following Holinshed, has made use in his tragedy. A short time
afterward, Macbeth and Banquo were traveling to Forres, where the
king then lay, "and went sporting by the way together, without
other company save only themselves," when they were suddenly
accosted by three women "in strange and wild apparel, resembling
creatures of the elder world," who saluted Macbeth precisely as
it is related in the tragedy. Upon this, Banquo said, "What
manner of women are you that seem so little favorable unto me,
whereas, to my fellow here, besides high offices, ye assign also
the kingdom, appointing forth nothing for me at all?" "Yes,"
saith the first of them, "we promise greater benefits unto thee
than unto him, for he shall reign, indeed, but with an unlucky
end; neither shall he leave any issue behind him to succeed in
his place; whereas, contrarily, thou indeed shalt not reign at
all, but of thee those shall be born who shall govern the
Scottish kingdoms by long order of continual descent."
{197}
Herewith the women immediately disappeared. Soon afterward, the
thane of Cawdor having been put to death for treason, his title
was conferred upon Macbeth, who now began, as well as Banquo, to
place great faith in the predictions of the witches, and to
devise means for obtaining the crown.
He had a good chance of succeeding legitimately to the throne,
for Duncan's sons were not yet of age to reign, and the law of
Scotland ordained that, if the king died before his sons or
direct descendants were old enough to undertake the management of
affairs, the nearest relative of the deceased king should be
elected in their stead. But Duncan having appointed his son
Malcolm, while still under age, Prince of Cumberland and
successor to the throne, Macbeth, who saw his hopes destroyed by
this proceeding, thought himself entitled to take revenge for the
injustice he had experienced. To this, moreover, he was
incessantly stimulated by his wife, Guach, who, burning with
desire to bear the name of queen, and being, says Boetius, "like
all women, impatient of delay," continually reproached him with
his want of courage. Macbeth, therefore, having assembled a large
number of his friends at Inverness, or, as some say, at
Botgosuane, communicated to them his design, killed Duncan, and
repaired with his party to Scone, where he obtained possession of
the crown without difficulty.
Holinshed's chronicle relates the murder of Duncan without any
detail. The incidents which Shakspeare has interwoven into his
drama are taken from another part of the same chronicle
concerning the murder of King Duff, who had been assassinated
more than sixty years before by a Scottish lord named Donwald.
The following are the circumstances of this murder, as related in
the chronicle:
{198}
Duff had shown himself, from the commencement of his reign, very
anxious to protect the people against malefactors, and "idle
persons who sought to live only upon other men's goods." He put
several to death, and compelled others to withdraw to Ireland, or
else to learn "some manual occupation wherewith to get their
living." Although, as it would appear, these fellows were
connected only in a very remote degree with the high nobility of
Scotland, the nobles, says the chronicle, "were much offended
with this extreme rigor, accounting it a great dishonor for such
as were descended of noble parentage to be constrained to get
their living with the labor of their hands, which only
appertained to plowmen, and such others of the base degree as
were born to travail for the maintenance of the nobility, and to
serve at their commandment." The king was consequently regarded
by them as an enemy of the nobles, and unworthy to govern them,
as he was, they said, devoted solely to the interests of the
people and clergy, who at that time made common cause against the
oppression of the great lords. The discontent increased daily,
and several rebellions arose, in one of which some young
gentlemen engaged, who were relatives of Donwald, the king's
lieutenant of the castle of Forres. These young men were taken
prisoners, and Donwald, who until then had faithfully and
usefully served the king, hoped to obtain their pardon; but not
succeeding in his attempt, he was filled with resentment. His
wife, who was irritated against the king from a similar cause,
spared no efforts to increase his anger, and reminded him how
easy it would be to take his revenge when Duff came, as
frequently happened, to reside at Forres without any other guard
than the garrison of the castle, which was entirely devoted to
them; and "she showed him the means whereby he might soonest
accomplish it."
{199}
Duff came to Forres a short time afterward, and, on the evening
before his departure, when he had gone to bed after spending a
longer time than usual at prayers in his oratory, Donwald and his
wife sat down to table with the two chamberlains, whose
"reare-supper or collation" they had carefully prepared, and
feasted them so well that they fell into a lethargic sleep. Then
Donwald, "though he abhorred the act greatly in heart," at the
instigation of his wife, summoned four of his servants who were
aware of his plot, and whom he had gained over by presents. These
entered the king's chamber, killed him, carried his body out of
the castle by a postern-gate, and, placing it on a horse which
they had provided for the purpose, conveyed it to a place about
two miles distant from the castle. Having got some laborers to
help them to turn the course of a little river that ran through
the fields, they dug a deep hole in the channel and buried the
body in it, "ramming it up with stones and gravel so closely,
that, setting the water in the right course again, no man could
perceive that any thing had been newly digged there. This they
did by order of Donwald, that the body should not be found, and
by bleeding, when Donwald was present, declare him to be guilty
of the murder." Donwald, in the mean while, was careful to be one
of those who kept guard, and did not leave his post during the
whole night. The subsequent circumstances relative to the murder
of the two chamberlains are exactly as Shakspeare has represented
them in "Macbeth;" and the same may be said of the prodigies
which he relates, and which took place at the death of Duff.
{200}
The sun did not appear for six months, until at last, the
murderers having been discovered and executed, it shone forth
again upon the earth, and the fields became covered with flowers,
"clean contrary to the time and season of the year."
To return to Macbeth. The first ten years of his reign were
marked by a wise, equitable, and vigorous government. Several of
his laws have been preserved, of which the following are
specimens:
"He that attendeth any man to the church, market, or to any other
public assembly, as a retainer, shall suffer death, except he
have living at his hands, on whom he so attendeth." The
punishment of death was also decreed against all who became sworn
retainers of any other person than the king.
"All manner of lords and great barons shall not contract
matrimony with other, under pain of death, specially if their
lands and rooms be near together."
"All armor and weapon borne to other effect than in defense of
the king and realm in time of wars, shall be confiscated to the
king's use, with all other movable goods of the party that herein
offendeth." It was also enacted that "a horse kept by any of the
commons or husbandmen to any other use than for tillage and
laboring of the earth shall be forfeited to the king by escheat."
"Such as be appointed governors or (as I may call them) captains,
that buy within those limits where their charges lie any lands or
possessions, shall lose both lands and possessions, and the money
which they have paid fur the same. And if any of the said
captains or governors marry their sons or daughters unto any
manner of person that dwelleth within the bounds of their rooms,
they shall lose their office; neither shall it be lawful for any
of their sons or copartners to occupy the same office."
{201}
"No man shall sit as judge in any temporal court without the
king's commission authorizing him thereto. All conventions,
offices, and acts of justice shall pass in the king's name."
Other laws are intended to assure the immunity of the clergy and
the authority of the censures of the Church, to regulate the
duties of knighthood, the succession of property, and so forth.
Several of these laws, some of which are rather singular for the
time, were passed from motives of order and regularity; others
were destined to maintain civil independence against the
oppressive power of the officers of the crown; but most of them
are evidently intended to diminish the power of the nobles, and
to concentrate all authority in the hands of the king. All are
mentioned by the historians of the period as wise and beneficent
laws; and if Macbeth had obtained the throne by legitimate means,
and had continued in the ways of justice as he began, he might,
says Holinshed, "have been numbered among the most noble princes
that any where had reigned."
"But this," continues our chronicle, "was but a counterfeit zeal
of equity showed by him against his natural inclination." Macbeth
appeared at length in his true colors, and the same feeling of
his position which had led him to seek public favor by justice
changed justice into cruelty; "for the prick of conscience caused
him ever to fear lest he should be served of the same cup as he
had ministered to his predecessor." Now begins the Macbeth of the
tragedy. The murder of Banquo, executed in the same manner and
for the same reasons as those which Shakspeare ascribes to him,
was followed by a great number of other crimes, so that "at
length he found such sweetness by putting his nobles thus to
death, that his earnest thirst after blood in this behalf might
in no wise be satisfied."
{202}
Certain wizards, in whom he placed great trust, had warned him to
beware of Macduff, whose power, moreover, gave him great umbrage,
and he only sought a pretext for giving vent to his hatred of
him. Macduff, informed of his danger, passed over into England to
invite Malcolm, who had taken refuge in that country, to return
to claim his rights. Macbeth became acquainted with this plot,
"for kings," says the chronicle, "have sharp sight like unto
lynx, and long ears like unto Midas;" and Macbeth maintained
spies in the houses of all the nobles of his realm. The flight of
Macduff, the massacre of all his family, and his conversation
with Malcolm, are all facts taken from the chronicle. Malcolm at
first met Macduff's entreaties with objections based upon his
own incontinence, and Macduff replied as in Shakspeare, with this
addition only, "Make thyself king, and I shall convey the matter
so wisely that thou shalt be so satisfied at thy pleasure in such
secret wise that no man shall be aware thereof." The remainder of
the scene is faithfully imitated by the poet; and all that
concerns the death of Macbeth, the predictions that had been made
to him, and the manner in which they were at once eluded and
accomplished, is taken almost word for word from the chronicle,
in which we see at last how, "by illusion of the devil, he
defamed, with most terrible cruelty, his reign, which in the
beginning was very profitable to the commonwealth." Macbeth had
assassinated Duncan in the year 1040, and he was himself killed
in 1057, after a reign of seventeen years. [Footnote 26]
[Footnote 26: Holinshed's Chronicle, "History of Scotland,"
vol. i., p. 168-176. The story of the murder of King Duff is
contained in p. 150, 151. It was probably of the facts
furnished by Hector Boëtius to this chronicle that Buchanan,
when relating in a much more summary manner the history of
Macbeth, said, "Multa hic fabulose quidam nostrorum
affingunt; sed quia theatris aut Milesiis fabulis sunt
aptiora quam historiæ, ea omitto."--_Rerum. Scot.
Hist._, lib. vii.]
{203}
Such is a general view of the facts to which Shakspeare undertook
to impart a soul and life. He places himself simply in the midst
of the events and personages, and, setting all these inanimate
things in motion with a breath, he enables us to witness the
spectacle of their existence. Far from adding any thing to the
incidents furnished him by the narrative from which he has
borrowed his subject, he omits many things; he is especially
careful to lop off every thing that might injure the simplicity
of his progress, and embarrass the action of his personages; and
he suppresses every thing that might prevent him from fathoming
them with a single glance, and portraying them with a few bold
touches. Macbeth, with all the crimes and great qualities
ascribed to him by his history, would be too complicated a being;
it would be necessary for him to possess at once too much
ambition and too much virtue for one of his dispositions to
maintain itself for any time in presence of the other, and too
cumbrous machinery would be required to make the balance finally
incline to one or the other side. Shakspeare's Macbeth is
brilliant only by his warlike virtues, and especially by his
personal bravery; he has only the qualities and the defects of a
barbarian; brave, but not a stranger to the fear of peril when he
believes in its proximity; cruel and sensitive by fits and
starts; perfidious through his inconstancy; always ready to yield
to any temptation that presents itself, whether it lead to crime
or to virtue--he displays, in his ambition as well as in his
criminality, that character of thoughtlessness and mobility which
belongs to an almost savage state of civilization.
{204}
His passions are imperious, but no series of reasonings and
projects determines and governs them; they form a lofty tree, but
one devoid of roots, which the least breeze may shake, and the
fall of which is a disaster. Hence arises his tragic grandeur; it
resides in his destiny more than in his character. Macbeth, if
placed at a greater distance from the expectation of succession
to the throne, would have remained virtuous; but his virtue,
would have been restless, for it would have been merely the fruit
of circumstance. His crime becomes a punishment to him, because
it is circumstance which has forced him to commit it; this crime
did not proceed from the depths of Macbeth's nature, and yet it
clings to him, envelops him, enchains him, racks him in every
part, and thus creates for him a troubled and irremissible
destiny, in which the unhappy victim vainly writhes, doing
nothing that does not plunge him still deeper, and with
increasing despair, into the career which is henceforward
prescribed to him by his implacable persecutor. Macbeth is one of
those characters marked out in all superstitions to become the
prey and instrument of the perverse spirit who takes pleasure in
destroying them, because they have received some spark of the
divine nature, and who, at the same time, meets with but few
difficulties in his task, for the heavenly light darts but a few
fleeting rays into their souls, which are obscured by storms at
every instant.
Lady Macbeth is just exactly the wife of such a man, the product
of the same state of civilization, and of the same habit of
passions. She adds to this, moreover, the fact that she is a
woman without prudence, without generality in her views,
perceiving at once only a single part of a single idea, and
giving herself up to it entirely, without ever admitting any
thing that might distract or disturb her attention from it.
{205}
The feelings which belong to her sex are not unknown to her; she
loves her husband, knows the pleasures of a mother, and could not
kill Duncan herself, because he resembled "her father as he
slept;" but she aspires to be queen, and for this cause Duncan
must die; she sees nothing in the death of Duncan but the
pleasure of being queen; her courage is easy, for she does not
perceive any thing to make her recoil from the deed. When her
passion is satisfied and the action committed, then only will the
other consequences be revealed to her as a novelty of which she
previously had not the slightest anticipation. Those fears, and
that necessity for new crimes, which her husband had foreseen at
the outset, she has never thought of. She was quite willing to
throw the crime upon the two chamberlains, but it was not her
idea to kill them; she did not arrange the murder of Banquo, or
the massacre of Macduff's family; she did not see so far forward;
she had not even divined the effect which would be produced upon
her by such a sight, when she entered the room in which Duncan
lay dead. She leaves it in agitation, no longer contemning the
terrors of her husband, but merely urging him not to dwell too
much upon images, by which we see that she is beginning to feel
herself besieged. The blow is struck, and will reveal itself in
the admirable and terrible scene of her somnambulism: there we
shall learn what becomes of a character apparently so immovable,
when it is no longer sustained by the blind fury of passion.
Macbeth has become hardened in crime, after having hesitated to
commit it, because he knew its character; but we shall see his
wife, succumbing beneath the knowledge which she has acquired too
late, substitute one fixed idea for another, die to deliver
herself from its influence, and punish, by the madness of
despair, the crime which she was led to commit by the madness of
ambition.
{206}
The other personages, introduced merely to fill up this great
picture of the progress and destiny of crime, have no other color
than that of the position given them by history. The Witches are,
indeed, what they should be, and I do not know why it is the
custom to exclaim with disgust against this portion of the
representation of "Macbeth." When we see these vile creatures the
arbiters of life and death, of all the chances and all the
interests of humanity, disposing of them in accordance with the
most contemptible caprices of their odious nature, to the terror
which their power inspires is added the dread occasioned by their
unreason, and the very absurdity of such a spectacle only
augments its effect.
The style of "Macbeth" is remarkable, in its wild energy, for a
refinement which we may indeed blame, but which it would be wrong
to consider as contrary to truth as it is to naturalness.
Refinement of language is not incompatible with rudeness of
manners and ideas; it seems even to be rather common in times and
positions in which general ideas are wanting. The mind, which can
not remain idle, then attaches itself to the slightest verbal
connections, takes delight in them, and makes a habit of them,
which we meet with in all analogous positions. Nothing can be
more far-fetched than the spirit of the literature of the Middle
Ages; and what we know of the speech of savages contains many
choice ideas. Refinement is the characteristic of the wits of the
lower classes; and even the insults of the common people are
sometimes composed with a quite singular fastidiousness, as if,
at those times when anger excites their faculties, their mind
seized with greater facility and abundance upon relations of this
kind, the only ones which it was capable of attaining.
{207}
It is believed that "Macbeth" was performed in 1606. The idea of
writing a tragedy upon this subject, which would necessarily be
pleasing to King James, who had just ascended the throne of
England, was probably suggested to Shakspeare by a short poetical
dialogue, which the students of Oxford, in 1605, recited in Latin
before the king, and in English before the queen, who had
accompanied him to that city. The students were three in number,
and probably spoke in turn. Their speech turned upon the
prediction uttered to Banquo; and, in allusion to the triple
salutation which Macbeth had received, they hailed James King of
England, Scotland, and Ireland. They also hailed him King of
France, which destroyed, somewhat gratuitously, the virtue of the
number _three_.
{208}
Julius Cæsar.
(1607.)
Among those tragedies of Shakspeare to which public opinion has
assigned a first rank, "Julius Cæsar" is the one of which the
commentators have spoken most coldly. Johnson, the coldest of
them all, contents himself with saying: "Of this tragedy, many
particular passages deserve regard, and the contention and
reconcilement of Brutus and Cassius is universally celebrated;
but I have never been strongly agitated in perusing it, and think
it somewhat cold and unaffecting, compared with some other of
Shakspeare's plays."
It is to adopt an entirely false principle of criticism to judge
Shakspeare by himself, and to compare the impressions which he
has succeeded in producing, in a given style and subject, with
those which he calls forth in another style and subject; as if he
possessed only a special and singular merit, which he was bound
to display on every occasion, and which constituted his sole
title to glory. His vast and true genius must be measured on a
larger scale; we must compare Shakspeare with nature, with the
world; and in every particular case, the comparison must be made
between that portion of the world and of nature which it was his
intention to represent, and the picture which he has drawn of it.
{209}
Do not expect from the painter of Brutus the same impressions and
the same effects as from the delineator of King Lear, or of Romeo
and Juliet. Shakspeare penetrates to the inmost recesses of all
subjects, and can derive from each the impressions which
naturally flow from it, and the distinct and original effects
which it ought to produce.
That, after this, the spectacle of the soul of Brutus should he,
to Johnson, less touching and dramatic than the display of any
particular passion, or of any particular position in life, is a
result of the personal inclinations of the critic, and of the
turn taken by his ideas and feelings. We can not find in it a
general rule upon which we may found a comparison between works
of an absolutely different kind. There are minds so constituted
that Corneille will fill them with more emotions than Voltaire,
and a mother will feel her nature more agitated and disturbed by
Mérope than by Zaire. The mind of Johnson, more strong and
upright than it was elevated, could understand tolerably well the
interests and passions which agitate the middle region of life,
but he never could attain to those lofty eminences in which a
truly stoical soul can exist without effort or distraction. The
age in which Johnson lived, moreover, was not an age of great
devotements; and although, even at that epoch, the political
climate of England preserved its literature in some degree from
that effeminate influence which had enervated our own, it could
not entirely escape from that general disposition of the national
mind, that sort of moral materialism, which, granting, as it
were, to the soul no other life but that which it derives from
the contact of external objects, did not suppose it possible for
it to be supplied with other sources of interest than the
_pathetic_, properly so called--the individual sorrows of
life, the anguish of the heart, and the storms of the passions.
{210}
This disposition of the eighteenth century was so powerful, that,
when introducing the death of Cæsar upon our stage, Voltaire, who
justly boasted that he had made a tragedy succeed without the aid
of love, nevertheless did not think that such a spectacle could
dispense with the pathetic interest which results from the
painful conflict of duty and affection. In this great struggle of
the last efforts of dying liberty against budding despotism, he
sought out, and gave the first place to, an obscure and doubtful
fact, but one which was adapted to furnish him with the kind of
emotions of which he stood in need; and from the position, real
or fictitious, of Brutus placed between his father and his
country, Voltaire has constructed the basis and lifespring of his
tragedy.
Shakspeare's drama rests entirely upon the character of Brutus;
and he has even been blamed for not having entitled his work
"Marcus Brutus" instead of "Julius Cæsar." But if Brutus is the
hero of the play, the power and death of Cæsar form its subject.
Cæsar alone occupies the foreground; the horror felt for his
power, and the necessity of deliverance from it, fill the whole
of the first part of the drama; the other half is consecrated to
the recollection and consequences of his death. It is, as Antony
says,
"Cæsar's spirit ranging for revenge;"
and, that his sway may not be lost sight of, it is still his
spirit which, on the plains of Sardis and of Philippi, appears to
Brutus as his evil genius.
{211}