Coleridge calls Helena one of Shakespeare’s loveliest women. I cannot agree. She secures her husband’s embraces under a false pretence. How a woman could consent to lie in the arms of a man who had cast her off, and who believed when he was enjoying her that she was a mistress whom he preferred is beyond my comprehension. It is so in Boccaccio, but that is no excuse. Devotion to a man who is indifferent or who hates, is tragically possible, but in its greatest intensity would hardly permit such humiliation.
The play is bad altogether. What was the necessity for suggesting Bertram’s second marriage? There is nowhere any trace of Shakespeare’s depth. The difficulties of the text are singular, and seem to mark this drama as one different from the rest.
Macbeth.—Johnson’s remark that the events are so great that they overpower the persons and prevent nice discrimination of character is partly true.
Coleridge notices that Lady Macbeth was a person of high rank, living much alone. A darkly meditative mind left in solitude can conceive without being startled the most awful designs. The same imagination in Lady Macbeth which brooded over the plot against Duncan’s life drove her to delirium and suicide.
Shakespeare transfers the most perilous stuff in him to Macbeth. The function smothered in surmise; the reflection on the emptiness of life—tale told by an idiot—Shakespeare empties it into this murderous traitor. He makes him the prey of that which is mixed in the composition of the best.
The witches do not strike us as miraculous. They are not supernatural, but extensions of the natural.
It is an apology for emendation that one of the most celebrated passages in the play is based on conjecture (confirmed by what follows) and on analogy.
‘I dare do all that may become a man;
Who dares no [Folio] more is none.’
‘No’—corrected by Rowe to ‘do.’
In Measure for Measure we have