Dowden somewhere remarks that if Shakespeare had died at the age of forty, posterity would have said that this was certainly a great loss, but would have found comfort in the thought that Hamlet marked the zenith of his productive power—he could hardly have written another such masterpiece.
And now follow in rapid succession Macbeth, Othello, King Lear, Antony and Cleopatra, and the rest. Hamlet was not the conclusion of a career; Hamlet was the spring-board from which Shakespeare leaped forth into a whole new world of mystery and awe. Dowden has happily compared the tragic figures that glide one after the other across his field of vision between 1604 and 1610 with the bloody and threatening apparitions that pass before Macbeth in the witches' cavern.
The natural tendency of his youth had been to see good everywhere. He had even felt, with his King Henry, that "there is some soul of goodness in things evil." Now, when the misery of life, the problem of evil, presented itself to his inward eye, it was especially the potency of wickedness that impressed him as strange and terrible. We have seen him brooding over it in Hamlet and Measure for Measure. He had of course recognized it before, and represented it on the grandest scale; but in Richard III. the main emphasis is still laid on outward history; Richard is the same man from his first appearance to his last. What now fascinates Shakespeare is to show how the man into whose veins evil has injected some drops of its poison, becomes bloated, gangrened, foredoomed to self-destruction or annihilation, like Macbeth, Othello, Lear. Lady Macbeth's ambition, Iago's malice, the daughters' ingratitude, lead, step by step, to irresistible, ever-increasing calamity.
It is my conviction that Macbeth was the first of these subjects which Shakespeare took in hand. All we know with certainty, indeed, is that the play was acted at the Globe Theatre in 1610. Dr. Simon Forman, in his Booke of Plaies and Notes thereon, gave a detailed account of a performance of it at which he was present on the 20th of April of this year. But in the comedy of The Puritan, dating from 1607, we find an unmistakable allusion to Banquo's ghost; and the lines in the play itself (iv. I)—
"And some I see
That twofold balls and treble sceptres carry,"
—a reference to the union of England and Scotland, and their conjunction with Ireland under James—would have had little effect unless spoken from the stage shortly after the event. As James was proclaimed King of Great Britain and Ireland on the 20th of October 1604, we may conclude that Macbeth was not produced later than 1604-1605.
At James's accession a breath of Scottish air blew over England; we feel it in Macbeth. The scene of the tragedy is laid in the country from which the new king came, and most true to nature is the reproduction in this dark drama of Scotland's forests and heaths and castles, her passions and her poetry.
There is much to indicate that an unbroken train of thought led Shakespeare from Hamlet to Macbeth. The personality of Macbeth is a sort of counterpart to that of Hamlet. The Danish prince's nature is passionate, but refined and thoughtful. Before the deed of vengeance which is imposed upon him he is restless, self-reproachful, and self-tormenting; but he never betrays the slightest remorse for a murder once committed, though he kills four persons before he stabs the King. The Scottish thane is the rough, blunt soldier, the man of action. He takes little time for deliberation before he strikes; but immediately after the murder he is attacked by hallucinations both of sight and hearing, and is hounded on, wild and vacillating and frenzied, from crime to crime. He stifles his self-reproaches and falls at last, after defending himself with the hopeless fury of the "bear tied to the stake."
Hamlet says:—
"And thus the native hue of resolution
Is sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought."