SHAKESPEARE HEROINES

Southland Times, Issue 19248, 11 June 1921, Page 8

SHAKESPEARE HEROINES

APPRECIATION BY AN ACTRESS. INEXHAUSTIBLE SUBJECT OF SUPPLY. This very interesting article has been written specialty for The Daily Mail by Miss Hunter-Watts, who w'ill be seen in Invercargill early in July. “Which of them is dearest to me? I have no skill in sense to make distinction.” To have played Juliet, Viola, Rosalind, Ophelia is to place oneself among the “rortunate unhappy” whose waggons are for ever hitched to stars. In Shakespeare’s women I find an inexhaustible subject of study, new felicities discovered in every part; but since one’s representation of such ideals of womanhood must needs fall so short of our dreams of them—let me strive to write of them merely as friends in whom “I count myself in nothing else so happy.” DESDEMONA. Perhaps the small trusting hands of Desdemona (surety the most pathetic figure of all Shakespeare’s “soft, sweet women”) cling the most closely round my heart. I have for her the affection that all mothers have for their firstborn. In the vernacular of the theatre, she was my first “Shakespearean lead,” and the delicate purity oi this character, studied when I had not yet entered the "careless twenties, has I am sure, helped me to walk “the softlien, sweetlier all my days.” I de net think 1 have consciously altered my interpretation of this part since its first conception. Though much lees experienced then, I found in this role a simplicity of thought and speech that must have found a responsive echo in my own lack of years and limited vision of life. I see her still, as I did then, wide eyed as a child, with ail the sweet trust and helplessness of a child; a mind so incapable of evil that it could not recognise it in others; “of spirit so still and quiet that her motion blushed at herself I” I have read a-id played in “Othello” more times than I can count, and Desdemona is still to me “oo lovely fair that the sense aches” when only writing of her. 0 radiant purity oi heart! 0 ardent courage of love; that whou bruised only gave forth a more exquisite fragrance I PORTIA. If, like Portia’s describing of her suitors, my description must also level at my affections, I fear Belmont’s proud mistress finds a very small corner in my heart. By my own sex, I will be accused of an unpardonable heresy should I say anything that might detract from the perfection of Portia. She is, I believe, the favourite of her sex, the man of all Shakespeare’s women of whom they are proudest. Is it, I wonder, because in her mental supremacy is foreshadowed the present emancipation of woman’ Must I confess that Portia leaves me coldf Her mental brilliance is hard, her wit sharp but cruel, her suitors, great princes “from the four corners of the earth," are laughed at for their personal imperfections. When they fail in their choice of the right casket, there is no spark of womanly pity for the loser in Portia’s curt dismissal of them. There is tenderness in her attitude towards Bassauio, but in his happiness she has achieved her own. She can rejoice with those that •io rejoice, but not weep with them that •veep. She has lived a golden life, accustomed to command rather than beg a tribute of service or admiration. She has never suffered, and lacks that bond of sympathy. She is vivacious, sparkling, witty, proud, but her perfections move me not. OPHELIA. I stand more humble before the gentle aubmissiveness and intellectual helplessness of Ophelia, that “Rose of May” with such divine unconsciousness of personal worth hat she accepts her brother’s estimate of her.

Laertes: “For Hamlet and the trifling of h\i favour held it a fashion, and a toy in blood; a violet in the youth of primy nature, forward, not permanent, sweet, not lasting, the perfume and suppliance of a minute, no more.” Ophelia: No more, but so. To my thinking, there is something flow-er-like about Ophelia. She is frail and fragrant. “From her fair and unpolluted .lesh may violets spring,” her brother cries in his grief at her grave—and “the beauteous Majesty of Denmark,” Queen Gertrude, casts flowers upon her bier with the long-grown familiar words. “Sweets to the sweet.” Who can hear or read unmoved the exquisite lines coming from those dear mad lips—“ Rosemary that’s for remembrance—pray you, love, remember.” How our heart strings are wrung when we see the pitiful stare “of things remembered not”; and as the pansies fall through her fingers and we hear her wistful whisper, “Pansies that’s for thoughts,” how ours ache to think of them! What irreparable loss is in her last pitiful cry—“l would give you some violets, but they withered all when my father died.” Like Ophelia, our eyes, too, are dim with tears; like Ophelia, we too, bury our face in our hands, as if loth to gaze on the sacrilege of so sweet a soul made bare; and this scene packed with so much wounding, arresting beauty lasts a bare five minutes! LADY MACBETH. What comet? blazed—what flaming “twisted star” rode by when Shakespeare’s sublimely dreadful Northern Queen was born ? This daemonic, dynamic personality, with a mind and character so strong that nothing, it seems, can break—only in sleep can Nature take her revenge. Lady Macbeth is a tremendous part—a crushing part. One feels oneself sink and dwindle under its tragic sublimity. But I do not see in her that fiend like cruelty that has been ascribed to this character. If we turn to her own reflections it is always her woman’s weakness that she dreads may defeat her purpose. Murder is something foreign to her nature. She has resort to the wine-cup to nerve her to the deed—“that which hath made them drunk, hath made me bold.” When she sees the pathetic figure of King Duncan in simple trustfulness resembling her “father as he slept,” she shrinks from the deed of killing and puts it in her husband’s hands. All through the scene, after the murder is committed, to me she appears a woman whose iron will has purposely refused to allow any “compunctious visitings of Nature to shake her fell purpose.” But this unnatural rising above her true womanliness one feels is only 1 sustained by tremendous effort. The faltering flesh is whipped and scourged by the indomitable spirit; the heart’s natural softness that knows “how tender ’tis to love the babe” is steeled o’er by her dauntless will. What sublime courage and awful fixedness of purpose has this woman who could delight in the beauty “of the innocent flower,” and “the perfumes of Arabia,” and when there remains nothing for her but the dust and ashes of her perished dreams “nought’s had—all’s spent”—she never utters one word of reproach or regret to her husband, who has also played and failed in the “red-handed game.” In the famous sleep-walking scene one sees the dreadful spectacle of a strong soul in torment. To my mind, here is pictured the true nature of Lady Macbeth. That master-mind that saw the “future in the instant” is now broken; the weak flesh cries out and shudders to think “the old man had so much blood in him.” The delicate senses are revolted at the smell of the blood, and the little hands once

“raised in sovereign sway and masterdom” are wrung piteously. What dreadful scene is this, in which the heart is so “soro o’ercharged; in which the spirit flutters on so tired a wing, and moaps for its release, with a sigh, that seems must be perpetual. When the messenger brings his tidings “the Queen, my lord, is dead,” I cannot even then picture this flaming sworfl-like woman at lost at peace. Even in the grave I think the earth will lie heavily upon her eyes. ROSALIND. High hearted Rosalind. There is sweet laughter in her name—Rosalind of the joyous heart, the sparkling wit, the gladsome mirth, “full of tears, full of smiles,” tender, golden-hearted Rosalind, surely the happiest, most lovesome of all Shakespeare's most lovesome women. How delicately she poises between the light of comedy and the deeper shade of tenderness. This ’neaveniy Rosalind” more than common tall that is “so many fathoms deep in love”; carelessly fleeting the time in the velvet depths of Arden, finding “odes upon hawthorns, elegies on brambles” all deifying her own fair name. Has she, indeed, since she was “three years old conversed with a magician,” that with such dear magic she holds us all in thrall? For all her slender height, is she not, after all, only “just as high .as our hearts” and is it not there she is perpetually enshrined, JULIET. All the world loves a lover. Dante and Beatrice, Tristram and Iseult, Abelard and Heloise, Romeo and Juliet— ' the world will end when they are forgotten. Juliet of the warm, sensiunii south, whose “bud of love” blossomed so etfulgently ’neath the glowing Italian skies. Do we not always see her with Romeo’s eyes, the lover’s eyes that “see not with the eye but with the mind.” Juliet, “hanging upon the cheek of night like a rich jewel”! How swiftly beats the warm, passionate heart in that soft young breast, as the light, eager feet tread joyously to the throbbing music of the dance. How easy for us to believe that she does, indeed, “teach the torches to burn bright”! Like Romeo, we, too, fall before her fair loveliness. How all hearts, young and old, beat with hers in the balcony scene, with its lyric sweet sweetness of passion, and have we not, too, with Juliet, “an ill- | divining soul” when Romeo throws down his i challenge to ‘Hove devouring death” ? How 1 quickly this envious death takes up the challenge and comes swiftly, with pale triumphant banners flying! O happy dagger that rests in such a soft, sweet breast! O happy Juliet safe from the condemning years! | More happy love, more happy, happy love! | For ever warm and still to be enjoyed. For ever panting, and for ever young. In France lovers still strew flowers on ‘ the tomb of Abelard and Heloise. AU the lovers of all the world, down all the years, pay deathless tribute to Juliet, whose “bounty was as boundless as the sea, her love as deep.”