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Page 38 text:
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Havergal College Magazine SHAKESPEARE ' S HEROINES. Of the 137 feminine characters in Shakespeare ' s plays, 71 are finished character studies, possessing their own value as such, as well as their dramatic value. Among these come readily to mind Opheiia, Portia, Lady Macbeth. The remaining 66 may be class- ed as minor studies, and while they do not play important roles as do their more exalted sisters, yet they are indispensable to the plots in which they appear, and Shakespeare is remarkable for the care which he expends on his minor characters. Though Shake- speare portrays ideal women, yet his characters on the whole are so human and true to life as to warrant the assumption that he adapted them from living originals, as he did his plots from exist- ing plays. Dividing the women characters into groups according to their chronological order, it is interesting to denote the development and the various phrases through which the poet passes. The first period is bounded roughly by Love ' s Labour Lost and Romeo and Juiiet ; the second period includes The Merchant of Venice and several Chronicle plays ; the third period embraces higher come- dies, as Much Ado About Nothing, Twelfth Night, and later tragedies, as Lear, Othello, Macbeth ; while the fourth period contains three beautiful romances, The Tempest, A Win- ter ' s Tale and Cymbeline. The early heroines, with the exception of Juliet, are not as clearly defined as the later ones. They have sparkle, poetry and youth, but they are not grown up yet. They deal in love philtres and poison cups, they dabble in love in rhymed stanzas, and not love in real earnest. Here we have Helena and Hermia eloping with their respective lovers without a second thought, running hand-in- hand through the woods and quarrelling outrageously under the trees. A serious theme is taken in Two Gentlemen of Verona, but Julia is portrayed as fondly oblivious of any wrong, and thus materials for tragedy are treated as comedy. All the women of this period show the poet ' s great potentialities of strength and genius, which he fully developed in his later plays. The second group covers most of the chronicle plays, but takes in one great comedy, at least, The Merchant of Venice. Here we find the feminine character has gained much in strength, the women ha e intellect as well as heart — there is still the music and poetry as of old, but for the conjunction of poetry and strength Shakespeare is unique. Portia is a good example of this. She shows a balance of heart and head, and possesses besides what writers of less perspi- cacity have denied her sex, namely, a sense of humour. One of Shakespeare ' s own adjectives, sunny, aptly describes her, and this smiling, sweet temper must have considerably softened her lot under her father ' s embarrassing will. Again, how Portia must have enjoyed her adventure in man ' s costume, and what joy she must have felt at nonplussing the learn- 34
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Page 39 text:
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Havergal College Magazine ed advocates at court. Yet her subsequent submissive womanly surrender to Bassanio contradicts certain modern ideas of the wo- man ' s suffrage faction, and repudiates the idea that Portia was a mannish woman. In the troublous times depicted in the chronicle plays, we get a group of unhappy storm-tossed women. Shakespeare makes them subservient to the will of man, and accentuates their woes by a cer- tain hardness of treatment. She is a woman, therefore may be won, is the cynical cry. The repulsive hunchback, Richard of Gloster, slayer of her former husband, demands and receives the hand of Lady Anne over the corpse of her dead husband ' s father. Was ever woman in like manner woo ' d? Constance ' s mother- ly heart is broken. Here I and sorrow sit! she cries, and casts herself on the ground with, Here is my throne. Alas! I am a woman, friendless, hopeless! is the pathetic cry of Queen Kath- arine. But amid these sorrowful heroines comes one bright sun- ray, in the person of Lady Percy, merry, tender and spirited, the best vindication of the charge against Shakespeare that at this period his women characters are all dolorous ones. In the third period the poet ' s horizon is so large that he por- trays every type of feminine character, and whereas in the Chronicle plays, comparatively speaking, there are few women characters, in the higher comedies we get the stage full of them. Shake- speare shows a great advance on the women of the first period ; in many cases, as with Julia and Hero, he takes the same theme, and we can compare how much broader and firmer is his touch. Here are girlish, captivating Rosalind, full of sentiment, but laughing at sentimentality; forlorn Viola, indiscreet Desdemona, dignified Olivia, naive Katharine of France, and winsome Beatrice. If one may digress, Shakespeare in creating the shrew, Kathar- ine, has the same opinion as the old Turkish seer, whose cantank- erous wife one day drowned herself in a fit of temper. The old man went down to the river-bank and started up-stream looking for her body. But, Effendim, remonstrated his followers, who thought his mind was unhinged with the shock, surely by all the laws of Nature thy wife will float down-stream! Not so, said the sage, continuing his way, she was a woman; therefore will she go contrary. Then we come to the luckless women : Ophelia, the victim of circumstance ; Cordelia, sweet, but obstinate, and lacking in tact ; and lastly, the women of whom it might be said: Let it not be believed for womanhood — Regan, Goneril and, later, Lady Mac- beth. In this group we have the tide of po etry, rhythm, music, mer- riment, pathos, melancholy, hope, misanthropy, which we have traced from a little stream, risen to a mighty flood. We see woman in her many phases, good women, wicked women, heroines, angels, monsters, all true to life, and whose counterparts we may find in history or in the world of today. 35
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