleman when a lady holds forth on the virtues of her own sex. He is a parricide of his mother's name, And with an impious hand murders her fame, That wrongs the praise of women; that dares write Libels on saints, or with foul ink requite The milk they lent us. Yours was the nobler birth, For you from man were made--man but of earth-- The son of dust! ALDA. What's this? MEDON. "Only a rhyme I learned from one I talked withal;" 'tis a quotation from some old poet that has fixed itself in my memory--from Randolph, I think. ALDA. 'Tis very justly thought, and very politely quoted, and my best courtesy is due to him and to you:--but now will you listen to me? MEDON. With most profound humility. ALDA. Nay, then! I have done, unless you will lay aside these mock airs of gallantry, and listen to me for a moment! Is it fair to bring a second-hand accusation against me, and not attend to my defence? MEDON. Well, I will be serious. ALDA. Do so, and let us talk like reasonable beings. MEDON. Then tell me, (as a reasonable woman you will not be affronted with the question,) do you really expect that any one will read this little book of yours? ALDA. I might answer, that it has been a great source of amusement and interest to me for several months, and that so far I am content: but no one writes a book without a hope of finding readers, and I shall find a few. Accident first made me an authoress; and not now, nor ever, have I written to flatter any prevailing fashion of the day for the sake of profit, though this is done, I know, by many who have less excuse for thus coining their brains. This little book was undertaken without a thought of fame or money: out of the fulness of my own heart and soul have I written it. In the pleasure it has given me, in the new and various views of human nature it has opened to me, in the beautiful and soothing images it has placed before me, in the exercise and improvement of my own faculties, I have already been repaid: if praise or profit come beside, they come as a surplus. I should be gratified and grateful, but I have not sought for them, nor worked for them. Do you believe this? MEDON. I do: in this I cannot suspect you of affectation, for the profession of disinterestedness is uncalled for, and the contrary would be too far countenanced by the custom of the day to be matter of reserve or reproach. But how could you (saving the reverence due to a lady-authoress, and speaking as one reasonable being to another) choose such a threadbare subject? ALDA. What do you mean? MEDON. I presume you have written a book to maintain the superiority of your sex over ours; for so I judge by the names at the heads of some of your chapters; women fit indeed to inlay heaven with stars, but, pardon me, very unlike those who at present walk upon this earth. ALDA. Very unlike the fine ladies of your acquaintance, I grant you; but as to maintaining the superiority, or speculating on the rights of women--nonsense! why should you suspect me of such folly?--it is quite out of date. Why should there be competition or comparison? MEDON. Both are ill-judged and odious; but did you ever meet with a woman of the world, who did not abuse most heartily the whole race of men? ALDA. Did you ever talk with a man of the world, who did not speak with levity or contempt of the whole human race of women? MEDON. Perhaps I might answer like Voltaire--"Hélas ils pourraient bien avoir raison tous deux." But do you thence infer that both are good for nothing? ALDA. Thence I infer that the men of the world and the women of the world are neither of them--good for much. MEDON. And you have written a book to make them better? ALDA. Heaven forbid! else I were only fit for the next lunatic asylum. Vanity run mad never conceived such an impossible idea. MEDON. Then, in a few words, what is the subject, and what the object, of your book? ALDA. I have endeavoured to illustrate the various modifications of which the female character is susceptible, with their causes and results. My life has been spent in observing and thinking; I have had, as you well know, more opportunities for the first, more leisure for the last, than have fallen to the lot of most people. What I have seen, felt, thought, suffered, has led me to form certain opinions. It appears to me that the condition of women in society, as at present constituted, is false in itself, and injurious to them,--that the education of women, as at present conducted, is founded in mistaken principles, and tends to increase fearfully the sum of misery and error in both sexes; but I do not choose presumptuously to fling these opinions in the face of the world, in the form of essays on morality, and treatises on education. I have rather chosen to illustrate certain positions by examples, and leave my readers to deduce the moral themselves, and draw their own inferences. MEDON. And why have you not chosen your examples from real life? you might easily have done so. You have not been a mere spectator, or a mere actor, but a lounger behind the scenes of existence--have even assisted in preparing the puppets for the stage: you might have given us an epitome of your experience, instead of dreaming over Shakspeare. ALDA. I might so, if I had chosen to become a female satirist, which I will never be. MEDON. You would, at least, stand a better chance of being read. ALDA. I am not sure of that. The vile taste for satire and personal gossip will not be eradicated, I suppose, while the elements of curiosity and malice remain in human nature; but as a fashion of literature, I think it is passing away;--at all events it is not my _forte_. Long experience of what is called "the world," of the folly, duplicity, shallowness, selfishness, which meet us at every turn, too soon unsettles our youthful creed. If it only led to the knowledge of good and evil, it were well; if it only taught us to despise the illusions and retire from the pleasures of the world, it would be better. But it destroys our belief--it dims our perception of all abstract truth, virtue, and happiness; it turns life into a jest, and a very dull one too. It makes us indifferent to beauty, and incredulous of goodness; it teaches us to consider _self_ as the centre on which all actions turn, and to which all motives are to be referred. MEDON. But this being so, we must either revolve with these earthly natures, and round the same centre, or seek a sphere for ourselves, and dwell apart. ALDA. I trust it is not necessary to do either. While we are yet young, and the passions, powers, and feelings, in their full activity, create to us a world within, we cannot look fairly on the world without:--all things then are good. When first we throw ourselves forth, and meet burs and briars on every side, which stick in our very hearts;--and fair tempting fruits which turn to bitter ashes in the taste, then we exclaim with impatience, all things are evil. But at length comes the calm hour, when they who look beyond the superficies of things begin to discern their true bearings; when the perception of evil, or sorrow, or sin, brings also the perception of some opposite good, which awakens our indulgence, or the knowledge of the cause which excites our pity. Thus it is with me. I can smile,--nay, I can laugh still, to see folly, vanity, absurdity, meanness, exposed by scornful wit, and depicted by others in fictions light and brilliant. But these very things, when I encounter the reality, rather make me sad than merry, and take away all the inclination, if I had the power, to hold them up to derision. MEDON. Unless, by doing so, you might correct them. ALDA. Correct them! Show me that one human being who has been made essentially better by satire! O no, no! there is something in human nature which hardens itself against the lash--something in satire which excites only the lowest and worst of our propensities. That avowal in Pope-- I must be proud to see Men not afraid of God, afraid of me! --has ever filled me with terror and pity-- MEDON. From its truth perhaps? ALDA. From its arrogance,--for the truth is, that a vice never corrected a vice. Pope might be proud of the terror he inspired in those who feared no God in whom vanity was stronger than conscience: but that terror made no individual man better; and while he indulged his own besetting sin, he administered to the malignity of others. Your professed satirists always send me to think upon the opposite sentiment in Shakspeare, on "the mischievous foul sin of chiding sin." I remember once hearing a poem of Barry Cornwall's, (he read it to me,) about a strange winged creature that, having the lineaments of a man, yet preyed on a man, and afterwards coming to a stream to drink, and beholding his own face therein, and that he had made his prey of a creature like himself, pined away with repentance. So should those do, who having made themselves mischievous mirth out of the sins and sorrows of others, remembering their own humanity, and seeing within themselves the same lineaments--so should _they_ grieve and pine away, self-punished. MEDON. 'Tis an old allegory, and a sad one--and but too much to the purpose. ALDA. I abhor the spirit of ridicule--I dread it and I despise it. I abhor it because it is in direct contradiction to the mild and serious spirit of Christianity; I fear it, because we find that in every state of society in which it has prevailed as a fashion, and has given the tone to the manners and literature, it marked the moral degradation and approaching destruction of that society; and I despise it, because it is the usual resource of the shallow and the base mind, and, when wielded by the strongest hand with the purest intentions, an inefficient means of good. The spirit of satire reversing the spirit of mercy which is twice blessed, seems to me twice accursed;--evil in those who indulge it--evil to those who are the objects of it. MEDON. "Peut-être fallait-il que la punition des imprudens et des faibles fut confiée à la malignité, car la pure vertu n'eût jamais été assez cruelle." ALDA. That is a woman's sentiment. MEDON. True--it _was_; and I have pleasure in reminding you that a female satirist by profession is yet an anomaly in the history of our literature, as a female schismatic is yet unknown in the history of our religion. But to what do you attribute the number of satirical women we meet in society? ALDA. Not to our nature; but to a state of society in which the levelling spirit of _persiflage_ has been long a fashion; to the perverse education which fosters it; to affections disappointed or unemployed, which embitter the temper; to faculties misdirected or wasted, which oppress and irritate the mind; to an utter ignorance of ourselves, and the common lot of humanity, combined with quick and refined perceptions and much superficial cultivation; to frivolous habits, which make serious thought a burden, and serious feeling a bane if suppressed, if betrayed, a ridicule. Women, generally speaking, are by nature too much subjected to suffering in many forms--have too much of fancy and sensibility, and too much of that faculty which some philosophers call _veneration_, to be naturally satirical. I have known but one woman eminently gifted in mind and person, who is also distinguished for powers of satire as bold as merciless; and she is such a compound of all that nature can give of good, and all that society can teach of evil-- MEDON. That she reminds us of the dragon of old, which was generated between the sunbeams from heaven and the slime of earth. ALDA. No such thing. Rather of the powerful and beautiful fairy Melusina, who had every talent and every charm under heaven but once in so many hours was fated to become a serpent. No, I return to my first position. It is not by exposing folly and scorning fools, that we make other people wiser, or ourselves happier. But to soften the heart by images and examples of the kindly and generous affections--to show how the human soul is disciplined and perfected by suffering--to prove how much of possible good may exist in things evil and perverted--how much hope there is for those who despair--how much comfort for those whom a heartless world has taught to contemn both others and themselves, and so put barriers to the hard, cold, selfish, mocking, and levelling spirit of the day--O would I could do this! MEDON. On the same principle, I suppose, that they have changed the treatment of lunatics; and whereas they used to condemn poor distempered wretches to straw and darkness, stripes and a strait waistcoat, they now send them to sunshine and green fields, to wander in gardens among birds and flowers, and soothe them with soft music and kind flattering speech. ALDA. You laugh at me! perhaps I deserve it. MEDON. No, in truth; I am a little amused, but most honestly attentive: and perhaps wish I could think more like you. But to proceed: I allow that with this view of the case, you could not well have chosen your illustrations from real life; but why not from history? ALDA. As far as history could guide me, I have taken her with me in one or two recent publications, which all tend to the same object. Nor have I here lost sight of her; but I have entered on a land where she alone is not to be trusted, and may make a pleasant companion but a most fallacious guide. To drop metaphor: history informs us that such things have been done or have occurred; but when we come to inquire into motives and characters, it is the most false and partial and unsatisfactory authority we can refer to. Women are illustrious in history, not from what they have been in themselves, but generally in proportion to the mischief they have done or caused. Those characters best fitted to my purpose are precisely those of which history never heard, or disdains to speak; of those which have been handed down to us by many different authorities under different aspects we cannot judge without prejudice; in others there occur certain chasms which it is difficult to supply; and hence inconsistencies we have no means of reconciling, though doubtless they _might_ be reconciled if we knew the whole, instead of a part. MEDON. But instance--instance! ALDA. Examples crowd upon me; but take the first that occurs. Do you remember that Duchesse de Longueville, whose beautiful picture we were looking at yesterday?--the heroine of the Fronde?--think of that woman--bold, intriguing, profligate, vain, ambitious, factious!--who made men rebels with a smile;--or if that were not enough, the lady was not scrupulous, apparently without principle as without shame, nothing was _too_ much! And then think of the same woman protecting the virtuous philosopher Arnauld, when he was denounced and condemned; and from motives which her worst enemies could not malign, secreting him in her house, unknown even to her own servants--preparing his food herself, watching for his safety, and at length saving him. Her tenderness, her patience, her discretion, her disinterested benevolence, not only defied danger, (that were little to a woman of her temper,) but endured a lengthened trial, all the ennui caused by the necessity of keeping her house, continual self-control, and the thousand small daily sacrifices which, to a vain, dissipated, proud, impatient woman, must have been hard to bear. Now if Shakspeare had drawn the character of the Duchesse de Longueville, he would have shown us the same individual woman in both situations:--for the same being, with the same faculties, and passions, and powers, it surely was: whereas in history, we see in one case a fury of discord, a woman without modesty or pity; and in the other an angel of benevolence, and a worshipper of goodness; and nothing to connect the two extremes in our fancy. MEDON. But these are contradictions which we meet on every page of history, which make us giddy with doubt, or sick with belief, and are the proper subjects of inquiry for the moralist and the philosopher. ALDA. I cannot say that professed moralists and philosophers did much to help _me_ out of the dilemma; but the riddle which history presented I found solved in the pages of Shakspeare. There the crooked appeared straight; the inaccessible, easy; the incomprehensible, plain. All I sought, I found there; his characters combine history and real life; they are complete individuals, whose hearts and souls are laid open before us: all may behold, and all judge for themselves. MEDON. But all will not judge alike. ALDA. No; and herein lies a part of their wonderful truth. We hear Shakspeare's men and women discussed, praised and dispraised, liked, disliked, as real human beings; and in forming our opinions of them, we are influenced by our own characters, habits of thought, prejudices, feelings, impulses, just as we are influenced with regard to our acquaintances and associates. MEDON. But we are then as likely to misconceive and misjudge them. ALDA. Yes, if we had only the same imperfect means of studying them. But we can do with them what we cannot do with real people: we can unfold the whole character before us, stripped of all pretensions of self-love, all disguises of manner. We can take leisure to examine, to analyze, to correct our own impressions, to watch the rise and progress of various passions--we can hate, love, approve, condemn, without offence to others, without pain to ourselves. MEDON. In this respect they may be compared to those exquisite anatomical preparations of wax, which those who could not without disgust and horror dissect a real specimen, may study, and learn the mysteries of our frame, and all the internal workings of the wondrous machine of life. ALDA. And it is the safer and the better way--for us at least. But look--that brilliant rain-drop trembling there in the sunshine suggests to me another illustration. Passion, when we contemplate it through the medium of imagination, is like a ray of light transmitted through a prism; we can calmly, and with undazzled eye, study its complicate nature, and analyze its variety of tints; but passion brought home to us in its reality, through our own feelings and experience, is like the same ray transmitted through a lens,--blinding, burning, consuming where it falls. MEDON. Your illustration is the most poetical, I allow; but not the most just. But tell me, is the ground you have taken sufficiently large?--is the foundation you have chosen strong enough to bear the moral superstructure you raise upon it? You know the prevalent idea is, that Shakspeare's women are inferior to his men. This assertion is constantly repeated, and has been but tamely refuted. ALDA. Professor Richardson?-- MEDON. He is as dry as a stick, and his refutation not successful even as a piece of logic. Then it is not sufficient for critics to assert this inferiority and want of variety: they first assume the fallacy, then argue upon it. Cibber accounts for it from the circumstance that all the female parts in Shakspeare's time were acted by boys--there were no women on the stage; and Mackenzie, who ought to have known better, says that he was not so happy in his delineations of love and tenderness, as of the other passions; because, forsooth, the majesty of his genius could not stoop to the refinements of delicacy;--preposterous! ALDA. Stay! before we waste epithets of indignation, let us consider. If these people mean that Shakspeare's women are inferior in power to his men, I grant it at once; for in Shakspeare the male and female characters bear precisely the same relation to each other that they do in nature and in society--they are not equal in prominence or in power--they are subordinate throughout. Richardson remarks, that "if situation influences the mind, and if uniformity of conduct be frequently occasioned by uniformity of condition, there _must_ be a greater diversity of male than of female characters,"--which is true; add to this our limited sphere of action, consequently of experience,--the habits of self-control rendering the outward distinctions of character and passion less striking and less strong--all this we see in Shakspeare as in nature: for instance, Juliet is the most impassioned of the female characters, but what are _her_ passions compared to those which shake the soul of Othello? "Even as the dew-drop on the myrtle-leaf To the vex'd sea." Look at Constance, frantic for the loss of her son--then look at Lear, maddened by the ingratitude of his daughters: why it is the west wind bowing those aspen tops that wave before our window, compared to the tropic hurricane, when forests crash and burn, and mountains tremble to their bases! MEDON. True; and Lady Macbeth, with all her soaring ambition, her vigor of intellect, her subtlety, her courage, and her cruelty--what is she, compared to Richard III.? ALDA. I will tell you what she is--she is a woman. Place Lady Macbeth in comparison with Richard III., and you see at once the essential distinction between masculine and feminine ambition--though both in extreme, and overleaping all restraints of conscience or mercy. Richard says of himself, that he has "neither pity, love, nor fear:" Lady Macbeth is susceptible of all three. You smile! but that remains to be proved. The reason that Shakspeare's wicked women have such a singular hold upon our fancy, is from the consistent preservation of the feminine character, which renders them more terrible, because more credible and intelligible--not like those monstrous caricatures we meet with in history-- MEDON. In history?--this is new! ALDA. Yes! I repeat, in history, where certain isolated facts and actions are recorded, without any relation to causes, or motives, or connecting feelings and pictures exhibited, from which the considerate mind turns in disgust, and the feeling heart has no relief but in positive, and I may add, reasonable incredulity. I have lately seen one of Correggio's finest pictures, in which the three Furies are represented, not as ghastly deformed hags, with talons and torches, and snaky hair, but as young women, with fine luxuriant forms and regular features, and a single serpent wreathing the tresses like a bandeau--but _such_ countenances!--such a hideous expression of malice, cunning, and cruelty!--and the effect is beyond conception appalling. Leonardo da Vinci worked upon the same grand principle of art in his Medusa-- Where it is less the horror than the grace Which turns the gazer's spirit into stone-- * * * * 'Tis the melodious tints of beauty thrown Athwart the hue of guilt and glare of pain, That humanize and harmonize the strain. And Shakspeare, who understood all truth, worked out his conceptions on the same principle, having said himself, that "proper deformity shows not in the fiend so horrid as in women." Hence it is that whether he portrayed the wickedness founded in perverted power, as in Lady Macbeth; or the wickedness founded in weakness, as in Gertrude, Lady Anne, or Cressida, he is the more fearfully impressive, because we cannot claim for ourselves an exemption from the same nature, before which, in its corrupted state, we tremble with horror or shrink with disgust. MEDON. Do you remember that some of the commentators of Shakspeare have thought it incumbent on their gallantry to express their utter contempt for the scene between Richard and Lady Anne, as a monstrous and incredible libel on your sex? ALDA. They might have spared themselves the trouble. Lady Anne is just one of those women whom we see walking in crowds through the drawing-rooms of the world--the puppets of habit, the fools of fortune, without any particular inclination for vice, or any steady principle of virtue; whose actions are inspired by vanity, not affection, and regulated by opinion, not by conscience: who are good while there is no temptation to be otherwise, and ready victims of the first soliciting to evil. In the case of Lady Anne, we are startled by the situation: not three months a widow, and following to the sepulchre the remains of a husband and a father, she is met and wooed and won by the very man who murdered them. In such a case it required perhaps either Richard or the arch-fiend himself to tempt her successfully; but in a less critical moment, a far less subtle and audacious seducer would have sufficed. Cressida is another modification of vanity, weakness, and falsehood, drawn in stronger colors. The world contains many Lady Annes and Cressidas, polished and refined externally, whom chance and vanity keep right, whom chance and vanity lead wrong, just as it may happen. When we read in history of the enormities of certain women, perfect scarecrows and ogresses, we can safely, like the Pharisee in Scripture, hug ourselves in our secure virtue, and thank God that we are not as others are--but the wicked women in Shakspeare are portrayed with such perfect consistency and truth, that they leave us no such resource--they frighten us into reflection--they make us believe and tremble. On the other hand, his amiable women are touched with such exquisite simplicity--they have so little external pretensions--and are so unlike the usual heroines of tragedy and romance, that they delight us more "than all the nonsense of the beau-ideal!" We are flattered by the perception of our own nature in the midst of so many charms and virtues: not only are they what we could wish to be, or ought to be, but what we persuade ourselves we might be, or would be, under a different and a happier state of things, and, perhaps, some time or other _may_ be. They are not stuck up, like the cardinal virtues, all in a row, for us to admire and wonder at--they are not mere poetical abstractions--nor (as they have been termed) mere abstractions of the affections,-- But common clay ta'en from the common earth. Moulded by God, and tempered by the tears Of angels, to the perfect form of--_woman_. MEDON. Beautiful lines!--Where are they? ALDA. I quote from memory, and I am afraid inaccurately, from a poem of Alfred Tennyson's. MEDON. Well, between argument, and sentiment, and logic, and poetry, you are making out a very plausible case. I think with you that, in the instances you have mentioned, (as Lady Macbeth and Richard, Juliet, and Othello, and others,) the want of comparative power is only an additional excellence; but to go to an opposite extreme of delineation, we must allow that there is not one of Shakspeare's women that, as a dramatic character, can be compared to Falstaff. ALDA. No; because any thing like Falstaff in the form of woman--any such compound of wit, sensuality, and selfishness, unchecked by the moral sentiments and the affections, and touched with the same vigorous painting, would be a gross and monstrous caricature. If it could exist in nature, we might find it in Shakspeare; but a moment's reflection shows us that it would be essentially an impossible combination of faculties in a female. MEDON. It strikes me, however, that his humorous women are feebly drawn, in comparison with some of the female wits of other writers. ALDA. Because his women of wit and humor are not introduced for the sole purpose of saying brilliant things, and displaying the wit of the author; they are, as I will show you, real, natural women, in whom _wit_ is only a particular and occasional modification of intellect. They are all, in the first place, affectionate, thinking beings, and moral agents; and _then_ witty, as if by accident, or as the Duchesse de Chaulnes said of herself, "par la grâce de Dieu." As to humor, it is carried as far as possible in Mrs. Quickly; in the termagant Catherine; in Maria, in "Twelfth Night;" in Juliet's nurse; in Mrs. Ford and Mrs. Page. What can exceed in humorous naïveté, Mrs. Quickly's upbraiding Falstaff, and her concluding appeal--"Didst thou not kiss me, and bid me fetch thee thirty shillings?" Is it not exquisite--irresistible? Mrs. Ford and Mrs. Page are both "merry wives," but how perfectly discriminated! Mrs. Ford has the most good nature--Mrs. Page is the cleverer of the two, and has more sharpness in her tongue, more mischief in her mirth. In all these instances I allow that the humor is more or less vulgar; but a humorous woman, whether in high or low life has always a tinge of vulgarity. MEDON. I should like to see that word _vulgar_ properly defined, and its meaning limited--at present it is the most arbitrary word in the language. ALDA. Yes, like the word romantic, it is a convenient "exploding word," and in its general application signifies nothing more than "see how much finer I am than other people!"[1] but in literature and character I shall adhere to the definition of Madame de Staël, who uses the word _vulgar_ as the reverse of _poetical_. Vulgarity (as I wish to apply the word) is the _negative_ in all things. In literature, it is the total absence of elevation and depth in the ideas, and of elegance and delicacy in the expression of them. In character, it is the absence of truth, sensibility, and reflection. The vulgar in manner, is the result of vulgarity of character; it is grossness, hardness, or affectation.--If you would see how Shakspeare has discriminated, not only different degrees, but different kinds of plebeian vulgarity in women, you have only to compare the nurse in Romeo and Juliet with Mrs. Quickly. On the whole, if there are people who, taking the strong and essential distinction of sex into consideration, still maintain that Shakspeare's female characters are not, in truth, in variety, in power, equal to his men, I think I shall prove the contrary. MEDON. I observe that you have divided your illustrations into classes; but shades of character so melt into each other, and the various faculties and powers are so blended and balanced, that all classification must be arbitrary. I am at a loss to conceive where you have drawn the line; here, at the head of your first chapter, I find "Characters of Intellect"--do you call Portia intellectual, and Hermione and Constance not so? ALDA. I know that Schlegel has said that it is impossible to arrange Shakspeare's characters in classes: yet some classification was necessary for my purpose. I have therefore divided them into characters in which intellect and wit predominate; characters in which fancy and passion predominate; and characters in which the moral sentiments and affections predominate. The historical characters I have considered apart, as requiring a different mode of illustration. Portia I regard as a perfect model of an intellectual woman, in whom wit is tempered by sensibility, and fancy regulated by strong reflection. It is objected to her, to Beatrice, and others of Shakspeare's women, that the display of intellect is tinged with a coarseness of manner belonging to the age in which he wrote. To remark that the conversation and letters of high-bred and virtuous women of that time were more bold and frank in expression than any part of the dialogue appropriated to Beatrice and Rosalind, may excuse it to our judgment, but does not reconcile it to our taste. Much has been said, and more might be said on this subject--but I would rather not discuss it. It is a mere difference of manner which is to be regretted, but has nothing to do with the essence of the character. MEDON. I think you have done well in avoiding the topic altogether; but between ourselves, do you really think that the refinement of manner, the censorious, hypocritical, verbal scrupulosity, which is carried so far in this "picked age" of ours, is a true sign of superior refinement of taste, and purity of morals? Is it not rather a whiting of the sepulchre? I will not even allude to individual instances whom we both know, but does it not remind you, on the whole, of the tone of French manners previous to the revolution--that "décence," which Horace Walpole so admired,[2] veiling the moral degradation, the inconceivable profligacy of the higher classes?--Stay--I have not yet done--not to you, but _for_ you, I will add thus much;--our modern idea of delicacy apparently attaches more importance to words than to things--to manners than to morals. You will hear people inveigh against the improprieties of Shakspeare, with Don Juan, or one of those infernal French novels--I beg your pardon--lying on their toilet table. Lady Florence is shocked at the sallies of Beatrice, and Beatrice would certainly stand aghast to see Lady Florence dressed for Almack's; so you see that in both cases the fashion makes the indecorum. Let her ladyship new model her gowns! ALDA. Well, well, leave Lady Florence--I would rather hear you defend Shakspeare. MEDON. I think it is Coleridge who so finely observes that Shakspeare ever kept the high road of human life, whereon all travel, that he did not pick out by-paths of feeling and sentiment; in him we have no moral highwaymen, and sentimental thieves and rat-catchers, and interesting villains, and amiable, elegant adulteresses--_à-la-mode Germanorum_--no delicate entanglements of situation, in which the grossest images are presented to the mind disguised under the superficial attraction of style and sentiment. He flattered no bad passion, disguised no vice in the garb of virtue, trifled with with no just and generous principle. He can make us laugh at folly, and shudder at crime, yet still preserve our love for our fellow-beings, and our reverence for ourselves. He has a lofty and a fearless trust in his own powers, and in the beauty and excellence of virtue; and with his eye fixed on the lode-star of truth, steers us triumphantly among shoals and quicksands, where with any other pilot we had been wrecked:--for instance, who but himself would have dared to bring into close contact two such characters as Iago and Desdemona? Had the colors in which he has arrayed Desdemona been one atom less transparently bright and pure, the charm had been lost; she could not have borne the approximation: some shadow from the overpowering blackness of _his_ character must have passed over the sun-bright purity of _hers_. For observe that Iago's disbelief in the virtue of Desdemona is not pretended, it is real. It arises from his total want of faith in all virtue; he is no more capable of conceiving goodness than she is capable of conceiving evil. To the brutish coarseness and fiendish malignity of this man, her gentleness appears only a contemptible weakness; her purity of affection, which saw "Othello's visage in his mind," only a perversion of taste; her bashful modesty, only a cloak for evil propensities; so he represents them with all the force of language and self-conviction, and we are obliged to listen to him. He rips her to pieces before us--he would have bedeviled an angel! yet such is the unrivalled, though passive delicacy of the delineation, that it can stand it unhurt, untouched! It is wonderful!--yet natural as it is wonderful! After all, there are people in the world, whose opinions and feelings are tainted by an habitual acquaintance with the evil side of society, though in action and intention they remain right; and who, without the real depravity of heart and malignity of intention of Iago, judge as he does of the character and productions of others. ALDA. Heaven bless me from such critics! yet if genius, youth, and innocence could not escape unslurred, can I hope to do so? I pity from my soul the persons you allude to--for to such minds there can exist few uncontaminated sources of pleasure either in nature or in art. MEDON. Ay--"the perfumes of Paradise were poison to the Dives, and made them melancholy."[3] You pity them, and they will sneer at you. But what have we here?--"Characters of Imagination--Juliet--Viola;" are these romantic young ladies the pillars which are to sustain your moral edifice? Are they to serve as examples or as warnings for the youth of this enlightened age? ALDA. As warnings, of course--what else? MEDON. Against the dangers of romance?--but where are they? "Vraiment," as B. Constant says, "je ne vois pas qu'en fait d'enthousiasme, le feu soit à la maison." Where are they--these disciples of poetry and romance, these victims of disinterested devotion and believing truth, these unblown roses--all conscience and tenderness--whom it is so necessary to guard against too much confidence in others, and too little in themselves--where are they? ALDA. Wandering in the Elysian fields, I presume, with the romantic young gentlemen who are too generous, too zealous in defence of innocence, too enthusiastic in their admiration of virtue, too violent in their hatred of vice, too sincere in friendship, too faithful in love, too active and disinterested in the cause of truth-- MEDON. Very fair! But seriously, do you think it necessary to guard young people, in this selfish and calculating age, against an excess of sentiment and imagination? Do you allow no distinction between the romance of exaggerated sentiment, and the romance of elevated thought? Do _you_ bring cold water to quench the smouldering ashes of enthusiasm? Methinks it is rather superfluous; and that another doctrine is needed to withstand the heartless system of expediency which is the favorite philosophy of the day. The warning you speak of may be gently hinted to the few who are in danger of being misled by an excess of the generous impulses of fancy and feeling; but need hardly, I think, be proclaimed by sound of trumpet amid the mocks of the world. No, no; there are young women in these days, but there is no such thing as youth--the bloom of existence is sacrificed to a fashionable education, and where we should find the rose-buds of the spring, we see only the fullblown, flaunting, precocious roses of the hot-bed. ALDA. Blame then that _forcing_ system of education, the most pernicious, the most mistaken, the most far-reaching in its miserable and mischievous effects, that ever prevailed in this world. The custom which shut up women in convents till they were married, and then launched them innocent and ignorant on society, was bad enough; but not worse than a system of education which inundates us with hard, clever, sophisticated girls, trained by knowing mothers, and all-accomplished governesses, with whom vanity and expediency take place of conscience and affection--(in other words, of romance)--"frutto senile in sul giovenil fiore;" with feelings and passions suppressed or contracted, not governed by higher faculties and purer principles; with whom opinion--the same false honor which sends men out to fight duels--stands instead of the strength and the light of virtue within their own souls. Hence the strange anomalies of artificial society--girls of sixteen who are models of manner miracles of prudence, marvels of learning, who sneer at sentiment, and laugh at the Juliets and the Imogens; and matrons of forty, who, when the passions should be tame and wait upon the judgment, amaze the world and put us to confusion with their doings. MEDON. Or turn politicians to vary the excitement--How I hate political women! ALDA. Why do you hate them? MEDON. Because they are mischievous. ALDA. But why are they mischievous? MEDON. Why!--why are they mischievous? Nay, ask them, or ask the father of all mischief, who has not a more efficient instrument to further his designs in this world, than a woman run mad with politics. The number of political intriguing women of this time, whose boudoirs and drawing-rooms are the _foyers_ of party-spirit, is another trait of resemblance between the state of society now, and that which existed at Paris before the revolution. ALDA. And do you think, like some interesting young lady in Miss Edgeworth's tales, that "women have nothing to do with politics?" Do you mean to say that women are not capable of comprehending the principles of legislation, or of feeling an interest in the government and welfare of their country, or of perceiving and sympathizing in the progress of great events?--That they cannot feel patriotism? Believe me, when we do feel it, our patriotism, like our courage and our love, has a purer source than with you; for a man's patriotism has always some tinge of egotism, while a woman's patriotism is generally a sentiment, and of the noblest kind. MEDON. I agree in all this; and all this does not mitigate my horror of political women in general, who are, I repeat it, both mischievous and absurd. If you could but hear the reasoning in these feminine coteries!--but you never talk politics. ALDA. Indeed I do, when I can get any one to listen to me; but I prefer listening. As for the evil you complain of, impute it to that imperfect education which at once cultivates and enslaves the intellect, and loads the memory, while it fetters the judgment. Women, however well read in history, never generalize in politics; never argue on any broad or general principle; never reason from a consideration of past events, their causes and consequences. But they are always political through their affections, their prejudices, their personal _liaisons_, their hopes, their fears. MEDON. If it were no worse, I could stand it; for that is at least feminine. ALDA. But most mischievous. For hence it is that we make such blind partisans, such violent party women, and such wretched politicians. I never heard a woman _talk_ politics, as it is termed, that I could not discern at once the motive, the affection, the secret bias which swayed her opinions and inspired her arguments. If it appeared to the Grecian sage so "difficult for a man not to love himself, nor the things that belong to him, but justice only?"--how much more for woman! MEDON. Then you think that a better education, based on truer moral principles, would render women more reasonable politicians, or at least give them some right to meddle with politics? ALDA. It would cease in that case to be _meddling_, as you term it, for it would be legitimized. It is easy to sneer at political and mathematical ladies, and quote Lord Byron--but O leave those angry common-places to others!--they do not come well from you. Do not force me to remind you, that women have achieved enough to silence them forever,[4] and how often must that truism be repeated, that it is not a woman's attainments which make her amiable or unamiable, estimable or the contrary, but her qualities? A time is coming, perhaps, when the education of women will be considered, with a view to their future destination as the mothers and nurses of legislators and statesmen, and the cultivation of their powers of reflection and moral feelings supersede the exciting drudgery by which they are now crammed with knowledge and accomplishments. MEDON. Well--till that blessed period arrives, I wish you would leave us the province of politics to ourselves. I see here you have treated of a very different class of beings, "_women in whom the affections and the moral sentiments predominate_." Are there many such, think you, in the world? ALDA. Yes, many such; the development of affection and sentiment is more quiet and unobtrusive than that of passion and intellect, and less observed; it is more common, too, therefore less remarked; but in women it generally gives the prevailing tone to the character, except where vanity has been made the ruling motive. MEDON. Except! I admire your exception! You make in this case the rule the exception. Look round the world. ALDA. You are not one of those with whom that common phrase "the world" signifies the circle, whatever and wherever that may be, which limits our individual experience--as a child considers the visible horizon as the bounds which shut in the mighty universe. Believe me, it is a sorry, vulgar kind of wisdom, if it be wisdom--a shallow and confined philosophy, if it be philosophy--which resolves all human motives and impulses into egotism in one sex, and vanity in the other. Such may be the way of _the world_, as it is called--the result of a very artificial and corrupt state of society, but such is not general nature, nor female nature. Would you see the kindly, self-sacrificing affections developed under their most honest but least poetical guise--displayed without any mixture of vanity, and unchecked in the display by any fear of being thought vain?--you will see it, not among the prosperous, the high-born, the educated, "far, far removed from want, and grief, and fear," but among the poor, the miserable, the perverted--among those habitually exposed to all influences that harden and deprave. MEDON. I believe it--nay, I know it; but how should _you_ know it, or anything of the strange places of refuge which truth and nature have found in the two extremes of society? ALDA. It is no matter what I have seen or known; and for the two extremes of society, I leave them to the author of Paul Clifford, and that most exquisite painter of living manners, Mrs. Gore. St. Giles's is no more _nature_ than St. James's. I wanted character in its essential truth, not mortified by particular customs, by fashion, by situation. I wished to illustrate the manner in which the affections would naturally display themselves in women--whether combined with high intellect, regulated by reflection, and elevated by imagination, or existing with perverted dispositions, or purified by the moral sentiments. I found all these in Shakspeare; his delineations of women, in whom the virtuous and calm affections predominate, and triumph over shame, fear, pride, resentment, vanity, jealousy,--are particularly worthy of consideration, and perfect in their kind, because so quiet in their effect. MEDON. Several critics have remarked in general terms on those beautiful pictures of female friendship, and of the generous affection of women for each other, which we find in Shakspeare. Other writers, especially dramatic writers, have found ample food for wit and satiric delineation in the littleness of feminine spite and rivalry, in the mean spirit of competition, the petty jealousy of superior charms, the mutual slander and mistrust, the transient leagues of folly or selfishness miscalled friendship--the result of an education which makes vanity the ruling principle, and of a false position in society. Shakspeare, who looked upon women with the spirit of humanity, wisdom, and deep love, has done justice to their natural good tendencies and kindly sympathies. In the friendship of Beatrice and Hero, of Rosalind and Celia; in the description of the girlish attachment of Helena and Hermia, he has represented truth and generous affection rising superior to all the usual sources of female rivalry and jealousy; and with such force and simplicity, and obvious self-conviction, that he absolutely forces the same conviction on us. ALDA. Add to these the generous feeling of Viola for her rival Olivia; of Julia for her rival Sylvia; of Helena for Diana; of the old Countess for Helena, in the same play; and even the affection of the wicked queen in Hamlet for the gentle Ophelia, which prove that Shakspeare thought--(and when did he ever think other than the truth?)--that women have by nature "virtues that are merciful," and can be just, tender, and true to their sister women, whatever wits and worldlings, and satirists and fashionable poets, may say or sing of us to the contrary. There is another thing which he has most deeply felt and beautifully represented--the distinction between masculine and feminine _courage_. A man's courage is often a mere animal quality, and in its most elevated form a point of honor. But a woman's courage is always a virtue, because it is not required of us, it is not one of the means through which we seek admiration and applause; on the contrary, we are courageous through our affections and mental energies, not through our vanity or our strength. A woman's heroism is always the excess of sensibility. Do you remember Lady Fanshawe putting on a sailor's jacket, and his "blue thrum cap," and standing at her husband's side, unknown to him during a sea-fight? There she stood, all bathed in tears, but fixed to that spot. Her husband's exclamation when he turned and discovered her--"Good God, that love should make such a change as this!" is applicable to all the acts of courage which we read or hear of in women. This is the courage of Juliet, when, after summing up all the possible consequences of her own act, till she almost maddens herself with terror, she drinks the sleeping potion; and for that passive fortitude which is founded in piety and pure strength of affection, such as the heroism of Lady Russel and Gertrude de Wart, he has given us some of the noblest modifications of it in Hermione, in Cordelia, in Imogen, in Katherine of Arragon. MEDON. And what do you call the courage of Lady Macbeth?-- My hands are of your color, but I shame To wear a heart so white. And again, A little water clears us of this deed, How easy is it then! If this is not mere masculine indifference to blood and death, mere firmness of nerve, what is it? ALDA. Not _that_, at least, which apparently you deem it; you will find, if you have patience to read me to the end, that I have judged Lady Macbeth very differently. Take these frightful passages with the context--take the whole situation, and you will see that it is no such thing. A friend of mine truly observed, that if Macbeth had been a ruffian without any qualms of conscience, Lady Macbeth would have been the one to shrink and tremble; but that which quenched _him_ lent her fire. The absolute necessity for self-command, the strength of her reason, and her love for her husband, combine at this critical moment to conquer all fear but the fear of detection, leaving her the full possession of her faculties. Recollect that the same woman who speaks with such horrible indifference of a little water clearing the blood-stain from her hand, sees in imagination that hand forever reeking, forever polluted: and when reason is no longer awake and paramount over the violated feelings of nature and womanhood, we behold her making unconscious efforts to wash out that "damned spot," and sighing, heart-broken, over that little hand which all the perfumes of Arabia will never sweeten more. MEDON. I hope you have given her a place among the women in whom the tender affections and moral sentiments predominate. ALDA. You laugh; but, jesting apart, perhaps it would have been a more accurate classification than placing her among the historical characters. MEDON. Apropos to the historical characters, I hope you have refuted that _insolent_ assumption, (shall I call it?) that Shakspeare tampered inexcusably with the truth of history. He is the truest of all historians. His anachronisms always remind me of those in the fine old Italian pictures; either they are insignificant, or, if properly considered, are really beauties; for instance, every one knows that Correggio's St. Jerome presenting his books to the Virgin, involves half-a-dozen anachronisms,--to say nothing of that heavenly figure of the Magdalen, in the same picture, kissing the feet of the infant Saviour. Some have ridiculed, some have excused this strange combination of inaccuracies but is it less one of the divinest pieces of sentiment and poetry that ever breathed and glowed from the canvas? You remember too the famous nativity by some Neapolitan painter, who has placed Mount Vesuvius and the Bay of Naples in the background? In these and a hundred other instances, no one seems to feel that the apparent absurdity involves the highest truth, and that the sacred beings thus represented, if once allowed as objects of faith and worship, are eternal under every aspect, and independent of all time and all locality. So it is with Shakspeare and his anachronisms. The learned scorn of Johnson and some of his brotherhood of commentators, and the eloquent defence of Schlegel, seem in this case superfluous. If he chose to make the Delphic oracle and Julio Romano contemporary--what does it signify? he committed no anachronisms of character. He has not metamorphosed Cleopatra into a turtle-dove, nor Katherine of Arragon into a sentimental heroine. He is true to the spirit and even to the _letter_ of history; where he deviates from the latter, the reason may be found in some higher beauty and more universal truth. ALDA. I have proved this, I think, by placing parallel with the dramatic character all the historic testimony I could collect relative to Constance, Cleopatra, Katherine of Arragon, &c. MEDON. Analyzing the character of Cleopatra must have been something like catching a meteor by the tail, and making it sit for its picture. ALDA. Something like it, in truth; but those of Miranda and Ophelia were more embarrassing, because they seemed to defy all analysis. It was like intercepting the dew-drop or the snow-flake ere it fell to earth, and subjecting it to a chemical process. MEDON. Some one said the other day that Shakspeare had never drawn a coquette. What is Cleopatra but the empress and type of all the coquettes that ever were--or are? She would put Lady ---- herself to school. But now for the moral. ALDA. The moral!--of what? MEDON. Of your book. It has a moral, I suppose. ALDA. It has indeed a very deep one, which those who seek will find. If now I have answered all your considerations and objections, and sufficiently explained my own views, may I proceed? MEDON. If you please--I am prepared to listen in earnest. FOOTNOTES: [1] See Foster's Essay on the application of the word _romantic_--_Essays_, vol. I [2] Correspondence, vol. iii. [3] An Oriental proverb [4] In our own time, Madame de Staël, Mrs. Somerville, Harriet Martineau, Mrs. Marcet; we need not go back to the Rolands and Agnesi, nor even to our own Lucy Hutchinson. CHARACTERS OF INTELLECT. PORTIA. We hear it asserted, not seldom by way of compliment to us women, that intellect is of no sex. If this mean that the same faculties of mind are common to men and women, it is true; in any other signification it appears to me false, and the reverse of a compliment. The intellect of woman bears the same relation to that of man as her physical organization;--it is inferior in power, and different in kind. That certain women have surpassed certain men in bodily strength or intellectual energy, does not contradict the general principle founded in nature. The essential and invariable distinction appears to me this: in men the intellectual faculties exist more self-poised and self-directed--more independent of the rest of the character, than we ever find them in women, with whom talent, however predominant, is in a much greater degree modified by the sympathies and moral qualities. In thinking over all the distinguished women can at this moment call to mind, I recollect but one, who, in the exercise of a rare talent, belied her sex, but the moral qualities had been first perverted.[5] It is from not knowing, or not allowing this general principle, that men of genius have committed some signal mistakes. They have given us exquisite and just delineations of the more peculiar characteristics of women, as modesty, grace, tenderness; and when they have attempted to portray them with the powers common to both sexes, as wit, energy, intellect, they have blundered in some respect; they could form no conception of intellect which was not masculine, and therefore have either suppressed the feminine attributes altogether and drawn coarse caricatures, or they have made them completely artificial.[6] Women distinguished for wit may sometimes appear masculine and flippant, but the cause must be sought elsewhere than in nature, who disclaims all such. Hence the witty and intellectual ladies of our comedies and novels are all in the fashion of some particular time; they are like some old portraits which can still amuse and please by the beauty of the workmanship, in spite of the graceless costume or grotesque accompaniments, but from which we turn to worship with ever new delight the Floras and goddesses of Titian--the saints and the virgins of Raffaelle and Domenichino. So the Millamants and Belindas, the Lady Townleys and Lady Teazles are out of date, while Portia and Rosalind, in whom nature and the feminine character are paramount, remain bright and fresh to the fancy as when first created. Portia, Isabella, Beatrice, and Rosalind, may be classed together, as characters of intellect, because, when compared with others, they are at once distinguished by their mental superiority. In Portia, it is intellect kindled into romance by a poetical imagination; in Isabel, it is intellect elevated by religious principle; in Beatrice, intellect animated by spirit; in Rosalind, intellect softened by sensibility. The wit which is lavished on each is profound, or pointed, or sparkling, or playful--but always feminine; like spirits distilled from flowers, it always reminds us of its origin; it is a volatile essence, sweet as powerful; and to pursue the comparison a step further the wit of Portia is like ottar of roses, rich and concentrated; that of Rosalind, like cotton dipped in aromatic vinegar; the wit of Beatrice is like sal volatile; and that of Isabel, like the incense wafted to heaven. Of these four exquisite characters, considered as dramatic and poetical conceptions, it is difficult to pronounce which is most perfect in its way, most admirably drawn, most highly finished. But if considered in another point of view, as women and individuals, as breathing realities, clothed in flesh and blood, I believe we must assign the first rank to Portia, as uniting in herself in a more eminent degree than the others, all the noblest and most lovable qualities that ever met together in woman; and presenting a complete personification of Petrarch's exquisite epitome of female perfection:-- Il vago spirito ardento, E'n alto intelletto, un puro core. It is singular, that hitherto no critical justice has been done to the character of Portia; it is yet more wonderful, that one of the finest writers on the eternal subject of Shakspeare and his perfections, should accuse Portia of pedantry and affectation, and confess she is not a great favorite of his--a confession quite worthy of him, who avers his predilection for servant-maids, and his preference of the Fannys and the Pamelas over the Clementinas and Clarissas.[7] Schlegel, who has given several pages to a rapturous eulogy on the Merchant of Venice, simply designates Portia as a "rich, beautiful, clever heiress:"--whether the fault lie in the writer or translator, I do protest against the word clever.[8] Portia _clever!_ what an epithet to apply to this heavenly compound of talent, feeling, wisdom, beauty, and gentleness! Now would it not be well, if this common and comprehensive word were more accurately defined, or at least more accurately used? It signifies properly, not so much the possession of high powers, as dexterity in the adaptation of certain faculties (not necessarily of a high order) to a certain end or aim--not always the worthiest. It implies something common-place, inasmuch as it speaks the presence of the _active_ and _perceptive_, with a deficiency of the _feeling_ and _reflective_ powers; and applied to a woman, does it not almost invariably suggest the idea of something we should distrust or shrink from, if not allied to a higher nature? The profligate French women, who ruled the councils of Europe in the middle of the last century, were clever women; and that _philosopheress_ Madame du Châtelet, who managed, at one and the same moment, the thread of an intrigue, her cards at piquet, and a calculation in algebra, was a very clever woman! If Portia had been created as a mere instrument to bring about a dramatic catastrophe--if she had merely detected the flaw in Antonio's bond, and used it as a means to baffle the Jew, she might have been pronounced a clever woman. But what Portia does, is forgotten in what she _is_. The rare and harmonious blending of energy, reflection, and feeling, in her fine character, make the epithet _clever_ sound like a discord as applied to _her_, and place her infinitely beyond the slight praise of Richardson and Schlegel, neither of whom appear to have fully comprehended her. These and other critics have been apparently so dazzled and engrossed by the amazing character of Shylock, that Portia has received less than justice at their hands; while the fact is, that Shylock is not a finer or more finished character in his way, than Portia is in hers. These two splendid figures are worthy of each other; worthy of being placed together within the same rich framework of enchanting poetry, and glorious and graceful forms. She hangs beside the terrible, inexorable Jew, the brilliant lights of her character set off by the shadowy power of his, like a magnificent beauty-breathing Titian by the side of a gorgeous Rembrandt. Portia is endued with her own share of those delightful qualities, which Shakspeare has lavished on many of his female characters; but besides the dignity, the sweetness, and tenderness which should distinguish her sex generally, she is individualized by qualities peculiar to herself; by her high mental powers, her enthusiasm of temperament, her decision of purpose, and her buoyancy of spirit. These are innate; she has other distinguishing qualities more external, and which are the result of the circumstances in which she is placed. Thus she is the heiress of a princely name and countless wealth; a train of obedient pleasures have ever waited round her; and from infancy she has breathed an atmosphere redolent of perfume and blandishment Accordingly there is a commanding grace, a highbred, airy elegance, a spirit of magnificence in all that she does and says, as one to whom splendor had been familiar from her very birth. She treads as though her footsteps had been among marble palaces, beneath roofs of fretted gold, o'er cedar floors and pavements of jasper and porphyry--amid gardens full of statues, and flowers, and fountains, and haunting music. She is full of penetrative wisdom, and genuine tenderness, and lively wit; but as she has never known want, or grief, or fear, or disappointment, her wisdom is without a touch of the sombre or the sad; her affections are all mixed up with faith, hope and joy; and her wit has not a particle of malevolence or causticity. It is well known that the Merchant of Venice is founded on two different tales; and in weaving together his double plot in so masterly a manner, Shakspeare has rejected altogether the character of the astutious Lady of Belmont with her magic potions, who figures in the Italian novel. With yet more refinement, he has thrown out all the licentious part of the story, which some of his contemporary dramatists would have seized on with avidity, and made the best or worst of it possible; and he has substituted the trial of the caskets from another source.[9] We are not told expressly where Belmont is situated; but as Bassanio takes ship to go thither from Venice, and as we find them afterwards ordering horses from Belmont to Padua, we will imagine Portia's hereditary palace as standing on some lovely promontory between Venice and Trieste, overlooking the blue Adriatic, with the Friuli mountains or the Euganean hills for its background, such as we often see in one of Claude's or Poussin's elysian landscapes. In a scene, in a home like this, Shakspeare, having first exorcised the original possessor, has placed his Portia; and so endowed her, that all the wild, strange, and moving circumstances of the story, become natural, probable, and necessary in connexion with her. That such a woman should be chosen by the solving of an enigma, is not surprising: herself and all around her, the scene, the country, the age in which she is placed, breathe of poetry, romance, and enchantment. From the four quarters of the earth they come To kiss this shrine, this mortal breathing saint The Hyrcanian desert, and the vasty wilds Of wide Arabia, are as thoroughfares now, For princes to come view fair Portia; The watery kingdom, whose ambitious head Spits in the face of heaven is no bar To stop the foreign spirits; but they come As o'er a brook to see fair Portia. The sudden plan which she forms for the release of her husband's friend, her disguise, and her deportment as the young and learned doctor, would appear forced and improbable in any other woman but in Portia are the simple and natural result of her character.[10] The quickness with which she perceives the legal advantage which may be taken of the circumstances; the spirit of adventure with which she engages in the masquerading, and the decision, firmness, and intelligence with which she executes her generous purpose, are all in perfect keeping, and nothing appears forced--nothing as introduced merely for theatrical effect. But all the finest parts of Portia's character are brought to bear in the trial scene. There she shines forth all her divine self. Her intellectual powers, her elevated sense of religion, her high honorable principles, her best feelings as a woman, are all displayed. She maintains at first a calm self-command, as one sure of carrying her point in the end; yet the painful heart-thrilling uncertainty in which she keeps the whole court, until suspense verges upon agony, is not contrived for effect merely; it is necessary and inevitable. She has two objects in view; to deliver her husband's friend, and to maintain her husband's honor by the discharge of his just debt, though paid out of her own wealth ten times over. It is evident that she would rather owe the safety of Antonio to any thing rather than the legal quibble with which her cousin Bellario has armed her, and which she reserves as a last resource. Thus all the speeches addressed to Shylock in the first instance, are either direct or indirect experiments on his temper and feelings. She must be understood from the beginning to the end as examining, with intense anxiety, the effect of her own words on his mind and countenance; as watching for that relenting spirit, which she hopes to awaken either by reason or persuasion. She begins by an appeal to his mercy, in that matchless piece of eloquence, which, with an irresistible and solemn pathos, falls upon the heart like "gentle dew from heaven:"--but in vain; for that blessed dew drops not more fruitless and unfelt on the parched sand of the desert, than do these heavenly words upon the ear of Shylock. She next attacks his avarice: Shylock, there's _thrice_ thy money offered thee! Then she appeals, in the same breath, both to his avarice and his pity: Be merciful! Take thrice thy money. Bid me tear the bond. All that she says afterwards--her strong expressions, which are calculated to strike a shuddering horror through the nerves--the reflections she interposes--her delays and circumlocution to give time for any latent feeling of commiseration to display itself--all, all are premeditated and tend in the same manner to the object she has in view. Thus-- You must prepare your bosom for his knife. Therefore lay bare your bosom! These two speeches, though addressed apparently to Antonio, are spoken _at_ Shylock, and are evidently intended to penetrate _his_ bosom. In the same spirit she asks for the balance to weigh the pound of flesh; and entreats of Shylock to have a surgeon ready-- Have by some surgeon, Shylock, on your charge, To stop his wounds, lest he do bleed to death! SHYLOCK. Is it so nominated in the bond? PORTIA. It is not so expressed--but what of that? 'Twere good you do so much, for _charity_. So unwilling is her sanguine and generous spirit to resign all hope, or to believe that humanity is absolutely extinct in the bosom of the Jew, that she calls on Antonio, as a last resource, to speak for himself. His gentle, yet manly resignation--the deep pathos of his farewell, and the affectionate allusion to herself in his last address to Bassanio-- Commend me to your honorable wife; Say how I lov'd you, speak me fair in death, &c. are well calculated to swell that emotion, which through the whole scene must have been laboring suppressed within her heart. At length the crisis arrives, for patience and womanhood can endure no longer; and when Shylock, carrying his savage bent "to the last hour of act," springs on his victim--"A sentence come, prepare!" then the smothered scorn, indignation, and disgust, burst forth with an impetuosity which interferes with the judicial solemnity she had at first affected;--particularly in the speech-- Therefore, prepare thee to cut off the flesh. Shed thou no blood; nor cut thou less, nor more, But just the pound of flesh; if thou tak'st more, Or less than a just pound,--be it but so much As makes it light, or heavy, in the substance, Or the division of the twentieth part Of one poor scruple; nay, if the scale do turn But in the estimation of a hair,-- Thou diest, and all thy goods are confiscate. But she afterwards recovers her propriety, and triumphs with a cooler scorn and a more self-possessed exultation. It is clear that, to feel the full force and dramatic beauty of this marvellous scene, we must go along with Portia as well as with Shylock; we must understand her concealed purpose, keep in mind her noble motives, and pursue in our fancy the under current of feeling, working in her mind throughout. The terror and the power of Shylock's character,--his deadly and inexorable malice,--would be too oppressive; the pain and pity too intolerable, and the horror of the possible issue too overwhelming, but for the intellectual relief afforded by this double source of interest and contemplation. I come now to that capacity for warm and generous affection, that tenderness of heart, which render Portia not less lovable as a woman, than admirable for her mental endowments. The affections are to the intellect, what the forge is to the metal; it is they which temper and shape it to all good purposes, and soften, strengthen, and purify it. What an exquisite stroke of judgment in the poet, to make the mutual passion of Portia and Bassanio, though unacknowledged to each other, anterior to the opening of the play! Bassanio's confession very properly comes first:-- BASSANIO. In Belmont is a lady richly left, And she is fair, and fairer than that word, Of wond'rous virtues: sometimes from her eyes I did receive fair speechless messages; * * * * and prepares us for Portia's half betrayed, unconscious election of this most graceful and chivalrous admirer-- NERISSA. Do you not remember, lady, in your father's time, a Venetian, a scholar, and a soldier, that came hither in company of the Marquis of Montferrat? PORTIA. Yes, yes, it was Bassanio; as I think, so he was called. NERISSA. True, madam; he of all the men that ever my foolish eyes looked upon, was the best deserving a fair lady. PORTIA. I remember him well; and I remember him worthy of thy praise. Our interest is thus awakened for the lovers from the very first; and what shall be said of the casket-scene with Bassanio, where every line which Portia speaks is so worthy of herself, so full of sentiment and beauty, and poetry and passion? Too naturally frank for disguise, too modest to confess her depth of love while the issue of the trial remains in suspense, the conflict between love and fear, and maidenly dignity, cause the most delicious confusion that ever tinged a woman's cheek, or dropped in broken utterance from her lips. I pray you, tarry, pause a day or two, Before you hazard; for in choosing wrong, I lose your company; therefore, forbear awhile; There's something tells me, (but it is not love,) I would not lose you; and you know yourself, Hate counsels not in such a quality: But lest you should not understand me well, (And yet a maiden hath no tongue but thought) I would detain you here some month or two Before you venture for me. I could teach you How to choose right,--but then I am forsworn;-- So will I never be: so you may miss me;-- But if you do, you'll make me wish a sin, That I had been forsworn. Beshrew your eyes, They have o'erlooked me, and divided me: One half of me is yours, the other half yours,-- Mine own, I would say; but if mine, then yours, And so all yours! The short dialogue between the lovers is exquisite. BASSANIO. Let me choose, For, as I am, I live upon the rack. PORTIA. Upon the rack, Bassanio? Then confess What treason there is mingled with your love. BASSANIO. None, but that ugly treason of mistrust, Which makes me fear the enjoying of my love. There may as well be amity and life 'Tween snow and fire, as treason and my love. PORTIA. Ay! but I fear you speak upon the rack, Where men enforced do speak any thing. BASSANIO. Promise me life, and I'll confess the truth. PORTIA. Well then, confess, and live. BASSANIO. Confess and love Had been the very sum of my confession! O happy torment, when my torturer Doth teach me answers for deliverance! A prominent feature in Portia's character is that confiding, buoyant spirit, which mingles with all her thoughts and affections. And here let me observe, that I never yet met in real life, nor ever read in tale or history, of any woman, distinguished for intellect of the highest order, who was not also remarkable for this trusting spirit, this hopefulness and cheerfulness of temper, which is compatible with the most serious habits of thought, and the most profound sensibility. Lady Wortley Montagu was one instance; and Madame de Staël furnishes another much more memorable. In her Corinne, whom she drew from herself, this natural brightness of temper is a prominent part of the character. A disposition to doubt, to suspect, and to despond, in the young, argues, in general, some inherent weakness, moral or physical, or some miserable and radical error of education; in the old, it is one of the first symptoms of age; it speaks of the influence of sorrow and experience, and foreshows the decay of the stronger and more generous powers of the soul. Portia's strength of intellect takes a natural tinge from the flush and bloom of her young and prosperous existence, and from her fervent imagination. In the casket-scene, she fears indeed the issue of the trial; on which more than her life is hazarded but while she trembles, her hope is stronger than her fear. While Bassanio is contemplating the caskets, she suffers herself to dwell for one moment on the possibility of disappointment and misery. Let music sound while he doth make his choice; Then if he lose, he makes a swan-like end, Fading in music: that the comparison May stand more proper, my eye shall be the stream And watery death-bed for him. Then, immediately follows that revulsion of feeling, so beautifully characteristic of the hopeful, trusting, mounting spirit of this noble creature. But he may win! And what is music then?--then music is Even as the flourish, when true subjects bow To a new-crowned monarch: such it is As are those dulcet sounds at break of day, That creep into the dreaming bridegroom's ear, And summon him to marriage. Now he goes With no less presence, but with much more love Than young Alcides, when he did redeem The virgin tribute paid by howling Troy To the sea monster. I stand here for sacrifice. Here, not only the feeling itself, born of the elastic and sanguine spirit which had never been touched by grief, but the images in which it comes arrayed to her fancy,--the bridegroom waked by music on his wedding-morn,--the new-crowned monarch,--the comparison of Bassanio to the young Alcides, and of herself to the daughter of Laomedon,--are all precisely what would have suggested themselves to the fine poetical imagination of Portia in such a moment. Her passionate exclamations of delight, when Bassanio has fixed on the right casket, are as strong as though she had despaired before. Fear and doubt she could repel; the native elasticity of her mind bore up against them; yet she makes us feel, that, as the sudden joy overpowers her almost to fainting, the disappointment would as certainly have killed her. How all the other passions fleet to air, As doubtful thoughts, and rash-embraced despair, And shudd'ring fear, and green-eyed jealousy? O love! be moderate, allay thy ecstasy; In measure rain thy joy scant this excess; I feel too much thy blessing: make it less, For fear I surfeit! Her subsequent surrender of herself in heart and soul, of her maiden freedom, and her vast possessions, can never be read without deep emotions; for not only all the tenderness and delicacy of a devoted woman, are here blended with all the dignity which becomes the princely heiress of Belmont, but the serious, measured self-possession of her address to her lover, when all suspense is over, and all concealment superfluous, is most beautifully consistent with the character. It is, in truth, an awful moment, that in which a gifted woman first discovers, that besides talents and powers, she has also passions and affections; when she first begins to suspect their vast importance in the sum of her existence; when she first confesses that her happiness is no longer in her own keeping, but is surrendered forever and forever into the dominion of another! The possession of uncommon powers of mind are so far from affording relief or resource in the first intoxicating surprise--I had almost said terror--of such a revolution, that they render it more intense. The sources of thought multiply beyond calculation the sources of feeling; and mingled, they rush together, a torrent deep as strong. Because Portia is endued with that enlarged comprehension which looks before and after, she does not feel the less, but the more: because from the height of her commanding intellect she can contemplate the force, the tendency, the consequences of her own sentiments--because she is fully sensible of her own situation, and the value of all she concedes--the concession is not made with less entireness and devotion of heart, less confidence in the truth and worth of her lover, than when Juliet, in a similar moment, but without any such intrusive reflections--any check but the instinctive delicacy of her sex, flings herself and her fortunes at the feet of her lover: And all my fortunes at thy foot I'll lay, And follow thee, my lord, through all the world.[11] In Portia's confession, which is not breathed from a moonlit balcony, but spoken openly in the presence of her attendants and vassals, there is nothing of the passionate self-abandonment of Juliet, nor of the artless simplicity of Miranda, but a consciousness and a tender seriousness, approaching to solemnity, which are not less touching. You see me, Lord Bassanio, where I stand, Such as I am: though for myself alone, I would not be ambitious in my wish, To wish myself much better; yet, for you, I would be trebled twenty times myself; A thousand times more fair, ten thousand times More rich; that only to stand high in your account, I might in virtues, beauties, livings, friends, Exceed account; but the full sum of me Is sum of something; which to term in gross, Is an unlesson'd girl, unschool'd, unpractis'd, Happy in this, she is not yet so old But she may learn; and happier than this, She is not bred so dull but she can learn; Happiest of all is, that her gentle spirit Commits itself to yours to be directed, As from her lord, her governor, her king. Myself and what is mine, to you and yours Is now converted. But now, I was the lord, Of this fair mansion, master of my servants, Queen o'er myself; and even now, but now, This house, these servants, and this same myself, Are yours, my lord. We must also remark that the sweetness, the solicitude, the subdued fondness which she afterwards displays, relative to the letter, are as true to the softness of her sex, as the generous self-denial with which she urges the departure of Bassanio, (having first given him a husband's right over herself and all her countless wealth,) is consistent with a reflecting mind, and a spirit at once tender, reasonable, and magnanimous. It is not only in the trial scene that Portia's acuteness, eloquence, and lively intelligence are revealed to us; they are displayed in the first instance, and kept up consistently to the end. Her reflections, arising from the most usual aspects of nature, and from the commonest incidents of life are in such a poetical spirit, and are at the same time so pointed, so profound, that they have passed into familiar and daily application, with all the force of proverbs. If to do, were as easy as to know what were good to do, chapels had been churches, and poor men's cottages princes' palaces. I can easier teach twenty what were good to be done, than be one of the twenty to follow mine own teaching. The crow doth sing as sweetly as the lark, When neither is attended; and, I think, The nightingale, if she should sing by day, When every goose is cackling, would be thought No better a musician than the wren. How many things by season, seasoned are To their right praise and true perfection! How far that little candle throws his beams! So shines a good deed in a naughty world. A substitute shines as brightly as a king, Until a king be by; and then his state Empties itself, as doth an inland brook, Into the main of waters. Her reflections on the friendship between her husband and Antonio are as full of deep meaning as of tenderness; and her portrait of a young coxcomb, in the same scene, is touched with a truth and spirit which show with what a keen observing eye she has looked upon men and things. ----I'll hold thee any wager, When we are both accouter'd 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; and speak of frays, Like a fine bragging youth; and tell quaint lies-- How honorable ladies sought my love, Which I denying, they fell sick and died; I could not do withal: then I'll repent, And wish, for all that, that I had not killed them; And twenty of these puny lies I'll tell, That men should swear, I have discontinued school Above a twelvemonth! And in the description of her various suitors, in the first scene with Nerissa, what infinite power, wit, and vivacity! She half checks herself as she is about to give the reins to her sportive humor: "In truth, I know it is a sin to be a mocker."--But if it carries her away, if is so perfectly good-natured, so temperately bright, so lady-like, it is ever without offence; and so far, most unlike the satirical, poignant, unsparing wit of Beatrice, "misprising what she looks on." In fact, I can scarce conceive a greater contrast than between the vivacity of Portia and the vivacity of Beatrice. Portia, with all her airy brilliance, is supremely soft and dignified; every thing she says or does, displays her capability for profound thought and feeling, as well as her lively and romantic disposition; and as I have seen in an Italian garden a fountain flinging round its wreaths of showery light, while the many-colored Iris hung brooding above it, in its calm and soul-felt glory; so in Portia the wit is ever kept subordinate to the poetry, and we still feel the tender, the intellectual, and the imaginative part of the character, as superior to, and presiding over its spirit and vivacity. In the last act, Shylock and his machinations being dismissed from our thoughts, and the rest of the _dramatis personæ_ assembled together at Belmont, all our interest and all our attention are riveted on Portia, and the conclusion leaves the most delightful impression on the fancy. The playful equivoque of the rings, the sportive trick she puts on her husband, and her thorough enjoyment of the jest, which she checks just as it is proceeding beyond the bounds of propriety, show how little she was displeased by the sacrifice of her gift, and are all consistent with her bright and buoyant spirit. In conclusion; when Portia invites her company to enter her palace to refresh themselves after their travels, and talk over "these events at full," the imagination, unwilling to lose sight of the brilliant group, follows them in gay procession from the lovely moonlight garden to marble halls and princely revels, to splendor and festive mirth, to love and happiness. Many women have possessed many of those qualities which render Portia so delightful. She is in herself a piece of reality, in whose possible existence we have no doubt: and yet a human being, in whom the moral, intellectual, and sentient faculties should be so exquisitely blended and proportioned to each other; and these again, in harmony with all outward aspects and influences probably never existed--certainly could not now exist. A woman constituted like Portia, and placed in this age, and in the actual state of society, would find society armed against her; and instead of being like Portia, a gracious, happy, beloved, and loving creature, would be a victim, immolated in fire to that multitudinous Moloch termed Opinion. With her, the world without would be at war with the world within; in the perpetual strife, either her nature would "be subdued to the element it worked in," and bending to a necessity it could neither escape nor approve, lose at last something of its original brightness; or otherwise--a perpetual spirit of resistance, cherished as a safeguard, might perhaps in the end destroy the equipoise; firmness would become pride and self-assurance; and the soft, sweet, feminine texture of the mind, settle into rigidity. Is there then no sanctuary for such a mind?--Where shall it find a refuge from the world?--Where seek for strength against itself? Where, but in heaven? Camiola, in Massinger's Maid of Honor, is said to emulate Portia; and the real story of Camiola (for she is an historical personage) is very beautiful. She was a lady of Messina, who lived in the beginning of the fourteenth century; and was the contemporary of Queen Joanna, of Petrarch and Boccaccio. It fell out in those days, that Prince Orlando of Arragon, the younger brother of the King of Sicily, having taken the command of a naval armament against the Neapolitans, was defeated, wounded, taken prisoner, and confined by Robert of Naples (the father of Queen Joanna) in one of his strongest castles. As the prince had distinguished himself by his enmity to the Neapolitans, and by many exploits against them, his ransom was fixed at an exorbitant sum, and his captivity was unusually severe; while the King of Sicily, who had some cause of displeasure against his brother, and imputed to him the defeat of his armament, refused either to negotiate for his release, or to pay the ransom demanded. Orlando, who was celebrated for his fine person and reckless valour, was apparently doomed to languish away the rest of his life in a dungeon, when Camiola Turinga, a rich Sicilian heiress, devoted the half of her fortune to release him. But as such an action might expose her to evil comments, she made it a condition, that Orlando should marry her. The prince gladly accepted the terms, and sent her the contract of marriage, signed by his hand; but no sooner was he at liberty, than he refused to fulfil it, and even denied all knowledge of his benefactress. Camiola appealed to the tribunal of state, produced the written contract, and described the obligations she had heaped on this ungrateful and ungenerous man; sentence was given against him, and he was adjudged to Camiola, not only as her rightful husband, but as a property which, according to the laws of war in that age, she had purchased with her gold. The day of marriage was fixed; Orlando presented himself with a splendid retinue; Camiola also appeared, decorated as for her bridal; but instead of bestowing her hand on the recreant, she reproached him in the presence of all with his breach of faith, declared her utter contempt for his baseness; and then freely bestowing on him the sum paid for his ransom, as a gift worthy of his mean soul, she turned away, and dedicated herself and her heart to heaven. In this resolution she remained inflexible, though the king and all the court united in entreaties to soften her. She took the veil; and Orlando, henceforth regarded as one who had stained his knighthood, and violated his faith, passed the rest of his life as a dishonored man, and died in obscurity. Camiola, in "The Maid of Honor," is, like Portia, a wealthy heiress, surrounded by suitors, and "queen o'er herself:" the character is constructed upon the same principles, as great intellectual power, magnanimity of temper, and feminine tenderness; but not only do pain and disquiet, and the change induced by unkind and inauspicious influences, enter into this sweet picture to mar and cloud its happy beauty,--but the portrait itself may be pronounced out of drawing;--for Massinger apparently had not sufficient delicacy of sentiment to work out his own conception of the character with perfect consistency. In his adaptation of the story he represents the mutual love of Orlando and Camiola as existing previous to the captivity of the former, and on his part declared with many vows of eternal faith, yet she requires a written contract of marriage before she liberates him. It will perhaps be said that she has penetrated his weakness, and anticipates his falsehood: miserable excuse!--how could a magnanimous woman love a man, whose falsehood she believes but _possible_?--or loving him, how could she deign to secure herself by such means against the consequences? Shakspeare and Nature never committed such a solecism. Camiola doubts before she has been wronged; the firmness and assurance in herself border on harshness. What in Portia is the gentle wisdom of a noble nature, appears, in Camiola, too much a spirit of calculation: it savors a little of the counting house. As Portia is the heiress of Belmont, and Camiola a merchant's daughter, the distinction may be proper and characteristic, but it is not in favor of Camiola. The contrast may be thus illustrated: CAMIOLA. You have heard of Bertoldo's captivity and the king's neglect, the greatness of his ransom; _fifty thousand crowns_, Adorni! _Two parts of my estate!_ Yet I so love the gentleman, for to you I will confess my weakness, that I purpose now, when he is forsaken by the king and his own hopes, to ransom him. _Maid of Honor_, _Act. 3_. PORTIA. What sum owes he the Jew? BASSANIO. For me--three thousand ducats. PORTIA. What! _no more!_ Pay him six thousand and deface the bond, Double six thousand, and then treble that, Before a friend of this description Shall lose a hair thro' my Bassanio's fault. ----You shall have gold To pay the _petty debt_ twenty times o'er. _Merchant of Venice._ Camiola, who is a Sicilian, might as well have been born at Amsterdam: Portia could have only existed in Italy. Portia is profound as she is brilliant; Camiola is sensible and sententious; she asserts her dignity very successfully; but we cannot for a moment imagine Portia as reduced to the necessity of asserting hers. The idiot Sylli, in "The Maid of Honor," who follows Camiola like one of the deformed dwarfs of old time, is an intolerable violation of taste and propriety, and it sensibly lowers our impression of the principal character. Shakspeare would never have placed Sir Andrew Aguecheek in constant and immediate approximation with such a woman as Portia. Lastly, the charm of the poetical coloring is wholly wanting in Camiola, so that when she is placed in contrast with the glowing eloquence, the luxuriant grace, the buoyant spirit of Portia, the effect is somewhat that of coldness and formality. Notwithstanding the dignity and the beauty of Massinger's delineation, and the noble self-devotion of Camiola, which I acknowledge and admire, the two characters will admit of no comparison as sources of contemplation and pleasure. * * * * * It is observable that something of the intellectual brilliance of Portia is reflected on the other female characters of the "Merchant of Venice," so as to preserve in the midst of contrast a certain harmony and keeping. Thus Jessica, though properly kept subordinate, is certainly A most beautiful pagan--a most sweet Jew. She cannot be called a sketch--or if a sketch, she is like one of those dashed off in glowing colors from the rainbow pallette of a Rubens; she has a rich tinge of orientalism shed over her, worthy of her eastern origin. In any other play, and in any other companionship than that of the matchless Portia, Jessica would make a very beautiful heroine of herself. Nothing can be more poetically, more classically fanciful and elegant, than the scenes between her and Lorenzo;--the celebrated moonlight dialogue, for instance, which we all have by heart. Every sentiment she utters interests us for her:--more particularly her bashful self-reproach, when flying in the disguise of a page;-- I am glad 'tis night, you do not look upon me, For I am much asham'd of my exchange; But love is blind, and lovers cannot see The pretty follies that themselves commit; For if they could, Cupid himself would blush To see me thus transformed to a boy. And the enthusiastic and generous testimony to the superior graces and accomplishments of Portia comes with a peculiar grace from her lips. Why, if two gods should play some heavenly match. And on the wager lay two earthly women, And Portia one, there must be something else Pawned with the other; for the poor rude world Hath not her fellow. We should not, however, easily pardon her for cheating her father with so much indifference, but for the perception that Shylock values his daughter far beneath his wealth. I would my daughter were dead at my foot, and the jewels in her ear!--would she were hearsed at my foot, and the ducats in her coffin! Nerissa is a good specimen of a common genus of characters; she is a clever confidential waiting-woman, who has caught a little of her lady's elegance and romance; she affects to be lively and sententious, falls in love, and makes her favor conditional on the fortune of the caskets, and in short mimics her mistress with good emphasis and discretion. Nerissa and the gay talkative Gratiano are as well matched as the incomparable Portia and her magnificent and captivating lover. ISABELLA. The character of Isabella, considered as a poetical delineation, is less mixed than that of Portia; and the dissimilarity between the two appears, at first view, so complete that we can scarce believe that the same elements enter into the composition of each. Yet so it is; they are portrayed as equally wise, gracious, virtuous, fair, and young; we perceive in both the same exalted principle and firmness of character; the same depth of reflection and persuasive eloquence; the same self-denying generosity and capability of strong affections; and we must wonder at that marvellous power by which qualities and endowments, essentially and closely allied, are so combined and modified as to produce a result altogether different. "O Nature! O Shakespeare! which of ye drew from the other?" Isabella is distinguished from Portia, and strongly individualized by a certain moral grandeur, a saintly grace, something of vestal dignity and purity, which render her less attractive and more imposing; she is "severe in youthful beauty," and inspires a reverence which would have placed her beyond the daring of one unholy wish or thought, except in such a man as Angelo-- O cunning enemy, that, to catch a saint, With saints dost bait thy hook! This impression of her character is conveyed from the very first, when Lucio, the libertine jester, whose coarse audacious wit checks at every feather, thus expresses his respect for her,-- I would not--though 'tis my familiar sin With maids to seem the lapwing, and to jest Tongue far from heart--play with all virgins so. I hold you as a thing enskyed, and sainted; By your renouncement an immortal spirit, And to be talked with in sincerity, As with a saint. A strong distinction between Isabella and Portia is produced by the circumstances in which they are respectively placed. Portia is a high-born heiress, "Lord of a fair mansion, master of her servants, queen o'er herself;" easy and decided, as one born to command, and used to it. Isabella has also the innate dignity which renders her "queen o'er herself," but she has lived far from the world and its pomps and pleasures; she is one of a consecrated sisterhood--a novice of St. Clare; the power to command obedience and to confer happiness are to her unknown. Portia is a splendid creature, radiant with confidence, hope, and joy. She is like the orange-tree, hung at once with golden fruit and luxuriant flowers, which has expanded into bloom and fragrance beneath favoring skies, and has been nursed into beauty by the sunshine and the dews of heaven. Isabella is like a stately and graceful cedar, towering on some alpine cliff, unbowed and unscathed amid the storm. She gives us the impression of one who has passed under the ennobling discipline of suffering and self-denial: a melancholy charm tempers the natural vigor of her mind: her spirit seems to stand upon an eminence, and look down upon the world as if already enskyed and sainted; and yet when brought in contact with that world which she inwardly despises, she shrinks back with all the timidity natural to her cloistral education. This union of natural grace and grandeur with the habits and sentiments of a recluse,--of austerity of life with gentleness of manner,--of inflexible moral principle with humility and even bashfulness of deportment, is delineated with the most beautiful and wonderful consistency. Thus when her brother sends to her, to entreat her mediation, her first feeling is fear, and a distrust in her own powers: ... Alas! what poor ability's in me To do him good? LUCIO. Essay the power you have. ISABELLA. My power, alas! I doubt. In the first scene with Angelo she seems divided between her love for her brother and her sense of his fault; between her self-respect and her maidenly bashfulness. She begins with a kind of hesitation "at war 'twixt will and will not:" and when Angelo quotes the law, and insists on the justice of his sentence, and the responsibility of his station, her native sense of moral rectitude and severe principles takes the lead, and she shrinks back:-- O just, but severe law! I _had_ a brother then--Heaven keep your honor! [_Retiring._ Excited and encouraged by Lucio, and supported by her own natural spirit, she returns to the charge,--she gains energy and self-possession as she proceeds, grows more earnest and passionate from the difficulty she encounters, and displays that eloquence and power of reasoning for which we had been already prepared by Claudio's first allusion to her:-- ... In her youth There is a prone and speechless dialect, Such as moves men; besides, she hath prosperous art, When she will play with reason and discourse, And well she can persuade. It is a curious coincidence that Isabella, exhorting Angelo to mercy, avails herself of precisely the same arguments, and insists on the self-same topics which Portia addresses to Shylock in her celebrated speech; but how beautifully and how truly is the distinction marked! how like, and yet how unlike! Portia's eulogy on mercy is a piece of heavenly rhetoric; it falls on the ear with a solemn measured harmony; it is the voice of a descended angel addressing an inferior nature: if not premeditated, it is at least part of a preconcerted scheme; while Isabella's pleadings are poured from the abundance of her heart in broken sentences, and with the artless vehemence of one who feels that life and death hang upon her appeal. This will be best understood by placing the corresponding passages in immediate comparison with each other. PORTIA. The quality of mercy is not strain'd, It droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven, Upon the place beneath: it is twice bless'd; It blesseth him that gives, and him that takes: 'Tis mightiest in the mightiest; it becomes The throned monarch better than his crown; His sceptre shows the force of temporal power, The attribute to awe and majesty, Wherein doth sit the dread and fear of kings. But mercy is above this sceptred sway-- It is enthron'd in the hearts of kings. ISABELLA. Well, believe this, No ceremony that to great ones 'longs, Not the king's crown, nor the deputed sword, The marshal's truncheon, nor the judge's robe. Become them with one half so good a grace As mercy does. PORTIA. Consider this-- That in the course of justice, none of us Should see salvation. We do pray for mercy; And that same prayer doth teach us all to render The deeds of mercy. ISABELLA. ... Alas! alas! Why all the souls that were, were forfeit once; And He, that might the 'vantage best have took, Found out the remedy. How would you be, If He, which is the top of judgment, should But judge you as you are? O, think on that, And mercy then will breathe within your lips, Like man new made! The beautiful things which Isabella is made to utter, have, like the sayings of Portia, become proverbial; but in spirit and character they are as distinct as are the two women. In all that Portia says, we confess the power of a rich poetical imagination, blended with a quick practical spirit of observation, familiar with the surfaces of things; while there is a profound yet simple morality, a depth of religious feeling, a touch of melancholy, in Isabella's sentiments, and something earnest and authoritative in the manner and expression, as though they had grown up in her mind from long and deep meditation in the silence and solitude of her convent cell:-- O it is excellent To have a giant's strength; but it is tyrannous To use it like a giant. Could great men thunder, As Jove himself does, Jove would ne'er be quiet: For every pelting, petty officer Would use his heaven for thunder; nothing but thunder Merciful Heaven! Thou rather with thy sharp and sulphurous bolt Split'st the unwedgeable and gnarled oak Than the soft myrtle. O but man, proud man! Drest in a little brief authority, Most ignorant of what he's most assured, His glassy essence, like an angry ape, Plays such fantastic tricks before high heaven, As make the angels weep. Great men may jest with saints, 'tis wit in them; But in the less, foul profanation. That in the captain's but a choleric word, Which in the soldier is flat blasphemy. Authority, although it err like others, Hath yet a kind of medicine in itself That skins the vice o' the top. Go to you, bosom; Knock there, and ask your heart what it doth know That's like my brother's fault: if it confess A natural guiltiness such as his is, Let it not sound a thought upon your tongue Against my brother's life. Let me be ignorant, and in nothing good, But graciously to know I am no better. The sense of death is most in apprehension; And the poor beetle that we tread upon, In corporal sufferance finds a pang as great As when a giant dies. 'Tis not impossible But one, the wicked'st caitiff on the ground, May seem as shy, as grave, as just, as absolute As Angelo; even so may Angelo, In all his dressings, characts, titles, forms, Be an arch villain. Her fine powers of reasoning, and that natural uprightness and purity which no sophistry can warp, and no allurement betray, are farther displayed in the second scene with Angelo. ANGELO. What would you do? ISABELLA. As much for my poor brother as myself; That is, were I under the terms of death, The impression of keen whips I'd wear as rubies, And strip myself to death as to a bed That, longing, I have been sick for, ere I'd yield My body up to shame. ANGELO. Then must your brother die. ISABELLA. And 'twere the cheaper way; Better it were a brother died at once, Than that a sister, by redeeming him, Should die forever. ANGELO. Were you not then cruel as the sentence, That you have slander'd so! ISABELLA. Ignominy in ransom, and free pardon, Are of two houses: lawful mercy is Nothing akin to foul redemption. ANGELO. You seem'd of late to make the law a tyrant; And rather proved the sliding of your brother A merriment than a vice. ISABELLA. O pardon me, my lord; it oft falls out, To have what we'd have, we speak not what we mean: I something do excuse the thing I hate, For his advantage that I dearly love. Towards the conclusion of the play we have another instance of that rigid sense of justice, which is a prominent part of Isabella's character, and almost silences her earnest intercession for her brother, when his fault is placed between her plea and her conscience. The Duke condemns the villain Angelo to death, and his wife Mariana entreats Isabella to plead for him. Sweet Isabel, take my part, Lend me your knees, and all my life to come I'll lend you all my life to do you service. Isabella remains silent, and Mariana reiterates her prayer. MARIANA. Sweet Isabel, do yet but kneel by me, Hold up your hands, say nothing, I'll speak all! O Isabel! will you not lend a knee? Isabella, thus urged, breaks silence and appeals to the Duke, not with supplication, or persuasion, but with grave argument, and a kind of dignified humility and conscious power, which are finely characteristic of the individual woman. Most bounteous Sir, Look, if it please you, on this man condemn'd, As if my brother liv'd; I partly think A due sincerity govern'd his deeds Till he did look on me; since it is so Let him not die. My brother had but justice, In that he did the thing for which he died. For Angelo, His art did not o'ertake his bad intent, That perish'd by the way: thoughts are no subjects. Intents, but merely thoughts. In this instance, as in the one before mentioned, Isabella's conscientiousness is overcome by the only sentiment which ought to temper justice into mercy, the power of affection and sympathy. Isabella's confession of the general frailty of her sex, has a peculiar softness, beauty, and propriety. She admits the imputation with all the sympathy of woman for woman; yet with all the dignity of one who felt her own superiority to the weakness she acknowledges. ANGELO. Nay, women are frail too. ISABELLA. Ay, as the glasses where they view themselves; Which are as easy broke as they make forms. Women! help heaven! men their creation mar In profiting by them. Nay, call us ten times frail, For we are soft as our complexions are, And credulous to false prints. Nor should we fail to remark the deeper interest which is thrown round Isabella, by one part of her character, which is betrayed rather than exhibited in the progress of the action; and for which we are not at first prepared, though it is so perfectly natural. It is the strong under-current of passion and enthusiasm flowing beneath this calm and saintly self-possession; it is the capacity for high feeling and generous and strong indignation, veiled beneath the sweet austere composure of the religious recluse, which, by the very force of contrast, powerfully impress the imagination. As we see in real life that where, from some external or habitual cause, a strong control is exercised over naturally quick feelings and an impetuous temper, they display themselves with a proportionate vehemence when that restraint is removed; so the very violence with which her passions burst forth, when opposed or under the influence of strong excitement, is admirably characteristic. Thus in her exclamation, when she first allows herself to perceive Angelo's vile design-- ISABELLA. Ha! little honor to be much believed, And most pernicious purpose;--seeming!--seeming I will proclaim thee, Angelo: look for it! Sign me a present pardon for my brother, Or with an outstretched throat I'll tell the world Aloud, what man thou art! And again, where she finds that the "outward tainted deputy," has deceived her-- O I will to him, and pluck out his eyes! Unhappy Claudio! wretched Isabel! Injurious world! most damned Angelo! She places at first a strong and high-souled confidence in her brother's fortitude and magnanimity, judging him by her own lofty spirit: I'll to my brother; Though he hath fallen by prompture of the blood, Yet hath he in him such a mind of honor, That had he twenty heads to tender down, On twenty bloody blocks, he'd yield them up Before his sister should her body stoop To such abhorr'd pollution. But when her trust in his honor is deceived by his momentary weakness, her scorn has a bitterness, and her indignation a force of expression almost fearful; and both are carried to an extreme, which is perfectly in character: O faithless coward! O dishonest wretch! Wilt thou be made a man out of my vice? Is't not a kind of incest to take life From thine own sister's shame? What should I think? Heaven shield, my mother play'd my father fair! For such a warped slip of wilderness Ne'er issued from his blood. Take my defiance; Die! perish! might but my bending down, Reprieve thee from thy fate, it should proceed. I'll pray a thousand prayers for thy death. No word to save thee. The whole of this scene with Claudio is inexpressibly grand in the poetry and the sentiment; and the entire play abounds in those passages and phrases which must have become trite from familiar and constant use and abuse, if their wisdom and unequalled beauty did not invest them with an immortal freshness and vigor, and a perpetual charm. The story of Measure for Measure is a tradition of great antiquity, of which there are several versions, narrative and dramatic. A contemptible tragedy, the _Promos and Cassandra_ of George Whetstone, is supposed, from various coincidences, to have furnished Shakspeare with the groundwork of the play; but the character of Isabella is, in conception and execution, all his own. The commentators have collected with infinite industry all the sources of the plot; but to the grand creation of Isabella, they award either silence or worse than silence. Johnson and the rest of the black-letter crew, pass over her without a word. One critic, a lady-critic too, whose name I will be so merciful as to suppress, treats Isabella as a coarse vixen. Hazlitt, with that strange perversion of sentiment and want of taste which sometimes mingle with his piercing and powerful intellect, dismisses Isabella with a slight remark, that "we are not greatly enamoured of her rigid chastity, nor can feel much confidence in the virtue that is sublimely good at another's expense." What shall we answer to such criticism? Upon what ground can we read the play from beginning to end, and doubt the angel-purity of Isabella, or contemplate her possible lapse from virtue? Such gratuitous mistrust is here a sin against the light of heaven. Having waste ground enough, Shall we desire to raze the sanctuary, And pitch our evils there? Professor Richardson is more just, and truly sums up her character as "amiable, pious, sensible, resolute, determined, and eloquent:" but his remarks are rather superficial. Schlegel's observations are also brief and general, and in no way distinguish Isabella from many other characters; neither did his plan allow him to be more minute. Of the play altogether, he observes very beautifully, "that the title Measure for Measure is in reality a misnomer, the sense of the whole being properly the triumph of mercy over strict justice:" but it is also true that there is "an original sin in the nature of the subject, which prevents us from taking a cordial interest in it."[12] Of all the characters, Isabella alone has our sympathy. But though she triumphs in the conclusion, her triumph is not produced in a pleasing manner. There are too many disguises and tricks, too many "by-paths and indirect crooked ways," to conduct us to the natural and foreseen catastrophe, which the Duke's presence throughout renders inevitable. This Duke seems to have a predilection for bringing about justice by a most unjustifiable succession of falsehoods and counterplots. He really deserves Lucio's satirical designation, who somewhere styles him "The Fantastical Duke of Dark Corners." But Isabella is ever consistent in her pure and upright simplicity, and in the midst of this simulation, expresses a characteristic disapprobation of the part she is made to play, To speak so indirectly I am loth: I would say the truth.[13] She yields to the supposed Friar with a kind of forced docility, because her situation as a religious novice, and his station, habit, and authority, as her spiritual director, demand this sacrifice. In the end we are made to feel that her transition from the convent to the throne has but placed this noble creature in her natural sphere: for though Isabella, as Duchess of Vienna, could not more command our highest reverence than Isabella, the novice of Saint Clare, yet a wider range of usefulness and benevolence, of trial and action, was better suited to the large capacity, the ardent affections, the energetic intellect, and firm principle of such a woman as Isabella, than the walls of a cloister. The philosophical Duke observes in the very first scene-- Spirits are not finely touched, But to fine issues: nor nature never lends The smallest scruple of her excellence, But like a thrifty goddess she determines, Herself the glory of a creditor, Both thanks and use.[14] This profound and beautiful sentiment is illustrated in the character and destiny of Isabella. She says, of herself, that "she has spirit to act whatever her heart approves;" and what her heart approves we know. In the convent, (which may stand here poetically for any narrow and obscure situation in which such a woman might be placed,) Isabella would not have been unhappy, but happiness would have been the result of an effort, or of the concentration of her great mental powers to some particular purpose; as St. Theresa's intellect, enthusiasm, tenderness, restless activity, and burning eloquence, governed by one overpowering sentiment of devotion, rendered her the most extraordinary of saints. Isabella, like St. Theresa, complains that the rules of her order are not sufficiently severe, and from the same cause,--that from the consciousness of strong intellectual and imaginative power, and of overflowing sensibility, she desires a more "strict restraint," or, from the continual, involuntary struggle against the trammels imposed, feels its necessity. ISABELLA. And have you nuns no further privileges? FRANCISCA. Are not these large enough? ISABELLA. Yes, truly; I speak, not as desiring more, But rather wishing a more strict restraint Upon the sisterhood! Such women as Desdemona and Ophelia would have passed their lives in the seclusion of a nunnery, without wishing, like Isabella, for stricter bonds, or planning, like St. Theresa, the reformation of their order, simply, because any restraint would have been efficient, as far as _they_ were concerned. Isabella, "dedicate to nothing temporal," might have found resignation through self government, or have become a religious enthusiast: while "place and greatness" would have appeared to her strong and upright mind, only a more extended field of action, a trust and a trial. The mere trappings of power and state, the gemmed coronal, the ermined robe, she would have regarded as the outward emblems of her earthly profession; and would have worn them with as much simplicity as her novice's hood and scapular; still, under whatever guise she might tread this thorny world--the same "angel of light." BEATRICE. Shakspeare has exhibited in Beatrice a spirited and faithful portrait of the fine lady of his own time. The deportment, language, manners, and allusions, are those of a particular class in a particular age; but the individual and dramatic character which forms the groundwork, is strongly discriminated; and being taken from general nature, belongs to every age. In Beatrice, high intellect and high animal spirits meet, and excite each other like fire and air. In her wit (which is brilliant without being imaginative) there is a touch of insolence, not unfrequent in women when the wit predominates over reflection and imagination. In her temper, too, there is a slight infusion of the termagant; and her satirical humor plays with such an unrespective levity over all subjects alike, that it required a profound knowledge of women to bring such a character within the pale of our sympathy. But Beatrice, though wilful, is not wayward; she is volatile, not unfeeling. She has not only an exuberance of wit and gayety, but of heart, and soul, and energy of spirit; and is no more like the fine ladies of modern comedy,--whose wit consists in a temporary allusion, or a play upon words, and whose petulance is displayed in a toss of the head, a flirt of the fan, or a flourish of the pocket handkerchief,--than one of our modern dandies is like Sir Philip Sydney. In Beatrice, Shakspeare has contrived that the poetry of the character shall not only soften, but heighten its comic effect. We are not only inclined to forgive Beatrice all her scornful airs, all her biting jests, all her assumption of superiority; but they amuse and delight us the more, when we find her, with all the headlong simplicity of a child, falling at once into the snare laid for her affections; when we see _her_, who thought a man of God's making not good enough for her, who disdained to be o'ermastered by "a piece of valiant dust," stooping like the rest of her sex, vailing her proud spirit, and taming her wild heart to the loving hand of him whom she had scorned, flouted, and misused, "past the endurance of a block." And we are yet more completely won by her generous enthusiastic attachment to her cousin. When the father of Hero believes the tale of her guilt; when Claudio, her lover, without remorse or a lingering doubt, consigns her to shame; when the Friar remains silent, and the generous Benedick himself knows not what to say, Beatrice, confident in her affections, and guided only by the impulses of her own feminine heart, sees through the inconsistency, the impossibility of the charge, and exclaims, without a moment's hesitation, O, on my soul, my cousin is belied! Schlegel, in his remarks on the play of "Much Ado about nothing," has given us an amusing instance of that sense of reality with which we are impressed by Shakspeare's characters. He says of Benedick and Beatrice, as if he had known them personally, that the exclusive direction of their pointed raillery against each other "is a proof of a growing inclination." This is not unlikely; and the same inference would lead us to suppose that this mutual inclination had commenced before the opening of the play. The very first words uttered by Beatrice are an inquiry after Benedick, though expressed with her usual arch impertinence:-- I pray you, is Signior Montanto returned from the wars, or no? I pray you, how many hath he killed and eaten in these wars? But how many hath he killed? for indeed I promised to eat all of his killing. And in the unprovoked hostility with which she falls upon him in his absence, in the pertinacity and bitterness of her satire, there is certainly great argument that he occupies much more of her thoughts than she would have been willing to confess, even to herself. In the same manner Benedick betrays a lurking partiality for his fascinating enemy; he shows that he has looked upon her with no careless eye, when he says, There's her cousin, (meaning Beatrice,) an' she were not possessed with a fury, excels her as much in beauty as the first of May does the last of December. Infinite skill, as well as humor, is shown in making this pair of airy beings the exact counterpart of each other; but of the two portraits, that of Benedick is by far the most pleasing, because the independence and gay indifference of temper, the laughing defiance of love and marriage, the satirical freedom of expression, common to both, are more becoming to the masculine than to the feminine character. Any woman might love such a cavalier as Benedick, and be proud of his affection; his valor, his wit, and his gayety sit so gracefully upon him! and his light scoffs against the power of love are but just sufficient to render more piquant the conquest of this "heretic in despite of beauty." But a man might well be pardoned who should shrink from encountering such a spirit as that of Beatrice, unless, indeed, he had "served an apprenticeship to the taming school." The wit of Beatrice is less good-humored than that of Benedick; or, from the difference of sex, appears so. It is observable that the power is throughout on her side, and the sympathy and interest on his: which, by reversing the usual order of things, seems to excite us _against the grain_, if I may use such an expression. In all their encounters she constantly gets the better of him, and the gentleman's wits go off halting, if he is not himself fairly _hors de combat_. Beatrice, woman-like, generally has the first word, and will have the last. Thus, when they first meet, she begins by provoking the merry warfare:-- I wonder that you will still be talking, Signior Benedick; nobody marks you. BENEDICK. What, my dear Lady Disdain! are you yet living? BEATRICE. Is it possible Disdain should die, while she hath such meet food to feed it as Signior Benedick? Courtesy itself must convert to disdain, if you come in her presence. It is clear that she cannot for a moment endure his neglect, and he can as little tolerate her scorn. Nothing that Benedick addresses to Beatrice personally can equal the malicious force of some of her attacks upon him: he is either restrained by a feeling of natural gallantry, little as she deserves the consideration due to her sex, (for a female satirist ever places herself beyond the pale of such forbearance,) or he is subdued by her superior volubility. He revenges himself, however, in her absence: he abuses her with such a variety of comic invective, and pours forth his pent-up wrath with such a ludicrous extravagance and exaggeration, that he betrays at once how deep is his mortification, and how unreal his enmity. In the midst of all this tilting and sparring of their nimble and fiery wits, we find them infinitely anxious for the good opinion of each other, and secretly impatient of each other's scorn: but Beatrice is the most truly indifferent of the two; the most assured of herself. The comic effect produced by their mutual attachment, which, however natural and expected, comes upon us with all the force of a surprise, cannot be surpassed: and how exquisitely characteristic the mutual avowal! BENEDICK. By my sword, Beatrice, thou lovest me. BEATRICE. Do not swear by it, and eat it. BENEDICK. I will swear by it that you love me; and I will make him eat it, that says, I love not you. BEATRICE. Will you not eat your word? BENEDICK. With no sauce that can be devised to it: I protest, I love thee. BEATRICE. Why, then, God forgive me! BENEDICK. What offence, sweet Beatrice? BEATRICE. You stayed me in a happy hour. I was about to protest, I loved you. BENEDICK. And do it with all thy heart. BEATRICE. I love you with so much of my heart, that there is none left to protest. But here again the dominion rests with Beatrice, and she appears in a less amiable light than her lover. Benedick surrenders his whole heart to her and to his new passion. The revulsion of feeling even causes it to overflow in an excess of fondness; but with Beatrice temper has still the mastery. The affection of Benedick induces him to challenge his intimate friend for her sake, but the affection of Beatrice does not prevent her from risking the life of her lover. The character of Hero is well contrasted with that of Beatrice, and their mutual attachment is very beautiful and natural. When they are both on the scene together, Hero has but little to say for herself: Beatrice asserts the rule of a master spirit, eclipses her by her mental superiority, abashes her by her raillery, dictates to her, answers for her, and would fain inspire her gentle-hearted cousin with some of her own assurance. Yes, faith; it is my cousin's duty to make a curtsey, and say, "Father, as it please you;" but yet, for all that, cousin, let him be a handsome fellow, or else make another curtsey, and, "Father, as it please me." But Shakspeare knew well how to make one character subordinate to another, without sacrificing the slightest portion of its effect; and Hero, added to her grace and softness, and all the interest which attaches to her as the sentimental heroine of the play, possesses an intellectual beauty of her own. When she has Beatrice at an advantage, she repays her with interest, in the severe, but most animated and elegant picture she draws of her cousin's imperious character and unbridled levity of tongue. The portrait is a little overcharged, because administered as a corrective, and intended to be overheard. But nature never fram'd a woman's heart Of prouder stuff than that of Beatrice: Disdain and scorn ride sparkling in her eyes, Misprising what they look on; and her wit Values itself so highly, that to her All matter else seems weak; she cannot love, Nor take no shape nor project of affection, She is so self-endeared. URSULA. Sure, sure, such carping is not commendable. HERO. No: not to be so odd, and from all fashions, As Beatrice is cannot be commendable: But who dare tell her so? If I should speak, She'd mock me into air: O she would laugh me Out of myself, press me to death with wit. Therefore let Benedick, like cover'd fire, Consume away in sighs, waste inwardly: It were a better death than die with mocks, Which is as bad as die with tickling. Beatrice never appears to greater advantage than in her soliloquy after leaving her concealment "in the pleached bower where honeysuckles, ripened by the sun, forbid the sun to enter;" she exclaims, after listening to this tirade against herself,-- What fire is in mine ears? Can this be true? Stand I condemned for pride and scorn so much? The sense of wounded vanity is lost in bitter feelings, and she is infinitely more struck by what is said in praise of Benedick, and the history of his supposed love for her than by the dispraise of herself. The immediate success of the trick is a most natural consequence of the self-assurance and magnanimity of her character; she is so accustomed to assert dominion over the spirits of others, that she cannot suspect the possibility of a plot laid against herself. A haughty, excitable, and violent temper is another of the characteristics of Beatrice; but there is more of impulse than of passion in her vehemence. In the marriage scene where she has beheld her gentle-spirited cousin,--whom she loves the more for those very qualities which are most unlike her own,--slandered, deserted, and devoted to public shame, her indignation, and the eagerness with which she hungers and thirsts after revenge, are, like the rest of her character, open, ardent, impetuous, but not deep or implacable. When she bursts into that outrageous speech-- Is he not approved in the height a villain that hath slandered, scorned, dishonored my kinswoman? O that I were a man! What! bear her in hand until they come to take hands; and then, with public accusation, uncovered slander, unmitigated rancor--O God, that I were a man! I would eat his heart in the market-place! And when she commands her lover, as the first proof of his affection, "to kill Claudio," the very consciousness of the exaggeration,--of the contrast between the real good-nature of Beatrice and the fierce tenor of her language, keeps alive the comic effect, mingling the ludicrous with the serious. It is remarkable that, notwithstanding the point and vivacity of the dialogue, few of the speeches of Beatrice are capable of a general application, or engrave themselves distinctly on the memory; they contain more mirth than matter; and though wit be the predominant feature in the dramatic portrait, Beatrice more charms and dazzles us by what she is than by what she _says_. It is not merely her sparkling repartees and saucy jests, it is the soul of wit, and the spirit of gayety in forming the whole character,--looking out from her brilliant eyes, and laughing on her full lips that pout with scorn,--which we have before us, moving and full of life. On the whole, we dismiss Benedick and Beatrice to their matrimonial bonds rather with a sense of amusement than a feeling of congratulation or sympathy; rather with an acknowledgment that they are well-matched, and worthy of each other than with any well-founded expectation of their domestic tranquillity. If, as Benedick asserts, they are both "too wise to woo peaceably," it may be added that both are too wise, too witty, and too wilful to live peaceably together. We have some misgivings about Beatrice--some apprehensions that poor Benedick will not escape the "predestinated scratched face," which he had foretold to him who should win and wear this quick-witted and pleasant-spirited lady; yet when we recollect that to the wit and imperious temper of Beatrice is united a magnanimity of spirit which would naturally place her far above all selfishness, and all paltry struggles for power--when we perceive, in the midst of her sarcastic levity and volubility of tongue, so much of generous affection, and such a high sense of female virtue and honor, we are inclined to hope the best. We think it possible that though the gentleman may now and then swear, and the lady scold, the native good-humor of the one, the really fine understanding of the other, and the value they so evidently attach to each other's esteem, will ensure them a tolerable portion of domestic felicity, and in this hope we leave them. ROSALIND. I come now to Rosalind, whom I should have ranked before Beatrice, inasmuch as the greater degree of her sex's softness and sensibility, united with equal wit and intellect, give her the superiority as a woman; but that, as a dramatic character, she is inferior in force. The portrait is one of infinitely more delicacy and variety, but of less strength and depth. It is easy to seize on the prominent features in the mind of Beatrice, but extremely difficult to catch and fix the more fanciful graces of Rosalind. She is like a compound of essences, so volatile in their nature, and so exquisitely blended, that on any attempt to analyze them, they seem to escape us. To what else shall we compare her, all-enchanting as she is?--to the silvery summer clouds which, even while we gaze on them, shift their hues and forms dissolving into air, and light, and rainbow showers?--to the May-morning, flush with opening blossoms and roseate dews, and "charm of earliest birds?"--to some wild and beautiful melody, such as some shepherd boy might "pipe to Amarillis in the shade?"--to a mountain streamlet, now smooth as a mirror in which the skies may glass themselves, and anon leaping and sparkling in the sunshine--or rather to the very sunshine itself? for so her genial spirit touches into life and beauty whatever it shines on! But this impression, though produced by the complete development of the character, and in the end possessing the whole fancy, is not immediate. The first introduction of Rosalind is less striking than interesting; we see her a dependant, almost a captive, in the house of her usurping uncle; her genial spirits are subdued by her situation, and the remembrance of her banished father her playfulness is under a temporary eclipse. I pray thee, Rosalind, sweet my coz, be merry! _is_ an adjuration which Rosalind needed not when once at liberty, and sporting "under the greenwood tree." The sensibility and even pensiveness of her demeanor in the first instance, render her archness and gayety afterwards, more graceful and more fascinating. Though Rosalind is a princess, she is a princess of Arcady; and notwithstanding the charming effect produced by her first scenes, we scarcely ever think of her with a reference to them, or associate her with a court, and the artificial appendages of her rank. She was not made to "lord it o'er a fair mansion," and take state upon her like the all-accomplished Portia; but to breathe the free air of heaven, and frolic among green leaves. She was not made to stand the siege of daring profligacy, and oppose high action and high passion to the assaults of adverse fortune, like Isabel; but to "fleet the time carelessly as they did i' the golden age." She was not made to bandy wit with lords, and tread courtly measures with plumed and warlike cavaliers, like Beatrice; but to dance on the green sward, and "murmur among living brooks a music sweeter than their own." Though sprightliness is the distinguishing characteristic of Rosalind, as of Beatrice, yet we find her much more nearly allied to Portia in temper and intellect. The tone of her mind is, like Portia's, genial and buoyant: she has something, too, of her softness and sentiment; there is the same confiding abandonment of self in her affections; but the characters are otherwise as distinct as the situations are dissimilar. The age, the manners, the circumstance in which Shakspeare has placed his Portia, are not beyond the bounds of probability; nay, have a certain reality and locality. We fancy her a contemporary of the Raffaelles and the Ariostos; the sea-wedded Venice, its merchants and Magnificos,--the Rialto, and the long canals,--rise up before us when we think of her. But Rosalind is surrounded with the purely ideal and imaginative; the reality is in the characters and in the sentiments, not in the circumstances or situation. Portia is dignified, splendid, and romantic; Rosalind is playful, pastoral, and picturesque: both are in the highest degree poetical, but the one is epic and the other lyric. Every thing about Rosalind breathes of "youth and youth's sweet prime." She is fresh as the morning, sweet as the dew-awakened blossoms, and light as the breeze that plays among them. She is as witty, as voluble, as sprightly as Beatrice; but in a style altogether distinct. In both, the wit is equally unconscious; but in Beatrice it plays about us like the lightning, dazzling but also alarming; while the wit of Rosalind bubbles up and sparkles like the living fountain, refreshing all around. Her volubility is like the bird's song; it is the outpouring of a heart filled to overflowing with life, love, and joy, and all sweet and affectionate impulses. She has as much tenderness as mirth, and in her most petulant raillery there is a touch of softness--"By this hand, it will not hurt a fly!" As her vivacity never lessens our impression of her sensibility, so she wears her masculine attire without the slightest impugnment of her delicacy. Shakspeare did not make the modesty of his women depend on their dress, as we shall see further when we come to Viola and Imogen. Rosalind has in truth "no doublet and hose in her disposition." How her heart seems to throb and flutter under her page's vest! What depth of love in her passion for Orlando! whether disguised beneath a saucy playfulness, or breaking forth with a fond impatience, or half betrayed in that beautiful scene where she faints at the sight of his 'kerchief stained with his blood! Here her recovery of her self-possession--her fears lest she should have revealed her sex--her presence of mind, and quick-witted excuse-- I pray you, tell your brother how well I counterfeited. and the characteristic playfulness which seems to return so naturally with her recovered senses,--are all as amusing as consistent. Then how beautifully is the dialogue managed between herself and Orlando! how well she assumes the airs of a saucy page, without throwing off her feminine sweetness! How her wit flutters free as air over every subject! With what a careless grace, yet with what exquisite propriety! For innocence hath a privilege in her To dignify arch jests and laughing eyes. And if the freedom of some of the expressions used by Rosalind or Beatrice be objected to, let it be remembered that this was not the fault of Shakspeare or the women, but generally of the age. Portia, Beatrice, Rosalind, and the rest lived in times when more importance was attached to things than to words; now we think more of words than of things; and happy are we in these later days of super-refinement, if we are to be saved by our verbal morality. But this is meddling with the province of the melancholy Jaques, and our argument is Rosalind. The impression left upon our hearts and minds by the character of Rosalind--by the mixture of playfulness, sensibility, and what the French (and we for lack of a better expression) call _naïveté_--is like a delicious strain of music. There is a depth of delight, and a subtlety of words to express that delight, which is enchanting. Yet when we call to mind particular speeches and passages, we find that they have a relative beauty and propriety, which renders it difficult to separate them from the context without injuring their effect She says some of the most charming things in the world, and some of the most humorous: but we apply them as phrases rather than as maxims, and remember them rather for their pointed felicity of expression and fanciful application, than for their general truth and depth of meaning. I will give a few instances:-- I was never so be-rhymed since Pythagoras' time--that I was an Irish rat--which I can hardly remember.[15] Good, my complexion! Dost thou think, though I am caparisoned like a man, that I have a doublet and hose in my disposition? We dwell here in the skirts of the forest, like fringe upon a petticoat. Love is merely a madness; and, I tell you, deserves as well a dark house and a whip as madmen do; and the reason why they are not so punished and cured is, that the lunacy is so ordinary that the whippers are in love too. A traveller! By my faith you have great reason to be sad. I fear you have sold your own lands to see other men's; then to have seen much and to have nothing, is to have rich eyes and poor hands. Farewell, Monsieur Traveller. Look you lisp, and wear strange suits; disable all the benefits of your own country; be out of love with your nativity, and almost chide God for making you that countenance you are; or I will scarce think you have swam in a gondola. Break an hour's promise in love! He that will divide a minute into a thousand parts, and break but a part of the thousandth part of a minute in the affairs of love, it may be said of him that Cupid hath clapp'd him o' the shoulder, but I warrant him heart-whole. Men have died from time to time, and worms have eaten them--but not for love. I could find in my heart to disgrace my man's apparel, and to cry like a woman; but I must comfort the weaker vessel, as doublet and hose ought to show itself courageous to petticoat. Rosalind has not the impressive eloquence of Portia, nor the sweet wisdom of Isabella. Her longest speeches are not her best; nor is her taunting address to Phebe, beautiful and celebrated as it is, equal to Phebe's own description of her. The latter, indeed, is more in earnest.[16] Celia is more quiet and retired: but she rather yields to Rosalind, than is eclipsed by her. She is as full of sweetness, kindness, and intelligence, quite as susceptible, and almost as witty, though she makes less display of wit. She is described as less fair and less gifted; yet the attempt to excite in her mind a jealousy of her lovelier friend, by placing them in comparison-- Thou art a fool; she robs thee of thy name; And thou wilt show more bright, and seem more virtuous, When she is gone-- fails to awaken in the generous heart of Celia any other feeling than an increased tenderness and sympathy for her cousin. To Celia, Shakspeare has given some of the most striking and animated parts of the dialogue; and in particular, that exquisite description of the friendship between her and Rosalind-- If she be a traitor, Why, so am I; we have still slept together, Rose at an instant, learned, played, eat together, And wheresoe'er we went, like Juno's swans, Still we were coupled and inseparable. The feeling of interest and admiration thus excited for Celia at the first, follows her through the whole play. We listen to her as to one who has made herself worthy of our love; and her silence expresses more than eloquence. Phebe is quite an Arcadian coquette; she is a piece of pastoral poetry. Audrey is only rustic. A very amusing effect is produced by the contrast between the frank and free bearing of the two princesses in disguise, and the scornful airs of the real Shepherdess. In the speeches of Phebe, and in the dialogue between her and Sylvius, Shakspeare has anticipated all the beauties of the Italian pastoral, and surpassed Tasso and Guarini. We find two among the most poetical passages of the play appropriated to Phebe; the taunting speech to Sylvius, and the description of Rosalind in her page's costume;--which last is finer than the portrait of Bathyllus in Anacreon. FOOTNOTES: [5] Artemisia Gentileschi, an Italian artist of the seventeenth century, painted one or two pictures, considered admirable as works of art, of which the subjects are the most vicious and barbarous conceivable. I remember one of these in the gallery of Florence, which I looked at once, but once, and wished then, as I do now, for the privilege of burning it to ashes. [6] Lucy Ashton, in the Bride of Lammermoor, may be placed next to Desdemona; Diana Vernon is (comparatively) a failure as every woman will allow; while the masculine lady Geraldine in Miss Edgeworth's tale of Ennui, and the intellectual Corinne are consistent, essential women; the distinction is more easily felt than analyzed. [7] Hazlitt's Essays, vol. ii. p. 167. [8] I am informed that the original German word is _geistreiche_ literally, _rich in soul or spirit_, a just and beautiful epithet. 2d. _Edit._ [9] In the "Mercatante di Venezia" of Ser. Giovanni, we have the whole story of Antonio and Bassanio, and part of the story but not the character of Portia. The incident of the caskets is from the Gesta Romanorum. [10] In that age, delicate points of law were not determined by the ordinary judges of the provinces, but by doctors of law, who were called from Bologna, Padua, and other places celebrated for their legal colleges. [11] Romeo and Juliet, Act ii. Scene 2 [12] Characters of Shakespeare's Plays. [13] Act iv. Scene 5. [14] _Use_, i. e. usury, interest. [15] In Shakspeare's time, there were people In Ireland, (there may be so still, for aught I know,) who undertook to charm rats to death, by chanting certain verses which acted as a spell. "Rhyme them to death, as they do rats in Ireland," is a line in one of Ben Jonson's comedies; this will explain Rosalind's humorous allusion. [16] Rousseau could describe such a character as Rosalind, but failed to represent it consistently. "N'est-ce pas de ton coeur que viennent les graces de ton enjouement? Tes railleries sont des signes d'intérêt plus touchants que les compliments d'un autre. Tu caresses quand tu folâtres. Tu ris, mais ton rire pénètre l'âme; tu ris, mais tu fais pleurer de tendresse et je te vois presque toujours sérieuse avec les indifférents" _Héloïse._ CHARACTERS OF PASSION AND IMAGINATION. JULIET. O Love! thou teacher'--O Grief! thou tamer--and Time, thou healer of human hearts!--bring hither all your deep and serious revelations!--And ye too, rich fancies of unbruised, unbowed youth--ye visions of long perished hopes--shadows of unborn joys--gay colorings of the dawn of existence! whatever memory hath treasured up of bright and beautiful in nature or in art; all soft and delicate images--all lovely forms--divinest voices and entrancing melodies--gleams of sunnier skies and fairer climes,--Italian moonlights and airs that "breathe of the sweet south,"--now, if it be possible, revive to my imagination--live once more to my heart! Come, thronging around me, all inspirations that wait on passion, on power, on beauty; give me to tread, not bold, and yet unblamed, within the inmost sanctuary of Shakspeare's genius, in Juliet's moonlight bower, and Miranda's enchanted isle! * * * * * It is not without emotion, that I attempt to touch on the character of Juliet. Such beautiful things have already been said of her--only to be exceeded in beauty by the subject that inspired them!--it is impossible to say any thing better; but it is possible to say something more. Such in fact is the simplicity, the truth, and the loveliness of Juliet's character, that we are not at first aware of its complexity, its depth, and its variety. There is in it an intensity of passion, a singleness of purpose, an entireness, a completeness of effect, which we feel as a whole; and to attempt to analyze the impression thus conveyed at once to soul and sense, is as if while hanging over a half-blown rose, and revelling in its intoxicating perfume, we should pull it asunder, leaflet by leaflet, the better to display its bloom and fragrance. Yet how otherwise should we disclose the wonders of its formation, or do justice to the skill of the divine hand that hath thus fashioned it in its beauty? Love, as a passion, forms the groundwork of the drama. Now, admitting the axiom of Rochefoucauld, that there is but one love, though a thousand different copies, yet the true sentiment itself has as many different aspects as the human soul of which it forms a part. It is not only modified by the individual character and temperament, but it is under the influence of climate and circumstance. The love that is calm in one moment, shall show itself vehement and tumultuous at another. The love that is wild and passionate in the south, is deep and contemplative in the north; as the Spanish or Roman girl perhaps poisons a rival, or stabs herself for the sake of a living lover, and the German or Russian girl pines into the grave for love of the false, the absent, or the dead. Love is ardent or deep, bold or timid, jealous or confiding, impatient or humble, hopeful or desponding--and yet there are not many loves, but one love. All Shakspeare's women, being essentially women, either love or have loved, or are capable of loving; but Juliet is love itself. The passion is her state of being, and out of it she has no existence. It is the soul within her soul; the pulse within her heart; the life-blood along her veins, "blending with every atom of her frame." The love that is so chaste and dignified in Portia--so airy-delicate and fearless in Miranda--so sweetly confiding in Perdita--so playfully fond in Rosalind--so constant in Imogen--so devoted in Desdemona--so fervent in Helen--so tender in Viola,--is each and all of these in Juliet. All these remind us of her; but she reminds us of nothing but her own sweet self; or if she does, it is of the Gismunda, or the Lisetta, or the Fiammetta of Boccaccio, to whom she is allied, not in the character or circumstances, but in the truly Italian spirit, the glowing, national complexion of the portrait.[17] There was an Italian painter who said that the secret of all effect in color consisted in white upon black, and black upon white. How perfectly did Shakspeare understand this secret of effect! and how beautifully he has exemplified it in Juliet? So shows a snowy dove trooping with crows, As yonder lady o'er her fellows shows! Thus she and her lover are in contrast with all around them. They are all love, surrounded with all hate; all harmony, surrounded with all discord: all pure nature, in the midst of polished and artificial life. Juliet, like Portia, is the foster child of opulence and splendor; she dwells in a fair city--she has been nurtured in a palace--she clasps her robe with jewels--she braids her hair with rainbow-tinted pearls; but in herself she has no more connection with the trappings around her, than the lovely exotic, transplanted from some Eden-like climate, has with the carved and gilded conservatory which has reared and sheltered its luxuriant beauty. But in this vivid impression of contrast, there is nothing abrupt or harsh. A tissue of beautiful poetry weaves together the principal figures, and the subordinate personages. The consistent truth of the costume, and the exquisite gradations of relief with which the most opposite hues are approximated, blend all into harmony. Romeo and Juliet are not poetical beings placed on a prosaic background; nor are they, like Thekla and Max in the Wallenstein, two angels of light amid the darkest and harshest, the most debased and revolting aspects of humanity; but every circumstance, and every personage, and every shade of character in each, tends to the development of the sentiment which is the subject of the drama. The poetry, too, the richest that can possibly be conceived, is interfused through all the characters; the splendid imagery lavished upon all with the careless prodigality of genius, and the whole is lighted up into such a sunny brilliance of effect, as though Shakspeare had really transported himself into Italy, and had drunk to intoxication of her genial atmosphere. How truly it has been said, that "although Romeo and Juliet are in love, they are not love-sick!" What a false idea would anything of the mere whining amoroso, give us of Romeo, such as he really is in Shakspeare--the noble, gallant, ardent, brave, and witty! And Juliet--with even less truth could the phrase or idea apply to her! The picture in "Twelfth Night" of the wan girl dying of love, "who pined in thought, and with a green and yellow melancholy," would never surely occur to us, when thinking on the enamored and impassioned Juliet, in whose bosom love keeps a fiery vigil, kindling tenderness into enthusiasm, enthusiasm into passion, passion into heroism! No, the whole sentiment of the play is of a far different cast. It is flushed with the genial spirit of the south: it tastes of youth, and of the essence of youth; of life, and of the very sap of life.[18] We have indeed the struggle of love against evil destinies, and a thorny world; the pain, the grief, the anguish, the terror, the despair; the aching adieu; the pang unutterable of parted affection; and rapture, truth, and tenderness trampled into an early grave: but still an Elysian grace lingers round the whole, and the blue sky of Italy bends over all! In the delineation of that sentiment which forms the groundwork of the drama, nothing in fact can equal the power of the picture, but its inexpressible sweetness and its perfect grace: the passion which has taken possession of Juliet's whole soul, has the force, the rapidity, the resistless violence of the torrent: but she is herself as "moving delicate," as fair, as soft, as flexible as the willow that bends over it, whose light leaves tremble even with the motion of the current which hurries beneath them. But at the same time that the pervading sentiment is never lost sight of, and is one and the same throughout, the individual part of the character in all its variety is developed, and marked with the nicest discrimination. For instance,--the simplicity of Juliet is very different from the simplicity of Miranda: her innocence is not the innocence of a desert island. The energy she displays does not once remind us of the moral grandeur of Isabel, or the intellectual power of Portia;--it is founded in the strength of passion, not in the strength of character:--it is accidental rather than inherent, rising with the tide of feeling or temper, and with it subsiding. Her romance is not the pastoral romance of Perdita, nor the fanciful romance of Viola; it is the romance of a tender heart and a poetical imagination. Her inexperience is not ignorance: she has heard that there is such a thing as falsehood, though she can scarcely conceive it. Her mother and her nurse have perhaps warned her against flattering vows and man's inconstancy; or she has even ----Turned the tale by Ariosto told, Of fair Olympia, loved and left, of old! Hence that bashful doubt, dispelled almost as soon as felt-- Ah, gentle Romeo! If thou dost love, pronounce it faithfully. That conscious shrinking from her own confession-- Fain would I dwell on form; fain, fain deny What I have spoke! The ingenuous simplicity of her avowal-- Or if thou think'st I am too quickly won, I'll frown, and be perverse, and say thee nay, So thou wilt woo--but else, not for the world! In truth, fair Montague, I am too fond, And therefore thou may'st think my 'havior light, But trust me, gentleman, I'll prove more true Than those who have more cunning to be strange. And the proud yet timid delicacy, with which she throws herself for forbearance and pardon upon the tenderness of him she loves, even for the love she bears him-- Therefore pardon me, And not impute this yielding to light love, Which the dark night hath so discovered. In the alternative, which she afterwards places before her lover with such a charming mixture of conscious delicacy and girlish simplicity, there is that jealousy of female honor which precept and education have infused into her mind, without one real doubt of his truth, or the slightest hesitation in her self-abandonment: for she does not even wait to hear his asseverations;-- But if thou mean'st not well, I do beseech thee To cease thy suit, and leave me to my grief. ROMEO. So thrive my soul-- JULIET. A thousand times, good night! But all these flutterings between native impulses and maiden fears become gradually absorbed, swept away, lost, and swallowed up in the depth and enthusiasm of confiding love. My bounty is as boundless as the sea, My love as deep; the more I give to you The more I have--for both are _infinite_! What a picture of the young heart, that sees no bound to its hopes, no end to its affections! For "what was to hinder the thrilling tide of pleasure which had just gushed from her heart, from flowing on without stint or measure, but experience, which she was yet without? What was to abate the transport of the first sweet sense of pleasure which her heart had just tasted, but indifference, to which she was yet a stranger? What was there to check the ardor of hope, of faith, of constancy, just rising in her breast, but disappointment, which she had never yet felt?"[19] Lord Byron's Haidée is a copy of Juliet in the Oriental costume, but the development is epic, not dramatic.[20] I remember no dramatic character, conveying the same impression of singleness of purpose, and devotion of heart and soul, except the Thekla of Schiller's Wallenstein; she is the German Juliet; far unequal, indeed, but conceived, nevertheless, in a kindred spirit. I know not if critics have ever compared them, or whether Schiller is supposed to have had the English, or rather the Italian, Juliet in his fancy when he portrayed Thekla; but there are some striking points of coincidence, while the national distinction in the character of the passion leaves to Thekla a strong cast of originality.[21] The _Princess_ Thekla is, like Juliet, the heiress of rank and opulence; her first introduction to us, in her full dress and diamonds, does not impair the impression of her softness and simplicity. We do not think of them, nor do we sympathize with the complaint of her lover,-- The dazzle of the jewels which played round you Hid the beloved from me. We almost feel the reply of Thekla before she utters it,-- Then you saw me Not with your heart, but with your eyes! The timidity of Thekla in her first scene, her trembling silence in the commencement, and the few words she addresses to her mother, remind us of the unobtrusive simplicity of Juliet's first appearance; but the impression is different; the one is the shrinking violet, the other the unexpanded rose-bud. Thekla and Max Piccolomini are, like Romeo and Juliet, divided by the hatred of their fathers. The death of Max, and the resolute despair of Thekla, are also points of resemblance; and Thekla's complete devotion, her frank yet dignified abandonment of all disguise, and her apology for her own unreserve, are quite in Juliet's style,-- I ought to be less open, ought to hide My heart more from thee--so decorum dictates: But where in this place wouldst thou seek for truth If in my mouth thou didst not find it? The same confidence, innocence, and fervor of affection, distinguish both heroines; but the love of Juliet is more vehement, the love of Thekla is more calm, and reposes more on itself; the love of Juliet gives us the idea of infinitude, and that of Thekla of eternity: the love of Juliet flows on with an increasing tide, like the river pouring to the ocean; and the love of Thekla stands unalterable, and enduring as the rock. In the heart of Thekla love shelters as in a home; but in the heart of Juliet he reigns a crowned king,--"he rides on its pants triumphant!" As women, they would divide the loves and suffrages of mankind, but not as dramatic characters: the moment we come to look nearer, we acknowledge that it is indeed "rashness and ignorance to compare Schiller with Shakspeare."[22] Thekla is a fine conception in the German spirit, but Juliet is a lovely and palpable creation. The coloring in which Schiller has arrayed his Thekla is pale, sombre, vague, compared with the strong individual marking, the rich glow of life and reality, which distinguish Juliet. One contrast in particular has always struck me; the two beautiful speeches in the first interview between Max and Thekla, that in which she describes her father's astrological chamber, and that in which he replies with reflections on the influence of the stars, are said to "form in themselves a fine poem." They do so; but never would Shakspeare have placed such extraneous description and reflection in the mouths of _his_ lovers. Romeo and Juliet speak of themselves only; they see only themselves in the universe, all things else are as an idle matter. Not a word they utter, though every word is poetry--not a sentiment or description, though dressed in the most luxuriant imagery, but has a direct relation to themselves, or to the situation in which they are placed, and the feelings that engross them: and besides, it may be remarked of Thekla, and generally of all tragedy heroines in love, that, however beautifully and distinctly characterized, we see the passion only under one or two aspects at most, or in conflict with some one circumstance or contending duty or feeling. In Juliet alone we find it exhibited under every variety of aspect, and every gradation of feeling it could possibly assume in a delicate female heart: as we see the rose, when passed through the colors of the prism, catch and reflect every tint of the divided ray, and still it is the same sweet rose. I have already remarked the quiet manner in which Juliet steals upon us in her first scene, as the serene, graceful girl, her feelings as yet unawakened, and her energies all unknown to herself, and unsuspected by others. Her silence and her filial deference are charming:-- I'll look to like, if looking liking move; But no more deep will I endart mine eye, Than your consent shall give it strength to fly Much in the same unconscious way we are impressed with an idea of her excelling loveliness:-- Beauty too rich for use, for earth too dear! and which could make the dark vault of death "a feasting presence full of light." Without any elaborate description, we behold Juliet, as she is reflected in the heart of her lover, like a single bright star mirrored in the bosom of a deep, transparent well. The rapture with which he dwells on the "white wonder of her hand;" on her lips, That even in pure and vestal modesty Still blush, as thinking their own kisses sin. And then her eyes, "two of the fairest stars in all the heavens!" In his exclamation in the sepulchre, Ah, dear Juliet, why art thou yet so fair! there is life and death, beauty and horror, rapture and anguish combined. The Friar's description of her approach, O, so light a step Will ne'er wear out the everlasting flint! and then her father's similitude, Death lies on her, like an untimely frost Upon the sweetest flower of all the field;-- all these mingle into a beautiful picture of youthful, airy, delicate grace, feminine sweetness, and patrician elegance. And our impression of Juliet's loveliness and sensibility is enhanced, when we find it overcoming in the bosom of Romeo a previous love for another. His visionary passion for the cold, inaccessible Rosaline, forms but the prologue, the threshold, to the true--the real sentiment which succeeds to it. This incident, which is found in the original story, has been retained by Shakspeare with equal feeling and judgment; and far from being a fault in taste and sentiment, far from prejudicing us against Romeo, by casting on him, at the outset of the piece, the stigma of inconstancy, it becomes, if properly considered, a beauty in the drama, and adds a fresh stroke of truth to the portrait of the lover. Why, after all, should we be offended at what does not offend Juliet herself? for in the original story we find that her attention is first attracted towards Romeo, by seeing him "fancy sick and pale of cheer," for love of a cold beauty. We must remember that in those times every young cavalier of any distinction devoted himself, at his first entrance into the world, to the service of some fair lady, who was selected to be his fancy's queen; and the more rigorous the beauty, and the more hopeless the love, the more honorable the slavery. To go about "metamorphosed by a mistress," as Speed humorously expresses it,[23]--to maintain her supremacy in charms at the sword's point; to sigh; to walk with folded arms; to be negligent and melancholy, and to show a careless desolation, was the fashion of the day. The Surreys, the Sydneys, the Bayards, the Herberts of the time--all those who were the mirrors "in which the noble youth did dress themselves," were of this fantastic school of gallantry--the last remains of the age of chivalry; and it was especially prevalent in Italy. Shakspeare has ridiculed it in many places with exquisite humor; but he wished to show us that it has its serious as well as its comic aspect. Romeo, then, is introduced to us with perfect truth of costume, as the thrall of a dreaming, fanciful passion for the scornful Rosaline, who had forsworn to love; and on her charms and coldness, and on the power of love generally, he descants to his companions in pretty phrases, quite in the style and taste of the day.[24] Why then, O brawling love, O loving hate, O any thing, of nothing first create! O heavy lightness, serious vanity, Mis-shapen chaos of well-seeming forms! Love is a smoke raised with the fume of sighs; Being purg'd, a fire sparkling in lover's eyes; Being vex'd, a sea nourish'd with lover's tears. But when once he has beheld Juliet, and quaffed intoxicating draughts of hope and love from her soft glance, how all these airy fancies fade before the soul-absorbing reality! The lambent fire that played round his heart, burns to that heart's very core. We no longer find him adorning his lamentations in picked phrases, or making a confidant of his gay companions: he is no longer "for the numbers that Petrarch flowed in;" but all is consecrated, earnest, rapturous, in the feeling and the expression. Compare, for instance, the sparkling antithetical passages just quoted, with one or two of his passionate speeches to or of Juliet:-- Heaven is here, Where Juliet lives! &c. Ah Juliet! if the measure of thy joy Be heaped like mine, and that thy skill be more To blazon it, then sweeten with thy breath This neighbour air, and let rich music's tongue Unfold the imagin'd happiness, that both Receive in either by this dear encounter. Come what sorrow may, It cannot countervail the exchange of joy That one short minute gives me in her sight. How different! and how finely the distinction is drawn! His first passion is indulged as a waking dream, a reverie of the fancy; it is depressing, indolent, fantastic; his second elevates him to the third heaven, or hurries him to despair. It rushes to its object through all impediments, defies all dangers, and seeks at last a triumphant grave, in the arms of her he so loved. Thus Romeo's previous attachment to Rosaline is so contrived as to exhibit to us another variety in that passion, which is the subject of the poem, by showing us the distinction between the fancied and the real sentiment. It adds a deeper effect to the beauty of Juliet; it interests us in the commencement for the tender and romantic Romeo; and gives an individual reality to his character, by stamping him like an historical, as well as a dramatic portrait, with the very spirit of the age in which he lived.[25] It may be remarked of Juliet as of Portia, that we not only trace the component qualities in each as they expand before us in the course of the action, but we seem to have known them previously, and mingle a consciousness of their past, with the interest of their present and their future. Thus, in the dialogue between Juliet and her parents, and in the scenes with the Nurse, we seem to have before us the whole of her previous education and habits: we see her, on the one hand, kept in severe subjection by her austere parents; and on the other, fondled and spoiled by a foolish old nurse--a situation perfectly accordant with the manners of the time. Then Lady Capulet comes sweeping by with her train of velvet, her black hood, her fan, and her rosary--the very _beau-idéal_ of a proud Italian matron of the fifteenth century, whose offer to poison Romeo in revenge for the death of Tybalt, stamps her with one very characteristic trait of the age and country. Yet she loves her daughter; and there is a touch of remorseful tenderness in her lamentation over her, which adds to our impression of the timid softness of Juliet, and the harsh subjection in which she has been kept:-- But one, poor one!--one poor and loving child, But one thing to rejoice and solace in, And cruel death hath catched it from my sight! Capulet, as the jovial, testy old man, the self willed, violent, tyrannical father,--to whom his daughter is but a property, the appanage of his house, and the object of his pride,--is equal as a portrait: but both must yield to the Nurse, who is drawn with the most wonderful power and discrimination. In the prosaic homeliness of the outline, and the magical illusion of the coloring, she reminds us of some of the marvellous Dutch paintings, from which, with all their coarseness, we start back as from a reality. Her low humor, her shallow garrulity, mixed with the dotage and petulance of age--her subserviency, her secrecy, and her total want of elevated principle, or even common honesty--are brought before us like a living and palpable truth. Among these harsh and inferior spirits is Juliet placed; her haughty parents, and her plebeian nurse, not only throw into beautiful relief her own native softness and elegance, but are at once the cause and the excuse of her subsequent conduct. She trembles before her stern mother and her violent father: but, like a petted child, alternately cajoles and commands her nurse. It is her old foster-mother who is the confidante of her love. It is the woman who cherished her infancy, who aids and abets her in her clandestine marriage. Do we not perceive how immediately our impression of Juliet's character would have been lowered, if Shakspeare had placed her in connection with any common-place dramatic waiting-woman?--even with Portia's adroit Nerissa, or Desdemona's Emilia? By giving her the Nurse for her confidante, the sweetness and dignity of Juliet's character are preserved inviolate to the fancy, even in the midst of all the romance and wilfulness of passion. The natural result of these extremes of subjection and independence, is exhibited in the character of Juliet, as it gradually opens upon us. We behold it in the mixture of self-will and timidity, of strength and weakness, of confidence and reserve, which are developed as the action of the play proceeds. We see it in the fond eagerness of the indulged girl, for whose impatience the "nimblest of the lightning-winged loves" had been too slow a messenger; in her petulance with her nurse; in those bursts of vehement feeling, which prepare us for the climax of passion at the catastrophe; in her invectives against Romeo, when she hears of the death of Tybalt; in her indignation when the nurse echoes those reproaches, and the rising of her temper against unwonted contradiction:-- NURSE. Shame come to Romeo! JULIET. Blistered be thy tongue, For such a wish! he was not born to shame. Then comes that revulsion of strong feeling, that burst of magnificent exultation in the virtue and honor of her lover:-- Upon _his_ brow Shame is ashamed to sit, For 'tis a throne where Honor may be crown'd Sole monarch of the universal earth! And this, by one of those quick transitions of feeling which belong to the character, is immediately succeeded by a gush of tenderness and self-reproach-- Ah, poor my lord, what tongue shall smooth thy name, When I, thy three-hours' wife, have mangled it? With the same admirable truth of nature, Juliet is represented as at first bewildered by the fearful destiny that closes round her; reverse is new and terrible to one nursed in the lap of luxury, and whose energies are yet untried. Alack, alack, that heaven should practise stratagems Upon so soft a subject as myself. While a stay remains to her amid the evils that encompass her, she clings to it. She appeals to her father--to her mother-- Good father, I beseech you on my knees, Hear me with patience but to speak one word! * * * * Ah, sweet my mother, cast me not away! Delay this marriage for a month,--a week! And, rejected by both, she throws herself upon her nurse in all the helplessness of anguish, of confiding affection, of habitual dependence-- O God! O nurse! how shall this be prevented? Some comfort, nurse! The old woman, true to her vocation, and fearful lest her share in these events should be discovered, counsels her to forget Romeo and marry Paris; and the moment which unveils to Juliet the weakness and baseness of her confidante, is the moment which reveals her to herself. She does not break into upbraidings; it is no moment for anger; it is incredulous amazement, succeeded by the extremity of scorn and abhorrence, which take possession of her mind. She assumes at once and asserts all her own superiority, and rises to majesty in the strength of her despair. JULIET. Speakest thou from thy heart? NURSE. Aye, and from my soul too;--or else Beshrew them both! JULIET. Amen! This final severing of all the old familiar ties of her childhood-- Go, counsellor! Thou and my bosom henceforth shall be twain! and the calm, concentrated force of her resolve, If all else fail,--myself have power to die; have a sublime pathos. It appears to me also an admirable touch of nature, considering the master-passion which, at this moment, rules in Juliet's soul, that she is as much shocked by the nurse's dispraise of her lover, as by her wicked, time-serving advice. This scene is the crisis in the character; and henceforth we see Juliet assume a new aspect. The fond, impatient, timid girl, puts on the wife and the woman: she has learned heroism from suffering, and subtlety from oppression. It is idle to criticize her dissembling submission to her father and mother; a higher duty has taken place of that which she owed to them; a more sacred tie has severed all others. Her parents are pictured as they are, that no feeling for them may interfere in the slightest degree with our sympathy for the lovers. In the mind of Juliet there is no struggle between her filial and her conjugal duties, and there ought to be none. The Friar, her spiritual director, dismisses her with these instructions:-- Go home,--be merry,--give consent To marry Paris; and she obeys him. Death and suffering in every horrid form she is ready to brave, without fear or doubt, "to live an unstained wife:" and the artifice to which she has recourse, which she is even instructed to use, in no respect impairs the beauty of the character; we regard it with pain and pity; but excuse it, as the natural and inevitable consequence of the situation in which she is placed. Nor should we forget, that the dissimulation, as well as the courage of Juliet, though they spring from passion, are justified by principle:-- My husband is on earth, my faith in heaven; How shall my faith return again to earth, Unless that husband send it me from heaven? In her successive appeals to her father, her mother, her nurse, and the Friar, she seeks those remedies which would first suggest themselves to a gentle and virtuous nature, and grasps her dagger only as the last resource against dishonor and violated faith;-- God join'd my heart with Romeo's,--thou our hands. And ere this hand, by thee to Romeo seal'd, Shall be the label to another deed, Or my true heart with treacherous revolt Turn to another,--_this_ shall slay them both! Thus, in the very tempest and whirlwind of passion and terror, preserving, to a certain degree, that moral and feminine dignity which harmonizes with our best feelings, and commands our unreproved sympathy. I reserve my remarks on the catastrophe, which demands separate consideration; and return to trace from the opening, another and distinguishing trait in Juliet's character. In the extreme vivacity of her imagination, and its influence upon the action, the language, the sentiments of the drama, Juliet resembles Portia; but with this striking difference. In Portia, the imaginative power, though developed in a high degree, is so equally blended with the other intellectual and moral faculties, that it does not give us the idea of excess. It is subject to her nobler reason; it adorns and heightens all her feelings; it does not overwhelm or mislead them. In Juliet, it is rather a part of her southern temperament, controlling and modifying the rest of her character; springing from her sensibility, hurried along by her passions, animating her joys, darkening her sorrows, exaggerating her terrors, and, in the end, overpowering her reason. With Juliet, imagination is, in the first instance, if not the source, the medium of passion; and passion again kindles her imagination. It is through the power of imagination that the eloquence of Juliet is so vividly poetical; that every feeling, every sentiment comes to her, clothed in the richest imagery, and is thus reflected from her mind to ours. The poetry is not here the mere adornment, the outward garnishing of the character; but its result, or rather blended with its essence. It is indivisible from it, and interfused through it like moonlight through the summer air. To particularize is almost impossible, since the whole of the dialogue appropriated to Juliet is one rich stream of imagery: she speaks in pictures and sometimes they are crowded one upon another--thus in the balcony scene-- I have no joy of this contract to-night: It is too rash, too unadvised, too sudden, Too like the lightning which doth cease to be Ere one can say it lightens. This bud of love, by summer's ripening breath, May prove a beauteous flower when next we meet. Again, O for a falconer's voice To lure this tassel-gentle back again! Bondage is hoarse, and may not speak aloud, Else would I tear the cave where Echo lies, And make her airy tongue more hoarse than mine With repetition of my Romeo's name. Here there are three images in the course of six lines. In the same scene, the speech of twenty-two lines, beginning, Thou know'st the mask of night is on my face, contains but one figurative expression, _the mask of night_; and every one reading this speech with the context, must have felt the peculiar propriety of its simplicity, though perhaps without examining the cause of an omission which certainly is not fortuitous. The reason lies in the situation and in the feeling of the moment; where confusion, and anxiety, and earnest self-defence predominate, the excitability and play of the imagination would be checked and subdued for the time. In the soliloquy of the second act, where she is chiding at the nurse's delay:-- O she is lame! Love's heralds should be thoughts, That ten times faster glide than the sun's beams, Driving back shadows over low'ring hills: Therefore do nimble-pinioned doves draw Love, And therefore hath the wind-swift Cupid wings! How beautiful! how the lines mount and float responsive to the sense! She goes on-- Had she affections, and warm youthful blood, She'd be as swift in motion as a ball; My words should bandy her to my sweet love, And his to me! The famous soliloquy, "Gallop apace, ye fiery-footed steeds," teems with luxuriant imagery. The fond adjuration, "Come night! come Romeo! _come thou day in night_!" expresses that fulness of enthusiastic admiration for her lover, which possesses her whole soul; but expresses it as only Juliet could or would have expressed it,--in a bold and beautiful metaphor. Let it be remembered, that, in this speech, Juliet is not supposed to be addressing an audience, nor even a confidante; and I confess I have been shocked at the utter want of taste and refinement in those who, with coarse derision, or in a spirit of prudery, yet more gross and perverse, have dared to comment on this beautiful "Hymn to the Night," breathed out by Juliet in the silence and solitude of her chamber. She is thinking aloud; it is the young heart "triumphing to itself in words." In the midst of all the vehemence with which she calls upon the night to bring Romeo to her arms, there is something so almost infantine in her perfect simplicity, so playful and fantastic in the imagery and language, that the charm of sentiment and innocence is thrown over the whole; and her impatience, to use her own expression, is truly that of "a child before a festival, that hath new robes and may not wear them." It is at the very moment too that her whole heart and fancy are abandoned to blissful anticipation, that the nurse enters with the news of Romeo's banishment; and the immediate transition from rapture to despair has a most powerful effect. It is the same shaping spirit of imagination which, in the scene with the Friar, heaps together all images of horror that ever hung upon a troubled dream. O bid me leap, rather than marry Paris, From off the battlements of yonder tower, Or walk in thievish ways; or bid me lurk Where serpents are--chain me with roaring bears, Or shut me nightly in a charnel-house O'ercovered quite with dead men's rattling bones; Or bid me go into a new made grave; Or hide me with a dead man in his shroud;-- Things that to hear them told have made me tremble But she immediately adds,-- And I will do it without fear or doubt, To live an unstained wife to my sweet love! In the scene where she drinks the sleeping potion, although her spirit does not quail, nor her determination falter for an instant, her vivid fancy conjures up one terrible apprehension after another, till gradually, and most naturally in such a mind once thrown off its poise, the horror rises to frenzy--her imagination realizes its own hideous creations, and she _sees_ her cousin Tybalt's ghost.[26] In particular passages this luxuriance of fancy may seem to wander into excess. For instance,-- O serpent heart, hid with a flowery face! Did ever dragon keep so fair a cave? Beautiful tyrant! fiend angelical! Dove-feather'd raven! wolfish ravening lamb, &c. Yet this highly figurative and antithetical exuberance of language is defended by Schlegel on strong and just grounds; and to me also it appears natural, however critics may argue against its taste or propriety.[27] The warmth and vivacity of Juliet's fancy, which plays like a light over every part of her character--which animates every line she utters--which kindles every thought into a picture, and clothes her emotions in visible images, would naturally, under strong and unusual excitement, and in the conflict of opposing sentiments, run into some extravagance of diction.[28] With regard to the termination of the play, which has been a subject of much critical argument, it is well known that Shakspeare, following the old English versions, has departed from the original story of Da Porta;[29] and I am inclined to believe that Da Porta, in making Juliet waken from her trance while Romeo yet lives, and in his terrible final scene between the lovers, has himself departed from the old tradition, and, as a romance, has certainly improved it; but that which is effective in a narrative, is not always calculated for the drama, and I cannot but agree with Schlegel, that Shakspeare has done well and wisely in adhering to the old story. Can we doubt for a moment that he who has given us the catastrophe of Othello, and the tempest scene in Lear, might also have adopted these additional circumstances of horror in the fate of the lovers, and have so treated them as to harrow up our very soul--had it been his object to do so? But apparently it was _not_. The tale is one, Such as, once heard, in gentle heart destroys All pain but pity. It is in truth a tale of love and sorrow, not of anguish and terror. We behold the catastrophe afar off with scarcely a wish to avert it. Romeo and Juliet _must_ die; their destiny is fulfilled; they have quaffed off the cup of life, with all its infinite of joys and agonies, in one intoxicating draught. What have they to do more upon this earth? Young, innocent, loving and beloved, they descend together into the tomb: but Shakspeare has made that tomb a shrine of martyred and sainted affection consecrated for the worship of all hearts,--not a dark charnel vault, haunted by spectres of pain, rage, and desperation. Romeo and Juliet are pictured lovely in death as in life; the sympathy they inspire does not oppress us with that suffocating sense of horror, which in the altered tragedy makes the fall of the curtain a relief; but all pain is lost in the tenderness and poetic beauty of the picture. Romeo's last speech over his bride is not like the raving of a disappointed boy: in its deep pathos, its rapturous despair, its glowing imagery, there is the very luxury of life and love. Juliet, who had drunk off the sleeping potion in a fit of frenzy, wakes calm and collected-- I do remember well where I should be, And there I am--Where is my Romeo? The profound slumber in which her senses have been steeped for so many hours has tranquillized her nerves, and stilled the fever in her blood; she wakes "like a sweet child who has been dreaming of something promised to it by its mother," and opens her eyes to ask for it-- ... Where is my Romeo? she is answered at once,-- Thy husband in thy bosom here lies dead. This is enough: she sees at once the whole horror of her situation--she sees it with a quiet and resolved despair--she utters no reproach against the Friar--makes no inquiries, no complaints, except that affecting remonstrance-- O churl--drink all, and leave no friendly drop To help me after! All that is left to her is to die, and she dies. The poem, which opened with the enmity of the two families, closes with their reconciliation over the breathless remains of their children; and no violent, frightful, or discordant feeling is suffered to mingle with that soft impression of melancholy left within the heart, and which Schlegel compares to one long, endless sigh. "A youthful passion," says Goëthe, (alluding to one of his own early attachments,) "which is conceived and cherished without any certain object, may be compared to a shell thrown from a mortar by night: it rises calmly in a brilliant track, and seems to mix, and even to dwell for a moment, with the stars of heaven; but at length it falls--it bursts--consuming and destroying all around, even as itself expires." * * * * * To conclude: love, considered under its poetical aspect, is the union of passion and imagination and accordingly, to one of these, or to both, all the qualities of Juliet's mind and heart (unfolding and varying as the action of the drama proceeds) may be finally traced; the former concentrating all those natural impulses, fervent affections and high energies, which lend the character its internal charm, its moral power and individual interest: the latter diverging from all those splendid and luxuriant accompaniments which invest it with its external glow, its beauty, its vigor, its freshness, and its truth. With all this immense capacity of affection and imagination, there is a deficiency of reflection and of moral energy arising from previous habit and education: and the action of the drama, while it serves to develope the character, appears but its natural and necessary result. "Le mystère de l'existence," said Madame de Staël to her daughter, "c'est le rapport de nos erreurs avec nos peines." HELENA. In the character of Juliet we have seen the passionate and the imaginative blended in an equal degree, and in the highest conceivable degree as combined with delicate female nature. In Helena we have a modification of character altogether distinct; allied, indeed, to Juliet as a picture of fervent, enthusiastic, self-forgetting love, but differing wholly from her in other respects; for Helen is the union of strength of passion with strength of character. "To be tremblingly alive to gentle impressions, and yet be able to preserve, when the prosecution of a design requires it, an immovable heart amidst even the most imperious causes of subduing emotion, is perhaps not an impossible constitution of mind, but it is the utmost and rarest endowment of humanity."[30] Such a character, almost as difficult to delineate in fiction as to find in real life, has Shakspeare given us in Helena; touched with the most soul-subduing pathos, and developed with the most consummate skill. Helena, as a woman, is more passionate than imaginative; and, as a character, she bears the same relation to Juliet that Isabel bears to Portia. There is equal unity of purpose and effect, with much less of the glow of imagery and the external coloring of poetry in the sentiments, language, and details. It is passion developed under its most profound and serious aspect; as in Isabella, we have the serious and the thoughtful, not the brilliant side of intellect. Both Helena and Isabel are distinguished by high mental powers, tinged with a melancholy sweetness; but in Isabella the serious and energetic part of the character is founded in religious principle; in Helena it is founded in deep passion. There never was, perhaps, a more beautiful picture of a woman's love, cherished in secret, not self-consuming in silent languishment--not pining in thought--not passive and "desponding over its idol"--but patient and hopeful, strong in its own intensity, and sustained by its own fond faith. The passion here reposes upon itself for all its interest; it derives nothing from art or ornament or circumstance; it has nothing of the picturesque charm or glowing romance of Juliet; nothing of the poetical splendor of Portia, or the vestal grandeur of Isabel. The situation of Helena is the most painful and degrading in which a woman can be placed. She is poor and lowly; she loves a man who is far her superior in rank, who repays her love with indifference, and rejects her hand with scorn. She marries him against his will; he leaves her with contumely on the day of their marriage, and makes his return to her arms depend on conditions apparently impossible.[31] All the circumstances and details with which Helena is surrounded, are shocking to our feelings and wounding to our delicacy: and yet the beauty of the character is made to triumph over all: and Shakspeare, resting for all his effect on its internal resources and its genuine truth and sweetness, has not even availed himself of some extraneous advantages with which Helen is represented in the original story. She is the Giletta di Narbonna of Boccaccio. In the Italian tale, Giletta is the daughter of a celebrated physician attached to the court of Roussillon; she is represented as a rich heiress, who rejects many suitors of worth and rank, in consequence of her secret attachment to the young Bertram de Roussillon. She cures the King of France of a grievous distemper, by one of her fathers prescriptions; and she asks and receives as her reward the young Count of Roussillon as her wedded husband. He forsakes her on their wedding day, and she retires, by his order, to his territory of Roussillon. There she is received with honor, takes state upon her in her husband's absence as the "lady of the land," administers justice, and rules her lord's dominions so wisely and so well, that she is universally loved and reverenced by his subjects. In the mean time, the Count, instead of rejoining her, flies to Tuscany, and the rest of the story is closely followed in the drama. The beauty, wisdom, and royal demeanor of Giletta are charmingly described, as well as her fervent love for Bertram. But Helena, in the play, derives no dignity or interest from place or circumstance, and rests for all our sympathy and respect solely upon the truth and intensity of her affections. She is indeed represented to us as one Whose beauty did astonish the survey Of richest eyes: whose words all ears took captive; Whose dear perfection, hearts that scorn'd to serve. Humbly called mistress. As her dignity is derived from mental power, without any alloy of pride, so her humility has a peculiar grace. If she feels and repines over her lowly birth, it is merely as an obstacle which separates her from the man she loves. She is more sensible to his greatness than her own littleness: she is continually looking from herself up to him, not from him down to herself. She has been bred up under the same roof with him; she has adored him from infancy. Her love is not "th' infection taken in at the eyes," nor kindled by youthful romance: it appears to have taken root in her being; to have grown with her years; and to have gradually absorbed all her thoughts and faculties, until her fancy "carries no favor in it but Bertram's," and "there is no living, none, if Bertram be away." It may be said that Bertram, arrogant, wayward, and heartless, does not justify this ardent and deep devotion. But Helena does not behold him with our eyes; but as he is "sanctified in her idolatrous fancy." Dr. Johnson says he cannot reconcile himself to a man who marries Helena like a coward, and leaves her like a profligate. This is much too severe; in the first place, there is no necessity that we _should_ reconcile ourselves to him. In this consists a part of the wonderful beauty of the character of Helena--a part of its womanly truth, which Johnson, who accuses Bertram, and those who so plausibly defend him, did not understand. If it never happened in real life, that a woman, richly endued with heaven's best gifts, loved with all her heart, and soul, and strength, a man unequal to or unworthy of her, and to whose faults herself alone was blind--I would give up the point: but if it be in nature, why should it not be in Shakspeare? We are not to look into Bertram's character for the spring and source of Helena's love for him, but into her own. She loves Bertram,--because she loves him!--a woman's reason,--but here, and sometimes elsewhere, all-sufficient. And although Helena tells herself that she loves in vain, a conviction stronger than reason tells her that she does not: her love is like a religion, pure, holy, and deep: the blessedness to which she has lifted her thoughts is forever before her; to despair would be a crime,--it would be to cast herself away and die. The faith of her affection, combining with the natural energy of her character, believing all things possible makes them so. It could say to the mountain of pride which stands between her and her hopes, "Be thou removed!" and it is removed. This is the solution of her behavior in the marriage scene, where Bertram, with obvious reluctance and disdain, accepts her hand, which the king, his feudal lord and guardian, forces on him. Her maidenly feeling is at first shocked, and she shrinks back-- That you are well restor'd, my lord, I am glad: Let the rest go. But shall she weakly relinquish the golden opportunity, and dash the cup from her lips at the moment it is presented? Shall she cast away the treasure for which she has ventured both life and honor, when it is just within her grasp? Shall she, after compromising her feminine delicacy by the public disclosure of her preference, be thrust back into shame, "to blush out the remainder of her life," and die a poor, lost, scorned thing? This would be very pretty and interesting and characteristic in Viola or Ophelia, but not at all consistent with that high determined spirit, that moral energy, with which Helena is portrayed. Pride is the only obstacle opposed to her. She is not despised and rejected as a woman, but as a poor physician's daughter; and this, to an understanding so clear, so strong, so just as Helena's, is not felt as an unpardonable insult. The mere pride of rank and birth is a prejudice of which she cannot comprehend the force, because her mind towers so immeasurably above it; and, compared to the infinite love which swells within her own bosom, it sinks into nothing. She cannot conceive that he, to whom she has devoted her heart and truth, her soul, her life, her service, must not one day love her in return; and once her own beyond the reach of fate, that her cares, her caresses, her unwearied patient tenderness, will not at last "win her lord to look upon her"-- ... For time will bring on summer, When briars shall have leaves as well as thorns, And be as sweet as sharp. It is this fond faith which, hoping all things, enables her to endure all things:--which hallows and dignifies the surrender of her woman's pride, making it a sacrifice on which virtue and love throw a mingled incense. The scene in which the Countess extorts from Helen the confession of her love, must, as an illustration, be given here. It is perhaps, the finest in the whole play, and brings out all the striking points of Helen's character, to which I have already alluded. We must not fail to remark, that though the acknowledgment is wrung from her with an agony which seems to convulse her whole being, yet when once she has given it solemn utterance, she recovers her presence of mind, and asserts her native dignity. In her justification of her feelings and her conduct, there is neither sophistry, nor self-deception, nor presumption, but a noble simplicity, combined with the most impassioned earnestness; while the language naturally rises in its eloquent beauty, as the tide of feeling, now first let loose from the bursting heart, comes pouring forth in words. The whole scene is wonderfully beautiful. HELENA. What is your pleasure, madam? COUNTESS. You know, Helen, I am a mother to you. HELENA. Mine honorable mistress. COUNTESS Nay, a mother; Why not a mother? When I said a mother, Methought you saw a serpent: what's in mother, That you start at it? I say, I am your mother: And put you in the catalogue of those That were enwombed mine: 'tis often seen, Adoption strives with nature; and choice breeds A native slip to us from foreign seeds. You ne'er oppress'd me with a mother's groan, Yet I express to you a mother's care;-- God's mercy, maiden! does it curd thy blood, To say, I am thy mother? What's the matter That this distempered messenger of wet, The many-color'd Iris, rounds thine eye? Why?--that you are my daughter? HELENA. That I am not. COUNTESS. I say, I am your mother. HELENA. Pardon, madam: The Count Roussillon cannot be my brother: I am from humble, he from honor'd name; No note upon my parents, his all noble: My master, my dear lord he is: and I His servant live, and will his vassal die: He must not be my brother. COUNTESS. Nor I your mother? HELENA. You are my mother, madam; would you were (So that my lord, your son, were not my brother,) Indeed my mother, or, were you both our mothers, I care no more for, than I do for Heaven,[32] So I were not his sister; can't no other, But I, your daughter, he must be my brother? COUNTESS. Yes, Helen, you might be my daughter-in-law; God shield, you mean it not! daughter and mother So strive upon your pulse: what, pale again? My fear hath catch'd your fondness: now I see The mystery of your loneliness, and find Your salt tears' head. Now to all sense 'tis gross You love my son; invention is asham'd, Against the proclamation of thy passion, To say, thou dost not: therefore tell me true; But tell me, then, 'tis so:--for, look, thy cheeks Confess it, one to the other. Speak, is't so? If it be so, you have wound a goodly clue! If it be not, forswear't: howe'er, I charge thee, As heaven shall work in me for thy avail, To tell me truly. HELENA. Good madam, pardon me! COUNTESS. Do you love my son? HELENA. Your pardon, noble mistress! COUNTESS. Love you my son? HELENA. Do not you love him, madam? COUNTESS. Go not about; my love hath in't a bond, Whereof the world takes note: come, come, disclose The state of your affection; for your passions Have to the full appeach'd. HELENA. Then I confess Here on my knee, before high heaven and you, That before you, and next unto high heaven, I love your son:-- My friends were poor, but honest; so's my love Be not offended; for it hurts not him, That he is loved of me; I follow him not By any token of presumptuous suit; Nor would I have him till I do deserve him: Yet never know how that desert should be. I know I love in vain; strive against hope; Yet, in this captious and untenable sieve, I still pour in the waters of my love, And lack not to love still: thus, Indian-like, Religious in mine error, I adore The sun that looks upon his worshipper, But knows of him no more. My dearest madam, Let not your hate encounter with my love, For loving where you do: but, if yourself, Whose aged honor cites a virtuous youth, Did ever in so true a flame of liking, Wish chastely, and love dearly, that your Dian Was both herself and love; O then give pity To her, whose state is such, that cannot choose But lend and give, where she is sure to lose; That seeks not to find that her search implies, But, riddle-like, lives sweetly where she dies. This old Countess of Roussillon is a charming sketch. She is like one of Titian's old women, who still, amid their wrinkles, remind us of that soul of beauty and sensibility, which must have animated them when young. She is a fine contrast to Lady Capulet--benign, cheerful, and affectionate; she has a benevolent enthusiasm, which neither age, nor sorrow, nor pride can wear away. Thus, when she is brought to believe that Helen nourishes a secret attachment for her son, she observes-- Even so it was with me when I was young! This thorn Doth to our rose of youth rightly belong, It is the show and seal of nature's truth, When love's strong passion is impress'd in youth. Her fond, maternal love for Helena, whom she has brought up: her pride in her good qualities overpowering all her own prejudices of rank and birth, are most natural in such a mind; and her indignation against her son, however strongly expressed, never forgets the mother. What angel shall Bless this unworthy husband? he cannot thrive Unless _her_ prayers, whom heaven delights to hear And loves to grant, reprieve him from the wrath Of greatest justice. Which of them both Is dearest to me--I have no skill in sense To make distinction. This is very skilfully, as well as delicately conceived. In rejecting those poetical and accidental advantages which Giletta possesses in the original story, Shakspeare has substituted the beautiful character of the Countess; and he has contrived, that, as the character of Helena should rest for its internal charm on the depth of her own affections, so it should depend for its _external_ interest on the affection she inspires. The enthusiastic tenderness of the old Countess, the admiration and respect of the King, Lafeu, and all who are brought in connection with her, make amends for the humiliating neglect of Bertram; and cast round Helen that collateral light, which Giletta in the story owes to other circumstances, striking indeed, and well imagined, but not (I think) so finely harmonizing with the character. It is also very natural that Helen, with the intuitive discernment of a pure and upright mind, and the penetration of a quick-witted woman, should be the first to detect the falsehood and cowardice of the boaster Parolles, who imposes on every one else. It has been remarked, that there is less of poetical imagery in this play than in many of the others. A certain solidity in Helen's character takes place of the ideal power; and with consistent truth of keeping, the same predominance of feeling over fancy, of the reflective over the imaginative faculty, is maintained through the whole dialogue. Yet the finest passages in the serious scenes are those appropriated to her; they are familiar and celebrated as quotations, but fully to understand their beauty and truth, they should be considered relatively to her character and situation; thus, when in speaking of Bertram, she says, "that he is one to whom she wishes well," the consciousness of the disproportion between her words and her feelings draws from her this beautiful and affecting observation, so just in itself, and so true to her situation, and to the sentiment which fills her whole heart:-- 'Tis pity That wishing well had not a body in't Which might be felt: that we the poorer born, Whose baser stars do shut us up in wishes, Might with effects of them follow our friends, And act what we must only think, which never Returns us thanks. Some of her general reflections have a sententious depth and a contemplative melancholy, which remind us of Isabella:-- Our remedies oft in themselves do lie Which we ascribe to heaven; the fated sky Gives us free scope; only doth backward pull Our slow designs when we ourselves are dull. Impossible be strange events to those That weigh their pains in sense; and do suppose What hath been cannot be. He that of greatest works is finisher, Oft does them by the weakest minister; So holy writ in babes hath judgment shown, When judges have been babes. Oft expectation fails, and most oft there Where most it promises; and oft it hits, Where hope is coldest, and despair most sits. Her sentiments in the same manner are remarkable for the union of profound sense with the most passionate feeling; and when her language is figurative, which is seldom, the picture presented to us is invariably touched either with a serious, a lofty, or a melancholy beauty. For instance:-- It were all one That I should love a bright particular star, And think to wed it--he's so far above me. And when she is brought to choose a husband from among the young lords at the court, her heart having already made its election, the strangeness of that very privilege for which she had ventured all, nearly overpowers her, and she says beautifully:-- The blushes on my cheeks thus whisper me, "We blush that thou shouldst choose;--but be refused, Let the white death sit on that cheek for ever We'll ne'er come there again!" In her soliloquy after she has been forsaken by Bertram, the beauty lies in the intense feeling, the force and simplicity of the expressions. There is little imagery, and wherever it occurs, it is as bold as it is beautiful, and springs out of the energy of the sentiment, and the pathos of the situation. She has been reading his cruel letter. _Till I have no wife I have nothing in France._ 'Tis bitter! Nothing in France, until he has no wife! Thou shalt have none, Roussillon, none in France, Then hast thou all again. Poor lord! is't I That chase thee from thy country, and expose Those tender limbs of thine to the event Of the none-sparing war? And is it I That drive thee from the sportive court, where thou Wast shot at with fair eyes, to be the mark Of smoky muskets? O you leaden messengers, That ride upon the violent speed of fire, Fly with false aim! move the still-piercing air, That sings with piercing, do not touch my lord! Whoever shoots at him, I set him there; Whoever charges on his forward breast, I am the caitiff that do hold him to it; And though I kill him not, I am the cause His death was so effected; better 'twere I met the ravin lion when he roared With sharp constraint of hunger; better 'twere That all the miseries which nature owes, Were mine at once. No, no, although The air of paradise did fan the house, And angels officed all; I will be gone. Though I cannot go the length of those who have defended Bertram on almost every point, still I think the censure which Johnson has passed on the character is much too severe. Bertram is certainly not a pattern hero of romance, but full of faults such as we meet with every day in men of his age and class. He is a bold, ardent, self-willed youth, just dismissed into the world from domestic indulgence, with an excess of aristocratic and military pride, but not without some sense of true honor and generosity. I have lately read a defence of Bertram's character, written with much elegance and plausibility. "The young Count," says this critic, "comes before us possessed of a good heart, and of no mean capacity, but with a haughtiness which threatens to dull the kinder passions, and to cloud the intellect. This is the inevitable consequence of an illustrious education. The glare of his birthright has dazzled his young faculties. Perhaps the first words he could distinguish were from the important nurse, giving elaborate directions about his lordship's pap. As soon as he could walk, a crowd of submissive vassals doffed their caps, and hailed his first appearance on his legs. His spelling book had the arms of the family emblazoned on the cover. He had been accustomed to hear himself called the great, the mighty son of Roussillon, ever since he was a helpless child. A succession of complacent tutors would by no means destroy the illusion; and it is from their hands that Shakspeare receives him, while yet in his minority. An overweening pride of birth is Bertram's great foible. To cure him of this, Shakspeare sends him to the wars, that he may win fame for himself, and thus exchange a shadow for a reality. There the great dignity that his valor acquired for him places him on an equality with any one of his ancestors, and he is no longer beholden to them alone for the world's observance. Thus in his own person he discovers there is something better than mere hereditary honors; and his heart is prepared to acknowledge that the entire devotion of a Helen's love is of more worth than the court-bred smiles of a princess."[33] It is not extraordinary that, in the first instance, his spirit should revolt at the idea of marrying his mother's "waiting gentlewoman," or that he should refuse her; yet when the king, his feudal lord, whose despotic authority was in this case legal and indisputable, threatens him with the extremity of his wrath and vengeance, that he should submit himself to a hard necessity, was too consistent with the manners of the time to be called _cowardice_. Such forced marriages were not uncommon even in our own country, when the right of wardship, now vested in the Lord Chancellor, was exercised with uncontrolled and often cruel despotism by the sovereign. There is an old ballad, in which the king bestows a maid of low degree on a noble of his court, and the undisguised scorn and reluctance of the knight and the pertinacity of the lady, are in point. He brought her down full forty pound Tyed up within a glove, "Fair maid, I'll give the same to thee, Go seek another love." "O I'll have none of your gold," she said, "Nor I'll have none of your fee; But your fair bodye I must have, The king hath granted me." Sir William ran and fetched her then, Five hundred pounds in gold, Saying, "Fair maid, take this to thee, My fault will ne'er be told." "'Tis not the gold that shall me tempt," These words then answered she; "But your own bodye I must have, The king hath granted me." "Would I had drank the water clear, When I did drink the wine, Rather than my shepherd's brat Should be a ladye of mine!"[34] Bertram's disgust at the tyranny which has made his freedom the payment of another's debt, which has united him to a woman whose merits are not towards him--whose secret love, and long-enduring faith, are yet unknown and untried--might well make his bride distasteful to him. He flies her on the very day of their marriage, most like a wilful, haughty, angry boy, but not like a profligate. On other points he is not so easily defended; and Shakspeare, we see, has not defended, but corrected him. The latter part of the play is more perplexing than pleasing. We do not, indeed, repine with Dr. Johnson, that Bertram, after all his misdemeanors, is "dismissed to happiness;" but, not withstanding the clever defence that has been made for him, he has our pardon rather than our sympathy; and for mine own part, I could find it easier to love Bertram as Helena does, than to excuse him; her love for him is his best excuse. PERDITA. In Viola and Perdita the distinguishing traits are the same--sentiment and elegance; thus we associate them together, though nothing can be more distinct to the fancy than the Doric grace of Perdita, compared to the romantic sweetness of Viola. They are created out of the same materials, and are equal to each other in the tenderness, delicacy, and poetical beauty of the conception. They are both more imaginative than passionate; but Perdita is the more imaginative of the two. She is the union of the pastoral and romantic with the classical and poetical, as if a dryad of the woods had turned shepherdess. The perfections with which the poet has so lavishly endowed her, sit upon her with a certain careless and picturesque grace, "as though they had fallen upon her unawares." Thus Belphoebe, in the Fairy Queen, issues from the flowering forest with hair and garments all besprinkled with the leaves and blossoms they had entangled in their flight; and so arrayed by chance and "heedless hap," takes all hearts with "stately presence and with princely port,"--most like to Perdita! The story of Florizel and Perdita is but an episode in the "Winter's Tale;" and the character of Perdita is properly kept subordinate to that of her mother, Hermione: yet the picture is perfectly finished in every part;--Juliet herself is not more firmly and distinctly drawn. But the coloring in Perdita is more silvery light and delicate; the pervading sentiment more touched with the ideal; compared with Juliet, she is like a Guido hung beside a Georgione, or one of Paesiello's airs heard after one of Mozart's. The qualities which impart to Perdita her distinct individuality, are the beautiful combination of the pastoral with the elegant--of simplicity with elevation--of spirit with sweetness. The exquisite delicacy of the picture is apparent. To understand and appreciate its effective truth and nature, we should place Perdita beside some of the nymphs of Arcadia, or the Chloris' and Sylvias of the Italian pastorals, who, however graceful in themselves, when opposed to Perdita, seem to melt away into mere poetical abstractions;--as, in Spenser, the fair but fictitious Florimel, which the subtle enchantress had moulded out of snow, "vermeil tinctured," and informed with an airy spirit, that knew "all wiles of woman's wits," fades and dissolves away, when placed next to the real Florimel, in her warm, breathing, human loveliness. Perdita does not appear till the fourth act, and the whole of the character is developed in the course of a single scene, (the third,) with a completeness of effect which leaves nothing to be required--nothing to be supplied. She is first introduced in the dialogue between herself and Florizel, where she compares her own lowly state to his princely rank, and expresses her fears of the issue of their unequal attachment. With all her timidity and her sense of the distance which separates her from her lover, she breathes not a single word which could lead us to impugn either her delicacy or her dignity. FLORIZEL. These your unusual weeds to each part of you Do give a life--no shepherdess, but Flora Peering in April's front; this your sheep-shearing Is as the meeting of the petty gods, And you the queen on't. PERDITA. Sir, my gracious lord, To chide at your extremes it not becomes me; O pardon that I name them: your high self, The gracious mark o' the land, you have obscured With a swain's bearing; and me, poor lowly maid, Most goddess-like prank'd up:--but that our feasts In every mess have folly, and the feeders Digest it with a custom, I should blush To see you so attired; sworn, I think To show myself a glass. The impression of her perfect beauty and airy elegance of demeanor is conveyed in two exquisite passages:-- What you do Still betters what is done. When you speak, sweet, I'd have you do it ever. When you sing, I'd have you buy and sell so; so give alms, Pray so, and for the ordering your affairs To sing them too. When you do dance, I wish you A wave o' the sea, that you might ever do Nothing but that; move still, still so, and own No other function. I take thy hand; this hand As soft as dove's down, and as white as it; Or Ethiopian's tooth, or the fann'd snow, That's bolted by the northern blasts twice o'er. The artless manner in which her innate nobility of soul shines forth through her pastoral disguise, is thus brought before us at once:-- This is the prettiest low-born lass that ever Ran on the green sward; nothing she does or seems, But smacks of something greater than herself; Too noble for this place. Her natural loftiness of spirit breaks out where she is menaced and reviled by the King, as one whom his son has degraded himself by merely looking on; she bears the royal frown without quailing; but the moment he is gone, the immediate recollection of herself, and of her humble state, of her hapless love, is full of beauty, tenderness, and nature:-- Even here undone! I was much afeard: for once or twice, I was about to speak; and tell him plainly The self-same sun, that shines upon his court Hides not his visage from our cottage, but Looks on alike. Will't please, you Sir, be gone? I told you what would come of this. Beseech you, Of your own state take care; this dream of mine-- Being now awake--I'll queen it no inch further, But milk my ewes, and weep. How often have I told you 'twould be thus How often said, my dignity would last But till 'twere known! FLORIZEL. It cannot fail, but by The violation of my faith; and then Let nature crush the sides o' the earth together And mar the seeds within! Lift up thy looks. * * * * Not for Bohemia, nor the pomp that may Be thereat glean'd! for all the sun sees, or The close earth wombs, or the profound seas hide In unknown fathoms, will I break my oath To thee, my fair beloved! Perdita has another characteristic, which lends to the poetical delicacy of the delineation a certain strength and moral elevation, which is peculiarly striking. It is that sense of truth and rectitude, that upright simplicity of mind, which disdains all crooked and indirect means, which would not stoop for an instant to dissemblance, and is mingled with a noble confidence in her love and in her lover. In this spirit is her answer to Camilla, who says, courtier like,-- Besides, you know Prosperity's the very bond of love; Whose fresh complexion, and whose heart together Affliction alters. To which she replies,-- One of these is true; I think, affliction may subdue the cheek, But not take in the mind. In that elegant scene where she receives the guests at the sheep-shearing, and distributes the flowers, there is in the full flow of the poetry, a most beautiful and striking touch of individual character: but here it is impossible to mutilate the dialogue. Reverend sirs, For you there's rosemary and rue; these keep Seeming and savor all the winter long; Grace and remembrance be to you both, And welcome to our shearing! POLIXENES. Shepherdess, (A fair one are you,) well you fit our ages With flowers of winter. PERDITA. Sir, the year growing ancient, Nor yet on summer's death, nor on the birth Of trembling winter, the fairest flowers o' the season Are our carnations, and streaked gilliflowers, 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 gentle scion 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 gilliflowers, And do not call them bastards. PERDITA. I'll not put The dibble in earth to set one slip of them; No more than were I painted, I would wish This youth should say 'twere well. It has been well remarked of this passage, that Perdita does not attempt to answer the reasoning of Polixenes: she gives up the argument, but, woman-like, retains her own opinion, or rather, her sense of right, unshaken by his sophistry. She goes on in a strain of poetry, which comes over the soul like music and fragrance mingled: we seem to inhale the blended odors of a thousand flowers, till the sense faints with their sweetness; and she concludes with a touch of passionate sentiment, which melts into the very heart:-- O Proserpina! For the flowers now, that, frighted, thou let'st fall From Dis's wagon! daffodils, That come before the swallow dares, and take The winds of March with beauty; violets dim, But sweeter than the lids of Juno's eyes, Or Cytherea's breath; pale primroses, That die unmarried, ere they can behold Bright Phoebus in his strength, a malady Most incident to maids; bold oxlips, and The crown imperial; lilies of all kinds, The flower-de-luce being one! O, these I lack, To make you garlands of; and my sweet friend To strew him o'er and o'er. FLORIZEL. What! like a corse? PERDITA. No, like a bank, for Love to lie and play on; Not like a corse: or if,--not to be buried, But quick, and in mine arms! This love of truth, this _conscientiousness_, which forms so distinct a feature in the character of Perdita, and mingles with its picturesque delicacy a certain firmness and dignity, is maintained consistently to the last. When the two lovers fly together from Bohemia, and take refuge in the court of Leontes, the real father of Perdita, Florizel presents himself before the king with a feigned tale, in which he has been artfully instructed by the old counsellor Camillo. During this scene, Perdita does not utter a word. In the strait in which they are placed, she cannot deny the story which Florizel relates--she will not confirm it. Her silence, in spite of all the compliments and greetings of Leontes, has a peculiar and characteristic grace and, at the conclusion of the scene, when they are betrayed, the truth bursts from her as if instinctively, and she exclaims, with emotion,-- The heavens set spies upon us--will not have Our contract celebrated. After this scene, Perdita says very little. The description of her grief, while listening to the relation of her mother's death,-- "One of the prettiest touches of all, was, when at the relation of the queen's death, with the manner how she came by it, how attentiveness wounded her daughter: till from one sign of dolor to another, she did, with an _alas_! I would fain say, bleed tears:"-- her deportment too as she stands gazing on the statue of Hermione, fixed in wonder, admiration and sorrow, as if she too were marble-- O royal piece! There's magic in thy majesty, which has From thy admiring daughter ta'en the spirits, Standing like stone beside thee! are touches of character conveyed indirectly, and which serve to give a more finished effect to this beautiful picture. VIOLA. As the innate dignity of Perdita pierces through her rustic disguise, so the exquisite refinement of Viola triumphs over her masculine attire. Viola is, perhaps, in a degree less elevated and ideal than Perdita, but with a touch of sentiment more profound and heart-stirring; she is "deep-learned in the lore of love,"--at least theoretically,--and speaks as masterly on the subject as Perdita does of flowers. DUKE. How dost thou like this tune? VIOLA. It gives a very echo to the seat Where love is thron'd. And again, If I did love you in my master's flame, With such a suffering, such a deadly life-- in your denial I would find no sense, I would not understand it. OLIVIA. Why, what would you do? VIOLA. Make me a willow cabin at your gate, And call upon my soul within the house; Write loyal cantons[35] of contemned love, And sing them loud even in the dead of night. Holla your name to the reverberate hills, And make babbling gossip of the air Cry out, Olivia! O you should not rest Between the elements of air and earth, But you should pity me. OLIVIA. You might do much. The situation and the character of Viola have been censured for their want of consistency and probability; it is therefore worth while to examine how far this criticism is true. As for her situation in the drama, (of which she is properly the heroine,) it is shortly this. She is shipwrecked on the coast of Illyria: she is alone and without protection in a strange country. She wishes to enter into the service of the Countess Olivia; but she is assured that this is impossible; "for the lady having recently lost an only and beloved brother, has abjured the sight of men, has shut herself up in her palace, and will admit no kind of suit." In this perplexity Viola remembers to have heard her father speak with praise and admiration of Orsino, the Duke of the country; and having ascertained that he is not married, and that therefore his court is not a proper asylum for her in her feminine character, she attires herself in the disguise of a page, as the best protection against uncivil comments, till she can gain some tidings of her brother. If we carry our thoughts back to a romantic and chivalrous age, there is surely sufficient probability here for all the purposes of poetry. To pursue the thread of Viola's destiny;--she is engaged in the service of the Duke, whom she finds "fancy-sick" for the love of Olivia. We are left to infer, (for so it is hinted in the first scene,) that this Duke--who with his accomplishments, and his personal attractions, his taste for music, his chivalrous tenderness, and his unrequited love, is really a very fascinating and poetical personage, though a little passionate and fantastic--had already made some impression on Viola's imagination; and when she comes to play the confidante, and to be loaded with favors and kindness in her assumed character, that she should be touched by a passion made up of pity, admiration, gratitude, and tenderness, does not, I think, in any way detract from the genuine sweetness and delicacy of her character, for "_she never told her love_." Now all this, as the critic wisely observes, may not present a very just picture of life; and it may also fail to impart any moral lesson for the especial profit of well-bred young ladies; but is it not in truth and in nature? Did it ever fail to charm or to interest, to seize on the coldest fancy, to touch the most insensible heart? Viola then is the chosen favorite of the enamoured Duke, and becomes his messenger to Olivia, and the interpreter of his sufferings to that inaccessible beauty. In her character of a youthful page, she attracts the favor of Olivia, and excites the jealousy of her lord. The situation is critical and delicate; but how exquisitely is the character of Viola fitted to her part, carrying her through the ordeal with all the inward and spiritual grace of modesty. What beautiful propriety in the distinction drawn between Rosalind and Viola! The wild sweetness, the frolic humor which sports free and unblamed amid the shades of Ardennes, would ill become Viola, whose playfulness is assumed as part of her disguise as a court-page, and is guarded by the strictest delicacy. She has not, like Rosalind, a saucy enjoyment in her own incognito; her disguise does not sit so easily upon her; her heart does not beat freely under it. As in the old ballad, where "Sweet William" is detected weeping in secret over her "man's array,"[36] so in Viola, a sweet consciousness of her feminine nature is for ever breaking through her masquerade:-- And on her cheek is ready with a blush Modest as morning, when she coldly eyes The youthful Phoebus. She plays her part well, but never forgets nor allows us to forget, that she is playing a part. OLIVIA. Are you a comedian? VIOLA. No, my profound heart! and yet by the very fangs of malice I swear, I am not that I play! And thus she comments on it:-- Disguise, I see thou art wickedness, Wherein the pregnant enemy does much; How easy is it for the proper false In women's waxen hearts to set their forms! Alas! our frailty is the cause, not we. The feminine cowardice of Viola, which will not allow her even to affect a courage becoming her attire,--her horror at the idea of drawing a sword, is very natural and characteristic; and produces a most humorous effect, even at the very moment it charms and interests us. Contrasted with the deep, silent, patient love of Viola for the Duke, we have the lady-like wilfulness of Olivia; and her sudden passion, or rather fancy, for the disguised page, takes so beautiful a coloring of poetry and sentiment, that we do not think her forward. Olivia is like a princess of romance, and has all the privileges of one; she is, like Portia, high born and high bred, mistress over her servants--but not like Portia, "queen o'er herself." She has never in her life been opposed; the first contradiction, therefore, rouses all the woman in her, and turns a caprice into a headlong passion; yet she apologizes for herself. I have said too much unto a heart of stone, And laid mine honor too unchary out; There's something in me that reproves my fault; But such a headstrong potent fault it is, That it but mocks reproof! And in the midst of her self-abandonment, never allows us to contemn, even while we pity her:-- What shall you ask of me that I'll deny. That honor, saved, may upon asking give? The distance of rank which separates the Countess from the youthful page--the real sex of Viola--the dignified elegance of Olivia's deportment, except where passion gets the better of her pride--her consistent coldness towards the Duke--the description of that "smooth, discreet, and stable bearing" with which she rules her household--her generous care for her steward Malvolio, in the midst of her own distress,--all these circumstances raise Olivia in our fancy, and render her caprice for the page a source of amusement and interest, not a subject of reproach. _Twelfth Night_ is a genuine comedy;--a perpetual spring of the gayest and the sweetest fancies. In artificial society men and women are divided into castes and classes, and it is rarely that extremes in character or manners can approximate. To blend into one harmonious picture the utmost grace and refinement of sentiment, and the broadest effects of humor; the most poignant wit, and the most indulgent benignity;--in short, to bring before us in the same scene, Viola and Olivia, with Malvolio and Sir Toby, belonged only to Nature and to Shakspeare. OPHELIA. A woman's affections, however strong, are sentiments, when they run smooth; and become passions only when opposed. In Juliet and Helena, love is depicted as a passion, properly so called; that is, a natural impulse, throbbing in the heart's blood, and mingling with the very sources of life;--a sentiment more or less modified by the imagination; a strong abiding principle and motive, excited by resistance, acting upon the will, animating all the other faculties, and again influenced by them. This is the most complex aspect of love, and in these two characters, it is depicted in colors at once the most various, the most intense, and the most brilliant. In Viola and Perdita, love, being less complex, appears more refined; more a sentiment than a passion--a compound of impulse and fancy, while the reflective powers and moral energies are more faintly developed. The same remark applies also to Julia and Silvia, in the Two Gentlemen of Verona, and, in a greater degree, to Hermia and Helena in the Midsummer Night's Dream. In the two latter, though perfectly discriminated, love takes the visionary fanciful cast, which belongs to the whole piece; it is scarcely a passion or a sentiment, but a dreamy enchantment, a reverie, which a fairy spell dissolves or fixes at pleasure. But there was yet another possible modification of the sentiment, as combined with female nature; and this Shakspeare has shown to us. He has portrayed two beings, in whom all intellectual and moral energy is in a manner latent, if existing; in whom love is an unconscious impulse, and imagination lends the external charm and hue, not the internal power; in whom the feminine character appears resolved into its very elementary principles--as modesty, grace,[37] tenderness. _Without_ these a woman is no woman, but a thing which, luckily, wants a name yet; _with_ these, though every other faculty were passive or deficient, she might still be herself. These are the inherent qualities with which God sent us into the world: they may be perverted by a bad education--they may be obscured by harsh and evil destinies--they may be overpowered by the development of some particular mental power, the predominance of some passion--but they are never wholly crushed out of the woman's soul, while it retains those faculties which render it responsible to its Creator. Shakspeare then has shown us that these elemental feminine qualities, modesty, grace, tenderness, when expanded under genial influences, suffice to constitute a perfect and happy human creature: such is Miranda. When thrown alone amid harsh and adverse destinies, and amid the trammels and corruptions of society, without energy to resist, or will to act, or strength to endure, the end must needs be desolation. Ophelia--poor Ophelia! O far too soft, too good, too fair, to be cast among the briers of this working-day world, and fall and bleed upon the thorns of life! What shall be said of her? for eloquence is mute before her! Like a strain of sad sweet music which comes floating by us on the wings of night and silence, and which we rather feel than hear--like the exhalation of the violet dying even upon the sense it charms--like the snow-flake dissolved in air before it has caught a stain of earth--like the light surf severed from the billow, which a breath disperses--such is the character of Ophelia: so exquisitely delicate, it seems as if a touch would profane it; so sanctified in our thoughts by the last and worst of human woes, that we scarcely dare to consider it too deeply. The love of Ophelia, which she never once confesses, is like a secret which we have stolen from her, and which ought to die upon our hearts as upon her own. Her sorrows ask not words but tears; and her madness has precisely the same effect that would be produced by the spectacle of real insanity, if brought before us: we feel inclined to turn away, and veil our eyes in reverential pity and too painful sympathy. Beyond every character that Shakspeare has drawn, (Hamlet alone excepted,) that of Ophelia makes us forget the poet in his own creation. Whenever we bring her to mind, it is with the same exclusive sense of her real existence, without reference to the wondrous power which called her into life. The effect (and what an effect!) is produced by means so simple, by strokes so few, and so unobtrusive, that we take no thought of them. It is so purely natural and unsophisticated, yet so profound in its pathos, that, as Hazlitt observes, it takes us back to the old ballads; we forget that, in its perfect artlessness, it is the supreme and consummate triumph of art. The situation of Ophelia in the story,[38] is that of a young girl who, at an early age, is brought from a life of privacy into the circle of a court--a court such as we read of in those early times, at once rude, magnificent, and corrupted. She is placed immediately about the person of the queen, and is apparently her favorite attendant. The affection of the wicked queen for this gentle and innocent creature, is one of those beautiful redeeming touches, one of those penetrating glances into the secret springs of natural and feminine feeling which we find only in Shakspeare. Gertrude, who is not so wholly abandoned but that there remains within her heart some sense of the virtue she has forfeited, seems to look with a kind yet melancholy complacency on the lovely being she has destined for the bride of her son; and the scene in which she is introduced as scattering flowers on the grave of Ophelia, is one of those effects of contrast in poetry, in character and in feeling, at once natural and unexpected; which fill the eye, and make the heart swell and tremble within itself--like the nightingales singing in the grove of the Furies in Sophocles.[39] Again, in the father of Ophelia, the Lord Chamberlain Polonius--the shrewd, wary, subtle, pompous, garrulous old courtier--have we not the very man who would send his son into the world to see all, learn all it could teach of good and evil, but keep his only daughter as far as possible from every taint of that world he knew so well? So that when she is brought to the court, she seems in her loveliness and perfect purity, like a seraph that had wandered out of bounds, and yet breathed on earth the air of paradise. When her father and her brother find it necessary to warn her simplicity, give her lessons of worldly wisdom, and instruct her "to be scanter of her maiden presence," for that Hamlet's vows of love "but breathe like sanctified and pious bonds, the better to beguile," we feel at once that it comes too late; for from the moment she appears on the scene amid the dark conflict of crime and vengeance, and supernatural terrors, we know what must be her destiny. Once, at Murano, I saw a dove caught in a tempest; perhaps it was young, and either lacked strength of wing to reach its home, or the instinct which teaches to shun the brooding storm; but so it was--and I watched it, pitying, as it flitted, poor bird hither and thither, with its silver pinions shining against the black thunder-cloud, till, after a few giddy whirls, it fell blinded, affrighted, and bewildered, into the turbid wave beneath, and was swallowed up forever. It reminded me then of the fate of Ophelia; and now when I think of her, I see again before me that poor dove, beating with weary wing, bewildered amid the storm. It is the helplessness of Ophelia, arising merely from her innocence, and pictured without any indication of weakness, which melts us with such profound pity. She is so young, that neither her mind nor her person have attained maturity; she is not aware of the nature of her own feelings; they are prematurely developed in their full force before she has strength to bear them; and love and grief together rend and shatter the frail texture of her existence, like the burning fluid poured into a crystal vase. She says very little, and what she does say seems rather intended to hide than to reveal the emotions of her heart; yet in those few words we are made as perfectly acquainted with her character, and with what is passing in her mind, as if she had thrown forth her soul with all the glowing eloquence of Juliet. Passion with Juliet seems innate, a part of her being, "as dwells the gathered lightning in the cloud;" and we never fancy her but with the dark splendid eyes and Titian-like complexion of the south. While in Ophelia we recognize as distinctly the pensive, fair-haired, blue-eyed daughter of the north, whose heart seems to vibrate to the passion she has inspired, more conscious of being loved than of loving; and yet, alas! loving in the silent depths of her young heart far more than she is loved. When her brother warns her against Hamlet's importunities-- For Hamlet, and the trifling of his favor, Hold it a fashion, and a toy of blood, A violet in the youth of primy nature, Forward not permanent, sweet not lasting, The perfume and the suppliance of a minute-- No more! she replies with a kind of half consciousness-- No more but so? LAERTES. Think it no more. He concludes his admonition with that most beautiful passage, in which the soundest sense, the most excellent advice, is conveyed in a strain of the most exquisite poetry. The chariest maid is prodigal enough, If she unmask her beauty to the moon: Virtue itself 'scapes not calumnious strokes. The canker galls the infants of the spring Too oft before their buttons be disclos'd: And in the morn and liquid dew of youth, Contagious blastments are most imminent. She answers with the same modesty, yet with a kind of involuntary avowal, that his fears are not altogether without cause:-- I shall the effect of this good lesson keep As watchman to my heart. But, good my brother, Do not, as some ungracious pastors do, Show me the steep and thorny way to heaven; Whilst, like the puff'd and reckless libertine, Himself the primrose path of dalliance treads, And recks not his own read.[40] When her father, immediately afterwards, catechizes her on the same subject, he extorts from her, in short sentences, uttered with bashful reluctance, the confession of Hamlet's love for her, but not a word of her love for him. The whole scene is managed with inexpressible delicacy: it is one of those instances, common in Shakspeare, in which we are allowed to perceive what is passing in the mind of a person, without any consciousness on their part. Only Ophelia herself is unaware that while she is admitting the extent of Hamlet's courtship, she is also betraying how deep is the impression it has made, how entire the love with which it is returned. POLONIUS. What is between you? give me up the truth! OPHELIA. He hath, my lord, of late, made many tenders Of his affection to me. POLONIUS. Affection! poh! you speak like a green girl, Unsifted in such perilous circumstances. Do you believe his tenders, as you call them? OPHELIA. I do not know, my lord, what I should think. POLONIUS. Marry, I'll teach you: think yourself a baby; That you have taken these tenders for true pay Which are not sterling. Tender yourself more dearly Or (not to crack the wind of the poor phrase, Wronging it thus) you'll tender me a fool. OPHELIA. My lord, he hath importun'd me with love In honorable fashion. POLONIUS. Ay, fashion you may call it; go to, go to. OPHELIA. And hath given countenance to his speech, my lord, With almost all the holy vows of heaven. POLONIUS. Ay, springes to catch woodcocks. This is for all: would not, in plain terms, from this time forth Have you so slander any moment's leisure As to give words or talk with the Lord Hamlet, Look to't, I charge you: come your ways. OPHELIA. I shall obey, my lord. Besides its intrinsic loveliness, the character of Ophelia has a relative beauty and delicacy when considered in relation to that of Hamlet, which is the delineation of a man of genius in contest with the powers of this world. The weakness of volition, the instability of purpose, the contemplative sensibility, the subtlety of thought, always shrinking from action, and always occupied in "thinking too precisely on the event," united to immense intellectual power, render him unspeakably interesting: and yet I doubt whether any woman, who would have been capable of understanding and appreciating such a man, would have passionately loved him. Let us for a moment imagine any one of Shakspeare's most beautiful and striking female characters in immediate connection with Hamlet. The gentle Desdemona would never have despatched her household cares in haste, to listen to his philosophical speculations, his dark conflicts with his own spirit. Such a woman as Portia would have studied him; Juliet would have pitied him; Rosalind would have turned him over with a smile to the melancholy Jacques; Beatrice would have laughed at him outright; Isabel would have reasoned with him; Miranda could but have wondered at him: but Ophelia loves him. Ophelia, the young, fair, inexperienced girl, facile to every impression, fond in her simplicity, and credulous in her innocence, loves Hamlet; not from what he is in himself, but for that which appears to her--the gentle, accomplished prince, upon whom she has been accustomed to see all eyes fixed in hope and admiration, "the expectancy and rose of the fair state," the star of the court in which she moves, the first who has ever whispered soft vows in her ear: and what can be more natural? But it is not singular, that while no one entertains a doubt of Ophelia's love for Hamlet--though never once expressed by herself, or asserted by others, in the whole course of the drama--yet it is a subject of dispute whether Hamlet loves Ophelia, though she herself allows that he had importuned her with love, and "had given countenance to his suit with almost all the holy vows of heaven;" although in the letter which Polonius intercepted, Hamlet declares that he loves her "best, O most best!"--though he asserts himself, with the wildest vehemence,-- I lov'd Ophelia; forty thousand brothers Could not, with all their quantity of love, Make up my sum: --still I have heard the question canvassed; I have even heard it denied that Hamlet did love Ophelia. The author of the finest remarks I have yet seen on the play and character of Hamlet, leans to this opinion. As the observations I allude to are contained in a periodical publication, and may not be at hand for immediate reference, I shall indulge myself (and the reader no less) by quoting the opening paragraphs of this noble piece of criticism, upon the principle, and for the reason I have already stated in the introduction. "We take up a play, and ideas come rolling in upon us, like waves impelled by a strong wind. There is in the ebb and flow of Shakspeare's soul all the grandeur of a mighty operation of nature; and when we think or speak of him, it should be with humility where we do not understand, and a conviction that it is rather to the narrowness of our own mind than to any failing in the art of the great magician, that we ought to attribute any sense of weakness, which may assail us during the contemplation of his created worlds. "Shakspeare himself, had he even been as great a critic as a poet, could not have written a regular dissertation upon Hamlet. So ideal, and yet so real an existence, could have been shadowed out only in the colors of poetry. When a character deals solely or chiefly with this world and its events when it acts and is acted upon by objects that have a palpable existence, we see it distinctly, as if it were cast in a material mould, as if it partook of the fixed and settled lineaments of the things on which it lavishes its sensibilities and its passions. We see in such cases the vision of an individual soul, as we see the vision of an individual countenance. We can describe both, and can let a stranger into our knowledge. But how tell in words, so pure, so fine, so ideal an abstraction as Hamlet? We can, indeed, figure to ourselves generally his princely form, that outshone all others in manly beauty, and adorn it with the consummation of all liberal accomplishment. We can behold in every look, every gesture, every motion, the future king,-- The courtier's, soldier's, scholar's eye, tongue, sword, Th' expectancy and rose of the fair state; The glass of fashion, and the mould of form, Th' observ'd of all observers. "But when we would penetrate into his spirit, meditate on those things on which he meditates, accompany him even unto the brink of eternity, fluctuate with him on the ghastly sea of despair, soar with him into the purest and serenest regions of human thought, feel with him the curse of beholding iniquity, and the troubled delight of thinking on innocence, and gentleness, and beauty; come with him from all the glorious dreams cherished by a noble spirit in the halls of wisdom and philosophy, of a sudden into the gloomy courts of sin, and incest, and murder; shudder with him over the broken and shattered fragments of all the fairest creations of his fancy,--be borne with him at once, from calm, and lofty, and delighted speculations, into the very heart of fear, and horror, and tribulations,--have the agonies and the guilt of our mortal world brought into immediate contact with the world beyond the grave, and the influence of an awful shadow hanging forever on our thoughts,--be present at a fearful combat between all the stirred-up passions of humanity in the soul of man, a combat in which one and all of these passions are alternately victorious and overcome; I say, that when we are thus placed and acted upon, how is it possible to draw a character of this sublime drama, or of the mysterious being who is its moving spirit? In him, his character and situation, there is a concentration of all the interests that belong to humanity. There is scarcely a trait of frailty or of grandeur, which may have endeared to us our most beloved friends in real life, that is not to be found in Hamlet. Undoubtedly Shakspeare loved him beyond all his other creations. Soon as he appears on the stage we are satisfied: when absent we long for his return. This is the only play which exists almost altogether in the character of one single person. Who ever knew a Hamlet in real life? yet who, ideal as the character is, feels not its reality? This is the wonder. We love him not, we think of him, not because he is witty, because he was melancholy, because he was filial; but we love him because he existed, and was himself. This is the sum total of the impression. I believe that, of every other character either in tragic or epic poetry, the story makes part of the conception; but of Hamlet, the deep and permanent interest is the conception of himself. This seems to belong, not to the character being more perfectly drawn, but to there being a more intense conception of individual human life than perhaps any other human composition. Here is a being with springs of thought, and feeling, and action, deeper than we can search. These springs rise from an unknown depth, and in that depth there seems to be a oneness of being which we cannot distinctly behold, but which we believe to be there; and thus irreconcilable circumstances, floating on the surface of his actions, have not the effect of making us doubt the truth of the general picture."[41] This is all most admirable, most eloquent, most true! but the critic subsequently declares, that "there is nothing in Ophelia which could make her the object of an engrossing passion to so majestic a spirit as Hamlet." Now, though it be with reluctance, and even considerable mistrust of myself, that I differ from a critic who can thus feel and write, I do not think so:--I do think, with submission, that the love of Hamlet for Ophelia is deep, is real, and is precisely the kind of love which such a man as Hamlet would feel for such a woman as Ophelia. When the heathen would represent their Jove as clothed in all his Olympian terrors, they mounted him on the back of an eagle, and armed him with the lightnings; but when in Holy Writ the Supreme Being is described as coming in his glory, He is upborne on the wings of cherubim, and his emblem is the dove. Even so our blessed religion, which has revealed deeper mysteries in the human soul than ever were dreamt of by philosophy till she went hand-in-hand with faith, has taught us to pay that worship to the symbols of purity and innocence, which in darker times was paid to the manifestations of power: and therefore do I think that the mighty intellect, the capacious, soaring, penetrating genius of Hamlet may be represented, without detracting from its grandeur, as reposing upon the tender virgin innocence of Ophelia, with all that deep delight with which a superior nature contemplates the goodness which is at once perfect in itself, and of itself unconscious. That Hamlet regards Ophelia with this kind of tenderness,--that he loves her with a love as intense as can belong to a nature in which there is, (I think,) much more of contemplation and sensibility than action or passion--is the feeling and conviction with which I have always read the play of Hamlet. As to whether the mind of Hamlet be, or be not, touched with madness--this is another point at issue among critics, philosophers, ay, and physicians. To me it seems that he is not so far disordered as to cease to be a responsible human being--that were too pitiable: but rather that his mind is shaken from its equilibrium, and bewildered by the horrors of his situation--horrors which his fine and subtle intellect, his strong imagination, and his tendency to melancholy, at once exaggerate, and take from him the power either to endure, or "by opposing, end them." We do not see him as a lover, nor as Ophelia first beheld him; for the days when he importuned her with love were before the opening of the drama--before his father's spirit revisited the earth; but we behold him at once in a sea of troubles, of perplexities, of agonies, of terrors. Without remorse, he endures all its horrors; without guilt, he endures all its shame. A loathing of the crime he is called on to revenge, which revenge is again abhorrent to his nature, has set him at strife with himself; the supernatural visitation has perturbed his soul to its inmost depths; all things else, all interests, all hopes, all affections, appear as futile, when the majestic shadow comes lamenting from its place of torment "to shake him with thoughts beyond the reaches of his soul!" His love for Ophelia is then ranked by himself among those trivial, fond records which he has deeply sworn to erase from his heart and brain. He has no thought to link his terrible destiny with hers: he cannot marry her: he cannot reveal to her, young, gentle, innocent as she is, the terrific influences which have changed the whole current of his life and purposes. In his distraction he overacts the painful part to which he had tasked himself; he is like that judge of the Areopagus, who being occupied with graver matters, flung from him the little bird which had sought refuge in his bosom, and with such angry violence, that unwittingly he killed it. In the scene with Hamlet,[42] in which he madly outrages her and upbraids himself, Ophelia says very little: there are two short sentences in which she replies to his wild, abrupt discourse:-- HAMLET. I did love you once. OPHELIA. Indeed, my lord, you made me believe so. HAMLET. You should not have believed me: for virtue cannot so inocculate our old stock, but we shall relish of it. I loved you not. OPHELIA. I was the more deceived. Those who ever heard Mrs. Siddons read the play of Hamlet, cannot forget the world of meaning, of love, of sorrow, of despair, conveyed in these two simple phrases. Here, and in the soliloquy afterwards, where she says,-- And I of ladies most deject and wretched, That sucked the honey of his music vows, are the only allusions to herself and her own feelings in the course of the play; and these, uttered almost without consciousness on her own part, contain the revelation of a life of love, and disclose the secret burthen of a heart bursting with its own unuttered grief. She believes Hamlet crazed; she is repulsed, she is forsaken, she is outraged, where she had bestowed her young heart, with all its hopes and wishes; her father is slain by the hand of her lover, as it is supposed, in a paroxysm of insanity: she is entangled inextricably in a web of horrors which she cannot even comprehend, and the result seems inevitable. Of her subsequent madness, what can be said? What an affecting--what an astonishing picture of a mind utterly, hopelessly wrecked!--past hope--past cure! There is the frenzy of excited passion--there is the madness caused by intense and continued thought--there is the delirium of fevered nerves; but Ophelia's madness is distinct from these: it is not the suspension, but the utter destruction of the reasoning powers; it is the total imbecility which, as medical people well know, frequently follows some terrible shock to the spirits. Constance is frantic; Lear is mad; Ophelia is _insane_. Her sweet mind lies in fragments before us--a pitiful spectacle! Her wild, rambling fancies; her aimless, broken speeches; her quick transitions from gayety to sadness--each equally purposeless and causeless; her snatches of old ballads, such as perhaps her nurse sung her to sleep with in her infancy--are all so true to the life, that we forget to wonder, and can only weep. It belonged to Shakspeare alone so to temper such a picture that we can endure to dwell upon it:-- Thought and affliction, passion, hell itself, She turns to favor and to prettiness. That in her madness she should exchange her bashful silence for empty babbling, her sweet maidenly demeanor for the impatient restlessness that spurns at straws, and say and sing precisely what she never would or could have uttered had she been in possession of her reason, is so far from being an impropriety, that it is an additional stroke of nature. It is one of the symptoms of this species of insanity, as we are assured by physicians. I have myself known one instance in the case of a young Quaker girl, whose character resembled that of Ophelia, and whose malady arose from a similar cause. The whole action of this play sweeps past us like a torrent, which hurries along in its dark and resistless course all the personages of the drama towards a catastrophe that is not brought about by human will, but seems like an abyss ready dug to receive them, where the good and the wicked are whelmed together.[43] As the character of Hamlet has been compared, or rather contrasted, with the Greek Orestes, being like him, called on to avenge a crime by a crime, tormented by remorseful doubts, and pursued by distraction, so, to me, the character of Ophelia bears a certain relation to that of the Greek Iphigenia,[44] with the same strong distinction between the classical and the romantic conception of the portrait. Iphigenia led forth to sacrifice, with her unresisting tenderness, her mournful sweetness, her virgin innocence, is doomed to perish by that relentless power, which has linked her destiny with crimes and contests, in which she has no part but as a sufferer; and even so, poor Ophelia, "divided from herself and her fair judgment," appears here like a spotless victim offered up to the mysterious and inexorable fates. "For it is the property of crime to extend its mischiefs over innocence, as it is of virtue to extend its blessings over many that deserve them not, while frequently the author of one or the other is not, as far as we can see, either punished or rewarded."[45] But there's a heaven above us! MIRANDA. We might have deemed it impossible to go beyond Viola, Perdita, and Ophelia, as pictures of feminine beauty; to exceed the one in tender delicacy, the other in ideal grace, and the last in simplicity,--if Shakspeare had not done this; and he alone could have done it. Had he never created a Miranda, we should never have been made to feel how completely the purely natural and the purely ideal can blend into each other. The character of Miranda resolves itself into the very elements of womanhood. She is beautiful, modest, and tender, and she is these only; they comprise her whole being, external and internal. She is so perfectly unsophisticated, so delicately refined, that she is all but ethereal. Let us imagine any other woman placed beside Miranda--even one of Shakspeare's own loveliest and sweetest creations--there is not one of them that could sustain the comparison for a moment; not one that would not appear somewhat coarse or artificial when brought into immediate contact with this pure child of nature, this "Eve of an enchanted Paradise." What, then, has Shakspeare done?--"O wondrous skill and sweet wit of the man!"--he has removed Miranda far from all comparison with her own sex; he has placed her between the demi-demon of earth and the delicate spirit of air. The next step is into the ideal and supernatural; and the only being who approaches Miranda, with whom she can be contrasted, is Ariel. Beside the subtle essence of this ethereal sprite, this creature of elemental light and air, that "ran upon the winds, rode the curl'd clouds, and in the colors of the rainbow lived," Miranda herself appears a palpable reality; a woman, "breathing thoughtful breath," a woman, walking the earth in her mortal loveliness, with a heart as frail-strung, as passion-touched, as ever fluttered in a female bosom. I have said that Miranda possesses merely the elementary attributes of womanhood, but each of these stand in her with a distinct and peculiar grace. She resembles nothing upon earth; but do we therefore compare her, in our own minds, with any of those fabled beings with which the fancy of ancient poets peopled the forest depths, the fountain or the ocean?--oread or dryad fleet, sea-maid, or naiad of the stream? We cannot think of them together. Miranda is a consistent, natural, human being. Our impression of her nymph-like beauty, her peerless grace, and purity of soul, has a distinct and individual character. Not only is she exquisitely lovely, being what she is, but we are made to feel that she _could_ not possibly be otherwise than as she is portrayed. She has never beheld one of her own sex; she has never caught from society one imitated or artificial grace. The impulses which have come to her, in her enchanted solitude, are of heaven and nature, not of the world and its vanities. She has sprung up into beauty beneath the eye of her father, the princely magician; her companions have been the rocks and woods, the many-shaped, many-tinted clouds, and the silent stars; her playmates the ocean billows, that stooped their foamy crests, and ran rippling to kiss her feet. Ariel and his attendant sprites hovered over her head, ministered duteous to her every wish, and presented before her pageants of beauty and grandeur. The very air, made vocal by her father's art, floated in music around her. If we can presuppose such a situation with all its circumstances, do we not behold in the character of Miranda not only the credible, but the natural, the necessary results of such a situation? She retains her woman's heart, for that is unalterable and inalienable, as a part of her being; but her deportment, her looks, her language, her thoughts--all these, from the supernatural and poetical circumstances around her, assume a cast of the pure ideal; and to us, who are in the secret of her human and pitying nature, nothing can be more charming and consistent than the effect which she produces upon others, who never having beheld any thing resembling her, approach her as "a wonder," as something celestial:-- Be sure! the goddess on whom these airs attend! And again:-- What is this maid? Is she the goddess who hath severed us, And brought us thus together? And Ferdinand exclaims, while gazing on her, My spirits as in a dream are all bound up! My father's loss, the weakness that I feel, The wreck of all my friends, or this man's threats, To whom I am subdued, are but light to me Might I but through my prison once a day Behold this maid: all corners else o' the earth Let liberty make use of, space enough Have I in such a prison. Contrasted with the impression of her refined and dignified beauty, and its effect on all beholders, is Miranda's own soft simplicity, her virgin innocence, her total ignorance of the conventional forms and language of society. It is most natural that in a being thus constituted, the first tears should spring from compassion, "suffering with those that she saw suffer:"-- O the cry did knock Against my very heart. Poor souls! they perished. Had I been any god of power, I would Have sunk the sea within the earth, or e'er It should the good ship so have swallowed, And the freighting souls within her; and that her first sigh should be offered to a love at once fearless and submissive, delicate and fond. She has no taught scruples of honor like Juliet; no coy concealments like Viola; no assumed dignity standing in its own defence. Her bashfulness is less a quality than an instinct; it is like the self-folding of a flower, spontaneous and unconscious. I suppose there is nothing of the kind in poetry equal to the scene between Ferdinand and Miranda. In Ferdinand, who is a noble creature, we have all the chivalrous magnanimity with which man, in a high state of civilization, disguises his real superiority, and does humble homage to the being of whose destiny he disposes; while Miranda, the mere child of nature, is struck with wonder at her own new emotions. Only conscious of her own weakness as a woman, and ignorant of those usages of society which teach us to dissemble the real passion, and assume (and sometimes abuse) an unreal and transient power, she is equally ready to place her life, her love, her service beneath his feet. MIRANDA. Alas, now! pray you, Work not so hard: I would the lightning had Burnt up those logs, that you are enjoined to pile! Pray set it down and rest you: when this burns, 'Twill weep for having weary'd you. My father Is hard at study; pray now, rest yourself: He's safe for these three hours. FERDINAND. O most dear mistress, The sun will set before I shall discharge What I must strive to do. MIRANDA. If you'll sit down, I'll bear your logs the while. Pray give me that, I'll carry it to the pile. FERDINAND. No, precious creature; I had rather crack my sinews, break my back, Than you should such dishonor undergo, While I sit lazy by. MIRANDA. It would become me As well as it does you; and I should do it With much more ease; for my good will is to it, And yours against. * * * * MIRANDA. You look wearily. FERDINAND. No, noble mistress; 'tis fresh morning with me When you are by at night. I do beseech you, (Chiefly that I might set it in my prayers,) What is your name? MIRANDA. Miranda. O my father I have broke your 'hest to say so! FERDINAND. Admir'd Miranda! Indeed the top of admiration; worth What's dearest to the world! Full many a lady I have eyed with best regard: and many a time The harmony of their tongues hath into bondage Brought my too diligent ear: for several virtues Have I liked several women; never any With so full soul, but some defect in her Did quarrel with the noblest grace she owed And put it to the foil. But you, O you, So perfect and so peerless, are created Of every creature's best! MIRANDA. I do not know One of my sex: no woman's face remember, Save, from my glass, mine own; nor have I seen Mere that I may call men, than you, good friend, And my dear father. How features are abroad I am skill-less of: but, by my modesty, (The jewel in my dower,) I would not wish Any companion in the world but you; Nor can imagination form a shape, Besides yourself, to like of--But I prattle Something too wildly, and my father's precepts Therein forget. FERDINAND. I am, in my condition A prince, Miranda--I do think a king-- (I would, not so!) and would no more endure This wooden slavery, than I would suffer The flesh-fly blow my mouth. Hear my soul speak The very instant that I saw you, did My heart fly to your service; there resides, To make me slave to it; and for your sake, Am I this patient log-man. MIRANDA. Do you love me? FERDINAND. O heaven! O earth! bear witness to this sound And crown what I profess with kind event, If I speak true: if hollowly, invert What best is boded me, to mischief! I, Beyond all limit of what else i' the world, Do love, prize, honor you. MIRANDA. I am a fool, To weep at what I am glad of. FERDINAND. Wherefore weep you MIRANDA. At mine unworthiness, that dare not offer What I desire to give; and much less take, What I shall die to want--But this is trifling: And all the more it seeks to hide itself, The bigger bulk it shows. Hence, bashful cunning; And prompt me, plain and holy innocence! I am your wife, if you will marry me; If not I'll die your maid: to be your fellow You may deny me; but I'll be your servant Whether you will or no! FERDINAND. My mistress, dearest! And I thus humble ever. MIRANDA. My husband, then? FERDINAND. Ay, with a heart as willing, As bondage e'er of freedom. Here's my hand. MIRANDA. And mine with my heart in it. And now farewell Till half an hour hence. As Miranda, being what she is, could only have had a Ferdinand for a lover, and an Ariel for her attendant, so she could have had with propriety no other father than the majestic and gifted being, who fondly claims her as "a thread of his own life--nay, that for which he lives." Prospero, with his magical powers, his superhuman wisdom, his moral worth and grandeur, and his kingly dignity, is one of the most sublime visions that ever swept with ample robes, pale brow, and sceptred hand, before the eye of fancy. He controls the invisible world, and works through the agency of spirits: not by any evil and forbidden compact, but solely by superior might of intellect--by potent spells gathered from the lore of ages, and abjured when he mingles again as a man with his fellow men. He is as distinct a being from the necromancers and astrologers celebrated in Shakspeare's age, as can well be imagined:[46] and all the wizards of poetry and fiction, even Faust and St. Leon, sink into common-places before the princely, the philosophic, the benevolent Prospero. The Bermuda Isles, in which Shakspeare has placed the scene of the Tempest, were discovered in his time: Sir George Somers and his companions having been wrecked there in a terrible storm,[47] brought back a most fearful account of those unknown islands, which they described as "a land of devils--a most prodigious and enchanted place, subject to continual tempests and supernatural visitings." Such was the idea entertained of the "still-vext Bermoothes" in Shakspeare's age; but later travellers describe them as perfect regions of enchantment in a far different sense; as so many fairy Edens, clustered like a knot of gems upon the bosom of the Atlantic, decked out in all the lavish luxuriance of nature, with shades of myrtle and cedar, fringed round with groves of coral; in short, each island a tiny paradise, rich with perpetual blossoms, in which Ariel might have slumbered, and ever-verdant bowers, in which Ferdinand and Miranda might have strayed: so that Shakspeare, in blending the wild relations of the shipwrecked mariners with his own inspired fancies, has produced nothing, however lovely in nature and sublime in magical power, which does not harmonize with the beautiful and wondrous reality. There is another circumstance connected with the Tempest, which is rather interesting. It was produced and acted for the first time upon the occasion of the nuptials of the Princess Elizabeth, the eldest daughter of James I. with Frederic, the elector palatine. It is hardly necessary to remind the reader of the fate of this amiable but most unhappy woman, whose life, almost from the period of her marriage, was one long tempestuous scene of trouble and adversity. * * * * * The characters which I have here classed together, as principally distinguished by the predominance of passion and fancy, appear to me to rise, in the scale of ideality and simplicity, from Juliet to Miranda; the last being in comparison so refined, so elevated above all stain of earth, that we can only acknowledge her in connection with it through the emotions of sympathy she feels and inspires. I remember, when I was in Italy, standing "at evening on the top of Fiesole," and at my feet I beheld the city of Florence and the Val d'Arno, with its villas, its luxuriant gardens, groves, and olive grounds, all bathed in crimson light. A transparent vapor or exhalation, which in its tint was almost as rich as the pomegranate flower, moving with soft undulation, rolled through the valley, and the very earth seemed to pant with warm life beneath its rosy veil. A dark purple shade, the forerunner of night, was already stealing over the east; in the western sky still lingered the blaze of the sunset, while the faint perfume of trees, and flowers, and now and then a strain of music wafted upwards, completed the intoxication of the senses. But I looked from the earth to the sky, and immediately above this scene hung the soft crescent moon--alone, with all the bright heaven to herself; and as that sweet moon to the glowing landscape beneath it, such is the character of Miranda compared to that of Juliet. FOOTNOTES: [17] Lord Byron remarked of the Italian women, (and he could speak _avec connaissance de fait_,) that they are the only women in the world capable of impressions, at once very sudden and very durable; which, he adds, is to be found in no other nation. Mr. Moore observes afterwards, how completely an Italian woman, either from nature or her social position, is led to invert the usual course of frailty among ourselves, and, weak in resisting the first impulses of passion, to reserve the whole strength of her character for a display of constancy and devotedness afterwards.--Both these traits of national character are exemplified in Juliet--_Moore's Life of Byron_, vol. ii. pp. 303, 338. 4to edit. [18] _La sève de la vie_, is an expression used somewhere by Madame de Staël. [19] Characters of Shakspeare's Plays. [20] I must allude, but with reluctance, to another character, which I have heard likened to Juliet, and often quoted as the heroine _par excellence_ of amatory fiction--I mean the Julie of Rousseau's Nouvelle Héloïse; I protest against her altogether. As a creation of fancy the portrait is a compound of the most gross and glaring inconsistencies; as false and impossible to the reflecting and philosophical mind, as the fabled Syrens, Hamatryads and Centaurs to the eye of the anatomist. As a woman, Julie belongs neither to nature nor to artificial society; and if the pages of melting and dazzling eloquence in which Rousseau has garnished out his idol did not blind and intoxicate us, as the incense and the garlands did the votaries of Isis, we should be disgusted. Rousseau, having composed his Julie of the commonest clay of the earth, does not animate her with fire from heaven, but breathes his own spirit into her, and then calls the "impetticoated" paradox a _woman_. He makes her a peg on which to hang his own visions and sentiments--and what sentiments! but that I fear to soil my pages, I would pick out a few of them, and show the difference between this strange combination of youth and innocence, philosophy and pedantry, sophistical prudery, and detestable _grossièreté_, and our own Juliet. No! if we seek a French Juliet, we must go far--far back to the real Héloïse, to her eloquence, her sensibility, her fervor of passion, her devotedness of truth. She, at least, married the man she loved, and loved the man she married, and more than died for him; but enough of both. [21] Constant describes her beautifully--"Sa voix si douce au travers le bruit des armes, sa forme délicate au milieu de cet hommes tous couverts de fer, la pureté de son âme opposée leurs calculs avides, son calme céleste qui contraste avec leurs agitations, remplissent le spectateur d'une émotion constante et mélancolique, telle que ne la fait ressentir nulle tragédie ordinaire." [22] Coleridge--preface to Wallenstein. [23] In the "Two Gentlemen of Verona." [24] There is an allusion to this court language of love in "All Well that Ends Well," where Helena says,-- There shall your master have a thousand loves-- A guide, a goddess, and a sovereign; A counsellor, a traitress, and a dear, His humble ambition, proud humility, His jarring concord, and his discord dulcut, His faith, his sweet disaster, with a world Of pretty fond adoptious Christendoms That blinking Cupid gossips.--ACT I SCENE 1 The courtly poets of Elizabeth's time, who copied the Italian sonnetteers of the sixteenth century, are full of these quaint conceits. [25] Since this was written, I have met with some remarks of a similar tendency in that most interesting book, "The Life of Lord E. Fitzgerald." [26] Juliet, courageously drinking off the potion, after she has placed before herself in the most fearful colors all its possible consequences, is compared by Schlegel to the famous story of Alexander and his physician. [27] Perhaps 'tis pretty to force together Thoughts so all unlike each other; To mutter and mock a broken charm, To dally with wrong that does no harm! Perhaps 'tis tender, too, and pretty, At each wild word to feel within A sweet recoil of love and pity. And what if in a world of sin (O sorrow and shame should this be true!) Such giddiness of heart and brain Comes seldom save from rage and pain, So talks as it's most used to do? COLERIDGE. These lines seem to me to form the truest comment on Juliet's wild exclamations against Romeo. [28] "The censure," observes Schlegel, "originates in a fanciless way of thinking, to which every thing appears unnatural that does not suit its tame insipidity. Hence an idea has been formed of simple and natural pathos which consists in exclamations destitute of imagery, and nowise elevated above every-day life; but energetic passions electrify the whole mental powers and will, consequently, in highly-favored natures, express themselves in an ingenious and figurative manner." [29] The "Giulietta" of Luigi da Porta was written about 1520. In a popular little book published in 1565, thirty years before Shakspeare wrote his tragedy, the name of Juliet occurs as an example of faithful love, and is thus explained by a note in the margin. "Juliet, a noble maiden of the citie of Verona, which loved Romeo, eldest son of the Lord Monteschi; and being privily married together, he at last poisoned himself for love of her: she, for sorrow of his death, slew herself with his dagger." This note, which furnishes, in brief, the whole argument of Shakspeare's play, might possibly have made the first impression on his fancy. In the novel of Da Porta the catastrophe is altogether different. After the death of Romeo, the Friar Lorenzo endeavors to persuade Juliet to leave the fatal monument. She refuses; and throwing herself back on the dead body of her husband, she resolutely holds her breath and dies.--"E voltatasi al giacente corpo di Romeo, il cui capo sopra un origliere, che con lei uell' arca era stato lasciato, posto aveva; gli occhi meglio rinchiusi avendogli, e di lagrime il freddo volto bagnandogli, disse;" Che debbo senza di te in vita più fare, signor mio? e che altro mi resta verso te se non colla mia morte seguirti? "E detto questo, la sua gran sciagura nell' animo recatasi, e la perdita del caro amante ricordandosi, deliberando di più non vivere, raccolto a se il fiato, e per buono spazio tenutolo, e poscia con un gran grido fuori mandandolo, sopra il morto corpo, morta ricadde." There is nothing so improbable in the story of Romeo and Juliet as to make us doubt the tradition that it is a real fact. "The Veronese," says Lord Byron, in one of his letters from Verona, "are tenacious to a degree of the truth of Juliet's story, insisting on the fact, giving the date 1303, and showing a tomb. It is a plain, open, and partly decayed sarcophagus, with withered leaves in it, in a wild and desolate conventual garden--once a cemetery, now ruined, to the very graves! The situation struck me as very appropriate to the legend, being blighted as their love." He might have added, that when Verona itself, with its amphitheatre and its Paladian structures, lies level with the earth, the very spot on which it stood will be consecrated by the memory of Juliet. When in Italy, I met a gentleman, who being then "_dans le genre romantique_," wore a fragment of Juliet's tomb set in a ring. [30] Foster's Essays [31] I have read somewhere that the play of which Helena is the heroine, (All's Well that Ends Well,) was at first entitled by Shakspeare "Love's Labor Won." Why the title was altered or by whom I cannot discover. [32] i. e. I care as much for as I do for heaven. [33] New Monthly Magazine, vol. iv. [34] Percy's Reliques. [35] i. e. _canzons_, songs [36] Percy's Reliques, vol. iii.--see the ballad of the "Lady turning Serving Man." [37] By this word, as used here, I would be understood to mean that inexpressible something within the soul, which tends to the good, the beautiful, the true, and is the antipodes to the vulgar, the violent, and the false;--that which we see diffused externally over the form and movements, where there is perfect innocence and unconsciousness, as in children. [38] _i. e._ In the story of the drama; for in the original "History of Amleth the Dane," from which Shakspeare drew his materials, there is a woman introduced who is employed as an instrument to seduce Amleth, but not even the germ of the character of Ophelia. [39] In the Oedipus Coloneus [40] "And recks not his own read," _i. e._ heeds not his own lesson. [41] Blackwood's Magazine, vol. 11. [42] Act iii. scene 1. [43] Goëthe. See the analysis of Hamlet in Wilhelm Meister [44] The Iphigenia in Aulis of Euripides. [45] Goëthe [46] Such as Cornelius Agrippa, Michael Scott, Dr. Dee. The last was the contemporary of Shakspeare. [47] In 1609, about three years before Shakspeare produced the Tempest, which, though placed first in all the editions of his works, was one of the last of his dramas. CHARACTERS OF THE AFFECTIONS HERMIONE. Characters in which the affections and the moral qualities predominate over fancy and all that bears the name of passion, are not, when we meet with them in real life, the most striking and interesting, nor the easiest to be understood and appreciated; but they are those on which, in the long run, we repose with increasing confidence and ever-new delight. Such characters are not easily exhibited in the colors of poetry, and when we meet with them there, we are reminded of the effect of Raffaelle's pictures. Sir Joshua Reynolds assures us, that it took him three weeks to discover the beauty of the frescos in the Vatican; and many, if they spoke the truth, would prefer one of Titian's or Murillo's Virgins to one of Raffaelle's heavenly Madonnas. The less there is of marked expression or vivid color in a countenance or character, the more difficult to delineate it in such a manner as to captivate and interest us: but when this is done, and done to perfection, it is the miracle of poetry in painting, and of painting in poetry. Only Raffaelle and Correggio have achieved it in one case, and only Shakspeare in the other. When, by the presence or the agency of some predominant and exciting power, the feelings and affections are upturned from the depths of the heart, and flung to the surface, the painter or the poet has but to watch the workings of the passions, thus in a manner made visible, and transfer them to his page or his canvas, in colors more or less vigorous: but where all is calm without and around, to dive into the profoundest abysses of character, trace the affections where they lie hidden like the ocean springs, wind into the most intricate involutions of the heart, patiently unravel its most delicate fibres, and in a few graceful touches place before us the distinct and visible result,--to do this demanded power of another and a rarer kind. There are several of Shakspeare's characters which are especially distinguished by this profound feeling in the conception, and subdued harmony of tone in the delineation. To them may be particularly applied the ingenious simile which Goëthe has used to illustrate generally all Shakspeare's characters, when he compares them to the old-fashioned batches in glass cases, which not only showed the index pointing to the hour, but the wheels and springs within, which set that index in motion. Imogen, Desdemona, and Hermione, are three women placed in situations nearly similar, and equally endowed with all the qualities which can render that situation striking and interesting. They are all gentle, beautiful, and innocent; all are models of conjugal submission, truth, and tenderness, and all are victims of the unfounded jealousy of their husbands. So far the parallel is close, but here the resemblance ceases; the circumstances of each situation are varied with wonderful skill, and the characters, which are as different as it is possible to imagine, conceived and discriminated with a power of truth and a delicacy of feeling yet more astonishing. Critically speaking, the character of Hermione is the most simple in point of dramatic effect, that of Imogen is the most varied and complex. Hermione is most distinguished by her magnanimity and her fortitude, Desdemona by her gentleness and refined grace, while Imogen combines all the best qualities of both, with others which they do not possess; consequently she is, as a character, superior to either; but considered as women, I suppose the preference would depend on individual taste. Hermione is the heroine of the first three acts of the Winter's Tale. She is the wife of Leontes, king of Sicilia, and though in the prime of beauty and womanhood, is not represented in the first bloom of youth. Her husband on slight grounds suspects her of infidelity with his friend Polixenes, king of Bohemia; the suspicion once admitted, and working on a jealous, passionate, and vindictive mind, becomes a settled and confirmed opinion. Hermione is thrown into a dungeon; her new-born infant is taken from her, and by the order of her husband, frantic with jealousy, exposed to death on a desert shore; she is herself brought to a public trial for treason and incontinency, defends herself nobly, and is pronounced innocent by the oracle. But at the very moment that she is acquitted, she learns the death of the prince her son, who Conceiving the dishonor of his mother, Had straight declined, drooped, took it deeply, Fastened and fixed the shame on't in himself, Threw off his spirit, appetite, and sleep, And downright languished. She swoons away with grief, and her supposed death concludes the third act. The last two acts are occupied with the adventures of her daughter Perdita; and with the restoration of Perdita to the arms of her mother, and the reconciliation of Hermione and Leontes, the piece concludes. Such, in few words, is the dramatic situation. The character of Hermione exhibits what is never found in the other sex, but rarely in our own--yet sometimes;--dignity without pride, love without passion, and tenderness without weakness. To conceive a character in which there enters so much of the negative, required perhaps no rare and astonishing effort of genius, such as created a Juliet, a Miranda, or a Lady Macbeth; but to delineate such a character in the poetical form, to develop it through the medium of action and dialogue, without the aid of description: to preserve its tranquil, mild, and serious beauty, its unimpassioned dignity, and at the same time keep the strongest hold upon our sympathy and our imagination; and out of this exterior calm, produce the most profound pathos, the most vivid impression of life and internal power:--it is this which renders the character of Hermione one of Shakspeare's masterpieces. Hermione is a queen, a matron, and a mother: she is good and beautiful, and royally descended. A majestic sweetness, a grand and gracious simplicity, an easy, unforced, yet dignified self-possession, are in all her deportment, and in every word she utters. She is one of those characters, of whom it has been said proverbially, that "still waters run deep." Her passions are not vehement, but in her settled mind the sources of pain or pleasure, love or resentment, are like the springs that feed the mountain lakes, impenetrable, unfathomable, and inexhaustible. Shakspeare has conveyed (as is his custom) a part of the character of Hermione in scattered touches and through the impressions which she produces on all around her. Her surpassing beauty is alluded to in few but strong terms:-- This jealousy Is for a precious creature; as she is rare Must it be great. Praise her but for this her out-door form, 'Which, on my faith, deserves high speech--' If one by one you wedded all the world, Or from the all that are, took something good To make a perfect woman; she you killed Would be unparalleled. I might have looked upon my queen's full eyes, Have taken treasure from her lips-- --and left them More rich for what they yielded. The expressions "most sacred lady," "dread mistress," "sovereign," with which she is addressed or alluded to, the boundless devotion and respect of those around her, and their confidence in her goodness and innocence, are so many additional strokes in the portrait. For her, my lord, I dare my life lay down, and will do't, sir, Please you t' accept it, that the queen is spotless I' the eyes of heaven, and to you. Every inch of woman in the world, Ay, every dram of woman's flesh is false, If she be so. I would not be a stander-by to hear My sovereign mistress clouded so, without My present vengeance taken! The mixture of playful courtesy, queenly dignity, and lady-like sweetness, with which she prevails on Polixenes to prolong his visit, is charming. HERMIONE. You'll stay! POLIXENES. No, madam. HERMIONE. Nay, but you will. POLIXENES. I may not, verily. HERMIONE. Verily! You put me off with limber vows; but I, Tho' you would seek t' unsphere the stars with oaths Should still say, "Sir, no going!" Verily, You shall _not_ go! A lady's verily is As potent as a lord's. Will you go yet? Force me to keep you as a prisoner, Not like a guest? And though the situation of Hermione admits but of few general reflections, one little speech, inimitably beautiful and characteristic, has become almost proverbial from its truth. She says:-- One good deed, dying tongueless, Slaughters a thousand, waiting upon that. Our praises are our wages; you may ride us With one soft kiss a thousand furlongs, ere With spur we heat an acre. She receives the first intimation of her husband's jealous suspicions with incredulous astonishment. It is not that, like Desdemona, she does not or cannot understand; but she _will_ not. When he accuses her more plainly, she replies with a calm dignity:-- Should a villain say so-- The most replenished villain in the world-- He were as much more villain: you, my lord, Do but mistake. This characteristic composure of temper never forsakes her; and yet it is so delineated that the impression is that of grandeur, and never borders upon pride or coldness: it is the fortitude of a gentle but a strong mind, conscious of its own innocence. Nothing can be more affecting than her calm reply to Leontes, who, in his jealous rage, heaps insult upon insult, and accuses her before her own attendants, as no better "than one of those to whom the vulgar give bold titles." How will this grieve you, When you shall come to clearer knowledge, that You have thus published me! Gentle my lord, You scarce can right me thoroughly then, to say You _did_ mistake. Her mild dignity and saint-like patience, combined as they are with the strongest sense of the cruel injustice of her husband, thrill us with admiration as well as pity; and we cannot but see and feel, that for Hermione to give way to tears and feminine complaints under such a blow, would be quite incompatible with the character. Thus she says of herself, as she is led to prison:-- There's some ill planet reigns: I must be patient till the heavens look With an aspect more favorable. Good my lords, I am not prone to weeping, as our sex Commonly are; the want of which vain dew Perchance shall dry your pities; but I have That honorable grief lodged here, that burns Worse than tears drown. Beseech you all, my lords With thought so qualified as your charities Shall best instruct you, measure me; and so The king's will be performed. When she is brought to trial for supposed crimes, called on to defend herself, "standing to prate and talk for life and honor, before who please to come and hear," the sense of her ignominious situation--all its shame and all its horror press upon her, and would apparently crush even _her_ magnanimous spirit, but for the consciousness of her own worth and innocence, and the necessity that exists for asserting and defending both. If powers divine Behold our human actions, (as they do), I doubt not, then, but innocence shall make False accusation blush, and tyranny Tremble at patience. * * * * For life, I prize it As I weigh grief, which I would spare. For honor-- 'Tis a derivative from me to mine, And only that I stand for. Her earnest, eloquent justification of herself, and her lofty sense of female honor, are rendered more affecting and impressive by that chilling despair that contempt for a life which has been made bitter to her through unkindness, which is betrayed in every word of her speech, though so calmly characteristic. When she enumerates the unmerited insults which have been heaped upon her, it is without asperity or reproach, yet in a tone which shows how completely the iron has entered her soul. Thus, when Leontes threatens her with death:-- Sir, spare your threats; The bug which you would fright me with, I seek. To me can life be no commodity; The crown and comfort of my life, your favor, I do give lost; for I do feel it gone, But know not how it went. My second joy, The first-fruits of my body, from his presence I am barr'd, like one infectious. My third comfort-- Starr'd most unluckily!--is from my breast, The innocent milk in its most innocent mouth, Haled out to murder. Myself on every post Proclaimed a strumpet; with immodest hatred, The childbed privilege denied, which 'longs To women of all fashion. Lastly, hurried Here to this place, i' the open air, before I have got strength of limit. Now, my liege, Tell me what blessings I have here alive, That I should fear to die. Therefore, proceed, But yet hear this; mistake me not. No! life, I prize it not a straw:--but for mine honor. (Which I would free,) if I shall be condemned Upon surmises; all proof sleeping else, But what your jealousies awake; I tell you, 'Tis rigor and not law. The character of Hermione is considered open to criticism on one point. I have heard it remarked that when she secludes herself from the world for sixteen years, during which time she is mourned as dead by her repentant husband, and is not won to relent from her resolve by his sorrow, his remorse, his constancy to her memory; such conduct, argues the critic, is unfeeling as it is inconceivable in a tender and virtuous woman. Would Imogen have done so, who is so generously ready to grant a pardon before it be asked? or Desdemona, who does not forgive because she cannot even resent? No, assuredly; but this is only another proof of the wonderful delicacy and consistency with which Shakspeare has discriminated the characters of all three. The incident of Hermione's supposed death and concealment for sixteen years, is not indeed very probable in itself, nor very likely to occur in every-day life. But besides all the probability necessary for the purposes of poetry, it has all the likelihood it can derive from the peculiar character of Hermione, who is precisely the woman who could and would have acted in this manner. In such a mind as hers, the sense of a cruel injury, inflicted by one she had loved and trusted, without awakening any violent anger or any desire of vengeance, would sink deep--almost incurably and lastingly deep. So far she is most unlike either Imogen or Desdemona, who are portrayed as much more flexible in temper; but then the circumstances under which she is wronged are very different, and far more unpardonable. The self-created, frantic jealousy of Leontes is very distinct from that of Othello, writhing under the arts of Iago: or that of Posthumus, whose understanding has been cheated by the most damning evidence of his wife's infidelity. The jealousy which in Othello and Posthumus is an error of judgment, in Leontes is a vice of the blood; he suspects without cause, condemns without proof; he is without excuse--unless the mixture of pride, passion, and imagination, and the predisposition to jealousy with which Shakspeare has portrayed him, be considered as an excuse. Hermione has been openly insulted: he to whom she gave herself, her heart, her soul, has stooped to the weakness and baseness of suspicion; has doubted her truth, has wronged her love, has sunk in her esteem, and forfeited her confidence. She has been branded with vile names; her son, her eldest hope, is dead--dead through the false accusation which has stuck infamy on his mother's name; and her innocent babe, stained with illegitimacy, disowned and rejected, has been exposed to a cruel death. Can we believe that the mere tardy acknowledgment of her innocence could make amends for wrongs and agonies such as these? or heal a heart which must have bled inwardly, consumed by that untold grief, "which burns worse than tears drown?" Keeping in view the peculiar character of Hermione, such as she is delineated, is she one either to forgive hastily or forget quickly? and though she might, in her solitude, mourn over her repentant husband, would his repentance suffice to restore him at once to his place in her heart: to efface from her strong and reflecting mind the recollection of his miserable weakness? or can we fancy this high-souled woman--left childless through the injury which has been inflicted on her, widowed in heart by the unworthness of him she loved, a spectacle of grief to all--to her husband a continual reproach and humiliation--walking through the parade of royalty in the court which had witnessed her anguish, her shame, her degradation, and her despair? Methinks that the want of feeling, nature, delicacy, and consistency, would lie in such an exhibition as this. In a mind like Hermione's, where the strength of feeling is founded in the power of thought, and where there is little of impulse or imagination,--"the depth, but not the tumult of the soul,"[48]--there are but two influences which predominate over the will,--time and religion. And what then remained, but that, wounded in heart and spirit, she should retire from the world?--not to brood over her wrongs, but to study forgiveness, and wait the fulfilment of the oracle which had promised the termination of her sorrows. Thus a premature reconciliation would not only have been painfully inconsistent with the character; it would also have deprived us of that most beautiful scene, in which Hermione is discovered to her husband as the statue or image of herself. And here we have another instance of that admirable art, with which the dramatic character is fitted to the circumstances in which it is placed: that perfect command over her own feelings, that complete self-possession necessary to this extraordinary situation, is consistent with all that we imagine of Hermione: in any other woman it would be so incredible as to shock all our ideas of probability. This scene, then, is not only one of the most picturesque and striking instances of stage effect to be found in the ancient or modern drama, but by the skilful manner in which it is prepared, it has, wonderful as it appears, all the merit of consistency and truth. The grief, the love, the remorse and impatience of Leontes, are finely contrasted with the astonishment and admiration of Perdita, who, gazing on the figure of her mother like one entranced, looks as if she were also turned to marble. There is here one little instance of tender remembrance in Leontes, which adds to the charming impression of Hermione's character. Chide me, dear stone! that I may say indeed Thou art Hermione; or rather thou art she In thy not chiding, for she was as tender As infancy and grace. Thus she stood, Even with such life of majesty--warm life-- As now it coldly stands--when first I woo'd her! The effect produced on the different persons of the drama by this living statue--an effect which at the same moment is, and is _not_ illusion--the manner in which the feelings of the spectators become entangled between the conviction of death and the impression of life, the idea of a deception and the feeling of a reality; and the exquisite coloring of poetry and touches of natural feeling with which the whole is wrought up, till wonder, expectation, and intense pleasure, hold our pulse and breath suspended on the event,--are quite inimitable. The expressions used here by Leontes,-- Thus she stood, Even with such life of majesty--_warm life_. The fixture of her eye has motion in't. And we are mock'd by art! And by Polixines,-- The very life seems warm upon her lip, appear strangely applied to a statue, such as we usually imagine it--of the cold colorless marble; but it is evident that in this scene Hermione personates one of those images or effigies, such as we may see in the old gothic cathedrals, in which the stone, or marble, was colored after nature. I remember coming suddenly upon one of these effigies, either at Basle or at Fribourg, which made me start: the figure was large as life; the drapery of crimson, powdered with stars of gold; the face and eyes, and hair, tinted after nature, though faded by time: it stood in a gothic niche, over a tomb, as I think, and in a kind of dim uncertain light. It would have been very easy for a living person to represent such an effigy, particularly if it had been painted by that "rare Italian master, Julio Romano,"[49] who, as we are informed, was the reputed author of this wonderful statue. The moment when Hermione descends from her pedestal, to the sound of soft music, and throws herself without speaking into her husband's arms, is one of inexpressible interest. It appears to me that her silence during the whole of this scene (except where she invokes a blessing on her daughter's head) is in the finest taste as a poetical beauty, besides being an admirable trait of character. The misfortunes of Hermione, her long religious seclusion, the wonderful and almost supernatural part she has just enacted, have invested her with such a sacred and awful charm, that any words put into her mouth, must, I think, have injured the solemn and profound pathos of the situation. There are several among Shakspeare's characters which exercise a far stronger power over our feelings, our fancy, our understanding, than that of Hermione; but not one,--unless perhaps Cordelia,--constructed upon so high and pure a principle. It is the union of gentleness with power which constitutes the perfection of mental grace. Thus among the ancients, with whom the _graces_ were also the _charities_, (to show, perhaps, that while form alone may constitute beauty, sentiment is necessary to grace,) one and the same word signified equally _strength_ and _virtue_. This feeling, carried into the fine arts, was the secret of the antique grace--the grace of repose. The same eternal nature--the same sense of immutable truth and beauty, which revealed this sublime principle of art to the ancient Greeks, revealed it to the genius of Shakspeare; and the character of Hermione, in which we have the same largeness of conception and delicacy of execution,--the same effect of suffering without passion, and grandeur without effort, is an instance, I think, that he felt within himself, and by intuition, what we study all our lives in the remains of ancient art. The calm, regular, classical beauty of Hermione's character is the more impressive from the wild and gothic accompaniments of her story, and the beautiful relief afforded by the pastoral and romantic grace which is thrown around her daughter Perdita. The character of Paulina, in the Winter's Tale, though it has obtained but little notice, and no critical remark, (that I have seen,) is yet one of the striking beauties of the play: and it has its moral too. As we see running through the whole universe that principle of contrast which may be called the life of nature, so we behold it every where illustrated in Shakspeare: upon this principle he has placed Emilia beside Desdemona, the nurse beside Juliet; the clowns and dairy-maids, and the merry peddler thief Autolycus round Florizel and Perdita;--and made Paulina the friend of Hermione. Paulina does not fill any ostensible office near the person of the queen, but is a lady of high rank in the court--the wife of the Lord Antigones. She is a character strongly drawn from real and common life--a clever, generous, strong-minded, warmhearted woman, fearless in asserting the truth, firm in her sense of right, enthusiastic in all her affections: quick in thought, resolute in word, and energetic in action; but heedless, hot-tempered, impatient, loud, bold, voluble, and turbulent of tongue; regardless of the feelings of those for whom she would sacrifice her life, and injuring from excess of zeal those whom she most wishes to serve. How many such are there in the world! But Paulina, though a very termagant, is yet a poetical termagant in her way; and the manner in which all the evil and dangerous tendencies of such a temper are placed before us, even while the individual character preserves the strongest hold upon our respect and admiration, forms an impressive lesson, as well as a natural and delightful portrait. In the scene, for instance, where she brings the infant before Leontes, with the hope of softening him to a sense of his injustice--"an office which," as she observes, "becomes a woman best"--her want of self-government, her bitter, inconsiderate reproaches, only add, as we might easily suppose, to his fury. PAULINA. I say I come From your good queen! LEONTES. Good queen! PAULINA. Good queen, my lord, good queen: I say good queen; And would by combat make her good, so were I A man, the worst about you. LEONTES. Force her hence. PAULINA. Let him that makes but trifles of his eyes, First hand me: on mine own accord I'll off; But first I'll do mine errand. The good queen (For she is good) hath brought you forth a daughter-- Here 'tis; commends it to your blessing. LEONTES. Traitors! Will you not push her out! Give her the bastard. PAULINA. Forever Unvenerable be thy hands, if thou Tak'st up the princess by that forced baseness Which he has put upon't! LEONTES. He dreads his wife. PAULINA. So, I would _you_ did; then 'twere past all doubt You'd call your children your's. LEONTES. A callat, Of boundless tongue, who late hath beat her husband, And now baits me!--this brat is none of mine. PAULINA. It is yours, And might we lay the old proverb to your charge, So like you, 'tis the worse. * * * * LEONTES. A gross hag! And lozel, thou art worthy to be hang'd, That wilt not stay her tongue. ANTIGONES. Hang all the husbands That cannot do that feat, you'll leave yourself Hardly one subject. LEONTES. Once more, take her hence. PAULINA. A most unworthy and unnatural lord Can do no more. LEONTES. I'll have thee burn'd. PAULINA. I care not: It is an heretic that makes the fire, Not she which burns in't. Here, while we honor her courage and her affection, we cannot help regretting her violence. We see, too, in Paulina, what we so often see in real life, that it is not those who are most susceptible in their own temper and feelings, who are most delicate and forbearing towards the feelings of others. She does not comprehend, or will not allow for the sensitive weakness of a mind less firmly tempered than her own. There is a reply of Leontes to one of her cutting speeches, which is full of feeling, and a lesson to those, who, with the best intentions in the world, force the painful truth, like a knife, into the already lacerated heart. PAULINA. If, one by one, you wedded all the world, Or, from the all that are, took something good To make a perfect woman, she you kill'd Would be unparallel'd. LEONTES. I think so. Kill'd! She I kill'd? I did so: but thou strik'st me Sorely, to say I did; it is as bitter Upon thy tongue, as in my thought. Now, good now, Say so but seldom. CLEOMENES. Not at all, good lady: You might have spoken a thousand things that would Have done the time more benefit, and grac'd Your kindness better. We can only excuse Paulina by recollecting that it is a part of her purpose to keep alive in the heart of Leontes the remembrance of his queen's perfections, and of his own cruel injustice. It is admirable, too, that Hermione and Paulina, while sufficiently approximated to afford all the pleasure of contrast, are never brought too nearly in contact on the scene or in the dialogue;[50] for this would have been a fault in taste, and have necessarily weakened the effect of both characters:--either the serene grandeur of Hermione would have subdued and overawed the fiery spirit of Paulina, or the impetuous temper of the latter must have disturbed in some respect our impression of the calm, majestic, and somewhat melancholy beauty of Hermione. DESDEMONA. The character of Hermione is addressed more to the imagination; that of Desdemona to the feelings. All that can render sorrow majestic is gathered round Hermione; all that can render misery heart-breaking is assembled round Desdemona. The wronged but self-sustained virtue of Hermione commands our veneration; the injured and defenceless innocence of Desdemona so wrings the soul, "that all for pity we could die." Desdemona, as a character, comes nearest to Miranda, both in herself as a woman, and in the perfect simplicity and unity of the delineation; the figures are differently draped--the proportions are the same. There is the same modesty, tenderness, and grace; the same artless devotion in the affections, the same predisposition to wonder, to pity, to admire; the same almost ethereal refinement and delicacy; but all is pure poetic nature within Miranda and around her: Desdemona is more associated with the palpable realities of every-day existence, and we see the forms and habits of society tinting her language and deportment; no two beings can be more alike in character--nor more distinct as individuals. The love of Desdemona for Othello appears at first such a violation of all probabilities, that her father at once imputes it to magic, "to spells and mixtures powerful o'er the blood." She, in spite of nature, Of years, of country, credit, every thing, To fall in love with what she feared to look on! And the devilish malignity of Iago, whose coarse mind cannot conceive an affection founded purely in sentiment, derives from her love itself a strong argument against her. Ay, there's the point, as to be bold with you, Not to affect any proposed matches Of her own clime, complexion, and degree, Whereto, we see, in all things nature tends,[51] &c. Notwithstanding this disparity of age, character, country, complexion, we, who are admitted into the secret, see her love rise naturally and necessarily out of the leading propensities of her nature. At the period of the story a spirit of wild adventure had seized all Europe. The discovery of both Indies was yet recent; over the shores of the western hemisphere still fable and mystery hung, with all their dim enchantments, visionary terrors, and golden promises! perilous expeditions and distant voyages were every day undertaken from hope of plunder, or mere love of enterprise; and from these the adventurers returned with tales of "Antres vast and desarts wild--of cannibals that did each other eat--of Anthropophagi, and men whose heads did grow beneath their shoulders." With just such stories did Raleigh and Clifford, and their followers return from the New World: and thus by their splendid or fearful exaggerations, which the imperfect knowledge of those times could not refute, was the passion for the romantic and marvellous nourished at home, particularly among the women. A cavalier of those days had no nearer no surer way to his mistress's heart, than by entertaining her with these wondrous narratives. What was a general feature of his time, Shakspeare seized and adapted to his purpose with the most exquisite felicity of effect. Desdemona, leaving her household cares in haste, to hang breathless on Othello's tales, was doubtless a picture from the life; and her inexperience and her quick imagination lend it an added propriety: then her compassionate disposition is interested by all the disastrous chances, hair-breadth 'scapes, and moving accidents by flood and field, of which he has to tell; and her exceeding gentleness and timidity, and her domestic turn of mind, render her more easily captivated by the military renown, the valor, and lofty bearing of the noble Moor-- And to his honors and his valiant parts Does she her soul and fortunes consecrate. The confession and the excuse for her love is well placed in the mouth of Desdemona, while the history of the rise of that love, and of his course of wooing, is, with the most graceful propriety, as far as she is concerned, spoken by Othello, and in her absence. The last two lines summing up the whole-- She loved me for the dangers I had passed, And I loved her that she did pity them-- comprise whole volumes of sentiment and metaphysics. Desdemona displays at times a transient energy, arising from the power of affection, but gentleness gives the prevailing tone to the character--gentleness in its excess--gentleness verging on passiveness--gentleness, which not only cannot resent,--but cannot resist. OTHELLO. Then of so gentle a condition! IAGO. Ay! too gentle. OTHELLO. Nay, that's certain Here the exceeding softness of Desdemona's temper is turned against her by Iago, so that it suddenly strikes Othello in a new point of view, as the inability to resist temptation; but to us who perceive the character as a whole, this extreme gentleness of nature is yet delineated with such exceeding refinement, that the effect never approaches to feebleness. It is true that _once_ her extreme timidity leads her in a moment of confusion and terror to prevaricate about the fatal handkerchief. This handkerchief, in the original story of Cinthio, is merely one of those embroidered handkerchiefs which were as fashionable in Shakspeare's time as in our own; but the minute description of it as "lavorato alla morisco sottilissimamente,"[52] suggested to the poetical fancy of Shakspeare one of the most exquisite and characteristic passages in the whole play. Othello makes poor Desdemona believe that the handkerchief was a talisman. There's magic in the web of it. A sibyl, that had numbered in the world The sun to make two hundred compasses, In her prophetic fury sew'd the work: The worms were hallowed that did breed the silk, And it was dyed in mummy, which the skilful Conserv'd of maidens' hearts. DESDEMONA. Indeed! is't true? OTHELLO. Most veritable, therefore look to't well. DESDEMONA. Then would to heaven that I had never seen it! OTHELLO. Ha! wherefore! DESDEMONA. Why do you speak so startingly and rash? OTHELLO. Is't lost,--Is't gone? Speak, is it out of the way? DESDEMONA. Heavens bless us! OTHELLO. Say you? DESDEMONA. It is not lost--but what an' if it were? OTHELLO. Ha! DESDEMONA. I say it is not lost. OTHELLO. Fetch it, let me see it. DESDEMONA. Why so I can, sir, but I will not now, &c. Desdemona, whose soft credulity, whose turn for the marvellous, whose susceptible imagination had first directed her thoughts and affections to Othello, is precisely the woman to be frightened out of her senses by such a tale as this, and betrayed by her fears into a momentary tergiversation. It is most natural in such a being, and shows us that even in the sweetest natures there can be no completeness and consistency without moral energy.[53] With the most perfect artlessness, she has something of the instinctive, unconscious address of her sex; as when she appeals to her father-- So much duty as my mother show'd To you, preferring you before her father, So much I challenge, that I may profess Due to the Moor, my lord. And when she is pleading for Cassio-- What! Michael Cassio! That came a wooing with you; and many a time. When I have spoken of you disparagingly, Hath ta'en your part? In persons who unite great sensibility and lively fancy, I have often observed this particular species of address, which is always unconscious of itself, and consists in the power of placing ourselves in the position of another, and imagining, rather than perceiving, what is in their hearts. We women have this _address_ (if so it can be called) naturally, but I have seldom met with it in men. It is not inconsistent with extreme simplicity of character, and quite distinct from that kind of art which is the result of natural acuteness and habits of observation--quick to perceive the foibles of others, and as quick to turn them to its own purposes; which is always conscious of itself, and, if united with strong intellect, seldom perceptible to others. In the mention of her mother, and the appeal to Othello's self-love, Desdemona has no design formed on conclusions previously drawn; but her intuitive quickness of feeling, added to her imagination, lead her more safely to the same results, and the distinction is as truly as it is delicately drawn. When Othello first outrages her in a manner which appears inexplicable, she seeks and finds excuses for him. She is so innocent that not only she cannot believe herself suspected, but she cannot conceive the existence of guilt in others. Something, sure, of state, Either from Venice, or some unhatch'd practice Made demonstrable here in Cyprus to him, Hath puddled his clear spirit. 'Tis even so-- Nay, we must think, men are not gods, Nor of them look for such observances As fit the bridal. And when the direct accusation of crime is flung on her in the vilest terms, it does not anger but stun her, as if it transfixed her whole being; she attempts no reply, no defence; and reproach or resistance never enters her thought. 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 of thought or actual deed; Or that mine eyes, mine ears, or any sense, Delighted them in any other form; Or that I do not yet, 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. And there is one stroke of consummate delicacy surprising, when we remember the latitude of expression prevailing in Shakspeare's time, and which he allowed to his other women generally: she says, on recovering from her stupefaction-- Am I that name, Iago? IAGO. What name, sweet lady? DESDEMONA. That which she says my lord did say I was. So completely did Shakspeare enter into the angelic refinement of the character. Endued with that temper which is the origin of superstition in love as in religion,--which, in fact makes love itself a religion,--she not only does not utter an upbraiding, but nothing that Othello does or says, no outrage, no injustice, can tear away the charm with which her imagination had invested him, or impair her faith in his honor; "Would you had never seen him!" exclaims Emilia. DESDEMONA. So would not I!--my love doth so approve him, That even his stubbornness, his checks and frowns Have grace and favor in them. There is another peculiarity, which, in reading the play of Othello, we rather feel than perceive: through the whole of the dialogue appropriated to Desdemona, there is not one general observation. Words are with her the vehicle of sentiment, and never of reflection; so that I cannot find throughout a sentence of general application. The same remark applies to Miranda: and to no other female character of any importance or interest; not even to Ophelia. The rest of what I wished to say of Desdemona, has been anticipated by an anonymous critic, and so beautifully, so justly, so eloquently expressed, that I with pleasure erase my own page, to make room for his. "Othello," observes this writer, "is no love story; all that is below tragedy in the passion of love, is taken away at once, by the awful character of Othello; for such he seems to us to be designed to be. He appears never as a lover, but at once as a husband: and the relation of his love made dignified, as it is a husband's justification of his marriage, is also dignified, as it is a soldier's relation of his stern and perilous life. His love itself, as long as it is happy, is perfectly calm and serene--the protecting tenderness of a husband. It is not till it is disordered, that it appears as a passion: then is shown a power in contention with itself--a mighty being struck with death, and bringing up from all the depths of life convulsions and agonies. It is no exhibition of the power of the passion of love, but of the passion of life, vitally wounded, and self over-mastering. If Desdemona had been really guilty, the greatness would have been destroyed, because his love would have been unworthy, false. But she is good, and his love is most perfect, just, and good. That a man should place his perfect love on a wretched thing, is miserably debasing, and shocking to thought; but that loving perfectly and well, he should by hellish human circumvention be brought to distrust and dread, and abjure his own perfect love, is most mournful indeed--it is the infirmity of our good nature wrestling in vain with the strong powers of evil. Moreover, he would, had Desdemona been false, have been the mere victim of fate; whereas he is now in a manner his own victim. His happy love was heroic tenderness; his injured love is terrible passion, and disordered power, engendered within itself to its own destruction, is the height of all tragedy. "The character of Othello is perhaps the most greatly drawn, the most heroic of any of Shakspeare's actors; but it is, perhaps, that one also of which his reader last acquires the intelligence. The intellectual and warlike energy of his mind--his tenderness of affection--his loftiness of spirit--his frank, generous magnanimity--impetuosity like a thunderbolt--and that dark, fierce flood of boiling passion, polluting even his imagination,--compose a character entirely original, most difficult to delineate, but perfectly delineated." Emilia in this play is a perfect portrait from common life, a masterpiece in the Flemish style: and though not necessary as a contrast, it cannot be but that the thorough vulgarity, the loose principles of this plebeian woman, united to a high degree of spirit, energetic feeling, strong sense and low cunning, serve to place in brighter relief the exquisite refinement, the moral grace, the unblemished truth, and the soft submission of Desdemona. On the other perfections of this tragedy, considered as a production of genius--on the wonderful characters of Othello and Iago--on the skill with which the plot is conducted, and its simplicity which a word unravels,[54] and on the overpowering horror of the catastrophe--eloquence and analytical criticism have been exhausted; I will only add, that the source of the pathos throughout--of that pathos which at once softens and deepens the tragic effect--lies in the character of Desdemona. No woman differently constituted could have excited the same intense and painful compassion, without losing something of that exalted charm, which invests her from beginning to end, which we are apt to impute to the interest of the situation, and to the poetical coloring, but which lies, in fact, in the very essence of the character. Desdemona, with all her timid flexibility and soft acquiescence, is not weak; for the negative alone is weak; and the mere presence of goodness and affection implies in itself a species of power; power without consciousness, power without effort, power with repose--that soul of grace! I know a Desdemona in real life, one in whom the absence of intellectual power is never felt as a deficiency, nor the absence of energy of will as impairing the dignity, nor the most imperturbable serenity, as a want of feeling: one in whom thoughts appear mere instincts, the sentiment of rectitude supplies the principle, and virtue itself seems rather a necessary state of being, than an imposed law. No shade of sin or vanity has yet stolen over that bright innocence. No discord within has marred the loveliness without--no strife of the factitious world without has disturbed the harmony within. The comprehension of evil appears forever shut out, as if goodness had converted all things to itself; and all to the pure in heart must necessarily be pure. The impression produced is exactly that of the character of Desdemona; genius is a rare thing, but abstract goodness is rarer. In Desdemona, we cannot but feel that the slightest manifestation of intellectual power or active will would have injured the dramatic effect. She is a victim consecrated from the first,--"an offering without blemish," alone worthy of the grand final sacrifice; all harmony, all grace, all purity, all tenderness, all truth! But, alas! to see her fluttering like a cherub in the talons of a fiend!--to see her--O poor Desdemona! IMOGEN. We come to Imogen. Others of Shakspeare's characters are, as dramatic and poetical conceptions, more striking, more brilliant, more powerful; but of all his women, considered as individuals rather than as heroines, Imogen is the most perfect. Portia and Juliet are pictured to the fancy with more force of contrast, more depth of light and shade; Viola and Miranda, with more aerial delicacy of outline; but there is no female portrait that can be compared to Imogen as a woman--none in which so great a variety of tints are mingled together into such perfect harmony. In her, we have all the fervor of youthful tenderness, all the romance of youthful fancy, all the enchantment of ideal grace,--the bloom of beauty, the brightness of intellect and the dignity of rank, taking a peculiar hue from the conjugal character which is shed over all, like a consecration and a holy charm. In Othello and the Winter's Tale, the interest excited for Desdemona and Hermione is divided with others: but in Cymbeline, Imogen is the angel of light, whose lovely presence pervades and animates the whole piece. The character altogether may be pronounced finer, more complex in its elements, and more fully developed in all its parts, than those of Hermione and Desdemona; but the position in which she is placed is not, I think, so fine--at least, not so effective, as a tragic situation. Shakspeare has borrowed the chief circumstances of Imogen's story from one of Boccaccio's tales.[55] A company of Italian merchants who are assembled in a tavern at Paris, are represented as conversing on the subject of their wives: all of them express themselves with levity, or skepticism, or scorn, on the virtue of women, except a young Genoese merchant named Bernabo, who maintains, that by the especial favor of Heaven he possesses a wife no less chaste than beautiful. Heated by the wine, and excited by the arguments and the coarse raillery of another young merchant, Ambrogiolo, Bernabo proceeds to enumerate the various perfections and accomplishments of his Zinevra. He praises her loveliness, her submission, and her discretion--her skill in embroidery, her graceful service, in which the best trained page of the court could not exceed her; and he adds, as rarer accomplishments, that she could mount a horse, fly a hawk, write and read, and cast up accounts, as well as any merchant of them all. His enthusiasm only excites the laughter and mockery of his companions, particularly of Ambrogiolo, who, by the most artful mixture of contradiction and argument, rouses the anger of Bernabo, and he at length exclaims, that he would willingly stake his life, his head, on the virtue of his wife. This leads to the wager which forms so important an incident in the drama. Ambrogiolo bets one thousand florins of gold against five thousand, that Zinevra, like the rest of her sex, is accessible to temptation--that in less than three months he will undermine her virtue, and bring her husband the most undeniable proofs of her falsehood. He sets off for Genoa, in order to accomplish his purpose; but on his arrival, all that he learns, and all that he beholds with his own eyes, of the discreet and noble character of the lady, make him despair of success by fair means; he therefore has recourse to the basest treachery. By bribing an old woman in the service of Zinevra, he is conveyed to her sleeping apartment, concealed in a trunk, from which he issues in the dead of the night; he takes note of the furniture of the chamber, makes himself master of her purse, her morning robe, or cymar, and her girdle, and of a certain mark on her person. He repeats these observations for two nights, and, furnished with these evidences of Zinevra's guilt, he returns to Paris, and lays them before the wretched husband. Bernabo rejects every proof of his wife's infidelity except that which finally convinces Posthumus. When Ambrogiolo mentions the "mole, cinque-spotted," he stands like one who has received a poniard in his heart; without further dispute he pays down the forfeit, and filled with rage and despair both at the loss of his money and the falsehood of his wife, he returns towards Genoa; he retires to his country house, and sends a messenger to the city with letters to Zinevra, desiring that she would come and meet him, but with secret orders to the man to despatch her by the way. The servant prepares to execute his master's command, but overcome by her entreaties for mercy, and his own remorse, he spares her life, on condition that she will fly from the country forever. He then disguises her in his own cloak and cap, and brings back to her husband the assurance that she is killed, and that her body has been devoured by the wolves. In the disguise of a mariner, Zinevra then embarks on board a vessel bound to the Levant, and on arriving at Alexandria, she is taken into the service of the Sultan of Egypt, under the name of Sicurano; she gains the confidence of her master, who, not suspecting her sex, sends her as captain of the guard which was appointed for the protection of the merchants at the fair of Acre. Here she accidentally meets Ambrogiolo, and sees in his possession the purse and girdle, which she immediately recognizes as her own. In reply to her inquiries, he relates with fiendish exultation the manner in which he had obtained possession of them, and she persuades him to go back with her to Alexandria. She then sends a messenger to Genoa in the name of the Sultan, and induces her husband to come and settle in Alexandria. At a proper opportunity, she summons both to the presence of the Sultan, obliges Ambrogiolo to make a full confession of his treachery, and wrings from her husband the avowal of his supposed murder of herself: then falling at the feet of the Sultan discovers her real name and sex, to the great amazement of all. Bernabo is pardoned at the prayer of his wife, and Ambrogiolo is condemned to be fastened to a stake, smeared with honey, and left to be devoured by the flies and locusts. This horrible sentence is executed; while Zinevra, enriched by the presents of the Sultan, and the forfeit wealth of Ambrogiolo, returns with her husband to Genoa, where she lives in great honor and happiness, and maintains her reputation of virtue to the end of her life. These are the materials from which Shakspeare has drawn the dramatic situation of Imogen. He has also endowed her with several of the qualities which are attributed to Zinevra; but for the essential truth and beauty of the individual character, for the sweet coloring of pathos, and sentiment, and poetry interfused through the whole, he is indebted only to nature and himself. It would be a waste of words to refute certain critics who have accused Shakspeare of a want of judgment in the adoption of the story; of having transferred the manners of a set of intoxicated merchants and a merchant's wife to heroes and princesses, and of having entirely destroyed the interest of the catastrophe.[56] The truth is, that Shakspeare has wrought out the materials before him with the most luxuriant fancy and the most wonderful skill. As for the various anachronisms, and the confusion of names, dates, and manners, over which Dr. Johnson exults in no measured terms, the confusion is nowhere but in his own heavy obtuseness of sentiment and perception, and his want of poetical faith. Look into the old Italian poets, whom we read continually with still increasing pleasure; does any one think of sitting down to disprove the existence of Ariodante, king of Scotland? or to prove that the mention of Proteus and Pluto, baptism and the Virgin Mary, in a breath, amounts to an anachronism? Shakspeare, by throwing his story far back into a remote and uncertain age, has blended, by his "own omnipotent will," the marvellous, the heroic, the ideal, and the classical,--the extreme of refinement and the extreme of simplicity,--into one of the loveliest fictions of romantic poetry; and, to use Schlegel's expression, "has made the social manners of the latest times harmonize with heroic deeds, and even with the appearances of the gods."[57] But, admirable as is the conduct of the whole play, rich in variety of character and in picturesque incident, its chief beauty and interest is derived from Imogen. When Ferdinand tells Miranda that she was "created of every creature's best," he speaks like a lover, or refers only to her personal charms: the same expression might be applied critically to the character of Imogen; for, as the portrait of Miranda is produced by resolving the female character into its original elements, so that of Imogen unites the greatest number of those qualities which we imagine to constitute excellency in woman. Imogen, like Juliet, conveys to our mind the impression of extreme simplicity in the midst of the most wonderful complexity. To conceive her aright, we must take some peculiar tint from many characters, and so mingle them, that, like the combination of hues in a sunbeam, the effect shall be as one to the eye. We must imagine something of the romantic enthusiasm of Juliet, of the truth and constancy of Helen, of the dignified purity of Isabel, of the tender sweetness of Viola, of the self-possession and intellect of Portia--combined together so equally and so harmoniously, that we can scarcely say that one quality predominates over the other. But Imogen is less imaginative than Juliet, less spirited and intellectual than Portia, less serious than Helen and Isabel; her dignity is not so imposing as that of Hermione, it stands more on the defensive; her submission, though unbounded, is not so passive as that of Desdemona; and thus while she resembles each of these characters individually, she stands wholly distinct from all. It is true, that the conjugal tenderness of Imogen is at once the chief subject of the drama, and the pervading charm of her character; but it is not true, I think, that she is merely interesting from her tenderness and constancy to her husband. We are so completely let into the essence of Imogen's nature, that we feel as if we had known and loved her before she was married to Posthumus, and that her conjugal virtues are a charm superadded, like the color laid upon a beautiful groundwork. Neither does it appear to me, that Posthumus is unworthy of Imogen, or only interesting on Imogen's account. His character, like those of all the other persons of the drama, is kept subordinate to hers: but this could not be otherwise, for she is the proper subject--the heroine of the poem. Every thing is done to ennoble Posthumus, and justify her love for him; and though we certainly approve him more for her sake than for his own, we are early prepared to view him with Imogen's eyes; and not only excuse, but sympathize in her admiration of one Who sat 'mongst men like a descended god. * * * * Who lived in court, which it is rare to do, Most praised, most loved: A sample to the youngest; to the more mature, A glass that feated them. And with what beauty and delicacy is her conjugal and matronly character discriminated! Her love for her husband is as deep as Juliet's for her lover, but without any of that headlong vehemence, that fluttering amid hope, fear, and transport--that giddy intoxication of heart and sense, which belongs to the novelty of passion, which we feel once, and but once, in our lives. We see her love for Posthumus acting upon her mind with the force of an habitual feeling, heightened by enthusiastic passion, and hallowed by the sense of duty. She asserts and justifies her affection with energy indeed, but with a calm and wife-like dignity:-- CYMBELINE. Thou took'st a beggar, would'st have made my throne A seat for baseness. IMOGEN. No, I rather added a lustre to it CYMBELINE. O thou vile one! IMOGEN. Sir, It is your fault that I have loved Posthumus; You bred him as my playfellow, and he is A man worth any woman; overbuys me, Almost the sum he pays. Compare also, as examples of the most delicate discrimination of character and feeling, the parting scene between Imogen and Posthumus, that between Romeo and Juliet, and that between Troilus and Cressida: compare the confiding matronly tenderness, the deep but resigned sorrow of Imogen, with the despairing agony of Juliet, and the petulant grief of Cressida. When Posthumus is driven into exile, he comes to take a last farewell of his wife:-- IMOGEN. My dearest husband, I something fear my father's wrath, but nothing (Always reserved my holy duty) what His rage can do on me. You must be gone, And I shall here abide the hourly shot Of angry eyes: not comforted to live, But that there is this jewel in the world That I may see again. POSTHUMUS. My queen! my mistress! O, lady, weep no more! lest I give cause To be suspected of more tenderness Than doth become a man. I will remain The loyal'st husband that did e'er plight troth * * * * Should we be taking leave As long a term as yet we have to live, The loathness to depart would grow--Adieu! IMOGEN. Nay, stay a little: Were you but riding forth to air yourself, Such parting were too petty. Look here, love, This diamond was my mother's; take it, heart But keep it till you woo another wife, When Imogen is dead! Imogen, in whose tenderness there is nothing jealous or fantastic, does not seriously apprehend that her husband will woo another wife when she is dead. It is one of those fond fancies which women are apt to express in moments of feeling, merely for the pleasure of hearing a protestation to the contrary. When Posthumus leaves her, she does not burst forth in eloquent lamentation; but that silent, stunning, overwhelming sorrow, which renders the mind insensible to all things else, is represented with equal force and simplicity. IMOGEN. There cannot be a pinch in death More sharp than this is. CYMBELINE. O disloyal thing, That should'st repair my youth; thou heapeat A year's age on me! IMOGEN. I beseech you, sir, Harm not yourself with your vexation; I Am senseless of your wrath; a touch more rare[58] Subdues all pangs, all fears. CYMBELINE. Past grace? obedience? IMOGEN. Past hope and in despair--that way past grace. In the same circumstances, the impetuous excited feelings of Juliet, and her vivid imagination, lend something far more wildly agitated, more intensely poetical and passionate to her grief. JULIET. Art thou gone so? My love, my lord, my friend! I must hear from thee every day i' the hour, For in a minute there are many days-- O by this count I shall be much in years, Ere I again behold my Romeo! ROMEO. Farewell! I will omit no opportunity That may convey my greetings, love, to thee. JULIET. O! think'st thou we shall ever meet again? ROMEO. I doubt it not; and all these woes shall serve For sweet discourses in our time to come. JULIET. O God! I have an ill-divining soul: Methinks I see thee, now thou art below, As one dead in the bottom of a tomb: Either my eye-sight fails, or thou look'st pale. We have no sympathy with the pouting disappointment of Cressida, which is just like that of a spoilt child which has lost its sugar-plum, without tenderness, passions, or poetry: and, in short, perfectly characteristic of that vain, fickle, dissolute, heartless woman,--"unstable as water." CRESSIDA. And is it true that I must go from Troy? TROILUS. A hateful truth. CRESSIDA. What, and from Troilus too? TROILUS. From Troy and Troilus. CRESSIDA. Is it possible? TROILUS. And suddenly. CRESSIDA. I must then to the Greeks? TROILUS. No remedy. CRESSIDA. A woeful Cressid 'mongst the merry Greeks! When shall we see again? TROILUS. Hear me, my love. Be thou but true of heart-- CRESSIDA. I true! How now? what wicked deem is this? TROILUS. Nay, we must use expostulation kindly, For it is parting from us; I speak not, be thou true, as fearing thee; For I will throw my glove to Death himself That there's no maculation in thy heart: But be thou true, say I, to fashion in My sequent protestation. Be thou true, And I will see thee. CRESSIDA. O heavens! be true again-- O heavens! you love me not. TROILUS. Die I a villain, then! In this I do not call your faith in question, So mainly as my merit-- --But be not tempted. CRESSIDA. Do you think I will? * * * * * In the eagerness of Imogen to meet her husband there is all a wife's fondness, mixed up with the breathless hurry arising from a sudden and joyful surprise; but nothing of the picturesque eloquence, the ardent, exuberant, Italian imagination of Juliet, who, to gratify her impatience, would have her heralds thoughts;--press into her service the nimble pinioned doves, and wind-swift Cupids,--change the course of nature, and lash the steeds of Phoebus to the west. Imogen only thinks "one score of miles, 'twixt sun and sun," slow travelling for a lover, and wishes for a horse with wings-- O for a horse with wings! Hear'st thou, Pisanio? He is at Milford Haven. Read, and tell me How far 'tis thither. If one of mean affairs May plod it in a week, why may not I Glide thither in a day? Then, true Pisanio, (Who long'st like me, to see thy lord--who long'st-- O let me bate, but not like me--yet long'st, But in a fainter kind--O not like me, For mine's beyond beyond,) say, and speak thick-- (Love's counsellor should fill the bores of hearing To the smothering of the sense)--how far is it To this same blessed Milford? And by the way, Tell me how Wales was made so happy, as To inherit such a haven. But, first of all, How we may steal from hence; and for the gap That we shall make in time, from our hence going And our return, to excuse. But first, how get hence. Why should excuse be born, or e'er begot? We'll talk of that hereafter. Pr'ythee speak, How many score of miles may we well ride 'Twixt hour and hour? PISANIO. One score, 'twixt sun and sun, Madam, 's enough for you; and too much too. IMOGEN. Why, one that rode to his execution, man, Could never go so slow! There are two or three other passages bearing on the conjugal tenderness of Imogen, which must be noticed for the extreme intensity of the feeling, and the unadorned elegance of the expression. I would thou grew'st unto the shores o' the haven And question'dst every sail: if he should write, And I not have it, 'twere a paper lost As offer'd mercy is. What was the last That he spake to thee? PISANIO. 'Twas, His queen! his queen! IMOGEN. Then wav'd his hankerchief? PISANIO. And kiss'd it, madam. IMOGEN. Senseless linen! happier therein than I!-- And that was all? PISANIO. No, madam; for so long As he could make me with this eye or ear Distinguish him from others, he did keep The deck, with glove, or hat, or handkerchief Still waving, as the fits and stirs of his mind Could best express how slow his soul sail'd on, How swift his ship. IMOGEN. Thou should'st have made him As little as a crow, or less, ere left To after-eye him. PISANIO. Madam, so I did. IMOGEN. I would have broke my eye-strings; cracked them, but To look upon him; till the diminution Of space had pointed him sharp as my needle; Nay, followed him, till he had melted from The smallness of a gnat to air; and then Have turn'd mine eye, and wept. Two little incidents, which are introduced with the most unobtrusive simplicity, convey the strongest impression of her tenderness for her husband, and with that perfect unconsciousness on her part, which adds to the effect. Thus when she has lost her bracelet-- Go, bid my woman Search for a jewel, that too casually, Hath left my arm. It was thy master's: 'shrew me, If I would lose it for a revenue Of any king in Europe. I do think I saw't this morning; confident I am, Last night 'twas on mine arm--_I kiss'd it. I hope it has not gone to tell my lord That I kiss aught but he._ It has been well observed, that our consciousness that the bracelet is really gone to bear false witness against her, adds an inexpressibly touching effect to the simplicity and tenderness of the sentiment. And again, when she opens her bosom to meet the death to which her husband has doomed her, she finds his letters preserved next her heart What's here! The letters of the loyal Leonatus?-- Soft, we'll no defence. The scene in which Posthumus stakes his ring on the virtue of his wife, and gives Iachimo permission to tempt her, is taken from the story. The baseness and folly of such conduct have been justly censured; but Shakspeare, feeling that Posthumus needed every excuse, has managed the quarrelling scene between him and Iachimo with the most admirable skill. The manner in which his high spirit is gradually worked up by the taunts of this Italian fiend, is contrived with far more probability, and much less coarseness, than in the original tale. In the end he is not the challenger, but the challenged; and could hardly (except on a moral principle, much too refined for those rude times) have declined the wager without compromising his own courage and his faith in the honor of Imogen. IACHIMO. I durst attempt it against any lady in the world. POSTHUMUS. You are a great deal abused in too bold a persuasion; and I doubt not you sustain what you're worthy of, by your attempt. IACHIMO. What's that? POSTHUMUS. A repulse: though your _attempt_, as you call it, deserve more--a punishment too. PHILARIO. Gentlemen, enough of this. It came in too suddenly; let it die as it was born, and I pray you be better acquainted. IACHIMO. Would I had put my estate and my neighbor's on the approbation of what I have said! POSTHUMUS. What lady would you choose to assail? IACHIMO. Yours, whom in constancy you think stands so safe In the interview between Imogen and Iachimo, he does not begin his attack on her virtue by a direct accusation against Posthumus; but by dark hints and half-uttered insinuations, such as Iago uses to madden Othello, he intimates that her husband, in his absence from her, has betrayed her love and truth, and forgotten her in the arms of another. All that Imogen says in this scene is comprised in a few lines--a brief question, or a more brief remark. The proud and delicate reserve with which she veils the anguish she suffers, is inimitably beautiful. The strongest expression of reproach he can draw from her, is only, "My lord, I fear, has forgot Britain." When he continues in the same strain, she exclaims in an agony, "Let me hear no more." When he urges her to revenge, she asks, with all the simplicity of virtue, "How should I be revenged?" And when he explains to her how she is to be avenged, her sudden burst of indignation, and her immediate perception of his treachery, and the motive for it, are powerfully fine: it is not only the anger of a woman whose delicacy has been shocked, but the spirit of a princess insulted in her court. Away! I do condemn mine ears, that have So long attended thee. If thou wert honorable, Thou would'st have told this tale for virtue not For such an end thou seek'st, as base as strange Thou wrong'st a gentleman, who is as far From thy report as thou from honor; and Solicit'st here a lady that disdains Thee and the devil alike. It has been remarked, that "her readiness to pardon Iachimo's false imputation, and his designs against herself, is a good lesson to prudes, and may show that where there is a real attachment to virtue, there is no need of an outrageous antipathy to vice."[59] This is true; but can we fail to perceive that the instant and ready forgiveness of Imogen is accounted for, and rendered more graceful and characteristic by the very means which Iachimo employs to win it? He pours forth the most enthusiastic praises of her husband, professes that he merely made this trial of her out of his exceeding love for Posthumus, and she is pacified at once; but, with exceeding delicacy of feeling, she is represented as maintaining her dignified reserve and her brevity of speech to the end of the scene.[60] We must also observe how beautifully the character of Imogen is distinguished from those of Desdemona and Hermione. When she is made acquainted with her husband's cruel suspicions, we see in her deportment neither the meek submission of the former, nor the calm resolute dignity of the latter. The first effect produced on her by her husband's letter is conveyed to the fancy by the exclamation of Pisanio, who is gazing on her as she reads.-- What shall I need to draw my sword? The paper Has cut her throat already! No, 'tis slander, Whose edge is sharper than the sword! And in her first exclamations we trace, besides astonishment and anguish, and the acute sense of the injustice inflicted on her, a flash of indignant spirit, which we do not find in Desdemona or Hermione False to his bed!--What is it to be false? To lie in watch there, and to think of 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 his bed, Is it? This is followed by that affecting lamentation over the falsehood and injustice of her husband, in which she betrays no atom of jealousy or wounded self-love, but observes in the extremity of her anguish, that after _his_ lapse from truth, "all good seeming would be discredited," and she then resigns herself to his will with the most entire submission. In the original story, Zinevra prevails on the servant to spare her, by her exclamations and entreaties for mercy. "The lady, seeing the poniard, and hearing those words, exclaimed in terror, 'Alas! have pity on me for the love of Heaven! do not become the slayer of one who never offended thee, only to pleasure another. God, who knows all things, knows that I have never done that which could merit such a reward from my husband's hand.'" Now let us turn to Shakspeare. Imogen says,-- Come, fellow, be thou honest; Do thou thy master's bidding: when thou seest him, A little witness my obedience. Look! I draw the sword myself; take it, and hit The innocent mansion of my love, my heart. Fear not; 'tis empty of all things but grief: Thy master is not there, who was, indeed, The riches of it. Do his bidding; strike! The devoted attachment of Pisanio to his royal mistress, all through the piece, is one of those side touches by which Shakspeare knew how to give additional effect to his characters. Cloten is odious;[61] but we must not overlook the peculiar fitness and propriety of his character, in connection with that of Imogen. He is precisely the kind of man who would be most intolerable to such a woman. He is a fool,--so is Slender, and Sir Andrew Aguecheek: but the folly of Cloten is not only ridiculous, but hateful; it arises not so much from a want of understanding as a total want of heart; it is the perversion of sentiment, rather than the deficiency of intellect; he has occasional gleams of sense, but never a touch of feeling. Imogen describes herself not only as "sprighted with a fool," but as "frighted and anger'd worse." No other fool but Cloten--a compound of the booby and the villain--could excite in such a mind as Imogen's the same mixture of terror, contempt, and abhorrence. The stupid, obstinate malignity of Cloten, and the wicked machinations of the queen-- A father cruel, and a step-dame false, A foolish suitor to a wedded lady-- justify whatever might need excuse in the conduct of Imogen--as her concealed marriage and her flight from her father's court--and serve to call out several of the most beautiful and striking parts of her character: particularly that decision and vivacity of temper, which in her harmonize so beautifully with exceeding delicacy, sweetness, and submission. In the scene with her detested suitor, there is at first a careless majesty of disdain, which is admirable. I am much sorry, sir, You put me to forget a lady's manners, By being so verbal;[62] and learn now, for all, That I, which know my heart, do here pronounce, By the very truth of it, I care not for you, And am so near the lack of charity, (T' accuse myself,) I hate you; which I had rather You felt, than make 't my boast. But when he dares to provoke her, by reviling the absent Posthumus, her indignation heightens her scorn, and her scorn sets a keener edge on her indignation. CLOTEN. For the contract you pretend with that base wretch, One bred of alms, and fostered with cold dishes, With scraps o' the court; it is no contract, none. IMOGEN. Profane fellow! Wert thou the son of Jupiter, and no more, But what thou art, besides, thou wert too base To be his groom; thou wert dignified enough, Even to the point of envy, if 'twere made Comparative for your virtues, to be styl'd The under hangman of his kingdom; and hated For being preferr'd so well. He never can meet more mischance than come To be but nam'd of thee. His meanest garment That ever hath but clipp'd his body, is dearer In my respect, than all the hairs above thee. Were they all made such men. One thing more must be particularly remarked because it serves to individualize the character from the beginning to the end of the poem. We are constantly sensible that Imogen, besides being a tender and devoted woman, is a princess and a beauty, at the same time that she is ever superior to her position and her external charms. There is, for instance, a certain airy majesty of deportment--a spirit of accustomed command breaking out every now and then--the dignity, without the assumption of rank and royal birth, which is apparent in the scene with Cloten and elsewhere; and we have not only a general impression that Imogen, like other heroines, is beautiful, but the peculiar style and character of her beauty is placed before us: we have an image of the most luxuriant loveliness, combined with exceeding delicacy, and even fragility of person: of the most refined elegance, and the most exquisite modesty, set forth in one or two passages of description; as when Iachimo is contemplating her asleep:-- Cytherea, How bravely thou becom'st thy bed! fresh lily. And whiter than the sheets. 'Tis her breathing that Perfumes the chamber thus. The flame o' the taper Bows toward her; and would underpeep her lids To see the enclos'd lights, now canopied Under those windows, white and azure, lac'd With blue of heaven's own tinct! The preservation of her feminine character under her masculine attire; her delicacy, her modesty, and her timidity, are managed with the same perfect consistency and unconscious grace as in Viola. And we must not forget that her "neat cookery," which is so prettily eulogized by Guiderius:-- He cuts out roots in characters, And sauc'd our broths, as Juno had been sick, And he her dieter, formed part of the education of a princess in those remote times. Few reflections of a general nature are put into the mouth of Imogen; and what she says is more remarkable for sense, truth, and tender feeling, than for wit, or wisdom, or power of imagination. The following little touch of poetry reminds us of Juliet:-- Ere I could Give him that parting kiss, which I had set Between two charming words, comes in my father; And, like the tyrannous breathing of the north, Shakes all our buds from growing. Her exclamation on opening her husband's letter reminds us of the profound and thoughtful tenderness of Helen:-- O learned indeed were that astronomer That knew the stars, as I his characters! He'd lay the future open. The following are more in the manner of Isabel:-- Most miserable Is the desire that's glorious: bless'd be those, How mean soe'er, that have their honest wills, That seasons comfort, Against self-slaughter There is a prohibition so divine That cravens my weak hand. Thus may poor fools Believe false teachers; though those that are betray'd Do feel the reason sharply, yet the traitor Stands in worse case of woe, Are we not brothers? So man and man should be; But clay and clay differs in dignity, Whose dust is both alike. Will poor folks lie That have afflictions on them, knowing 'tis A punishment or trial? Yes: no wonder, When rich ones scarce tell true: to lapse in fulness Is sorer than to lie for need; and falsehood Is worse in kings than beggars. The sentence which follows, and which I believe has become proverbial, has much of the manner of Portia, both in the thought and the expression:-- Hath Britain all the sun that shines? Day, night, Are they not but in Britain? I' the world's volume Our Britain seems as of it, but not in it; In a great pool, a swan's nest; pr'ythee, think There's livers out of Britain. * * * * * The catastrophe of this play has been much admired for the peculiar skill with which all the various threads of interest are gathered together at last, and entwined with the destiny of Imogen. It may be added, that one of its chief beauties is the manner in which the character of Imogen is not only preserved, but rises upon us to the conclusion with added grace: her instantaneous forgiveness of her husband before he even asks it, when she flings herself at once into his arms-- Why did you throw your wedded lady from you? and her magnanimous reply to her father, when he tells her, that by the discovery of her two brothers she has lost a kingdom-- No--I have gain'd two worlds by it-- clothing a noble sentiment in a noble image, give the finishing touches of excellence to this most enchanting portrait. On the whole, Imogen is a lovely compound of goodness, truth, and affection, with just so much of passion and intellect and poetry, as serve to lend to the picture that power and glowing richness of effect which it would otherwise have wanted; and of her it might be said, if we could condescend to quote from any other poet with Shakespeare open before us, that "her person was a paradise, and her soul the cherub to guard it."[63] CORDELIA. There is in the beauty of Cordelia's character an effect too sacred for words, and almost too deep for tears; within her heart is a fathomless well of purest affection, but its waters sleep in silence and obscurity,--never failing in their depth and never overflowing in their fulness. Every thing in her seems to lie beyond our view, and affects us in a manner which we feel rather than perceive. The character appears to have no surface, no salient points upon which the fancy can readily seize: there is little external development of intellect, less of passion, and still less of imagination. It is completely made out in the course of a few scenes, and we are surprised to find that in those few scenes there is matter for a life of reflection, and materials enough for twenty heroines. If Lear be the grandest of Shakspeare's tragedies, Cordelia in herself, as a human being, governed by the purest and holiest impulses and motives, the most refined from all dross of selfishness and passion, approaches near to perfection; and in her adaptation, as a dramatic personage, to a determinate plan of action, may be pronounced altogether perfect. The character, to speak of it critically as a poetical conception, is not, however, to be comprehended at once, or easily; and in the same manner Cordelia, as a woman, is one whom we must have loved before we could have known her, and known her long before we could have known her truly. Most people, I believe, have heard the story of the young German artist Müller, who, while employed in copying and engraving Raffaelle's Madonna del Sisto, was so penetrated by its celestial beauty, so distrusted his own power to do justice to it, that between admiration and despair he fell into a sadness; thence through the usual gradations, into a melancholy, thence into madness; and died just as he had put the finishing stroke to his own matchless work, which had occupied him for eight years. With some slight tinge of this concentrated kind of enthusiasm I have learned to contemplate the character of Cordelia; I have looked into it till the revelation of its hidden beauty, and an intense feeling of the wonderful genius which created it, have filled me at once with delight and despair. Like poor Müller, but with more reason, I _do_ despair of ever conveying, through a different and inferior medium, the impression made on my own mind to the mind of another. Schlegel, the most eloquent of critics, concludes his remarks on King Lear with these words: "Of the heavenly beauty of soul of Cordelia, I will not venture to speak." Now if I attempt what Schlegel and others have left undone, it is because I feel that this general acknowledgment of her excellence can neither satisfy those who have studied the character, nor convey a just conception of it to the mere reader. Amid the awful, the overpowering interest of the story, amid the terrible convulsions of passion and suffering, and pictures of moral and physical wretchedness which harrow up the soul, the tender influence of Cordelia, like that of a celestial visitant, is felt and acknowledged without being quite understood. Like a soft star that shines for a moment from behind a stormy cloud and the next is swallowed up in tempest and darkness, the impression it leaves is beautiful and deep,--but vague. Speak of Cordelia to a critic or to a general reader, all agree in the beauty of the portrait, for all must feel it; but when we come to details, I have heard more various and opposite opinions relative to her than any other of Shakspeare's characters--a proof of what I have advanced in the first instance, that from the simplicity with which the character is dramatically treated, and the small space it occupies, few are aware of its internal power, or its wonderful depth of purpose. It appears to me that the whole character rests upon the two sublimest principles of human action, the love of truth and the sense of duty; but these, when they stand alone, (as in the Antigone,) are apt to strike us as severe and cold. Shakspeare has, therefore, wreathed them round with the dearest attributes of our feminine nature, the power of feeling and inspiring affection. The first part of the play shows us how Cordelia is loved, the second part how she can love. To her father she is the object of a secret preference, his agony at her supposed unkindness draws from him the confession, that he had loved her most, and "thought to set his rest on her kind nursery." Till then she had been "his best object, the argument of his praise, balm of his age, most best, most dearest!" The faithful and worthy Kent is ready to brave death and exile in her defence: and afterwards a farther impression of her benign sweetness is conveyed in a simple and beautiful manner, when we are told that "since the lady Cordelia went to France, her father's poor fool had much pined away." We have her sensibility "when patience and sorrow strove which should express her goodliest:" and all her filial tenderness when she commits her poor father to the care of the physician, when she hangs over him as he is sleeping, and kisses him as she contemplates the wreck of grief and majesty. O my dear father! restoration hang Its medicine on my lips: and let this kiss Repair those violent harms that my two sisters Have in thy reverence made! Had you not been their father, these white flakes Had challenged pity of them! Was this a face To be exposed against the warring winds, To stand against the deep dread-bolted thunder In the most terrible and nimble stroke Of quick cross lightning? to watch, (poor perdu!) With thin helm? mine enemy's dog, Though he had bit me, should have stood that night Against my fire. Her mild magnanimity shines out in her farewell to her sisters, of whose real character she is perfectly aware:-- Ye jewels of our father! with washed eyes Cordelia leaves you! I know ye what ye are, And like a sister, am most loath to call Your faults as they are nam'd. Use well our father, To your professed bosoms I commit him. But yet, alas! stood I within his grace, I would commend him to a better place; So farewell to you both. GONERIL. Prescribe not us our duties! The modest pride with which she replies to the Duke of Burgundy is admirable; this whole passage is too illustrative of the peculiar character of Cordelia, as well as too exquisite, to be mutilated I yet beseech your majesty, (If, for I want that glib and oily heart, To speak and purpose not, since what I well intend I'll do't before I speak,) that you make known, It is no vicious blot, murder, or foulness, No unchaste action, or dishonored step That hath deprived me of your grace and favor; But even for want of that, for which I am richer; A still soliciting eye, and such a tongue I am glad I have not, tho' not to have it Hath lost me in your liking. LEAR. Better thou Hadst not been born, than not to have pleased me better. FRANCE. Is it but this? a tardiness of nature, That often leaves the history unspoke Which it intends to do?--My lord of Burgundy, What say you to the lady? love is not love When it is mingled with respects that stand Aloof from the entire point. Will you have her? She is herself a dowry. BURGUNDY. Royal Lear, Give but that portion which yourself proposed, And here I take Cordelia by the hand Duchess of Burgundy. LEAR. Nothing: I have sworn; I am firm. BURGUNDY. I am sorry, then, you have lost a father That you must lose a husband. CORDELIA. Peace be with Burgundy! Since that respects of fortune are his love, I shall not be his wife. FRANCE. Fairest Cordelia! thou art more rich, being poor, Most choice, forsaken, and most lov'd, despised! Thee and thy virtues here I seize upon. She takes up arms, "not for ambition, but a dear father's right." In her speech after her defeat, we have a calm fortitude and elevation of soul, arising from the consciousness of duty, and lifting her above all consideration of self. She observes,-- We are not the first Who with best meaning have incurred the worst! She thinks and fears only for her father. For thee, oppressed king, am I cast down; Myself would else out-frown false fortune's frown. To complete the picture, her very voice is characteristic, "ever soft, gentle, and low; an excellent thing in woman." But it will be said, that the qualities here exemplified--as sensibility, gentleness, magnanimity, fortitude, generous affection--are qualities which belong, in their perfection, to others of Shakspeare's characters--to Imogen, for instance, who unites them all; and yet Imogen and Cordelia are wholly unlike each other. Even though we should reverse their situations, and give to Imogen the filial devotion of Cordelia, and to Cordelia the conjugal virtues of Imogen, still they would remain perfectly distinct as women. What is it, then, which lends to Cordelia that peculiar and individual truth of character, which distinguishes her from every other human being? It is a natural reserve, a tardiness of disposition, "which often leaves the history unspoke which it intends to do;" a subdued quietness of deportment and expression, a veiled shyness thrown over all her emotions, her language and her manner; making the outward demonstration invariably fall short of what we know to be the feeling within. Not only is the portrait singularly beautiful and interesting in itself, but the conduct of Cordelia, and the part which she bears in the beginning of the story, is rendered consistent and natural by the wonderful truth and delicacy with which this peculiar disposition is sustained throughout the play. In early youth, and more particularly if we are gifted with a lively imagination, such a character as that of Cordelia is calculated above every other to impress and captivate us. Any thing like mystery, any thing withheld or withdrawn from our notice, seizes on our fancy by awakening our curiosity. Then we are won more by what we half perceive and half create, than by what is openly expressed and freely bestowed. But this feeling is a part of our young life: when time and years have chilled us, when we can no longer afford to send our souls abroad, nor from our own superfluity of life and sensibility spare the materials out of which we build a shrine for our idol--then do we seek, we ask, we thirst for that warmth of frank, confiding tenderness, which revives in us the withered affections and feelings, buried but not dead. Then the excess of love is welcomed, not repelled: it is gracious to us as the sun and dew to the seared and riven trunk, with its few green leaves. Lear is old--"fourscore and upward"--but we see what he has been in former days: the ardent passions of youth have turned to rashness and wilfulness: he is long passed that age when we are more blessed in what we bestow than in what we receive. When he says to his daughters, "I gave ye all!" we feel that he requires all in return, with a jealous, restless, exacting affection which defeats its own wishes. How many such are there in the world! How many to sympathize with the fiery, fond old man, when he shrinks as if petrified from Cordelia's quiet calm reply! LEAR. Now our joy, Although the last not least-- What can you say to draw A third more opulent than your sisters'? Speak! CORDELIA. Nothing, my lord. LEAR. Nothing! CORDELIA. Nothing. LEAR. Nothing can come of nothing: speak again! CORDELIA. Unhappy that I am! I cannot heave My heart into my mouth: I love your majesty According to my bond; nor more, nor less. Now this is perfectly natural. Cordelia has penetrated the vile characters of her sisters. Is it not obvious, that, in proportion as her own mind is pure and guileless, she must be disgusted with their gross hypocrisy and exaggeration, their empty protestations, their "plaited cunning;" and would retire from all competition with what she so disdains and abhors,--even into the opposite extreme? In such a case, as she says herself-- What should Cordelia do?--love and be silent? For the very expressions of Lear-- What can you say to draw A third more opulent than your sisters'? are enough to strike dumb forever a generous, delicate, but shy disposition, such as Cordelia's, by holding out a bribe for professions. If Cordelia were not thus portrayed, this deliberate coolness would strike us as verging on harshness or obstinacy; but it is beautifully represented as a certain modification of character, the necessary result of feelings habitually, if not naturally, repressed: and through the whole play we trace the same peculiar and individual disposition--the same absence of all display--the same sobriety of speech veiling the most profound affections--the same quiet steadiness of purpose--the same shrinking from all exhibition of emotion. "Tous les sentimens naturels ont leur pudeur," was a _vivâ voce_ observation of Madame de Staël, when disgusted by the sentimental affectation of her imitators. This "pudeur," carried to an excess, appears to me the peculiar characteristic of Cordelia. Thus, in the description of her deportment when she receives the letter of the Earl of Kent, informing her of the cruelty of her sisters and the wretched condition of Lear, we seem to have her before us:-- KENT. Did your letters pierce the queen to any demonstration of grief? GENTLEMAN. Ay, sir, she took them, and read them in my presence And now and then an ample tear stole down Her delicate cheek. It seemed she was a queen Over her passion; who, most rebel-like Sought to be king over her. KENT. O then it moved her! GENTLEMAN. Not to a rage. Faith, once or twice she heaved the name of father Pantingly forth, as if it pressed her heart, Cried, _Sisters! sisters! Shame of ladies! Sisters! What, i' the storm? i' the night? Let pity not be believed._ Then she shook The holy water from her heavenly eyes; * * * * Then away she started, To deal with grief alone. Here the last line--the image brought before us of Cordelia starting away from observation, "to deal with grief alone," is as exquisitely beautiful as it is characteristic. But all the passages hitherto quoted must yield in beauty and power to that scene, in which her poor father recognizes her, and in the intervals of distraction asks forgiveness of his wronged child. The subdued pathos and simplicity of Cordelia's character, her quiet but intense feeling, the misery and humiliation of the bewildered old man, are brought before us in so few words, and at the same time sustained with such a deep intuitive knowledge of the innermost workings of the human heart, that as there is nothing surpassing this scene in Shakspeare himself, so there is nothing that can be compared to it in any other writer. CORDELIA. How does my royal lord? How fares your majesty? LEAR. You do me wrong to take me out of the grave. Thou art a soul in bliss; but I am bound Upon a wheel of fire, that mine own tears Do scald like molten lead. CORDELIA. Sir, do you know me? LEAR. You are a spirit, I know: when did you die? CORDELIA. Still, still far wide! PHYSICIAN. He's scarce awake: let him alone awhile. LEAR. Where have I been? Where am I? Fair daylight! I am mightily abused. I should even die with pity To see another thus. I know not what to say. I will not swear these are my hands: Let's see. I feel this pin prick. Would I were assured Of my condition. CORDELIA. O look upon me, sir, And hold your hands in benediction o'er me-- No, sir, you must not kneel. LEAR. Pray, do not mock me: I am a very foolish, fond old man, Fourscore and upwards; and to deal plainly with you, I fear I am not in my perfect mind. Methinks I should know you, and know this man, Yet I am doubtful: for I am mainly ignorant What place this is; and all the skill I have Remembers not these garments; nor I know not Where I did lodge last night. Do not laugh at me; For as I am a man, I think this lady To be my child Cordelia. CORDELIA. And so I am, I am. LEAR. Be your tears wet? Yes, faith. I pray you weep not If you have poison for me I will drink it. I know you do not love me; for your sisters Have, as I do remember, done me wrong: You have some cause, they have not. CORDELIA. No cause, no cause! As we do not estimate Cordelia's affection for her father by the coldness of her language, so neither should we measure her indignation against her sisters by the mildness of her expressions. What, in fact, can be more eloquently significant, and at the same time more characteristic of Cordelia, than the single line when she and her father are conveyed to their prison:-- Shall we not see these _daughters_ and these _sisters_? The irony here is so bitter and intense, and at the same time so quiet, so feminine, so dignified in the expression, that who but Cordelia would have uttered it in the same manner, or would have condensed such ample meaning into so few and simple words? We lose sight of Cordelia during the whole of the second and third, and great part of the fourth act; but towards the conclusion she reappears. Just as our sense of human misery and wickedness being carried to its extreme height, becomes nearly intolerable, "like an engine wrenching our frame of nature from its fixed place," then, like a redeeming angel, she descends to mingle in the scene, "loosening the springs of pity in our eyes," and relieving the impressions of pain and terror by those of admiration and a tender pleasure. For the catastrophe, it is indeed terrible! wondrous terrible! When Lear enters with Cordelia dead in his arms, compassion and awe so seize on all our faculties, that we are left only to silence and to tears. But if I might judge from my own sensations, the catastrophe of Lear is not so overwhelming as the catastrophe of Othello. We do not turn away with the same feeling of absolute unmitigated despair. Cordelia is a saint ready prepared for heaven--our earth is not good enough for her: and Lear!--O who, after sufferings and tortures such as his, would wish to see his life prolonged? What replace a sceptre in that shaking hand?--a crown upon that old gray head, on which the tempest had poured in its wrath?--on which the deep dread bolted thunders and the winged lightnings had spent their fury? O never, never! Let him pass! he hates him That would upon the rack of this rough world Stretch him out longer. In the story of King Lear and his three daughters, as it is related in the "delectable and mellifluous" romance of Perceforest, and in the Chronicle of Geoffrey of Monmouth, the conclusion is fortunate. Cordelia defeats her sisters, and replaces her father on his throne. Spenser, in his version of the story, has followed these authorities. Shakspeare has preferred the catastrophe of the old ballad, founded apparently on some lost tradition. I suppose it is by way of amending his errors, and bringing back this daring innovator to sober history, that it has been thought fit to alter the play of Lear for the stage, as they have altered Romeo and Juliet: they have converted the seraph-like Cordelia into a puling love heroine, and sent her off victorious at the end of the play--exit with drums and colors flying--to be married to Edgar. Now any thing more absurd, more discordant with all our previous impressions, and with the characters as unfolded to us, can hardly be imagined. "I cannot conceive," says Schlegel, "what ideas of art and dramatic connection those persons have, who suppose we can at pleasure tack a double conclusion to a tragedy--a melancholy one for hard-hearted spectators, and a merry one for those of softer mould." The fierce manners depicted in this play, the extremes of virtue and vice in the persons, belong to the remote period of the story.[64] There is no attempt at character in the old narratives; Regan and Goneril are monsters of ingratitude, and Cordelia merely distinguished by her filial piety; whereas, in Shakspeare, this filial piety is an affection quite distinct from the qualities which serve to individualize the human being; we have a perception of innate character apart from all accidental circumstance: we see that if Cordelia had never known her father, had never been rejected from his love, had never been a born princess or a crowned queen, she would not have been less Cordelia; less distinctly _herself_; that is, a woman of a steady mind, of calm but deep affections, of inflexible truth, of few words, and of reserved deportment. As to Regan and Goneril--"tigers, not daughters"--we might wish to regard them as mere hateful chimeras, impossible as they are detestable; but fortunately there was once a Tullia. I know not where to look for the prototype of Cordelia: there was a Julia Alpinula, the young priestess of Aventicum,[65] who, unable to save her father's life by the sacrifice of her own, died with him--"_infelix patris, infelix proles_"--but this is all we know of her. There was the Roman daughter, too. I remember seeing at Genoa, Guido's "Pieta Romana," in which the expression of the female bending over the aged parent, who feeds from her bosom, is perfect,--but it is not a Cordelia: only Raffaelle could have painted Cordelia. But the character which at once suggests itself in comparison with Cordelia, as the heroine of filial tenderness and piety, is certainly the Antigone of Sophocles. As poetical conceptions, they rest on the same basis: they are both pure abstractions of truth, piety, and natural affection; and in both, love, as a passion, is kept entirely out of sight: for though the womanly character is sustained, by making them the objects of devoted attachment, yet to have portrayed them as influenced by passion, would have destroyed that unity of purpose and feeling which is one source of power; and, besides, have disturbed that serene purity and grandeur of soul, which equally distinguishes both heroines. The spirit, however, in which the two characters are conceived, is as different as possible; and we must not fail to remark, that Antigone, who plays a principal part in two fine tragedies, and is distinctly and completely made out, is considered as a masterpiece, the very triumph of the ancient classical drama; whereas, there are many among Shakspeare's characters which are equal to Cordelia as dramatic conceptions, and superior to her in finishing of outline, as well as in the richness of the poetical coloring. When Oedipus, pursued by the vengeance of the gods, deprived of sight by his own mad act, and driven from Thebes by his subjects and his sons, wanders forth, abject and forlorn, he is supported by his daughter Antigone; who leads him from city to city, begs for him, and pleads for him against the harsh, rude men, who, struck more by his guilt than his misery, would drive him from his last asylum. In the opening of the "Oedipus Coloneus," where the wretched old man appears leaning on his child, and seats himself in the consecrated Grove of the Furies, the picture presented to us is wonderfully solemn and beautiful. The patient, duteous tenderness of Antigone; the scene in which she pleads for her brother Polynices, and supplicates her father to receive his offending son; her remonstrance to Polynices, when she entreats him not to carry the threatened war into his native country, are finely and powerfully delineated; and in her lamentation over Oedipus, when he perishes in the mysterious grove, there is a pathetic beauty, apparent even through the stiffness of the translation. Alas! I only wished I might have died With my poor father; wherefore should I ask For longer life? O I was fond of misery with him; E'en what was most unlovely grew beloved When he was with me. O my dearest father, Beneath the earth now in deep darkness hid, Worn as thou wert with age, to me thou still Wert dear, and shalt be ever. --Even as he wished he died, In a strange land--for such was his desire-- A shady turf covered his lifeless limbs, Nor unlamented fell! for O these eyes, My father, still shall weep for thee, nor time E'er blot thee from my memory. The filial piety of Antigone is the most affecting part of the tragedy of "Oedipus Coloneus:" her sisterly affection, and her heroic self-devotion to a religious duty, form the plot of the tragedy called by her name. When her two brothers, Eteocles and Polynices, had slain each other before the walls of Thebes, Creon issued an edict forbidding the rites of sepulture to Polynices, (as the invader of his country,) and awarding instant death to those who should dare to bury him. We know the importance which the ancients attached to the funeral obsequies, as alone securing their admission into the Elysian fields. Antigone, upon hearing the law of Creon, which thus carried vengeance beyond the grave, enters in the first scene, announcing her fixed resolution to brave the threatened punishment: her sister Ismene shrinks from sharing the peril of such an undertaking, and endeavors to dissuade her from it, on which Antigone replies:-- Wert thou to proffer what I do not ask-- Thy poor assistance--I would scorn it now; Act as thou wilt, I'll bury him myself: Let me perform but that, and death is welcome. I'll do the pious deed, and lay me down By my dear brother; loving and beloved, We'll rest together. She proceeds to execute her generous purpose; she covers with earth the mangled corse of Polynices, pours over it the accustomed libations, is detected in her pious office, and after nobly defending her conduct, is led to death by command of the tyrant: her sister Ismene, struck with shame and remorse, now comes forward to accuse herself as a partaker in the offence, and share her sister's punishment; but Antigone sternly and scornfully rejects her; and after pouring forth a beautiful lamentation on the misery of perishing "without the nuptial song--a virgin and a slave," she dies _à l'antique_--she strangles herself to avoid a lingering death. Hemon, the son of Creon, unable to save her life, kills himself upon her grave: but throughout the whole tragedy we are left in doubt whether Antigone does or does not return the affection of this devoted lover. Thus it will be seen that in the Antigone there is a great deal of what may be called the effect of situation, as well as a great deal of poetry and character: she says the most beautiful things in the world, performs the most heroic actions, and all her words and actions are so placed before us as to _command_ our admiration. According to the classical ideas of virtue and heroism, the character is sublime, and in the delineation there is a severe simplicity mingled with its Grecian grace, a unity, a grandeur, an elegance, which appeal to our taste and our understanding, while they fill and exalt the imagination: but in Cordelia it is not the external coloring or form, it is not what she says or does, but what she is in herself, what she feels, thinks, and suffers, which continually awaken our sympathy and interest. The heroism of Cordelia is more passive and tender--it melts into our heart; and in the veiled loveliness and unostentatious delicacy of her character, there is an effect more profound and artless, if it be less striking and less elaborate than in the Grecian heroine. To Antigone we give our admiration, to Cordelia our tears. Antigone stands before us in her austere and statue-like beauty, like one of the marbles of the Parthenon. If Cordelia reminds us of any thing on earth, it is of one of the Madonnas in the old Italian pictures, "with downcast eyes beneath th' almighty dove?" and as that heavenly form is connected with our human sympathies only by the expression of maternal tenderness or maternal sorrow, even so Cordelia would be almost too angelic, were she not linked to our earthly feelings, bound to our very hearts, by her filial love, her wrongs, her sufferings, and her tears. FOOTNOTES: [48] ----The gods approve The depth, and not the tumult of the soul. WORDSWORTH. "Il pouvait y avoir des vagues majestueuses et non de l'orage sans son coeur," was finely observed of Madame de Staël in her maturer years; it would have been true of Hermione at any period of her life. [49] Winter's Tale, act v scene 11 [50] Only in the last scene, when, with solemnity befitting the occasion, Paulina invokes the majestic figure to "descend, and be stone no more," and where she presents her daughter to her. "Turn, good lady! our Perdita is found." [51] Act iii, scene 3. [52] Which being interpreted into modern English, means, I believe, nothing more than that the pattern was what we now call _arabesque_. [53] There is an incident in the original tale, "Il Moro di Venezia," which could not well be transferred to the drama, but which is very effective, and adds, I think, to the circumstantial horrors of the story. Desdemona does not accidentally drop the handkerchief; it is stolen from her by Iago's little child, an infant of three years old, whom he trains and bribes to the theft. The love of Desdemona for this child, her little playfellow--the pretty description of her taking it in her arms and caressing it, while it profits by its situation to steal the handkerchief from her bosom, are well imagined, and beautifully told; and the circumstance of Iago employing his own innocent child as the instrument of his infernal villany, adds a deeper, and, in truth an unnecessary touch of the fiend, to his fiendish character. [54] Consequences are so linked together, that the exclamation of Emilia, O thou dull Moor!--That handkerchief thou speakest of I found by fortune, and did give my husband!-- is sufficient to reveal to Othello the whole history of his ruin. [55] Decamerone. Novella, 9mo. Giornata, 2do. [56] _Vide_ Dr. Johnson, and Dunlop's History of Fiction. [57] See Hazlitt and Schlegel on the catastrophe of Cymbeline. [58] More rare--_i. e._ more exquisitely poignant. [59] Characters of Shakspeare's Plays. [60] _Vide_ act 1. scene 7. [61] The character of Cloten has been pronounced by some unnatural, by others inconsistent, and by others obsolete. The following passage occurs in one of Miss Seward's letters, vol. iii p. 246: "It is curious that Shakspeare should, in so singular a character as Cloten, have given the exact prototype of a being whom I once knew. The unmeaning frown of countenance, the shuffling gait, the burst of voice, the bustling insignificance, the fever and ague fits of valor, the froward tetchiness, the unprincipled malice, and, what is more curious, those occasional gleams of good sense amidst the floating clouds of folly which generally darkened and confused the man's brain, and which, in the character of Cloten, we are apt to impute to a violation of unity in character; but in the some-time Captain C----, I saw that the portrait of Cloten was not out of nature." [62] i. e. _full of words_. [63] Dryden. [64] King Lear may be supposed to have lived about one thousand years before the Christian era, being the forth or fifth in descent from King Brut, the great-grandson of Æneas, and the fabulous founder of the kingdom of Britain. [65] She is commemorated by Lord Byron. _Vide_ Childe Harold Canto iii. HISTORICAL CHARACTERS. CLEOPATRA. I cannot agree with one of the most philosophical of Shakspeare's critics, who has asserted "that the actual truth of particular events, in proportion as we are conscious of it, is a drawback on the pleasure as well as the dignity of tragedy." If this observation applies at all, it is equally just with regard to characters: and in either case can we admit it? The reverence and the simpleness of heart with which Shakspeare has treated the received and admitted truths of history--I mean according to the imperfect knowledge of his time--is admirable; his inaccuracies are few: his general accuracy, allowing for the distinction between the narrative and the dramatic form, is acknowledged to be wonderful. He did not steal the precious material from the treasury of history, to debase its purity,--new-stamp it arbitrarily with effigies and legends of his own devising and then attempt to pass it current, like Dryden, Racine, and the rest of those poetical coiners: he only rubbed off the rust, purified and brightened it, so that history herself has been known to receive it back as sterling. Truth, wherever manifested, should be sacred: so Shakspeare deemed, and laid no profane hand upon her altars. But tragedy--majestic tragedy, is worthy to stand before the sanctuary of Truth, and to be the priestess of her oracles. "Whatever in religion is holy and sublime, in virtue amiable or grave, whatsoever hath passion or admiration in all the changes of that which is called fortune from without, or the wily subtleties and refluxes of man's thought from within;"[66]--whatever is pitiful in the weakness, sublime in the strength, or terrible in the perversion of human intellect, these are the domain of Tragedy. Sibyl and Muse at once, she holds aloft the book of human fate, and is the interpreter of its mysteries. It is not, then, making a mock of the serious sorrows of real life, nor of those human beings who lived, suffered and acted upon this earth, to array them in her rich and stately robes, and present them before us as powers evoked from dust and darkness, to awaken the generous sympathies, the terror or the pity of mankind. It does not add to the pain, as far as tragedy is a source of emotion, that the wrongs and sufferings represented, the guilt of Lady Macbeth, the despair of Constance, the arts of Cleopatra, and the distresses of Katherine, had a real existence; but it adds infinitely to the moral effect, as a subject of contemplation and a lesson of conduct.[67] I shall be able to illustrate these observations more fully in the course of this section, in which we will consider those characters which are drawn from history; and first, Cleopatra. Of all Shakspeare's female characters, Miranda and Cleopatra appear to me the most wonderful. The first, unequalled as a poetic conception; the latter, miraculous as a work of art. If we could make a regular classification of his characters, these would form the two extremes of simplicity and complexity; and all his other characters would be found to fill up some shade or gradation between these two. Great crimes, springing from high passions, grafted on high qualities, are the legitimate source of tragic poetry. But to make the extreme of littleness produce an effect like grandeur--to make the excess of frailty produce an effect like power--to heap up together all that is most unsubstantial, frivolous, vain, contemptible, and variable, till the worthlessness be lost in the magnitude, and a sense of the sublime spring from the very elements of littleness,--to do this, belonged only to Shakspeare that worker of miracles. Cleopatra is a brilliant antithesis, a compound of contradictions, of all that we most hate, with what we most admire. The whole character is the triumph of the external over the innate; and yet like one of her country's hieroglyphics, though she present at first view a splendid and perplexing anomaly, there is deep meaning and wondrous skill in the apparent enigma, when we come to analyze and decipher it. But how are we to arrive at the solution of this glorious riddle, whose dazzling complexity continually mocks and eludes us? What is most astonishing in the character of Cleopatra is its antithetical construction--its _consistent inconsistency_, if I may use such an expression--which renders it quite impossible to reduce it to any elementary principles. It will, perhaps, be found on the whole, that vanity and the love of power predominate; but I dare not say it _is_ so, for these qualities and a hundred others mingle into each other, and shift and change, and glance away, like the colors in a peacock's train. In some others of Shakspeare's female characters, also remarkable for their complexity, (Portia and Juliet, for instance,) we are struck with the delightful sense of harmony in the midst of contrast, so that the idea of unity and simplicity of effect is produced in the midst of variety; but in Cleopatra it is the absence of unity and simplicity which strikes us; the impression is that of perpetual and irreconcilable contrast. The continual approximation of whatever is most opposite in character, in situation, in sentiment, would be fatiguing, were it not so perfectly natural: the woman herself would be distracting, if she were not so enchanting. I have not the slightest doubt that Shakspeare's Cleopatra is the real historical Cleopatra--the "Rare Egyptian"--individualized and placed before us. Her mental accomplishments, her unequalled grace, her woman's wit and woman's wiles, her irresistible allurements, her starts of irregular grandeur, her bursts of ungovernable temper, her vivacity of imagination, her petulant caprice, her fickleness and her falsehood, her tenderness and her truth, her childish susceptibility to flattery, her magnificent spirit, her royal pride, the gorgeous eastern coloring of the character; all these contradictory elements has Shakspeare seized, mingled them in their extremes, and fused them into one brilliant impersonation of classical elegance, Oriental voluptuousness, and gipsy sorcery. What better proof can we have of the individual truth of the character than the admission that Shakspeare's Cleopatra produces exactly the same effect on us that is recorded of the real Cleopatra? She dazzles our faculties, perplexes our judgment, bewilders and bewitches our fancy; from the beginning to the end of the drama, we are conscious of a kind of fascination against which our moral sense rebels, but from which there is no escape. The epithets applied to her perpetually by Antony and others confirm this impression: "enchanting queen!"--"witch"--"spell"--"great fairy"--"cockatrice"--"serpent of old Nile"--"thou grave charm!"[68] are only a few of them; and who does not know by heart the famous quotations in which this Egyptian Circe is described with all her infinite seductions? Fie! wrangling queen! Whom every thing becomes--to chide, to laugh, To weep; whose every passion fully strives To make itself, in thee, fair and admired. Age cannot wither her, nor custom stale Her infinite variety:-- For vilest things Become themselves in her. And the pungent irony of Enobarbus has well exposed her feminine arts, when he says, on the occasion of Antony's intended departure,-- Cleopatra, catching but the least noise of this, dies instantly: I have seen her die twenty times upon far poorer moment. ANTONY. She is cunning past man's thought. ENOBARBUS. Alack, sir, no! her passions are made of nothing but the finest part of pure love. We cannot call her winds and waters, sighs and tears; they are greater storms and tempests than almanacs can report; this cannot be cunning in her; if it be, she makes a shower of rain as well as Jove. The whole secret of her absolute dominion over the facile Antony may be found in one little speech:-- See where he is--who's with him--what he does-- (I did not send you.) If you find him sad, Say I am dancing; if in mirth, report That I am sudden sick! Quick! and return. CHARMIAN. Madam, methinks if you did love him dearly, You do not hold the method to enforce The like from him. CLEOPATRA. What should I do, I do not? CHARMIAN. In each thing give him way; cross him in nothing. CLEOPATRA. Thou teachest like a fool: the way to lose him. CHARMIAN. Tempt him not too far. But Cleopatra is a mistress of her art, and knows better: and what a picture of her triumphant petulance, her imperious and imperial coquetry, is given in her own words! That time--O times! I laugh'd him out of patience; and that night I laughed him into patience: and next morn, Ere the ninth hour, I drunk him to his bed; Then put my tires and mantles on, whilst I wore his sword, Philippan. When Antony enters full of some serious purpose which he is about to impart, the woman's perverseness, and the tyrannical waywardness with which she taunts him and plays upon his temper, are admirably depicted. I know, by that same eye, there's some good news. What says the married woman?[69] You may go; Would she had never given you leave to come! Let her not say, 'tis I that keep you here; I have no power upon you; hers you are. ANTONY. The gods best know-- CLEOPATRA. O, never was there queen So mightily betray'd! Yet at the first, I saw the treasons planted. ANTONY. Cleopatra! CLEOPATRA. Why should I think you can be mine, and true, Though you in swearing shake the throned gods, Who have been false to Fulvia? Riotous madness To be entangled with those mouth-made vows, Which break themselves in swearing! ANTONY. Most sweet queen! CLEOPATRA. Nay, pray you, seek no color for your going, But bid farewell, and go. She recovers her dignity for a moment at the news of Fulvia's death, as if roused by a blow:-- Though age from folly could not give me freedom, It does from childishness. Can Fulvia die? And then follows the artful mockery with which she tempts and provokes him, in order to discover whether he regrets his wife. O most false love! Where be the sacred vials thou shouldst fill With sorrowful water? Now I see, I see In Fulvia's death, how mine receiv'd shall be. ANTONY. Quarrel no more; but be prepared to know The purposes I bear: which are, or cease, As you shall give th' advice. Now, by the fire That quickens Nilus' shrine, I go from hence Thy soldier, servant, making peace or war, As thou affectest. CLEOPATRA. Cut my lace, Charmian, come--But let it be. I am quickly ill, and well. So Antony loves. ANTONY. My precious queen, forbear: And give true evidence to his love which stands An honorable trial. CLEOPATRA. So Fulvia told me. I pr'ythee turn aside, and weep for her: Then bid adieu to me, and say, the tears Belong to Egypt. Good now, play one scene Of excellent dissembling; and let it look Like perfect honor. ANTONY. You'll heat my blood--no more. CLEOPATRA. You can do better yet; but this is meetly. ANTONY. Now, by my sword-- CLEOPATRA. And target--still he mends: But this is not the best. Look, pr'ythee, Charmian, How this Herculean Roman does become The carriage of his chafe! This is, indeed, most "excellent dissembling;" but when she has fooled and chafed the Herculean Roman to the verge of danger, then comes that return of tenderness which secures the power she has tried to the utmost, and we have all the elegant, the poetical Cleopatra in her beautiful farewell. Forgive me! Since my becomings kill me when they do not Eye well to you. Your honor calls you hence, Therefore be deaf to my unpitied folly, And all the gods go with you! Upon your sword Sit laurell'd victory; and smooth success Be strew'd before your feet! Finer still are the workings of her variable mind and lively imagination, after Antony's departure; her fond repining at his absence, her violent spirit, her right royal wilfulness and impatience, as if it were a wrong to her majesty, an insult to her sceptre, that there should exist in her despite such things as space and time; and high treason to her sovereign power, to dare to remember what she chooses to forget Give me to drink mandragora, That I might sleep out this great gap of time My Antony is away. O Charmian! Where think'st thou he is now? Stands he, or sits he, Or does he walk? or is he on his horse? O happy horse, to bear the weight of Antony! Do bravely, horse! for wot'st thou whom thou mov'st? The demi-Atlas of this earth--the arm And burgonet of men. He's speaking now, Or murmuring, Where's my serpent of old Nile? For so he calls me. Met'st thou my posts? ALEXAS. Ay, madam, twenty several messengers: Why do you send so thick? CLEOPATRA. Who's born that day When I forget to send to Antony, Shall die a beggar. Ink and paper, Charmian. Welcome, my good Alexas. Did I, Charmian, Ever love Cæsar so? CHARMIAN. O that brave Cæsar! CLEOPATRA. Be chok'd with such another emphasis! Say, the brave Antony. CHARMIAN. The valiant Cæsar! CLEOPATRA. By Isis, I will give thee bloody teeth, If thou with Cæsar paragon again My man of men! CHARMIAN. By your most gracious pardon, I sing but after you. CLEOPATRA. My salad days, When I was green in judgment, cold in blood, To say as I said then. But, come away-- Get me some ink and paper: he shall have every day A several greeting, or I'll unpeople Egypt. We learn from Plutarch, that it was a favorite amusement with Antony and Cleopatra to ramble through the streets at night, and bandy ribald jests with the populace of Alexandria. From the same authority, we know that they were accustomed to live on the most familiar terms with their attendants and the companions of their revels. To these traits we must add, that with all her violence, perverseness, egotism, and caprice, Cleopatra mingled a capability for warm affections and kindly feeling, or rather what we should call in these days, a constitutional _good-nature_; and was lavishly generous to her favorites and dependents. These characteristics we find scattered through the play; they are not only faithfully rendered by Shakspeare, but he has made the finest use of them in his delineation of manners. Hence the occasional freedom of her women and her attendants, in the midst of their fears and flatteries, becomes most natural and consistent: hence, too, their devoted attachment and fidelity, proved even in death. But as illustrative of Cleopatra's disposition, perhaps the finest and most characteristic scene in the whole play, is that in which the messenger arrives from Rome with the tidings of Antony's marriage with Octavia. She perceives at once with quickness that all is not well, and she hastens to anticipate the worst, that she may have the pleasure of being disappointed. Her impatience to know what she fears to learn, the vivacity with which she gradually works herself up into a state of excitement, and at length into fury, is wrought out with a force of truth which makes us recoil. CLEOPATRA. Antony's dead! If thou say so, villain, thou kill'st thy mistress. But well and free, If thou so yield him, there is gold, and here My bluest veins to kiss; a hand that kings Have lipp'd, and trembled kissing. MESSENGER. First, madam, he is well. CLEOPATRA. Why, there's more gold. But, sirrah, mark! we use To say, the dead are well: bring it to that, The gold I give thee will I melt, and pour Down thy ill-uttering throat. MESSENGER. Good madam, hear me. CLEOPATRA. Well, go to, I will. But there's no goodness in thy face. If Antony Be free and healthful, why so tart a favor To trumpet such good tidings? If not well, Thou should'st come like a fury crown'd with snakes. MESSENGER. Wil't please you hear me? CLEOPATRA. I have a mind to strike thee ere thou speak'st; Yet if thou say Antony lives, is well, Or friends with Cæsar, or not captive to him, I'll set thee in a shower of gold, and hail Rich pearls upon thee. MESSENGER. Madam, he's well. CLEOPATRA. Well said. MESSENGER. And friends with Cæsar. CLEOPATRA. Thou art an honest man. MESSENGER. Cæsar and he are greater friends than ever. CLEOPATRA. Make thee a fortune from me. MESSENGER. But yet, madam-- CLEOPATRA. I do not like _but yet_--it does allay The good precedence. Fie upon _but yet_: _But yet_ is as a gaoler to bring forth Some monstrous malefactor. Pr'ythee, friend, Pour out thy pack of matter to mine ear, The good and bad together. He's friends with Cæsar In state of health, thou say'st; and thou say'st free. MESSENGER. Free, madam! No: I made no such report, He's bound unto Octavia. CLEOPATRA. For what good turn? MESSENGER. Madam he's married to Octavia. CLEOPATRA. The most infectious pestilence upon thee! [_Strikes him down._ MESSENGER. Good madam, patience. CLEOPATRA. What say you? [_Strikes him again._ Hence horrible villain! or I'll spurn thine eyes Like balls before me--I'll unhair thine head-- Thou shalt be whipp'd with wire, and stewed in brine Smarting in ling'ring pickle. MESSENGER. Gracious madam! I, that do bring the news, made not the match. CLEOPATRA. Say 'tis not so, a province I will give thee, And make thy fortunes proud: the blow thou hadst Shall make thy peace for moving me to rage; And I will boot thee with what gift beside Thy modesty can beg. MESSENGER. He's married, madam. CLEOPATRA. Rogue, thou hast lived too long. [_Draws a dagger._ MESSENGER. Nay then I'll run. What mean you, madam? I have made no fault. [_Exit._ CHARMIAN. Good madam, keep yourself within yourself; The man is innocent. CLEOPATRA. Some innocents 'scape not the thunderbolt. Melt Egypt into Nile! and kindly creatures Turn all to serpents! Call the slave again; Though I am mad, I will not bite him--Call! CHARMIAN. He is afraid to come. CLEOPATRA. I will not hurt him. These hands do lack nobility, that they strike A meaner than myself. * * * * CLEOPATRA. In praising Antony I have dispraised Cæsar. CHARMIAN. Many times, madam. CLEOPATRA. I am paid for't now-- Lead me from hence. I faint. O Iras, Charmian--'tis no matter Go to the fellow, good Alexas; bid him Report the features of Octavia, her years, Her inclination--let him not leave out The color of her hair. Bring me word quickly. [_Exit Alex._ Let him forever go--let him not--Charmian, Though he be painted one way like a Gorgon, T'other way he's a Mars. Bid you Alexas [_To Mardian._ Bring me word how tall she is. Pity me, Charmian. But do not speak to me. Lead me to my chamber. I have given this scene entire because I know nothing comparable to it The pride and arrogance of the Egyptian queen, the blandishment of the woman, the unexpected but natural transitions of temper and feeling, the contest of various passions, and at length--when the wild hurricane has spent its fury--the melting into tears, faintness, and languishment, are portrayed with the most astonishing power, and truth, and skill in feminine nature. More wonderful still is the splendor and force of coloring which is shed over this extraordinary scene. The mere idea of an angry woman beating her menial, presents something ridiculous or disgusting to the mind; in a queen or a tragedy heroine it is still more indecorous;[70] yet this scene is as far as possible from the vulgar or the comic. Cleopatra seems privileged to "touch the brink of all we hate" with impunity. This imperial termagant, this "wrangling queen, whom every thing becomes," becomes even her fury. We know not by what strange power it is, that in the midst of all these unruly passions and childish caprices, the poetry of the character, and the fanciful and sparkling grace of the delineation are sustained and still rule in the imagination; but we feel that it is so. I need hardly observe, that we have historical authority for the excessive violence of Cleopatra's temper. Witness the story of her boxing the ears of her treasurer, in presence of Octavius, as related by Plutarch. Shakspeare has made a fine use of this anecdote also towards the conclusion of the drama, but it is not equal in power to this scene with the messenger. The man is afterwards brought back, almost by force, to satisfy Cleopatra's jealous anxiety, by a description of Octavia:--but this time, made wise by experience, he takes care to adapt his information to the humors of his imperious mistress, and gives her a satirical picture of her rival. The scene which follows, in which Cleopatra--artful, acute, and penetrating as she is--becomes the dupe of her feminine spite and jealousy, nay, assists in duping herself; and after having cuffed the messenger for telling her truths which are offensive, rewards him for the falsehood which flatters her weakness--is not only an admirable exhibition of character, but a fine moral lesson. She concludes, after dismissing the messenger with gold and thanks, I repent me much That I so harry'd him. Why, methinks by him This creature's no such thing? CHARMIAN. O nothing, madam. CLEOPATRA. The man hath seen some majesty, and should know! Do we not fancy Cleopatra drawing herself up with all the vain consciousness of rank and beauty as she pronounces this last line? and is not this the very woman who celebrated her own apotheosis,--who arrayed herself in the robe and diadem of the goddess Isis, and could find no titles magnificent enough for her children but those of _the Sun_ and _the Moon_? The despotism and insolence of her temper are touched in some other places most admirably. Thus, when she is told that the Romans libel and abuse her, she exclaims,-- Sink Rome, and their tongues rot That speak against us! And when one of her attendants observes, that "Herod of Jewry dared not look upon her but when she were well pleased," she immediately replies, "That Herod's head I'll have."[71] When Proculeius surprises her in her monument, and snatches her poniard from her, terror, and fury, pride, passion, and disdain, swell in her haughty soul, and seem to shake her very being. CLEOPATRA. Where art thou, death? Come hither, come! come, come and take a queen Worth many babes and beggars! PROCULEIUS. O temperance, lady? CLEOPATRA. Sir, I will eat no meat; I'll not drink, sir: If idle talk will once be necessary. I'll not sleep neither; this mortal house I'll ruin, Do Cæsar what he can! Know, sir, that I Will not wait pinion'd at your master's court, Nor once be chastis'd with the sober eye Of dull Octavia. Shall they hoist me up, And show me to the shouting varletry Of censuring Rome? Rather a ditch in Egypt Be gentle grave to me! Rather on Nilus' mud Lay me stark naked, and let the water-flies Blow me into abhorring! Rather make My country's high pyramids my gibbet, And hang me up in chains! In the same spirit of royal bravado, but finer still, and worked up with a truly Oriental exuberance of fancy and imagery, is her famous description of Antony, addressed to Dolabella:-- Most noble empress you have heard of me? CLEOPATRA. I cannot tell. DOLABELLA. Assuredly, you know me. CLEOPATRA. No matter, sir, what I have heard or known. You laugh when boys, or women, tell their dreams Is't not your trick? DOLABELLA. I understand not, madam. CLEOPATRA. I dream'd there was an emperor Antony; O such another sleep, that I might see But such another man! DOLABELLA. If it might please you-- CLEOPATRA. His face was as the heavens; and therein stuck A sun and moon; which kept their course, and lighted The little O, the earth. DOLABELLA. Most sovereign creature-- CLEOPATRA. His legs bestrid the ocean: his reared arm Crested the world; his voice was propertied As all the tuned spheres, and that to friends; But when he meant to quail or shake the orb He was as rattling thunder. For his bounty, There was no winter in't; an autumn 'twas, That grew the more by reaping. His delights Were dolphin like; they show'd his back above The element they liv'd in. In his livery[72] Walk'd crowns and coronets; realms and islands were As plates[73] dropp'd from his pocket. DOLABELLA. Cleopatra! CLEOPATRA. Think you there was, or might be, such a man As this I dream'd of? DOLABELLA. Gentle madam, no. CLEOPATRA. You lie,--up to the hearing of the gods! There was no room left in this amazing picture for the display of that passionate maternal tenderness, which was a strong and redeeming feature in Cleopatra's historical character; but it is not left untouched, for when she is imprecating mischiefs on herself, she wishes, as the last and worst of possible evils, that "thunder may smite Cæsarion!" In representing the mutual passion of Antony and Cleopatra as real and fervent, Shakspeare has adhered to the truth of history as well as to general nature. On Antony's side it is a species of infatuation, a single and engrossing feeling: it is, in short, the love of a man declined in years for a woman very much younger than himself, and who has subjected him to every species of female enchantment. In Cleopatra the passion is of a mixed nature, made up of real attachment, combined with the love of pleasure, the love of power, and the love of self. Not only is the character most complicated, but no one sentiment could have existed pure and unvarying in such a mind as hers; her passion in itself is true, fixed to one centre; but like the pennon streaming from the mast, it flutters and veers with every breath of her variable temper: yet in the midst of all her caprices, follies, and even vices, womanly feeling is still predominant in Cleopatra: and the change which takes place in her deportment towards Antony, when their evil fortune darkens round them, is as beautiful and interesting in itself as it is striking and natural. Instead of the airy caprice and provoking petulance she displays in the first scenes, we have a mixture of tenderness, and artifice, and fear, and submissive blandishment. Her behavior, for instance, after the battle of Actium, when she quails before the noble and tender rebuke of her lover, is partly female subtlety and partly natural feeling. CLEOPATRA. O my lord, my lord, Forgive my fearful sails! I little thought You would have follow'd. ANTONY. Egypt, thou know'st too well My heart was to the rudder tied by the strings, And thou should'st tow me after. O'er my spirit Thy full supremacy thou know'st; and that Thy beck might from the bidding of the gods Command me. CLEOPATRA. O, my pardon? ANTONY. Now I must To the young man send humble treaties, dodge And palter in the shifts of lowness; who With half the bulk o' the world play'd as I pleas'd, Making and marring fortunes. You did know How much you were my conqueror; and that My sword, made weak by my affection, would Obey it on all cause. CLEOPATRA. O pardon, pardon! ANTONY. Fall not a tear, I say; one of them rates All that is won and lost. Give me a kiss; Even this repays me. It is perfectly in keeping with the individual character, that Cleopatra, alike destitute of moral strength and physical courage, should cower terrified and subdued before the masculine spirit of her lover, when once she has fairly roused it. Thus Tasso's Armida, half siren, half sorceress, in the moment of strong feeling, forgets her incantations, and has recourse to persuasion, to prayers, and to tears. Lascia gl' incanti, e vuol provar se vaga E supplice belta sia miglior maga. Though the poet afterwards gives us to understand that even in this relinquishment of art there was a more refined artifice. Nella doglia amara Già tutte non oblia l' arti e le frodi. And something like this inspires the conduct of Cleopatra towards Antony in his fallen fortunes. The reader should refer to that fine scene, where Antony surprises Thyreus kissing her hand, "that kingly seal and plighter of high hearts," and rages like a thousand hurricanes. The character of Mark Antony, as delineated by Shakspeare, reminds me of the Farnese Hercules. There is an ostentatious display of power, an exaggerated grandeur, a colossal effect in the whole conception, sustained throughout in the pomp of the language, which seems, as it flows along, to resound with the clang of arms and the music of the revel. The coarseness and violence of the historic portrait are a little kept down; but every word which Antony utters is characteristic of the arrogant but magnanimous Roman, who "with half the bulk o' the world played as he pleased," and was himself the sport of a host of mad (and bad) passions, and the slave of a woman. History is followed closely in all the details of the catastrophe, and there is something wonderfully grand in the hurried march of events towards the conclusion. As disasters hem her round, Cleopatra gathers up her faculties to meet them, not with the calm fortitude of a great soul, but the haughty, tameless spirit of a wilful woman, unused to reverse or contradiction. Her speech, after Antony has expired in her arms, I have always regarded as one of the most wonderful in Shakspeare. Cleopatra is not a woman to grieve silently. The contrast between the violence of her passions and the weakness of her sex, between her regal grandeur and her excess of misery, her impetuous, unavailing struggles with the fearful destiny which has compassed her, and the mixture of wild impatience and pathos in her agony, are really magnificent. She faints on the body of Antony, and is recalled to life by the cries of her women:-- IRAS. Royal Egypt--empress! CLEOPATRA. No more, but e'en a woman![74] and commanded By such poor passion as the maid that milks, And does the meanest chares.--It were for me To throw my sceptre at the injurious gods: To tell them that our world did equal theirs Till they had stolen our jewel. All's but naught, Patience is sottish, and impatience does Become a dog that's mad. Then is it sin To rush into the secret house of death Ere death dare come to us? How do you, women? What, what? good cheer! why how now, Charmian? My noble girls!--ah, women, women! look Our lamp is spent, is out. We'll bury him, and then what's brave, what's noble, Let's do it after the high Roman fashion, And make death proud to take us. But although Cleopatra talks of dying "after the high Roman fashion" she fears what she most desires, and cannot perform with simplicity what costs her such an effort. That extreme physical cowardice, which was so strong a trait in her historical character, which led to the defeat of Actium, which made her delay the execution of a fatal resolve, till she had "tried conclusions infinite of _easy_ ways to die," Shakspeare has rendered with the finest possible effect, and in a manner which heightens instead of diminishing our respect and interest. Timid by nature, she is courageous by the mere force of will, and she lashes herself up with high-sounding words into a kind of false daring. Her lively imagination suggests every incentive which can spur her on to the deed she has resolved, yet trembles to contemplate. She pictures to herself all the degradations which must attend her captivity, and let it be observed, that those which she anticipates are precisely such as a vain, luxurious, and haughty woman would especially dread, and which only true virtue and magnanimity could despise. Cleopatra could have endured the loss of freedom; but to be led in triumph through the streets of Rome is insufferable. She could stoop to Cæsar with dissembling courtesy, and meet duplicity with superior art; but "to be chastised" by the scornful or upbraiding glance of the injured Octavia--"rather a ditch in Egypt!" If knife, drugs, serpents, have Edge, sting, or operation, I am safe. Your wife, Octavia, with her modest eyes, And still conclusion,[75] shall acquire no honor Demurring upon me. Now Iras, what think'st thou? Thou, an Egyptian puppet, shall be shown In Rome as well as I. Mechanic slaves, With greasy aprons, rules, and hammers, shall Uplift us to the view. In their thick breaths, Rank of gross diet, shall we be enclouded, And forc'd to drink their vapor. IRAS. The gods forbid! CLEOPATRA. Nay, 'tis most certain, Iras. Saucy lictors Will catch at us like strumpets; and scald rhymers Ballad us out o' tune. The quick comedians Extemporally will stage us, and present Our Alexandrian revels. Antony Shall be brought drunken forth; and I shall see Some squeaking Cleopatra boy my greatness. She then calls for her diadem, her robes of state, and attires herself as if "again for Cydnus, to meet Mark Antony." Coquette to the last, she must make Death proud to take her, and die, "phoenix like," as she had lived, with all the pomp of preparation--luxurious in her despair. The death of Lucretia, of Portia, of Arria, and others who died "after the high Roman fashion," is sublime according to the Pagan ideas of virtue, and yet none of them so powerfully affect the imagination as the catastrophe of Cleopatra. The idea of this frail, timid, wayward woman, dying with heroism from the mere force of passion and will, takes us by surprise. The Attic elegance of her mind, her poetical imagination, the pride of beauty and royalty predominating to the last, and the sumptuous and picturesque accompaniments with which she surrounds herself in death, carry to its extreme height that effect of contrast which prevails through her life and character. No arts, no invention could add to the real circumstances of Cleopatra's closing scene. Shakspeare has shown profound judgment and feeling in adhering closely to the classical authorities; and to say that the language and sentiments worthily fill up the outline, is the most magnificent praise that can be given. The magical play of fancy and the overpowering fascination of the character are kept up to the last, and when Cleopatra, on applying the asp, silences the lamentations of her women:-- Peace! peace! Dost thou not see my baby at my breast, That sucks the nurse to sleep?-- These few words--the contrast between the tender beauty of the image and the horror of the situation--produce an effect more intensely mournful than all the ranting in the world. The generous devotion of her women adds the moral charm which alone was wanting: and when Octavius hurries in too late to save his victim, and exclaims, when gazing on her-- She looks like sleep-- As she would catch another Antony In her strong toil of grace, the image of her beauty and her irresistible arts, triumphant even in death, is at once brought before us, and one masterly and comprehensive stroke consummates this most wonderful, most dazzling delineation. I am not here the apologist of Cleopatra's historical character, nor of such women as resemble her: I am considering her merely as a dramatic portrait of astonishing beauty, spirit, and originality. She has furnished the subject of two Latin, sixteen French, six English, and at least four Italian tragedies;[76] yet Shakspeare alone has availed himself of all the interest of the story, without falsifying the character. He alone has dared to exhibit the Egyptian queen with all her greatness and all her littleness--all her frailties of temper--all her paltry arts and dissolute passions--yet preserved the dramatic propriety and poetical coloring of the character, and awakened our pity for fallen grandeur, without once beguiling us into sympathy with guilt and error. Corneille has represented Cleopatra as a model of chaste propriety, magnanimity, constancy, and every female virtue; and the effect is almost ludicrous. In our own language, we have two very fine tragedies on the story of Cleopatra: in that of Dryden, which is in truth a noble poem, and which he himself considered his masterpiece, Cleopatra is a mere common-place "all-for-love" heroine, full of constancy and fine sentiments. For instance:-- My love's so true, That I can neither hide it where it is, Nor show it where it is not. Nature meant me A wife--a silly, harmless, household dove, Fond without art, and kind without deceit. But fortune, that has made a mistress of me, Has thrust me out to the wild world, unfurnished Of falsehood to be happy. Is this Antony's Cleopatra--the Circe of the Nile--the Venus of the Cydnus? _She_ never uttered any thing half so mawkish in her life. In Fletcher's "False One," Cleopatra is represented at an earlier period of her history: and to give an idea of the aspect under which the character is exhibited, (and it does not vary throughout the play,) I shall give one scene; if it be considered out of place, its extreme beauty will form its best apology. Ptolemy and his council having exhibited to Cæsar all the royal treasures in Egypt, he is so astonished and dazzled at the view of the accumulated wealth, that he forgets the presence of Cleopatra, and treats her with negligence. The following scene between her and her sister Arsinoe occurs immediately afterwards. ARSINOE. You're so impatient! CLEOPATRA. Have I not cause? Women of common beauties and low births, When they are slighted, are allowed their angers-- Why should not I, a princess, make him know The baseness of his usage? ARSINOE. Yes, 'tis fit: But then again you know what man-- CLEOPATRA. He's no man! The shadow of a greatness hangs upon him, And not the virtue; he is no conqueror, Has suffered under the base dross of nature; Poorly deliver'd up his power to wealth. The god of bed-rid men taught his eyes treason. Against the truth of love he has rais'd rebellion Defied his holy flames. EROS. He will fall back again And satisfy your grace. CLEOPATRA. Had I been old, Or blasted in my bud, he might have show'd Some shadow of dislike: but to prefer The lustre of a little trash, Arsinoe, And the poor glow-worm light of some faint jewels Before the light of love, and soul of beauty-- O how it vexes me! He is no soldier: All honorable soldiers are Love's servants. He is a merchant, a mere wandering merchant, Servile to gain; he trades for poor commodities, And makes his conquests thefts! Some fortunate captains That quarter with him, and are truly valiant. Have flung the name of "Happy Cæsar" on him; Himself ne'er won it. He's so base and covetous, He'll sell his sword for gold. ARSINOE. This is too bitter. CLEOPATRA. O, I could curse myself, that was so foolish. So fondly childish, to believe his tongue-- His promising tongue--ere I could catch his temper. I'd trash enough to have cloyed his eyes withal, (His covetous eyes,) such as I scorn to tread on, Richer than e'er he saw yet, and more tempting; Had I known he'd stoop'd at that, I'd saved mine honor-- I had been happy still! But let him take it. And let him brag how poorly I'm rewarded; Let him go conquer still weak wretched ladies; Love has his angry quiver too, his deadly, And when he finds scorn, armed at the strongest-- I am a fool to fret thus for a fool,-- An old blind fool too! I lose my health; I will not, I will not cry; I will not honor him With tears diviner than the gods he worships; I will not take the pains to curse a poor thing. EROS. Do not; you shall not need. CLEOPATRA. Would I were prisoner To one I hate, that I might anger him! I will love any man to break the heart of him! Any that has the heart and will to kill him! ARSINOE. Take some fair truce. CLEOPATRA. I will go study mischief, And put a look on, arm'd with all my cunnings. Shall meet him like a basilisk, and strike him. Love! put destroying flame into mine eyes, Into my smiles deceits, that I may torture him-- That I may make him love to death, and laugh at him _Enter_ APOLLODORUS. APOLLODORUS. Cæsar commends his service to your grace CLEOPATRA. His service? What's his service? EROS. Pray you be patient The noble Cæsar loves still. CLEOPATRA. What's his will? APOLLODORUS. He craves access unto your highness. CLEOPATRA No;-- Say no; I will have none to trouble me. ARSINOE. Good sister!-- CLEOPATRA. None, I say. I will be private. Would thou hadst flung me into Nilus, keeper, When first thou gav'st consent to bring my body To this unthankful Cæsar! APOLLODORUS. 'Twas your will, madam. Nay more, your charge upon me, as I honor'd you. You know what danger I endur'd. CLEOPATRA. Take this, [_giving a jewel_, And carry it to that lordly Cæsar sent thee; There's a new love, a handsome one, a rich one,-- One that will hug his mind: bid him make love to it: Tell the ambitious broker this will suffer-- _Enter_ CÆSAR. APOLLODORUS. He enters. CLEOPATRA. How! CÆSAR. I do not use to wait, lady Where I am, all the doors are free and open. CLEOPATRA. I guess so by your rudeness. CÆSAR. You're not angry? Things of your tender mould should be most gentle. Why should you frown? Good gods, what a set anger Have you forc'd into your face! Come, I must temper you. What a coy smile was there, and a disdainful! How like an ominous flash it broke out from you! Defend me, love! Sweet, who has anger'd you? CLEOPATRA. Show him a glass! That false face has betray'd me-- That base heart wrong'd me! CÆSAR. Be more sweetly angry. I wrong'd you, fair? CLEOPATRA. Away with your foul flatteries; They are too gross! But that I dare be angry, And with as great a god as Cæsar is, To show how poorly I respect his memory I would not speak to you. CÆSAR. Pray you, undo this riddle, And tell me how I've vexed you. CLEOPATRA. Let me think first, Whether I may put on patience That will with honor suffer me. Know I hate you! Let that begin the story. Now I'll tell you. CÆSAR. But do it mildly: in a noble lady, Softness of spirit, and a sober nature, That moves like summer winds, cool, and blows sweetness, Shows blessed, like herself. CLEOPATRA. And that great blessedness. You first reap'd of me; till you taught my nature, Like a rude storm, to talk aloud and thunder, Sleep was not gentler than my soul, and stiller. You had the spring of my affections, And my fair fruits I gave you leave to taste of; You must expect the winter of mine anger. You flung me off--before the court disgraced me-- When in the pride I appear'd of all my beauty-- Appear'd your mistress; took unto your eyes The common strumpet, love of hated lucre,-- Courted with covetous heart the slave of nature,-- Gave all your thoughts to gold, that men of glory, And minds adorned with noble love, would kick at! Soldiers of royal mark scorn such base purchase; Beauty and honor are the marks they shoot at. I spake to you then, I courted you, and woo'd you, Called you dear Cæsar, hung about you tenderly, Was proud to appear your friend-- CÆSAR. You have mistaken me. CLEOPATRA. But neither eye, nor favor, not a smile Was I blessed back withal, but shook off rudely, And as you had been sold to sordid infamy, You fell before the images of treasure, And in your soul you worship'd. I stood slighted; Forgotten, and contemned; my soft embraces, And those sweet kisses which you called Elysium As letters writ in sand, no more remember'd; The name and glory of your Cleopatra Laugh'd at, and made a story to your captains! Shall I endure? CÆSAR. You are deceived in all this; Upon my life you are; 'tis your much tenderness. CLEOPATRA. No, no; I love not that way; you are cozen'd; I love with as much ambition as a conqueror, And where I love will triumph! CÆSAR. So you shall: My heart shall be the chariot that shall bear you: All I have won shall wait upon you. By the gods, The bravery of this woman's mind has fir'd me! Dear mistress, shall I but this once---- CLEOPATRA. How! Cæsar! Have I let slip a second vanity That gives thee hope? CÆSAR. You shall be absolute, And reign alone as queen; you shall be any thing. CLEOPATRA. * * * * Farewell, unthankful! CÆSAR. Stay! CLEOPATRA. I will not. CÆSAR. I command. CLEOPATRA. Command, and go without, sir, I do command _thee_ be my slave forever, And vex, while I laugh at thee! CÆSAR. Thus low, beauty---- [_He kneels_ CLEOPATRA. It is too late; when I have found thee absolute, The man that fame reports thee, and to me, May be I shall think better. Farewell, conqueror! (_Exit._) Now this is magnificent poetry, but this is not Cleopatra, this is not "the gipsey queen." The sentiment here is too profound, the majesty too real, and too lofty. Cleopatra could be great by fits and starts, but never sustained her dignity upon so high a tone for ten minutes together. The Cleopatra of Fletcher reminds us of the antique colossal statue of her in the Vatican, all grandeur and grace. Cleopatra in Dryden's tragedy is like Guido's dying Cleopatra in the Pitti Palace, tenderly beautiful. Shakspeare's Cleopatra is like one of those graceful and fantastic pieces of antique Arabesque, in which all anomalous shapes and impossible and wild combinations of form are woven together in regular confusion and most harmonious discord: and such, we have reason to believe, was the living woman herself, when she existed upon this earth. OCTAVIA. I do not understand the observation of a late critic, that in this play "Octavia is only a dull foil to Cleopatra." Cleopatra requires no foil, and Octavia is not dull, though in a moment of jealous spleen, her accomplished rival gives her that epithet.[77] It is possible that her beautiful character, if brought more forward and colored up to the historic portrait, would still be eclipsed by the dazzling splendor of Cleopatra's; for so I have seen a flight of fireworks blot out for a while the silver moon and ever-burning stars. But here the subject of the drama being the love of Antony and Cleopatra, Octavia is very properly kept in the background, and far from any competition with her rival: the interest would otherwise have been unpleasantly divided, or rather Cleopatra herself must have served but as a foil to the tender, virtuous, dignified, and generous Octavia, the very _beau ideal_ of a noble Roman lady:-- Admired Octavia, whose beauty claims No worse a husband than the best of men; Whose virtues and whose general graces speak That which none else can utter. Dryden has committed a great mistake in bringing Octavia and her children on the scene, and in immediate contact with Cleopatra. To have thus violated the truth of history[78] might have been excusable, but to sacrifice the truth of nature and dramatic propriety, to produce a mere stage effect, was unpardonable. In order to preserve the unity of interest, he has falsified the character of Octavia as well as that of Cleopatra:[79] he has presented us with a regular scolding-match between the rivals, in which they come sweeping up to each other from opposite sides of the stage, with their respective trains, like two pea-hens in a passion. Shakspeare would no more have brought his captivating, brilliant, but meretricious Cleopatra into immediate comparison with the noble and chaste simplicity of Octavia, than a connoisseur in art would have placed Canova's Dansatrice, beautiful as it is, beside the Athenian Melpomene, or the Vestal of the Capitol. The character of Octavia is merely indicated in a few touches, but every stroke tells. We see her with "downcast eyes sedate and sweet, and looks demure,"--with her modest tenderness and dignified submission--the very antipodes of her rival! Nor should we forget that she has furnished one of the most graceful similes in the whole compass of poetry, where her soft equanimity in the midst of grief is compared to The swan's down feather That stands upon the swell at flood of tide, And neither way inclines. The fear which, seems to haunt the mind of Cleopatra, lest she should be "chastised by the sober eye" of Octavia, is exceedingly characteristic of the two women: it betrays the jealous pride of her, who was conscious that she had forfeited all real claim to respect; and it places Octavia before us in all the majesty of that virtue which could strike a kind of envying and remorseful awe even into the bosom of Cleopatra. What would she have thought and felt, had some soothsayer foretold to her the fate of her own children, whom she so tenderly loved? Captives, and exposed to the rage of the Roman populace, they owed their existence to the generous, admirable Octavia, in whose mind there entered no particle of littleness. She received into her house the children of Antony and Cleopatra, educated them with her own, treated them with truly maternal tenderness, and married them nobly. Lastly, to complete the contrast, the death of Octavia should be put in comparison with that of Cleopatra. After spending several years in dignified retirement, respected as the sister of Augustus, but more for her own virtues, Octavia lost her eldest son Marcellus, who was expressively called the "Hope of Rome." Her fortitude gave way under this blow, and she fell into a deep melancholy, which gradually wasted her health. While she was thus declining into death, occurred that beautiful scene, which has never yet, I believe, been made the subject of a picture, but should certainly be added to my gallery, (if I had one,) and I would hang it opposite to the dying Cleopatra. Virgil was commanded by Augustus to read aloud to his sister that book of the Eneid in which he had commemorated the virtues and early death of the young Marcellus. When he came to the lines-- This youth, the blissful vision of a day, Shall just be shown on earth, then snatch'd away, &c. The mother covered her face, and burst into tears. But when Virgil mentioned her son by name, ("Tu Marcellus eris,") which he had artfully deferred till the concluding lines, Octavia, unable to control her agitation, fainted away. She afterwards, with a magnificent spirit, ordered the poet a gratuity of ten thousand sesterces for each line of the panegyric.[80] It is probable that the agitation she suffered on this occasion hastened the effects of her disorder; for she died soon after, (of grief, says the historian,) having survived Antony about twenty years. VOLUMNIA. Octavia, however, is only a beautiful sketch, while in Volumnia, Shakspeare has given us the portrait of a Roman matron, conceived in the true antique spirit, and finished in every part. Although Coriolanus is the hero of the play, yet much of the interest of the action and the final catastrophe turn upon the character of his mother, Volumnia, and the power she exercised over his mind, by which, according to the story, "she saved Rome and lost her son." Her lofty patriotism, her patrician haughtiness, her maternal pride, her eloquence, and her towering spirit, are exhibited with the utmost power of effect; yet the truth of female nature is beautifully preserved, and the portrait, with all its vigor, is without harshness. I shall begin by illustrating the relative position and feelings of the mother and son; as these are of the greatest importance in the action of the drama, and consequently most prominent in the characters. Though Volumnia is a Roman matron, and though her country owes its salvation to her, it is clear that her maternal pride and affection are stronger even than her patriotism. Thus when her son is exiled, she burst into an imprecation against Rome and its citizens:-- Now the red pestilence strikes all trades in Rome, And occupations perish! Here we have the impulses of individual and feminine nature, overpowering all national and habitual influences. Volumnia would never have exclaimed like the Spartan mother, of her dead son, "Sparta has many others as brave as he;" but in a far different spirit she says to the Romans,-- Ere you go, hear this: As far as doth the Capitol exceed The meanest house in Rome, so far my son, Whom you have banished, does exceed you all. In the very first scene, and before the introduction of the principal personages, one citizen observes to another that the military exploits of Marcius were performed, not so much for his country's sake "as to please his mother." By this admirable stroke of art, introduced with such simplicity of effect, our attention is aroused, and we are prepared in the very outset of the piece for the important part assigned to Volumnia, and for her share in producing the catastrophe. In the first act we have a very graceful scene, in which the two Roman ladies, the wife and mother of Coriolanus, are discovered at their needle-work, conversing on his absence and danger, and are visited by Valeria:-- The noble sisters of Publicola, The moon of Rome; chaste as the icicle, That's curded by the frost from purest snow, And hangs on Dian's temple! Over this little scene Shakspeare, without any display of learning, has breathed the very spirit of classical antiquity. The haughty temper of Volumnia, her admiration of the valor and high bearing of her son, and her proud but unselfish love for him, are finely contrasted with the modest sweetness, he conjugal tenderness, and the fond solicitude of his wife Virgilia. VOLUMNIA. When yet he was but tender-bodied, and the only son of my womb; when youth with comeliness pluck'd all gaze his way; when, for a day of king's entreaties, a mother should not sell him an hour from her beholding--considering how honor would become such a person; that it was no better than picture-like to hang by the wall, if renown made it not stir,--was pleased to let him seek danger where he was like to find fame. To a cruel war I sent him, from whence he returned, his brows bound with oak. I tell thee, daughter--I sprang not more in joy at first hearing he was a man-child, than now in first seeing he had proved himself a man. VIRGILIA. But had he died in the business, madam? how then? VOLUMNIA. Then his good report should have been my son; I therein would have found issue. Hear me profess sincerely: had I a dozen sons, each in my love alike, and none less dear than thine and my good Marcius, I had rather eleven die nobly for their country, than one voluptuously surfeit out of action. _Enter a_ GENTLEWOMAN. Madam, the lady Valeria is come to visit you. VIRGILIA. Beseech you, give me leave to retire myself. VOLUMNIA. Indeed you shall not. Methinks I hear hither your husband's drum: See him pluck Aufidius down by the hair: As children from a bear, the Volces shunning him: Methinks I see him stamp thus, and call thus-- "Come on, you cowards! you were got in fear, Though you were born in Rome." His bloody brow With his mail'd hand then wiping, forth he goes; Like to a harvest-man, that's task'd to mow Or all, or lose his hire. VIRGILIA. His bloody brow! O Jupiter, no blood! VOLUMNIA. Away, you fool! it more becomes a man Than gilt his trophy. The breast of Hecuba, When she did suckle Hector, look'd not lovelier Than Hector's forehead, when it spit forth blood At Grecian swords contending. Tell Valeria We are fit to bid her welcome. [_Exit Gent._ VIRGILIA. Heavens bless my lord from fell Aufidius! VOLUMNIA. He'll beat Aufidius's head below his knee. And tread upon his neck. This distinction between the two females is as interesting and beautiful as it is well sustained. Thus when the victory of Coriolanus is proclaimed, Menenius asks, "Is he wounded?" VIRGILIA. O no, no, no! VOLUMNIA. Yes, he is wounded--I thank the gods for it! And when he returns victorious from the wars, his high-spirited mother receives him with blessings and applause--his gentle wife with "gracious silence" and with tears. The resemblance of temper in the mother and the son, modified as it is by the difference of sex, and by her greater age and experience, is exhibited with admirable truth. Volumnia, with all her pride and spirit, has some prudence and self-command; in her language and deportment all is matured and matronly. The dignified tone of authority she assumes towards her son, when checking his headlong impetuosity, her respect and admiration for his noble qualities, and her strong sympathy even with the feelings she combats, are all displayed in the scene in which she prevails on him to soothe the incensed plebeians. VOLUMNIA. Pray be counsell'd: I have a heart as little apt as yours, But yet a brain that leads my use of anger To better vantage. MENENIUS. Well said, noble woman: Before he should thus stoop to the herd, but that The violent fit o' the time craves it as physic For the whole state, I would put mine armour on, Which I can scarcely bear. CORIOLANUS. What must I do? MENENIUS. Return to the tribunes. CORIOLANUS. Well. What then? what then? MENENIUS. Repent what you have spoke. CORIOLANUS. For them? I cannot do it to the gods; Must I then do't to them? VOLUMNIA. You are too absolute, Though therein you can never be too noble, But when extremities speak. I pr'ythee now, my son, Go to them with this bonnet in thy hand; And thus far having stretch'd it, (here be with them) Thy knee bussing the stones, (for in such business Action is eloquent, and the eyes of the ignorant More learned than the ears,) waving thy head, Which often, thus, correcting thy stout heart Now humble, as the ripest mulberry, That will not hold the handling. Or, say to them, Thou art their soldier, and being bred in broils Hast not the soft way which, thou dost confess, Were fit for thee to use, as they to claim, In asking their good loves; but thou wilt frame Thyself, forsooth, hereafter theirs, so far As thou hast power and person. MENENIUS. This but done, Even as she speaks, why all their hearts were yours For they have pardons, being asked, as free As words to little purpose. VOLUMNIA. Pr'ythee now, Go, and be rul'd: although I know thou hadst rather Follow thine enemy in a fiery gulf Than flatter him in a bower. MENENIUS. Only fair speech. COMINIUS. I think 'twill serve, if he Can thereto frame his spirit. VOLUMNIA. He must, and will: Pr'ythee, now say you will, and go about it. CORIOLANUS. Must I go show them my unbarb'd sconce? Must I With my base tongue give to my noble heart A lie, that it must bear? Well, I will do't; Yet were there but this single plot to lose, This mould of Marcius, they to dust should grind it, And throw it against the wind. To the market-place You have put me now to such a part, which never I shall discharge to the life. VOLUMNIA. I pr'ythee now, sweet son, as thou hast said, My praises made thee first a soldier, so To have my praise for this, perform a part Thou hast not done before. CORIOLANUS. Well, I must do't: Away, my disposition, and possess me Some harlot's spirit! * * * * I will not do't: Lest I surcease to honor mine own truth, And by my body's action, teach my mind A most inherent baseness. VOLUMNIA. At thy choice, then: To beg of thee, it is my more dishonor, Than thou of them. Come all to ruin: let Thy mother rather feel thy pride, than fear Thy dangerous stoutness: for I mock at death With as big heart as thou. Do as thou list-- Thy valiantness was mine, thou suck'dst it from me But owe thy pride thyself. CORIOLANUS. Pray be content; Mother, I am going to the market place-- Chide me no more. When the spirit of the mother and the son are brought into immediate collision, he yields before her; the warrior who stemmed alone the whole city of Corioli, who was ready to face "the steep Tarpeian death, or at wild horses' heels,--vagabond exile--flaying," rather than abate one jot of his proud will--shrinks at her rebuke. The haughty, fiery, overbearing temperament of Coriolanus, is drawn in such forcible and striking colors, that nothing can more impress us with the real grandeur and power of Volumnia's character, than his boundless submission to her will--his more than filial tenderness and respect. You gods! I prate, And the most noble mother of the world Leave unsaluted. Sink my knee i' the earth-- Of thy deep duty more impression show Than that of common sons! When his mother appears before him as a suppliant, he exclaims,-- My mother bows; As if Olympus to a molehill should In supplication nod. Here the expression of reverence, and the magnificent image in which it is clothed, are equally characteristic both of the mother and the son. Her aristocratic haughtiness is a strong trait in Volumnia's manner and character, and her supreme contempt for the plebeians, whether they are to be defied or cajoled, is very like what I have heard expressed by some high-born and high-bred women of our own day. I muse my mother Does not approve me further, who was wont To call them woollen vassals; things created To buy and sell with groats; to show bare heads In congregations; to yawn, be still, and wonder When one but of my ordinance stood up To speak of peace or war. And Volumnia reproaching the tribunes,-- 'Twas you incensed the rabble-- Cats, that can judge as fitly of his worth, As I can of those mysteries which Heaven Will not have earth to know. There is all the Roman spirit in her exultation when the trumpets sound the return of Coriolanus. Hark! the trumpets! These are the ushers of Marcius: before him He carries noise, and behind him he leaves tears. And in her speech to the gentle Virgilia, who is weeping her husband's banishment-- Leave this faint puling! and lament as I do In anger--Juno-like! But the triumph of Volumnia's character, the full display of all her grandeur of soul, her patriotism, her strong affections, and her sublime eloquence, are reserved for her last scene, in which she pleads for the safety of Rome, and wins from her angry son that peace which all the swords of Italy and her confederate arms could not have purchased. The strict and even literal adherence to the truth of history is an additional beauty. Her famous speech, beginning "Should we be silent and not speak," is nearly word for word from Plutarch, with some additional graces of expression, and the charm of metre superadded. I shall give the last lines of this address, as illustrating that noble and irresistible eloquence which was the crowning ornament of the character. One exquisite touch of nature, which is distinguished by italics, was beyond the rhetorician and historian, and belongs only to the poet. Speak to me, son; Thou hast affected the fine strains of honor, To imitate the graces of the gods; To tear with thunder the wide cheeks o' the air, And yet to charge thy sulphur with a bolt That should but rive an oak. Why dost not speak? Think'st thou it honorable for a nobleman Still to remember wrongs? Daughter, speak you: He cares not for your weeping. Speak thou, boy; Perhaps thy childishness may move him more Than can our reasons. There is no man in the world More bound to his mother; yet here he lets me prate Like one i' the stocks. Thou hast never in thy life Show'd thy dear mother any courtesy; _When she, (poor hen!) fond of no second brood, Has cluck'd thee to the wars, and safely home, Laden with honor._ Say my request's unjust, And spurn me back: but, if it be not so, Thou art not honest, and the gods will plague thee That thou restrain'st from me the duty which To a mother's part belongs. He turns away: Down, ladies: let us shame him with our knees. To his surname Coriolanus 'longs more pride, Than pity to our prayers; down, and end; This is the last; so will we home to Rome, And die among our neighbors. Nay, behold us; This boy, that cannot tell what he would have, But kneels, and holds up hands, for fellowship, Does reason our petition with more strength Than thou hast to deny't.[81] It is an instance of Shakspeare's fine judgment, that after this magnificent and touching piece of eloquence, which saved Rome, Volumnia should speak no more, for she could say nothing that would not deteriorate from the effect thus left on the imagination. She is at last dismissed from our admiring gaze amid the thunder of grateful acclamations-- Behold, our patroness,--the life of Rome. CONSTANCE. We have seen that in the mother of Coriolanus, the principal qualities are exceeding pride, self-will, strong maternal affection, great power of imagination, and energy of temper. Precisely the same qualities enter into the mind of Constance of Bretagne: but in her these qualities are so differently modified by circumstances and education, that not even in fancy do we think of instituting a comparison between the Gothic grandeur of Constance, and the more severe and classical dignity of the Roman matron. The scenes and circumstances with which Shakspeare has surrounded Constance, are strictly faithful to the old chronicles, and are as vividly as they are accurately represented. On the other hand, the hints on which the character has been constructed, are few and vague; but the portrait harmonizes so wonderfully with its historic background, and with all that later researches have discovered relative to the personal adventures of Constance, that I have not the slightest doubt of its individual truth. The result of a life of strange vicissitude; the picture of a tameless will, and high passions, forever struggling in vain against a superior power: and the real situation of women in those chivalrous times, are placed before us in a few noble scenes. The manner in which Shakspeare has applied the scattered hints of history to the formation of the character, reminds us of that magician who collected the mangled limbs which had been dispersed up and down, reunited them into the human form, and reanimated them with the breathing and conscious spirit of life. Constance of Bretagne was the only daughter and heiress of Conan IV., Duke of Bretagne; her mother was Margaret of Scotland, the eldest daughter of Malcolm IV.: but little mention is made of this princess in the old histories; but she appears to have inherited some portion of the talent and spirit of her father, and to have transmitted them to her daughter. The misfortunes of Constance may be said to have commenced before her birth, and took their rise in the misconduct of one of her female ancestors. Her great-grandmother Matilda, the wife of Conan III., was distinguished by her beauty and imperious temper, and not less by her gallantries. Her husband, not thinking proper to repudiate her during his lifetime, contented himself with disinheriting her son Hoel, whom he declared illegitimate; and bequeathed his dukedom to his daughter Bertha, and her husband Allan the Black, Earl of Richmond, who were proclaimed and acknowledged Duke and Duchess of Bretagne. Prince Hoel, so far from acquiescing in his father's will, immediately levied an army to maintain his rights, and a civil war ensued between the brother and sister, which lasted for twelve or fourteen years. Bertha, whose reputation was not much fairer than that of her mother Matilda, was succeeded by her son Conan IV.; he was young, and of a feeble, vacillating temper, and after struggling for a few years against the increasing power of his uncle Hoel, and his own rebellious barons, he called in the aid of that politic and ambitious monarch, Henry II. of England. This fatal step decided the fate of his crown and his posterity; from the moment the English set foot in Bretagne, that miserable country became a scene of horrors and crimes--oppression and perfidy on the one hand, unavailing struggles on the other. Ten years of civil discord ensued, during which the greatest part of Bretagne was desolated, and nearly a third of the population carried off by famine and pestilence. In the end, Conan was secured in the possession of his throne by the assistance of the English king, who, equally subtle and ambitious, contrived in the course of this warfare to strip Conan of most of his provinces by successive treaties; alienate the Breton nobles from their lawful sovereign, and at length render the Duke himself the mere vassal of his power. In the midst of these scenes of turbulence and bloodshed was Constance born, in the year 1164. The English king consummated his perfidious scheme of policy, by seizing on the person of the infant princess, before she was three years old, as a hostage for her father. Afterwards, by contracting her in marriage to his third son, Geoffrey Plantagenet, he ensured, as he thought, the possession of the duchy of Bretagne to his own posterity. From this time we hear no more of the weak, unhappy Conan, who, retiring from a fruitless contest, hid himself in some obscure retreat: even the date of his death is unknown. Meanwhile Henry openly claimed the duchy in behalf of his son Geoffrey and the Lady Constance; and their claims not being immediately acknowledged, he invaded Bretagne with a large army, laid waste the country, bribed or forced some of the barons into submission, murdered or imprisoned others, and, by the most treacherous and barbarous policy, contrived to keep possession of the country he had thus seized. However, in order to satisfy the Bretons, who were attached to the race of their ancient sovereigns, and to give some color to his usurpation, he caused Geoffrey and Constance to be solemnly crowned at Rennes, as Duke and Duchess of Bretagne. This was in the year 1169 when Constance was five, and Prince Geoffrey about eight, years old. His father, Henry, continued to rule, or rather to ravage and oppress, the country in their name for about fourteen years, during which period we do not hear of Constance. She appears to have been kept in a species of constraint as a hostage rather than a sovereign; while her husband Geoffrey, as he grew up to manhood, was too much engaged in keeping the Bretons in order, and disputing his rights with his father, to think about the completion of his union with Constance, although his sole title to the dukedom was properly and legally in right of his wife. At length, in 1182, the nuptials were formally celebrated, Constance being then in her nineteenth year. At the same time, she was recognized as Duchess of Bretagne _de son chef_, (that is, in her own right,) by two acts of legislation, which are still preserved among the records of Bretagne, and bear her own seal and signature. Those domestic feuds which embittered the whole life of Henry II., and at length broke his heart, are well known. Of all his sons, who were in continual rebellion against him, Geoffrey was the most undutiful, and the most formidable: he had all the pride of the Plantagenets,--all the warlike accomplishments of his two elder brothers, Henry and Richard; and was the only one who could compete with his father in talent, eloquence, and dissimulation. No sooner was he the husband of Constance, and in possession of the throne of Bretagne, than he openly opposed his father; in other words, he maintained the honor and interests of his wife and her unhappy country against the cruelties and oppression of the English plunderers.[82] About three years after his marriage, he was invited to Paris for the purpose of concluding a league, offensive and defensive, with the French king: in this journey he was accompanied by the Duchess Constance, and they were received and entertained with royal magnificence. Geoffrey, who excelled in all chivalrous accomplishments, distinguished himself in the tournaments which were celebrated on the occasion; but unfortunately, after an encounter with a French knight, celebrated for his prowess, he was accidentally flung from his horse, and trampled to death in the lists before he could be extricated. Constance, being now left a widow, returned to Bretagne, where her barons rallied round her, and acknowledged her as their sovereign. The Salique law did not prevail in Bretagne, and it appears that in those times the power of a female to possess and transmit the rights of sovereignty had been recognized in several instances; but Constance is the first woman who exercised those rights in her own person. She had one daughter, Elinor, born in the second year of her marriage, and a few months after her husband's death she gave birth to a son. The States of Bretagne were filled with exultation; they required that the infant prince should not bear the name of his father,--a name which Constance, in fond remembrance of her husband, would have bestowed on him--still less that of his grandfather Henry; but that of Arthur, the redoubted hero of their country, whose memory was worshipped by the populace. Though the Arthur of romantic and fairy legends--the Arthur of the round table, had been dead for six centuries, they still looked for his second appearance among them, according to the prophecy of Merlin; and now, with fond and short-sighted enthusiasm, fixed their hopes on the young Arthur as one destined to redeem the glory and independence of their oppressed and miserable country. But in the very midst of the rejoicings which succeeded the birth of the prince, his grandfather, Henry II., demanded to have the possession and guardianship of his person; and on the spirited refusal of Constance to yield her son into his power, he invaded Bretagne with a large army, plundering, burning, devastating the country as he advanced. He seized Rennes, the capital, and having by the basest treachery obtained possession of the persons both of the young duchess and her children, he married Constance forcibly to one of his own favorite adherents, Randal de Blondeville, Earl of Chester, and conferred on him the duchy of Bretagne, to be held as a fief of the English crown. The Earl of Chester, though a brave knight and one of the greatest barons of England, had no pretensions to so high an alliance; nor did he possess any qualities or personal accomplishments which might have reconciled Constance to him as a husband. He was a man of diminutive stature and mean appearance, but of haughty and ferocious manners, and unbounded ambition.[83] In a conference between this Earl of Chester and the Earl of Perche, in Lincoln cathedral, the latter taunted Randal with his insignificant person, and called him contemptuously "_Dwarf_." "Sayst thou so!" replied Randal; "I vow to God and our Lady, whose church this is, that ere long I will seem to thee high as that steeple!" He was as good as his word, when, on ascending the throne of Brittany, the Earl of Perche became his vassal. We cannot know what measures were used to force this degradation on the reluctant and high-spirited Constance; it is only certain that she never considered her marriage in the light of a sacred obligation, and that she took the first opportunity of legally breaking from a chain which could scarcely be considered as legally binding. For about a year she was obliged to allow this detested husband the title of Duke of Bretagne, and he administered the government without the slightest reference to her will, even in form, till 1189, when Henry II. died, execrating himself and his undutiful children. Whatever great and good qualities this monarch may have possessed, his conduct in Bretagne was uniformly detestable. Even the unfilial behavior of his sons may be extenuated; for while he spent his life, and sacrificed his peace, and violated every principle of honor and humanity to compass their political aggrandizement, he was guilty of atrocious injustice towards them, and set them a bad example in his own person. The tidings of Henry's death had no sooner reached Bretagne than the barons of that country rose with one accord against his government, banished or massacred his officers, and, sanctioned by the Duchess Constance, drove Randal de Blondeville and his followers from Bretagne; he retired to his earldom of Chester, there to brood over his injuries, and meditate vengeance. In the mean time, Richard I. ascended the English throne. Soon afterwards he embarked on his celebrated expedition to the Holy Land, having previously declared Prince Arthur, the only son of Constance, heir to all his dominions.[84] His absence, and that of many of her own turbulent barons and encroaching neighbors, left to Constance and her harassed dominions a short interval of profound peace. The historians of that period, occupied by the warlike exploits of the French and English kings in Palestine, make but little mention of the domestic events of Europe during their absence; but it is no slight encomium on the character of Constance, that Bretagne flourished under her government, and began to recover from the effects of twenty years of desolating war. The seven years during which she ruled as an independent sovereign, were not marked by any events of importance; but in the year 1196 she caused her son Arthur, then nine years of age, to be acknowledged Duke of Bretagne by the States, and associated him with herself in all the acts of government. There was more of maternal fondness than policy in this measure, and it cost her dear. Richard, that royal firebrand, had now returned to England: by the intrigues and representations of Earl Randal, his attention was turned to Bretagne. He expressed extreme indignation that Constance should have proclaimed her son Duke of Bretagne, and her partner in power, without his consent, he being the feudal lord and natural guardian of the young prince. After some excuses and representations on the part of Constance, he affected to be pacified, and a friendly interview was appointed at Pontorson, on the frontiers of Normandy. We can hardly reconcile the cruel and perfidious scenes which follow with those romantic and chivalrous associations which illustrate the memory of Coeur-de-Lion--the friend of Blondel, and the antagonist of Saladin. Constance, perfectly unsuspicious of the meditated treason, accepted the invitation of her brother-in-law, and set out from Rennes with a small but magnificent retinue to join him at Pontorson. On the road, and within sight of the town, the Earl of Chester was posted with a troop of Richard's soldiery, and while the Duchess prepared to enter the gates, where she expected to be received with honor and welcome, he suddenly rushed from his ambuscade, fell upon her and her suite, put the latter to flight, and carried off Constance to the strong Castle of St. Jaques de Beuvron, where he detained her a prisoner for eighteen months. The chronicle does not tell us how Randal treated his unfortunate wife during this long imprisonment. She was absolutely in his power; none of her own people were suffered to approach her, and whatever might have been his behavior towards her, one thing alone is certain, that so far from softening her feelings towards _him_, it seems to have added tenfold bitterness to her abhorrence and her scorn. The barons of Bretagne sent the Bishop of Rennes to complain of this violation of faith and justice, and to demand the restitution of the Duchess. Richard meanly evaded and temporized: he engaged to restore Constance to liberty on certain conditions; but this was merely to gain time. When the stipulated terms were complied with, and the hostages delivered, the Bretons sent a herald to the English king, to require him to fulfil his part of the treaty, and restore their beloved Constance. Richard replied with insolent defiance, refused to deliver up either the hostages or Constance, and marched his army into the heart of the country. All that Bretagne had suffered previously was as nothing compared to this terrible invasion; and all that the humane and peaceful government of Constance had effected during seven years was at once annihilated. The English barons and their savage and mercenary followers spread themselves through the country, which they wasted with fire and sword. The castles of those who ventured to defend themselves were razed to the ground; the towns and villages plundered and burnt, and the wretched inhabitants fled to the caves and forests; but not even there could they find an asylum; by the orders, and in the presence of Richard, the woods were set on fire, and hundreds either perished in the flames, or were suffocated in the smoke. Constance, meanwhile, could only weep in her captivity over the miseries of her country, and tremble with all a mother's fears for the safety of her son. She had placed Arthur under the care of William Desroches, the seneschal of her palace, a man of mature age, of approved valor, and devotedly attached to her family. This faithful servant threw himself, with his young charge, into the fortress of Brest, where he for some time defied the power of the English king. But notwithstanding the brave resistance of the nobles and people of Bretagne, they were obliged to submit to the conditions imposed by Richard. By a treaty concluded in 1198, of which the terms are not exactly known, Constance was delivered from her captivity, though not from her husband; but in the following year, when the death of Richard had restored her to some degree of independence, the first use she made of it was to _divorce herself_ from Randal. She took this step with her usual precipitancy, not waiting for the sanction of the Pope, as was the custom in those days; and soon afterwards she gave her hand to Guy, Count de Thouars, a man of courage and integrity, who for some time maintained the cause of his wife and her son against the power of England. Arthur was now fourteen, and the legitimate heir of all the dominions of his uncle Richard. Constance placed him under the guardianship of the king of France, who knighted the young prince with his own hand, and solemnly swore to defend his rights against his usurping uncle John. It is at this moment that the play of King John opens; and history is followed as closely as the dramatic form would allow, to the death of John. The real fate of poor Arthur, after he had been abandoned by the French, and had fallen into the hands of his uncle, is now ascertained; but according to the chronicle from which Shakspeare drew his materials, he was killed in attempting to escape from the castle of Falaise. Constance did not live to witness this consummation of her calamities; within a few months after Arthur was taken prisoner, in 1201, she died suddenly, before she had attained her thirty-ninth year; but the cause of her death is not specified. Her eldest daughter Elinor, the legitimate heiress of England, Normandy, and Bretagne, died in captivity; having been kept a prisoner in Bristol Castle from the age of fifteen. She was at that time so beautiful, that she was called proverbially, "La belle Bretonne," and by the English the "Fair Maid of Brittany." She, like her brother Arthur, was sacrificed to the ambition of her uncles. Of the two daughters of Constance by Guy de Thouars, the eldest, Alice, became Duchess of Bretagne, and married the Count de Dreux, of the royal blood of France. The sovereignty of Bretagne was transmitted through her descendants in an uninterrupted line, till, by the marriage of the celebrated Anne de Bretagne with Charles VIII. of France, her dominions were forever united with the French monarchy. In considering the real history of Constance, three things must strike us as chiefly remarkable. First, that she is not accused of any vice, or any act of injustice or violence; and this praise, though poor and negative, should have its due weight, considering the scanty records that remain of her troubled life, and the period at which she lived--a period in which crimes of the darkest dye were familiar occurrences. Her father, Conan, was considered as a gentle and amiable prince--"gentle even to feebleness;" yet we are told that on one occasion he acted over again the tragedy of Ugolino and Ruggiero, when he shut up the Count de Dol, with his two sons and his nephew, in a dungeon, and deliberately starved them to death; an event recorded without any particular comment by the old chroniclers of Bretagne. It also appears that, during those intervals when Constance administered the government of her states with some degree of independence, the country prospered under her sway, and that she possessed at all times the love of her people and the respect of her nobles. Secondly, no imputation whatever has been cast on the honor of Constance as a wife and as a woman. The old historians, who have treated in a very unceremonious style the levities of her great-grandmother Matilda, her grandmother Bertha, her godmother Constance, and her mother-in-law Elinor, treat the name and memory of our Lady Constance with uniform respect. Her third marriage, with Guy de Thouars, has been censured as impolitic, but has also been defended; it can hardly, considering her age, and the circumstances in which she was placed, be a just subject of reproach. During her hated union with Randal de Blondeville, and the years passed in a species of widowhood, she conducted herself with propriety: at least I can find no reason to judge otherwise. Lastly, we are struck by the fearless, determined spirit, amounting at times to rashness, which Constance displayed on several occasions, when left to the free exercise of her own power and will; yet we see how frequently, with all this resolution and pride of temper, she became a mere instrument in the hands of others, and a victim to the superior craft or power of her enemies. The inference is unavoidable; there must have existed in the mind of Constance, with all her noble and amiable qualities, a deficiency somewhere, a want of firmness, a want of judgment or wariness, and a total want of self-control. * * * * * In the play of King John, the three principal characters are the King, Falconbridge, and Lady Constance. The first is drawn forcibly and accurately from history: it reminds us of Titian's portrait of Cæsar Borgia, in which the hatefulness of the subject is redeemed by the masterly skill of the artist,--the truth, and power, and wonderful beauty of the execution. Falconbridge is the spirited creation of the poet.[85] Constance is certainly an historical personage; but the form which, when we meet it on the record of history, appears like a pale indistinct shadow, half melted into its obscure background, starts before us into a strange relief and palpable breathing reality upon the page of Shakspeare. Whenever we think of Constance, it is in her maternal character. All the interest which she excites in the drama turns upon her situation as the mother of Arthur. Every circumstance in which she is placed, every sentiment she utters, has a reference to him, and she is represented through the whole of the scenes in which she is engaged, as alternately pleading for the rights, and trembling for the existence of her son. The same may be said of the Merope. In the four tragedies of which her story forms the subject,[86] we see her but in one point of view, namely, as a mere impersonation of the maternal feeling. The poetry of the situation is every thing, the character nothing. Interesting as she is, take Merope out of the circumstances in which she is placed,--take away her son, for whom she trembles from the first scene to the last, and Merope in herself is nothing; she melts away into a name, to which we can fix no other characteristic by which to distinguish her. We recognize her no longer. Her position is that of an agonized mother; and we can no more fancy her under a different aspect, than we can imagine the statue of Niobe in a different attitude. But while we contemplate the character of Constance, she assumes before us an individuality perfectly distinct from the circumstances around her. The action calls forth her maternal feelings, and places them in the most prominent point of view: but with Constance, as with a real human being, the maternal affections are a powerful instinct, modified by other faculties, sentiments, and impulses, making up the individual character. We think of her as a mother, because, as a mother distracted for the loss of her son, she is immediately presented before us, and calls forth our sympathy and our tears; but we infer the rest of her character from what we see, as certainly and as completely as if we had known her whole course of life. That which strikes us as the principal attribute of Constance is _power_--power of imagination, of will, of passion, of affection, of pride: the moral energy, that faculty which is principally exercised in self-control, and gives consistency to the rest, is deficient; or rather, to speak more correctly, the extraordinary development of sensibility and imagination, which lends to the character its rich poetical coloring, leaves the other qualities comparatively subordinate. Hence it is that the whole complexion of the character, notwithstanding its amazing grandeur, is so exquisitely feminine. The weakness of the woman, who by the very consciousness of that weakness is worked up to desperation and defiance, the fluctuations of temper and the bursts of sublime passion, the terrors, the impatience, and the tears, are all most true to feminine nature. The energy of Constance not being based upon strength of character, rises and falls with the tide of passion. Her haughty spirit swells against resistance, and is excited into frenzy by sorrow and disappointment while neither from her towering pride, nor her strength of intellect, can she borrow patience to submit, or fortitude to endure. It is, therefore, with perfect truth of nature, that Constance is first introduced as pleading for peace. Stay for an answer to your embassy, Lest unadvised you stain your swords with blood: My Lord Chatillon may from England bring That right in peace, which here we urge in war; And then we shall repent each drop of blood, That hot, rash haste so indirectly shed. And that the same woman, when all her passions are roused by the sense of injury, should afterwards exclaim, War, war! No peace! peace is to me a war! That she should be ambitious for her son, proud of his high birth and royal rights, and violent in defending them, is most natural; but I cannot agree with those who think that in the mind of Constance, _ambition_--that is, the love of dominion for its own sake--is either a strong motive or a strong feeling: it could hardly be so where the natural impulses and the ideal power predominate in so high a degree. The vehemence with which she asserts the just and legal rights of her son is that of a fond mother and a proud-spirited woman, stung with the sense of injury, and herself a reigning sovereign,--by birth and right, if not in fact: yet when bereaved of her son, grief not only "fills the room up of her absent child," but seems to absorb every other faculty and feeling--even pride and anger. It is true that she exults over him as one whom nature and fortune had destined to be _great_, but in her distraction for his loss, she thinks of him only as her "Pretty Arthur." O lord! my boy, my Arthur, my fair son! My life, my joy, my food, my all the world! My widow-comfort, and my sorrow's cure! No other feeling can be traced through the whole of her frantic scene: it is grief only, a mother's heart-rending, soul-absorbing grief, and nothing else. Not even indignation, or the desire of revenge, interfere with its soleness and intensity. An ambitious woman would hardly have thus addressed the cold, wily Cardinal:-- And, Father Cardinal, I have heard you say, That we shall see and know our friends in heaven: If that be