Shakespearean Tragedy: Lectures on Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth

Once, 'weird women.' Whether Shakespeare knew that 'weird' signified 'fate' we cannot tell, but it is probable that he did. The word occurs six times in Macbeth (it does not occur elsewhere in Shakespeare). The first three times it is spelt in the Folio weyward, the last three weyard. This may suggest a miswriting or misprinting of wayward; but, as that word is always spelt in the Folio either rightly or waiward, it is more likely that the weyward and weyard of Macbeth are the copyist's or printer's misreading of Shakespeare's weird or weyrd.

204

The doubt as to these passages (see Note Z) does not arise from the mere appearance of this figure. The idea of Hecate's connection with witches appears also at ii. i. 52, and she is mentioned again at iii. ii. 41 (cf. Mid. Night's Dream, v. i. 391, for her connection with fairies). It is part of the common traditional notion of the heathen gods being now devils. Scot refers to it several times. See the notes in the Clarendon Press edition on iii. v. 1, or those in Furness's Variorum.

Of course in the popular notion the witch's spirits are devils or servants of Satan. If Shakespeare openly introduces this idea only in such phrases as 'the instruments of darkness' and 'what! can the devil speak true?' the reason is probably his unwillingness to give too much prominence to distinctively religious ideas.

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.]

206

See Note CC.

207

The proclamation of Malcolm as Duncan's successor (i. iv.) changes the position, but the design of murder is prior to this.

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.)

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.

210

This comparison was suggested by a passage in Hegel's Aesthetik, i. 291 ff.

211

Il. i. 188 ff. (Leaf's translation).

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.

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.

214

The word is used of him (i. ii. 67), but not in a way that decides this question or even bears on it.

215

This view, thus generally stated, is not original, but I cannot say who first stated it.

216

The latter, and more important, point was put quite clearly by Coleridge.

217

It is the consequent insistence on the idea of fear, and the frequent repetition of the word, that have principally led to misinterpretation.

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.

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.

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).

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, nowHave you consider'd of my speeches? KnowThat it was he in the times past which held youSo under fortune, which you thought had beenOur innocent self: this I made good to youIn 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 mightTo half a soul and to a notion crazedSay, '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.

222

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

223

For only in destroying I find easeTo 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.)

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 strangeEven 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.

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.

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.

227

So Mrs. Siddons is said to have given the passage.

228

Surely the usual interpretation of 'We fail?' as a question of contemptuous astonishment, is right. 'We fail!' gives practically the same sense, but alters the punctuation of the first two Folios. In either case, 'But,' I think, means 'Only.' On the other hand the proposal to read 'We fail.' with a full stop, as expressive of sublime acceptance of the possibility, seems to me, however attractive at first sight, quite out of harmony with Lady Macbeth's mood throughout these scenes.

229

See Note DD.

230

It is not new.

231

The words about Lady Macduff are of course significant of natural human feeling, and may have been introduced expressly to mark it, but they do not, I think, show any fundamental change in Lady Macbeth, for at no time would she have suggested or approved a purposeless atrocity. It is perhaps characteristic that this human feeling should show itself most clearly in reference to an act for which she was not directly responsible, and in regard to which therefore she does not feel the instinct of self-assertion.

232

The tendency to sentimentalise Lady Macbeth is partly due to Mrs. Siddons's fancy that she was a small, fair, blue-eyed woman, 'perhaps even fragile.' Dr. Bucknill, who was unaquainted with this fancy, independently determined that she was 'beautiful and delicate,' 'unoppressed by weight of flesh,' 'probably small,' but 'a tawny or brown blonde,' with grey eyes: and Brandes affirms that she was lean, slight, and hard. They know much more than Shakespeare, who tells us absolutely nothing on these subjects. That Lady Macbeth, after taking part in a murder, was so exhausted as to faint, will hardly demonstrate her fragility. That she must have been blue-eyed, fair, or red-haired, because she was a Celt, is a bold inference, and it is an idle dream that Shakespeare had any idea of making her or her husband characteristically Celtic. The only evidence ever offered to prove that she was small is the sentence, 'All the perfumes of Arabia will not sweeten this little hand'; and Goliath might have called his hand 'little' in contrast with all the perfumes of Arabia. One might as well propose to prove that Othello was a small man by quoting,

I have seen the day,That, with this little arm and this good sword,I have made my way through more impedimentsThan twenty times your stop.

The reader is at liberty to imagine Lady Macbeth's person in the way that pleases him best, or to leave it, as Shakespeare very likely did, unimagined.

Perhaps it may be well to add that there is not the faintest trace in the play of the idea occasionally met with, and to some extent embodied in Madame Bernhardt's impersonation of Lady Macbeth, that her hold upon her husband lay in seductive attractions deliberately exercised. Shakespeare was not unskilled or squeamish in indicating such ideas.

233

That it is Macbeth who feels the harmony between the desolation of the heath and the figures who appear on it is a characteristic touch.

234

So, in Holinshed, 'Banquho jested with him and sayde, now Makbeth thou haste obtayned those things which the twoo former sisters prophesied, there remayneth onely for thee to purchase that which the third sayd should come to passe.'

235

=doubts.

236

=design.

237

'tis much he dares,And, to that dauntless temper of his mind,He hath a wisdom that doth guide his valourTo act in safety.

238

So when he hears that Fleance has escaped he is not much troubled (iii. iv. 29):

the worm that's fledHath nature that in time will venom breed,No teeth for the present.

I have repeated above what I have said before, because the meaning of Macbeth's soliloquy is frequently misconceived.

239

Virgilia in Coriolanus is a famous example. She speaks about thirty-five lines.

240

The percentage of prose is, roughly, in Hamlet 30-2/3, in Othello 16-1/3, in King Lear 27-1/2, in Macbeth 8-1/2.

241

Cf. Note F. There are also in Macbeth several shorter passages which recall the Player's speech. Cf. 'Fortune … showed like a rebel's whore' (i. ii. 14) with 'Out! out! thou strumpet Fortune!' The form 'eterne' occurs in Shakespeare only in Macbeth, iii. ii. 38, and in the 'proof eterne' of the Player's speech. Cf. 'So, as a painted tyrant, Pyrrhus stood,' with Macbeth, v. viii. 26; 'the rugged Pyrrhus, like the Hyrcanian beast,' with 'the rugged Russian bear … or the Hyrcan tiger' (Macbeth, iii. iv. 100); 'like a neutral to his will and matter' with Macbeth, i. v. 47. The words 'Till he unseam'd him from the nave to the chaps,' in the Serjeant's speech, recall the words 'Then from the navel to the throat at once He ript old Priam,' in Dido Queen of Carthage, where these words follow those others, about Priam falling with the mere wind of Pyrrhus' sword, which seem to have suggested 'the whiff and wind of his fell sword' in the Player's speech.

242

See Cunliffe, The Influence of Seneca on Elizabethan Tragedy. The most famous of these parallels is that between 'Will all great Neptune's Ocean,' etc., and the following passages:

Quis eluet me Tanais? aut quae barbarisMaeotis undis Pontico incumbens mari?Non ipse toto magnus Oceano paterTantum expiarit sceleris. (Hipp. 715.)Quis Tanais, aut quis Nilus, aut quis PersicaViolentus unda Tigris, aut Rhenus ferox,Tagusve Ibera turbidus gaza fluens,Abluere dextram poterit? Arctoum licetMaeotis in me gelida transfundat mare,Et tota Tethys per meas currat manus,Haerebit altum facinus. (Herc. Furens, 1323.)

(The reader will remember Othello's 'Pontic sea' with its 'violent pace.') Medea's incantation in Ovid's Metamorphoses, vii. 197 ff., which certainly suggested Prospero's speech, Tempest, v. i. 33 ff., should be compared with Seneca, Herc. Oet., 452 ff., 'Artibus magicis,' etc. It is of course highly probable that Shakespeare read some Seneca at school. I may add that in the Hippolytus, beside the passage quoted above, there are others which might have furnished him with suggestions. Cf. for instance Hipp., 30 ff., with the lines about the Spartan hounds in Mids. Night's Dream, iv. i. 117 ff., and Hippolytus' speech, beginning 483, with the Duke's speech in As You Like It, ii. i.

243

Cf. Coleridge's note on the Lady Macduff scene.

244

It is nothing to the purpose that Macduff himself says,

Sinful Macduff,They were all struck for thee! naught that I am,Not for their own demerits, but for mine,Fell slaughter on their souls.

There is no reason to suppose that the sin and demerit he speaks of is that of leaving his home. And even if it were, it is Macduff that speaks, not Shakespeare, any more than Shakespeare speaks in the preceding sentence,

Did heaven look on,And would not take their part?

And yet Brandes (ii. 104) hears in these words 'the voice of revolt … that sounds later through the despairing philosophy of King Lear.' It sounds a good deal earlier too; e.g. in Tit. And., iv. i. 81, and 2 Henry VI., ii. i. 154. The idea is a commonplace of Elizabethan tragedy.

245

And the idea that it was the death of his son Hamnet, aged eleven, that brought this power to maturity is one of the more plausible attempts to find in his dramas a reflection of his private history. It implies however as late a date as 1596 for King John.

246

Even if this were true, the retort is obvious that neither is there anything resembling the murder-scene in Macbeth.

247

I have confined myself to the single aspect of this question on which I had what seemed something new to say. Professor Hales's defence of the passage on fuller grounds, in the admirable paper reprinted in his Notes and Essays on Shakespeare, seems to me quite conclusive. I may add two notes. (1) The references in the Porter's speeches to 'equivocation,' which have naturally, and probably rightly, been taken as allusions to the Jesuit Garnet's appeal to the doctrine of equivocation in defence of his perjury when, on trial for participation in the Gunpowder Plot, do not stand alone in Macbeth. The later prophecies of the Witches Macbeth calls 'the equivocation of the fiend That lies like truth' (v. v. 43); and the Porter's remarks about the equivocator who 'could swear in both the scales against either scale, who committed treason enough for God's sake, yet could not equivocate to heaven,' may be compared with the following dialogue (iv. ii. 45):

Son.What is a traitor?Lady Macduff.Why, one that swears and lies.Son.And be all traitors that do so?Lady Macduff.Everyone that does so is a traitor, and must be hanged.

Garnet, as a matter of fact, was hanged in May, 1606; and it is to be feared that the audience applauded this passage.

(2) The Porter's soliloquy on the different applicants for admittance has, in idea and manner, a marked resemblance to Pompey's soliloquy on the inhabitants of the prison, in Measure for Measure, iv. iii. 1 ff.; and the dialogue between him and Abhorson on the 'mystery' of hanging (iv. ii. 22 ff.) is of just the same kind as the Porter's dialogue with Macduff about drink.

248

In the last Act, however, he speaks in verse even in the quarrel with Laertes at Ophelia's grave. It would be plausible to explain this either from his imitating what he thinks the rant of Laertes, or by supposing that his 'towering passion' made him forget to act the madman. But in the final scene also he speaks in verse in the presence of all. This again might be accounted for by saying that he is supposed to be in a lucid interval, as indeed his own language at 239 ff. implies. But the probability is that Shakespeare's real reason for breaking his rule here was simply that he did not choose to deprive Hamlet of verse on his last appearance. I wonder the disuse of prose in these two scenes has not been observed, and used as an argument, by those who think that Hamlet, with the commission in his pocket, is now resolute.

249

The verse-speech of the Doctor, which closes this scene, lowers the tension towards that of the next scene. His introductory conversation with the Gentlewoman is written in prose (sometimes very near verse), partly, perhaps, from its familiar character, but chiefly because Lady Macbeth is to speak in prose.

250

This is intrinsically not probable, and is the more improbable because in Q1 Hamlet's letter to Ophelia (which must have been written before the action of the play begins) is signed 'Thine ever the most unhappy Prince Hamlet.' 'Unhappy' might be meant to describe an unsuccessful lover, but it probably shows that the letter was written after his father's death.

251

These three words are evidently addressed to Bernardo.

252

Cf. Antonio in his melancholy (Merchant of Venice, i. i. 6),

And such a want-wit sadness makes of meThat I have much ado to know myself.

253

In Der Bestrafte Brudermord it is Wittenberg. Hamlet says to the actors: 'Were you not, a few years ago, at the University of Wittenberg? I think I saw you act there': Furness's Variorum, ii. 129. But it is very doubtful whether this play is anything but an adaptation and enlargement of Hamlet as it existed in the stage represented by Q1.

254

It is perhaps worth while to note that in Der Bestrafte Brudermord Hamlet is said to have been 'in Germany' at the time of his father's murder.

255

Of course we do not know that he did work on it.

256

I find that I have been anticipated in this remark by H. Türck (Jahrbuch for 1900, p. 267 ff.)

257

I do not know if it has been observed that in the opening of the Player-King's speech, as given in Q2 and the Folio (it is quite different in Q1), there seems to be a reminiscence of Greene's Alphonsus King of Arragon, Act iv., lines 33 ff. (Dyce's Greene and Peele, p. 239):

Thrice ten times Phœbus with his golden beamsHath compassed the circle of the sky,Thrice ten times Ceres hath her workmen hir'd,And fill'd her barns with fruitful crops of corn,Since first in priesthood I did lead my life.

258

The reader will observe that this suggestion of a further reason for his making the note may be rejected without the rest of the interpretation being affected.

259

It is impossible to tell whether Coleridge formed his view independently, or adopted it from Schlegel. For there is no record of his having expressed his opinion prior to the time of his reading Schlegel's Lectures; and, whatever he said to the contrary, his borrowings from Schlegel are demonstrable.

260

Clark and Wright well compare Polonius' antithesis of 'rich, not gaudy': though I doubt if 'handsome' implies richness.

261

Is it not possible that 'mobled queen,' to which Hamlet seems to object, and which Polonius praises, is meant for an example of the second fault of affected phraseology, from which the play was said to be free, and an instance of which therefore surprises Hamlet?

262

The extravagance of these phrases is doubtless intentional (for Macbeth in using them is trying to act a part), but the absurdity of the second can hardly be so.

263

Steevens observes that Heywood uses the phrase 'guled with slaughter,' and I find in his Iron Age various passages indicating that he knew the speech of Aeneas (cf. p. 140 for another sign that he knew Hamlet). The two parts of the Iron Age were published in 1632, but are said, in the preface to the Second, to have 'been long since writ.' I refer to the pages of vol. 3 of Pearson's Heywood (1874). (1) p. 329, Troilus 'lyeth imbak'd In his cold blood.' (2) p. 341, of Achilles' armour:

Vulcan that wrought it out of gadds of SteeleWith his Ciclopian hammers, never madeSuch noise upon his Anvile forging it,Than these my arm'd fists in Ulisses wracke.

(3) p. 357, 'till Hecub's reverent lockes Be gul'd in slaughter.' (4) p. 357, 'Scamander plaines Ore-spread with intrailes bak'd in blood and dust.' (5) p. 378, 'We'll rost them at the scorching flames of Troy.' (6) p. 379, 'tragicke slaughter, clad in gules and sables' (cf.'sable arms' in the speech in Hamlet). (7) p. 384, 'these lockes, now knotted all, As bak't in blood.' Of these, all but (1) and (2) are in Part II. Part I. has many passages which recall Troilus and Cressida. Mr. Fleay's speculation as to its date will be found in his Chronicle History of the English Drama, i. p. 285.

For the same writer's ingenious theory (which is of course incapable of proof) regarding the relation of the player's speech in Hamlet to Marlowe and Nash's Dido, see Furness's Variorum Hamlet.