Shakespearean Tragedy: Lectures on Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth
_Macbeth_ being more simple than the other tragedies, and broader and
more massive in effect, three passages in it are of great importance as
securing variety in tone, and also as affording relief from the feelings
excited by the Witch-scenes and the principal characters. They are the
passage where the Porter appears, the conversation between Lady Macduff
and her little boy, and the passage where Macduff receives the news of
the slaughter of his wife and babes. Yet the first of these, we are told
even by Coleridge, is unworthy of Shakespeare and is not his; and the
second, with the rest of the scene which contains it, appears to be
usually omitted in stage representations of _Macbeth_.
I question if either this scene or the exhibition of Macduff's grief is
required to heighten our abhorrence of Macbeth's cruelty. They have a
technical value in helping to give the last stage of the action the form
of a conflict between Macbeth and Macduff. But their chief function is
of another kind. It is to touch the heart with a sense of beauty and
pathos, to open the springs of love and of tears. Shakespeare is loved
for the sweetness of his humanity, and because he makes this kind of
appeal with such irresistible persuasion; and the reason why _Macbeth_,
though admired as much as any work of his, is scarcely loved, is that
the characters who predominate cannot make this kind of appeal, and at
no point are able to inspire unmingled sympathy. The two passages in
question supply this want in such measure as Shakespeare thought
advisable in _Macbeth_, and the play would suffer greatly from their
excision. The second, on the stage, is extremely moving, and Macbeth's
reception of the news of his wife's death may be intended to recall it
by way of contrast. The first brings a relief even greater, because here
the element of beauty is more marked, and because humour is mingled with
pathos. In both we escape from the oppression of huge sins and
sufferings into the presence of the wholesome affections of unambitious
hearts; and, though both scenes are painful and one dreadful, our
sympathies can flow unchecked.[243]
Lady Macduff is a simple wife and mother, who has no thought for
anything beyond her home. Her love for her children shows her at once
that her husband's flight exposes them to terrible danger. She is in an
agony of fear for them, and full of indignation against him. It does not
even occur to her that he has acted from public spirit, or that there is
such a thing.
What had he done to make him fly the land?
He must have been mad to do it. He fled for fear. He does not love his
wife and children. He is a traitor. The poor soul is almost beside
herself--and with too good reason. But when the murderer bursts in with
the question 'Where is your husband?' she becomes in a moment the wife,
and the great noble's wife:
I hope, in no place so unsanctified
Where such as thou may'st find him.
What did Shakespeare mean us to think of Macduff's flight, for which
Macduff has been much blamed by others beside his wife? Certainly not
that fear for himself, or want of love for his family, had anything to
do with it. His love for his country, so strongly marked in the scene
with Malcolm, is evidently his one motive.
He is noble, wise, judicious, and best knows
The fits o' the season,
says Ross. That his flight was 'noble' is beyond doubt. That it was not
wise or judicious in the interest of his family is no less clear. But
that does not show that it was wrong; and, even if it were, to represent
its consequences as a judgment on him for his want of due consideration
is equally monstrous and ludicrous.[244] The further question whether he
did fail in due consideration, or whether for his country's sake he
deliberately risked a danger which he fully realised, would in
Shakespeare's theatre have been answered at once by Macduff's expression
and demeanour on hearing Malcolm's words,
Why in that rawness left you wife and child,
Those precious motives, those strong knots of love,
Without leave-taking?
It cannot be decided with certainty from the mere text; but, without
going into the considerations on each side, I may express the opinion
that Macduff knew well what he was doing, and that he fled without
leave-taking for fear his purpose should give way. Perhaps he said to
himself, with Coriolanus,
Not of a woman's tenderness to be,
Requires nor child nor woman's face to see.
Little Macduff suggests a few words on Shakespeare's boys (there are
scarcely any little girls). It is somewhat curious that nearly all of
them appear in tragic or semi-tragic dramas. I remember but two
exceptions: little William Page, who said his _Hic, haec, hoc_ to Sir
Hugh Evans; and the page before whom Falstaff walked like a sow that
hath overwhelmed all her litter but one; and it is to be feared that
even this page, if he is the Boy of _Henry V._, came to an ill end,
being killed with the luggage.
So wise so young, they say, do ne'er live long,
as Richard observed of the little Prince of Wales. Of too many of these
children (some of the 'boys,' _e.g._ those in _Cymbeline_, are lads, not
children) the saying comes true. They are pathetic figures, the more so
because they so often appear in company with their unhappy mothers, and
can never be thought of apart from them. Perhaps Arthur is even the
first creation in which Shakespeare's power of pathos showed itself
mature;[245] and the last of his children, Mamillius, assuredly proves
that it never decayed. They are almost all of them noble figures,
too,--affectionate, frank, brave, high-spirited, 'of an open and free
nature' like Shakespeare's best men. And almost all of them, again, are
amusing and charming as well as pathetic; comical in their mingled
acuteness and _naivete_, charming in their confidence in themselves and
the world, and in the seriousness with which they receive the jocosity
of their elders, who commonly address them as strong men, great
warriors, or profound politicians.
Little Macduff exemplifies most of these remarks. There is nothing in
the scene of a transcendent kind, like the passage about Mamillius'
never-finished 'Winter's Tale' of the man who dwelt by a churchyard, or
the passage about his death, or that about little Marcius and the
butterfly, or the audacity which introduces him, at the supreme moment
of the tragedy, outdoing the appeals of Volumnia and Virgilia by the
statement,
'A shall not tread on me:
I'll run away till I'm bigger, but then I'll fight.
Still one does not easily forget little Macduff's delightful and
well-justified confidence in his ability to defeat his mother in
argument; or the deep impression she made on him when she spoke of his
father as a 'traitor'; or his immediate response when he heard the
murderer call his father by the same name,--
Thou liest, thou shag-haired villain.
Nor am I sure that, if the son of Coriolanus had been murdered, his last
words to his mother would have been, 'Run away, I pray you.'
I may add two remarks. The presence of this child is one of the things
in which _Macbeth_ reminds us of _Richard III._ And he is perhaps the
only person in the tragedy who provokes a smile. I say 'perhaps,' for
though the anxiety of the Doctor to escape from the company of his
patient's husband makes one smile, I am not sure that it was meant to.
5
The Porter does not make me smile: the moment is too terrific. He is
grotesque; no doubt the contrast he affords is humorous as well as
ghastly; I dare say the groundlings roared with laughter at his coarsest
remarks. But they are not comic enough to allow one to forget for a
moment what has preceded and what must follow. And I am far from
complaining of this. I believe that it is what Shakespeare intended, and
that he despised the groundlings if they laughed. Of course he could
have written without the least difficulty speeches five times as
humorous; but he knew better. The Grave-diggers make us laugh: the old
Countryman who brings the asps to Cleopatra makes us smile at least. But
the Grave-digger scene does not come at a moment of extreme tension; and
it is long. Our distress for Ophelia is not so absorbing that we refuse
to be interested in the man who digs her grave, or even continue
throughout the long conversation to remember always with pain that the
grave is hers. It is fitting, therefore, that he should be made
decidedly humorous. The passage in _Antony and Cleopatra_ is much nearer
to the passage in _Macbeth_, and seems to have been forgotten by those
who say that there is nothing in Shakespeare resembling that
passage.[246] The old Countryman comes at a moment of tragic exaltation,
and the dialogue is appropriately brief. But the moment, though tragic,
is emphatically one of exaltation. We have not been feeling horror, nor
are we feeling a dreadful suspense. We are going to see Cleopatra die,
but she is to die gloriously and to triumph over Octavius. And therefore
our amusement at the old Countryman and the contrast he affords to these
high passions, is untroubled, and it was right to make him really comic.
But the Porter's case is quite different. We cannot forget how the
knocking that makes him grumble sounded to Macbeth, or that within a few
minutes of his opening the gate Duncan will be discovered in his blood;
nor can we help feeling that in pretending to be porter of hell-gate he
is terribly near the truth. To give him language so humorous that it
would ask us almost to lose the sense of these things would have been a
fatal mistake,--the kind of mistake that means want of dramatic
imagination. And that was not the sort of error into which Shakespeare
fell.
To doubt the genuineness of the passage, then, on the ground that it is
not humorous enough for Shakespeare, seems to me to show this want. It
is to judge the passage as though it were a separate composition,
instead of conceiving it in the fulness of its relations to its
surroundings in a stage-play. Taken by itself, I admit, it would bear no
indubitable mark of Shakespeare's authorship, not even in the phrase
'the primrose way to the everlasting bonfire,' which Coleridge thought
Shakespeare might have added to an interpolation of 'the players.' And
if there were reason (as in my judgment there is not) to suppose that
Shakespeare thus permitted an interpolation, or that he collaborated
with another author, I could believe that he left 'the players' or his
collaborator to write the words of the passage. But that anyone except
the author of the scene of Duncan's murder _conceived_ the passage, is
incredible.[247]
* * * * *
The speeches of the Porter, a low comic character, are in prose. So is
the letter of Macbeth to his wife. In both these cases Shakespeare
follows his general rule or custom. The only other prose-speeches occur
in the sleep-walking scene, and here the use of prose may seem strange.
For in great tragic scenes we expect the more poetic medium of
expression, and this is one of the most famous of such scenes. Besides,
unless I mistake, Lady Macbeth is the only one of Shakespeare's great
tragic characters who on a last appearance is denied the dignity of
verse.
Yet in this scene also he adheres to his custom. Somnambulism is an
abnormal condition, and it is his general rule to assign prose to
persons whose state of mind is abnormal. Thus, to illustrate from these
four plays, Hamlet when playing the madman speaks prose, but in
soliloquy, in talking with Horatio, and in pleading with his mother, he
speaks verse.[248] Ophelia in her madness either sings snatches of songs
or speaks prose. Almost all Lear's speeches, after he has become