[In the following essay, Berggren surveys the woman 's role in Shakespeare's plays as an archetypal figure of innate power that elicits both fear and adoration in men. ]

Despite all the ink spilled on inventing fanciful histories for Falstaff with Mowbray, Hamlet at Wittenberg, and the like, it is Shakespeare's women, rather than his men, who have most consistently moved his readers to a peculiarly cloying, gossipy condescension. No one, after all, has written a book on the boyhood of Shakespeare's heroes, complete with illustrations, nor have critics ritually agonized over who deserves to be hailed as the manliest of Shakespeare's men. Even worse, the contagion spreads from contemplation of his female characters to fatuous musings on their creator himself: we are invited to ponder not only Rosalind's happy hours in her forest of Arden, but Shakespeare's in his. A positively unwholesome curiosity about the author's erotic predilections springs naturally, it would appear, from a study of his women: we read of his "feminine" imagination, his bisexual tastes, his relations with his mother, his wife, his daughter, his mistress.¹

In the wake of these deplorable critical fallacies, it takes some temerity to reopen the question of Shakespeare's characterization of women. Yet in the past few years a number of scholars have returned from the blameless consideration of rhetorical and structural elements in Shakespeare's dramatic poetry to a newly sophisticated investigation of his dramatic characters. While the time has happily passed when such a study must wallow in an evocation of the "real lives" of what J. Leeds Barroll has called "artificial persons," microscopic examinations of individual personalities may still profitably be undertaken.² It is not my purpose to do so, however, but, risking some broad generalizations, I propose to take a synoptic view of feminine character development through Shakespeare's plays, arguing that underlying his detailed, idiosyncratic portraits of women is one constant that unites them all: the central element in Shakespeare's treatment of women is always their sex, not as a focus for cultural observation or social criticism (though these may be discerned),³ but primarily as a mythic source of power, an archetypal symbol that arouses both love and loathing in the male.

To begin, certain facts seem clear: although Shakespeare's women "live" on stage as the women of his immediate predecessors do not, they never achieve the grand and tragic dominion of the seventeenth century's heroines, French as well as English. In Shakespearean comedy, it is true, the heroine dominates; in Shakespearean tragedy, she most emphatically does not. Moreover, the women in tragedy seem to split into two basic types: victims or monsters, "good" or "evil." While Shakespeare drew on conventional sources for almost all of his characters, male and female, we need a fuller range of categories to group the men adequately: not just heroes and villains, but warriors, princes, courtiers; Machiavels and Vices; braggart soldiers, clowns, fools. Despite the fertility of local, imaginative touches that beggar our attempts to delimit, we can nevertheless perceive a fundamental distinction along sexual lines. The women in Shakespeare remain the Other; there are fewer of them, certainly, and they seem more regularly than the fuller array of male characters to bear heavy symbolic burdens. Furthermore, I would suggest, they become more or less crucial to the dramatic proceedings by virtue of the one act of which women alone are capable. The comic world requires childbearers to perpetuate the race, to ensure community and continuity; the tragic world, which abhors such reassurance, consequently shrinks from a female protagonist.⁴ Such women as exist in tragedy must make their mark by rejecting their womanliness, by sublime sacrifice, or as midwives to the passion of the hero. We wonder how many children Lady Macbeth had only because she has dismissed them as an irrelevance in her life. The curse of the tragic world is to be barren; the salvation of the comic is fecundity.

It is a paradox, therefore, that the romantic heroines so frequently disguise themselves as boys, thus denying the procreative function that makes them undisputed rulers of their terrain; but like all paradoxes, upon examination this one reveals more than it obscures. At first glance, the male disguise acknowledges the shortcomings of the female: in virtually every instance in Shakespeare, the heroine changes clothes because she needs to present herself in circumstances where a woman would be rebuffed or, more typically, subjected to injury. Traditional female fashions are designed to hamper movement as traditional female roles hamper mobility; only an exceptionally gifted woman will dare cross the boundaries defined by both fashion and role. The disregard for these limitations underscored by the change in costume might suggest a radical criticism of society, but while the wearing of pants allows expression of a talent otherwise dampened by convention, it does not, in Shakespeare, lead to a direct challenge of the masculine order. Portia does not take the bar exam and Viola does not organize a search party; they are content to reassume their womanly duties (but we must ask neither how their husbands coped with them nor how many children they had).⁵

Yet it would be foolish to see the male disguise merely as an indication of the female's infirmity; clearly derived from the romance tradition, the assumption of masculine garb creates no lady knights in Shakespeare's scheme of things, but rather celebrates a flexibility and responsiveness that few men, in comedy or tragedy, can match.⁶ Shakespeare's boy-heroines move effortlessly through their impersonations, despite—and because of—the encumbrance imposed by an actual change of costume. The disguises taken up by Shakespeare's men, on the other hand, are more often psychic than physical, demanding relentless concentration if they are to be sustained. The heroine, who can rely on her outfit to shroud her true identity, dresses up with amused nonchalance, innocent of the calculation typical of the master-disguiser, the Machiavel. Disguise remains incidental, though useful, for Shakespeare's women; for his men, it is the very core of experience.

So extensive a topic as disguise in Shakespeare cannot, of course, be adequately dealt with simply as a sex-linked phenomenon, yet I think one can see easily enough that the woman's disguise alters her far less than that undertaken, for very different reasons, by either the plotting villain or the alienated hero. Richard of Gloucester sets the pattern of the Shakespearean villain's reliance on disguise. Like the chameleon, like Proteus, he cannot exist without it: when he is finally stripped of disguise, the Machiavel has no form and disintegrates, deflated, silenced, insubstantial. The tragic hero, who rarely initiates his "disguise," must yet endure the profoundest crisis on its account. At once self-revelation and self-betrayal, his false identity goes deeper than the consciously contrived dissimulations of the heroine or the villain, yet the full achievement of tragic stature depends on his return to the original heroic self, leaving the audience to wonder whether the insight gained through the tragic disguise continues to inform the mind restored to greatness.⁷ Only the heroine seems to emerge from disguise enriched, however momentary our final view of her as woman once again may be.

The aimless and impromptu nature of the heroine's transformation confirms her identity instead of shattering it. Bent on neither devious manipulation of others nor frenzied interrogation of self, she simply activates the masculine resources within the normal feminine personality without negating her essential femininity. Thus she manages to absorb and retain what she has learned about being another sort of creature, for the female self in Shakespeare's plays rests on a foundation of purposes understood and accepted, a feature I would attribute to the sexual nature that gives her both roots and limits. The heroines are personally vulnerable, as are any of the non-villains who take up disguises, but they have a kind of faith—in time, in themselves, in biology—that anchors them, making the existential plunge into the self a short one. Where the tragic hero discovers quicksand, the comic heroine finds solid rock instead.

In the painful pursuit of self, Shakespeare's heroes may dress in borrowed robes, but they never assume a woman's garments. We can deduce a certain insecurity in this fear of seeming feminized; significantly, Antony, sexually the most mature of Shakespeare's men, is alone among them in having worn woman's dress. Still we never see him so attired, but learn from Cleopatra's recollection of their love games that she once decked him in her "tires and mantles" (11.v.22).⁸ Nor can we explain the general failure of Shakespeare's men to dress themselves like women by citing their tragic seriousness, for a man in woman's clothes need not be embarked on mere frivolity. Euripides' Pentheus demonstrates how devastating an avenue for self-examination such costume provides. For Anglo-Saxon audiences, however, a man in travesty, as the term suggests, remains an instrument of farce. In a society where men are ashamed to weep, to appear womanly can only be a humiliation, but in avoiding any semblance of the opposite sex, Shakespeare's men cut themselves off from an understanding of the fullest range of human experience. Thus, while women have the power to confound men, the masculine world holds little sway over a female who has walked around in trousers (or doublet and hose) unchallenged.⁹

Whether they have dressed like men or not, Shakespeare's women as a rule maintain a remarkably disinterested view of the masculine physique. In private his women may laugh at the expense of ungainly men, as Portia does, leaving no doubt in the reader's mind that they will choose good-looking husbands, but Shakespeare rarely writes a scene that explicitly delineates female sexual longing. The awkwardness of charging a boy actor with material of this sort has often been cited, but, as usual, Shakespeare capitalizes on a technical stricture. The heroine in disguise is more likely to admire herself in her boy's costume than she is to praise her lover's bodily attributes. In this complacency, she wittily remarks the superficiality of physical attractiveness. Similarly, when a Phebe or Olivia makes a sonneteer's inventory of the beloved's attractions, the joke lies in her misapprehension of externals: the man she admires is a woman. No woman in Shakespeare, not even Cleopatra, thirstily catalogues a lover's parts as Romeo and Troilus do in their poetry of frustration, the last gasp of Petrarchan worship of the unattainable.¹⁰ Shakespeare's women have it within their means eventually to fulfill their sensual needs and act rather than moon over rejection. As early as The Two Gentlemen of Verona, Julia, the first of the heroines in pants, deflates the pomposity of phallic show. If she must wear a codpiece to guarantee her disguise, it is no more absurd a sartorial note for her than for the upto-date males who affect the style in order to stick pins on it (II.vii.56). She settles for what is "most mannerly" (58) in a pun that reminds us how often Shakespeare's women prove more "manly" than their lovers.

By obscuring their own sex, the heroines gain extraordinary access to the men they love, with the result that friendship validates marriage in Shakespeare's comedies. Consequently, when his heroines cease to adopt men's clothes, they forgo the rewards of friendship as well, and the comic world darkens. Helena's disguise as a female pilgrim rather than an adventurous boy signals a momentous shift in Shakespeare's treatment of women: "realistic" psychological development takes second place to a determined reification of gender. Because intellectual compatibility in sexual relationships becomes a luxury they can dispense with, the heroines of All's Well That Ends Well and Measure for Measure shock some sensibilities. Shakespeare does not impede their already tortuous route toward consummation by dressing Helena, Isabella, and Mariana in masculine garments, but seems perversely to force a showdown between holiness and lust by clothing them instead in pilgrim's gown and nun's habit, cloistering them (like Mariana in her moated grange) from physical contact. This apparent perversity, however, brilliantly exposes the shallow religiosity that presumes chastity can be achieved simply by hiding all evidence of sexuality: both All's Well That Ends Well and Measure for Measure insist that body as well as spirit may serve the divine plan.

The early comedies generally culminate in the ceremony of marriage or its promise; with All's Well and Measure for Measure, the ceremony itself does not suffice, for it threatens to become an empty legalism.¹¹ Helena and Bertram, like Angelo and Mariana, are not truly married, while Claudio and Juliet, anticipating their rites, assuredly are. The problematic nature of these plays can be sensed in their demand for physical confirmation of relationships to which they fail to lend psychological credence. Helena finds that she must draw on her womanhood where the earlier heroines are free to release their boyishness; the image of ideal love enshrined in the universally appealing Ganymede and Cesario¹² yields to the proof of physical encounter that only childbirth can give.

Like Helena, Rosalind boasts the twin advantages of disguise and an undefined personal magic, a source of power she must tap if a satisfactory conclusion to the riddles of As You Like If s antepenultimate scene is to be found (V.ii.82-125). Even in this most confidently artful of the great comedies, an increasing sense of strain begins to tell. On her wedding day, as Rosalind conjures Hymen's presence to bless a series of unions arranged on an ascending scale of mutual devotion, a new physical urgency bids farewell to games. The intensity of Celia's and Oliver's passion for each other compounds Orlando's despairing inability to live by thinking: Ganymede the artificer must vanish so that Rosalind the woman can supply the fleshly solution the lovers long for.

As You Like It alerts us to the supernatural admixture that strengthens the Shakespearean heroine, but neither Ganymede's glib invention of an old magician friend nor the last-minute introduction of an actual god should deceive us into thinking that she needs outside assistance. Rosalind's sexuality endows her automatically with the magic she requires: Hymen does not condescend to save an impossible situation, but merely enhances a foregone conclusion. If anything, Rosalind uses him to cover her tracks, manipulating a minor deity as skillfully as she has everyone else. While the men with magic power in Shakespeare need external aids, the women need only be themselves to become conduits of extraordinary forces. In reaffirming their sexual natures they exercise the most potent magic of all: Ganymede must become Rosalind; Cesario, Viola; the Pilgrim, Helena. Disguise provides the opportunity for, but not the substance of, their authority.

After Helena, disguise rarely aids Shakespeare's women, since the creative sexuality it fosters no longer enchants, but repels, the masculine protagonist. A man who doubts the very value of existence cannot spare the energy required to appreciate delicate ambivalence. The loathing of the flesh variously spat out by a Lear, Hamlet, Timon, or Posthumus represents a coarsened sexual sensibility that blames life's ills on a force outside oneself and beyond male comprehension. The same drive toward procreation that enriches female personality in the comedies expunges it in the tragedies: "Down from the waist they are Centaurs, / Though women all above" (Lear, IV.vi.126-27). Precisely their lack of clear motivation points to the importance of these woman-hating speeches of disgust. In a malign world, the perceived source of life best deserves to be attacked.

The climate of masculine prudery which seeks to deny male complicity in the "act of darkness" is inhospitable to nubile women, accounting in large measure for the powerlessness of the female in Shakespearean tragedy. As Barroll points out, even romantic heroines like Juliet and Desdemona are really "well-behaved ingenues";¹³ young women in these plays must be desexualized. Cordelia (whom one might call the ultimate "ingenue" of Shakespeare's middle period) is never allowed the seductiveness that leads Ophelia to an equivocal madness and Desdemona to the double entendre of death between her wedding sheets. In a way, Desdemona's progress through Othello is a more leisurely and explicit version of Cordelia's virtual canonization. The full-blooded, courageous bride of Act I, the witty yet reserved Venetian lady of Act II, flowers into the womanly warrior who greets Othello after the storm but then must slough off her joyous sensuality to become the naïve innocent who counters Emilia's worldly veniality in Act IV: rather than temper her husband's fury with a sexual invitation in Act V, Desdemona prays. Cordelia's womanliness, totally stylized, finds its only expression in her disembodied voice, "soft, / Gentle and low" (v.iii.272-73).

Lear's three daughters in effect sum up the Manichaean view of female sensuality in Shakespeare's high tragic world: if not Cordelia, then Goneril and Regan. After blessing them at first with the natural abundance embodied in "plenteous rivers and wide-skirted meads" (I.i.65), King Lear reverses his promise to Goneril and Regan, bidding Nature instead "dry up [their] organs of increase" (I.iv.288). They consequently manifest that depraved and nonprocreative lasciviousness that the sonnets attribute to the Dark Lady; indeed, evil in Shakespearean women seems to grow from a sexuality so out of tune with its procreative potential that it breeds villainy rather than children. When female lechery is not actually sterile, its progeny is malignant: from Tamora to Cymbeline's Queen, the impulse to destroy passes inevitably from dissatisfied mother to dissatisfied son. Even the complex women of the major tragic phase suffer from an excess of libidinal energies that neither marriage nor motherhood can channel. Purgative transvestism might have done wonders for Goneril, Lady Macbeth, and Volumnia, but no outlets for safety-valve experimentation of this sort exist in the rigid masculine world of Shakespearean tragedy.¹⁴

Only Cleopatra relaxes this rigidity, symbolized in Antony and Cleopatra by the cold calculation of Rome, because she can put on Antony's sword, experience the trials of the masculine ruler, and renew her femininity at the last—the formula for the comic heroine restated in grander terms. Like the comic heroines, she enters a maternal phase in her final moments. Antony's botched suicide, his suggestive inaccuracy in the placing of his sword, is redeemed as Cleopatra takes the asp to her breast, mothering it like the stupendous vision of Antony to which she gives birth in her dialogue with Dolabella. She augments the imaginative generosity of the Desdemonas and Cordelias who, cherishing a vision of the men they love at their best, have died to perpetuate it; the "ingenue" tragic heroines spur on the men who survive them to a glory of self-delivery (Hamlet leaping into Ophelia's grave, Othello pulling out his weapon, Lear with his looking glass), while Cleopatra encompasses both the ultimate death and the glorification. In an important anticipation of the matriarchal final romances, Antony's fourth-act death leaves to Cleopatra the heretofore masculine prerogatives of the fifth.

In his last moments, the flawed Shakespearean protagonist converts himself into the tragic redeemer by sheer will; whether we call it self-realization or cheering oneself up, his transformation remains solipsistic, its price being death. The final plays enlarge this movement toward salvation by removing the sting: in place of the tragic sacrifice that leaves the world as much impoverished as redeemed, they substitute a promise of cosmic regeneration. Like Rosalind (and all the disguised heroines) a forerunner of the openly magical conciliators led by Prospero, Cleopatra, the first of Shakespeare's characters to be freed from the restraints imposed by the material world, prefigures a great aesthetic shift.¹⁵ Nursing the asp, voluptuous even as she prepares to die, Cleopatra assumes a posture that apparently was a medieval emblem of the dull earth.¹⁶ Yet at the last this enchanting queen triumphs over physical nature, readjusts the elements themselves, and sublimates herself into fire and air (v.ii.288-89).

Although Cleopatra sits grandly in maternal posture as she dies, performing a rite of translation to a higher realm, a ritual rebirth like that of her gods, this rebirth remains metaphor. Rebirth as miracle and as physical accomplishment becomes the frank subject matter of the last plays, which reinstate maternity as the primal fact that justifies the ways of God to men.¹⁷ The late plays confront again the misogynistic fears that cloud the tragedies, but resolve them with their paired mothers and daughters. The victim's death endured by Cordelia and Desdemona is here undergone by Thaisa and Hermione, but only provisionally, while their daughters clarify the merits of the mothers and prepare the repentant husbands and fathers for their return.

Incest, which haunts the fathers in the last plays, is the obverse of misogyny: it reveals the narcissism underlying the vilification of the female that Shakespeare's tragic heroes so arbitrarily indulge in.¹⁸ When men revile women, they cry out against their own failures, hating themselves for what women "tempt" them to; women, by contrast, curse men for external, verifiable wrongs against them. Women resent men for oppressing them, while men despise women for reminding them that they are creatures of the flesh. If a man can accept himself in this state, the false reassurance of personal worth that incest seems to promise holds no power over him. Thus, in refraining from the incestuous coupling with his own child, the Shakespearean father reestablishes his own sense of dignity and restraint, so that he once again deserves the company of his wife. This chastening process makes possible in turn the refreshing of the species by the next generation and weds the comic insistence on sheer physical continuity to the tragic achievement of self-purification.

In the tragic heroes, often uneasy about their sexual appetites, there is occasionally an anticipation of the riddle of incest which Pericles dares to understand. Thus the Fool castigates Lear for the obscene reversal of his relationship with his daughters; Hamlet, of course, transfixed by his mother, copes more directly with a confusion of idealism and desire. The women in the tragedies seem often to excite illicit responses, yet even the most treacherous among them do not nourish incestuous longings of their own, perhaps because even the troubled women in Shakespeare accept their bodies' limits and claims more easily than do men. As the heroines in disguise are never physically aggressive, so Lady Macbeth and Volumnia, who might profit from disguise and chafe against the constraints of their womanly roles, personify them in their final appearances. In her nightgown, with her hair loose, Lady Macbeth resembles not only an undisciplined madwoman, but a frightened innocent child, or a seductive unsatisfied wife; she is caught in the web that cripples women in a paternalistic society and is doomed to frustration in any case, for the husband who is neither father nor lover is beyond helping her. More secure in her social niche, more massive in her presence, Volumnia may want her son's opportunities, but not (at least consciously) his body. Indeed, she throws her motherhood up to him almost savagely, equating herself with Mother Rome in an exaltation of the womb to which the bewildered boy-hero can only yield.

The mature heroines of the last plays, on the other hand, represent an ideal, curative maternity. Loved by fathers, husbands, and friends till a great crisis deprives them of all three, in serene self-knowledge they survive, ultimately to be "resurrected," not merely by reproducing themselves, but also by enduring tragic disharmony to emerge the more beautiful for having undergone it. The quasi-religious retirement they enter into does not disqualify them from returning to the living world of bodies. While this movement back into family life recalls the prophetic frame of The Comedy of Errors, only the final romances give us this expansive view of married women. Domesticity in Shakespeare's earlier plays bears out Millamant's sad recognition in The Way of the World that witty ladies dwindle into wives. One thinks, for example, of Kate Percy's carefully rationed outings with a husband she can still charm if only she gets the chance. The full equation of wifehood with heroism begins with All's Well; unfortunately, the Shakespearean husband seems the last to know it.

If Helena in her mysteriously sanctified determination looks forward to the fruition of the maternal type represented by Hermione, Imogen's career explicates the transition from the comedies' resourceful virgins to the romances' beatified mothers. The nineteenth century preferred Imogen to the earlier heroines because her male disguise discomfited her, but if she lacks their high spirits, she has good cause. Even before Posthumus casts her off, in the simple act of marrying him she has set herself within a framework none of the boy-women had to cope with. The tomboy vivacity of the unmarried woman does not become the wife, who has already narrowed her choice of the options that a Rosalind is free to explore. Nevertheless, Imogen's change in clothes prompts her to the insight implicit in Rosalind's and Viola's bemused appreciation of their androgynous powers, as all three learn that being a man is not as easy as it looks. When the disguises donned for protection expose them instead to unexpected danger, the heroines stand their ground as males despite the onrush of that stereotyped "feminine" apprehension with which Shakespeare seems to signal their forthcoming return to their true selves. More sorely tried than Viola faced with a duel or Rosalind with a bloody handkerchief, Imogen more generoysly expresses the sympathy for men that all gain through imposture: "I see a man's life is a tedious one" ( Cymbeline, III.vi.1).

Posthumus, thinking himself betrayed, has sought to eradicate "the woman's part" from his being; Imogen, knowing herself wished dead, worries not only for herself but for the male reputation for honor as well. Throughout these last plays, the tragic predicament afflicts male and female protagonists equally, but the men remain more comfortably self-indulgent in their pain. Here too Shakespeare's works ask more resilience of women, and the women are able to supply it. Thus with marvelously egotistical humility, Posthumus suggests that "every villain / Be call'd Posthumus Leonatus," and keens: "O Imogen! / My queen, my life, my wife, O Imogen, / Imogen, Imogen!" When the disguised Imogen makes so bold as to answer his cry by identifying herself, the hero turns on this impudent "page," furious at the interruption of his showstopping theatrics, and strikes her: "Shall's have a play of this? Thou scornful page, / There lie thy part" (v.v.223-29). This heroine in boy's clothing lacks the power to fascinate a lover that the earlier androgynes enjoy. In his colossal self-absorption, Posthumus typifies the tragic hero, who demands compliant fidelity from women and little more. An extension of her husband rather than an autonomous object of desire, Imogen has chosen her disguise name wisely—Fidele.

As sole heroine of Cymbeline, Imogen combines the roles taken separately by mother and daughter in Pericles and The Winter's Tale. In her supposed death and apparent resurrection, she participates in the miracle experienced by Thaisa and Hermione, but their agony and rebirth more directly exemplify the woman's role as savior of the race through childbirth. Similarly, in the catalog of flowers strewn over her grave, Imogen's correspondence to the filial heroines of the other romances may be remarked. Less assertive than her younger counterparts, Imogen is appropriately the recipient, not the donor, of the bouquet; Marina and Perdita gather their own blossoms. In each case, however, the flowers themselves differ significantly from those connected with women in the tragedies—though events perplex Imogen more than Marina and Perdita, she never lets them defeat her. Thus floral passages in the tragedies are emblems of death and chaos, inventories of willows, nettles, and weeds. The romances offer visions of life-in-death: Marina, the unplucked flower, carpets her nurse's grave with brightly colored blooms; Arviragus sweetens his sister's rest with delicate primroses, antidotes to the wicked Queen's flowerbased poisons. The culmination comes in the long fourth act of The Winter's Tale, which reminds us that spring returns to earth. Tragic soil breeds weeping willows, while tragicomedy regathers the flowers that Proserpina let fall.

The Tempest's island, though fertile with life, is not a horticulturist's dream. Caliban sings of brine pits and bogs; Miranda and Ferdinand play chess rather than dally in gardens. That elusive form, tragicomedy, admits of complication here: critics have long noted the distinction between Pericles, Cymbeline, and The Winter's Tale, tragicomedies, however divergent, that share a similar outlook, and The Tempest. For me, the contrast between the first three and the last of the late romances demonstrates succinctly the differences between masculine and feminine in Shakespeare. In telling opposition to the ripe overflow of The Winter's Tale, The Tempest is presided over by a magician adept at careful pruning. The Tempest itself has been similarly cut back. Its confines admit only one female character, Miranda, in whom femininity has been refined to the point of attenuation; herself a wonderer, she is more to be wondered at than understood. The Winter's Tale, in its greater abundance, has room not only for a mother and a daughter, but for a third heroine as well, Paulina, who seals the image of feminine power in the late plays. Like Cerimon, she preserves the maternal heroine, but without recourse to potions and infusions. Though her magic cannot be identified with her fertility, she has been introduced to us as the mother of three girls, sufficient recommendation in a world where boy children die of shock while infant girls survive far worse. Paulina's management remains so mysterious that even the audience wonders at her means, whereas Prospero's plans are engineered in our full view.¹⁹The Tempest seems an anomaly among the romances, a masculine stronghold where masques break off abruptly and no statues come to life. Rebirth here seems more a matter of sleight of hand than a dramatic embodiment of humanity's marriage with time. The taboo on premarital sex, an undercurrent throughout these explorations of sensuality's consequences and rewards, becomes the morbid preoccupation of a man who has known temptation, who speaks of contracts and warns of weeds.

Paulina as priestess arranges for Leontes' love to reincarnate his wife, yet she has made no provision for herself. Celia's generous support of the love-elated Rosalind deserves the praise it frequently wins for her, but Paulina seems to me the most selfless of all Shakespeare's women, ruthless in a cause that offers no personal profit whatsoever. In his fury at her persistence, Leontes calls Paulina a "mankind witch" (II.iii.67); the adjective perfectly encapsulates the spirit of The Winter 's Tale, which exorcises the violence of masculine jealousy and redeems it through the kind of patience Penelope achieved. The tragic actor finds correction not in action but in passivity: Leontes has to learn the woman's part, by unknowingly emulating Hermione as if he had tried on a woman's robes, before he can find her again. In fact, the chastened Leontes learns his lesson so well that he works what may be the play's ultimate miracle. Excluded from the marriage circle that traditionally consummates Shakespearean comedy, Paulina prepares like "an old turtle" to fly to "some wither'd bough" (v.iii.132-33) and mourn her widowed state. But in The Winter's Tale turtledoves come in pairs: Leontes gives Paulina's hand to Camillo and bids the young yield pride of place to their elders.

Thus fittingly Paulina once more leads the way, ushering the group out of her chapel back into a world of flux where even withered boughs may bloom anew.

Though another husband can be found for Paulina, no second wife could possibly warm Prospero's remaining years. Weddings in The Tempest rid fathers of fear for their daughters, but discord prevails despite them. The malignity of the flesh evades Prospero's intellectual solutions and spiritual lessons: the matriarchal figure in The Tempest is Sycorax, whose demonic powers and appetites bedevil Prospero in the shape of Caliban, who cannot be reformed. As Pericles and The Winter's Tale expatiate on the romance elements in The Comedy of Errors, The Tempest reaches back to the interlocking politics and witchcraft of the Henry VI trilogy. Female sexuality corrupts in this final statement as in the first; natural impulses must be straitened and rationalized. "Earth's increase" takes the form of a harvest prudently stored in barns and garners. Cupid breaks his arrows as Prospero his staff; masculine potency has limits no fourteen-year-old daughter can restore.²⁰ Prospero's magic exhausts itself: like the tragic hero, he uses himself up. In Shakespeare's world, only the woman, sometimes witch, sometimes saint, sometimes mother, commands the innate energy that renews and revives.

Notes

¹ The studies of Shakespeare's women by women, like Anna Jameson's Heroines of Shakespeare (New York: Wiley and Putnam, 1848) or Mary Cowden Clarke's The Girlhood of Shakespeare's Heroines, 2 vols. (New York: G. P. Putnam, 1851), rhapsodize over the heroines. Those by men, and of more recent vintage, prefer the "biographical" approach. See Frank Harris, The Women of Shakespeare (London: Methuen, 1911); Wyndham Lewis, The Lion and the Fox (1927; rpt. London: Methuen, 1951), especially on Antony and Cleopatra; Leslie Fiedler, The Stranger in Shakespeare (New York: Stein and Day, 1972).

² The most complete recent study is J. Leeds Barroll's Artificial Persons: The Formation of Character in the Tragedies of Shakespeare (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1974), which deals almost exclusively with Shakespeare's men. Not surprisingly, writers who discuss the comedies have more to say about the women. I would cite particularly the character analyses resulting from Ralph Berry's assumption that "the behavior of the dramatis personae is, or ought to be, explicable in terms of naturalistic psychology," in Shakespeare's Comedies (Princeton, N. J.: Princeton University Press, 1972), p. 18, and Hugh M. Richmond's emphasis throughout Shakespeare's Sexual Comedy (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1971).

³ See Juliet Dusinberre, Shakespeare and the Nature of Women (London: Macmillan, 1975), which stresses the importance of the Puritan, bourgeois background in the formation of the heroines of Shakespeare and his contemporaries.

⁴ This is true of Shakespearean tragedy, but not of the Jacobeans in general, as Webster's Duchess of Malfi emphasizes. But while the later drama uses tragic women, it never allows them the introspective scope of the Shakespearean tragic hero. My general debt to Northrop Frye's treatment of Shakespearean comedy and romance in Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays (Princeton, N. J.: Princeton University Press, 1957) and A Natural Perspective (New York: Columbia University Press, 1965) will be obvious here. See too Dusinberre's comments on women's sense of "the physical process of birth and death," pp. 169-71.

⁵ Dusinberre, Shakespeare and the Nature of Women, however, insists on the "insubordination" implicit in the male disguise in the plays, because she connects it to the seventeenth-century attacks (memorialized by the Hic Mulier-Haec Vir debate) on women who wore men's clothing. See especially pp. 231-44.

⁶ Cf. the concluding paragraphs of Thomas Greene's "The Flexibility of the Self in Renaissance Literature," in The Disciplines of Criticism, ed. Peter Demetz, Thomas Greene, and Lowry Nelson, Jr. (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1968). To prove that Shakespeare's plays lack the earlier Humanistic confidence in man's ability to shape himself as he will, Greene distinguishes between "the adroit improviser," including the disguised women and Petruchio, Puck, and Prince Hal in this category, and the tragic heroes, "too stiff to adjust, obstinately and massively embedded in roles which no longer fit," p. 263. I would see a further distinction: disguise is no spontaneous self-extension but a shrewd political tactic for the not-quite-tragic characters like Hal and Edgar. Their early soliloquies announcing disguise unnervingly recall the Machiavel's confidences to the audience, and, again somewhat like the villains (see text below), they seem lesser figures in reaffirming their official selves, Edgar oddly oblivious to the astonishing inner journeys that produced Poor Tom, Hal sadly diminished by his retrenchment into a king.

⁷ See Maynard Mack's discussion of the hero's "cycle of change" in "The Jacobean Shakespeare," in Jacobean Theatre, ed. John Russell Brown and Bernard Harris (1960; rpt. New York: Capricorn, 1967), particularly the treatment of madness and the contrast between change in comedy and in tragedy, pp. 33-40.

⁸ Shakespeare is cited throughout in the Arden texts, as follows: Antony and Cleopatra, ed. M. R. Ridley, rev. ed. (London: Methuen, 1954); The Two Gentlemen of Verona, ed. Clifford Leech (London: Methuen, 1969); King Lear, ed. Kenneth Muir, rev. ed. (London: Methuen, 1957); Cymbeline, ed. J. M. Nosworthy (London: Methuen, 1955); The Winter's Tale, ed. J. H. P. Pafford (London: Methuen, 1955); As You Like It, ed. Agnes Latham (London: Methuen, 1975).

⁹ Thomas Kelly says that one reason for the heroines' disguise "is to dramatize the rigidly circumscribed perception of the young men with whom they are paired," in "Shakespeare's Romantic Heroes: Orlando Reconsidered," Shakespeare Quarterly, 24 (1973), 13. The male disguise is in this view a deliberate tactic for keeping the man secondary in comedy.

¹⁰ See Rosalie Colie, Shakespeare 's Living Art (Princeton, N. J.: Princeton University Press, 1974) for a discussion of the use of Petrarchan rhetoric in the plays, especially pp. 135-67.

¹¹ In Shakespeare and the Traditions of Comedy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1974), Leo Salingar postulates the existence in the problem plays, among others, of what he calls "the complex of the judge and the nun," a formula whereby a man will be saved from death if a woman is released from a convent, suggestive of a "conflict in [Shakespeare's] mind over the claims of love and the claims of law in Elizabethan society," pp. 311-12. I would stress the importance of the childbearing function: unless women get out of the convent, man will die.

¹² See Jan Kott's discussion of androgyny as an image of the vanished Golden Age in "Shakespeare's Bitter Arcadia," in Shakespeare our Contemporary, trans. Boleslaw Taborski (Garden City, N. Y.: Doubleday/Anchor, 1966), pp. 287-342.

¹³ Barroll, Artificial Persons, p. 184.

¹⁴ Cf. Richmond's discussion of sexual imbalance in Shakespeare's heroines, passim. Perhaps the first full-scale analyses of the relationship between masculine and feminine in Shakespeare, G. Wilson Knight's essays on Antony and Cleopatra and Macbeth in The Imperial Theme (1931; rpt. London: Methuen, 1965) still seem to me among the best. His study of All's Well That Ends Well, "The Third Eye," in The Sovereign Flower (London: Methuen, 1958), pp. 93-160, is also worth considering.

¹⁵ Harold C. Goddard speaks of Cleopatra as participating in an "alchemic effect," in The Meaning of Shakespeare, 2 vols. (1951; rpt. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1960), II, 203; while Phyllis Rackin, in "Shakespeare's Boy Cleopatra, the Decorum of Nature and the Golden World of Poetry," PMLA, 87 (1972), 201-12, sees her as an artist figure. Many have noted, too, the resemblance between Prospero and the powerful comic heroines; see, for example, Bertrand Evans, Shakespeare's Comedies (Oxford: Clarendon, 1960), p. 149 and elsewhere.

¹⁶ I am thinking in particular of a set of metalwork figures representing the Four Elements owned by the Bayerisches Nationalmuseum in Munich and displayed in New York in 1970. Terra is a woman with a serpent pressed to her breast. See Konrad Hoffmann, The Year 1200: A Centennial Exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Cloisters Studies in Medieval Art (New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1970), I, 85-87. The serpent at Cleopatra's breast links her as well with the ancient images in which snakes draped around female bodies represent the interrelationship of the male and female principles. See Erich Neumann, The Great Mother, trans. Ralph Manheim, 2d ed., Bollingen Series, 47 (Princeton, N. J.: Princeton University Press, 1963), pp. 185-89, also 153 and plates 55-59.

¹⁷ Cf. Neumann, The Great Mother, p. 59: "Whenever we encounter the symbol of rebirth, we have to do with a matriarchal transformation mystery, and this is true even when its symbolism or interpretation bears a patriarchal disguise."

¹⁸ As Milton knew when he had Sin recall her incestuous mating with Satan, who first recoiled from her until he saw his "perfect image" in her and conceived Death upon her ( Paradise Lost, II, 759-67).

¹⁹ See Evans, Shakespeare's Comedies, pp. 325 ff.

²⁰ Cf. R. E. Gajdusek, "Death, Incest and the Triple Bond in the Later Plays of Shakespeare," American Imago, 31 (1974), 156. This essay, which treats incest as a manifestation of the feminine world that the masculine heroes of the last plays must conquer, notes the phallic symbolism in Prospero's gesture.