MACBETH.
Many actors have represented Macbeth as a coward moulded and directed at will by his stronger wife,—a weakling caught like a leaf in an irresistible current and hurried helplessly on to his doom. Such is not the picture painted by Shakspeare. Such was not the interpretation given by Forrest. Macbeth is a broad, rich, powerful nature, with a poetic mind, a loving heart, a courageous will. He is also strongly ambitious, and prone to superstition. To gratify his ambition he is tempted to commit a dreadful crime, and the temptation is urged on him by what he holds to be supernatural agencies. After misgivings and struggles with himself, he yields. The horrid deed being perpetrated, the results disappoint him. The supernatural prophecies that led him on change to supernatural terrors, his soul is filled with remorse, his brain reels, and as the sequel of his guilt thickens darkly around him he rallies his desperate energies and meets his fate with superb defiance. The struggle of temptation in a soul richly furnished with good yet fatally susceptible to evil, the violation of conscience, the overwhelming retribution,—these points, softened with sunny touches of domestic love and poetic moral sentiment, compose the lurid substance and movement of the drama. And these points Forrest embodied in his portraiture with an emotional intensity and an intellectual clearness which enthralled his audience.
As he came over the hills at the back of the stage, accompanied by Banquo, in his Highland tartan, his plumed Scotch cap, his legs bare from the knee to the ankle, his pointed targe on his arm, with his free and commanding air, and his appearance of elastic strength and freshness, he was a picture of vigorous, breezy manhood. His first words were addressed to Banquo in an easy tone, such as one would naturally use in describing the weather:
“So foul and fair a day I have not seen.”
The witches hailing him with new titles and a royal prophecy, he starts,—
“And seems to fear
Things that do sound so fair.”
As they concluded, the manner in which, with subdued breathing eagerness, he said,—
“Stay, you imperfect speakers; tell me more,”—
showed what a deep and prepared chord in his soul their greeting had struck. And when they made themselves vapor and disappeared, he stood rapt in the wonder of it, and replied to the question of Banquo, “Whither have they vanished?” with a dissolving whispering voice, in an attitude of musing suspense and astonishment,—
“Into the air; and what seemed corporal melted
As breath into the wind. Would they had stayed!”
When the missives from the king saluted him Glamis and Cawdor, he attributed more than mortal knowledge to the weird sisters; and at once the terrible temptation to gratify his ambition by murder seized his soul, and conscience began to struggle with it. This struggle, in all its dread import, he pictured forth as he delivered the ensuing soliloquy with speaking features and in quick low tones of suppressed questioning eagerness:
“This supernatural soliciting
Cannot be ill; cannot be good. If ill,
Why hath it given me earnest of success,
Commencing in a truth? I am thane of Cawdor.
If good, why do I yield to that suggestion
Whose horrid image doth unfix my hair,
And make my seated heart knock at my ribs,
Against the use of nature?
My thought, whose murder yet is but fantastical,
Shakes so my single state of man that function
Is smothered in surmise, and nothing is,
But what is not.”
In uttering these words he painted to eye and ear how temptation divides the soul into the desiring passion and the forbidding principle and sets them in deadly contention. Then the apologetic sympathy of his reply to the expostulation of Banquo,—
“Worthy Macbeth, we stay upon your leisure,”—
showed the gentle quality of his nature:
“Give me your favor: my dull brain was wrought
With things forgotten. Kind gentlemen, your pains
Are registered where every day I turn
The leaf to read them. Let us toward the king.”
A. Robin.
EDWIN FORREST AS
MACBETH.
Macbeth was one originally full of the milk of human kindness, who would not play false, but would win holily what he wished highly: yet his ambition was so sharp that the sight of the coveted prize made him wild to snatch it the nearest way. This conflict Forrest continually indicated by alternations of geniality towards his comrades and of lowering gloom in himself, while his brain seemed heaving in the throes of a moral earthquake. Thus, when Duncan had indicated Malcolm as successor to the throne, Macbeth betrayed the depths of his soul by saying, with sinister mien, aside,—
“The Prince of Cumberland! That is a step
On which I must fall down, or else o’erleap,
For in my way it lies. Stars, hide your fires!
Let not light see my black and deep desires.”
The earnest and tender warmth which Forrest made Macbeth put into his greeting of his wife after his absence, his dangers in battle, and his mysterious adventure with the witches, proved how deeply he loved her. And his first words,—
“My dearest love,
Duncan comes here to-night,”—
were spoken with an abstracted and concentrated air that fully revealed the awful scheme that loomed darkly far back in his mind. Left alone with himself, the temptation renewed the struggle between his better and his worse self. In the long and wonderful soliloquy, beginning—
“If it were done when ’tis done, then ’twere well,”—
he painted the gradual victory of reason, honor, conscience, and affection over the fell ambition that was spurring him to murder, and, as Lady Macbeth entered, he exclaimed, with a clearing and relieved look,—
“We will proceed no further in this business.”
But the stinging taunts with which she upbraided him, and the frightful energy of her own resolution with which she eloquently infected him, worked so strongly on his susceptible nature that he reinstalled his discarded purpose, and went out saying firmly,—
“I am settled, and bend up
Each corporal agent to this terrible feat.”
In this scene he so distinctly exhibited the operation of her influence on him, the slow change of his innocent determination into uncertain wavering, and then the change of the irresolute state into guilty determination, that the spectators could almost see the inspiring temptress pour her spirits into him, as with the valor of her tongue she chastised his hesitation away.
When he next appeared he looked oppressed, bowed, haggard, and pale, as if the fearful crisis had exerted on him the effect of years of misery. In half-undress, with semi-distraught air, his hushed and gliding manner of sinewy stealth, in conjunction with the silence and darkness of the hour, conveyed a mysterious impression of awe and terror to every soul. He said to the servant, with an absent look and tone, as if the words uttered themselves without his heed,—
“Go; bid thy mistress, when my drink is ready,
She strike upon the bell. Get thee to bed.”
Then slowly came the appalling climax in the temptation whose influences had been progressively operating in the automatic strata of his being deeper than his free consciousness could reach. Those influences were now ready to produce an illusion, by a reversal of the normal action of the faculties unconscious ideas reporting themselves outwardly as objects. Buried in thought, he stands gazing on the floor. Lifting his head, at last, as if to speak, he sees a dagger floating in the air. He winks rapidly, then rubs his eyes, to clear his sight and dispel his doubt. The fatal vision stays. He reasons with himself, and acts the reasoning out, to decide whether it is a deception of fancy or a supernatural reality. First he thinks it real, but, failing in his attempt to clutch it, he holds it to be a false creation of the brain. Then its persistence drives him insane, and as he sees the blade and dudgeon covered with gouts of blood he shrieks in a frenzy of horror. Passing this crisis, he re-seizes possession of his mind, and, with an air of profound relief, sighs,—
“There’s no such thing:
It is the bloody business which informs
Thus to mine eyes.”
Then, changing his voice from a giant whisper to a full sombre vocality, the next words fell on the ear in their solemn music like thunder rolling mellowed and softened in the distance:
“Now o’er the one half world
Nature seems dead, and wicked dreams abuse
The curtained sleep.”
Gathering his faculties and girding up his resolution for the final deed, as the bell rang he grasped his dagger and made his exit, saying,—
“Hear it not, Duncan; for it is a knell
That summons thee to heaven or to hell.”
These words he spoke, not with the bellowing declamation many players had given them, but in a low, firm tone tinged with sadness, a tone expressive of melancholy mixed with determination. As he came out of the fatal chamber backwards, with his hands recking, he did not see Lady Macbeth standing there in an attitude of intense listening, until he struck against her. They both started and gazed at each other in terror,—an action so true to nature that it always electrified the house.
Then at once began the dread reaction of sorrow, fear, and remorse. Forrest made the regret and lamentation of Macbeth over the crime and its irreparable consequences exquisitely piteous and mournful. The marvellous wail of his description of innocent sleep forfeited thenceforth, the panic surprise of his
“How is it with me when every noise appals me?”
the lacerating distress of his
“Wake Duncan with thy knocking: I would thou couldst!”
penetrated the heart of every hearer with commiseration.
Forrest gave Macbeth, in the first scene of the play, a cheerful and observant air; after the interview with the witches he was absorbed and abstracted; pending his direful crime he was agitated, moody, troubled,—
“Dark thoughts rolling to and fro in his mind
Like thunder-clouds darkening the lucid sky;”
after the murder he was restless, suspicious, terrified, at times insane. These alterations of mood and manner were distinctly marked with the evolution of the plot through its salient stages. Of the pervasive remorse with which the moral nature of Macbeth afflicted and shook him, Forrest presented a picture fascinating in its fearful beauty and truth. When he spoke the following passage, the mournfulness of his voice was like the sighing of the November wind as it throws its low moan over the withered leaves:
“Better be with the dead,
Whom we to gain our peace have sent to peace,
Than on the torture of the mind to lie
In restless ecstasy. Duncan is in his grave:
After life’s fitful fever he sleeps well:
Treason has done his worst; nor steel, nor poison,
Malice domestic, foreign levy, nothing
Can touch him farther.”
Then, seeking sympathy and consolation, he turned to the partner of his bosom and his greatness with the agonizing outburst,—
“O, full of scorpions is my mind, dear wife.”
Close on the awful remorse and on the pathetic tenderness, with consummate truth to nature the selfish instincts were shown hardening the man in his crime, making him resolve to strengthen with further ill things bad begun:
“I am in blood
Stept in so far, that, should I wade no more,
Returning were as tedious as go o’er.”
So unstably poised was his disposition between his good affections and his wicked desires that the conflict was still repeated, and with each defeat of conscience the dominion of evil grew completer. As his remorseful fears translated themselves into outward spectres, Forrest vividly illustrated the curdling horror human nature experiences when guilt opens the supernatural world to its apprehension. He made Macbeth show a proud and lion-mettled courage in human relations, but seem cowed with abject terror by ghostly visitations. His criminal course collects momentum till it hurries him headlong to wholesale slaughters and to his own inevitable ruin. In his mad infatuation of self-entangling crime he says of his own proposed massacre of the family of Macduff,—
“No boasting like a fool:
This deed I’ll do before this purpose cool.”
Relying on the promise of the witches that none of woman born should harm him, and that he should never be vanquished till Birnam wood came to Dunsinane, he added crime to crime till the whole land was in arms for his overthrow. Then, despite his forced faith and bravery, a profound melancholy sank on him. His vital spirits failed. He grew sick of life and weary of the sun. To this phase of the character and career Forrest did conspicuous justice. Nothing of the kind could exceed the exquisite beauty of his readings of the three famous passages,—
“I have lived long enough; my way of life
Has fallen into the sere, the yellow leaf:”
“Canst thou not minister to a mind diseased,
Pluck from the memory a rooted sorrow?”
She should have died hereafter:
“There would have been a time for such a word.”
His voice lingered on the melodious melancholy of the words and every line of his face responded to their mournful and despairing significance.
When told that Birnam wood was moving, the sense of supernatural power turned against him. For a moment he stood, a solid dismay. Then he staggered as if his brain had received a blow from the words which smote to its reeling centre. So, when Macduff exposed to him the paltering of the fiends in a double sense, his boasted charm seemed visibly to melt from him, and he shrank back as though struck by a withering spell. His towering form contracted into itself, his knees shook, and his sword half dropped from his grasp. But the next instant, goaded by the taunts of his adversary, he rallied on his native heroism, braced himself for the struggle as if he resolved to rise superior to fate whether natural or demoniac, and fell at last like a ruined king, with all his blazing regalia on. The performance left on the mind of the appreciative beholder, stamped in terrible impress, the eternal moral of temptation and crime culminating in fatal success and followed by the inevitable swoop of retribution:
“Naught’s had, all’s spent,
Where our desire is got without content.”