MACBETH INTRODUCTION THE tragedy of Macbeth was first printed in the folio of 1623. It is much to be regretted that we possess no preceding quarto of the play, for, as given in the folio, it had probably been somewhat reduced in length for theatrical performance; it had probably received some interpolated passages by another hand than Shakespeare's; and it appears in a text which in not a few instances is manifestly corrupt. The Clarendon Press editors-Mr. W. G. Clark and Dr. Aldis Wright— express the opinion that it was probably printed from a transcript of the author's MS., which was in great part not copied from the original but written to dictation', an opinion 'confirmed by the fact that several of the most palpable blunders are blunders of the ear and not of the eye'. Macbeth is by some hundreds of lines the shortest of Shakespeare's tragedies. We are not, however, obliged to suppose that it was very considerably abridged; the progress of the action is rapid, but proceeds with few, if any, clear indications of omissions. Possibly, as Dr. Bradley conjectures, it was originally written for some private, perhaps royal occasion, when time was limited'. If it moves swiftly from the opening to the close, it keeps the spectator's and the reader's attention constantly on the strain and completely fills the mind. We think, as we read the tragedy, of that pause in the flight of Byron's Giaour, which gathers in that drop of time A life of pain, an age of crime. No other drama of Shakespeare seems to condense so oppressive a body of emotion into a space so narrow. The play was written at some date between 1603 and 1610. On April 20 of the latter year Dr. Simon Forman saw it presented at the Globe Theatre, and he has left a description of the action in considerable detail which permits no doubt as to the performance having been that of the present play. It was evidently new to Forman in 1610, but it does not follow that it was then new to the stage. Many indications point to a considerably earlier date. The style is not that of Shakespeare's latest group of plays, but we are sensible of a certain progress towards the style there fully developed; and the result of the verse-tests confirms this impression. When under James I things Scottish grew of special interest and importance, the dramatist may have turned to seek for a Scottish theme. On witchcraft James was himself an authority. His Daemonologie was published before his accession to the English throne. In 1605, when the king visited Oxford, he was saluted by three students of St. John's College in Latin verses founded on the predictions of the weird sistersan incident which was thought by Farmer to have suggested in a definite way his subject to Shakespeare. Before 1603 the allusion to the two coronations and the union of the kingdoms (Act IV, Scene i, lines 120, 121), some I see That two-fold balls and treble sceptres carry, would have been impossible. The farmer that 'hanged himself on the expectation of plenty' (in the Porterscene) may, as Malone supposed, have involved an allusion to the exceptionally low price of wheat in 1606. The 'equivocator' of the same speech not improbably was suggested by the words of the Jesuit Garnett dealing with equivocation in his trial of the same year. There seems to be a clear allusion to the ghost of Banquo in The Puritan, 1607. Dr. Bradley (Shakespearean Tragedy, p. 471) notices echoes from Macbeth in Marston's Sophonisba, 1606. Our play probably followed Hamlet and King Lear; it probably preceded Antony and Cleopatra and Coriolanus. With few excep tions critics agree in assigning Macbeth to the year 1606, and, although we cannot here speak of decisive proof, the several pieces of evidence in favour of that date are of cumulative force. That the tragedy had been tampered with before it appeared in the folio is not improbable. Some 'cuts' had perhaps been made; some passages may have been added to the witch-scenes. The stage-direction in Act III, Scene v, 'Sing within. Come away, come away, &c.,' and that in Act IV, Scene i, 'Musicke and a Song. Blacke Spirits, &c.,' may refer to songs given afterwards in Davenant's alteration of Macbeth, and doubtless derived by Davenant from Middleton's The Witch, the manuscript of which was long afterwards found by Steevens. In Middleton's play Hecate has a part, and the speeches of Hecate in Macbeth, Act III, Sc. v, and Act IV, Sc. i, may justly be suspected from the characteristics of their style to be non-Shakespearean. The Clarendon Press editors went much further, and rejected or doubted various other passages of the play, including Act 1, Sc. ii; Sc. iii, lines 1-37; the Porter's soliloquy, Act ñ, Sc. iii (as to which they followed Coleridge); the lines which tell of touching for the evil in Act IV, Sc. iii; Act v, Sc. ii; some lines in Act v, Sc. v and viii, and among these the last forty lines of the play. Such scepticism has not found many adherents. The second scene of the first Act is bombastic in style, and contains what at first sight seems a discrepancy in its reference to the thane of Cawdor when compared with some lines of the next scene. Macbeth in the third scene, when he speaks of Cawdor, may be ignorant, or may be testing the trustworthiness of the witches; Cawdor was a secret traitor, arrested by the king's order, not captured by Macbeth; and we may without high treason admit that Shakespeare at times could write in a tumid style. The Porter's soliloquy seems to many readers eminently Shakespearean. The student of the play may be referred to De Quincey's impressive essay on the knocking in Macbeth, and to an article by Professor Hales in the But Transactions of the New Shakspere Society (1874). Brandes speaks of the fantastic interlude of the Porter as an invaluable and indispensable ingredient in the tragedy'. The Porter,' writes Dr. Bradley, 'does not make me smile; the moment is too terrific; . . . in pretending to be porter of hell-gate he is terribly near the truth.' The sole source from which Shakespeare drew materials for his tragedy is the Chronicle of Holinshed; but he brought together for his purpose various scattered passages of the Chronicle, connecting them with those that are concerned with Macbeth, and he varies freely from his original and adds not a little which is of his own invention. He elevates the character of Duncan, whose administration was, according to Holinshed, feeble and slothful, and the character of Banquo, who was incorrectly supposed to be an ancestor of King James I. He darkens the character of Macbeth. According to the Chronicle the murderer and usurper in the beginning of his reign 'accomplished many worthie acts, right profitable to the common wealth... but afterwards by illusion of the diuell, he defamed the same with most terrible crueltie '. We may indeed speak of the characters of Macbeth and Lady Macbeth as created by the dramatist. In the Chronicle Banquo promises aid in the event of Duncan's murder; in the play the supposed ancestor of the royal house of Scotland is cleared from such collusion. The circumstances attending the death of Duncan are transferred from Holinshed's account of the slaughter of King Duffe by Donwald to the story of Macbeth. The dramatist seldom reproduces the words of the annalist as in the Roman plays he often reproduces those of North's Plutarch; but in the long dialogue between Malcolm and Macduff in England (Act IV, Scene iii) he follows Holinshed with considerable closeness. It has been questioned whether Shakespeare's witches are supernatural beings or, as Dr. Bradley describes them, old women, poor and ragged, skinny and hideous, full of vulgar spite,' such as we read of in Reginald |