]wSm BBftSfl tJOgPJPlwffl ISjfcS? SHHBH BH Class ZEE ; : Book._ Gcpightls 10 COPYRIGHT DEPOSIT A, 7 211 €^e dSatetna? Series OF ENGLISH TEXTS GENERAL EDITOR HENRY VAN DYKE THE GATEWAY SERIES. HENRY VAN DYKE, General Editor. Shakespeare's Merchant of Venice. Professor Felix E. Schelling, University of Pennsylvania. Shakespeare's Julius Caesar. Dr. Hamilton W. Mabie, " The Outlook." Shakespeare's Macbeth. Professor T. M. Parrott, Prince- ton University. Milton's Minor Poems. Professor Mary A. Jordan, Smith College. Addison's Sir Roger de Coverley Papers. Professor C. T. Winchester, Wesleyan University. Goldsmith's Vicar of Wakefield. Professor James A. Tufts, Phillips Exeter Academy. Burke's Speech on Conciliation. Professor William MacDonald, Brown University. Coleridge's The Ancient Mariner. Professor George E. Woodberry, Columbia University. Scott's Ivanhoe. Professor Francis H. Stoddard, New York University. Scott's Lady of the Lake. Professor R. M. Alden, Leland Stanford Jr. University. Irving's Life of Goldsmith. Professor Martin Wright Sampson, Indiana University. Macaulay's Milton. Rev. E. L. Gulick, Lawrenceville School. Macaulay's Addison. Professor Charles F. McClumpha, University of Minnesota. Macaulay's Life of Johnson. Professor J. S. Clark, North- western University. Carlyle'S Essay on Burns. Professor Edwin Mims, Trin- ity College, North Carolina. George Eliot's Silas Marner. Professor W. L. Cross, Yale University. Tennyson's Princess. Professor Katharine Lee Bates, Wellesley College. Tennyson's Gareth and Lynette, Lancelot and Elaine, and The Passing of Arthur. Henry van Dyke. 1$W. ^htfsFsfi fmi c GATEWAY SERIES MACBETH EDITED BY THOMAS MARC PARROTT, Ph.D. PROFESSOR OF ENGLISH IN PRINCETON UNIVERSITY ft ■•:. NEW" YORK •:• CINCINNATI :• CHICAGO AMERICAN BOOK COMPANY LIBRARY of C0N6RESS Two Goolps Received JUL 16 1904 Copyright Entry ' CLASS fc- XXe. Na ttir f? £ L COPY B Copyright, 1904, by AMERICAN BOOK COMPANY. Entered at Stationers' Hall, London. MACBETH. W. P. 1 PREFACE BY THE GENERAL EDITOR This series of books aims, first, to give the English texts required for entrance to college in* a form which shall make them clear, interesting, and helpful to those who are beginning the study of literature ; and, second, to supply the knowledge which the student needs to pass the entrance examination. For these two reasons it is called The Gateway Series. The poems, plays, essays, and stories in these small volumes are treated, first of all, as works of literature, which were written to be read and enjoyed, not to be parsed and scanned and pulled to pieces. A short life of the author is given, and a portrait, in order to help the student to know the real person who wrote the book. The introduction tells what it is about, and how it was written, and where the author got the idea, and what it means. The notes at the foot of the page are simply to give the sense of the hard words so that the student can read straight on without turning to a dictionary. The other notes, at the end of the book, explain difficulties and allusions and fine points, 5 6 Preface by the General Editor The editors are chosen because of their thorough training and special fitness to deal with the books committed to them, and because they agree with this idea of what a Gateway Series ought to be. They express, in each case, their own views of the books which they edit. Simplicity, thoroughness, shortness, and clearness, — these, we hope, will be the marks of the series. HENRY VAN DYKE. PREFACE It has been my aim in preparing this edition of Macbeth to bring one of the greatest creations of Eng- lish literature within the comprehension of the average school-boy. The biography and introduction have been composed with the hope of awakening in the young student some interest in Shakespeare's life and work, and of thus inducing him to approach the play, not as a piece of task work, but in a spirit of intellectual curiosity. The text itself has been carefully prepared with a view to reproducing as far as possible the exact words which Shakespeare wrote. One passage alone I have felt called upon to excise, and that has been lifted cleanly out of the play without garbling the context. The glossarial notes, based for the most part upon Schmidt's Shakespeare Dictionary and the New English Dictionary, have been placed at the bottom of the page in order to save the student's time and distract his attention as little as possible from the real subject of study, the play itself. The critical and explanatory notes have a twofold purpose. They are meant to explain in the simplest terms possible the difficulties in the text itself and the allusions and references which stand in the way of an intelligent appreciation of the play. And they are also 7 8 Preface meant to interpret in the simplest fashion the play as a piece of dramatic art, to show the relation of one scene to another, and the place of each in the scheme of the whole. I trust that these notes are not over- copious ; their bulk is due to my conviction that the average school-boy is at once incapable of understand- ing Shakespeare by the light of nature, and that he is in practice wholly dependent for aid upon the text-book which is put into his hands. The textual notes are an attempt to justify the text here presented. They may, perhaps, serve also in the case of students advanced above the average as an introduction to the study of textual criticism. The brief note on metre is intended to give the student such elementary knowledge of this subject as is usually required for entrance into college. In the preparation of this book I have drawn upon many sources, particularly upon Dr. Furness's Variorum edition. I have been particularly fortunate in being able to check and correct my work by reference to Dr. LiddelPs scholarly and stimulating commentary in the Elizabethan Macbeth. In conclusion I wish to thank, not for the first time, Mr. D. L. Chambers and my colleague, Mr. Long, for illuminating suggestion, severe and kindly criticism, and valued assistance in the matter of proof reading. THOMAS MARC PARROTT. Princeton University. CONTENTS PAGE Biography . .11 Introduction . . . . , , . . .30 Macbeth 51 Notes : Critical and Explanatory . . . . . ,167 Textual Notes 245 A Note on Metre 264 BIOGRAPHY It has sometimes been said that we know next to nothing about Shakespeare the man ; but this statement is far from accurate. We know a great deal about the world he lived in and the influences which shaped and coloured his work ; we know as many facts about his life as about that of almost any poet of his day ; and from his plays we may learn far more than is usually admitted about his character and temperament. It is a mistaken reverence which loses itself in admiration of the work of the poet and forgets the very human man who lies behind this work. William Shakespeare was born probably on April 22 or 23, 1564. His father, John Shakespeare, was at this time a prosperous citizen in the little town of Stratford- on-Avon. Some twelve years before the poet's birth, John Shakespeare had come into town and opened a sort of general store for the sale of country produce. He rapidly rose into prominence, filled one office after an- other, and, four years after William's birth, was elected to the highest position in the town, that of bailiff. During his year of office he twice extended the hospitalities of the town to travelling actors, and it is most likely that William Shakespeare got his first impressions of the drama 11 12 Biography as a boy upon his father's knees in the town hall of Strat- ford. The poet's mother, Mary Arden, was connected with one of the most prominent families in the county and was, moreover, better provided with the world's goods than her husband. At the age of seven or eight William Shakespeare entered the grammar school of Stratford. His studies, which were probably continued for at least five or six years, were, after the fashion of the day, almost entirely confined to Latin. He committed the grammar to mem- ory, learned to repeat easy conversations in Latin, and read selections from such authors as Virgil, Horace, Cicero, and Seneca. His favourite poet seems to have been Ovid. Probably he also obtained at school some little knowledge of Greek, enough at least to read the standard authors in the popular editions which printed the Greek text on one page and a Latin translation on the other. Ben Jonson's remark that Shakespeare had " small Latin and less Greek " has sometimes been accepted as showing that the poet's education was very superficial ; but it must be remembered that Jonson was one of the best classical scholars of his time, and judged Shakespeare by his own standard. There can be no doubt that as far as a reading knowledge of the classics goes, Shakespeare was at least on a level with the average graduate of an American college. Very little, if any, instruction in mathematics was given in English schools in Shakespeare's day, and there was no opportunity whatever for studying either his native Biography 13 tongue, or the modern languages. Shakespeare's knowl- edge of the Bible was obtained at home and in the town church, and his acquaintance with French and Italian, such as it was, he probably acquired during his later life in London. Shakespeare cannot have done much reading in his youth, — his father's house contained at most a Bible, a chronicle, and, perhaps, some old romance, and there was no free library in Stratford in those days, — but he had all the more time for boyish games, for the legends of ghosts and fairies which served to pass the long winter evenings, and above all for the sights and sounds of the beautiful English country which lay about him. Stratford was a very tiny town, and a few steps from the main street would take the boy into some of the loveliest scenery in England. Warwickshire was wilder then than now, and the forest of Arden covered a great part of the county. To Shakespeare, with his be- lief in witchcraft and wood-spirits, rambles in its shades must have seemed like voyages in fairyland ; and we may be sure that when in after years he wrote of the haunted wood outside of Athens, or the great forest in France where the banished Duke and his companions chased the deer, he was dreaming of his own English Arden. But we may be sure, too, that Shakespeare was no mere dreamy boy. He had eyes and ears for all that he saw or heard. He knew all the flowers of the field, and all the notes of the birds. But perhaps the best proof of Shakespeare's genuine boyishness was his devotion to 14 Biography sports. He loved dogs, hawks, and horses, and knew all their good points ; and his love of hunting seems at one time to have involved him in serious trouble. During Shakespeare's school days his father became entangled in business difficulties and was forced to mort- gage the property he had received from his wife. It was probably on this account that he withdrew his son from school at an early age, and set him to work, perhaps in his own shop in Stratford. Some five or six years after leaving school, Shake- speare, then a lad of eighteen, suddenly and perhaps secretly, married Anne Hathaway, a woman eight years his senior. His first child, Susanna, was born within a year. In January, 1585, his wife gave birth to twins, Hamnet and Judith, and shortly after Shakespeare left Stratford and his wife never to return, except for an occa- sional visit, until the main work of his life was over. Va- rious causes, no doubt, contributed to his departure from Stratford, — his father's poverty, his own increasing fam- ily, the impossibility of finding suitable employment in the little town, but probably the immediate occasion of his flight was the trouble in which his love of sport had involved him. The most important personage in or about Stratford at this time was a certain Sir Thomas Lucy, a country squire of wide acres and strict principles. He owned a rabbit warren on which Shakespeare made frequent raids. He was at last detected and the great man's anger was so fierce that Shakespeare sought safety in flight. Biography 17 The same tendency to expansion and assimilation appeared in the intellectual and artistic life of the nation. The great outburst of literature which marks the beginning of the second half of Elizabeth's reign, was by no means a mere development of the literature of the Middle Ages. On the contrary it was based upon the New Learning, the passionate study of the classics which for the last half century had been dominating the schools and universities of England ; and it was coloured by contact at many points with the rich and varied literature of Italy. The intellectual eagerness of the nation to learn is proved by the multitude of transla- tions which opened even to those who were ignorant of all languages but their own, the treasures of the classics and of foreign literatures. But there was little or no slavish imitation ; what the English borrowed they assimi- lated, and reproduced in a thoroughly English form ; and this was particularly the case with the drama, the most characteristic form of Elizabethan art. For centuries dramatic performances had been a popular form of amusement in England. But the old mediaeval drama was a very crude affair. It took its subjects mainly from the stories of the Bible and pre- sented them in the simplest fashion. There were neither theatres nor professional actors ; the plays were presented upon movable stages by amateur performers chosen from the various trade guilds. About the middle of the six- teenth century, however, the influence of the classical dramatists began to be felt, and English plays were MACBETH — 2 1 8 Biography written in direct imitation of Plautus and Seneca. But the effort to enforce the strict rules of the classic drama had broken down even before Shakespeare came to Lon- don. The new spirit of patriotism had given birth to a new form of dramatic art, the history or chronicle play, which appealed to the interest felt by English audiences in their country's glorious past. And a new school of playwrights, Lyly, Greene, Peele, Kyd, and Marlowe, — men for the most part of classical education, but forced by the circumstances of their lives to rely directly upon the applause of the public, — were, during the early years of Shakespeare's life in London, creating a new drama as different from the conventional regularity of the classic as from the formlessness of the mediaeval stage. The new drama was, in fact, a blending of classical and roman- tic elements, choosing its themes at will from classical mythology and history, from English history and tradition, or from the passionate stories of love, hatred, and revenge so common in the Renaissance literature of Italy and France. It was for the most part composed in verse, and appealed by its stately rhetoric and its lyric charm to the Elizabethan passion for high-sounding phrases and beautiful words. At the same time, in order to hold the attention of the common people, it crowded its scenes with action ; battle, murder, and sudden death were the commonest of incidents. And the indomitable good humour of the age was seen in the constant presence of the clown, whose coarse jests and boisterous horse-play cast a gleam of mirth over even the gloomiest of tragedies. Biography 19 While the drama was thus developing toward the point where Shakespeare found it, the instruments for the inter- pretation of the drama were also in process of evolution. Professional actors had come into existence perhaps . a century before Shakespeare's birth ; but they were long regarded with scorn by the staid civic authorities. The law indeed ranked them with strollers and " lusty vaga- bonds." But the pleasure-loving aristocracy took up their cause and invited them to enrol themselves in com- panies under the patronage of some noblemen. These licensed companies, as they were called, enjoyed a degree of respect which their humbler fellows lacked, and were permitted to give performances about the country, in the suburbs of London, and even in the city itself. They were composed wholly of men and boys ; no women be- longed to professional companies till after the Restoration. There were as yet no theatres and for a long time after the formation of these companies, they were obliged to play in the courtyards of inns, in the halls of gentlemen's houses, or on booths erected at town or county fairs. For a private performance they received a fee from the person who had requested their services ; after a public performance they passed around the hat. In 1576, how- ever, while Shakespeare was still a boy at Stratford, James Burbage, the father of Shakespeare's friend, hit on the happy thought of erecting a building for theatrical per- formances by professional actors and of charging a fixed price for admission. The city authorities refused to allow such a place within the walls of London, so Burbage built 20 Biography " The Theatre " in one of the suburbs just outside the town limits. It was soon followed by the " Curtain " and the " Rose," and just as the century was closing, the Burbages pulled down " The Theatre " and with its mate- rials erected the most famous of all Elizabethan play- houses, the " Globe." Before Shakespeare's death there were probably ten or twelve theatres in and about the city. These theatres were, of course, very simple affairs. They were for the most part mere sheds, open to the sky, except for a scaffolding over the stage, and some- times over the boxes in which the better class of the audience were seated. Performances were always given in the afternoon, so that there was no need of the elabo- rate devices for the illumination of the stage to which we are accustomed. Scenery was practically unknown, and stage machinery was of the very simplest sort. The stage itself projected forward into the body of the house so that the actors could be seen from three sides. At the rear of the stage there was a recess, before which hung a curtain and over which there projected a balcony. These places served to diversify the action, since they could be used to indicate a change of scene in the play. The recess, for instance, might stand for a royal throne, a lady's bed-chamber, or a magician's study. The balcony might be anything from the deck of a vessel to the walls of a city. There was naturally no attempt at realistic stage-setting ; the place of the action was sometimes indicated by a placard hung out to announce that the Biography 21 scene was laid in Rome, or Athens, or England. It is evident that performances upon such a stage had to rely largely on the imagination of the audience, but the Elizabethan audience was ready of response, and the beautiful descriptive passages in Shakespeare's plays show that he knew that the people for whom he wrote would meet him halfway. It was into this busy, eager, pleasure-loving world that Shakespeare plunged when he joined Lord Leicester's company. In a very short time he had become one of the busiest men in London. He had, in the first place, his work as an actor, and since there were no long runs in those days, his time must have been fairly well filled with rehearsals and performances alone. His experience as an actor gave him invaluable insight into the methods of dramatic composition and before long his skill as a dramatist began to manifest itself. At first he attempted nothing more than the revision of old plays. There was no law of copyright in those days. When a playwright finished his drama, he sold it for cash to one of the com- panies and it became their absolute property. They might use it as they pleased, perform it as it came from the author, add various striking scenes and characters to it, or have it written over to suit their taste. It seems certain that in his first historical plays, the three parts of King Henry VI, Shakespeare was in the main revising and strengthening the work of older writers. But it was not long before he attempted original composition ; and after he had once begun, he worked steadily for nearly 22 Biography twenty years, turning out on an average two plays a year. His first editors declared that there was hardly a blot or correction in his manuscripts, and on the strength of this statement it has been believed that Shakespeare was one of the great unconscious artists who do their work without knowing how or why they do it. But there seems to be good evidence that Shake- speare worked hard over his plays, that he revised and corrected, and, in some cases, practically rewrote them before he was satisfied. His dramatic genius, the greatest the world has ever known, did not spring full-grown into life, but was developed and perfected by long years of strenuous effort. Shakespeare's first unqualified success as a man of let- ters was attained by the publication of his poems Venus and Adonis, 1593, and The Rape of Lucrece, 1594. Critics who looked down with scorn upon the productions of the common stage welcomed these poems with rapturous ap- plause ; and the reading public bought them up as fast as they could be issued from the press. Only two of his plays, Richard III and the first part of King Henry IV, if we may judge by the frequency of contemporary pub- lication, enjoyed anything like a corresponding popularity. The most noteworthy contemporary testimony to Shake- speare's reputation as a dramatist is that of Francis Meres, a scholar and clergyman, who published, in 1598, a work entitled Palladis Tamia, or The Treasury of Wit. In a very complete review of contemporary literature Meres declared that Shakespeare excelled all others in both Biography 23 comedy and tragedy, and he cited twelve plays to jus- tify his assertion. Less than half of these plays had been published when Meres wrote. The actors who held the copyright be- lieved that the publication of a play would lessen its drawing power as a stage performance. But as Shake- speare's reputation increased, the reading public became so eager to obtain his works that unscrupulous publishers resorted to all sorts of devices to satisfy the demand. They sent shorthand writers to the theatre to take notes, they bought parts of plays from needy actors, and some- times they even persuaded the company to part with a copy of the manuscript. In 1600 there were published no less than six separate plays by Shakespeare. A fur- ther testimony to his popularity is borne by the fact that the piratical publishers of the time took to printing other men's plays with his name, or at least his initials, upon the title-page. Seven of such publications appeared dur- ing Shakespeare's lifetime. Shakespeare's reputation as an actor and playwright soon spread from the public theatre to the court of Queen Elizabeth. Probably some of the young noblemen of her intimate circle carried a report of his genius to her. As early as 1594 he was summoned along with Burbage, the tragedian, and Kemp, the famous comic actor, to play before her at Greenwich. His early comedy, Love's Labour's Lost, was rewritten and presented at court by special request in the Christmas holidays of 1597. The Queen, with her strong masculine sense of humour, took 24 Biography a special delight in the character of Falstaff, and a plaus- ible tradition relates that she ordered Shakespeare to write a play which should exhibit the fat knight as a lover, and thus inspired the Merry Wives of Windsor. King James showed himself an even more gracious patron of Shakespeare and his friends. Almost immedi- ately after his accession he took the company under his special protection, granting them a license to perform, not only in the Globe Theatre, but also in the town hall of any town in England. Throughout the reign of James, Shakespeare's company bore the enviable title of the " King's Servants." Even before the new king entered the capital the company was requested to play before him ; and on his public entry into London, Shakespeare and eight of his fellows walked ' in the royal procession robed in scarlet cloaks bestowed upon them by the royal bounty. Throughout his reign James remained a gener- ous benefactor of his " Servants." By his special request many of Shakespeare's plays were performed at court, and for these performances the players were always hand- somely rewarded. The Tempest, perhaps the last play that Shakespeare wrote, was given at the festivities attending the marriage of James's daughter to the Prince Palatine. It is well known that Shakespeare made his fortune in London. It is not, perhaps, a matter of general acquaint- ance that he devoted this fortune to regaining for himself and his family the social position in Stratford which his father's bankruptcy and, perhaps, his own wild youth Biography 25 had forfeited. By 1596 Shakespeare had made money enough to lift his father from the slough of debts in which he had for years been struggling. In the same year, John Shakespeare, no doubt, at the suggestion of his son, applied to the College of Heralds, in London, for a coat of arms, the outward and visible sign of the possessor's rank as a gentleman. Even before the coat of arms was granted to his father, Shakespeare had given evidence of his ability as well as his desire to re-establish himself in Stratford as a substan- tial citizen. In 1597 he bought the largest dwelling in Stratford, — New Place, — the "great house" erected by Sir Hugh Clopton a hundred years before. It had long since fallen into a ruinous condition, so that the sum which Shakespeare paid for it, equivalent to about $2500, probably represented but a small part of his outlay upon the property. On his father's death, in 1601, Shakespeare inherited the double house on Henley Street, now shown to visitors as the " Birthplace " ; in the following year he bought a large farm of 107 acres near Stratford ; and in the same year he acquired a cottage and garden facing the grounds of New Place. In 1605 he invested a sum equal to be- tween $15,000 and $20,000 in purchasing a share in the tithes of Stratford, an investment which not only paid him a handsome profit, but established his position as one of the moneyed men of the town. It is said, indeed, that after his retiring from the stage he spent about $8000 a year on his Stratford house and estate. 16 Biography Shakespeare's income was derived in part from his plays, in part from his profession as an actor. To these sources must be added for the years between 1599 and 161 1 or 161 2 his shares in the Globe and Blackfriars theatres. All in all, it is hardly an exaggeration to say that Shakespeare's income in the latter years of his life approximated the sum of $25,000 a year. There is a certain satisfaction in knowing that the greatest of Eng- lish poets, the poet who, as actor and playwright, appealed most directly to the English people, received his due reward of wealth, as well as of fame. Shakespeare's life in London was, however, by no means wholly given over to work. His sympathetic and sen- sitive temperament craved the companionship of friends and his gentleness and charm of manner soon won the hearts of men and held them to him in lasting bonds. There is no trace of Shakespeare's having been involved in the bitter quarrels which raged in the theatrical world of his day. On the contrary his closest friends were those of his own calling, actors like Burbage, Heming, and Condell, poets and playwrights like Drayton and Ben Jonson. Jonson, indeed, allowed himself the freedom of criticizing Shakespeare's methods of work, but he said : " I loved the man, and do honour his memory on this side idolatry as much as any." Shakespeare mingled in the merry life of the London taverns where poets, play- wrights, and actors met to discuss their work and to fleet the time carelessly. " Many were the wit-combats " wrote Thomas Fuller in the next generation il betwixt Biography 27 him and Ben Jonson, which two I behold like a Spanish great galleon and an English man-of-war ; Master Jonson (like the former) was built far higher in learning, solid but slow in his performances. Shakespear, with the English man-of-war, lesser in bulk, but lighter in sailing, could turn with all tides, tack about, and take advantage of all winds by the quickness of his wit and invention." Outside of his immediate circle Shakespeare had prob- ably few friends, though many admirers. The dedica- tions of his two poems show the strength of the tie which bound him to the Earl of Southampton ; " the love I dedicate to your lordship is without end " he wrote. Shakespeare's sonnets reveal a passionate conception of friendship unmatched in English literature, and many critics believe that they were addressed to this same nobleman. Another claimant for this honour is William Herbert, Earl of Pembroke, who is said by Shakespeare's friends, Heming and Condell, to have been a patron of the poet. The sonnets seem to tell a strange and sad story of Shakespeare's devotion to a noble youth, of his passion for a fascinating but dangerous woman, of his betrayal by his friend and the lady, of his bitter grief, and of his final reconciliation with his friend. Many attempts have been made to throw light upon this story and to ascertain the identity of the friend and the lady, but we know too little of Shakespeare's life in London to come to any positive conclusion on these points. One thing alone seems plain, that Shakespeare had sinned and been even more deeply sinned against, that he had suffered 28 Biography and sorrowed, and forgiven, and that these sad experi- ences of life gave him a tender sympathy with erring humanity and a deep sense of the necessity of charity for human weakness. Shakespeare seems to have left London for Stratford about the year 1611, and, although he paid an occa- sional visit to the capital, his last years were spent in the comfort and quiet retirement of his country home. There can have been little charm for Shakespeare in the society of Stratford. His wife was now an elderly woman, ignorant of the world, and devoutly puritanical. His little son, Hamnet, whom he had hoped to make the heir of his estate, was long since dead, and his eldest daughter had married an able, but narrow and fanatical, country doctor. In the town itself the growing strength and bit- terness of Puritanism, shown by the fact that in 161 2 the town council imposed a prohibitive fine of something like $400, upon all stage-plays, must have been most repug- nant to him. Yet there is no reason to suppose that Shakespeare's last years were unhappy. It would have been easy for him to have remained in London, had he preferred. But he had grown weary of the city and deliberately broke the bonds that held him there, selling his shares in the two theatres and turning over the manu- scripts of his unfinished plays to be worked up by other and weaker hands. He found in Stratford what he sought, — rest, a retreat from the noises of the world, and the companionship of nature. His little grandchild was growing up into girlhood, and many a passage in Biography 29 Shakespeare's plays shows his tender love of children. He saw his daughter Judith married to the son of one of his old friends, and Jonson and Drayton, who visited him in this year, may have come down to help celebrate the wedding festivities. Shortly afterward Shakespeare fell ill of a fever, rising probably from the dirty streets and choked gutters of the little town. He had time to make his will and dispose of all his property, leaving the greater part of his estate to Susanna, a handsome portion to Ju- dith, and his second best bed to his wife. He died on the 23d of April, 16 16, and was buried inside the beau- tiful parish church of Stratford. The handsome monu- ment erected over the grave testifies as plainly to the affection with which his family regarded the poet, as its pompous Latin epitaph does to their entire incomprehen- sion of his genius. The true monument to Shakespeare's genius is that erected by his friends, Heming and Con- dell, who, in 1623, seven years after his death, published the first collected edition of his dramas ; and one line of the poem by Ben Jonson prefixed to this edition is, perhaps, the most fitting epitaph ever penned for Shakespeare : — " He was not of an age, but for all time." INTRODUCTION In the year 1610 Dr. Simon Forman, a notorious Lon- don quack, entered in a little note-book, which some lucky chance has preserved for us, a detailed account of a performance of Macbeth at the Globe Theatre on April 20 of that year. This gives us, of course, positive proof that Macbeth was already on the stage in 16 10. That it cannot have been written before the accession of James VI of Scotland to the English throne in 1603 is established by the reference in the play to the union of the kingdoms (iv. 1. 120, 121), and by the allusion to James's practice of " touching for the evil " (iv. 3. 141-156). Somewhere between these dates, then, the play must have been composed, and most editors now agree on the year 1606. It is not impossible that Shake- speare's attention was attracted to the story by a college performance at Oxford in August of 1605, when three students, attired like the weird sisters of the legend, reminded King James of the prophecy once made to his ancestor, Banquo. Shakespeare found the story of Banquo and Macbeth told at full length in one of his favourite books, Holin- shed's Chronicles of England, Scotland, and Ireland. In brief Holinshed's account is as follows : — 30 Introduction 31 King Duncan was so soft and gentle of nature that he was unable to restrain his unruly subjects. A certain Macdowald headed a rebellious army, including numbers of men from the western isles and many kerns and gallowglasses from Ireland. After some successes he was attacked and defeated by Macbeth and Banquo, whereupon he slew himself, and his head was cut off and sent as a present to King Duncan. Immediately thereafter Sweno, king of Norway, landed in Fife with a great army. He was, however, expelled by Macbeth, who also defeated an invading army of Danes, and forced them to pay a great sum of gold to secure the burial of their dead at St. Colme's Inch. Not long after these victories, while Macbeth and Banquo were walk- ing alone through the woods and fields, there met them three women " in strange and wild apparel, resembling creatures of elder world." The first of these spake and said, " All hail, Macbeth, thane of Glamis ; " the second, "Hail, Macbeth, thane of Cawdor;" but the third said "All hail, Macbeth, that hereafter shalt be king of Scotland." When Banquo bade the women speak to him, the first of them replied that they promised him greater benefits than Macbeth, who should reign indeed, but should come to an unlucky end and leave no heirs to the crown, whereas Banquo, though not destined himself to reign, should be the father of a long line of Scottish kings. And hereupon the women vanished. At first Macbeth and Banquo thought little of this vision and even jested over the prophecies. But afterward it was thought that these women were either the weird sisters, that is, the goddesses of destiny, or else nymphs or fairies, because all came to pass as they had spoken. For in a little while the thane of Cawdor was condemned for high treason and his title and estate were conferred upon Macbeth. There- upon Macbeth began to consider how he might obtain the crown as well. At first he decided to wait until Divine Providence should make him king; but when Duncan proclaimed his first-born son, Malcolm, Prince of Cumberland and heir to the kingdom, Macbeth determined to seize the throne by force. In this design he was encouraged by his wife, who was very ambi- tious, " burning in unquenchable desire to bear the name of a queen." At last Macbeth with a number of trusty friends, of whom Banquo was the chief, fell upon Duncan and slew him at Inverness. Duncan's body was interred at Colmekill ; and Macbeth went to Scone, where he was 32 Macbeth crowned king. The sons of Duncan, Malcolm, and Donald Bane, fled to England and Ireland respectively, and Macbeth reigned unopposed in Scotland. For ten years Macbeth ruled the land with impartial justice. But at last, through fear that he might be treated as he had served Duncan, he began to practise cruelty. Remembering the prophecy of the witches to Banquo, he invited his old friend, along with his son, Fleance, to a banquet, and set murderers upon them as they left the palace. Banquo was slain ; but Fleance escaped and fled to Wales. After the murder of Banquo nothing prospered with Macbeth, his subjects distrusted him, and he in turn feared them. Certain wizards warned him against Macduff, one of his nobles, and he would surely have slain him at once, but a witch whom he trusted prophesied that he should never be killed by any man born of woman, and never van- quished until Birnam wood came to his castle of Dunsinane. Con- fident in this prophecy he took no steps against Macduff, but oppressed his people more cruelly than before. Finally Macduff decided to invite the exiled Malcolm to claim his father's throne. Macbeth heard of this through a spy, and came to Mac- duff's castle where he massacred Macduff's wife and children, and all his retainers. But Macduff himself had already escaped to England, where he told Malcolm of the usurper's cruelty, and urged him to in- vade Scotland. Malcolm, however, suspected that Macduff might be sent by Macbeth to betray him, and, to put him to the test, he began to accuse himself of all sorts of vices, especially of licentiousness, avarice, and falsehood. Thereupon Macduff broke out into lament over the wretched state of Scotland, oppressed by a bloody tyrant, and deserted by the true heir who was unworthy to obtain the crown. At this proof of his true patriotism Malcolm embraced Macduff, and shortly after they" invaded Scotland, supported by Siward of Northumberland with ten thousand men. On his way to attack Dunsinane, where Macbeth had shut himself up, Malcolm passed through Birnam wood, and in order to conceal the numbers of his troop he ordered every soldier to cut down a bough and bear it before him. When Macbeth saw the moving wood approaching, he realized that the prophecy was now fulfilled, and straightway took to flight. Macduff, however, overtook him, and destroyed his last hope by declaring that he was the destined slayer of Introduction 33 Macbeth, inasmuch as he had not been born of woman, but had been ripped from his mother's womb. And with these words he cut off Mac- beth's head and brought it on a pole to Malcolm. This prince was then crowned at Scone, and rewarded his followers by promoting those who had before been thanes to be earls. iVnd these were the first earls in Scotland. It is plain that Shakespeare not only held closely to Ihe general outline of the story as he read it in Holin- shed, but that he also borrowed from it many minute details and even phrases which with the finest art he adapted to his dramatic purposes. At the same time there are several notable divergences. In the first place Shakespeare compressed the intro- ductory matter as much as possible, only reporting Mac- beth's double victory on one great day of battle in order to set him before us as a loyal and successful soldier. For the sake of unity he brought the treason of Cawdor into connection with Sweno's invasion, and he heightened the rapidity of the action by bestowing Cawdor's title upon Macbeth immediately after the prophecy of the weird sisters. More important, however, is Shakespeare's departure from his sources as regards his treatment of the character of Banquo. This departure was probably due in the first place to the fact that Shakespeare felt it impossible to represent the ancestor of the reigning sovereign as a rebel and a partner with Macbeth in the murder of their king. And, secondly, he realized that from the dramatic point of view it would be a great improvement on the story if he presented in Banquo a sharp contrast to Macbeth, and MACBETH — 3 34 Macbeth asserted the freedom of the human will by exposing him to the same temptation as Macbeth, without permitting him to fall into sin. The details of the murder of Duncan, Shakespeare drew for the most part from Holinshed's account of the murder of King Duff by his trusted servant, Donwald. This nobleman had a private grudge against the king which his wife worked upon until she induced him to kill his master. Waiting for their opportunity until a time when the king was staying with them, Donwald and his wife intoxicated the two chamberlains who guarded the king's bed and then sent in assassins who slew him. In the morning when the murder was discovered Donwald rushed into the king's room and killed the chamberlains with his own hand, accusing them of having been accom- plices in the deed. For six months thereafter the people of Scotland saw neither sun nor moon, but were continu- ally troubled by darkness and great storms. Horses were seen to eat their own flesh, and a sparhawk was strangled by an owl, — evident omens of the anger of Heaven. One or two other incidents of minor importance, such as the death of young Siward and, possibly, the voice that cried, " Macbeth shall sleep no more," were sug- gested to Shakespeare by other passages in the chronicle. In Holinshed we hear of certain wizards and a witch who warned and encouraged Macbeth, as well as of the three women who first prophesied that he should be king. The statement in Holinshed that these women were com- monly regarded as the "weird sisters," that is, the "god- Introduction 35 desses of destiny " probably shows that in an old form of the legend they appeared as the Norns, or Fates of Scandinavian mythology. Shakespeare, however, who knew little or nothing of the Norns, simply identified the three sisters with the witches of popular superstition, and assigned to them the warning and the prophecies of the wizards and the trusted witch of Holinshed. The belief in witchcraft, that is, in the existence of men and women who had voluntarily sold themselves to the devil and had obtained from him supernatural powers, was, in Shakespeare's day, almost universally accepted. It was held as an article of faith both by the Roman Catholic and the Protestant churches, and it was recog- nized by the laws of both England and Scotland. Even so enlightened a thinker as Bacon did not deny the possi- bility of witchcraft, and Shakespeare probably accepted without question the common belief of his day. It is remarkable, moreover, that a great revival of this belief had occurred in Scotland toward the close of the sixteenth century, and that in England also the smouldering fires of superstition had been fanned into new life by the accession of the orthodox and witch-hating Scottish king. James, it seems, had strong personal grounds for his hatred of witchcraft. In 1589 the fleet which was bring- ing home his bride, Princess Anne of Denmark, was dispersed by a violent storm, which was popularly at- tributed to the devilish arts of a company of Scottish sorcerers and witches, against whom the monarch promptly instituted an aggressive campaign. It is said that in the 36 Macbeth next year he condemned and burned no less than two hundred men and women as guilty of witchcraft. Nine years later James published a learned treatise on witch- craft, called De?nonologie. This book was reprinted about the time of his accession to the English throne and may possibly have been known to Shakespeare. In 1604 James induced the English Parliament to pass a law inflicting capital punishment on all persons who by magical acts killed or harmed the bodies of his subjects. This law remained in force for more than a century, and this century was especially noteworthy in England for the frequency of trials for witchcraft. It is plain, therefore, that in treating the topic of witchcraft as he did in Macbeth, Shakespeare was dealing with no antiquated prejudice, but with one of the most widespread and virulent superstitions of his time. The witches of Macbeth possess quite enough of the characteristics of the witches of Elizabethan superstition to establish the identity of the two. They are hideously ugly, with choppy fingers, skinny lips, and unwomanish beards. Each has a familiar spirit, cat, toad, or harpy. They kill swine, sail the sea in sieves, fly through the air, drive away sleep, cause sickness, and raise up tempests. The ingredients of their " hell-broth " were the familiar materials of witchcraft. These are all realistic touches, and yet the idealistic method of Shakespeare is nowhere more plainly visible to the thoughtful reader than in the manner in which he lifts the witches of his play above the miserable creatures of popular superstition. Their Introduction 37 very appearance has something supernatural about it ; they " look not like the inhabitants of earth." There is not the faintest reference in Macbeth to the foul sexual practices commonly attributed to witches. In their dealings with Macbeth the witches are prompted neither by greed of profit nor thirst for revenge, the usual motives assigned to the witch, but by a sheer love of evil for evil's sake. And in the case of Macbeth at least, the evil that they do is not material, but spiritual, a thing uncommon, if not altogether unknown, in the popular accounts of witches. In short, Shakespeare has exalted the witches into true and typical representatives of the Principle of Evil. It is as such that they are recognized by the wise and virtuous Banquo, who speaks of them as " instruments of darkness." And Macbeth himself, when at last awakened from the fatal dream of security into which their predictions have cast him, realizes that their words were nothing more than the " equivocation of the fiend." There was an absurd discrepancy in the popu- lar belief between the powers of the witch and her per- formances, limited as these were for the most part to malicious mischief or the infliction of bodily harm. Shakespeare wiped out this discrepancy by directing the attacks of the weird sisters not against the body, but against the soul of Macbeth. The one scene in the play which is inconsistent with this conception of the witches as representatives of the Evil One, the fifth scene of the third act, is assuredly not the work of Shakespeare. 38 Macbeth The fact is that Macbeth, as it has come down to us, is not wholly the work of Shakespeare's hand. For some incomprehensible reason this masterpiece of tragedy does not seem to have been especially popular in his day. We have but one notice of its performance during Shakespeare's lifetime, and only one direct allusion to it has been discovered in the literature of his day. 1 When it was revived in the reign of Charles II, it was trans- formed into something like an opera with flying machines, songs, and a " variety of dancing and music," so that a theatre-goer of the day pronounced it a most excellent play in all respects, " but especially in divertissment, though it be a deep tragedy." In an edition of Macbeth published in 1674, which gives us this new version, there are two songs which are indicated in the Folio text (see Notes, pp. 219 and 223), and which are found in full in The Witch by Thomas Middleton. There has been some dispute as to whether Shake- speare or Middleton was the author of these songs ; but they are now universally assigned to the latter. A mere glance should, I think, be enough to show that they are not the sort of thing that Shakespeare would put in the mouth of the weird sisters, or their familiar spirits. The first of them is mentioned in Macbeth in the stage di- rection to iii. 5. 32 ; the second in that to iv. 1. 43. The versions in The Witch are as follows : — I. Come away, come away, Hecate, Hecate, come away! 1 In Beaumont and Fletcher's foiight of the Burning Pestle, v. i. Introduction . 39 Hec. I come, I come, I come, I come, With all the speed I may, With all the speed I may. Where's Stadlin ? 1 ( Voice above) Here. Hec. Where's Puckle ? ( Voice above) Here ; And Hoppo too, and Hellwain too ; We lack but you, we lack but you ; Come away, make up the count. Hec. I will but 'noint, and then I mount. [A Spirit like a cat descends II. Black spirits and white, red spirits and gray, Mingle, mingle, mingle, you that mingle may. Titty, Tiffin, Keep it stiff in ; Firedrake, Puckey, Make it lucky ; Liard, Robin, You must bob in. Round, around, around, about, about ! All ill come running in, all good keep out. It seems fairly certain that Middleton, who frequently wrote plays for Shakespeare's company, was invited by the actors to touch up Macbeth for some revival which took place between the date of Shakespeare's leaving London and the publication of the Folio. By way of in- creasing the attractiveness of the play Middleton inserted in it these two songs from his own unpublished Witch, and a marginal direction for this insertion in the play- house manuscript of the drama was reproduced in the first printed copy of Macbeth. !The name of another witch, as are those of Puckle, Hoppo, and Hellwain. 40 Macbeth There has been much dispute as to the extent of Mid- dleton's interference with the original form of Macbeth. Some critics suppose him to have made extensive cuts; but there is no evidence of this. It has also been stated that Middleton added several scenes of his own compo- sition; i. 2; i. 3. 1-37; h. 3. 1-46; and v. 2, for example, have been assigned to him. But there is no good reason for this statement, and the general consensus of scholars limits Middleton's additions, apart from the songs, to one scene, hi. 5, and a few lines in another, iv. 1. 39-49. and l2 5~ I 3 2 - The reasons for assigning these passages to Middleton may be briefly stated. Hecate, who appears in hi. 5, is a prominent character in his play, The Witch, where she figures as the mistress of a band of hags. She contributes nothing to the action in Macbeth, and her rebuke to the witches and their fear of her is quite inconsistent with Shakespeare's conception of their characters. The iam- bic rhythm of her speeches is a favourite of Middleton's, but contrasts strongly with the trochaic metre which Shakespeare puts into the mouths of the witches. The same iambic metre appears in the speech of the First Witch in iv. 1. 125-132, where the idea that the witches should cheer up Macbeth by a dance is much more sug- gestive of Middleton than of Shakespeare. Middleton's additions, in short, were mere devices to introduce music and dancing and so lighten the sternly tragic character of the play. The un-Shakespearean element in Macbeth is, after all, Introduction 41 a minor matter. It is limited in quantity, and although it is out of keeping with Shakespeare's genuine work, it does not impair the essential unity of his conception. Macbeth is one of the shortest of Shakespeare's plays ; it is by far the shortest of his great tragedies. It includes no underplot ; it contains, with the single brief exception of the Porter scene, no comic relief; it holds with stern self-restraint to the development of the main action and discards the broader and more varied presentation of life which Shakespeare, as a rule, employed in his dramatic treatment of tragic and historic themes. There is not a single scene in the play which does not either contribute to, or comment upon, the main story. The movement of the action is so swift as to produce the effect of breathless haste. And the whole interest of the drama centres round the heroic figure of Macbeth, to whom all the other char- acters are but reliefs and foils. And as a result there is no other play of Shakespeare's which possesses in so marked a degree the characteristic of unity. It has the effect of a magnificent improvisation upon a' theme which, at one period of his life, completely dominated his mind and impelled him irresistibly to give it dramatic expression. The theme of Macbeth is the word which once came to the prophet Ezekiel : " The soul that sinneth it shall die." There is a sense, indeed, in which this may be said to be the theme of all the great tragedies of Shakespeare. Thus Brutus perishes because of his inability to square his ideal conceptions with the practical demands of life, X 42 Macbeth and Hamlet because he prefers until too late melancholy brooding to resolute action ; Othello's fault is want of faith in womanly purity ; Coriolanus is the victim of his selfish pride, Lear of his own folly and impatience, Antony of his lustful passion. But the peculiar and distinguishing characteristic of Macbeth is that its hero alone of Shakespeare's great tragic figures sins deliberately and wilfully, realizing from the beginning the unpardon- able nature of his crime. No sooner does the temptation to seize the crown enter his mind than he calls the act which he must commit to gain his end by its proper name of murder. He is willing to "jump the life to come " in order to obtain his desire upon earth ; but he realizes perfectly what price he must pay for the satisfaction of his desire. And that this realization comes to him even before he has committed the deed is amply shown by a phrase in the great soliloquy of the first act, where he speaks of the " deep damnation " of the murder. Macbeth's later crimes spring from his first deed of blood, but in no case does he pretend to any higher motive than that which actually impels him, the securing of the fruits of his sin. Macbeth, in short, sells himself to the devil deliberately, and the witches who tempt him to this sin may, in a sense, be regarded as the poet's symbols, or personifications, of its deliberate and wilful nature, for witches were in Shakespeare's day regarded in no sense as supernatural powers, but simply as human beings who had of their own free will renounced God and chosen Satan as their master Introduction 43 And just as Macbeth's sin is more conscious and de- liberate than that of any other of the protagonists of Shakespeare's tragedies, so his fall is deeper and his ruin more complete and hopeless. It does not consist so much in his loss of the throne, or his death upon the battle-field, as in the utter degeneration of his moral nature. He whose whole " state of man " was shaken by the first temptation to murder comes at last to love blood for its own sake. It takes all the powerful influence of his wife to nerve him to the actual killing of Duncan, but he needs no encouragement to plot the assassination of Banquo, and he massacres the household of Macduff with as little reason as remorse. Through the isolating influ- ence of his career of guilt he forfeits even the compan- ionship of her who had been his " dearest partner," and turns for aid and counsel to the witches from whose first apparition he had recoiled in horror. The final revela- tion that the powers of evil have mocked him brings him no hope of pardon or escape, but only fills him with a wild beast's desire of selling his life as dearly as possible. No other hero in Shakespeare's plays passes away in a catastrophe of such utter darkness. Macbeth's punishment, like his fall, is progressive and corresponds to the depth of his plunge into sin. The first stage is marked by violent mental suffering. He has no sooner slain Duncan than he bitterly regrets the deed. Terrible dreams shake him nightly ; his very meals are haunted by the fear of detection ; the vessel of his peace is full of rancours. His words to Lady Macbeth in the 44 Macbeth early part of the third act sum up this stage : he lies " on the torture of the mind in restless ecstasy." This mental agony is succeeded by a lethargy, or numb- ness of feeling, which marks the gradual mortification of his soul. Lulled into a false security by the predictions of the witches, Macbeth forgets the sense of fear and ceases to suffer from the torture of the mind. The report of Ross in the fourth act shows that this period was attended by frequent acts of bloodshed, but Macbeth is no longer troubled by the ghosts of his victims. Yet he is none the less sick at heart. Now that he has ceased to fear, he realizes as never before the utter futility of his crimes. The crown has brought him nothing of all that he had hoped to enjoy with it ; and looking forward to a lonely and loveless old age, devoid of " honour, love, obedience, troops of friends," he feels that he has already lived too long. The news of his wife's death fails to rouse in him any emotion of sorrow, for existence in general seems to him in this mood of world-weariness as devoid of purpose or meaning as the babble of an idiot. He seems, indeed, on the point of suicide out of utter disgust with life. From this miserable state, Macbeth is roused by the report of the moving wood. His dream of safety broken, he plunges into action only to discover that the powers he trusted have delivered him into the hands of the avenger of blood. He has already tasted the bitterness of death before he falls under the sword of Macduff. Shakespeare's exposition of his theme, the utter ruin and inevitable punishment of the deliberately sinning soul, is complete and triumphant. Introduction 45 A few words are necessary to clear the character of the hero from current misconceptions. Macbeth is by no means a representative of the old barbaric Hi'ghland chieftains, no rough soldier, or mere man of action. On the contrary he is a noble and courteous gentleman. His wife characterizes him as " too full of the milk of human kindness " ; and his hesitation before and his suffering after the murder of Duncan show how abhorrent such a deed of blood was to his original disposition. His relation to his wife in the first part of the play and his bitter sense of loneliness at its close, show him to be a man of warm human affections ; and he is by no means indifferent to the breath of popular opinion. Macbeth is a man of vivid imagination : he sees a visionary dagger marshalling him to Duncan's chamber, he hears ghostly voices proclaiming his future punishment, his overwrought mind conjures up the spectre of the murdered Banquo. He is intensely susceptible to the influence of superstition, and has no firm belief in an overruling Providence to protect him against its ravages. In short Macbeth, though by no means base or brutal, is not a strong man mentally or morally. His reasoning faculties are as simple as his imagination is extraordinary, and hence it comes that he yields so readily to the stronger intellect and the firmer will of his wife. He lacks a true ideal of loyalty or duty ; mere earthly power appears to him in the stress of temptation as the highest good. And yet we feel as we close the play that in Macbeth there perished a man who under happier cir- 46 Macbeth cumstances might have lived an honourable and even glorious life. Susceptible, impulsive, fearless of human foes, he is no bad type of the mediaeval knights who followed the lead of Peter the Hermit, or the gentlemen adventurers of Shakespeare's own day who singed the beard of the Spanish king. But the height to which he might have risen serves only to measure the depth of his fall. iv/^ Inasmuch as the whole interest of this drama centres about Macbeth, all the other personages are, quite prop- erly, subordinated to him. Lady Macbeth alone claims for a time an equal share of our attention. But a very brief consideration of the structure of the drama will show how little, comparatively speaking, Shakespeare cared for her. She does not appear in the story at all until Macbeth has resolved to murder Duncan, and she drops out of it almost unnoticed before the final catastrophe. The truth is that her part in the drama is merely relative ; it is a foil which serves to bring out more vividly the character of her husband. The character of Lady Macbeth, then, must be con- sidered as a masterly sketch dashed in with a few strong strokes rather than as an elaborate piece of portrait paint- ing. And as is often the case with sketches, the significance of the work has been frequently misunderstood. Lady Macbeth is no monster of bloodthirstiness nor incar- nate demon of ambition. Nor is she to be thought of as one of the wild heroines of Scandinavian legend.. On the contrary there is evidence in the play to show that Introduction 47 Shakespeare thought of her as ' a slight and delicate woman. We hear of her "little hand"; we learn that she needs the stimulus of wine to carry her through the ordeal of the night of murder ; we see her swooning in the reaction that follows. And Macbeth's caressing phrase, "dearest chuck," is hardly the pet name that one would apply to a Valkyrie. So far from being bloodthirsty, it is hardly too much to say that Lady Macbeth is naturally of an affectionate and gentle disposition. She has been a loving daughter and a tender mother ; her whole atti- tude toward her husband is that of a devoted wife. The tremendous invocation to the powers of evil, which Shakespeare puts into her mouth, to unsex her, to fill her " top full of direst cruelty," shows in itself that she is not cruel by nature. Lady Macbeth is no doubt ambitious ; but she is am- bitious solely for her husband. There is not a word in the play which can be construed into a shadow of evi- dence that she desired the crown for her own sake. In this point Shakespeare has departed, with the fine instinct of a great artist, from the sources of his story. Holinshed speaks of Lady Macbeth's insatiable ambition, but to have introduced this motive into the play would at once have destroyed the unity of interest which centres round Macbeth alone. The dominant note in Lady Macbeth's character is her imperious and masterful will. What she wishes, she wishes most intensely ; and she drives herself and her hus- band relentlessly on to the attainment of the goal. She 48 Macbeth has none of his fears and scruples, simply because she will not permit herself to consider anything but the ob- ject of her desire. On the other hand she shows no trace of Macbeth's sensitiveness to exterior impressions nor of his exalted imaginative powers. She sees no vis- ions and hears no ghostly voices. Her final ruin is due not so much to remorse as to a complete collapse of body and mind brought about, not only by the reaction from the terrible strain which her fierce will had imposed upon all her faculties, but, in an even greater degree, by the crushing disappointment which followed upon the attain- ment of her goal. The crown which was to give " solely sovereign sway and masterdom " to her husband, brought him only terrible dreams and bitter misery. And as he drifted farther and farther away from her upon a sea of guilt, she awoke to a realization of the irremediable mistake that she had made, like a traveller who has strained every nerve to reach some fancied fountain in the desert, only to find it a mirage. She is not sustained by any belief like her husband's in the false prophecies of the witches ; she has not even the last resource of desperate battle. Nothing is left her but death, and she seems to have sought death by her own hands. Of the remaining characters of the play only four deserve special notice. Banquo and MacdurT are very obviously a pair of figures introduced, not merely for the sake of the action, but, in large measure at least, for the sake of character contrast with Macbethl The impor- tance of Banquo's relation to the witches has already been Introduction 49 pointed out. He fights against the temptation to which Macbeth succumbs, and invokes heavenly aid to banish the suggestions of evil. Yet Banquo is not wholly unaf- fected by the prophecy of the witches. In spite of his well-founded suspicions as to the real murderer of Dun- can, he makes no attempt to avenge his old master. On the contrary, he swears allegiance to Macbeth in the hope, it would seem, that by passively acquiescing in the crime he might hope to reap the profit foretold to his house. And this passive acquiescence is the direct cause of his own tragic fall. Macduff, on the other hand, who begins to play a prominent part in the story just as Banquo drops out of it, represents the simplicity and straightforwardness of a nature untouched by any dealings with the powers of evil. Of all the nobles he is evidently the most horror-stricken at the murder ; with the instinctive abhorrence of virtue to guilt, he assumes at once an attitude of opposition to Macbeth, declines to attend his coronation, and refuses the invitation to his solemn feast. His flight to England is prompted not so much by fear, for he has no knowl- edge of Macbeth's designs, as by the hope of restoring the true heir to the throne. His wild amazement at the fate which overwhelms his wife and children shows plainly that he has no conception of the depth of guilt to which Macbeth has sunk, and his own essential innocence ap- pears in his despairing outcry that his loved ones were punished for his sins. Duncan and Malcolm are a pair of characters intro- MACBETH — 4 5