On Some of Shakespeare's Female Characters

by Helena Faucit Martin

Overview

Helena Faucit Martin, one of the leading stage actresses of the early nineteenth century, played several Shakespearean roles. When she began expressing her opinions on her favourite women characters in letters to her friends, they urged her to publish them. The result is a series of fascinating, candid and informed sketches of seven of Shakespeare's well-known female characters, featuring Ophelia, Juliet, Portia, Imogen, Desdemona, Rosalind and Beatrice, which was published in 1885. Faucit's writings are distinctive, in that she approaches her subjects not as a critic of drama, but as someone who has 'thought their thoughts and spoken their words'. She treats Shakespeare's characters as beings with a life outside the stage, as figures for herself and other women to look up to as guides, friends and mirrors for their own lives. Among the letters in the volume are those written to Faucit's eminent friends, Robert Browning and John Ruskin.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781108000253
Publisher:	Cambridge University Press
Publication date:	07/20/2009
Series:	Cambridge Library Collection - Shakespeare and Renaissance Drama
Pages:	468
Product dimensions:	5.51(w) x 8.50(h) x 1.02(d)

Read an Excerpt

IV. JULIET. 31 Onslow Square, ath January 1881. " So shows a snowy dove trooping with crows, Aa yonder lady o'er her fellows shows." ilOU ask me to write to you, dear friend, of Juliet, and of all my earliest dreams about her. Whose bidding should I heed, if not yours, my always loving, indulgent, constant friend ? But indeed you hardly realise how difficult is the task you have set me. Of the characters about which I wrote to our dear Miss Jewsbury, I could speak as of beings outside, as it were, my own personality; but Juliet seems inwoven with my life. Of all characters, hers is the one which I have found the greatest difficulty, butalso the greatest delight, in acting. My early girlhood's first step upon the stage was made as Juliet. To the last days of my artist life I never acted the character without finding fresh cause to marvel at the genius which created this child- woman, raised by love to heroism of the highest type. It was at the little theatre beside the Green at Richmond1 that I first played Juliet; and Richmond is therefore indelibly associated with the Juliet of my early youth. I will tell you why. My holidays were passed there, for there my family always spent some of the summer months. The small house on the Green, in which we were often left, with a kind old servant in charge, looks to me even now like a home. Every step of the Green, the river-banks, the fields round Sion House, the Hill, the Park, and Twickenham Meadows, were all loved more and more as each summer enlarged my sense of beauty. One of my earliest and most vivid recollections— I was then quite a child—was a meeting with "the great Edmund Kean," as my sister called him. He was her pethero. She had seen him act, and, through friends, had a slight acquaintance with him. Wishing her l...

Table of Contents

1. Ophelia; 2. Portia; 3. Desdemona; 4. Juliet; 5. Imogen; 6. Rosalind; 7. Beatrice; Appendix.