I will not have you smile, sirrah, when you do it,
As though you cut a lady’s corn; ’tis scurvy.
Do me it, as thou dost thy prayers, seriously.”[166:1]
Here is a man whose mind is certainly in an abnormal condition, and, whatever the precise nature of that condition may be, it alone gives to the play the least vestige of probability. If Memnon were sane, the play would be absurd; if he were mad, then madness would once more be degraded. As it is, he is not an unpleasing fellow; at times he is even touched with pathos: any verdict on him would assuredly be more favourable than a just verdict on the play as a whole.
FOOTNOTES:
[150:1] Dr. Faustus, l. 1419, etc. (Oxford text.)
[151:1] The insanity of Ann Ratcliff, in this play, may also be noticed, though it is of the same rude type as that of Greene’s Orlando. “See, see, see,” she cries, “the Man in the Moon has built a new windmill, and what running there’s from all quarters of the city, to learn the art of grinding.” The only feature of interest in her frenzy is the expression of physical pain which we noticed in “King Lear.” Her ribs are like to break, and “there’s a Lancashire horn-pipe in my throat. Hark how it tickles it, with Doodle, doodle, doodle, doodle,” etc.
[152:1] With Macbeth might be compared two other remorse-stricken murderers in little known plays. Glapthorne’s “Albertus Wallenstein” is the story of a man who causes his son and his son’s betrothed to be killed and is then haunted by his crimes. His soul “is shaken with a nipping frost”; he mistakes his son’s page for a ghost and murders him; after this false visions of spirits are ever before him. Only when mortally wounded by conspirators is his mind at rest. In Denham’s “Sophy” (which is in spirit outside our period, though it was acted in 1641), Abbas, King of Persia, is likewise tormented by the ghosts of those whom he has murdered. Abbas, unlike Macbeth and Wallenstein, is quite a maniac, and does not recover his senses before his death.
[152:2] cf. “Macbeth,” v., 5, 9, etc. “I have almost forgot the taste of fears . . .”