Page:Some Textual Difficulties in Shakespeare.djvu/26

8 Let us turn next to "All's Well that Ends Well." The chaste Diana, whose Italian upbringing, like Juliet's, has made womanly modesty the one great meaning of life to her, finds herself contemplating a crucial moment. She is dealing with Bertram under circumstances of secrecy; their relations, if Bertram has his way, are to be by stealth. Certain words rise to her lips as she contemplates the step of deserting her colors and leaving her girlhood forever behind her. As she expresses it, she is in a pass where "we" (meaning women generally) "forsake ourselves." Now forsake certainly means to desert or give up what we feel ought to be clung to; and so, reading this "All's Well" passage in the strict light of the context we find one of Shakespeare's women regarding herself, in connection with the giving up of her principles of maidenhood, as a deserter or runaway. It is very apt and luminous of her inner life. In "Romeo and Juliet" we see Shakespeare dealing with a young Italian girl of the same type of womanhood. She and Romeo have been secretly married, and in the evening of that same day we see her waiting, in a transport of anticipation, among the orchard trees. The blood has mounted to her cheeks as she sees her girlhood about to be relinquished; she has a lively sense of the too garish day; and being so modest she wishes night to fall speedily so that her own eyes may wink, or be blinded; for, as she says: