‘Be that you are,
That is, a woman; if you be more, you’re none.’
Note the terrible, gasping brevity of the dialogue between Lady Macbeth and her husband after the murder:
Lady M. ‘Did not you speak?
M. When?
Lady M. Now.
M. As I descended?
Lady M. Ay.’
Macbeth’s speech beginning just before he hears of Lady Macbeth’s death, and ending after he hears of it, should be interpreted and spoken as follows. He had just said he ‘will laugh a siege to scorn.’ Then a cry of women within.
‘What is that noise?
Seyton. It is the cry of women, my good lord.
[Exit.
Macbeth (musing). I have almost forgot the taste of fears.
The time has been, my senses would have cool’d
To hear a night-shriek; and my fell of hair
Would at a dismal treatise rouse and stir
As life were in ’t: I have supp’d full with horrors;
Direness, familiar to my slaughterous thoughts,
Cannot once start me.Re-enter Seyton.
Wherefore was that cry?
Seyton. The queen, my lord, is dead.
Macbeth (with a touch of impatience). She should have died hereafter:
There would have been a time for such a word.’
He makes no inquiry about his wife, but goes on with his reverie, which does not specially refer to her.
‘To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day
To the last syllable of recorded time,
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!
Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
And then is heard no more: it is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.’
The ‘petty pace,’ coming from Macbeth! The ‘out, out, brief candle,’ should be spoken in the same musing tone.
Johnson says of a learned apology by Heath for a line in Macbeth which is defective in metre: ‘This is one of the effects of literature in minds not naturally perspicacious’—a criticism which might be extended to much Shakespearean comment.
Cymbeline.—The wager is loathsome. If any man with whom we were acquainted had laid it, should we not scorn and brand him? It was a crime to mention Imogen’s name in such society as that which met at Philario’s house. The only excuse is Boccaccio, but what shall we say of Iachimo’s interview with Imogen, invented by Shakespeare! After his beastly experiment upon her, he excuses himself: