Page:Wit, humor, and Shakspeare. Twelve essays (IA cu31924013161223).pdf/276

 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.

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