COMMENTS By SHAKESPEAREAN SCHOLARS LEONTES Of the jealousy that animates Leontes, the jealousy that needs no extraneous prompting to suspicion Emilia, in Othello, gives a perfect description. In answer to the hope which she expresses to Desdemona that Othello's harsh bearing towards her is due to state affairs, and to "no conception, nor no jealous toy concerning you,” Desdemona replies, "Alas the day, I never gave him cause!" To this Emila rejoins, "But jealous souls will not be answered so; They are ever jealous for the cause, But jealous for they are jealous; 'tis a monster This is the jealousy which Shakespeare has portrayed in Leontes,―a jealousy without cause, cruel, vindictive, and remorseless almost beyond belief. Othello, moreover, has been wedded, so far as we see, but a few brief weeks. He had not had time to prove how deeply Desdemona loved him. But years of happy wedlock had assured Leontes of Hermione's affection,-years in which he had tested the inward nobility which expressed itself in that majestic bearing, of which he speaks again and again, long after he has reason to believe her to be dead. Maintaining through all her life the charm of royal graciousness and dignity, she has inspired the chivalrously enthusiastic admiration and devotion of every member of the Court; a woman, in short, with whom no derogatory thought could be associated, being, as she is described by one of them, to be "so sovereignly honorable."-MARTIN, On Some of Shakespeare's Characters. The nature of Leontes is naturally noble; that we see afterwards. Even Paulina (and after she has known his crimes) confesses his nobility. But his nature is also weak; he is weak even in his repentance. Violence, it is said, goes with weakness; and the more furious the violence, the greater the weakness. Again, violence is often the refuge of that ignorance of what to do in trouble which results from the wavering of weak-mindedness. Then, again, the weak man knows he is weak, and is violent, as Richard II was, to hide his weakness from himself, or to prove himself strong. He who knows his strength has no desire to prove what he knows, and is quiet. Excess of passion adds a new weakness to the natural weakness of Leontes. "I have tremor cordis on me," "My heart dances, but not for joy-not joy." Enervated by unbroken happiness, he has no guard against the invasion of jealousy. It reaches its full and maddest height in him. There is not one touch of any other passion, of any other thought but jealous thought, while the tempest lasts. He is not a man; he is jealousy itself. This tempest of passion is brief: it dies as suddenly as it arose. Evil naturally exhausts itself, and all the more if the nature it attacks be good. And Leontes, originally a good but weak man, repents with as much passion as he sinned. But a good passion does not exhaust itself; on the contrary it grows in power. And then, the wrongdoer, having done deeds meet for repentance, gets the good, but not till then, of the evil trouble he has battled through. He suffers the inevitable punishment, but he conquers a higher goodness than he had when as yet his goodness was untried. And in the end Leontes attains full purification. Weakness in him becomes strength; pride, humility; remorse, repentance; sudden judgments, temperate acts; sorrow, sympathy with others; punishment, a means of progress; violence, steadfast obedience to law. As to his native jealousy, it has been worked through. It cannot occur again. And its complete destruction means the destruction also of the other evil passions. When one passion, raised to its highest pitch of evil force, has been extinguished, there is no need to care about conquering the others. They are already beaten. For the thing to crush, in order to be self-conqueror, is not the passions, but their excess; and if we conquer excess in one, we conquer it in all. For then we have strengthened the will to win the good which is opposite to the evil in which we have been entangled; and if we have made the will strong, it is as strong against all the passions as it has been against The work is done, and needs not twice doing. The whole nature of Leontes is tempered into steadfast calm.— BROOKE, Lectures on Shakespeare. one. The contrast of the character and jealousies of Leontes and of Othello has frequently been remarked upon; it lies between the vice self-sown, self-born, and self-developed, and that which, however springing from a native germ, is only forced and ripened to venomous germination by the heat of tending malice, and the fostering of all unlucky moral and external circumstances. The jealousy of Leontes is the headlong plunge of the beast of prey that he is named after, and thinking of him with the lightly limbed and fine-thoughted Othello, we are reminded in a general way of the difference: "The, headlong lioness between And hound sagacious on the tainted green." Leontes is chiefly affected by the insult of the fate that he stupidly and groundlessly hugs to himself. He thinks not,—not he, of the pity of the supposed fall of so complete a paragon, but pursues her as an enemy with rancorous and publicly proclaimed animosity. Such temper shows most grossly when the object of it is a lady whose nature is not only alien to such falsehood but unsuggestive of it, a lady who with clear and steady intellectual light illuminates every perversity in her husband's course. Had the victim of Leontes been a wife in whom conjugal affectionateness and not matronly dignity and the grace and pride of motherhood prevailed, his conduct would have seemed too intolerably brutal for any reconciliation, and the reuniting link of common parental affection would have been wanting, to render it acceptable to our sympathies and convictions. Neither would it have been natural for such a heart to have remained in seclusion so long, feeding on the hope of a daughter's recovery, not brooding over the lost love of her husband. Desdemona, affectionate and devoted, is the object of love of a husband whose bitterest trial in jealousy, sensitive as he is in honor, is still the loss of her trusted and tender heart. The submissive love of Desdemona faints into a tint of the weakness that invites misfortune, and is the worst of all fatalities; the graceful majesty of Hermione is inclined to the side of sober selfcommand, and for this, when attempered with tenderness and truth, fortune has ever in reserve a happiness at last.— LLOYD, Critical Essays. HERMIONE The character of Hermione exhibits what is never found in the other sex, but rarely in our own-yet sometimes;dignity without pride, love without passion, and tenderness without weakness. To conceive a character in which there enters so much of the negative, required perhaps no rare and astonishing effort of genius, such as created a Juliet, a Miranda, or a Lady Macbeth; but to delineate such a character in the poetical form, to develop it through the medium of action and dialogue, without the aid of description to preserve its tranquil, mild, and serious beauty, its unimpassioned dignity, and at the same time keep the strongest hold upon our sympathy and our imagination; and out of this exterior calm produce the most profound pathos, the most vivid impression of life and internal power-it is this which renders the character of Hermione one of Shakespeare's masterpieces. Hermione is a queen, a matron, and a mother; she is good and beautiful, and royally descended. A majestic sweetness, a grand and gracious simplicity, an easy, unforced, yet dignified self-possession, are in all her deportment, and in every word she utters. She is one of those characters, of whom it has been said proverbially, that "still waters run deep." Her passions are not vehement, but in her settled mind the sources of pain or pleasure, love or resentment, are like the springs that feed the mountain lakes, impenetrable, unfathomable, and inexhaustible.JAMESON, Shakespeare's Heroines. Shakespeare has given Leontes a wife and a monitress who are both better fitted to guide him to the false origin of his delusion than Desdemona and Emilia were with respect to Othello. Hermione is soft as "childhood and grace"; she is also full of dignity and majesty. She unites to Desdemona's goodness a discretion, thoughtfulness, and eloquence which the other did not possess. Desdemona consented unreflectingly to a secret marriage with the Moor, to whom she had offered herself; Hermione, on the legitimate proposal of Leontes, had required some months for consideration, then, however, she was his forever. This calm reflection, this resolution after reflection, this strong feeling of honor and duty, and the consciousness of moral nobility, penetrate the whole character of Hermione, and render it a strong contrast to Desdemona's. When she becomes aware of the suspicion of the king, she does not, like Desdemona, utter in her confusion things that may seem to criminate herself; her husband shrinks from uttering the word that would brand her whole life and character; but she does not, like Desdemona, shrink from it, because she is too conscious of her purity to fear that she could stain herself by it; notwithstanding her mental agitation, her answers are calm, even proud; she is sorrowfully firm in her resignation. She, like Desdemona, keeps back |