"Shall I deny you? no: farewell, my lord. This vivacity, this petulance, does not prevent shrinking modesty and silent timidity: on the contrary, they spring from a common cause, extreme sensibility. She who feels much and quickly has more reserve and more passion than others; she breaks out or is silent; she says nothing or everything. Such is this Imogen. "So tender of rebukes that words are strokes, And strokes death to her." 5 Such is Virgilia, the sweet wife of Coriolanus; her heart is not a Roman one; she is terrified at her husband's victories: when Volumnia describes him stamping on the field of battle, and wiping his bloody brow with his hand, she grows pale: His bloody brow! O Jupiter, no blood! Heavens bless my lord from fell Aufidius!" 6 She wishes to forget all that she knows of these dangers; she dare not think of them. When asked if Coriolanus does not generally return wounded, she cries, "O, no, no, no." She avoids this cruel picture, and yet nurses a secret pang at the bottom of her heart. She will not leave the house: "I'll not over the threshold till my lord return." 7 She does not smile, will hardly admit a visitor; she would blame herself, as for a lack of tenderness, for a moment's forgetfulness or gayety. When he does return, she can only blush and weep. This exalted sensibility must needs end in love. All Shakespeare's women love without measure, and nearly all at first sight. At the first look Juliet cast on Romeo, she says to the nurse: "Go, ask his name: if he be married, My grave is like to be my wedding bed." 8 It is the revelation of their destiny. As Shakespeare has made them, they cannot but love, and they must love till death. But this first look is an ecstasy: and this sudden approach of love is a transport. Miranda seeing Fernando, fancies that she "Othello," iii. 3. "Cymbeline," i. 5. 646 Coriolanus," i. 3. 7 Ibid. 66 sees a thing divine." She halts motionless, in the amazement of this sudden vision, at the sound of these heavenly harmonies which rise from the depths of her heart. She weeps, on seeing him drag the heavy logs; with her slender white hands she would do the work whilst he reposed. Her compassion and tenderness carry her away; she is no longer mistress of her words, she says what she would not, what her father has forbidden her to disclose, what an instant before she would never have confessed. The too full heart overflows unwittingly, happy, and ashamed at the current of joy and new sensations with which an unknown feeling has flooded her: 66 'Miranda. I am a fool to weep at what I am glad of. M. At mine unworthiness that dare not offer I am your wife, if you will marry me; If not, I'll die your maid." 9 This irresistible invasion of love transforms the whole character. The shrinking and tender Desdemona, suddenly, in full Senate, before her father, renounces her father; dreams not for an instant of asking his pardon, or consoling him. She will leave for Cyprus with Othello, through the enemy's fleet and the tempest. Everything vanishes before the one and adored image which has taken entire and absolute possession of her whole heart. So, extreme evils, bloody resolves, are only the natural sequence of such love. Ophelia becomes mad, Juliet commits suicide; no one but looks upon such madness and death as necessary. You will not then discover virtue in these souls, for by virtue is implied a determinate desire to do good, and a rational observance of duty. They are only pure through delicacy or love. They recoil from vice as a gross thing, not as an immoral thing. What they feel is not respect for the marriage vow, but adoration of their husband. “O sweetest, fairest lily!" So Cymbeline speaks of one of these frail and lovely flowers which cannot be torn from the tree to which they have grown, whose least impurity would tarnish their whiteness. When Imogen learns that her husband means to kill her as being faithless, she does not revolt at the outrage; she has no "The Tempest," iii. 1. pride, but only love. "False to his bed!" She faints at the thought that she is no longer loved. When Cordelia hears her father, an irritable old man, already almost insane, ask her how she loves him, she cannot make up her mind to say aloud the flattering protestations which her sisters have been lavishing. She is ashamed to display her tenderness before the world, and to buy a dowry by it. He disinherits her, and drives her away; she holds her tongue. And when she afterwards finds him abandoned and mad, she goes on her knees before him, with such a touching emotion, she weeps over that dear insulted head with so gentle a pity, that you might fancy it was the tender voice of a desolate but delighted mother, kissing the pale lips of her child: "O you kind gods, Cure this great breach in his abused nature! O my dear father! Restoration hang Thy medicine on my lips; and let this kiss Repair those violent harms that my two sisters Mine enemy's dog, Though he had bit me, should have stood that night Against my fire. How does my royal lord? How fares your majesty?" 10 If, in short, Shakespeare comes across a heroic character, worthy of Corneille, a Roman, such as the mother of Coriolanus, he will explain by passion what Corneille would have explained by heroism. He will depict it violent and thirsting for the violent feelings of glory. She will not be able to refrain herself. She will break out into accents of triumph when she sees her son crowned; into imprecations of vengeance when she sees him banished. She will descend to the vulgarities of pride and anger; she will abandon herself to mad effusions of joy, to dreams of an ambitious fancy," and will prove once more that 10" King Lear," iv. 7. 11 "O ye're well met: the hoarded plague o' the gods Requite your love! If that I could for weeping, you should hear- I'll tell thee what; yet go: Nay but thou shalt stay too: I would my son His good sword in his hand."-Coriolanus, iv. 2. See again, "Coriolanus,' i. 3, the frank and abandoned triumph of a woman of the people, "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.' the impassioned imagination of Shakespeare has left its trace in all the creatures whom it has called forth. Section VII.-Types of Villains Nothing is easier to such a poet than to create perfect villains. Throughout he is handling the unruly passions which make their character, and he never hits upon the moral law which restrains them; but at the same time, and by the same faculty, he changes the inanimate masks, which the conventions of the stage mould on an identical pattern, into living and illusory figures. How shall a demon be made to look as real as a man? Iago is a soldier of fortune who has roved the world from Syria to England, who, nursed in the lowest ranks, having had close acquaintance with the horrors of the wars of the sixteenth century, had drawn thence the maxims of a Turk and the philosophy of a butcher; principles he has none left. “O my reputation, my reputation!" cries the dishonored Cassio. "As I am an honest man," says Iago, "I thought you had received some bodily wound; there is more sense in that than in reputation." 1 As for woman's virtue, he looks upon it like a man who has kept company with slave-dealers. He estimates Desdemona's love as he would estimate a mare's: that sort of thing lasts so long-then . . . And then he airs an experimental theory with precise details and nasty expressions like a stud doctor. "It cannot be that Desdemona should long continue her love to the Moor, nor he his to her. These Moors are changeable in their wills; . the food that to him now is as luscious as locusts, shall be to him shortly as bitter as coloquintida. She must change for youth: when she is sated with his body, she will find the error of her choice."2 Desdemona, on the shore, trying to forget her cares, begs him to sing the praises of her sex. For every portrait he finds the most insulting insinuations. She insists, and bids him take the case of a deserving woman. "Indeed," he replies, "she was a wight, if ever such wight were, to suckle fools and chronicle small beer." He also says, when Desdemona asks him what he would write in praise of her: "O gentle lady do not put me to't, 1" Othello," ii. 3. for I am nothing, if not critical." This is the key to his character. He despises man; to him Desdemona is a little wanton wench, Cassio an elegant word-shaper, Othello a mad bull, Roderigo an ass to be basted, thumped, made to go. He diverts himself by setting these passions at issue; he laughs at it as at a play. When Othello, swooning, shakes in his convulsions, he rejoices at this capital result: "Work on, my medicine, work! Thus credulous fools are caught." You would take him for one of the poisoners of the time, studying the effect of a new potion on a dying dog. He only speaks in sarcasms; he has them ready for everyone, even for those whom he does not know. When he wakes Brabantio to inform him of the elopement of his daughter, he tells him the matter in coarse terms, sharpening the sting of the bitter pleasantry, like a conscientious executioner, rubbing his hands when he hears the culprit groan under the knife. “Thou art a villain!” cries Brabantio. “You are a senator!" answers Iago. But the feature which really completes him, and makes him take rank with Mephistopheles, is the atrocious truth and the cogent reasoning by which he likens his crime to virtue. Cassio, under his advice, goes to see Desdemona, to obtain her intercession for him; this visit is to be the ruin of Desdemona and Cassio. Iago, left alone, hums for an instant quietly, then cries: 66 And what's he then that says I play the villain? Probal to thinking and indeed the course To win the Moor again." 7 To all these features must be added a diabolical energy, an in exhaustible inventiveness in images, caricatures, obscenity, the manners of a guard-room, the brutal bearing and tastes of a trooper, habits of dissimulation, coolness, hatred, and patience, contracted amid the perils and devices of a military life, and the continuous miseries of long degradation and frustrated hope; you will understand how Shakespeare could transform abstract treachery into a concrete form, and how Iago's atrocious vengeance is only the natural consequence of his character, life, and training. |