'tis much he dares,
And, to that dauntless temper of his mind,
He hath a wisdom that doth guide his valour
To act in safety.
[238] So when he hears that Fleance has escaped he is not much troubled (iii. iv. 29):
the worm that's fled
Hath nature that in time will venom breed,
No teeth for the present.
I have repeated above what I have said before, because the meaning of Macbeth's soliloquy is frequently misconceived.
[239] Virgilia in Coriolanus is a famous example. She speaks about thirty-five lines.
[240] The percentage of prose is, roughly, in Hamlet 30-2/3, in Othello 16-1/3, in King Lear 27-1/2, in Macbeth 8-1/2.
[241] Cf. [Note F]. There are also in Macbeth several shorter passages which recall the Player's speech. Cf. 'Fortune ... showed like a rebel's whore' (i. ii. 14) with 'Out! out! thou strumpet Fortune!' The form 'eterne' occurs in Shakespeare only in Macbeth, iii. ii. 38, and in the 'proof eterne' of the Player's speech. Cf. 'So, as a painted tyrant, Pyrrhus stood,' with Macbeth, v. viii. 26; 'the rugged Pyrrhus, like the Hyrcanian beast,' with 'the rugged Russian bear ... or the Hyrcan tiger' (Macbeth, iii. iv. 100); 'like a neutral to his will and matter' with Macbeth, i. v. 47. The words 'Till he unseam'd him from the nave to the chaps,' in the Serjeant's speech, recall the words 'Then from the navel to the throat at once He ript old Priam,' in Dido Queen of Carthage, where these words follow those others, about Priam falling with the mere wind of Pyrrhus' sword, which seem to have suggested 'the whiff and wind of his fell sword' in the Player's speech.
[242] See Cunliffe, The Influence of Seneca on Elizabethan Tragedy. The most famous of these parallels is that between 'Will all great Neptune's Ocean,' etc., and the following passages:
Quis eluet me Tanais? aut quae barbaris
Maeotis undis Pontico incumbens mari?
Non ipse toto magnus Oceano pater
Tantum expiarit sceleris. (Hipp. 715.)
Quis Tanais, aut quis Nilus, aut quis Persica
Violentus unda Tigris, aut Rhenus ferox,
Tagusve Ibera turbidus gaza fluens,
Abluere dextram poterit? Arctoum licet
Maeotis in me gelida transfundat mare,
Et tota Tethys per meas currat manus,
Haerebit altum facinus. (Herc. Furens, 1323.)