ABSTRACT
The emergence in the nineteenth century of Shakespearean character studies spawned an interest in Shakespeare’s female characters. The critical views of Coleridge and Hazlitt, particularly views on the individuality of Shakespeare’s characters and on the likelihood that readers could empathize with them, were adopted by others to analyze and illuminate the female characters. 1 Anna Jameson, for instance, sought to refute the notion that Shakespeare’s women are “mere abstractions of the affections” (30) in the Introduction to her Characteristics of Women, Moral, Poetical, and Historical and to demonstrate “the manner in which the affections would naturally display themselves in women—whether combined with high intellect, regulated by reflection, and elevated by imagination, or existing with perverted dispositions, or purified by moral sentiments” (46). Louis Lewes expressed the same notion in The Women of Shakespeare when he asserted that Shakespeare profoundly depicted the “soul and mind of man” and “was equally able to explore the heart of woman to its inmost depths,” by showing both what is beautiful and what is frightful (“Preface” x). Analyses such as these suggest that Shakespeare’s women had been too long overlooked and oversimplified, that their intellectual, emotional, and moral complexity could no longer be disregarded. Helena Faucit Martin, writing as an actress who had struggled with the heroines’ complexities, described the difficulty of playing a role like Imogen, a role that required tenderness and enduring fortitude as well as cultivated intellect and abundant emotion. How difficult it is, she explained, to “express in action, however faintly, what must have been in the poet’s mind” (176). Nineteenth-century critics and actresses believed, then, that Shakespeare had invested his female characters with more than had ever been noticed, and these writers wanted to shatter old stereotypes by asserting a new perception of complexity and inferiority in the women, by plumbing their “inmost depths” (Lewes). But what is the relation between the text that these writers studied and the representation that was offered on the stage? What image of feminine inferiority was actually conveyed theatrically?
