Part 15

The English people were scandalized by the interference of Alice Perers with the politics of the reign of Edward III. She was a "fair piece of sin," for whose sake Edward anticipated his dotage. When Parliament interfered to break up a scandal that astonished even the court of France, Alice was perfectly ready to take an oath never again to see the King; for she knew that he valued her counsels because he drivelled over her person. So she returned from exile in time to misrepresent the most honest and outspoken man in Parliament, Peter de la Marr, who was well acquainted with the back-stairs policy which she would fain import into the government of England. As history bids her shift across its light in the various outlines of her domineering temper, to show her to us seated on the bench with the judges, suggesting to them what their ruling must be, or as she drives a trade between the court and foreign envoys, and mistranslates to the King the bias of popular opinion, we perceive a woman whose facile sex is merely a sop to drug a king in order to control his policy. The pages of royal and republican annals are mildewed with these old spots of decayed womanhood. Like dead flowers put to be pressed against some sweet or lofty rhyme, their musty petals mark the place where a single vice enlisted all the fine perception of the sex against honest manhood and the spirit of the age.

Bertram, in "All's Well that Ends Well," is under the influence of Parolles, "a snipt-taffata fellow," who goes buzzing around like a "red-tailed humble-bee" in a vile yellow suit all stuck over with bows and trimmings. Bertram has been often advised to cast him off: "There can be no kernel in this light nut; the soul of this man is his clothes; trust him not in matter of heavy consequence." Bertram is a raw boy for discernment, and insists that Parolles is very valiant, and has a good knowledge of the world. His friends are obliged to lay a plot, and invite him to be witness to Parolles's cowardice and knavery: not till then will he confess to the crudeness of his judgment.

But Helena, though well disposed to like a man who is Bertram's companion, has read him thoroughly, and, moreover, has the instinct to perceive that the man's knavery is so inbred that it suits him better than honesty. Her observation is full of subtlety:--

"I know him a notorious liar, Think him a great way fool, solely a coward; Yet these fix'd evils sit so fit in him, That they take place, when virtue's steely bones Look bleak in the cold wind."

The "evils" have a congenial place in such a temperament: a bleaker one would discourage the finest virtues. His nature fortunately cannot be reformed, since reform would turn a most satisfactory and harmonious miscreant into a scrubby gentleman. "And that's the humor of it," as Nym would say. Shakspeare puts this rare breadth of judgment into the mouth of a woman.

Imogen's step-mother, the Queen and wife of Cymbeline, is a strong-minded woman, who "bears all down with her brain." She rules the king by force or craft, and has arranged to marry Imogen to her own shallow-pated son Cloten. This ancestress of all the plotting step-mothers carries poison in her heart: her relatives may expect to find it in their food; for she is curious in distilling the essences of noxious herbs, under a scientific pretext to watch their effects in creatures not worth the hanging. But the compound that is ostensibly for rats is intended to dispossess Imogen of all her watchful liegemen, including her husband; and then, after getting her married to Cloten, the "mortal mineral" was meant to waste the King by inches to a grave that should be a royal footstool for her son.

Now the King has no suspicion of the simmering deviltry that he embraced. When all her projects are discovered, he exclaims,--

"O most delicate fiend! Who is't can read a woman?"

Not he, certainly; for he had been fooled in the time-honored way of crafty women.

"Mine eyes Were not in fault, for she was beautiful; Mine ears, that heard her flattery; nor my heart, That thought her like her seeming."

At the point of death, she confessed to her physician the whole of her unsexed intent. She never loved the King as Lady Macbeth loved her lord, but only affected the greatness got by him: she was wife to his place, but abhorred his person. Who but a woman could play that game with such an air of jaunty probability that invested her blackest kisses! Imogen's husband was a scorpion to her, ranked among the vermin which she meant to kill for pastime. And she purposed to lull the King into security by "watching, weeping, tendance, kissing," while her poison was vacating his throne. At the last, she only repented that the evils she hatched were not effected, "so, despairing, died," a martyr to an unfulfilled ideal. She is really the Lady Macbeth of the popular conception, being fiend-like from ambition. It would not have been Shakspearean if such a woman had been duplicated to furnish a wife to Macbeth. One hated with all her baffled spite, and the other loved with all her heart, her King.

Shakspeare would have us notice that the clear-sighted Imogen has privately read her step-mother, and lives with suspicions for her constant warders. The King, having banished Posthumus who was secretly married to her, has turned her over to the jailership of the Queen, who tries to cajole her:--

"No, be assured, you shall not find me, daughter, After the slander of most step-mothers, Evil-ey'd unto you."

Then she grants the married pair a stolen interview, in order that she may whip out and bring the King in to discover them. She knows the King will be displeased; but she calculates that after his first anger is cooled he will load her with favors to atone for his impetuosity:--

"I never do him wrong, But he does buy my injuries to be friends; Pays dear for my offences."

What a capable woman, with this new patent for depleting a husband's pocket by wringing his heart! What an extraordinary endowment of a husband's heart to connect its spasms with the purse-clasp!

Imogen feels the manœuvre of the Queen when she leaves to hurry up the King; and she says to Posthumus,--

"O dissembling courtesy! How fine this tyrant Can tickle where she wounds!"

Why, then, if Shakspeare endowed her with this penetration, does she not at a glance unmask Iachimo when he comes pretending that Posthumus has been false to her in exile, and proffering himself that she may take revenge in kind? Because she has such a heart of trust in her husband that both her ears cannot hastily abuse it. The conflict between Iachimo's counterfeit news and her loyal memory occupies the whole field of her being, and keeps out the base design. She listens to Iachimo with ears attuned by the high praises which her husband sends by letter to introduce a friend "of the noblest note." Iachimo is the creature of her husband's admiration, sent to be admired, suspicion disarmed in advance, not a sentry left on duty before her frankness. His hints of a dishonorable purpose cannot be taken by a mind that is unable to conceive dishonor. So her absolute spotlessness drives him to the plainest speech; for such an artless and unconscious woman never tasked his lips before. When the revelation comes, like a hideous scrawl of flame across her clear firmament in the very high noon of her confiding, the heaven of purity rains down at once, and there he is, swimming for life in the flood of her disdain. Then he saw womanhood in one "awe-inspiring gaze" that might have prompted Shelley to exclaim,--

"Her beams anatomize me, nerve by nerve, And lay me bare, and make me blush to see My hidden thoughts."

What an angelic impossibility of hearing is Imogen's! She has nothing that ever dreamed to itself of the covert meaning of his words. Without a second's interval of parley, not even time enough for natural astonishment, one peremptory instant annihilates his hope.

It is not every woman, even of the irreproachable kind, who wields so prompt a lightning of her chastity. And here Shakspeare has marked the difference between unconsciousness and prudery. I think that Isabella would have understood Iachimo much earlier, for the matter of her virtue was constantly in her thoughts, as a thing to be guarded against an undermining world. Her indignation is voluble; and she undertakes to reason in a priggish fashion with Angelo. But Imogen simply calls her servant that Iachimo may be taken in an instant out of the room. Many a woman whose life has been without a stain is still less intolerant than Isabella, and more complaisant than Imogen. Race and climate are largely implicated in these natural differences.

When Madame de Sévigné heard of her husband's infidelities, it was through the interested malice of her cousin, Bussy-Rabutin, who was in love with her. He proposed that she should seek to be revenged: "I will go halves in your revenge; for, after all, your interests are as dear to me as my own." She quietly replied: "I am not so exasperated as you think."

Iachimo said,--

"Revenge it. I dedicate myself to your sweet pleasure, And will continue fast to your affection."

Imogen's white-heat of honor shrivels up the wit of the French lady. Her mind can make but one motion, to cry out, "What ho, Pisanio!"

"Away!--I do contemn mine ears, that have So long attended thee."

Thou dost solicit a lady

"That disdains Thee and the devil alike."

Iachimo now pretends that he was only making trial of her by a false report and by a counterfeited overture,--and all for the sake of the love he bore her husband. This is quite enough: her frankness returns as suddenly as it was dismissed. For, as Iachimo well said,--

"The gods made you, Unlike all others, chaffless."

And that is a statement of the limit placed by Nature to her womanly shrewdness of observation.

In the historical dramas, Shakspeare seldom introduces women in order to make them convey to us impressions of character, traits of mind or heart. They are not so much feminine shapes as persons implicated in the play by the accident of relationship to the men. The parts are not particularized by them. Lady Percy, with one or two light touches of eager inquisitiveness, hints her fond and simple love. Queen Katherine fills out the proportions of a pathetic figure. But in "Henry V." Mrs. Quickly monopolizes all the point and savor: the Queen of France and her daughter are only lay-figures of the plot. In "1, 2 Henry IV.," it is the same. In "Richard II." the Queen seems merely born to this,--

"That my sad look Should grace the triumph of great Bolingbroke."

And her gardener plants a bank of rue

"In the remembrance of a weeping queen."

But, in "King John" both the grief and the character of Constance are more personally set forth, and we become aware of her distinctive quality. Queen Katherine, in "Henry VIII.," also puts an accent, different from that of Constance, upon her misfortunes; and her grief reveals another mood of the feminine nature; so that she attains to a separate consideration.

None of the women in the historical plays stand by the side of the men so emphasized as the mother of Arthur is: she agitates his claims with an impetuous sincerity that ought to have kept him alive to reign.

A high-minded man who claims his rights, and a high-minded woman who does the same, express themselves in different styles. The feminine style is shown in Constance with great discrimination. Both sexes can hate injustice, and may be opposed to compromises. Both can have indignation for a crime. But see how Constance puts into these moral feelings a scorn and a swiftness of dissent, urged by a volubility more native to a woman than to a man. Woman is apt, indeed, to be too voluble: each minute of her phrases breeds new ones; so she does not stop to notice that her indictment is shorter than her breath. Therefore men are apt to notice and to complain that her indictment does not reach up to the tide-mark of her breath. But the invective of Constance is the swift weapon-play of maternity: it flashes through every guard, touches rapidly to and fro, and draws blood at every unexpected touch.

A man's moral disposition has not been nourished and toned by the additional organs which impose wifehood and motherhood upon a woman. In her, more nerve centres are involved, with an exquisite sensibility for pain and pleasure which the average man's life seldom reaches. His bosom is not ample enough to contain such throbs of acquiescence or revolt. Every fount of feeling is twinned in woman, and sweet as the milk is, mingled by love, so sharp and bitter is its flavor made by hate. Her nerves revenge the violence of acts which she supposes dishonorable: she can fight with glances more searching and words more unequivocal than the cooler man will furnish. No doubt that his disdains, too, can summon all his blood to blush and lower magnificently on the cheek. But her blood seems richer in the red corpuscles: it wins, therefore, and is more visited by, the air of heaven. There is no blush so daunting, no look so penetrating to dissolve, no silence of a surprised conscience so unanswerable. And when she grieves, it seems as if the eyes were re-enforced, for all the founts of motherhood are weeping.

This ability to vindicate the right and to repudiate the wrong can easily become absurd to the spectators when it is charged with some excess of temper. Literature does ample justice to the termagant vein, and shows that it is ludicrous because it devotes a high degree of choler to a low measure of affront. In pantomimes, an enormous gun is pointed toward the audience, with extravagant anticipation of its exploit on the faces of the performers. For a moment we are cowed, but laughter fills the vast space between the faint puff and the noise we expected.

I presume that Xantippe felt justified in making the home of Socrates so unpleasant that he preferred the market, the forum, and the leather-dresser's shop, because she thought he neglected her for all those places, and wasted time, and kept her drudging, while he ran to find men and make their coarse grain revolve to sharpen his soul's edge against it. Perhaps, as Socrates was famed for falling into brown studies, which sometimes lasted all day, with contempt for food, it was a case of chronic absence of mind on the subject of dinner; for that is as vital as τὁ πρεπὁν καἱ καλὁν, the ethically proper and the beautifully true; and no household can dispense with it,--in fact, children cry for it. Perhaps he supped many a time upon the hemlock of her tongue, and became so acclimated to the draught that the last cup in prison tasted sweetly.

Shakspeare shows the exaggeration of the protesting temper in woman by means of the little spat between Queen Eleanor and Constance, in ii. 7.

A woman's language becomes exacerbated because she is so inadequate to protest by actions. The weakness rolls itself into a bristling defence of words. Men do not drip so profusely into words because they are reservoirs of force and competency. They know that by fair means or foul they can effect purposes from which women are debarred by seclusion, strangeness of habit, and innate reserve. Among women there is a certain resentment at this civic and social disability which does not stint expression.

When, however, a noble woman with a level countenance repudiates an unjust charge, she transfers herself from the bar to the bench, and unseats her summoners. Their purpose quails before this innocence that is so weak, yet grows so overpowering, as in the beauty of Madame Roland and the prison-blanched majesty of Marie Antoinette. The rebuke pulls down the accuser's eyes from their threat, and they seem to go wandering into corners furtively for refuge. Joan of Arc burns in court before the deluded men who claim her as an imp of witchcraft have time to pile their fagots: the passionless chastity gives out blinding sparks when thus enforced; the cheeks of bystanders are reached by them and set aglow. No man who has been unjustly dealt with, and selected for foul practice, can reach such palsying dignity of behavior that turns the axe's edge or holds the arm suspended in mid-resolve. There is a high manly scorn which is beyond refuting: it can kindle admiration in unwilling minds, and compel baseness to pause and to confer. But woman's beauty, planted in the breastplate of an untainted heart, becomes a petrifying image; and whoso meets the ruthless look will remember it even in the moment of a consummated revenge. Nothing helps bad men at such a sight but the poor subterfuge of flying into a rage, as if to muster in that way momentum enough to huddle her off, to get her where the condemning head shall fall before its eyes or lips can utter another protest. They shear it at the neck, never reflecting that they thus untether it to range in other skies, to unkennel heaven sleuth-hounds at last and drag them down.

"I will instruct my sorrows to be proud; For grief is proud, and makes his owner stoop. To me, and to the state of my great grief, Let kings assemble: for my grief's so great That no supporter but the huge firm earth Can hold it up: here I and sorrow sit; Here is my throne, bid kings come bow to it."

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 10: This word was issued from Coleridge's private mint, but never got into circulation. He invented some words, not to avoid circumlocution, of which there is quite enough in his style, but to save trouble by extemporizing tallies for his thought, as surveyors use the nearest sticks on their line. The ecclesiastical word, "introit,"--a passing from within to enter the church,--hinted to him "extroit,"--a starting from without. He means that women proceed from social convention, and not from interior thought.]

LORD BACON AND THE PLAYS:

SHAKSPEARE'S WOMEN:

LOVE IN SHAKSPEARE.

LORD BACON AND THE PLAYS.

A consideration of the theory that Lord Bacon wrote the plays which are attributed to Shakspeare comes in here more conveniently, because it will appear that Bacon's knowledge of women and his experience of the passion of Love, as expressed in his works, are so meagre and so colorless when contrasted with the plays that the fact might stand alone, with scarce a comment, to refute the theory which is so elaborately defended. In its proper place this will appear. In the mean time, some notice may be taken of a few points of the theory which seem to have gained a recognition so far as to produce scepticism in many intelligent minds.

Books enough are published in various languages filled with preternaturally far-fetched conjectures concerning Shakspeare. Many of them are devoted to proving that he must have been brought up to this or that profession. Lord Campbell has shown the extent of the poet's knowledge of legal terms, and his aptness in placing them. A surgeon claims him on the ground of his knowledge of the technical terms used in medical art. Bucknill and others, on the same ground of technical knowledge, prove that he must have been trained as a mad-doctor. A musician refers to his love of music, botanists to his accuracy in grouping flowers according to their seasons, and Hastings is convinced that he was bred a bird-fancier. Each investigator discovers his own specialty in the teeming pages, and insists upon apprenticing the poet. The doctor points to the line in "Hamlet,"--

"And crook the pregnant hinges of the knee,"--

and asks, with an air of conviction, how any one at that period, who had not been bred to the profession, could have understood the ginglymoid structure of the knee! The Worshipful Master of the Bard-of-Avon Lodge claims masonic fraternity with him, thinking that allusions to masonic terms and customs are scattered through the plays, but chiefly on the strength of Hubert's words in "King John,"--

"They shake their heads, And whisper one another in the ear, And he that speaks doth grip the hearer's wrist;"

for that action is the symbol of the sublime degree! Dr. Farmer anchored his theory that Shakspeare was in his youth, and during the unaccounted-for years after he left Stratford, a sharpener and dealer in skewers, upon these lines from "Hamlet:"--

"There's a Divinity that shapes our ends, Rough-hew them how we will."

These skewers were of the kind then used to fasten bales of wool. But Hugh Miller, who began life as a stone-cutter, finds in those lines a clear indication that the poet was bred to be a stone-mason! And at last a practical printer by the name of Blades proves that he worked at the printer's trade; for he speaks about "printing kisses" and the print of hoofs. In "Love's Labor Lost" is the clause, "I will do it, sir, in print;" and in the "Winter's Tale," "I love a ballad in print." Blades even apprentices him to the printer Vantrollier, who at the time enjoyed the monopoly of printing a certain class of books. Up to the present date, the number of professions and employments to which Shakspeare was trained amounts to twenty-four. No doubt some one is preparing to show that he must have been a fishmonger, and the lines which invite his attempt are quite as apposite as any of the above: "A fish: he smells like a fish;" "The luce is a fresh fish, the salt-fish is an old coat;" "They are both as whole as a fish;" and, more decisive than all, "The fish lives in the sea." By all means, let us have the sixty-eight allusions to fish and fishing in Shakspeare elaborated into one final theory, that he spent four years on a herring-smack; for how otherwise could the Clown in "Twelfth Night" have told Viola that a pilchard was a big herring?

There is another kind of criticism to which the plays have been subjected that imputes to them all the after-thoughts of later times. Ulrici derives from them an evangelical scheme of Christian ethics; a Roman Catholic claims the poet as an ardent adherent of the Pope; another commentator attributes to Shakspeare a deliberate purpose to write up the Protestant Reformation and write down the Pope, and finds a trace of Shakspeare's contempt for Romanism in "I Henry IV.," iv. I, where the troops of the Prince of Wales are described as--

"Glittering in golden coats, like images."

Sievers[11] thinks that the main thread of all Shakspeare's poetry was the "reproduction out of the nature of man of the Protestant scheme of Christianity"! It is shown particularly in the "Merchant of Venice" and "Hamlet." Tschischwitz's[12] book is as deterrent as his name. It is an attempt to develop Shakspeare's views upon the relation between ruler and people,--to show that he considered the state and kingdom to rest upon reciprocity of duties and upon the principle of piety. This is only another specimen of the terrific after-thoughts which the Germans force back upon Shakspeare. Gervinus calls him the perfect representative of modern Protestantism; Vischer concluded that he was a Pantheist; Bernays will not allow to him any religion at all; while Dr. Reichensperger, of the German Parliament, gives reasons in his book[13] for believing that he was an Ultramontanist! And Thomas Tyler, of the University of London, considers that Hamlet was a forerunner of Schopenhauer, and thoroughly pessimistic, because the calamity in the play does not respect personal character, and the future retributions and compensations are not clearly made out![14]