DID SHAKESPEARE UNDERSTAND WOMEN?

New Zealand Listener, Volume 6, Issue 144, 27 March 1942, Page 17

DID SHAKESPEARE UNDERSTAND WOMEN?

— Asks Our Female Philistine

HEN I was at school, they told me that Shakespeare had a wonderful insight into human nature. I was quite prepared to believe it. They also told me that Shakespeare Understood Women. I was quite prepared to believe that, too. In fact, it is only recently that I have developed doubts. The other day, I went to see Maria Dronke’s presentation of "Shakespeare’s Women," in Wellington. This, let me point out from the beginning, was not an attempt to evaluate the relative influence on the poet’s life of such figures as Ann Hathaway and the Dark Lady of the Sonnets, but an attempt to present Shakespeare’s heroines on the stage in characteristic scenes and speeches. The extracts were well chosen, and the roles-for the most part — admirably allotted and performed. But after seeing and hearing 14 such scenes in which rathér more than 14 of Shakespeare’s female creations were moved to strut and fret their two and a-half hours upon the stage, I was forced to conclude that none of pricy at peare’s female creations has much in common with the modern woman. In fact, Shakespeare’s heroines bear about as close a relationship to the woman of to-day as the traditional Red Riding Hood bears to James Thurber’s simi-larly-clad heroine, who, because even at 10 yards it isn’t easy to mistake a wolf for your grandmother, took out her gun and shot the wolf dead, the moral being that it isn’t as easy as all that to fool little girls nowadays. lf They Were Modern And that’s one of the things that strikes me. most forcibly about Shakespeare’s heroines. They were appallingly easy to fool. A modern Ophelia would have. wormed from Hamlet the secret of his strange conduct, and by refusing to act as the tool of her father and Claudius, would have saved herself a lot of trouble and seven other people the unpleasantness of sudden death. A modern Olivia would have pierced Viola’s disguise at the moment of meeting. A modern Lady Anne would have realised that all Richard’s fine speeches could not alter the fact that he had already murdered her husband and her husband’s father, and that she had no guarantee of his future good conduct. A modern Desdemona, fearing her husband’s intention of murdering her, would scarcely have put herself with such complete confidence into his hands. But in many cases, it is upon the gullibility of the heroine that the whole play depends. Give Ophelia a normal quota of commonsense and what happens to the next four acts of Hamlet? Give Miranda a little more sophistica--tion and the figure of Prospero crumbles. So we are forced to conclude

that Shakespeare in many cases tailored his heroines to fit the ready-made (in many cases hand-me-down), plot rather than allow his plot to be moulded by the indiosyncrasies of his female characters. In the case of the men, he was more lenient. He allowed them to have some say in the development of the action.

Yet let us at all costs. give Shakespeare his due (or, as Douglas Reed would have it, Jew). Perhaps he really did understand women. But perhaps he hesitated to put Woman, in all her complexity, upon a stage that resounded only to the masculine tread, and therefore it was only occasionally that he allowed himself the luxury of depicting a comparatively complex person such

as Lady Macbeth. Too often he had to people his stage with simple young things, the obverse side pert for comedy, the reverse side pathetic for tragedy, whose one-dimensional emotions could be easily handled by boys in their ’*teens. And these simple young things serve the purpose well enough, given a whole play in which to disport themselves. It is only when we meet 10 of them in the same evening that they become rather too great a strain on our credulity and tolerance.