Shakespearean Tragedy: Lectures on Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth
[Footnote 205: If this paragraph is true, some of the statements even of
Lamb and of Coleridge about the Witches are, taken literally, incorrect.
What these critics, and notably the former, describe so well is the
poetic aspect abstracted from the remainder; and in describing this they
attribute to the Witches themselves what belongs really to the complex
of Witches, Spirits, and Hecate. For the purposes of imagination, no
doubt, this inaccuracy is of small consequence; and it is these purposes
that matter. [I have not attempted to fulfil them.]]
[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 assertion that the first thought of the murder
comes from the Witches is thus in flat contradiction with the text. (The
sentence in which he asserts 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 passage 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 assertion 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 repetition of the word, that have principally 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 antitheses 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, pass'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 circumstances, uses, on the death of Cassius, words which remind
us of Macbeth's:
I shall find time, Cassius, 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 hoarse
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 assumes the
direction of affairs,--appears to assume 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 passionate
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 passion 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 passages 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?