Richard III.?

ALDA.

I will tell you what she is--she is a woman. Place Lady Macbeth in
comparison with Richard III., and you see at once the essential
distinction between masculine and feminine ambition--though both in
extreme, and overleaping all restraints of conscience or mercy. Richard
says of himself, that he has "neither pity, love, nor fear:" Lady
Macbeth is susceptible of all three. You smile! but that remains to be
proved. The reason that Shakspeare's wicked women have such a singular
hold upon our fancy, is from the consistent preservation of the feminine
character, which renders them more terrible, because more credible and
intelligible--not like those monstrous caricatures we meet with in
history--

MEDON.

In history?--this is new!

ALDA.

Yes! I repeat, in history, where certain isolated facts and actions are
recorded, without any relation to causes, or motives, or connecting
feelings and pictures exhibited, from which the considerate mind turns
in disgust, and the feeling heart has no relief but in positive, and I
may add, reasonable incredulity. I have lately seen one of Correggio's
finest pictures, in which the three Furies are represented, not as
ghastly deformed hags, with talons and torches, and snaky hair, but as
young women, with fine luxuriant forms and regular features, and a
single serpent wreathing the tresses like a bandeau--but _such_
countenances!--such a hideous expression of malice, cunning, and
cruelty!--and the effect is beyond conception appalling. Leonardo da
Vinci worked upon the same grand principle of art in his Medusa--

Where it is less the horror than the grace
Which turns the gazer's spirit into stone--

* * * *

'Tis the melodious tints of beauty thrown
Athwart the hue of guilt and glare of pain,
That humanize and harmonize the strain.

And Shakspeare, who understood all truth, worked out his conceptions on
the same principle, having said himself, that "proper deformity shows
not in the fiend so horrid as in women." Hence it is that whether he
portrayed the wickedness founded in perverted power, as in Lady Macbeth;
or the wickedness founded in weakness, as in Gertrude, Lady Anne, or
Cressida, he is the more fearfully impressive, because we cannot claim
for ourselves an exemption from the same nature, before which, in its
corrupted state, we tremble with horror or shrink