In two of these tragedies we have Shakespeare's most elaborate and, so to speak, admirable representations of villany: Edmund in "King Lear" and Iago in "Othello." These vile creations cannot, however, be justly regarded as the fruit of a lower view of human nature consequent upon a longer acquaintance with it. They were merely required by the exigencies of his plots; and being required, he made them as it was in him to do. For in nothing is his superiority more greatly manifested than in the fact that monsters of baseness, or even thoroughly base men, figure so rarely among his dramatis personæ. They are common with inferior dramatists and writers of prose fiction, whose ruder hands need them as convenient motive powers and as vehicles of the expression of a lower view of human nature. Not so with him. He has weak and erring men—men who are misled by their passions, ambition, revenge, selfish lust, or what not; but Iago, Edmund, and the Duke in "Measure for Measure" are almost all his characters of their kind. In "Richard III." he merely painted a highly colored historical portrait; and Parolles, in "All's Well that Ends Well," and Iachimo, in "Cymbeline," do not rise to the dignity of even third-rate personages. Iago, it need hardly be said, is the most perfect of all his creatures in this kind, and indeed he is the most admirably detestable and infamous character in all literature. Edmund is equally base and cruel; but compared with Iago he is a coarse, low, brutal, and rabid animal. In Iago all the craft and venom of which the human soul is capable is united with an intellectual subtlety which seems to reach the limit of imagination or conception. There are some who see in the making the bastard son in "Lear" the monster of ingratitude and villany and the legitimate a model of all the manly and filial virtues an evidence of Shakespeare's judgment and discrimination. But this is one of those fond and over-subtle misapprehensions from which Shakespeare has suffered in not a few instances, even at the hands of critics of reputation. It suited Shakespeare's plot that the villain should be the bastard; that is all; and Lear's legitimate daughters Goneril and Regan are as base, as bad, and as cruelly ungrateful as Gloucester's illegitimate son. Shakespeare knew human nature too well, and handled it with too just and impartial a hand, to let the question of legitimacy influence him in one way or the other. In "King John" we have, on the contrary, the mean-souled Robert Faulconbridge and his gallant and chivalrous bastard brother Philip.
About the same time, or if not in the same time, perhaps in the same year which saw the production of "King Lear," "Macbeth" was written. But its date is not certain within four or five years. It was surely written before 1610, in which year a contemporary diary records its performance on the 20th of April. The Cambridge editors, in their annotated edition of this play, in the "Clarendon Press" series, prefer the later date; but notwithstanding my great respect for their judgment, I hold to my conclusion for the earlier, for the reasons given in my own edition. The question has not in itself much pertinence to our present purpose, as there is no doubt that the tragedy was produced in this period, and its general style, both of thought and versification, is that of Shakespeare in its fullest development and vigor. But with the question of date there is involved another of great interest to the thoughtful reader—that of mixed authorship. In the introductory essay to my edition of this play (published in 1861) attention was directed to the internal evidence that it was hastily written and left unfinished.[H] Subsequent editors and critics, notably the Cambridge editors and the Rev. F. G. Fleay, in his "Shakespearian Manual," starting from this view, have gone so far as to say that "Macbeth," as we have it, is not all Shakespeare's, but in part the work of Thomas Middleton, a second or third-rate playwright contemporary with Shakespeare, who wrote a play, called "The Witch," which is plainly an imitation of the supernatural scenes in this tragedy. The Cambridge editors believe that Middleton was permitted to supply certain scenes at the time of the writing of Macbeth: Mr. Fleay, that Middleton cut down and patched up Shakespeare's perfected work, adding much inferior matter of his own, and that he did this being engaged to alter the play for stage purposes. The latter opinion I must reject, notwithstanding Mr. Fleay's minute, elaborate, and often specious argument; but the opinion of the Cambridge editors seems to me to a certain extent sound. I cannot, however, go to the length which they do in rejecting parts of this play as not being Shakespeare's work. This study of Shakespeare's style and of what is not his work at a certain period of his life being directly to our purpose, let us examine the tragedy for traces of his hand and of another.
And first let the reader turn to Scene 5 of Act III., which consists almost entirely of a long speech by Hecate, beginning:
Have I not reason, beldames as you are,
Saucy, and overbold? How did you dare
To trade and traffic with Macbeth
In riddles and affairs of death:
And I, the mistress of your charms,
The close contriver of all harms,
Was never called to bear my part,
Or show the glory of our art?
This speech is surely not of Shakespeare's writing. Its being in octosyllabic rhyme is not against it, however; although he abandoned rhyme almost altogether at or before this period. The fact of the business of the scene being supernatural would account for its form. But it is mere rhyme; little more than an unmeaning jingle of verses. Any journeyman at versemaking would write such stuff. Read the speech through, and then think of the writer of "Hamlet," and "Lear," and "Othello," producing such a weak wash of words at the same time when he was writing those tragedies. And even turn back and compare it with the rhyming speeches of his other supernatural personages, of Puck and Titana and Oberon in "A Midsummer Night's Dream," which he wrote at least ten or twelve years earlier, and you will see that it is not only so inferior, but so unlike his undoubted work that it must be rejected. Turn next to Scene 3 of Act II., and read the speeches of the Porter. Long ago Coleridge said of these, "This low soliloquy of the Porter and his few speeches afterward I believe to have been written for the mob by some other hand." That they were written for the mob is nothing against them as Shakespeare's. Shakespeare wrote for the mob. He made a point of putting in something for the groundlings[I] in every play that he wrote. But with what a mighty hand he did it! so that those who have since then sat in the highest seats in the world's theatre have laughed, and pondered as they laughed. "Lear" is notably free from this element; but even in the philosophical "Hamlet" we have the much elaborated scene of the Gravediggers, which was written only to please Coleridge's "mob."[J] But let the reader now compare these Porter's speeches in "Macbeth" with those of the Gravediggers in "Hamlet," and if he is one who can hope to appreciate Shakespeare at all, he will at this stage of his study see at once that although both are low-comedy, technically speaking, the former are low-lived, mean, thoughtless, without any other significance than that of the surface meaning of the poor, gross language in which they are written; while the latter, although, far more laughable even to the most uncultivated hearer, are pregnant with thought and suggestion. There can be no question that these speeches in "Macbeth" were written by some other hand than Shakespeare's.
Having now satisfied ourselves that some part of "Macbeth" is not Shakespeare's (and I began with those so manifestly spurious passages to establish that point clearly and easily in the reader's apprehension), "we are in a proper mood of mind to consider the objections that have been made by the Cambridge editors to other parts of the tragedy. The whole second scene of Act I. is regarded as spurious because of "slovenly metre," too slovenly for him even when he is most careless; "bombastic phraseology," too bombastic for him even when he is most so; also because he had too much good sense to send a severely wounded soldier with the news of a victory. I cannot reject this scene for these reasons. The question of metre and style is one of judgment; and the one seems to me not more irregular and careless, and the other not more tumid, than Shakespeare is in passages undoubtedly of his writing; while there is a certain flavor of language in the scene and a certain roll of the words upon the tongue which are his peculiar traits and tricks of style. The point as to the wounded soldier seems to me a manifest misapprehension. He is not sent as a messenger. Nothing in the text or in the stage directions of the original edition gives even color to such an opinion. The first two scenes of this act prepare one's mind for the tragedy and lay out its action; and they do so, as far as design is concerned, with great skill. The first short scene announces the supernatural character of the agencies at work; the next tells us of the personages who are to figure in the action and the position in which they are placed. In the second scene King Duncan and his suite, marching toward the scene of conflict, and so near it that they are within ear-shot, if not arrow-shot, meet a wounded officer. He is not sent to them. He is merely retiring from the field severely wounded—so severely that he cannot remain long uncared for. The stage direction of the folio is "Alarum within," which means (as will be found by examining other plays) that the sound of drums, trumpets, and the conflict of arms is heard. Then, "Enter King, etc., etc., meeting a bleeding Captaine." The King, then, does not greet or regard him as a messenger, but exclaims, "What bloody man is that?" and adds, "He can report, as seemeth by his plight, the condition of the revolt." Plainly this is no messenger, but a mere wounded officer who leaves the field because, as he says, his "gashes cry for help."
In Act IV., Sc. 1, this speech of the First Witch after the "Show of Eight Kings," is plainly not Shakespeare's:
Ay, sir, all this is so; but why
Stands Macbeth thus amazedly?
Come, sisters, cheer we up his sprites,
And show the best of our delights.
I'll charm the air to give a sound,
While you perform your antic round,
That this great king may kindly say
Our duties did his welcome pay.
This is condemned by the Cambridge editors, and I agree entirely with them. Moreover it seems to be manifestly from the same hand as Hecate's speech (Act III., Sc. 5), previously referred to. The style shows this, and the motive is the same—the introduction of fairy business, dancing and singing, which have nothing to do with the action of the tragedy, and are quite foreign to the supernatural motive of it as indicated in the witch scenes which have the mark of Shakespeare's hand.
In Act IV., Sc. 3, the passage in regard to touching for the King's Evil, from "Enter a Doctor" to "full of grace," was, we may be pretty sure, an interpolation previous to a representation at court, as the Cambridge editors suggest, and it is probably not Shakespeare's; but I would not undertake to say so positively. The same editors say they "have doubts about the second scene of Act V." I notice this not merely to express my surprise at it, but to let the reader see how difficult it is to arrive at a general consent upon such points which are merely matters of judgment. To me this scene is unmistakably Shakespeare's. Who else could have written this passage, not only for its excellence but for its peculiarity?