SHAKESPEARE AND MIDDLETON. EV 'VERY one ripely conversant with Shakespeare's manner, and thoroughly at home in his idiom of thought and language, especially in his peculiar mode of conceiving and working out character, must, I think, have at least a dim sense, if not a clear perception, of disharmony and incongruity in certain portions of this tragedy. Many years ago I had something of this feeling; but, as the whole play was then universally ascribed to Shakespeare, I did not dare to trust such feeling: I sought, and of course easily found, refuge from it in the thought, that Shakespeare, even in his wisest days, was not wise at all hours, and that in his highest hours he had occasional moments of nodding, as Homer is said to have; that sometimes, for popular effect, he put in, or let in, things which his own imperial judgment could not approve; and that, in his serene carelessness, or perhaps in his calm assurance, of fame, both his genius and his taste indulged themselves now and then in rather emphatic lapses, and even - I almost dread to speak it—in pretentious platitudes. The feeling in question was first moved by the wide contrast between what comes from the Witches, in Act i., scene 3, before the entrance of Macbeth and Banquo, and what comes from the Weird Sisters after that entrance. The difference is not merely one of degree, but of kind; a difference as broad and as pronounced as that between a tadpole and an eagle. In the former case, they are neither more nor less than the coarse, foul old-woman witches of ancient superstition; creatures actuated by the worst and low est human motives,and passions, envy, malice, and spite; killing swine, sailing in sieves, assuming the forms of rats without tails, dealing in the thumbs of wrecked pilots, and riding through the air on broomsticks. Their aspect and behaviour are in the last degree commonplace and vulgar; there is nothing even respectable about them; all is of the earth earthy. In the latter case, they are mysterious and supernatural beings, unearthly and terrible, such as we may well conceive “the Goddesses of Destiny” to be their very aspect at once strikes the beholder with dread and awe: they “look not like the inhabitants of the Earth": they do not come and go, they appear and vanish; bubbling up, as it were, through the ground from the lower world, in something of a human shape, to breathe the contagion of Hell upon a soul which they know to be secretly in sympathy with them, and inwardly attempered to their purposes. Surely every one who reads that scene, with his thoughts about him, and having himself fairly in hand, must catch at least some glimpses of this huge discrepancy: still I felt bound to presume that the Poet's great and wonderful art had some way of reconciling it. Again, in the second scene of Act i., it was long ago apparent, that either Shakespeare assumed a style not properly his own, or else that another hand than Shakespeare's held the pen. But, for the peculiarity here displayed, Coleridge gave a plausible, if not a sufficient reason. “The style,” says he, “and rhythm of the Captain's speeches in the second scene should be illustrated by reference to the interlude in Hamlet, in which the epic is substituted for the tragic, in order to make the latter be felt as the real-life diction." In this explanation of the matter I rested, as perhaps some others did. But surely the two cases are not parallel at all: there is no such occasion here for a change of style as there is in Hamlet: there, it is a play within a play; here, nothing of the kind. At length, in the year 1869, Mr. W. G. Clark and Mr. W. A. Wright, the learned Editors of the "Clarendon Press Series," led off in a new solution of the difficulty. I propose, first, to reproduce, partly in their own words, so much of their theory, and of their arguments in support thereof, as I concur in; my limited space not well affording room for the whole of it. Before doing this, however, I must advert briefly to another matter. 66 In the Introduction I have spoken of the peculiar relation which has long been known to subsist between Shakespeare's Macbeth and The Witch of Thomas Middleton. That relation was discovered in manner as follows. In the original copy of Macbeth, Act iii., scene 5, we have the stage-direction, "Music, and a Song"; and then, two lines after, another stage-direction, Sing within. Come away, come away, &c." Again, in Act iv., scene I, we have the stage-direction, “Music, and a Song. Black Spirits, &c." Thus in both places the songs are merely indicated, not printed.—In 1674, Sir William Davenant published an altered version of the tragedy, giving both songs in full, but making no sign as to the source of them; so that they were supposed to be his own composition. So the matter stood till 1779, when the manuscript of Middleton's play, The Witch, was discovered by George Steevens; and there both songs were found, in nearly the same words as Davenant had given them. From this it was easily gathered why the songs were not printed at length in the folio of 1623. Macbeth was of course there printed from a playhouse manuscript; and those songs were presumed to be so well known to the actors of the play in the form it then had, that a bare indication of them was enough. to us. The date of Middleton's play has not been ascertained, nor have we any means of ascertaining it. The forecited particulars infer, of course, that The Witch must have been written some time before Macbeth acquired the form in which it has come down On the other hand, besides the particulars specified above, Clark and Wright point out various resemblances both of thought and language in the two plays, — resemblances much too close and literal to be merely accidental. So that one of the authors must have borrowed from the other. Now, several of these resemblances occur in those parts of the tragedy which are unquestionably Shakespeare's, and which bear the clearest tokens of his mintage. It is, on the face of the thing, nowise likely that Shakespeare would have borrowed from Middleton: but, Middleton's connection with the tragedy being established, nothing is more likely than that he may have borrowed from Shakespeare. The natural conclusion therefore is, that Macbeth was well known, and its very language familiar, to Middleton before he wrote The Witch, or while he was writing it. Here, then, we have a contradiction, or seeming contradiction; which, however, is easily cleared up by supposing the original form of the tragedy to have been in being before The Witch was written, and that the tragedy received its present form after the writing of The Witch. Middleton's play was doubtless highly popular on the stage for a time the witchcraft-scenes especially yield ample food for a transient popularity. Finding that his representation of oldwoman witches pleased the popular taste and took well with the multitude, he would naturally crave to repeat or prolong the thing with some variation. In Shakespeare's tragedy he may well have seen a cheap and ready way of catering still further to the popular taste. Upon the supposal of his having taken Macbeth in hand with this view, we can easily perceive strong inducements for him to assimilate, as far as might be, the sublime and unique creations of Shakespeare's imagination to the commonplace and vulgar offspring of his own fancy, which he had found so profitable. To those at all booked in the usages of the Elizabethan stage, it is well known that stock plays, as they are called, belonging to the theatrical companies, and laid up in their archives, were often taken in hand, overhauled, altered, improved, and brought out afresh, either as new plays or as old plays with new attractions. It is as certain as any thing of the kind well can be, that Shakespeare himself exercised his hand more or less in thus recasting and amending old stock plays; and such, no doubt, was the genesis of the Second and Third Parts of King Henry the Sixth, of The Taming of the Shrew, of Pericles, and perhaps some others, as we now have them in the Poet's works. It is also well known that his manuscripts were owned by the theatrical com pany of which he was a member; and that they remained in the company's hands, as their property, both during his life and after his death. What, then, is more likely than that some of his plays may in turn have been subjected to the same process which he had himself used on the workmanship of others, though not indeed with the same result? And so, I have no doubt, it was. The thing was quite too common for any scruples to spring up about it. I may as well add, here, that Middleton died in 1627, eleven years after the death of Shakespeare; and that he continued to write more or less for the stage till near the close of his life. The matter, I believe, is now ready for something to be heard from Clark and Wright. "If we were certain," say they, "that the whole of Macbeth, as we now read it, came from Shakespeare's hand, we should be justified in concluding from the data before us, that Middleton, who was probably junior and certainly inferior to Shakespeare, consciously or unconsciously imitated the great master. But we are persuaded that there are parts of Macbeth which Shakespeare did not write; and the style of these seems to us to resemble that of Middleton. It would be very uncritical to pick out of Shakespeare's works all that seems inferior to the rest, and to assign it to somebody else. At his worst, he is still Shakespeare; and, though the least mannered' of all poets, he has always a manner which cannot well be mistaken. In the parts of Macbeth of which we speak we find no trace of his manner. But to come to particulars. We believe that the second scene of the first Act was not written by Shakespeare. Making all allowance for corruption of text, the slovenly metre is not like Shakespeare's work, even when he is most careless. The bombastic phraseology of the Sergeant is not like Shakespeare's language, even when he is most bombastic." The writers then go on to allege the fact, for such it is, that in one point this scene is strangely inconsistent with what is said in the following scene. For Ross, in giving Duncan an account of the battle, here represents the Thane of Cawdor as having |