“_Ros._ Take you me for a spunge, my lord?
_Ham._ Ay, Sir; that soaks up the King’s countenance, his
rewards, his authorities,” &c.
Hamlet’s madness is made to consist in the free utterance of all the
thoughts that had passed through his mind before;—in fact, in telling
home-truths.
Act iv. sc. 5. Ophelia’s singing. O, note the conjunction here of these
two thoughts that had never subsisted in disjunction, the love for Hamlet,
and her filial love, with the guileless floating on the surface of her
pure imagination of the cautions so lately expressed, and the fears not
too delicately avowed, by her father and brother, concerning the dangers
to which her honour lay exposed. Thought, affliction, passion, murder
itself—she turns to favour and prettiness. This play of association is
instanced in the close:—
“My brother shall know of it, and I thank you for your good
counsel.”
_Ib._ Gentleman’s speech:—
“And as the world were now but to begin
Antiquity forgot, custom not known,
The ratifiers and props of every word—
They cry,” &c.
Fearful and self-suspicious as I always feel, when I seem to see an error
of judgment in Shakespeare, yet I cannot reconcile the cool, and, as
Warburton calls it, “rational and consequential,” reflection in these
lines with the anonymousness, or the alarm, of this Gentleman or
Messenger, as he is called in other editions.
_Ib._ King’s speech:—
“There’s such divinity doth hedge a king,
That treason can but peep to what it would,
Acts little of his will.”
Proof, as indeed all else is, that Shakespeare never intended us to see
the King with Hamlet’s eyes; though, I suspect, the managers have long
done so.
_Ib._ Speech of Laertes:—
“To hell, allegiance! vows, to the blackest devil!”
“Laertes is a _good_ character, but,” &c.—WARBURTON.
Mercy on Warburton’s notion of goodness! Please to refer to the seventh
scene of this act;—
“I will do’t;
And for that purpose I’ll anoint my sword,” &c.—
uttered by Laertes after the King’s description of Hamlet;—
... “He being remiss,
Most generous, and free from all contriving,
Will not peruse the foils.”
Yet I acknowledge that Shakespeare evidently wishes, as much as possible,
to spare the character of Laertes,—to break the extreme turpitude of his
consent to become an agent and accomplice of the King’s treachery;—and to
this end he re-introduces Ophelia at the close of this scene to afford a
probable stimulus of passion in her brother.
_Ib._ sc. 6. Hamlet’s capture by the pirates. This is almost the only play
of Shakespeare, in which mere accidents, independent of all will, form an
essential part of the plot;—but here how judiciously in keeping with the
character of the over-meditative Hamlet, ever at last determined by
accident or by a fit of passion!
_Ib._ sc. 7. Note how the King first awakens Laertes’s vanity by praising
the reporter, and then gratifies it by the report itself, and finally
points it by—
... “Sir, this report of his
Did Hamlet so envenom with his envy!”
_Ib._ King’s speech:—
“For goodness, growing to a _pleurisy_,
Dies in his own too much.”
Theobald’s note from Warburton, who conjectures “plethory.”
I rather think that Shakespeare meant “pleurisy,” but involved in it the
thought of _plethora_, as supposing pleurisy to arise from too much blood;
otherwise I cannot explain the following line—
“And then this _should_ is like a spendthrift sigh,
That hurts by easing.”
In a stitch in the side every one must have heaved a sigh that “hurt by
easing.”
Since writing the above I feel confirmed that “pleurisy” is the right
word; for I find that in the old medical dictionaries the pleurisy is
often called the “plethory.”
_Ib._—
“_Queen._ Your sister’s drown’d, Laertes.
_Laer._ Drown’d! O, where?”
That Laertes might be excused in some degree for not cooling, the Act
concludes with the affecting death of Ophelia,—who in the beginning lay
like a little projection of land into a lake or stream, covered with
spray-flowers, quietly reflected in the quiet waters, but at length is
undermined or loosened, and becomes a faery isle, and after a brief
vagrancy sinks almost without an eddy!
Act v. sc. 1. O, the rich contrast between the Clowns and Hamlet, as two
extremes! You see in the former the mockery of logic, and a traditional
wit valued, like truth, for its antiquity, and treasured up, like a tune,
for use.
_Ib._ sc. 1 and 2. Shakespeare seems to mean all Hamlet’s character to be
brought together before his final disappearance from the scene;—his
meditative excess in the grave-digging, his yielding to passion with
Laertes, his love for Ophelia blazing out, his tendency to generalise on
all occasions in the dialogue with Horatio, his fine gentlemanly manners
with Osrick, and his and Shakespeare’s own fondness for presentment:—
“But thou wouldst not think, how ill all’s here about my heart:
but it is no matter.”
“Macbeth.”
“Macbeth” stands in contrast throughout with _Hamlet_; in the manner of
opening more especially. In the latter, there is a gradual ascent from the
simplest forms of conversation to the language of impassioned
intellect,—yet the intellect still remaining the seat of passion: in the
former, the invocation is at once made to the imagination and the emotions
connected therewith. Hence the movement throughout is the most rapid of
all Shakespeare’s plays; and hence also, with the exception of the
disgusting passage of the Porter (Act ii. sc. 3), which I dare pledge
myself to demonstrate to be an interpolation of the actors, there is not,
to the best of my remembrance, a single pun or play on words in the whole
drama. I have previously given an answer to the thousand times repeated
charge against Shakespeare upon the subject of his punning, and I here
merely mention the fact of the absence of any puns in _Macbeth_, as
justifying a candid doubt, at least, whether even in these figures of
speech and fanciful modifications of language, Shakespeare may not have
followed rules and principles that merit and would stand the test of
philosophic examination. And hence, also, there is an entire absence of
comedy, nay, even of irony and philosophic contemplation in _Macbeth_,—the
play being wholly and purely tragic. For the same cause, there are no
reasonings of equivocal morality, which would have required a more
leisurely state and a consequently greater activity of mind;—no sophistry
of self-delusion,—except only that previously to the dreadful act, Macbeth
mistranslates the recoilings and ominous whispers of conscience into
prudential and selfish reasonings; and, after the deed done, the terrors
of remorse into fear from external dangers,—like delirious men who run
away from the phantoms of their own brains, or, raised by terror to rage,
stab the real object that is within their reach:—whilst Lady Macbeth
merely endeavours to reconcile his and her own sinkings of heart by
anticipations of the worst, and an affected bravado in confronting them.
In all the rest, Macbeth’s language is the grave utterance of the very
heart, conscience-sick, even to the last faintings of moral death. It is
the same in all the other characters. The variety arises from rage, caused
ever and anon by disruption of anxious thought, and the quick transition
of fear into it.
In _Hamlet_ and _Macbeth_ the scene opens with superstition; but, in each
it is not merely different, but opposite. In the first it is connected
with the best and holiest feelings; in the second with the shadowy,
turbulent, and unsanctified cravings of the individual will. Nor is the
purpose the same; in the one the object is to excite, whilst in the other
it is to mark a mind already excited. Superstition, of one sort or
another, is natural to victorious generals; the instances are too
notorious to need mentioning. There is so much of chance in warfare, and
such vast events are connected with the acts of a single individual,—the
representative, in truth, of the efforts of myriads, and yet to the
public, and doubtless to his own feelings, the aggregate of all,—that the
proper temperament for generating or receiving superstitious impressions
is naturally produced. Hope, the master element of a commanding genius,
meeting with an active and combining intellect, and an imagination of just
that degree of vividness which disquiets and impels the soul to try to
realise its images, greatly increases the creative power of the mind; and
hence the images become a satisfying world of themselves, as is the case
in every poet and original philosopher:—but hope fully gratified, and yet
the elementary basis of the passion remaining, becomes fear; and, indeed,
the general, who must often feel, even though he may hide it from his own
consciousness, how large a share chance had in his successes, may very
naturally be irresolute in a new scene, where he knows that all will
depend on his own act and election.
The Weird Sisters are as true a creation of Shakespeare’s, as his Ariel
and Caliban,—fates, furies, and materialising witches being the elements.
They are wholly different from any representation of witches in the
contemporary writers, and yet presented a sufficient external resemblance
to the creatures of vulgar prejudice to act immediately on the audience.
Their character consists in the imaginative disconnected from the good;
they are the shadowy obscure and fearfully anomalous of physical nature,
the lawless of human nature,—elemental avengers without sex or kin:—
“Fair is foul, and foul is fair;
Hover through the fog and filthy air.”
How much it were to be wished in playing _Macbeth_, that an attempt should
be made to introduce the flexile character-mask of the ancient
pantomime;—that Flaxman would contribute his genius to the embodying and
making sensuously perceptible that of Shakespeare!
The style and rhythm of the Captain’s speeches in the second scene should
be illustrated by reference to the interlude in _Hamlet_, in which the
epic is substituted for the tragic, in order to make the latter be felt as
the real-life diction. In _Macbeth_ the poet’s object was to raise the
mind at once to the high tragic tone, that the audience might be ready for
the precipitate consummation of guilt in the early part of the play. The
true reason for the first appearance of the Witches is to strike the
key-note of the character of the whole drama, as is proved by their
re-appearance in the third scene, after such an order of the king’s as
establishes their supernatural power of information. I say
information,—for so it only is as to Glamis and Cawdor; the “king
hereafter” was still contingent,—still in Macbeth’s moral will; although,
if he should yield to the temptation, and thus forfeit his free agency,
the link of cause and effect _more physico_ would then commence. I need
not say, that the general idea is all that can be required from the
poet,—not a scholastic logical consistency in all the parts so as to meet
metaphysical objectors. But O! how truly Shakespearian is the opening of
Macbeth’s character given in the _unpossessedness_ of Banquo’s mind,
wholly present to the present object,—an unsullied, unscarified mirror!
And how strictly true to nature it is that Banquo, and not Macbeth
himself, directs our notice to the effect produced on Macbeth’s mind,
rendered temptible by previous dalliance of the fancy with ambitious
thoughts:—
“Good Sir, why do you start; and seem to fear
Things that do sound so fair?”