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Shakespeare and Ms. Grundy
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 Lloyd
Rose, theater critic of
the Washington Post, has asked the arresting question
whether Shakespeare disliked women. After all, he created some of the most
appalling harpies ever to walk the stage: Lady Macbeth; King Lear’s
ruthless daughters, Goneril and Regan; Coriolanus’s fanatical mother,
Volumnia; Kate the Shrew; and a few others you wouldn’t want to
meet on a blind
date.  (And Tamora, in Titus
Andronicus, is even more terrifying than Bertie Wooster’s
aunts.)
But how
could a man who disliked women have created heroines like
Juliet, Cordelia, Beatrice, Rosalind, and Cleopatra, not to mention such
endearing lesser characters as Emilia in Othello or the Countess of
Roussillon in All’s Well That Ends Well? The
whole effect of Shakespeare’s most powerful scenes depends on our
feeling of the infinite pathos of the deaths of women like Cordelia and
Desdemona. He, at least, must at least, have cared about them.
I
don’t know of another author, male or otherwise, who created such a
wide range of female characters, or who took such obvious delight in witty
women. Shakespeare can raise a young man’s expectations of women
even more unrealistically than Hugh Hefner. What’s more, even his
most ghastly women are sharply individualized. It seems purblind to reduce
his amazing genius for characterizing women to a single attitude.
Why should
we have to defend Shakespeare, anyway? What’s the point? Is he on
trial for misogyny? If convicted, will he be banned from the stage?
I wish these
questions could be laughed away. But in this age of crackpot feminism,
militant victimology and ideological criticism, not even Shakespeare is safe.
The prudish Mrs. Grundy of yesteryear has been replaced by the even more
censorious Ms. Grundy of today.
Living in an
age of heavy censorship, Shakespeare was still free of certain social
oppressions with which we, First Amendment or no, have become all too
familiar. He didn’t have to worry, every time he endowed a female or
minority character with an unpleasant trait, that he’d be accused of
having the Wrong Attitude toward a whole sex or race. Nobody was keeping
score in those days. So he was free to create individuals instead of
representatives.
Are we
quite as free? Doesn’t a writer today — especially a white male
writer — feel, as he dips the quill into the old inkwell, a certain haunting
anxiety that he may run afoul of the bigotry patrol if his women and minority
characters don’t, so to speak, meet federal guidelines? It can’t
be good for the imagination to work under such conditions.
Think of all
the authors of the past who have been brought up on sexism and bigotry
raps lately: The list includes Chaucer, Milton, Dickens, Dostoyevsky, Twain,
Kipling, G.K. Chesterton, Hemingway, T.S. Eliot, and Raymond Chandler, not to
mention St. Paul.
It’s
perfectly legitimate to note moral failings and even ugliness in old authors,
however great. But too often they are not being judged by valid universal
standards, but being arraigned on ex post facto charges that reveal our own
parochial mentality, not theirs.
Shakespeare
obviously knew what it was to adore a woman. But he
wasn’t idiotic enough to adore them all, or like them all.
He was deeply interested in them, remarkably observant about them and
often sympathetic to them. He had a humorous sense of how women feel
about men, as witness Emilia’s earthy remark about husbands:
“’Tis not a year or two shows us a man: / They are all but
stomachs, and we all but food; / They eat us hungerly, and when they are
full, / They belch us.”
A surefire
crack like that loses its essence if it’s turned into a manifesto or a
“universal truth.” Like most jokes (not that Emilia is joking!),
it’s both a recognizable experience and an exaggeration.
If the male
sex ever gets into organized touchiness, it will have far more complaints with
Shakespeare than the feminists do. The tragedies always result chiefly from
male flaws, with the woman a contributory factor at most, and more often
the victim of male jealousy, self-absorption, or sheer pig-headedness.
Come to
think of it, is King Lear fair to senior citizens? But
let’s leave it at that. I don’t want to give anyone ideas.
Joseph Sobran |
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| Copyright © 2006 by the
Griffin Internet Syndicate, a division of Griffin Communications This column may not be reprinted in print or Internet publications without express permission of Griffin Internet Syndicate 
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