simplicity of _Macbeth_ is one of the reasons why many readers feel
that, in spite of its being intensely 'romantic,' it is less unlike a
classical tragedy than _Hamlet_ or _Othello_ or _King Lear_. And it is
possible that this effect is, in a sense, the result of design. I do not
mean that Shakespeare intended to imitate a classical tragedy; I mean
only that he may have seen in the bloody story of Macbeth a subject
suitable for treatment in a manner somewhat nearer to that of Seneca, or
of the English Senecan plays familiar to him in his youth, than was the
manner of his own mature tragedies. The Witches doubtless are
'romantic,' but so is the witch-craft in Seneca's _Medea_ and _Hercules
Oetaeus_; indeed it is difficult to read the account of Medea's
preparations (670-739) without being reminded of the incantations in
_Macbeth_. Banquo's Ghost again is 'romantic,' but so are Seneca's
ghosts. For the swelling of the style in some of the great
passages--however immeasurably superior these may be to anything in
Seneca--and certainly for the turgid bombast which occasionally appears
in _Macbeth_, and which seems to have horrified Jonson, Shakespeare
might easily have found a model in Seneca. Did he not think that this
was the high Roman manner? Does not the Sergeant's speech, as Coleridge
observed, recall the style of the 'passionate speech' of the Player in
_Hamlet_,--a speech, be it observed, on a Roman subject?[241] And is it
entirely an accident that parallels between Seneca and Shakespeare seem
to be more frequent in _Macbeth_ than in any other of his undoubtedly
genuine works except perhaps _Richard III._, a tragedy unquestionably
influenced either by Seneca or by English Senecan plays?[242] If there
is anything in these suggestions, and if we suppose that Shakespeare
meant to give to his play a certain classical tinge, he might naturally
carry out this idea in respect to the characters, as well as in other
respects, by concentrating almost the whole interest on the important
figures and leaving the others comparatively shadowy.
4
_Macbeth_ being more simple than the other tragedies, and broader and
more massive in effect, three passages in it are of great importance as
securing variety in tone, and also as affording relief from the feelings
excited by the Witch-scenes and the principal characters. They are the
passage where the Porter appears, the conversation between Lady Macduff
and her little boy, and the passage where Macduff receives the news of
the slaughter of his wife and babes. Yet the first of these, we are told
even by Coleridge, is unworthy of Shakespeare and is not his; and the
second, with the rest of the scene which contains it, appears to be
usually omitted in stage representations of _Macbeth_.
I question if either this scene or the exhibition of Macduff's grief is
required to heighten our abhorrence of Macbeth's cruelty. They have a
technical value in helping to give the last stage of the action the form
of a conflict between Macbeth and Macduff. But their chief function is
of another kind. It is to touch the heart with a sense of beauty and
pathos, to open the springs of love and of tears. Shakespeare is loved
for the sweetness of his humanity, and because he makes this kind of
appeal with such irresistible persuasion; and the reason why _Macbeth_,
though admired as much as any work of his, is scarcely loved, is that
the characters who predominate cannot make this kind of appeal, and at
no point are able to inspire unmingled sympathy. The two passages in
question supply this want in such measure as Shakespeare thought
advisable in _Macbeth_, and the play would suffer greatly from their
excision. The second, on the stage, is extremely moving, and Macbeth's
reception of the news of his wife's death may be intended to recall it
by way of contrast. The first brings a relief even greater, because here
the element of beauty is more marked, and because humour is mingled with
pathos. In both we escape from the oppression of huge sins and
sufferings into the presence of the wholesome affections of unambitious
hearts; and, though both scenes are painful and one dreadful, our
sympathies can flow unchecked.[243]
Lady Macduff is a simple wife and mother, who has no thought for
anything beyond her home. Her love for her children shows her at once
that her husband's flight exposes them to terrible danger. She is in an
agony of fear for them, and full of indignation against him. It does not
even occur to her that he has acted from public spirit, or that there is
such a thing.
What had he done to make him fly the land?
He must have been mad to do it. He fled for fear. He does not love his
wife and children. He is a traitor. The poor soul is almost beside
herself--and with too good reason. But when the murderer bursts in with
the question 'Where is your husband?' she becomes in a moment the wife,
and the great noble's wife:
I hope, in no place so unsanctified
Where such as thou may'st find him.
What did Shakespeare mean us to think of Macduff's flight, for which
Macduff has been much blamed by others beside his wife? Certainly not
that fear for himself, or want of love for his family, had anything to
do with it. His love for his country, so strongly marked in the scene
with Malcolm, is evidently his one motive.
He is noble, wise, judicious, and best knows
The fits o' the season,
says Ross. That his flight was 'noble' is beyond doubt. That it was not
wise or judicious in the interest of his family is no less clear. But
that does not show that it was wrong; and, even if it were, to represent
its consequences as a judgment on him for his want of due consideration
is equally monstrous and ludicrous.[244] The further question whether he
did fail in due consideration, or whether for his country's sake he
deliberately risked a danger which he fully realised, would in
Shakespeare's theatre have been answered at once by Macduff's expression
and demeanour on hearing Malcolm's words,
Why in that rawness left you wife and child,
Those precious motives, those strong knots of love,
Without leave-taking?
It cannot be decided with certainty from the mere text; but, without
going into the considerations on each side, I may express the opinion
that Macduff knew well what he was doing, and that he fled without
leave-taking for fear his purpose should give way. Perhaps he said to
himself, with Coriolanus,
Not of a woman's tenderness to be,
Requires nor child nor woman's face to see.
Little Macduff suggests a few words on Shakespeare's boys (there are
scarcely any little girls). It is somewhat curious that nearly all of
them appear in tragic or semi-tragic dramas. I remember but two
exceptions: little William Page, who said his _Hic, haec, hoc_ to Sir
Hugh Evans; and the page before whom Falstaff walked like a sow that
hath overwhelmed all her litter but one; and it is to be feared that
even this page, if he is the Boy of _Henry V._, came to an ill end,
being killed with the luggage.
So wise so young, they say, do ne'er live long,
as Richard observed of the little Prince of Wales. Of too many of these
children (some of the 'boys,' _e.g._ those in _Cymbeline_, are lads, not
children) the saying comes true. They are pathetic figures, the more so
because they so often appear in company with their unhappy mothers, and
can never be thought of apart from them. Perhaps Arthur is even the
first creation in which Shakespeare's power of pathos showed itself
mature;[245] and the last of his children, Mamillius, assuredly proves
that it never decayed. They are almost all of them noble figures,
too,--affectionate, frank, brave, high-spirited, 'of an open and free
nature' like Shakespeare's best men. And almost all of them, again, are
amusing and charming as well as pathetic; comical in their mingled
acuteness and _naïveté_, charming in their confidence in themselves and
the world, and in the seriousness with which they receive the jocosity
of their elders, who commonly address them as strong men, great
warriors, or profound politicians.
Little Macduff exemplifies most of these remarks. There is nothing in
the scene of a transcendent kind, like the passage about Mamillius'
never-finished 'Winter's Tale' of the man who dwelt by a churchyard, or
the passage about his death, or that about little Marcius and the
butterfly, or the audacity which introduces him, at the supreme moment
of the tragedy, outdoing the appeals of Volumnia and Virgilia by the
statement,
'A shall not tread on me:
I'll run away till I'm bigger, but then I'll fight.
Still one does not easily forget little Macduff's delightful and
well-justified confidence in his ability to defeat his mother in
argument; or the deep impression she made on him when she spoke of his
father as a 'traitor'; or his immediate response when he heard the
murderer call his father by the same name,--
Thou liest, thou shag-haired villain.
Nor am I sure that, if the son of Coriolanus had been murdered, his last
words to his mother would have been, 'Run away, I pray you.'
I may add two remarks. The presence of this child is one of the things
in which _Macbeth_ reminds us of _Richard III._ And he is perhaps the
only person in the tragedy who provokes a smile. I say 'perhaps,' for
though the anxiety of the Doctor to escape from the company of his
patient's husband makes one smile, I am not sure that it was meant to.
5
The Porter does not make me smile: the moment is too terrific. He is
grotesque; no doubt the contrast he affords is humorous as well as
ghastly; I dare say the groundlings roared with laughter at his coarsest
remarks. But they are not comic enough to allow one to forget for a
moment what has preceded and what must follow. And I am far from
complaining of this. I believe that it is what Shakespeare intended, and
that he despised the groundlings if they laughed. Of course he could
have written without the least difficulty speeches five times as
humorous; but he knew better. The Grave-diggers make us laugh: the old
Countryman who brings the asps to Cleopatra makes us smile at least. But
the Grave-digger scene does not come at a moment of extreme tension; and
it is long. Our distress for Ophelia is not so absorbing that we refuse
to be interested in the man who digs her grave, or even continue
throughout the long conversation to remember always with pain that the
grave is hers. It is fitting, therefore, that he should be made
decidedly humorous. The passage in _Antony and Cleopatra_ is much nearer
to the passage in _Macbeth_, and seems to have been forgotten by those
who say that there is nothing in Shakespeare resembling that
passage.[246] The old Countryman comes at a moment of tragic exaltation,
and the dialogue is appropriately brief. But the moment, though tragic,
is emphatically one of exaltation. We have not been feeling horror, nor
are we feeling a dreadful suspense. We are going to see Cleopatra die,
but she is to die gloriously and to triumph over Octavius. And therefore
our amusement at the old Countryman and the contrast he affords to these
high passions, is untroubled, and it was right to make him really comic.
But the Porter's case is quite different. We cannot forget how the
knocking that makes him grumble sounded to Macbeth, or that within a few
minutes of his opening the gate Duncan will be discovered in his blood;
nor can we help feeling that in pretending to be porter of hell-gate he
is terribly near the truth. To give him language so humorous that it
would ask us almost to lose the sense of these things would have been a
fatal mistake,--the kind of mistake that means want of dramatic
imagination. And that was not the sort of error into which Shakespeare
fell.
To doubt the genuineness of the passage, then, on the ground that it is
not humorous enough for Shakespeare, seems to me to show this want. It
is to judge the passage as though it were a separate composition,
instead of conceiving it in the fulness of its relations to its
surroundings in a stage-play. Taken by itself, I admit, it would bear no
indubitable mark of Shakespeare's authorship, not even in the phrase
'the primrose way to the everlasting bonfire,' which Coleridge thought
Shakespeare might have added to an interpolation of 'the players.' And
if there were reason (as in my judgment there is not) to suppose that
Shakespeare thus permitted an interpolation, or that he collaborated
with another author, I could believe that he left 'the players' or his
collaborator to write the words of the passage. But that anyone except
the author of the scene of Duncan's murder _conceived_ the passage, is
incredible.[247]
* * * * *
The speeches of the Porter, a low comic character, are in prose. So is
the letter of Macbeth to his wife. In both these cases Shakespeare
follows his general rule or custom. The only other prose-speeches occur
in the sleep-walking scene, and here the use of prose may seem strange.
For in great tragic scenes we expect the more poetic medium of
expression, and this is one of the most famous of such scenes. Besides,
unless I mistake, Lady Macbeth is the only one of Shakespeare's great
tragic characters who on a last appearance is denied the dignity of
verse.
Yet in this scene also he adheres to his custom. Somnambulism is an
abnormal condition, and it is his general rule to assign prose to
persons whose state of mind is abnormal. Thus, to illustrate from these
four plays, Hamlet when playing the madman speaks prose, but in
soliloquy, in talking with Horatio, and in pleading with his mother, he
speaks verse.[248] Ophelia in her madness either sings snatches of songs
or speaks prose. Almost all Lear's speeches, after he has become
definitely insane, are in prose: where he wakes from sleep recovered,
the verse returns. The prose enters with that speech which closes with
his trying to tear off his clothes; but he speaks in verse--some of it
very irregular--in the Timon-like speeches where his intellect suddenly
in his madness seems to regain the force of his best days (IV. vi.).
Othello, in IV. i., speaks in verse till the moment when Iago tells him
that Cassio has confessed. There follow ten lines of prose--exclamations
and mutterings of bewildered horror--and he falls to the ground
unconscious.
The idea underlying this custom of Shakespeare's evidently is that the
regular rhythm of verse would be inappropriate where the mind is
supposed to have lost its balance and to be at the mercy of chance
impressions coming from without (as sometimes with Lear), or of ideas
emerging from its unconscious depths and pursuing one another across its
passive surface. The somnambulism of Lady Macbeth is such a condition.
There is no rational connection in the sequence of images and ideas. The
sight of blood on her hand, the sound of the clock striking the hour for
Duncan's murder, the hesitation of her husband before that hour came,
the vision of the old man in his blood, the idea of the murdered wife of
Macduff, the sight of the hand again, Macbeth's 'flaws and starts' at
the sight of Banquo's ghost, the smell on her hand, the washing of hands
after Duncan's murder again, her husband's fear of the buried Banquo,
the sound of the knocking at the gate--these possess her, one after
another, in this chance order. It is not much less accidental than the
order of Ophelia's ideas; the great difference is that with Ophelia
total insanity has effaced or greatly weakened the emotional force of
the ideas, whereas to Lady Macbeth each new image or perception comes
laden with anguish. There is, again, scarcely a sign of the exaltation
of disordered imagination; we are conscious rather of an intense
suffering which forces its way into light against resistance, and speaks
a language for the most part strikingly bare in its diction and simple
in its construction. This language stands in strong contrast with that
of Macbeth in the surrounding scenes, full of a feverish and almost
furious excitement, and seems to express a far more desolating misery.
The effect is extraordinarily impressive. The soaring pride and power of
Lady Macbeth's first speeches return on our memory, and the change is
felt with a breathless awe. Any attempt, even by Shakespeare, to draw
out the moral enfolded in this awe, would but weaken it. For the moment,
too, all the language of poetry--even of Macbeth's poetry--seems to be
touched with unreality, and these brief toneless sentences seem the only
voice of truth.[249]
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 227: So Mrs. Siddons is said to have given the passage.]
[Footnote 228: Surely the usual interpretation of 'We fail?' as a
question of contemptuous astonishment, is right. 'We fail!' gives
practically the same sense, but alters the punctuation of the first two
Folios. In either case, 'But,' I think, means 'Only.' On the other hand
the proposal to read 'We fail.' with a full stop, as expressive of
sublime acceptance of the possibility, seems to me, however attractive
at first sight, quite out of harmony with Lady Macbeth's mood throughout
these scenes.]
[Footnote 229: See Note DD.]
[Footnote 230: It is not new.]
[Footnote 231: The words about Lady Macduff are of course significant of
natural human feeling, and may have been introduced expressly to mark
it, but they do not, I think, show any fundamental change in Lady
Macbeth, for at no time would she have suggested or approved a
_purposeless_ atrocity. It is perhaps characteristic that this human
feeling should show itself most clearly in reference to an act for which
she was not directly responsible, and in regard to which therefore she
does not feel the instinct of self-assertion.]
[Footnote 232: The tendency to sentimentalise Lady Macbeth is partly due
to Mrs. Siddons's fancy that she was a small, fair, blue-eyed woman,
'perhaps even fragile.' Dr. Bucknill, who was unaquainted with this
fancy, independently determined that she was 'beautiful and delicate,'
'unoppressed by weight of flesh,' 'probably small,' but 'a tawny or
brown blonde,' with grey eyes: and Brandes affirms that she was lean,
slight, and hard. They know much more than Shakespeare, who tells us
absolutely nothing on these subjects. That Lady Macbeth, after taking
part in a murder, was so exhausted as to faint, will hardly demonstrate
her fragility. That she must have been blue-eyed, fair, or red-haired,
because she was a Celt, is a bold inference, and it is an idle dream
that Shakespeare had any idea of making her or her husband
characteristically Celtic. The only evidence ever offered to prove that
she was small is the sentence, 'All the perfumes of Arabia will not
sweeten this little hand'; and Goliath might have called his hand
'little' in contrast with all the perfumes of Arabia. One might as well
propose to prove that Othello was a small man by quoting,
I have seen the day,
That, with this little arm and this good sword,
I have made my way through more impediments
Than twenty times your stop.
The reader is at liberty to imagine Lady Macbeth's person in the way
that pleases him best, or to leave it, as Shakespeare very likely did,
unimagined.
Perhaps it may be well to add that there is not the faintest trace in
the play of the idea occasionally met with, and to some extent embodied
in Madame Bernhardt's impersonation of Lady Macbeth, that her hold upon
her husband lay in seductive attractions deliberately exercised.
Shakespeare was not unskilled or squeamish in indicating such ideas.]
[Footnote 233: That it is Macbeth who feels the harmony between the
desolation of the heath and the figures who appear on it is a
characteristic touch.]
[Footnote 234: So, in Holinshed, 'Banquho jested with him and sayde, now
Makbeth thou haste obtayned those things which the twoo former sisters
prophesied, there remayneth onely for thee to purchase that which the
third sayd should come to passe.']
[Footnote 235: =doubts.]
[Footnote 236: =design.]
[Footnote 237:
'tis much he dares,
And, to that dauntless temper of his mind,
He hath a wisdom that doth guide his valour
To act in safety.]
[Footnote 238: So when he hears that Fleance has escaped he is not much
troubled (III. iv. 29):
the worm that's fled
Hath nature that in time will venom breed,
No teeth for the present.
I have repeated above what I have said before, because the meaning of
Macbeth's soliloquy is frequently misconceived.]
[Footnote 239: Virgilia in _Coriolanus_ is a famous example. She speaks
about thirty-five lines.]
[Footnote 240: The percentage of prose is, roughly, in _Hamlet_ 30-2/3,
in _Othello_ 16-1/3, in _King Lear_ 27-1/2, in _Macbeth_ 8-1/2.]
[Footnote 241: Cf. Note F. There are also in _Macbeth_ several shorter
passages which recall the Player's speech. Cf. 'Fortune ... showed like
a rebel's whore' (I. ii. 14) with 'Out! out! thou strumpet Fortune!' The
form 'eterne' occurs in Shakespeare only in _Macbeth_, III. ii. 38, and
in the 'proof eterne' of the Player's speech. Cf. 'So, as a painted
tyrant, Pyrrhus stood,' with _Macbeth_, V. viii. 26; 'the rugged
Pyrrhus, like the Hyrcanian beast,' with 'the rugged Russian bear ... or
the Hyrcan tiger' (_Macbeth_, III. iv. 100); 'like a neutral to his will
and matter' with _Macbeth_, I. v. 47. The words 'Till he unseam'd him
from the nave to the chaps,' in the Serjeant's speech, recall the words
'Then from the navel to the throat at once He ript old Priam,' in _Dido
Queen of Carthage_, where these words follow those others, about Priam
falling with the mere wind of Pyrrhus' sword, which seem to have
suggested 'the whiff and wind of his fell sword' in the Player's
speech.]
[Footnote 242: See Cunliffe, _The Influence of Seneca on Elizabethan
Tragedy_. The most famous of these parallels is that between 'Will all
great Neptune's Ocean,' etc., and the following passages:
Quis eluet me Tanais? aut quae barbaris
Maeotis undis Pontico incumbens mari?
Non ipse toto magnus Oceano pater
Tantum expiarit sceleris. (_Hipp._ 715.)
Quis Tanais, aut quis Nilus, aut quis Persica
Violentus unda Tigris, aut Rhenus ferox,
Tagusve Ibera turbidus gaza fluens,
Abluere dextram poterit? Arctoum licet
Maeotis in me gelida transfundat mare,
Et tota Tethys per meas currat manus,
Haerebit altum facinus. (_Herc. Furens_, 1323.)
(The reader will remember Othello's 'Pontic sea' with its 'violent
pace.') Medea's incantation in Ovid's _Metamorphoses_, vii. 197 ff.,
which certainly suggested Prospero's speech, _Tempest_, V. i. 33 ff.,
should be compared with Seneca, _Herc. Oet._, 452 ff., 'Artibus
magicis,' etc. It is of course highly probable that Shakespeare read
some Seneca at school. I may add that in the _Hippolytus_, beside the
passage quoted above, there are others which might have furnished him
with suggestions. Cf. for instance _Hipp._, 30 ff., with the lines about
the Spartan hounds in _Mids. Night's Dream_, IV. i. 117 ff., and
Hippolytus' speech, beginning 483, with the Duke's speech in _As You
Like It_, II. i.]
[Footnote 243: Cf. Coleridge's note on the Lady Macduff scene.]
[Footnote 244: It is nothing to the purpose that Macduff himself says,
Sinful Macduff,
They were all struck for thee! naught that I am,
Not for their own demerits, but for mine,
Fell slaughter on their souls.
There is no reason to suppose that the sin and demerit he speaks of is
that of leaving his home. And even if it were, it is Macduff that
speaks, not Shakespeare, any more than Shakespeare speaks in the
preceding sentence,
Did heaven look on,
And would not take their part?
And yet Brandes (ii. 104) hears in these words 'the voice of revolt ...
that sounds later through the despairing philosophy of _King Lear_.' It
sounds a good deal earlier too; _e.g._ in _Tit. And._, IV. i. 81, and _2
Henry VI._, II. i. 154. The idea is a commonplace of Elizabethan
tragedy.]
[Footnote 245: And the idea that it was the death of his son Hamnet,
aged eleven, that brought this power to maturity is one of the more
plausible attempts to find in his dramas a reflection of his private
history. It implies however as late a date as 1596 for _King John_.]
[Footnote 246: Even if this were true, the retort is obvious that
neither is there anything resembling the murder-scene in _Macbeth_.]