Caithness.—Great Dunsinane he strongly fortifies:
Some say he's mad; others, that lesser hate him,
Do call it valiant fury; but for certain
He cannot buckle his distempered cause
Within the belt of rule.
Angus.— Now does he feel
His secret murders sticking on his hands;
Now minutely revolts upbraid his faith-breach;
Those he commands move only in command,
Nothing in love; now does he feel his title
Hang loose about him like a giant's robe
Upon a dwarfish thief.
I am sure that I should have suspected those lines to be Shakespeare's if I had first met them without a name, in a nameless book. Still more surprising is it to me to find these editors saying that in Act V., Sc. 5, lines 47-50 are "singularly weak." Here they are:
If this which he avouches does appear,
There is no flying hence or tarrying here.
I 'gin to be a-weary of the sun,
And wish the estate of the world were now undone.
The first two have no particular character, nor need they have any, as they merely introduce the last two, which contain an utterance of blank despair and desolation which seems to me more expressive than any other that I ever read.
The last passage of the play, that after line 34, when Macbeth and Macduff go off fighting, and Macbeth is killed, are probably, as the Cambridge editors suggest, by another hand than Shakespeare's. Their tameness and their constrained rhythm are not Shakespearian work, particularly at this period of his life, and in the writing of such a scene. "Nor would he," as the Cambridge editors say, "have drawn away the veil which with his fine tact he had dropped over her [Lady Macbeth's] fate by telling us that she had taken off her life 'by self, and violent hands.'"
The person who wrote these un-Shakespearian passages was probably Middleton. Shakespeare, writing the tragedy in haste for an occasion, received a little help, according to the fashion of the time, from another playwright; and the latter having imitated the supernatural poets of this play in one of his own, the players or managers afterward introduced from that play songs by him—"Music and a song, Come away, come away," Act III., Sc. 5, and "Music and a song, Black spirits," etc., Act IV., Sc. 1. This was done to please the inferior part of the audience. These songs and all this sort of operatic incantation are entirely foreign to the supernatural motive of the tragedy as Shakespeare conceived it. And I will here remark that the usual performance of "Macbeth" with "a chorus" and "all Locke's music" is a revolting absurdity.
My next paper will close this series with an examination of some of Shakespeare's least known dramas.
Richard Grant White.