CHAPTER V

THE FEMALE CHARACTERS IN THE PLAYS BELONGING TO SHAKESPEARE'S FIRST PERIOD

"TITUS ANDRONICUS "

Tamora-Lavinia

IT is manifest already in the first period of Shakespeare's poetical activity, that while still dependent on foreign models, his genius could boast an exceeding versatility, since he used materials and plays of the most diverse kinds as the subjects of his creations and paraphrases. Among the pieces of which a part certainly, a part probably, belong to this epoch, we find the terrible heroic tragedy Titus Andronicus. This play, after the manner of Greene, Marlowe, and others, who ruled the English stage before Shakespeare, piles up horrors and deeds of blood in a way insupportable to moderns. To this date pertains also the curious original drama Pericles, which, in the language of the present day would be described as a romantic play; further, the compilation of his historical play Henry VI.; and finally the pieces The Comedy of Errors, suggested by the "menechmae" of the Roman comic poet Plautus, and the Taming of the Shrew, founded on an older play of which the author is unknown-plays belonging to quite another category. When we contemplate the exceedingly varied female characters in these plays, we remark, in spite of their diversity, a trait common to almost all, and that is, an unpleasant presentation of the sex from every

point of view. Nearly all the women are endowed with the most unlovely qualities. Some of them are caricatures, like the Maid of Orleans, for Shakespeare cannot be absolved from the accusation of having painted an ugly distortion of a touching and noble historical personage to please English hatred and prejudice. Others are monsters, like Tamora in Titus Andronicus, or untamable and passionate masculine women, like Queen Margaret and the Duchess of Gloster in Henry VI. Others, again, are so weak that they may be said to have no character at all, like Princess Anne and Queen Elizabeth (Woodville) in Richard III., a play written in close connection with Henry VI. The women of the comedies have the most unamiable feminine characteristics, by which means they torment the lives of their parents, brothers, and husbands, and make a hell of homes that should be rendered the abodes of peace by their lovable womanliness. Only a very few women in these plays are so drawn as to win our sympathy; such an one, for instance, is Lavinia, the unfortunate victim of Tamora in Titus Andronicus, and Marina, the daughter of Pericles. We cannot shake off the notion that these unlovely pictures in the plays of Shakespeare's first period, which lie so close to the time of his life at Stratford, must be connected with unpleasant experiences of the fair sex, for which he avenged himself, as it were, by these ungracious representations of womanhood. Detailed accounts of his youth, the circumstances which led him to contract marriage at an age so comparatively early, the nature of his married life, the reasons for his sudden departure for London while his wife remained behind in Stratford, are not sufficiently familiar to allow us to build up conjectures with certainty. But there is great probability that his married experiences were of an unpleasant kind, and that these induced that angry and bitter temper against the whole female sex which he, unconsciously or of sct purpose, wreaks upon them in these plays. Analogies for this are not wanting in

the lives and development of other poets. To quote one example from German literary history, the equivocal and slippery relations Goethe represents in his youthful comedy of the Accomplices is nothing but a poetically expressed account of his juvenile experiences with divers women and girls. And what is the romance of Goethe's youth, The Sorrows of Werther, but a picture of the feelings and passions which filled the breast of the young poet, and which he strove to master by representing them plastically and objectively in the form of a tale? So, also, the exaggerated figures, the wild measureless passions, of Schiller's boyish work The Robbers, was simply the expression of a young soul's reaction, its longing to attain to freedom and independence, and to shake off the dull and heavy pressure which weighed upon it in the Karlschule, making the place more of a prison than a high-school. In the same way the representations of female characters in the plays of Shakespeare's first period, so markedly different from his later attitude, may have sprung from his personal experiences, even though this fact cannot be as clearly explained and proved as in the case of the German authors we have cited.

It now behoves us to examine in detail the different female characters to justify our assertions. We will first give our attention to the women of Titus Andronicus, the horrible Tamora, and the lovely, innocent, and unfortunate Lavinia, because this tragedy, if Shakespeare was its author, was certainly one of his earliest works.

According to excellent evidence, it was already produced in 1580, that is, soon after Shakespeare's arrival in London. English literary historians are divided in opinion as to its authenticity, and one is tempted to wish that those are right who deny Shakespeare's authorship, for its action is really too horrible. Circumstantial evidence can be set against circumstantial evidence. Some assert that the play was written by an older author, and that Shakespeare only changed and amended it. Others, again, no less credible, simply

nature.

enroll the play in their list of Shakespeare's works without further remark. Nor is an examination of the work itself calculated to dispel our doubts or to lead us to certain conclusions. Shakespeare's most terrible tragedies make an entirely different impression to this piece with its monstrous and fearful action; while, on the other hand, the tragedies of his forerunners, Greene, Kyd, and Marlowe, with the single exception of Dr. Faustus, are exactly of the same In those great works of the tragic muse we feel that the poet sympathises with the heavy sorrows he lays before us in their full intensity; that he allows no misfortune to overtake his personages to which his natural disposition, his own faults, or the pitiless march of Fate, that destroys guilty and innocent alike, has not of logical necessity led up. But in Titus Andronicus, it would seem as if the poet delighted, with savage complacency, in the disgusting horrors which he strews broadcast, without assigning any psychological motive save the brutal rage of the criminals who commit them. The most terrible malefactors of Shakepeare's tragedies, Iago or Richard III., are angels of light in comparison with the Moor Aaron, who reverses the idea of the Emperor Titus, and counts the day lost in which he committed no crime, no deed of blood. Shakespeare generally endeavours to show us some link between the criminal and his better instincts. In Titus Andronicus he portrays a beast who wallows brutally in blood amid brutal desires and brutal talk. But because of the gulf which divides this play from Shakespeare's other works, we may not decide absolutely against his authorship. This abyss, in another form, is scarcely less deep than the wide gap which divides Schiller's Robbers from his Wallenstein. The revolution that took place in the moral and artistic nature of Schiller, enabling him to pass from the wild, passionate Storm-and-stress tragedy, alike uncontrolled in plot and in expression, to the dignified calm and wise measure of Wallenstein, was no less great than that which Shakespeare