It has been said that Shakespeare’s female characters are inferior to his characters of men.  Doubtless in some respects they are so; they would not be female characters if they were not; but then in other respects they are superior.  Some people apparently hold it impossible for man and woman to be equal and different at the same time.  Hence the false equality of the sexes which has been of late so often and so excruciatingly advocated.  On this ground, the Poet could not have made his women equal to his men without unsexing and unsphering them; which he was just as far from doing as Nature is.  The alleged inferiority, then, of his women simply means, I suppose, that they are women, as they ought to be, and not men, as he meant they should not be, and as we have cause to rejoice that they are not.  He knew very well that in this matter equality and diversity are nowise incompatible, and that the sexes might therefore stand or sit on the same level without standing in the same shoes or sitting in the same seats.  If, indeed, he had not known this, he could not have given characters of either sex, but only wretched and disgusting medlies and caricatures of both.

How nicely, on the one hand, Shakespeare discriminates things that really differ, so as to present in all cases the soul of womanhood, without a particle of effeminacy; and how perfectly, on the other hand, he reconciles things that seem most diverse, pouring into his women all the intellectual forces of the other sex, without in the least impairing or obscuring their womanliness;—­all this is not more rare in poetry than it is characteristic of his workmanship.  Thus Portia is as much superior to her husband in intellect, in learning, and accomplishment, as she is in wealth; but she is none the less womanly for all that.  Nor, which is more, does she ever on that account take the least thought of inverting the relation between them.  In short, her mental superiority breeds no kind of social displacement, nor any desire of it.  Very few indeed of the Poet’s men are more highly charged with intellectual power.  While she is acting the lawyer in disguise, her speech and bearing seem to those about her in the noblest style of manliness.  In her judge-like gravity and dignity of deportment; in the extent and accuracy of her legal knowledge; in the depth and appropriateness of her moral reflections; in the luminous order, the logical coherence, and the beautiful transparency of her thoughts, she almost rivals our Chief Justice Marshall.  Yet to us, who are in the secret of her sex, all the proprieties, all the inward harmonies, of her character are exquisitely preserved; and the essential grace of womanhood seems to irradiate and consecrate the dress in which she is disguised.