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LONDON SHAKESPEARE MACBETH.

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Queen Catharine's part that it is played. In Shakespeare's time, women did not appear much on the stage, and he gave them few considerable parts; Mrs Siddons, therefore, has not much choice. The tragedy of Macbeth has also a principal female part, but quite different from that of Queen Catharine. Macbeth is a Scotch chieftain, returning victorious from the wars with Banquo his companion. Crossing a wild heath, they fall into an ambuscade of witches, who, it seems, have placed themselves in their way, on purpose to play them a most infernal trick. It is hardly necessary to say, that a witch is always a frightful old woman in rags, with a great broom in her hands. I had seen these dramatic witches before, and the part is not always understood;a bad actor, for they are men in petticoats, is apt to think that he must play the fool with his rags and his broom, and that he is there to make the gallery laugh. Rousseau said, that the pasteboard monsters of the opera of Paris were moved by a blackguard boy, qui n'a pas l'esprit de faire la bête ; and some degree of talent is unquestionably necessary to do even these things well. The witches. cannot pretend to French tragical dignity, but there is a certain low sublime that the actor understands, when he has any talents. If the cavern of the robbers in Gil Blas could be chosen for the scene of a French tragedy, the old woman might give some idea of this low sublime, injudiciously excluded from our stage.

The infernal ladies predict to Macbeth that he is to be Thane of Cawdor, and a king afterwards; and to Banquo, that, although not king himself, his posterity will be kings, and then disappear, without explaining themselves farther. Macbeth being soon after created Thane of Cawdor, begins to have

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some faith in the remainder of the prediction. The unbridled ambition of Lady Macbeth urges him to secure its fulfilment by the murder of the king, who is come to spend a night in their castle.

Lady M. Was the hope drunk

Wherein you drest yourself? Hath it slept since,
And wakes it now, to look so green and pale
At what it did so freely? From this time
Such I account thy love. Art thou afeard
To be the same in thine own act and valour,
As thou art in desire? Would'st thou have that
Which thou esteem'st the ornament of life,
And live a coward in thine own esteem;
Letting, I dare not;' wait upon,' I would.'
Macb. Pr'ythee peace:

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I dare do all that may become a man;
Who dares do more, is none.

Lady M. What beast was it then,

That made you break this enterprise to me?
When you durst do it, then you were a man;
And, to be more than what you were, you would
Be so much more the man,-nor time, nor place,
Did then adhere, and yet you would make both.
They have made themselves, and that their fitness now
Does unmake you. I have given suck, and know

How tender 'tis to love the babe that milks me:

I would, while it was smiling in my face,
Have pluck'd my nipple from his boneless gums,
And dashed the brains out, had I so sworn

As you have done to this.

The murder of the king renders others necessary. Banquo is one of the first to be removed. Become more cruel by the recollection of their deeds of cruelty, and urged by terror, they deluge all Scotland with blood. At last the son of the murdered king returns with an English army, and Macbeth, forsaken by all, is killed. He had, since his accession to the throne, paid a visit to his old friends the witches, whose predictions had so well operated their own accomplishment, and found them em

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ployed in preparing charms, in their dark subterranean abode, assembled around a boiling cauldron. The fire sheds its pale and livid light on the haggard faces and meagre hands of three midnighthags, mixing their hellish drugs, naming them gravely one after the other,—a monstrous assemblage of all that the wildest fancy could bring together, of objects fantastically hideous, in a simple age that dreaded no ridicule. And I own, that, far from feeling any inclination to laugh at the witches, they impress me with a considerable degree of horror. The double meaning of their prediction is always such as to urge Macbeth more and more to his destruction.

Such are the outlines of this play. Independently of its tragical beauties, it excites a strong interest, and, excepting the little infernal agency intermixed, is true to nature. The rules of Aristotle, without being very strictly attended to, are not so outrageously violated as in other plays of the great English dramatist. The principal charm of this, as of all his works, consists in the ease, the liberty, the inimitable grace, and the never-failing vigour of his language. He plays with his ideas, flowing abundant, lively and deep from an inexhaustible source.

Mrs Siddons, as Lady Macbeth, was that night a merciless tigress, thirsting for blood and carnage. She goads on her husband to the consummation of his crimes, with unrelenting ferocity. Yet, after placing by the bed-side of the king the instruments of his murder, and while anxiously waiting for the performance of the deed, she says,

-Had he not resembled
My father as he slept, I had done't.

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This unexpected sentiment of humanity and momentary feeling of tenderness crossing the murderess's mind, like a flash of lightning in the darkness of the storm, is expressed without pomp of language, and rests for its effect on the simple energy of the contrast:

A sunny island in a stormy main;

A spot of azure in a clouded sky.

Macbeth himself, a prey to the terrors of guilt, thinks he heard a voice cry," Sleep no more!"

Towards the end of the play, when the castle is surrounded, and all the delusive dreams of ambition have vanished, leaving only remorse and despair, Lady Macbeth comes out of her apartment, walking in her sleep, pale and dishevelled, and seems to be intent on rubbing out some stains she has on her hands. It is blood she thinks she sees, and tries in vain to efface;-her discourse, incoherent, interrupted, indicates the agitation of a tortured mind.

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Out, damned spot! out, I say!-one; two; why then 'tis time to do't;-Hell is murky!—Fie my Lord, fie! a soldier, and afear'd? What need we fear who knows it, when none can call our power to account?-Yet who would have thought the old man to have had so much blood in him?"

Then a little while after she says again,

"Here's the smell of the blood still; all the perfumes of Arabia will not sweeten this little hand,-Oh! Oh! Oh!"

Such scenes as these, of which there are many in this play, afford the greatest scope to the talent of the actor. Mrs Siddons and Mr Kemble did them full justice; restoring to the conceptions of the poet what the insufficiency of language has

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made them lose, and clothing with a new body the shade of his genius.

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The death of Lady Macbeth, announced by the cries of her women, introduces some very beautiful passages, which are translated in the French journal, but would be superfluous here. I yielded with great diffidence, to a desire of conveying into the French language something of the beauties of Shakespeare, but I felt too plainly the difference of the two languages, and yet that is the least difficulty. For the thoughts, the turn of mind, of two nations so near and so much alike in many respects, differ still more than their respective languages; and, by a singular contradiction, while liveliness and reason form the respective bases of their supposed characters, the poetry of the former is as conspicuous for regularity and imperturbable decorum, as that of the latter is for exuberance, licence, and eccentricity. An inordinate fear of ridicule is the passion of a cultivated age, and rules in France with more force than anywhere else, not the less incurred, however, in many respects, for being so sedulously avoided.

"On est honteux des affections fortes devant les ames légères; l'enthousiasme en tout genre est ridicule pour qui ne l'éprouve pas; la poésie, le dévouement, l'amour, la religion, ont la même origine. Hors le soin de son existence tout peut être illusion, ou peut être supposé tel."-Mad. de Stael.

"Il y a souvent dans les choses où tout paroit ridicule au vulgaire, un coin de grandeur, qui ne le fait apercevoir qu'aux hommes de génie."-Vol

taire.

It appears impossible that the French and the English should ever agree on the comparative me

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