17 JANUARY 1925, Page 15

A BOOK OF THE MOMENT

THE WOMEN OF SHAKESPEARE'S EPOCH

THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA BY THE

New York Times.] [COPYRIGHT IN

Society Women of Shakespeare's Time. By Violet A. Wilson. (John Lane. 12s. 6d. net.)

NOTHING surprises one more in reading Shakespeare's Plays and Sonnets, the Poems of Ben Jonson, or the Letters, Elegies and Lyrics of Donne, than the high standing, social and literary, of the Elizabethan women. They are almost modern in their intellectual emancipation, and in the great parts that they play in life. Queen Elizabeth was, we feel, no exception, but rather the female product of her age, in her cultivation, in her brain power, and in her capacity to charm and to com- mand. Women in no other period of English history ever took so large a share of the public regard. To find a parallel we have to go to our own day.

But this is not all. The tide in the affairs of women did not merely reach a high mark and stay there, instead of advancing pari passu with the advance of the men. The women went back while the men went on. Not only relatively, but abso- lutely, the women of the period between 1620 and 1720 were lower in the intellectual and cultural scale than they had been in the three previous generations. The times of Elizabeth and of the first half of the Jacobean epoch were crowded with _ great female personalities, women " whose smiles embroiled the world," women who inspired to high deeds in all walks of life ; women who were partners and partakers in the great movements of the day.

Now look at the women of the Restoration period, of the times of William and. Mary, and of Anne. They appear for the most part illiterate nonentities. Those that at all emerge are shrewd, good-tempered " baggages " like Nell Gwynne, or else boisterous termagants like Sarah, Duchess of Marl- borough. Even Queen Mary, the most beautiful woman of her time, and also, to speak primly, one of the nicest, was dull of mind, and ahnost wholly illiterate. Her girlish letters recently published have hardly a spark of life or interest in them, except for their almost uncanny ingenuity in bad spel- ling. Her devotion to her neurotic and ungenial, if great- minded and great-hearted, husband had in it a touch of real pathos, but it was only the devotion of a noble and faithful dog. She gave all she had, but it was very little. She was no Portia to her Brutus.

Queen Anne had rather more character, but she remains the shadow of a name. She had little or no individuality and all we know about her except that she died—she did somehow contrive to attract public attention by her demise—is that she refused to allow Swift to be made a Bishop even in Ireland. But even that may be no true bill. Plenty of " inconvenient" politicians have been refused advancement on the ground that the Sovereign had unfortunately conceived a personal preju- dice which could not be overcome. A Queen's veto was a specially useful excuse; for who can fight against that potent yet inexplicable thing, la caprice de femme? Yet all the time it was Oxford or Bolingbroke who was really determined not to make Swift a Peer of Parliament, either in England or Ireland.

Be that as it may, the mass of womankind in the 1620-1720 century were of as little account as the English Queens. Consider the women in Dryden's Plays and in the Comedies of Congreve. They do not get further than the power to fascinate, and it is only an animal faseination.that is bestowed on them by their creators in the drama. Sedley, no doubt, thought he was stating an absolute and universal truth when he ingeminated his desperate quatrain :—

" All that in women is adored In thy dear self I find.

For the whole sex can but afford The Handsome and the Kind."

And yet every poet of the preceding age from Shakespeare to Shirley would have given him the lie over his apothegm. Even Pope. who was by nature a Feminist. could find very few modern instances to adorn his constant attempts to reha- bilitate woman. Lady Mary Wortley-Montagu, who was the beginning of the new dispensation, no doubt crosses his scene, but Pope burnt his fingers so badly with her that he makes little of her in his later verse. Mrs. Howard does, no doubt, stand as a great example of female charm and capacity, but she is only one in a million. As a rule, Pope's Chloes, Celias, Delias, Cynthias, and even Marthas and Theresas, are of small account. " Contradictious still " they " haunt the places where their honour died," but do not do much else.

The book before us not only emphasizes this strange fact, as to the rapid decline of womanhood after the Shakespearean epoch, but gives us a clue to the riddle. It shows us with great acumen as well as sympathy what remarkable people were the leading ladies of the Elizabethan times, and also suggests. why and how the women of the next three generations were kept down, and by law and custom deprived of their rights in the Commonwealth. It happened that one of the most emancipated of Elizabethan ladies, Lady Hatton, was united in a second marriage to that man of superb intellect and power, but also of prejudice and guile, Lord Chief Justice Coke. Lady Hatton was essentially a masterful woman. Acting as such she gave her great spouse a very bad time. She mocked him, she flouted him, she ignored him. But this was not a safe thing to do with the great judge of whom even James I. said that if Coke summoned him to his Court lie, the Sovereign, must obey and go.

No doubt it will be asked how Coke could contrive to do this, even assuming that he so desired. After all, though he was Chief Justice of England he did- not control Parliament. Again, his personal authority died with him. I confess that I cannot solve the problem. I can only pass on the statement of the author of this fascinating book, Mrs. Violet A. Wilson.

She writes very confidently. After giving a most amusing account of how Lady Hatton teased her husband, and how, after ten years of wrangling they took their case to the Privy Council, and how Lady Hatton spoke there so bitterly and so well that the audience determined that Richard Burbage the player could not have acted better, she concludes:

" Coke took a bitter revenge for his unhappy domestic life, by using his unrivalled legal knowledge to lower the status of women, making invidious distinctions between the sexes which aforetime had never been thought of. The weight of his authority created a precedent whereby women's independence was first hampered, and her place in the State withheld for several generations."

Whether this view is probable or improbable, there can be no question as to the fascination of Mrs. Wilson's book. It is delightful in itself, and it throws many beams of illumina- tion upon the women of Shakespeare's time and enhances even their charm. When I say " enhances " I mean that we get in them an increased feeling of reality. We see from the

records so carefully unearthed and so cleverly used by Mrs. Wilson that the great ladies whom Shakespeare must have seen and known, and no doubt talked to, were like, his characters. Clearly he had seen in the flesh women who might stand for the Venetian Portia, for Beatrice, for Lady Hotspur, for the wife of Brutus, and even for Cleopatra herself. Again, he must have seen the good and the innocent as well as the great and the masterful. In these pages we catch glimpses probably of Miranda, certainly of the Lady Olivia. Again, the saucy and audacious young women like Beatrice, Maria, or Rosalind are vitalized for us. Mrs. Wilson in her introduction quotes Aubrey's saying that Shakespeare and Ben Jonson " did gather humours of men dayly " when- ever and wherever they put their feet. London was a close- knit corporation in those days, and there was not the isolation - of sets and cliques that we have grown accustomed to in modem times. Shakespeare was never out of the hearing of the great world, and he used his ears well.

Mrs. Wilson begins her book by pointing out how England became known in the sixteenth century for the reputation of its women. " England is a paradise for women " was the popular saying of the sixteenth century. Travellers recounted to a disbelieving world how in England, at any rate, the women were free. But what mattered even more to the Continent was not only that our women were free, but that they were of marvellous beauty and wonderfully clever. Did not Erasmus himself point out that it was a land of free kissing ?

Here is a very amusing description by a Dutch gentleman who, though he admired the English woman, was, like the modern German, a good deal shocked at her want of domesticity :-

" They are well-dressed, fond of taking it easy, and commonly leave the care of household matters and drudgery to their servants. . . . In all banquets and feasts they are shown the greatest honour ; they are placed at the upper end of the table, where they are the first served ; at the lower end they help the men. All the rest of their time they employ in walking and riding, in playing at cards or otherwise, in visiting their friends and keeping company, conversing with their equals (whom they term gossips) and their neighbours, and making merry with them at child- births, christenings, churchings and funerals ; and all this with the permission and knowledge of their husbands, as such is the custom. Although the husbands often recommend to them the pains, industry, and care of the German or Dutch women, who do what the men ought to do both in the house and in the shops, for which services in England men are employed, nevertheless the women usually persist in retaining their customs."

And here I may note that whenever Mrs. Wilson gives a quotation from some prose source she backs it up with references to the Plays of Shakespeare.

The main part of the book, however, is devoted to indi- vidual studies of particular Elizabethan ladies. The first is Lady Russell, and a most amazing lady she was. There never was a more notable maitresse femme, and her appearance as recorded in a picture at Bisham Abbey is exactly what one might expect. Another exceedingly interesting story is that of Penelope Rich, the lady whose portrait still hangs where Laud bade it hang—in Lambeth Palace—a strange face to be in such halls, and of a strange and fascinating woman. Another attractive person herein described is the Countess of Northumberland, who " did up " Syon House in the most approved new fashion. Strange as it may seem for an Elizabethan lady, she actually insisted on having a bathroom opening out of her own bedroom. Yet we learn that " in face of determined opposition from her imprisoned husband, she got it." But, although the poor man had to obey, he apparently showed great reluctance in footing the bill. For example, he says lugubriously, " It cost me £400 this last year past in building off Bathing Houses, cabinettes,

and other things shee had a fancy to, which this 15 yeare before was never miste nor wanting."

This same husband, the Earl of Northumberland, though he appears to have shown little fight when he got to real grips with his Lucy, in after life admonished his son on the ways of wives. He, the son, was to assert himself in " a grave and commanding fashion " towards his better half.

The following are generalizations which the writer probably dared not use in practice :-

" I have understood them to be see violent somtymes, when they could not have there wills as to threaten to act many mischiefs upon their owen persons ; which skilfull men in this trade of there humors have remedyed by offering furtherances to ther threats ; as, if they would needs kill them selves, to give them a knife ; if to hang themselves, to lend them your garters ; if to cast them- selves headlong out of windoes, .to open the casements if to swound and dye, to lett them lye till they come, to themselves again : soe as to this day I could never here of any that perished by these mornefull deaths ! ' "

Mrs. Wilson further summarized Northumberland's 'views" on the wife problem

The Earl of Northumberland_ considered present-day treat- ment of women occasioned all the trouble, for a passionate woman will pride herself on being a lady of good spirit,' whereas in the good old days, before women wera so highly educated, she would have been plainly accounted a scold.' Things might be remedied if husbands, instead of with dalliance and attendances to be ridiculously obsequious' to their wives, asserted their authority.",

Before I leave -this pleasant book I must- draw special attention to the two appendices with which it ends. One

deals with Lady Russell and has some most amusing letters describing a fine countryside row, which Mrs. Wilson very properly attaches to the scene between Shallow, Evans and

Falstaff in The Merry Wives of Windsor. Lady Russell's

letters to her nephew, Cecil, are masterpieces. Her signature in one of them is particularly effective—" Your desolate

wronged Aunt." Very properly Mrs. Wilson gives us an account of the aforesaid row as it is recorded in the Star Chamber in the old Law French. Anyone can understand it who will take a little trouble in reading it. It well repays the trouble by its charm and quaintness. But even better than this is the appendix which records the Yorkshire quarrel. This, as Mrs. Wilson in effect points out to us, may well have been the basis for the great scene between Maria, Toby, the Clown and Malvolio. The only difference is that in the original the spoilsport is not the chamberlain or master of the household, but the host himself, Sir Posthumous Hoby. Unfortunately it is too long to quote, and would be spoilt by compression. I recommend it, however, most whole- heartedly to anyone who wishes to get the true Elizabethan atmosphere and see how exactly it corresponds with that

given us by Shakespeare. Shakespeare, I may add, gives us the atmosphere of his age much more exactly than any of the other Elizabethan playwrights. He had the power of transmutation—the alchemist's power to make the basest metals into gold.

J. ST. LOE STRA. EY.