MISCELLANY.

Mr. J. O. Halliwell-Phillipps has issued a fourth edition of his Outlines of the Life of Shakespeare.

A second installment of Lady Martin's (Helena Faucit) studies in Shakespeare will shortly be issued by Messrs. Blackwood & Sons. The volume is dedicated, by permission, to the Queen.

Houghton, Mifflin & Co., have ready for immediate issue the first four volumes of Mr. Bullen's edition of Middleton, forming the second installment of his admirable edition of the Elizabethan poets.

Mr. William Winters' criticisms of Henry Irving have been republished in book form by George J. Coombes.

The months of December and January were marked by a number of representations by amateurs. Among the most successful were the Merchant of Venice, by the Jersey City Dramatic Club, at the Academy of Music of that city, and the same play by the Mimosa, at the Academy of Music in New York. The production of Richard III, by the Forrest, was also remarkably successful.

The Dramatic Reform Association of Manchester, England, offers prizes in order to encourage the study of dramatic literature. As You Like It is the play on which competitors will be examined this year.

George Eliot, in the newly published life by J. W. Cross, writes as follows of Shakespeare: "In opposition to most people who love to read Shakespeare, I like to see his plays acted better than any others; his great tragedies thrill me, let them be acted how they may. I think it is something like what I used to experience in old days in listening to uncultured preachers-the emotions lay hold of one too strongly for one to care about the medium. Before all other plays I find myself cold and critical, seeing nothing but actors and 'properties.'

In a recent private letter Hon. Ignatius Donnelly furnishes some interesting information concerning his forthcoming book.

I am progressing rapidly and most satisfactorily with "the cipher." I have got the whole story of Shakespeare's life-his neglect of his trade, his falling into evil courses and bad company, his being whipped, his leading a crowd of boys and men to rob Sir Thomas Lucy's orchard and park, his killing of the deer, his flight_to London, the pursuit of him, etc., etc. All this comes in incidentally in Henry IV, referred to by Cecil when telling Queen Elizabeth that Shakespeare did not write the plays, that he had not "the intelligence, wit, wisdom, or knowledge," for such a work. I think the same story is told in greater detail in the Merry Wives; see opening scene-Sir Thomas Lucy-his coat-of-arms, the riot, killing the deer, etc.

201

SHAKESPEARE'S PORTRAITURE OF

WOMEN.

FOR a critic to say anything of Shakspeare that has not been said already is as hard as it would be for a poet to sing a new song about the sun. But we vivify our old impressions by rearranging them; each reflects the light, flinging a gleam or a sparkle on its neighbour, and when we alter the position of this or that, nothing seems to remain quite the same; we have given our kaleidoscope a turn. On this account, if on no other, we may value the chronological method of studying an author's works of late pursued so industriously; it has been a new way of arranging our knowledge, and so it has reanimated our dulled impressions. Let us see whether we can feel the old immortal beauty in some degree afresh, and cheat ourselves into supposing that we are making some small discoveries about Shakspeare, and the growth of his character and genius, by glancing along his portraitures of women in the order in which they were actually conceived by him. We shall at least spend an hour in the best possible company. These ideal figures cannot fail to quicken our sensibility for what is beautiful in real life; there are hidden or marred ideals all around us in the actual men and women, in the commonplace lives of the street, in the market and the fireside. If we knew every motion of an Imogen or a Cordelia, it might be possible to detect the heart of one of these beating under a modern gown.

But why not go to a woman to hear about women? Why expect to learn as much from Shakspeare as from George Eliot or Jane Austen? It is true that there were secrets known to Jane Austen and George Eliot at which even Shakspeare only guessed; secrets of womanly fortitude in petty things, which are properly known only to those who feel where the shoe pinches; secrets of feminine weakness

visible to keen eyes which are tempted by no chivalric sentiment to blink the fact. The commonplaces of masculine satire on women have something clumsy and stupid about them; it is well to have them near us as stones to fling on occasion, but they seldom hit the mark. If the barbed dart is to quiver in the flesh, it should be aimed by a sister's hand; she is aware at what precise points the armour is unjointed. But, on the other hand, there are many truths which each sex can best tell about the other. Our personality does not consist solely or chiefly in the little hard central kernel which we call the ego; we effuse ourselves, and live more in this active expanded self than in the midmost cell of our being. And each sex dilates and discovers itself chiefly in presence of the opposite sex. Therefore, a man may know some things about women of which a woman is hardly aware, and (if we would only believe it) a woman may know a good deal about men which a man will stoutly deny, yet which is most certain; only, women are seldom courageous enough to tell us what they know, and we are pleased by this timidity, choosing to live on in our fool's paradise. Each sex holds the mirror up to the other, and what matter if it be a magic mirror? We may call Charlotte Brontë's admirable M. Paul Emanuel a woman's hero; and so he is, for he is a man reflected in a woman's magic mirror. But one of our sex who would understand the potency of manhood, will by no means waste his time if he studies the character of M. Paul Emanuel. He will see manhood, presented indeed in magic mirror, but raying out its fierce undeniable attractions, and grappling with myriad spiritual tentacles the feminine heart. Could we have conceived it so? And in like manner we may say of Shakspeare's heroines, who are women beheld in the most wonderful of magic mirrors, that they are more perfectly feminine than any woman could have found it in her heart or brain to make them. By what art of divination could she have guessed all the potency of her sex?

There are poets and artists whose genius brings forth men-children only. The greatest of Shakspeare's fellow-dramatists, Ben Jonson, was one of these. Admirable as were his wit, his judgment, his learning, his satiric power, his knowledge of life, his reverence for art, his constructive talent, he could not fashion a noble or beautiful woman. Ben Jonson wrought superbly in bronze, and ran his metal into carefully constructed moulds; he could not work in such finer elements of air and light as those from which a Miranda is framed, and some of these subtle elements enter into each of Shakspeare's heroines. On the other hand, a far less robust genius, John Webster, one of Shakspeare's dramatic disciples, delighted in nothing so much as in full-length studies of tragic female figures, There are indeed wonderful creations in his plays beside these

sinister and cynical faces of men apparent in the gloom. But in his greatest dramas all exists for the sake of the one woman after whom each drama is named-the Duchess of Malfi, Webster's lady of sorrow, and his White Devil, Vittoria Corombona, on whom, splendid in her crime, he turns a high light of imagination that dazzles while we gaze. This was not Shakspeare's method. In no play of his do we find a woman as center of the piece, or conceived as a dramatic unit. And hence indeed it is almost an error to study the character of any of Shakspeare's heroines apart from the associate with whom she plays her part. Beatrice is hardly intelligible apart from Benedick; the echoing voice of love rebounds and rebounds in Romeo and Juliet, inextricably intermingling from lover to lover, until death has stilled all sound; in that circle of traitors through which Shakspeare leads us in his Inferno, Macbeth and his Queen are miserably united for ever by their crime and its retribution.

Among the dramatis personæ of a single play of Shakspeare's, and of this play alone, there is the conspicuous absence of any important female character. It is the tragedy of despair, "Timon of Athens." Two or three sentences are spoken by Phrynia and Timandra, and that is all. In their foul few words, and in their crying for gold, they merely represent the vice of Athens, from which Timon has fled; they possess no individuality, and therefore (like Rosencrantz and Guildenstern in "Hamlet") they are coupled, and never appear singly; they show themselves only to demonstrate that the very virtue of womanhood is extinct in the luxurious city, and thus to intensify the despair of the young misanthrope. In all Shakespeare's plays there is only one absolute infidel as regards womanly truth and goodness, and he is Shakspeare's one irredeemable villain, Iago. The loss of faith in woman is treated in two or three of Shakspeare's plays, and is always recognized as a turning-point or crisis in the development of character. Hamlet might have endured his father's untimely death, and the loss of the Danish crown; he was a student and a lover, and at no time really ambitious to be a king. It was his mother's frailty which transformed his grief into a corroding decay of all joyous energy; it was this which made the world appear to him an unweeded garden, ripening to seed-time; it was this which poisoned his love for Ophelia-" Frailty, thy name is woman." Again, in "Troilus and Cressida " it is a turning-point in the life of the young champion of Troy when he sees Cressida, who has heretofore been for him all purity and passion, wantoning lip and hand with Diomed beneath the torch-light of the Grecian camp. Happily the gallant youth has by his side worldly-wisdom incarnate in the person of Ulysses; and yet the pinch of death could not well be sharper :

"Let it not be believed for womanhood!

Think, we had mothers; we do not give advantage
To stubborn critics apt, without a theme,

For depravation, to square the general sex

By Cressid's rule; rather think this not Cressid."

Troilus comes out of the boy's fiery trial successfully. He is cured of love, as far as we can discern, for the rest of his life; but he has suddenly become a man, strung up by this bitter tonic for the work of a man, yet made a little merciless and a little reckless by the fact that life has grown a thing of less value than heretofore in his eyes. But Troilus is young. If the same anguish, or one far more cruel but of a like kind, were to come upon a man in mature years, a man of fiery nature, who had staked all his hopes and all his faith on a single cast, and who had lost, or deemed himself to have lost, could such an one, like Troilus, begin a new career, and transform his loss into a bitter gain? Shakspeare gives the answer; we hear it in the great throbs and heavings of Othello's breast:

"O now for ever

Farewell the tranquil mind! farewell content!
Farewell the plumed troop and the big wars
That make ambition virtue! O farewell!"

So much Shakspeare tells us of the havoc that may be wrought in a man's life and character by loss of faith in a mother, a lover, or a wife. And, on the other hand, who has said with more energy of conviction than Shakspeare, that even for one who stands upon the heights of virtue higher heights may become visible in the light of a woman's heroism? It is no romantic boy who speaks in his first fervour of love, but the noblest Roman in presence of one who had been tested and not found wanting (and here Shakspeare follows almost the words of Plutarch):

"O ye gods,

Render me worthy of this noble wife.” "Timon," Shakspeare's tragedy of despair, is the only play in which no woman is portrayed. From the first, evidently he was attracted as an artist to the study of female character. The two poems, on which in his earlier years he hoped to rest his fame, are laboured studies of womanly character and passion; and as if resolved to spread his drag-net wide, so that nothing might escape him, he studies the remote extremes of womanhood-in the one, enamoured Venus flushed with all the sensuous ardours of the god; in the other, Lucrece, pale with despair, and heroic with the chastity of a Roman wife. Probably the first play of Shakspeare, in which he worked out ideas of his own, not following in the steps of a predecessor, is "Love's Labour's Lost." It is throughout a piece of homage, halfserious, half-playful, to the influence of women. It tells us that the best school in which to study is the school of life, and that to rouse and quicken all our faculties, so that we may learn brightly the