murder if he thought he would not be found out. His lower self, tainted by sin, sought out wizards and witches, and he tried to secure his throne by blood. His imagination was the concrete and limited imagination of a savage, who feared the supernatural, yet would jump the life to come to attain his earthly ends. He was brave and determined, and his physical courage never failed, though for a moment his manhood quailed before the terrible vision of the murdered Banquo, and at the mortal sight by which he discovered “the juggling of the fiend that lied like truth." But the poet carries back our sympathy to the vanquished man, who, alone and deserted by men and spirits, willed to die with harness on his back. And this is the mission of the true tragic poet. Full of crime as Shakespeare made Macbeth, he painted of him a picture grand in its lurid colouring, equalled only in power and in interest by the "Satan" of Milton's Paradise Lost.' And from the stories he contracted into Macbeth's life, Shakespeare evolved a play on broad elemental lines, a picture of Destiny, stern as a Greek tragedy, or rather as three Greek tragedies, a trilogy of crime, triumph, and punishment; a play in which romance and love-making, by-play and fun, have no place; in which even the pure matronly love of Lady Macbeth was clouded from the very outset by ambition; and yet, taken all in all, it remains, after Hamlet, the play most widely read and deeply studied of all. The character of Lady Macbeth is even more Shakespeare's original creation than that of her husband. There is nothing in literature that one can note as a parallel. The character of Rossa, painted by Fulke Greville, Lord Brooke, in his play of "Mustapha," seems modelled after hers, but lacks all Shakespeare's finer touches. Through the early scenes of the play comes a faint whisper of the hidden wrongs of Macbeth and his wife, that induce them so readily to yield to the temptation of opportunity, showing Shakespeare's suppressed study. Hasty readers are apt to blame Lady Macbeth for being the temptress of her noble husband. But even in the play Shakespeare shows that the thought had occurred to Macbeth before he spoke to his wife: Stars, hide your fires, Let not light see my black and deep desires, His hesitations arose only from doubts of the prudence of present action, through the dread of losing these precious "golden opinions." The admiration his wife awakened in him by her bold counsel stimulated him to try to keep her golden opinion and risk the others. When she urged, not the crime, but promptness and decisiveness in action, he hesitated; but when, descending to his lower level, she showed him how he might do it, and yet evade suspicion, he yielded at once. She was more fearless and impetuous than her husband; more direct, more self-sufficing, and more interiorly simple. Her imagination was of a colder, more intellectual type. Warm in her affection for her husband, she was proud of his kingly qualities, and wished him to be free to exercise them. The weak, indolent king, whose sole prop Macbeth had been and was, had ungratefully slighted him by making the juvenile Malcolm the centre of attraction at the time that Macbeth was the true hero, and had given the untried youth the inheritance the brave man so well deserved. The weird sisters had said that Macbeth in spite of all would be king. Let him become so now, while the country honoured him and needed him, while Duncan was weak and Malcolm was young. They would go away to their southern capital, and it might be at the risk of his own life were Macbeth to follow him and attack him there later. Regardless of other considerations, she drove towards her end. It was only after it was attained that her conscience awoke, and waking, never ceased to gnaw. She at last recognised the moral elements of responsibility and retribution, and in her bitter remorse stands on a much higher plane than her husband. Her clear intellect recognised their united action to be sin; and acknowledged that she, the sharer in the one, shared all the other sins of her husband that flowed from that one. Macbeth deadened his imagination and blunted his feeling by repeated crimes; his wife thinned the veil of sense, and let her late-born imagination reign, while brooding over the terrible past, until it made her mad. Shakespeare, with consummate art, restores somewhat of sympathy for her, as he had done for her husband. He never could have written the speech of Malcolm with which the play closes, as it generally is printed. He would never have cast away his labours, or demeaned his art, by recalling the thoughts of his listeners to the evils of " this dead butcher, and his fiend-like queen"; but would have left them to go to their homes with the tragic feeling aching in their hearts, and the lesson of his play moving their souls, that in the beginning we must stay evil and avoid crimes, and that we ourselves are not sufficient so to do without a standard higher than ourselves. Other scenes show alteration by an inferior hand, such as the second scene of Act I; but these last words are an addition, similar in nature to those historic glosses that I have tried to show you have been added through the centuries to the contemporary portrait of the brave king' whose strong hand sustained eleventh century Scotland during seventeen years.2 1 Dr Garnett kindly suggested to me that it may be worth noting that Milton, who, in spite of his Puritan predilections, honoured Shakespeare even to reverence, seemed to have been dissatisfied with his treatment of Macbeth. Among the list of the subjects that he drew up in his youth, as plans for his work, he notes for tragedies "Scotch Stories, or rather British of the North Parts.' 2. 'Duffe and Donewald,' a strange story of witchcraft and murder. 3. Kenneth, who, having poisoned Malcom Duffe, is slain by Fenella. 4. Macbeth. The matter of Duncan may be expressed by the appearing of his ghost." Thus he separates the two main elements of Shakespeare's story, and seems to think another conception than that of Shakespeare's desirable (see Masson's Milton,' ii, 115). 2 My views are criticised in "Palæstra" v. 39. "Die Saga von Macbeth." Ernst Krögers. (Read before the Royal Society of Literature, Feb. 24th, 1997.) VI. IS LADY MACBETH REALLY A "FIEND-LIKE Το QUEEN?" O answer this question, we must first glance at the four portraits which we have of Lady Macbeth: that of the old contemporary records; that of the Latin histories which provided Shakespeare with his materials; that of the dramatist himself, and that of the present epilogue to his play. Gruoch and her infant son Lulach were the sole survivors of the ancient royal line of Scotland in the time of Malcolm II. He had only two daughters, the elder of whom had married the Abbot of Dunkeld, and was the mother of the weak Duncan, the younger of whom had married Finlegh Thane of Cromarty, and was the mother of Macbeth, older, braver, and more popular than his incompetent cousin Duncan. His grandfather, however, wished the succession to go in the elder line, and for Duncan's sake he slew Gruoch's father and her brother, and burnt her first husband Gilcomgain and his friends alive in their castle. So that she had the blood feud of many against the rival race. By some means she escaped alone in the snow, and fled with her baby in her arms to seek shelter from Macbeth, who risked offending his grandfather to give it to her. He afterwards married her, to ensure protection. Thus she at least was no usurper. Her position was the same as that of Elizabeth of York; she might not have been selected as sovereign, because she was a woman, but, as Elizabeth married Henry VII. who secured the crown by conquest, she carried her right to him, a right he had not in himself. It was exactly so with Queen Gruoch and King Macbeth. Few records of her are preserved, but there are sufficient to show that she was a faithful and liberal daughter of the early Scottish Church. Her charitable gifts were many. On one of her gifts of land to the Priory of Loch Leven was a well, which has ever since been venerated by her name as Gruoch's Well." Her eldest son Lulach, the baby she saved under such terrible circumstances, as well as her children by Macbeth, were well brought up. But it was Lulach who succeeded his stepfather, until Malcolm the third killed him too. Something of this old story can be also gleaned from the later histories written under the influence of the conquerors. But we cannot expect Shakespeare to know it. Holinshed said very little of Lady Macbeth, only that she urged her husband to destroy Duncan, as she burned with unquenchable desire to bear the name of Queen. (Shakespeare naturally follows the later history, though he never wronged characters 1 as he wronged Macbeth and his wife.) He cannot hide the fact that Duncan was incompetent, and that Macbeth had to fight all his battles for him. Though he knew that his grandfather had settled the crown on Duncan, Macbeth had the constitutional right to be considered his heir, since the brother of Gruoch had been slain. Therefore the folly of Duncan is nowhere more clearly shown than in choosing the time when Macbeth had saved his country from the Norwegians to announce that he had determined that he should not have his right of being nominated the Prince of Cumberland, but that it would be granted to the child Malcolm, who had done nothing, following an innovation in the old laws of succession; and giving a public expression of contempt, instead of the expression of royal and national gratitude. No wonder that the hearts of Macbeth and his wife were hot within them, and that of many friends, so that Macbeth went out to fight with his ungrateful cousin and slew him on the open field. It is only Shakespeare who lays the crime on them that Donewald committed on Duffe, his master. Character is not a constant unity, neither are its rates of development constant. Lady Macbeth's character as created by Shakespeare, |