Shakespearean Tragedy: Lectures on Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth
common characteristics, notably to the fascination of the supernatural,
the absence of the spectacle of extreme undeserved suffering, the
absence of characters which horrify and repel and yet are destitute of
grandeur. The reader who looks unwillingly at Iago gazes at Lady Macbeth
in awe, because though she is dreadful she is also sublime. The whole
tragedy is sublime.
In this, however, and in other respects, _Macbeth_ makes an impression
quite different from that of _Hamlet_. The dimensions of the principal
characters, the rate of movement in the action, the supernatural effect,
the style, the versification, are all changed; and they are all changed
in much the same manner. In many parts of _Macbeth_ there is in the
language a peculiar compression, pregnancy, energy, even violence; the
harmonious grace and even flow, often conspicuous in _Hamlet_, have
almost disappeared. The cruel characters, built on a scale at least as
large as that of _Othello_, seem to attain at times an almost superhuman
stature. The diction has in places a huge and rugged grandeur, which
degenerates here and there into tumidity. The solemn majesty of the
royal Ghost in _Hamlet_, appearing in armour and standing silent in the
moonlight, is exchanged for shapes of horror, dimly seen in the murky
air or revealed by the glare of the caldron fire in a dark cavern, or
for the ghastly face of Banquo badged with blood and staring with blank
eyes. The other three tragedies all open with conversations which lead
into the action: here the action bursts into wild life amidst the sounds
of a thunder-storm and the echoes of a distant battle. It hurries
through seven very brief scenes of mounting suspense to a terrible
crisis, which is reached, in the murder of Duncan, at the beginning of
the Second Act. Pausing a moment and changing its shape, it hastes again
with scarcely diminished speed to fresh horrors. And even when the speed
of the outward action is slackened, the same effect is continued in
another form: we are shown a soul tortured by an agony which admits not
a moment's repose, and rushing in frenzy towards its doom. _Macbeth_ is
very much shorter than the other three tragedies, but our experience in
traversing it is so crowded and intense that it leaves an impression not
of brevity but of speed. It is the most vehement, the most concentrated,
perhaps we may say the most tremendous, of the tragedies.
1
A Shakespearean tragedy, as a rule, has a special tone or atmosphere of
its own, quite perceptible, however difficult to describe. The effect of
this atmosphere is marked with unusual strength in _Macbeth_. It is due
to a variety of influences which combine with those just noticed, so
that, acting and reacting, they form a whole; and the desolation of the
blasted heath, the design of the Witches, the guilt in the hero's soul,
the darkness of the night, seem to emanate from one and the same source.
This effect is strengthened by a multitude of small touches, which at
the moment may be little noticed but still leave their mark on the
imagination. We may approach the consideration of the characters and the
action by distinguishing some of the ingredients of this general effect.
Darkness, we may even say blackness, broods over this tragedy. It is
remarkable that almost all the scenes which at once recur to memory take
place either at night or in some dark spot. The vision of the dagger,
the murder of Duncan, the murder of Banquo, the sleep-walking of Lady
Macbeth, all come in night-scenes. The Witches dance in the thick air of
a storm, or, 'black and midnight hags,' receive Macbeth in a cavern. The
blackness of night is to the hero a thing of fear, even of horror; and
that which he feels becomes the spirit of the play. The faint
glimmerings of the western sky at twilight are here menacing: it is the
hour when the traveller hastens to reach safety in his inn, and when
Banquo rides homeward to meet his assassins; the hour when 'light
thickens,' when 'night's black agents to their prey do rouse,' when the
wolf begins to howl, and the owl to scream, and withered murder steals
forth to his work. Macbeth bids the stars hide their fires that his
'black' desires may be concealed; Lady Macbeth calls on thick night to
come, palled in the dunnest smoke of hell. The moon is down and no stars
shine when Banquo, dreading the dreams of the coming night, goes
unwillingly to bed, and leaves Macbeth to wait for the summons of the
little bell. When the next day should dawn, its light is 'strangled,'
and 'darkness does the face of earth entomb.' In the whole drama the sun
seems to shine only twice: first, in the beautiful but ironical passage
where Duncan sees the swallows flitting round the castle of death; and,
afterwards, when at the close the avenging army gathers to rid the earth
of its shame. Of the many slighter touches which deepen this effect I
notice only one. The failure of nature in Lady Macbeth is marked by her
fear of darkness; 'she has light by her continually.' And in the one
phrase of fear that escapes her lips even in sleep, it is of the
darkness of the place of torment that she speaks.[195]
The atmosphere of _Macbeth_, however, is not that of unrelieved
blackness. On the contrary, as compared with _King Lear_ and its cold
dim gloom, _Macbeth_ leaves a decided impression of colour; it is really
the impression of a black night broken by flashes of light and colour,
sometimes vivid and even glaring. They are the lights and colours of the
thunder-storm in the first scene; of the dagger hanging before Macbeth's
eyes and glittering alone in the midnight air; of the torch borne by the
servant when he and his lord come upon Banquo crossing the castle-court
to his room; of the torch, again, which Fleance carried to light his
father to death, and which was dashed out by one of the murderers; of
the torches that flared in the hall on the face of the Ghost and the
blanched cheeks of Macbeth; of the flames beneath the boiling caldron
from which the apparitions in the cavern rose; of the taper which showed
to the Doctor and Gentlewoman the wasted face and blank eyes of Lady
Macbeth. And, above all, the colour is the colour of blood. It cannot be
an accident that the image of blood is forced upon us continually, not
merely by the events themselves, but by full descriptions, and even by
reiteration of the word in unlikely parts of the dialogue. The Witches,
after their first wild appearance, have hardly quitted the stage when
there staggers onto it a 'bloody man,' gashed with wounds. His tale is
of a hero whose 'brandished steel smoked with bloody execution,' 'carved
out a passage' to his enemy, and 'unseam'd him from the nave to the
chaps.' And then he tells of a second battle so bloody that the
combatants seemed as if they 'meant to bathe in reeking wounds.' What
metaphors! What a dreadful image is that with which Lady Macbeth greets
us almost as she enters, when she prays the spirits of cruelty so to
thicken her blood that pity cannot flow along her veins! What pictures
are those of the murderer appearing at the door of the banquet-room with
Banquo's 'blood upon his face'; of Banquo himself 'with twenty trenched
gashes on his head,' or 'blood-bolter'd' and smiling in derision at his
murderer; of Macbeth, gazing at his hand, and watching it dye the whole
green ocean red; of Lady Macbeth, gazing at hers, and stretching it away
from her face to escape the smell of blood that all the perfumes of
Arabia will not subdue! The most horrible lines in the whole tragedy are
those of her shuddering cry, 'Yet who would have thought the old man to
have had so much blood in him?' And it is not only at such moments that
these images occur. Even in the quiet conversation of Malcolm and
Macduff, Macbeth is imagined as holding a bloody sceptre, and Scotland
as a country bleeding and receiving every day a new gash added to her
wounds. It is as if the poet saw the whole story through an ensanguined
mist, and as if it stained the very blackness of the night. When
Macbeth, before Banquo's murder, invokes night to scarf up the tender
eye of pitiful day, and to tear in pieces the great bond that keeps him
pale, even the invisible hand that is to tear the bond is imagined as
covered with blood.
Let us observe another point. The vividness, magnitude, and violence of
the imagery in some of these passages are characteristic of _Macbeth_
almost throughout; and their influence contributes to form its
atmosphere. Images like those of the babe torn smiling from the breast
and dashed to death; of pouring the sweet milk of concord into hell; of
the earth shaking in fever; of the frame of things disjointed; of
sorrows striking heaven on the face, so that it resounds and yells out
like syllables of dolour; of the mind lying in restless ecstasy on a
rack; of the mind full of scorpions; of the tale told by an idiot, full
of sound and fury;--all keep the imagination moving on a 'wild and
violent sea,' while it is scarcely for a moment permitted to dwell on
thoughts of peace and beauty. In its language, as in its action, the
drama is full of tumult and storm. Whenever the Witches are present we
see and hear a thunder-storm: when they are absent we hear of
ship-wrecking storms and direful thunders; of tempests that blow down
trees and churches, castles, palaces and pyramids; of the frightful
hurricane of the night when Duncan was murdered; of the blast on which
pity rides like a new-born babe, or on which Heaven's cherubim are
horsed. There is thus something magnificently appropriate in the cry
'Blow, wind! Come, wrack!' with which Macbeth, turning from the sight of
the moving wood of Birnam, bursts from his castle. He was borne to his
throne on a whirlwind, and the fate he goes to meet comes on the wings
of storm.
Now all these agencies--darkness, the lights and colours that illuminate
it, the storm that rushes through it, the violent and gigantic
images--conspire with the appearances of the Witches and the Ghost to
awaken horror, and in some degree also a supernatural dread. And to this
effect other influences contribute. The pictures called up by the mere
words of the Witches stir the same feelings,--those, for example, of the
spell-bound sailor driven tempest-tost for nine times nine weary weeks,
and never visited by sleep night or day; of the drop of poisonous foam
that forms on the moon, and, falling to earth, is collected for
pernicious ends; of the sweltering venom of the toad, the finger of the
babe killed at its birth by its own mother, the tricklings from the
murderer's gibbet. In Nature, again, something is felt to be at work,
sympathetic with human guilt and supernatural malice. She labours with
portents.
Lamentings heard in the air, strange screams of death,
And prophesying with accents terrible,
burst from her. The owl clamours all through the night; Duncan's horses
devour each other in frenzy; the dawn comes, but no light with it.
Common sights and sounds, the crying of crickets, the croak of the
raven, the light thickening after sunset, the home-coming of the rooks,
are all ominous. Then, as if to deepen these impressions, Shakespeare
has concentrated attention on the obscurer regions of man's being, on
phenomena which make it seem that he is in the power of secret forces
lurking below, and independent of his consciousness and will: such as
the relapse of Macbeth from conversation into a reverie, during which he
gazes fascinated at the image of murder drawing closer and closer; the
writing on his face of strange things he never meant to show; the
pressure of imagination heightening into illusion, like the vision of a
dagger in the air, at first bright, then suddenly splashed with blood,