The cry is still, "They come !" Our castle's strength
Will laugh a siege to scorn: here let them lie,
Till famine and the ague eat them up.
Were they not forc'd with those that should be ours,
We might have met them dareful, beard to beard,
And beat them backward home. What is that noise?
[A cry within, of Women.

Sey. It is the cry of women, my good lord.
Macb. I have almost forgot the taste of fears.
The time has been, my senses would have cool'd
To hear a night-shriek; and my fell of hair
Would at a dismal treatise rouse, and stir,
As life were in't. I have supp'd full with horrors:
Direness, familiar to my slaughterous thoughts,
Cannot once start me.-Wherefore was that cry?
Sey. The queen, my lord, is dead.
Macb. She should have died hereafter:
There would have been a time for such a word.-
To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,
To the last syllable of recorded time;
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools

The way to dusty death. 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.

Mess. Let me endure your wrath, if't be not so. Within this three mile may you see it coming; I say, a moving grove.

Macb.

If thou speak'st false,
Upon the next tree shalt thou hang alive,
Till famine cling thee: if thy speech be sooth,
I care not if thou dost for me as much.-

I pull in resolution; and begin

To doubt th' equivocation of the fiend,

That lies like truth: "Fear not, till Birnam wood
Do come to Dunsinane;"-and now a wood
Comes toward Dunsinane.-Arm, arm, and out!—
If this, which he avouches, does appear,
There is nor flying hence, nor tarrying here.
I 'gin to be a-weary of the sun,

And wish th' estate o' the world were now undone.-
Ring the alarum bell!-Blow, wind!-come, wrack!
At least we'll die with harness on our back.

Macb.

No, nor more fearful. Yo. Siw. Thou liest, abhorred tyrant; wich my

sword

I'll prove the lie thou speak'st.

[They fight, and young SIWARD is slain. Macb. Thou wast born of woman :But swords I smile at, weapons laugh to scorn, Brandish'd by man that's of a woman born. [Exit. Alarums. Enter MACDUFF.

Macd. That way the noise is.-Tyrant, show thy face!

If thou be'st slain, and with no stroke of mine,
My wife and children's ghosts will haunt me still.
I cannot strike at wretched kernes, whose arms
Are hir'd to bear their staves; either thou, Macbeth,
Or else my sword, with an unbatter'd edge,

I sheathe again undeeded. There thou should'st be;
By this great clatter, one of greatest note
Seems bruited. Let me find him, fortune!
And more I beg not.
[Exit. Alarum.

Enter MALCOLM and old Siward. Siw. This way, my lord.-The castle's gently render'd;

The tyrant's people on both sides do fight;
The noble thanes do bravely in the war.
The day almost itself professes yours,
And little is to do.

Mal.
We have met with foes
That strike beside us.
Siw.

Enter, sir, the castle. [Exeunt. Alarum.

Re-enter MACBETH.

Macb. Why should I play the Roman fool, and die

On mine own sword? whiles I see lives, the gashes Do better upon them.

My voice is in my sword: thou bloodier villain
Than terms can give thee out! [They fight.
Macb.
Thou losest labour.

As easy may'st thou the intrenchant air

With thy keen sword impress, as make me bleed :
Let fall thy blade on vulnerable crests;

I bear a charmed life, which must not yield
To one of woman born.

Macd.
Despair thy charm;
And let the angel, whom thou still hast serv'd,
Tell thee, Macduff was from his mother's womb
Untimely ripp'd.

Macb. Accurs'd be that tongue that tells me so,
For it hath cow'd my better part of man:
And be these juggling fiends no more believ'd,
That palter with us in a double sense;
That keep the word of promise to our ear,
And break it to our hope.-I'll not fight with thee.
Macd. Then, yield thee, coward,

And live to be the gaze and show o' the time:
We'll have thee, as our rarer monsters are,
Painted upon a pole, and underwrit,

"Here may you see the tyrant."
I will not yield,

Macb.

To kiss the ground before young Malcolm's feet,
And to be baited with the rabble's curse.
Though Birnam wood be come to Dunsinane,
And thou oppos'd, being of no woman born,
Yet I will try the last. Before my body
I throw my warlike shield: lay on, Macduff;
And damn'd be him that first cries, "Hold, enough."
[Exeunt, fighting.

Retreat. Flourish. Re-enter, with Drum and Colours, MALCOLM, old SIWARD, ROSSE, Thanes, and Soldiers.

Mal. I would, the friends we miss were safe arriv'd.

Siw. Some must go off; and yet, by these I see, So great a day as this is cheaply bought.

Mal. Macduff is missing, and your noble son. Rosse. Your son, my lord, has paid a soldier's debt:

He only liv'd but till he was a man,

The which no sooner had his prowess confirm'd

Re-enter MACDUFF, with MACBETH'S Head. Macd. Hail, king! for so thou art. Behold, where stands

The usurper's cursed head: the time is free.
I see thee compass'd with thy kingdom's pearl,
That speak my salutation in their minds:
Whose voices I desire aloud with mine,-
Hail, king of Scotland!
All.

Hail, king of Scotland!
[Flourish.
Mal. We shall not spend a large expense of time,
Before we reckon with your several loves,
And make us even with you. My thanes and kins-

men,

Henceforth be earls; the first that ever Scotland
In such an honour nam'd. What's more to do,
Which would be planted newly with the time,-
As calling home our exil'd friends abroad,
That fled the snares of watchful tyranny;
Producing forth the cruel ministers

Of this dead butcher, and his fiend-like queen,
Who, as 'tis thought, by self and violent hands
Took off her life;-this, and what needful else
That calls upon us, by the grace of Grace,
We will perform in measure, time, and place.
So, thanks to all at once, and to each one,
Whom we invite to see us crown'd at Scone.

[Flourish. Exeunt.

ACT I.-SCENE 1.

"Enter three Witches."

FEW lovers of Shakespeare need now to be informed, that the Weird Sisters are not the witches of vulgar superstition. He indeed used the materials of superstitious belief in his day, as to witches, their charms, their malignity, and their league with the "common enemy of man;" but he elevated them from objects of material dread and disgust, mixed with contempt, into mysterious and powerful agents of spiritual wickedness. He has retained enough of the well-known adjuncts of the Scotch or Lancashire witches to give individuality and reality to his personages, and even selected so much of the wildly ludicrous as would add to the strange mystery of their being; yet they are not miserable and decrepid hags, the dread of the village, but "the Weird Sisters"that is, says Hollingshed, "as ye would say, the goddesses of destiny, or else nymphs or fairies indued with prophecy by necromantical science." They are powerful as well as malignant beings, whose amusement may be the persecution of the "tempest-tossed" mariner, but whose delight is to poison the minds of the brave, and to act upon the destinies of the great. Coleridge rightly remarks:

"The Weird Sisters are as true a creation of Shakespeare'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 natureelemental avengers without sex or kin."

In the same spirit of true criticism, Charles Lamb says: "They are foul anomalies, of whom we know not whence they are sprung, nor whether they have beginning or ending. As they are without human passions, so they seem to be without human relations. They come with thunder and lightning, and vanish to airmusic. This is all we know of them. Except Hecate, they have no names, which heightens their mysterious

ness."

The account given by Dr. Forman, in his lately discovered diary, of the manner in which MACBETH was

originally acted as he saw it in 1610, strongly indicates that these witches were, even on that humble stage, represented as much nobler beings than they have since been permitted to appear.

"In MACBETH, at the Globe, 1610, the 20th of April, Saturday, there was to be observed, first, how Macbeth and Banquo, two noblemen of Scotland, riding through a wood, there stood before them three women Fairies, or Nymphs, and saluted Macbeth, saying three times unto him, Hail, Macbeth, King of Codor, for thou shalt be a King, but shalt beget no Kings, &c. Then, said Banquo, What! all to Macbeth, and nothing to me? Yes, said the Nymphs, Hail to thee, Banquo; thou shalt beget Kings, yet be no King."

"That will be ere the set of sun."

Coleridge was struck with the "direful music, the wild wayward rhythm, and abrupt lyrics of the opening of MACBETH." The English editors of the last age have done what they could to weaken this effect. I concur with Mr. Knight in restoring the old text, and in his reasons throughout.

"Stevens strikes out the as harsh and unnecessary. Any one who has an ear for the lyrical movement of the whole scene will see what an exquisite variety of pause there is in the ten lines of which it consists. Take the line

'There to meet with Macbeth;' and contrast its solemn movement with what has preceded it. But the editors must have seven syllables; and so some read

"-damn'd QUARRY"-i. e. his army doomed, or damned, to become the "quarry," or prey, of his enemies. This is the reading of all the old copies, which was deserted by most editors, although giving an obvious meaning, more forcible than quarrel, which, at Johnson's instance, they substituted for "quarry."

"AROINT thee, witch!' the rump-fed ronyon cries."The meaning of "aroint" is begone, or stand off, and it is still used in the Craven district, and generally in the north of England, as well as in Cheshire. In some places it has assumed the form of rynt, but it is the same word.

Ronyon"-i. e. scabby or mangy woman. Fren. rogneux, royne, scurf.-COLLIER.

“Pll drain him as dry as hay."

"Stevens says, 'As I cannot help supposing this scene to have been uniformly metrical when our author wrote it, in its present state I suspect it to be clogged with interpolations, or mutilated by omissions.' There appears no foundation for the supposition that the scene was uniformly metrical. It is a mixture of blank verse with the seven-syllable rhyme, producing, from its variety, a wild and solemn effect, which no regularity could have achieved.

I'll drain him as dry as hay,'

is a ten-syllable line, rhyming with the following one of seven syllables. The editors have destroyed this metrical arrangement, by changing 'Th' art kind,' into "Thou art kind:' and 'I'll drain him as dry as hay,' into 'I will drain him as dry as hay.""-Knight.

"The WEIRD sisters, hand in hand.”—All authorities agree that "weird" (spelled weyward in the folio) is of Saxon origin, viz. from wyrd, which has the same meaning as the Latin fatum: "weird" is therefore fatal. The ballad of "The Birth of St. George," in Percy's "Reliques," has the expression of "The weird lady of the woods;" and the same word occurs twice in the old Scottish drama of "Philotus," 1603 and 1612. Gawin Douglas, in his translation of the Æneid, calls the Parca "the weird sisters."-COLLIER.

"Are ye FANTASTICAL"-i. e. creatures of fantasy or imagination. Hollingshed says, that Macbeth and Banquo at first reputed the appearance of the witches some vain, fantastical illusion."

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"By Sinel's death, I know I am thane of Cawdor." Sinel, according to Hollingshed, was the name of Macbeth's father.

"Or have we eaten of the insane root,
That takes the reason prisoner?”

This alludes to the qualities anciently ascribed to hemlock. In Greene's "Never too Late," 1616, we have "You gazed against the sun, and so blemished your

sight; or else you have eaten of the roots of hemlock, that makes men's eyes conceit unseen objects."

"CAME post with post."-The old copies read, “Can post with post," which seems a misprint. The meaning is evident, when we take tale in the sense, not of a narrative, but of an enumeration, from the Saxon telas, to count. Johnson explains the passage correctly in these words:" Posts arrived as fast as they could be counted." Rowe reads, "as thick as hail," which may be considered as a needless alteration.

Is smother'd in surmise; and nothing is,
But what is not."

"All powers of action are oppressed and crushed by one overwhelming image in the mind, and nothing is present to me but that which is really future."-JOHN

SON.

SCENE IV.

"Safe toward your love and honour."

Blackstone would read, "safe towards you," and interprets the word safe as saved, conceiving that the whole speech is an allusion to feudal homage: The oath of allegiance, or liege homage, to the king, was absolute, and without any exception; but simple homage, when done to a subject for lands holden of him, was always with a saving of the allegiance (the love and honour) due to the sovereign. Sauf la foy que jeo doy a nostre seignor le roy.' But it is intelligible as it stands, taking safe in one of its senses still in use, for conferring security, as we say, "a safe port,” “ a safe guide."

"We will establish our estate upon

66

Our eldest, Malcolm; whom we name hereafter,
The prince of Cumberland."

Cumberland was, at the time, held by Scotland of the crown of England, as a fief. Prince of Cumberland was the title borne by the declared successor to the throne of Scotland. Hollingshed explains Macbeth's uneasiness on this occasion:-" Duncan having two sons, he made the elder of them (called Malcolm) Prince of Cumberland, as it was thereby to appoint him his successor in his kingdom, immediately after his decease. Macbeth, sorely troubled therewith, for that he saw by this means his hope sore hindered (where, by the old laws of the realm the ordinance was, that if he that should succeed was not able of age to take the charge upon himself, he that was next of blood unto him should be admitted,) he began to take counsel how he might usurp the kingdom by force, having a just quarrel so to do (as he took the matter,) for that Duncan did what in him lay to defraud him of all manner of title and claim which he might, in time to come, pretend to the crown."

SCENE V.

"Enter LADY MACBETH."

"Macbeth is described by Lady Macbeth so as at the same time to reveal her own character. Could he have every thing 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 Shakespeare, 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,' ete.

is that of one who had habitually familiarized her ima

"Come, you spirits."-The modern editors, who insert after Davenant, "all ye spirits," or, with Stevens, read, "Come, come," so as to make a regular heroic verse, lessen the solemnity of the rhythm, and by taking away the long pause after the close of the preceding sentence, quite destroy the effect of the transition of thought and feeling required by the terrible imprecation which is next uttered. The break in the metre marks this in common reading, and adds to the effect in more elaborate delivery.

"Alter favour"-to change countenance.

SCENE VI.

"This castle hath a pleasant seat," etc. "This short dialogue between Duncan and Banquo, as they approach Macbeth's castle, has always appeared to me a striking instance of what in painting is termed Tepose. Their conversation naturally turns upon the beauty of its situation, and the pleasantness of the air; and Banquo, observing the martlets' nests in every recess of the cornice, remarks that, where these birds most breed and haunt, the air is delicate. The subject of this quiet and easy conversation gives that repose so necessary to the mind after the tumultuous bustle of the preceding scenes, and perfectly contrasts the scene of horror that immediately succeeds. It seems as if Shakespeare asked himself, What is a prince likely to say to his attendants on such an occasion?' Whereas the modern writers seem, on the contrary, to be always searching for new thoughts, such as would never occur to men in the situation represented. This also is frequently the practice of Homer, who, from the midst of battles and horrors, relieves and refreshes the mind of the reader, by introducing some quiet rural image, or picture of familiar domestic life."-SIR J. REYNOLDS.

"How you shall bid God yield us for your pains, And thank us for your trouble."

Duncan says, that even love sometimes occasions him trouble, but that he thanks it as love notwithstanding; and that thus he teaches Lady Macbeth, while she takes trouble on his account, to "bid God yield," or reward, him for giving that trouble.-COLLIER.

SCENE VII.

"With his SURCEASE success."-To "surcease" is to finish, or conclude; and the meaning (his being used for its) is," and catch success with its conclusion."

"We rest your HERMITS"-beadsmen, bound to pray for a benefactor.

"Upon this bank and SHOAL of time”—in the original, schoole. Theobald corrected the word to shoal, "by which," says Stevens, "our author means the shallow ford of life." The received reading is unquestionably the clearest. Tieck's defence of school is however sufficiently ingenious :-" Bank," he says, "is here the school-bench; time is used, as it frequently is, for the present time. The editors have altered school into shoal. But this would-be improvement does not fit with the context; and smothers the idea of the author. Macbeth says-if we could believe that after perpetrated wickedness we could enjoy peace in the present(here occurs to him the image of a school, where a scholar anticipates a complaint or an injury)—if the present only were secure, I would care nothing for the future-what might happen to me-if this school were removed. ...... But we receive the judgment in this school, where we but teach bloody instruction,'" &c.

"Vaulting ambition, which o'erleaps itself,

And falls on the other"—

"It has been proposed to read, instead of itself, its sell, its saddle. However clever may be the notion, we can scarcely admit the necessity for the change of the original. A person (and vaulting ambition is personified) might be said to overleap himself, as well as overbalance himself, or overcharge himself, or overlabour himself, or overmeasure himself, or overreach himself. There is a parallel use of the word over in Beaumont and Fletcher:- Prove it again, sir; it may be your sense was set too high, and so overwrought itself.' The word over, in all these cases, is used in the sense of too much."-KNIGHT.

Many editors follow Hanmer's conjectural insertion, and read, "falls on the other side." That, I presume, is meant; but the poet's language was sufficiently clear to suggest that sense in his own rapid manner, and the sentence is broken off by the entrance of Lady Macbeth, to whom Macbeth turns in agitated inquiry. This hurried agitation is better expressed by omitting side, as in the old copies, and printing the passage as an interrupted and incomplete sentence.

"We fail."-This punctuation is adopted, as giving the sense most congruous with the next line, and by far the most characteristic of the speaker's dauntless selfpossession. "If we should fail? what then?" asks the hesitating chief. "Then we fail, and must take the consequences; but be bold and you will not fail." But both speeches are printed in the folios with a note of interrogation ". -we fail ?" "We fail?" This too permits a natural sense. She repeats the question interrogatively, but with a contemptuous tone. The note of admiration in many editions is wholly conjectural, and the sense not in unison with the context. Since the above was written, I find my opinion confirmed by the authority of Mrs. Siddons, and that of Mrs. Jameson, who says

"In her impersonation of the part of Lady Macbeth, Mrs. Siddons adopted three different intonations in giving the words "We fail." At first, a quick contemptuous interrogation-We fail? Afterwards with the note of admiration-We fail! and an accent of indignant astonishment, laying the principal emphasis on the word we- -We fail! Lastly, she fixed on what I am convinced is the true reading-We fail. With the simple period, modulating her voice to a deep, low, resolute tone, which settled the issue at once; as though she had said, "If we fail, why then we fail, and all is over." This is consistent with the dark fatalism of the character, and the sense of the lines following; and the effect was sublime, almost awful."

"Will I with wine and wassel so CONVINCE”—i. e. so overcome. The word is again used in the same sense,