Shakespeare’s Women and Mr. George Moore

Handling the Porcupine of Avon is always ticklish work. When Mr. George Moore, after containing himself for years, at last wrote to explain that it was he, and not Mr. Shaw or Mr. Franz Heinrichs, who discovered the fact that Shakespeare’s female characters were weak because they were written for boy-actors, it was only natural that another correspondent should show that Mr. Moore had been forestalled by an eighteenth-century Frenchman. Mr. Moore’s remark about the boy-actors was, however, merely a passing observation in a lecture in French (published in the Revue Bleue in 1910) which is an important document in the movement against what Mr. Shaw calls Bardolatry.

“He is inconceivably wise; the others conceivably.” Thus Emerson; and a few generations of such sweeping remarks were bound to be followed by a reaction. For a hundred years we have swallowed Shakespeare steadily and swallowed him whole; a man has even written a book on The Messiahship of Shakespeare. And of all his powers, that of creating an infinite variety of female character has been perhaps more enthusiastically praised than any other. The professors have given us treatises on Shakespeare’s Feminine Types; and the less erudite public has been deluged with Posies from Shakespeare’s Garden of Girls. “O Nature! O Shakespeare! which of ye drew from the other?” That is typical. Dr. Lewes, one of the ablest German writers on the subject, kneels and adores, and asks women to do the same. “This piece,” he says of Henry VIII,

“this piece and its female characters should indeed inspire women with profound gratitude towards a poet who represents a queen and a heroine who is above all things an excellent woman, displaying in the midst of frightful trials all the best womanly qualities, thus proving that a noble, pure feminine heart is the home of the noblest virtue, the highest truth and purity. Seldom has more flattering homage been paid to the sex than by Shakespeare in his presentation of Catherine of Aragon.”

And hear Mrs. Jamieson, author of the best-known English book on these women. Dare any one apply the epithet “clever” to Portia, “this heavenly compound of talent, feeling, wisdom, beauty, and gentleness”? As for Lady Macbeth, with her “Gothic grandeur, rich chiaroscuro, and deep-toned colours,” even she is not to be insulted by comparison with other villainesses. Sophocles’ Clytemnestra had been mentioned, but

“would any one compare this shameless adulteress, cruel murderess and unnatural mother with Lady Macbeth? Lady Macbeth herself would certainly shrink from the approximation.”

One has sometimes felt that her ladyship was probably president of the local branches of the G.F.S. and the Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Families Association.

There was nothing of this sort about Mr. George Moore’s lecture. It opened with a strong protest against the “vast clamour” of Shakespeare’s worshippers:

“One might take them for a gathering of negro Methodists in a chapel, each one straining his lungs to out-bellow his neighbour, in order to attract the Almighty’s attention. Is it that the critics think that Shakespeare is listening to them? At any rate, the madness increases daily, and, if the cult of Jahveh should happen to decay in England, I should not be surprised were they to promote Shakespeare to the vacant throne in the heavens.”

After this engaging beginning he went on to the general contention that neither Shakespeare nor any of his contemporaries drew or painted a real woman. The Renaissance was interested in women only as queens or odalisques, and Shakespeare at most made a few delicious silhouettes of women. His men were another matter. “Hamlet is the secret thought of all men”; and, though it hurts Mr. Moore to agree with Tolstoi, he reaffirmed Tolstoi’s statement that “Falstaff is the most universal and original thing in Shakespeare.” “Hamlet is the hieroglyphic and symbol of the intellect; Falstaff is the symbol and arabesque of the flesh.” But Shakespeare, like Balzac, was chiefly concerned with “the eternal masculine.”

But suppose it be admitted that Shakespeare has no female Hamlet and no female Falstaff; is it not arguable that then the case for the superiority of Shakespeare’s males over his females is very much less strong? It would be absurd to attempt to dogmatize on the subject; but personally I doubt whether any one who cannot get inside the minds of most (though many would exempt Heine’s “ancient Parisienne” Cleopatra, and one or two more) of Shakespeare’s women will get inside the minds of most of his men either. When Professor Dowden said that he had “edited a whole play for love of Imogen” the remark (if he heard it) may have sounded strange to Mr. Moore; but would he understand, either, any one editing a whole play for love of Antonio, Bassanio, Benedict, the Duke of Twelfth Night, King Lear, Othello, Mark Antony, or Henry V? It is possible to hold the view that Shakespeare “put himself” into a few characters and observed the others “from the outside,” making them most interesting when they are most markedly what are called “character parts.” Personally, though I should certainly know Hamlet or Falstaff if I met them in swallowtails, I don’t think there are many other of Shakespeare’s characters whom I should recognize if I encountered them clothed in other than their traditional garments. But I do not think it is easy to sustain the argument that, as a whole, his women are less carefully and sympathetically drawn than his men—Lady Macbeth than Macbeth, Juliet than Romeo, Cleopatra than Anthony, Beatrice than Benedict, Rosalind than Orlando—or, still more, that he was not interested in women and regarded them in a casual lazy way as decorations. Shakespeare’s politics were Heaven knows what; and he may not necessarily have drawn Portia as an argument for the admission of women to the Inns of Court. But one would have imagined that if ever there were a writer who treated women and men on a footing of complete equality, and even perhaps elevated women’s moral superiority to an indefensible pitch, it was he. If his female characters are not living human beings it is certainly not because he despised them. He gave them plenty of virtue, wit, courage, and will, and an ample share of the stage; it is, with all due respect to Mr. Moore, grotesque to suggest that he thought of them merely as properties.

The recent correspondence sent me back to Mr. Moore’s paper, and I read it with admiration for the fruits of what he called a month’s rather exhausting liaison with the French language. But something about it—perhaps it was the catalogue of heroines, each with an appropriate criticism—seemed familiar. I have tracked it; here also Mr. Moore has been anticipated. It was the late Max O’Rell—it is almost like being anticipated by Charley’s Aunt—who remarked that

“The heroines of Shakespeare are for the most part slaves or fools. Juliet is a spoilt child, Desdemona a sort of submissive odalisque, Beatrice a chatterbox, and Ophelia a goose.”

It is very difficult indeed to say anything new about Shakespeare.