Page:Hutcheson Macaulay Posnett - Comparative Literature (1886).djvu/53

 women? They had to live in Elizabethan feelings or they were dead, long since dead, and, worst of all, not buried out of sight. He who, as Walt Whitman says, "drags the dead out of their coffins and stands them again on their feet," who "says to the past, Rise and walk before me that I may realize you," is the truly great dramatist; but to do this the puppets of the show must move along many a subtle wire which the feelings of the audience have supplied, but which their intellect shall not detect. The tribute of the heart must be paid to the past much as the Chinese offer their oblations to living persons representing their deceased ancestors; and no culture of the intellect must be allowed to destroy the fiction. So the "Romans" of Shakspere might not be historical Romans, might not even belong to the social life of Rome at all, but they were living human figures for the men and women of the Elizabethan theatre because they resembled themselves. The women of Shakspere's " Roman" dramas—Portia, Calphurnia, Volumnia, Virgilia—are not really pagans; they are Christian women, married by Christian marriage, and standing towards their sons and husbands in the Christian and chivalrous relations of family life. Volumnia enjoys a position which perpetual tutelage could not have tolerated; and the public freedom of the Roman woman is conceived in a thoroughly Elizabethan, or rather Elizabethan-London spirit. So, too, the men of Shakspere's Roman plays are as free from any sentiments of the Roman family as Elizabethan London can make them; and if in the Rome of Coriolanus we have clergy, and Christian clergy too, ("Hang 'em! I would they would forget me, like the virtues which our divines lose by 'em." Cor. ii. 3), Coriolanus himself is more a medieval knight than a Roman citizen.