bond of entire affection and confidence which, through the whole of this
dreadful tissue of crime and its consequences, unites Macbeth and his
wife; claiming from us an involuntary respect and sympathy, and shedding
a softening influence over the whole tragedy. Macbeth leans upon her
strength, trusts in her fidelity, and throws himself on her tenderness.
O full of scorpions is my mind, dear wife!
She sustains him, calms him, soothes him--
Come on;
Gentle my lord, sleek o'er your rugged looks;
Be bright and jovial 'mong your guests to-night.
The endearing epithets, the terms of fondness in which he addresses her,
and the tone of respect she invariably maintains towards him, even when
most exasperated by his vacillation of mind and his brain-sick terrors,
have, by the very force of contrast, a powerful effect on the fancy.
By these tender redeeming touches we are impressed with a feeling that
Lady Macbeth's influence over the affections of her husband, as a wife
and a woman, is at least equal to her power over him as a superior mind.
Another thing has always struck me. During the supper scene, in which
Macbeth is haunted by the spectre of the murdered Banquo, and his reason
appears unsettled by the extremity of his horror and dismay, her
indignant rebuke, her low whispered remonstrance, the sarcastic
emphasis with which she combats his sick fancies, and endeavors to
recall him to himself, have an intenseness, a severity, a bitterness,
which makes the blood creep.
LADY MACBETH.
Are you a man?
MACBETH.
Ay, and a bold one, that dare look on that
Which might appall the devil.
LADY MACBETH.
O proper stuff!
This is the very painting of your fear:
This is the air-drawn dagger, which, you said,
Led you to Duncan. O, these flaws and starts
(Impostors to true fear) would well become
A woman's story, at a winter's fire,
Authoriz'd by her grandam! Shame itself!
Why do you make such faces? When all's done
You look but on a stool.
What! quite unmann'd in folly?
Yet when the guests are dismissed, and they are left alone, she says no
more, and not a syllable of reproach or scorn escapes her: a few words
in submissive reply to his questions, and an entreaty to seek repose,
are all she permits herself to utter. There is a touch of pathos and of
tenderness in this silence which has always affected me beyond
expression: it is one of the most masterly and most beautiful traits of
character in the whole play.
Lastly, it is clear that in a mind constituted like that of Lady
Macbeth, and not utterly depraved and hardened by the habit of crime,
conscience must wake some time or other, and bring with it remorse
closed by despair, and despair by death. This great moral retribution
was to be displayed to us--but how? Lady Macbeth is not a woman to start
at shadows; she mocks at air-drawn daggers; she sees no imagined
spectres rise from the tomb to appall or accuse her.[115] The towering
bravery of _her_ mind disdains the visionary terrors which haunt her
weaker husband. We know, or rather we feel, that she who could give a
voice to the most direful intent, and call on the spirits that wait on
mortal thoughts to "unsex her," and "stop up all access and passage of
remorse"--to that remorse would have given nor tongue nor sound; and
that rather than have uttered a complaint, she would have held her
breath and died. To have given her a confidant, though in the partner of
her guilt, would have been a degrading resource, and have disappointed
and enfeebled all our previous impressions of her character; yet justice
is to be done, and we are to be made acquainted with that which the
woman herself would have suffered a thousand deaths of torture rather
than have betrayed. In the sleeping scene we have a glimpse into the
depths of that inward hell: the seared brain and broken heart are laid
bare before us in the helplessness of slumber. By a judgment the most
sublime ever imagined, yet the most unforced, natural, and inevitable,
the sleep of her who murdered sleep is no longer repose, but a
condensation of resistless horrors which the prostrate intellect and
powerless will can neither baffle nor repel. We shudder and are
satisfied; yet our human sympathies are again touched: we rather sigh
over the ruin than exult in it; and after watching her through this
wonderful scene with a sort of fascination, we dismiss the unconscious,
helpless, despair-stricken murderess, with a feeling which Lady Macbeth,
in her waking strength, with all her awe-commanding powers about her,
could never have excited.
It is here especially we perceive that sweetness of nature which in
Shakspeare went hand in hand with his astonishing powers. He never
confounds that line of demarcation which eternally separates good from
evil, yet he never places evil before us without exciting in some way a
consciousness of the opposite good which shall balance and relieve it.
I do deny that he has represented in Lady Macbeth a woman "_naturally
cruel_,"[116] "_invariably savage_,"[117] or endued with "_pure demoniac
firmness_."[118] If ever there could have existed a woman to whom such
phrases could apply--a woman without touch of modesty, pity or
fear,--Shakspeare knew that a thing so monstrous was unfit for all the
purposes of poetry. If Lady Macbeth had been _naturally_ cruel, she
needed not so solemnly to have abjured all pity, and called on the
spirits that wait on mortal thoughts to _unsex_ her; nor would she have
been loved to excess by a man of Macbeth's character; for it is the
sense of intellectual energy and strength of will overpowering her
feminine nature, which draws from him that burst of intense admiration--
Bring forth men children only,
For thy undaunted metal should compose
Nothing but males.
If she had been _invariably_ savage, her love would not have comforted
and sustained her husband in his despair, nor would her uplifted dagger
have been arrested by a dear and venerable image rising between her soul
and its fell purpose. If endued with _pure demoniac firmness_, her
woman's nature would not, by the reaction, have been so horribly
avenged, she would not have died of remorse and despair.
* * * * *
We cannot but observe that through the whole of the dialogue
appropriated to Lady Macbeth, there is something very peculiar and
characteristic in the turn of expression: her compliments, when she is
playing the hostess or the queen, are elaborately elegant and
verbose: but, when in earnest, she speaks in short energetic
sentences--sometimes abrupt, but always full of meaning; her thoughts
are rapid and clear, her expressions forcible, and the imagery like
sudden flashes of lightning: all the foregoing extracts exhibit this,
but I will venture one more, as an immediate illustration.
MACBETH.
My dearest love,
Duncan comes here to-night.
LADY MACBETH.
And when goes hence?
MACBETH.
To-morrow,--as he purposes.
LADY MACBETH.
O never
Shall sun that morrow see!
Thy face, my thane, is as a book, where men
May read strange matters;--to beguile the time,
Look like the time; bear welcome in your eye
Your tongue, your hand; look like the innocent flower,
But be the serpent under it.
What would not the firmness, the self-command, the enthusiasm, the
intellect, the ardent affections of this woman have performed, if
properly directed? but the object being unworthy of the effort, the end
is disappointment, despair, and death.
The power of religion could alone have controlled such a mind; but it is
the misery of a very proud, strong, and gifted spirit, without sense of
religion, that instead of looking upward to find a superior, looks
round and sees all things as subject to itself. Lady Macbeth is placed
in a dark, ignorant, iron age; her powerful intellect is slightly tinged
with its credulity and superstition, but she has no religious feeling to
restrain the force of will. She is a stern fatalist in principle and
action--"what is done, is done," and would be done over again under the
same circumstances; her remorse is without repentance, or any reference
to an offended Deity; it arises from the pang of a wounded conscience,
the recoil of the violated feelings of nature: it is the horror of the
past, not the terror of the future; the torture of self-condemnation,
not the fear of judgment; it is strong as her soul, deep as her guilt,
fatal as her resolve, and terrible as her crime.
If it should be objected to this view of Lady Macbeth's character, that
it engages our sympathies in behalf of a perverted being--and that to
leave her so strong a power upon our feelings in the midst of such
supreme wickedness, involves a moral wrong, I can only reply in the
words of Dr. Channing, that "in this and the like cases our interest
fastens on what is _not_ evil in the character--that there is something
kindling and ennobling in the consciousness, however awakened, of the
energy which resides in mind; and many a virtuous man has borrowed new
strength from the force, constancy, and dauntless courage of evil
agents."[119]
This is true; and might he not have added, that many a powerful and
gifted spirit has learnt humility and self-government, from beholding
how far the energy which resides in mind may be degraded and perverted?
* * * * *
In general, when a woman is introduced into a tragedy to be the
presiding genius of evil in herself, or the cause of evil to others, she
is either too feebly or too darkly portrayed; either crime is heaped on
crime, and horror on horror, till our sympathy is lost in incredulity,
or the stimulus is sought in unnatural or impossible situations, or in
situations that ought to be impossible, (as in the Myrrha or the Cenci,)
or the character is enfeebled by a mixture of degrading propensities and
sexual weakness, as in Vittoria Corombona. But Lady Macbeth, though so
supremely wicked, and so consistently feminine, is still kept aloof from
all base alloy. When Shakspeare created a female character purely
detestable, he made her an accessory, never a principal. Thus Regan and
Goneril are two powerful sketches of selfishness, cruelty, and
ingratitude; we abhor them whenever we see or think of them, but we
think very little about them, except as necessary to the action of the
drama. They are to cause the madness of Lear, and to call forth the
filial devotion of Cordelia, and their depravity is forgotten in its
effects. A comparison has been made between Lady Macbeth and the Greek
Clytemnestra in the Agamemnon of Eschylus. The Clytemnestra of
Sophocles is something more in Shakspeare's spirit, for she is something
less impudently atrocious; but, considered as a woman and an individual,
would any one compare this shameless adulteress, cruel murderess, and
unnatural mother, with Lady Macbeth? Lady Macbeth herself would
certainly shrink from the approximation.[120]
The Electra of Sophocles comes nearer to Lady Macbeth as a poetical
conception, with this strong distinction, that she commands more respect
and esteem, and less sympathy. The murder in which she participates is
ordained by the oracle--is an act of justice, and therefore less a
murder than a sacrifice. Electra is drawn with magnificent simplicity
and intensity of feeling and purpose, but there is a want of light, and
shade, and relief. Thus the scene in which Orestes stabs his mother
within her chamber, and she is heard pleading for mercy, while Electra
stands forward listening exultingly to her mother's cries, and urging
her brother to strike again, "another blow! another!" &c. is terribly
fine, but the horror is too shocking, too _physical_--if I may use such
an expression: it will not surely bear a comparison with the murdering
scene in Macbeth, where the exhibition of various passions--the
irresolution of Macbeth, the bold determination of his wife, the deep
suspense, the rage of the elements without, the horrid stillness within,
and the secret feeling of that infernal agency which is ever present to
the fancy, even when not visible on the scene--throw a rich coloring of
poetry over the whole, which does not take from "the present horror of
the time," and yet relieves it. Shakspeare's blackest shadows are like
those of Rembrandt; so intense, that the gloom which brooded over Egypt
in her day of wrath was pale in comparison--yet so transparent that we
seem to see the light of heaven through their depth.
In the whole compass of dramatic poetry, there is but one female
character which can be placed near that of Lady Macbeth; the MEDEA. Not
the vulgar, voluble fury of the Latin tragedy,[121] nor the Medea in a
hoop petticoat of Corneille, but the genuine Greek Medea,--the Medea of
Euripides.[122]
There is something in the _Medea_ which seizes irresistibly on the
imagination. Her passionate devotion to Jason, for whom she had left her
parents and country--to whom she had given all, and
Would have drawn the spirit from her breast
Had he but asked it, sighing forth her soul
Into his bosom;[123]
the wrongs and insults which drive her to desperation--the horrid
refinement of cruelty with which she plans and executes her revenge upon
her faithless husband--the gush of fondness with which she weeps over
her children, whom in the next moment she devotes to destruction in a
paroxysm of insane fury, carry the terror and pathos of tragic situation
to their extreme height. But if we may be allowed to judge through the
medium of a translation, there is a certain hardness in the manner of
treating the character, which in some degree defeats the effect. Medea
talks too much: her human feelings and superhuman power are not
sufficiently blended. Taking into consideration the different impulses
which actuate Medea and Lady Macbeth, as love, jealousy, and revenge on
the one side, and ambition on the other, we expect to find more of
female nature in the first than in the last: and yet the contrary is the
fact: at least, my own impression as far as a woman may judge of a
woman, is, that although the passions of Medea are more feminine, the
character is less so; we seem to require more feeling in her
fierceness, more passion in her frenzy; something less of poetical
abstraction,--less art, fewer words: her delirious vengeance we might
forgive, but her calmness and subtlety are rather revolting.
These two admirable characters, placed in contrast to each other, afford
a fine illustration of Schlegel's distinction between the ancient or
Greek drama, which he compares to sculpture, and the modern or romantic
drama, which he compares to painting. The gothic grandeur, the rich
chiaroscuro, and deep-toned colors of Lady Macbeth, stand thus opposed
to the classical elegance and mythological splendor, the delicate yet
inflexible outline of the Medea. If I might be permitted to carry this
illustration still further, I would add, that there exists the same
distinction between the Lady Macbeth and the Medea, as between the
Medusa of Leonardo da Vinci and the Medusa of the Greek gems and bas
reliefs. In the painting, the horror of the subject is at once exalted
and softened by the most vivid coloring, and the most magical contrast
of light and shade. We gaze--until, from the murky depths of the
background, the serpent hair seems to stir and glitter as if instinct
with life, and the head itself, in all its ghastliness and brightness,
appears to rise from the canvass with the glare of reality. In the
Medusa of sculpture, how different is the effect on the imagination! We
have here the snakes convolving round the winged and graceful head: the
brows contracted with horror and pain; but every feature is chiselled
into the most regular and faultless perfection; and amid the gorgon
terrors, there rests a marbly, fixed, supernatural grace, which, without
reminding us for a moment of common life or nature, stands before us a
presence, a power, and an enchantment!
FOOTNOTES:
[66] Milton.
[67] "That the treachery of King John, the death of Arthur, and the
grief of Constance, had a real truth in history, sharpens the sense of
pain, while it hangs a leaden weight on the heart and the imagination.
Something whispers us that we have no right to make a mock of calamities
like these, or to turn the truth of things into the puppet and plaything
of our fancies."--See Characters of Shakspeare's Plays.--To consider
_thus_ is not to consider _too_ deeply, but not deeply _enough_.
[68] _Grave_, in the sense of mighty or potent.
[69] Fulvia, the first wife of Antony.
[70] The well-known violence and coarseness of Queen Elizabeth's
manners, in which she was imitated by the women about her, may in
Shakspeare's time have rendered the image of a royal virago less
offensive and less extraordinary.
[71] She was as good as her word. See the life of Antony in Plutarch.
[72] _i. e._ retinue.
[73] _i. e._ silver coins, from the Spanish _plata_.
[74] Cleopatra replies to the first word she hears on recovering her
sense, "No more _an empress_, but a mere woman!"
[75] _i. e._ sedate determination.--JOHNSON
[76] The Cleopatra of Jodelle was the first regular French tragedy: the
last French tragedy on the same subject was the Cleopatre of Marmontel.
For the representation of this tragedy Vaucanson, the celebrated French
mechanist, invented an automaton asp, which crawled and hissed to the
life,--to the great delight of the Parisians. But it appears that
neither Vaucanson's asp, nor Clairon, could save Cleopatre from a
deserved fate. Of the English tragedies, one was written by the Countess
of Pembroke, the sister of Sir Philip Sydney; and is, I believe, the
first instance in our language, of original dramatic writing, by female.
[77] "The sober eye of dull Octavia."--Act v. scene 2.
[78] Octavia was never in Egypt.
[79] "The Octavia of Dryden is a much more important personage than in
the Antony and Cleopatra of Shakspeare. She is, however, more cold and
unamiable, for in the very short scenes in which the Octavia of
Shakspeare is introduced, she is placed in rather an interesting point
of view. But Dryden has himself informed us that he was apprehensive
that the justice of a wife's claim would draw the audience to her side,
and lessen their interest in the lover and the mistress. He seems
accordingly to have studiously lowered the character of the injured
Octavia who, in her conduct to her husband, shows much duty and little
love." Sir W. Scott (in the same fine piece of criticism prefixed to
Dryden's All for Love) gives the preference to Shakspeare's Cleopatra.
[80] In all, about two thousand pounds.
[81] The corresponding passage in the old English Plutarch runs thus:
"My son, why dost thou not answer me? Dost thou think it good altogether
to give place unto thy choler and revenge, and thinkest thou it not
honesty for thee to grant thy mother's request in so weighty a cause?
Dost thou take it honorable for a nobleman to remember the wrongs and
injuries done him, and dost not in like case think it an honest
nobleman's part to be thankful for the goodness that parents do show to
their children, acknowledging the duty and reverence they ought to bear
unto them? No man living is more bound to show himself thankful in all
parts and respects than thyself, who so universally showest all
ingratitude. Moreover, my son, thou hast sorely taken of thy country,
exacting grievous payments upon them in revenge of the injuries offered
thee; besides, thou hast not hitherto showed thy poor mother any
courtesy. And, therefore, it is not only honest, but due unto me, that
without compulsion I should obtain my so just and reasonable request of
thee. But since by reason I cannot persuade ye to it, to what purpose do
I defer my last hope?" And with these words, herself, his wife, and
children, fell down upon their knees before him.
[82] _Vide_ Daru, Histoire de Bretagne.
[83] _Vide_ Sir Peter Leycester's Antiquities of Chester.
[84] By the treaty of Messina, 1190
[85] Malone says, that "In expanding the character of the bastard,
Shakspeare seems to have proceeded on the following slight hint in an
old play on the story of King John:--
Next them a bastard of the king's deceased--
A hardy wild-head, rough and venturous."
It is easy to _say_ this; yet who but Shakspeare could have expanded the
last line into a Falconbridge?
[86] The Greek Merope, which was esteemed one of the finest of the
tragedies of Euripides, is unhappily lost; those of Maffei, Alfieri, and
Voltaire, are well known. There is another Merope in Italian, which I
have not seen: the English Merope is merely a bad translation from
Voltaire.
[87] "Queen Elinor saw that if he were king, how his mother Constance
would look to bear the most rule in the realm of England, till her son
should come of a lawful age to govern of himself."--HOLINSHED.
[88] King John, Act iii, Scene 1.
[89] Louis VII. of France, whom she was accustomed to call, in contempt,
_the monk_. Elinor's adventures in Syria, whither she accompanied Louis
on the second Crusade, would form a romance.
[90] Henry II. of England. It is scarcely necessary to observe that the
story of Fair Rosamond, as far as Elinor is concerned, is a mere
invention of some ballad-maker of later times.
[91] _Vide_ Mezerai.
[92] When at Naples, I have often stood upon the rock at the extreme
point of Posilippo, and looked down upon the little Island of Nisida,
and thought of this scene till I forgot the Lazaretta which now deforms
it: deforms it, however, to the fancy only, for the building itself, as
it rises from amid the vines, the cypresses and fig-trees which embosom
it, looks beautiful at a distance.
[93] "The contention of the two Houses of York and Lancaster," in two
parts, supposed by Malone to have been written about 1590.
[94] I abstain from making any remarks on the character of Joan of Arc,
as delineated in the First part of Henry VI.; first, because I do not in
my conscience attribute it to Shakspeare, and secondly, because in
representing her according to the vulgar English traditions, as half
sorceress, half enthusiast, and in the end, corrupted by pleasure and
ambition, the truth of history, and the truth of nature, justice, and
common sense, are equally violated. Schiller has treated the character
nobly: but in making Joan the slave of passion, and the victim of love,
instead of the victim of patriotism, has committed, I think, a serious
error in judgment and feeling; and I cannot sympathize with Madame de
Stael's defence of him on this particular point. There was no occasion
for this deviation from the truth of things, and from the dignity and
spotless purity of the character. This young enthusiast, with her
religious reveries, her simplicity, her heroism, her melancholy, her
sensibility, her fortitude, her perfectly feminine bearing in all her
exploits, (for though she so often led the van of battle unshrinking,
while death was all around her, she never struck a blow, nor stained her
consecrated sword with blood,--another point in which Schiller has
wronged her,) this heroine and martyr, over whose last moments we shed
burning tears of pity and indignation, remains yet to be treated as a
Dramatic character, and I know but one person capable of doing this.
[95] See Henry VI. Part III. Act. iii. sc. 3--
QUEEN MARGARET.
Warwick, these words have turned my hate to love,--
And I forgive and quite forget old faults,
And joy that thou becom'st King Henry's friend.
[96] Horace Walpole observes, that "it is evident from the conduct of
Shakspeare, that the house of Tudor retained all their Lancasterian
prejudices even in the reign of Queen Elizabeth. In his play of Richard
the Third, he seems to deduce the woes of the house of York from the
curses which Queen Margaret had vented against them; and he could not
give that weight to her curses, without supposing a right in her to
utter them."
[97] See her letters in Ellis's Collection.
[98] Under similar circumstances, one of Katherine's predecessors,
Philippe of Hainault, had gained in her husband's absence the battle of
Neville Cross, in which David Bruce was taken prisoner.
[99] Ellis's Collection. We must keep in mind that Katherine was a
foreigner, and till after she was seventeen, never spoke or wrote a word
of English.
[100] Hall's Chronicle
[101] Hall's Chronicle, p. 781.