But, in general, the figure, gait, and instinctive movements of the actress continually betray the Imogen, the Viola, the Jessica, the Julia, the Rosalind, who may well say, "I could find in my heart to disgrace my man's apparel, and to cry like a woman." Portia says to Nerissa,--
"I'll hold thee any wager, When we are both accoutred like young men, I'll prove the prettier fellow of the two, And wear my dagger with the braver grace; And speak, between the change of man and boy, With a reed voice; and turn two mincing steps Into a manly stride."
But, when Shakspeare's smooth youngsters reassumed their characters as women, how the great poet must have been inwardly fretted with the incongruous presentation of the tone of masculinity in each passion, of the boy's smutch on the bloom of each emotion, the elbows wearing ragged holes through delicate sentiment, the scraggy shoulders and strong collar-bones working out of every tender phrase! He was forced to see a Cleopatra without "the entire and sinuous wealth of the shining shape" that held
"A soul's predominance I' the head so high and haught, except one thievish glance, From back of oblong eye, intent to count the slain."
It was Antony's Egypt without the fine malice and insinuation, stripped of the abjectness of her love which, grovelling for pardon at having wrecked her lord, makes him arrest her heart again to indemnify him for all his fortunes that had gone to pieces; as he answers to her cry for pardon,--
"Fall not a tear, I say; one of them rates All that is won and lost. Give me a kiss; Even this repays me."
Could all Shakspeare's training have infected a boy's imagination with Juliet's ardent frankness, which tipped those lines with the sparkle of first love, and launched it from the balcony into the night, to be one star the more? And what boy or man could have returned to Shakspeare that motherhood of scorn which whitened the lip of Constance,--could have picked up and handed back to him the gauntletted verses of her defiance? His imagination must have wilted in that dryness of the actors; it was a limbo for the infants of his soul, out of which they never graduated: the tender grace of Perdita, doting over flowers as if they had natural instincts like her own, which ought not to be dismissed but rather claimed; the moan of distracted Ophelia, using flowers for tokens; the airy coquetries of Beatrice and Rosalind; the concealment preying on the bud of Viola's cheek; the gathering madness discharged in showers of pity on Cordelia's; the fell chastity of eye which made Iachimo's looks peruse the ground. All the distinctive temperament in the gestures, tones, allusions, of Shakspeare's women; all the difference of sex to which the verses strive to connect each emotion as it rises, to hold it a moment on the face, to detain it in the eyes, to send it scurrying by; that struggle of shyness with desire, the tremor of a heart that has a secret threatening to climb into sight, the anxious reticence that reaches to pull it down; the love that whets itself upon ambition's stone to the point of murder, and makes its hands of one color with the husband's; the swaying, queenly gait, the sinuous arms that would embrace when words were done, as Hermione descends slowly from the pedestal; the impromptu charm of Miranda's modesty when she would not wish any companion in the world but Ferdinand; the reverie of Desdemona, as she unpinned her dress to the tune of "Willow, willow, willow," and started at the wind, thinking it was Othello's knock, expectant but bodeful,--all the generic traits which differentiate Shakspeare's women from all the other women of literature, according as women themselves naturally furnish those traits, could never have been personated by any man.