for characters that combine history and real life, for complete individuals, whose hearts and souls are laid open before us,—while, in History, 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 is averted in disgust, and the feeling heart has no relief but in positive and justifiable incredulity. The prevalent idea, that Shakspeare's women are inferior to his men, Mrs. Jameson assents to at once, if inferiority in power be meant; for she holds that in Shakspeare the male and female characters bear precisely the same relation to each other that they do in nature and in society[1]—but, taking the strong and essential distinction of sex into consideration, she maintains, and goes very far to prove, that Shakspeare's women are equal to his men in truth, in variety, and in power. The classification adopted, in treating of the splendid portrait-gallery, is almost of course arbitrary and open to exception; but the skill displayed in critical interpretation, poetical sympathy, psychological analysis, and studious comprehensiveness, in most excellent. To every diligent student of Shakspeare, the aid of Mrs. Jameson's commentaries is invaluable; to the collector of criticisms on his peerless dramas, her "Characteristics" must no more be overlooked than the contributions of Coleridge and Hazlitt, of Lamb, George Moir,[2] De Quincey,[3] Hartley Coleridge,[4] Wilson,[5] Knight, Hallam, Fletcher, Campbell, Goethe, A. W. Schlegel, Tiedic, Ulrici, and others. She divides her characters into classes, under the heads of Intellect and Wit—Fancy and Passion—Sentiment and Affection. The historical characters are considered apart, as requiring a different mode of illustration, and their dramatic delineation is illustrated by all the historic testimony the industrious author could collect.
The four "representative women" of Intellect—Portia, Isabella, Beatrice, and Rosalind—are delicately discriminated. Portia is intellect kindled into romance by a poetical imagination; Isabel, intellect elevated by religious principle; Beatrice, intellect animated by spirit; Rosalind, intellect softened by sensibility. The wit of the first is compared to attar of roses; of the second (who, however, seems a little out of place in this category), to incense wafted to heaven; of the third, to sal-volatile; of the fourth, to cotton dipped in aromatic vinegar. To Portia, Mrs. Jameson assigns the first rank among the four, as more eminently embodying all the noblest and most loveable qualities that ever met together in woman (albeit we must own to some share in Hazlitt's confession that the Lady of Belmont was "no great favourite of his"—comparatively, that is, when Imogen, Cordelia, Miranda, and others are remembered). Besides lavish endowments of womanly dignity, sweetness, and tenderness, Portia is here individualised by high mental powers,
- ↑ Thus: Juliet is the most impassioned of Shakspeare's "heroines;" but what are her passions compared to those which shake the soul of Othello?—"even as the dewdrop on the myrtle-leaf to the vexed sea." Constance, frantic for the loss of her son, is to Lear, maddened by the ingratitude of his daughters, as the west wind bowing the aspen tops to the tropic hurricane.
- ↑ "Shakspeare in Germany," &c.
- ↑ "On the Knocking at the Door in Macbeth," Life of Shakspeare in Encyclopædia Britannica, &c.
- ↑ "Shakspeare a Tory and a Gentleman," "The Character of Hamlet," &c.
- ↑ In his reviews of Mrs. Jameson, Dies Boreales, &c.
