His women were in this respect exquisite logicians;
for there is nothing so logical as passion. They knew their own
minds exactly; and only followed up a favourite idea, which they had
sworn to with their tongues, and which was engraven on their hearts,
into its untoward consequences. They were the prettiest little set
of martyrs and confessors on record. Cibber, in speaking of the
early English stage, accounts for the want of prominence and
theatrical display in Shakespeare's female characters from the
circumstance, that women in those days were not allowed to play the
parts of women, which made it necessary to keep them a good deal in
the background. Does not this state of manners itself, which
prevented their exhibiting themselves in public, and confined them
to the relations and charities of domestic life, afford a truer
explanation of the matter? His women are certainly very unlike
stage-heroines; the reverse of tragedy-queens.
We have almost as great an affection for Imogen as she had for
Posthumus; and she deserves it better. Of all Shakespeare's women
she is perhaps the most tender and the most artless. Her incredulity
in the opening scene with Iachimo, as to her husband's infidelity,
is much the same as Desdemona's backwardness to believe Othello's
jealousy. Her answer to the most distressing part of the picture is
only, 'My lord, I fear, has forgot Britain.
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