to those Shakespeare habitually portrayed, or whether they differ from them, and thus offer a point of departure from which to deduce conclusions as to their authorship. We noted in Titus Andronicus that the characterisation of Tamora, at once a powerful, ambitious woman and an incautious fool, who blindly falls into the stupid snare laid for her, does not bear the stamp of Shakespearian psychology, while, on the other hand, the lovely Marina in Pericles reveals the master's hand in many passages. The most prominent female character in Henry VI., Queen Margaret (of Anjou), furnishes equally interesting observations. It is doubtful whether the work is Shakespeare's, or by an earlier writer, and merely worked over by him. The latter is the most probable conjecture; indeed, it is almost certain. What proportion of the work must be assigned to the poet cannot be established, for the older play is not before us. But at all events, the way in which Shakespeare worked up the female characters, or left them as he found them, helps to justify our previous remark, that the female characters of his first period are, with few exceptions, unlovely, gloomy, cerie creatures. The idiosyncrasics of these female figures docs not contradict our conjecture that Shakespeare was influenced in the presentment of his carly female characters, whether wholly or partly his own, by a subjective tendency, induced by melancholy personal experiences, from which he only gradually freed himself. All those characters which are the outcome of an independent, calm, and noble method of work, with some exceptions, of which Juliet is one, are to be found in his riper productions. Let us examine the women of Henry VI. We have already referred to the hateful, the Maid of Orleans, and have said enough concerning this caricature. But altogether women do not fare well in Henry VI. All evil and destructive elements are united in the passionate queen and the Duchess of Gloster. Foremost stands the queen, the Frenchwoman Margaret. Young, beautiful, charming, armed with all the panoply of her sex, she comes to England. The king is enchanted by the aspect of "the fairest queen that ever king received," and delighted with her mild and modest words. But the patriot Gloster hears with regret that this pearl has been bought at the price of the conquests of the great Henry V., and further, that "this pearl" is neither genuine nor pure, that the happiness in her love, of which the poor king dreams, is impossible. The fiendish woman knows this well. With perjury on her lips, she enters the house whose spirit of vengeance she will prove. She loves the knightly, ambitious Suffolk, she despises Henry, whose childlike innocence she cannot understand, and whose weakness of character interferes with her high-reaching plans. It is not in her to sacrifice an inclination on the shrine of duty. Hence we see her, on the one hand, carrying on a criminal relation with Suffolk; on the other, becoming a centre of intrigue, and the cup in which all the poison of the ultra-ambitious nobility is collected. Female passion and jealousy hasten the conflict which has long been brooding in the hearts of the men. The meeting of the two passionate women is described with pitiless hardness, entirely free from any touch of modern sentimentality. The demonic figures of antique legend rise before our eyes, and we seem to be listening to Clytemnestra, to Medea. In the terrible and recurring cursing bouts we encounter nature in all her grossness, free from the varnish of good society manners. Here, to justify the poet, we must take into consideration a circumstance true to this day, namely, that women who, at the highest point of their intellectual and moral development, are the equals, nay, often the superiors of men in loving self-sacrifice, when they overstep their protecting moral bounds, go farther than men, who are more capable of self-control. Thus, the quarrel of the two passionate women takes harder and more hateful shapes than even the outrageous fury of the cardinal. Thus, Margaret, after the young and innocent Rutland is slain, and she gives to the mourning father, to dry his tears, the handkerchief she had dipped in the boy's blood, seems to us a frightful fury, beside whom Lady Macbeth appears mild. Margaret's character, nevertheless, merits careful study because of its relation to the above-named literary dispute. The attempt has often been made to prove, from outer and inner evidence, that the three parts of Henry VI. were not originally written by Shakespeare, but woven out of two older plays, worked up together. In any case, the three parts of this great Trilogy appear to the careful observer to contain fewer poetical beauties, less true passion, more empty and hollow-sounding pathos, in the long-drawn speeches of the characters, than we find in the other dramas. It is also undeniable that the action lacks the unity found in other plays. These, however irregular and apparently capricious, nearly always show, on careful study, more unity of composition than those ever-renewed scenes of crime and bloodshed, against which the mind revolts, until we lose all interest. But, on the other hand, it cannot be denied that the Trilogy, and especially its Second and Third Parts, contain several detached passages in which Shakespeare's master-hand shows with brilliant clearness. It is, therefore, very difficult to decide from internal evidence, and from the poetical form of the Trilogy, as to the authenticity of the work. But the character of Margaret, and the manner in which it is developed and presented, seems to me to contradict the theory of authenticity. She is absolutely unlike Shakespeare's other women, -we do not forget the infinite variety of his female creations, for example, Lady Macbeth and Juliet, Miranda and Portia, and many more,because the whole creation, the fashion of her presentment, differs from his methods. Certainly, in detached passages there are traces of the master-hand to which Shakespeare has accustomed us, but, as a whole, it is wanting in the great, powerful spirit, in the psychological truth we so admire in his female characters. It leaves the impression of having been originally hard and awkward of presentment, into which he threw some high lights here and there. The queen is a powerful and logically developed type, but she is no Shakespearian woman. It is not Shakespeare's way to present to us, as a heroine, a woman who entirely lacks the first quality requisite for such a character, namely, heroism. It is not Shakespeare's way to show us a woman who endures, unyieldingly, the most terrible catastrophes and reverses of fortune, who with unbroken courage resists trials calculated to break the spirit of a strong man, without at the same time granting her personal qualities that make our hearts sympathise with her tireless fight against evil fate. Further, in order to describe this figure, he has set himself in distinct contradiction to the truth of history. Recalling his usual methods, we should have said that he would have made of Margaret of Anjou, the great-hearted queen, such as she appears in history, not merely the false and cunning Frenchwoman endowed with every trait of rough boorishness and corruption, who wakes no sentiment save abhorrence. Chronicles assure us that Queen Margaret was distinguished among women for beauty, intellect, and sagacity, but that her whole character was rather masculine than feminine, and that Henry's friends fell away from him after his marriage. The great families were divided among themselves, the people rose against their lawful king, a terrible civil war broke out. The blood of thousands flowed in sanguinary battles. In the end the king was dethroned, his son murdered, and the queen banished, sent back "with even as much pain and suffering as she had come with splendour and triumph." The delineation of Margaret's character in the play seems to touch history at this point, but without the depth and art in its development we are wont to admire in Shakespeare. The Margaret of the play is adorned with all the charms of her sex, armed with all its weapons; she is bold, cunning, resolute in action, stead fast in endurance, but false, haughty, capable of every form of dissimulation, vindictive, furious in temper. All her womanliness has vanished in the frightful bloody battles for the maintenance of her power. Only maternal love has remained as its last trace. Detached scenes rise to poetical beauty, but from the character of Margaret as a whole every atom of poetry has disappeared. We need but mention the scene where, forgetting her dignity as a queen, as woman, she boxes the Duchess of Gloster on the ear. Very beautiful, and characteristic, at the same time, of the period and the personage, is the scene in which she blames with bitter scorn the king's weakness, complains in angry railing of the influence of the great and haughty nobles, and gives passionate expression to her rage against, and jealousy of, the Duchess of Gloster: Not all these lords do vex me half so much As that proud dame, the Lord Protector's wife. She sweeps it through the court with troops of ladies, She was mixed up in all the intrigues which the nobles hatched against the good Duke of Gloster, the upright patriot. She knew well that he cared only for the welfare and greatness of England, that he did not approve of the king's marriage with a princess who had neither lands nor money, and whose price was the two provinces conquered by Henry V. Hence she looks upon him as her mortal enemy. After his shameful murder she succeeds, with |