It is not possible to misread the plays of Shakspeare more profoundly than this. They have been viewed in the color of some exclusive ideas concerning the nature and the mission of woman, in whose advocacy the writer spent a noble life. Not finding in any of the plays precise statements that reflect the most advanced sentiments upon the Woman Question, and discovering that Shakspeare was neither morally nor politically a partisan, and that neither position nor reflection impelled him to anticipate modern ideas on social subjects, the writer declares that he was not the poet of woman because he was not her prophet. A criticism more destructive than this of the Shakspearean delineations cannot be made. In fact, no _doctrinaire_ of ethics, politics, theology, can suitably approach Shakspeare with a critical purpose.
Nature seems to have draughted many of her women in the mind of Shakspeare before she embodied them to play their parts. Already there existed Antigone, Medea, Electra, and the ensky'd Beatrice; but these did not exhaust her capacity of womanhood. They seem only sketches of a few single features, portraits of isolated qualities that waited to be combined. Medea was the hate of a mortified and neglected love; Electra was the unsleeping persistency of a daughter's revenge; Antigone, the divine constancy of a daughter's affection; Ismene, the weakness of a common mind; Alcestis, the extravagant submission of a tender wife: they are all single strings of the old Greek lyre, never tuned to sweep into a perfect octave. The note which Alcestis emits is merely her willingness to die. Imogen sounds the same at the command of a husband who suspects her honor. But it wakes the harmony of other strings, and we listen to a chastity that is as spirited and deadly as it is submissive; to a love that is as eager as it is refined; to an honesty that exposes the discord of double dealing by chiming with a simplicity that scarce knows how to suspect; to a purity that is as unconscious as a girl, while it is as haughty as a man. The chords are rich and solid, and support the theme of her character through all its movements.
So women began to exist for the first time in literature. Shakspeare discovered woman, and took note of her generic peculiarity which upholds the specific differences of individual women. They all came forth to him as surely as flowers to the sun. He solicited each jealously interfolded sheath, and drew out of it the heart of its color. All of them are rooted in the common ground of sex; but each one lifts into the blossom her signals of a temper and modulation that are peculiarly her own. So that, although "each woman is a brief of Womankind," she is also a woman who must be designated by some one of Shakspeare's famous names.