Chapter XV: Act I: sc. 1. Bedford's speech (2)

These purposely obscure lines, I rather think, refer to some thought in Hamlet's mind, contrasting the lovely daughter with such a tedious old fool, her father, as he, Hamlet, represents Polonius to himself:--'Why, fool as he is, he is some degrees in rank above a dead dog's carcase; and if the sun, being a god that kisses carrion, can raise life out of a dead dog,--why may not good fortune, that favours fools, have raised a lovely girl out of this dead-alive old fool?' Warburton is often led astray, in his interpretations, by his attention to general positions without the due Shakspearian reference to what is probably passing in the mind of his speaker, characteristic, and expository of his particular character and present mood. The subsequent passage,--

O Jephtha, judge of Israel! what a treasure hadst thou!

is confirmatory of my view of these lines.

Ib.

'Ham'. You cannot, Sir, take from me any thing that I will more
willingly part withal; except my life, except my life, except my life.

This repetition strikes me as most admirable.

Ib.

'Ham'. Then are our beggars, bodies; and our monarchs, and
out-stretched heroes, the beggars' shadows.

I do not understand this; and Shakspeare seems to have intended the meaning not to be more than snatched at:--'By my fay, I cannot reason!'

Ib.

The rugged Pyrrhus--he whose sable arms, &c.

This admirable substitution of the epic for the dramatic, giving such a reality to the impassioned dramatic diction of Shakspeare's own dialogue, and authorized, too, by the actual style of the tragedies before his time (Porrex and Ferrex, Titus Andronicus, &c.)--is well worthy of notice. The fancy, that a burlesque was intended, sinks below criticism: the lines, as epic narrative, are superb.

In the thoughts, and even in the separate parts of the diction, this description is highly poetical: in truth, taken by itself, this is its fault that it is too poetical!--the language of lyric vehemence and epic pomp, and not of the drama. But if Shakspeare had made the diction truly dramatic, where would have been the contrast between Hamlet and the play in Hamlet?

Ib.

--had seen the _mobled_ queen, &c.

A mob-cap is still a word in common use for a morning cap, which conceals the whole head of hair, and passes under the chin. It is nearly the same as the night-cap, that is, it is an imitation of it, so as to answer the purpose ('I am not drest for company'), and yet reconciling it with neatness and perfect purity.

'Ib.' Hamlet's soliloquy:

O, what a rogue and peasant slave am I! &c.

This is Shakspeare's own attestation to the truth of the idea of Hamlet which I have before put forth.

Ib.

The spirit that I have seen, May be a devil: and the devil hath power To assume a pleasing shape; yea, and, perhaps Out of my weakness, and my melancholy, (As he is very potent with such spirits) Abuses me to damn me.

See Sir Thomas Brown:

I believe----that those apparitions and ghosts of departed persons are
not the wandering souls of men, but the unquiet walks of devils,
prompting and suggesting us unto mischief, blood and villany,
instilling and stealing into our hearts, that the blessed spirits are
not at rest in their graves, but wander solicitous of the affairs of
the world.
'Relig. Med'. Pt. I. Sect. 37.

Act iii. sc. 1. Hamlet's soliloquy:

To be, or not to be, that is the question, &c.

This speech is of absolutely universal interest,--and yet to which of all Shakspeare's characters could it have been appropriately given but to Hamlet? For Jaques it would have been too deep, and for Iago too habitual a communion with the heart; which in every man belongs, or ought to belong, to all mankind.

Ib.

That undiscover'd country, from whose bourne
No traveller returns.--

Theobald's note in defence of the supposed contradiction of this in the apparition of the Ghost.

O miserable defender! If it be necessary to remove the apparent contradiction,--if it be not rather a great beauty,--surely, it were easy to say, that no traveller returns to this world, as to his home, or abiding-place.

Ib.

'Ham'. Ha, ha! are you honest?

'Oph'. My lord?

'Ham'. Are you fair?

Here it is evident that the penetrating Hamlet perceives, from the strange and forced manner of Ophelia, that the sweet girl was not acting a part of her own, but was a decoy; and his after speeches are not so much directed to her as to the listeners and spies. Such a discovery in a mood so anxious and irritable accounts for a certain harshness in him;--and yet a wild up-working of love, sporting with opposites in a wilful self-tormenting strain of irony, is perceptible throughout. 'I did love you once:'--'I lov'd you not:'--and particularly in his enumeration of the faults of the sex from which Ophelia is so free, that the mere freedom therefrom constitutes her character. Note Shakspeare's charm of composing the female character by the absence of characters, that is, marks and out-juttings.

'Ib.' Hamlet's speech:--

I say, we will have no more marriages: those that are married already,
all but one, shall live: the rest shall keep as they are.

Observe this dallying with the inward purpose, characteristic of one who had not brought his mind to the steady acting point. He would fain sting the uncle's mind;--but to stab his body!--The soliloquy of Ophelia, which follows, is the perfection of love--so exquisitely unselfish!

'Ib.' sc. 2. This dialogue of Hamlet with the players is one of the happiest instances of Shakspeare's power of diversifying the scene while he is carrying on the plot.

Ib.

'Ham'. My lord, you play'd once i' the university, you say?
(_To Polonius_.)

To have kept Hamlet's love for Ophelia before the audience in any direct form, would have made a breach in the unity of the interest;--but yet to the thoughtful reader it is suggested by his spite to poor Polonius, whom he cannot let rest.

'Ib.' The style of the interlude here is distinguished from the real dialogue by rhyme, as in the first interview with the players by epic verse.

Ib.

'Ros'. My lord, you once did love me.

'Ham'. So I do still, by these pickers and stealers.

I never heard an actor give this word 'so' its proper emphasis. Shakspeare's meaning is--'lov'd you? Hum!--_so_ I do still, &c.' There has been no change in my opinion:--I think as ill of you as I did. Else Hamlet tells an ignoble falsehood, and a useless one, as the last speech to Guildenstern--'Why, look you now,' &c.--proves.

'Ib.' Hamlet's soliloquy:--

Now could I drink hot blood,
And do such business as the bitter day
Would quake to look on.

The utmost at which Hamlet arrives, is a disposition, a mood, to do something:--but what to do, is still left undecided, while every word he utters tends to betray his disguise. Yet observe how perfectly equal to any call of the moment is Hamlet, let it only not be for the future.

'Ib.' sc. 4. Speech of Polonius. Polonius's volunteer obtrusion of himself into this business, while it is appropriate to his character, still itching after former importance, removes all likelihood that Hamlet should suspect his presence, and prevents us from making his death injure Hamlet in our opinion.

'Ib.' The king's speech:--

O, my offence is rank, it smells to heaven, &c.

This speech well marks the difference between crime and guilt of habit. The conscience here is still admitted to audience. Nay, even as an audible soliloquy, it is far less improbable than is supposed by such as have watched men only in the beaten road of their feelings. But the final--'all may be well!' is remarkable;--the degree of merit attributed by the self-flattering soul to its own struggle, though baffled, and to the indefinite half-promise, half-command, to persevere in religious duties. The solution is in the divine 'medium' of the Christian doctrine of expiation:--not what you have done, but what you are, must determine.

'Ib.' Hamlet's speech:--

Now might I do it, pat, now he is praying:
And now I'll do it:--And so he goes to heaven:
And so am I revenged? That would be scann'd, &c.

Dr. Johnson's mistaking of the marks of reluctance and procrastination for impetuous, horror-striking, fiendishness!--Of such importance is it to understand the germ of a character. But the interval taken by Hamlet's speech is truly awful! And then--

My words fly up, my thoughts remain below:
Words, without thoughts, never to heaven go,--

O what a lesson concerning the essential difference between wishing and willing, and the folly of all motive-mongering, while the individual self remains!

'Ib.' sc. 4.

'Ham'. A bloody deed;--almost as bad, good mother,
As kill a king, and marry with his brother.

'Queen'. As kill a king?

I confess that Shakspeare has left the character of the Queen in an unpleasant perplexity. Was she, or was she not, conscious of the fratricide?

Act iv. sc. 2.

'Ros'. Take you me for a spunge, my lord?

'Ham'. Ay, Sir; that soaks up the King's countenance, his rewards, his
authorities, &c.

Hamlet's madness is made to consist in the free utterance of all the thoughts that had passed through his mind before;--in fact, in telling home-truths.

Act. iv. sc. 5. Ophelia's singing. O, note the conjunction here of these two thoughts that had never subsisted in disjunction, the love for Hamlet, and her filial love, with the guileless floating on the surface of her pure imagination of the cautions so lately expressed, and the fears not too delicately avowed, by her father and brother concerning the dangers to which her honour lay exposed. Thought, affliction, passion, murder itself--she turns to favour and prettiness. This play of association is instanced in the close:--

My brother shall know of it, and I thank you for your good counsel.

'Ib.' Gentleman's speech:--

And as the world were now but to begin,
Antiquity forgot, custom not known,
The ratifiers and props of every ward--
They cry, &c.

Fearful and self-suspicious as I always feel, when I seem to see an error of judgment in Shakspeare, yet I cannot reconcile the cool, and, as Warburton calls it, 'rational and consequential,' reflection in these lines with the anonymousness, or the alarm, of this Gentleman or Messenger, as he is called in other editions.

'Ib.' King's speech:--

There's such divinity doth hedge a king,
That treason can but peep to what it would,
Acts little of his will.

Proof, as indeed all else is, that Shakspeare never intended us to see the King with Hamlet's eyes; though, I suspect, the managers have long done so.

'Ib.' Speech of Laertes:--

To hell, allegiance! vows, to the blackest devil!

Laertes is a 'good' character, but, &c. (WARBURTON.)

Mercy on Warburton's notion of goodness! Please to refer to the seventh scene of this act;--

I will do it;
And for this purpose I'll anoint my sword, &c.

uttered by Laertes after the King's description of Hamlet;--

He being remiss,
Most generous, and free from all contriving,
Will not peruse the foils.

Yet I acknowledge that Shakspeare evidently wishes, as much as possible, to spare the character of Laertes,--to break the extreme turpitude of his consent to become an agent and accomplice of the King's treachery;--and to this end he re-introduces Ophelia at the close of this scene to afford a probable stimulus of passion in her brother.

'Ib.' sc. 6. Hamlet's capture by the pirates. This is almost the only play of Shakspeare, in which mere accidents, independent of all will, form an essential part of the plot;--but here how judiciously in keeping with the character of the over-meditative Hamlet, ever at last determined by accident or by a fit of passion!

'Ib.' sc. 7. Note how the King first awakens Laertes's vanity by praising the reporter, and then gratifies it by the report itself, and finally points it by--

Sir, this report of his
Did Hamlet so envenom with his envy!--

'Ib.' King's speech:

For goodness, growing to a _pleurisy_,
Dies in his own too much.

Theobald's note from Warburton, who conjectures 'plethory.'

I rather think that Shakspeare meant 'pleurisy,' but involved in it the thought of _plethora_, as supposing pleurisy to arise from too much blood; otherwise I cannot explain the following line--

And then this _should_ is like a spendthrift sigh,
That hurts by easing.

In a stitch in the side every one must have heaved a sigh that 'hurt by easing.'

Since writing the above I feel confirmed that 'pleurisy' is the right word; for I find that in the old medical dictionaries the pleurisy is often called the 'plethory.'

Ib.

'Queen'. Your sister's drown'd, Laertes.

'Laer'. Drown'd! O, where?

That Laertes might be excused in some degree for not cooling, the Act concludes with the affecting death of Ophelia,--who in the beginning lay like a little projection of land into a lake or stream, covered with spray-flowers quietly reflected in the quiet waters, but at length is undermined or loosened, and becomes a faery isle, and after a brief vagrancy sinks almost without an eddy!

Act v. sc. 1. O, the rich contrast between the Clowns and Hamlet, as two extremes! You see in the former the mockery of logic, and a traditional wit valued, like truth, for its antiquity, and treasured up, like a tune, for use.

'Ib.' sc. 1 and 2. Shakspeare seems to mean all Hamlet's character to be brought together before his final disappearance from the scene;--his meditative excess in the grave-digging, his yielding to passion with Laertes, his love for Ophelia blazing out, his tendency to generalize on all occasions in the dialogue with Horatio, his fine gentlemanly manners with Osrick, and his and Shakspeare's own fondness for presentiment:

But thou would'st not think, how ill all's here about my heart: but it
is no matter.

[Footnote 1: It is so pointed in the modern editions.--Ed.]

NOTES ON MACBETH.

Macbeth stands in contrast throughout with Hamlet; in the manner of opening more especially. In the latter, there is a gradual ascent from the simplest forms of conversation to the language of impassioned intellect,--yet the intellect still remaining the seat of passion: in the former, the invocation is at once made to the imagination and the emotions connected therewith. Hence the movement throughout is the most rapid of all Shakspeare's plays; and hence also, with the exception of the disgusting passage of the Porter (Act ii. sc. 3.), which I dare pledge myself to demonstrate to be an interpolation of the actors, there is not, to the best of my remembrance, a single pun or play on words in the whole drama. I have previously given an answer to the thousand times repeated charge against Shakspeare upon the subject of his punning, and I here merely mention the fact of the absence of any puns in Macbeth, as justifying a candid doubt at least, whether even in these figures of speech and fanciful modifications of language, Shakspeare may not have followed rules and principles that merit and would stand the test of philosophic examination. And hence, also, there is an entire absence of comedy, nay, even of irony and philosophic contemplation in Macbeth,--the play being wholly and purely tragic. For the same cause, there are no reasonings of equivocal morality, which would have required a more leisurely state and a consequently greater activity of mind;--no sophistry of self-delusion,--except only that previously to the dreadful act, Macbeth mistranslates the recoilings and ominous whispers of conscience into prudential and selfish reasonings, and, after the deed done, the terrors of remorse into fear from external dangers,--like delirious men who run away from the phantoms of their own brains, or, raised by terror to rage, stab the real object that is within their reach:--whilst Lady Macbeth merely endeavours to reconcile his and her own sinkings of heart by anticipations of the worst, and an affected bravado in confronting them. In all the rest, Macbeth's language is the grave utterance of the very heart, conscience-sick, even to the last faintings of moral death. It is the same in all the other characters. The variety arises from rage, caused ever and anon by disruption of anxious thought, and the quick transition of fear into it.

In Hamlet and Macbeth the scene opens with superstition; but, in each it is not merely different, but opposite. In the first it is connected with the best and holiest feelings; in the second with the shadowy, turbulent, and unsanctified cravings of the individual will. Nor is the purpose the same; in the one the object is to excite, whilst in the other it is to mark a mind already excited. Superstition, of one sort or another, is natural to victorious generals; the instances are too notorious to need mentioning. There is so much of chance in warfare, and such vast events are connected with the acts of a single individual,--the representative, in truth, of the efforts of myriads, and yet to the public and, doubtless, to his own feelings, the aggregate of all,--that the proper temperament for generating or receiving superstitious impressions is naturally produced. Hope, the master element of a commanding genius, meeting with an active and combining intellect, and an imagination of just that degree of vividness which disquiets and impels the soul to try to realize its images, greatly increases the creative power of the mind; and hence the images become a satisfying world of themselves, as is the case in every poet and original philosopher:--but hope fully gratified, and yet the elementary basis of the passion remaining, becomes fear; and, indeed, the general, who must often feel, even though he may hide it from his own consciousness, how large a share chance had in his successes, may very naturally be irresolute in a new scene, where he knows that all will depend on his own act and election.

The Wierd Sisters are as true a creation of Shakspeare's, as his Ariel and Caliban,--fates, furies, and materializing witches being the elements. They are wholly different from any representation of witches in the contemporary writers, and yet presented a sufficient external resemblance to the creatures of vulgar prejudice to act immediately on the audience. Their character consists in the imaginative disconnected from the good; they are the shadowy obscure and fearfully anomalous of physical nature, the lawless of human nature,--elemental avengers without sex or kin:

Fair is foul, and foul is fair; Hover thro' the fog and filthy air.

How much it were to be wished in playing Macbeth, that an attempt should be made to introduce the flexile character-mask of the ancient pantomime;--that Flaxman would contribute his genius to the embodying and making sensuously perceptible that of Shakspeare!

The style and rhythm of the Captain's speeches in the second scene should be illustrated by reference to the interlude in Hamlet, in which the epic is substituted for the tragic, in order to make the latter be felt as the real-life diction. In Macbeth, the poet's object was to raise the mind at once to the high tragic tone, that the audience might be ready for the precipitate consummation of guilt in the early part of the play. The true reason for the first appearance of the Witches is to strike the key-note of the character of the whole drama, as is proved by their re-appearance in the third scene, after such an order of the king's as establishes their supernatural power of information. I say information,--for so it only is as to Glamis and Cawdor; the 'king hereafter' was still contingent,--still in Macbeth's moral will; although, if he should yield to the temptation, and thus forfeit his free agency, the link of cause and effect 'more physico' would then commence. I need not say, that the general idea is all that can be required from the poet,--not a scholastic logical consistency in all the parts so as to meet metaphysical objectors. But O! how truly Shakspearian is the opening of Macbeth's character given in the 'unpossessedness' of Banquo's mind, wholly present to the present object,--an unsullied, unscarified mirror!--And how strictly true to nature it is, that Banquo, and not Macbeth himself, directs our notice to the effect produced on Macbeth's mind, rendered temptible by previous dalliance of the fancy with ambitious thoughts:

Good Sir, why do you start; and seem to fear
Things that do sound so fair?

And then, again, still unintroitive, addresses the Witches:--

I' the name of truth,
Are ye fantastical, or that indeed
Which outwardly ye show?

Banquo's questions are those of natural curiosity,--such as a girl would put after hearing a gipsy tell her schoolfellow's fortune;--all perfectly general, or rather planless. But Macbeth, lost in thought, raises himself to speech only by the Witches being about to depart:--

Stay, you imperfect speakers, tell me more:--

and all that follows is reasoning on a problem already discussed in his mind,--on a hope which he welcomes, and the doubts concerning the attainment of which he wishes to have cleared up. Compare his eagerness,--the keen eye with which he has pursued the Witches' evanishing--

Speak, I charge you!

with the easily satisfied mind of the self-uninterested Banquo:--

The air hath bubbles, as the water has,
And these are of them:--Whither are they vanish'd?

and then Macbeth's earnest reply,--

Into the air; and what seem'd corporal, melted
As breath into the wind.--_'Would they had staid!_

Is it too minute to notice the appropriateness of the simile 'as breath,' &c. in a cold climate?

Still again Banquo goes on wondering like any common spectator:

Were such things here as we do speak about?

whilst Macbeth persists in recurring to the self-concerning:--

Your children shall be kings.

'Ban'. You shall be king.

'Macb'. And thane of Cawdor too: went it not so?

So surely is the guilt in its germ anterior to the supposed cause, and immediate temptation! Before he can cool, the confirmation of the tempting half of the prophecy arrives, and the concatenating tendency of the imagination is fostered by the sudden coincidence:--

Glamis, and thane of Cawdor: The greatest is behind.

Oppose this to Banquo's simple surprise:--

What, can the devil speak true?

'Ib.' Banquo's speech:--

That, trusted home,
Might yet enkindle you unto the crown,
Besides the thane of Cawdor.

I doubt whether 'enkindle' has not another sense than that of 'stimulating;' I mean of 'kind' and 'kin,' as when rabbits are said to 'kindle.' However Macbeth no longer hears any thing 'ab extra':--

Two truths are told,
As happy prologues to the swelling act
Of the imperial theme.

Then in the necessity of recollecting himself--

I thank you, gentlemen.

Then he relapses into himself again, and every word of his soliloquy shows the early birthdate of his guilt. He is all-powerful without strength; he wishes the end, but is irresolute as to the means; conscience distinctly warns him, and he lulls it imperfectly:--

If chance will have me king, why, chance may crown me
Without my stir.

Lost in the prospective of his guilt, he turns round alarmed lest others may suspect what is passing in his own mind, and instantly vents the lie of ambition:

My dull brain was wrought
With things _forgotten_;--

And immediately after pours forth the promising courtesies of a usurper in intention:--

Kind gentlemen, your pains
Are register'd where every day I turn
The leaf to read them.

'Ib.' Macbeth's speech:

Presents _fears_ Are less than horrible imaginings.

Warburton's note, and substitution of 'feats' for 'fears.'

Mercy on this most wilful ingenuity of blundering, which, nevertheless, was the very Warburton of Warburton--his inmost being! 'Fears,' here, are present fear-striking objects, 'terribilia adstantia'.

'Ib.' sc. 4. O! the affecting beauty of the death of Cawdor, and the presentimental speech of the king:

There's no art
To find the mind's construction in the face:
He was a gentleman on whom I built
An absolute trust--

Interrupted by--

O worthiest cousin!

on the entrance of the deeper traitor for whom Cawdor had made way! And here in contrast with Duncan's 'plenteous joys,' Macbeth has nothing but the common-places of loyalty, in which he hides himself with 'our duties.' Note the exceeding effort of Macbeth's addresses to the king, his reasoning on his allegiance, and then especially when a new difficulty, the designation of a successor, suggests a new crime. This, however, seems the first distinct notion, as to the plan of realizing his wishes; and here, therefore, with great propriety, Macbeth's cowardice of his own conscience discloses itself. I always think there is something especially Shakspearian in Duncan's speeches throughout this scene, such pourings forth, such abandonments, compared with the language of vulgar dramatists, whose characters seem to have made their speeches as the actors learn them.

'Ib.' Duncan's speech:--

Sons, kinsmen, thanes,
And you whose places are the nearest, know,
We will establish our estate upon
Our eldest Malcolm, whom we name hereafter
The Prince of Cumberland: which honour must
Not unaccompanied, invest him only;
But signs of nobleness, like stars, shall shine
On all deservers.

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.

'Ib.' sc. 5. Macbeth is described by Lady Macbeth so as at the same time to reveal her own character. Could he have everything he wanted, he would rather have it innocently;--ignorant, as alas! how many of us are, that he who wishes a temporal end for itself, does in truth will the means; and hence the danger of indulging fancies. Lady Macbeth, like all in Shakspeare, is a class individualized:--of high rank, left much alone, and feeding herself with day-dreams of ambition, she mistakes the courage of fantasy for the power of bearing the consequences of the realities of guilt. Hers is the mock fortitude of a mind deluded by ambition; she shames her husband with a superhuman audacity of fancy which she cannot support, but sinks in the season of remorse, and dies in suicidal agony. Her speech:

Come, all you spirits That tend on mortal thoughts, unsex me here, &c.

is that of one who had habitually familiarized her imagination to dreadful conceptions, and was trying to do so still more. Her invocations and requisitions are all the false efforts of a mind accustomed only hitherto to the shadows of the imagination, vivid enough to throw the every-day substances of life into shadow, but never as yet brought into direct contact with their own correspondent realities. She evinces no womanly life, no wifely joy, at the return of her husband, no pleased terror at the thought of his past dangers; whilst Macbeth bursts forth naturally--

My dearest love--

and shrinks from the boldness with which she presents his own thoughts to him. With consummate art she at first uses as incentives the very circumstances, Duncan's coming to their house, &c. which Macbeth's conscience would most probably have adduced to her as motives of abhorrence or repulsion. Yet Macbeth is not prepared:

We will speak further.

'Ib.' sc. 6. The lyrical movement with which this scene opens, and the free and unengaged mind of Banquo, loving nature, and rewarded in the love itself, form a highly dramatic contrast with the laboured rhythm and hypocritical over-much of Lady Macbeth's welcome, in which you cannot detect a ray of personal feeling, but all is thrown upon the 'dignities,' the general duty.

'Ib.' sc. 7. Macbeth's speech:

We will proceed no further in this business:
He hath honor'd me of late; and I have bought
Golden opinions from all sorts of people,
Which would be worn now in their newest gloss,
Not cast aside so soon.

Note the inward pangs and warnings of conscience interpreted into prudential reasonings.

Act ii. sc. 1. Banquo's speech:

A heavy summons lies like lead upon me,
And yet I would not sleep. Merciful powers!
Restrain in me the cursed thoughts, that nature
Gives way to in repose.

The disturbance of an innocent soul by painful suspicions of another's guilty intentions and wishes, and fear of the cursed thoughts of sensual nature.

'Ib.' sc. 2. Now that the deed is done or doing--now that the first reality commences, Lady Macbeth shrinks. The most simple sound strikes terror, the most natural consequences are horrible, whilst previously every thing, however awful, appeared a mere trifle; conscience, which before had been hidden to Macbeth in selfish and prudential fears, now rushes in upon him in her own veritable person:

Methought I heard a voice cry--
Sleep no more! I could not say Amen,
When they did say, God bless us!

And see the novelty given to the most familiar images by a new state of feeling.

'Ib.' sc. 3. This low soliloquy of the Porter and his few speeches afterwards, I believe to have been written for the mob by some other hand, perhaps with Shakspeare's consent; and that finding it take, he with the remaining ink of a pen otherwise employed, just interpolated the words--

I'll devil-porter it no further: I had thought to have let in some of
all professions, that go the primrose way to th' everlasting bonfire.

Of the rest not one syllable has the ever-present being of Shakspeare.

Act iii. sc. 1. Compare Macbeth's mode of working on the murderers in this place with Schiller's mistaken scene between Butler, Devereux, and Macdonald in Wallenstein. (Part II. act iv. sc. 2.) The comic was wholly out of season. Shakspeare never introduces it, but when it may react on the tragedy by harmonious contrast.

'Ib.' sc. 2. Macbeth's speech:

But let the frame of things disjoint, both the worlds suffer,
Ere we will eat our meal in fear, and sleep
In the affliction of these terrible dreams
That shake us nightly.

Ever and ever mistaking the anguish of conscience for fears of selfishness, and thus as a punishment of that selfishness, plunging still deeper in guilt and ruin.

'Ib.' Macbeth's speech:

Be innocent of the knowledge, dearest chuck,
Till thou applaud the deed.

This is Macbeth's sympathy with his own feelings, and his mistaking his wife's opposite state.

'Ib.' sc. 4.

'Macb'. It will have blood, they say; blood will have blood:
Stones have been known to move, and trees to speak;
Augurs, and understood relations, have
By magot-pies, and choughs, and rooks, brought forth
The secret'st man of blood.

The deed is done; but Macbeth receives no comfort,--no additional security. He has by guilt torn himself live-asunder from nature, and is, therefore, himself in a preter-natural state: no wonder, then, that he is inclined to superstition, and faith in the unknown of signs and tokens, and super-human agencies.

Act iv. sc. 1.

'Len'. 'Tis two or three, my lord, that bring you word,
Macduff is fled to England.

'Macb'. Fled to England?

The acme of the avenging conscience.

'Ib.' sc. 2. This scene, dreadful as it is, is still a relief, because a variety, because domestic, and therefore soothing, as associated with the only real pleasures of life. The conversation between Lady Macduff and her child heightens the pathos, and is preparatory for the deep tragedy of their assassination. Shakspeare's fondness for children is every where shown;--in Prince Arthur, in King John; in the sweet scene in the Winter's Tale between Hermione and her son; nay, even in honest Evans's examination of Mrs. Page's schoolboy. To the objection that Shakspeare wounds the moral sense by the unsubdued, undisguised description of the most hateful atrocity--that he tears the feelings without mercy, and even outrages the eye itself with scenes of insupportable horror--I, omitting Titus Andronicus, as not genuine, and excepting the scene of Gloster's blinding in Lear, answer boldly in the name of Shakspeare, not guilty.

'Ib.' sc. 3. Malcolm's speech:

Better Macbeth,
Than such a one to reign.

The moral is--the dreadful effects even on the best minds of the soul--sickening sense of insecurity.

'Ib.' How admirably Macduff's grief is in harmony with the whole play! It rends, not dissolves, the heart. 'The tune of it goes manly.' Thus is Shakspeare always master of himself and of his subject,--a genuine Proteus:--we see all things in him, as images in a calm lake, most distinct, most accurate,--only more splendid, more glorified. This is correctness in the only philosophical sense. But he requires your sympathy and your submission; you must have that recipiency of moral impression without which the purposes and ends of the drama would be frustrated, and the absence of which demonstrates an utter want of all imagination, a deadness to that necessary pleasure of being innocently--shall I say, deluded?--or rather, drawn away from ourselves to the music of noblest thought in harmonious sounds. Happy he, who not only in the public theatre, but in the labours of a profession, and round the light of his own hearth, still carries a heart so pleasure-fraught!

Alas for Macbeth! Now all is inward with him; he has no more prudential prospective reasonings. His wife, the only being who could have had any seat in his affections, dies; he puts on despondency, the final heart-armour of the wretched, and would fain think every thing shadowy and unsubstantial, as indeed all things are to those who cannot regard them as symbols of goodness:--

Out, out, brief candle!
Life's but a walking shadow; a poor player,
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,
And then is heard no more: it is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.

NOTES ON THE WINTER'S TALE.

Although, on the whole, this play is exquisitely respondent to its title, and even in the fault I am about to mention, still a winter's tale; yet it seems a mere indolence of the great bard not to have provided in the oracular response (Act ii. sc. 2.) some ground for Hermione's seeming death and fifteen years voluntary concealment. This might have been easily effected by some obscure sentence of the oracle, as for example:--

'Nor shall he ever recover an heir, if he have a wife before that
recovery.'

The idea of this delightful drama is a genuine jealousy of disposition, and it should be immediately followed by the perusal of Othello, which is the direct contrast of it in every particular. For jealousy is a vice of the mind, a culpable tendency of the temper, having certain well known and well defined effects and concomitants, all of which are visible in Leontes, and, I boldly say, not one of which marks its presence in Othello;--such as, first, an excitability by the most inadequate causes, and an eagerness to snatch at proofs; secondly, a grossness of conception, and a disposition to degrade the object of the passion by sensual fancies and images; thirdly, a sense of shame of his own feelings exhibited in a solitary moodiness of humour, and yet from the violence of the passion forced to utter itself, and therefore catching occasions to ease the mind by ambiguities, equivoques, by talking to those who cannot, and who are known not to be able to, understand what is said to them,--in short, by soliloquy in the form of dialogue, and hence a confused, broken, and fragmentary, manner; fourthly, a dread of vulgar ridicule, as distinct from a high sense of honour, or a mistaken sense of duty; and lastly, and immediately, consequent on this, a spirit of selfish vindictiveness.

Act i. sc. 1--2.

Observe the easy style of chitchat between Camillo and Archidamus as contrasted with the elevated diction on the introduction of the kings and Hermione in the second scene: and how admirably Polixenes' obstinate refusal to Leontes to stay--

There is no tongue that moves; none, none i' the world
So soon as yours, could win me;--

prepares for the effect produced by his afterwards yielding to Hermione;--which is, nevertheless, perfectly natural from mere courtesy of sex, and the exhaustion of the will by former efforts of denial, and well calculated to set in nascent action the jealousy of Leontes. This, when once excited, is unconsciously increased by Hermione:--

Yet, good deed, Leontes, I love thee not a jar o' the clock behind
What lady she her lord;--

accompanied, as a good actress ought to represent it, by an expression and recoil of apprehension that she had gone too far.

At my request, he would not:--

The first working of the jealous fit;--

Too hot, too hot:--

The morbid tendency of Leontes to lay hold of the merest trifles, and his grossness immediately afterwards--

Padling palms and pinching fingers:--

followed by his strange loss of self-control in his dialogue with the little boy.

Act iii. sc. 2. Paulina's speech:

That thou betray'dst Polixenes,'twas nothing;
That did but show thee, of a _fool_, inconstant,
And damnable ingrateful.--

Theobald reads 'soul.'

I think the original word is Shakspeare's.

1. My ear feels it to be Shakspearian;

2. The involved grammar is Shakspearian;--'show thee, being a fool naturally, to have improved thy folly by inconstancy;'

3. The alteration is most flat, and un-Shakspearian. As to the grossness of the abuse--she calls him 'gross and foolish' a few lines below.

Act iv. sc. 2. Speech of Autolycus:--

For the life to come, I sleep out the thought of it.

Fine as this is, and delicately characteristic of one who had lived and been reared in the best society, and had been precipitated from it by dice and drabbing; yet still it strikes against my feelings as a note out of tune, and as not coalescing with that pastoral tint which gives such a charm to this act. It is too Macbeth-like in the 'snapper up of unconsidered trifles.'

'Ib.' sc. 3. Perdita's speech:--

From Dis's waggon! daffodils.

An epithet is wanted here, not merely or chiefly for the metre, but for the balance, for the aesthetic logic. Perhaps, 'golden' was the word which would set off the 'violets dim.'

Ib.

Pale primroses
That die unmarried.--

Milton's--

And the rathe primrose that forsaken dies.

'Ib.' Perdita's speech:--

Even here undone:
I was not much afraid; for once or twice
I was about to speak, and tell him plainly,
The self-same sun, that shines upon his court,
Hides not his visage from our cottage, but
Looks on alike. Wilt please you, Sir, be gone!
(_To Florizel._)
I told you, what would come of this. Beseech you,
Of your own state take care: this dream of mine,
Being awake, I'll queen it no inch farther,
But milk my ewes, and weep.

O how more than exquisite is this whole speech!--And that profound nature of noble pride and grief venting themselves in a momentary peevishness of resentment toward Florizel:--

--Wilt please you, Sir, be gone!

'Ib.' Speech of Autolycus:--

Let me have no lying; it becomes none but tradesmen, and they often
give us soldiers the lie; but we pay them for it in stamped coin, not
stabbing steel;--therefore they do not _give_ us the lie.

As we _pay_ them, they, therefore, do not _give_ it us.

NOTES ON OTHELLO