: scene the actual reappearance of the murdered Banquo ought by all means to be discontinued on the stage. It can hardly fail to excite feelings just the reverse of suitable to the occasion in a word, the thing is simply ludicrous, and cannot be made to seem otherwise in our time. It is indeed certain, from Forman's Notes, that such reappearance was used in the Poet's time; but there were good reasons for it then which do not now exist. In the right conception of the matter, the ghost is manifestly a thing existing only in the diseased imagination of Macbeth; what we call a subjective ghost, a Banquo of the mind; and having no more objective being than the air-drawn dagger of a previous scene; the difference being that Macbeth is there so well in his senses as to be aware of the unreality, while he is here quite out of his senses, and completely hallucinated. All this is evident in that the apparition is seen by none of the other persons present. In Shakespeare's time, the generality of people could not possibly take the conception of a subjective ghost; but it is not so now. To be sure, it was part of the old superstition in this behalf, that a ghost could make itself visible, if it chose, only to such as it had some special concern with; but this is just what we mean by a subjective ghost. The same arguments and the same conclusion hold also respecting the Ghost in the closet-scene of Hamlet, where the hero has the interview with his mother. It has often struck me as a highly-significant fact, that the sleep-walking scene, which is more intensely tragic than any other scene in Shakespeare, is all, except the closing speech, written in prose. Why is this? The question is at least not a little curious. The diction is of the very plainest and simplest texture; yet what an impression of sublimity it carries! In fact, I suspect the matter is too sublime, too austerely grand, to admit of any thing so artificial as the measured language of verse, even though the verse were Shakespeare's; and that the Poet, as from an instinct of genius, saw or felt that any attempt to heighten the effect by any such arts or charms of delivery would unbrace and impair it. And I think that the very diction of the closing speech, poetical as it is, must be felt by every competent reader as a letting-down to a lower intellectual plane. Is prose, then, after all, a higher form of speech than verse?* Divers critics have spoken strongly against the Porterscene: Coleridge denounces it as unquestionably none of Shakespeare's work. Which makes me almost afraid to trust my own judgment concerning it; yet I always feel it to be in the true spirit of the Poet's method. This strain of droll broad humour, oozing out amid such a congregation of terrors, to my mind deepens their effect, the strange but momentary diversion causing them to return with the greater force. Of the murder-scene, the banquet-scene, the sleepwalking-scene, with their dagger of the mind, and Banquo of the mind, and blood-spots of the mind, it were vain to speak. Yet over these sublimely-terrific passages there everywhere hovers a magic light of poetry, at once disclosing the * It has just struck my feelings that, the Pherecydean origin of prose being granted, prose must have struck men with greater admiration than poetry. In the latter it was the language of passion and emotion: it is what they themselves spoke and heard in moments of exaltation, indignation, &c. But to hear an evolving roll or a succession of leaves talk continually the language of deliberate reason in the form of a continued preconception,— this must have appeared godlike. I feel myself in the same state when, in the perusal of a sober, yet elevated and harmonious, succession of sentences and periods, I abstract my mind from the particular passage, and sympathize with the wonder of the common people, who say of an eloquent man, He talks like a book!"- COLERIDGE. horrors of the scene and annealing them into matter of delight. — Hallam sets the work down as being, in the language of Drake, "the greatest effort of our author's genius, the most sublime and impressive drama which the world has ever beheld"; a judgment from which most readers will perhaps be less inclined to dissent, the older they grow. It seems hardly right to close this Introduction without quoting two brief but very apposite passages of criticism; one from the well-known work of Gervinus, the other from Heraud's Inner Life of Shakespeare. "Macbeth," says Gervinus, "stands forth uniquely preeminent in the splendours of poetic and picturesque diction and in the living representation of persons, times, and places. Here Schlegel has perceived the vigorous heroic age of the North depicted with powerful touches, the generations of an iron time, whose virtue was bravery. How grandly do the mighty forms arise, how grandly do they move in a heroic style! Justly has Reynolds admired that description of the martlet's resort at Macbeth's dwelling as a charming image of repose, following by way of contrast the lively picture of the fight. More justly has praise been ever lavished on the powerful representation of the terrible in the sleep-walking of Lady Macbeth, in the banquet-scene, in the dismal creation of the Weird Sisters. Still far above all this is the speaking truth of the scene at the murder of Duncan, which has a powerful effect even in the most imperfect representation. The fearful whispered conference, in the horrible dimness of which the pair arrange and complete their atrocious project; the heart-rending portraiture of Macbeth's state of mind at the deed itself; - all this is so perfectly natural, and wrought to such powerful effect with so little art, that it would be difficult to find its equal in the poetry of any age." "All this tragedy," says Heraud, "is symbolic, - the diction, the action, the dialogue. That is, each is but a representative portion of a larger whole. Lady Macbeth's letter is only suggestive, not the entire document; and the conversation in the seventh scene of the first Act refers to a long-previous one. Of Sinel and Cawdor, to whose titles Macbeth succeeds, nothing is told but the names: the Witches themselves are introduced without any explanation, and we have to refer them to a system of mythology which we can only guess at. Lady Macbeth in the last Act comes suddenly before us as a somnambulist; and what she says then in her soliloquy - and she says it in the briefest wayis to indicate to us a psychological process very obscurely foreshadowed in the third Act, scene second, and which, on account of that obscurity, has been misunderstood. By this method of composition Shakespeare has gained a rapidity in the conduct of this drama which brings it into contrast with almost all the others. Thus, in illustrating a subject which reveals itself in types and symbols only on the stage of history and real life, Shakespeare, with a fine inner instinct, gives the same form to his religious tragedy. The symbolical style of this drama almost imparts to it a Biblical character. The type condenses a world of examples in a single one. A lesson which is a man; a myth with a human face so plastic that it looks at you, and that its look is a mirror; a parable which warns you; a symbol which cries out 'Beware!' an idea which is nerve, muscle, and flesh, and which has a heart to love, eyes to weep, and teeth to devour or laugh; a psychical conception with the relief of actual fact, that is the type." Lords, Gentlemen, Officers, Soldiers, Murderers, Attendants, Messengers, and Apparitions. SCENE, in the end of the fourth Act, in England; through the rest of the ACT I. -- SCENE I. An Open Place. Thunder and lightning. Enter three Witches. I Witch. When shall we three meet again In thunder, lightning, and in rain? |