e had
cast her away from him; as it is, she all but saves him.

Of Othello I need not trace the tale;--nor the one weakness of his so
mighty love; nor the inferiority of his perceptive intellect to that
even of the second woman character in the play, the Emilia who dies in
wild testimony against his error:--"Oh, murderous coxcomb! What should
such a fool Do with so good a wife?"

In Romeo and Juliet, the wise and brave stratagem of the wife is
brought to ruinous issue by the reckless impatience of her husband. In
Winter's Tale and in Cymbeline, the happiness and existence of two
princely households, lost through long years, and imperiled to the
death by the folly and obstinacy of the husbands, are redeemed at last
by the queenly patience and wisdom of the wives. In Measure for
Measure, the foul injustice of the judge, and the foul cowardice of the
brother, are opposed to the victorious truth and adamantine purity of a
woman. In Coriolanus, the mother's counsel, acted upon in time, would
have saved her son from all evil; his momentary forgetfulness of it is
his ruin; her prayer at last granted, saves him--not, indeed, from
death, but from the curse of living as the destroyer of his country.

And what shall I say of Julia, constant against the fickleness of a
lover who is a mere wicked child?--of Helena, against the petulance and
insult of a careless youth?--of the patience of Hero, the passion of
Beatrice, and the calmly devoted wisdom of the "unlessoned girl," who
appears among the helplessness, the blindness, and the vindictive
passions of men, as a gentle angel, bringing courage and safety by her
presence, and defeating the worst malignities of crime by what women
are fancied most to fail in,--precision and accuracy of thought.

58. Observe, further, among all the principal figures in Shakespeare's
plays, there is only one weak woman--Ophelia; and it is because she
fails Hamlet at the critical moment, and is not, and cannot in her
nature be, a guide to him when he needs her most, that all the bitter
catastrophe follows. Finally, though there are three wicked women
among the principal figures, Lady Macbeth, Regan, and Goneril, they are
felt at once to be frightful exceptions to the ordinary laws of life;
fatal in their influence also in proportion to the power for good which
they have abandoned.

Such, in broad light, is Shakespeare's testimony to the position and
character of women in human life. He repres