How fortunate it is for a grateful posterity that it has been enabled to repay to Shakspeare a portion of its heavy debt to him, by committing his female characters to women of various talents and temperaments, some of whom are the brightest offspring of their age! Could he have foreseen, when the women of his fancy were consigned to the beardless tenors of London, that the true woman would eventually route these wretched eunuchs, claim the scene, appropriate her own verse, and infuse the whole unsuspected genius of her sex into his conceptions, to give them new births in the travailing of her bright endowments? That was a perfect forecast of the imagination which, with only youths for actors, whose chief advantage was the callowness upon the cheek, could have written the parts which have laid an attachment upon the finest women of the last two hundred years, and taxed all their passion, wile, and infinite variety. He must have written in a divining sense that Nature, piqued by the revelations of her deepest mystery, would have to summon at length its representatives to mediate, and, taking these things of heaven, show them unto men.
In some respects, the conceptions of Shakspeare have not found the later actors and actresses to be profitable allies, in so far as they have put a private stamp upon their favorite characters, and have levied duty upon his fancy that prefers free-trade even to direct dealing clear of middlemen with every heart. So does every sect hang over the great stream of the Bible, see its own face reflected there, and languish for it. Shakspeare's pages surprise actors with their own temperament, and make them long to embody it. So that our Shakspearean impressions are decided for us, and descend to our children through the style or school of great histrionic families, in the same way that congenital traits travel out of the past into the future: the traditional studies of great theatrical performers propagate themselves. Their excellences cannot be ignored, and they quite plausibly vindicate themselves as pure Shakspearean intentions. We accept these renderings, and soon become disturbed to have them challenged and displaced. It is a great but willing tribute which we pay to the genius of the artist when we confide the imagination of Shakspeare to his interpretations; just as we despatch our diamond to be ground and set. He sends it back to us flashing from facets which describe his individual skill.