Lady Amelia in "Palamon and Arcyte"
because she gathered flowers prettily and was commended by the Queen. He
makes the surprising statement that the three heroines in "Cymbeline,"
the "Tempest" and "Winter's Tale" have on the stage "few qualities to
distinguish them from almost any of Beaumont and Fletcher's." It is
difficult to discuss such generalizations with the temperance of
criticism. They can be true only if Professor Thorndike's theory is
correct,--that the delineation of character is solely for stage effect.
There is another theory announced and recorded by Shakspere himself, and
illustrated in every drama he wrote,--that the sole end and aim of the
stage itself and of the characters it represents, is "to hold the mirror
up to nature," and therefore his characters are not "types"; they are
men and women who were born, not manufactured; each is a separate,
individual human being; each different from every other. We know them,
for they have entered our houses, sat at our tables, talked with us,
laughed and wept with us, made us shudder at crime and exult in the
triumph of virtue.

Therefore, there is but one "Lear": his madness was never imitated
outside of Bedlam; but one Lady Macbeth, and we have seen her walking in
her awful dream. Beaumont and Fletcher in six romances delineate
"love-lorn maidens," "conventionalized types," who differ little from
each other, except that three of them "masquerade in boy's clothing" and
three do not. They have "little individuality," "are utterly romantic,"
"utterly removed from life"; all are presented to produce novel
situations leading up to a startling climax.

Imogen is not like Miranda or Perdita; neither is a "type" of the
"love-lorn" maiden; all are living, acting individuals, differing from
each other like those we know, resembling each other only as one
beautiful and pure woman resembles another. Professor Thorndike, who is
the advocate of Beaumont and Fletcher, may keep his personal opinion
that Imogen lacks "individual traits," but we respectfully decline to
take his opinion as a critic that she is like Arethusa in "Philaster."
For us and for all men and women, Shakspere has _created_ the character
of Imogen, as of Perdita and Miranda, and her "individual traits" are
clear enough, to those who have had the happiness of her acquaintance,
to show that neither in feature or dress, neither in manners or morals,
did she "imitate" any of the heroines of Beaumont and Flet