Since Shakspeare's day, new countries have been discovered and peopled; new colonies have carried his mother-tongue around the earth; the language of woman, like the girdle of a goddess, is a zone drawn round all other climates to hold them in the clasp of her charm. The wider culture and the opportunities derived from modern wants have already increased the number of her gifts, and set her person in fresh shadings of character. Perhaps Macaulay's New Zealander, who is expected to meditate in the future over the ruins of London, will turn out to be a woman, of a variety which Shakspeare has nowhere precisely drawn. But, if all his plays should by that time have shared the fate of an extinguished England, there would she sit, the survivor in the direct line of descent from his essential Woman; by virtue of her sex the Sibyl foretelling the women who will be possible to Nature.
"Magnus ab integro sæclorum nascitur ordo: Jam redit et Virgo."
Woman, as she resembles man, was of less consequence to Shakspeare than woman in herself, apart from what she can do, can earn, or can aspire to. He merely received the feminine side of Nature into his recreating thought, the essential Woman, without respect to the exigencies of any period or style of culture,--the only She, such as woman must remain to the end of time underneath all her activities and requirements. Her sex is the unalterable decree which she can cast no ballot to vote away from her, and assume no profession to raze it from the eternal tablets of her distinction. All the purely modern questions which relate to her career; the efforts to equalize with man's her wages, to multiply her opportunities, to claim her interest in the politics of human rights, to secure her alleviating presence in the rude scenes of republicanism,--successful as these tendencies may be,--cannot transform Woman; and she will not step out of her Shakspearean Self. On the figured coast of his page her Essence stands, as yet without the right of suffrage, limited to household cares, or raised to queenly ones; as learned as Portia can become, but not yet admitted to the profession which she mimicked; provided for by the various dexterities of man, and still undriven by the modern threat of starvation into risking a single quality that is her birthright. There she stands; the modern world, stooping at her feet, will have to yield some of the reputed exclusiveness of men, but only such traits of it as Imogen, Cordelia, Beatrice, Portia, will select. In all this complicated period of over-crowded cities, over-stimulated competition, vices overfed, employers over-purse-proud, and politicians over-careless, there is no strait cruel enough to compel the essential woman to choose a career which would have unsexed one of Shakspeare's plays. I have no fear. Stand aside: cease that frantic bracing of the masculine back against so many doors of prescription. Throw them wide open, and let Shakspeare's stately crowd pass up and down to scan the vista through them. Come, patient, chaste, obedient, high-spirited Imogen, too docile Ophelia, frank Perdita, warm Julia, bright and witty Beatrice, whose tongue is a pen already, or the etcher's tool; come, thou accomplished, grave, acute, and self-possessed Portia; thou unsophisticated Miranda, who would fain share thy lover's toil; thou shifty, prompt Maria, hater of humbug; thou tender Viola,--come, choose how many of these men's garments you will continue to wear, preferring to be women. Not one of them, I venture to declare, which your eternal instinct will feel to cramp or to disguise the form. "Dost thou think," says Rosalind, "though I am caparison'd like a man, I have a doublet and hose in my disposition?"