Shakespearean Tragedy Part 29

[Footnote 206: See Note CC.]

[Footnote 207: The proclamation of Malcolm as Duncan's successor (I.

iv.) changes the position, but the design of murder is prior to this.]

[Footnote 208: Schlegel's a.s.sertion that the first thought of the murder comes from the Witches is thus in flat contradiction with the text. (The sentence in which he a.s.serts this is, I may observe, badly mistranslated in the English version, which, wherever I have consulted the original, shows itself untrustworthy. It ought to be revised, for Schlegel is well worth reading.)]

[Footnote 209: It is noticeable that Dr. Forman, who saw the play in 1610 and wrote a sketch of it in his journal, says nothing about the later prophecies. Perhaps he despised them as mere stuff for the groundlings. The reader will find, I think, that the great poetic effect of Act IV. Sc. i. depends much more on the 'charm' which precedes Macbeth's entrance, and on Macbeth himself, than on the predictions.]

[Footnote 210: This comparison was suggested by a pa.s.sage in Hegel's _Aesthetik_, i. 291 ff.]

[Footnote 211: _Il._ i. 188 ff. (Leaf's translation).]

[Footnote 212: The supernaturalism of the modern poet, indeed, is more 'external' than that of the ancient. We have already had evidence of this, and shall find more when we come to the character of Banquo.]

[Footnote 213: The a.s.sertion that Lady Macbeth sought a crown for herself, or sought anything for herself, apart from her husband, is absolutely unjustified by anything in the play. It is based on a sentence of Holinshed's which Shakespeare did _not_ use.]

[Footnote 214: The word is used of him (I. ii. 67), but not in a way that decides this question or even bears on it.]

[Footnote 215: This view, thus generally stated, is not original, but I cannot say who first stated it.]

[Footnote 216: The latter, and more important, point was put quite clearly by Coleridge.]

[Footnote 217: It is the consequent insistence on the idea of fear, and the frequent repet.i.tion of the word, that have princ.i.p.ally led to misinterpretation.]

[Footnote 218: _E.g._ I. iii. 149, where he excuses his abstraction by saying that his 'dull brain was wrought with things forgotten,' when nothing could be more natural than that he should be thinking of his new honour.]

[Footnote 219: _E.g._ in I. iv. This is so also in II. iii. 114 ff., though here there is some real imaginative excitement mingled with the rhetorical ant.i.theses and balanced clauses and forced bombast.]

[Footnote 220: III. i. Lady Macbeth herself could not more naturally have introduced at intervals the questions 'Ride you this afternoon?'

(l. 19), 'Is't far you ride?' (l. 24), 'Goes Fleance with you?' (l.

36).]

[Footnote 221: We feel here, however, an underlying subdued frenzy which awakes some sympathy. There is an almost unendurable impatience expressed even in the rhythm of many of the lines; _e.g._:

Well then, now Have you consider'd of my speeches? Know That it was he in the times past which held you So under fortune, which you thought had been Our innocent self: this I made good to you In our last conference, pa.s.s'd in probation with you, How you were borne in hand, how cross'd, the instruments, Who wrought with them, and all things else that might To half a soul and to a notion crazed Say, 'Thus did Banquo.'

This effect is heard to the end of the play in Macbeth's less poetic speeches, and leaves the same impression of burning energy, though not of imaginative exaltation, as his great speeches. In these we find either violent, huge, sublime imagery, or a torrent of figurative expressions (as in the famous lines about 'the innocent sleep'). Our impressions as to the diction of the play are largely derived from these speeches of the hero, but not wholly so. The writing almost throughout leaves an impression of intense, almost feverish, activity.]

[Footnote 222: See his first words to the Ghost: 'Thou canst not say I did it.']

[Footnote 223:

For only in destroying I find ease To my relentless thoughts.--_Paradise Lost_, ix. 129.

Milton's portrait of Satan's misery here, and at the beginning of Book IV., might well have been suggested by _Macbeth_. Coleridge, after quoting Duncan's speech, I. iv. 35 ff., says: 'It is a fancy; but I can never read this, and the following speeches of Macbeth, without involuntarily thinking of the Miltonic Messiah and Satan.' I doubt if it was a mere fancy. (It will be remembered that Milton thought at one time of writing a tragedy on Macbeth.)]

[Footnote 224: The immediate reference in 'But no more sights' is doubtless to the visions called up by the Witches; but one of these, the 'blood-bolter'd Banquo,' recalls to him the vision of the preceding night, of which he had said,

You make me strange Even to the disposition that I owe, When now I think you can behold such _sights_, And keep the natural ruby of your cheeks, When mine is blanch'd with fear.]

[Footnote 225: 'Luxurious' and 'luxury' are used by Shakespeare only in this older sense. It must be remembered that these lines are spoken by Malcolm, but it seems likely that they are meant to be taken as true throughout.]

[Footnote 226: I do not at all suggest that his love for his wife remains what it was when he greeted her with the words 'My dearest love, Duncan comes here to-night.' He has greatly changed; she has ceased to help him, sunk in her own despair; and there is no intensity of anxiety in the questions he puts to the doctor about her. But his love for her was probably never unselfish, never the love of Brutus, who, in somewhat similar circ.u.mstances, uses, on the death of Ca.s.sius, words which remind us of Macbeth's:

I shall find time, Ca.s.sius, I shall find time.

For the opposite strain of feeling cf. Sonnet 90:

Then hate me if thou wilt; if ever, now, Now while the world is bent my deeds to cross.]

LECTURE X

MACBETH

1

To regard _Macbeth_ as a play, like the love-tragedies _Romeo and Juliet_ and _Antony and Cleopatra_, in which there are two central characters of equal importance, is certainly a mistake. But Shakespeare himself is in a measure responsible for it, because the first half of _Macbeth_ is greater than the second, and in the first half Lady Macbeth not only appears more than in the second but exerts the ultimate deciding influence on the action. And, in the opening Act at least, Lady Macbeth is the most commanding and perhaps the most awe-inspiring figure that Shakespeare drew. Sharing, as we have seen, certain traits with her husband, she is at once clearly distinguished from him by an inflexibility of will, which appears to hold imagination, feeling, and conscience completely in check. To her the prophecy of things that will be becomes instantaneously the determination that they shall be:

Glamis thou art, and Cawdor, and shalt be That thou art promised.

She knows her husband's weakness, how he scruples 'to catch the nearest way' to the object he desires; and she sets herself without a trace of doubt or conflict to counteract this weakness. To her there is no separation between will and deed; and, as the deed falls in part to her, she is sure it will be done:

The raven himself is hoa.r.s.e That croaks the fatal entrance of Duncan Under my battlements.

On the moment of Macbeth's rejoining her, after braving infinite dangers and winning infinite praise, without a syllable on these subjects or a word of affection, she goes straight to her purpose and permits him to speak of nothing else. She takes the superior position and a.s.sumes the direction of affairs,--appears to a.s.sume it even more than she really can, that she may spur him on. She animates him by picturing the deed as heroic, 'this night's _great_ business,' or 'our _great_ quell,' while she ignores its cruelty and faithlessness. She bears down his faint resistance by presenting him with a prepared scheme which may remove from him the terror and danger of deliberation. She rouses him with a taunt no man can bear, and least of all a soldier,--the word 'coward.'

She appeals even to his love for her:

from this time Such I account thy love;

--such, that is, as the protestations of a drunkard. Her reasonings are mere sophisms; they could persuade no man. It is not by them, it is by personal appeals, through the admiration she extorts from him, and through sheer force of will, that she impels him to the deed. Her eyes are fixed upon the crown and the means to it; she does not attend to the consequences. Her plan of laying the guilt upon the chamberlains is invented on the spur of the moment, and simply to satisfy her husband.

Her true mind is heard in the ringing cry with which she answers his question, 'Will it not be received ... that they have done it?'

Who _dares_ receive it other?

And this is repeated in the sleep-walking scene: 'What need we fear who knows it, when none can call our power to account?' Her pa.s.sionate courage sweeps him off his feet. His decision is taken in a moment of enthusiasm:

Bring forth men-children only; For thy undaunted mettle should compose Nothing but males.

And even when pa.s.sion has quite died away her will remains supreme. In presence of overwhelming horror and danger, in the murder scene and the banquet scene, her self-control is perfect. When the truth of what she has done dawns on her, no word of complaint, scarcely a word of her own suffering, not a single word of her own as apart from his, escapes her when others are by. She helps him, but never asks his help. She leans on nothing but herself. And from the beginning to the end--though she makes once or twice a slip in acting her part--her will never fails her. Its grasp upon her nature may destroy her, but it is never relaxed. We are sure that she never betrayed her husband or herself by a word or even a look, save in sleep. However appalling she may be, she is sublime.

In the earlier scenes of the play this aspect of Lady Macbeth's character is far the most prominent. And if she seems invincible she seems also inhuman. We find no trace of pity for the kind old king; no consciousness of the treachery and baseness of the murder; no sense of the value of the lives of the wretched men on whom the guilt is to be laid; no shrinking even from the condemnation or hatred of the world.

Yet if the Lady Macbeth of these scenes were really utterly inhuman, or a 'fiend-like queen,' as Malcolm calls her, the Lady Macbeth of the sleep-walking scene would be an impossibility. The one woman could never become the other. And in fact, if we look below the surface, there is evidence enough in the earlier scenes of preparation for the later. I do not mean that Lady Macbeth was naturally humane. There is nothing in the play to show this, and several pa.s.sages subsequent to the murder-scene supply proof to the contrary. One is that where she exclaims, on being informed of Duncan's murder,

Woe, alas!

What, in our house?