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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Shakespearean Tragedy, by A. C. Bradley
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Shakespearean Tragedy
+       Lectures on Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth
+
+Author: A. C. Bradley
+
+Release Date: October 30, 2005 [EBook #16966]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK SHAKESPEAREAN TRAGEDY ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Suzanne Shell, Lisa Reigel and the Online
+Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+SHAKESPEAREAN TRAGEDY
+
+
+MACMILLAN AND CO., LIMITED
+
+LONDON·BOMBAY·CALCUTTA·MADRAS·MELBOURNE
+
+
+THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
+
+NEW YORK·BOSTON·CHICAGO·DALLAS·SAN FRANCISCO
+
+
+THE MACMILLAN CO. OF CANADA, LTD.
+
+TORONTO
+
+
+
+
+SHAKESPEAREAN TRAGEDY
+
+LECTURES ON
+
+HAMLET, OTHELLO, KING LEAR
+
+MACBETH
+
+BY
+
+A.C. BRADLEY
+
+LL.D. LITT.D., FORMERLY PROFESSOR OF POETRY IN THE UNIVERSITY OF OXFORD
+
+
+_SECOND EDITION_ (_THIRTEENTH IMPRESSION_)
+
+
+MACMILLAN AND CO., LIMITED ST. MARTIN'S STREET, LONDON
+
+1919
+
+
+_COPYRIGHT._
+
+First Edition 1904.
+
+Second Edition March 1905.
+
+Reprinted August 1905, 1906, 1908, 1910, 1911, 1912, 1914, 1915, 1916,
+1918, 1919.
+
+
+GLASGOW: PRINTED AT THE UNIVERSITY PRESS BY ROBERT MACLEHOSE AND CO.
+LTD.
+
+
+TO MY STUDENTS
+
+
+
+
+PREFACE
+
+
+These lectures are based on a selection from materials used in teaching
+at Liverpool, Glasgow, and Oxford; and I have for the most part
+preserved the lecture form. The point of view taken in them is explained
+in the Introduction. I should, of course, wish them to be read in their
+order, and a knowledge of the first two is assumed in the remainder; but
+readers who may prefer to enter at once on the discussion of the several
+plays can do so by beginning at page 89.
+
+Any one who writes on Shakespeare must owe much to his predecessors.
+Where I was conscious of a particular obligation, I have acknowledged
+it; but most of my reading of Shakespearean criticism was done many
+years ago, and I can only hope that I have not often reproduced as my
+own what belongs to another.
+
+Many of the Notes will be of interest only to scholars, who may find, I
+hope, something new in them.
+
+I have quoted, as a rule, from the Globe edition, and have referred
+always to its numeration of acts, scenes, and lines.
+
+_November, 1904._
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+
+NOTE TO SECOND AND SUBSEQUENT IMPRESSIONS
+
+In these impressions I have confined myself to making some formal
+improvements, correcting indubitable mistakes, and indicating here and
+there my desire to modify or develop at some future time statements
+which seem to me doubtful or open to misunderstanding. The changes,
+where it seemed desirable, are shown by the inclusion of sentences in
+square brackets.
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+
+                                                              PAGE
+INTRODUCTION                                                    1
+
+
+LECTURE I.
+
+THE SUBSTANCE OF SHAKESPEAREAN TRAGEDY                          5
+
+
+LECTURE II.
+
+CONSTRUCTION IN SHAKESPEARE'S TRAGEDIES                        40
+
+
+LECTURE III.
+
+SHAKESPEARE'S TRAGIC PERIOD--HAMLET                            79
+
+
+LECTURE IV.
+
+HAMLET                                                        129
+
+
+LECTURE V.
+
+OTHELLO                                                       175
+
+
+LECTURE VI.
+
+OTHELLO                                                       207
+
+
+LECTURE VII.
+
+KING LEAR                                                     243
+
+
+LECTURE VIII.
+
+KING LEAR                                                     280
+
+
+LECTURE IX.
+
+MACBETH                                                       331
+
+
+LECTURE X.
+
+MACBETH                                                       366
+
+
+NOTE A. Events before the opening of the action in _Hamlet_   401
+
+NOTE B. Where was Hamlet at the time of his father's death?   403
+
+NOTE C. Hamlet's age                                          407
+
+NOTE D. 'My tables--meet it is I set it down'                 409
+
+NOTE E. The Ghost in the cellarage                            412
+
+NOTE F. The Player's speech in _Hamlet_                       413
+
+NOTE G. Hamlet's apology to Laertes                           420
+
+NOTE H. The exchange of rapiers                               422
+
+NOTE I. The duration of the action in
+  _Othello_                                                   423
+
+NOTE J. The 'additions' in the Folio text of _Othello_. The
+  Pontic sea                                                  429
+
+NOTE K. Othello's courtship                                   432
+
+NOTE L. Othello in the Temptation scene                       434
+
+NOTE M. Questions as to _Othello_, IV. i.                     435
+
+NOTE N. Two passages in the last scene of _Othello_           437
+
+NOTE O. Othello on Desdemona's last words                     438
+
+NOTE P. Did Emilia suspect Iago?                              439
+
+NOTE Q. Iago's suspicion regarding Cassio and Emilia          441
+
+NOTE R. Reminiscences of _Othello_ in _King Lear_             441
+
+NOTE S. _King Lear_ and _Timon of Athens_                     443
+
+NOTE T. Did Shakespeare shorten _King Lear_?                  445
+
+NOTE U. Movements of the _dramatis personæ_ in _King
+  Lear_, II                                                   448
+
+NOTE V. Suspected interpolations in _King Lear_               450
+
+NOTE W. The staging of the scene of Lear's reunion with
+  Cordelia                                                    453
+
+NOTE X. The Battle in _King Lear_                             456
+
+NOTE Y. Some difficult passages in _King Lear_                458
+
+NOTE Z. Suspected interpolations in _Macbeth_                 466
+
+NOTE AA. Has _Macbeth_ been abridged?                         467
+
+NOTE BB. The date of _Macbeth_. Metrical Tests                470
+
+NOTE CC. When was the murder of Duncan first plotted?         480
+
+NOTE DD. Did Lady Macbeth really faint?                       484
+
+NOTE EE. Duration of the action in _Macbeth_. Macbeth's age.
+  'He has no children'                                        486
+
+NOTE FF. The Ghost of Banquo                                  492
+
+INDEX                                                         494
+
+
+
+
+INTRODUCTION
+
+
+In these lectures I propose to consider the four principal tragedies of
+Shakespeare from a single point of view. Nothing will be said of
+Shakespeare's place in the history either of English literature or of
+the drama in general. No attempt will be made to compare him with other
+writers. I shall leave untouched, or merely glanced at, questions
+regarding his life and character, the development of his genius and art,
+the genuineness, sources, texts, inter-relations of his various works.
+Even what may be called, in a restricted sense, the 'poetry' of the four
+tragedies--the beauties of style, diction, versification--I shall pass
+by in silence. Our one object will be what, again in a restricted sense,
+may be called dramatic appreciation; to increase our understanding and
+enjoyment of these works as dramas; to learn to apprehend the action and
+some of the personages of each with a somewhat greater truth and
+intensity, so that they may assume in our imaginations a shape a little
+less unlike the shape they wore in the imagination of their creator. For
+this end all those studies that were mentioned just now, of literary
+history and the like, are useful and even in various degrees necessary.
+But an overt pursuit of them is not necessary here, nor is any one of
+them so indispensable to our object as that close familiarity with the
+plays, that native strength and justice of perception, and that habit of
+reading with an eager mind, which make many an unscholarly lover of
+Shakespeare a far better critic than many a Shakespeare scholar.
+
+Such lovers read a play more or less as if they were actors who had to
+study all the parts. They do not need, of course, to imagine whereabouts
+the persons are to stand, or what gestures they ought to use; but they
+want to realise fully and exactly the inner movements which produced
+these words and no other, these deeds and no other, at each particular
+moment. This, carried through a drama, is the right way to read the
+dramatist Shakespeare; and the prime requisite here is therefore a vivid
+and intent imagination. But this alone will hardly suffice. It is
+necessary also, especially to a true conception of the whole, to
+compare, to analyse, to dissect. And such readers often shrink from this
+task, which seems to them prosaic or even a desecration. They
+misunderstand, I believe. They would not shrink if they remembered two
+things. In the first place, in this process of comparison and analysis,
+it is not requisite, it is on the contrary ruinous, to set imagination
+aside and to substitute some supposed 'cold reason'; and it is only want
+of practice that makes the concurrent use of analysis and of poetic
+perception difficult or irksome. And, in the second place, these
+dissecting processes, though they are also imaginative, are still, and
+are meant to be, nothing but means to an end. When they have finished
+their work (it can only be finished for the time) they give place to the
+end, which is that same imaginative reading or re-creation of the drama
+from which they set out, but a reading now enriched by the products of
+analysis, and therefore far more adequate and enjoyable.
+
+This, at any rate, is the faith in the strength of which I venture, with
+merely personal misgivings, on the path of analytic interpretation. And
+so, before coming to the first of the four tragedies, I propose to
+discuss some preliminary matters which concern them all. Though each is
+individual through and through, they have, in a sense, one and the same
+substance; for in all of them Shakespeare represents the tragic aspect
+of life, the tragic fact. They have, again, up to a certain point, a
+common form or structure. This substance and this structure, which would
+be found to distinguish them, for example, from Greek tragedies, may, to
+diminish repetition, be considered once for all; and in considering them
+we shall also be able to observe characteristic differences among the
+four plays. And to this may be added the little that it seems necessary
+to premise on the position of these dramas in Shakespeare's literary
+career.
+
+Much that is said on our main preliminary subjects will naturally hold
+good, within certain limits, of other dramas of Shakespeare beside
+_Hamlet_, _Othello_, _King Lear_, and _Macbeth_. But it will often apply
+to these other works only in part, and to some of them more fully than
+to others. _Romeo and Juliet_, for instance, is a pure tragedy, but it
+is an early work, and in some respects an immature one. _Richard III._
+and _Richard II._, _Julius Caesar_, _Antony and Cleopatra_, and
+_Coriolanus_ are tragic histories or historical tragedies, in which
+Shakespeare acknowledged in practice a certain obligation to follow his
+authority, even when that authority offered him an undramatic material.
+Probably he himself would have met some criticisms to which these plays
+are open by appealing to their historical character, and by denying that
+such works are to be judged by the standard of pure tragedy. In any
+case, most of these plays, perhaps all, do show, as a matter of fact,
+considerable deviations from that standard; and, therefore, what is said
+of the pure tragedies must be applied to them with qualifications which
+I shall often take for granted without mention. There remain _Titus
+Andronicus_ and _Timon of Athens_. The former I shall leave out of
+account, because, even if Shakespeare wrote the whole of it, he did so
+before he had either a style of his own or any characteristic tragic
+conception. _Timon_ stands on a different footing. Parts of it are
+unquestionably Shakespeare's, and they will be referred to in one of the
+later lectures. But much of the writing is evidently not his, and as it
+seems probable that the conception and construction of the whole tragedy
+should also be attributed to some other writer, I shall omit this work
+too from our preliminary discussions.
+
+
+
+
+LECTURE I
+
+THE SUBSTANCE OF SHAKESPEAREAN TRAGEDY
+
+
+The question we are to consider in this lecture may be stated in a
+variety of ways. We may put it thus: What is the substance of a
+Shakespearean tragedy, taken in abstraction both from its form and from
+the differences in point of substance between one tragedy and another?
+Or thus: What is the nature of the tragic aspect of life as represented
+by Shakespeare? What is the general fact shown now in this tragedy and
+now in that? And we are putting the same question when we ask: What is
+Shakespeare's tragic conception, or conception of tragedy?
+
+These expressions, it should be observed, do not imply that Shakespeare
+himself ever asked or answered such a question; that he set himself to
+reflect on the tragic aspects of life, that he framed a tragic
+conception, and still less that, like Aristotle or Corneille, he had a
+theory of the kind of poetry called tragedy. These things are all
+possible; how far any one of them is probable we need not discuss; but
+none of them is presupposed by the question we are going to consider.
+This question implies only that, as a matter of fact, Shakespeare in
+writing tragedy did represent a certain aspect of life in a certain way,
+and that through examination of his writings we ought to be able, to
+some extent, to describe this aspect and way in terms addressed to the
+understanding. Such a description, so far as it is true and adequate,
+may, after these explanations, be called indifferently an account of the
+substance of Shakespearean tragedy, or an account of Shakespeare's
+conception of tragedy or view of the tragic fact.
+
+Two further warnings may be required. In the first place, we must
+remember that the tragic aspect of life is only one aspect. We cannot
+arrive at Shakespeare's whole dramatic way of looking at the world from
+his tragedies alone, as we can arrive at Milton's way of regarding
+things, or at Wordsworth's or at Shelley's, by examining almost any one
+of their important works. Speaking very broadly, one may say that these
+poets at their best always look at things in one light; but _Hamlet_ and
+_Henry IV._ and _Cymbeline_ reflect things from quite distinct
+positions, and Shakespeare's whole dramatic view is not to be identified
+with any one of these reflections. And, in the second place, I may
+repeat that in these lectures, at any rate for the most part, we are to
+be content with his _dramatic_ view, and are not to ask whether it
+corresponded exactly with his opinions or creed outside his poetry--the
+opinions or creed of the being whom we sometimes oddly call 'Shakespeare
+the man.' It does not seem likely that outside his poetry he was a very
+simple-minded Catholic or Protestant or Atheist, as some have
+maintained; but we cannot be sure, as with those other poets we can,
+that in his works he expressed his deepest and most cherished
+convictions on ultimate questions, or even that he had any. And in his
+dramatic conceptions there is enough to occupy us.
+
+
+1
+
+In approaching our subject it will be best, without attempting to
+shorten the path by referring to famous theories of the drama, to start
+directly from the facts, and to collect from them gradually an idea of
+Shakespearean Tragedy. And first, to begin from the outside, such a
+tragedy brings before us a considerable number of persons (many more
+than the persons in a Greek play, unless the members of the Chorus are
+reckoned among them); but it is pre-eminently the story of one person,
+the 'hero,'[1] or at most of two, the 'hero' and 'heroine.' Moreover, it
+is only in the love-tragedies, _Romeo and Juliet_ and _Antony and
+Cleopatra_, that the heroine is as much the centre of the action as the
+hero. The rest, including _Macbeth_, are single stars. So that, having
+noticed the peculiarity of these two dramas, we may henceforth, for the
+sake of brevity, ignore it, and may speak of the tragic story as being
+concerned primarily with one person.
+
+The story, next, leads up to, and includes, the _death_ of the hero. On
+the one hand (whatever may be true of tragedy elsewhere), no play at the
+end of which the hero remains alive is, in the full Shakespearean sense,
+a tragedy; and we no longer class _Troilus and Cressida_ or _Cymbeline_
+as such, as did the editors of the Folio. On the other hand, the story
+depicts also the troubled part of the hero's life which precedes and
+leads up to his death; and an instantaneous death occurring by
+'accident' in the midst of prosperity would not suffice for it. It is,
+in fact, essentially a tale of suffering and calamity conducting to
+death.
+
+The suffering and calamity are, moreover, exceptional. They befall a
+conspicuous person. They are themselves of some striking kind. They are
+also, as a rule, unexpected, and contrasted with previous happiness or
+glory. A tale, for example, of a man slowly worn to death by disease,
+poverty, little cares, sordid vices, petty persecutions, however piteous
+or dreadful it might be, would not be tragic in the Shakespearean sense.
+
+Such exceptional suffering and calamity, then, affecting the hero,
+and--we must now add--generally extending far and wide beyond him, so as
+to make the whole scene a scene of woe, are an essential ingredient in
+tragedy and a chief source of the tragic emotions, and especially of
+pity. But the proportions of this ingredient, and the direction taken by
+tragic pity, will naturally vary greatly. Pity, for example, has a much
+larger part in _King Lear_ than in _Macbeth_, and is directed in the one
+case chiefly to the hero, in the other chiefly to minor characters.
+
+Let us now pause for a moment on the ideas we have so far reached. They
+would more than suffice to describe the whole tragic fact as it
+presented itself to the mediaeval mind. To the mediaeval mind a tragedy
+meant a narrative rather than a play, and its notion of the matter of
+this narrative may readily be gathered from Dante or, still better, from
+Chaucer. Chaucer's _Monk's Tale_ is a series of what he calls
+'tragedies'; and this means in fact a series of tales _de Casibus
+Illustrium Virorum_,--stories of the Falls of Illustrious Men, such as
+Lucifer, Adam, Hercules and Nebuchadnezzar. And the Monk ends the tale
+of Croesus thus:
+
+     Anhanged was Cresus, the proudè kyng;
+     His roial tronè myghte hym nat availle.
+     Tragédie is noon oother maner thyng,
+     Ne kan in syngyng criè ne biwaille
+     But for that Fortune alwey wole assaile
+     With unwar strook the regnès that been proude;
+     For whan men trusteth hire, thanne wol she faille,
+     And covere hire brighte facè with a clowde.
+
+A total reverse of fortune, coming unawares upon a man who 'stood in
+high degree,' happy and apparently secure,--such was the tragic fact to
+the mediaeval mind. It appealed strongly to common human sympathy and
+pity; it startled also another feeling, that of fear. It frightened men
+and awed them. It made them feel that man is blind and helpless, the
+plaything of an inscrutable power, called by the name of Fortune or some
+other name,--a power which appears to smile on him for a little, and
+then on a sudden strikes him down in his pride.
+
+Shakespeare's idea of the tragic fact is larger than this idea and goes
+beyond it; but it includes it, and it is worth while to observe the
+identity of the two in a certain point which is often ignored. Tragedy
+with Shakespeare is concerned always with persons of 'high degree';
+often with kings or princes; if not, with leaders in the state like
+Coriolanus, Brutus, Antony; at the least, as in _Romeo and Juliet_, with
+members of great houses, whose quarrels are of public moment. There is a
+decided difference here between _Othello_ and our three other tragedies,
+but it is not a difference of kind. Othello himself is no mere private
+person; he is the General of the Republic. At the beginning we see him
+in the Council-Chamber of the Senate. The consciousness of his high
+position never leaves him. At the end, when he is determined to live no
+longer, he is as anxious as Hamlet not to be misjudged by the great
+world, and his last speech begins,
+
+     Soft you; a word or two before you go.
+     I have done the state some service, and they know it.[2]
+
+And this characteristic of Shakespeare's tragedies, though not the most
+vital, is neither external nor unimportant. The saying that every
+death-bed is the scene of the fifth act of a tragedy has its meaning,
+but it would not be true if the word 'tragedy' bore its dramatic sense.
+The pangs of despised love and the anguish of remorse, we say, are the
+same in a peasant and a prince; but, not to insist that they cannot be
+so when the prince is really a prince, the story of the prince, the
+triumvir, or the general, has a greatness and dignity of its own. His
+fate affects the welfare of a whole nation or empire; and when he falls
+suddenly from the height of earthly greatness to the dust, his fall
+produces a sense of contrast, of the powerlessness of man, and of the
+omnipotence--perhaps the caprice--of Fortune or Fate, which no tale of
+private life can possibly rival.
+
+Such feelings are constantly evoked by Shakespeare's tragedies,--again
+in varying degrees. Perhaps they are the very strongest of the emotions
+awakened by the early tragedy of _Richard II._, where they receive a
+concentrated expression in Richard's famous speech about the antic
+Death, who sits in the hollow crown
+
+     That rounds the mortal temples of a king,
+
+grinning at his pomp, watching till his vanity and his fancied security
+have wholly encased him round, and then coming and boring with a little
+pin through his castle wall. And these feelings, though their
+predominance is subdued in the mightiest tragedies, remain powerful
+there. In the figure of the maddened Lear we see
+
+     A sight most pitiful in the meanest wretch,
+     Past speaking of in a king;
+
+and if we would realise the truth in this matter we cannot do better
+than compare with the effect of _King Lear_ the effect of Tourgénief's
+parallel and remarkable tale of peasant life, _A King Lear of the
+Steppes_.
+
+
+2
+
+A Shakespearean tragedy as so far considered may be called a story of
+exceptional calamity leading to the death of a man in high estate. But
+it is clearly much more than this, and we have now to regard it from
+another side. No amount of calamity which merely befell a man,
+descending from the clouds like lightning, or stealing from the darkness
+like pestilence, could alone provide the substance of its story. Job was
+the greatest of all the children of the east, and his afflictions were
+well-nigh more than he could bear; but even if we imagined them wearing
+him to death, that would not make his story tragic. Nor yet would it
+become so, in the Shakespearean sense, if the fire, and the great wind
+from the wilderness, and the torments of his flesh were conceived as
+sent by a supernatural power, whether just or malignant. The calamities
+of tragedy do not simply happen, nor are they sent; they proceed mainly
+from actions, and those the actions of men.
+
+We see a number of human beings placed in certain circumstances; and we
+see, arising from the co-operation of their characters in these
+circumstances, certain actions. These actions beget others, and these
+others beget others again, until this series of inter-connected deeds
+leads by an apparently inevitable sequence to a catastrophe. The effect
+of such a series on imagination is to make us regard the sufferings
+which accompany it, and the catastrophe in which it ends, not only or
+chiefly as something which happens to the persons concerned, but equally
+as something which is caused by them. This at least may be said of the
+principal persons, and, among them, of the hero, who always contributes
+in some measure to the disaster in which he perishes.
+
+This second aspect of tragedy evidently differs greatly from the first.
+Men, from this point of view, appear to us primarily as agents,
+'themselves the authors of their proper woe'; and our fear and pity,
+though they will not cease or diminish, will be modified accordingly. We
+are now to consider this second aspect, remembering that it too is only
+one aspect, and additional to the first, not a substitute for it.
+
+The 'story' or 'action' of a Shakespearean tragedy does not consist, of
+course, solely of human actions or deeds; but the deeds are the
+predominant factor. And these deeds are, for the most part, actions in
+the full sense of the word; not things done ''tween asleep and wake,'
+but acts or omissions thoroughly expressive of the doer,--characteristic
+deeds. The centre of the tragedy, therefore, may be said with equal
+truth to lie in action issuing from character, or in character issuing
+in action.
+
+Shakespeare's main interest lay here. To say that it lay in _mere_
+character, or was a psychological interest, would be a great mistake,
+for he was dramatic to the tips of his fingers. It is possible to find
+places where he has given a certain indulgence to his love of poetry,
+and even to his turn for general reflections; but it would be very
+difficult, and in his later tragedies perhaps impossible, to detect
+passages where he has allowed such freedom to the interest in character
+apart from action. But for the opposite extreme, for the abstraction of
+mere 'plot' (which is a very different thing from the tragic 'action'),
+for the kind of interest which predominates in a novel like _The Woman
+in White_, it is clear that he cared even less. I do not mean that this
+interest is absent from his dramas; but it is subordinate to others, and
+is so interwoven with them that we are rarely conscious of it apart, and
+rarely feel in any great strength the half-intellectual, half-nervous
+excitement of following an ingenious complication. What we do feel
+strongly, as a tragedy advances to its close, is that the calamities and
+catastrophe follow inevitably from the deeds of men, and that the main
+source of these deeds is character. The dictum that, with Shakespeare,
+'character is destiny' is no doubt an exaggeration, and one that may
+mislead (for many of his tragic personages, if they had not met with
+peculiar circumstances, would have escaped a tragic end, and might even
+have lived fairly untroubled lives); but it is the exaggeration of a
+vital truth.
+
+This truth, with some of its qualifications, will appear more clearly if
+we now go on to ask what elements are to be found in the 'story' or
+'action,' occasionally or frequently, beside the characteristic deeds,
+and the sufferings and circumstances, of the persons. I will refer to
+three of these additional factors.
+
+(_a_) Shakespeare, occasionally and for reasons which need not be
+discussed here, represents abnormal conditions of mind; insanity, for
+example, somnambulism, hallucinations. And deeds issuing from these are
+certainly not what we called deeds in the fullest sense, deeds
+expressive of character. No; but these abnormal conditions are never
+introduced as the origin of deeds of any dramatic moment. Lady Macbeth's
+sleep-walking has no influence whatever on the events that follow it.
+Macbeth did not murder Duncan because he saw a dagger in the air: he saw
+the dagger because he was about to murder Duncan. Lear's insanity is not
+the cause of a tragic conflict any more than Ophelia's; it is, like
+Ophelia's, the result of a conflict; and in both cases the effect is
+mainly pathetic. If Lear were really mad when he divided his kingdom, if
+Hamlet were really mad at any time in the story, they would cease to be
+tragic characters.
+
+(_b_) Shakespeare also introduces the supernatural into some of his
+tragedies; he introduces ghosts, and witches who have supernatural
+knowledge. This supernatural element certainly cannot in most cases, if
+in any, be explained away as an illusion in the mind of one of the
+characters. And further, it does contribute to the action, and is in
+more than one instance an indispensable part of it: so that to describe
+human character, with circumstances, as always the _sole_ motive force
+in this action would be a serious error. But the supernatural is always
+placed in the closest relation with character. It gives a confirmation
+and a distinct form to inward movements already present and exerting an
+influence; to the sense of failure in Brutus, to the stifled workings of
+conscience in Richard, to the half-formed thought or the horrified
+memory of guilt in Macbeth, to suspicion in Hamlet. Moreover, its
+influence is never of a compulsive kind. It forms no more than an
+element, however important, in the problem which the hero has to face;
+and we are never allowed to feel that it has removed his capacity or
+responsibility for dealing with this problem. So far indeed are we from
+feeling this, that many readers run to the opposite extreme, and openly
+or privately regard the supernatural as having nothing to do with the
+real interest of the play.
+
+(_c_) Shakespeare, lastly, in most of his tragedies allows to 'chance'
+or 'accident' an appreciable influence at some point in the action.
+Chance or accident here will be found, I think, to mean any occurrence
+(not supernatural, of course) which enters the dramatic sequence neither
+from the agency of a character, nor from the obvious surrounding
+circumstances.[3] It may be called an accident, in this sense, that
+Romeo never got the Friar's message about the potion, and that Juliet
+did not awake from her long sleep a minute sooner; an accident that
+Edgar arrived at the prison just too late to save Cordelia's life; an
+accident that Desdemona dropped her handkerchief at the most fatal of
+moments; an accident that the pirate ship attacked Hamlet's ship, so
+that he was able to return forthwith to Denmark. Now this operation of
+accident is a fact, and a prominent fact, of human life. To exclude it
+_wholly_ from tragedy, therefore, would be, we may say, to fail in
+truth. And, besides, it is not merely a fact. That men may start a
+course of events but can neither calculate nor control it, is a _tragic_
+fact. The dramatist may use accident so as to make us feel this; and
+there are also other dramatic uses to which it may be put. Shakespeare
+accordingly admits it. On the other hand, any _large_ admission of
+chance into the tragic sequence[4] would certainly weaken, and might
+destroy, the sense of the causal connection of character, deed, and
+catastrophe. And Shakespeare really uses it very sparingly. We seldom
+find ourselves exclaiming, 'What an unlucky accident!' I believe most
+readers would have to search painfully for instances. It is, further,
+frequently easy to see the dramatic intention of an accident; and some
+things which look like accidents have really a connection with
+character, and are therefore not in the full sense accidents. Finally, I
+believe it will be found that almost all the prominent accidents occur
+when the action is well advanced and the impression of the causal
+sequence is too firmly fixed to be impaired.
+
+Thus it appears that these three elements in the 'action' are
+subordinate, while the dominant factor consists in deeds which issue
+from character. So that, by way of summary, we may now alter our first
+statement, 'A tragedy is a story of exceptional calamity leading to the
+death of a man in high estate,' and we may say instead (what in its turn
+is one-sided, though less so), that the story is one of human actions
+producing exceptional calamity and ending in the death of such a man.[5]
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Before we leave the 'action,' however, there is another question that
+may usefully be asked. Can we define this 'action' further by describing
+it as a conflict?
+
+The frequent use of this idea in discussions on tragedy is ultimately
+due, I suppose, to the influence of Hegel's theory on the subject,
+certainly the most important theory since Aristotle's. But Hegel's view
+of the tragic conflict is not only unfamiliar to English readers and
+difficult to expound shortly, but it had its origin in reflections on
+Greek tragedy and, as Hegel was well aware, applies only imperfectly to
+the works of Shakespeare.[6] I shall, therefore, confine myself to the
+idea of conflict in its more general form. In this form it is obviously
+suitable to Shakespearean tragedy; but it is vague, and I will try to
+make it more precise by putting the question, Who are the combatants in
+this conflict?
+
+Not seldom the conflict may quite naturally be conceived as lying
+between two persons, of whom the hero is one; or, more fully, as lying
+between two parties or groups, in one of which the hero is the leading
+figure. Or if we prefer to speak (as we may quite well do if we know
+what we are about) of the passions, tendencies, ideas, principles,
+forces, which animate these persons or groups, we may say that two of
+such passions or ideas, regarded as animating two persons or groups, are
+the combatants. The love of Romeo and Juliet is in conflict with the
+hatred of their houses, represented by various other characters. The
+cause of Brutus and Cassius struggles with that of Julius, Octavius and
+Antony. In _Richard II._ the King stands on one side, Bolingbroke and
+his party on the other. In _Macbeth_ the hero and heroine are opposed to
+the representatives of Duncan. In all these cases the great majority of
+the _dramatis personae_ fall without difficulty into antagonistic
+groups, and the conflict between these groups ends with the defeat of
+the hero.
+
+Yet one cannot help feeling that in at least one of these cases,
+_Macbeth_, there is something a little external in this way of looking
+at the action. And when we come to some other plays this feeling
+increases. No doubt most of the characters in _Hamlet_, _King Lear_,
+_Othello_, or _Antony and Cleopatra_ can be arranged in opposed
+groups;[7] and no doubt there is a conflict; and yet it seems misleading
+to describe this conflict as one _between these groups_. It cannot be
+simply this. For though Hamlet and the King are mortal foes, yet that
+which engrosses our interest and dwells in our memory at least as much
+as the conflict between them, is the conflict _within_ one of them. And
+so it is, though not in the same degree, with _Antony and Cleopatra_ and
+even with _Othello_; and, in fact, in a certain measure, it is so with
+nearly all the tragedies. There is an outward conflict of persons and
+groups, there is also a conflict of forces in the hero's soul; and even
+in _Julius Caesar_ and _Macbeth_ the interest of the former can hardly
+be said to exceed that of the latter.
+
+The truth is, that the type of tragedy in which the hero opposes to a
+hostile force an undivided soul, is not the Shakespearean type. The
+souls of those who contend with the hero may be thus undivided; they
+generally are; but, as a rule, the hero, though he pursues his fated
+way, is, at least at some point in the action, and sometimes at many,
+torn by an inward struggle; and it is frequently at such points that
+Shakespeare shows his most extraordinary power. If further we compare
+the earlier tragedies with the later, we find that it is in the latter,
+the maturest works, that this inward struggle is most emphasised. In the
+last of them, _Coriolanus_, its interest completely eclipses towards the
+close of the play that of the outward conflict. _Romeo and Juliet_,
+_Richard III._, _Richard II._, where the hero contends with an outward
+force, but comparatively little with himself, are all early plays.
+
+If we are to include the outer and the inner struggle in a conception
+more definite than that of conflict in general, we must employ some such
+phrase as 'spiritual force.' This will mean whatever forces act in the
+human spirit, whether good or evil, whether personal passion or
+impersonal principle; doubts, desires, scruples, ideas--whatever can
+animate, shake, possess, and drive a man's soul. In a Shakespearean
+tragedy some such forces are shown in conflict. They are shown acting in
+men and generating strife between them. They are also shown, less
+universally, but quite as characteristically, generating disturbance and
+even conflict in the soul of the hero. Treasonous ambition in Macbeth
+collides with loyalty and patriotism in Macduff and Malcolm: here is the
+outward conflict. But these powers or principles equally collide in the
+soul of Macbeth himself: here is the inner. And neither by itself could
+make the tragedy.[8]
+
+We shall see later the importance of this idea. Here we need only
+observe that the notion of tragedy as a conflict emphasises the fact
+that action is the centre of the story, while the concentration of
+interest, in the greater plays, on the inward struggle emphasises the
+fact that this action is essentially the expression of character.
+
+
+3
+
+Let us turn now from the 'action' to the central figure in it; and,
+ignoring the characteristics which distinguish the heroes from one
+another, let us ask whether they have any common qualities which appear
+to be essential to the tragic effect.
+
+One they certainly have. They are exceptional beings. We have seen
+already that the hero, with Shakespeare, is a person of high degree or
+of public importance, and that his actions or sufferings are of an
+unusual kind. But this is not all. His nature also is exceptional, and
+generally raises him in some respect much above the average level of
+humanity. This does not mean that he is an eccentric or a paragon.
+Shakespeare never drew monstrosities of virtue; some of his heroes are
+far from being 'good'; and if he drew eccentrics he gave them a
+subordinate position in the plot. His tragic characters are made of the
+stuff we find within ourselves and within the persons who surround them.
+But, by an intensification of the life which they share with others,
+they are raised above them; and the greatest are raised so far that, if
+we fully realise all that is implied in their words and actions, we
+become conscious that in real life we have known scarcely any one
+resembling them. Some, like Hamlet and Cleopatra, have genius. Others,
+like Othello, Lear, Macbeth, Coriolanus, are built on the grand scale;
+and desire, passion, or will attains in them a terrible force. In almost
+all we observe a marked one-sidedness, a predisposition in some
+particular direction; a total incapacity, in certain circumstances, of
+resisting the force which draws in this direction; a fatal tendency to
+identify the whole being with one interest, object, passion, or habit of
+mind. This, it would seem, is, for Shakespeare, the fundamental tragic
+trait. It is present in his early heroes, Romeo and Richard II.,
+infatuated men, who otherwise rise comparatively little above the
+ordinary level. It is a fatal gift, but it carries with it a touch of
+greatness; and when there is joined to it nobility of mind, or genius,
+or immense force, we realise the full power and reach of the soul, and
+the conflict in which it engages acquires that magnitude which stirs not
+only sympathy and pity, but admiration, terror, and awe.
+
+The easiest way to bring home to oneself the nature of the tragic
+character is to compare it with a character of another kind. Dramas like
+_Cymbeline_ and the _Winter's Tale_, which might seem destined to end
+tragically, but actually end otherwise, owe their happy ending largely
+to the fact that the principal characters fail to reach tragic
+dimensions. And, conversely, if these persons were put in the place of
+the tragic heroes, the dramas in which they appeared would cease to be
+tragedies. Posthumus would never have acted as Othello did; Othello, on
+his side, would have met Iachimo's challenge with something more than
+words. If, like Posthumus, he had remained convinced of his wife's
+infidelity, he would not have repented her execution; if, like Leontes,
+he had come to believe that by an unjust accusation he had caused her
+death, he would never have lived on, like Leontes. In the same way the
+villain Iachimo has no touch of tragic greatness. But Iago comes nearer
+to it, and if Iago had slandered Imogen and had supposed his slanders to
+have led to her death, he certainly would not have turned melancholy and
+wished to die. One reason why the end of the _Merchant of Venice_ fails
+to satisfy us is that Shylock is a tragic character, and that we cannot
+believe in his accepting his defeat and the conditions imposed on him.
+This was a case where Shakespeare's imagination ran away with him, so
+that he drew a figure with which the destined pleasant ending would not
+harmonise.
+
+In the circumstances where we see the hero placed, his tragic trait,
+which is also his greatness, is fatal to him. To meet these
+circumstances something is required which a smaller man might have
+given, but which the hero cannot give. He errs, by action or omission;
+and his error, joining with other causes, brings on him ruin. This is
+always so with Shakespeare. As we have seen, the idea of the tragic hero
+as a being destroyed simply and solely by external forces is quite alien
+to him; and not less so is the idea of the hero as contributing to his
+destruction only by acts in which we see no flaw. But the fatal
+imperfection or error, which is never absent, is of different kinds and
+degrees. At one extreme stands the excess and precipitancy of Romeo,
+which scarcely, if at all, diminish our regard for him; at the other the
+murderous ambition of Richard III. In most cases the tragic error
+involves no conscious breach of right; in some (_e.g._ that of Brutus or
+Othello) it is accompanied by a full conviction of right. In Hamlet
+there is a painful consciousness that duty is being neglected; in Antony
+a clear knowledge that the worse of two courses is being pursued; but
+Richard and Macbeth are the only heroes who do what they themselves
+recognise to be villainous. It is important to observe that Shakespeare
+does admit such heroes,[9] and also that he appears to feel, and exerts
+himself to meet, the difficulty that arises from their admission. The
+difficulty is that the spectator must desire their defeat and even their
+destruction; and yet this desire, and the satisfaction of it, are not
+tragic feelings. Shakespeare gives to Richard therefore a power which
+excites astonishment, and a courage which extorts admiration. He gives
+to Macbeth a similar, though less extraordinary, greatness, and adds to
+it a conscience so terrifying in its warnings and so maddening in its
+reproaches that the spectacle of inward torment compels a horrified
+sympathy and awe which balance, at the least, the desire for the hero's
+ruin.
+
+The tragic hero with Shakespeare, then, need not be 'good,' though
+generally he is 'good' and therefore at once wins sympathy in his error.
+But it is necessary that he should have so much of greatness that in his
+error and fall we may be vividly conscious of the possibilities of human
+nature.[10] Hence, in the first place, a Shakespearean tragedy is never,
+like some miscalled tragedies, depressing. No one ever closes the book
+with the feeling that man is a poor mean creature. He may be wretched
+and he may be awful, but he is not small. His lot may be heart-rending
+and mysterious, but it is not contemptible. The most confirmed of cynics
+ceases to be a cynic while he reads these plays. And with this greatness
+of the tragic hero (which is not always confined to him) is connected,
+secondly, what I venture to describe as the centre of the tragic
+impression. This central feeling is the impression of waste. With
+Shakespeare, at any rate, the pity and fear which are stirred by the
+tragic story seem to unite with, and even to merge in, a profound sense
+of sadness and mystery, which is due to this impression of waste. 'What
+a piece of work is man,' we cry; 'so much more beautiful and so much
+more terrible than we knew! Why should he be so if this beauty and
+greatness only tortures itself and throws itself away?' We seem to have
+before us a type of the mystery of the whole world, the tragic fact
+which extends far beyond the limits of tragedy. Everywhere, from the
+crushed rocks beneath our feet to the soul of man, we see power,
+intelligence, life and glory, which astound us and seem to call for our
+worship. And everywhere we see them perishing, devouring one another and
+destroying themselves, often with dreadful pain, as though they came
+into being for no other end. Tragedy is the typical form of this
+mystery, because that greatness of soul which it exhibits oppressed,
+conflicting and destroyed, is the highest existence in our view. It
+forces the mystery upon us, and it makes us realise so vividly the worth
+of that which is wasted that we cannot possibly seek comfort in the
+reflection that all is vanity.
+
+
+4
+
+In this tragic world, then, where individuals, however great they may be
+and however decisive their actions may appear, are so evidently not the
+ultimate power, what is this power? What account can we give of it which
+will correspond with the imaginative impressions we receive? This will
+be our final question.
+
+The variety of the answers given to this question shows how difficult it
+is. And the difficulty has many sources. Most people, even among those
+who know Shakespeare well and come into real contact with his mind, are
+inclined to isolate and exaggerate some one aspect of the tragic fact.
+Some are so much influenced by their own habitual beliefs that they
+import them more or less into their interpretation of every author who
+is 'sympathetic' to them. And even where neither of these causes of
+error appears to operate, another is present from which it is probably
+impossible wholly to escape. What I mean is this. Any answer we give to
+the question proposed ought to correspond with, or to represent in terms
+of the understanding, our imaginative and emotional experience in
+reading the tragedies. We have, of course, to do our best by study and
+effort to make this experience true to Shakespeare; but, that done to
+the best of our ability, the experience is the matter to be interpreted,
+and the test by which the interpretation must be tried. But it is
+extremely hard to make out exactly what this experience is, because, in
+the very effort to make it out, our reflecting mind, full of everyday
+ideas, is always tending to transform it by the application of these
+ideas, and so to elicit a result which, instead of representing the
+fact, conventionalises it. And the consequence is not only mistaken
+theories; it is that many a man will declare that he feels in reading a
+tragedy what he never really felt, while he fails to recognise what he
+actually did feel. It is not likely that we shall escape all these
+dangers in our effort to find an answer to the question regarding the
+tragic world and the ultimate power in it.
+
+It will be agreed, however, first, that this question must not be
+answered in 'religious' language. For although this or that _dramatis
+persona_ may speak of gods or of God, of evil spirits or of Satan, of
+heaven and of hell, and although the poet may show us ghosts from
+another world, these ideas do not materially influence his
+representation of life, nor are they used to throw light on the mystery
+of its tragedy. The Elizabethan drama was almost wholly secular; and
+while Shakespeare was writing he practically confined his view to the
+world of non-theological observation and thought, so that he represents
+it substantially in one and the same way whether the period of the story
+is pre-Christian or Christian.[11] He looked at this 'secular' world
+most intently and seriously; and he painted it, we cannot but conclude,
+with entire fidelity, without the wish to enforce an opinion of his own,
+and, in essentials, without regard to anyone's hopes, fears, or beliefs.
+His greatness is largely due to this fidelity in a mind of extraordinary
+power; and if, as a private person, he had a religious faith, his tragic
+view can hardly have been in contradiction with this faith, but must
+have been included in it, and supplemented, not abolished, by additional
+ideas.
+
+Two statements, next, may at once be made regarding the tragic fact as
+he represents it: one, that it is and remains to us something piteous,
+fearful and mysterious; the other, that the representation of it does
+not leave us crushed, rebellious or desperate. These statements will be
+accepted, I believe, by any reader who is in touch with Shakespeare's
+mind and can observe his own. Indeed such a reader is rather likely to
+complain that they are painfully obvious. But if they are true as well
+as obvious, something follows from them in regard to our present
+question.
+
+From the first it follows that the ultimate power in the tragic world is
+not adequately described as a law or order which we can see to be just
+and benevolent,--as, in that sense, a 'moral order': for in that case
+the spectacle of suffering and waste could not seem to us so fearful and
+mysterious as it does. And from the second it follows that this ultimate
+power is not adequately described as a fate, whether malicious and
+cruel, or blind and indifferent to human happiness and goodness: for in
+that case the spectacle would leave us desperate or rebellious. Yet one
+or other of these two ideas will be found to govern most accounts of
+Shakespeare's tragic view or world. These accounts isolate and
+exaggerate single aspects, either the aspect of action or that of
+suffering; either the close and unbroken connection of character, will,
+deed and catastrophe, which, taken alone, shows the individual simply as
+sinning against, or failing to conform to, the moral order and drawing
+his just doom on his own head; or else that pressure of outward forces,
+that sway of accident, and those blind and agonised struggles, which,
+taken alone, show him as the mere victim of some power which cares
+neither for his sins nor for his pain. Such views contradict one
+another, and no third view can unite them; but the several aspects from
+whose isolation and exaggeration they spring are both present in the
+fact, and a view which would be true to the fact and to the whole of our
+imaginative experience must in some way combine these aspects.
+
+Let us begin, then, with the idea of fatality and glance at some of the
+impressions which give rise to it, without asking at present whether
+this idea is their natural or fitting expression. There can be no doubt
+that they do arise and that they ought to arise. If we do not feel at
+times that the hero is, in some sense, a doomed man; that he and others
+drift struggling to destruction like helpless creatures borne on an
+irresistible flood towards a cataract; that, faulty as they may be,
+their fault is far from being the sole or sufficient cause of all they
+suffer; and that the power from which they cannot escape is relentless
+and immovable, we have failed to receive an essential part of the full
+tragic effect.
+
+The sources of these impressions are various, and I will refer only to a
+few. One of them is put into words by Shakespeare himself when he makes
+the player-king in _Hamlet_ say:
+
+     Our thoughts are ours, their ends none of our own;
+
+'their ends' are the issues or outcomes of our thoughts, and these, says
+the speaker, are not our own. The tragic world is a world of action, and
+action is the translation of thought into reality. We see men and women
+confidently attempting it. They strike into the existing order of things
+in pursuance of their ideas. But what they achieve is not what they
+intended; it is terribly unlike it. They understand nothing, we say to
+ourselves, of the world on which they operate. They fight blindly in the
+dark, and the power that works through them makes them the instrument of
+a design which is not theirs. They act freely, and yet their action
+binds them hand and foot. And it makes no difference whether they meant
+well or ill. No one could mean better than Brutus, but he contrives
+misery for his country and death for himself. No one could mean worse
+than Iago, and he too is caught in the web he spins for others. Hamlet,
+recoiling from the rough duty of revenge, is pushed into
+blood-guiltiness he never dreamed of, and forced at last on the revenge
+he could not will. His adversary's murders, and no less his adversary's
+remorse, bring about the opposite of what they sought. Lear follows an
+old man's whim, half generous, half selfish; and in a moment it looses
+all the powers of darkness upon him. Othello agonises over an empty
+fiction, and, meaning to execute solemn justice, butchers innocence and
+strangles love. They understand themselves no better than the world
+about them. Coriolanus thinks that his heart is iron, and it melts like
+snow before a fire. Lady Macbeth, who thought she could dash out her own
+child's brains, finds herself hounded to death by the smell of a
+stranger's blood. Her husband thinks that to gain a crown he would jump
+the life to come, and finds that the crown has brought him all the
+horrors of that life. Everywhere, in this tragic world, man's thought,
+translated into act, is transformed into the opposite of itself. His
+act, the movement of a few ounces of matter in a moment of time, becomes
+a monstrous flood which spreads over a kingdom. And whatsoever he dreams
+of doing, he achieves that which he least dreamed of, his own
+destruction.
+
+All this makes us feel the blindness and helplessness of man. Yet by
+itself it would hardly suggest the idea of fate, because it shows man as
+in some degree, however slight, the cause of his own undoing. But other
+impressions come to aid it. It is aided by everything which makes us
+feel that a man is, as we say, terribly unlucky; and of this there is,
+even in Shakespeare, not a little. Here come in some of the accidents
+already considered, Juliet's waking from her trance a minute too late,
+Desdemona's loss of her handkerchief at the only moment when the loss
+would have mattered, that insignificant delay which cost Cordelia's
+life. Again, men act, no doubt, in accordance with their characters; but
+what is it that brings them just the one problem which is fatal to them
+and would be easy to another, and sometimes brings it to them just when
+they are least fitted to face it? How is it that Othello comes to be the
+companion of the one man in the world who is at once able enough, brave
+enough, and vile enough to ensnare him? By what strange fatality does it
+happen that Lear has such daughters and Cordelia such sisters? Even
+character itself contributes to these feelings of fatality. How could
+men escape, we cry, such vehement propensities as drive Romeo, Antony,
+Coriolanus, to their doom? And why is it that a man's virtues help to
+destroy him, and that his weakness or defect is so intertwined with
+everything that is admirable in him that we can hardly separate them
+even in imagination?
+
+If we find in Shakespeare's tragedies the source of impressions like
+these, it is important, on the other hand, to notice what we do _not_
+find there. We find practically no trace of fatalism in its more
+primitive, crude and obvious forms. Nothing, again, makes us think of
+the actions and sufferings of the persons as somehow arbitrarily fixed
+beforehand without regard to their feelings, thoughts and resolutions.
+Nor, I believe, are the facts ever so presented that it seems to us as
+if the supreme power, whatever it may be, had a special spite against a
+family or an individual. Neither, lastly, do we receive the impression
+(which, it must be observed, is not purely fatalistic) that a family,
+owing to some hideous crime or impiety in early days, is doomed in later
+days to continue a career of portentous calamities and sins.
+Shakespeare, indeed, does not appear to have taken much interest in
+heredity, or to have attached much importance to it. (See, however,
+'heredity' in the Index.)
+
+What, then, is this 'fate' which the impressions already considered lead
+us to describe as the ultimate power in the tragic world? It appears to
+be a mythological expression for the whole system or order, of which the
+individual characters form an inconsiderable and feeble part; which
+seems to determine, far more than they, their native dispositions and
+their circumstances, and, through these, their action; which is so vast
+and complex that they can scarcely at all understand it or control its
+workings; and which has a nature so definite and fixed that whatever
+changes take place in it produce other changes inevitably and without
+regard to men's desires and regrets. And whether this system or order is
+best called by the name of fate or no,[12] it can hardly be denied that
+it does appear as the ultimate power in the tragic world, and that it
+has such characteristics as these. But the name 'fate' may be intended
+to imply something more--to imply that this order is a blank necessity,
+totally regardless alike of human weal and of the difference between
+good and evil or right and wrong. And such an implication many readers
+would at once reject. They would maintain, on the contrary, that this
+order shows characteristics of quite another kind from those which made
+us give it the name of fate, characteristics which certainly should not
+induce us to forget those others, but which would lead us to describe it
+as a moral order and its necessity as a moral necessity.
+
+
+5
+
+Let us turn, then, to this idea. It brings into the light those aspects
+of the tragic fact which the idea of fate throws into the shade. And the
+argument which leads to it in its simplest form may be stated briefly
+thus: 'Whatever may be said of accidents, circumstances and the like,
+human action is, after all, presented to us as the central fact in
+tragedy, and also as the main cause of the catastrophe. That necessity
+which so much impresses us is, after all, chiefly the necessary
+connection of actions and consequences. For these actions we, without
+even raising a question on the subject, hold the agents responsible; and
+the tragedy would disappear for us if we did not. The critical action
+is, in greater or less degree, wrong or bad. The catastrophe is, in the
+main, the return of this action on the head of the agent. It is an
+example of justice; and that order which, present alike within the
+agents and outside them, infallibly brings it about, is therefore just.
+The rigour of its justice is terrible, no doubt, for a tragedy is a
+terrible story; but, in spite of fear and pity, we acquiesce, because
+our sense of justice is satisfied.'
+
+Now, if this view is to hold good, the 'justice' of which it speaks must
+be at once distinguished from what is called 'poetic justice.' 'Poetic
+justice' means that prosperity and adversity are distributed in
+proportion to the merits of the agents. Such 'poetic justice' is in
+flagrant contradiction with the facts of life, and it is absent from
+Shakespeare's tragic picture of life; indeed, this very absence is a
+ground of constant complaint on the part of Dr. Johnson. [Greek:
+Drasanti pathein], 'the doer must suffer'--this we find in Shakespeare.
+We also find that villainy never remains victorious and prosperous at
+the last. But an assignment of amounts of happiness and misery, an
+assignment even of life and death, in proportion to merit, we do not
+find. No one who thinks of Desdemona and Cordelia; or who remembers that
+one end awaits Richard III. and Brutus, Macbeth and Hamlet; or who asks
+himself which suffered most, Othello or Iago; will ever accuse
+Shakespeare of representing the ultimate power as 'poetically' just.
+
+And we must go further. I venture to say that it is a mistake to use at
+all these terms of justice and merit or desert. And this for two
+reasons. In the first place, essential as it is to recognise the
+connection between act and consequence, and natural as it may seem in
+some cases (_e.g._ Macbeth's) to say that the doer only gets what he
+deserves, yet in very many cases to say this would be quite unnatural.
+We might not object to the statement that Lear deserved to suffer for
+his folly, selfishness and tyranny; but to assert that he deserved to
+suffer what he did suffer is to do violence not merely to language but
+to any healthy moral sense. It is, moreover, to obscure the tragic fact
+that the consequences of action cannot be limited to that which would
+appear to us to follow 'justly' from them. And, this being so, when we
+call the order of the tragic world just, we are either using the word in
+some vague and unexplained sense, or we are going beyond what is shown
+us of this order, and are appealing to faith.
+
+But, in the second place, the ideas of justice and desert are, it seems
+to me, in _all_ cases--even those of Richard III. and of Macbeth and
+Lady Macbeth--untrue to our imaginative experience. When we are immersed
+in a tragedy, we feel towards dispositions, actions, and persons such
+emotions as attraction and repulsion, pity, wonder, fear, horror,
+perhaps hatred; but we do not _judge_. This is a point of view which
+emerges only when, in reading a play, we slip, by our own fault or the
+dramatist's, from the tragic position, or when, in thinking about the
+play afterwards, we fall back on our everyday legal and moral notions.
+But tragedy does not belong, any more than religion belongs, to the
+sphere of these notions; neither does the imaginative attitude in
+presence of it. While we are in its world we watch what is, seeing that
+so it happened and must have happened, feeling that it is piteous,
+dreadful, awful, mysterious, but neither passing sentence on the agents,
+nor asking whether the behaviour of the ultimate power towards them is
+just. And, therefore, the use of such language in attempts to render our
+imaginative experience in terms of the understanding is, to say the
+least, full of danger.[13]
+
+Let us attempt then to re-state the idea that the ultimate power in the
+tragic world is a moral order. Let us put aside the ideas of justice and
+merit, and speak simply of good and evil. Let us understand by these
+words, primarily, moral good and evil, but also everything else in human
+beings which we take to be excellent or the reverse. Let us understand
+the statement that the ultimate power or order is 'moral' to mean that
+it does not show itself indifferent to good and evil, or equally
+favourable or unfavourable to both, but shows itself akin to good and
+alien from evil. And, understanding the statement thus, let us ask what
+grounds it has in the tragic fact as presented by Shakespeare.
+
+Here, as in dealing with the grounds on which the idea of fate rests, I
+choose only two or three out of many. And the most important is this. In
+Shakespearean tragedy the main source of the convulsion which produces
+suffering and death is never good: good contributes to this convulsion
+only from its tragic implication with its opposite in one and the same
+character. The main source, on the contrary, is in every case evil; and,
+what is more (though this seems to have been little noticed), it is in
+almost every case evil in the fullest sense, not mere imperfection but
+plain moral evil. The love of Romeo and Juliet conducts them to death
+only because of the senseless hatred of their houses. Guilty ambition,
+seconded by diabolic malice and issuing in murder, opens the action in
+_Macbeth_. Iago is the main source of the convulsion in _Othello_;
+Goneril, Regan and Edmund in _King Lear_. Even when this plain moral
+evil is not the obviously prime source within the play, it lies behind
+it: the situation with which Hamlet has to deal has been formed by
+adultery and murder. _Julius Caesar_ is the only tragedy in which one is
+even tempted to find an exception to this rule. And the inference is
+obvious. If it is chiefly evil that violently disturbs the order of the
+world, this order cannot be friendly to evil or indifferent between evil
+and good, any more than a body which is convulsed by poison is friendly
+to it or indifferent to the distinction between poison and food.
+
+Again, if we confine our attention to the hero, and to those cases where
+the gross and palpable evil is not in him but elsewhere, we find that
+the comparatively innocent hero still shows some marked imperfection or
+defect,--irresolution, precipitancy, pride, credulousness, excessive
+simplicity, excessive susceptibility to sexual emotions, and the like.
+These defects or imperfections are certainly, in the wide sense of the
+word, evil, and they contribute decisively to the conflict and
+catastrophe. And the inference is again obvious. The ultimate power
+which shows itself disturbed by this evil and reacts against it, must
+have a nature alien to it. Indeed its reaction is so vehement and
+'relentless' that it would seem to be bent on nothing short of good in
+perfection, and to be ruthless in its demand for it.
+
+To this must be added another fact, or another aspect of the same fact.
+Evil exhibits itself everywhere as something negative, barren,
+weakening, destructive, a principle of death. It isolates, disunites,
+and tends to annihilate not only its opposite but itself. That which
+keeps the evil man[14] prosperous, makes him succeed, even permits him
+to exist, is the good in him (I do not mean only the obviously 'moral'
+good). When the evil in him masters the good and has its way, it
+destroys other people through him, but it also destroys _him_. At the
+close of the struggle he has vanished, and has left behind him nothing
+that can stand. What remains is a family, a city, a country, exhausted,
+pale and feeble, but alive through the principle of good which animates
+it; and, within it, individuals who, if they have not the brilliance or
+greatness of the tragic character, still have won our respect and
+confidence. And the inference would seem clear. If existence in an order
+depends on good, and if the presence of evil is hostile to such
+existence, the inner being or soul of this order must be akin to good.
+
+These are aspects of the tragic world at least as clearly marked as
+those which, taken alone, suggest the idea of fate. And the idea which
+they in their turn, when taken alone, may suggest, is that of an order
+which does not indeed award 'poetic justice,' but which reacts through
+the necessity of its own 'moral' nature both against attacks made upon
+it and against failure to conform to it. Tragedy, on this view, is the
+exhibition of that convulsive reaction; and the fact that the spectacle
+does not leave us rebellious or desperate is due to a more or less
+distinct perception that the tragic suffering and death arise from
+collision, not with a fate or blank power, but with a moral power, a
+power akin to all that we admire and revere in the characters
+themselves. This perception produces something like a feeling of
+acquiescence in the catastrophe, though it neither leads us to pass
+judgment on the characters nor diminishes the pity, the fear, and the
+sense of waste, which their struggle, suffering and fall evoke. And,
+finally, this view seems quite able to do justice to those aspects of
+the tragic fact which give rise to the idea of fate. They would appear
+as various expressions of the fact that the moral order acts not
+capriciously or like a human being, but from the necessity of its
+nature, or, if we prefer the phrase, by general laws,--a necessity or
+law which of course knows no exception and is as 'ruthless' as fate.
+
+It is impossible to deny to this view a large measure of truth. And yet
+without some amendment it can hardly satisfy. For it does not include
+the whole of the facts, and therefore does not wholly correspond with
+the impressions they produce. Let it be granted that the system or order
+which shows itself omnipotent against individuals is, in the sense
+explained, moral. Still--at any rate for the eye of sight--the evil
+against which it asserts itself, and the persons whom this evil
+inhabits, are not really something outside the order, so that they can
+attack it or fail to conform to it; they are within it and a part of it.
+It itself produces them,--produces Iago as well as Desdemona, Iago's
+cruelty as well as Iago's courage. It is not poisoned, it poisons
+itself. Doubtless it shows by its violent reaction that the poison _is_
+poison, and that its health lies in good. But one significant fact
+cannot remove another, and the spectacle we witness scarcely warrants
+the assertion that the order is responsible for the good in Desdemona,
+but Iago for the evil in Iago. If we make this assertion we make it on
+grounds other than the facts as presented in Shakespeare's tragedies.
+
+Nor does the idea of a moral order asserting itself against attack or
+want of conformity answer in full to our feelings regarding the tragic
+character. We do not think of Hamlet merely as failing to meet its
+demand, of Antony as merely sinning against it, or even of Macbeth as
+simply attacking it. What we feel corresponds quite as much to the idea
+that they are _its_ parts, expressions, products; that in their defect
+or evil _it_ is untrue to its soul of goodness, and falls into conflict
+and collision with itself; that, in making them suffer and waste
+themselves, _it_ suffers and wastes itself; and that when, to save its
+life and regain peace from this intestinal struggle, it casts them out,
+it has lost a part of its own substance,--a part more dangerous and
+unquiet, but far more valuable and nearer to its heart, than that which
+remains,--a Fortinbras, a Malcolm, an Octavius. There is no tragedy in
+its expulsion of evil: the tragedy is that this involves the waste of
+good.
+
+Thus we are left at last with an idea showing two sides or aspects which
+we can neither separate nor reconcile. The whole or order against which
+the individual part shows itself powerless seems to be animated by a
+passion for perfection: we cannot otherwise explain its behaviour
+towards evil. Yet it appears to engender this evil within itself, and in
+its effort to overcome and expel it it is agonised with pain, and driven
+to mutilate its own substance and to lose not only evil but priceless
+good. That this idea, though very different from the idea of a blank
+fate, is no solution of the riddle of life is obvious; but why should we
+expect it to be such a solution? Shakespeare was not attempting to
+justify the ways of God to men, or to show the universe as a Divine
+Comedy. He was writing tragedy, and tragedy would not be tragedy if it
+were not a painful mystery. Nor can he be said even to point distinctly,
+like some writers of tragedy, in any direction where a solution might
+lie. We find a few references to gods or God, to the influence of the
+stars, to another life: some of them certainly, all of them perhaps,
+merely dramatic--appropriate to the person from whose lips they fall. A
+ghost comes from Purgatory to impart a secret out of the reach of its
+hearer--who presently meditates on the question whether the sleep of
+death is dreamless. Accidents once or twice remind us strangely of the
+words, 'There's a divinity that shapes our ends.' More important are
+other impressions. Sometimes from the very furnace of affliction a
+conviction seems borne to us that somehow, if we could see it, this
+agony counts as nothing against the heroism and love which appear in it
+and thrill our hearts. Sometimes we are driven to cry out that these
+mighty or heavenly spirits who perish are too great for the little space
+in which they move, and that they vanish not into nothingness but into
+freedom. Sometimes from these sources and from others comes a
+presentiment, formless but haunting and even profound, that all the fury
+of conflict, with its waste and woe, is less than half the truth, even
+an illusion, 'such stuff as dreams are made on.' But these faint and
+scattered intimations that the tragic world, being but a fragment of a
+whole beyond our vision, must needs be a contradiction and no ultimate
+truth, avail nothing to interpret the mystery. We remain confronted with
+the inexplicable fact, or the no less inexplicable appearance, of a
+world travailing for perfection, but bringing to birth, together with
+glorious good, an evil which it is able to overcome only by self-torture
+and self-waste. And this fact or appearance is tragedy.[15]
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[Footnote 1: _Julius Caesar_ is not an exception to this rule. Caesar,
+whose murder comes in the Third Act, is in a sense the dominating figure
+in the story, but Brutus is the 'hero.']
+
+[Footnote 2: _Timon of Athens_, we have seen, was probably not designed
+by Shakespeare, but even _Timon_ is no exception to the rule. The
+sub-plot is concerned with Alcibiades and his army, and Timon himself is
+treated by the Senate as a man of great importance. _Arden of Feversham_
+and _A Yorkshire Tragedy_ would certainly be exceptions to the rule; but
+I assume that neither of them is Shakespeare's; and if either is, it
+belongs to a different species from his admitted tragedies. See, on this
+species, Symonds, _Shakspere's Predecessors_, ch. xi.]
+
+[Footnote 3: Even a deed would, I think, be counted an 'accident,' if it
+were the deed of a very minor person whose character had not been
+indicated; because such a deed would not issue from the little world to
+which the dramatist had confined our attention.]
+
+[Footnote 4: Comedy stands in a different position. The tricks played by
+chance often form a principal part of the comic action.]
+
+[Footnote 5: It may be observed that the influence of the three elements
+just considered is to strengthen the tendency, produced by the
+sufferings considered first, to regard the tragic persons as passive
+rather than as agents.]
+
+[Footnote 6: An account of Hegel's view may be found in _Oxford Lectures
+on Poetry_.]
+
+[Footnote 7: The reader, however, will find considerable difficulty in
+placing some very important characters in these and other plays. I will
+give only two or three illustrations. Edgar is clearly not on the same
+side as Edmund, and yet it seems awkward to range him on Gloster's side
+when Gloster wishes to put him to death. Ophelia is in love with Hamlet,
+but how can she be said to be of Hamlet's party against the King and
+Polonius, or of their party against Hamlet? Desdemona worships Othello,
+yet it sounds odd to say that Othello is on the same side with a person
+whom he insults, strikes and murders.]
+
+[Footnote 8: I have given names to the 'spiritual forces' in _Macbeth_
+merely to illustrate the idea, and without any pretension to adequacy.
+Perhaps, in view of some interpretations of Shakespeare's plays, it will
+be as well to add that I do not dream of suggesting that in any of his
+dramas Shakespeare imagined two abstract principles or passions
+conflicting, and incorporated them in persons; or that there is any
+necessity for a reader to define for himself the particular forces which
+conflict in a given case.]
+
+[Footnote 9: Aristotle apparently would exclude them.]
+
+[Footnote 10: Richard II. is perhaps an exception, and I must confess
+that to me he is scarcely a tragic character, and that, if he is
+nevertheless a tragic figure, he is so only because his fall from
+prosperity to adversity is so great.]
+
+[Footnote 11: I say substantially; but the concluding remarks on
+_Hamlet_ will modify a little the statements above.]
+
+[Footnote 12: I have raised no objection to the use of the idea of fate,
+because it occurs so often both in conversation and in books about
+Shakespeare's tragedies that I must suppose it to be natural to many
+readers. Yet I doubt whether it would be so if Greek tragedy had never
+been written; and I must in candour confess that to me it does not often
+occur while I am reading, or when I have just read, a tragedy of
+Shakespeare. Wordsworth's lines, for example, about
+
+         poor humanity's afflicted will
+     Struggling in vain with ruthless destiny
+
+do not represent the impression I receive; much less do images which
+compare man to a puny creature helpless in the claws of a bird of prey.
+The reader should examine himself closely on this matter.]
+
+[Footnote 13: It is dangerous, I think, in reference to all really good
+tragedies, but I am dealing here only with Shakespeare's. In not a few
+Greek tragedies it is almost inevitable that we should think of justice
+and retribution, not only because the _dramatis personae_ often speak of
+them, but also because there is something casuistical about the tragic
+problem itself. The poet treats the story in such a way that the
+question, Is the hero doing right or wrong? is almost forced upon us.
+But this is not so with Shakespeare. _Julius Caesar_ is probably the
+only one of his tragedies in which the question suggests itself to us,
+and this is one of the reasons why that play has something of a classic
+air. Even here, if we ask the question, we have no doubt at all about
+the answer.]
+
+[Footnote 14: It is most essential to remember that an evil man is much
+more than the evil in him. I may add that in this paragraph I have, for
+the sake of clearness, considered evil in its most pronounced form; but
+what is said would apply, _mutatis mutandis_, to evil as imperfection,
+etc.]
+
+[Footnote 15: Partly in order not to anticipate later passages, I
+abstained from treating fully here the question why we feel, at the
+death of the tragic hero, not only pain but also reconciliation and
+sometimes even exultation. As I cannot at present make good this defect,
+I would ask the reader to refer to the word _Reconciliation_ in the
+Index. See also, in _Oxford Lectures on Poetry_, _Hegel's Theory of
+Tragedy_, especially pp. 90, 91.]
+
+
+
+
+LECTURE II
+
+CONSTRUCTION IN SHAKESPEARE'S TRAGEDIES
+
+
+Having discussed the substance of a Shakespearean tragedy, we should
+naturally go on to examine the form. And under this head many things
+might be included; for example, Shakespeare's methods of
+characterisation, his language, his versification, the construction of
+his plots. I intend, however, to speak only of the last of these
+subjects, which has been somewhat neglected;[16] and, as construction is
+a more or less technical matter, I shall add some general remarks on
+Shakespeare as an artist.
+
+
+1
+
+As a Shakespearean tragedy represents a conflict which terminates in a
+catastrophe, any such tragedy may roughly be divided into three parts.
+The first of these sets forth or expounds the situation,[17] or state of
+affairs, out of which the conflict arises; and it may, therefore, be
+called the Exposition. The second deals with the definite beginning, the
+growth and the vicissitudes of the conflict. It forms accordingly the
+bulk of the play, comprising the Second, Third and Fourth Acts, and
+usually a part of the First and a part of the Fifth. The final section
+of the tragedy shows the issue of the conflict in a catastrophe.[18]
+
+The application of this scheme of division is naturally more or less
+arbitrary. The first part glides into the second, and the second into
+the third, and there may often be difficulty in drawing the lines
+between them. But it is still harder to divide spring from summer, and
+summer from autumn; and yet spring is spring, and summer summer.
+
+The main business of the Exposition, which we will consider first, is to
+introduce us into a little world of persons; to show us their positions
+in life, their circumstances, their relations to one another, and
+perhaps something of their characters; and to leave us keenly interested
+in the question what will come out of this condition of things. We are
+left thus expectant, not merely because some of the persons interest us
+at once, but also because their situation in regard to one another
+points to difficulties in the future. This situation is not one of
+conflict,[19] but it threatens conflict. For example, we see first the
+hatred of the Montagues and Capulets; and then we see Romeo ready to
+fall violently in love; and then we hear talk of a marriage between
+Juliet and Paris; but the exposition is not complete, and the conflict
+has not definitely begun to arise, till, in the last scene of the First
+Act, Romeo the Montague sees Juliet the Capulet and becomes her slave.
+
+The dramatist's chief difficulty in the exposition is obvious, and it is
+illustrated clearly enough in the plays of unpractised writers; for
+example, in _Remorse_, and even in _The Cenci_. He has to impart to the
+audience a quantity of information about matters of which they generally
+know nothing and never know all that is necessary for his purpose.[20]
+But the process of merely acquiring information is unpleasant, and the
+direct imparting of it is undramatic. Unless he uses a prologue,
+therefore, he must conceal from his auditors the fact that they are
+being informed, and must tell them what he wants them to know by means
+which are interesting on their own account. These means, with
+Shakespeare, are not only speeches but actions and events. From the very
+beginning of the play, though the conflict has not arisen, things are
+happening and being done which in some degree arrest, startle, and
+excite; and in a few scenes we have mastered the situation of affairs
+without perceiving the dramatist's designs upon us. Not that this is
+always so with Shakespeare. In the opening scene of his early _Comedy of
+Errors_, and in the opening speech of _Richard III._, we feel that the
+speakers are addressing us; and in the second scene of the _Tempest_
+(for Shakespeare grew at last rather negligent of technique) the purpose
+of Prospero's long explanation to Miranda is palpable. But in general
+Shakespeare's expositions are masterpieces.[21]
+
+His usual plan in tragedy is to begin with a short scene, or part of a
+scene, either full of life and stir, or in some other way arresting.
+Then, having secured a hearing, he proceeds to conversations at a lower
+pitch, accompanied by little action but conveying much information. For
+example, _Romeo and Juliet_ opens with a street-fight, _Julius Caesar_
+and _Coriolanus_ with a crowd in commotion; and when this excitement has
+had its effect on the audience, there follow quiet speeches, in which
+the cause of the excitement, and so a great part of the situation, are
+disclosed. In _Hamlet_ and _Macbeth_ this scheme is employed with great
+boldness. In _Hamlet_ the first appearance of the Ghost occurs at the
+fortieth line, and with such effect that Shakespeare can afford to
+introduce at once a conversation which explains part of the state of
+affairs at Elsinore; and the second appearance, having again increased
+the tension, is followed by a long scene, which contains no action but
+introduces almost all the _dramatis personae_ and adds the information
+left wanting. The opening of _Macbeth_ is even more remarkable, for
+there is probably no parallel to its first scene, where the senses and
+imagination are assaulted by a storm of thunder and supernatural alarm.
+This scene is only eleven lines long, but its influence is so great that
+the next can safely be occupied with a mere report of Macbeth's
+battles,--a narrative which would have won much less attention if it had
+opened the play.
+
+When Shakespeare begins his exposition thus he generally at first makes
+people talk about the hero, but keeps the hero himself for some time out
+of sight, so that we await his entrance with curiosity, and sometimes
+with anxiety. On the other hand, if the play opens with a quiet
+conversation, this is usually brief, and then at once the hero enters
+and takes action of some decided kind. Nothing, for example, can be less
+like the beginning of _Macbeth_ than that of _King Lear_. The tone is
+pitched so low that the conversation between Kent, Gloster, and Edmund
+is written in prose. But at the thirty-fourth line it is broken off by
+the entrance of Lear and his court, and without delay the King proceeds
+to his fatal division of the kingdom.
+
+This tragedy illustrates another practice of Shakespeare's. _King Lear_
+has a secondary plot, that which concerns Gloster and his two sons. To
+make the beginning of this plot quite clear, and to mark it off from the
+main action, Shakespeare gives it a separate exposition. The great scene
+of the division of Britain and the rejection of Cordelia and Kent is
+followed by the second scene, in which Gloster and his two sons appear
+alone, and the beginning of Edmund's design is disclosed. In _Hamlet_,
+though the plot is single, there is a little group of characters
+possessing a certain independent interest,--Polonius, his son, and his
+daughter; and so the third scene is devoted wholly to them. And again,
+in _Othello_, since Roderigo is to occupy a peculiar position almost
+throughout the action, he is introduced at once, alone with Iago, and
+his position is explained before the other characters are allowed to
+appear.
+
+But why should Iago open the play? Or, if this seems too presumptuous a
+question, let us put it in the form, What is the effect of his opening
+the play? It is that we receive at the very outset a strong impression
+of the force which is to prove fatal to the hero's happiness, so that,
+when we see the hero himself, the shadow of fate already rests upon him.
+And an effect of this kind is to be noticed in other tragedies. We are
+made conscious at once of some power which is to influence the whole
+action to the hero's undoing. In _Macbeth_ we see and hear the Witches,
+in _Hamlet_ the Ghost. In the first scene of _Julius Caesar_ and of
+_Coriolanus_ those qualities of the crowd are vividly shown which render
+hopeless the enterprise of the one hero and wreck the ambition of the
+other. It is the same with the hatred between the rival houses in _Romeo
+and Juliet_, and with Antony's infatuated passion. We realise them at
+the end of the first page, and are almost ready to regard the hero as
+doomed. Often, again, at one or more points during the exposition this
+feeling is reinforced by some expression that has an ominous effect. The
+first words we hear from Macbeth, 'So foul and fair a day I have not
+seen,' echo, though he knows it not, the last words we heard from the
+Witches, 'Fair is foul, and foul is fair.' Romeo, on his way with his
+friends to the banquet, where he is to see Juliet for the first time,
+tells Mercutio that he has had a dream. What the dream was we never
+learn, for Mercutio does not care to know, and breaks into his speech
+about Queen Mab; but we can guess its nature from Romeo's last speech in
+the scene:
+
+                          My mind misgives
+     Some consequence yet hanging in the stars
+     Shall bitterly begin his fearful date
+     With this night's revels.
+
+When Brabantio, forced to acquiesce in his daughter's stolen marriage,
+turns, as he leaves the council-chamber, to Othello, with the warning,
+
+     Look to her, Moor, if thou hast eyes to see;
+     She has deceived her father, and may thee,
+
+this warning, and no less Othello's answer, 'My life upon her faith,'
+make our hearts sink. The whole of the coming story seems to be
+prefigured in Antony's muttered words (I. ii. 120):
+
+     These strong Egyptian fetters I must break,
+     Or lose myself in dotage;
+
+and, again, in Hamlet's weary sigh, following so soon on the passionate
+resolution stirred by the message of the Ghost:
+
+     The time is out of joint. Oh cursed spite,
+     That ever I was born to set it right.
+
+These words occur at a point (the end of the First Act) which may be
+held to fall either within the exposition or beyond it. I should take
+the former view, though such questions, as we saw at starting, can
+hardly be decided with certainty. The dimensions of this first section
+of a tragedy depend on a variety of causes, of which the chief seems to
+be the comparative simplicity or complexity of the situation from which
+the conflict arises. Where this is simple the exposition is short, as in
+_Julius Caesar_ and _Macbeth_. Where it is complicated the exposition
+requires more space, as in _Romeo and Juliet_, _Hamlet_, and _King
+Lear_. Its completion is generally marked in the mind of the reader by a
+feeling that the action it contains is for the moment complete but has
+left a problem. The lovers have met, but their families are at deadly
+enmity; the hero seems at the height of success, but has admitted the
+thought of murdering his sovereign; the old king has divided his kingdom
+between two hypocritical daughters, and has rejected his true child; the
+hero has acknowledged a sacred duty of revenge, but is weary of life:
+and we ask, What will come of this? Sometimes, I may add, a certain time
+is supposed to elapse before the events which answer our question make
+their appearance and the conflict begins; in _King Lear_, for instance,
+about a fortnight; in _Hamlet_ about two months.
+
+
+2
+
+We come now to the conflict itself. And here one or two preliminary
+remarks are necessary. In the first place, it must be remembered that
+our point of view in examining the construction of a play will not
+always coincide with that which we occupy in thinking of its whole
+dramatic effect. For example, that struggle in the hero's soul which
+sometimes accompanies the outward struggle is of the highest importance
+for the total effect of a tragedy; but it is not always necessary or
+desirable to consider it when the question is merely one of
+construction. And this is natural. The play is meant primarily for the
+theatre; and theatrically the outward conflict, with its influence on
+the fortunes of the hero, is the aspect which first catches, if it does
+not engross, attention. For the average play-goer of every period the
+main interest of _Hamlet_ has probably lain in the vicissitudes of his
+long duel with the King; and the question, one may almost say, has been
+which will first kill the other. And so, from the point of view of
+construction, the fact that Hamlet spares the King when he finds him
+praying, is, from its effect on the hero's fortunes, of great moment;
+but the cause of the fact, which lies within Hamlet's character, is not
+so.
+
+In the second place we must be prepared to find that, as the plays vary
+so much, no single way of regarding the conflict will answer precisely
+to the construction of all; that it sometimes appears possible to look
+at the construction of a tragedy in two quite different ways, and that
+it is material to find the best of the two; and that thus, in any given
+instance, it is necessary first to define the opposing sides in the
+conflict. I will give one or two examples. In some tragedies, as we saw
+in our first lecture, the opposing forces can, for practical purposes,
+be identified with opposing persons or groups. So it is in _Romeo and
+Juliet_ and _Macbeth_. But it is not always so. The love of Othello may
+be said to contend with another force, as the love of Romeo does; but
+Othello cannot be said to contend with Iago as Romeo contends with the
+representatives of the hatred of the houses, or as Macbeth contends with
+Malcolm and Macduff. Again, in _Macbeth_ the hero, however much
+influenced by others, supplies the main driving power of the action; but
+in _King Lear_ he does not. Possibly, therefore, the conflict, and with
+it the construction, may best be regarded from different points of view
+in these two plays, in spite of the fact that the hero is the central
+figure in each. But if we do not observe this we shall attempt to find
+the same scheme in both, and shall either be driven to some unnatural
+view or to a sceptical despair of perceiving any principle of
+construction at all.
+
+With these warnings, I turn to the question whether we can trace any
+distinct method or methods by which Shakespeare represents the rise and
+development of the conflict.
+
+(1) One at least is obvious, and indeed it is followed not merely during
+the conflict but from beginning to end of the play. There are, of
+course, in the action certain places where the tension in the minds of
+the audience becomes extreme. We shall consider these presently. But, in
+addition, there is, all through the tragedy, a constant alternation of
+rises and falls in this tension or in the emotional pitch of the work, a
+regular sequence of more exciting and less exciting sections. Some kind
+of variation of pitch is to be found, of course, in all drama, for it
+rests on the elementary facts that relief must be given after emotional
+strain, and that contrast is required to bring out the full force of an
+effect. But a good drama of our own time shows nothing approaching to
+the _regularity_ with which in the plays of Shakespeare and of his
+contemporaries the principle is applied. And the main cause of this
+difference lies simply in a change of theatrical arrangements. In
+Shakespeare's theatre, as there was no scenery, scene followed scene
+with scarcely any pause; and so the readiest, though not the only, way
+to vary the emotional pitch was to interpose a whole scene where the
+tension was low between scenes where it was high. In our theatres there
+is a great deal of scenery, which takes a long time to set and change;
+and therefore the number of scenes is small, and the variations of
+tension have to be provided within the scenes, and still more by the
+pauses between them. With Shakespeare there are, of course, in any long
+scene variations of tension, but the scenes are numerous and, compared
+with ours, usually short, and variety is given principally by their
+difference in pitch.
+
+It may further be observed that, in a portion of the play which is
+relatively unexciting, the scenes of lower tension may be as long as
+those of higher; while in a portion of the play which is specially
+exciting the scenes of low tension are shorter, often much shorter, than
+the others. The reader may verify this statement by comparing the First
+or the Fourth Act in most of the tragedies with the Third; for, speaking
+very roughly, we may say that the First and Fourth are relatively quiet
+acts, the Third highly critical. A good example is the Third Act of
+_King Lear_, where the scenes of high tension (ii., iv., vi.) are
+respectively 95, 186 and 122 lines in length, while those of low tension
+(i., iii., v.) are respectively 55, 26 and 26 lines long. Scene vii.,
+the last of the Act, is, I may add, a very exciting scene, though it
+follows scene vi., and therefore the tone of scene vi. is greatly
+lowered during its final thirty lines.
+
+(2) If we turn now from the differences of tension to the sequence of
+events within the conflict, we shall find the principle of alternation
+at work again in another and a quite independent way. Let us for the
+sake of brevity call the two sides in the conflict A and B. Now,
+usually, as we shall see presently, through a considerable part of the
+play, perhaps the first half, the cause of A is, on the whole,
+advancing; and through the remaining part it is retiring, while that of
+B advances in turn. But, underlying this broad movement, all through the
+conflict we shall find a regular alternation of smaller advances and
+retirals; first A seeming to win some ground, and then the
+counter-action of B being shown. And since we always more or less
+decidedly prefer A to B or B to A, the result of this oscillating
+movement is a constant alternation of hope and fear, or rather of a
+mixed state predominantly hopeful and a mixed state predominantly
+apprehensive. An example will make the point clear. In _Hamlet_ the
+conflict begins with the hero's feigning to be insane from
+disappointment in love, and we are shown his immediate success in
+convincing Polonius. Let us call this an advance of A. The next scene
+shows the King's great uneasiness about Hamlet's melancholy, and his
+scepticism as to Polonius's explanation of its cause: advance of B.
+Hamlet completely baffles Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, who have been
+sent to discover his secret, and he arranges for the test of the
+play-scene: advance of A. But immediately before the play-scene his
+soliloquy on suicide fills us with misgiving; and his words to Ophelia,
+overheard, so convince the King that love is _not_ the cause of his
+nephew's strange behaviour, that he determines to get rid of him by
+sending him to England: advance of B. The play-scene proves a complete
+success: decided advance of A. Directly after it Hamlet spares the King
+at prayer, and in an interview with his mother unwittingly kills
+Polonius, and so gives his enemy a perfect excuse for sending him away
+(to be executed): decided advance of B. I need not pursue the
+illustration further. This oscillating movement can be traced without
+difficulty in any of the tragedies, though less distinctly in one or two
+of the earliest.
+
+(3) Though this movement continues right up to the catastrophe, its
+effect does not disguise that much broader effect to which I have
+already alluded, and which we have now to study. In all the tragedies,
+though more clearly in some than in others, one side is distinctly felt
+to be on the whole advancing up to a certain point in the conflict, and
+then to be on the whole declining before the reaction of the other.
+There is therefore felt to be a critical point in the action, which
+proves also to be a turning point. It is critical sometimes in the sense
+that, until it is reached, the conflict is not, so to speak, clenched;
+one of the two sets of forces might subside, or a reconciliation might
+somehow be effected; while, as soon as it is reached, we feel this can
+no longer be. It is critical also because the advancing force has
+apparently asserted itself victoriously, gaining, if not all it could
+wish, still a very substantial advantage; whereas really it is on the
+point of turning downward towards its fall. This Crisis, as a rule,
+comes somewhere near the middle of the play; and where it is well marked
+it has the effect, as to construction, of dividing the play into five
+parts instead of three; these parts showing (1) a situation not yet one
+of conflict, (2) the rise and development of the conflict, in which A or
+B advances on the whole till it reaches (3) the Crisis, on which follows
+(4) the decline of A or B towards (5) the Catastrophe. And it will be
+seen that the fourth and fifth parts repeat, though with a reversal of
+direction as regards A or B, the movement of the second and third,
+working towards the catastrophe as the second and third worked towards
+the crisis.
+
+In developing, illustrating and qualifying this statement, it will be
+best to begin with the tragedies in which the movement is most clear and
+simple. These are _Julius Caesar_ and _Macbeth_. In the former the
+fortunes of the conspiracy rise with vicissitudes up to the crisis of
+the assassination (III. i.); they then sink with vicissitudes to the
+catastrophe, where Brutus and Cassius perish. In the latter, Macbeth,
+hurrying, in spite of much inward resistance, to the murder of Duncan,
+attains the crown, the upward movement being extraordinarily rapid, and
+the crisis arriving early: his cause then turns slowly downward, and
+soon hastens to ruin. In both these tragedies the simplicity of the
+constructional effect, it should be noticed, depends in part on the fact
+that the contending forces may quite naturally be identified with
+certain persons, and partly again on the fact that the defeat of one
+side is the victory of the other. Octavius and Antony, Malcolm and
+Macduff, are left standing over the bodies of their foes.
+
+This is not so in _Romeo and Juliet_ and _Hamlet_, because here,
+although the hero perishes, the side opposed to him, being the more
+faulty or evil, cannot be allowed to triumph when he falls. Otherwise
+the type of construction is the same. The fortunes of Romeo and Juliet
+rise and culminate in their marriage (II. vi.), and then begin to
+decline before the opposition of their houses, which, aided by
+accidents, produces a catastrophe, but is thereupon converted into a
+remorseful reconciliation. Hamlet's cause reaches its zenith in the
+success of the play-scene (III. ii.). Thereafter the reaction makes way,
+and he perishes through the plot of the King and Laertes. But they are
+not allowed to survive their success.
+
+The construction in the remaining Roman plays follows the same plan, but
+in both plays (as in _Richard II._ and _Richard III._) it suffers from
+the intractable nature of the historical material, and is also
+influenced by other causes. In _Coriolanus_ the hero reaches the topmost
+point of success when he is named consul (II. iii.), and the rest of the
+play shows his decline and fall; but in this decline he attains again
+for a time extraordinary power, and triumphs, in a sense, over his
+original adversary, though he succumbs to another. In _Antony and
+Cleopatra_ the advance of the hero's cause depends on his freeing
+himself from the heroine, and he appears to have succeeded when he
+becomes reconciled to Octavius and marries Octavia (III. ii.); but he
+returns to Egypt and is gradually driven to his death, which involves
+that of the heroine.
+
+There remain two of the greatest of the tragedies, and in both of them a
+certain difficulty will be felt. _King Lear_ alone among these plays has
+a distinct double action. Besides this, it is impossible, I think, from
+the point of view of construction, to regard the hero as the leading
+figure. If we attempt to do so, we must either find the crisis in the
+First Act (for after it Lear's course is downward), and this is absurd;
+or else we must say that the usual movement is present but its direction
+is reversed, the hero's cause first sinking to the lowest point (in the
+Storm-scenes) and then rising again. But this also will not do; for
+though his fortunes may be said to rise again for a time, they rise only
+to fall once more to a catastrophe. The truth is, that after the First
+Act, which is really filled by the exposition, Lear suffers but hardly
+initiates action at all; and the right way to look at the matter, _from
+the point of view of construction_, is to regard Goneril, Regan and
+Edmund as the leading characters. It is they who, in the conflict,
+initiate action. Their fortune mounts to the crisis, where the old King
+is driven out into the storm and loses his reason, and where Gloster is
+blinded and expelled from his home (III. vi. and vii.). Then the
+counter-action begins to gather force, and their cause to decline; and,
+although they win the battle, they are involved in the catastrophe which
+they bring on Cordelia and Lear. Thus we may still find in _King Lear_
+the usual scheme of an ascending and a descending movement of one side
+in the conflict.
+
+The case of _Othello_ is more peculiar. In its whole constructional
+effect _Othello_ differs from the other tragedies, and the cause of this
+difference is not hard to find, and will be mentioned presently. But
+how, after it is found, are we to define the principle of the
+construction? On the one hand the usual method seems to show itself.
+Othello's fortune certainly advances in the early part of the play, and
+it may be considered to reach its topmost point in the exquisite joy of
+his reunion with Desdemona in Cyprus; while soon afterwards it begins to
+turn, and then falls to the catastrophe. But the topmost point thus
+comes very early (II. i.), and, moreover, is but faintly marked; indeed,
+it is scarcely felt as a crisis at all. And, what is still more
+significant, though reached by conflict, it is not reached by conflict
+with the force which afterwards destroys it. Iago, in the early scenes,
+is indeed shown to cherish a design against Othello, but it is not Iago
+against whom he has at first to assert himself, but Brabantio; and Iago
+does not even begin to poison his mind until the third scene of the
+Third Act.
+
+Can we then, on the other hand, following the precedent of _King Lear_,
+and remembering the probable chronological juxtaposition of the two
+plays, regard Iago as the leading figure from the point of view of
+construction? This might at first seem the right view; for it is the
+case that _Othello_ resembles _King Lear_ in having a hero more acted
+upon than acting, or rather a hero driven to act by being acted upon.
+But then, if Iago is taken as the leading figure, the usual mode of
+construction is plainly abandoned, for there will nowhere be a crisis
+followed by a descending movement. Iago's cause advances, at first
+slowly and quietly, then rapidly, but it does nothing but advance until
+the catastrophe swallows his dupe and him together. And this way of
+regarding the action does positive violence, I think, to our natural
+impressions of the earlier part of the play.
+
+I think, therefore, that the usual scheme is so far followed that the
+drama represents first the rise of the hero, and then his fall. But,
+however this question may be decided, one striking peculiarity remains,
+and is the cause of the unique effect of _Othello_. In the first half of
+the play the main conflict is merely incubating; then it bursts into
+life, and goes storming, without intermission or change of direction, to
+its close. Now, in this peculiarity _Othello_ is quite unlike the other
+tragedies; and in the consequent effect, which is that the second half
+of the drama is immeasurably more exciting than the first, it is
+approached only by _Antony and Cleopatra_. I shall therefore reserve it
+for separate consideration, though in proceeding to speak further of
+Shakespeare's treatment of the tragic conflict I shall have to mention
+some devices which are used in _Othello_ as well as in the other
+tragedies.
+
+
+3
+
+Shakespeare's general plan, we have seen, is to show one set of forces
+advancing, in secret or open opposition to the other, to some decisive
+success, and then driven downward to defeat by the reaction it provokes.
+And the advantages of this plan, as seen in such a typical instance as
+_Julius Caesar_, are manifest. It conveys the movement of the conflict
+to the mind with great clearness and force. It helps to produce the
+impression that in his decline and fall the doer's act is returning on
+his own head. And, finally, as used by Shakespeare, it makes the first
+half of the play intensely interesting and dramatic. Action which
+effects a striking change in an existing situation is naturally watched
+with keen interest; and this we find in some of these tragedies. And the
+spectacle, which others exhibit, of a purpose forming itself and, in
+spite of outward obstacles and often of inward resistance, forcing its
+way onward to a happy consummation or a terrible deed, not only gives
+scope to that psychological subtlety in which Shakespeare is scarcely
+rivalled, but is also dramatic in the highest degree.
+
+But when the crisis has been reached there come difficulties and
+dangers, which, if we put Shakespeare for the moment out of mind, are
+easily seen. An immediate and crushing counter-action would, no doubt,
+sustain the interest, but it would precipitate the catastrophe, and
+leave a feeling that there has been too long a preparation for a final
+effect so brief. What seems necessary is a momentary pause, followed by
+a counter-action which mounts at first slowly, and afterwards, as it
+gathers force, with quickening speed. And yet the result of this
+arrangement, it would seem, must be, for a time, a decided slackening of
+tension. Nor is this the only difficulty. The persons who represent the
+counter-action and now take the lead, are likely to be comparatively
+unfamiliar, and therefore unwelcome, to the audience; and, even if
+familiar, they are almost sure to be at first, if not permanently, less
+interesting than those who figured in the ascending movement, and on
+whom attention has been fixed. Possibly, too, their necessary prominence
+may crowd the hero into the back-ground. Hence the point of danger in
+this method of construction seems to lie in that section of the play
+which follows the crisis and has not yet approached the catastrophe. And
+this section will usually comprise the Fourth Act, together, in some
+cases, with a part of the Third and a part of the Fifth.
+
+Shakespeare was so masterly a playwright, and had so wonderful a power
+of giving life to unpromising subjects, that to a large extent he was
+able to surmount this difficulty. But illustrations of it are easily to
+be found in his tragedies, and it is not always surmounted. In almost
+all of them we are conscious of that momentary pause in the action,
+though, as we shall see, it does not generally occur _immediately_ after
+the crisis. Sometimes he allows himself to be driven to keep the hero
+off the stage for a long time while the counter-action is rising;
+Macbeth, Hamlet and Coriolanus during about 450 lines, Lear for nearly
+500, Romeo for about 550 (it matters less here, because Juliet is quite
+as important as Romeo). How can a drama in which this happens compete,
+in its latter part, with _Othello_? And again, how can deliberations
+between Octavius, Antony and Lepidus, between Malcolm and Macduff,
+between the Capulets, between Laertes and the King, keep us at the
+pitch, I do not say of the crisis, but even of the action which led up
+to it? Good critics--writers who have criticised Shakespeare's dramas
+from within, instead of applying to them some standard ready-made by
+themselves or derived from dramas and a theatre of quite other kinds
+than his--have held that some of his greatest tragedies fall off in the
+Fourth Act, and that one or two never wholly recover themselves. And I
+believe most readers would find, if they examined their impressions,
+that to their minds _Julius Caesar_, _Hamlet_, _King Lear_ and _Macbeth_
+have all a tendency to 'drag' in this section of the play, and that the
+first and perhaps also the last of these four fail even in the
+catastrophe to reach the height of the greatest scenes that have
+preceded the Fourth Act. I will not ask how far these impressions are
+justified. The difficulties in question will become clearer and will
+gain in interest if we look rather at the means which have been employed
+to meet them, and which certainly have in part, at least, overcome them.
+
+(_a_) The first of these is always strikingly effective, sometimes
+marvellously so. The crisis in which the ascending force reaches its
+zenith is followed quickly, or even without the slightest pause, by a
+reverse or counter-blow not less emphatic and in some cases even more
+exciting. And the effect is to make us feel a sudden and tragic change
+in the direction of the movement, which, after ascending more or less
+gradually, now turns sharply downward. To the assassination of Caesar
+(III. i.) succeeds the scene in the Forum (III. ii.), where Antony
+carries the people away in a storm of sympathy with the dead man and of
+fury against the conspirators. We have hardly realised their victory
+before we are forced to anticipate their ultimate defeat and to take the
+liveliest interest in their chief antagonist. In _Hamlet_ the thrilling
+success of the play-scene (III. ii.) is met and undone at once by the
+counter-stroke of Hamlet's failure to take vengeance (III. iii.) and his
+misfortune in killing Polonius (III. iv.). Coriolanus has no sooner
+gained the consulship than he is excited to frenzy by the tribunes and
+driven into exile. On the marriage of Romeo follows immediately the
+brawl which leads to Mercutio's death and the banishment of the hero
+(II. vi. and III. i.). In all of these instances excepting that of
+_Hamlet_ the scene of the counter-stroke is at least as exciting as that
+of the crisis, perhaps more so. Most people, if asked to mention the
+scene that occupies the _centre_ of the action in _Julius Caesar_ and in
+_Coriolanus_, would mention the scenes of Antony's speech and
+Coriolanus' banishment. Thus that apparently necessary pause in the
+action does not, in any of these dramas, come directly after the crisis.
+It is deferred; and in several cases it is by various devices deferred
+for some little time; _e.g._ in _Romeo and Juliet_ till the hero has
+left Verona, and Juliet is told that her marriage with Paris is to take
+place 'next Thursday morn' (end of Act III.); in _Macbeth_ till the
+murder of Duncan has been followed by that of Banquo, and this by the
+banquet-scene. Hence the point where this pause occurs is very rarely
+reached before the end of the Third Act.
+
+(_b_) Either at this point, or in the scene of the counter-stroke which
+precedes it, we sometimes find a peculiar effect. We are reminded of the
+state of affairs in which the conflict began. The opening of _Julius
+Caesar_ warned us that, among a people so unstable and so easily led
+this way or that, the enterprise of Brutus is hopeless; the days of the
+Republic are done. In the scene of Antony's speech we see this same
+people again. At the beginning of _Antony and Cleopatra_ the hero is
+about to leave Cleopatra for Rome. Where the play takes, as it were, a
+fresh start after the crisis, he leaves Octavia for Egypt. In _Hamlet_,
+when the counter-stroke succeeds to the crisis, the Ghost, who had
+appeared in the opening scenes, reappears. Macbeth's action in the first
+part of the tragedy followed on the prediction of the Witches who
+promised him the throne. When the action moves forward again after the
+banquet-scene the Witches appear once more, and make those fresh
+promises which again drive him forward. This repetition of a first
+effect produces a fateful feeling. It generally also stimulates
+expectation as to the new movement about to begin. In _Macbeth_ the
+scene is, in addition, of the greatest consequence from the purely
+theatrical point of view.
+
+(_c_) It has yet another function. It shows, in Macbeth's furious
+irritability and purposeless savagery, the internal reaction which
+accompanies the outward decline of his fortunes. And in other plays also
+the exhibition of such inner changes forms a means by which interest is
+sustained in this difficult section of a tragedy. There is no point in
+_Hamlet_ where we feel more hopeless than that where the hero, having
+missed his chance, moralises over his irresolution and determines to
+cherish now only thoughts of blood, and then departs without an effort
+for England. One purpose, again, of the quarrel-scene between Brutus and
+Cassius (IV. iii), as also of the appearance of Caesar's ghost just
+afterwards, is to indicate the inward changes. Otherwise the
+introduction of this famous and wonderful scene can hardly be defended
+on strictly dramatic grounds. No one would consent to part with it, and
+it is invaluable in sustaining interest during the progress of the
+reaction, but it is an episode, the removal of which would not affect
+the actual sequence of events (unless we may hold that, but for the
+emotion caused by the quarrel and reconciliation, Cassius would not have
+allowed Brutus to overcome his objection to the fatal policy of offering
+battle at Philippi).
+
+(_d_) The quarrel-scene illustrates yet another favourite expedient. In
+this section of a tragedy Shakespeare often appeals to an emotion
+different from any of those excited in the first half of the play, and
+so provides novelty and generally also relief. As a rule this new
+emotion is pathetic; and the pathos is not terrible or lacerating, but,
+even if painful, is accompanied by the sense of beauty and by an outflow
+of admiration or affection, which come with an inexpressible sweetness
+after the tension of the crisis and the first counter-stroke. So it is
+with the reconciliation of Brutus and Cassius, and the arrival of the
+news of Portia's death. The most famous instance of this effect is the
+scene (IV. vii.) where Lear wakes from sleep and finds Cordelia bending
+over him, perhaps the most tear-compelling passage in literature.
+Another is the short scene (IV. ii.) in which the talk of Lady Macduff
+and her little boy is interrupted by the entrance of the murderers, a
+passage of touching beauty and heroism. Another is the introduction of
+Ophelia in her madness (twice in different parts of IV. v.), where the
+effect, though intensely pathetic, is beautiful and moving rather than
+harrowing; and this effect is repeated in a softer tone in the
+description of Ophelia's death (end of Act IV.). And in _Othello_ the
+passage where pathos of _this_ kind reaches its height is certainly that
+where Desdemona and Emilia converse, and the willow-song is sung, on the
+eve of the catastrophe (IV. iii.).
+
+(_e_) Sometimes, again, in this section of a tragedy we find humorous or
+semi-humorous passages. On the whole such passages occur most frequently
+in the early or middle part of the play, which naturally grows more
+sombre as it nears the close; but their occasional introduction in the
+Fourth Act, and even later, affords variety and relief, and also
+heightens by contrast the tragic feelings. For example, there is a touch
+of comedy in the conversation of Lady Macduff with her little boy.
+Purely and delightfully humorous are the talk and behaviour of the
+servants in that admirable scene where Coriolanus comes disguised in
+mean apparel to the house of Aufidius (IV. v.); of a more mingled kind
+is the effect of the discussion between Menenius and the sentinels in V.
+ii.; and in the very middle of the supreme scene between the hero,
+Volumnia and Virgilia, little Marcius makes us burst out laughing (V.
+iii.) A little before the catastrophe in _Hamlet_ comes the grave-digger
+passage, a passage ever welcome, but of a length which could hardly be
+defended on purely dramatic grounds; and still later, occupying some
+hundred and twenty lines of the very last scene, we have the chatter of
+Osric with Hamlet's mockery of it. But the acme of audacity is reached
+in _Antony and Cleopatra_, where, quite close to the end, the old
+countryman who brings the asps to Cleopatra discourses on the virtues
+and vices of the worm, and where his last words, 'Yes, forsooth: I wish
+you joy o' the worm,' are followed, without the intervention of a line,
+by the glorious speech,
+
+     Give me my robe; put on my crown; I have
+     Immortal longings in me....
+
+In some of the instances of pathos or humour just mentioned we have been
+brought to that part of the play which immediately precedes, or even
+contains, the catastrophe. And I will add at once three remarks which
+refer specially to this final section of a tragedy.
+
+(_f_) In several plays Shakespeare makes here an appeal which in his own
+time was evidently powerful: he introduces scenes of battle. This is the
+case in _Richard III._, _Julius Caesar_, _King Lear_, _Macbeth_ and
+_Antony and Cleopatra_. Richard, Brutus and Cassius, and Macbeth die on
+the battlefield. Even if his use of this expedient were not enough to
+show that battle-scenes were extremely popular in the Elizabethan
+theatre, we know it from other sources. It is a curious comment on the
+futility of our spectacular effects that in our theatre these scenes, in
+which we strive after an 'illusion' of which the Elizabethans never
+dreamt, produce comparatively little excitement, and to many spectators
+are even somewhat distasteful.[22] And although some of them thrill the
+imagination of the reader, they rarely, I think, quite satisfy the
+_dramatic_ sense. Perhaps this is partly because a battle is not the
+most favourable place for the exhibition of tragic character; and it is
+worth notice that Brutus, Cassius and Antony do not die fighting, but
+commit suicide after defeat. The actual battle, however, does make us
+feel the greatness of Antony, and still more does it help us to regard
+Richard and Macbeth in their day of doom as heroes, and to mingle
+sympathy and enthusiastic admiration with desire for their defeat.
+
+(_g_) In some of the tragedies, again, an expedient is used, which
+Freytag has pointed out (though he sometimes finds it, I think, where it
+is not really employed). Shakespeare very rarely makes the least attempt
+to surprise by his catastrophes. They are felt to be inevitable, though
+the precise way in which they will be brought about is not, of course,
+foreseen. Occasionally, however, where we dread the catastrophe because
+we love the hero, a moment occurs, just before it, in which a gleam of
+false hope lights up the darkening scene; and, though we know it is
+false, it affects us. Far the most remarkable example is to be found in
+the final Act of _King Lear_. Here the victory of Edgar and the deaths
+of Edmund and the two sisters have almost made us forget the design on
+the lives of Lear and Cordelia. Even when we are reminded of it there is
+still room for hope that Edgar, who rushes away to the prison, will be
+in time to save them; and, however familiar we are with the play, the
+sudden entrance of Lear, with Cordelia dead in his arms, comes on us
+with a shock. Much slighter, but quite perceptible, is the effect of
+Antony's victory on land, and of the last outburst of pride and joy as
+he and Cleopatra meet (IV. viii.). The frank apology of Hamlet to
+Laertes, their reconciliation, and a delusive appearance of quiet and
+even confident firmness in the tone of the hero's conversation with
+Horatio, almost blind us to our better knowledge, and give to the
+catastrophe an added pain. Those in the audience who are ignorant of
+_Macbeth_, and who take more simply than most readers now can do the
+mysterious prophecies concerning Birnam Wood and the man not born of
+woman, feel, I imagine, just before the catastrophe, a false fear that
+the hero may yet escape.
+
+(_h_) I will mention only one point more. In some cases Shakespeare
+spreads the catastrophe out, so to speak, over a considerable space, and
+thus shortens that difficult section which has to show the development
+of the counter-action. This is possible only where there is, besides the
+hero, some character who engages our interest in the highest degree, and
+with whose fate his own is bound up. Thus the murder of Desdemona is
+separated by some distance from the death of Othello. The most
+impressive scene in _Macbeth_, after that of Duncan's murder, is the
+sleep-walking scene; and it may truly, if not literally, be said to show
+the catastrophe of Lady Macbeth. Yet it is the opening scene of the
+Fifth Act, and a number of scenes in which Macbeth's fate is still
+approaching intervene before the close. Finally, in _Antony and
+Cleopatra_ the heroine equals the hero in importance, and here the death
+of Antony actually occurs in the Fourth Act, and the whole of the Fifth
+is devoted to Cleopatra.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Let us now turn to _Othello_ and consider briefly its exceptional scheme
+of construction. The advantage of this scheme is obvious. In the second
+half of the tragedy there is no danger of 'dragging,' of any awkward
+pause, any undue lowering of pitch, any need of scenes which, however
+fine, are more or less episodic. The tension is extreme, and it is
+relaxed only for brief intervals to permit of some slight relief. From
+the moment when Iago begins to poison Othello's mind we hold our breath.
+_Othello_ from this point onwards is certainly the most exciting of
+Shakespeare's plays, unless possibly _Macbeth_ in its first part may be
+held to rival it. And _Othello_ is such a masterpiece that we are
+scarcely conscious of any disadvantage attending its method of
+construction, and may even wonder why Shakespeare employed this
+method--at any rate in its purity--in this tragedy alone. Nor is it any
+answer to say that it would not elsewhere have suited his material. Even
+if this be granted, how was it that he only once chose a story to which
+this method was appropriate? To his eyes, or for his instinct, there
+must have been some disadvantage in it. And dangers in it are in fact
+not hard to see.
+
+In the first place, where the conflict develops very slowly, or, as in
+_Othello_, remains in a state of incubation during the first part of a
+tragedy, that part cannot produce the tension proper to the
+corresponding part of a tragedy like _Macbeth_, and may even run the
+risk of being somewhat flat. This seems obvious, and it is none the less
+true because in _Othello_ the difficulty is overcome. We may even see
+that in _Othello_ a difficulty was felt. The First Act is full of stir,
+but it is so because Shakespeare has filled it with a kind of
+preliminary conflict between the hero and Brabantio,--a personage who
+then vanishes from the stage. The long first scene of the Second Act is
+largely occupied with mere conversations, artfully drawn out to
+dimensions which can scarcely be considered essential to the plot. These
+expedients are fully justified by their success, and nothing more
+consummate in their way is to be found in Shakespeare than Othello's
+speech to the Senate and Iago's two talks with Roderigo. But the fact
+that Shakespeare can make a plan succeed does not show that the plan is,
+abstractedly considered, a good plan; and if the scheme of construction
+in _Othello_ were placed, in the shape of a mere outline, before a
+play-wright ignorant of the actual drama, he would certainly, I believe,
+feel grave misgivings about the first half of the play.
+
+There is a second difficulty in the scheme. When the middle of the
+tragedy is reached, the audience is not what it was at the beginning. It
+has been attending for some time, and has been through a certain amount
+of agitation. The extreme tension which now arises may therefore easily
+tire and displease it, all the more if the matter which produces the
+tension is very painful, if the catastrophe is not less so, and if the
+limits of the remainder of the play (not to speak of any other
+consideration) permit of very little relief. It is one thing to watch
+the scene of Duncan's assassination at the beginning of the Second Act,
+and another thing to watch the murder of Desdemona at the beginning of
+the Fifth. If Shakespeare has wholly avoided this difficulty in
+_Othello_, it is by treating the first part of the play in such a manner
+that the sympathies excited are predominantly pleasant and therefore not
+exhausting. The scene in the Council Chamber, and the scene of the
+reunion at Cyprus, give almost unmixed happiness to the audience;
+however repulsive Iago may be, the humour of his gulling of Roderigo is
+agreeable; even the scene of Cassio's intoxication is not, on the whole,
+painful. Hence we come to the great temptation-scene, where the conflict
+emerges into life (III. iii.), with nerves unshaken and feelings much
+fresher than those with which we greet the banquet-scene in _Macbeth_
+(III. iv.), or the first of the storm-scenes in _King Lear_ (III. i.).
+The same skill may be observed in _Antony and Cleopatra_, where, as we
+saw, the second half of the tragedy is the more exciting. But, again,
+the success due to Shakespeare's skill does not show that the scheme of
+construction is free from a characteristic danger; and on the whole it
+would appear to be best fitted for a plot which, though it may cause
+painful agitation as it nears the end, actually ends with a solution
+instead of a catastrophe.
+
+But for Shakespeare's scanty use of this method there may have been a
+deeper, though probably an unconscious, reason. The method suits a plot
+based on intrigue. It may produce intense suspense. It may stir most
+powerfully the tragic feelings of pity and fear. And it throws into
+relief that aspect of tragedy in which great or beautiful lives seem
+caught in the net of fate. But it is apt to be less favourable to the
+exhibition of character, to show less clearly how an act returns upon
+the agent, and to produce less strongly the impression of an inexorable
+order working in the passions and actions of men, and labouring through
+their agony and waste towards good. Now, it seems clear from his
+tragedies that what appealed most to Shakespeare was this latter class
+of effects. I do not ask here whether _Othello_ fails to produce, in the
+same degree as the other tragedies, these impressions; but Shakespeare's
+preference for them may have been one reason why he habitually chose a
+scheme of construction which produces in the final Acts but little of
+strained suspense, and presents the catastrophe as a thing foreseen and
+following with a psychological and moral necessity on the action
+exhibited in the first part of the tragedy.
+
+
+4
+
+The more minute details of construction cannot well be examined here,
+and I will not pursue the subject further. But its discussion suggests a
+question which will have occurred to some of my hearers. They may have
+asked themselves whether I have not used the words 'art' and 'device'
+and 'expedient' and 'method' too boldly, as though Shakespeare were a
+conscious artist, and not rather a writer who constructed in obedience
+to an extraordinary dramatic instinct, as he composed mainly by
+inspiration. And a brief explanation on this head will enable me to
+allude to a few more points, chiefly of construction, which are not too
+technical for a lecture.
+
+In speaking, for convenience, of devices and expedients, I did not
+intend to imply that Shakespeare always deliberately aimed at the
+effects which he produced. But _no_ artist always does this, and I see
+no reason to doubt that Shakespeare often did it, or to suppose that his
+method of constructing and composing differed, except in degree, from
+that of the most 'conscious' of artists. The antithesis of art and
+inspiration, though not meaningless, is often most misleading.
+Inspiration is surely not incompatible with considerate workmanship. The
+two may be severed, but they need not be so, and where a genuinely
+poetic result is being produced they cannot be so. The glow of a first
+conception must in some measure survive or rekindle itself in the work
+of planning and executing; and what is called a technical expedient may
+'come' to a man with as sudden a glory as a splendid image. Verse may be
+easy and unpremeditated, as Milton says his was, and yet many a word in
+it may be changed many a time, and the last change be more 'inspired'
+than the original. The difference between poets in these matters is no
+doubt considerable, and sometimes important, but it can only be a
+difference of less and more. It is probable that Shakespeare often wrote
+fluently, for Jonson (a better authority than Heminge and Condell) says
+so; and for anything we can tell he may also have constructed with
+unusual readiness. But we know that he revised and re-wrote (for
+instance in _Love's Labour's Lost_ and _Romeo and Juliet_ and _Hamlet_);
+it is almost impossible that he can have worked out the plots of his
+best plays without much reflection and many experiments; and it appears
+to me scarcely more possible to mistake the signs of deliberate care in
+some of his famous speeches. If a 'conscious artist' means one who holds
+his work away from him, scrutinises and judges it, and, if need be,
+alters it and alters it till it comes as near satisfying him as he can
+make it, I am sure that Shakespeare frequently employed such conscious
+art. If it means, again, an artist who consciously aims at the effects
+he produces, what ground have we for doubting that he frequently
+employed such art, though probably less frequently than a good many
+other poets?
+
+But perhaps the notion of a 'conscious artist' in drama is that of one
+who studies the theory of the art, and even writes with an eye to its
+'rules.' And we know it was long a favourite idea that Shakespeare was
+totally ignorant of the 'rules.' Yet this is quite incredible. The
+rules referred to, such as they were, were not buried in Aristotle's
+Greek nor even hidden away in Italian treatises. He could find pretty
+well all of them in a book so current and famous as Sidney's _Defence
+of Poetry_. Even if we suppose that he refused to open this book
+(which is most unlikely), how could he possibly remain ignorant of the
+rules in a society of actors and dramatists and amateurs who must have
+been incessantly talking about plays and play-writing, and some of
+whom were ardent champions of the rules and full of contempt for the
+lawlessness of the popular drama? Who can doubt that at the Mermaid
+Shakespeare heard from Jonson's lips much more censure of his offences
+against 'art' than Jonson ever confided to Drummond or to paper? And
+is it not most probable that those battles between the two which
+Fuller imagines, were waged often on the field of dramatic criticism?
+If Shakespeare, then, broke some of the 'rules,' it was not from
+ignorance. Probably he refused, on grounds of art itself, to trouble
+himself with rules derived from forms of drama long extinct. And it is
+not unlikely that he was little interested in theory as such, and more
+than likely that he was impatient of pedantic distinctions between
+'pastoral-comical, historical-pastoral, tragical-historical,
+tragical-comical-historical-pastoral, scene individable or poem
+unlimited.' But that would not prove that he never reflected on his
+art, or could not explain, if he cared to, what _he_ thought would be
+good general rules for the drama of his own time. He could give advice
+about play-acting. Why should we suppose that he could not give advice
+about play-making?
+
+Still Shakespeare, though in some considerable degree a 'conscious'
+artist, frequently sins against art; and if his sins were not due to
+ignorance or inspiration, they must be accounted for otherwise. Neither
+can there be much doubt about their causes (for they have more than one
+cause), as we shall see if we take some illustrations of the defects
+themselves.
+
+Among these are not to be reckoned certain things which in dramas
+written at the present time would rightly be counted defects. There are,
+for example, in most Elizabethan plays peculiarities of construction
+which would injure a play written for our stage but were perfectly
+well-fitted for that very different stage,--a stage on which again some
+of the best-constructed plays of our time would appear absurdly faulty.
+Or take the charge of improbability. Shakespeare certainly has
+improbabilities which are defects. They are most frequent in the winding
+up of his comedies (and how many comedies are there in the world which
+end satisfactorily?). But his improbabilities are rarely psychological,
+and in some of his plays there occurs one kind of improbability which is
+no defect, but simply a characteristic which has lost in our day much of
+its former attraction. I mean that the story, in most of the comedies
+and many of the tragedies of the Elizabethans, was _intended_ to be
+strange and wonderful. These plays were tales of romance dramatised, and
+they were meant in part to satisfy the same love of wonder to which the
+romances appealed. It is no defect in the Arthurian legends, or the old
+French romances, or many of the stories in the _Decameron_, that they
+are improbable: it is a virtue. To criticise them as though they were of
+the same species as a realistic novel, is, we should all say, merely
+stupid. Is it anything else to criticise in the same way _Twelfth Night_
+or _As You Like It_? And so, even when the difference between comedy and
+tragedy is allowed for, the improbability of the opening of _King Lear_,
+so often censured, is no defect. It is not out of character, it is only
+extremely unusual and strange. But it was meant to be so; like the
+marriage of the black Othello with Desdemona, the Venetian senator's
+daughter.
+
+To come then to real defects, (_a_) one may be found in places where
+Shakespeare strings together a number of scenes, some very short, in
+which the _dramatis personae_ are frequently changed; as though a
+novelist were to tell his story in a succession of short chapters, in
+which he flitted from one group of his characters to another. This
+method shows itself here and there in the pure tragedies (_e.g._ in the
+last Act of _Macbeth_), but it appears most decidedly where the
+historical material was undramatic, as in the middle part of _Antony and
+Cleopatra_. It was made possible by the absence of scenery, and
+doubtless Shakespeare used it because it was the easiest way out of a
+difficulty. But, considered abstractedly, it is a defective method, and,
+even as used by Shakespeare, it sometimes reminds us of the merely
+narrative arrangement common in plays before his time.
+
+(_b_) We may take next the introduction or excessive development of
+matter neither required by the plot nor essential to the exhibition of
+character: _e.g._ the references in _Hamlet_ to theatre-quarrels of the
+day, and the length of the player's speech and also of Hamlet's
+directions to him respecting the delivery of the lines to be inserted in
+the 'Murder of Gonzago.' All this was probably of great interest at the
+time when _Hamlet_ was first presented; most of it we should be very
+sorry to miss; some of it seems to bring us close to Shakespeare
+himself; but who can defend it from the point of view of constructive
+art?
+
+(_c_) Again, we may look at Shakespeare's soliloquies. It will be agreed
+that in listening to a soliloquy we ought never to feel that we are
+being addressed. And in this respect, as in others, many of the
+soliloquies are master-pieces. But certainly in some the purpose of
+giving information lies bare, and in one or two the actor openly speaks
+to the audience. Such faults are found chiefly in the early plays,
+though there is a glaring instance at the end of Belarius's speech in
+_Cymbeline_ (III. iii. 99 ff.), and even in the mature tragedies
+something of this kind may be traced. Let anyone compare, for example,
+Edmund's soliloquy in _King Lear_, I. ii., 'This is the excellent
+foppery of the world,' with Edgar's in II. iii., and he will be
+conscious that in the latter the purpose of giving information is
+imperfectly disguised.[23]
+
+(_d_) It cannot be denied, further, that in many of Shakespeare's plays,
+if not in all, there are inconsistencies and contradictions, and also
+that questions are suggested to the reader which it is impossible for
+him to answer with certainty. For instance, some of the indications of
+the lapse of time between Othello's marriage and the events of the later
+Acts flatly contradict one another; and it is impossible to make out
+whether Hamlet was at Court or at the University when his father was
+murdered. But it should be noticed that often what seems a defect of
+this latter kind is not really a defect. For instance, the difficulty
+about Hamlet's age (even if it cannot be resolved by the text alone) did
+not exist for Shakespeare's audience. The moment Burbage entered it must
+have been clear whether the hero was twenty or thirty. And in like
+manner many questions of dramatic interpretation which trouble us could
+never have arisen when the plays were first produced, for the actor
+would be instructed by the author how to render any critical and
+possibly ambiguous passage. (I have heard it remarked, and the remark I
+believe is just, that Shakespeare seems to have relied on such
+instructions less than most of his contemporaries; one fact out of
+several which might be adduced to prove that he did not regard his plays
+as mere stage-dramas of the moment.)
+
+(_e_) To turn to another field, the early critics were no doubt often
+provokingly wrong when they censured the language of particular passages
+in Shakespeare as obscure, inflated, tasteless, or 'pestered with
+metaphors'; but they were surely right in the general statement that his
+language often shows these faults. And this is a subject which later
+criticism has never fairly faced and examined.
+
+(_f_) Once more, to say that Shakespeare makes all his serious
+characters talk alike,[24] and that he constantly speaks through the
+mouths of his _dramatis personae_ without regard to their individual
+natures, would be to exaggerate absurdly; but it is true that in his
+earlier plays these faults are traceable in some degree, and even in
+_Hamlet_ there are striking passages where dramatic appropriateness is
+sacrificed to some other object. When Laertes speaks the lines
+beginning,
+
+     For nature, crescent, does not grow alone
+     In thews and bulk,
+
+who can help feeling that Shakespeare is speaking rather than Laertes?
+Or when the player-king discourses for more than twenty lines on the
+instability of human purpose, and when King Claudius afterwards insists
+to Laertes on the same subject at almost equal length, who does not see
+that Shakespeare, thinking but little of dramatic fitness, wishes in
+part simply to write poetry, and partly to impress on the audience
+thoughts which will help them to understand, not the player-king nor yet
+King Claudius, but Hamlet himself, who, on his side,--and here quite in
+character--has already enlarged on the same topic in the most famous of
+his soliloquies?
+
+(_g_) Lastly, like nearly all the dramatists of his day and of times
+much earlier, Shakespeare was fond of 'gnomic' passages, and introduces
+them probably not more freely than his readers like, but more freely
+than, I suppose, a good play-wright now would care to do. These
+passages, it may be observed, are frequently rhymed (_e.g._ _Othello_,
+I. iii. 201 ff., II. i. 149 ff.). Sometimes they were printed in early
+editions with inverted commas round them, as are in the First Quarto
+Polonius's 'few precepts' to Laertes.
+
+If now we ask whence defects like these arose, we shall observe that
+some of them are shared by the majority of Shakespeare's contemporaries,
+and abound in the dramas immediately preceding his time. They are
+characteristics of an art still undeveloped, and, no doubt, were not
+perceived to be defects. But though it is quite probable that in regard
+to one or two kinds of imperfection (such as the superabundance of
+'gnomic' passages) Shakespeare himself erred thus ignorantly, it is very
+unlikely that in most cases he did so, unless in the first years of his
+career of authorship. And certainly he never can have thought it
+artistic to leave inconsistencies, obscurities, or passages of bombast
+in his work. Most of the defects in his writings must be due to
+indifference or want of care.
+
+I do not say that all were so. In regard, for example, to his occasional
+bombast and other errors of diction, it seems hardly doubtful that his
+perception was sometimes at fault, and that, though he used the English
+language like no one else, he had not that _sureness_ of taste in words
+which has been shown by some much smaller writers. And it seems not
+unlikely that here he suffered from his comparative want of
+'learning,'--that is, of familiarity with the great writers of
+antiquity. But nine-tenths of his defects are not, I believe, the errors
+of an inspired genius, ignorant of art, but the sins of a great but
+negligent artist. He was often, no doubt, over-worked and pressed for
+time. He knew that the immense majority of his audience were incapable
+of distinguishing between rough and finished work. He often felt the
+degradation of having to live by pleasing them. Probably in hours of
+depression he was quite indifferent to fame, and perhaps in another mood
+the whole business of play-writing seemed to him a little thing. None of
+these thoughts and feelings influenced him when his subject had caught
+hold of him. To imagine that _then_ he 'winged his roving flight' for
+'gain' or 'glory,' or wrote from any cause on earth but the necessity of
+expression, with all its pains and raptures, is mere folly. He was
+possessed: his mind must have been in a white heat: he worked, no doubt,
+with the _furia_ of Michael Angelo. And if he did not succeed at
+once--and how can even he have always done so?--he returned to the
+matter again and again. Such things as the scenes of Duncan's murder or
+Othello's temptation, such speeches as those of the Duke to Claudio and
+of Claudio to his sister about death, were not composed in an hour and
+tossed aside; and if they have defects, they have not what Shakespeare
+thought defects. Nor is it possible that his astonishingly individual
+conceptions of character can have been struck out at a heat: prolonged
+and repeated thought must have gone to them. But of small
+inconsistencies in the plot he was often quite careless. He seems to
+have finished off some of his comedies with a hasty and even
+contemptuous indifference, as if it mattered nothing how the people got
+married, or even who married whom, so long as enough were married
+somehow. And often, when he came to parts of his scheme that were
+necessary but not interesting to him, he wrote with a slack hand, like a
+craftsman of genius who knows that his natural gift and acquired skill
+will turn out something more than good enough for his audience: wrote
+probably fluently but certainly negligently, sometimes only half saying
+what he meant, and sometimes saying the opposite, and now and then, when
+passion was required, lapsing into bombast because he knew he must
+heighten his style but would not take the trouble to inflame his
+imagination. It may truly be said that what injures such passages is not
+inspiration, but the want of it. But, as they are mostly passages where
+no poet could expect to be inspired, it is even more true to say that
+here Shakespeare lacked the conscience of the artist who is determined
+to make everything as good as he can. Such poets as Milton, Pope,
+Tennyson, habitually show this conscience. They left probably scarcely
+anything that they felt they could improve. No one could dream of saying
+that of Shakespeare.
+
+Hence comes what is perhaps the chief difficulty in interpreting his
+works. Where his power or art is fully exerted it really does resemble
+that of nature. It organises and vitalises its product from the centre
+outward to the minutest markings on the surface, so that when you turn
+upon it the most searching light you can command, when you dissect it
+and apply to it the test of a microscope, still you find in it nothing
+formless, general or vague, but everywhere structure, character,
+individuality. In this his great things, which seem to come whenever
+they are wanted, have no companions in literature except the few
+greatest things in Dante; and it is a fatal error to allow his
+carelessness elsewhere to make one doubt whether here one is not seeking
+more than can be found. It is very possible to look for subtlety in the
+wrong places in Shakespeare, but in the right places it is not possible
+to find too much. But then this characteristic, which is one source of
+his endless attraction, is also a source of perplexity. For in those
+parts of his plays which show him neither in his most intense nor in his
+most negligent mood, we are often unable to decide whether something
+that seems inconsistent, indistinct, feeble, exaggerated, is really so,
+or whether it was definitely meant to be as it is, and has an intention
+which we ought to be able to divine; whether, for example, we have
+before us some unusual trait in character, some abnormal movement of
+mind, only surprising to us because we understand so very much less of
+human nature than Shakespeare did, or whether he wanted to get his work
+done and made a slip, or in using an old play adopted hastily something
+that would not square with his own conception, or even refused to
+trouble himself with minutiae which we notice only because we study him,
+but which nobody ever notices in a stage performance. We know well
+enough what Shakespeare is doing when at the end of _Measure for
+Measure_ he marries Isabella to the Duke--and a scandalous proceeding it
+is; but who can ever feel sure that the doubts which vex him as to some
+not unimportant points in _Hamlet_ are due to his own want of eyesight
+or to Shakespeare's want of care?
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[Footnote 16: The famous critics of the Romantic Revival seem to have
+paid very little attention to this subject. Mr. R.G. Moulton has written
+an interesting book on _Shakespeare as a Dramatic Artist_ (1885). In
+parts of my analysis I am much indebted to Gustav Freytag's _Technik des
+Dramas_, a book which deserves to be much better known than it appears
+to be to Englishmen interested in the drama. I may add, for the benefit
+of classical scholars, that Freytag has a chapter on Sophocles. The
+reader of his book will easily distinguish, if he cares to, the places
+where I follow Freytag, those where I differ from him, and those where I
+write in independence of him. I may add that in speaking of construction
+I have thought it best to assume in my hearers no previous knowledge of
+the subject; that I have not attempted to discuss how much of what is
+said of Shakespeare would apply also to other dramatists; and that I
+have illustrated from the tragedies generally, not only from the chosen
+four.]
+
+[Footnote 17: This word throughout the lecture bears the sense it has
+here, which, of course, is not its usual dramatic sense.]
+
+[Footnote 18: In the same way a comedy will consist of three parts,
+showing the 'situation,' the 'complication' or 'entanglement,' and the
+_dénouement_ or 'solution.']
+
+[Footnote 19: It is possible, of course, to open the tragedy with the
+conflict already begun, but Shakespeare never does so.]
+
+[Footnote 20: When the subject comes from English history, and
+especially when the play forms one of a series, some knowledge may be
+assumed. So in _Richard III._ Even in _Richard II._ not a little
+knowledge seems to be assumed, and this fact points to the existence of
+a popular play on the earlier part of Richard's reign. Such a play
+exists, though it is not clear that it is a genuine Elizabethan work.
+See the _Jahrbuch d. deutschen Sh.-gesellschaft_ for 1899.]
+
+[Footnote 21: This is one of several reasons why many people enjoy
+reading him, who, on the whole, dislike reading plays. A main cause of
+this very general dislike is that the reader has not a lively enough
+imagination to carry him with pleasure through the exposition, though in
+the theatre, where his imagination is helped, he would experience little
+difficulty.]
+
+[Footnote 22: The end of _Richard III._ is perhaps an exception.]
+
+[Footnote 23: I do not discuss the general question of the justification
+of soliloquy, for it concerns not Shakespeare only, but practically all
+dramatists down to quite recent times. I will only remark that neither
+soliloquy nor the use of verse can be condemned on the mere ground that
+they are 'unnatural.' No dramatic language is 'natural'; _all_ dramatic
+language is idealised. So that the question as to soliloquy must be one
+as to the degree of idealisation and the balance of advantages and
+disadvantages. (Since this lecture was written I have read some remarks
+on Shakespeare's soliloquies to much the same effect by E. Kilian in the
+_Jahrbuch d. deutschen Shakespeare-Gesellschaft_ for 1903.)]
+
+[Footnote 24: If by this we mean that these characters all speak what is
+recognisably Shakespeare's style, of course it is true; but it is no
+accusation. Nor does it follow that they all speak alike; and in fact
+they are far from doing so.]
+
+
+
+
+LECTURE III
+
+SHAKESPEARE'S TRAGIC PERIOD--HAMLET
+
+
+1
+
+Before we come to-day to _Hamlet_, the first of our four tragedies, a
+few remarks must be made on their probable place in Shakespeare's
+literary career. But I shall say no more than seems necessary for our
+restricted purpose, and, therefore, for the most part shall merely be
+stating widely accepted results of investigation, without going into the
+evidence on which they rest.[25]
+
+Shakespeare's tragedies fall into two distinct groups, and these groups
+are separated by a considerable interval. He wrote tragedy--pure, like
+_Romeo and Juliet_; historical, like _Richard III._--in the early years
+of his career of authorship, when he was also writing such comedies as
+_Love's Labour's Lost_ and the _Midsummer-Night's Dream_. Then came a
+time, lasting some half-dozen years, during which he composed the most
+mature and humorous of his English History plays (the plays with
+Falstaff in them), and the best of his romantic comedies (the plays with
+Beatrice and Jaques and Viola in them). There are no tragedies belonging
+to these half-dozen years, nor any dramas approaching tragedy. But now,
+from about 1601 to about 1608, comes tragedy after tragedy--_Julius
+Caesar_, _Hamlet_, _Othello_, _King Lear_, _Timon of Athens_, _Macbeth_,
+_Antony and Cleopatra_ and _Coriolanus_; and their companions are plays
+which cannot indeed be called tragedies, but certainly are not comedies
+in the same sense as _As You Like It_ or the _Tempest_. These seven
+years, accordingly, might, without much risk of misunderstanding, be
+called Shakespeare's tragic period.[26] And after it he wrote no more
+tragedies, but chiefly romances more serious and less sunny than _As You
+Like It_, but not much less serene.
+
+The existence of this distinct tragic period, of a time when the
+dramatist seems to have been occupied almost exclusively with deep and
+painful problems, has naturally helped to suggest the idea that the
+'man' also, in these years of middle age, from thirty-seven to
+forty-four, was heavily burdened in spirit; that Shakespeare turned to
+tragedy not merely for change, or because he felt it to be the greatest
+form of drama and felt himself equal to it, but also because the world
+had come to look dark and terrible to him; and even that the railings of
+Thersites and the maledictions of Timon express his own contempt and
+hatred for mankind. Discussion of this large and difficult subject,
+however, is not necessary to the dramatic appreciation of any of his
+works, and I shall say nothing of it here, but shall pass on at once to
+draw attention to certain stages and changes which may be observed
+within the tragic period. For this purpose too it is needless to raise
+any question as to the respective chronological positions of _Othello_,
+_King Lear_ and _Macbeth_. What is important is also generally admitted:
+that _Julius Caesar_ and _Hamlet_ precede these plays, and that _Antony
+and Cleopatra_ and _Coriolanus_ follow them.[27]
+
+If we consider the tragedies first on the side of their substance, we
+find at once an obvious difference between the first two and the
+remainder. Both Brutus and Hamlet are highly intellectual by nature and
+reflective by habit. Both may even be called, in a popular sense,
+philosophic; Brutus may be called so in a stricter sense. Each, being
+also a 'good' man, shows accordingly, when placed in critical
+circumstances, a sensitive and almost painful anxiety to do right. And
+though they fail--of course in quite different ways--to deal
+successfully with these circumstances, the failure in each case is
+connected rather with their intellectual nature and reflective habit
+than with any yielding to passion. Hence the name 'tragedy of thought,'
+which Schlegel gave to _Hamlet_, may be given also, as in effect it has
+been by Professor Dowden, to _Julius Caesar_. The later heroes, on the
+other hand, Othello, Lear, Timon, Macbeth, Antony, Coriolanus, have, one
+and all, passionate natures, and, speaking roughly, we may attribute the
+tragic failure in each of these cases to passion. Partly for this
+reason, the later plays are wilder and stormier than the first two. We
+see a greater mass of human nature in commotion, and we see
+Shakespeare's own powers exhibited on a larger scale. Finally,
+examination would show that, in all these respects, the first tragedy,
+_Julius Caesar_, is further removed from the later type than is the
+second, _Hamlet_.
+
+These two earlier works are both distinguished from most of the
+succeeding tragedies in another though a kindred respect. Moral evil is
+not so intently scrutinised or so fully displayed in them. In _Julius
+Caesar_, we may almost say, everybody means well. In _Hamlet_, though we
+have a villain, he is a small one. The murder which gives rise to the
+action lies outside the play, and the centre of attention within the
+play lies in the hero's efforts to do his duty. It seems clear that
+Shakespeare's interest, since the early days when under Marlowe's
+influence he wrote _Richard III._, has not been directed to the more
+extreme or terrible forms of evil. But in the tragedies that follow
+_Hamlet_ the presence of this interest is equally clear. In Iago, in the
+'bad' people of _King Lear_, even in Macbeth and Lady Macbeth, human
+nature assumes shapes which inspire not mere sadness or repulsion but
+horror and dismay. If in _Timon_ no monstrous cruelty is done, we still
+watch ingratitude and selfishness so blank that they provoke a loathing
+we never felt for Claudius; and in this play and _King Lear_ we can
+fancy that we hear at times the _saeva indignatio_, if not the despair,
+of Swift. This prevalence of abnormal or appalling forms of evil, side
+by side with vehement passion, is another reason why the convulsion
+depicted in these tragedies seems to come from a deeper source, and to
+be vaster in extent, than the conflict in the two earlier plays. And
+here again _Julius Caesar_ is further removed than _Hamlet_ from
+_Othello_, _King Lear_, and _Macbeth_.
+
+But in regard to this second point of difference a reservation must be
+made, on which I will speak a little more fully, because, unlike the
+matter hitherto touched on, its necessity seems hardly to have been
+recognised. _All_ of the later tragedies may be called tragedies of
+passion, but not all of them display these extreme forms of evil.
+Neither of the last two does so. Antony and Coriolanus are, from one
+point of view, victims of passion; but the passion that ruins Antony
+also exalts him, he touches the infinite in it; and the pride and
+self-will of Coriolanus, though terrible in bulk, are scarcely so in
+quality; there is nothing base in them, and the huge creature whom they
+destroy is a noble, even a lovable, being. Nor does either of these
+dramas, though the earlier depicts a corrupt civilisation, include even
+among the minor characters anyone who can be called villainous or
+horrible. Consider, finally, the impression left on us at the close of
+each. It is remarkable that this impression, though very strong, can
+scarcely be called purely tragic; or, if we call it so, at least the
+feeling of reconciliation which mingles with the obviously tragic
+emotions is here exceptionally well-marked. The death of Antony, it will
+be remembered, comes before the opening of the Fifth Act. The death of
+Cleopatra, which closes the play, is greeted by the reader with sympathy
+and admiration, even with exultation at the thought that she has foiled
+Octavius; and these feelings are heightened by the deaths of Charmian
+and Iras, heroically faithful to their mistress, as Emilia was to hers.
+In _Coriolanus_ the feeling of reconciliation is even stronger. The
+whole interest towards the close has been concentrated on the question
+whether the hero will persist in his revengeful design of storming and
+burning his native city, or whether better feelings will at last
+overpower his resentment and pride. He stands on the edge of a crime
+beside which, at least in outward dreadfulness, the slaughter of an
+individual looks insignificant. And when, at the sound of his mother's
+voice and the sight of his wife and child, nature asserts itself and he
+gives way, although we know he will lose his life, we care little for
+that: he has saved his soul. Our relief, and our exultation in the power
+of goodness, are so great that the actual catastrophe which follows and
+mingles sadness with these feelings leaves them but little diminished,
+and as we close the book we feel, it seems to me, more as we do at the
+close of _Cymbeline_ than as we do at the close of _Othello_. In saying
+this I do not in the least mean to criticise _Coriolanus_. It is a much
+nobler play as it stands than it would have been if Shakespeare had made
+the hero persist, and we had seen him amid the flaming ruins of Rome,
+awaking suddenly to the enormity of his deed and taking vengeance on
+himself; but that would surely have been an ending more strictly tragic
+than the close of Shakespeare's play. Whether this close was simply due
+to his unwillingness to contradict his historical authority on a point
+of such magnitude we need not ask. In any case _Coriolanus_ is, in more
+than an outward sense, the end of his tragic period. It marks the
+transition to his latest works, in which the powers of repentance and
+forgiveness charm to rest the tempest raised by error and guilt.
+
+If we turn now from the substance of the tragedies to their style and
+versification, we find on the whole a corresponding difference between
+the earlier and the later. The usual assignment of _Julius Caesar_, and
+even of _Hamlet_, to the end of Shakespeare's Second Period--the period
+of _Henry V._--is based mainly, we saw, on considerations of form. The
+general style of the serious parts of the last plays from English
+history is one of full, noble and comparatively equable eloquence. The
+'honey-tongued' sweetness and beauty of Shakespeare's early writing, as
+seen in _Romeo and Juliet_ or the _Midsummer-Night's Dream_, remain; the
+ease and lucidity remain; but there is an accession of force and weight.
+We find no great change from this style when we come to _Julius
+Caesar_,[28] which may be taken to mark its culmination. At this point
+in Shakespeare's literary development he reaches, if the phrase may be
+pardoned, a limited perfection. Neither thought on the one side, nor
+expression on the other, seems to have any tendency to outrun or contend
+with its fellow. We receive an impression of easy mastery and complete
+harmony, but not so strong an impression of inner power bursting into
+outer life. Shakespeare's style is perhaps nowhere else so free from
+defects, and yet almost every one of his subsequent plays contains
+writing which is greater. To speak familiarly, we feel in _Julius
+Caesar_ that, although not even Shakespeare could better the style he
+has chosen, he has not let himself go.
+
+In reading _Hamlet_ we have no such feeling, and in many parts (for
+there is in the writing of _Hamlet_ an unusual variety[29]) we are
+conscious of a decided change. The style in these parts is more rapid
+and vehement, less equable and less simple; and there is a change of the
+same kind in the versification. But on the whole the _type_ is the same
+as in _Julius Caesar_, and the resemblance of the two plays is decidedly
+more marked than the difference. If Hamlet's soliloquies, considered
+simply as compositions, show a great change from Jaques's speech, 'All
+the world's a stage,' and even from the soliloquies of Brutus, yet
+_Hamlet_ (for instance in the hero's interview with his mother) is like
+_Julius Caesar_, and unlike the later tragedies, in the fulness of its
+eloquence, and passages like the following belong quite definitely to
+the style of the Second Period:
+
+     _Mar._ It faded on the crowing of the cock.
+     Some say that ever 'gainst that season comes
+     Wherein our Saviour's birth is celebrated,
+     The bird of dawning singeth all night long;
+     And then, they say, no spirit dare stir abroad;
+     The nights are wholesome; then no planets strike,
+     No fairy takes, nor witch hath power to charm,
+     So hallow'd and so gracious is the time.
+
+     _Hor._ So have I heard and do in part believe it.
+     But, look, the morn, in russet mantle clad,
+     Walks o'er the dew of yon high eastward hill.
+
+This bewitching music is heard again in Hamlet's farewell to Horatio:
+
+     If thou didst ever hold me in thy heart,
+     Absent thee from felicity awhile,
+     And in this harsh world draw thy breath in pain,
+     To tell my story.
+
+But after _Hamlet_ this music is heard no more. It is followed by a
+music vaster and deeper, but not the same.
+
+The changes observable in _Hamlet_ are afterwards, and gradually, so
+greatly developed that Shakespeare's style and versification at last
+become almost new things. It is extremely difficult to illustrate this
+briefly in a manner to which no just exception can be taken, for it is
+almost impossible to find in two plays passages bearing a sufficiently
+close resemblance to one another in occasion and sentiment. But I will
+venture to put by the first of those quotations from _Hamlet_ this from
+_Macbeth_:
+
+     _Dun._ This castle hath a pleasant seat; the air
+     Nimbly and sweetly recommends itself
+     Unto our gentle senses.
+
+     _Ban._                 This guest of summer,
+     The temple-haunting martlet, does approve,
+     By his loved mansionry, that the heaven's breath
+     Smells wooingly here: no jutty, frieze,
+     Buttress, nor coign of vantage, but this bird
+     Hath made his pendent bed and procreant cradle;
+     Where they most breed and haunt, I have observed,
+     The air is delicate;
+
+and by the second quotation from _Hamlet_ this from _Antony and
+Cleopatra_:
+
+     The miserable change now at my end
+     Lament nor sorrow at; but please your thoughts
+     In feeding them with those my former fortunes
+     Wherein I lived, the greatest prince o' the world,
+     The noblest; and do now not basely die,
+     Not cowardly put off my helmet to
+     My countryman,--a Roman by a Roman
+     Valiantly vanquish'd. Now my spirit is going;
+     I can no more.
+
+It would be almost an impertinence to point out in detail how greatly
+these two passages, and especially the second, differ in effect from
+those in _Hamlet_, written perhaps five or six years earlier. The
+versification, by the time we reach _Antony and Cleopatra_, has assumed
+a new type; and although this change would appear comparatively slight
+in a typical passage from _Othello_ or even from _King Lear_, its
+approach through these plays to _Timon_ and _Macbeth_ can easily be
+traced. It is accompanied by a similar change in diction and
+construction. After _Hamlet_ the style, in the more emotional passages,
+is heightened. It becomes grander, sometimes wilder, sometimes more
+swelling, even tumid. It is also more concentrated, rapid, varied, and,
+in construction, less regular, not seldom twisted or elliptical. It is,
+therefore, not so easy and lucid, and in the more ordinary dialogue it
+is sometimes involved and obscure, and from these and other causes
+deficient in charm.[30] On the other hand, it is always full of life and
+movement, and in great passages produces sudden, strange, electrifying
+effects which are rarely found in earlier plays, and not so often even
+in _Hamlet_. The more pervading effect of beauty gives place to what may
+almost be called explosions of sublimity or pathos.
+
+There is room for differences of taste and preference as regards the
+style and versification of the end of Shakespeare's Second Period, and
+those of the later tragedies and last romances. But readers who miss in
+the latter the peculiar enchantment of the earlier will not deny that
+the changes in form are in entire harmony with the inward changes. If
+they object to passages where, to exaggerate a little, the sense has
+rather to be discerned beyond the words than found in them, and if they
+do not wholly enjoy the movement of so typical a speech as this,
+
+     Yes, like enough, high-battled Caesar will
+     Unstate his happiness, and be staged to the show,
+     Against a sworder! I see men's judgements are
+     A parcel of their fortunes; and things outward
+     Do draw the inward quality after them,
+     To suffer all alike. That he should dream,
+     Knowing all measures, the full Caesar will
+     Answer his emptiness! Caesar, thou hast subdued
+     His judgement too,
+
+they will admit that, in traversing the impatient throng of thoughts not
+always completely embodied, their minds move through an astonishing
+variety of ideas and experiences, and that a style less generally poetic
+than that of _Hamlet_ is also a style more invariably dramatic. It may
+be that, for the purposes of tragedy, the highest point was reached
+during the progress of these changes, in the most critical passages of
+_Othello_, _King Lear_ and _Macbeth_.[31]
+
+
+2
+
+Suppose you were to describe the plot of _Hamlet_ to a person quite
+ignorant of the play, and suppose you were careful to tell your hearer
+nothing about Hamlet's character, what impression would your sketch make
+on him? Would he not exclaim: 'What a sensational story! Why, here are
+some eight violent deaths, not to speak of adultery, a ghost, a mad
+woman, and a fight in a grave! If I did not know that the play was
+Shakespeare's, I should have thought it must have been one of those
+early tragedies of blood and horror from which he is said to have
+redeemed the stage'? And would he not then go on to ask: 'But why in the
+world did not Hamlet obey the Ghost at once, and so save seven of those
+eight lives?'
+
+This exclamation and this question both show the same thing, that the
+whole story turns upon the peculiar character of the hero. For without
+this character the story would appear sensational and horrible; and yet
+the actual _Hamlet_ is very far from being so, and even has a less
+terrible effect than _Othello_, _King Lear_ or _Macbeth_. And again, if
+we had no knowledge of this character, the story would hardly be
+intelligible; it would at any rate at once suggest that wondering
+question about the conduct of the hero; while the story of any of the
+other three tragedies would sound plain enough and would raise no such
+question. It is further very probable that the main change made by
+Shakespeare in the story as already represented on the stage, lay in a
+new conception of Hamlet's character and so of the cause of his delay.
+And, lastly, when we examine the tragedy, we observe two things which
+illustrate the same point. First, we find by the side of the hero no
+other figure of tragic proportions, no one like Lady Macbeth or Iago, no
+one even like Cordelia or Desdemona; so that, in Hamlet's absence, the
+remaining characters could not yield a Shakespearean tragedy at all.
+And, secondly, we find among them two, Laertes and Fortinbras, who are
+evidently designed to throw the character of the hero into relief. Even
+in the situations there is a curious parallelism; for Fortinbras, like
+Hamlet, is the son of a king, lately dead, and succeeded by his brother;
+and Laertes, like Hamlet, has a father slain, and feels bound to avenge
+him. And with this parallelism in situation there is a strong contrast
+in character; for both Fortinbras and Laertes possess in abundance the
+very quality which the hero seems to lack, so that, as we read, we are
+tempted to exclaim that either of them would have accomplished Hamlet's
+task in a day. Naturally, then, the tragedy of _Hamlet_ with Hamlet left
+out has become the symbol of extreme absurdity; while the character
+itself has probably exerted a greater fascination, and certainly has
+been the subject of more discussion, than any other in the whole
+literature of the world.
+
+Before, however, we approach the task of examining it, it is as well to
+remind ourselves that the virtue of the play by no means wholly depends
+on this most subtle creation. We are all aware of this, and if we were
+not so the history of _Hamlet_, as a stage-play, might bring the fact
+home to us. It is to-day the most popular of Shakespeare's tragedies on
+our stage; and yet a large number, perhaps even the majority of the
+spectators, though they may feel some mysterious attraction in the hero,
+certainly do not question themselves about his character or the cause of
+his delay, and would still find the play exceptionally effective, even
+if he were an ordinary brave young man and the obstacles in his path
+were purely external. And this has probably always been the case.
+_Hamlet_ seems from the first to have been a favourite play; but until
+late in the eighteenth century, I believe, scarcely a critic showed that
+he perceived anything specially interesting in the character. Hanmer, in
+1730, to be sure, remarks that 'there appears no reason at all in nature
+why this young prince did not put the usurper to death as soon as
+possible'; but it does not even cross his mind that this apparent
+'absurdity' is odd and might possibly be due to some design on the part
+of the poet. He simply explains the absurdity by observing that, if
+Shakespeare had made the young man go 'naturally to work,' the play
+would have come to an end at once! Johnson, in like manner, notices that
+'Hamlet is, through the whole piece, rather an instrument than an
+agent,' but it does not occur to him that this peculiar circumstance can
+be anything but a defect in Shakespeare's management of the plot.
+Seeing, they saw not. Henry Mackenzie, the author of _The Man of
+Feeling_, was, it would seem, the first of our critics to feel the
+'indescribable charm' of Hamlet, and to divine something of
+Shakespeare's intention. 'We see a man,' he writes, 'who in other
+circumstances would have exercised all the moral and social virtues,
+placed in a situation in which even the amiable qualities of his mind
+serve but to aggravate his distress and to perplex his conduct.'[32] How
+significant is the fact (if it be the fact) that it was only when the
+slowly rising sun of Romance began to flush the sky that the wonder,
+beauty and pathos of this most marvellous of Shakespeare's creations
+began to be visible! We do not know that they were perceived even in his
+own day, and perhaps those are not wholly wrong who declare that this
+creation, so far from being a characteristic product of the time, was a
+vision of
+
+                  the prophetic soul
+     Of the wide world dreaming on things to come.
+
+But the dramatic splendour of the whole tragedy is another matter, and
+must have been manifest not only in Shakespeare's day but even in
+Hanmer's.
+
+It is indeed so obvious that I pass it by, and proceed at once to the
+central question of Hamlet's character. And I believe time will be
+saved, and a good deal of positive interpretation may be introduced, if,
+without examining in detail any one theory, we first distinguish classes
+or types of theory which appear to be in various ways and degrees
+insufficient or mistaken. And we will confine our attention to sane
+theories;--for on this subject, as on all questions relating to
+Shakespeare, there are plenty of merely lunatic views: the view, for
+example, that Hamlet, being a disguised woman in love with Horatio,
+could hardly help seeming unkind to Ophelia; or the view that, being a
+very clever and wicked young man who wanted to oust his innocent uncle
+from the throne, he 'faked' the Ghost with this intent.
+
+But, before we come to our types of theory, it is necessary to touch on
+an idea, not unfrequently met with, which would make it vain labour to
+discuss or propose any theory at all. It is sometimes said that Hamlet's
+character is not only intricate but unintelligible. Now this statement
+might mean something quite unobjectionable and even perhaps true and
+important. It might mean that the character cannot be _wholly_
+understood. As we saw, there may be questions which we cannot answer
+with certainty now, because we have nothing but the text to guide us,
+but which never arose for the spectators who saw _Hamlet_ acted in
+Shakespeare's day; and we shall have to refer to such questions in these
+lectures. Again, it may be held without any improbability that, from
+carelessness or because he was engaged on this play for several years,
+Shakespeare left inconsistencies in his exhibition of the character
+which must prevent us from being certain of his ultimate meaning. Or,
+possibly, we may be baffled because he has illustrated in it certain
+strange facts of human nature, which he had noticed but of which we are
+ignorant. But then all this would apply in some measure to other
+characters in Shakespeare, and it is not this that is meant by the
+statement that Hamlet is unintelligible. What is meant is that
+Shakespeare _intended_ him to be so, because he himself was feeling
+strongly, and wished his audience to feel strongly, what a mystery life
+is, and how impossible it is for us to understand it. Now here, surely,
+we have mere confusion of mind. The mysteriousness of life is one thing,
+the psychological unintelligibility of a dramatic character is quite
+another; and the second does not show the first, it shows only the
+incapacity or folly of the dramatist. If it did show the first, it would
+be very easy to surpass Shakespeare in producing a sense of mystery: we
+should simply have to portray an absolutely nonsensical character. Of
+course _Hamlet_ appeals powerfully to our sense of the mystery of life,
+but so does _every_ good tragedy; and it does so not because the hero is
+an enigma to us, but because, having a fair understanding of him, we
+feel how strange it is that strength and weakness should be so mingled
+in one soul, and that this soul should be doomed to such misery and
+apparent failure.
+
+(1) To come, then, to our typical views, we may lay it down, first, that
+no theory will hold water which finds the cause of Hamlet's delay
+merely, or mainly, or even to any considerable extent, in external
+difficulties. Nothing is easier than to spin a plausible theory of this
+kind. What, it may be asked,[33] was Hamlet to do when the Ghost had
+left him with its commission of vengeance? The King was surrounded not
+merely by courtiers but by a Swiss body-guard: how was Hamlet to get at
+him? Was he then to accuse him publicly of the murder? If he did, what
+would happen? How would he prove the charge? All that he had to offer in
+proof was--a ghost-story! Others, to be sure, had seen the Ghost, but no
+one else had heard its revelations. Obviously, then, even if the court
+had been honest, instead of subservient and corrupt, it would have voted
+Hamlet mad, or worse, and would have shut him up out of harm's way. He
+could not see what to do, therefore, and so he waited. Then came the
+actors, and at once with admirable promptness he arranged for the
+play-scene, hoping that the King would betray his guilt to the whole
+court. Unfortunately the King did not. It is true that immediately
+afterwards Hamlet got his chance; for he found the King defenceless on
+his knees. But what Hamlet wanted was not a private revenge, to be
+followed by his own imprisonment or execution; it was public justice. So
+he spared the King; and, as he unluckily killed Polonius just
+afterwards, he had to consent to be despatched to England. But, on the
+voyage there, he discovered the King's commission, ordering the King of
+England to put him immediately to death; and, with this in his pocket,
+he made his way back to Denmark. For now, he saw, the proof of the
+King's attempt to murder him would procure belief also for the story of
+the murder of his father. His enemy, however, was too quick for him, and
+his public arraignment of that enemy was prevented by his own death.
+
+A theory like this sounds very plausible--so long as you do not remember
+the text. But no unsophisticated mind, fresh from the reading of
+_Hamlet_, will accept it; and, as soon as we begin to probe it, fatal
+objections arise in such numbers that I choose but a few, and indeed I
+think the first of them is enough.
+
+(_a_) From beginning to end of the play, Hamlet never makes the
+slightest reference to any external difficulty. How is it possible to
+explain this fact in conformity with the theory? For what conceivable
+reason should Shakespeare conceal from us so carefully the key to the
+problem?
+
+(_b_) Not only does Hamlet fail to allude to such difficulties, but he
+always assumes that he _can_ obey the Ghost,[34] and he once asserts
+this in so many words ('Sith I have cause and will and strength and
+means To do't,' IV. iv. 45).
+
+(_c_) Again, why does Shakespeare exhibit Laertes quite easily raising
+the people against the King? Why but to show how much more easily
+Hamlet, whom the people loved, could have done the same thing, if that
+was the plan he preferred?
+
+(_d_) Again, Hamlet did _not_ plan the play-scene in the hope that the
+King would betray his guilt to the court. He planned it, according to
+his own account, in order to convince _himself_ by the King's agitation
+that the Ghost had spoken the truth. This is perfectly clear from II.
+ii. 625 ff. and from III. ii. 80 ff. Some readers are misled by the
+words in the latter passage:
+
+                     if his occulted guilt
+     Do not itself unkennel in one speech,
+     It is a damned ghost that we have seen.
+
+The meaning obviously is, as the context shows, 'if his hidden guilt do
+not betray itself _on occasion of_ one speech,' viz., the 'dozen or
+sixteen lines' with which Hamlet has furnished the player, and of which
+only six are delivered, because the King does not merely show his guilt
+in his face (which was all Hamlet had hoped, III. ii. 90) but
+rushes from the room.
+
+It may be as well to add that, although Hamlet's own account of his
+reason for arranging the play-scene may be questioned, it is impossible
+to suppose that, if his real design had been to provoke an open
+confession of guilt, he could have been unconscious of this design.
+
+(_e_) Again, Hamlet never once talks, or shows a sign of thinking, of
+the plan of bringing the King to public justice; he always talks of
+using his 'sword' or his 'arm.' And this is so just as much after he has
+returned to Denmark with the commission in his pocket as it was before
+this event. When he has told Horatio the story of the voyage, he does
+not say, 'Now I can convict him': he says, 'Now am I not justified in
+using this arm?'
+
+This class of theory, then, we must simply reject. But it suggests two
+remarks. It is of course quite probable that, when Hamlet was 'thinking
+too precisely on the event,' he was considering, among other things, the
+question how he could avenge his father without sacrificing his own life
+or freedom. And assuredly, also, he was anxious that his act of
+vengeance should not be misconstrued, and would never have been content
+to leave a 'wounded name' behind him. His dying words prove that.
+
+(2) Assuming, now, that Hamlet's main difficulty--almost the whole of
+his difficulty--was internal, I pass to views which, acknowledging this,
+are still unsatisfactory because they isolate one element in his
+character and situation and treat it as the whole.
+
+According to the first of these typical views, Hamlet was restrained by
+conscience or a moral scruple; he could not satisfy himself that it was
+right to avenge his father.
+
+This idea, like the first, can easily be made to look very plausible if
+we vaguely imagine the circumstances without attending to the text. But
+attention to the text is fatal to it. For, on the one hand, scarcely
+anything can be produced in support of it, and, on the other hand, a
+great deal can be produced in its disproof. To take the latter point
+first, Hamlet, it is impossible to deny, habitually assumes, without any
+questioning, that he _ought_ to avenge his father. Even when he doubts,
+or thinks that he doubts, the honesty of the Ghost, he expresses no
+doubt as to what his duty will be if the Ghost turns out honest: 'If he
+but blench I know my course.' In the two soliloquies where he reviews
+his position (II. ii., 'O what a rogue and peasant slave am I,'
+and IV. iv., 'How all occasions do inform against me') he
+reproaches himself bitterly for the neglect of his duty. When he
+reflects on the possible causes of this neglect he never mentions among
+them a moral scruple. When the Ghost appears in the Queen's chamber he
+confesses, conscience-stricken, that, lapsed in time and passion, he has
+let go by the acting of its command; but he does not plead that his
+conscience stood in his way. The Ghost itself says that it comes to whet
+his 'almost blunted purpose'; and conscience may unsettle a purpose but
+does not blunt it. What natural explanation of all this can be given on
+the conscience theory?
+
+And now what can be set against this evidence? One solitary passage.[35]
+Quite late, after Hamlet has narrated to Horatio the events of his
+voyage, he asks him (V. ii. 63):
+
+     Does it not, thinks't thee, stand me now upon--
+     He that hath kill'd my king and whored my mother,
+     Popp'd in between the election and my hopes,
+     Thrown out his angle for my proper life,
+     And with such cozenage--is't not perfect conscience
+     To quit him with this arm? and is't not to be damn'd
+     To let this canker of our nature come
+     In further evil?
+
+Here, certainly, is a question of conscience in the usual present sense
+of the word; and, it may be said, does not this show that all along
+Hamlet really has been deterred by moral scruples? But I ask first how,
+in that case, the facts just adduced are to be explained: for they must
+be explained, not ignored. Next, let the reader observe that even if
+this passage did show that _one_ hindrance to Hamlet's action was his
+conscience, it by no means follows that this was the sole or the chief
+hindrance. And, thirdly, let him observe, and let him ask himself
+whether the coincidence is a mere accident, that Hamlet is here almost
+repeating the words he used in vain self-reproach some time before
+(IV. iv. 56):
+
+                             How stand I then,
+     That have a father kill'd, a mother stain'd,
+     Excitements of my reason and my blood,
+     And let all sleep?
+
+Is it not clear that he is speculating just as vainly now, and that this
+question of conscience is but one of his many unconscious excuses for
+delay? And, lastly, is it not so that Horatio takes it? He declines to
+discuss that unreal question, and answers simply,
+
+     It must be shortly known to him from England
+     What is the issue of the business there.
+
+In other words, 'Enough of this endless procrastination. What is wanted
+is not reasons for the deed, but the deed itself.' What can be more
+significant?
+
+Perhaps, however, it may be answered: 'Your explanation of this passage
+may be correct, and the facts you have mentioned do seem to be fatal to
+the theory of conscience in its usual form. But there is another and
+subtler theory of conscience. According to it, Hamlet, so far as his
+explicit consciousness went, was sure that he ought to obey the Ghost;
+but in the depths of his nature, and unknown to himself, there was a
+moral repulsion to the deed. The conventional moral ideas of his time,
+which he shared with the Ghost, told him plainly that he ought to avenge
+his father; but a deeper conscience in him, which was in advance of his
+time, contended with these explicit conventional ideas. It is because
+this deeper conscience remains below the surface that he fails to
+recognise it, and fancies he is hindered by cowardice or sloth or
+passion or what not; but it emerges into light in that speech to
+Horatio. And it is just because he has this nobler moral nature in him
+that we admire and love him.'
+
+Now I at once admit not only that this view is much more attractive and
+more truly tragic than the ordinary conscience theory, but that it has
+more verisimilitude. But I feel no doubt that it does not answer to
+Shakespeare's meaning, and I will simply mention, out of many objections
+to it, three which seem to be fatal. (_a_) If it answers to
+Shakespeare's meaning, why in the world did he conceal that meaning
+until the last Act? The facts adduced above seem to show beyond question
+that, on the hypothesis, he did so. That he did so is surely next door
+to incredible. In any case, it certainly requires an explanation, and
+certainly has not received one. (_b_) Let us test the theory by
+reference to a single important passage, that where Hamlet finds the
+King at prayer and spares him. The reason Hamlet gives himself for
+sparing the King is that, if he kills him now, he will send him to
+heaven, whereas he desires to send him to hell. Now, this reason may be
+an unconscious excuse, but is it believable that, if the real reason had
+been the stirrings of his deeper conscience, _that_ could have masked
+itself in the form of a desire to send his enemy's soul to hell? Is not
+the idea quite ludicrous? (_c_) The theory requires us to suppose that,
+when the Ghost enjoins Hamlet to avenge the murder of his father, it is
+laying on him a duty which _we_ are to understand to be no duty but the
+very reverse. And is not that supposition wholly contrary to the natural
+impression which we all receive in reading the play? Surely it is clear
+that, whatever we in the twentieth century may think about Hamlet's
+duty, we are meant in the play to assume that he _ought_ to have obeyed
+the Ghost.
+
+The conscience theory, then, in either of its forms we must reject. But
+it may remind us of points worth noting. In the first place, it is
+certainly true that Hamlet, in spite of some appearances to the
+contrary, was, as Goethe said, of a most moral nature, and had a great
+anxiety to do right. In this anxiety he resembles Brutus, and it is
+stronger in him than in any of the later heroes. And, secondly, it is
+highly probable that in his interminable broodings the kind of paralysis
+with which he was stricken masked itself in the shape of conscientious
+scruples as well as in many other shapes. And, finally, in his shrinking
+from the deed there was probably, together with much else, something
+which may be called a moral, though not a conscientious, repulsion: I
+mean a repugnance to the idea of falling suddenly on a man who could not
+defend himself. This, so far as we can see, was the only plan that
+Hamlet ever contemplated. There is no positive evidence in the play that
+he regarded it with the aversion that any brave and honourable man, one
+must suppose, would feel for it; but, as Hamlet certainly was brave and
+honourable, we may presume that he did so.
+
+(3) We come next to what may be called the sentimental view of Hamlet, a
+view common both among his worshippers and among his defamers. Its germ
+may perhaps be found in an unfortunate phrase of Goethe's (who of course
+is not responsible for the whole view): 'a lovely, pure and most moral
+nature, _without the strength of nerve which forms a hero_, sinks
+beneath a burden which it cannot bear and must not cast away.' When this
+idea is isolated, developed and popularised, we get the picture of a
+graceful youth, sweet and sensitive, full of delicate sympathies and
+yearning aspirations, shrinking from the touch of everything gross and
+earthly; but frail and weak, a kind of Werther, with a face like
+Shelley's and a voice like Mr. Tree's. And then we ask in tender pity,
+how could such a man perform the terrible duty laid on him?
+
+How, indeed! And what a foolish Ghost even to suggest such a duty! But
+this conception, though not without its basis in certain beautiful
+traits of Hamlet's nature, is utterly untrue. It is too kind to Hamlet
+on one side, and it is quite unjust to him on another. The 'conscience'
+theory at any rate leaves Hamlet a great nature which you can admire and
+even revere. But for the 'sentimental' Hamlet you can feel only pity not
+unmingled with contempt. Whatever else he is, he is no _hero_.
+
+But consider the text. This shrinking, flower-like youth--how could he
+possibly have done what we _see_ Hamlet do? What likeness to him is
+there in the Hamlet who, summoned by the Ghost, bursts from his
+terrified friends with the cry:
+
+                          Unhand me, gentlemen!
+     By heaven, I'll make a ghost of him that lets me;
+
+the Hamlet who scarcely once speaks to the King without an insult, or to
+Polonius without a gibe; the Hamlet who storms at Ophelia and speaks
+daggers to his mother; the Hamlet who, hearing a cry behind the arras,
+whips out his sword in an instant and runs the eavesdropper through; the
+Hamlet who sends his 'school-fellows' to their death and never troubles
+his head about them more; the Hamlet who is the first man to board a
+pirate ship, and who fights with Laertes in the grave; the Hamlet of the
+catastrophe, an omnipotent fate, before whom all the court stands
+helpless, who, as the truth breaks upon him, rushes on the King, drives
+his foil right through his body,[36] then seizes the poisoned cup and
+forces it violently between the wretched man's lips, and in the throes
+of death has force and fire enough to wrest the cup from Horatio's hand
+('By heaven, I'll have it!') lest he should drink and die? This man, the
+Hamlet of the play, is a heroic, terrible figure. He would have been
+formidable to Othello or Macbeth. If the sentimental Hamlet had crossed
+him, he would have hurled him from his path with one sweep of his arm.
+
+This view, then, or any view that approaches it, is grossly unjust to
+Hamlet, and turns tragedy into mere pathos. But, on the other side, it
+is too kind to him. It ignores the hardness and cynicism which were
+indeed no part of his nature, but yet, in this crisis of his life, are
+indubitably present and painfully marked. His sternness, itself left out
+of sight by this theory, is no defect; but he is much more than stern.
+Polonius possibly deserved nothing better than the words addressed to
+his corpse:
+
+     Thou wretched, rash, intruding fool, farewell!
+     I took thee for thy better: take thy fortune:
+     Thou find'st to be too busy is some danger;
+
+yet this was Ophelia's father, and, whatever he deserved, it pains us,
+for Hamlet's own sake, to hear the words:
+
+     This man shall set me packing:
+     I'll lug the guts into the neighbour room.
+
+There is the same insensibility in Hamlet's language about the fate of
+Rosencrantz and Guildenstern; and, observe, their deaths were not in the
+least required by his purpose. Grant, again, that his cruelty to Ophelia
+was partly due to misunderstanding, partly forced on him, partly
+feigned; still one surely cannot altogether so account for it, and still
+less can one so account for the disgusting and insulting grossness of
+his language to her in the play-scene. I know this is said to be merely
+an example of the custom of Shakespeare's time. But it is not so. It is
+such language as you will find addressed to a woman by no other hero of
+Shakespeare's, not even in that dreadful scene where Othello accuses
+Desdemona. It is a great mistake to ignore these things, or to try to
+soften the impression which they naturally make on one. That this
+embitterment, callousness, grossness, brutality, should be induced on a
+soul so pure and noble is profoundly tragic; and Shakespeare's business
+was to show this tragedy, not to paint an ideally beautiful soul
+unstained and undisturbed by the evil of the world and the anguish of
+conscious failure.[37]
+
+(4) There remains, finally, that class of view which may be named after
+Schlegel and Coleridge. According to this, _Hamlet_ is the tragedy of
+reflection. The cause of the hero's delay is irresolution; and the cause
+of this irresolution is excess of the reflective or speculative habit of
+mind. He has a general intention to obey the Ghost, but 'the native hue
+of resolution is sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought.' He is
+'thought-sick.' 'The whole,' says Schlegel, 'is intended to show how a
+calculating consideration which aims at exhausting, so far as human
+foresight can, all the relations and possible consequences of a deed,
+cripples[38] the power of acting.... Hamlet is a hypocrite towards
+himself; his far-fetched scruples are often mere pretexts to cover his
+want of determination.... He has no firm belief in himself or in
+anything else.... He loses himself in labyrinths of thought.' So
+Coleridge finds in Hamlet 'an almost enormous intellectual activity and
+a proportionate aversion to real action consequent upon it' (the
+aversion, that is to say, is consequent on the activity). Professor
+Dowden objects to this view, very justly, that it neglects the emotional
+side of Hamlet's character, 'which is quite as important as the
+intellectual'; but, with this supplement, he appears on the whole to
+adopt it. Hamlet, he says, 'loses a sense of fact because with him each
+object and event transforms and expands itself into an idea.... He
+cannot steadily keep alive within himself a sense of the importance of
+any positive, limited thing,--a deed, for example.' And Professor Dowden
+explains this condition by reference to Hamlet's life. 'When the play
+opens he has reached the age of thirty years ... and he has received
+culture of every kind except the culture of active life. During the
+reign of the strong-willed elder Hamlet there was no call to action for
+his meditative son. He has slipped on into years of full manhood still a
+haunter of the university, a student of philosophies, an amateur in art,
+a ponderer on the things of life and death, who has never formed a
+resolution or executed a deed' (_Shakspere, his Mind and Art_, 4th ed.,
+pp. 132, 133).
+
+On the whole, the Schlegel-Coleridge theory (with or without Professor
+Dowden's modification and amplification) is the most widely received
+view of Hamlet's character. And with it we come at last into close
+contact with the text of the play. It not only answers, in some
+fundamental respects, to the general impression produced by the drama,
+but it can be supported by Hamlet's own words in his soliloquies--such
+words, for example, as those about the native hue of resolution, or
+those about the craven scruple of thinking too precisely on the event.
+It is confirmed, also, by the contrast between Hamlet on the one side
+and Laertes and Fortinbras on the other; and, further, by the occurrence
+of those words of the King to Laertes (IV. vii. 119 f.), which,
+if they are not in character, are all the more important as showing what
+was in Shakespeare's mind at the time:
+
+                     that we would do
+     We should do when we would; for this 'would' changes,
+     And hath abatements and delays as many
+     As there are tongues, are hands, are accidents;
+     And then this 'should' is like a spendthrift sigh
+     That hurts by easing.
+
+And, lastly, even if the view itself does not suffice, the _description_
+given by its adherents of Hamlet's state of mind, as we see him in the
+last four Acts, is, on the whole and so far as it goes, a true
+description. The energy of resolve is dissipated in an endless brooding
+on the deed required. When he acts, his action does not proceed from
+this deliberation and analysis, but is sudden and impulsive, evoked by
+an emergency in which he has no time to think. And most of the reasons
+he assigns for his procrastination are evidently not the true reasons,
+but unconscious excuses.
+
+Nevertheless this theory fails to satisfy. And it fails not merely in
+this or that detail, but as a whole. We feel that its Hamlet does not
+fully answer to our imaginative impression. He is not nearly so
+inadequate to this impression as the sentimental Hamlet, but still we
+feel he is inferior to Shakespeare's man and does him wrong. And when we
+come to examine the theory we find that it is partial and leaves much
+unexplained. I pass that by for the present, for we shall see, I
+believe, that the theory is also positively misleading, and that in a
+most important way. And of this I proceed to speak.
+
+Hamlet's irresolution, or his aversion to real action, is, according to
+the theory, the _direct_ result of 'an almost enormous intellectual
+activity' in the way of 'a calculating consideration which attempts to
+exhaust all the relations and possible consequences of a deed.' And this
+again proceeds from an original one-sidedness of nature, strengthened by
+habit, and, perhaps, by years of speculative inaction. The theory
+describes, therefore, a man in certain respects like Coleridge himself,
+on one side a man of genius, on the other side, the side of will,
+deplorably weak, always procrastinating and avoiding unpleasant duties,
+and often reproaching himself in vain; a man, observe, who at _any_ time
+and in _any_ circumstances would be unequal to the task assigned to
+Hamlet. And thus, I must maintain, it degrades Hamlet and travesties the
+play. For Hamlet, according to all the indications in the text, was not
+naturally or normally such a man, but rather, I venture to affirm, a man
+who at any _other_ time and in any _other_ circumstances than those
+presented would have been perfectly equal to his task; and it is, in
+fact, the very cruelty of his fate that the crisis of his life comes on
+him at the one moment when he cannot meet it, and when his highest
+gifts, instead of helping him, conspire to paralyse him. This aspect of
+the tragedy the theory quite misses; and it does so because it
+misconceives the cause of that irresolution which, on the whole, it
+truly describes. For the cause was not directly or mainly an habitual
+excess of reflectiveness. The direct cause was a state of mind quite
+abnormal and induced by special circumstances,--a state of profound
+melancholy. Now, Hamlet's reflectiveness doubtless played a certain part
+in the _production_ of that melancholy, and was thus one indirect
+contributory cause of his irresolution. And, again, the melancholy, once
+established, displayed, as one of its _symptoms_, an excessive
+reflection on the required deed. But excess of reflection was not, as
+the theory makes it, the _direct_ cause of the irresolution at all; nor
+was it the _only_ indirect cause; and in the Hamlet of the last four
+Acts it is to be considered rather a symptom of his state than a cause
+of it.
+
+These assertions may be too brief to be at once clear, but I hope they
+will presently become so.
+
+
+3
+
+Let us first ask ourselves what we can gather from the play, immediately
+or by inference, concerning Hamlet as he was just before his father's
+death. And I begin by observing that the text does not bear out the idea
+that he was one-sidedly reflective and indisposed to action. Nobody who
+knew him seems to have noticed this weakness. Nobody regards him as a
+mere scholar who has 'never formed a resolution or executed a deed.' In
+a court which certainly would not much admire such a person he is the
+observed of all observers. Though he has been disappointed of the throne
+everyone shows him respect; and he is the favourite of the people, who
+are not given to worship philosophers. Fortinbras, a sufficiently
+practical man, considered that he was likely, had he been put on, to
+have proved most royally. He has Hamlet borne by four captains 'like a
+soldier' to his grave; and Ophelia says that Hamlet _was_ a soldier. If
+he was fond of acting, an aesthetic pursuit, he was equally fond of
+fencing, an athletic one: he practised it assiduously even in his worst
+days.[39] So far as we can conjecture from what we see of him in those
+bad days, he must normally have been charmingly frank, courteous and
+kindly to everyone, of whatever rank, whom he liked or respected, but by
+no means timid or deferential to others; indeed, one would gather that
+he was rather the reverse, and also that he was apt to be decided and
+even imperious if thwarted or interfered with. He must always have been
+fearless,--in the play he appears insensible to fear of any ordinary
+kind. And, finally, he must have been quick and impetuous in action; for
+it is downright impossible that the man we see rushing after the Ghost,
+killing Polonius, dealing with the King's commission on the ship,
+boarding the pirate, leaping into the grave, executing his final
+vengeance, could _ever_ have been shrinking or slow in an emergency.
+Imagine Coleridge doing any of these things!
+
+If we consider all this, how can we accept the notion that Hamlet's was
+a weak and one-sided character? 'Oh, but he spent ten or twelve years at
+a University!' Well, even if he did, it is possible to do that without
+becoming the victim of excessive thought. But the statement that he did
+rests upon a most insecure foundation.[40]
+
+Where then are we to look for the seeds of danger?
+
+(1) Trying to reconstruct from the Hamlet of the play, one would not
+judge that his temperament was melancholy in the present sense of the
+word; there seems nothing to show that; but one would judge that by
+temperament he was inclined to nervous instability, to rapid and
+perhaps extreme changes of feeling and mood, and that he was disposed to
+be, for the time, absorbed in the feeling or mood that possessed him,
+whether it were joyous or depressed. This temperament the Elizabethans
+would have called melancholic; and Hamlet seems to be an example of it,
+as Lear is of a temperament mixedly choleric and sanguine. And the
+doctrine of temperaments was so familiar in Shakespeare's time--as
+Burton, and earlier prose-writers, and many of the dramatists show--that
+Shakespeare may quite well have given this temperament to Hamlet
+consciously and deliberately. Of melancholy in its developed form, a
+habit, not a mere temperament, he often speaks. He more than once laughs
+at the passing and half-fictitious melancholy of youth and love; in Don
+John in _Much Ado_ he had sketched the sour and surly melancholy of
+discontent; in Jaques a whimsical self-pleasing melancholy; in Antonio
+in the _Merchant of Venice_ a quiet but deep melancholy, for which
+neither the victim nor his friends can assign any cause.[41] He gives to
+Hamlet a temperament which would not develop into melancholy unless
+under some exceptional strain, but which still involved a danger. In the
+play we see the danger realised, and find a melancholy quite unlike any
+that Shakespeare had as yet depicted, because the temperament of Hamlet
+is quite different.
+
+(2) Next, we cannot be mistaken in attributing to the Hamlet of earlier
+days an exquisite sensibility, to which we may give the name 'moral,' if
+that word is taken in the wide meaning it ought to bear. This, though
+it suffers cruelly in later days, as we saw in criticising the
+sentimental view of Hamlet, never deserts him; it makes all his
+cynicism, grossness and hardness appear to us morbidities, and has an
+inexpressibly attractive and pathetic effect. He had the soul of the
+youthful poet as Shelley and Tennyson have described it, an unbounded
+delight and faith in everything good and beautiful. We know this from
+himself. The world for him was _herrlich wie am ersten Tag_--'this
+goodly frame the earth, this most excellent canopy the air, this brave
+o'erhanging firmament, this majestical roof fretted with golden fire.'
+And not nature only: 'What a piece of work is a man! how noble in
+reason! how infinite in faculty! in form and moving how express and
+admirable! in action how like an angel! in apprehension how like a god!'
+This is no commonplace to Hamlet; it is the language of a heart thrilled
+with wonder and swelling into ecstasy.
+
+Doubtless it was with the same eager enthusiasm he turned to those
+around him. Where else in Shakespeare is there anything like Hamlet's
+adoration of his father? The words melt into music whenever he speaks of
+him. And, if there are no signs of any such feeling towards his mother,
+though many signs of love, it is characteristic that he evidently never
+entertained a suspicion of anything unworthy in her,--characteristic,
+and significant of his tendency to see only what is good unless he is
+forced to see the reverse. For we find this tendency elsewhere, and find
+it going so far that we must call it a disposition to idealise, to see
+something better than what is there, or at least to ignore deficiencies.
+He says to Laertes, 'I loved you ever,' and he describes Laertes as a
+'very noble youth,' which he was far from being. In his first greeting
+of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, where his old self revives, we trace
+the same affectionateness and readiness to take men at their best. His
+love for Ophelia, too, which seems strange to some, is surely the most
+natural thing in the world. He saw her innocence, simplicity and
+sweetness, and it was like him to ask no more; and it is noticeable that
+Horatio, though entirely worthy of his friendship, is, like Ophelia,
+intellectually not remarkable. To the very end, however clouded, this
+generous disposition, this 'free and open nature,' this unsuspiciousness
+survive. They cost him his life; for the King knew them, and was sure
+that he was too 'generous and free from all contriving' to 'peruse the
+foils.' To the very end, his soul, however sick and tortured it may be,
+answers instantaneously when good and evil are presented to it, loving
+the one and hating the other. He is called a sceptic who has no firm
+belief in anything, but he is never sceptical about _them_.
+
+And the negative side of his idealism, the aversion to evil, is perhaps
+even more developed in the hero of the tragedy than in the Hamlet of
+earlier days. It is intensely characteristic. Nothing, I believe, is to
+be found elsewhere in Shakespeare (unless in the rage of the
+disillusioned idealist Timon) of quite the same kind as Hamlet's disgust
+at his uncle's drunkenness, his loathing of his mother's sensuality, his
+astonishment and horror at her shallowness, his contempt for everything
+pretentious or false, his indifference to everything merely external.
+This last characteristic appears in his choice of the friend of his
+heart, and in a certain impatience of distinctions of rank or wealth.
+When Horatio calls his father 'a goodly king,' he answers, surely with
+an emphasis on 'man,'
+
+     He was a man, take him for all in all,
+     I shall not look upon his like again.
+
+He will not listen to talk of Horatio being his 'servant.' When the
+others speak of their 'duty' to him, he answers, 'Your love, as mine to
+you.' He speaks to the actor precisely as he does to an honest courtier.
+He is not in the least a revolutionary, but still, in effect, a king and
+a beggar are all one to him. He cares for nothing but human worth, and
+his pitilessness towards Polonius and Osric and his 'school-fellows' is
+not wholly due to morbidity, but belongs in part to his original
+character.
+
+Now, in Hamlet's moral sensibility there undoubtedly lay a danger. Any
+great shock that life might inflict on it would be felt with extreme
+intensity. Such a shock might even produce tragic results. And, in fact,
+_Hamlet_ deserves the title 'tragedy of moral idealism' quite as much as
+the title 'tragedy of reflection.'
+
+(3) With this temperament and this sensibility we find, lastly, in the
+Hamlet of earlier days, as of later, intellectual genius. It is chiefly
+this that makes him so different from all those about him, good and bad
+alike, and hardly less different from most of Shakespeare's other
+heroes. And this, though on the whole the most important trait in his
+nature, is also so obvious and so famous that I need not dwell on it at
+length. But against one prevalent misconception I must say a word of
+warning. Hamlet's intellectual power is not a specific gift, like a
+genius for music or mathematics or philosophy. It shows itself,
+fitfully, in the affairs of life as unusual quickness of perception,
+great agility in shifting the mental attitude, a striking rapidity and
+fertility in resource; so that, when his natural belief in others does
+not make him unwary, Hamlet easily sees through them and masters them,
+and no one can be much less like the typical helpless dreamer. It shows
+itself in conversation chiefly in the form of wit or humour; and, alike
+in conversation and in soliloquy, it shows itself in the form of
+imagination quite as much as in that of thought in the stricter sense.
+Further, where it takes the latter shape, as it very often does, it is
+not philosophic in the technical meaning of the word. There is really
+nothing in the play to show that Hamlet ever was 'a student of
+philosophies,' unless it be the famous lines which, comically enough,
+exhibit this supposed victim of philosophy as its critic:
+
+     There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,
+     Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.[42]
+
+His philosophy, if the word is to be used, was, like Shakespeare's own,
+the immediate product of the wondering and meditating mind; and such
+thoughts as that celebrated one, 'There is nothing either good or bad
+but thinking makes it so,' surely needed no special training to produce
+them. Or does Portia's remark, 'Nothing is good without respect,'
+_i.e._, out of relation, prove that she had studied metaphysics?
+
+Still Hamlet had speculative genius without being a philosopher, just as
+he had imaginative genius without being a poet. Doubtless in happier
+days he was a close and constant observer of men and manners, noting his
+results in those tables which he afterwards snatched from his breast to
+make in wild irony his last note of all, that one may smile and smile
+and be a villain. Again and again we remark that passion for
+generalisation which so occupied him, for instance, in reflections
+suggested by the King's drunkenness that he quite forgot what it was he
+was waiting to meet upon the battlements. Doubtless, too, he was always
+considering things, as Horatio thought, too curiously. There was a
+necessity in his soul driving him to penetrate below the surface and to
+question what others took for granted. That fixed habitual look which
+the world wears for most men did not exist for him. He was for ever
+unmaking his world and rebuilding it in thought, dissolving what to
+others were solid facts, and discovering what to others were old truths.
+There were no old truths for Hamlet. It is for Horatio a thing of course
+that there's a divinity that shapes our ends, but for Hamlet it is a
+discovery hardly won. And throughout this kingdom of the mind, where he
+felt that man, who in action is only like an angel, is in apprehension
+like a god, he moved (we must imagine) more than content, so that even
+in his dark days he declares he could be bounded in a nutshell and yet
+count himself a king of infinite space, were it not that he had bad
+dreams.
+
+If now we ask whether any special danger lurked _here_, how shall we
+answer? We must answer, it seems to me, 'Some danger, no doubt, but,
+granted the ordinary chances of life, not much.' For, in the first
+place, that idea which so many critics quietly take for granted--the
+idea that the gift and the habit of meditative and speculative thought
+tend to produce irresolution in the affairs of life--would be found by
+no means easy to verify. Can you verify it, for example, in the lives of
+the philosophers, or again in the lives of men whom you have personally
+known to be addicted to such speculation? I cannot. Of course,
+individual peculiarities being set apart, absorption in _any_
+intellectual interest, together with withdrawal from affairs, may make a
+man slow and unskilful in affairs; and doubtless, individual
+peculiarities being again set apart, a mere student is likely to be more
+at a loss in a sudden and great practical emergency than a soldier or a
+lawyer. But in all this there is no difference between a physicist, a
+historian, and a philosopher; and again, slowness, want of skill, and
+even helplessness are something totally different from the peculiar kind
+of irresolution that Hamlet shows. The notion that speculative thinking
+specially tends to produce _this_ is really a mere illusion.
+
+In the second place, even if this notion were true, it has appeared that
+Hamlet did _not_ live the life of a mere student, much less of a mere
+dreamer, and that his nature was by no means simply or even one-sidedly
+intellectual, but was healthily active. Hence, granted the ordinary
+chances of life, there would seem to be no great danger in his
+intellectual tendency and his habit of speculation; and I would go
+further and say that there was nothing in them, taken alone, to unfit
+him even for the extraordinary call that was made upon him. In fact, if
+the message of the Ghost had come to him within a week of his father's
+death, I see no reason to doubt that he would have acted on it as
+decisively as Othello himself, though probably after a longer and more
+anxious deliberation. And therefore the Schlegel-Coleridge view (apart
+from its descriptive value) seems to me fatally untrue, for it implies
+that Hamlet's procrastination was the normal response of an
+over-speculative nature confronted with a difficult practical problem.
+
+On the other hand, under conditions of a peculiar kind, Hamlet's
+reflectiveness certainly might prove dangerous to him, and his genius
+might even (to exaggerate a little) become his doom. Suppose that
+violent shock to his moral being of which I spoke; and suppose that
+under this shock, any possible action being denied to him, he began to
+sink into melancholy; then, no doubt, his imaginative and generalising
+habit of mind might extend the effects of this shock through his whole
+being and mental world. And if, the state of melancholy being thus
+deepened and fixed, a sudden demand for difficult and decisive action in
+a matter connected with the melancholy arose, this state might well have
+for one of its symptoms an endless and futile mental dissection of the
+required deed. And, finally, the futility of this process, and the shame
+of his delay, would further weaken him and enslave him to his melancholy
+still more. Thus the speculative habit would be _one_ indirect cause of
+the morbid state which hindered action; and it would also reappear in a
+degenerate form as one of the _symptoms_ of this morbid state.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Now this is what actually happens in the play. Turn to the first words
+Hamlet utters when he is alone; turn, that is to say, to the place where
+the author is likely to indicate his meaning most plainly. What do you
+hear?
+
+     O, that this too too solid flesh would melt,
+     Thaw and resolve itself into a dew!
+     Or that the Everlasting had not fix'd
+     His canon 'gainst self-slaughter! O God! God!
+     How weary, stale, flat and unprofitable,
+     Seem to me all the uses of this world!
+     Fie on't! ah fie! 'tis an unweeded garden,
+     That grows to seed; things rank and gross in nature
+     Possess it merely.
+
+Here are a sickness of life, and even a longing for death, so intense
+that nothing stands between Hamlet and suicide except religious awe. And
+what has caused them? The rest of the soliloquy so thrusts the answer
+upon us that it might seem impossible to miss it. It was not his
+father's death; that doubtless brought deep grief, but mere grief for
+some one loved and lost does not make a noble spirit loathe the world as
+a place full only of things rank and gross. It was not the vague
+suspicion that we know Hamlet felt. Still less was it the loss of the
+crown; for though the subserviency of the electors might well disgust
+him, there is not a reference to the subject in the soliloquy, nor any
+sign elsewhere that it greatly occupied his mind. It was the moral shock
+of the sudden ghastly disclosure of his mother's true nature, falling on
+him when his heart was aching with love, and his body doubtless was
+weakened by sorrow. And it is essential, however disagreeable, to
+realise the nature of this shock. It matters little here whether
+Hamlet's age was twenty or thirty: in either case his mother was a
+matron of mature years. All his life he had believed in her, we may be
+sure, as such a son would. He had seen her not merely devoted to his
+father, but hanging on him like a newly-wedded bride, hanging on him
+
+     As if increase of appetite had grown
+     By what it fed on.
+
+He had seen her following his body 'like Niobe, all tears.' And then
+within a month--'O God! a beast would have mourned longer'--she married
+again, and married Hamlet's uncle, a man utterly contemptible and
+loathsome in his eyes; married him in what to Hamlet was incestuous
+wedlock;[43] married him not for any reason of state, nor even out of
+old family affection, but in such a way that her son was forced to see
+in her action not only an astounding shallowness of feeling but an
+eruption of coarse sensuality, 'rank and gross,'[44] speeding post-haste
+to its horrible delight. Is it possible to conceive an experience more
+desolating to a man such as we have seen Hamlet to be; and is its result
+anything but perfectly natural? It brings bewildered horror, then
+loathing, then despair of human nature. His whole mind is poisoned. He
+can never see Ophelia in the same light again: she is a woman, and his
+mother is a woman: if she mentions the word 'brief' to him, the answer
+drops from his lips like venom, 'as woman's love.' The last words of the
+soliloquy, which is _wholly_ concerned with this subject, are,
+
+     But break, my heart, for I must hold my tongue!
+
+He can do nothing. He must lock in his heart, not any suspicion of his
+uncle that moves obscurely there, but that horror and loathing; and if
+his heart ever found relief, it was when those feelings, mingled with
+the love that never died out in him, poured themselves forth in a flood
+as he stood in his mother's chamber beside his father's
+marriage-bed.[45]
+
+If we still wonder, and ask why the effect of this shock should be so
+tremendous, let us observe that _now_ the conditions have arisen under
+which Hamlet's highest endowments, his moral sensibility and his genius,
+become his enemies. A nature morally blunter would have felt even so
+dreadful a revelation less keenly. A slower and more limited and
+positive mind might not have extended so widely through its world the
+disgust and disbelief that have entered it. But Hamlet has the
+imagination which, for evil as well as good, feels and sees all things
+in one. Thought is the element of his life, and his thought is
+infected. He cannot prevent himself from probing and lacerating the
+wound in his soul. One idea, full of peril, holds him fast, and he cries
+out in agony at it, but is impotent to free himself ('Must I remember?'
+'Let me not think on't'). And when, with the fading of his passion, the
+vividness of this idea abates, it does so only to leave behind a
+boundless weariness and a sick longing for death.
+
+And this is the time which his fate chooses. In this hour of uttermost
+weakness, this sinking of his whole being towards annihilation, there
+comes on him, bursting the bounds of the natural world with a shock of
+astonishment and terror, the revelation of his mother's adultery and his
+father's murder, and, with this, the demand on him, in the name of
+everything dearest and most sacred, to arise and act. And for a moment,
+though his brain reels and totters,[46] his soul leaps up in passion to
+answer this demand. But it comes too late. It does but strike home the
+last rivet in the melancholy which holds him bound.
+
+     The time is out of joint! O cursed spite
+     That ever I was born to set it right,--
+
+so he mutters within an hour of the moment when he vowed to give his
+life to the duty of revenge; and the rest of the story exhibits his vain
+efforts to fulfil this duty, his unconscious self-excuses and unavailing
+self-reproaches, and the tragic results of his delay.
+
+
+4
+
+'Melancholy,' I said, not dejection, nor yet insanity. That Hamlet was
+not far from insanity is very probable. His adoption of the pretence of
+madness may well have been due in part to fear of the reality; to an
+instinct of self-preservation, a fore-feeling that the pretence would
+enable him to give some utterance to the load that pressed on his heart
+and brain, and a fear that he would be unable altogether to repress such
+utterance. And if the pathologist calls his state melancholia, and even
+proceeds to determine its species, I see nothing to object to in that; I
+am grateful to him for emphasising the fact that Hamlet's melancholy was
+no mere common depression of spirits; and I have no doubt that many
+readers of the play would understand it better if they read an account
+of melancholia in a work on mental diseases. If we like to use the word
+'disease' loosely, Hamlet's condition may truly be called diseased. No
+exertion of will could have dispelled it. Even if he had been able at
+once to do the bidding of the Ghost he would doubtless have still
+remained for some time under the cloud. It would be absurdly unjust to
+call _Hamlet_ a study of melancholy, but it contains such a study.
+
+But this melancholy is something very different from insanity, in
+anything like the usual meaning of that word. No doubt it might develop
+into insanity. The longing for death might become an irresistible
+impulse to self-destruction; the disorder of feeling and will might
+extend to sense and intellect; delusions might arise; and the man might
+become, as we say, incapable and irresponsible. But Hamlet's melancholy
+is some way from this condition. It is a totally different thing from
+the madness which he feigns; and he never, when alone or in company with
+Horatio alone, exhibits the signs of that madness. Nor is the dramatic
+use of this melancholy, again, open to the objections which would justly
+be made to the portrayal of an insanity which brought the hero to a
+tragic end. The man who suffers as Hamlet suffers--and thousands go
+about their business suffering thus in greater or less degree--is
+considered irresponsible neither by other people nor by himself: he is
+only too keenly conscious of his responsibility. He is therefore, so
+far, quite capable of being a tragic agent, which an insane person, at
+any rate according to Shakespeare's practice, is not.[47] And, finally,
+Hamlet's state is not one which a healthy mind is unable sufficiently to
+imagine. It is probably not further from average experience, nor more
+difficult to realise, than the great tragic passions of Othello, Antony
+or Macbeth.
+
+Let me try to show now, briefly, how much this melancholy accounts for.
+
+It accounts for the main fact, Hamlet's inaction. For the _immediate_
+cause of that is simply that his habitual feeling is one of disgust at
+life and everything in it, himself included,--a disgust which varies in
+intensity, rising at times into a longing for death, sinking often into
+weary apathy, but is never dispelled for more than brief intervals. Such
+a state of feeling is inevitably adverse to _any_ kind of decided
+action; the body is inert, the mind indifferent or worse; its response
+is, 'it does not matter,' 'it is not worth while,' 'it is no good.' And
+the action required of Hamlet is very exceptional. It is violent,
+dangerous, difficult to accomplish perfectly, on one side repulsive to a
+man of honour and sensitive feeling, on another side involved in a
+certain mystery (here come in thus, in their subordinate place, various
+causes of inaction assigned by various theories). These obstacles would
+not suffice to prevent Hamlet from acting, if his state were normal; and
+against them there operate, even in his morbid state, healthy and
+positive feelings, love of his father, loathing of his uncle, desire of
+revenge, desire to do duty. But the retarding motives acquire an
+unnatural strength because they have an ally in something far stronger
+than themselves, the melancholic disgust and apathy; while the healthy
+motives, emerging with difficulty from the central mass of diseased
+feeling, rapidly sink back into it and 'lose the name of action.' We
+_see_ them doing so; and sometimes the process is quite simple, no
+analytical reflection on the deed intervening between the outburst of
+passion and the relapse into melancholy.[48] But this melancholy is
+perfectly consistent also with that incessant dissection of the task
+assigned, of which the Schlegel-Coleridge theory makes so much. For
+those endless questions (as we may imagine them), 'Was I deceived by the
+Ghost? How am I to do the deed? When? Where? What will be the
+consequence of attempting it--success, my death, utter misunderstanding,
+mere mischief to the State? Can it be right to do it, or noble to kill a
+defenceless man? What is the good of doing it in such a world as
+this?'--all this, and whatever else passed in a sickening round through
+Hamlet's mind, was not the healthy and right deliberation of a man with
+such a task, but otiose thinking hardly deserving the name of thought,
+an unconscious weaving of pretexts for inaction, aimless tossings on a
+sick bed, symptoms of melancholy which only increased it by deepening
+self-contempt.
+
+Again, (_a_) this state accounts for Hamlet's energy as well as for his
+lassitude, those quick decided actions of his being the outcome of a
+nature normally far from passive, now suddenly stimulated, and producing
+healthy impulses which work themselves out before they have time to
+subside. (_b_) It accounts for the evidently keen satisfaction which
+some of these actions give to him. He arranges the play-scene with
+lively interest, and exults in its success, not really because it brings
+him nearer to his goal, but partly because it has hurt his enemy and
+partly because it has demonstrated his own skill (III. ii.
+286-304). He looks forward almost with glee to countermining the King's
+designs in sending him away (III. iv. 209), and looks back with
+obvious satisfaction, even with pride, to the address and vigour he
+displayed on the voyage (V. ii. 1-55). These were not _the_
+action on which his morbid self-feeling had centred; he feels in them
+his old force, and escapes in them from his disgust. (_c_) It accounts
+for the pleasure with which he meets old acquaintances, like his
+'school-fellows' or the actors. The former observed (and we can observe)
+in him a 'kind of joy' at first, though it is followed by 'much forcing
+of his disposition' as he attempts to keep this joy and his courtesy
+alive in spite of the misery which so soon returns upon him and the
+suspicion he is forced to feel. (_d_) It accounts no less for the
+painful features of his character as seen in the play, his almost savage
+irritability on the one hand, and on the other his self-absorption, his
+callousness, his insensibility to the fates of those whom he despises,
+and to the feelings even of those whom he loves. These are frequent
+symptoms of such melancholy, and (_e_) they sometimes alternate, as they
+do in Hamlet, with bursts of transitory, almost hysterical, and quite
+fruitless emotion. It is to these last (of which a part of the
+soliloquy, 'O what a rogue,' gives a good example) that Hamlet alludes
+when, to the Ghost, he speaks of himself as 'lapsed in _passion_,' and
+it is doubtless partly his conscious weakness in regard to them that
+inspires his praise of Horatio as a man who is not 'passion's
+slave.'[49]
+
+Finally, Hamlet's melancholy accounts for two things which seem to be
+explained by nothing else. The first of these is his apathy or
+'lethargy.' We are bound to consider the evidence which the text
+supplies of this, though it is usual to ignore it. When Hamlet mentions,
+as one possible cause of his inaction, his 'thinking too precisely on
+the event,' he mentions another, 'bestial oblivion'; and the thing
+against which he inveighs in the greater part of that soliloquy
+(IV. iv.) is not the excess or the misuse of reason (which for
+him here and always is god-like), but this _bestial_ oblivion or
+'_dullness_,' this 'letting all _sleep_,' this allowing of heaven-sent
+reason to 'fust unused':
+
+                            What is a man,
+     If his chief good and market of his time
+     Be but to _sleep_ and feed? a _beast_, no more.[50]
+
+So, in the soliloquy in II. ii. he accuses himself of being 'a
+_dull_ and muddy-mettled rascal,' who 'peaks [mopes] like John-a-dreams,
+unpregnant of his cause,' dully indifferent to his cause.[51] So, when
+the Ghost appears to him the second time, he accuses himself of being
+tardy and lapsed in _time_; and the Ghost speaks of his purpose being
+almost _blunted_, and bids him not to _forget_ (cf. 'oblivion'). And so,
+what is emphasised in those undramatic but significant speeches of the
+player-king and of Claudius is the mere dying away of purpose or of
+love.[52] Surely what all this points to is not a condition of excessive
+but useless mental activity (indeed there is, in reality, curiously
+little about that in the text), but rather one of dull, apathetic,
+brooding gloom, in which Hamlet, so far from analysing his duty, is not
+thinking of it at all, but for the time literally _forgets_ it. It seems
+to me we are driven to think of Hamlet _chiefly_ thus during the long
+time which elapsed between the appearance of the Ghost and the events
+presented in the Second Act. The Ghost, in fact, had more reason than we
+suppose at first for leaving with Hamlet as his parting injunction the
+command, 'Remember me,' and for greeting him, on re-appearing, with the
+command, 'Do not forget.'[53] These little things in Shakespeare are not
+accidents.
+
+The second trait which is fully explained only by Hamlet's melancholy is
+his own inability to understand why he delays. This emerges in a marked
+degree when an occasion like the player's emotion or the sight of
+Fortinbras's army stings Hamlet into shame at his inaction. '_Why_,' he
+asks himself in genuine bewilderment, 'do I linger? Can the cause be
+cowardice? Can it be sloth? Can it be thinking too precisely of the
+event? And does _that_ again mean cowardice? What is it that makes me
+sit idle when I feel it is shameful to do so, and when I have _cause,
+and will, and strength, and means_, to act?' A man irresolute merely
+because he was considering a proposed action too minutely would not feel
+this bewilderment. A man might feel it whose conscience secretly
+condemned the act which his explicit consciousness approved; but we have
+seen that there is no sufficient evidence to justify us in conceiving
+Hamlet thus. These are the questions of a man stimulated for the moment
+to shake off the weight of his melancholy, and, because for the moment
+he is free from it, unable to understand the paralysing pressure which
+it exerts at other times.
+
+I have dwelt thus at length on Hamlet's melancholy because, from the
+psychological point of view, it is the centre of the tragedy, and to
+omit it from consideration or to underrate its intensity is to make
+Shakespeare's story unintelligible. But the psychological point of view
+is not equivalent to the tragic; and, having once given its due weight
+to the fact of Hamlet's melancholy, we may freely admit, or rather may
+be anxious to insist, that this pathological condition would excite but
+little, if any, tragic interest if it were not the condition of a nature
+distinguished by that speculative genius on which the Schlegel-Coleridge
+type of theory lays stress. Such theories misinterpret the connection
+between that genius and Hamlet's failure, but still it is this
+connection which gives to his story its peculiar fascination and makes
+it appear (if the phrase may be allowed) as the symbol of a tragic
+mystery inherent in human nature. Wherever this mystery touches us,
+wherever we are forced to feel the wonder and awe of man's godlike
+'apprehension' and his 'thoughts that wander through eternity,' and at
+the same time are forced to see him powerless in his petty sphere of
+action, and powerless (it would appear) from the very divinity of his
+thought, we remember Hamlet. And this is the reason why, in the great
+ideal movement which began towards the close of the eighteenth century,
+this tragedy acquired a position unique among Shakespeare's dramas, and
+shared only by Goethe's _Faust_. It was not that _Hamlet_ is
+Shakespeare's greatest tragedy or most perfect work of art; it was that
+_Hamlet_ most brings home to us at once the sense of the soul's
+infinity, and the sense of the doom which not only circumscribes that
+infinity but appears to be its offspring.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[Footnote 25: It may be convenient to some readers for the purposes of
+this book to have by them a list of Shakespeare's plays, arranged in
+periods. No such list, of course, can command general assent, but the
+following (which does not throughout represent my own views) would
+perhaps meet with as little objection from scholars as any other. For
+some purposes the Third and Fourth Periods are better considered to be
+one. Within each period the so-called Comedies, Histories, and Tragedies
+are respectively grouped together; and for this reason, as well as for
+others, the order within each period does not profess to be
+chronological (_e.g._ it is not implied that the _Comedy of Errors_
+preceded _1 Henry VI._ or _Titus Andronicus_). Where Shakespeare's
+authorship of any considerable part of a play is questioned, widely or
+by specially good authority, the name of the play is printed in italics.
+
+_First Period_ (to 1595?).--Comedy of Errors, Love's Labour's Lost, Two
+Gentlemen of Verona, Midsummer-Night's Dream; _1 Henry VI._, _2 Henry
+VI._, _3 Henry VI._, Richard III., Richard II.; _Titus Andronicus_,
+Romeo and Juliet.
+
+_Second Period_ (to 1602?).--Merchant of Venice, All's Well (better in
+Third Period?), _Taming of the Shrew_, Much Ado, As You Like it, Merry
+Wives, Twelfth Night; King John, 1 Henry IV., 2 Henry IV., Henry V.;
+Julius Caesar, Hamlet.
+
+_Third Period_ (to 1608?).--Troilus and Cressida, Measure for Measure;
+Othello, King Lear, _Timon of Athens_, Macbeth, Antony and Cleopatra,
+Coriolanus.
+
+_Fourth Period._--_Pericles_, Cymbeline, Winter's Tale, Tempest, _Two
+Noble Kinsmen_, _Henry VIII._]
+
+[Footnote 26: The reader will observe that this 'tragic period' would
+not exactly coincide with the 'Third Period' of the division given in
+the last note. For _Julius Caesar_ and _Hamlet_ fall in the Second
+Period, not the Third; and I may add that, as _Pericles_ was entered at
+Stationers' Hall in 1608 and published in 1609, it ought strictly to be
+put in the Third Period--not the Fourth. The truth is that _Julius
+Caesar_ and _Hamlet_ are given to the Second Period mainly on the ground
+of style; while a Fourth Period is admitted, not mainly on that ground
+(for there is no great difference here between _Antony_ and _Coriolanus_
+on the one side and _Cymbeline_ and the _Tempest_ on the other), but
+because of a difference in substance and spirit. If a Fourth Period were
+admitted on grounds of form, it ought to begin with _Antony and
+Cleopatra_.]
+
+[Footnote 27: I should go perhaps too far if I said that it is generally
+admitted that _Timon of Athens_ also precedes the two Roman tragedies;
+but its precedence seems to me so nearly certain that I assume it in
+what follows.]
+
+[Footnote 28: That play, however, is distinguished, I think, by a
+deliberate endeavour after a dignified and unadorned simplicity,--a
+Roman simplicity perhaps.]
+
+[Footnote 29: It is quite probable that this may arise in part from the
+fact, which seems hardly doubtful, that the tragedy was revised, and in
+places re-written, some little time after its first composition.]
+
+[Footnote 30: This, if we confine ourselves to the tragedies, is, I
+think, especially the case in _King Lear_ and _Timon_.]
+
+[Footnote 31: The first, at any rate, of these three plays is, of
+course, much nearer to _Hamlet_, especially in versification, than to
+_Antony and Cleopatra_, in which Shakespeare's final style first shows
+itself practically complete. It has been impossible, in the brief
+treatment of this subject, to say what is required of the individual
+plays.]
+
+[Footnote 32: _The Mirror_, 18th April, 1780, quoted by Furness,
+_Variorum Hamlet_, ii. 148. In the above remarks I have relied mainly on
+Furness's collection of extracts from early critics.]
+
+[Footnote 33: I do not profess to reproduce any one theory, and, still
+less, to do justice to the ablest exponent of this kind of view, Werder
+(_Vorlesungen über Hamlet_, 1875), who by no means regards Hamlet's
+difficulties as _merely_ external.]
+
+[Footnote 34: I give one instance. When he spares the King, he speaks of
+killing him when he is drunk asleep, when he is in his rage, when he is
+awake in bed, when he is gaming, as if there were in none of these cases
+the least obstacle (III. iii. 89 ff.).]
+
+[Footnote 35: It is surprising to find quoted, in support of the
+conscience view, the line 'Thus conscience does make cowards of us all,'
+and to observe the total misinterpretation of the soliloquy _To be or
+not to be_, from which the line comes. In this soliloquy Hamlet is not
+thinking of the duty laid upon him at all. He is debating the question
+of suicide. No one oppressed by the ills of life, he says, would
+continue to bear them if it were not for speculation about his possible
+fortune in another life. And then, generalising, he says (what applies
+to himself, no doubt, though he shows no consciousness of the fact) that
+such speculation or reflection makes men hesitate and shrink like
+cowards from great actions and enterprises. 'Conscience' does not mean
+moral sense or scrupulosity, but this reflection on the _consequences_
+of action. It is the same thing as the 'craven scruple of thinking too
+precisely on the event' of the speech in IV. iv. As to this use
+of 'conscience,' see Schmidt, _s.v._ and the parallels there given. The
+_Oxford Dictionary_ also gives many examples of similar uses of
+'conscience,' though it unfortunately lends its authority to the
+misinterpretation criticised.]
+
+[Footnote 36: The King does not die of the _poison_ on the foil, like
+Laertes and Hamlet. They were wounded before he was, but they die after
+him.]
+
+[Footnote 37: I may add here a word on one small matter. It is
+constantly asserted that Hamlet wept over the body of Polonius. Now, if
+he did, it would make no difference to my point in the paragraph above;
+but there is no warrant in the text for the assertion. It is based on
+some words of the Queen (IV. i. 24), in answer to the King's
+question, 'Where is he gone?':
+
+     To draw apart the body he hath killed:
+     O'er whom his very madness, like some ore
+     Among a mineral of metals base,
+     Shows itself pure; he weeps for what is done.
+
+But the Queen, as was pointed out by Doering, is trying to screen her
+son. She has already made the false statement that when Hamlet, crying,
+'A rat! a rat!', ran his rapier through the arras, it was because he
+heard _something stir_ there, whereas we know that what he heard was a
+man's voice crying, 'What ho! help, help, help!' And in this scene she
+has come straight from the interview with her son, terribly agitated,
+shaken with 'sighs' and 'profound heaves,' in the night (line 30). Now
+we know what Hamlet said to the body, and of the body, in that
+interview; and there is assuredly no sound of tears in the voice that
+said those things and others. The only sign of relenting is in the words
+(III. iv. 171):
+
+                         For this same lord,
+     I do repent: but heaven hath pleased it so,
+     To punish me with this and this with me,
+     That I must be their scourge and minister.
+
+His mother's statement, therefore, is almost certainly untrue, though it
+may be to her credit. (It is just conceivable that Hamlet wept at
+III. iv. 130, and that the Queen supposed he was weeping for
+Polonius.)
+
+Perhaps, however, he may have wept over Polonius's body afterwards?
+Well, in the _next_ scene (IV. ii.) we see him _alone_ with the
+body, and are therefore likely to witness his genuine feelings. And his
+first words are, 'Safely stowed'!]
+
+[Footnote 38: Not 'must cripple,' as the English translation has it.]
+
+[Footnote 39: He says so to Horatio, whom he has no motive for deceiving
+(V. ii. 218). His contrary statement (II. ii. 308) is made to
+Rosencrantz and Guildenstern.]
+
+[Footnote 40: See Note B.]
+
+[Footnote 41: The critics have laboured to find a cause, but it seems to
+me Shakespeare simply meant to portray a pathological condition; and a
+very touching picture he draws. Antonio's sadness, which he describes in
+the opening lines of the play, would never drive him to suicide, but it
+makes him indifferent to the issue of the trial, as all his speeches in
+the trial-scene show.]
+
+[Footnote 42: Of course 'your' does not mean Horatio's philosophy in
+particular. 'Your' is used as the Gravedigger uses it when he says that
+'your water is a sore decayer of your ... dead body.']
+
+[Footnote 43: This aspect of the matter leaves _us_ comparatively
+unaffected, but Shakespeare evidently means it to be of importance. The
+Ghost speaks of it twice, and Hamlet thrice (once in his last furious
+words to the King). If, as we must suppose, the marriage was universally
+admitted to be incestuous, the corrupt acquiescence of the court and the
+electors to the crown would naturally have a strong effect on Hamlet's
+mind.]
+
+[Footnote 44: It is most significant that the metaphor of this soliloquy
+reappears in Hamlet's adjuration to his mother (III. iv. 150):
+
+     Repent what's past; avoid what is to come;
+     And do not spread the compost on the weeds
+     To make them ranker.]
+
+[Footnote 45: If the reader will now look at the only speech of Hamlet's
+that precedes the soliloquy, and is more than one line in length--the
+speech beginning 'Seems, madam! nay, it _is_'--he will understand what,
+surely, when first we come to it, sounds very strange and almost
+boastful. It is not, in effect, about Hamlet himself at all; it is about
+his mother (I do not mean that it is intentionally and consciously so;
+and still less that she understood it so).]
+
+[Footnote 46: See Note D.]
+
+[Footnote 47: See p. 13.]
+
+[Footnote 48: _E.g._ in the transition, referred to above, from
+desire for vengeance into the wish never to have been born; in
+the soliloquy, 'O what a rogue'; in the scene at Ophelia's grave.
+The Schlegel-Coleridge theory does not account for the psychological
+movement in these passages.]
+
+[Footnote 49: Hamlet's violence at Ophelia's grave, though probably
+intentionally exaggerated, is another example of this want of
+self-control. The Queen's description of him (V. i. 307),
+
+               This is mere madness;
+     And thus awhile the fit will work on him;
+     Anon, as patient as the female dove,
+     When that her golden couplets are disclosed,
+     His silence will sit drooping.
+
+may be true to life, though it is evidently prompted by anxiety to
+excuse his violence on the ground of his insanity. On this passage see
+further Note G.]
+
+[Footnote 50: Throughout, I italicise to show the connection of ideas.]
+
+[Footnote 51: Cf. _Measure for Measure_, IV. iv. 23, 'This deed
+ ... makes me unpregnant and dull to all proceedings.']
+
+[Footnote 52: III. ii. 196 ff., IV. vii. 111 ff.:
+_e.g._,
+
+     Purpose is but the slave to _memory_,
+     Of violent birth but poor validity.]
+
+[Footnote 53: So, before, he had said to him:
+
+     And duller should'st thou be than the fat weed
+     That roots itself in ease on Lethe wharf,
+     Would'st thou not stir in this.
+
+On Hamlet's soliloquy after the Ghost's disappearance see Note D.]
+
+
+
+
+LECTURE IV
+
+HAMLET
+
+
+The only way, if there is any way, in which a conception of Hamlet's
+character could be proved true, would be to show that it, and it alone,
+explains all the relevant facts presented by the text of the drama. To
+attempt such a demonstration here would obviously be impossible, even if
+I felt certain of the interpretation of all the facts. But I propose now
+to follow rapidly the course of the action in so far as it specially
+illustrates the character, reserving for separate consideration one
+important but particularly doubtful point.
+
+
+1
+
+We left Hamlet, at the close of the First Act, when he had just received
+his charge from the spirit of his father; and his condition was vividly
+depicted in the fact that, within an hour of receiving this charge, he
+had relapsed into that weariness of life or longing for death which is
+the immediate cause of his later inaction. When next we meet him, at the
+opening of the Second Act, a considerable time has elapsed, apparently
+as much as two months.[54] The ambassadors sent to the King of Norway
+(I. ii. 27) are just returning. Laertes, whom we saw leaving Elsinore
+(I. iii.), has been in Paris long enough to be in want of fresh
+supplies. Ophelia has obeyed her father's command (given in I. iii.),
+and has refused to receive Hamlet's visits or letters. What has Hamlet
+done? He has put on an 'antic disposition' and established a reputation
+for lunacy, with the result that his mother has become deeply anxious
+about him, and with the further result that the King, who was formerly
+so entirely at ease regarding him that he wished him to stay on at
+Court, is now extremely uneasy and very desirous to discover the cause
+of his 'transformation.' Hence Rosencrantz and Guildenstern have been
+sent for, to cheer him by their company and to worm his secret out of
+him; and they are just about to arrive. Beyond exciting thus the
+apprehensions of his enemy Hamlet has done absolutely nothing; and, as
+we have seen, we must imagine him during this long period sunk for the
+most part in 'bestial oblivion' or fruitless broodings, and falling
+deeper and deeper into the slough of despond.
+
+Now he takes a further step. He suddenly appears unannounced in
+Ophelia's chamber; and his appearance and behaviour are such as to
+suggest both to Ophelia and to her father that his brain is turned by
+disappointment in love. How far this step was due to the design of
+creating a false impression as to the origin of his lunacy, how far to
+other causes, is a difficult question; but such a design seems certainly
+present. It succeeds, however, only in part; for, although Polonius is
+fully convinced, the King is not so, and it is therefore arranged that
+the two shall secretly witness a meeting between Ophelia and Hamlet.
+Meanwhile Rosencrantz and Guildenstern arrive, and at the King's request
+begin their attempts, easily foiled by Hamlet, to pluck out the heart of
+his mystery. Then the players come to Court, and for a little while one
+of Hamlet's old interests revives, and he is almost happy. But only for
+a little while. The emotion shown by the player in reciting the speech
+which tells of Hecuba's grief for her slaughtered husband awakes into
+burning life the slumbering sense of duty and shame. He must act. With
+the extreme rapidity which always distinguishes him in his healthier
+moments, he conceives and arranges the plan of having the 'Murder of
+Gonzago' played before the King and Queen, with the addition of a speech
+written by himself for the occasion. Then, longing to be alone, he
+abruptly dismisses his guests, and pours out a passion of self-reproach
+for his delay, asks himself in bewilderment what can be its cause,
+lashes himself into a fury of hatred against his foe, checks himself in
+disgust at his futile emotion, and quiets his conscience for the moment
+by trying to convince himself that he has doubts about the Ghost, and by
+assuring himself that, if the King's behaviour at the play-scene shows
+but a sign of guilt, he 'knows his course.'
+
+Nothing, surely, can be clearer than the meaning of this famous
+soliloquy. The doubt which appears at its close, instead of being the
+natural conclusion of the preceding thoughts, is totally inconsistent
+with them. For Hamlet's self-reproaches, his curses on his enemy, and
+his perplexity about his own inaction, one and all imply his faith in
+the identity and truthfulness of the Ghost. Evidently this sudden doubt,
+of which there has not been the slightest trace before, is no genuine
+doubt; it is an unconscious fiction, an excuse for his delay--and for
+its continuance.
+
+A night passes, and the day that follows it brings the crisis. First
+takes place that interview from which the King is to learn whether
+disappointed love is really the cause of his nephew's lunacy. Hamlet is
+sent for; poor Ophelia is told to walk up and down, reading her
+prayer-book; Polonius and the King conceal themselves behind the arras.
+And Hamlet enters, so deeply absorbed in thought that for some time he
+supposes himself to be alone. What is he thinking of? 'The Murder of
+Gonzago,' which is to be played in a few hours, and on which everything
+depends? Not at all. He is meditating on suicide; and he finds that what
+stands in the way of it, and counterbalances its infinite attraction, is
+not any thought of a sacred unaccomplished duty, but the doubt, quite
+irrelevant to that issue, whether it is not ignoble in the mind to end
+its misery, and, still more, whether death _would_ end it. Hamlet, that
+is to say, is here, in effect, precisely where he was at the time of his
+first soliloquy ('O that this too too solid flesh would melt') two
+months ago, before ever he heard of his father's murder.[55] His
+reflections have no reference to this particular moment; they represent
+that habitual weariness of life with which his passing outbursts of
+emotion or energy are contrasted. What can be more significant than the
+fact that he is sunk in these reflections on the very day which is to
+determine for him the truthfulness of the Ghost? And how is it possible
+for us to hope that, if that truthfulness should be established, Hamlet
+will be any nearer to his revenge?[56]
+
+His interview with Ophelia follows; and its result shows that his delay
+is becoming most dangerous to himself. The King is satisfied that,
+whatever else may be the hidden cause of Hamlet's madness, it is not
+love. He is by no means certain even that Hamlet is mad at all. He has
+heard that infuriated threat, 'I say, we will have no more marriages;
+those that are married, all but one, shall live; the rest shall keep as
+they are.' He is thoroughly alarmed. He at any rate will not delay. On
+the spot he determines to send Hamlet to England. But, as Polonius is
+present, we do not learn at once the meaning of this purpose.
+
+Evening comes. The approach of the play-scene raises Hamlet's spirits.
+He is in his element. He feels that he is doing _something_ towards his
+end, striking a stroke, but a stroke of intellect. In his instructions
+to the actor on the delivery of the inserted speech, and again in his
+conversation with Horatio just before the entry of the Court, we see the
+true Hamlet, the Hamlet of the days before his father's death. But how
+characteristic it is that he appears quite as anxious that his speech
+should not be ranted as that Horatio should observe its effect upon the
+King! This trait appears again even at that thrilling moment when the
+actor is just going to deliver the speech. Hamlet sees him beginning to
+frown and glare like the conventional stage-murderer, and calls to him
+impatiently, 'Leave thy damnable faces and begin!'[57]
+
+Hamlet's device proves a triumph far more complete than he had dared to
+expect. He had thought the King might 'blench,' but he does much more.
+When only six of the 'dozen or sixteen lines' have been spoken he starts
+to his feet and rushes from the hall, followed by the whole dismayed
+Court. In the elation of success--an elation at first almost
+hysterical--Hamlet treats Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, who are sent to
+him, with undisguised contempt. Left to himself, he declares that now he
+could
+
+                   drink hot blood,
+     And do such bitter business as the day
+     Would quake to look on.
+
+He has been sent for by his mother, and is going to her chamber; and so
+vehement and revengeful is his mood that he actually fancies himself in
+danger of using daggers to her as well as speaking them.[58]
+
+In this mood, on his way to his mother's chamber, he comes upon the
+King, alone, kneeling, conscience-stricken and attempting to pray. His
+enemy is delivered into his hands.
+
+     Now might I do it pat, now he is praying:
+     And now I'll do it: and so he goes to heaven:
+     And so am I revenged.[59] That would be scanned.
+
+He scans it; and the sword that he drew at the words, 'And now I'll do
+it,' is thrust back into its sheath. If he killed the villain now he
+would send his soul to heaven; and he would fain kill soul as well as
+body.
+
+That this again is an unconscious excuse for delay is now pretty
+generally agreed, and it is needless to describe again the state of mind
+which, on the view explained in our last lecture, is the real cause of
+Hamlet's failure here. The first five words he utters, 'Now might I do
+it,' show that he has no effective _desire_ to 'do it'; and in the
+little sentences that follow, and the long pauses between them, the
+endeavour at a resolution, and the sickening return of melancholic
+paralysis, however difficult a task they set to the actor, are plain
+enough to a reader. And any reader who may retain a doubt should observe
+the fact that, when the Ghost reappears, Hamlet does not think of
+justifying his delay by the plea that he was waiting for a more perfect
+vengeance. But in one point the great majority of critics, I think, go
+astray. The feeling of intense hatred which Hamlet expresses is not the
+cause of his sparing the King, and in his heart he knows this; but it
+does not at all follow that this feeling is unreal. All the evidence
+afforded by the play goes to show that it is perfectly genuine, and I
+see no reason whatever to doubt that Hamlet would have been very sorry
+to send his father's murderer to heaven, nor much to doubt that he would
+have been glad to send him to perdition. The reason for refusing to
+accept his own version of his motive in sparing Claudius is not that his
+sentiments are horrible, but that elsewhere, and also in the opening of
+his speech here, we can see that his reluctance to act is due to other
+causes.
+
+The incident of the sparing of the King is contrived with extraordinary
+dramatic insight. On the one side we feel that the opportunity was
+perfect. Hamlet could not possibly any longer tell himself that he had
+no certainty as to his uncle's guilt. And the external conditions were
+most favourable; for the King's remarkable behaviour at the play-scene
+would have supplied a damning confirmation of the story Hamlet had to
+tell about the Ghost. Even now, probably, in a Court so corrupt as that
+of Elsinore, he could not with perfect security have begun by charging
+the King with the murder; but he could quite safely have killed him
+first and given his justification afterwards, especially as he would
+certainly have had on his side the people, who loved him and despised
+Claudius. On the other hand, Shakespeare has taken care to give this
+perfect opportunity so repulsive a character that we can hardly bring
+ourselves to wish that the hero should accept it. One of his minor
+difficulties, we have seen, probably was that he seemed to be required
+to attack a defenceless man; and here this difficulty is at its maximum.
+
+This incident is, again, the turning-point of the tragedy. So far,
+Hamlet's delay, though it is endangering his freedom and his life, has
+done no irreparable harm; but his failure here is the cause of all the
+disasters that follow. In sparing the King, he sacrifices Polonius,
+Ophelia, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, Laertes, the Queen and himself.
+This central significance of the passage is dramatically indicated in
+the following scene by the reappearance of the Ghost and the repetition
+of its charge.
+
+Polonius is the first to fall. The old courtier, whose vanity would not
+allow him to confess that his diagnosis of Hamlet's lunacy was mistaken,
+had suggested that, after the theatricals, the Queen should endeavour in
+a private interview with her son to penetrate the mystery, while he
+himself would repeat his favourite part of eaves-dropper (III. i. 184
+ff.). It has now become quite imperative that the Prince should be
+brought to disclose his secret; for his choice of the 'Murder of
+Gonzago,' and perhaps his conduct during the performance, have shown a
+spirit of exaggerated hostility against the King which has excited
+general alarm. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern discourse to Claudius on the
+extreme importance of his preserving his invaluable life, as though
+Hamlet's insanity had now clearly shown itself to be homicidal.[60]
+When, then, at the opening of the interview between Hamlet and his
+mother, the son, instead of listening to her remonstrances, roughly
+assumes the offensive, she becomes alarmed; and when, on her attempting
+to leave the room, he takes her by the arm and forces her to sit down,
+she is terrified, cries out, 'Thou wilt not murder me?' and screams for
+help. Polonius, behind the arras, echoes her call; and in a moment
+Hamlet, hoping the concealed person is the King, runs the old man
+through the body.
+
+Evidently this act is intended to stand in sharp contrast with Hamlet's
+sparing of his enemy. The King would have been just as defenceless
+behind the arras as he had been on his knees; but here Hamlet is already
+excited and in action, and the chance comes to him so suddenly that he
+has no time to 'scan' it. It is a minor consideration, but still for the
+dramatist not unimportant, that the audience would wholly sympathise
+with Hamlet's attempt here, as directed against an enemy who is lurking
+to entrap him, instead of being engaged in a business which perhaps to
+the bulk of the audience then, as now, seemed to have a 'relish of
+salvation in't.'
+
+We notice in Hamlet, at the opening of this interview, something of the
+excited levity which followed the _dénouement_ of the play-scene. The
+death of Polonius sobers him; and in the remainder of the interview he
+shows, together with some traces of his morbid state, the peculiar
+beauty and nobility of his nature. His chief desire is not by any means
+to ensure his mother's silent acquiescence in his design of revenge; it
+is to save her soul. And while the rough work of vengeance is repugnant
+to him, he is at home in this higher work. Here that fatal feeling, 'it
+is no matter,' never shows itself. No father-confessor could be more
+selflessly set upon his end of redeeming a fellow-creature from
+degradation, more stern or pitiless in denouncing the sin, or more eager
+to welcome the first token of repentance. There is something infinitely
+beautiful in that sudden sunshine of faith and love which breaks out
+when, at the Queen's surrender,
+
+     O Hamlet, thou hast cleft my heart in twain,
+
+he answers,
+
+     O throw away the worser part of it,
+     And live the purer with the other half.
+
+The truth is that, though Hamlet hates his uncle and acknowledges the
+duty of vengeance, his whole heart is never in this feeling or this
+task; but his whole heart is in his horror at his mother's fall and in
+his longing to raise her. The former of these feelings was the
+inspiration of his first soliloquy; it combines with the second to form
+the inspiration of his eloquence here. And Shakespeare never wrote more
+eloquently than here.
+
+I have already alluded to the significance of the reappearance of the
+Ghost in this scene; but why does Shakespeare choose for the particular
+moment of its reappearance the middle of a speech in which Hamlet is
+raving against his uncle? There seems to be more than one reason. In the
+first place, Hamlet has already attained his object of stirring shame
+and contrition in his mother's breast, and is now yielding to the old
+temptation of unpacking his heart with words, and exhausting in useless
+emotion the force which should be stored up in his will. And, next, in
+doing this he is agonising his mother to no purpose, and in despite of
+her piteous and repeated appeals for mercy. But the Ghost, when it gave
+him his charge, had expressly warned him to spare her; and here again
+the dead husband shows the same tender regard for his weak unfaithful
+wife. The object of his return is to repeat his charge:
+
+     Do not forget: this visitation
+     Is but to whet thy almost blunted purpose;
+
+but, having uttered this reminder, he immediately bids the son to help
+the mother and 'step between her and her fighting soul.'
+
+And, whether intentionally or not, another purpose is served by
+Shakespeare's choice of this particular moment. It is a moment when the
+state of Hamlet's mind is such that we cannot suppose the Ghost to be
+meant for an hallucination; and it is of great importance here that the
+spectator or reader should not suppose any such thing. He is further
+guarded by the fact that the Ghost proves, so to speak, his identity by
+showing the same traits as were visible on his first appearance--the
+same insistence on the duty of remembering, and the same concern for the
+Queen. And the result is that we construe the Ghost's interpretation of
+Hamlet's delay ('almost blunted purpose') as the truth, the dramatist's
+own interpretation. Let me add that probably no one in Shakespeare's
+audience had any doubt of his meaning here. The idea of later critics
+and readers that the Ghost is an hallucination is due partly to failure
+to follow the indications just noticed, but partly also to two mistakes,
+the substitution of our present intellectual atmosphere for the
+Elizabethan, and the notion that, because the Queen does not see and
+hear the Ghost, it is meant to be unreal. But a ghost, in Shakespeare's
+day, was able for any sufficient reason to confine its manifestation to
+a single person in a company; and here the sufficient reason, that of
+sparing the Queen, is obvious.[61]
+
+At the close of this scene it appears that Hamlet has somehow learned of
+the King's design of sending him to England in charge of his two
+'school-fellows.' He has no doubt that this design covers some
+villainous plot against himself, but neither does he doubt that he will
+succeed in defeating it; and, as we saw, he looks forward with pleasure
+to this conflict of wits. The idea of refusing to go appears not to
+occur to him. Perhaps (for here we are left to conjecture) he feels that
+he could not refuse unless at the same time he openly accused the King
+of his father's murder (a course which he seems at no time to
+contemplate); for by the slaughter of Polonius he has supplied his enemy
+with the best possible excuse for getting him out of the country.
+Besides, he has so effectually warned this enemy that, after the death
+of Polonius is discovered, he is kept under guard (IV. iii. 14). He
+consents, then, to go. But on his way to the shore he meets the army of
+Fortinbras on its march to Poland; and the sight of these men going
+cheerfully to risk death 'for an egg-shell,' and 'making mouths at the
+invisible event,' strikes him with shame as he remembers how he, with so
+much greater cause for action, 'lets all sleep;' and he breaks out into
+the soliloquy, 'How all occasions do inform against me!'
+
+This great speech, in itself not inferior to the famous 'To be or not to
+be,' is absent not only from the First Quarto but from the Folio. It is
+therefore probable that, at any rate by the time when the Folio appeared
+(1623), it had become customary to omit it in theatrical representation;
+and this is still the custom. But, while no doubt it is dramatically the
+least indispensable of the soliloquies, it has a direct dramatic value,
+and a great value for the interpretation of Hamlet's character. It shows
+that Hamlet, though he is leaving Denmark, has not relinquished the idea
+of obeying the Ghost. It exhibits very strikingly his inability to
+understand why he has delayed so long. It contains that assertion which
+so many critics forget, that he has 'cause and will and strength and
+means to do it.' On the other hand--and this was perhaps the principal
+purpose of the speech--it convinces us that he has learnt little or
+nothing from his delay, or from his failure to seize the opportunity
+presented to him after the play-scene. For, we find, both the motive and
+the gist of the speech are precisely the same as those of the soliloquy
+at the end of the Second Act ('O what a rogue'). There too he was
+stirred to shame when he saw a passionate emotion awakened by a cause
+which, compared with his, was a mere egg-shell. There too he stood
+bewildered at the sight of his own dulness, and was almost ready to
+believe--what was justly incredible to him--that it was the mask of mere
+cowardice. There too he determined to delay no longer: if the King
+should but blench, he knew his course. Yet this determination led to
+nothing then; and why, we ask ourselves in despair, should the bloody
+thoughts he now resolves to cherish ever pass beyond the realm of
+thought?
+
+Between this scene (IV. iv.) and the remainder of the play we must again
+suppose an interval, though not a very long one. When the action
+recommences, the death of Polonius has led to the insanity of Ophelia
+and the secret return of Laertes from France. The young man comes back
+breathing slaughter. For the King, afraid to put Hamlet on his trial (a
+course likely to raise the question of his own behaviour at the play,
+and perhaps to provoke an open accusation),[62] has attempted to hush up
+the circumstances of Polonius's death, and has given him a hurried and
+inglorious burial. The fury of Laertes, therefore, is directed in the
+first instance against the King: and the ease with which he raises the
+people, like the King's fear of a judicial enquiry, shows us how purely
+internal were the obstacles which the hero had to overcome. This
+impression is intensified by the broad contrast between Hamlet and
+Laertes, who rushes headlong to his revenge, and is determined to have
+it though allegiance, conscience, grace and damnation stand in his way
+(IV. v. 130). But the King, though he has been hard put to it, is now in
+his element and feels safe. Knowing that he will very soon hear of
+Hamlet's execution in England, he tells Laertes that his father died by
+Hamlet's hand, and expresses his willingness to let the friends of
+Laertes judge whether he himself has any responsibility for the deed.
+And when, to his astonishment and dismay, news comes that Hamlet has
+returned to Denmark, he acts with admirable promptitude and address,
+turns Laertes round his finger, and arranges with him for the murder of
+their common enemy. If there were any risk of the young man's resolution
+faltering, it is removed by the death of Ophelia. And now the King has
+but one anxiety,--to prevent the young men from meeting before the
+fencing-match. For who can tell what Hamlet might say in his defence, or
+how enchanting his tongue might prove?[63]
+
+Hamlet's return to Denmark is due partly to his own action, partly to
+accident. On the voyage he secretly possesses himself of the royal
+commission, and substitutes for it another, which he himself writes and
+seals, and in which the King of England is ordered to put to death, not
+Hamlet, but Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. Then the ship is attacked by a
+pirate, which, apparently, finds its intended prize too strong for it,
+and makes off. But as Hamlet 'in the grapple,' eager for fighting, has
+boarded the assailant, he is carried off in it, and by promises induces
+the pirates to put him ashore in Denmark.
+
+In what spirit does he return? Unquestionably, I think, we can observe a
+certain change, though it is not great. First, we notice here and there
+what seems to be a consciousness of power, due probably to his success
+in counter-mining Claudius and blowing the courtiers to the moon, and to
+his vigorous action in the sea-fight. But I doubt if this sense of power
+is more marked than it was in the scenes following the success of the
+'Murder of Gonzago.' Secondly, we nowhere find any direct expression of
+that weariness of life and that longing for death which were so marked
+in the first soliloquy and in the speech 'To be or not to be.' This may
+be a mere accident, and it must be remembered that in the Fifth Act we
+have no soliloquy. But in the earlier Acts the feelings referred to do
+not appear _merely_ in soliloquy, and I incline to think that
+Shakespeare means to show in the Hamlet of the Fifth Act a slight
+thinning of the dark cloud of melancholy, and means us to feel it tragic
+that this change comes too late. And, in the third place, there is a
+trait about which doubt is impossible,--a sense in Hamlet that he is in
+the hands of Providence. This had, indeed, already shown itself at the
+death of Polonius,[64] and perhaps at Hamlet's farewell to the King,[65]
+but the idea seems now to be constantly present in his mind. 'There's a
+divinity that shapes our ends,' he declares to Horatio in speaking of
+the fighting in his heart that would not let him sleep, and of his
+rashness in groping his way to the courtiers to find their commission.
+How was he able, Horatio asks, to seal the substituted commission?
+
+     Why, even in that was heaven ordinant,
+
+Hamlet answers; he had his father's signet in his purse. And though he
+has a presentiment of evil about the fencing-match he refuses to yield
+to it: 'we defy augury: there is special providence in the fall of a
+sparrow ... the readiness is all.'
+
+Though these passages strike us more when put together thus than when
+they come upon us at intervals in reading the play, they have a marked
+effect on our feeling about Hamlet's character and still more about the
+events of the action. But I find it impossible to believe, with some
+critics, that they indicate any material change in his general
+condition, or the formation of any effective resolution to fulfil the
+appointed duty. On the contrary, they seem to express that kind of
+religious resignation which, however beautiful in one aspect, really
+deserves the name of fatalism rather than that of faith in Providence,
+because it is not united to any determination to do what is believed to
+be the will of Providence. In place of this determination, the Hamlet of
+the Fifth Act shows a kind of sad or indifferent self-abandonment, as if
+he secretly despaired of forcing himself to action, and were ready to
+leave his duty to some other power than his own. _This_ is really the
+main change which appears in him after his return to Denmark, and which
+had begun to show itself before he went,--this, and not a determination
+to act, nor even an anxiety to do so.
+
+For when he returns he stands in a most perilous position. On one side
+of him is the King, whose safety depends on his death, and who has done
+his best to murder him; on the other, Laertes, whose father and sister
+he has sent to their graves, and of whose behaviour and probable
+attitude he must surely be informed by Horatio. What is required of him,
+therefore, if he is not to perish with his duty undone, is the utmost
+wariness and the swiftest resolution. Yet it is not too much to say
+that, except when Horatio forces the matter on his attention, he shows
+no consciousness of this position. He muses in the graveyard on the
+nothingness of life and fame, and the base uses to which our dust
+returns, whether it be a court-jester's or a world-conqueror's. He
+learns that the open grave over which he muses has been dug for the
+woman he loved; and he suffers one terrible pang, from which he gains
+relief in frenzied words and frenzied action,--action which must needs
+intensify, if that were possible, the fury of the man whom he has,
+however unwittingly, so cruelly injured. Yet he appears absolutely
+unconscious that he has injured Laertes at all, and asks him:
+
+     What is the reason that you use me thus?
+
+And as the sharpness of the first pang passes, the old weary misery
+returns, and he might almost say to Ophelia, as he does to her brother:
+
+     I loved you ever: but it is no matter.
+
+'It is no matter': _nothing_ matters.
+
+The last scene opens. He narrates to Horatio the events of the voyage
+and his uncle's attempt to murder him. But the conclusion of the story
+is no plan of action, but the old fatal question, 'Ought I not to
+act?'[66] And, while he asks it, his enemies have acted. Osric enters
+with an invitation to him to take part in a fencing-match with Laertes.
+This match--he is expressly told so--has been arranged by his deadly
+enemy the King; and his antagonist is a man whose hands but a few hours
+ago were at his throat, and whose voice he had heard shouting 'The devil
+take thy soul!' But he does not think of that. To fence is to show a
+courtesy, and to himself it is a relief,--action, and not the one
+hateful action. There is something noble in his carelessness, and also
+in his refusal to attend to the presentiment which he suddenly feels
+(and of which he says, not only 'the readiness is all,' but also 'it is
+no matter'). Something noble; and yet, when a sacred duty is still
+undone, ought one to be so ready to die? With the same carelessness, and
+with that trustfulness which makes us love him, but which is here so
+fatally misplaced, he picks up the first foil that comes to his hand,
+asks indifferently, 'These foils have all a length?' and begins. And
+Fate descends upon his enemies, and his mother, and himself.
+
+But he is not left in utter defeat. Not only is his task at last
+accomplished, but Shakespeare seems to have determined that his hero
+should exhibit in his latest hour all the glorious power and all the
+nobility and sweetness of his nature. Of the first, the power, I spoke
+before,[67] but there is a wonderful beauty in the revelation of the
+second. His body already labouring in the pangs of death, his mind soars
+above them. He forgives Laertes; he remembers his wretched mother and
+bids her adieu, ignorant that she has preceded him. We hear now no word
+of lamentation or self-reproach. He has will, and just time, to think,
+not of the past or of what might have been, but of the future; to forbid
+his friend's death in words more pathetic in their sadness than even his
+agony of spirit had been; and to take care, so far as in him lies, for
+the welfare of the State which he himself should have guided. Then in
+spite of shipwreck he reaches the haven of silence where he would be.
+What else could his world-wearied flesh desire?
+
+But _we_ desire more; and we receive it. As those mysterious words, 'The
+rest is silence,' die upon Hamlet's lips, Horatio answers:
+
+     Now cracks a noble heart. Good night, sweet prince,
+     And flights of angels sing thee to thy rest.
+
+Why did Shakespeare here, so much against his custom, introduce this
+reference to another life? Did he remember that Hamlet is the only one
+of his tragic heroes whom he has not allowed us to see in the days when
+this life smiled on him? Did he feel that, while for the others we might
+be content to imagine after life's fitful fever nothing more than
+release and silence, we must ask more for one whose 'godlike reason' and
+passionate love of goodness have only gleamed upon us through the heavy
+clouds of melancholy, and yet have left us murmuring, as we bow our
+heads, 'This was the noblest spirit of them all'?
+
+
+2
+
+How many things still remain to say of Hamlet! Before I touch on his
+relation to Ophelia, I will choose but two. Neither of them, compared
+with the matters so far considered, is of great consequence, but both
+are interesting, and the first seems to have quite escaped observation.
+
+(1) Most people have, beside their more essential traits of character,
+little peculiarities which, for their intimates, form an indissoluble
+part of their personality. In comedy, and in other humorous works of
+fiction, such peculiarities often figure prominently, but they rarely do
+so, I think, in tragedy. Shakespeare, however, seems to have given one
+such idiosyncrasy to Hamlet.
+
+It is a trick of speech, a habit of repetition. And these are simple
+examples of it from the first soliloquy:
+
+                            O _God! God!_
+     How weary, stale, flat and unprofitable
+     Seem to me all the uses of this world!
+     _Fie_ on't! ah _fie!_
+
+Now I ask your patience. You will say: 'There is nothing individual
+here. Everybody repeats words thus. And the tendency, in particular, to
+use such repetitions in moments of great emotion is well-known, and
+frequently illustrated in literature--for example, in David's cry of
+lament for Absalom.'
+
+This is perfectly true, and plenty of examples could be drawn from
+Shakespeare himself. But what we find in Hamlet's case is, I believe,
+_not_ common. In the first place, this repetition is a _habit_ with him.
+Here are some more instances: 'Thrift, thrift, Horatio'; 'Indeed,
+indeed, sirs, but this troubles me'; 'Come, deal justly with me: come,
+come'; 'Wormwood, wormwood!' I do not profess to have made an exhaustive
+search, but I am much mistaken if this _habit_ is to be found in any
+other serious character of Shakespeare.[68]
+
+And, in the second place--and here I appeal with confidence to lovers of
+Hamlet--some of these repetitions strike us as intensely characteristic.
+Some even of those already quoted strike one thus, and still more do the
+following:
+
+     (_a_)  _Horatio._   It would have much amazed you.
+            _Hamlet._    Very like, very like. Stay'd it long?
+
+     (_b_)  _Polonius._  What do you read, my lord?
+            _Hamlet._    Words, words, words.
+
+     (_c_)  _Polonius._  My honourable lord, I will most humbly take
+                           my leave of you.
+            _Hamlet._    You cannot, sir, take from me anything that I
+                           will more willingly part withal: except my
+                           life, except my life, except my life.
+
+     (_d_)  _Ophelia._                  Good my lord,
+                         How does your honour for this many a day?
+            _Hamlet._    I humbly thank you, well, well, well.
+
+Is there anything that Hamlet says or does in the whole play more
+unmistakably individual than these replies?[69]
+
+(2) Hamlet, everyone has noticed, is fond of quibbles and word-play, and
+of 'conceits' and turns of thought such as are common in the poets whom
+Johnson called Metaphysical. Sometimes, no doubt, he plays with words
+and ideas chiefly in order to mystify, thwart and annoy. To some extent,
+again, as we may see from the conversation where Rosencrantz and
+Guildenstern first present themselves (II. ii. 227), he is merely
+following the fashion of the young courtiers about him, just as in his
+love-letter to Ophelia[70] he uses for the most part the fantastic
+language of Court Euphuism. Nevertheless in this trait there is
+something very characteristic. We should be greatly surprised to find it
+marked in Othello or Lear or Timon, in Macbeth or Antony or Coriolanus;
+and, in fact, we find it in them hardly at all. One reason of this may
+perhaps be that these characters are all later creations than Hamlet,
+and that Shakespeare's own fondness for this kind of play, like the
+fondness of the theatrical audience for it, diminished with time. But
+the main reason is surely that this tendency, as we see it in Hamlet,
+betokens a nimbleness and flexibility of mind which is characteristic of
+him and not of the later less many-sided heroes. Macbeth, for instance,
+has an imagination quite as sensitive as Hamlet's to certain
+impressions, but he has none of Hamlet's delight in freaks and twists of
+thought, or of his tendency to perceive and play with resemblances in
+the most diverse objects and ideas. Though Romeo shows this tendency,
+the only tragic hero who approaches Hamlet here is Richard II., who
+indeed in several ways recalls the emasculated Hamlet of some critics,
+and may, like the real Hamlet, have owed his existence in part to
+Shakespeare's personal familiarity with the weaknesses and dangers of an
+imaginative temperament.
+
+That Shakespeare meant this trait to be characteristic of Hamlet is
+beyond question. The very first line the hero speaks contains a play on
+words:
+
+     A little more than kin and less than kind.
+
+The fact is significant, though the pun itself is not specially
+characteristic. Much more so, and indeed absolutely individual, are the
+uses of word-play in moments of extreme excitement. Remember the awe and
+terror of the scene where the Ghost beckons Hamlet to leave his friends
+and follow him into the darkness, and then consider this dialogue:
+
+     _Hamlet._                    It waves me still.
+                   Go on; I'll follow thee.
+
+     _Marcellus._  You shall not go, my lord.
+
+     _Hamlet._                    Hold off your hands.
+
+     _Horatio._    Be ruled; you shall not go.
+
+     _Hamlet._                    My fate cries out,
+                   And makes each petty artery in this body
+                   As hardy as the Nemean lion's nerve.
+                   Still am I called. Unhand me, gentlemen.
+                   _By heaven I'll make a ghost of him that lets me._
+
+Would any other character in Shakespeare have used those words? And,
+again, where is Hamlet more Hamlet than when he accompanies with a pun
+the furious action by which he compels his enemy to drink the 'poison
+tempered by himself'?
+
+     Here, thou incestuous, murderous, damn'd Dane,
+     Drink off this potion. Is thy union here?
+     Follow my mother.
+
+The 'union' was the pearl which Claudius professed to throw into the
+cup, and in place of which (as Hamlet supposes) he dropped poison in.
+But the 'union' is also that incestuous marriage which must not be
+broken by his remaining alive now that his partner is dead. What rage
+there is in the words, and what a strange lightning of the mind!
+
+Much of Hamlet's play with words and ideas is imaginatively humorous.
+That of Richard II. is fanciful, but rarely, if ever, humorous. Antony
+has touches of humour, and Richard III. has more; but Hamlet, we may
+safely assert, is the only one of the tragic heroes who can be called a
+humorist, his humour being first cousin to that speculative tendency
+which keeps his mental world in perpetual movement. Some of his quips
+are, of course, poor enough, and many are not distinctive. Those of his
+retorts which strike one as perfectly individual do so, I think, chiefly
+because they suddenly reveal the misery and bitterness below the
+surface; as when, to Rosencrantz's message from his mother, 'She desires
+to speak with you in her closet, ere you go to bed,' he answers, 'We
+shall obey, were she ten times our mother'; or as when he replies to
+Polonius's invitation, 'Will you walk out of the air, my lord?' with
+words that suddenly turn one cold, 'Into my grave.' Otherwise, what we
+justly call Hamlet's characteristic humour is not his exclusive
+property, but appears in passages spoken by persons as different as
+Mercutio, Falstaff and Rosalind. The truth probably is that it was the
+kind of humour most natural to Shakespeare himself, and that here, as in
+some other traits of the poet's greatest creation, we come into close
+contact with Shakespeare the man.
+
+
+3
+
+The actor who plays the part of Hamlet must make up his mind as to the
+interpretation of every word and deed of the character. Even if at some
+point he feels no certainty as to which of two interpretations is right,
+he must still choose one or the other. The mere critic is not obliged to
+do this. Where he remains in doubt he may say so, and, if the matter is
+of importance, he ought to say so.
+
+This is the position in which I find myself in regard to Hamlet's love
+for Ophelia. I am unable to arrive at a conviction as to the meaning of
+some of his words and deeds, and I question whether from the mere text
+of the play a sure interpretation of them can be drawn. For this reason
+I have reserved the subject for separate treatment, and have, so far as
+possible, kept it out of the general discussion of Hamlet's character.
+
+On two points no reasonable doubt can, I think, be felt. (1) Hamlet was
+at one time sincerely and ardently in love with Ophelia. For she herself
+says that he had importuned her with love in honourable fashion, and had
+given countenance to his speech with almost all the holy vows of heaven
+(I. iii. 110 f.). (2) When, at Ophelia's grave, he declared,
+
+     I loved Ophelia; forty thousand brothers
+     Could not, with all their quantity of love,
+     Make up my sum,
+
+he must have spoken sincerely; and, further, we may take it for granted
+that he used the past tense, 'loved,' merely because Ophelia was dead,
+and not to imply that he had once loved her but no longer did so.
+
+So much being assumed, we come to what is doubtful, and I will begin by
+stating what is probably the most popular view. According to this view,
+Hamlet's love for Ophelia never changed. On the revelation made by the
+Ghost, however, he felt that he must put aside all thoughts of it; and
+it also seemed to him necessary to convince Ophelia, as well as others,
+that he was insane, and so to destroy her hopes of any happy issue to
+their love. This was the purpose of his appearance in her chamber,
+though he was probably influenced also by a longing to see her and bid
+her a silent farewell, and possibly by a faint hope that he might safely
+entrust his secret to her. If he entertained any such hope his study of
+her face dispelled it; and thereafter, as in the Nunnery-scene (III. i.)
+and again at the play-scene, he not only feigned madness, but, to
+convince her that he had quite lost his love for her, he also addressed
+her in bitter and insulting language. In all this he was acting a part
+intensely painful to himself; the very violence of his language in the
+Nunnery-scene arose from this pain; and so the actor should make him
+show, in that scene, occasional signs of a tenderness which with all his
+efforts he cannot wholly conceal. Finally, over her grave the truth
+bursts from him in the declaration quoted just now, though it is still
+impossible for him to explain to others why he who loved her so
+profoundly was forced to wring her heart.
+
+Now this theory, if the view of Hamlet's character which I have taken is
+anywhere near the truth, is certainly wrong at one point, viz., in so
+far as it supposes that Hamlet's bitterness to Ophelia was a _mere_
+pretence forced on him by his design of feigning to be insane; and I
+proceed to call attention to certain facts and considerations, of which
+the theory seems to take no account.
+
+1. How is it that in his first soliloquy Hamlet makes no reference
+whatever to Ophelia?
+
+2. How is it that in his second soliloquy, on the departure of the
+Ghost, he again says nothing about her? When the lover is feeling that
+he must make a complete break with his past, why does it not occur to
+him at once that he must give up his hopes of happiness in love?
+
+3. Hamlet does not, as the popular theory supposes, break with Ophelia
+directly after the Ghost appears to him; on the contrary, he tries to
+see her and sends letters to her (II. i. 109). What really happens is
+that Ophelia suddenly repels his visits and letters. Now, _we_ know that
+she is simply obeying her father's order; but how would her action
+appear to Hamlet, already sick at heart because of his mother's
+frailty,[71] and now finding that, the moment fortune has turned against
+him, the woman who had welcomed his love turns against him too? Even if
+he divined (as his insults to Polonius suggest) that her father was
+concerned in this change, would he not still, in that morbid condition
+of mind, certainly suspect her of being less simple than she had
+appeared to him?[72] Even if he remained free from _this_ suspicion, and
+merely thought her deplorably weak, would he not probably feel anger
+against _her_, an anger like that of the hero of _Locksley Hall_ against
+his Amy?
+
+4. When Hamlet made his way into Ophelia's room, why did he go in the
+garb, the conventionally recognised garb, of the distracted _lover_? If
+it was necessary to convince Ophelia of his insanity, how was it
+necessary to convince her that disappointment in _love_ was the cause of
+his insanity? His _main_ object in the visit appears to have been to
+convince _others_, through her, that his insanity was not due to any
+mysterious unknown cause, but to this disappointment, and so to allay
+the suspicions of the King. But if his feeling for her had been simply
+that of love, however unhappy, and had not been in any degree that of
+suspicion or resentment, would he have adopted a plan which must involve
+her in so much suffering?[73]
+
+5. In what way are Hamlet's insults to Ophelia at the play-scene
+necessary either to his purpose of convincing her of his insanity or to
+his purpose of revenge? And, even if he did regard them as somehow means
+to these ends, is it conceivable that he would have uttered them, if his
+feeling for her were one of hopeless but unmingled love?
+
+6. How is it that neither when he kills Polonius, nor afterwards, does
+he appear to reflect that he has killed Ophelia's father, or what the
+effect on Ophelia is likely to be?
+
+7. We have seen that there is no reference to Ophelia in the soliloquies
+of the First Act. Neither is there the faintest allusion to her in any
+one of the soliloquies of the subsequent Acts, unless possibly in the
+words (III. i. 72) 'the pangs of despised love.'[74] If the popular
+theory is true, is not this an astounding fact?
+
+8. Considering this fact, is there no significance in the further fact
+(which, by itself, would present no difficulty) that in speaking to
+Horatio Hamlet never alludes to Ophelia, and that at his death he says
+nothing of her?
+
+9. If the popular theory is true, how is it that neither in the
+Nunnery-scene nor at the play-scene does Shakespeare insert anything to
+make the truth plain? Four words like Othello's 'O hardness to
+dissemble' would have sufficed.
+
+These considerations, coupled with others as to Hamlet's state of mind,
+seem to point to two conclusions. They suggest, first, that Hamlet's
+love, though never lost, was, after Ophelia's apparent rejection of him,
+mingled with suspicion and resentment, and that his treatment of her was
+due in part to this cause. And I find it impossible to resist this
+conclusion. But the question how much of his harshness is meant to be
+real, and how much assumed, seems to me impossible in some places to
+answer. For example, his behaviour at the play-scene seems to me to show
+an intention to hurt and insult; but in the Nunnery-scene (which cannot
+be discussed briefly) he is evidently acting a part and suffering
+acutely, while at the same time his invective, however exaggerated,
+seems to spring from real feelings; and what is pretence, and what
+sincerity, appears to me an insoluble problem. Something depends here on
+the further question whether or no Hamlet suspects or detects the
+presence of listeners; but, in the absence of an authentic stage
+tradition, this question too seems to be unanswerable.
+
+But something further seems to follow from the considerations adduced.
+Hamlet's love, they seem to show, was not only mingled with bitterness,
+it was also, like all his healthy feelings, weakened and deadened by his
+melancholy.[75] It was far from being extinguished; probably it was
+_one_ of the causes which drove him to force his way to Ophelia;
+whenever he saw Ophelia, it awoke and, the circumstances being what they
+were, tormented him. But it was not an absorbing passion; it did not
+habitually occupy his thoughts; and when he declared that it was such a
+love as forty thousand brothers could not equal, he spoke sincerely
+indeed but not truly. What he said was true, if I may put it thus, of
+the inner healthy self which doubtless in time would have fully
+reasserted itself; but it was only partly true of the Hamlet whom we see
+in the play. And the morbid influence of his melancholy on his love is
+the cause of those strange facts, that he never alludes to her in his
+soliloquies, and that he appears not to realise how the death of her
+father must affect her.
+
+The facts seem almost to force this idea on us. That it is less
+'romantic' than the popular view is no argument against it. And
+psychologically it is quite sound, for a frequent symptom of such
+melancholy as Hamlet's is a more or less complete paralysis, or even
+perversion, of the emotion of love. And yet, while feeling no doubt that
+up to a certain point it is true, I confess I am not satisfied that the
+explanation of Hamlet's silence regarding Ophelia lies in it. And the
+reason of this uncertainty is that scarcely any spectators or readers of
+_Hamlet_ notice this silence at all; that I never noticed it myself till
+I began to try to solve the problem of Hamlet's relation to Ophelia; and
+that even now, when I read the play through without pausing to consider
+particular questions, it scarcely strikes me. Now Shakespeare wrote
+primarily for the theatre and not for students, and therefore great
+weight should be attached to the immediate impressions made by his
+works. And so it seems at least possible that the explanation of
+Hamlet's silence may be that Shakespeare, having already a very
+difficult task to perform in the soliloquies--that of showing the state
+of mind which caused Hamlet to delay his vengeance--did not choose to
+make his task more difficult by introducing matter which would not only
+add to the complexity of the subject but might, from its 'sentimental'
+interest, distract attention from the main point; while, from his
+theatrical experience, he knew that the audience would not observe how
+unnatural it was that a man deeply in love, and forced not only to
+renounce but to wound the woman he loved, should not think of her when
+he was alone. But, as this explanation is no more completely convincing
+to me than the other, I am driven to suspend judgment, and also to
+suspect that the text admits of no sure interpretation. [This paragraph
+states my view imperfectly.]
+
+This result may seem to imply a serious accusation against Shakespeare.
+But it must be remembered that if we could see a contemporary
+representation of _Hamlet_, our doubts would probably disappear. The
+actor, instructed by the author, would make it clear to us by looks,
+tones, gestures, and by-play how far Hamlet's feigned harshness to
+Ophelia was mingled with real bitterness, and again how far his
+melancholy had deadened his love.
+
+
+4
+
+As we have seen, all the persons in _Hamlet_ except the hero are minor
+characters, who fail to rise to the tragic level. They are not less
+interesting on that account, but the hero has occupied us so long that I
+shall refer only to those in regard to whom Shakespeare's intention
+appears to be not seldom misunderstood or overlooked.
+
+It may seem strange that Ophelia should be one of these; and yet
+Shakespearean literature and the experience of teachers show that there
+is much difference of opinion regarding her, and in particular that a
+large number of readers feel a kind of personal irritation against her.
+They seem unable to forgive her for not having been a heroine, and they
+fancy her much weaker than she was. They think she ought to have been
+able to help Hamlet to fulfil his task. And they betray, it appears to
+me, the strangest misconceptions as to what she actually did.
+
+Now it was essential to Shakespeare's purpose that too great an interest
+should not be aroused in the love-story; essential, therefore, that
+Ophelia should be merely one of the subordinate characters; and
+necessary, accordingly, that she should not be the equal, in spirit,
+power or intelligence, of his famous heroines. If she had been an
+Imogen, a Cordelia, even a Portia or a Juliet, the story must have taken
+another shape. Hamlet would either have been stimulated to do his duty,
+or (which is more likely) he would have gone mad, or (which is
+likeliest) he would have killed himself in despair. Ophelia, therefore,
+was made a character who could not help Hamlet, and for whom on the
+other hand he would not naturally feel a passion so vehement or profound
+as to interfere with the main motive of the play.[76] And in the love
+and the fate of Ophelia herself there was introduced an element, not of
+deep tragedy but of pathetic beauty, which makes the analysis of her
+character seem almost a desecration.
+
+Ophelia is plainly quite young and inexperienced. She has lost her
+mother, and has only a father and a brother, affectionate but worldly,
+to take care of her. Everyone in the drama who has any heart is drawn to
+her. To the persons in the play, as to the readers of it, she brings the
+thought of flowers. 'Rose of May' Laertes names her.
+
+             Lay her in the earth,
+     And from her fair and unpolluted flesh
+     May violets spring!
+
+--so he prays at her burial. 'Sweets to the sweet' the Queen murmurs, as
+she scatters flowers on the grave; and the flowers which Ophelia herself
+gathered--those which she gave to others, and those which floated about
+her in the brook--glimmer in the picture of the mind. Her affection for
+her brother is shown in two or three delicate strokes. Her love for her
+father is deep, though mingled with fear. For Hamlet she has, some say,
+no deep love--and perhaps she is so near childhood that old affections
+have still the strongest hold; but certainly she has given to Hamlet all
+the love of which her nature is as yet capable. Beyond these three
+beloved ones she seems to have eyes and ears for no one. The Queen is
+fond of her, but there is no sign of her returning the Queen's
+affection. Her existence is wrapped up in these three.
+
+On this childlike nature and on Ophelia's inexperience everything
+depends. The knowledge that 'there's tricks in the world' has reached
+her only as a vague report. Her father and brother are jealously anxious
+for her because of her ignorance and innocence; and we resent their
+anxiety chiefly because we know Hamlet better than they. Her whole
+character is that of simple unselfish affection. Naturally she is
+incapable of understanding Hamlet's mind, though she can feel its
+beauty. Naturally, too, she obeys her father when she is forbidden to
+receive Hamlet's visits and letters. If we remember not what _we_ know
+but what _she_ knows of her lover and her father; if we remember that
+she had not, like Juliet, confessed her love; and if we remember that
+she was much below her suitor in station, her compliance surely must
+seem perfectly natural, apart from the fact that the standard of
+obedience to a father was in Shakespeare's day higher than in ours.
+
+'But she does more than obey,' we are told; 'she runs off frightened to
+report to her father Hamlet's strange visit and behaviour; she shows to
+her father one of Hamlet's letters, and tells him[77] the whole story of
+the courtship; and she joins in a plot to win Hamlet's secret from him.'
+One must remember, however, that she had never read the tragedy.
+Consider for a moment how matters looked to _her_. She knows nothing
+about the Ghost and its disclosures. She has undergone for some time the
+pain of repelling her lover and appearing to have turned against him.
+She sees him, or hears of him, sinking daily into deeper gloom, and so
+transformed from what he was that he is considered to be out of his
+mind. She hears the question constantly discussed what the cause of this
+sad change can be; and her heart tells her--how can it fail to tell
+her?--that her unkindness is the chief cause. Suddenly Hamlet forces his
+way into her chamber; and his appearance and his behaviour are those of
+a man crazed with love. She is frightened--why not? She is not Lady
+Macbeth. Rosalind would have been frightened. Which of her censors would
+be wholly unmoved if his room were invaded by a lunatic? She is
+frightened, then; frightened, if you will, like a child. Yes, but,
+observe, her one idea is to help Hamlet. She goes, therefore, at once to
+her father. To whom else should she go? Her brother is away. Her father,
+whom she saw with her own eyes and not with Shakespeare's, is kind, and
+the wisest of men, and concerned about Hamlet's state. Her father finds,
+in her report, the solution of the mystery: Hamlet is mad because she
+has repulsed him. Why should she not tell her father the whole story and
+give him an old letter which may help to convince the King and the
+Queen? Nay, why should she not allow herself to be used as a 'decoy' to
+settle the question why Hamlet is mad? It is all-important that it
+should be settled, in order that he may be cured; all her seniors are
+simply and solely anxious for his welfare; and, if her unkindness _is_
+the cause of his sad state, they will permit her to restore him by
+kindness (III. i. 40). Was she to refuse to play a part just because it
+would be painful to her to do so? I find in her joining the 'plot' (as
+it is absurdly called) a sign not of weakness, but of unselfishness and
+strength.
+
+'But she practised deception; she even told a lie. Hamlet asked her
+where her father was, and she said he was at home, when he was really
+listening behind a curtain.' Poor Ophelia! It is considered angelic in
+Desdemona to say untruly that she killed herself, but most immoral or
+pusillanimous in Ophelia to tell _her_ lie. I will not discuss these
+casuistical problems; but, if ever an angry lunatic asks me a question
+which I cannot answer truly without great danger to him and to one of my
+relations, I hope that grace may be given me to imitate Ophelia.
+Seriously, at such a terrible moment was it weak, was it not rather
+heroic, in a simple girl not to lose her presence of mind and not to
+flinch, but to go through her task for Hamlet's sake and her father's?
+And, finally, is it really a thing to be taken as matter of course, and
+no matter for admiration, in this girl that, from beginning to end, and
+after a storm of utterly unjust reproach, not a thought of resentment
+should even cross her mind?
+
+Still, we are told, it was ridiculously weak in her to lose her reason.
+And here again her critics seem hardly to realise the situation, hardly
+to put themselves in the place of a girl whose lover, estranged from
+her, goes mad and kills her father. They seem to forget also that
+Ophelia must have believed that these frightful calamities were not mere
+calamities, but followed from _her_ action in repelling her lover. Nor
+do they realise the utter loneliness that must have fallen on her. Of
+the three persons who were all the world to her, her father has been
+killed, Hamlet has been sent out of the country insane, and her brother
+is abroad. Horatio, when her mind gives way, tries to befriend her, but
+there is no sign of any previous relation between them, or of Hamlet's
+having commended her to his friend's care. What support she can gain
+from the Queen we can guess from the Queen's character, and from the
+fact that, when Ophelia is most helpless, the Queen shrinks from the
+very sight of her (IV. v. 1). She was left, thus, absolutely alone, and
+if she looked for her brother's return (as she did, IV. v. 70), she
+might reflect that it would mean danger to Hamlet.
+
+Whether this idea occurred to her we cannot tell. In any case it was
+well for her that her mind gave way before Laertes reached Elsinore; and
+pathetic as Ophelia's madness is, it is also, we feel, the kindest
+stroke that now could fall on her. It is evident, I think, that this was
+the effect Shakespeare intended to produce. In her madness Ophelia
+continues sweet and lovable.
+
+     Thought and affliction, passion, hell itself,
+     She turns to favour and to prettiness.
+
+In her wanderings we hear from time to time an undertone of the deepest
+sorrow, but never the agonised cry of fear or horror which makes madness
+dreadful or shocking.[78] And the picture of her death, if our eyes grow
+dim in watching it, is still purely beautiful. Coleridge was true to
+Shakespeare when he wrote of 'the affecting death of Ophelia,--who in
+the beginning lay like a little projection of land into a lake or
+stream, covered with spray-flowers quietly reflected in the quiet
+waters, but at length is undermined or loosened, and becomes a fairy
+isle, and after a brief vagrancy sinks almost without an eddy.'[79]
+
+
+5
+
+I reluctantly pass by Polonius, Laertes and the beautiful character of
+Horatio, to say something in conclusion of the Queen and the King.
+
+The answers to two questions asked about the Queen are, it seems to me,
+practically certain, (1) She did not merely marry a second time with
+indecent haste; she was false to her husband while he lived. This is
+surely the most natural interpretation of the words of the Ghost (I. v.
+41 f.), coming, as they do, before his account of the murder. And
+against this testimony what force has the objection that the queen in
+the 'Murder of Gonzago' is not represented as an adulteress? Hamlet's
+mark in arranging the play-scene was not his mother, whom besides he had
+been expressly ordered to spare (I. v. 84 f.).
+
+(2) On the other hand, she was _not_ privy to the murder of her husband,
+either before the deed or after it. There is no sign of her being so,
+and there are clear signs that she was not. The representation of the
+murder in the play-scene does not move her; and when her husband starts
+from his throne, she innocently asks him, 'How fares my lord?' In the
+interview with Hamlet, when her son says of his slaughter of Polonius,
+
+     'A bloody deed!' Almost as bad, good mother,
+     As kill a king and marry with his brother,
+
+the astonishment of her repetition 'As kill a king!' is evidently
+genuine; and, if it had not been so, she would never have had the
+hardihood to exclaim:
+
+     What have I done, that thou darest wag thy tongue
+     In noise so rude against me?
+
+Further, it is most significant that when she and the King speak
+together alone, nothing that is said by her or to her implies her
+knowledge of the secret.
+
+The Queen was not a bad-hearted woman, not at all the woman to think
+little of murder. But she had a soft animal nature, and was very dull
+and very shallow. She loved to be happy, like a sheep in the sun; and,
+to do her justice, it pleased her to see others happy, like more sheep
+in the sun. She never saw that drunkenness is disgusting till Hamlet
+told her so; and, though she knew that he considered her marriage
+'o'er-hasty' (II. ii. 57), she was untroubled by any shame at the
+feelings which had led to it. It was pleasant to sit upon her throne and
+see smiling faces round her, and foolish and unkind in Hamlet to persist
+in grieving for his father instead of marrying Ophelia and making
+everything comfortable. She was fond of Ophelia and genuinely attached
+to her son (though willing to see her lover exclude him from the
+throne); and, no doubt, she considered equality of rank a mere trifle
+compared with the claims of love. The belief at the bottom of her heart
+was that the world is a place constructed simply that people may be
+happy in it in a good-humoured sensual fashion.
+
+Her only chance was to be made unhappy. When affliction comes to her,
+the good in her nature struggles to the surface through the heavy mass
+of sloth. Like other faulty characters in Shakespeare's tragedies, she
+dies a better woman than she had lived. When Hamlet shows her what she
+has done she feels genuine remorse. It is true, Hamlet fears it will not
+last, and so at the end of the interview (III. iv. 180 ff.) he adds a
+warning that, if she betrays him, she will ruin herself as well.[80] It
+is true too that there is no sign of her obeying Hamlet in breaking off
+her most intimate connection with the King. Still she does feel remorse;
+and she loves her son, and does not betray him. She gives her husband a
+false account of Polonius's death, and is silent about the appearance of
+the Ghost. She becomes miserable;
+
+     To her sick soul, as sin's true nature is,
+     Each toy seems prologue to some great amiss.
+
+She shows spirit when Laertes raises the mob, and one respects her for
+standing up for her husband when she can do nothing to help her son. If
+she had sense to realise Hamlet's purpose, or the probability of the
+King's taking some desperate step to foil it, she must have suffered
+torture in those days. But perhaps she was too dull.
+
+The last we see of her, at the fencing-match, is most characteristic.
+She is perfectly serene. Things have slipped back into their groove, and
+she has no apprehensions. She is, however, disturbed and full of
+sympathy for her son, who is out of condition and pants and perspires.
+These are afflictions she can thoroughly feel for, though they are even
+more common than the death of a father. But then she meets her death
+because she cannot resist the wish to please her son by drinking to his
+success. And more: when she falls dying, and the King tries to make out
+that she is merely swooning at the sight of blood, she collects her
+energies to deny it and to warn Hamlet:
+
+     No, no, the drink, the drink,--O my dear Hamlet,--
+     The drink, the drink! I am poison'd.                [_Dies._
+
+Was ever any other writer at once so pitiless and so just as
+Shakespeare? Did ever any other mingle the grotesque and the pathetic
+with a realism so daring and yet so true to 'the modesty of nature'?
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+King Claudius rarely gets from the reader the attention he deserves. But
+he is very interesting, both psychologically and dramatically. On the
+one hand, he is not without respectable qualities. As a king he is
+courteous and never undignified; he performs his ceremonial duties
+efficiently; and he takes good care of the national interests. He
+nowhere shows cowardice, and when Laertes and the mob force their way
+into the palace, he confronts a dangerous situation with coolness and
+address. His love for his ill-gotten wife seems to be quite genuine, and
+there is no ground for suspecting him of having used her as a mere means
+to the crown.[81] His conscience, though ineffective, is far from being
+dead. In spite of its reproaches he plots new crimes to ensure the prize
+of the old one; but still it makes him unhappy (III. i. 49 f., III. iii.
+35 f.). Nor is he cruel or malevolent.
+
+On the other hand, he is no tragic character. He had a small nature. If
+Hamlet may be trusted, he was a man of mean appearance--a mildewed ear,
+a toad, a bat; and he was also bloated by excess in drinking. People
+made mouths at him in contempt while his brother lived; and though, when
+he came to the throne, they spent large sums in buying his portrait, he
+evidently put little reliance on their loyalty. He was no villain of
+force, who thought of winning his brother's crown by a bold and open
+stroke, but a cut-purse who stole the diadem from a shelf and put it in
+his pocket. He had the inclination of natures physically weak and
+morally small towards intrigue and crooked dealing. His instinctive
+predilection was for poison: this was the means he used in his first
+murder, and he at once recurred to it when he had failed to get Hamlet
+executed by deputy. Though in danger he showed no cowardice, his first
+thought was always for himself.
+
+     I like him not, nor stands it safe with _us_
+     To let his madness range,
+
+--these are the first words we hear him speak after the play-scene. His
+first comment on the death of Polonius is,
+
+     It had been so with _us_ had we been there;
+
+and his second is,
+
+     Alas, how shall this bloody deed be answered?
+     It will be laid to _us_.
+
+He was not, however, stupid, but rather quick-witted and adroit. He won
+the Queen partly indeed by presents (how pitifully characteristic of
+her!), but also by 'witch-craft of his wit' or intellect. He seems to
+have been soft-spoken, ingratiating in manner, and given to smiling on
+the person he addressed ('that one may smile, and smile, and be a
+villain'). We see this in his speech to Laertes about the young man's
+desire to return to Paris (I. ii. 42 f.). Hamlet scarcely ever speaks to
+him without an insult, but he never shows resentment, hardly even
+annoyance. He makes use of Laertes with great dexterity. He had
+evidently found that a clear head, a general complaisance, a willingness
+to bend and oblige where he could not overawe, would lead him to his
+objects,--that he could trick men and manage them. Unfortunately he
+imagined he could trick something more than men.
+
+This error, together with a decided trait of temperament, leads him to
+his ruin. He has a sanguine disposition. When first we see him, all has
+fallen out to his wishes, and he confidently looks forward to a happy
+life. He believes his secret to be absolutely safe, and he is quite
+ready to be kind to Hamlet, in whose melancholy he sees only excess of
+grief. He has no desire to see him leave the court; he promises him his
+voice for the succession (I. ii. 108, III. ii. 355); he will be a father
+to him. Before long, indeed, he becomes very uneasy, and then more and
+more alarmed; but when, much later, he has contrived Hamlet's death in
+England, he has still no suspicion that he need not hope for happiness:
+
+                       till I know 'tis done,
+     Howe'er my haps, my _joys_ were ne'er begun.
+
+Nay, his very last words show that he goes to death unchanged:
+
+     Oh yet defend me, friends, I am but hurt [=wounded],
+
+he cries, although in half a minute he is dead. That his crime has
+failed, and that it could do nothing else, never once comes home to him.
+He thinks he can over-reach Heaven. When he is praying for pardon, he is
+all the while perfectly determined to keep his crown; and he knows it.
+More--it is one of the grimmest things in Shakespeare, but he puts such
+things so quietly that we are apt to miss them--when the King is praying
+for pardon for his first murder he has just made his final arrangements
+for a second, the murder of Hamlet. But he does not allude to that fact
+in his prayer. If Hamlet had really wished to kill him at a moment that
+had no relish of salvation in it, he had no need to wait.[82] So we are
+inclined to say; and yet it was not so. For this was the crisis for
+Claudius as well as Hamlet. He had better have died at once, before he
+had added to his guilt a share in the responsibility for all the woe and
+death that followed. And so, we may allow ourselves to say, here also
+Hamlet's indiscretion served him well. The power that shaped his end
+shaped the King's no less.
+
+For--to return in conclusion to the action of the play--in all that
+happens or is done we seem to apprehend some vaster power. We do not
+define it, or even name it, or perhaps even say to ourselves that it is
+there; but our imagination is haunted by the sense of it, as it works
+its way through the deeds or the delays of men to its inevitable end.
+And most of all do we feel this in regard to Hamlet and the King. For
+these two, the one by his shrinking from his appointed task, and the
+other by efforts growing ever more feverish to rid himself of his enemy,
+seem to be bent on avoiding each other. But they cannot. Through devious
+paths, the very paths they take in order to escape, something is pushing
+them silently step by step towards one another, until they meet and it
+puts the sword into Hamlet's hand. He himself must die, for he needed
+this compulsion before he could fulfil the demand of destiny; but he
+_must_ fulfil it. And the King too, turn and twist as he may, must reach
+the appointed goal, and is only hastening to it by the windings which
+seem to lead elsewhere. Concentration on the character of the hero is
+apt to withdraw our attention from this aspect of the drama; but in no
+other tragedy of Shakespeare's, not even in _Macbeth_, is this aspect so
+impressive.[83]
+
+I mention _Macbeth_ for a further reason. In _Macbeth_ and _Hamlet_ not
+only is the feeling of a supreme power or destiny peculiarly marked, but
+it has also at times a peculiar tone, which may be called, in a sense,
+religious. I cannot make my meaning clear without using language too
+definite to describe truly the imaginative impression produced; but it
+is roughly true that, while we do not imagine the supreme power as a
+divine being who avenges crime, or as a providence which supernaturally
+interferes, our sense of it is influenced by the fact that Shakespeare
+uses current religious ideas here much more decidedly than in _Othello_
+or _King Lear_. The horror in Macbeth's soul is more than once
+represented as desperation at the thought that he is eternally 'lost';
+the same idea appears in the attempt of Claudius at repentance; and as
+_Hamlet_ nears its close the 'religious' tone of the tragedy is deepened
+in two ways. In the first place, 'accident' is introduced into the plot
+in its barest and least dramatic form, when Hamlet is brought back to
+Denmark by the chance of the meeting with the pirate ship. This incident
+has been therefore severely criticised as a lame expedient,[84] but it
+appears probable that the 'accident' is meant to impress the imagination
+as the very reverse of accidental, and with many readers it certainly
+does so. And that this was the intention is made the more likely by a
+second fact, the fact that in connection with the events of the voyage
+Shakespeare introduces that feeling, on Hamlet's part, of his being in
+the hands of Providence. The repeated expressions of this feeling are
+not, I have maintained, a sign that Hamlet has now formed a fixed
+resolution to do his duty forthwith; but their effect is to strengthen
+in the spectator the feeling that, whatever may become of Hamlet, and
+whether he wills it or not, his task will surely be accomplished,
+because it is the purpose of a power against which both he and his enemy
+are impotent, and which makes of them the instruments of its own will.
+
+Observing this, we may remember another significant point of resemblance
+between _Hamlet_ and _Macbeth_, the appearance in each play of a
+Ghost,--a figure which seems quite in place in either, whereas it would
+seem utterly out of place in _Othello_ or _King Lear_. Much might be
+said of the Ghost in _Hamlet_, but I confine myself to the matter which
+we are now considering. What is the effect of the appearance of the
+Ghost? And, in particular, why does Shakespeare make this Ghost so
+_majestical_ a phantom, giving it that measured and solemn utterance,
+and that air of impersonal abstraction which forbids, for example, all
+expression of affection for Hamlet and checks in Hamlet the outburst of
+pity for his father? Whatever the intention may have been, the result is
+that the Ghost affects imagination not simply as the apparition of a
+dead king who desires the accomplishment of _his_ purposes, but also as
+the representative of that hidden ultimate power, the messenger of
+divine justice set upon the expiation of offences which it appeared
+impossible for man to discover and avenge, a reminder or a symbol of the
+connexion of the limited world of ordinary experience with the vaster
+life of which it is but a partial appearance. And as, at the beginning
+of the play, we have this intimation, conveyed through the medium of the
+received religious idea of a soul come from purgatory, so at the end,
+conveyed through the similar idea of a soul carried by angels to its
+rest, we have an intimation of the same character, and a reminder that
+the apparent failure of Hamlet's life is not the ultimate truth
+concerning him.
+
+If these various peculiarities of the tragedy are considered, it will be
+agreed that, while _Hamlet_ certainly cannot be called in the specific
+sense a 'religious drama,' there is in it nevertheless both a freer use
+of popular religious ideas, and a more decided, though always
+imaginative, intimation of a supreme power concerned in human evil and
+good, than can be found in any other of Shakespeare's tragedies. And
+this is probably one of the causes of the special popularity of this
+play, just as _Macbeth_, the tragedy which in these respects most nearly
+approaches it, has also the place next to it in general esteem.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[Footnote 54: In the First Act (I. ii. 138) Hamlet says that his father
+has been dead not quite two months. In the Third Act (III. ii. 135)
+Ophelia says King Hamlet has been dead 'twice two months.' The events of
+the Third Act are separated from those of the Second by one night (II.
+ii. 565).]
+
+[Footnote 55: The only difference is that in the 'To be or not to be'
+soliloquy there is no reference to the idea that suicide is forbidden by
+'the Everlasting.' Even this, however, seems to have been present in the
+original form of the speech, for the version in the First Quarto has a
+line about our being 'borne before an everlasting Judge.']
+
+[Footnote 56: The present position of the 'To be or not to be'
+soliloquy, and of the interview with Ophelia, appears to have been due
+to an after-thought of Shakespeare's; for in the First Quarto they
+precede, instead of following, the arrival of the players, and
+consequently the arrangement for the play-scene. This is a notable
+instance of the truth that 'inspiration' is by no means confined to a
+poet's first conceptions.]
+
+[Footnote 57: Cf. again the scene at Ophelia's grave, where a strong
+strain of aesthetic disgust is traceable in Hamlet's 'towering passion'
+with Laertes: 'Nay, an thou'lt mouth, I'll rant as well as thou' (V. i.
+306).]
+
+[Footnote 58:
+
+     O heart, lose not thy nature; let not ever
+     The soul of Nero enter this firm bosom:
+
+Nero, who put to death his mother who had poisoned her husband. This
+passage is surely remarkable. And so are the later words (III. iv. 28):
+
+     A bloody deed! almost as bad, good mother,
+     As kill a king, and marry with his brother.
+
+Are we to understand that at this time he really suspected her of
+complicity in the murder? We must remember that the Ghost had not told
+him she was innocent of that.]
+
+[Footnote 59: I am inclined to think that the note of interrogation put
+after 'revenged' in a late Quarto is right.]
+
+[Footnote 60: III. iii. 1-26. The state of affairs at Court at this
+time, though I have not seen it noticed by critics, seems to me
+puzzling. It is quite clear from III. ii. 310 ff., from the passage just
+cited, and from IV. vii. 1-5 and 30 ff., that everyone sees in the
+play-scene a gross and menacing insult to the King. Yet no one shows any
+sign of perceiving in it also an accusation of murder. Surely that is
+strange. Are we perhaps meant to understand that they do perceive this,
+but out of subservience choose to ignore the fact? If that were
+Shakespeare's meaning, the actors could easily indicate it by their
+looks. And if it were so, any sympathy we may feel for Rosencrantz and
+Guildenstern in their fate would be much diminished. But the mere text
+does not suffice to decide either this question or the question whether
+the two courtiers were aware of the contents of the commission they bore
+to England.]
+
+[Footnote 61: This passage in _Hamlet_ seems to have been in Heywood's
+mind when, in _The Second Part of the Iron Age_ (Pearson's reprint, vol.
+iii., p. 423), he makes the Ghost of Agamemnon appear in order to
+satisfy the doubts of Orestes as to his mother's guilt. No reader could
+possibly think that this Ghost was meant to be an hallucination; yet
+Clytemnestra cannot see it. The Ghost of King Hamlet, I may add, goes
+further than that of Agamemnon, for he is audible, as well as visible,
+to the privileged person.]
+
+[Footnote 62: I think it is clear that it is this fear which stands in
+the way of the obvious plan of bringing Hamlet to trial and getting him
+shut up or executed. It is much safer to hurry him off to his doom in
+England before he can say anything about the murder which he has somehow
+discovered. Perhaps the Queen's resistance, and probably Hamlet's great
+popularity with the people, are additional reasons. (It should be
+observed that as early as III. i. 194 we hear of the idea of 'confining'
+Hamlet as an alternative to sending him to England.)]
+
+[Footnote 63: I am inferring from IV. vii., 129, 130, and the last words
+of the scene.]
+
+[Footnote 64: III. iv. 172:
+
+                         For this same lord,
+     I do repent: but heaven hath pleased it so,
+     To punish me with this and this with me,
+     That I must be their scourge and minister:
+
+_i.e._ the scourge and minister of 'heaven,' which has a plural sense
+elsewhere also in Shakespeare.]
+
+[Footnote 65: IV. iii. 48:
+
+     _Ham._   For England!
+
+     _King._               Ay, Hamlet.
+
+     _Ham._                            Good.
+
+     _King._  So is it, if thou knew'st our purposes.
+
+     _Ham._   I see a cherub that sees them.]
+
+[Footnote 66: On this passage see p. 98. Hamlet's reply to Horatio's
+warning sounds, no doubt, determined; but so did 'I know my course.' And
+is it not significant that, having given it, he abruptly changes the
+subject?]
+
+[Footnote 67: P. 102.]
+
+[Footnote 68: It should be observed also that many of Hamlet's
+repetitions can hardly be said to occur at moments of great emotion,
+like Cordelia's 'And so I am, I am,' and 'No cause, no cause.'
+
+Of course, a habit of repetition quite as marked as Hamlet's may be
+found in comic persons, _e.g._ Justice Shallow in _2 Henry IV._]
+
+[Footnote 69: Perhaps it is from noticing this trait that I find
+something characteristic too in this coincidence of phrase: 'Alas, poor
+ghost!' (I. v. 4), 'Alas, poor Yorick!' (V. i. 202).]
+
+[Footnote 70: This letter, of course, was written before the time when
+the action of the drama begins, for we know that Ophelia, after her
+father's commands in I. iii., received no more letters (II. i. 109).]
+
+[Footnote 71: 'Frailty, thy name is woman!' he had exclaimed in the
+first soliloquy. Cf. what he says of his mother's act (III. iv. 40):
+
+                               Such an act
+     That blurs the grace and blush of modesty,
+     Calls virtue hypocrite, takes off the rose
+     From the fair forehead of an innocent love
+     And sets a blister there.]
+
+[Footnote 72: There are signs that Hamlet was haunted by the horrible
+idea that he had been deceived in Ophelia as he had been in his mother;
+that she was shallow and artificial, and even that what had seemed
+simple and affectionate love might really have been something very
+different. The grossness of his language at the play-scene, and some
+lines in the Nunnery-scene, suggest this; and, considering the state of
+his mind, there is nothing unnatural in his suffering from such a
+suspicion. I do not suggest that he _believed_ in it, and in the
+Nunnery-scene it is clear that his healthy perception of her innocence
+is in conflict with it.
+
+He seems to have divined that Polonius suspected him of dishonourable
+intentions towards Ophelia; and there are also traces of the idea that
+Polonius had been quite ready to let his daughter run the risk as long
+as Hamlet was prosperous. But it is dangerous, of course, to lay stress
+on inferences drawn from his conversations with Polonius.]
+
+[Footnote 73: Many readers and critics imagine that Hamlet went straight
+to Ophelia's room after his interview with the Ghost. But we have just
+seen that on the contrary he tried to visit her and was repelled, and it
+is absolutely certain that a long interval separates the events of I. v.
+and II. i. They think also, of course, that Hamlet's visit to Ophelia
+was the first announcement of his madness. But the text flatly
+contradicts that idea also. Hamlet has for some time appeared totally
+changed (II. ii. 1-10); the King is very uneasy at his 'transformation,'
+and has sent for his school-fellows in order to discover its cause.
+Polonius now, after Ophelia has told him of the interview, comes to
+announce his discovery, not of Hamlet's madness, but of its cause (II.
+ii. 49). That, it would seem, was the effect Hamlet aimed at in his
+interview. I may add that Ophelia's description of his intent
+examination of her face suggests doubt rather as to her 'honesty' or
+sincerity than as to her strength of mind. I cannot believe that he ever
+dreamed of confiding his secret to her.]
+
+[Footnote 74: If this _is_ an allusion to his own love, the adjective
+'despised' is significant. But I doubt the allusion. The other
+calamities mentioned by Hamlet, 'the oppressor's wrong, the proud man's
+contumely, the law's delay, the insolence of office, and the spurns that
+patient merit of the unworthy takes,' are not at all specially his own.]
+
+[Footnote 75: It should be noticed that it was not apparently of long
+standing. See the words 'of late' in I. iii. 91, 99.]
+
+[Footnote 76: This, I think, may be said on almost any sane view of
+Hamlet's love.]
+
+[Footnote 77: Polonius says so, and it _may_ be true.]
+
+[Footnote 78: I have heard an actress in this part utter such a cry as
+is described above, but there is absolutely nothing in the text to
+justify her rendering. Even the exclamation 'O, ho!' found in the
+Quartos at IV. v. 33, but omitted in the Folios and by almost all modern
+editors, coming as it does after the stanza, 'He is dead and gone,
+lady,' evidently expresses grief, not terror.]
+
+[Footnote 79: In the remarks above I have not attempted, of course, a
+complete view of the character, which has often been well described; but
+I cannot forbear a reference to one point which I do not remember to
+have seen noticed. In the Nunnery-scene Ophelia's first words
+pathetically betray her own feeling:
+
+                       Good my lord,
+     How does your honour _for this many a day_?
+
+She then offers to return Hamlet's presents. This has not been suggested
+to her by her father: it is her own thought. And the next lines, in
+which she refers to the sweet words which accompanied those gifts, and
+to the unkindness which has succeeded that kindness, imply a reproach.
+So again do those most touching little speeches:
+
+     _Hamlet._    ... I did love you once.
+
+     _Ophelia._  Indeed, my lord, you made me believe so.
+
+     _Hamlet._   You should not have believed me ... I loved you not.
+
+     _Ophelia._  I was the more deceived.
+
+Now the obvious surface fact was not that Hamlet had forsaken her, but
+that _she_ had repulsed _him_; and here, with his usual unobtrusive
+subtlety, Shakespeare shows how Ophelia, even though she may have
+accepted from her elders the theory that her unkindness has driven
+Hamlet mad, knows within herself that she is forsaken, and cannot
+repress the timid attempt to win her lover back by showing that her own
+heart is unchanged.
+
+I will add one note. There are critics who, after all the help given
+them in different ways by Goethe and Coleridge and Mrs. Jameson, still
+shake their heads over Ophelia's song, 'To-morrow is Saint Valentine's
+day.' Probably they are incurable, but they may be asked to consider
+that Shakespeare makes Desdemona, 'as chaste as ice, as pure as snow,'
+sing an old song containing the line,
+
+     If I court moe women, you'll couch with moe men.]
+
+[Footnote 80: _I.e._ the King will kill _her_ to make all sure.]
+
+[Footnote 81: I do not rely so much on his own statement to Laertes (IV.
+vii. 12 f.) as on the absence of contrary indications, on his tone in
+speaking to her, and on such signs as his mention of her in soliloquy
+(III. iii. 55).]
+
+[Footnote 82: This also is quietly indicated. Hamlet spares the King, he
+says, because if the King is killed praying he will _go to heaven_. On
+Hamlet's departure, the King rises from his knees, and mutters:
+
+     My words fly up, my thoughts remain below:
+     Words without thoughts _never to heaven go_.]
+
+[Footnote 83: I am indebted to Werder in this paragraph.]
+
+[Footnote 84: The attempt to explain this meeting as pre-arranged by
+Hamlet is scarcely worth mention.]
+
+
+
+
+LECTURE V
+
+OTHELLO
+
+
+There is practically no doubt that _Othello_ was the tragedy written
+next after _Hamlet_. Such external evidence as we possess points to this
+conclusion, and it is confirmed by similarities of style, diction and
+versification, and also by the fact that ideas and phrases of the
+earlier play are echoed in the later.[85] There is, further (not to
+speak of one curious point, to be considered when we come to Iago), a
+certain resemblance in the subjects. The heroes of the two plays are
+doubtless extremely unlike, so unlike that each could have dealt without
+much difficulty with the situation which proved fatal to the other; but
+still each is a man exceptionally noble and trustful, and each endures
+the shock of a terrible disillusionment. This theme is treated by
+Shakespeare for the first time in _Hamlet_, for the second in _Othello_.
+It recurs with modifications in _King Lear_, and it probably formed the
+attraction which drew Shakespeare to refashion in part another writer's
+tragedy of _Timon_. These four dramas may so far be grouped together in
+distinction from the remaining tragedies.
+
+But in point of substance, and, in certain respects, in point of style,
+the unlikeness of _Othello_ to _Hamlet_ is much greater than the
+likeness, and the later play belongs decidedly to one group with its
+successors. We have seen that, like them, it is a tragedy of passion, a
+description inapplicable to _Julius Caesar_ or _Hamlet_. And with this
+change goes another, an enlargement in the stature of the hero. There is
+in most of the later heroes something colossal, something which reminds
+us of Michael Angelo's figures. They are not merely exceptional men,
+they are huge men; as it were, survivors of the heroic age living in a
+later and smaller world. We do not receive this impression from Romeo or
+Brutus or Hamlet, nor did it lie in Shakespeare's design to allow more
+than touches of this trait to Julius Caesar himself; but it is strongly
+marked in Lear and Coriolanus, and quite distinct in Macbeth and even in
+Antony. Othello is the first of these men, a being essentially large and
+grand, towering above his fellows, holding a volume of force which in
+repose ensures preeminence without an effort, and in commotion reminds
+us rather of the fury of the elements than of the tumult of common human
+passion.
+
+
+1
+
+What is the peculiarity of _Othello_? What is the distinctive impression
+that it leaves? Of all Shakespeare's tragedies, I would answer, not even
+excepting _King Lear_, _Othello_ is the most painfully exciting and the
+most terrible. From the moment when the temptation of the hero begins,
+the reader's heart and mind are held in a vice, experiencing the
+extremes of pity and fear, sympathy and repulsion, sickening hope and
+dreadful expectation. Evil is displayed before him, not indeed with the
+profusion found in _King Lear_, but forming, as it were, the soul of a
+single character, and united with an intellectual superiority so great
+that he watches its advance fascinated and appalled. He sees it, in
+itself almost irresistible, aided at every step by fortunate accidents
+and the innocent mistakes of its victims. He seems to breathe an
+atmosphere as fateful as that of _King Lear_, but more confined and
+oppressive, the darkness not of night but of a close-shut murderous
+room. His imagination is excited to intense activity, but it is the
+activity of concentration rather than dilation.
+
+I will not dwell now on aspects of the play which modify this
+impression, and I reserve for later discussion one of its principal
+sources, the character of Iago. But if we glance at some of its other
+sources, we shall find at the same time certain distinguishing
+characteristics of _Othello_.
+
+(1) One of these has been already mentioned in our discussion of
+Shakespeare's technique. _Othello_ is not only the most masterly of the
+tragedies in point of construction, but its method of construction is
+unusual. And this method, by which the conflict begins late, and
+advances without appreciable pause and with accelerating speed to the
+catastrophe, is a main cause of the painful tension just described. To
+this may be added that, after the conflict has begun, there is very
+little relief by way of the ridiculous. Henceforward at any rate Iago's
+humour never raises a smile. The clown is a poor one; we hardly attend
+to him and quickly forget him; I believe most readers of Shakespeare, if
+asked whether there is a clown in _Othello_, would answer No.
+
+(2) In the second place, there is no subject more exciting than sexual
+jealousy rising to the pitch of passion; and there can hardly be any
+spectacle at once so engrossing and so painful as that of a great nature
+suffering the torment of this passion, and driven by it to a crime which
+is also a hideous blunder. Such a passion as ambition, however terrible
+its results, is not itself ignoble; if we separate it in thought from
+the conditions which make it guilty, it does not appear despicable; it
+is not a kind of suffering, its nature is active; and therefore we can
+watch its course without shrinking. But jealousy, and especially sexual
+jealousy, brings with it a sense of shame and humiliation. For this
+reason it is generally hidden; if we perceive it we ourselves are
+ashamed and turn our eyes away; and when it is not hidden it commonly
+stirs contempt as well as pity. Nor is this all. Such jealousy as
+Othello's converts human nature into chaos, and liberates the beast in
+man; and it does this in relation to one of the most intense and also
+the most ideal of human feelings. What spectacle can be more painful
+than that of this feeling turned into a tortured mixture of longing and
+loathing, the 'golden purity' of passion split by poison into fragments,
+the animal in man forcing itself into his consciousness in naked
+grossness, and he writhing before it but powerless to deny it entrance,
+gasping inarticulate images of pollution, and finding relief only in a
+bestial thirst for blood? This is what we have to witness in one who was
+indeed 'great of heart' and no less pure and tender than he was great.
+And this, with what it leads to, the blow to Desdemona, and the scene
+where she is treated as the inmate of a brothel, a scene far more
+painful than the murder scene, is another cause of the special effect of
+this tragedy.[86]
+
+(3) The mere mention of these scenes will remind us painfully of a third
+cause; and perhaps it is the most potent of all. I mean the suffering of
+Desdemona. This is, unless I mistake, the most nearly intolerable
+spectacle that Shakespeare offers us. For one thing, it is _mere_
+suffering; and, _ceteris paribus_, that is much worse to witness than
+suffering that issues in action. Desdemona is helplessly passive. She
+can do nothing whatever. She cannot retaliate even in speech; no, not
+even in silent feeling. And the chief reason of her helplessness only
+makes the sight of her suffering more exquisitely painful. She is
+helpless because her nature is infinitely sweet and her love absolute. I
+would not challenge Mr. Swinburne's statement that we _pity_ Othello
+even more than Desdemona; but we watch Desdemona with more unmitigated
+distress. We are never wholly uninfluenced by the feeling that Othello
+is a man contending with another man; but Desdemona's suffering is like
+that of the most loving of dumb creatures tortured without cause by the
+being he adores.
+
+(4) Turning from the hero and heroine to the third principal character,
+we observe (what has often been pointed out) that the action and
+catastrophe of _Othello_ depend largely on intrigue. We must not say
+more than this. We must not call the play a tragedy of intrigue as
+distinguished from a tragedy of character. Iago's plot is Iago's
+character in action; and it is built on his knowledge of Othello's
+character, and could not otherwise have succeeded. Still it remains true
+that an elaborate plot was necessary to elicit the catastrophe; for
+Othello was no Leontes, and his was the last nature to engender such
+jealousy from itself. Accordingly Iago's intrigue occupies a position in
+the drama for which no parallel can be found in the other tragedies; the
+only approach, and that a distant one, being the intrigue of Edmund in
+the secondary plot of _King Lear_. Now in any novel or play, even if the
+persons rouse little interest and are never in serious danger, a
+skilfully-worked intrigue will excite eager attention and suspense. And
+where, as in _Othello_, the persons inspire the keenest sympathy and
+antipathy, and life and death depend on the intrigue, it becomes the
+source of a tension in which pain almost overpowers pleasure. Nowhere
+else in Shakespeare do we hold our breath in such anxiety and for so
+long a time as in the later Acts of _Othello_.
+
+(5) One result of the prominence of the element of intrigue is that
+_Othello_ is less unlike a story of private life than any other of the
+great tragedies. And this impression is strengthened in further ways. In
+the other great tragedies the action is placed in a distant period, so
+that its general significance is perceived through a thin veil which
+separates the persons from ourselves and our own world. But _Othello_ is
+a drama of modern life; when it first appeared it was a drama almost of
+contemporary life, for the date of the Turkish attack on Cyprus is 1570.
+The characters come close to us, and the application of the drama to
+ourselves (if the phrase may be pardoned) is more immediate than it can
+be in _Hamlet_ or _Lear_. Besides this, their fortunes affect us as
+those of private individuals more than is possible in any of the later
+tragedies with the exception of _Timon_. I have not forgotten the
+Senate, nor Othello's position, nor his service to the State;[87] but
+his deed and his death have not that influence on the interests of a
+nation or an empire which serves to idealise, and to remove far from our
+own sphere, the stories of Hamlet and Macbeth, of Coriolanus and Antony.
+Indeed he is already superseded at Cyprus when his fate is consummated,
+and as we leave him no vision rises on us, as in other tragedies, of
+peace descending on a distracted land.
+
+(6) The peculiarities so far considered combine with others to produce
+those feelings of oppression, of confinement to a comparatively narrow
+world, and of dark fatality, which haunt us in reading _Othello_. In
+_Macbeth_ the fate which works itself out alike in the external conflict
+and in the hero's soul, is obviously hostile to evil; and the
+imagination is dilated both by the consciousness of its presence and by
+the appearance of supernatural agencies. These, as we have seen, produce
+in _Hamlet_ a somewhat similar effect, which is increased by the hero's
+acceptance of the accidents as a providential shaping of his end. _King
+Lear_ is undoubtedly the tragedy which comes nearest to _Othello_ in the
+impression of darkness and fatefulness, and in the absence of direct
+indications of any guiding power.[88] But in _King Lear_, apart from
+other differences to be considered later, the conflict assumes
+proportions so vast that the imagination seems, as in _Paradise Lost_,
+to traverse spaces wider than the earth. In reading _Othello_ the mind
+is not thus distended. It is more bound down to the spectacle of noble
+beings caught in toils from which there is no escape; while the
+prominence of the intrigue diminishes the sense of the dependence of the
+catastrophe on character, and the part played by accident[89] in this
+catastrophe accentuates the feeling of fate. This influence of accident
+is keenly felt in _King Lear_ only once, and at the very end of the
+play. In _Othello_, after the temptation has begun, it is incessant and
+terrible. The skill of Iago was extraordinary, but so was his good
+fortune. Again and again a chance word from Desdemona, a chance meeting
+of Othello and Cassio, a question which starts to our lips and which
+anyone but Othello would have asked, would have destroyed Iago's plot
+and ended his life. In their stead, Desdemona drops her handkerchief at
+the moment most favourable to him,[90] Cassio blunders into the presence
+of Othello only to find him in a swoon, Bianca arrives precisely when
+she is wanted to complete Othello's deception and incense his anger into
+fury. All this and much more seems to us quite natural, so potent is the
+art of the dramatist; but it confounds us with a feeling, such as we
+experience in the _Oedipus Tyrannus_, that for these star-crossed
+mortals--both [Greek: dysdaimones]--there is no escape from fate, and
+even with a feeling, absent from that play, that fate has taken sides
+with villainy.[91] It is not surprising, therefore, that _Othello_
+should affect us as _Hamlet_ and _Macbeth_ never do, and as _King Lear_
+does only in slighter measure. On the contrary, it is marvellous that,
+before the tragedy is over, Shakespeare should have succeeded in toning
+down this impression into harmony with others more solemn and serene.
+
+But has he wholly succeeded? Or is there a justification for the fact--a
+fact it certainly is--that some readers, while acknowledging, of course,
+the immense power of _Othello_, and even admitting that it is
+dramatically perhaps Shakespeare's greatest triumph, still regard it
+with a certain distaste, or, at any rate, hardly allow it a place in
+their minds beside _Hamlet_, _King Lear_ and _Macbeth_?
+
+The distaste to which I refer is due chiefly to two causes. First, to
+many readers in our time, men as well as women, the subject of sexual
+jealousy, treated with Elizabethan fulness and frankness, is not merely
+painful but so repulsive that not even the intense tragic emotions which
+the story generates can overcome this repulsion. But, while it is easy
+to understand a dislike of _Othello_ thus caused, it does not seem
+necessary to discuss it, for it may fairly be called personal or
+subjective. It would become more than this, and would amount to a
+criticism of the play, only if those who feel it maintained that the
+fulness and frankness which are disagreeable to them are also needless
+from a dramatic point of view, or betray a design of appealing to
+unpoetic feelings in the audience. But I do not think that this is
+maintained, or that such a view would be plausible.
+
+To some readers, again, parts of _Othello_ appear shocking or even
+horrible. They think--if I may formulate their objection--that in these
+parts Shakespeare has sinned against the canons of art, by representing
+on the stage a violence or brutality the effect of which is
+unnecessarily painful and rather sensational than tragic. The passages
+which thus give offence are probably those already referred to,--that
+where Othello strikes Desdemona (IV. i. 251), that where he affects to
+treat her as an inmate of a house of ill-fame (IV. ii.), and finally the
+scene of her death.
+
+The issues thus raised ought not to be ignored or impatiently dismissed,
+but they cannot be decided, it seems to me, by argument. All we can
+profitably do is to consider narrowly our experience, and to ask
+ourselves this question: If we feel these objections, do we feel them
+when we are reading the play with all our force, or only when we are
+reading it in a half-hearted manner? For, however matters may stand in
+the former case, in the latter case evidently the fault is ours and not
+Shakespeare's. And if we try the question thus, I believe we shall find
+that on the whole the fault is ours. The first, and least important, of
+the three passages--that of the blow--seems to me the most doubtful. I
+confess that, do what I will, I cannot reconcile myself with it. It
+seems certain that the blow is by no means a tap on the shoulder with a
+roll of paper, as some actors, feeling the repulsiveness of the passage,
+have made it. It must occur, too, on the open stage. And there is not, I
+think, a sufficiently overwhelming tragic feeling in the passage to make
+it bearable. But in the other two scenes the case is different. There,
+it seems to me, if we fully imagine the inward tragedy in the souls of
+the persons as we read, the more obvious and almost physical sensations
+of pain or horror do not appear in their own likeness, and only serve to
+intensify the tragic feelings in which they are absorbed. Whether this
+would be so in the murder-scene if Desdemona had to be imagined as
+dragged about the open stage (as in some modern performances) may be
+doubtful; but there is absolutely no warrant in the text for imagining
+this, and it is also quite clear that the bed where she is stifled was
+within the curtains,[92] and so, presumably, in part concealed.
+
+Here, then, _Othello_ does not appear to be, unless perhaps at one
+point,[93] open to criticism, though it has more passages than the other
+three tragedies where, if imagination is not fully exerted, it is
+shocked or else sensationally excited. If nevertheless we feel it to
+occupy a place in our minds a little lower than the other three (and I
+believe this feeling, though not general, is not rare), the reason lies
+not here but in another characteristic, to which I have already
+referred,--the comparative confinement of the imaginative atmosphere.
+_Othello_ has not equally with the other three the power of dilating the
+imagination by vague suggestions of huge universal powers working in the
+world of individual fate and passion. It is, in a sense, less
+'symbolic.' We seem to be aware in it of a certain limitation, a partial
+suppression of that element in Shakespeare's mind which unites him with
+the mystical poets and with the great musicians and philosophers. In one
+or two of his plays, notably in _Troilus and Cressida_, we are almost
+painfully conscious of this suppression; we feel an intense intellectual
+activity, but at the same time a certain coldness and hardness, as
+though some power in his soul, at once the highest and the sweetest,
+were for a time in abeyance. In other plays, notably in the _Tempest_,
+we are constantly aware of the presence of this power; and in such cases
+we seem to be peculiarly near to Shakespeare himself. Now this is so in
+_Hamlet_ and _King Lear_, and, in a slighter degree, in _Macbeth_; but
+it is much less so in _Othello_. I do not mean that in _Othello_ the
+suppression is marked, or that, as in _Troilus and Cressida_, it strikes
+us as due to some unpleasant mood; it seems rather to follow simply from
+the design of a play on a contemporary and wholly mundane subject. Still
+it makes a difference of the kind I have attempted to indicate, and it
+leaves an impression that in _Othello_ we are not in contact with the
+whole of Shakespeare. And it is perhaps significant in this respect that
+the hero himself strikes us as having, probably, less of the poet's
+personality in him than many characters far inferior both as dramatic
+creations and as men.
+
+
+2
+
+The character of Othello is comparatively simple, but, as I have dwelt
+on the prominence of intrigue and accident in the play, it is desirable
+to show how essentially the success of Iago's plot is connected with
+this character. Othello's description of himself as
+
+              one not easily jealous, but, being wrought,
+     Perplexed in the extreme,
+
+is perfectly just. His tragedy lies in this--that his whole nature was
+indisposed to jealousy, and yet was such that he was unusually open to
+deception, and, if once wrought to passion, likely to act with little
+reflection, with no delay, and in the most decisive manner conceivable.
+
+Let me first set aside a mistaken view. I do not mean the ridiculous
+notion that Othello was jealous by temperament, but the idea, which has
+some little plausibility, that the play is primarily a study of a noble
+barbarian, who has become a Christian and has imbibed some of the
+civilisation of his employers, but who retains beneath the surface the
+savage passions of his Moorish blood and also the suspiciousness
+regarding female chastity common among Oriental peoples, and that the
+last three Acts depict the outburst of these original feelings through
+the thin crust of Venetian culture. It would take too long to discuss
+this idea,[94] and it would perhaps be useless to do so, for all
+arguments against it must end in an appeal to the reader's understanding
+of Shakespeare. If he thinks it is like Shakespeare to look at things in
+this manner; that he had a historical mind and occupied himself with
+problems of 'Culturgeschichte'; that he laboured to make his Romans
+perfectly Roman, to give a correct view of the Britons in the days of
+Lear or Cymbeline, to portray in Hamlet a stage of the moral
+consciousness not yet reached by the people around him, the reader will
+also think this interpretation of _Othello_ probable. To me it appears
+hopelessly un-Shakespearean. I could as easily believe that Chaucer
+meant the Wife of Bath for a study of the peculiarities of
+Somersetshire. I do not mean that Othello's race is a matter of no
+account. It has, as we shall presently see, its importance in the play.
+It makes a difference to our idea of him; it makes a difference to the
+action and catastrophe. But in regard to the essentials of his character
+it is not important; and if anyone had told Shakespeare that no
+Englishman would have acted like the Moor, and had congratulated him on
+the accuracy of his racial psychology, I am sure he would have laughed.
+
+Othello is, in one sense of the word, by far the most romantic figure
+among Shakespeare's heroes; and he is so partly from the strange life of
+war and adventure which he has lived from childhood. He does not belong
+to our world, and he seems to enter it we know not whence--almost as if
+from wonderland. There is something mysterious in his descent from men
+of royal siege; in his wanderings in vast deserts and among marvellous
+peoples; in his tales of magic handkerchiefs and prophetic Sibyls; in
+the sudden vague glimpses we get of numberless battles and sieges in
+which he has played the hero and has borne a charmed life; even in
+chance references to his baptism, his being sold to slavery, his sojourn
+in Aleppo.
+
+And he is not merely a romantic figure; his own nature is romantic. He
+has not, indeed, the meditative or speculative imagination of Hamlet;
+but in the strictest sense of the word he is more poetic than Hamlet.
+Indeed, if one recalls Othello's most famous speeches--those that begin,
+'Her father loved me,' 'O now for ever,' 'Never, Iago,' 'Had it pleased
+Heaven,' 'It is the cause,' 'Behold, I have a weapon,' 'Soft you, a word
+or two before you go'--and if one places side by side with these
+speeches an equal number by any other hero, one will not doubt that
+Othello is the greatest poet of them all. There is the same poetry in
+his casual phrases--like 'These nine moons wasted,' 'Keep up your bright
+swords, for the dew will rust them,' 'You chaste stars,' 'It is a sword
+of Spain, the ice-brook's temper,' 'It is the very error of the
+moon'--and in those brief expressions of intense feeling which ever
+since have been taken as the absolute expression, like
+
+                      If it were now to die,
+     'Twere now to be most happy; for, I fear,
+     My soul hath her content so absolute
+     That not another comfort like to this
+     Succeeds in unknown fate,
+
+or
+
+     If she be false, O then Heaven mocks itself.
+     I'll not believe it;
+
+or
+
+     No, my heart is turned to stone; I strike it, and it hurts my hand,
+
+or
+
+     But yet the pity of it, Iago! O Iago, the pity of it, Iago!
+
+or
+
+                                 O thou weed,
+     Who art so lovely fair and smell'st so sweet
+     That the sense aches at thee, would thou hadst ne'er been born.
+
+And this imagination, we feel, has accompanied his whole life. He has
+watched with a poet's eye the Arabian trees dropping their med'cinable
+gum, and the Indian throwing away his chance-found pearl; and has gazed
+in a fascinated dream at the Pontic sea rushing, never to return, to the
+Propontic and the Hellespont; and has felt as no other man ever felt
+(for he speaks of it as none other ever did) the poetry of the pride,
+pomp, and circumstance of glorious war.
+
+So he comes before us, dark and grand, with a light upon him from the
+sun where he was born; but no longer young, and now grave,
+self-controlled, steeled by the experience of countless perils,
+hardships and vicissitudes, at once simple and stately in bearing and in
+speech, a great man naturally modest but fully conscious of his worth,
+proud of his services to the state, unawed by dignitaries and unelated
+by honours, secure, it would seem, against all dangers from without and
+all rebellion from within. And he comes to have his life crowned with
+the final glory of love, a love as strange, adventurous and romantic as
+any passage of his eventful history, filling his heart with tenderness
+and his imagination with ecstasy. For there is no love, not that of
+Romeo in his youth, more steeped in imagination than Othello's.
+
+The sources of danger in this character are revealed but too clearly by
+the story. In the first place, Othello's mind, for all its poetry, is
+very simple. He is not observant. His nature tends outward. He is quite
+free from introspection, and is not given to reflection. Emotion excites
+his imagination, but it confuses and dulls his intellect. On this side
+he is the very opposite of Hamlet, with whom, however, he shares a great
+openness and trustfulness of nature. In addition, he has little
+experience of the corrupt products of civilised life, and is ignorant of
+European women.
+
+In the second place, for all his dignity and massive calm (and he has
+greater dignity than any other of Shakespeare's men), he is by nature
+full of the most vehement passion. Shakespeare emphasises his
+self-control, not only by the wonderful pictures of the First Act, but
+by references to the past. Lodovico, amazed at his violence, exclaims:
+
+     Is this the noble Moor whom our full Senate
+     Call all in all sufficient? Is this the nature
+     Whom passion could not shake? whose solid virtue
+     The shot of accident nor dart of chance
+     Could neither graze nor pierce?
+
+Iago, who has here no motive for lying, asks:
+
+     Can he be angry? I have seen the cannon
+     When it hath blown his ranks into the air,
+     And, like the devil, from his very arm
+     Puffed his own brother--and can he be angry?[95]
+
+This, and other aspects of his character, are best exhibited by a single
+line--one of Shakespeare's miracles--the words by which Othello silences
+in a moment the night-brawl between his attendants and those of
+Brabantio:
+
+     Keep up your bright swords, for the dew will rust them.
+
+And the same self-control is strikingly shown where Othello endeavours
+to elicit some explanation of the fight between Cassio and Montano.
+Here, however, there occur ominous words, which make us feel how
+necessary was this self-control, and make us admire it the more:
+
+                          Now, by heaven,
+     My blood begins my safer guides to rule,
+     And passion, having my best judgment collied,
+     Assays to lead the way.
+
+We remember these words later, when the sun of reason is 'collied,'
+blackened and blotted out in total eclipse.
+
+Lastly, Othello's nature is all of one piece. His trust, where he
+trusts, is absolute. Hesitation is almost impossible to him. He is
+extremely self-reliant, and decides and acts instantaneously. If stirred
+to indignation, as 'in Aleppo once,' he answers with one lightning
+stroke. Love, if he loves, must be to him the heaven where either he
+must live or bear no life. If such a passion as jealousy seizes him, it
+will swell into a well-nigh incontrollable flood. He will press for
+immediate conviction or immediate relief. Convinced, he will act with
+the authority of a judge and the swiftness of a man in mortal pain.
+Undeceived, he will do like execution on himself.
+
+This character is so noble, Othello's feelings and actions follow so
+inevitably from it and from the forces brought to bear on it, and his
+sufferings are so heart-rending, that he stirs, I believe, in most
+readers a passion of mingled love and pity which they feel for no other
+hero in Shakespeare, and to which not even Mr. Swinburne can do more
+than justice. Yet there are some critics and not a few readers who
+cherish a grudge against him. They do not merely think that in the later
+stages of his temptation he showed a certain obtuseness, and that, to
+speak pedantically, he acted with unjustifiable precipitance and
+violence; no one, I suppose, denies that. But, even when they admit that
+he was not of a jealous temper, they consider that he _was_ 'easily
+jealous'; they seem to think that it was inexcusable in him to feel any
+suspicion of his wife at all; and they blame him for never suspecting
+Iago or asking him for evidence. I refer to this attitude of mind
+chiefly in order to draw attention to certain points in the story. It
+comes partly from mere inattention (for Othello did suspect Iago and did
+ask him for evidence); partly from a misconstruction of the text which
+makes Othello appear jealous long before he really is so;[96] and partly
+from failure to realise certain essential facts. I will begin with
+these.
+
+(1) Othello, we have seen, was trustful, and thorough in his trust. He
+put entire confidence in the honesty of Iago, who had not only been his
+companion in arms, but, as he believed, had just proved his faithfulness
+in the matter of the marriage. This confidence was misplaced, and we
+happen to know it; but it was no sign of stupidity in Othello. For his
+opinion of Iago was the opinion of practically everyone who knew him:
+and that opinion was that Iago was before all things 'honest,' his very
+faults being those of excess in honesty. This being so, even if Othello
+had not been trustful and simple, it would have been quite unnatural in
+him to be unmoved by the warnings of so honest a friend, warnings
+offered with extreme reluctance and manifestly from a sense of a
+friend's duty.[97] _Any_ husband would have been troubled by them.
+
+(2) Iago does not bring these warnings to a husband who had lived with a
+wife for months and years and knew her like his sister or his
+bosom-friend. Nor is there any ground in Othello's character for
+supposing that, if he had been such a man, he would have felt and acted
+as he does in the play. But he was newly married; in the circumstances
+he cannot have known much of Desdemona before his marriage; and further
+he was conscious of being under the spell of a feeling which can give
+glory to the truth but can also give it to a dream.
+
+(3) This consciousness in any imaginative man is enough, in such
+circumstances, to destroy his confidence in his powers of perception. In
+Othello's case, after a long and most artful preparation, there now
+comes, to reinforce its effect, the suggestions that he is not an
+Italian, not even a European; that he is totally ignorant of the
+thoughts and the customary morality of Venetian women;[98] that he had
+himself seen in Desdemona's deception of her father how perfect an
+actress she could be. As he listens in horror, for a moment at least the
+past is revealed to him in a new and dreadful light, and the ground
+seems to sink under his feet. These suggestions are followed by a
+tentative but hideous and humiliating insinuation of what his honest and
+much-experienced friend fears may be the true explanation of Desdemona's
+rejection of acceptable suitors, and of her strange, and naturally
+temporary, preference for a black man. Here Iago goes too far. He sees
+something in Othello's face that frightens him, and he breaks off. Nor
+does this idea take any hold of Othello's mind. But it is not surprising
+that his utter powerlessness to repel it on the ground of knowledge of
+his wife, or even of that instinctive interpretation of character which
+is possible between persons of the same race,[99] should complete his
+misery, so that he feels he can bear no more, and abruptly dismisses his
+friend (III. iii. 238).
+
+Now I repeat that _any_ man situated as Othello was would have been
+disturbed by Iago's communications, and I add that many men would have
+been made wildly jealous. But up to this point, where Iago is dismissed,
+Othello, I must maintain, does not show jealousy. His confidence is
+shaken, he is confused and deeply troubled, he feels even horror; but he
+is not yet jealous in the proper sense of that word. In his soliloquy
+(III. iii. 258 ff.) the beginning of this passion may be traced; but it
+is only after an interval of solitude, when he has had time to dwell on
+the idea presented to him, and especially after statements of fact, not
+mere general grounds of suspicion, are offered, that the passion lays
+hold of him. Even then, however, and indeed to the very end, he is quite
+unlike the essentially jealous man, quite unlike Leontes. No doubt the
+thought of another man's possessing the woman he loves is intolerable to
+him; no doubt the sense of insult and the impulse of revenge are at
+times most violent; and these are the feelings of jealousy proper. But
+these are not the chief or the deepest source of Othello's suffering. It
+is the wreck of his faith and his love. It is the feeling,
+
+     If she be false, oh then Heaven mocks itself;
+
+the feeling,
+
+     O Iago, the pity of it, Iago!
+
+the feeling,
+
+     But there where I have garner'd up my heart,
+     Where either I must live, or bear no life;
+     The fountain from the which my current runs,
+     Or else dries up--to be discarded thence....
+
+You will find nothing like this in Leontes.
+
+Up to this point, it appears to me, there is not a syllable to be said
+against Othello. But the play is a tragedy, and from this point we may
+abandon the ungrateful and undramatic task of awarding praise and blame.
+When Othello, after a brief interval, re-enters (III. iii. 330), we see
+at once that the poison has been at work and 'burns like the mines of
+sulphur.'
+
+     Look where he comes! Not poppy, nor mandragora,
+     Nor all the drowsy syrups of the world,
+     Shall ever medicine thee to that sweet sleep
+     Which thou owedst yesterday.
+
+He is 'on the rack,' in an agony so unbearable that he cannot endure the
+sight of Iago. Anticipating the probability that Iago has spared him the
+whole truth, he feels that in that case his life is over and his
+'occupation gone' with all its glories. But he has not abandoned hope.
+The bare possibility that his friend is deliberately deceiving
+him--though such a deception would be a thing so monstrously wicked that
+he can hardly conceive it credible--is a kind of hope. He furiously
+demands proof, ocular proof. And when he is compelled to see that he is
+demanding an impossibility he still demands evidence. He forces it from
+the unwilling witness, and hears the maddening tale of Cassio's dream.
+It is enough. And if it were not enough, has he not sometimes seen a
+handkerchief spotted with strawberries in his wife's hand? Yes, it was
+his first gift to her.
+
+     I know not that; but such a handkerchief--
+     I am sure it was your wife's--did I to-day
+     See Cassio wipe his beard with.
+
+'If it be that,' he answers--but what need to test the fact? The
+'madness of revenge' is in his blood, and hesitation is a thing he never
+knew. He passes judgment, and controls himself only to make his sentence
+a solemn vow.
+
+The Othello of the Fourth Act is Othello in his fall. His fall is never
+complete, but he is much changed. Towards the close of the
+Temptation-scene he becomes at times most terrible, but his grandeur
+remains almost undiminished. Even in the following scene (III. iv.),
+where he goes to test Desdemona in the matter of the handkerchief, and
+receives a fatal confirmation of her guilt, our sympathy with him is
+hardly touched by any feeling of humiliation. But in the Fourth Act
+'Chaos has come.' A slight interval of time may be admitted here. It is
+but slight; for it was necessary for Iago to hurry on, and terribly
+dangerous to leave a chance for a meeting of Cassio with Othello; and
+his insight into Othello's nature taught him that his plan was to
+deliver blow on blow, and never to allow his victim to recover from the
+confusion of the first shock. Still there is a slight interval; and when
+Othello reappears we see at a glance that he is a changed man. He is
+physically exhausted, and his mind is dazed.[100] He sees everything
+blurred through a mist of blood and tears. He has actually forgotten the
+incident of the handkerchief, and has to be reminded of it. When Iago,
+perceiving that he can now risk almost any lie, tells him that Cassio
+has confessed his guilt, Othello, the hero who has seemed to us only
+second to Coriolanus in physical power, trembles all over; he mutters
+disjointed words; a blackness suddenly intervenes between his eyes and
+the world; he takes it for the shuddering testimony of nature to the
+horror he has just heard,[101] and he falls senseless to the ground.
+When he recovers it is to watch Cassio, as he imagines, laughing over
+his shame. It is an imposition so gross, and should have been one so
+perilous, that Iago would never have ventured it before. But he is safe
+now. The sight only adds to the confusion of intellect the madness of
+rage; and a ravenous thirst for revenge, contending with motions of
+infinite longing and regret, conquers them. The delay till night-fall is
+torture to him. His self-control has wholly deserted him, and he strikes
+his wife in the presence of the Venetian envoy. He is so lost to all
+sense of reality that he never asks himself what will follow the deaths
+of Cassio and his wife. An ineradicable instinct of justice, rather than
+any last quiver of hope, leads him to question Emilia; but nothing could
+convince him now, and there follows the dreadful scene of accusation;
+and then, to allow us the relief of burning hatred and burning tears,
+the interview of Desdemona with Iago, and that last talk of hers with
+Emilia, and her last song.
+
+But before the end there is again a change. The supposed death of Cassio
+(V. i.) satiates the thirst for vengeance. The Othello who enters the
+bed-chamber with the words,
+
+     It is the cause, it is the cause, my soul,
+
+is not the man of the Fourth Act. The deed he is bound to do is no
+murder, but a sacrifice. He is to save Desdemona from herself, not in
+hate but in honour; in honour, and also in love. His anger has passed; a
+boundless sorrow has taken its place; and
+
+                  this sorrow's heavenly:
+     It strikes where it doth love.
+
+Even when, at the sight of her apparent obduracy, and at the hearing of
+words which by a crowning fatality can only reconvince him of her guilt,
+these feelings give way to others, it is to righteous indignation they
+give way, not to rage; and, terribly painful as this scene is, there is
+almost nothing here to diminish the admiration and love which heighten
+pity.[102] And pity itself vanishes, and love and admiration alone
+remain, in the majestic dignity and sovereign ascendancy of the close.
+Chaos has come and gone; and the Othello of the Council-chamber and the
+quay of Cyprus has returned, or a greater and nobler Othello still. As
+he speaks those final words in which all the glory and agony of his
+life--long ago in India and Arabia and Aleppo, and afterwards in Venice,
+and now in Cyprus--seem to pass before us, like the pictures that flash
+before the eyes of a drowning man, a triumphant scorn for the fetters of
+the flesh and the littleness of all the lives that must survive him
+sweeps our grief away, and when he dies upon a kiss the most painful of
+all tragedies leaves us for the moment free from pain, and exulting in
+the power of 'love and man's unconquerable mind.'
+
+
+3
+
+The words just quoted come from Wordsworth's sonnet to Toussaint
+l'Ouverture. Toussaint was a Negro; and there is a question, which,
+though of little consequence, is not without dramatic interest, whether
+Shakespeare imagined Othello as a Negro or as a Moor. Now I will not say
+that Shakespeare imagined him as a Negro and not as a Moor, for that
+might imply that he distinguished Negroes and Moors precisely as we do;
+but what appears to me nearly certain is that he imagined Othello as a
+black man, and not as a light-brown one.
+
+In the first place, we must remember that the brown or bronze to which
+we are now accustomed in the Othellos of our theatres is a recent
+innovation. Down to Edmund Kean's time, so far as is known, Othello was
+always quite black. This stage-tradition goes back to the Restoration,
+and it almost settles our question. For it is impossible that the colour
+of the original Othello should have been forgotten so soon after
+Shakespeare's time, and most improbable that it should have been changed
+from brown to black.
+
+If we turn to the play itself, we find many references to Othello's
+colour and appearance. Most of these are indecisive; for the word
+'black' was of course used then where we should speak of a 'dark'
+complexion now; and even the nickname 'thick-lips,' appealed to as proof
+that Othello was a Negro, might have been applied by an enemy to what we
+call a Moor. On the other hand, it is hard to believe that, if Othello
+had been light-brown, Brabantio would have taunted him with having a
+'sooty bosom,' or that (as Mr. Furness observes) he himself would have
+used the words,
+
+                    her name, that was as fresh
+     As Dian's visage, is now begrimed and black
+     As mine own face.
+
+These arguments cannot be met by pointing out that Othello was of royal
+blood, is not called an Ethiopian, is called a Barbary horse, and is
+said to be going to Mauritania. All this would be of importance if we
+had reason to believe that Shakespeare shared our ideas, knowledge and
+terms. Otherwise it proves nothing. And we know that sixteenth-century
+writers called any dark North-African a Moor, or a black Moor, or a
+blackamoor. Sir Thomas Elyot, according to Hunter,[103] calls Ethiopians
+Moors; and the following are the first two illustrations of 'Blackamoor'
+in the Oxford _English Dictionary_: 1547, 'I am a blake More borne in
+Barbary'; 1548, '_Ethiopo_, a blake More, or a man of Ethiope.' Thus
+geographical names can tell us nothing about the question how
+Shakespeare imagined Othello. He may have known that a Mauritanian is
+not a Negro nor black, but we cannot assume that he did. He may have
+known, again, that the Prince of Morocco, who is described in the
+_Merchant of Venice_ as having, like Othello, the complexion of a devil,
+was no Negro. But we cannot tell: nor is there any reason why he should
+not have imagined the Prince as a brown Moor and Othello as a
+Blackamoor.
+
+_Titus Andronicus_ appeared in the Folio among Shakespeare's works. It
+is believed by some good critics to be his: hardly anyone doubts that he
+had a hand in it: it is certain that he knew it, for reminiscences of it
+are scattered through his plays. Now no one who reads _Titus Andronicus_
+with an open mind can doubt that Aaron was, in our sense, black; and he
+appears to have been a Negro. To mention nothing else, he is twice
+called 'coal-black'; his colour is compared with that of a raven and a
+swan's legs; his child is coal-black and thick-lipped; he himself has a
+'fleece of woolly hair.' Yet he is 'Aaron the Moor,' just as Othello is
+'Othello the Moor.' In the _Battle of Alcazar_ (Dyce's _Peele_, p. 421)
+Muly the Moor is called 'the negro'; and Shakespeare himself in a single
+line uses 'negro' and 'Moor' of the same person (_Merchant of Venice_,
+III. v. 42).
+
+The horror of most American critics (Mr. Furness is a bright exception)
+at the idea of a black Othello is very amusing, and their arguments are
+highly instructive. But they were anticipated, I regret to say, by
+Coleridge, and we will hear him. 'No doubt Desdemona saw Othello's
+visage in his mind; yet, as we are constituted, and most surely as an
+English audience was disposed in the beginning of the seventeenth
+century, it would be something monstrous to conceive this beautiful
+Venetian girl falling in love with a veritable negro. It would argue a
+disproportionateness, a want of balance, in Desdemona, which Shakespeare
+does not appear to have in the least contemplated.'[104] Could any
+argument be more self-destructive? It actually _did_ appear to Brabantio
+'something monstrous to conceive' his daughter falling in love with
+Othello,--so monstrous that he could account for her love only by drugs
+and foul charms. And the suggestion that such love would argue
+'disproportionateness' is precisely the suggestion that Iago _did_ make
+in Desdemona's case:
+
+     Foh! one may smell in such a will most rank,
+     Foul _disproportion_, thoughts unnatural.
+
+In fact he spoke of the marriage exactly as a filthy-minded cynic now
+might speak of the marriage of an English lady to a negro like
+Toussaint. Thus the argument of Coleridge and others points straight to
+the conclusion against which they argue.
+
+But this is not all. The question whether to Shakespeare Othello was
+black or brown is not a mere question of isolated fact or historical
+curiosity; it concerns the character of Desdemona. Coleridge, and still
+more the American writers, regard her love, in effect, as Brabantio
+regarded it, and not as Shakespeare conceived it. They are simply
+blurring this glorious conception when they try to lessen the distance
+between her and Othello, and to smooth away the obstacle which his
+'visage' offered to her romantic passion for a hero. Desdemona, the
+'eternal womanly' in its most lovely and adorable form, simple and
+innocent as a child, ardent with the courage and idealism of a saint,
+radiant with that heavenly purity of heart which men worship the more
+because nature so rarely permits it to themselves, had no theories about
+universal brotherhood, and no phrases about 'one blood in all the
+nations of the earth' or 'barbarian, Scythian, bond and free'; but when
+her soul came in sight of the noblest soul on earth, she made nothing of
+the shrinking of her senses, but followed her soul until her senses took
+part with it, and 'loved him with the love which was her doom.' It was
+not prudent. It even turned out tragically. She met in life with the
+reward of those who rise too far above our common level; and we continue
+to allot her the same reward when we consent to forgive her for loving a
+brown man, but find it monstrous that she should love a black one.[105]
+
+There is perhaps a certain excuse for our failure to rise to
+Shakespeare's meaning, and to realise how extraordinary and splendid a
+thing it was in a gentle Venetian girl to love Othello, and to assail
+fortune with such a 'downright violence and storm' as is expected only
+in a hero. It is that when first we hear of her marriage we have not yet
+seen the Desdemona of the later Acts; and therefore we do not perceive
+how astonishing this love and boldness must have been in a maiden so
+quiet and submissive. And when we watch her in her suffering and death
+we are so penetrated by the sense of her heavenly sweetness and
+self-surrender that we almost forget that she had shown herself quite as
+exceptional in the active assertion of her own soul and will. She tends
+to become to us predominantly pathetic, the sweetest and most pathetic
+of Shakespeare's women, as innocent as Miranda and as loving as Viola,
+yet suffering more deeply than Cordelia or Imogen. And she seems to lack
+that independence and strength of spirit which Cordelia and Imogen
+possess, and which in a manner raises them above suffering. She appears
+passive and defenceless, and can oppose to wrong nothing but the
+infinite endurance and forgiveness of a love that knows not how to
+resist or resent. She thus becomes at once the most beautiful example of
+this love, and the most pathetic heroine in Shakespeare's world. If her
+part were acted by an artist equal to Salvini, and with a Salvini for
+Othello, I doubt if the spectacle of the last two Acts would not be
+pronounced intolerable.
+
+Of course this later impression of Desdemona is perfectly right, but it
+must be carried back and united with the earlier before we can see what
+Shakespeare imagined. Evidently, we are to understand, innocence,
+gentleness, sweetness, lovingness were the salient and, in a sense, the
+principal traits in Desdemona's character. She was, as her father
+supposed her to be,
+
+                         a maiden never bold,
+     Of spirit so still and quiet that her motion
+     Blushed at herself.
+
+But suddenly there appeared something quite different--something which
+could never have appeared, for example, in Ophelia--a love not only full
+of romance but showing a strange freedom and energy of spirit, and
+leading to a most unusual boldness of action; and this action was
+carried through with a confidence and decision worthy of Juliet or
+Cordelia. Desdemona does not shrink before the Senate; and her language
+to her father, though deeply respectful, is firm enough to stir in us
+some sympathy with the old man who could not survive his daughter's
+loss. This then, we must understand, was the emergence in Desdemona, as
+she passed from girlhood to womanhood, of an individuality and strength
+which, if she had lived, would have been gradually fused with her more
+obvious qualities and have issued in a thousand actions, sweet and good,
+but surprising to her conventional or timid neighbours. And, indeed, we
+have already a slight example in her overflowing kindness, her boldness
+and her ill-fated persistence in pleading Cassio's cause. But the full
+ripening of her lovely and noble nature was not to be. In her brief
+wedded life she appeared again chiefly as the sweet and submissive being
+of her girlhood; and the strength of her soul, first evoked by love,
+found scope to show itself only in a love which, when harshly repulsed,
+blamed only its own pain; when bruised, only gave forth a more exquisite
+fragrance; and, when rewarded with death, summoned its last labouring
+breath to save its murderer.
+
+Many traits in Desdemona's character have been described with
+sympathetic insight by Mrs. Jameson, and I will pass them by and add but
+a few words on the connection between this character and the catastrophe
+of _Othello_. Desdemona, as Mrs. Jameson remarks, shows less quickness
+of intellect and less tendency to reflection than most of Shakespeare's
+heroines; but I question whether the critic is right in adding that she
+shows much of the 'unconscious address common in women.' She seems to me
+deficient in this address, having in its place a frank childlike
+boldness and persistency, which are full of charm but are unhappily
+united with a certain want of perception. And these graces and this
+deficiency appear to be inextricably intertwined, and in the
+circumstances conspire tragically against her. They, with her innocence,
+hinder her from understanding Othello's state of mind, and lead her to
+the most unlucky acts and words; and unkindness or anger subdues her so
+completely that she becomes passive and seems to drift helplessly
+towards the cataract in front.
+
+In Desdemona's incapacity to resist there is also, in addition to her
+perfect love, something which is very characteristic. She is, in a
+sense, a child of nature. That deep inward division which leads to clear
+and conscious oppositions of right and wrong, duty and inclination,
+justice and injustice, is alien to her beautiful soul. She is not good,
+kind and true in spite of a temptation to be otherwise, any more than
+she is charming in spite of a temptation to be otherwise. She seems to
+know evil only by name, and, her inclinations being good, she acts on
+inclination. This trait, with its results, may be seen if we compare
+her, at the crises of the story, with Cordelia. In Desdemona's place,
+Cordelia, however frightened at Othello's anger about the lost
+handkerchief, would not have denied its loss. Painful experience had
+produced in her a conscious principle of rectitude and a proud hatred of
+falseness, which would have made a lie, even one wholly innocent in
+spirit, impossible to her; and the clear sense of justice and right
+would have led her, instead, to require an explanation of Othello's
+agitation which would have broken Iago's plot to pieces. In the same
+way, at the final crisis, no instinctive terror of death would have
+compelled Cordelia suddenly to relinquish her demand for justice and to
+plead for life. But these moments are fatal to Desdemona, who acts
+precisely as if she were guilty; and they are fatal because they ask for
+something which, it seems to us, could hardly be united with the
+peculiar beauty of her nature.
+
+This beauty is all her own. Something as beautiful may be found in
+Cordelia, but not the same beauty. Desdemona, confronted with Lear's
+foolish but pathetic demand for a profession of love, could have done, I
+think, what Cordelia could not do--could have refused to compete with
+her sisters, and yet have made her father feel that she loved him well.
+And I doubt if Cordelia, 'falsely murdered,' would have been capable of
+those last words of Desdemona--her answer to Emilia's 'O, who hath done
+this deed?'
+
+               Nobody: I myself. Farewell.
+     Commend me to my kind lord. O, farewell!
+
+Were we intended to remember, as we hear this last 'falsehood,' that
+other falsehood, 'It is not lost,' and to feel that, alike in the
+momentary child's fear and the deathless woman's love, Desdemona is
+herself and herself alone?[106]
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[Footnote 85: One instance is worth pointing out, because the passage in
+_Othello_ has, oddly enough, given trouble. Desdemona says of the maid
+Barbara: 'She was in love, and he she loved proved mad And did forsake
+her.' Theobald changed 'mad' to 'bad.' Warburton read 'and he she loved
+forsook her, And she proved mad'! Johnson said 'mad' meant only 'wild,
+frantic, uncertain.' But what Desdemona says of Barbara is just what
+Ophelia might have said of herself.]
+
+[Footnote 86: The whole force of the passages referred to can be felt
+only by a reader. The Othello of our stage can never be Shakespeare's
+Othello, any more than the Cleopatra of our stage can be his Cleopatra.]
+
+[Footnote 87: See p. 9.]
+
+[Footnote 88: Even here, however, there is a great difference; for
+although the idea of such a power is not suggested by _King Lear_ as it
+is by _Hamlet_ and _Macbeth_, it is repeatedly expressed by persons _in_
+the drama. Of such references there are very few in _Othello_. But for
+somewhat frequent allusions to hell and the devil the view of the
+characters is almost strictly secular. Desdemona's sweetness and
+forgivingness are not based on religion, and her only way of accounting
+for her undeserved suffering is by an appeal to Fortune: 'It is my
+wretched fortune' (IV. ii. 128). In like manner Othello can only appeal
+to Fate (V. ii. 264):
+
+           but, oh vain boast!
+     Who can control his fate?]
+
+[Footnote 89: Ulrici has good remarks, though he exaggerates, on this
+point and the element of intrigue.]
+
+[Footnote 90: And neither she nor Othello observes what handkerchief it
+is. Else she would have remembered how she came to lose it, and would
+have told Othello; and Othello, too, would at once have detected Iago's
+lie (III. iii. 438) that he had seen Cassio wipe his beard with the
+handkerchief 'to-day.' For in fact the handkerchief had been lost _not
+an hour_ before Iago told that lie (line 288 of the _same scene_), and
+it was at that moment in his pocket. He lied therefore most rashly, but
+with his usual luck.]
+
+[Footnote 91: For those who know the end of the story there is a
+terrible irony in the enthusiasm with which Cassio greets the arrival of
+Desdemona in Cyprus. Her ship (which is also Iago's) sets out from
+Venice a week later than the others, but reaches Cyprus on the same day
+with them:
+
+     Tempests themselves, high seas and howling winds,
+     The gutter'd rocks and congregated sands--
+     Traitors ensteep'd to clog the guiltless keel--
+     As having sense of beauty, do omit
+     Their mortal natures, letting go safely by
+     The divine Desdemona.
+
+So swiftly does Fate conduct her to her doom.]
+
+[Footnote 92: The dead bodies are not carried out at the end, as they
+must have been if the bed had been on the main stage (for this had no
+front curtain). The curtains within which the bed stood were drawn
+together at the words, 'Let it be hid' (V. ii. 365).]
+
+[Footnote 93: Against which may be set the scene of the blinding of
+Gloster in _King Lear_.]
+
+[Footnote 94: The reader who is tempted by it should, however, first ask
+himself whether Othello does act like a barbarian, or like a man who,
+though wrought almost to madness, does 'all in honour.']
+
+[Footnote 95: For the actor, then, to represent him as violently angry
+when he cashiers Cassio is an utter mistake.]
+
+[Footnote 96: I cannot deal fully with this point in the lecture. See
+Note L.]
+
+[Footnote 97: It is important to observe that, in his attempt to arrive
+at the facts about Cassio's drunken misdemeanour, Othello had just had
+an example of Iago's unwillingness to tell the whole truth where it must
+injure a friend. No wonder he feels in the Temptation-scene that 'this
+honest creature doubtless Sees and knows more, much more, than he
+unfolds.']
+
+[Footnote 98: To represent that Venetian women do not regard adultery so
+seriously as Othello does, and again that Othello would be wise to
+accept the situation like an Italian husband, is one of Iago's most
+artful and most maddening devices.]
+
+[Footnote 99: If the reader has ever chanced to see an African violently
+excited, he may have been startled to observe how completely at a loss
+he was to interpret those bodily expressions of passion which in a
+fellow-countryman he understands at once, and in a European foreigner
+with somewhat less certainty. The effect of difference in blood in
+increasing Othello's bewilderment regarding his wife is not sufficiently
+realised. The same effect has to be remembered in regard to Desdemona's
+mistakes in dealing with Othello in his anger.]
+
+[Footnote 100: See Note M.]
+
+[Footnote 101: Cf. _Winter's Tale_, I. ii. 137 ff.:
+
+              Can thy dam?--may't be?--
+     Affection! thy intention stabs the centre:
+     Thou dost make possible things not so held,
+     Communicatest with dreams;--how can this be?
+     With what's unreal thou coactive art,
+     And fellow'st nothing: then 'tis very credent
+     Thou may'st cojoin with something; and thou dost,
+     And that beyond commission, and I find it,
+     And that to the infection of my brains
+     And hardening of my brows.]
+
+[Footnote 102: See Note O.]
+
+[Footnote 103: New Illustrations, ii. 281.]
+
+[Footnote 104: _Lectures on Shakespeare_, ed. Ashe, p. 386.]
+
+[Footnote 105: I will not discuss the further question whether, granted
+that to Shakespeare Othello was a black, he should be represented as a
+black in our theatres now. I dare say not. We do not like the real
+Shakespeare. We like to have his language pruned and his conceptions
+flattened into something that suits our mouths and minds. And even if we
+were prepared to make an effort, still, as Lamb observes, to imagine is
+one thing and to see is another. Perhaps if we saw Othello coal-black
+with the bodily eye, the aversion of our blood, an aversion which comes
+as near to being merely physical as anything human can, would overpower
+our imagination and sink us below not Shakespeare only but the audiences
+of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
+
+As I have mentioned Lamb, I may observe that he differed from Coleridge
+as to Othello's colour, but, I am sorry to add, thought Desdemona to
+stand in need of excuse. 'This noble lady, with a singularity rather to
+be wondered at than imitated, had chosen for the object of her
+affections a Moor, a black.... Neither is Desdemona to be altogether
+condemned for the unsuitableness of the person whom she selected for her
+lover' (_Tales from Shakespeare_). Others, of course, have gone much
+further and have treated all the calamities of the tragedy as a sort of
+judgment on Desdemona's rashness, wilfulness and undutifulness. There is
+no arguing with opinions like this; but I cannot believe that even Lamb
+is true to Shakespeare in implying that Desdemona is in some degree to
+be condemned. What is there in the play to show that Shakespeare
+regarded her marriage differently from Imogen's?]
+
+[Footnote 106: When Desdemona spoke her last words, perhaps that line of
+the ballad which she sang an hour before her death was still busy in her
+brain,
+
+     Let nobody blame him: his scorn I approve.
+
+Nature plays such strange tricks, and Shakespeare almost alone among
+poets seems to create in somewhat the same manner as Nature. In the same
+way, as Malone pointed out, Othello's exclamation, 'Goats and monkeys!'
+(IV. i. 274) is an unconscious reminiscence of Iago's words at III. iii.
+403.]
+
+
+
+
+LECTURE VI
+
+OTHELLO
+
+
+1
+
+Evil has nowhere else been portrayed with such mastery as in the
+character of Iago. Richard III., for example, beside being less subtly
+conceived, is a far greater figure and a less repellent. His physical
+deformity, separating him from other men, seems to offer some excuse for
+his egoism. In spite of his egoism, too, he appears to us more than a
+mere individual: he is the representative of his family, the Fury of the
+House of York. Nor is he so negative as Iago: he has strong passions, he
+has admirations, and his conscience disturbs him. There is the glory of
+power about him. Though an excellent actor, he prefers force to fraud,
+and in his world there is no general illusion as to his true nature.
+Again, to compare Iago with the Satan of _Paradise Lost_ seems almost
+absurd, so immensely does Shakespeare's man exceed Milton's Fiend in
+evil. That mighty Spirit, whose
+
+                   form had yet not lost
+     All her original brightness, nor appeared
+     Less than archangel ruined and the excess
+     Of glory obscured;
+
+who knew loyalty to comrades and pity for victims; who
+
+               felt how awful goodness is, and saw
+     Virtue in her shape how lovely; saw, and pined
+     His loss;
+
+who could still weep--how much further distant is he than Iago from
+spiritual death, even when, in procuring the fall of Man, he completes
+his own fall! It is only in Goethe's Mephistopheles that a fit companion
+for Iago can be found. Here there is something of the same deadly
+coldness, the same gaiety in destruction. But then Mephistopheles, like
+so many scores of literary villains, has Iago for his father. And
+Mephistopheles, besides, is not, in the strict sense, a character. He is
+half person, half symbol. A metaphysical idea speaks through him. He is
+earthy, but could never live upon the earth.
+
+Of Shakespeare's characters Falstaff, Hamlet, Iago, and Cleopatra (I
+name them in the order of their births) are probably the most wonderful.
+Of these, again, Hamlet and Iago, whose births come nearest together,
+are perhaps the most subtle. And if Iago had been a person as attractive
+as Hamlet, as many thousands of pages might have been written about him,
+containing as much criticism good and bad. As it is, the majority of
+interpretations of his character are inadequate not only to
+Shakespeare's conception, but, I believe, to the impressions of most
+readers of taste who are unbewildered by analysis. These false
+interpretations, if we set aside the usual lunacies,[107] fall into two
+groups. The first contains views which reduce Shakespeare to
+commonplace. In different ways and degrees they convert his Iago into
+an ordinary villain. Their Iago is simply a man who has been slighted
+and revenges himself; or a husband who believes he has been wronged, and
+will make his enemy suffer a jealousy worse than his own; or an
+ambitious man determined to ruin his successful rival--one of these, or
+a combination of these, endowed with unusual ability and cruelty. These
+are the more popular views. The second group of false interpretations is
+much smaller, but it contains much weightier matter than the first. Here
+Iago is a being who hates good simply because it is good, and loves evil
+purely for itself. His action is not prompted by any plain motive like
+revenge, jealousy or ambition. It springs from a 'motiveless malignity,'
+or a disinterested delight in the pain of others; and Othello, Cassio
+and Desdemona are scarcely more than the material requisite for the full
+attainment of this delight. This second Iago, evidently, is no
+conventional villain, and he is much nearer to Shakespeare's Iago than
+the first. Only he is, if not a psychological impossibility, at any rate
+not a _human_ being. He might be in place, therefore, in a symbolical
+poem like _Faust_, but in a purely human drama like _Othello_ he would
+be a ruinous blunder. Moreover, he is not in _Othello_: he is a product
+of imperfect observation and analysis.
+
+Coleridge, the author of that misleading phrase 'motiveless malignity,'
+has some fine remarks on Iago; and the essence of the character has been
+described, first in some of the best lines Hazlitt ever wrote, and then
+rather more fully by Mr. Swinburne,--so admirably described that I am
+tempted merely to read and illustrate these two criticisms. This plan,
+however, would make it difficult to introduce all that I wish to say. I
+propose, therefore, to approach the subject directly, and, first, to
+consider how Iago appeared to those who knew him, and what inferences
+may be drawn from their illusions; and then to ask what, if we judge
+from the play, his character really was. And I will indicate the points
+where I am directly indebted to the criticisms just mentioned.
+
+But two warnings are first required. One of these concerns Iago's
+nationality. It has been held that he is a study of that peculiarly
+Italian form of villainy which is considered both too clever and too
+diabolical for an Englishman. I doubt if there is much more to be said
+for this idea than for the notion that Othello is a study of Moorish
+character. No doubt the belief in that Italian villainy was prevalent in
+Shakespeare's time, and it may perhaps have influenced him in some
+slight degree both here and in drawing the character of Iachimo in
+_Cymbeline_. But even this slight influence seems to me doubtful. If Don
+John in _Much Ado_ had been an Englishman, critics would have admired
+Shakespeare's discernment in making his English villain sulky and
+stupid. If Edmund's father had been Duke of Ferrara instead of Earl of
+Gloster, they would have said that Edmund could have been nothing but an
+Italian. Change the name and country of Richard III., and he would be
+called a typical despot of the Italian Renaissance. Change those of
+Juliet, and we should find her wholesome English nature contrasted with
+the southern dreaminess of Romeo. But this way of interpreting
+Shakespeare is not Shakespearean. With him the differences of period,
+race, nationality and locality have little bearing on the inward
+character, though they sometimes have a good deal on the total
+imaginative effect, of his figures. When he does lay stress on such
+differences his intention is at once obvious, as in characters like
+Fluellen or Sir Hugh Evans, or in the talk of the French princes before
+the battle of Agincourt. I may add that Iago certainly cannot be taken
+to exemplify the popular Elizabethan idea of a disciple of Macchiavelli.
+There is no sign that he is in theory an atheist or even an unbeliever
+in the received religion. On the contrary, he uses its language, and
+says nothing resembling the words of the prologue to the _Jew of Malta_:
+
+     I count religion but a childish toy,
+     And hold there is no sin but ignorance.
+
+Aaron in _Titus Andronicus_ might have said this (and is not more likely
+to be Shakespeare's creation on that account), but not Iago.
+
+I come to a second warning. One must constantly remember not to believe
+a syllable that Iago utters on any subject, including himself, until one
+has tested his statement by comparing it with known facts and with other
+statements of his own or of other people, and by considering whether he
+had in the particular circumstances any reason for telling a lie or for
+telling the truth. The implicit confidence which his acquaintances
+placed in his integrity has descended to most of his critics; and this,
+reinforcing the comical habit of quoting as Shakespeare's own statement
+everything said by his characters, has been a fruitful source of
+misinterpretation. I will take as an instance the very first assertions
+made by Iago. In the opening scene he tells his dupe Roderigo that three
+great men of Venice went to Othello and begged him to make Iago his
+lieutenant; that Othello, out of pride and obstinacy, refused; that in
+refusing he talked a deal of military rigmarole, and ended by declaring
+(falsely, we are to understand) that he had already filled up the
+vacancy; that Cassio, whom he chose, had absolutely no practical
+knowledge of war, nothing but bookish theoric, mere prattle, arithmetic,
+whereas Iago himself had often fought by Othello's side, and by 'old
+gradation' too ought to have been preferred. Most or all of this is
+repeated by some critics as though it were information given by
+Shakespeare, and the conclusion is quite naturally drawn that Iago had
+some reason to feel aggrieved. But if we ask ourselves how much of all
+this is true we shall answer, I believe, as follows. It is absolutely
+certain that Othello appointed Cassio his lieutenant, and _nothing_ else
+is absolutely certain. But there is no reason to doubt the statement
+that Iago had seen service with him, nor is there anything inherently
+improbable in the statement that he was solicited by three great
+personages on Iago's behalf. On the other hand, the suggestions that he
+refused out of pride and obstinacy, and that he lied in saying he had
+already chosen his officer, have no verisimilitude; and if there is any
+fact at all (as there probably is) behind Iago's account of the
+conversation, it doubtless is the fact that Iago himself was ignorant of
+military science, while Cassio was an expert, and that Othello explained
+this to the great personages. That Cassio, again, was an interloper and
+a mere closet-student without experience of war is incredible,
+considering first that Othello chose him for lieutenant, and secondly
+that the senate appointed him to succeed Othello in command at Cyprus;
+and we have direct evidence that part of Iago's statement is a lie, for
+Desdemona happens to mention that Cassio was a man who 'all his time had
+founded his good fortunes' on Othello's love and had 'shared dangers'
+with him (III. iv. 93). There remains only the implied assertion that,
+if promotion had gone by old gradation, Iago, as the senior, would have
+been preferred. It may be true: Othello was not the man to hesitate to
+promote a junior for good reasons. But it is just as likely to be a pure
+invention; and, though Cassio was young, there is nothing to show that
+he was younger, in years or in service, than Iago. Iago, for instance,
+never calls him 'young,' as he does Roderigo; and a mere youth would not
+have been made Governor of Cyprus. What is certain, finally, in the
+whole business is that Othello's mind was perfectly at ease about the
+appointment, and that he never dreamed of Iago's being discontented at
+it, not even when the intrigue was disclosed and he asked himself how he
+had offended Iago.
+
+
+2
+
+It is necessary to examine in this manner every statement made by Iago.
+But it is not necessary to do so in public, and I proceed to the
+question what impression he made on his friends and acquaintances. In
+the main there is here no room for doubt. Nothing could be less like
+Iago than the melodramatic villain so often substituted for him on the
+stage, a person whom everyone in the theatre knows for a scoundrel at
+the first glance. Iago, we gather, was a Venetian[108] soldier,
+eight-and-twenty years of age, who had seen a good deal of service and
+had a high reputation for courage. Of his origin we are ignorant, but,
+unless I am mistaken, he was not of gentle birth or breeding.[109] He
+does not strike one as a degraded man of culture: for all his great
+powers, he is vulgar, and his probable want of military science may well
+be significant. He was married to a wife who evidently lacked
+refinement, and who appears in the drama almost in the relation of a
+servant to Desdemona. His manner was that of a blunt, bluff soldier, who
+spoke his mind freely and plainly. He was often hearty, and could be
+thoroughly jovial; but he was not seldom rather rough and caustic of
+speech, and he was given to making remarks somewhat disparaging to human
+nature. He was aware of this trait in himself, and frankly admitted that
+he was nothing if not critical, and that it was his nature to spy into
+abuses. In these admissions he characteristically exaggerated his fault,
+as plain-dealers are apt to do; and he was liked none the less for it,
+seeing that his satire was humorous, that on serious matters he did not
+speak lightly (III. iii. 119), and that the one thing perfectly obvious
+about him was his honesty. 'Honest' is the word that springs to the lips
+of everyone who speaks of him. It is applied to him some fifteen times
+in the play, not to mention some half-dozen where he employs it, in
+derision, of himself. In fact he was one of those sterling men who, in
+disgust at gush, say cynical things which they do not believe, and then,
+the moment you are in trouble, put in practice the very sentiment they
+had laughed at. On such occasions he showed the kindliest sympathy and
+the most eager desire to help. When Cassio misbehaved so dreadfully and
+was found fighting with Montano, did not Othello see that 'honest Iago
+looked dead with grieving'? With what difficulty was he induced, nay,
+compelled, to speak the truth against the lieutenant! Another man might
+have felt a touch of satisfaction at the thought that the post he had
+coveted was now vacant; but Iago not only comforted Cassio, talking to
+him cynically about reputation, just to help him over his shame, but he
+set his wits to work and at once perceived that the right plan for
+Cassio to get his post again was to ask Desdemona to intercede. So
+troubled was he at his friend's disgrace that his own wife was sure 'it
+grieved her husband as if the case was his.' What wonder that anyone in
+sore trouble, like Desdemona, should send at once for Iago (IV. ii.
+106)? If this rough diamond had any flaw, it was that Iago's warm loyal
+heart incited him to too impulsive action. If he merely heard a friend
+like Othello calumniated, his hand flew to his sword; and though he
+restrained himself he almost regretted his own virtue (I. ii. 1-10).
+
+Such seemed Iago to the people about him, even to those who, like
+Othello, had known him for some time. And it is a fact too little
+noticed but most remarkable, that he presented an appearance not very
+different to his wife. There is no sign either that Emilia's marriage
+was downright unhappy, or that she suspected the true nature of her
+husband.[110] No doubt she knew rather more of him than others. Thus we
+gather that he was given to chiding and sometimes spoke shortly and
+sharply to her (III. iii. 300 f.); and it is quite likely that she gave
+him a good deal of her tongue in exchange (II. i. 101 f.). He was also
+unreasonably jealous; for his own statement that he was jealous of
+Othello is confirmed by Emilia herself, and must therefore be believed
+(IV. ii. 145).[111] But it seems clear that these defects of his had not
+seriously impaired Emilia's confidence in her husband or her affection
+for him. She knew in addition that he was not quite so honest as he
+seemed, for he had often begged her to steal Desdemona's handkerchief.
+But Emilia's nature was not very delicate or scrupulous about trifles.
+She thought her husband odd and 'wayward,' and looked on his fancy for
+the handkerchief as an instance of this (III. iii. 292); but she never
+dreamed he was a villain, and there is no reason to doubt the sincerity
+of her belief that he was heartily sorry for Cassio's disgrace. Her
+failure, on seeing Othello's agitation about the handkerchief, to form
+any suspicion of an intrigue, shows how little she doubted her husband.
+Even when, later, the idea strikes her that some scoundrel has poisoned
+Othello's mind, the tone of all her speeches, and her mention of the
+rogue who (she believes) had stirred up Iago's jealousy of her, prove
+beyond doubt that the thought of Iago's being the scoundrel has not
+crossed her mind (IV. ii. 115-147). And if any hesitation on the subject
+could remain, surely it must be dispelled by the thrice-repeated cry of
+astonishment and horror, 'My husband!', which follows Othello's words,
+'Thy husband knew it all'; and by the choking indignation and desperate
+hope which we hear in her appeal when Iago comes in:
+
+     Disprove this villain if thou be'st a man:
+     He says thou told'st him that his wife was false:
+     I know thou did'st not, thou'rt not such a villain:
+     Speak, for my heart is full.
+
+Even if Iago _had_ betrayed much more of his true self to his wife than
+to others, it would make no difference to the contrast between his true
+self and the self he presented to the world in general. But he never did
+so. Only the feeble eyes of the poor gull Roderigo were allowed a
+glimpse into that pit.
+
+The bearing of this contrast upon the apparently excessive credulity of
+Othello has been already pointed out. What further conclusions can be
+drawn from it? Obviously, to begin with, the inference, which is
+accompanied by a thrill of admiration, that Iago's powers of
+dissimulation and of self-control must have been prodigious: for he was
+not a youth, like Edmund, but had worn this mask for years, and he had
+apparently never enjoyed, like Richard, occasional explosions of the
+reality within him. In fact so prodigious does his self-control appear
+that a reader might be excused for feeling a doubt of its possibility.
+But there are certain observations and further inferences which, apart
+from confidence in Shakespeare, would remove this doubt. It is to be
+observed, first, that Iago was able to find a certain relief from the
+discomfort of hypocrisy in those caustic or cynical speeches which,
+being misinterpreted, only heightened confidence in his honesty. They
+acted as a safety-valve, very much as Hamlet's pretended insanity did.
+Next, I would infer from the entire success of his hypocrisy--what may
+also be inferred on other grounds, and is of great importance--that he
+was by no means a man of strong feelings and passions, like Richard, but
+decidedly cold by temperament. Even so, his self-control was wonderful,
+but there never was in him any violent storm to be controlled. Thirdly,
+I would suggest that Iago, though thoroughly selfish and unfeeling, was
+not by nature malignant, nor even morose, but that, on the contrary, he
+had a superficial good-nature, the kind of good-nature that wins
+popularity and is often taken as the sign, not of a good digestion, but
+of a good heart. And lastly, it may be inferred that, before the giant
+crime which we witness, Iago had never been detected in any serious
+offence and may even never have been guilty of one, but had pursued a
+selfish but outwardly decent life, enjoying the excitement of war and of
+casual pleasures, but never yet meeting with any sufficient temptation
+to risk his position and advancement by a dangerous crime. So that, in
+fact, the tragedy of _Othello_ is in a sense his tragedy too. It shows
+us not a violent man, like Richard, who spends his life in murder, but a
+thoroughly bad, _cold_ man, who is at last tempted to let loose the
+forces within him, and is at once destroyed.
+
+
+3
+
+In order to see how this tragedy arises let us now look more closely
+into Iago's inner man. We find here, in the first place, as has been
+implied in part, very remarkable powers both of intellect and of will.
+Iago's insight, within certain limits, into human nature; his ingenuity
+and address in working upon it; his quickness and versatility in dealing
+with sudden difficulties and unforeseen opportunities, have probably no
+parallel among dramatic characters. Equally remarkable is his strength
+of will. Not Socrates himself, not the ideal sage of the Stoics, was
+more lord of himself than Iago appears to be. It is not merely that he
+never betrays his true nature; he seems to be master of _all_ the
+motions that might affect his will. In the most dangerous moments of his
+plot, when the least slip or accident would be fatal, he never shows a
+trace of nervousness. When Othello takes him by the throat he merely
+shifts his part with his usual instantaneous adroitness. When he is
+attacked and wounded at the end he is perfectly unmoved. As Mr.
+Swinburne says, you cannot believe for a moment that the pain of torture
+will ever open Iago's lips. He is equally unassailable by the
+temptations of indolence or of sensuality. It is difficult to imagine
+him inactive; and though he has an obscene mind, and doubtless took his
+pleasures when and how he chose, he certainly took them by choice and
+not from weakness, and if pleasure interfered with his purposes the
+holiest of ascetics would not put it more resolutely by. 'What should I
+do?' Roderigo whimpers to him; 'I confess it is my shame to be so fond;
+but it is not in my virtue to amend it.' He answers: 'Virtue! a fig!
+'tis in ourselves that we are thus and thus. It all depends on our will.
+Love is merely a lust of the blood and a permission of the will. Come,
+be a man.... Ere I would say I would drown myself for the love of a
+guinea-hen, I would change my humanity with a baboon.' Forget for a
+moment that love is for Iago the appetite of a baboon; forget that he is
+as little assailable by pity as by fear or pleasure; and you will
+acknowledge that this lordship of the will, which is his practice as
+well as his doctrine, is great, almost sublime. Indeed, in intellect
+(always within certain limits) and in will (considered as a mere power,
+and without regard to its objects) Iago _is_ great.
+
+To what end does he use these great powers? His creed--for he is no
+sceptic, he has a definite creed--is that absolute egoism is the only
+rational and proper attitude, and that conscience or honour or any kind
+of regard for others is an absurdity. He does not deny that this
+absurdity exists. He does not suppose that most people secretly share
+his creed, while pretending to hold and practise another. On the
+contrary, he regards most people as honest fools. He declares that he
+has never yet met a man who knew how to love himself; and his one
+expression of admiration in the play is for servants
+
+     Who, trimmed in forms and visages of duty,
+     Keep yet their hearts attending on themselves.
+
+'These fellows,' he says, 'have some soul.' He professes to stand, and
+he, attempts to stand, wholly outside the world of morality.
+
+The existence of Iago's creed and of his corresponding practice is
+evidently connected with a characteristic in which he surpasses nearly
+all the other inhabitants of Shakespeare's world. Whatever he may once
+have been, he appears, when we meet him, to be almost destitute of
+humanity, of sympathetic or social feeling. He shows no trace of
+affection, and in presence of the most terrible suffering he shows
+either pleasure or an indifference which, if not complete, is nearly so.
+Here, however, we must be careful. It is important to realise, and few
+readers are in danger of ignoring, this extraordinary deadness of
+feeling, but it is also important not to confuse it with a general
+positive ill-will. When Iago has no dislike or hostility to a person he
+does _not_ show pleasure in the suffering of that person: he shows at
+most the absence of pain. There is, for instance, not the least sign of
+his enjoying the distress of Desdemona. But his sympathetic feelings are
+so abnormally feeble and cold that, when his dislike is roused, or when
+an indifferent person comes in the way of his purpose, there is scarcely
+anything within him to prevent his applying the torture.
+
+What is it that provokes his dislike or hostility? Here again we must
+look closely. Iago has been represented as an incarnation of envy, as a
+man who, being determined to get on in the world, regards everyone else
+with enmity as his rival. But this idea, though containing truth, seems
+much exaggerated. Certainly he is devoted to himself; but if he were an
+eagerly ambitious man, surely we should see much more positive signs of
+this ambition; and surely too, with his great powers, he would already
+have risen high, instead of being a mere ensign, short of money, and
+playing Captain Rook to Roderigo's Mr. Pigeon. Taking all the facts, one
+must conclude that his desires were comparatively moderate and his
+ambition weak; that he probably enjoyed war keenly, but, if he had money
+enough, did not exert himself greatly to acquire reputation or position;
+and, therefore, that he was not habitually burning with envy and
+actively hostile to other men as possible competitors.
+
+But what is clear is that Iago is keenly sensitive to anything that
+touches his pride or self-esteem. It would be most unjust to call him
+vain, but he has a high opinion of himself and a great contempt for
+others. He is quite aware of his superiority to them in certain
+respects; and he either disbelieves in or despises the qualities in
+which they are superior to him. Whatever disturbs or wounds his sense of
+superiority irritates him at once; and in _that_ sense he is highly
+competitive. This is why the appointment of Cassio provokes him. This is
+why Cassio's scientific attainments provoke him. This is the reason of
+his jealousy of Emilia. He does not care for his wife; but the fear of
+another man's getting the better of him, and exposing him to pity or
+derision as an unfortunate husband, is wormwood to him; and as he is
+sure that no woman is virtuous at heart, this fear is ever with him. For
+much the same reason he has a spite against goodness in men (for it is
+characteristic that he is less blind to its existence in men, the
+stronger, than in women, the weaker). He has a spite against it, not
+from any love of evil for evil's sake, but partly because it annoys his
+intellect as a stupidity; partly (though he hardly knows this) because
+it weakens his satisfaction with himself, and disturbs his faith that
+egoism is the right and proper thing; partly because, the world being
+such a fool, goodness is popular and prospers. But he, a man ten times
+as able as Cassio or even Othello, does not greatly prosper. Somehow,
+for all the stupidity of these open and generous people, they get on
+better than the 'fellow of some soul' And this, though he is not
+particularly eager to get on, wounds his pride. Goodness therefore
+annoys him. He is always ready to scoff at it, and would like to strike
+at it. In ordinary circumstances these feelings of irritation are not
+vivid in Iago--_no_ feeling is so--but they are constantly present.
+
+
+4
+
+Our task of analysis is not finished; but we are now in a position to
+consider the rise of Iago's tragedy. Why did he act as we see him acting
+in the play? What is the answer to that appeal of Othello's:
+
+     Will you, I pray, demand that demi-devil
+     Why he hath thus ensnared my soul and body?
+
+This question Why? is _the_ question about Iago, just as the question
+Why did Hamlet delay? is _the_ question about Hamlet. Iago refused to
+answer it; but I will venture to say that he _could_ not have answered
+it, any more than Hamlet could tell why he delayed. But Shakespeare knew
+the answer, and if these characters are great creations and not blunders
+we ought to be able to find it too.
+
+Is it possible to elicit it from Iago himself against his will? He makes
+various statements to Roderigo, and he has several soliloquies. From
+these sources, and especially from the latter, we should learn
+something. For with Shakespeare soliloquy generally gives information
+regarding the secret springs as well as the outward course of the plot;
+and, moreover, it is a curious point of technique with him that the
+soliloquies of his villains sometimes read almost like explanations
+offered to the audience.[112] Now, Iago repeatedly offers explanations
+either to Roderigo or to himself. In the first place, he says more than
+once that he 'hates' Othello. He gives two reasons for his hatred.
+Othello has made Cassio lieutenant; and he suspects, and has heard it
+reported, that Othello has an intrigue with Emilia. Next there is
+Cassio. He never says he hates Cassio, but he finds in him three causes
+of offence: Cassio has been preferred to him; he suspects _him_ too of
+an intrigue with Emilia; and, lastly, Cassio has a daily beauty in his
+life which makes Iago ugly. In addition to these annoyances he wants
+Cassio's place. As for Roderigo, he calls him a snipe, and who can hate
+a snipe? But Roderigo knows too much; and he is becoming a nuisance,
+getting angry, and asking for the gold and jewels he handed to Iago to
+give to Desdemona. So Iago kills Roderigo. Then for Desdemona: a
+fig's-end for her virtue! but he has no ill-will to her. In fact he
+'loves' her, though he is good enough to explain, varying the word, that
+his 'lust' is mixed with a desire to pay Othello in his own coin. To be
+sure she must die, and so must Emilia, and so would Bianca if only the
+authorities saw things in their true light; but he did not set out with
+any hostile design against these persons.
+
+Is the account which Iago gives of the causes of his action the true
+account? The answer of the most popular view will be, 'Yes. Iago was, as
+he says, chiefly incited by two things, the desire of advancement, and a
+hatred of Othello due principally to the affair of the lieutenancy.
+These are perfectly intelligible causes; we have only to add to them
+unusual ability and cruelty, and all is explained. Why should Coleridge
+and Hazlitt and Swinburne go further afield?' To which last question I
+will at once oppose these: If your view is correct, why should Iago be
+considered an extraordinary creation; and is it not odd that the people
+who reject it are the people who elsewhere show an exceptional
+understanding of Shakespeare?
+
+The difficulty about this popular view is, in the first place, that it
+attributes to Iago what cannot be found in the Iago of the play. Its
+Iago is impelled by _passions_, a passion of ambition and a passion of
+hatred; for no ambition or hatred short of passion could drive a man who
+is evidently so clear-sighted, and who must hitherto have been so
+prudent, into a plot so extremely hazardous. Why, then, in the Iago of
+the play do we find no sign of these passions or of anything approaching
+to them? Why, if Shakespeare meant that Iago was impelled by them, does
+he suppress the signs of them? Surely not from want of ability to
+display them. The poet who painted Macbeth and Shylock understood his
+business. Who ever doubted Macbeth's ambition or Shylock's hate? And
+what resemblance is there between these passions and any feeling that we
+can trace in Iago? The resemblance between a volcano in eruption and a
+flameless fire of coke; the resemblance between a consuming desire to
+hack and hew your enemy's flesh, and the resentful wish, only too
+familiar in common life, to inflict pain in return for a slight.
+Passion, in Shakespeare's plays, is perfectly easy to recognise. What
+vestige of it, of passion unsatisfied or of passion gratified, is
+visible in Iago? None: that is the very horror of him. He has _less_
+passion than an ordinary man, and yet he does these frightful things.
+The only ground for attributing to him, I do not say a passionate
+hatred, but anything deserving the name of hatred at all, is his own
+statement, 'I hate Othello'; and we know what his statements are worth.
+
+But the popular view, beside attributing to Iago what he does not show,
+ignores what he does show. It selects from his own account of his
+motives one or two, and drops the rest; and so it makes everything
+natural. But it fails to perceive how unnatural, how strange and
+suspicious, his own account is. Certainly he assigns motives enough; the
+difficulty is that he assigns so many. A man moved by simple passions
+due to simple causes does not stand fingering his feelings,
+industriously enumerating their sources, and groping about for new ones.
+But this is what Iago does. And this is not all. These motives appear
+and disappear in the most extraordinary manner. Resentment at Cassio's
+appointment is expressed in the first conversation with Roderigo, and
+from that moment is never once mentioned again in the whole play. Hatred
+of Othello is expressed in the First Act alone. Desire to get Cassio's
+place scarcely appears after the first soliloquy, and when it is
+gratified Iago does not refer to it by a single word. The suspicion of
+Cassio's intrigue with Emilia emerges suddenly, as an after-thought, not
+in the first soliloquy but the second, and then disappears for
+ever.[113] Iago's 'love' of Desdemona is alluded to in the second
+soliloquy; there is not the faintest trace of it in word or deed either
+before or after. The mention of jealousy of Othello is followed by
+declarations that Othello is infatuated about Desdemona and is of a
+constant nature, and during Othello's sufferings Iago never shows a sign
+of the idea that he is now paying his rival in his own coin. In the
+second soliloquy he declares that he quite believes Cassio to be in love
+with Desdemona; it is obvious that he believes no such thing, for he
+never alludes to the idea again, and within a few hours describes Cassio
+in soliloquy as an honest fool. His final reason for ill-will to Cassio
+never appears till the Fifth Act.
+
+What is the meaning of all this? Unless Shakespeare was out of his mind,
+it must have a meaning. And certainly this meaning is not contained in
+any of the popular accounts of Iago.
+
+Is it contained then in Coleridge's word 'motive-hunting'? Yes,
+'motive-hunting' exactly answers to the impression that Iago's
+soliloquies produce. He is pondering his design, and unconsciously
+trying to justify it to himself. He speaks of one or two real feelings,
+such as resentment against Othello, and he mentions one or two real
+causes of these feelings. But these are not enough for him. Along with
+them, or alone, there come into his head, only to leave it again, ideas
+and suspicions, the creations of his own baseness or uneasiness, some
+old, some new, caressed for a moment to feed his purpose and give it a
+reasonable look, but never really believed in, and never the main forces
+which are determining his action. In fact, I would venture to describe
+Iago in these soliloquies as a man setting out on a project which
+strongly attracts his desire, but at the same time conscious of a
+resistance to the desire, and unconsciously trying to argue the
+resistance away by assigning reasons for the project. He is the
+counterpart of Hamlet, who tries to find reasons for his delay in
+pursuing a design which excites his aversion. And most of Iago's reasons
+for action are no more the real ones than Hamlet's reasons for delay
+were the real ones. Each is moved by forces which he does not
+understand; and it is probably no accident that these two studies of
+states psychologically so similar were produced at about the same
+period.
+
+What then were the real moving forces of Iago's action? Are we to fall
+back on the idea of a 'motiveless malignity;'[114] that is to say, a
+disinterested love of evil, or a delight in the pain of others as simple
+and direct as the delight in one's own pleasure? Surely not. I will not
+insist that this thing or these things are inconceivable, mere phrases,
+not ideas; for, even so, it would remain possible that Shakespeare had
+tried to represent an inconceivability. But there is not the slightest
+reason to suppose that he did so. Iago's action is intelligible; and
+indeed the popular view contains enough truth to refute this desperate
+theory. It greatly exaggerates his desire for advancement, and the
+ill-will caused by his disappointment, and it ignores other forces more
+important than these; but it is right in insisting on the presence of
+this desire and this ill-will, and their presence is enough to destroy
+Iago's claims to be more than a demi-devil. For love of the evil that
+advances my interest and hurts a person I dislike, is a very different
+thing from love of evil simply as evil; and pleasure in the pain of a
+person disliked or regarded as a competitor is quite distinct from
+pleasure in the pain of others simply as others. The first is
+intelligible, and we find it in Iago. The second, even if it were
+intelligible, we do not find in Iago.
+
+Still, desire of advancement and resentment about the lieutenancy,
+though factors and indispensable factors in the cause of Iago's action,
+are neither the principal nor the most characteristic factors. To find
+these, let us return to our half-completed analysis of the character.
+Let us remember especially the keen sense of superiority, the contempt
+of others, the sensitiveness to everything which wounds these feelings,
+the spite against goodness in men as a thing not only stupid but, both
+in its nature and by its success, contrary to Iago's nature and
+irritating to his pride. Let us remember in addition the annoyance of
+having always to play a part, the consciousness of exceptional but
+unused ingenuity and address, the enjoyment of action, and the absence
+of fear. And let us ask what would be the greatest pleasure of such a
+man, and what the situation which might tempt him to abandon his
+habitual prudence and pursue this pleasure. Hazlitt and Mr. Swinburne do
+not put this question, but the answer I proceed to give to it is in
+principle theirs.[115]
+
+The most delightful thing to such a man would be something that gave an
+extreme satisfaction to his sense of power and superiority; and if it
+involved, secondly, the triumphant exertion of his abilities, and,
+thirdly, the excitement of danger, his delight would be consummated. And
+the moment most dangerous to such a man would be one when his sense of
+superiority had met with an affront, so that its habitual craving was
+reinforced by resentment, while at the same time he saw an opportunity
+of satisfying it by subjecting to his will the very persons who had
+affronted it. Now, this is the temptation that comes to Iago. Othello's
+eminence, Othello's goodness, and his own dependence on Othello, must
+have been a perpetual annoyance to him. At _any_ time he would have
+enjoyed befooling and tormenting Othello. Under ordinary circumstances
+he was restrained, chiefly by self-interest, in some slight degree
+perhaps by the faint pulsations of conscience or humanity. But
+disappointment at the loss of the lieutenancy supplied the touch of
+lively resentment that was required to overcome these obstacles; and the
+prospect of satisfying the sense of power by mastering Othello through
+an intricate and hazardous intrigue now became irresistible. Iago did
+not clearly understand what was moving his desire; though he tried to
+give himself reasons for his action, even those that had some reality
+made but a small part of the motive force; one may almost say they were
+no more than the turning of the handle which admits the driving power
+into the machine. Only once does he appear to see something of the
+truth. It is when he uses the phrase '_to plume up my will_ in double
+knavery.'
+
+To 'plume up the will,' to heighten the sense of power or
+superiority--this seems to be the unconscious motive of many acts of
+cruelty which evidently do not spring chiefly from ill-will, and which
+therefore puzzle and sometimes horrify us most. It is often this that
+makes a man bully the wife or children of whom he is fond. The boy who
+torments another boy, as we say, 'for no reason,' or who without any
+hatred for frogs tortures a frog, is pleased with his victim's pain, not
+from any disinterested love of evil or pleasure in pain, but mainly
+because this pain is the unmistakable proof of his own power over his
+victim. So it is with Iago. His thwarted sense of superiority wants
+satisfaction. What fuller satisfaction could it find than the
+consciousness that he is the master of the General who has undervalued
+him and of the rival who has been preferred to him; that these worthy
+people, who are so successful and popular and stupid, are mere puppets
+in his hands, but living puppets, who at the motion of his finger must
+contort themselves in agony, while all the time they believe that he is
+their one true friend and comforter? It must have been an ecstasy of
+bliss to him. And this, granted a most abnormal deadness of human
+feeling, is, however horrible, perfectly intelligible. There is no
+mystery in the psychology of Iago; the mystery lies in a further
+question, which the drama has not to answer, the question why such a
+being should exist.
+
+Iago's longing to satisfy the sense of power is, I think, the strongest
+of the forces that drive him on. But there are two others to be noticed.
+One is the pleasure in an action very difficult and perilous and,
+therefore, intensely exciting. This action sets all his powers on the
+strain. He feels the delight of one who executes successfully a feat
+thoroughly congenial to his special aptitude, and only just within his
+compass; and, as he is fearless by nature, the fact that a single slip
+will cost him his life only increases his pleasure. His exhilaration
+breaks out in the ghastly words with which he greets the sunrise after
+the night of the drunken tumult which has led to Cassio's disgrace: 'By
+the mass, 'tis morning. Pleasure and action make the hours seem short.'
+Here, however, the joy in exciting action is quickened by other
+feelings. It appears more simply elsewhere in such a way as to suggest
+that nothing but such actions gave him happiness, and that his happiness
+was greater if the action was destructive as well as exciting. We find
+it, for instance, in his gleeful cry to Roderigo, who proposes to shout
+to Brabantio in order to wake him and tell him of his daughter's flight:
+
+     Do, with like timorous[116] accent and dire yell
+     As when, by night and negligence, the fire
+     Is spied in populous cities.
+
+All through that scene; again, in the scene where Cassio is attacked and
+Roderigo murdered; everywhere where Iago is in physical action, we catch
+this sound of almost feverish enjoyment. His blood, usually so cold and
+slow, is racing through his veins.
+
+But Iago, finally, is not simply a man of action; he is an artist. His
+action is a plot, the intricate plot of a drama, and in the conception
+and execution of it he experiences the tension and the joy of artistic
+creation. 'He is,' says Hazlitt, 'an amateur of tragedy in real life;
+and, instead of employing his invention on imaginary characters or
+long-forgotten incidents, he takes the bolder and more dangerous course
+of getting up his plot at home, casts the principal parts among his
+newest friends and connections, and rehearses it in downright earnest,
+with steady nerves and unabated resolution.' Mr. Swinburne lays even
+greater stress on this aspect of Iago's character, and even declares
+that 'the very subtlest and strongest component of his complex nature'
+is 'the instinct of what Mr. Carlyle would call an inarticulate poet.'
+And those to whom this idea is unfamiliar, and who may suspect it at
+first sight of being fanciful, will find, if they examine the play in
+the light of Mr. Swinburne's exposition, that it rests on a true and
+deep perception, will stand scrutiny, and might easily be illustrated.
+They may observe, to take only one point, the curious analogy between
+the early stages of dramatic composition and those soliloquies in which
+Iago broods over his plot, drawing at first only an outline, puzzled how
+to fix more than the main idea, and gradually seeing it develop and
+clarify as he works upon it or lets it work. Here at any rate
+Shakespeare put a good deal of himself into Iago. But the tragedian in
+real life was not the equal of the tragic poet. His psychology, as we
+shall see, was at fault at a critical point, as Shakespeare's never was.
+And so his catastrophe came out wrong, and his piece was ruined.
+
+Such, then, seem to be the chief ingredients of the force which,
+liberated by his resentment at Cassio's promotion, drives Iago from
+inactivity into action, and sustains him through it. And, to pass to a
+new point, this force completely possesses him; it is his fate. It is
+like the passion with which a tragic hero wholly identifies himself, and
+which bears him on to his doom. It is true that, once embarked on his
+course, Iago _could_ not turn back, even if this passion did abate; and
+it is also true that he is compelled, by his success in convincing
+Othello, to advance to conclusions of which at the outset he did not
+dream. He is thus caught in his own web, and could not liberate himself
+if he would. But, in fact, he never shows a trace of wishing to do so,
+not a trace of hesitation, of looking back, or of fear, any more than of
+remorse; there is no ebb in the tide. As the crisis approaches there
+passes through his mind a fleeting doubt whether the deaths of Cassio
+and Roderigo are indispensable; but that uncertainty, which does not
+concern the main issue, is dismissed, and he goes forward with
+undiminished zest. Not even in his sleep--as in Richard's before his
+final battle--does any rebellion of outraged conscience or pity, or any
+foreboding of despair, force itself into clear consciousness. His
+fate--which is himself--has completely mastered him: so that, in the
+later scenes, where the improbability of the entire success of a design
+built on so many different falsehoods forces itself on the reader, Iago
+appears for moments not as a consummate schemer, but as a man absolutely
+infatuated and delivered over to certain destruction.
+
+
+5
+
+Iago stands supreme among Shakespeare's evil characters because the
+greatest intensity and subtlety of imagination have gone to his making,
+and because he illustrates in the most perfect combination the two facts
+concerning evil which seem to have impressed Shakespeare most. The first
+of these is the fact that perfectly sane people exist in whom
+fellow-feeling of any kind is so weak that an almost absolute egoism
+becomes possible to them, and with it those hard vices--such as
+ingratitude and cruelty--which to Shakespeare were far the worst. The
+second is that such evil is compatible, and even appears to ally itself
+easily, with exceptional powers of will and intellect. In the latter
+respect Iago is nearly or quite the equal of Richard, in egoism he is
+the superior, and his inferiority in passion and massive force only
+makes him more repulsive. How is it then that we can bear to contemplate
+him; nay, that, if we really imagine him, we feel admiration and some
+kind of sympathy? Henry the Fifth tells us:
+
+     There is some soul of goodness in things evil,
+     Would men observingly distil it out;
+
+but here, it may be said, we are shown a thing absolutely evil,
+and--what is more dreadful still--this absolute evil is united with
+supreme intellectual power. Why is the representation tolerable, and why
+do we not accuse its author either of untruth or of a desperate
+pessimism?
+
+To these questions it might at once be replied: Iago does not stand
+alone; he is a factor in a whole; and we perceive him there and not in
+isolation, acted upon as well as acting, destroyed as well as
+destroying.[117] But, although this is true and important, I pass it by
+and, continuing to regard him by himself, I would make three remarks in
+answer to the questions.
+
+In the first place, Iago is not merely negative or evil--far from it.
+Those very forces that moved him and made his fate--sense of power,
+delight in performing a difficult and dangerous action, delight in the
+exercise of artistic skill--are not at all evil things. We sympathise
+with one or other of them almost every day of our lives. And,
+accordingly, though in Iago they are combined with something detestable
+and so contribute to evil, our perception of them is accompanied with
+sympathy. In the same way, Iago's insight, dexterity, quickness,
+address, and the like, are in themselves admirable things; the perfect
+man would possess them. And certainly he would possess also Iago's
+courage and self-control, and, like Iago, would stand above the impulses
+of mere feeling, lord of his inner world. All this goes to evil ends in
+Iago, but in itself it has a great worth; and, although in reading, of
+course, we do not sift it out and regard it separately, it inevitably
+affects us and mingles admiration with our hatred or horror.
+
+All this, however, might apparently co-exist with absolute egoism and
+total want of humanity. But, in the second place, it is not true that in
+Iago this egoism and this want are absolute, and that in this sense he
+is a thing of mere evil. They are frightful, but if they were absolute
+Iago would be a monster, not a man. The fact is, he _tries_ to make them
+absolute and cannot succeed; and the traces of conscience, shame and
+humanity, though faint, are discernible. If his egoism were absolute he
+would be perfectly indifferent to the opinion of others; and he clearly
+is not so. His very irritation at goodness, again, is a sign that his
+faith in his creed is not entirely firm; and it is not entirely firm
+because he himself has a perception, however dim, of the goodness of
+goodness. What is the meaning of the last reason he gives himself for
+killing Cassio:
+
+     He hath a daily beauty in his life
+     That makes me ugly?
+
+Does he mean that he is ugly to others? Then he is not an absolute
+egoist. Does he mean that he is ugly to himself? Then he makes an open
+confession of moral sense. And, once more, if he really possessed no
+moral sense, we should never have heard those soliloquies which so
+clearly betray his uneasiness and his unconscious desire to persuade
+himself that he has some excuse for the villainy he contemplates. These
+seem to be indubitable proofs that, against his will, Iago is a little
+better than his creed, and has failed to withdraw himself wholly from
+the human atmosphere about him. And to these proofs I would add, though
+with less confidence, two others. Iago's momentary doubt towards the end
+whether Roderigo and Cassio must be killed has always surprised me. As a
+mere matter of calculation it is perfectly obvious that they must; and I
+believe his hesitation is not merely intellectual, it is another symptom
+of the obscure working of conscience or humanity. Lastly, is it not
+significant that, when once his plot has begun to develop, Iago never
+seeks the presence of Desdemona; that he seems to leave her as quickly
+as he can (III. iv. 138); and that, when he is fetched by
+Emilia to see her in her distress (IV. ii. 110 ff.), we fail to
+catch in his words any sign of the pleasure he shows in Othello's
+misery, and seem rather to perceive a certain discomfort, and, if one
+dare say it, a faint touch of shame or remorse? This interpretation of
+the passage, I admit, is not inevitable, but to my mind (quite apart
+from any theorising about Iago) it seems the natural one.[118] And if it
+is right, Iago's discomfort is easily understood; for Desdemona is the
+one person concerned against whom it is impossible for him even to
+imagine a ground of resentment, and so an excuse for cruelty.[119]
+
+There remains, thirdly, the idea that Iago is a man of supreme
+intellect who is at the same time supremely wicked. That he is supremely
+wicked nobody will doubt; and I have claimed for him nothing that will
+interfere with his right to that title. But to say that his intellectual
+power is supreme is to make a great mistake. Within certain limits he
+has indeed extraordinary penetration, quickness, inventiveness,
+adaptiveness; but the limits are defined with the hardest of lines, and
+they are narrow limits. It would scarcely be unjust to call him simply
+astonishingly clever, or simply a consummate master of intrigue. But
+compare him with one who may perhaps be roughly called a bad man of
+supreme intellectual power, Napoleon, and you see how small and negative
+Iago's mind is, incapable of Napoleon's military achievements, and much
+more incapable of his political constructions. Or, to keep within the
+Shakespearean world, compare him with Hamlet, and you perceive how
+miserably close is his intellectual horizon; that such a thing as a
+thought beyond the reaches of his soul has never come near him; that he
+is prosaic through and through, deaf and blind to all but a tiny
+fragment of the meaning of things. Is it not quite absurd, then, to call
+him a man of supreme intellect?
+
+And observe, lastly, that his failure in perception is closely connected
+with his badness. He was destroyed by the power that he attacked, the
+power of love; and he was destroyed by it because he could not
+understand it; and he could not understand it because it was not in him.
+Iago never meant his plot to be so dangerous to himself. He knew that
+jealousy is painful, but the jealousy of a love like Othello's he could
+not imagine, and he found himself involved in murders which were no part
+of his original design. That difficulty he surmounted, and his changed
+plot still seemed to prosper. Roderigo and Cassio and Desdemona once
+dead, all will be well. Nay, when he fails to kill Cassio, all may still
+be well. He will avow that he told Othello of the adultery, and persist
+that he told the truth, and Cassio will deny it in vain. And then, in a
+moment, his plot is shattered by a blow from a quarter where he never
+dreamt of danger. He knows his wife, he thinks. She is not
+over-scrupulous, she will do anything to please him, and she has learnt
+obedience. But one thing in her he does not know--that she _loves_ her
+mistress and would face a hundred deaths sooner than see her fair fame
+darkened. There is genuine astonishment in his outburst 'What! Are you
+mad?' as it dawns upon him that she means to speak the truth about the
+handkerchief. But he might well have applied to himself the words she
+flings at Othello,
+
+                          O gull! O dolt!
+     As ignorant as dirt!
+
+The foulness of his own soul made him so ignorant that he built into the
+marvellous structure of his plot a piece of crass stupidity.
+
+To the thinking mind the divorce of unusual intellect from goodness is a
+thing to startle; and Shakespeare clearly felt it so. The combination of
+unusual intellect with extreme evil is more than startling, it is
+frightful. It is rare, but it exists; and Shakespeare represented it in
+Iago. But the alliance of evil like Iago's with _supreme_ intellect is
+an impossible fiction; and Shakespeare's fictions were truth.
+
+
+6
+
+The characters of Cassio and Emilia hardly require analysis, and I will
+touch on them only from a single point of view. In their combination of
+excellences and defects they are good examples of that truth to nature
+which in dramatic art is the one unfailing source of moral instruction.
+
+Cassio is a handsome, light-hearted, good-natured young fellow, who
+takes life gaily, and is evidently very attractive and popular. Othello,
+who calls him by his Christian name, is fond of him; Desdemona likes him
+much; Emilia at once interests herself on his behalf. He has warm
+generous feelings, an enthusiastic admiration for the General, and a
+chivalrous adoration for his peerless wife. But he is too easy-going. He
+finds it hard to say No; and accordingly, although he is aware that he
+has a very weak head, and that the occasion is one on which he is bound
+to run no risk, he gets drunk--not disgustingly so, but ludicrously
+so.[120] And, besides, he amuses himself without any scruple by
+frequenting the company of a woman of more than doubtful reputation, who
+has fallen in love with his good looks. Moralising critics point out
+that he pays for the first offence by losing his post, and for the
+second by nearly losing his life. They are quite entitled to do so,
+though the careful reader will not forget Iago's part in these
+transactions. But they ought also to point out that Cassio's looseness
+does not in the least disturb our confidence in him in his relations
+with Desdemona and Othello. He is loose, and we are sorry for it; but we
+never doubt that there was 'a daily beauty in his life,' or that his
+rapturous admiration of Desdemona was as wholly beautiful a thing as it
+appears, or that Othello was perfectly safe when in his courtship he
+employed Cassio to 'go between' Desdemona and himself. It is fortunately
+a fact in human nature that these aspects of Cassio's character are
+quite compatible. Shakespeare simply sets it down; and it is just
+because he is truthful in these smaller things that in greater things we
+trust him absolutely never to pervert the truth for the sake of some
+doctrine or purpose of his own.
+
+There is something very lovable about Cassio, with his fresh eager
+feelings; his distress at his disgrace and still more at having lost
+Othello's trust; his hero-worship; and at the end his sorrow and pity,
+which are at first too acute for words. He is carried in, wounded, on a
+chair. He looks at Othello and cannot speak. His first words come later
+when, to Lodovico's question, 'Did you and he consent in Cassio's
+death?' Othello answers 'Ay.' Then he falters out, 'Dear General, I
+never gave you cause.' One is sure he had never used that adjective
+before. The love in it makes it beautiful, but there is something else
+in it, unknown to Cassio, which goes to one's heart. It tells us that
+his hero is no longer unapproachably above him.
+
+Few of Shakespeare's minor characters are more distinct than Emilia, and
+towards few do our feelings change so much within the course of a play.
+Till close to the end she frequently sets one's teeth on edge; and at
+the end one is ready to worship her. She nowhere shows any sign of
+having a bad heart; but she is common, sometimes vulgar, in minor
+matters far from scrupulous, blunt in perception and feeling, and quite
+destitute of imagination. She let Iago take the handkerchief though she
+knew how much its loss would distress Desdemona; and she said nothing
+about it though she saw that Othello was jealous. We rightly resent her
+unkindness in permitting the theft, but--it is an important point--we
+are apt to misconstrue her subsequent silence, because we know that
+Othello's jealousy was intimately connected with the loss of the
+handkerchief. Emilia, however, certainly failed to perceive this; for
+otherwise, when Othello's anger showed itself violently and she was
+really distressed for her mistress, she could not have failed to think
+of the handkerchief, and would, I believe, undoubtedly have told the
+truth about it. But, in fact, she never thought of it, although she
+guessed that Othello was being deceived by some scoundrel. Even after
+Desdemona's death, nay, even when she knew that Iago had brought it
+about, she still did not remember the handkerchief; and when Othello at
+last mentions, as a proof of his wife's guilt, that he had seen the
+handkerchief in Cassio's hand, the truth falls on Emilia like a
+thunder-bolt. 'O God!' she bursts out, 'O heavenly God!'[121] Her
+stupidity in this matter is gross, but it is stupidity and nothing
+worse.
+
+But along with it goes a certain coarseness of nature. The contrast
+between Emilia and Desdemona in their conversation about the infidelity
+of wives (IV. iii.) is too famous to need a word,--unless it be a word
+of warning against critics who take her light talk too seriously. But
+the contrast in the preceding scene is hardly less remarkable. Othello,
+affecting to treat Emilia as the keeper of a brothel, sends her away,
+bidding her shut the door behind her; and then he proceeds to torture
+himself as well as Desdemona by accusations of adultery. But, as a
+critic has pointed out, Emilia listens at the door, for we find, as soon
+as Othello is gone and Iago has been summoned, that she knows what
+Othello has said to Desdemona. And what could better illustrate those
+defects of hers which make one wince, than her repeating again and again
+in Desdemona's presence the word Desdemona could not repeat; than her
+talking before Desdemona of Iago's suspicions regarding Othello and
+herself; than her speaking to Desdemona of husbands who strike their
+wives; than the expression of her honest indignation in the words,
+
+     Has she forsook so many noble matches,
+     Her father and her country and her friends,
+     To be called whore?
+
+If one were capable of laughing or even of smiling when this point in
+the play is reached, the difference between Desdemona's anguish at the
+loss of Othello's love, and Emilia's recollection of the noble matches
+she might have secured, would be irresistibly ludicrous.
+
+And yet how all this, and all her defects, vanish into nothingness when
+we see her face to face with that which she can understand and feel!
+From the moment of her appearance after the murder to the moment of her
+death she is transfigured; and yet she remains perfectly true to
+herself, and we would not have her one atom less herself. She is the
+only person who utters for us the violent common emotions which we feel,
+together with those more tragic emotions which she does not comprehend.
+She has done this once already, to our great comfort. When she suggests
+that some villain has poisoned Othello's mind, and Iago answers,
+
+     Fie, there is no such man; it is impossible;
+
+and Desdemona answers,
+
+     If any such there be, Heaven pardon him;
+
+Emilia's retort,
+
+     A halter pardon him, and Hell gnaw his bones,
+
+says what we long to say, and helps us. And who has not felt in the last
+scene how her glorious carelessness of her own life, and her outbursts
+against Othello--even that most characteristic one,
+
+     She was too fond of her most filthy bargain--
+
+lift the overwhelming weight of calamity that oppresses us, and bring us
+an extraordinary lightening of the heart? Terror and pity are here too
+much to bear; we long to be allowed to feel also indignation, if not
+rage; and Emilia lets us feel them and gives them words. She brings us
+too the relief of joy and admiration,--a joy that is not lessened by her
+death. Why should she live? If she lived for ever she never could soar a
+higher pitch, and nothing in her life became her like the losing
+it.[122]
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[Footnote 107: It has been held, for example, that Othello treated Iago
+abominably in preferring Cassio to him; that he _did_ seduce Emilia;
+that he and Desdemona were too familiar before marriage; and that in any
+case his fate was a moral judgment on his sins, and Iago a righteous, if
+sharp, instrument of Providence.]
+
+[Footnote 108: See III. iii. 201, V. i. 89 f. The statements are his
+own, but he has no particular reason for lying. One reason of his
+disgust at Cassio's appointment was that Cassio was a Florentine (I. i.
+20). When Cassio says (III. i. 42) 'I never knew a Florentine more kind
+and honest,' of course he means, not that Iago is a Florentine, but that
+he could not be kinder and honester if he were one.]
+
+[Footnote 109: I am here merely recording a general impression. There is
+no specific evidence, unless we take Cassio's language in his drink (II.
+ii. 105 f.) to imply that Iago was not a 'man of quality' like himself.
+I do not know if it has been observed that Iago uses more nautical
+phrases and metaphors than is at all usual with Shakespeare's
+characters. This might naturally be explained by his roving military
+life, but it is curious that almost all the examples occur in the
+earlier scenes (see _e.g._ I. i. 30, 153, 157; I. ii. 17, 50; I. iii.
+343; II. iii. 65), so that the use of these phrases and metaphors may
+not be characteristic of Iago but symptomatic of a particular state of
+Shakespeare's mind.]
+
+[Footnote 110: See further Note P.]
+
+[Footnote 111: But it by no means follows that we are to believe his
+statement that there was a report abroad about an intrigue between his
+wife and Othello (I. iii. 393), or his statement (which may be divined
+from IV. ii. 145) that someone had spoken to him on the subject.]
+
+[Footnote 112: See, for instance, Aaron in _Titus Andronicus_, II. iii.;
+Richard in _3 Henry VI._, III. ii. and V. vi., and in _Richard III._, I.
+i. (twice), I. ii.; Edmund in _King Lear_, I. ii. (twice), III. iii. and
+v., V. i.]
+
+[Footnote 113: See, further, Note Q.]
+
+[Footnote 114: On the meaning which this phrase had for its author,
+Coleridge, see note on p. 228.][Transcriber's note: Reference is to
+Footnote 115.]
+
+[Footnote 115: Coleridge's view is not materially different, though less
+complete. When he speaks of 'the motive-hunting of a motiveless
+malignity,' he does not mean by the last two words that 'disinterested
+love of evil' or 'love of evil for evil's sake' of which I spoke just
+now, and which other critics attribute to Iago. He means really that
+Iago's malignity does not spring from the causes to which Iago himself
+refers it, nor from any 'motive' in the sense of an idea present to
+consciousness. But unfortunately his phrase suggests the theory which
+has been criticised above. On the question whether there is such a thing
+as this supposed pure malignity, the reader may refer to a discussion
+between Professor Bain and F.H. Bradley in _Mind_, vol. viii.]
+
+[Footnote 116: _I.e._ terrifying.]
+
+[Footnote 117: Cf. note at end of lecture.][Transcriber's note: Refers
+to Footnote 122.]
+
+[Footnote 118: It was suggested to me by a Glasgow student.]
+
+[Footnote 119: A curious proof of Iago's inability to hold by his creed
+that absolute egoism is the only proper attitude, and that loyalty and
+affection are mere stupidity or want of spirit, may be found in his one
+moment of real passion, where he rushes at Emilia with the cry,
+'Villainous whore!' (V. ii. 229). There is more than fury in his cry,
+there is indignation. She has been false to him, she has betrayed him.
+Well, but why should she not, if his creed is true? And what a
+melancholy exhibition of human inconsistency it is that he should use as
+terms of reproach words which, according to him, should be quite
+neutral, if not complimentary!]
+
+[Footnote 120: Cassio's invective against drink may be compared with
+Hamlet's expressions of disgust at his uncle's drunkenness. Possibly the
+subject may for some reason have been prominent in Shakespeare's mind
+about this time.]
+
+[Footnote 121: So the Quarto, and certainly rightly, though modern
+editors reprint the feeble alteration of the Folio, due to fear of the
+Censor, 'O heaven! O heavenly Powers!']
+
+[Footnote 122: The feelings evoked by Emilia are one of the causes which
+mitigate the excess of tragic pain at the conclusion. Others are the
+downfall of Iago, and the fact, already alluded to, that both Desdemona
+and Othello show themselves at their noblest just before death.]
+
+
+
+
+LECTURE VII
+
+KING LEAR
+
+
+_King Lear_ has again and again been described as Shakespeare's greatest
+work, the best of his plays, the tragedy in which he exhibits most fully
+his multitudinous powers; and if we were doomed to lose all his dramas
+except one, probably the majority of those who know and appreciate him
+best would pronounce for keeping _King Lear_.
+
+Yet this tragedy is certainly the least popular of the famous four. The
+'general reader' reads it less often than the others, and, though he
+acknowledges its greatness, he will sometimes speak of it with a certain
+distaste. It is also the least often presented on the stage, and the
+least successful there. And when we look back on its history we find a
+curious fact. Some twenty years after the Restoration, Nahum Tate
+altered _King Lear_ for the stage, giving it a happy ending, and putting
+Edgar in the place of the King of France as Cordelia's lover. From that
+time Shakespeare's tragedy in its original form was never seen on the
+stage for a century and a half. Betterton acted Tate's version; Garrick
+acted it and Dr. Johnson approved it. Kemble acted it, Kean acted it. In
+1823 Kean, 'stimulated by Hazlitt's remonstrances and Charles Lamb's
+essays,' restored the original tragic ending. At last, in 1838, Macready
+returned to Shakespeare's text throughout.
+
+What is the meaning of these opposite sets of facts? Are the lovers of
+Shakespeare wholly in the right; and is the general reader and
+play-goer, were even Tate and Dr. Johnson, altogether in the wrong? I
+venture to doubt it. When I read _King Lear_ two impressions are left on
+my mind, which seem to answer roughly to the two sets of facts. _King
+Lear_ seems to me Shakespeare's greatest achievement, but it seems to me
+_not_ his best play. And I find that I tend to consider it from two
+rather different points of view. When I regard it strictly as a drama,
+it appears to me, though in certain parts overwhelming, decidedly
+inferior as a whole to _Hamlet_, _Othello_ and _Macbeth_. When I am
+feeling that it is greater than any of these, and the fullest revelation
+of Shakespeare's power, I find I am not regarding it simply as a drama,
+but am grouping it in my mind with works like the _Prometheus Vinctus_
+and the _Divine Comedy_, and even with the greatest symphonies of
+Beethoven and the statues in the Medici Chapel.
+
+This two-fold character of the play is to some extent illustrated by the
+affinities and the probable chronological position of _King Lear_. It is
+allied with two tragedies, _Othello_ and _Timon of Athens_; and these
+two tragedies are utterly unlike.[123] _Othello_ was probably composed
+about 1604, and _King Lear_ about 1605; and though there is a somewhat
+marked change in style and versification, there are obvious resemblances
+between the two. The most important have been touched on already: these
+are the most painful and the most pathetic of the four tragedies, those
+in which evil appears in its coldest and most inhuman forms, and those
+which exclude the supernatural from the action. But there is also in
+_King Lear_ a good deal which sounds like an echo of _Othello_,--a fact
+which should not surprise us, since there are other instances where the
+matter of a play seems to go on working in Shakespeare's mind and
+re-appears, generally in a weaker form, in his next play. So, in _King
+Lear_, the conception of Edmund is not so fresh as that of Goneril.
+Goneril has no predecessor; but Edmund, though of course essentially
+distinguished from Iago, often reminds us of him, and the soliloquy,
+'This is the excellent foppery of the world,' is in the very tone of
+Iago's discourse on the sovereignty of the will. The gulling of Gloster,
+again, recalls the gulling of Othello. Even Edmund's idea (not carried
+out) of making his father witness, without over-hearing, his
+conversation with Edgar, reproduces the idea of the passage where
+Othello watches Iago and Cassio talking about Bianca; and the conclusion
+of the temptation, where Gloster says to Edmund:
+
+                              and of my land,
+     Loyal and natural boy, I'll work the means
+     To make thee capable,
+
+reminds us of Othello's last words in the scene of temptation, 'Now art
+thou my lieutenant.' This list might be extended; and the appearance of
+certain unusual words and phrases in both the plays increases the
+likelihood that the composition of the one followed at no great distance
+on that of the other.[124]
+
+When we turn from _Othello_ to _Timon of Athens_ we find a play of quite
+another kind. _Othello_ is dramatically the most perfect of the
+tragedies. _Timon_, on the contrary, is weak, ill-constructed and
+confused; and, though care might have made it clear, no mere care could
+make it really dramatic. Yet it is undoubtedly Shakespearean in part,
+probably in great part; and it immediately reminds us of _King Lear_.
+Both plays deal with the tragic effects of ingratitude. In both the
+victim is exceptionally unsuspicious, soft-hearted and vehement. In both
+he is completely overwhelmed, passing through fury to madness in the one
+case, to suicide in the other. Famous passages in both plays are curses.
+The misanthropy of Timon pours itself out in a torrent of maledictions
+on the whole race of man; and these at once recall, alike by their form
+and their substance, the most powerful speeches uttered by Lear in his
+madness. In both plays occur repeated comparisons between man and the
+beasts; the idea that 'the strain of man's bred out into baboon,' wolf,
+tiger, fox; the idea that this bestial degradation will end in a furious
+struggle of all with all, in which the race will perish. The
+'pessimistic' strain in _Timon_ suggests to many readers, even more
+imperatively than _King Lear_, the notion that Shakespeare was giving
+vent to some personal feeling, whether present or past; for the signs of
+his hand appear most unmistakably when the hero begins to pour the vials
+of his wrath upon mankind. _Timon_, lastly, in some of the
+unquestionably Shakespearean parts, bears (as it appears to me) so
+strong a resemblance to _King Lear_ in style and in versification that
+it is hard to understand how competent judges can suppose that it
+belongs to a time at all near that of the final romances, or even that
+it was written so late as the last Roman plays. It is more likely to
+have been composed immediately after _King Lear_ and before
+_Macbeth_.[125]
+
+Drawing these comparisons together, we may say that, while as a work of
+art and in tragic power _King Lear_ is infinitely nearer to _Othello_
+than to _Timon_, in its spirit and substance its affinity with _Timon_
+is a good deal the stronger. And, returning to the point from which
+these comparisons began, I would now add that there is in _King Lear_ a
+reflection or anticipation, however faint, of the structural weakness of
+_Timon_. This weakness in _King Lear_ is not due, however, to anything
+intrinsically undramatic in the story, but to characteristics which were
+necessary to an effect not wholly dramatic. The stage is the test of
+strictly dramatic quality, and _King Lear_ is too huge for the stage. Of
+course, I am not denying that it is a great stage-play. It has scenes
+immensely effective in the theatre; three of them--the two between Lear
+and Goneril and between Lear, Goneril and Regan, and the ineffably
+beautiful scene in the Fourth Act between Lear and Cordelia--lose in the
+theatre very little of the spell they have for imagination; and the
+gradual interweaving of the two plots is almost as masterly as in _Much
+Ado_. But (not to speak of defects due to mere carelessness) that which
+makes the _peculiar_ greatness of King Lear,--the immense scope of the
+work; the mass and variety of intense experience which it contains; the
+interpenetration of sublime imagination, piercing pathos, and humour
+almost as moving as the pathos; the vastness of the convulsion both of
+nature and of human passion; the vagueness of the scene where the action
+takes place, and of the movements of the figures which cross this scene;
+the strange atmosphere, cold and dark, which strikes on us as we enter
+this scene, enfolding these figures and magnifying their dim outlines
+like a winter mist; the half-realised suggestions of vast universal
+powers working in the world of individual fates and passions,--all this
+interferes with dramatic clearness even when the play is read, and in
+the theatre not only refuses to reveal itself fully through the senses
+but seems to be almost in contradiction with their reports. This is not
+so with the other great tragedies. No doubt, as Lamb declared,
+theatrical representation gives only a part of what we imagine when we
+read them; but there is no _conflict_ between the representation and the
+imagination, because these tragedies are, in essentials, perfectly
+dramatic. But _King Lear_, as a whole, is imperfectly dramatic, and
+there is something in its very essence which is at war with the senses,
+and demands a purely imaginative realisation. It is therefore
+Shakespeare's greatest work, but it is not what Hazlitt called it, the
+best of his plays; and its comparative unpopularity is due, not merely
+to the extreme painfulness of the catastrophe, but in part to its
+dramatic defects, and in part to a failure in many readers to catch the
+peculiar effects to which I have referred,--a failure which is natural
+because the appeal is made not so much to dramatic perception as to a
+rarer and more strictly poetic kind of imagination. For this reason,
+too, even the best attempts at exposition of _King Lear_ are
+disappointing; they remind us of attempts to reduce to prose the
+impalpable spirit of the _Tempest_.
+
+I propose to develop some of these ideas by considering, first, the
+dramatic defects of the play, and then some of the causes of its
+extraordinary imaginative effect.
+
+
+1
+
+We may begin, however, by referring to two passages which have often
+been criticised with injustice. The first is that where the blinded
+Gloster, believing that he is going to leap down Dover cliff, does in
+fact fall flat on the ground at his feet, and then is persuaded that he
+_has_ leaped down Dover cliff but has been miraculously preserved.
+Imagine this incident transferred to _Othello_, and you realise how
+completely the two tragedies differ in dramatic atmosphere. In _Othello_
+it would be a shocking or a ludicrous dissonance, but it is in harmony
+with the spirit of _King Lear_. And not only is this so, but, contrary
+to expectation, it is not, if properly acted, in the least absurd on the
+stage. The imagination and the feelings have been worked upon with such
+effect by the description of the cliff, and by the portrayal of the old
+man's despair and his son's courageous and loving wisdom, that we are
+unconscious of the grotesqueness of the incident for common sense.
+
+The second passage is more important, for it deals with the origin of
+the whole conflict. The oft-repeated judgment that the first scene of
+_King Lear_ is absurdly improbable, and that no sane man would think of
+dividing his kingdom among his daughters in proportion to the strength
+of their several protestations of love, is much too harsh and is based
+upon a strange misunderstanding. This scene acts effectively, and to
+imagination the story is not at all incredible. It is merely strange,
+like so many of the stories on which our romantic dramas are based.
+Shakespeare, besides, has done a good deal to soften the improbability
+of the legend, and he has done much more than the casual reader
+perceives. The very first words of the drama, as Coleridge pointed out,
+tell us that the division of the kingdom is already settled in all its
+details, so that only the public announcement of it remains.[126] Later
+we find that the lines of division have already been drawn on the map of
+Britain (l. 38), and again that Cordelia's share, which is her dowry, is
+perfectly well known to Burgundy, if not to France (ll. 197, 245). That
+then which is censured as absurd, the dependence of the division on the
+speeches of the daughters, was in Lear's intention a mere form, devised
+as a childish scheme to gratify his love of absolute power and his
+hunger for assurances of devotion. And this scheme is perfectly in
+character. We may even say that the main cause of its failure was not
+that Goneril and Regan were exceptionally hypocritical, but that
+Cordelia was exceptionally sincere and unbending. And it is essential to
+observe that its failure, and the consequent necessity of publicly
+reversing his whole well-known intention, is one source of Lear's
+extreme anger. He loved Cordelia most and knew that she loved him best,
+and the supreme moment to which he looked forward was that in which she
+should outdo her sisters in expressions of affection, and should be
+rewarded by that 'third' of the kingdom which was the most 'opulent.'
+And then--so it naturally seemed to him--she put him to open shame.
+
+There is a further point, which seems to have escaped the attention of
+Coleridge and others. Part of the absurdity of Lear's plan is taken to
+be his idea of living with his three daughters in turn. But he never
+meant to do this. He meant to live with Cordelia, and with her
+alone.[127] The scheme of his alternate monthly stay with Goneril and
+Regan is forced on him at the moment by what he thinks the undutifulness
+of his favourite child. In fact his whole original plan, though foolish
+and rash, was not a 'hideous rashness'[128] or incredible folly. If
+carried out it would have had no such consequences as followed its
+alteration. It would probably have led quickly to war,[129] but not to
+the agony which culminated in the storm upon the heath. The first scene,
+therefore, is not absurd, though it must be pronounced dramatically
+faulty in so far as it discloses the true position of affairs only to an
+attention more alert than can be expected in a theatrical audience or
+has been found in many critics of the play.
+
+Let us turn next to two passages of another kind, the two which are
+mainly responsible for the accusation of excessive painfulness, and so
+for the distaste of many readers and the long theatrical eclipse of
+_King Lear_. The first of these is much the less important; it is the
+scene of the blinding of Gloster. The blinding of Gloster on the stage
+has been condemned almost universally; and surely with justice, because
+the mere physical horror of such a spectacle would in the theatre be a
+sensation so violent as to overpower the purely tragic emotions, and
+therefore the spectacle would seem revolting or shocking. But it is
+otherwise in reading. For mere imagination the physical horror, though
+not lost, is so far deadened that it can do its duty as a stimulus to
+pity, and to that appalled dismay at the extremity of human cruelty
+which it is of the essence of the tragedy to excite. Thus the blinding
+of Gloster belongs rightly to _King Lear_ in its proper world of
+imagination; it is a blot upon _King Lear_ as a stage-play.
+
+But what are we to say of the second and far more important passage, the
+conclusion of the tragedy, the 'unhappy ending,' as it is called, though
+the word 'unhappy' sounds almost ironical in its weakness? Is this too a
+blot upon _King Lear_ as a stage-play? The question is not so easily
+answered as might appear. Doubtless we are right when we turn with
+disgust from Tate's sentimental alterations, from his marriage of Edgar
+and Cordelia, and from that cheap moral which every one of Shakespeare's
+tragedies contradicts, 'that Truth and Virtue shall at last succeed.'
+But are we so sure that we are right when we unreservedly condemn the
+feeling which prompted these alterations, or at all events the feeling
+which beyond question comes naturally to many readers of _King Lear_ who
+would like Tate as little as we? What they wish, though they have not
+always the courage to confess it even to themselves, is that the deaths
+of Edmund, Goneril, Regan and Gloster should be followed by the escape
+of Lear and Cordelia from death, and that we should be allowed to
+imagine the poor old King passing quietly in the home of his beloved
+child to the end which cannot be far off. Now, I do not dream of saying
+that we ought to wish this, so long as we regard _King Lear_ simply as a
+work of poetic imagination. But if _King Lear_ is to be considered
+strictly as a drama, or simply as we consider _Othello_, it is not so
+clear that the wish is unjustified. In fact I will take my courage in
+both hands and say boldly that I share it, and also that I believe
+Shakespeare would have ended his play thus had he taken the subject in
+hand a few years later, in the days of _Cymbeline_ and the _Winter's
+Tale_. If I read _King Lear_ simply as a drama, I find that my feelings
+call for this 'happy ending.' I do not mean the human, the
+philanthropic, feelings, but the dramatic sense. The former wish Hamlet
+and Othello to escape their doom; the latter does not; but it does wish
+Lear and Cordelia to be saved. Surely, it says, the tragic emotions have
+been sufficiently stirred already. Surely the tragic outcome of Lear's
+error and his daughters' ingratitude has been made clear enough and
+moving enough. And, still more surely, such a tragic catastrophe as this
+should seem _inevitable_. But this catastrophe, unlike those of all the
+other mature tragedies, does not seem at all inevitable. It is not even
+satisfactorily motived.[130] In fact it seems expressly designed to fall
+suddenly like a bolt from a sky cleared by the vanished storm. And
+although from a wider point of view one may fully recognise the value of
+this effect, and may even reject with horror the wish for a 'happy
+ending,' this wider point of view, I must maintain, is not strictly
+dramatic or tragic.
+
+Of course this is a heresy and all the best authority is against it. But
+then the best authority, it seems to me, is either influenced
+unconsciously by disgust at Tate's sentimentalism or unconsciously takes
+that wider point of view. When Lamb--there is no higher
+authority--writes, 'A happy ending!--as if the living martyrdom that
+Lear had gone through, the flaying of his feelings alive, did not make a
+fair dismissal from the stage of life the only decorous thing for him,'
+I answer, first, that it is precisely this _fair_ dismissal which we
+desire for him instead of renewed anguish; and, secondly, that what we
+desire for him during the brief remainder of his days is not 'the
+childish pleasure of getting his gilt robes and sceptre again,' not what
+Tate gives him, but what Shakespeare himself might have given him--peace
+and happiness by Cordelia's fireside. And if I am told that he has
+suffered too much for this, how can I possibly believe it with these
+words ringing in my ears:
+
+                      Come, let's away to prison:
+     We two alone will sing like birds i' the cage.
+     When thou dost ask me blessing, I'll kneel down,
+     And ask of thee forgiveness: so we'll live,
+     And pray, and sing, and tell old tales, and laugh
+     At gilded butterflies?
+
+And again when Schlegel declares that, if Lear were saved, 'the whole'
+would 'lose its significance,' because it would no longer show us that
+the belief in Providence 'requires a wider range than the dark
+pilgrimage on earth to be established in its whole extent,' I answer
+that, if the drama does show us that, it takes us beyond the strictly
+tragic point of view.[131]
+
+A dramatic mistake in regard to the catastrophe, however, even supposing
+it to exist, would not seriously affect the whole play. The principal
+structural weakness of _King Lear_ lies elsewhere. It is felt to some
+extent in the earlier Acts, but still more (as from our study of
+Shakespeare's technique we have learnt to expect) in the Fourth and the
+first part of the Fifth. And it arises chiefly from the double action,
+which is a peculiarity of _King Lear_ among the tragedies. By the side
+of Lear, his daughters, Kent, and the Fool, who are the principal
+figures in the main plot, stand Gloster and his two sons, the chief
+persons of the secondary plot. Now by means of this double action
+Shakespeare secured certain results highly advantageous even from the
+strictly dramatic point of view, and easy to perceive. But the
+disadvantages were dramatically greater. The number of essential
+characters is so large, their actions and movements are so complicated,
+and events towards the close crowd on one another so thickly, that the
+reader's attention,[132] rapidly transferred from one centre of interest
+to another, is overstrained. He becomes, if not intellectually confused,
+at least emotionally fatigued. The battle, on which everything turns,
+scarcely affects him. The deaths of Edmund, Goneril, Regan and Gloster
+seem 'but trifles here'; and anything short of the incomparable pathos
+of the close would leave him cold. There is something almost ludicrous
+in the insignificance of this battle, when it is compared with the
+corresponding battles in _Julius Caesar_ and _Macbeth_; and though there
+may have been further reasons for its insignificance, the main one is
+simply that there was no room to give it its due effect among such a
+host of competing interests.[133]
+
+A comparison of the last two Acts of _Othello_ with the last two Acts of
+_King Lear_ would show how unfavourable to dramatic clearness is a
+multiplicity of figures. But that this multiplicity is not in itself a
+fatal obstacle is evident from the last two Acts of _Hamlet_, and
+especially from the final scene. This is in all respects one of
+Shakespeare's triumphs, yet the stage is crowded with characters. Only
+they are not _leading_ characters. The plot is single; Hamlet and the
+King are the 'mighty opposites'; and Ophelia, the only other person in
+whom we are obliged to take a vivid interest, has already disappeared.
+It is therefore natural and right that the deaths of Laertes and the
+Queen should affect us comparatively little. But in _King Lear_, because
+the plot is double, we have present in the last scene no less than five
+persons who are technically of the first importance--Lear, his three
+daughters and Edmund; not to speak of Kent and Edgar, of whom the latter
+at any rate is technically quite as important as Laertes. And again,
+owing to the pressure of persons and events, and owing to the
+concentration of our anxiety on Lear and Cordelia, the combat of Edgar
+and Edmund, which occupies so considerable a space, fails to excite a
+tithe of the interest of the fencing-match in _Hamlet_. The truth is
+that all through these Acts Shakespeare has too vast a material to use
+with complete dramatic effectiveness, however essential this very
+vastness was for effects of another kind.
+
+Added to these defects there are others, which suggest that in _King
+Lear_ Shakespeare was less concerned than usual with dramatic fitness:
+improbabilities, inconsistencies, sayings and doings which suggest
+questions only to be answered by conjecture. The improbabilities in
+_King Lear_ surely far surpass those of the other great tragedies in
+number and in grossness. And they are particularly noticeable in the
+secondary plot. For example, no sort of reason is given why Edgar, who
+lives in the same house with Edmund, should write a letter to him
+instead of speaking; and this is a letter absolutely damning to his
+character. Gloster was very foolish, but surely not so foolish as to
+pass unnoticed this improbability; or, if so foolish, what need for
+Edmund to forge a letter rather than a conversation, especially as
+Gloster appears to be unacquainted with his son's handwriting?[134] Is
+it in character that Edgar should be persuaded without the slightest
+demur to avoid his father instead of confronting him and asking him the
+cause of his anger? Why in the world should Gloster, when expelled from
+his castle, wander painfully all the way to Dover simply in order to
+destroy himself (IV. i. 80)? And is it not extraordinary that, after
+Gloster's attempted suicide, Edgar should first talk to him in the
+language of a gentleman, then to Oswald in his presence in broad peasant
+dialect, then again to Gloster in gentle language, and yet that Gloster
+should not manifest the least surprise?
+
+Again, to take three instances of another kind; (_a_) only a fortnight
+seems to have elapsed between the first scene and the breach with
+Goneril; yet already there are rumours not only of war between Goneril
+and Regan but of the coming of a French army; and this, Kent says, is
+perhaps connected with the harshness of _both_ the sisters to their
+father, although Regan has apparently had no opportunity of showing any
+harshness till the day before. (_b_) In the quarrel with Goneril Lear
+speaks of his having to dismiss fifty of his followers at a clap, yet
+she has neither mentioned any number nor had any opportunity of
+mentioning it off the stage. (_c_) Lear and Goneril, intending to hurry
+to Regan, both send off messengers to her, and both tell the messengers
+to bring back an answer. But it does not appear either how the
+messengers _could_ return or what answer could be required, as their
+superiors are following them with the greatest speed.
+
+Once more, (_a_) why does Edgar not reveal himself to his blind father,
+as he truly says he ought to have done? The answer is left to mere
+conjecture. (_b_) Why does Kent so carefully preserve his incognito till
+the last scene? He says he does it for an important purpose, but what
+the purpose is we have to guess. (_c_) Why Burgundy rather than France
+should have first choice of Cordelia's hand is a question we cannot help
+asking, but there is no hint of any answer.[135] (_d_) I have referred
+already to the strange obscurity regarding Edmund's delay in trying to
+save his victims, and I will not extend this list of examples. No one of
+such defects is surprising when considered by itself, but their number
+is surely significant. Taken in conjunction with other symptoms it means
+that Shakespeare, set upon the dramatic effect of the great scenes and
+upon certain effects not wholly dramatic, was exceptionally careless of
+probability, clearness and consistency in smaller matters, introducing
+what was convenient or striking for a momentary purpose without
+troubling himself about anything more than the moment. In presence of
+these signs it seems doubtful whether his failure to give information
+about the fate of the Fool was due to anything more than carelessness or
+an impatient desire to reduce his overloaded material.[136]
+
+Before I turn to the other side of the subject I will refer to one more
+characteristic of this play which is dramatically disadvantageous. In
+Shakespeare's dramas, owing to the absence of scenery from the
+Elizabethan stage, the question, so vexatious to editors, of the exact
+locality of a particular scene is usually unimportant and often
+unanswerable; but, as a rule, we know, broadly speaking, where the
+persons live and what their journeys are. The text makes this plain, for
+example, almost throughout _Hamlet_, _Othello_ and _Macbeth_; and the
+imagination is therefore untroubled. But in _King Lear_ the indications
+are so scanty that the reader's mind is left not seldom both vague and
+bewildered. Nothing enables us to imagine whereabouts in Britain Lear's
+palace lies, or where the Duke of Albany lives. In referring to the
+dividing-lines on the map, Lear tells us of shadowy forests and
+plenteous rivers, but, unlike Hotspur and his companions, he studiously
+avoids proper names. The Duke of Cornwall, we presume in the absence of
+information, is likely to live in Cornwall; but we suddenly find, from
+the introduction of a place-name which all readers take at first for a
+surname, that he lives at Gloster (I. v. 1).[137] This seems likely to
+be also the home of the Earl of Gloster, to whom Cornwall is patron. But
+no: it is a night's journey from Cornwall's 'house' to Gloster's, and
+Gloster's is in the middle of an uninhabited heath.[138] Here, for the
+purpose of the crisis, nearly all the persons assemble, but they do so
+in a manner which no casual spectator or reader could follow. Afterwards
+they all drift towards Dover for the purpose of the catastrophe; but
+again the localities and movements are unusually indefinite. And this
+indefiniteness is found in smaller matters. One cannot help asking, for
+example, and yet one feels one had better not ask, where that 'lodging'
+of Edmund's can be, in which he hides Edgar from his father, and whether
+Edgar is mad that he should return from his hollow tree (in a district
+where 'for many miles about there's scarce a bush') to his father's
+castle in order to soliloquise (II. iii.):--for the favourite
+stage-direction, 'a wood' (which is more than 'a bush'), however
+convenient to imagination, is scarcely compatible with the presence of
+Kent asleep in the stocks.[139] Something of the confusion which
+bewilders the reader's mind in _King Lear_ recurs in _Antony and
+Cleopatra_, the most faultily constructed of all the tragedies; but
+there it is due not so much to the absence or vagueness of the
+indications as to the necessity of taking frequent and fatiguing
+journeys over thousands of miles. Shakespeare could not help himself in
+the Roman play: in _King Lear_ he did not choose to help himself,
+perhaps deliberately chose to be vague.
+
+From these defects, or from some of them, follows one result which must
+be familiar to many readers of _King Lear_. It is far more difficult to
+retrace in memory the steps of the action in this tragedy than in
+_Hamlet_, _Othello_, or _Macbeth_. The outline is of course quite clear;
+anyone could write an 'argument' of the play. But when an attempt is
+made to fill in the detail, it issues sooner or later in confusion even
+with readers whose dramatic memory is unusually strong.[140]
+
+
+2
+
+How is it, now, that this defective drama so overpowers us that we are
+either unconscious of its blemishes or regard them as almost irrelevant?
+As soon as we turn to this question we recognise, not merely that _King
+Lear_ possesses purely dramatic qualities which far outweigh its
+defects, but that its greatness consists partly in imaginative effects
+of a wider kind. And, looking for the sources of these effects, we find
+among them some of those very things which appeared to us dramatically
+faulty or injurious. Thus, to take at once two of the simplest examples
+of this, that very vagueness in the sense of locality which we have just
+considered, and again that excess in the bulk of the material and the
+number of figures, events and movements, while they interfere with the
+clearness of vision, have at the same time a positive value for
+imagination. They give the feeling of vastness, the feeling not of a
+scene or particular place, but of a world; or, to speak more accurately,
+of a particular place which is also a world. This world is dim to us,
+partly from its immensity, and partly because it is filled with gloom;
+and in the gloom shapes approach and recede, whose half-seen faces and
+motions touch us with dread, horror, or the most painful
+pity,--sympathies and antipathies which we seem to be feeling not only
+for them but for the whole race. This world, we are told, is called
+Britain; but we should no more look for it in an atlas than for the
+place, called Caucasus, where Prometheus was chained by Strength and
+Force and comforted by the daughters of Ocean, or the place where
+Farinata stands erect in his glowing tomb, 'Come avesse lo Inferno in
+gran dispitto.'
+
+Consider next the double action. It has certain strictly dramatic
+advantages, and may well have had its origin in purely dramatic
+considerations. To go no further, the secondary plot fills out a story
+which would by itself have been somewhat thin, and it provides a most
+effective contrast between its personages and those of the main plot,
+the tragic strength and stature of the latter being heightened by
+comparison with the slighter build of the former. But its chief value
+lies elsewhere, and is not merely dramatic. It lies in the fact--in
+Shakespeare without a parallel--that the sub-plot simply repeats the
+theme of the main story. Here, as there, we see an old man 'with a white
+beard.' He, like Lear, is affectionate, unsuspicious, foolish, and
+self-willed. He, too, wrongs deeply a child who loves him not less for
+the wrong. He, too, meets with monstrous ingratitude from the child whom
+he favours, and is tortured and driven to death. This repetition does
+not simply double the pain with which the tragedy is witnessed: it
+startles and terrifies by suggesting that the folly of Lear and the
+ingratitude of his daughters are no accidents or merely individual
+aberrations, but that in that dark cold world some fateful malignant
+influence is abroad, turning the hearts of the fathers against their
+children and of the children against their fathers, smiting the earth
+with a curse, so that the brother gives the brother to death and the
+father the son, blinding the eyes, maddening the brain, freezing the
+springs of pity, numbing all powers except the nerves of anguish and the
+dull lust of life.[141]
+
+Hence too, as well as from other sources, comes that feeling which
+haunts us in _King Lear_, as though we were witnessing something
+universal,--a conflict not so much of particular persons as of the
+powers of good and evil in the world. And the treatment of many of the
+characters confirms this feeling. Considered simply as psychological
+studies few of them, surely, are of the highest interest. Fine and
+subtle touches could not be absent from a work of Shakespeare's
+maturity; but, with the possible exception of Lear himself, no one of
+the characters strikes us as psychologically a _wonderful_ creation,
+like Hamlet or Iago or even Macbeth; one or two seem even to be somewhat
+faint and thin. And, what is more significant, it is not quite natural
+to us to regard them from this point of view at all. Rather we observe a
+most unusual circumstance. If Lear, Gloster and Albany are set apart,
+the rest fall into two distinct groups, which are strongly, even
+violently, contrasted: Cordelia, Kent, Edgar, the Fool on one side,
+Goneril, Regan, Edmund, Cornwall, Oswald on the other. These characters
+are in various degrees individualised, most of them completely so; but
+still in each group there is a quality common to all the members, or one
+spirit breathing through them all. Here we have unselfish and devoted
+love, there hard self-seeking. On both sides, further, the common
+quality takes an extreme form; the love is incapable of being chilled by
+injury, the selfishness of being softened by pity; and, it may be added,
+this tendency to extremes is found again in the characters of Lear and
+Gloster, and is the main source of the accusations of improbability
+directed against their conduct at certain points. Hence the members of
+each group tend to appear, at least in part, as varieties of one
+species; the radical differences of the two species are emphasized in
+broad hard strokes; and the two are set in conflict, almost as if
+Shakespeare, like Empedocles, were regarding Love and Hate as the two
+ultimate forces of the universe.
+
+The presence in _King Lear_ of so large a number of characters in whom
+love or self-seeking is so extreme, has another effect. They do not
+merely inspire in us emotions of unusual strength, but they also stir
+the intellect to wonder and speculation. How can there be such men and
+women? we ask ourselves. How comes it that humanity can take such
+absolutely opposite forms? And, in particular, to what omission of
+elements which should be present in human nature, or, if there is no
+omission, to what distortion of these elements is it due that such
+beings as some of these come to exist? This is a question which Iago
+(and perhaps no previous creation of Shakespeare's) forces us to ask,
+but in _King Lear_ it is provoked again and again. And more, it seems to
+us that the author himself is asking this question. 'Then let them
+anatomise Regan, see what breeds about her heart. Is there any cause in
+nature that makes these hard hearts?'--the strain of thought which
+appears here seems to be present in some degree throughout the play. We
+seem to trace the tendency which, a few years later, produced Ariel and
+Caliban, the tendency of imagination to analyse and abstract, to
+decompose human nature into its constituent factors, and then to
+construct beings in whom one or more of these factors is absent or
+atrophied or only incipient. This, of course, is a tendency which
+produces symbols, allegories, personifications of qualities and abstract
+ideas; and we are accustomed to think it quite foreign to Shakespeare's
+genius, which was in the highest degree concrete. No doubt in the main
+we are right here; but it is hazardous to set limits to that genius. The
+Sonnets, if nothing else, may show us how easy it was to Shakespeare's
+mind to move in a world of 'Platonic' ideas;[142] and, while it would be
+going too far to suggest that he was employing conscious symbolism or
+allegory in _King Lear_, it does appear to disclose a mode of
+imagination not so very far removed from the mode with which, we must
+remember, Shakespeare was perfectly familiar in Morality plays and in
+the _Fairy Queen_.
+
+This same tendency shows itself in _King Lear_ in other forms. To it is
+due the idea of monstrosity--of beings, actions, states of mind, which
+appear not only abnormal but absolutely contrary to nature; an idea,
+which, of course, is common enough in Shakespeare, but appears with
+unusual frequency in _King Lear_, for instance in the lines:
+
+     Ingratitude, thou marble-hearted fiend,
+     More hideous when thou show'st thee in a child
+     Than the sea-monster!
+
+or in the exclamation,
+
+                               Filial ingratitude!
+     Is it not as this mouth should tear this hand
+     For lifting food to't?
+
+It appears in another shape in that most vivid passage where Albany, as
+he looks at the face which had bewitched him, now distorted with
+dreadful passions, suddenly sees it in a new light and exclaims in
+horror:
+
+     Thou changed and self-cover'd thing, for shame.
+     Be-monster not thy feature. Were't my fitness
+     To let these hands obey my blood,
+     They are apt enough to dislocate and tear
+     Thy flesh and bones: howe'er thou art a fiend,
+     A woman's shape doth shield thee.[143]
+
+It appears once more in that exclamation of Kent's, as he listens to
+the description of Cordelia's grief:
+
+                             It is the stars,
+     The stars above us, govern our conditions;
+     Else one self mate and mate could not beget
+     Such different issues.
+
+(This is not the only sign that Shakespeare had been musing over
+heredity, and wondering how it comes about that the composition of two
+strains of blood or two parent souls can produce such astonishingly
+different products.)
+
+This mode of thought is responsible, lastly, for a very striking
+characteristic of _King Lear_--one in which it has no parallel except
+_Timon_--the incessant references to the lower animals[144] and man's
+likeness to them. These references are scattered broadcast through the
+whole play, as though Shakespeare's mind were so busy with the subject
+that he could hardly write a page without some allusion to it. The dog,
+the horse, the cow, the sheep, the hog, the lion, the bear, the wolf,
+the fox, the monkey, the pole-cat, the civet-cat, the pelican, the owl,
+the crow, the chough, the wren, the fly, the butterfly, the rat, the
+mouse, the frog, the tadpole, the wall-newt, the water-newt, the worm--I
+am sure I cannot have completed the list, and some of them are mentioned
+again and again. Often, of course, and especially in the talk of Edgar
+as the Bedlam, they have no symbolical meaning; but not seldom, even in
+his talk, they are expressly referred to for their typical
+qualities--'hog in sloth, fox in stealth, wolf in greediness, dog in
+madness, lion in prey,' 'The fitchew nor the soiled horse goes to't With
+a more riotous appetite.' Sometimes a person in the drama is compared,
+openly or implicitly, with one of them. Goneril is a kite: her
+ingratitude has a serpent's tooth: she has struck her father most
+serpent-like upon the very heart: her visage is wolvish: she has tied
+sharp-toothed unkindness like a vulture on her father's breast: for her
+husband she is a gilded serpent: to Gloster her cruelty seems to have
+the fangs of a boar. She and Regan are dog-hearted: they are tigers, not
+daughters: each is an adder to the other: the flesh of each is covered
+with the fell of a beast. Oswald is a mongrel, and the son and heir of a
+mongrel: ducking to everyone in power, he is a wag-tail: white with
+fear, he is a goose. Gloster, for Regan, is an ingrateful fox: Albany,
+for his wife, has a cowish spirit and is milk-liver'd: when Edgar as the
+Bedlam first appeared to Lear he made him think a man a worm. As we
+read, the souls of all the beasts in turn seem to us to have entered the
+bodies of these mortals; horrible in their venom, savagery, lust,
+deceitfulness, sloth, cruelty, filthiness; miserable in their
+feebleness, nakedness, defencelessness, blindness; and man, 'consider
+him well,' is even what they are. Shakespeare, to whom the idea of the
+transmigration of souls was familiar and had once been material for
+jest,[145] seems to have been brooding on humanity in the light of it.
+It is remarkable, and somewhat sad, that he seems to find none of man's
+better qualities in the world of the brutes (though he might well have
+found the prototype of the self-less love of Kent and Cordelia in the
+dog whom he so habitually maligns);[146] but he seems to have been
+asking himself whether that which he loathes in man may not be due to
+some strange wrenching of this frame of things, through which the lower
+animal souls have found a lodgment in human forms, and there found--to
+the horror and confusion of the thinking mind--brains to forge, tongues
+to speak, and hands to act, enormities which no mere brute can conceive
+or execute. He shows us in _King Lear_ these terrible forces bursting
+into monstrous life and flinging themselves upon those human beings who
+are weak and defenceless, partly from old age, but partly because they
+_are_ human and lack the dreadful undivided energy of the beast. And the
+only comfort he might seem to hold out to us is the prospect that at
+least this bestial race, strong only where it is vile, cannot endure:
+though stars and gods are powerless, or careless, or empty dreams, yet
+there must be an end of this horrible world:
+
+     It will come;
+     Humanity must perforce prey on itself
+     Like monsters of the deep.[147]
+
+The influence of all this on imagination as we read _King Lear_ is very
+great; and it combines with other influences to convey to us, not in the
+form of distinct ideas but in the manner proper to poetry, the wider or
+universal significance of the spectacle presented to the inward eye. But
+the effect of theatrical exhibition is precisely the reverse. There the
+poetic atmosphere is dissipated; the meaning of the very words which
+create it passes half-realised; in obedience to the tyranny of the eye
+we conceive the characters as mere particular men and women; and all
+that mass of vague suggestion, if it enters the mind at all, appears in
+the shape of an allegory which we immediately reject. A similar conflict
+between imagination and sense will be found if we consider the dramatic
+centre of the whole tragedy, the Storm-scenes. The temptation of Othello
+and the scene of Duncan's murder may lose upon the stage, but they do
+not lose their essence, and they gain as well as lose. The Storm-scenes
+in _King Lear_ gain nothing and their very essence is destroyed. It is
+comparatively a small thing that the theatrical storm, not to drown the
+dialogue, must be silent whenever a human being wishes to speak, and is
+wretchedly inferior to many a storm we have witnessed. Nor is it simply
+that, as Lamb observed, the corporal presence of Lear, 'an old man
+tottering about the stage with a walking-stick,' disturbs and depresses
+that sense of the greatness of his mind which fills the imagination.
+There is a further reason, which is not expressed, but still emerges, in
+these words of Lamb's: 'the explosions of his passion are terrible as a
+volcano: they are storms turning up and disclosing to the bottom that
+sea, his mind, with all its vast riches.' Yes, 'they are _storms_.' For
+imagination, that is to say, the explosions of Lear's passion, and the
+bursts of rain and thunder, are not, what for the senses they must be,
+two things, but manifestations of one thing. It is the powers of the
+tormented soul that we hear and see in the 'groans of roaring wind and
+rain' and the 'sheets of fire'; and they that, at intervals almost more
+overwhelming, sink back into darkness and silence. Nor yet is even this
+all; but, as those incessant references to wolf and tiger made us see
+humanity 'reeling back into the beast' and ravening against itself, so
+in the storm we seem to see Nature herself convulsed by the same
+horrible passions; the 'common mother,'
+
+     Whose womb immeasurable and infinite breast
+     Teems and feeds all,
+
+turning on her children, to complete the ruin they have wrought upon
+themselves. Surely something not less, but much more, than these
+helpless words convey, is what comes to us in these astounding scenes;
+and if, translated thus into the language of prose, it becomes confused
+and inconsistent, the reason is simply that it itself is poetry, and
+such poetry as cannot be transferred to the space behind the
+foot-lights, but has its being only in imagination. Here then is
+Shakespeare at his very greatest, but not the mere dramatist
+Shakespeare.[148]
+
+And now we may say this also of the catastrophe, which we found
+questionable from the strictly dramatic point of view. Its purpose is
+not merely dramatic. This sudden blow out of the darkness, which seems
+so far from inevitable, and which strikes down our reviving hopes for
+the victims of so much cruelty, seems now only what we might have
+expected in a world so wild and monstrous. It is as if Shakespeare said
+to us: 'Did you think weakness and innocence have any chance here? Were
+you beginning to dream that? I will show you it is not so.'
+
+I come to a last point. As we contemplate this world, the question
+presses on us, What can be the ultimate power that moves it, that
+excites this gigantic war and waste, or, perhaps, that suffers them and
+overrules them? And in _King Lear_ this question is not left to us to
+ask, it is raised by the characters themselves. References to religious
+or irreligious beliefs and feelings are more frequent than is usual in
+Shakespeare's tragedies, as frequent perhaps as in his final plays. He
+introduces characteristic differences in the language of the different
+persons about fortune or the stars or the gods, and shows how the
+question What rules the world? is forced upon their minds. They answer
+it in their turn: Kent, for instance:
+
+                           It is the stars,
+     The stars above us, govern our condition:
+
+Edmund:
+
+     Thou, nature, art my goddess; to thy law
+     My services are bound:
+
+and again,
+
+     This is the excellent foppery of the world, that, when we are
+     sick in fortune--often the surfeit of our own behaviour--we
+     make guilty of our disasters the sun, the moon and the stars;
+     as if we were villains by necessity, fools by heavenly
+     compulsion, ... and all that we are evil in by a divine
+     thrusting on:
+
+Gloster:
+
+     As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods;
+     They kill us for their sport;
+
+Edgar:
+
+     Think that the clearest gods, who make them honours
+     Of men's impossibilities, have preserved thee.
+
+Here we have four distinct theories of the nature of the ruling power.
+And besides this, in such of the characters as have any belief in gods
+who love good and hate evil, the spectacle of triumphant injustice or
+cruelty provokes questionings like those of Job, or else the thought,
+often repeated, of divine retribution. To Lear at one moment the storm
+seems the messenger of heaven:
+
+                         Let the great gods,
+     That keep this dreadful pother o'er our heads,
+     Find out their enemies now. Tremble, thou wretch,
+     That hast within thee undivulged crimes....
+
+At another moment those habitual miseries of the poor, of which he has
+taken too little account, seem to him to accuse the gods of injustice:
+
+                Take physic, pomp;
+     Expose thyself to feel what wretches feel,
+     That thou mayst shake the superflux to them
+     And show the heavens more just;
+
+and Gloster has almost the same thought (IV. i. 67 ff.). Gloster again,
+thinking of the cruelty of Lear's daughters, breaks out,
+
+                       but I shall see
+     The winged vengeance overtake such children.
+
+The servants who have witnessed the blinding of Gloster by Cornwall and
+Regan, cannot believe that cruelty so atrocious will pass unpunished.
+One cries,
+
+     I'll never care what wickedness I do,
+     If this man come to good;
+
+and another,
+
+                       if she live long,
+     And in the end meet the old course of death,
+     Women will all turn monsters.
+
+Albany greets the news of Cornwall's death with the exclamation,
+
+              This shows you are above,
+     You justicers, that these our nether crimes
+     So speedily can venge;
+
+and the news of the deaths of the sisters with the words,
+
+     This judgment[149] of the heavens, that makes us tremble,
+     Touches us not with pity.
+
+Edgar, speaking to Edmund of their father, declares
+
+     The gods are just, and of our pleasant vices
+     Make instruments to plague us,
+
+and Edmund himself assents. Almost throughout the latter half of the
+drama we note in most of the better characters a pre-occupation with the
+question of the ultimate power, and a passionate need to explain by
+reference to it what otherwise would drive them to despair. And the
+influence of this pre-occupation and need joins with other influences in
+affecting the imagination, and in causing it to receive from _King Lear_
+an impression which is at least as near of kin to the _Divine Comedy_ as
+to _Othello_.
+
+
+3
+
+For Dante that which is recorded in the _Divine Comedy_ was the justice
+and love of God. What did _King Lear_ record for Shakespeare? Something,
+it would seem, very different. This is certainly the most terrible
+picture that Shakespeare painted of the world. In no other of his
+tragedies does humanity appear more pitiably infirm or more hopelessly
+bad. What is Iago's malignity against an envied stranger compared with
+the cruelty of the son of Gloster and the daughters of Lear? What are
+the sufferings of a strong man like Othello to those of helpless age?
+Much too that we have already observed--the repetition of the main theme
+in that of the under-plot, the comparisons of man with the most wretched
+and the most horrible of the beasts, the impression of Nature's
+hostility to him, the irony of the unexpected catastrophe--these, with
+much else, seem even to indicate an intention to show things at their
+worst, and to return the sternest of replies to that question of the
+ultimate power and those appeals for retribution. Is it an accident, for
+example, that Lear's first appeal to something beyond the earth,
+
+                      O heavens,
+     If you do love old men, if your sweet sway
+     Allow[150] obedience, if yourselves are old,
+     Make it your cause:
+
+is immediately answered by the iron voices of his daughters, raising by
+turns the conditions on which they will give him a humiliating
+harbourage; or that his second appeal, heart-rending in its piteousness,
+
+     You see me here, you gods, a poor old man,
+     As full of grief as age; wretched in both:
+
+is immediately answered from the heavens by the sounds of the breaking
+storm?[151] Albany and Edgar may moralise on the divine justice as they
+will, but how, in face of all that we see, shall we believe that they
+speak Shakespeare's mind? Is not his mind rather expressed in the bitter
+contrast between their faith and the events we witness, or in the
+scornful rebuke of those who take upon them the mystery of things as if
+they were God's spies?[152] Is it not Shakespeare's judgment on his kind
+that we hear in Lear's appeal,
+
+                   And thou, all-shaking thunder,
+     Smite flat the thick rotundity o' the world!
+     Crack nature's moulds, all germens spill at once,
+     That make ingrateful man!
+
+and Shakespeare's judgment on the worth of existence that we hear in
+Lear's agonised cry, 'No, no, no life!'?
+
+Beyond doubt, I think, some such feelings as these possess us, and, if
+we follow Shakespeare, ought to possess us, from time to time as we read
+_King Lear_. And some readers will go further and maintain that this is
+also the ultimate and total impression left by the tragedy. _King Lear_
+has been held to be profoundly 'pessimistic' in the full meaning of that
+word,--the record of a time when contempt and loathing for his kind had
+overmastered the poet's soul, and in despair he pronounced man's life to
+be simply hateful and hideous. And if we exclude the biographical part
+of this view,[153] the rest may claim some support even from the
+greatest of Shakespearean critics since the days of Coleridge, Hazlitt
+and Lamb. Mr. Swinburne, after observing that _King Lear_ is 'by far the
+most Aeschylean' of Shakespeare's works, proceeds thus:
+
+'But in one main point it differs radically from the work and the spirit
+of Aeschylus. Its fatalism is of a darker and harder nature. To
+Prometheus the fetters of the lord and enemy of mankind were bitter;
+upon Orestes the hand of heaven was laid too heavily to bear; yet in the
+not utterly infinite or everlasting distance we see beyond them the
+promise of the morning on which mystery and justice shall be made one;
+when righteousness and omnipotence at last shall kiss each other. But on
+the horizon of Shakespeare's tragic fatalism we see no such twilight of
+atonement, such pledge of reconciliation as this. Requital, redemption,
+amends, equity, explanation, pity and mercy, are words without a meaning
+here.
+
+     As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods;
+     They kill us for their sport.
+
+Here is no need of the Eumenides, children of Night everlasting; for
+here is very Night herself.
+
+'The words just cited are not casual or episodical; they strike the
+keynote of the whole poem, lay the keystone of the whole arch of
+thought. There is no contest of conflicting forces, no judgment so much
+as by casting of lots: far less is there any light of heavenly harmony
+or of heavenly wisdom, of Apollo or Athene from above. We have heard
+much and often from theologians of the light of revelation: and some
+such thing indeed we find in Aeschylus; but the darkness of revelation
+is here.'[154]
+
+It is hard to refuse assent to these eloquent words, for they express in
+the language of a poet what we feel at times in reading _King Lear_ but
+cannot express. But do they represent the total and final impression
+produced by the play? If they do, this impression, so far as the
+substance of the drama is concerned (and nothing else is in question
+here), must, it would seem, be one composed almost wholly of painful
+feelings,--utter depression, or indignant rebellion, or appalled
+despair. And that would surely be strange. For _King Lear_ is admittedly
+one of the world's greatest poems, and yet there is surely no other of
+these poems which produces on the whole this effect, and we regard it as
+a very serious flaw in any considerable work of art that this should be
+its ultimate effect.[155] So that Mr. Swinburne's description, if taken
+as final, and any description of King Lear as 'pessimistic' in the
+proper sense of that word, would imply a criticism which is not
+intended, and which would make it difficult to leave the work in the
+position almost universally assigned to it.
+
+But in fact these descriptions, like most of the remarks made on _King
+Lear_ in the present lecture, emphasise only certain aspects of the play
+and certain elements in the total impression; and in that impression the
+effect of these aspects, though far from being lost, is modified by that
+of others. I do not mean that the final effect resembles that of the
+_Divine Comedy_ or the _Oresteia_: how should it, when the first of
+these can be called by its author a 'Comedy,' and when the second,
+ending (as doubtless the _Prometheus_ trilogy also ended) with a
+solution, is not in the Shakespearean sense a tragedy at all?[156] Nor
+do I mean that _King Lear_ contains a revelation of righteous
+omnipotence or heavenly harmony, or even a promise of the reconciliation
+of mystery and justice. But then, as we saw, neither do Shakespeare's
+other tragedies contain these things. Any theological interpretation of
+the world on the author's part is excluded from them, and their effect
+would be disordered or destroyed equally by the ideas of righteous or of
+unrighteous omnipotence. Nor, in reading them, do we think of 'justice'
+or 'equity' in the sense of a strict requital or such an adjustment of
+merit and prosperity as our moral sense is said to demand; and there
+never was vainer labour than that of critics who try to make out that
+the persons in these dramas meet with 'justice' or their 'deserts.'[157]
+But, on the other hand, man is not represented in these tragedies as the
+mere plaything of a blind or capricious power, suffering woes which have
+no relation to his character and actions; nor is the world represented
+as given over to darkness. And in these respects _King Lear_, though the
+most terrible of these works, does not differ in essence from the rest.
+Its keynote is surely to be heard neither in the words wrung from
+Gloster in his anguish, nor in Edgar's words 'the gods are just.' Its
+final and total result is one in which pity and terror, carried perhaps
+to the extreme limits of art, are so blended with a sense of law and
+beauty that we feel at last, not depression and much less despair, but a
+consciousness of greatness in pain, and of solemnity in the mystery we
+cannot fathom.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[Footnote 123: I leave undiscussed the position of _King Lear_ in
+relation to the 'comedies' of _Measure for Measure_, _Troilus and
+Cressida_ and _All's Well_.]
+
+[Footnote 124: See Note R.]
+
+[Footnote 125: On some of the points mentioned in this paragraph see
+Note S.]
+
+[Footnote 126:
+
+     '_Kent._ I thought the king had more affected the Duke of
+                Albany than Cornwall.
+
+      _Glos._ It did always seem so to us: but now, in the division
+                of the kingdom, it appears not which of the dukes
+                he values most.'
+
+For (Gloster goes on to say) their shares are exactly equal in value.
+And if the shares of the two elder daughters are fixed, obviously that
+of the third is so too.]
+
+[Footnote 127:
+
+     I loved her most, and thought to set my rest
+     On her kind nursery.]
+
+[Footnote 128: It is to Lear's altered plan that Kent applies these
+words.]
+
+[Footnote 129: There is talk of a war between Goneril and Regan within a
+fortnight of the division of the kingdom (II. i. 11 f.).]
+
+[Footnote 130: I mean that no sufficiently clear reason is supplied for
+Edmund's delay in attempting to save Cordelia and Lear. The matter
+stands thus. Edmund, after the defeat of the opposing army, sends Lear
+and Cordelia to prison. Then, in accordance with a plan agreed on
+between himself and Goneril, he despatches a captain with secret orders
+to put them both to death _instantly_ (V. iii. 26-37, 244, 252). He then
+has to fight with the disguised Edgar. He is mortally wounded, and, as
+he lies dying, he says to Edgar (at line 162, _more than a hundred
+lines_ after he gave that commission to the captain):
+
+     What you have charged me with, that have I done;
+     And more, much more; the time will bring it out;
+     'Tis past, and so am I.
+
+In 'more, much more' he seems to be thinking of the order for the deaths
+of Lear and Cordelia (what else remained undisclosed?); yet he says
+nothing about it. A few lines later he recognises the justice of his
+fate, yet still says nothing. Then he hears the story of his father's
+death, says it has moved him and 'shall perchance do good' (What good
+except saving his victims?); yet he still says nothing. Even when he
+hears that Goneril is dead and Regan poisoned, he _still_ says nothing.
+It is only when directly questioned about Lear and Cordelia that he
+tries to save the victims who were to be killed 'instantly' (242). How
+can we explain his delay? Perhaps, thinking the deaths of Lear and
+Cordelia would be of use to Goneril and Regan, he will not speak till he
+is sure that both the sisters are dead. Or perhaps, though he can
+recognise the justice of his fate and can be touched by the account of
+his father's death, he is still too self-absorbed to rise to the active
+effort to 'do some good, despite of his own nature.' But, while either
+of these conjectures is possible, it is surely far from satisfactory
+that we should be left to mere conjecture as to the cause of the delay
+which permits the catastrophe to take place. The _real_ cause lies
+outside the dramatic _nexus_. It is Shakespeare's wish to deliver a
+sudden and crushing blow to the hopes which he has excited.]
+
+[Footnote 131: Everything in these paragraphs must, of course, be taken
+in connection with later remarks.]
+
+[Footnote 132: I say 'the reader's,' because on the stage, whenever I
+have seen _King Lear_, the 'cuts' necessitated by modern scenery would
+have made this part of the play absolutely unintelligible to me if I had
+not been familiar with it. It is significant that Lamb in his _Tale of
+King Lear_ almost omits the sub-plot.]
+
+[Footnote 133: Even if Cordelia had won the battle, Shakespeare would
+probably have hesitated to concentrate interest on it, for her victory
+would have been a British defeat. On Spedding's view, that he did mean
+to make the battle more interesting, and that his purpose has been
+defeated by our wrong division of Acts IV. and V., see Note X.]
+
+[Footnote 134: It is vain to suggest that Edmund has only just come
+home, and that the letter is supposed to have been sent to him when he
+was 'out' See I. ii. 38-40, 65 f.]
+
+[Footnote 135: The idea in scene i., perhaps, is that Cordelia's
+marriage, like the division of the kingdom, has really been
+pre-arranged, and that the ceremony of choosing between France and
+Burgundy (I. i. 46 f.) is a mere fiction. Burgundy is to be her husband,
+and that is why, when Lear has cast her off, he offers her to Burgundy
+first (l. 192 ff.). It might seem from 211 ff. that Lear's reason for
+doing so is that he prefers France, or thinks him the greater man, and
+therefore will not offer him first what is worthless: but the language
+of France (240 ff.) seems to show that he recognises a prior right in
+Burgundy.]
+
+[Footnote 136: See Note T. and p. 315.]
+
+[Footnote 137: See Note U.]
+
+[Footnote 138: The word 'heath' in the stage-directions of the
+storm-scenes is, I may remark, Rowe's, not Shakespeare's, who never used
+the word till he wrote _Macbeth_.]
+
+[Footnote 139: It is pointed out in Note V. that what modern editors
+call Scenes ii., iii., iv. of Act II. are really one scene, for Kent is
+on the stage through them all.]
+
+[Footnote 140: [On the locality of Act I., Sc. ii., see _Modern Language
+Review_ for Oct., 1908, and Jan., 1909.]]
+
+[Footnote 141: This effect of the double action seems to have been
+pointed out first by Schlegel.]
+
+[Footnote 142: How prevalent these are is not recognised by readers
+familiar only with English poetry. See Simpson's _Introduction to the
+Philosophy of Shakespeare's Sonnets_ (1868) and Mr. Wyndham's edition of
+Shakespeare's Poems. Perhaps both writers overstate, and Simpson's
+interpretations are often forced or arbitrary, but his book is valuable
+and ought not to remain out of print.]
+
+[Footnote 143: The monstrosity here is a being with a woman's body and a
+fiend's soul. For the interpretation of the lines see Note Y.]
+
+[Footnote 144: Since this paragraph was written I have found that the
+abundance of these references has been pointed out and commented on by
+J. Kirkman, _New Shaks. Soc. Trans._, 1877.]
+
+[Footnote 145: _E.g._ in _As You Like It_, III. ii. 187, 'I was never so
+berhymed since Pythagoras' time, that I was an Irish rat, which I can
+hardly remember'; _Twelfth Night_, IV. ii. 55, '_Clown._ What is the
+opinion of Pythagoras concerning wild fowl? _Mal._ That the soul of our
+grandam might haply inhabit a bird. _Clown._ What thinkest thou of his
+opinion? _Mal._ I think nobly of the soul, and no way approve his
+opinion,' etc. But earlier comes a passage which reminds us of _King
+Lear_, _Merchant of Venice_, IV. i. 128:
+
+     O be thou damn'd, inexecrable dog!
+     And for thy life let justice be accused.
+     Thou almost makest me waver in my faith
+     To hold opinion with Pythagoras,
+     That souls of animals infuse themselves
+     Into the trunks of men: thy currish spirit
+     Govern'd a wolf, who, hang'd for human slaughter,
+     Even from the gallows did his fell soul fleet,
+     And, whilst thou lay'st in thy unhallow'd dam,
+     Infused itself in thee; for thy desires
+     Are wolvish, bloody, starved and ravenous.]
+
+[Footnote 146: I fear it is not possible, however, to refute, on the
+whole, one charge,--that the dog is a snob, in the sense that he
+respects power and prosperity, and objects to the poor and despised. It
+is curious that Shakespeare refers to this trait three times in _King
+Lear_, as if he were feeling a peculiar disgust at it. See III. vi. 65,
+'The little dogs and all,' etc.: IV. vi. 159, 'Thou hast seen a farmer's
+dog bark at a beggar ... and the creature run from the cur? There thou
+mightst behold the great image of authority': V. iii. 186, 'taught me to
+shift Into a madman's rags; to assume a semblance That very dogs
+disdain'd.' Cf. _Oxford Lectures_, p. 341.]
+
+[Footnote 147: With this compare the following lines in the great speech
+on 'degree' in _Troilus and Cressida_, I. iii.:
+
+     Take but degree away, untune that string,
+     And, hark, what discord follows! Each thing meets
+     In mere oppugnancy: the bounded waters
+     Should lift their bosoms higher than the shores
+     And make a sop of all this solid globe:
+     Strength should be lord of imbecility,
+     And the rude son should strike his father dead:
+     Force should be right; or, rather, right and wrong,
+     Between whose endless jar justice resides,
+     Should lose their names, and so should justice too.
+     Then everything includes itself in power,
+     Power into will, will into appetite;
+     And appetite, an universal wolf,
+     So doubly seconded with will and power,
+     Must make perforce an universal prey,
+     And last eat up himself.]
+
+[Footnote 148: Nor is it believable that Shakespeare, whose means of
+imitating a storm were so greatly inferior even to ours, had the
+stage-performance only or chiefly in view in composing these scenes. He
+may not have thought of readers (or he may), but he must in any case
+have written to satisfy his own imagination. I have taken no notice of
+the part played in these scenes by anyone except Lear. The matter is too
+huge, and too strictly poetic, for analysis. I may observe that in our
+present theatres, owing to the use of elaborate scenery, the three
+Storm-scenes are usually combined, with disastrous effect. Shakespeare,
+as we saw (p. 49), interposed between them short scenes of much lower
+tone.]
+
+[Footnote 149: 'justice,' Qq.]
+
+[Footnote 150: =approve.]
+
+[Footnote 151: The direction 'Storm and tempest' at the end of this
+speech is not modern, it is in the Folio.]
+
+[Footnote 152: The gods are mentioned many times in _King Lear_, but
+'God' only here (V. ii. 16).]
+
+[Footnote 153: The whole question how far Shakespeare's works represent
+his personal feelings and attitude, and the changes in them, would carry
+us so far beyond the bounds of the four tragedies, is so needless for
+the understanding of them, and is so little capable of decision, that I
+have excluded it from these lectures; and I will add here a note on it
+only as it concerns the 'tragic period.'
+
+There are here two distinct sets of facts, equally important, (1) On the
+one side there is the fact that, so far as we can make out, after
+_Twelfth Night_ Shakespeare wrote, for seven or eight years, no play
+which, like many of his earlier works, can be called happy, much less
+merry or sunny. He wrote tragedies; and if the chronological order
+_Hamlet_, _Othello_, _King Lear_, _Timon_, _Macbeth_, is correct, these
+tragedies show for some time a deepening darkness, and _King Lear_ and
+_Timon_ lie at the nadir. He wrote also in these years (probably in the
+earlier of them) certain 'comedies,' _Measure for Measure_ and _Troilus
+and Cressida_, and perhaps _All's Well_. But about these comedies there
+is a peculiar air of coldness; there is humour, of course, but little
+mirth; in _Measure for Measure_ perhaps, certainly in _Troilus and
+Cressida_, a spirit of bitterness and contempt seems to pervade an
+intellectual atmosphere of an intense but hard clearness. With _Macbeth_
+perhaps, and more decidedly in the two Roman tragedies which followed,
+the gloom seems to lift; and the final romances show a mellow serenity
+which sometimes warms into radiant sympathy, and even into a mirth
+almost as light-hearted as that of younger days. When we consider these
+facts, not as barely stated thus but as they affect us in reading the
+plays, it is, to my mind, very hard to believe that their origin was
+simply and solely a change in dramatic methods or choice of subjects, or
+even merely such inward changes as may be expected to accompany the
+arrival and progress of middle age.
+
+(2) On the other side, and over against these facts, we have to set the
+multitudinousness of Shakespeare's genius, and his almost unlimited
+power of conceiving and expressing human experience of all kinds. And we
+have to set more. Apparently during this period of years he never ceased
+to write busily, or to exhibit in his writings the greatest mental
+activity. He wrote also either nothing or very little (_Troilus and
+Cressida_ and his part of _Timon_ are the possible exceptions) in which
+there is any appearance of personal feeling overcoming or seriously
+endangering the self-control or 'objectivity' of the artist. And finally
+it is not possible to make out any continuously deepening _personal_
+note: for although _Othello_ is darker than _Hamlet_ it surely strikes
+one as about as impersonal as a play can be; and, on grounds of style
+and versification, it appears (to me, at least) impossible to bring
+_Troilus and Cressida_ chronologically close to _King Lear_ and _Timon_;
+even if parts of it are later than others, the late parts must be
+decidedly earlier than those plays.
+
+The conclusion we may very tentatively draw from these sets of facts
+would seem to be as follows. Shakespeare during these years was probably
+not a happy man, and it is quite likely that he felt at times even an
+intense melancholy, bitterness, contempt, anger, possibly even loathing
+and despair. It is quite likely too that he used these experiences of
+his in writing such plays as _Hamlet_, _Troilus and Cressida_, _King
+Lear_, _Timon_. But it is evident that he cannot have been for any
+considerable time, if, ever, overwhelmed by such feelings, and there is
+no appearance of their having issued in any settled 'pessimistic'
+conviction which coloured his whole imagination and expressed itself in
+his works. The choice of the subject of ingratitude, for instance, in
+_King Lear_ and _Timon_, and the method of handling it, may have been
+due in part to personal feeling; but it does not follow that this
+feeling was particularly acute at this particular time, and, even if it
+was, it certainly was not so absorbing as to hinder Shakespeare from
+representing in the most sympathetic manner aspects of life the very
+reverse of pessimistic. Whether the total impression of _King Lear_ can
+be called pessimistic is a further question, which is considered in the
+text.]
+
+[Footnote 154: _A Study of Shakespeare_, pp. 171, 172.]
+
+[Footnote 155: A flaw, I mean, in a work of art considered not as a
+moral or theological document but as a work of art,--an aesthetic flaw.
+I add the word 'considerable' because we do not regard the effect in
+question as a flaw in a work like a lyric or a short piece of music,
+which may naturally be taken as expressions merely of a mood or a
+subordinate aspect of things.]
+
+[Footnote 156: Caution is very necessary in making comparisons between
+Shakespeare and the Greek dramatists. A tragedy like the _Antigone_
+stands, in spite of differences, on the same ground as a Shakespearean
+tragedy; it is a self-contained whole with a catastrophe. A drama like
+the _Philoctetes_ is a self-contained whole, but, ending with a
+solution, it corresponds not with a Shakespearean tragedy but with a
+play like _Cymbeline_. A drama like the _Agamemnon_ or the _Prometheus
+Vinctus_ answers to no Shakespearean form of play. It is not a
+self-contained whole, but a part of a trilogy. If the trilogy is
+considered as a unit, it answers not to _Hamlet_ but to _Cymbeline_. If
+the part is considered as a whole, it answers to _Hamlet_, but may then
+be open to serious criticism. Shakespeare never made a tragedy end with
+the complete triumph of the worse side: the _Agamemnon_ and
+_Prometheus_, if wrongly taken as wholes, would do this, and would so
+far, I must think, be bad tragedies. [It can scarcely be necessary to
+remind the reader that, in point of 'self-containedness,' there is a
+difference of degree between the pure tragedies of Shakespeare and some
+of the historical.]]
+
+[Footnote 157: I leave it to better authorities to say how far these
+remarks apply also to Greek Tragedy, however much the language of
+'justice' may be used there.]
+
+
+
+
+LECTURE VIII
+
+KING LEAR
+
+
+We have now to look at the characters in _King Lear_; and I propose to
+consider them to some extent from the point of view indicated at the
+close of the last lecture, partly because we have so far been regarding
+the tragedy mainly from an opposite point of view, and partly because
+these characters are so numerous that it would not be possible within
+our limits to examine them fully.
+
+
+1
+
+The position of the hero in this tragedy is in one important respect
+peculiar. The reader of _Hamlet_, _Othello_, or _Macbeth_, is in no
+danger of forgetting, when the catastrophe is reached, the part played
+by the hero in bringing it on. His fatal weakness, error, wrong-doing,
+continues almost to the end. It is otherwise with _King Lear_. When the
+conclusion arrives, the old King has for a long while been passive. We
+have long regarded him not only as 'a man more sinned against than
+sinning,' but almost wholly as a sufferer, hardly at all as an agent.
+His sufferings too have been so cruel, and our indignation against those
+who inflicted them has been so intense, that recollection of the wrong
+he did to Cordelia, to Kent, and to his realm, has been well-nigh
+effaced. Lastly, for nearly four Acts he has inspired in us, together
+with this pity, much admiration and affection. The force of his passion
+has made us feel that his nature was great; and his frankness and
+generosity, his heroic efforts to be patient, the depth of his shame and
+repentance, and the ecstasy of his re-union with Cordelia, have melted
+our very hearts. Naturally, therefore, at the close we are in some
+danger of forgetting that the storm which has overwhelmed him was
+liberated by his own deed.
+
+Yet it is essential that Lear's contribution to the action of the drama
+should be remembered; not at all in order that we may feel that he
+'deserved' what he suffered, but because otherwise his fate would appear
+to us at best pathetic, at worst shocking, but certainly not tragic. And
+when we were reading the earlier scenes of the play we recognised this
+contribution clearly enough. At the very beginning, it is true, we are
+inclined to feel merely pity and misgivings. The first lines tell us
+that Lear's mind is beginning to fail with age.[158] Formerly he had
+perceived how different were the characters of Albany and Cornwall, but
+now he seems either to have lost this perception or to be unwisely
+ignoring it. The rashness of his division of the kingdom troubles us,
+and we cannot but see with concern that its motive is mainly selfish.
+The absurdity of the pretence of making the division depend on
+protestations of love from his daughters, his complete blindness to the
+hypocrisy which is patent to us at a glance, his piteous delight in
+these protestations, the openness of his expressions of preference for
+his youngest daughter--all make us smile, but all pain us. But pity
+begins to give way to another feeling when we witness the precipitance,
+the despotism, the uncontrolled anger of his injustice to Cordelia and
+Kent, and the 'hideous rashness' of his persistence in dividing the
+kingdom after the rejection of his one dutiful child. We feel now the
+presence of force, as well as weakness, but we feel also the presence of
+the tragic [Greek: hubris]. Lear, we see, is generous and unsuspicious,
+of an open and free nature, like Hamlet and Othello and indeed most of
+Shakespeare's heroes, who in this, according to Ben Jonson, resemble the
+poet who made them. Lear, we see, is also choleric by temperament--the
+first of Shakespeare's heroes who is so. And a long life of absolute
+power, in which he has been flattered to the top of his bent, has
+produced in him that blindness to human limitations, and that
+presumptuous self-will, which in Greek tragedy we have so often seen
+stumbling against the altar of Nemesis. Our consciousness that the decay
+of old age contributes to this condition deepens our pity and our sense
+of human infirmity, but certainly does not lead us to regard the old
+King as irresponsible, and so to sever the tragic _nexus_ which binds
+together his error and his calamities.
+
+The magnitude of this first error is generally fully recognised by the
+reader owing to his sympathy with Cordelia, though, as we have seen, he
+often loses the memory of it as the play advances. But this is not so, I
+think, with the repetition of this error, in the quarrel with Goneril.
+Here the daughter excites so much detestation, and the father so much
+sympathy, that we often fail to receive the due impression of his
+violence. There is not here, of course, the _injustice_ of his rejection
+of Cordelia, but there is precisely the same [Greek: hubris]. This had
+been shown most strikingly in the first scene when, _immediately_ upon
+the apparently cold words of Cordelia, 'So young, my lord, and true,'
+there comes this dreadful answer:
+
+     Let it be so; thy truth then be thy dower.
+     For, by the sacred radiance of the sun,
+     The mysteries of Hecate and the night;
+     By all the operation of the orbs
+     From whom we do exist and cease to be;
+     Here I disclaim all my paternal care,
+     Propinquity and property of blood,
+     And as a stranger to my heart and me
+     Hold thee from this for ever. The barbarous Scythian,
+     Or he that makes his generation messes
+     To gorge his appetite, shall to my bosom
+     Be as well neighbour'd, pitied and relieved,
+     As thou my sometime daughter.
+
+Now the dramatic effect of this passage is exactly, and doubtless
+intentionally, repeated in the curse pronounced against Goneril. This
+does not come after the daughters have openly and wholly turned against
+their father. Up to the moment of its utterance Goneril has done no more
+than to require him 'a little to disquantity' and reform his train of
+knights. Certainly her manner and spirit in making this demand are
+hateful, and probably her accusations against the knights are false; and
+we should expect from any father in Lear's position passionate distress
+and indignation. But surely the famous words which form Lear's immediate
+reply were meant to be nothing short of frightful:
+
+     Hear, nature, hear; dear goddess, hear!
+     Suspend thy purpose, if thou didst intend
+     To make this creature fruitful!
+     Into her womb convey sterility!
+     Dry up in her the organs of increase;
+     And from her derogate body never spring
+     A babe to honour her! If she must teem,
+     Create her child of spleen; that it may live,
+     And be a thwart disnatured torment to her!
+     Let it stamp wrinkles in her brow of youth;
+     With cadent tears fret channels in her cheeks;
+     Turn all her mother's pains and benefits
+     To laughter and contempt; that she may feel
+     How sharper than a serpent's tooth it is
+     To have a thankless child!
+
+The question is not whether Goneril deserves these appalling
+imprecations, but what they tell us about Lear. They show that, although
+he has already recognised his injustice towards Cordelia, is secretly
+blaming himself, and is endeavouring to do better, the disposition from
+which his first error sprang is still unchanged. And it is precisely the
+disposition to give rise, in evil surroundings, to calamities dreadful
+but at the same time tragic, because due in some measure to the person
+who endures them.
+
+The perception of this connection, if it is not lost as the play
+advances, does not at all diminish our pity for Lear, but it makes it
+impossible for us permanently to regard the world displayed in this
+tragedy as subject to a mere arbitrary or malicious power. It makes us
+feel that this world is so far at least a rational and a moral order,
+that there holds in it the law, not of proportionate requital, but of
+strict connection between act and consequence. It is, so far, the world
+of all Shakespeare's tragedies.
+
+But there is another aspect of Lear's story, the influence of which
+modifies, in a way quite different and more peculiar to this tragedy,
+the impressions called pessimistic and even this impression of law.
+There is nothing more noble and beautiful in literature than
+Shakespeare's exposition of the effect of suffering in reviving the
+greatness and eliciting the sweetness of Lear's nature. The occasional
+recurrence, during his madness, of autocratic impatience or of desire
+for revenge serves only to heighten this effect, and the moments when
+his insanity becomes merely infinitely piteous do not weaken it. The old
+King who in pleading with his daughters feels so intensely his own
+humiliation and their horrible ingratitude, and who yet, at fourscore
+and upward, constrains himself to practise a self-control and patience
+so many years disused; who out of old affection for his Fool, and in
+repentance for his injustice to the Fool's beloved mistress, tolerates
+incessant and cutting reminders of his own folly and wrong; in whom the
+rage of the storm awakes a power and a poetic grandeur surpassing even
+that of Othello's anguish; who comes in his affliction to think of
+others first, and to seek, in tender solicitude for his poor boy, the
+shelter he scorns for his own bare head; who learns to feel and to pray
+for the miserable and houseless poor, to discern the falseness of
+flattery and the brutality of authority, and to pierce below the
+differences of rank and raiment to the common humanity beneath; whose
+sight is so purged by scalding tears that it sees at last how power and
+place and all things in the world are vanity except love; who tastes in
+his last hours the extremes both of love's rapture and of its agony, but
+could never, if he lived on or lived again, care a jot for aught
+beside--there is no figure, surely, in the world of poetry at once so
+grand, so pathetic, and so beautiful as his. Well, but Lear owes the
+whole of this to those sufferings which made us doubt whether life were
+not simply evil, and men like the flies which wanton boys torture for
+their sport. Should we not be at least as near the truth if we called
+this poem _The Redemption of King Lear_, and declared that the business
+of 'the gods' with him was neither to torment him, nor to teach him a
+'noble anger,' but to lead him to attain through apparently hopeless
+failure the very end and aim of life? One can believe that Shakespeare
+had been tempted at times to feel misanthropy and despair, but it is
+quite impossible that he can have been mastered by such feelings at the
+time when he produced this conception.
+
+To dwell on the stages of this process of purification (the word is
+Professor Dowden's) is impossible here; and there are scenes, such as
+that of the meeting of Lear and Cordelia, which it seems almost a
+profanity to touch.[159] But I will refer to two scenes which may remind
+us more in detail of some of the points just mentioned. The third and
+fourth scenes of Act III. present one of those contrasts which speak as
+eloquently even as Shakespeare's words, and which were made possible in
+his theatre by the absence of scenery and the consequent absence of
+intervals between the scenes. First, in a scene of twenty-three lines,
+mostly in prose, Gloster is shown, telling his son Edmund how Goneril
+and Regan have forbidden him on pain of death to succour the houseless
+King; how a secret letter has reached him, announcing the arrival of a
+French force; and how, whatever the consequences may be, he is
+determined to relieve his old master. Edmund, left alone, soliloquises
+in words which seem to freeze one's blood:
+
+     This courtesy, forbid thee, shall the duke
+     Instantly know; and of that letter too:
+     This seems a fair deserving, and must draw me
+     That which my father loses; no less than all:
+     The younger rises when the old doth fall.
+
+He goes out; and the next moment, as the fourth scene opens, we find
+ourselves in the icy storm with Lear, Kent and the Fool, and yet in the
+inmost shrine of love. I am not speaking of the devotion of the others
+to Lear, but of Lear himself. He had consented, merely for the Fool's
+sake, to seek shelter in the hovel:
+
+                               Come, your hovel.
+     Poor fool and knave, I have one part in my heart
+     That's sorry yet for thee.
+
+But on the way he has broken down and has been weeping (III. iv. 17),
+and now he resists Kent's efforts to persuade him to enter. He does not
+feel the storm:
+
+                               when the mind's free
+     The body's delicate: the tempest in my mind
+     Doth from my senses take all feeling else
+     Save what beats there:
+
+and the thoughts that will drive him mad are burning in his brain:
+
+                               Filial ingratitude!
+     Is it not as this mouth should tear this hand
+     For lifting food to't? But I will punish home.
+     No, I will weep no more. In such a night
+     To shut me out! Pour on; I will endure.
+     In such a night as this! O Regan, Goneril!
+     Your old kind father, whose frank heart gave all,--
+     O, that way madness lies; let me shun that;
+     No more of that.
+
+And then suddenly, as he controls himself, the blessed spirit of
+kindness breathes on him 'like a meadow gale of spring,' and he turns
+gently to Kent:
+
+     Prithee, go in thyself; seek thine own ease:
+     This tempest will not give me leave to ponder
+     On things would hurt me more. But I'll go in.
+     In, boy; go first. You houseless poverty--
+     Nay, get thee in. I'll pray, and then I'll sleep.
+
+But his prayer is not for himself.
+
+     Poor naked wretches, wheresoe'er you are,
+
+it begins, and I need not quote more. This is one of those passages
+which make one worship Shakespeare.[160]
+
+Much has been written on the representation of insanity in _King Lear_,
+and I will confine myself to one or two points which may have escaped
+notice. The most obvious symptom of Lear's insanity, especially in its
+first stages, is of course the domination of a fixed idea. Whatever
+presents itself to his senses, is seized on by this idea and compelled
+to express it; as for example in those words, already quoted, which
+first show that his mind has actually given way:
+
+                            Hast thou given all
+     To thy two daughters? And art thou come to this?[161]
+
+But it is remarkable that what we have here is only, in an exaggerated
+and perverted form, the very same action of imagination that, just
+before the breakdown of reason, produced those sublime appeals:
+
+                         O heavens,
+     If you do love old men, if your sweet sway
+     Allow obedience, if yourselves are old,
+     Make it your cause;
+
+and:
+
+     Rumble thy bellyful! Spit, fire! spout, rain!
+     Nor rain, wind, thunder, fire, are my daughters:
+     I tax not you, you elements, with unkindness;
+     I never gave you kingdom, call'd you children,
+     You owe me no subscription: then let fall
+     Your horrible pleasure; here I stand, your slave,
+     A poor, infirm, weak, and despised old man:
+     But yet I call you servile ministers,
+     That have with two pernicious daughters join'd
+     Your high engender'd battles 'gainst a head
+     So old and white as this. O! O! 'tis foul!
+
+Shakespeare, long before this, in the _Midsummer Night's Dream_, had
+noticed the resemblance between the lunatic, the lover, and the poet;
+and the partial truth that genius is allied to insanity was quite
+familiar to him. But he presents here the supplementary half-truth that
+insanity is allied to genius.
+
+He does not, however, put into the mouth of the insane Lear any such
+sublime passages as those just quoted. Lear's insanity, which destroys
+the coherence, also reduces the poetry of his imagination. What it
+stimulates is that power of moral perception and reflection which had
+already been quickened by his sufferings. This, however partial and
+however disconnectedly used, first appears, quite soon after the
+insanity has declared itself, in the idea that the naked beggar
+represents truth and reality, in contrast with those conventions,
+flatteries, and corruptions of the great world, by which Lear has so
+long been deceived and will never be deceived again:
+
+     Is man no more than this? Consider him well. Thou owest the
+     worm no silk, the beast no hide, the sheep no wool, the cat no
+     perfume. Ha! here's three on's are sophisticated: thou art the
+     thing itself.
+
+Lear regards the beggar therefore with reverence and delight, as a
+person who is in the secret of things, and he longs to question him
+about their causes. It is this same strain of thought which much later
+(IV. vi.), gaining far greater force, though the insanity has otherwise
+advanced, issues in those famous Timon-like speeches which make us
+realise the original strength of the old King's mind. And when this
+strain, on his recovery, unites with the streams of repentance and love,
+it produces that serene renunciation of the world, with its power and
+glory and resentments and revenges, which is expressed in the speech (V.
+iii.):
+
+     No, no, no, no! Come, let's away to prison:
+     We two alone will sing like birds i' the cage:
+     When thou dost ask me blessing, I'll kneel down,
+     And ask of thee forgiveness: so we'll live,
+     And pray, and sing, and tell old tales, and laugh
+     At gilded butterflies, and hear poor rogues
+     Talk of court news; and we'll talk with them too,
+     Who loses, and who wins; who's in, who's out;
+     And take upon's the mystery of things,
+     As if we were God's spies: and we'll wear out,
+     In a wall'd prison, packs and sets of great ones,
+     That ebb and flow by the moon.
+
+This is that renunciation which is at the same time a sacrifice offered
+to the gods, and on which the gods themselves throw incense; and, it may
+be, it would never have been offered but for the knowledge that came to
+Lear in his madness.
+
+I spoke of Lear's 'recovery,' but the word is too strong. The Lear of
+the Fifth Act is not indeed insane, but his mind is greatly enfeebled.
+The speech just quoted is followed by a sudden flash of the old
+passionate nature, reminding us most pathetically of Lear's efforts,
+just before his madness, to restrain his tears:
+
+                           Wipe thine eyes:
+     The good-years shall devour them, flesh and fell,
+     Ere they shall make us weep: we'll see 'em starve first.
+
+And this weakness is still more pathetically shown in the blindness of
+the old King to his position now that he and Cordelia are made
+prisoners. It is evident that Cordelia knows well what mercy her father
+is likely to receive from her sisters; that is the reason of her
+weeping. But he does not understand her tears; it never crosses his mind
+that they have anything more than imprisonment to fear. And what is that
+to them? They have made that sacrifice, and all is well:
+
+                          Have I caught thee?
+     He that parts us shall bring a brand from heaven,
+     And fire us hence like foxes.
+
+This blindness is most affecting to us, who know in what manner they
+will be parted; but it is also comforting. And we find the same mingling
+of effects in the overwhelming conclusion of the story. If to the
+reader, as to the bystanders, that scene brings one unbroken pain, it is
+not so with Lear himself. His shattered mind passes from the first
+transports of hope and despair, as he bends over Cordelia's body and
+holds the feather to her lips, into an absolute forgetfulness of the
+cause of these transports. This continues so long as he can converse
+with Kent; becomes an almost complete vacancy; and is disturbed only to
+yield, as his eyes suddenly fall again on his child's corpse, to an
+agony which at once breaks his heart. And, finally, though he is killed
+by an agony of pain, the agony in which he actually dies is one not of
+pain but of ecstasy. Suddenly, with a cry represented in the oldest text
+by a four-times repeated 'O,' he exclaims:
+
+     Do you see this? Look on her, look, her lips,
+     Look there, look there!
+
+These are the last words of Lear. He is sure, at last, that she _lives_:
+and what had he said when he was still in doubt?
+
+                     She lives! if it be so,
+     It is a chance which does redeem all sorrows
+     That ever I have felt!
+
+To us, perhaps, the knowledge that he is deceived may bring a
+culmination of pain: but, if it brings _only_ that, I believe we are
+false to Shakespeare, and it seems almost beyond question that any actor
+is false to the text who does not attempt to express, in Lear's last
+accents and gestures and look, an unbearable _joy_.[162]
+
+To dwell on the pathos of Lear's last speech would be an impertinence,
+but I may add a remark on the speech from the literary point of view. In
+the simplicity of its language, which consists almost wholly of
+monosyllables of native origin, composed in very brief sentences of the
+plainest structure, it presents an extraordinary contrast to the dying
+speech of Hamlet and the last words of Othello to the by-standers. The
+fact that Lear speaks in passion is one cause of the difference, but not
+the sole cause. The language is more than simple, it is familiar. And
+this familiarity is characteristic of Lear (except at certain moments,
+already referred to) from the time of his madness onwards, and is the
+source of the peculiarly poignant effect of some of his sentences (such
+as 'The little dogs and all....'). We feel in them the loss of power to
+sustain his royal dignity; we feel also that everything external has
+become nothingness to him, and that what remains is 'the thing itself,'
+the soul in its bare greatness. Hence also it is that two lines in this
+last speech show, better perhaps than any other passage of poetry, one
+of the qualities we have in mind when we distinguish poetry as
+'romantic.' Nothing like Hamlet's mysterious sigh 'The rest is silence,'
+nothing like Othello's memories of his life of marvel and achievement,
+was possible to Lear. Those last thoughts are romantic in their
+strangeness: Lear's five-times repeated 'Never,' in which the simplest
+and most unanswerable cry of anguish rises note by note till the heart
+breaks, is romantic in its naturalism; and to make a verse out of this
+one word required the boldness as well as the inspiration which came
+infallibly to Shakespeare at the greatest moments. But the familiarity,
+boldness and inspiration are surpassed (if that can be) by the next
+line, which shows the bodily oppression asking for bodily relief. The
+imagination that produced Lear's curse or his defiance of the storm may
+be paralleled in its kind, but where else are we to seek the imagination
+that could venture to follow that cry of 'Never' with such a phrase as
+'undo this button,' and yet could leave us on the topmost peaks of
+poetry?[163]
+
+
+2
+
+Gloster and Albany are the two neutral characters of the tragedy. The
+parallel between Lear and Gloster, already noticed, is, up to a certain
+point, so marked that it cannot possibly be accidental. Both are old
+white-haired men (III. vii. 37); both, it would seem, widowers, with
+children comparatively young. Like Lear, Gloster is tormented, and his
+life is sought, by the child whom he favours; he is tended and healed by
+the child whom he has wronged. His sufferings, like Lear's, are partly
+traceable to his own extreme folly and injustice, and, it may be added,
+to a selfish pursuit of his own pleasure.[164] His sufferings, again,
+like Lear's, purify and enlighten him: he dies a better and wiser man
+than he showed himself at first. They even learn the same lesson, and
+Gloster's repetition (noticed and blamed by Johnson) of the thought in a
+famous speech of Lear's is surely intentional.[165] And, finally,
+Gloster dies almost as Lear dies. Edgar reveals himself to him and asks
+his blessing (as Cordelia asks Lear's):
+
+                       but his flaw'd heart--
+     Alack, too weak the conflict to support--
+     'Twixt two extremes of passion, joy and grief,
+     Burst smilingly.
+
+So far, the resemblance of the two stories, and also of the ways in
+which their painful effect is modified, is curiously close. And in
+character too Gloster is, like his master, affectionate,[166] credulous
+and hasty. But otherwise he is sharply contrasted with the tragic Lear,
+who is a towering figure, every inch a king,[167] while Gloster is built
+on a much smaller scale, and has infinitely less force and fire. He is,
+indeed, a decidedly weak though good-hearted man; and, failing wholly to
+support Kent in resisting Lear's original folly and injustice,[168] he
+only gradually takes the better part. Nor is his character either very
+interesting or very distinct. He often gives one the impression of being
+wanted mainly to fill a place in the scheme of the play; and, though it
+would be easy to give a long list of his characteristics, they scarcely,
+it seems to me, compose an individual, a person whom we are sure we
+should recognise at once. If this is so, the fact is curious,
+considering how much we see and hear of him.
+
+I will add a single note. Gloster is the superstitious character of the
+drama,--the only one. He thinks much of 'these late eclipses in the sun
+and moon.' His two sons, from opposite points of view, make nothing of
+them. His easy acceptance of the calumny against Edgar is partly due to
+this weakness, and Edmund builds upon it, for an evil purpose, when he
+describes Edgar thus:
+
+     Here stood he in the dark, his sharp sword out,
+     Mumbling of wicked charms, conjuring the moon,
+     To prove's auspicious mistress.
+
+Edgar in turn builds upon it, for a good purpose, when he persuades his
+blind father that he was led to jump down Dover cliff by the temptation
+of a fiend in the form of a beggar, and was saved by a miracle:
+
+     As I stood here below, methought his eyes
+     Were two full moons; he had a thousand noses,
+     Horns whelk'd and waved like the enridged sea:
+     It was some fiend; therefore, thou happy father,
+     Think that the clearest gods, who make them honours
+     Of men's impossibilities, have preserved thee.
+
+This passage is odd in its collocation of the thousand noses and the
+clearest gods, of grotesque absurdity and extreme seriousness. Edgar
+knew that the 'fiend' was really Gloster's 'worser spirit,' and that
+'the gods' were himself. Doubtless, however--for he is the most
+religious person in the play--he thought that it _was_ the gods who,
+through him, had preserved his father; but he knew that the truth could
+only enter this superstitious mind in a superstitious form.
+
+The combination of parallelism and contrast that we observe in Lear and
+Gloster, and again in the attitude of the two brothers to their father's
+superstition, is one of many indications that in _King Lear_ Shakespeare
+was working more than usual on a basis of conscious and reflective
+ideas. Perhaps it is not by accident, then, that he makes Edgar and Lear
+preach to Gloster in precisely the same strain. Lear says to him:
+
+     If thou wilt weep my fortunes, take my eyes.
+     I know thee well enough; thy name is Gloster:
+     Thou must be patient; we came crying hither:
+     Thou know'st, the first time that we smell the air,
+     We wawl and cry. I will preach to thee: mark.
+
+Edgar's last words to him are:
+
+     What, in ill thoughts again? Men must endure
+     Their going hence, even as their coming hither:
+     Ripeness is all.
+
+Albany is merely sketched, and he is so generally neglected that a few
+words about him may be in place. He too ends a better and wiser man than
+he began. When the play opens he is, of course, only just married to
+Goneril; and the idea is, I think, that he has been bewitched by her
+fiery beauty not less than by her dowry. He is an inoffensive
+peace-loving man, and is overborne at first by his 'great love' for his
+wife and by her imperious will. He is not free from responsibility for
+the treatment which the King receives in his house; the Knight says to
+Lear, 'there's a great abatement of kindness appears as well in the
+general dependants as in _the duke himself also_ and your daughter.' But
+he takes no part in the quarrel, and doubtless speaks truly when he
+protests that he is as guiltless as ignorant of the cause of Lear's
+violent passion. When the King departs, he begins to remonstrate with
+Goneril, but shrinks in a cowardly manner, which is a trifle comical,
+from contest with her. She leaves him behind when she goes to join
+Regan, and he is not further responsible for what follows. When he hears
+of it, he is struck with horror: the scales drop from his eyes, Goneril
+becomes hateful to him, he determines to revenge Gloster's eyes. His
+position is however very difficult, as he is willing to fight against
+Cordelia in so far as her army is French, and unwilling in so far as she
+represents her father. This difficulty, and his natural inferiority to
+Edmund in force and ability, pushes him into the background; the battle
+is not won by him but by Edmund; and but for Edgar he would certainly
+have fallen a victim to the murderous plot against him. When it is
+discovered, however, he is fearless and resolute enough, beside being
+full of kind feeling towards Kent and Edgar, and of sympathetic distress
+at Gloster's death. And one would be sure that he is meant to retain
+this strength till the end, but for his last words. He has announced his
+intention of resigning, during Lear's life, the 'absolute power' which
+has come to him; and that may be right. But after Lear's death he says
+to Kent and Edgar:
+
+                         Friends of my soul, you twain
+     Rule in this realm, and the gored state sustain.
+
+If this means that he wishes to hand over his absolute power to them,
+Shakespeare's intention is certainly to mark the feebleness of a
+well-meaning but weak man. But possibly he means by 'this realm' only
+that half of Britain which had belonged to Cornwall and Regan.
+
+
+3
+
+I turn now to those two strongly contrasted groups of good and evil
+beings; and to the evil first. The members of this group are by no means
+on a level. Far the most contemptible of them is Oswald, and Kent has
+fortunately expressed our feelings towards him. Yet twice we are able to
+feel sympathy with him. Regan cannot tempt him to let her open Goneril's
+letter to Edmund; and his last thought as he dies is given to the
+fulfilment of his trust. It is to a monster that he is faithful, and he
+is faithful to her in a monstrous design. Still faithfulness is
+faithfulness, and he is not wholly worthless. Dr. Johnson says: 'I know
+not well why Shakespeare gives to Oswald, who is a mere factor of
+wickedness, so much fidelity'; but in any other tragedy this touch, so
+true to human nature, is only what we should expect. If it surprises us
+in _King Lear_, the reason is that Shakespeare, in dealing with the
+other members of the group, seems to have been less concerned than usual
+with such mingling of light with darkness, and intent rather on making
+the shadows as utterly black as a regard for truth would permit.
+
+Cornwall seems to have been a fit mate for Regan; and what worse can be
+said of him? It is a great satisfaction to think that he endured what to
+him must have seemed the dreadful disgrace of being killed by a servant.
+He shows, I believe, no redeeming trait, and he is a coward, as may be
+seen from the sudden rise in his courage when Goneril arrives at the
+castle and supports him and Regan against Lear (II. iv. 202). But as his
+cruelties are not aimed at a blood-relation, he is not, in this sense, a
+'monster,' like the remaining three.
+
+Which of these three is the least and which the most detestable there
+can surely be no question. For Edmund, not to mention other
+alleviations, is at any rate not a woman. And the differences between
+the sisters, which are distinctly marked and need not be exhibited once
+more in full, are all in favour of 'the elder and more terrible.' That
+Regan did not commit adultery, did not murder her sister or plot to
+murder her husband, did not join her name with Edmund's on the order for
+the deaths of Cordelia and Lear, and in other respects failed to take
+quite so active a part as Goneril in atrocious wickedness, is quite true
+but not in the least to her credit. It only means that she had much less
+force, courage and initiative than her sister, and for that reason is
+less formidable and more loathsome. Edmund judged right when, caring for
+neither sister but aiming at the crown, he preferred Goneril, for he
+could trust her to remove the living impediments to her desires. The
+scornful and fearless exclamation, 'An interlude!' with which she greets
+the exposure of her design, was quite beyond Regan. Her unhesitating
+suicide was perhaps no less so. She would not have condescended to the
+lie which Regan so needlessly tells to Oswald:
+
+     It was great ignorance, Gloster's eyes being out,
+     To let him live: where he arrives he moves
+     All hearts against us: Edmund, I think, is gone,
+     _In pity of his misery_, to dispatch
+     His nighted life.
+
+Her father's curse is nothing to her. She scorns even to mention the
+gods.[169] Horrible as she is, she is almost awful. But, to set against
+Regan's inferiority in power, there is nothing: she is superior only in
+a venomous meanness which is almost as hateful as her cruelty. She is
+the most hideous human being (if she is one) that Shakespeare ever drew.
+
+I have already noticed the resemblance between Edmund and Iago in one
+point; and Edmund recalls his greater forerunner also in courage,
+strength of will, address, egoism, an abnormal want of feeling, and the
+possession of a sense of humour. But here the likeness ends. Indeed a
+decided difference is observable even in the humour. Edmund is
+apparently a good deal younger than Iago. He has a lighter and more
+superficial nature, and there is a certain genuine gaiety in him which
+makes one smile not unsympathetically as one listens to his first
+soliloquy, with its cheery conclusion, so unlike Iago's references to
+the powers of darkness,
+
+     Now, gods, stand up for bastards!
+
+Even after we have witnessed his dreadful deeds, a touch of this
+sympathy is felt again when we hear his nonchalant reflections before
+the battle:
+
+     To both these sisters have I sworn my love:
+     Each jealous of the other, as the stung
+     Are of the adder. Which of them shall I take?
+     Both? one? or neither?
+
+Besides, there is nothing in Edmund of Iago's motive-hunting, and very
+little of any of the secret forces which impelled Iago. He is
+comparatively a straightforward character, as straightforward as the
+Iago of some critics. He moves wonder and horror merely because the fact
+that a man so young can have a nature so bad is a dark mystery.
+
+Edmund is an adventurer pure and simple. He acts in pursuance of a
+purpose, and, if he has any affections or dislikes, ignores them. He is
+determined to make his way, first to his brother's lands, then--as the
+prospect widens--to the crown; and he regards men and women, with their
+virtues and vices, together with the bonds of kinship, friendship, or
+allegiance, merely as hindrances or helps to his end. They are for him
+divested of all quality except their relation to this end; as
+indifferent as mathematical quantities or mere physical agents.
+
+     A credulous father and a brother noble,
+      ... I see the business,
+
+he says, as if he were talking of _x_ and _y_.
+
+     This seems a fair deserving, and must draw me
+     That which my father loses; no less than all:
+     The younger rises when the old doth fall:
+
+he meditates, as if he were considering a problem in mechanics. He
+preserves this attitude with perfect consistency until the possibility
+of attaining his end is snatched from him by death.
+
+Like the deformity of Richard, Edmund's illegitimacy furnishes, of
+course, no excuse for his villainy, but it somewhat influences our
+feelings. It is no fault of his, and yet it separates him from other
+men. He is the product of Nature--of a natural appetite asserting itself
+against the social order; and he has no recognised place within this
+order. So he devotes himself to Nature, whose law is that of the
+stronger, and who does not recognise those moral obligations which exist
+only by convention,--by 'custom' or 'the curiosity of nations.'[170]
+Practically, his attitude is that of a professional criminal. 'You tell
+me I do not belong to you,' he seems to say to society: 'very well: I
+will make my way into your treasure-house if I can. And if I have to
+take life in doing so, that is your affair.' How far he is serious in
+this attitude, and really indignant at the brand of bastardy, how far
+his indignation is a half-conscious self-excuse for his meditated
+villainy, it is hard to say; but the end shows that he is not entirely
+in earnest.
+
+As he is an adventurer, with no more ill-will to anyone than good-will,
+it is natural that, when he has lost the game, he should accept his
+failure without showing personal animosity. But he does more. He admits
+the truth of Edgar's words about the justice of the gods, and applies
+them to his own case (though the fact that he himself refers to
+fortune's wheel rather than to the gods may be significant). He shows
+too that he is not destitute of feeling; for he is touched by the story
+of his father's death, and at last 'pants for life' in the effort to do
+'some good' by saving Lear and Cordelia. There is something pathetic
+here which tempts one to dream that, if Edmund had been whole brother to
+Edgar, and had been at home during those 'nine years' when he was 'out,'
+he might have been a very different man. But perhaps his words,
+
+                   Some good I mean to do,
+     _Despite of mine own nature_,
+
+suggest rather that Shakespeare is emphasising the mysterious fact,
+commented on by Kent in the case of the three daughters of Lear, of an
+immense original difference between children of one father. Stranger
+than this emergence of better feelings, and curiously pathetic, is the
+pleasure of the dying man in the thought that he was loved by both the
+women whose corpses are almost the last sight he is to see. Perhaps, as
+we conjectured, the cause of his delay in saving Lear and Cordelia even
+after he hears of the deaths of the sisters is that he is sunk in dreamy
+reflections on his past. When he murmurs, 'Yet Edmund was beloved,' one
+is almost in danger of forgetting that he had done much more than reject
+the love of his father and half-brother. The passage is one of several
+in Shakespeare's plays where it strikes us that he is recording some
+fact about human nature with which he had actually met, and which had
+seemed to him peculiarly strange.
+
+What are we to say of the world which contains these five beings,
+Goneril, Regan, Edmund, Cornwall, Oswald? I have tried to answer this
+question in our first lecture; for in its representation of evil _King
+Lear_ differs from the other tragedies only in degree and manner. It is
+the tragedy in which evil is shown in the greatest abundance; and the
+evil characters are peculiarly repellent from their hard savagery, and
+because so little good is mingled with their evil. The effect is
+therefore more startling than elsewhere; it is even appalling. But in
+substance it is the same as elsewhere; and accordingly, although it may
+be useful to recall here our previous discussion, I will do so only by
+the briefest statement.
+
+On the one hand we see a world which generates terrible evil in
+profusion. Further, the beings in whom this evil appears at its
+strongest are able, to a certain extent, to thrive. They are not
+unhappy, and they have power to spread misery and destruction around
+them. All this is undeniable fact.
+
+On the other hand this evil is _merely_ destructive: it founds nothing,
+and seems capable of existing only on foundations laid by its opposite.
+It is also self-destructive: it sets these beings at enmity; they can
+scarcely unite against a common and pressing danger; if it were averted
+they would be at each other's throats in a moment; the sisters do not
+even wait till it is past. Finally, these beings, all five of them, are
+dead a few weeks after we see them first; three at least die young; the
+outburst of their evil is fatal to them. These also are undeniable
+facts; and, in face of them, it seems odd to describe _King Lear_ as 'a
+play in which the wicked prosper' (Johnson).
+
+Thus the world in which evil appears seems to be at heart unfriendly to
+it. And this impression is confirmed by the fact that the convulsion of
+this world is due to evil, mainly in the worst forms here considered,
+partly in the milder forms which we call the errors or defects of the
+better characters. Good, in the widest sense, seems thus to be the
+principle of life and health in the world; evil, at least in these worst
+forms, to be a poison. The world reacts against it violently, and, in
+the struggle to expel it, is driven to devastate itself.
+
+If we ask why the world should generate that which convulses and wastes
+it, the tragedy gives no answer, and we are trying to go beyond tragedy
+in seeking one. But the world, in this tragic picture, is convulsed by
+evil, and rejects it.
+
+
+4
+
+And if here there is 'very Night herself,' she comes 'with stars in her
+raiment.' Cordelia, Kent, Edgar, the Fool--these form a group not less
+remarkable than that which we have just left. There is in the world of
+_King Lear_ the same abundance of extreme good as of extreme evil. It
+generates in profusion self-less devotion and unconquerable love. And
+the strange thing is that neither Shakespeare nor we are surprised. We
+approve these characters, admire them, love them; but we feel no
+mystery. We do not ask in bewilderment, Is there any cause in nature
+that makes these kind hearts? Such hardened optimists are we, and
+Shakespeare,--and those who find the darkness of revelation in a tragedy
+which reveals Cordelia. Yet surely, if we condemn the universe for
+Cordelia's death, we ought also to remember that it gave her birth. The
+fact that Socrates was executed does not remove the fact that he lived,
+and the inference thence to be drawn about the world that produced him.
+
+Of these four characters Edgar excites the least enthusiasm, but he is
+the one whose development is the most marked. His behaviour in the early
+part of the play, granted that it is not too improbable, is so foolish
+as to provoke one. But he learns by experience, and becomes the most
+capable person in the story, without losing any of his purity and
+nobility of mind. There remain in him, however, touches which a little
+chill one's feeling for him.
+
+     The gods are just, and of our pleasant vices
+     Make instruments to plague us:
+     The dark and vicious place where thee he got
+     Cost him his eyes:
+
+--one wishes he had not said to his dying brother those words about
+their dead father. 'The gods are just' would have been enough.[171] It
+may be suggested that Shakespeare merely wished to introduce this moral
+somehow, and did not mean the speech to be characteristic of the
+speaker. But I doubt this: he might well have delivered it through
+Albany, if he was determined to deliver it. This trait in Edgar _is_
+characteristic. It seems to be connected with his pronounced and
+conscious religiousness. He interprets everything religiously, and is
+speaking here from an intense conviction which overrides personal
+feelings. With this religiousness, on the other side, is connected his
+cheerful and confident endurance, and his practical helpfulness and
+resource. He never thinks of despairing; in the worst circumstances he
+is sure there is something to be done to make things better. And he is
+sure of this, not only from temperament, but from faith in 'the clearest
+gods.' He is the man on whom we are to rely at the end for the recovery
+and welfare of the state: and we do rely on him.
+
+I spoke of his temperament. There is in Edgar, with much else that is
+fine, something of that buoyancy of spirit which charms us in Imogen.
+Nothing can subdue in him the feeling that life is sweet and must be
+cherished. At his worst, misconstrued, contemned, exiled, under sentence
+of death, 'the lowest and most dejected thing of fortune,' he keeps his
+head erect. The inextinguishable spirit of youth and delight is in him;
+he _embraces_ the unsubstantial air which has blown him to the worst;
+for him 'the worst returns to laughter.'[172] 'Bear free and patient
+thoughts,' he says to his father. His own thoughts are more than
+patient, they are 'free,' even joyous, in spite of the tender sympathies
+which strive in vain to overwhelm him. This ability to feel and offer
+great sympathy with distress, without losing through the sympathy any
+elasticity or strength, is a noble quality, sometimes found in souls
+like Edgar's, naturally buoyant and also religious. It may even be
+characteristic of him that, when Lear is sinking down in death, he tries
+to rouse him and bring him back to life. 'Look up, my lord!' he cries.
+It is Kent who feels that
+
+                       he hates him,
+     That would upon the rack of this tough world
+     Stretch him out longer.
+
+Kent is one of the best-loved characters in Shakespeare. He is beloved
+for his own sake, and also for the sake of Cordelia and of Lear. We are
+grateful to him because he stands up for Cordelia, and because, when she
+is out of sight, he constantly keeps her in our minds. And how well
+these two love each other we see when they meet. Yet it is not Cordelia
+who is dearest to Kent. His love for Lear is the passion of his life: it
+_is_ his life. At the beginning he braves Lear's wrath even more for
+Lear's sake than Cordelia's.[173] At the end he seems to realise
+Cordelia's death only as it is reflected in Lear's agony. Nor does he
+merely love his master passionately, as Cordelia loves her father. That
+word 'master,' and Kent's appeal to the 'authority' he saw in the old
+King's face, are significant. He belongs to Lear, body and soul, as a
+dog does to his master and god. The King is not to him old, wayward,
+unreasonable, piteous: he is still terrible, grand, the king of men.
+Through his eyes we see the Lear of Lear's prime, whom Cordelia never
+saw. Kent never forgets this Lear. In the Storm-scenes, even after the
+King becomes insane, Kent never addresses him without the old terms of
+respect, 'your grace,' 'my lord,' 'sir.' How characteristic it is that
+in the scene of Lear's recovery Kent speaks to him but once: it is when
+the King asks 'Am I in France?' and he answers 'In your own kingdom,
+sir.'
+
+In acting the part of a blunt and eccentric serving-man Kent retains
+much of his natural character. The eccentricity seems to be put on, but
+the plainness which gets him set in the stocks is but an exaggeration of
+his plainness in the opening scene, and Shakespeare certainly meant him
+for one of those characters whom we love none the less for their
+defects. He is hot and rash; noble but far from skilful in his
+resistance to the King; he might well have chosen wiser words to gain
+his point. But, as he himself says, he has more man than wit about him.
+He shows this again when he rejoins Lear as a servant, for he at once
+brings the quarrel with Goneril to a head; and, later, by falling upon
+Oswald, whom he so detests that he cannot keep his hands off him, he
+provides Regan and Cornwall with a pretext for their inhospitality. One
+has not the heart to wish him different, but he illustrates the truth
+that to run one's head unselfishly against a wall is not the best way to
+help one's friends.
+
+One fact about Kent is often overlooked. He is an old man. He tells Lear
+that he is eight and forty, but it is clear that he is much older; not
+so old as his master, who was 'four-score and upward' and whom he 'loved
+as his father,' but, one may suppose, three-score and upward. From the
+first scene we get this impression, and in the scene with Oswald it is
+repeatedly confirmed. His beard is grey. 'Ancient ruffian,' 'old
+fellow,' 'you stubborn ancient knave, you reverent braggart'--these are
+some of the expressions applied to him. 'Sir,' he says to Cornwall, 'I
+am too old to learn.' If his age is not remembered, we fail to realise
+the full beauty of his thoughtlessness of himself, his incessant care of
+the King, his light-hearted indifference to fortune or fate.[174] We
+lose also some of the naturalness and pathos of his feeling that his
+task is nearly done. Even at the end of the Fourth Act we find him
+saying,
+
+     My point and period will be throughly wrought
+     Or well or ill, as this day's battle's fought.
+
+His heart is ready to break when he falls with his strong arms about
+Edgar's neck; bellows out as he'd burst heaven (how like him!);
+
+                     threw him on my father,
+     Told the most piteous tale of Lear and him
+     That ever ear received; which in recounting
+     His grief grew puissant, and the strings of life
+     Began to crack. Twice then the trumpet sounded,
+     And there I left him tranced;
+
+and a little after, when he enters, we hear the sound of death in his
+voice:
+
+                         I am come
+     To bid my king and master aye goodnight.
+
+This desire possesses him wholly. When the bodies of Goneril and Regan
+are brought in he asks merely, 'Alack, why thus?' How can he care? He is
+waiting for one thing alone. He cannot but yearn for recognition, cannot
+but beg for it even when Lear is bending over the body of Cordelia; and
+even in that scene of unmatched pathos we feel a sharp pang at his
+failure to receive it. It is of himself he is speaking, perhaps, when he
+murmurs, as his master dies, 'Break, heart, I prithee, break!' He puts
+aside Albany's invitation to take part in the government; his task is
+over:
+
+     I have a journey, sir, shortly to go:
+     My master calls me; I must not say no.
+
+Kent in his devotion, his self-effacement, his cheerful stoicism, his
+desire to follow his dead lord, has been well likened to Horatio. But
+Horatio is not old; nor is he hot-headed; and though he is stoical he is
+also religious. Kent, as compared with him and with Edgar, is not so. He
+has not Edgar's ever-present faith in the 'clearest gods.' He refers to
+them, in fact, less often than to fortune or the stars. He lives mainly
+by the love in his own heart.[175]
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The theatrical fool or clown (we need not distinguish them here) was a
+sore trial to the cultured poet and spectator in Shakespeare's day. He
+came down from the Morality plays, and was beloved of the groundlings.
+His antics, his songs, his dances, his jests, too often unclean,
+delighted them, and did something to make the drama, what the vulgar,
+poor or rich, like it to be, a variety entertainment. Even if he
+confined himself to what was set down for him, he often disturbed the
+dramatic unity of the piece; and the temptation to 'gag' was too strong
+for him to resist. Shakespeare makes Hamlet object to it in emphatic
+terms. The more learned critics and poets went further and would have
+abolished the fool altogether. His part declines as the drama advances,
+diminishing markedly at the end of the sixteenth century. Jonson and
+Massinger exclude him. Shakespeare used him--we know to what effect--as
+he used all the other popular elements of the drama; but he abstained
+from introducing him into the Roman plays,[176] and there is no fool in
+the last of the pure tragedies, _Macbeth_.
+
+But the Fool is one of Shakespeare's triumphs in _King Lear_. Imagine
+the tragedy without him, and you hardly know it. To remove him would
+spoil its harmony, as the harmony of a picture would be spoiled if one
+of the colours were extracted. One can almost imagine that Shakespeare,
+going home from an evening at the Mermaid, where he had listened to
+Jonson fulminating against fools in general and perhaps criticising the
+Clown in _Twelfth Night_ in particular, had said to himself: 'Come, my
+friends, I will show you once for all that the mischief is in you, and
+not in the fool or the audience. I will have a fool in the most tragic
+of my tragedies. He shall not play a little part. He shall keep from
+first to last the company in which you most object to see him, the
+company of a king. Instead of amusing the king's idle hours, he shall
+stand by him in the very tempest and whirlwind of passion. Before I have
+done you shall confess, between laughter and tears, that he is of the
+very essence of life, that you have known him all your days though you
+never recognised him till now, and that you would as soon go without
+Hamlet as miss him.'
+
+The Fool in _King Lear_ has been so favourite a subject with good
+critics that I will confine myself to one or two points on which a
+difference of opinion is possible. To suppose that the Fool is, like
+many a domestic fool at that time, a perfectly sane man pretending to be
+half-witted, is surely a most prosaic blunder. There is no difficulty in
+imagining that, being slightly touched in the brain, and holding the
+office of fool, he performs the duties of his office intentionally as
+well as involuntarily: it is evident that he does so. But unless we
+suppose that he _is_ touched in the brain we lose half the effect of
+his appearance in the Storm-scenes. The effect of those scenes (to state
+the matter as plainly as possible) depends largely on the presence of
+three characters, and on the affinities and contrasts between them; on
+our perception that the differences of station in King, Fool, and
+beggar-noble, are levelled by one blast of calamity; but also on our
+perception of the differences between these three in one respect,--viz.
+in regard to the peculiar affliction of insanity. The insanity of the
+King differs widely in its nature from that of the Fool, and that of the
+Fool from that of the beggar. But the insanity of the King differs from
+that of the beggar not only in its nature, but also in the fact that one
+is real and the other simply a pretence. Are we to suppose then that the
+insanity of the third character, the Fool, is, in this respect, a mere
+repetition of that of the second, the beggar,--that it too is _mere_
+pretence? To suppose this is not only to impoverish miserably the
+impression made by the trio as a whole, it is also to diminish the
+heroic and pathetic effect of the character of the Fool. For his heroism
+consists largely in this, that his efforts to outjest his master's
+injuries are the efforts of a being to whom a responsible and consistent
+course of action, nay even a responsible use of language, is at the best
+of times difficult, and from whom it is never at the best of times
+expected. It is a heroism something like that of Lear himself in his
+endeavour to learn patience at the age of eighty. But arguments against
+the idea that the Fool is wholly sane are either needless or futile; for
+in the end they are appeals to the perception that this idea almost
+destroys the poetry of the character.
+
+This is not the case with another question, the question whether the
+Fool is a man or a boy. Here the evidence and the grounds for discussion
+are more tangible. He is frequently addressed as 'boy.' This is not
+decisive; but Lear's first words to him, 'How now, my pretty knave, how
+dost thou?' are difficult to reconcile with the idea of his being a man,
+and the use of this phrase on his first entrance may show Shakespeare's
+desire to prevent any mistake on the point. As a boy, too, he would be
+more strongly contrasted in the Storm-scenes with Edgar as well as with
+Lear; his faithfulness and courage would be even more heroic and
+touching; his devotion to Cordelia, and the consequent bitterness of
+some of his speeches to Lear, would be even more natural. Nor does he
+seem to show a knowledge of the world impossible to a quick-witted
+though not whole-witted lad who had lived at Court. The only serious
+obstacle to this view, I think, is the fact that he is not known to have
+been represented as a boy or youth till Macready produced _King
+Lear_.[177]
+
+But even if this obstacle were serious and the Fool were imagined as a
+grown man, we may still insist that he must also be imagined as a timid,
+delicate and frail being, who on that account and from the expression of
+his face has a boyish look.[178] He pines away when Cordelia goes to
+France. Though he takes great liberties with his master he is frightened
+by Goneril, and becomes quite silent when the quarrel rises high. In the
+terrible scene between Lear and his two daughters and Cornwall
+(II. iv. 129-289), he says not a word; we have almost forgotten
+his presence when, at the topmost pitch of passion, Lear suddenly turns
+to him from the hateful faces that encompass him:
+
+                        You think I'll weep;
+     No, I'll not weep:
+     I have full cause of weeping; but this heart
+     Shall break into a hundred thousand flaws
+     Or ere I'll weep. O fool, I shall go mad.
+
+From the beginning of the Storm-scenes, though he thinks of his master
+alone, we perceive from his words that the cold and rain are almost more
+than he can bear. His childishness comes home to us when he runs out of
+the hovel, terrified by the madman and crying out to the King 'Help me,
+help me,' and the good Kent takes him by the hand and draws him to his
+side. A little later he exclaims, 'This cold night will turn us all to
+fools and madmen'; and almost from that point he leaves the King to
+Edgar, speaking only once again in the remaining hundred lines of the
+scene. In the shelter of the 'farm-house' (III. vi.) he revives, and
+resumes his office of love; but I think that critic is right who
+considers his last words significant. 'We'll go to supper i' the
+morning,' says Lear; and the Fool answers 'And I'll go to bed at noon,'
+as though he felt he had taken his death. When, a little later, the King
+is being carried away on a litter, the Fool sits idle. He is so benumbed
+and worn out that he scarcely notices what is going on. Kent has to
+rouse him with the words,
+
+              Come, help to bear thy master,
+     Thou must not stay behind.
+
+We know no more. For the famous exclamation 'And my poor fool is hanged'
+unquestionably refers to Cordelia; and even if it is intended to show a
+confused association in Lear's mind between his child and the Fool who
+so loved her (as a very old man may confuse two of his children), still
+it tells us nothing of the Fool's fate. It seems strange indeed that
+Shakespeare should have left us thus in ignorance. But we have seen that
+there are many marks of haste and carelessness in _King Lear_; and it
+may also be observed that, if the poet imagined the Fool dying on the
+way to Dover of the effects of that night upon the heath, he could
+perhaps convey this idea to the audience by instructing the actor who
+took the part to show, as he left the stage for the last time, the
+recognised tokens of approaching death.[179]
+
+Something has now been said of the four characters, Lear, Edgar, Kent
+and the Fool, who are together in the storm upon the heath. I have made
+no attempt to analyse the whole effect of these scenes, but one remark
+may be added. These scenes, as we observed, suggest the idea of a
+convulsion in which Nature herself joins with the forces of evil in man
+to overpower the weak; and they are thus one of the main sources of the
+more terrible impressions produced by _King Lear_. But they have at the
+same time an effect of a totally different kind, because in them are
+exhibited also the strength and the beauty of Lear's nature, and, in
+Kent and the Fool and Edgar, the ideal of faithful devoted love. Hence
+from the beginning to the end of these scenes we have, mingled with pain
+and awe and a sense of man's infirmity, an equally strong feeling of his
+greatness; and this becomes at times even an exulting sense of the
+powerlessness of outward calamity or the malice of others against his
+soul. And this is one reason why imagination and emotion are never here
+pressed painfully inward, as in the scenes between Lear and his
+daughters, but are liberated and dilated.
+
+
+5
+
+The character of Cordelia is not a masterpiece of invention or subtlety
+like that of Cleopatra; yet in its own way it is a creation as
+wonderful. Cordelia appears in only four of the twenty-six scenes of
+_King Lear_; she speaks--it is hard to believe it--scarcely more than a
+hundred lines; and yet no character in Shakespeare is more absolutely
+individual or more ineffaceably stamped on the memory of his readers.
+There is a harmony, strange but perhaps the result of intention, between
+the character itself and this reserved or parsimonious method of
+depicting it. An expressiveness almost inexhaustible gained through
+paucity of expression; the suggestion of infinite wealth and beauty
+conveyed by the very refusal to reveal this beauty in expansive
+speech--this is at once the nature of Cordelia herself and the chief
+characteristic of Shakespeare's art in representing it. Perhaps it is
+not fanciful to find a parallel in his drawing of a person very
+different, Hamlet. It was natural to Hamlet to examine himself minutely,
+to discuss himself at large, and yet to remain a mystery to himself; and
+Shakespeare's method of drawing the character answers to it; it is
+extremely detailed and searching, and yet its effect is to enhance the
+sense of mystery. The results in the two cases differ correspondingly.
+No one hesitates to enlarge upon Hamlet, who speaks of himself so much;
+but to use many words about Cordelia seems to be a kind of impiety.
+
+I am obliged to speak of her chiefly because the devotion she inspires
+almost inevitably obscures her part in the tragedy. This devotion is
+composed, so to speak, of two contrary elements, reverence and pity. The
+first, because Cordelia's is a higher nature than that of most even of
+Shakespeare's heroines. With the tenderness of Viola or Desdemona she
+unites something of the resolution, power, and dignity of Hermione, and
+reminds us sometimes of Helena, sometimes of Isabella, though she has
+none of the traits which prevent Isabella from winning our hearts. Her
+assertion of truth and right, her allegiance to them, even the touch of
+severity that accompanies it, instead of compelling mere respect or
+admiration, become adorable in a nature so loving as Cordelia's. She is
+a thing enskyed and sainted, and yet we feel no incongruity in the love
+of the King of France for her, as we do in the love of the Duke for
+Isabella.
+
+But with this reverence or worship is combined in the reader's mind a
+passion of championship, of pity, even of protecting pity. She is so
+deeply wronged, and she appears, for all her strength, so defenceless.
+We think of her as unable to speak for herself. We think of her as quite
+young, and as slight and small.[180] 'Her voice was ever soft, gentle,
+and low'; ever so, whether the tone was that of resolution, or rebuke,
+or love.[181] Of all Shakespeare's heroines she knew least of joy. She
+grew up with Goneril and Regan for sisters. Even her love for her father
+must have been mingled with pain and anxiety. She must early have
+learned to school and repress emotion. She never knew the bliss of young
+love: there is no trace of such love for the King of France. She had
+knowingly to wound most deeply the being dearest to her. He cast her
+off; and, after suffering an agony for him, and before she could see him
+safe in death, she was brutally murdered. We have to thank the poet for
+passing lightly over the circumstances of her death. We do not think of
+them. Her image comes before us calm and bright and still.
+
+The memory of Cordelia thus becomes detached in a manner from the action
+of the drama. The reader refuses to admit into it any idea of
+imperfection, and is outraged when any share in her father's sufferings
+is attributed to the part she plays in the opening scene. Because she
+was deeply wronged he is ready to insist that she was wholly right. He
+refuses, that is, to take the tragic point of view, and, when it is
+taken, he imagines that Cordelia is being attacked, or is being declared
+to have 'deserved' all that befell her. But Shakespeare's was the tragic
+point of view. He exhibits in the opening scene a situation tragic for
+Cordelia as well as for Lear. At a moment where terrible issues join,
+Fate makes on her the one demand which she is unable to meet. As I have
+already remarked in speaking of Desdemona, it was a demand which other
+heroines of Shakespeare could have met. Without loss of self-respect,
+and refusing even to appear to compete for a reward, they could have
+made the unreasonable old King feel that he was fondly loved. Cordelia
+cannot, because she is Cordelia. And so she is not merely rejected and
+banished, but her father is left to the mercies of her sisters. And the
+cause of her failure--a failure a thousand-fold redeemed--is a compound
+in which imperfection appears so intimately mingled with the noblest
+qualities that--if we are true to Shakespeare--we do not think either of
+justifying her or of blaming her: we feel simply the tragic emotions of
+fear and pity.
+
+In this failure a large part is played by that obvious characteristic to
+which I have already referred. Cordelia is not, indeed, always
+tongue-tied, as several passages in the drama, and even in this scene,
+clearly show. But tender emotion, and especially a tender love for the
+person to whom she has to speak, makes her dumb. Her love, as she says,
+is more ponderous than her tongue:[182]
+
+                   Unhappy that I am, I cannot heave
+     My heart into my mouth.
+
+This expressive word 'heave' is repeated in the passage which describes
+her reception of Kent's letter:
+
+     Faith, once or twice she heaved the name of 'Father'
+     Pantingly forth, as if it press'd her heart:
+
+two or three broken ejaculations escape her lips, and she 'starts' away
+'to deal with grief alone.' The same trait reappears with an ineffable
+beauty in the stifled repetitions with which she attempts to answer her
+father in the moment of his restoration:
+
+     _Lear._                 Do not laugh at me;
+              For, as I am a man, I think this lady
+              To be my child Cordelia.
+
+     _Cor._                             And so I am, I am.
+
+     _Lear._  Be your tears wet? yes, faith. I pray, weep not;
+              If you have poison for me, I will drink it.
+              I know you do not love me; for your sisters
+              Have, as I do remember, done me wrong:
+              You have some cause, they have not.
+
+     _Cor._                             No cause, no cause.
+
+We see this trait for the last time, marked by Shakespeare with a
+decision clearly intentional, in her inability to answer one syllable to
+the last words we hear her father speak to her:
+
+     No, no, no, no! Come, let's away to prison:
+     We two alone will sing like birds i' the cage:
+     When thou dost ask me blessing, I'll kneel down,
+     And ask of thee forgiveness: so we'll live,
+     And pray, and sing, and tell old tales, and laugh
+     At gilded butterflies....
+
+She stands and weeps, and goes out with him silent. And we see her alive
+no more.
+
+But (I am forced to dwell on the point, because I am sure to slur it
+over is to be false to Shakespeare) this dumbness of love was not the
+sole source of misunderstanding. If this had been all, even Lear could
+have seen the love in Cordelia's eyes when, to his question 'What can
+you say to draw a third more opulent than your sisters?' she answered
+'Nothing.' But it did not shine there. She is not merely silent, nor
+does she merely answer 'Nothing.' She tells him that she loves him
+'according to her bond, nor more nor less'; and his answer,
+
+     How now, Cordelia! mend your speech a little,
+     Lest it may mar your fortunes,
+
+so intensifies her horror at the hypocrisy of her sisters that she
+replies,
+
+                             Good my Lord,
+     You have begot me, bred me, loved me: I
+     Return those duties back as are right fit,
+     Obey you, love you, and most honour you.
+     Why have my sisters husbands, if they say
+     They love you all? Haply, when I shall wed,
+     That lord whose hand must take my plight shall carry
+     Half my love with him, half my care and duty:
+     Sure, I shall never marry like my sisters,
+     To love my father all.
+
+What words for the ear of an old father, unreasonable, despotic, but
+fondly loving, indecent in his own expressions of preference, and blind
+to the indecency of his appeal for protestations of fondness! Blank
+astonishment, anger, wounded love, contend within him; but for the
+moment he restrains himself and asks,
+
+     But goes thy heart with this?
+
+Imagine Imogen's reply! But Cordelia answers,
+
+                       Ay, good my lord.
+
+     _Lear._  So young, and so untender?
+
+     _Cor._   So young, my lord, and true.
+
+Yes, 'heavenly true.' But truth is not the only good in the world, nor
+is the obligation to tell truth the only obligation. The matter here was
+to keep it inviolate, but also to preserve a father. And even if truth
+_were_ the one and only obligation, to tell much less than truth is not
+to tell it. And Cordelia's speech not only tells much less than truth
+about her love, it actually perverts the truth when it implies that to
+give love to a husband is to take it from a father. There surely never
+was a more unhappy speech.
+
+When Isabella goes to plead with Angelo for her brother's life, her
+horror of her brother's sin is so intense, and her perception of the
+justice of Angelo's reasons for refusing her is so clear and keen, that
+she is ready to abandon her appeal before it is well begun; she would
+actually do so but that the warm-hearted profligate Lucio reproaches her
+for her coldness and urges her on. Cordelia's hatred of hypocrisy and of
+the faintest appearance of mercenary professions reminds us of
+Isabella's hatred of impurity; but Cordelia's position is infinitely
+more difficult, and on the other hand there is mingled with her hatred a
+touch of personal antagonism and of pride. Lear's words,
+
+     Let pride, which she calls plainness, marry her![183]
+
+are monstrously unjust, but they contain one grain of truth; and indeed
+it was scarcely possible that a nature so strong as Cordelia's, and with
+so keen a sense of dignity, should feel here nothing whatever of pride
+and resentment. This side of her character is emphatically shown in her
+language to her sisters in the first scene--language perfectly just, but
+little adapted to soften their hearts towards their father--and again in
+the very last words we hear her speak. She and her father are brought
+in, prisoners, to the enemy's camp; but she sees only Edmund, not those
+'greater' ones on whose pleasure hangs her father's fate and her own.
+For her own she is little concerned; she knows how to meet adversity:
+
+     For thee, oppressed king, am I cast down;
+     Myself could else out-frown false fortune's frown.
+
+Yes, that is how she would meet fortune, frowning it down, even as
+Goneril would have met it; nor, if her father had been already dead,
+would there have been any great improbability in the false story that
+was to be told of her death, that, like Goneril, she 'fordid herself.'
+Then, after those austere words about fortune, she suddenly asks,
+
+     Shall we not see these daughters and these sisters?
+
+Strange last words for us to hear from a being so worshipped and
+beloved; but how characteristic! Their tone is unmistakable. I doubt if
+she could have brought herself to plead with her sisters for her
+father's life; and if she had attempted the task, she would have
+performed it but ill. Nor is our feeling towards her altered one whit by
+that. But what is true of Kent and the Fool[184] is, in its measure,
+true of her. Any one of them would gladly have died a hundred deaths to
+help King Lear; and they do help his soul; but they harm his cause. They
+are all involved in tragedy.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Why does Cordelia die? I suppose no reader ever failed to ask that
+question, and to ask it with something more than pain,--to ask it, if
+only for a moment, in bewilderment or dismay, and even perhaps in tones
+of protest. These feelings are probably evoked more strongly here than
+at the death of any other notable character in Shakespeare; and it may
+sound a wilful paradox to assert that the slightest element of
+reconciliation is mingled with them or succeeds them. Yet it seems to me
+indubitable that such an element is present, though difficult to make
+out with certainty what it is or whence it proceeds. And I will try to
+make this out, and to state it methodically.
+
+(_a_) It is not due in any perceptible degree to the fact, which we have
+just been examining, that Cordelia through her tragic imperfection
+contributes something to the conflict and catastrophe; and I drew
+attention to that imperfection without any view to our present problem.
+The critics who emphasise it at this point in the drama are surely
+untrue to Shakespeare's mind; and still more completely astray are those
+who lay stress on the idea that Cordelia, in bringing a foreign army to
+help her father, was guilty of treason to her country. When she dies we
+regard her, practically speaking, simply as we regard Ophelia or
+Desdemona, as an innocent victim swept away in the convulsion caused by
+the error or guilt of others.
+
+(_b_) Now this destruction of the good through the evil of others is one
+of the tragic facts of life, and no one can object to the use of it,
+within certain limits, in tragic art. And, further, those who because of
+it declaim against the nature of things, declaim without thinking. It is
+obviously the other side of the fact that the effects of good spread far
+and wide beyond the doer of good; and we should ask ourselves whether we
+really could wish (supposing it conceivable) to see this double-sided
+fact abolished. Nevertheless the touch of reconciliation that we feel in
+contemplating the death of Cordelia is not due, or is due only in some
+slight degree, to a perception that the event is true to life,
+admissible in tragedy, and a case of a law which we cannot seriously
+desire to see abrogated.
+
+(_c_) What then is this feeling, and whence does it come? I believe we
+shall find that it is a feeling not confined to _King Lear_, but present
+at the close of other tragedies; and that the reason why it has an
+exceptional tone or force at the close of _King Lear_, lies in that very
+peculiarity of the close which also--at least for the moment--excites
+bewilderment, dismay, or protest. The feeling I mean is the impression
+that the heroic being, though in one sense and outwardly he has failed,
+is yet in another sense superior to the world in which he appears; is,
+in some way which we do not seek to define, untouched by the doom that
+overtakes him; and is rather set free from life than deprived of it.
+Some such feeling as this--some feeling which, from this description of
+it, may be recognised as their own even by those who would dissent from
+the description--we surely have in various degrees at the deaths of
+Hamlet and Othello and Lear, and of Antony and Cleopatra and
+Coriolanus.[185] It accompanies the more prominent tragic impressions,
+and, regarded alone, could hardly be called tragic. For it seems to
+imply (though we are probably quite unconscious of the implication) an
+idea which, if developed, would transform the tragic view of things. It
+implies that the tragic world, if taken as it is presented, with all its
+error, guilt, failure, woe and waste, is no final reality, but only a
+part of reality taken for the whole, and, when so taken, illusive; and
+that if we could see the whole, and the tragic facts in their true place
+in it, we should find them, not abolished, of course, but so transmuted
+that they had ceased to be strictly tragic,--find, perhaps, the
+suffering and death counting for little or nothing, the greatness of the
+soul for much or all, and the heroic spirit, in spite of failure, nearer
+to the heart of things than the smaller, more circumspect, and perhaps
+even 'better' beings who survived the catastrophe. The feeling which I
+have tried to describe, as accompanying the more obvious tragic emotions
+at the deaths of heroes, corresponds with some such idea as this.[186]
+
+Now this feeling is evoked with a quite exceptional strength by the
+death of Cordelia.[187] It is not due to the perception that she, like
+Lear, has attained through suffering; we know that she had suffered and
+attained in his days of prosperity. It is simply the feeling that what
+happens to such a being does not matter; all that matters is what she
+is. How this can be when, for anything the tragedy tells us, she has
+ceased to exist, we do not ask; but the tragedy itself makes us feel
+that somehow it is so. And the force with which this impression is
+conveyed depends largely on the very fact which excites our bewilderment
+and protest, that her death, following on the deaths of all the evil
+characters, and brought about by an unexplained delay in Edmund's effort
+to save her, comes on us, not as an inevitable conclusion to the
+sequence of events, but as the sudden stroke of mere fate or chance. The
+force of the impression, that is to say, depends on the very violence of
+the contrast between the outward and the inward, Cordelia's death and
+Cordelia's soul. The more unmotived, unmerited, senseless, monstrous,
+her fate, the more do we feel that it does not concern her. The
+extremity of the disproportion between prosperity and goodness first
+shocks us, and then flashes on us the conviction that our whole attitude
+in asking or expecting that goodness should be prosperous is wrong;
+that, if only we could see things as they are, we should see that the
+outward is nothing and the inward is all.
+
+And some such thought as this (which, to bring it clearly out, I have
+stated, and still state, in a form both exaggerated and much too
+explicit) is really present through the whole play. Whether Shakespeare
+knew it or not, it is present. I might almost say that the 'moral' of
+_King Lear_ is presented in the irony of this collocation:
+
+           _Albany._ The gods defend her!
+     _Enter Lear with Cordelia dead in his arms._
+
+The 'gods,' it seems, do _not_ show their approval by 'defending' their
+own from adversity or death, or by giving them power and prosperity.
+These, on the contrary, are worthless, or worse; it is not on them, but
+on the renunciation of them, that the gods throw incense. They breed
+lust, pride, hardness of heart, the insolence of office, cruelty, scorn,
+hypocrisy, contention, war, murder, self-destruction. The whole story
+beats this indictment of prosperity into the brain. Lear's great
+speeches in his madness proclaim it like the curses of Timon on life and
+man. But here, as in _Timon_, the poor and humble are, almost without
+exception, sound and sweet at heart, faithful and pitiful.[188] And here
+adversity, to the blessed in spirit, is blessed. It wins fragrance from
+the crushed flower. It melts in aged hearts sympathies which prosperity
+had frozen. It purges the soul's sight by blinding that of the
+eyes.[189] Throughout that stupendous Third Act the good are seen
+growing better through suffering, and the bad worse through success. The
+warm castle is a room in hell, the storm-swept heath a sanctuary. The
+judgment of this world is a lie; its goods, which we covet, corrupt us;
+its ills, which break our bodies, set our souls free;
+
+     Our means secure us,[190] and our mere defects
+     Prove our commodities.
+
+Let us renounce the world, hate it, and lose it gladly. The only real
+thing in it is the soul, with its courage, patience, devotion. And
+nothing outward can touch that.
+
+This, if we like to use the word, is Shakespeare's 'pessimism' in _King
+Lear_. As we have seen, it is not by any means the whole spirit of the
+tragedy, which presents the world as a place where heavenly good grows
+side by side with evil, where extreme evil cannot long endure, and where
+all that survives the storm is good, if not great. But still this strain
+of thought, to which the world appears as the kingdom of evil and
+therefore worthless, is in the tragedy, and may well be the record of
+many hours of exasperated feeling and troubled brooding. Pursued further
+and allowed to dominate, it would destroy the tragedy; for it is
+necessary to tragedy that we should feel that suffering and death do
+matter greatly, and that happiness and life are not to be renounced as
+worthless. Pursued further, again, it leads to the idea that the world,
+in that obvious appearance of it which tragedy cannot dissolve without
+dissolving itself, is illusive. And its tendency towards this idea is
+traceable in _King Lear_, in the shape of the notion that this 'great
+world' is transitory, or 'will wear out to nought' like the little world
+called 'man' (IV. vi. 137), or that humanity will destroy itself.[191]
+In later days, in the drama that was probably Shakespeare's last
+complete work, the _Tempest_, this notion of the transitoriness of
+things appears, side by side with the simpler feeling that man's life is
+an illusion or dream, in some of the most famous lines he ever wrote:
+
+     Our revels now are ended. These our actors,
+     As I foretold you, were all spirits and
+     Are melted into air, into thin air:
+     And, like the baseless fabric of this vision,
+     The cloud-capp'd towers, the gorgeous palaces,
+     The solemn temples, the great globe itself,
+     Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve
+     And, like this insubstantial pageant faded,
+     Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff
+     As dreams are made on, and our little life
+     Is rounded with a sleep.
+
+These lines, detached from their context, are familiar to everyone; but,
+in the _Tempest_, they are dramatic as well as poetical. The sudden
+emergence of the thought expressed in them has a specific and most
+significant cause; and as I have not seen it remarked I will point it
+out.
+
+Prospero, by means of his spirits, has been exhibiting to Ferdinand and
+Miranda a masque in which goddesses appear, and which is so majestic and
+harmonious that to the young man, standing beside such a father and such
+a wife, the place seems Paradise,--as perhaps the world once seemed to
+Shakespeare. Then, at the bidding of Iris, there begins a dance of
+Nymphs with Reapers, sunburnt, weary of their August labour, but now in
+their holiday garb. But, as this is nearing its end, Prospero 'starts
+suddenly, and speaks'; and the visions vanish. And what he 'speaks' is
+shown in these lines, which introduce the famous passage just quoted:
+
+     _Pros._ [_Aside_] I had forgot that foul conspiracy
+     Of the beast Caliban and his confederates
+     Against my life: the minute of their plot
+     Is almost come. [_To the Spirits._] Well done! avoid; no more.
+
+     _Fer._ This is strange; your father's in some passion
+     That works him strongly.
+
+     _Mir._                    Never till this day
+     Saw I him touch'd with anger so distemper'd.
+
+     _Pros._ You do look, my son, in a moved sort,
+     As if you were dismay'd: be cheerful, sir.
+     Our revels....
+
+And then, after the famous lines, follow these:
+
+                                Sir, I am vex'd:
+     Bear with my weakness; my old brain is troubled;
+     Be not disturb'd with my infirmity;
+     If you be pleased, retire into my cell
+     And there repose: a turn or two I'll walk,
+     To still my beating mind.
+
+We seem to see here the whole mind of Shakespeare in his last years.
+That which provokes in Prospero first a 'passion' of anger, and, a
+moment later, that melancholy and mystical thought that the great world
+must perish utterly and that man is but a dream, is the sudden
+recollection of gross and apparently incurable evil in the 'monster'
+whom he had tried in vain to raise and soften, and in the monster's
+human confederates. It is this, which is but the repetition of his
+earlier experience of treachery and ingratitude, that troubles his old
+brain, makes his mind 'beat,'[192] and forces on him the sense of
+unreality and evanescence in the world and the life that are haunted by
+such evil. Nor, though Prospero can spare and forgive, is there any sign
+to the end that he believes the evil curable either in the monster, the
+'born devil,' or in the more monstrous villains, the 'worse than
+devils,' whom he so sternly dismisses. But he has learned patience, has
+come to regard his anger and loathing as a weakness or infirmity, and
+would not have it disturb the young and innocent. And so, in the days of
+_King Lear_, it was chiefly the power of 'monstrous' and apparently
+cureless evil in the 'great world' that filled Shakespeare's soul with
+horror, and perhaps forced him sometimes to yield to the infirmity of
+misanthropy and despair, to cry 'No, no, no life,' and to take refuge in
+the thought that this fitful fever is a dream that must soon fade into a
+dreamless sleep; until, to free himself from the perilous stuff that
+weighed upon his heart, he summoned to his aid his 'so potent art,' and
+wrought this stuff into the stormy music of his greatest poem, which
+seems to cry,
+
+     You heavens, give me that patience, patience I need,
+
+and, like the _Tempest_, seems to preach to us from end to end, 'Thou
+must be patient,' 'Bear free and patient thoughts.'[193]
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[Footnote 158: Of course I do not mean that he is beginning to be
+insane, and still less that he _is_ insane (as some medical critics
+suggest).]
+
+[Footnote 159: I must however point out that the modern stage-directions
+are most unfortunate in concealing the fact that here Cordelia sees her
+father again _for the first time_. See Note W.]
+
+[Footnote 160: What immediately follows is as striking an illustration
+of quite another quality, and of the effects which make us think of Lear
+as pursued by a relentless fate. If he could go in and sleep after his
+prayer, as he intends, his mind, one feels, might be saved: so far there
+has been only the menace of madness. But from within the hovel
+Edgar--the last man who would willingly have injured Lear--cries,
+'Fathom and half, fathom and half! Poor Tom!'; the Fool runs out
+terrified; Edgar, summoned by Kent, follows him; and, at sight of Edgar,
+in a moment something gives way in Lear's brain, and he exclaims:
+
+                          Hast thou given all
+     To thy two daughters? And art thou come to this?
+
+Henceforth he is mad. And they remain out in the storm.
+
+I have not seen it noticed that this stroke of fate is repeated--surely
+intentionally--in the sixth scene. Gloster has succeeded in persuading
+Lear to come into the 'house'; he then leaves, and Kent after much
+difficulty induces Lear to lie down and rest upon the cushions. Sleep
+begins to come to him again, and he murmurs,
+
+     'Make no noise, make no noise; draw the curtains; so, so, so.
+     We'll go to supper i' the morning. So, so, so.'
+
+At that moment Gloster enters with the news that he has discovered a
+plot to kill the King; the rest that 'might yet have balm'd his broken
+senses' is again interrupted; and he is hurried away on a litter towards
+Dover. (His recovery, it will be remembered, is due to a long sleep
+artificially induced.)]
+
+[Footnote 161: III. iv. 49. This is printed as prose in the Globe
+edition, but is surely verse. Lear has not yet spoken prose in this
+scene, and his next three speeches are in verse. The next is in prose,
+and, ending, in his tearing off his clothes, shows the advance of
+insanity.]
+
+[Footnote 162: [Lear's death is thus, I am reminded, like _père_
+Goriot's.] This interpretation may be condemned as fantastic, but the
+text, it appears to me, will bear no other. This is the whole speech (in
+the Globe text):
+
+     And my poor fool is hang'd! No, no, no life!
+     Why should a dog, a horse, a rat, have life,
+     And thou no breath at all? Thou'lt come no more,
+     Never, never, never, never, never!
+     Pray you, undo this button: thank you, sir.
+     Do you see this? Look on her, look, her lips,
+     Look there, look there!
+
+The transition at 'Do you see this?' from despair to something more than
+hope is exactly the same as in the preceding passage at the word 'Ha!':
+
+     A plague upon you, murderers, traitors all!
+     I might have saved her; now she's gone for ever!
+     Cordelia, Cordelia, stay a little.
+     Ha!
+     What is't thou say'st? Her voice was ever soft,
+     Gentle, and low, an excellent thing in woman.
+
+As to my other remarks, I will ask the reader to notice that the passage
+from Lear's entrance with the body of Cordelia to the stage-direction
+_He dies_ (which probably comes a few lines too soon) is 54 lines in
+length, and that 30 of them represent the interval during which he has
+absolutely forgotten Cordelia. (It begins when he looks up at the
+Captain's words, line 275.) To make Lear during this interval turn
+continually in anguish to the corpse, is to act the passage in a manner
+irreconcilable with the text, and insufferable in its effect. I speak
+from experience. I have seen the passage acted thus, and my sympathies
+were so exhausted long before Lear's death that his last speech, the
+most pathetic speech ever written, left me disappointed and weary.]
+
+[Footnote 163: The Quartos give the 'Never' only thrice (surely
+wrongly), and all the actors I have heard have preferred this easier
+task. I ought perhaps to add that the Quartos give the words 'Break,
+heart; I prithee, break!' to Lear, not Kent. They and the Folio are at
+odds throughout the last sixty lines of King Lear, and all good modern
+texts are eclectic.]
+
+[Footnote 164: The connection of these sufferings with the sin of
+earlier days (not, it should be noticed, of youth) is almost thrust upon
+our notice by the levity of Gloster's own reference to the subject in
+the first scene, and by Edgar's often quoted words 'The gods are just,'
+etc. The following collocation, also, may be intentional (III. iv. 116):
+
+     _Fool_. Now a little fire in a wild field were like an old
+     lecher's heart; a small spark, all the rest on's body cold.
+     Look, here comes a walking fire. [_Enter_ GLOSTER with a
+     torch.]
+
+Pope destroyed the collocation by transferring the stage-direction to a
+point some dozen lines later.]
+
+[Footnote 165: The passages are here printed together (III. iv. 28 ff.
+and IV. i. 67 ff.):
+
+     _Lear._ Poor naked wretches, wheresoe'er you are,
+     That bide the pelting of this pitiless storm,
+     How shall your houseless heads and unfed sides,
+     Your loop'd and window'd raggedness, defend you
+     From seasons such as these? O, I have ta'en
+     Too little care of this! Take physic, pomp;
+     Expose thyself to feel what wretches feel,
+     That thou mayst shake the superflux to them,
+     And show the heavens just.
+
+     _Glo._ Here, take this purse, thou whom the heavens' plagues
+     Have humbled to all strokes: that I am wretched
+     Makes thee the happier: heavens, deal so still!
+     Let the superfluous and lust-dieted man,
+     That slaves your ordinance, that will not see
+     Because he doth not feel, feel your power quickly;
+     So distribution should undo excess,
+     And each man have enough.]
+
+[Footnote 166: Schmidt's idea--based partly on the omission from the
+Folios at I. ii. 103 (see Furness' Variorum) of the words 'To his father
+that so tenderly and entirely loves him'--that Gloster loved neither of
+his sons, is surely an entire mistake. See, not to speak of general
+impressions, III. iv. 171 ff.]
+
+[Footnote 167: Imagination demands for Lear, even more than for Othello,
+majesty of stature and mien. Tourgénief felt this and made his 'Lear of
+the Steppes' a _gigantic_ peasant. If Shakespeare's texts give no
+express authority for ideas like these, the reason probably is that he
+wrote primarily for the theatre, where the principal actor might not be
+a large man.]
+
+[Footnote 168: He is not present, of course, till France and Burgundy
+enter; but while he is present he says not a word beyond 'Here's France
+and Burgundy, my noble lord.' For some remarks on the possibility that
+Shakespeare imagined him as having encouraged Lear in his idea of
+dividing the kingdom see Note T. It must be remembered that Cornwall was
+Gloster's 'arch and patron.']
+
+[Footnote 169: In this she stands alone among the more notable
+characters of the play. Doubtless Regan's exclamation 'O the blest gods'
+means nothing, but the fact that it is given to her means something. For
+some further remarks on Goneril see Note T. I may add that touches of
+Goneril reappear in the heroine of the next tragedy, _Macbeth_; and that
+we are sometimes reminded of her again by the character of the Queen in
+_Cymbeline_, who bewitched the feeble King by her beauty, and married
+him for greatness while she abhorred his person (_Cymbeline_, V. v. 62
+f., 31 f.); who tried to poison her step-daughter and intended to poison
+her husband; who died despairing because she could not execute all the
+evil she purposed; and who inspirited her husband to defy the Romans by
+words that still stir the blood (_Cymbeline_, III. i. 14 f. Cf. _King
+Lear_, IV. ii. 50 f.).]
+
+[Footnote 170: I. ii. 1 f. Shakespeare seems to have in mind the idea
+expressed in the speech of Ulysses about the dependence of the world on
+degree, order, system, custom, and about the chaos which would result
+from the free action of appetite, the 'universal wolf' (_Troilus and
+Cr._ I. iii. 83 f.). Cf. the contrast between 'particular will' and 'the
+moral laws of nature and of nations,' II. ii. 53, 185 ('nature' here of
+course is the opposite of the 'nature' of Edmund's speech).]
+
+[Footnote 171: The line last quoted is continued by Edmund in the Folios
+thus: 'Th' hast spoken right; 'tis true,' but in the Quartos thus: 'Thou
+hast spoken truth,' which leaves the line imperfect. This, and the
+imperfect line 'Make instruments to plague us,' suggest that Shakespeare
+wrote at first simply,
+
+                  Make instruments to plague us.
+
+     _Edm._                           Th' hast spoken truth.
+
+The Quartos show other variations which seem to point to the fact that
+the MS. was here difficult to make out.]
+
+[Footnote 172: IV. i. 1-9. I am indebted here to Koppel,
+_Verbesserungsvorschläge zu den Erläuterungen und der Textlesung des
+Lear_ (1899).]
+
+[Footnote 173: See I. i. 142 ff. Kent speaks, not of the _injustice_ of
+Lear's action, but of its 'folly,' its 'hideous rashness.' When the King
+exclaims 'Kent, on thy life, no more,' he answers:
+
+     My life I never held but as a pawn
+     To wage against thy enemies; nor fear to lose it,
+     _Thy safety being the motive_.
+
+(The first Folio omits 'a,' and in the next line reads 'nere' for 'nor.'
+Perhaps the first line should read 'My life I ne'er held but as pawn to
+wage.')]
+
+[Footnote 174: See II. ii. 162 to end. The light-heartedness disappears,
+of course, as Lear's misfortunes thicken.]
+
+[Footnote 175: This difference, however, must not be pressed too far;
+nor must we take Kent's retort,
+
+                Now by Apollo, king,
+     Thou swear'st thy gods in vain,
+
+for a sign of disbelief. He twice speaks of the gods in another manner
+(I. i. 185, III. vi. 5), and he was accustomed to think of Lear in his
+'prayers' (I. i. 144).]
+
+[Footnote 176: The 'clown' in _Antony and Cleopatra_ is merely an old
+peasant. There is a fool in _Timon of Athens_, however, and he appears
+in a scene (II. ii.) generally attributed to Shakespeare. His talk
+sometimes reminds one of Lear's fool; and Kent's remark, 'This is not
+altogether fool, my lord,' is repeated in _Timon_, II. ii. 122, 'Thou
+art not altogether a fool.']
+
+[Footnote 177: [This is no obstacle. There could hardly be a stage
+tradition hostile to his youth, since he does not appear in Tate's
+version, which alone was acted during the century and a half before
+Macready's production. I had forgotten this; and my memory must also
+have been at fault regarding an engraving to which I referred in the
+first edition. Both mistakes were pointed out by Mr. Archer.]]
+
+[Footnote 178: In parts of what follows I am indebted to remarks by
+Cowden Clarke, quoted by Furness on I. iv. 91.]
+
+[Footnote 179: See also Note T.]
+
+[Footnote 180: 'Our last and least' (according to the Folio reading).
+Lear speaks again of 'this little seeming substance.' He can carry her
+dead body in his arms.]
+
+[Footnote 181: Perhaps then the 'low sound' is not merely metaphorical
+in Kent's speech in I. i. 153 f.:
+
+                        answer my life my judgment,
+     Thy youngest daughter does not love thee least;
+     Nor are those empty-hearted whose low sound
+     Reverbs no hollowness.]
+
+[Footnote 182: I. i. 80. 'More ponderous' is the reading of the Folios,
+'more richer' that of the Quartos. The latter is usually preferred, and
+Mr. Aldis Wright says 'more ponderous' has the appearance of being a
+player's correction to avoid a piece of imaginary bad grammar. Does it
+not sound more like the author's improvement of a phrase that he thought
+a little flat? And, apart from that, is it not significant that it
+expresses the same idea of weight that appears in the phrase 'I cannot
+heave my heart into my mouth'?]
+
+[Footnote 183: Cf. Cornwall's satirical remarks on Kent's 'plainness' in
+II. ii. 101 ff.,--a plainness which did no service to Kent's master. (As
+a matter of fact, Cordelia had said nothing about 'plainness.')]
+
+[Footnote 184: Who, like Kent, hastens on the quarrel with Goneril.]
+
+[Footnote 185: I do not wish to complicate the discussion by examining
+the differences, in degree or otherwise, in the various cases, or by
+introducing numerous qualifications; and therefore I do not add the
+names of Macbeth and Lady Macbeth.]
+
+[Footnote 186: It follows from the above that, if this idea were made
+explicit and accompanied our reading of a tragedy throughout, it would
+confuse or even destroy the tragic impression. So would the constant
+presence of Christian beliefs. The reader most attached to these beliefs
+holds them in temporary suspension while he is immersed in a
+Shakespearean tragedy. Such tragedy assumes that the world, as it is
+presented, is the truth, though it also provokes feelings which imply
+that this world is not the whole truth, and therefore not the truth.]
+
+[Footnote 187: Though Cordelia, of course, does not occupy the position
+of the hero.]
+
+[Footnote 188: _E.g._ in _King Lear_ the servants, and the old man who
+succours Gloster and brings to the naked beggar 'the best 'parel that he
+has, come on't what will,' _i.e._ whatever vengeance Regan can inflict.
+Cf. the Steward and the Servants in _Timon_. Cf. there also (V. i. 23),
+'Promising is the very air o' the time ... performance is ever the
+duller for his act; and, _but in the plainer and simpler kind of
+people_, the deed of saying [performance of promises] is quite out of
+use.' Shakespeare's feeling on this subject, though apparently specially
+keen at this time of his life, is much the same throughout (cf. Adam in
+_As You Like It_). He has no respect for the plainer and simpler kind of
+people as politicians, but a great respect and regard for their hearts.]
+
+[Footnote 189: 'I stumbled when I saw,' says Gloster.]
+
+[Footnote 190: Our advantages give us a blind confidence in our
+security. Cf. _Timon_, IV. iii. 76,
+
+     _Alc._ I have heard in some sort of thy miseries.
+
+     _Tim._ Thou saw'st them when I had prosperity.]
+
+[Footnote 191: Biblical ideas seem to have been floating in
+Shakespeare's mind. Cf. the words of Kent, when Lear enters with
+Cordelia's body, 'Is this the promised end?' and Edgar's answer, 'Or
+image of that horror?' The 'promised end' is certainly the end of the
+world (cf. with 'image' 'the great doom's image,' _Macbeth_, II. iii.
+83); and the next words, Albany's 'Fall and cease,' _may_ be addressed
+to the heavens or stars, not to Lear. It seems probable that in writing
+Gloster's speech about the predicted horrors to follow 'these late
+eclipses' Shakespeare had a vague recollection of the passage in
+_Matthew_ xxiv., or of that in _Mark_ xiii., about the tribulations
+which were to be the sign of 'the end of the world.' (I do not mean, of
+course, that the 'prediction' of I. ii. 119 is the prediction to be
+found in one of these passages.)]
+
+[Footnote 192: Cf. _Hamlet_, III. i. 181:
+
+     This something-settled matter in his heart,
+     Whereon his brains still beating puts him thus
+     From fashion of himself.]
+
+[Footnote 193: I believe the criticism of _King Lear_ which has
+influenced me most is that in Prof. Dowden's _Shakspere, his Mind and
+Art_ (though, when I wrote my lectures, I had not read that criticism
+for many years); and I am glad that this acknowledgment gives me the
+opportunity of repeating in print an opinion which I have often
+expressed to students, that anyone entering on the study of Shakespeare,
+and unable or unwilling to read much criticism, would do best to take
+Prof. Dowden for his guide.]
+
+
+
+
+LECTURE IX
+
+MACBETH
+
+
+_Macbeth_, it is probable, was the last-written of the four great
+tragedies, and immediately preceded _Antony and Cleopatra_.[194] In that
+play Shakespeare's final style appears for the first time completely
+formed, and the transition to this style is much more decidedly visible
+in _Macbeth_ than in _King Lear_. Yet in certain respects _Macbeth_
+recalls _Hamlet_ rather than _Othello_ or _King Lear_. In the heroes of
+both plays the passage from thought to a critical resolution and action
+is difficult, and excites the keenest interest. In neither play, as in
+_Othello_ and _King Lear_, is painful pathos one of the main effects.
+Evil, again, though it shows in _Macbeth_ a prodigious energy, is not
+the icy or stony inhumanity of Iago or Goneril; and, as in _Hamlet_, it
+is pursued by remorse. Finally, Shakespeare no longer restricts the
+action to purely human agencies, as in the two preceding tragedies;
+portents once more fill the heavens, ghosts rise from their graves, an
+unearthly light flickers about the head of the doomed man. The special
+popularity of _Hamlet_ and _Macbeth_ is due in part to some of these
+common characteristics, notably to the fascination of the supernatural,
+the absence of the spectacle of extreme undeserved suffering, the
+absence of characters which horrify and repel and yet are destitute of
+grandeur. The reader who looks unwillingly at Iago gazes at Lady Macbeth
+in awe, because though she is dreadful she is also sublime. The whole
+tragedy is sublime.
+
+In this, however, and in other respects, _Macbeth_ makes an impression
+quite different from that of _Hamlet_. The dimensions of the principal
+characters, the rate of movement in the action, the supernatural effect,
+the style, the versification, are all changed; and they are all changed
+in much the same manner. In many parts of _Macbeth_ there is in the
+language a peculiar compression, pregnancy, energy, even violence; the
+harmonious grace and even flow, often conspicuous in _Hamlet_, have
+almost disappeared. The cruel characters, built on a scale at least as
+large as that of _Othello_, seem to attain at times an almost superhuman
+stature. The diction has in places a huge and rugged grandeur, which
+degenerates here and there into tumidity. The solemn majesty of the
+royal Ghost in _Hamlet_, appearing in armour and standing silent in the
+moonlight, is exchanged for shapes of horror, dimly seen in the murky
+air or revealed by the glare of the caldron fire in a dark cavern, or
+for the ghastly face of Banquo badged with blood and staring with blank
+eyes. The other three tragedies all open with conversations which lead
+into the action: here the action bursts into wild life amidst the sounds
+of a thunder-storm and the echoes of a distant battle. It hurries
+through seven very brief scenes of mounting suspense to a terrible
+crisis, which is reached, in the murder of Duncan, at the beginning of
+the Second Act. Pausing a moment and changing its shape, it hastes again
+with scarcely diminished speed to fresh horrors. And even when the speed
+of the outward action is slackened, the same effect is continued in
+another form: we are shown a soul tortured by an agony which admits not
+a moment's repose, and rushing in frenzy towards its doom. _Macbeth_ is
+very much shorter than the other three tragedies, but our experience in
+traversing it is so crowded and intense that it leaves an impression not
+of brevity but of speed. It is the most vehement, the most concentrated,
+perhaps we may say the most tremendous, of the tragedies.
+
+
+1
+
+A Shakespearean tragedy, as a rule, has a special tone or atmosphere of
+its own, quite perceptible, however difficult to describe. The effect of
+this atmosphere is marked with unusual strength in _Macbeth_. It is due
+to a variety of influences which combine with those just noticed, so
+that, acting and reacting, they form a whole; and the desolation of the
+blasted heath, the design of the Witches, the guilt in the hero's soul,
+the darkness of the night, seem to emanate from one and the same source.
+This effect is strengthened by a multitude of small touches, which at
+the moment may be little noticed but still leave their mark on the
+imagination. We may approach the consideration of the characters and the
+action by distinguishing some of the ingredients of this general effect.
+
+Darkness, we may even say blackness, broods over this tragedy. It is
+remarkable that almost all the scenes which at once recur to memory take
+place either at night or in some dark spot. The vision of the dagger,
+the murder of Duncan, the murder of Banquo, the sleep-walking of Lady
+Macbeth, all come in night-scenes. The Witches dance in the thick air of
+a storm, or, 'black and midnight hags,' receive Macbeth in a cavern. The
+blackness of night is to the hero a thing of fear, even of horror; and
+that which he feels becomes the spirit of the play. The faint
+glimmerings of the western sky at twilight are here menacing: it is the
+hour when the traveller hastens to reach safety in his inn, and when
+Banquo rides homeward to meet his assassins; the hour when 'light
+thickens,' when 'night's black agents to their prey do rouse,' when the
+wolf begins to howl, and the owl to scream, and withered murder steals
+forth to his work. Macbeth bids the stars hide their fires that his
+'black' desires may be concealed; Lady Macbeth calls on thick night to
+come, palled in the dunnest smoke of hell. The moon is down and no stars
+shine when Banquo, dreading the dreams of the coming night, goes
+unwillingly to bed, and leaves Macbeth to wait for the summons of the
+little bell. When the next day should dawn, its light is 'strangled,'
+and 'darkness does the face of earth entomb.' In the whole drama the sun
+seems to shine only twice: first, in the beautiful but ironical passage
+where Duncan sees the swallows flitting round the castle of death; and,
+afterwards, when at the close the avenging army gathers to rid the earth
+of its shame. Of the many slighter touches which deepen this effect I
+notice only one. The failure of nature in Lady Macbeth is marked by her
+fear of darkness; 'she has light by her continually.' And in the one
+phrase of fear that escapes her lips even in sleep, it is of the
+darkness of the place of torment that she speaks.[195]
+
+The atmosphere of _Macbeth_, however, is not that of unrelieved
+blackness. On the contrary, as compared with _King Lear_ and its cold
+dim gloom, _Macbeth_ leaves a decided impression of colour; it is really
+the impression of a black night broken by flashes of light and colour,
+sometimes vivid and even glaring. They are the lights and colours of the
+thunder-storm in the first scene; of the dagger hanging before Macbeth's
+eyes and glittering alone in the midnight air; of the torch borne by the
+servant when he and his lord come upon Banquo crossing the castle-court
+to his room; of the torch, again, which Fleance carried to light his
+father to death, and which was dashed out by one of the murderers; of
+the torches that flared in the hall on the face of the Ghost and the
+blanched cheeks of Macbeth; of the flames beneath the boiling caldron
+from which the apparitions in the cavern rose; of the taper which showed
+to the Doctor and Gentlewoman the wasted face and blank eyes of Lady
+Macbeth. And, above all, the colour is the colour of blood. It cannot be
+an accident that the image of blood is forced upon us continually, not
+merely by the events themselves, but by full descriptions, and even by
+reiteration of the word in unlikely parts of the dialogue. The Witches,
+after their first wild appearance, have hardly quitted the stage when
+there staggers onto it a 'bloody man,' gashed with wounds. His tale is
+of a hero whose 'brandished steel smoked with bloody execution,' 'carved
+out a passage' to his enemy, and 'unseam'd him from the nave to the
+chaps.' And then he tells of a second battle so bloody that the
+combatants seemed as if they 'meant to bathe in reeking wounds.' What
+metaphors! What a dreadful image is that with which Lady Macbeth greets
+us almost as she enters, when she prays the spirits of cruelty so to
+thicken her blood that pity cannot flow along her veins! What pictures
+are those of the murderer appearing at the door of the banquet-room with
+Banquo's 'blood upon his face'; of Banquo himself 'with twenty trenched
+gashes on his head,' or 'blood-bolter'd' and smiling in derision at his
+murderer; of Macbeth, gazing at his hand, and watching it dye the whole
+green ocean red; of Lady Macbeth, gazing at hers, and stretching it away
+from her face to escape the smell of blood that all the perfumes of
+Arabia will not subdue! The most horrible lines in the whole tragedy are
+those of her shuddering cry, 'Yet who would have thought the old man to
+have had so much blood in him?' And it is not only at such moments that
+these images occur. Even in the quiet conversation of Malcolm and
+Macduff, Macbeth is imagined as holding a bloody sceptre, and Scotland
+as a country bleeding and receiving every day a new gash added to her
+wounds. It is as if the poet saw the whole story through an ensanguined
+mist, and as if it stained the very blackness of the night. When
+Macbeth, before Banquo's murder, invokes night to scarf up the tender
+eye of pitiful day, and to tear in pieces the great bond that keeps him
+pale, even the invisible hand that is to tear the bond is imagined as
+covered with blood.
+
+Let us observe another point. The vividness, magnitude, and violence of
+the imagery in some of these passages are characteristic of _Macbeth_
+almost throughout; and their influence contributes to form its
+atmosphere. Images like those of the babe torn smiling from the breast
+and dashed to death; of pouring the sweet milk of concord into hell; of
+the earth shaking in fever; of the frame of things disjointed; of
+sorrows striking heaven on the face, so that it resounds and yells out
+like syllables of dolour; of the mind lying in restless ecstasy on a
+rack; of the mind full of scorpions; of the tale told by an idiot, full
+of sound and fury;--all keep the imagination moving on a 'wild and
+violent sea,' while it is scarcely for a moment permitted to dwell on
+thoughts of peace and beauty. In its language, as in its action, the
+drama is full of tumult and storm. Whenever the Witches are present we
+see and hear a thunder-storm: when they are absent we hear of
+ship-wrecking storms and direful thunders; of tempests that blow down
+trees and churches, castles, palaces and pyramids; of the frightful
+hurricane of the night when Duncan was murdered; of the blast on which
+pity rides like a new-born babe, or on which Heaven's cherubim are
+horsed. There is thus something magnificently appropriate in the cry
+'Blow, wind! Come, wrack!' with which Macbeth, turning from the sight of
+the moving wood of Birnam, bursts from his castle. He was borne to his
+throne on a whirlwind, and the fate he goes to meet comes on the wings
+of storm.
+
+Now all these agencies--darkness, the lights and colours that illuminate
+it, the storm that rushes through it, the violent and gigantic
+images--conspire with the appearances of the Witches and the Ghost to
+awaken horror, and in some degree also a supernatural dread. And to this
+effect other influences contribute. The pictures called up by the mere
+words of the Witches stir the same feelings,--those, for example, of the
+spell-bound sailor driven tempest-tost for nine times nine weary weeks,
+and never visited by sleep night or day; of the drop of poisonous foam
+that forms on the moon, and, falling to earth, is collected for
+pernicious ends; of the sweltering venom of the toad, the finger of the
+babe killed at its birth by its own mother, the tricklings from the
+murderer's gibbet. In Nature, again, something is felt to be at work,
+sympathetic with human guilt and supernatural malice. She labours with
+portents.
+
+     Lamentings heard in the air, strange screams of death,
+     And prophesying with accents terrible,
+
+burst from her. The owl clamours all through the night; Duncan's horses
+devour each other in frenzy; the dawn comes, but no light with it.
+Common sights and sounds, the crying of crickets, the croak of the
+raven, the light thickening after sunset, the home-coming of the rooks,
+are all ominous. Then, as if to deepen these impressions, Shakespeare
+has concentrated attention on the obscurer regions of man's being, on
+phenomena which make it seem that he is in the power of secret forces
+lurking below, and independent of his consciousness and will: such as
+the relapse of Macbeth from conversation into a reverie, during which he
+gazes fascinated at the image of murder drawing closer and closer; the
+writing on his face of strange things he never meant to show; the
+pressure of imagination heightening into illusion, like the vision of a
+dagger in the air, at first bright, then suddenly splashed with blood,
+or the sound of a voice that cried 'Sleep no more' and would not be
+silenced.[196] To these are added other, and constant, allusions to
+sleep, man's strange half-conscious life; to the misery of its
+withholding; to the terrible dreams of remorse; to the cursed thoughts
+from which Banquo is free by day, but which tempt him in his sleep: and
+again to abnormal disturbances of sleep; in the two men, of whom one
+during the murder of Duncan laughed in his sleep, and the other raised a
+cry of murder; and in Lady Macbeth, who rises to re-enact in
+somnambulism those scenes the memory of which is pushing her on to
+madness or suicide. All this has one effect, to excite supernatural
+alarm and, even more, a dread of the presence of evil not only in its
+recognised seat but all through and around our mysterious nature.
+Perhaps there is no other work equal to _Macbeth_ in the production of
+this effect.[197]
+
+It is enhanced--to take a last point--by the use of a literary
+expedient. Not even in _Richard III._, which in this, as in other
+respects, has resemblances to _Macbeth_, is there so much of Irony. I do
+not refer to irony in the ordinary sense; to speeches, for example,
+where the speaker is intentionally ironical, like that of Lennox in III.
+vi. I refer to irony on the part of the author himself, to ironical
+juxtapositions of persons and events, and especially to the 'Sophoclean
+irony' by which a speaker is made to use words bearing to the audience,
+in addition to his own meaning, a further and ominous sense, hidden from
+himself and, usually, from the other persons on the stage. The very
+first words uttered by Macbeth,
+
+     So foul and fair a day I have not seen,
+
+are an example to which attention has often been drawn; for they startle
+the reader by recalling the words of the Witches in the first scene,
+
+     Fair is foul, and foul is fair.
+
+When Macbeth, emerging from his murderous reverie, turns to the nobles
+saying, 'Let us toward the King,' his words are innocent, but to the
+reader have a double meaning. Duncan's comment on the treachery of
+Cawdor,
+
+                       There's no art
+     To find the mind's construction in the face:
+     He was a gentleman on whom I built
+     An absolute trust,
+
+is interrupted[198] by the entrance of the traitor Macbeth, who is
+greeted with effusive gratitude and a like 'absolute trust.' I have
+already referred to the ironical effect of the beautiful lines in which
+Duncan and Banquo describe the castle they are about to enter. To the
+reader Lady Macbeth's light words,
+
+     A little water clears us of this deed:
+     How easy is it then,
+
+summon up the picture of the sleep-walking scene. The idea of the
+Porter's speech, in which he imagines himself the keeper of hell-gate,
+shows the same irony. So does the contrast between the obvious and the
+hidden meanings of the apparitions of the armed head, the bloody child,
+and the child with the tree in his hand. It would be easy to add further
+examples. Perhaps the most striking is the answer which Banquo, as he
+rides away, never to return alive, gives to Macbeth's reminder, 'Fail
+not our feast.' 'My lord, I will not,' he replies, and he keeps his
+promise. It cannot be by accident that Shakespeare so frequently in this
+play uses a device which contributes to excite the vague fear of hidden
+forces operating on minds unconscious of their influence.[199]
+
+
+2
+
+But of course he had for this purpose an agency more potent than any yet
+considered. It would be almost an impertinence to attempt to describe
+anew the influence of the Witch-scenes on the imagination of the
+reader.[200] Nor do I believe that among different readers this
+influence differs greatly except in degree. But when critics begin to
+analyse the imaginative effect, and still more when, going behind it,
+they try to determine the truth which lay for Shakespeare or lies for us
+in these creations, they too often offer us results which, either
+through perversion or through inadequacy, fail to correspond with that
+effect. This happens in opposite ways. On the one hand the Witches,
+whose contribution to the 'atmosphere' of Macbeth can hardly be
+exaggerated, are credited with far too great an influence upon the
+action; sometimes they are described as goddesses, or even as fates,
+whom Macbeth is powerless to resist. And this is perversion. On the
+other hand, we are told that, great as is their influence on the action,
+it is so because they are merely symbolic representations of the
+unconscious or half-conscious guilt in Macbeth himself. And this is
+inadequate. The few remarks I have to make may take the form of a
+criticism on these views.
+
+(1) As to the former, Shakespeare took, as material for his purposes,
+the ideas about witch-craft that he found existing in people around him
+and in books like Reginald Scot's _Discovery_ (1584). And he used these
+ideas without changing their substance at all. He selected and improved,
+avoiding the merely ridiculous, dismissing (unlike Middleton) the
+sexually loathsome or stimulating, rehandling and heightening whatever
+could touch the imagination with fear, horror, and mysterious
+attraction. The Witches, that is to say, are not goddesses, or fates,
+or, in any way whatever, supernatural beings. They are old women, poor
+and ragged, skinny and hideous, full of vulgar spite, occupied in
+killing their neighbours' swine or revenging themselves on sailors'
+wives who have refused them chestnuts. If Banquo considers their beards
+a proof that they are not women, that only shows his ignorance: Sir Hugh
+Evans would have known better.[201] There is not a syllable in _Macbeth_
+to imply that they are anything but women. But, again in accordance with
+the popular ideas, they have received from evil spirits certain
+supernatural powers. They can 'raise haile, tempests, and hurtfull
+weather; as lightening, thunder etc.' They can 'passe from place to
+place in the aire invisible.' They can 'keepe divels and spirits in the
+likenesse of todes and cats,' Paddock or Graymalkin. They can
+'transferre corne in the blade from one place to another.' They can
+'manifest unto others things hidden and lost, and foreshew things to
+come, and see them as though they were present.' The reader will apply
+these phrases and sentences at once to passages in _Macbeth_. They are
+all taken from Scot's first chapter, where he is retailing the current
+superstitions of his time; and, in regard to the Witches, Shakespeare
+mentions scarcely anything, if anything, that was not to be found, of
+course in a more prosaic shape, either in Scot or in some other easily
+accessible authority.[202] He read, to be sure, in Holinshed, his main
+source for the story of Macbeth, that, according to the common opinion,
+the 'women' who met Macbeth 'were eyther the weird sisters, that is (as
+ye would say) ye Goddesses of destinee, or els some Nimphes or Feiries.'
+But what does that matter? What he read in his authority was absolutely
+nothing to his audience, and remains nothing to us, unless he _used_
+what he read. And he did not use this idea. He used nothing but the
+phrase 'weird sisters,'[203] which certainly no more suggested to a
+London audience the Parcae of one mythology or the Norns of another than
+it does to-day. His Witches owe all their power to the spirits; they are
+'_instruments_ of darkness'; the spirits are their 'masters' (IV. i.
+63). Fancy the fates having masters! Even if the passages where Hecate
+appears are Shakespeare's,[204] that will not help the Witches; for they
+are subject to Hecate, who is herself a goddess or superior devil, not a
+fate.[205]
+
+Next, while the influence of the Witches' prophecies on Macbeth is very
+great, it is quite clearly shown to be an influence and nothing more.
+There is no sign whatever in the play that Shakespeare meant the actions
+of Macbeth to be forced on him by an external power, whether that of the
+Witches, or of their 'masters,' or of Hecate. It is needless therefore
+to insist that such a conception would be in contradiction with his
+whole tragic practice. The prophecies of the Witches are presented
+simply as dangerous circumstances with which Macbeth has to deal: they
+are dramatically on the same level as the story of the Ghost in
+_Hamlet_, or the falsehoods told by Iago to Othello. Macbeth is, in the
+ordinary sense, perfectly free in regard to them: and if we speak of
+degrees of freedom, he is even more free than Hamlet, who was crippled
+by melancholy when the Ghost appeared to him. That the influence of the
+first prophecies upon him came as much from himself as from them, is
+made abundantly clear by the obviously intentional contrast between him
+and Banquo. Banquo, ambitious but perfectly honest, is scarcely even
+startled by them, and he remains throughout the scene indifferent to
+them. But when Macbeth heard them he was not an innocent man. Precisely
+how far his mind was guilty may be a question; but no innocent man would
+have started, as he did, with a start of _fear_ at the mere prophecy of
+a crown, or have conceived thereupon _immediately_ the thought of
+murder. Either this thought was not new to him,[206] or he had cherished
+at least some vaguer dishonourable dream, the instantaneous recurrence
+of which, at the moment of his hearing the prophecy, revealed to him an
+inward and terrifying guilt. In either case not only was he free to
+accept or resist the temptation, but the temptation was already within
+him. We are admitting too much, therefore, when we compare him with
+Othello, for Othello's mind was perfectly free from suspicion when his
+temptation came to him. And we are admitting, again, too much when we
+use the word 'temptation' in reference to the first prophecies of the
+Witches. Speaking strictly we must affirm that he was tempted only by
+himself. _He_ speaks indeed of their 'supernatural soliciting'; but in
+fact they did not solicit. They merely announced events: they hailed him
+as Thane of Glamis, Thane of Cawdor, and King hereafter. No connection
+of these announcements with any action of his was even hinted by them.
+For all that appears, the natural death of an old man might have
+fulfilled the prophecy any day.[207] In any case, the idea of fulfilling
+it by murder was entirely his own.[208]
+
+When Macbeth sees the Witches again, after the murders of Duncan and
+Banquo, we observe, however, a striking change. They no longer need to
+go and meet him; he seeks them out. He has committed himself to his
+course of evil. Now accordingly they do 'solicit.' They prophesy, but
+they also give advice: they bid him be bloody, bold, and secure. We have
+no hope that he will reject their advice; but so far are they from
+having, even now, any power to compel him to accept it, that they make
+careful preparations to deceive him into doing so. And, almost as though
+to intimate how entirely the responsibility for his deeds still lies
+with Macbeth, Shakespeare makes his first act after this interview one
+for which his tempters gave him not a hint--the slaughter of Macduff's
+wife and children.
+
+To all this we must add that Macbeth himself nowhere betrays a suspicion
+that his action is, or has been, thrust on him by an external power. He
+curses the Witches for deceiving him, but he never attempts to shift to
+them the burden of his guilt. Neither has Shakespeare placed in the
+mouth of any other character in this play such fatalistic expressions as
+may be found in _King Lear_ and occasionally elsewhere. He appears
+actually to have taken pains to make the natural psychological genesis
+of Macbeth's crimes perfectly clear, and it was a most unfortunate
+notion of Schlegel's that the Witches were required because natural
+agencies would have seemed too weak to drive such a man as Macbeth to
+his first murder.
+
+'Still,' it may be said, 'the Witches did foreknow Macbeth's future; and
+what is foreknown is fixed; and how can a man be responsible when his
+future is fixed?' With this question, as a speculative one, we have no
+concern here; but, in so far as it relates to the play, I answer, first,
+that not one of the things foreknown is an action. This is just as true
+of the later prophecies as of the first. That Macbeth will be harmed by
+none of woman born, and will never be vanquished till Birnam Wood shall
+come against him, involves (so far as we are informed) no action of his.
+It may be doubted, indeed, whether Shakespeare would have introduced
+prophecies of Macbeth's deeds, even if it had been convenient to do so;
+he would probably have felt that to do so would interfere with the
+interest of the inward struggle and suffering. And, in the second place,
+_Macbeth_ was not written for students of metaphysics or theology, but
+for people at large; and, however it may be with prophecies of actions,
+prophecies of mere events do not suggest to people at large any sort of
+difficulty about responsibility. Many people, perhaps most, habitually
+think of their 'future' as something fixed, and of themselves as 'free.'
+The Witches nowadays take a room in Bond Street and charge a guinea; and
+when the victim enters they hail him the possessor of £1000 a year, or
+prophesy to him of journeys, wives, and children. But though he is
+struck dumb by their prescience, it does not even cross his mind that he
+is going to lose his glorious 'freedom'--not though journeys and
+marriages imply much more agency on his part than anything foretold to
+Macbeth. This whole difficulty is undramatic; and I may add that
+Shakespeare nowhere shows, like Chaucer, any interest in speculative
+problems concerning foreknowledge, predestination and freedom.
+
+(2) We may deal more briefly with the opposite interpretation. According
+to it the Witches and their prophecies are to be taken merely as
+symbolical representations of thoughts and desires which have slumbered
+in Macbeth's breast and now rise into consciousness and confront him.
+With this idea, which springs from the wish to get rid of a mere
+external supernaturalism, and to find a psychological and spiritual
+meaning in that which the groundlings probably received as hard facts,
+one may feel sympathy. But it is evident that it is rather a
+'philosophy' of the Witches than an immediate dramatic apprehension of
+them; and even so it will be found both incomplete and, in other
+respects, inadequate.
+
+It is incomplete because it cannot possibly be applied to all the facts.
+Let us grant that it will apply to the most important prophecy, that of
+the crown; and that the later warning which Macbeth receives, to beware
+of Macduff, also answers to something in his own breast and 'harps his
+fear aright' But there we have to stop. Macbeth had evidently no
+suspicion of that treachery in Cawdor through which he himself became
+Thane; and who will suggest that he had any idea, however subconscious,
+about Birnam Wood or the man not born of woman? It may be held--and
+rightly, I think--that the prophecies which answer to nothing inward,
+the prophecies which are merely supernatural, produce, now at any rate,
+much less imaginative effect than the others,--even that they are in
+_Macbeth_ an element which was of an age and not for all time; but still
+they are there, and they are essential to the plot.[209] And as the
+theory under consideration will not apply to them at all, it is not
+likely that it gives an adequate account even of those prophecies to
+which it can in some measure be applied.
+
+It is inadequate here chiefly because it is much too narrow. The Witches
+and their prophecies, if they are to be rationalised or taken
+symbolically, must represent not only the evil slumbering in the hero's
+soul, but all those obscurer influences of the evil around him in the
+world which aid his own ambition and the incitements of his wife. Such
+influences, even if we put aside all belief in evil 'spirits,' are as
+certain, momentous, and terrifying facts as the presence of inchoate
+evil in the soul itself; and if we exclude all reference to these facts
+from our idea of the Witches, it will be greatly impoverished and will
+certainly fail to correspond with the imaginative effect. The union of
+the outward and inward here may be compared with something of the same
+kind in Greek poetry.[210] In the first Book of the _Iliad_ we are told
+that, when Agamemnon threatened to take Briseis from Achilles, 'grief
+came upon Peleus' son, and his heart within his shaggy breast was
+divided in counsel, whether to draw his keen blade from his thigh and
+set the company aside and so slay Atreides, or to assuage his anger and
+curb his soul. While yet he doubted thereof in heart and soul, and was
+drawing his great sword from his sheath, Athene came to him from heaven,
+sent forth of the white-armed goddess Hera, whose heart loved both alike
+and had care for them. She stood behind Peleus' son and caught him by
+his golden hair, to him only visible, and of the rest no man beheld
+her.' And at her bidding he mastered his wrath, 'and stayed his heavy
+hand on the silver hilt, and thrust the great sword back into the
+sheath, and was not disobedient to the saying of Athene.'[211] The
+succour of the goddess here only strengthens an inward movement in the
+mind of Achilles, but we should lose something besides a poetic effect
+if for that reason we struck her out of the account. We should lose the
+idea that the inward powers of the soul answer in their essence to
+vaster powers without, which support them and assure the effect of their
+exertion. So it is in _Macbeth_.[212] The words of the Witches are fatal
+to the hero only because there is in him something which leaps into
+light at the sound of them; but they are at the same time the witness of
+forces which never cease to work in the world around him, and, on the
+instant of his surrender to them, entangle him inextricably in the web
+of Fate. If the inward connection is once realised (and Shakespeare has
+left us no excuse for missing it), we need not fear, and indeed shall
+scarcely be able, to exaggerate the effect of the Witch-scenes in
+heightening and deepening the sense of fear, horror, and mystery which
+pervades the atmosphere of the tragedy.
+
+
+3
+
+From this murky background stand out the two great terrible figures, who
+dwarf all the remaining characters of the drama. Both are sublime, and
+both inspire, far more than the other tragic heroes, the feeling of awe.
+They are never detached in imagination from the atmosphere which
+surrounds them and adds to their grandeur and terror. It is, as it were,
+continued into their souls. For within them is all that we felt
+without--the darkness of night, lit with the flame of tempest and the
+hues of blood, and haunted by wild and direful shapes, 'murdering
+ministers,' spirits of remorse, and maddening visions of peace lost and
+judgment to come. The way to be untrue to Shakespeare here, as always,
+is to relax the tension of imagination, to conventionalise, to conceive
+Macbeth, for example, as a half-hearted cowardly criminal, and Lady
+Macbeth as a whole-hearted fiend.
+
+These two characters are fired by one and the same passion of ambition;
+and to a considerable extent they are alike. The disposition of each is
+high, proud, and commanding. They are born to rule, if not to reign.
+They are peremptory or contemptuous to their inferiors. They are not
+children of light, like Brutus and Hamlet; they are of the world. We
+observe in them no love of country, and no interest in the welfare of
+anyone outside their family. Their habitual thoughts and aims are, and,
+we imagine, long have been, all of station and power. And though in both
+there is something, and in one much, of what is higher--honour,
+conscience, humanity--they do not live consciously in the light of these
+things or speak their language. Not that they are egoists, like Iago;
+or, if they are egoists, theirs is an _egoïsme à deux_. They have no
+separate ambitions.[213] They support and love one another. They suffer
+together. And if, as time goes on, they drift a little apart, they are
+not vulgar souls, to be alienated and recriminate when they experience
+the fruitlessness of their ambition. They remain to the end tragic, even
+grand.
+
+So far there is much likeness between them. Otherwise they are
+contrasted, and the action is built upon this contrast. Their attitudes
+towards the projected murder of Duncan are quite different; and it
+produces in them equally different effects. In consequence, they appear
+in the earlier part of the play as of equal importance, if indeed Lady
+Macbeth does not overshadow her husband; but afterwards she retires more
+and more into the background, and he becomes unmistakably the leading
+figure. His is indeed far the more complex character: and I will speak
+of it first.
+
+Macbeth, the cousin of a King mild, just, and beloved, but now too old
+to lead his army, is introduced to us as a general of extraordinary
+prowess, who has covered himself with glory in putting down a rebellion
+and repelling the invasion of a foreign army. In these conflicts he
+showed great personal courage, a quality which he continues to display
+throughout the drama in regard to all plain dangers. It is difficult to
+be sure of his customary demeanour, for in the play we see him either in
+what appears to be an exceptional relation to his wife, or else in the
+throes of remorse and desperation; but from his behaviour during his
+journey home after the war, from his _later_ conversations with Lady
+Macbeth, and from his language to the murderers of Banquo and to others,
+we imagine him as a great warrior, somewhat masterful, rough, and
+abrupt, a man to inspire some fear and much admiration. He was thought
+'honest,' or honourable; he was trusted, apparently, by everyone;
+Macduff, a man of the highest integrity, 'loved him well.' And there
+was, in fact, much good in him. We have no warrant, I think, for
+describing him, with many writers, as of a 'noble' nature, like Hamlet
+or Othello;[214] but he had a keen sense both of honour and of the worth
+of a good name. The phrase, again, 'too much of the milk of human
+kindness,' is applied to him in impatience by his wife, who did not
+fully understand him; but certainly he was far from devoid of humanity
+and pity.
+
+At the same time he was exceedingly ambitious. He must have been so by
+temper. The tendency must have been greatly strengthened by his
+marriage. When we see him, it has been further stimulated by his
+remarkable success and by the consciousness of exceptional powers and
+merit. It becomes a passion. The course of action suggested by it is
+extremely perilous: it sets his good name, his position, and even his
+life on the hazard. It is also abhorrent to his better feelings. Their
+defeat in the struggle with ambition leaves him utterly wretched, and
+would have kept him so, however complete had been his outward success
+and security. On the other hand, his passion for power and his instinct
+of self-assertion are so vehement that no inward misery could persuade
+him to relinquish the fruits of crime, or to advance from remorse to
+repentance.
+
+In the character as so far sketched there is nothing very peculiar,
+though the strength of the forces contending in it is unusual. But there
+is in Macbeth one marked peculiarity, the true apprehension of which is
+the key to Shakespeare's conception.[215] This bold ambitious man of
+action has, within certain limits, the imagination of a poet,--an
+imagination on the one hand extremely sensitive to impressions of a
+certain kind, and, on the other, productive of violent disturbance both
+of mind and body. Through it he is kept in contact with supernatural
+impressions and is liable to supernatural fears. And through it,
+especially, come to him the intimations of conscience and honour.
+Macbeth's better nature--to put the matter for clearness' sake too
+broadly--instead of speaking to him in the overt language of moral
+ideas, commands, and prohibitions, incorporates itself in images which
+alarm and horrify. His imagination is thus the best of him, something
+usually deeper and higher than his conscious thoughts; and if he had
+obeyed it he would have been safe. But his wife quite misunderstands it,
+and he himself understands it only in part. The terrifying images which
+deter him from crime and follow its commission, and which are really the
+protest of his deepest self, seem to his wife the creations of mere
+nervous fear, and are sometimes referred by himself to the dread of
+vengeance or the restlessness of insecurity.[216] His conscious or
+reflective mind, that is, moves chiefly among considerations of outward
+success and failure, while his inner being is convulsed by conscience.
+And his inability to understand himself is repeated and exaggerated in
+the interpretations of actors and critics, who represent him as a
+coward, cold-blooded, calculating, and pitiless, who shrinks from crime
+simply because it is dangerous, and suffers afterwards simply because he
+is not safe. In reality his courage is frightful. He strides from crime
+to crime, though his soul never ceases to bar his advance with shapes of
+terror, or to clamour in his ears that he is murdering his peace and
+casting away his 'eternal jewel.'
+
+It is of the first importance to realise the strength, and also (what
+has not been so clearly recognised) the limits, of Macbeth's
+imagination. It is not the universal meditative imagination of Hamlet.
+He came to see in man, as Hamlet sometimes did, the 'quintessence of
+dust'; but he must always have been incapable of Hamlet's reflections on
+man's noble reason and infinite faculty, or of seeing with Hamlet's eyes
+'this brave o'erhanging firmament, this majestical roof fretted with
+golden fire.' Nor could he feel, like Othello, the romance of war or the
+infinity of love. He shows no sign of any unusual sensitiveness to the
+glory or beauty in the world or the soul; and it is partly for this
+reason that we have no inclination to love him, and that we regard him
+with more of awe than of pity. His imagination is excitable and intense,
+but narrow. That which stimulates it is, almost solely, that which
+thrills with sudden, startling, and often supernatural fear.[217] There
+is a famous passage late in the play (V. v. 10) which is here very
+significant, because it refers to a time before his conscience was
+burdened, and so shows his native disposition:
+
+     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 rise and stir
+     As life were in't.
+
+This 'time' must have been in his youth, or at least before we see him.
+And, in the drama, everything which terrifies him is of this character,
+only it has now a deeper and a moral significance. Palpable dangers
+leave him unmoved or fill him with fire. He does himself mere justice
+when he asserts he 'dare do all that may become a man,' or when he
+exclaims to Banquo's ghost,
+
+                        What man dare, I dare:
+     Approach thou like the rugged Russian bear,
+     The arm'd rhinoceros, or the Hyrcan tiger;
+     Take any shape but that, and my firm nerves
+     Shall never tremble.
+
+What appals him is always the image of his own guilty heart or bloody
+deed, or some image which derives from them its terror or gloom. These,
+when they arise, hold him spell-bound and possess him wholly, like a
+hypnotic trance which is at the same time the ecstasy of a poet. As the
+first 'horrid image' of Duncan's murder--of himself murdering
+Duncan--rises from unconsciousness and confronts him, his hair stands on
+end and the outward scene vanishes from his eyes. Why? For fear of
+'consequences'? The idea is ridiculous. Or because the deed is bloody?
+The man who with his 'smoking' steel 'carved out his passage' to the
+rebel leader, and 'unseam'd him from the nave to the chaps,' would
+hardly be frightened by blood. How could fear of consequences make the
+dagger he is to use hang suddenly glittering before him in the air, and
+then as suddenly dash it with gouts of blood? Even when he _talks_ of
+consequences, and declares that if he were safe against them he would
+'jump the life to come,' his imagination bears witness against him, and
+shows us that what really holds him back is the hideous vileness of the
+deed:
+
+                            He's here in double trust;
+     First, as I am his kinsman and his subject,
+     Strong both against the deed; then, as his host,
+     Who should against his murderer shut the door,
+     Not bear the knife myself. Besides, this Duncan
+     Hath borne his faculties so meek, hath been
+     So clear in his great office, that his virtues
+     Will plead like angels, trumpet-tongued, against
+     The deep damnation of his taking-off;
+     And pity, like a naked new-born babe,
+     Striding the blast, or heaven's cherubim, horsed
+     Upon the sightless couriers of the air,
+     Shall blow the horrid deed in every eye,
+     That tears shall drown the wind.
+
+It may be said that he is here thinking of the horror that others will
+feel at the deed--thinking therefore of consequences. Yes, but could he
+realise thus how horrible the deed would look to others if it were not
+equally horrible to himself?
+
+It is the same when the murder is done. He is well-nigh mad with horror,
+but it is not the horror of detection. It is not he who thinks of
+washing his hands or getting his nightgown on. He has brought away the
+daggers he should have left on the pillows of the grooms, but what does
+he care for that? What _he_ thinks of is that, when he heard one of the
+men awaked from sleep say 'God bless us,' he could not say 'Amen'; for
+his imagination presents to him the parching of his throat as an
+immediate judgment from heaven. His wife heard the owl scream and the
+crickets cry; but what _he_ heard was the voice that first cried
+'Macbeth doth murder sleep,' and then, a minute later, with a change of
+tense, denounced on him, as if his three names gave him three
+personalities to suffer in, the doom of sleeplessness:
+
+     Glamis hath murdered sleep, and therefore Cawdor
+     Shall sleep no more, Macbeth shall sleep no more.
+
+There comes a sound of knocking. It should be perfectly familiar to him;
+but he knows not whence, or from what world, it comes. He looks down at
+his hands, and starts violently: 'What hands are here?' For they seem
+alive, they move, they mean to pluck out his eyes. He looks at one of
+them again; it does not move; but the blood upon it is enough to dye the
+whole ocean red. What has all this to do with fear of 'consequences'? It
+is his soul speaking in the only shape in which it can speak freely,
+that of imagination.
+
+So long as Macbeth's imagination is active, we watch him fascinated; we
+feel suspense, horror, awe; in which are latent, also, admiration and
+sympathy. But so soon as it is quiescent these feelings vanish. He is no
+longer 'infirm of purpose': he becomes domineering, even brutal, or he
+becomes a cool pitiless hypocrite. He is generally said to be a very bad
+actor, but this is not wholly true. Whenever his imagination stirs, he
+acts badly. It so possesses him, and is so much stronger than his
+reason, that his face betrays him, and his voice utters the most
+improbable untruths[218] or the most artificial rhetoric[219] But when
+it is asleep he is firm, self-controlled and practical, as in the
+conversation where he skilfully elicits from Banquo that information
+about his movements which is required for the successful arrangement of
+his murder.[220] Here he is hateful; and so he is in the conversation
+with the murderers, who are not professional cut-throats but old
+soldiers, and whom, without a vestige of remorse, he beguiles with
+calumnies against Banquo and with such appeals as his wife had used to
+him.[221] On the other hand, we feel much pity as well as anxiety in the
+scene (I. vii.) where she overcomes his opposition to the murder; and we
+feel it (though his imagination is not specially active) because this
+scene shows us how little he understands himself. This is his great
+misfortune here. Not that he fails to realise in reflection the baseness
+of the deed (the soliloquy with which the scene opens shows that he does
+not). But he has never, to put it pedantically, accepted as the
+principle of his conduct the morality which takes shape in his
+imaginative fears. Had he done so, and said plainly to his wife, 'The
+thing is vile, and, however much I have sworn to do it, I will not,' she
+would have been helpless; for all her arguments proceed on the
+assumption that there is for them no such point of view. Macbeth does
+approach this position once, when, resenting the accusation of
+cowardice, he answers,
+
+     I dare do all that may become a man;
+     Who dares do more is none.
+
+She feels in an instant that everything is at stake, and, ignoring the
+point, overwhelms him with indignant and contemptuous personal reproach.
+But he yields to it because he is himself half-ashamed of that answer of
+his, and because, for want of habit, the simple idea which it expresses
+has no hold on him comparable to the force it acquires when it becomes
+incarnate in visionary fears and warnings.
+
+Yet these were so insistent, and they offered to his ambition a
+resistance so strong, that it is impossible to regard him as falling
+through the blindness or delusion of passion. On the contrary, he
+himself feels with such intensity the enormity of his purpose that, it
+seems clear, neither his ambition nor yet the prophecy of the Witches
+would ever without the aid of Lady Macbeth have overcome this feeling.
+As it is, the deed is done in horror and without the faintest desire or
+sense of glory,--done, one may almost say, as if it were an appalling
+duty; and, the instant it is finished, its futility is revealed to
+Macbeth as clearly as its vileness had been revealed beforehand. As he
+staggers from the scene he mutters in despair,
+
+     Wake Duncan with thy knocking! I would thou could'st.
+
+When, half an hour later, he returns with Lennox from the room of the
+murder, he breaks out:
+
+     Had I but died an hour before this chance,
+     I had lived a blessed time; for from this instant
+     There's nothing serious in mortality:
+     All is but toys: renown and grace is dead;
+     The wine of life is drawn, and the mere lees
+     Is left this vault to brag of.
+
+This is no mere acting. The language here has none of the false
+rhetoric of his merely hypocritical speeches. It is meant to deceive,
+but it utters at the same time his profoundest feeling. And this he can
+henceforth never hide from himself for long. However he may try to drown
+it in further enormities, he hears it murmuring,
+
+                        Duncan is in his grave:
+     After life's fitful fever he sleeps well:
+
+or,
+
+     better be with the dead:
+
+or,
+
+     I have lived long enough:
+
+and it speaks its last words on the last day of his life:
+
+                     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.
+
+How strange that this judgment on life, the despair of a man who had
+knowingly made mortal war on his own soul, should be frequently quoted
+as Shakespeare's own judgment, and should even be adduced, in serious
+criticism, as a proof of his pessimism!
+
+It remains to look a little more fully at the history of Macbeth after
+the murder of Duncan. Unlike his first struggle this history excites
+little suspense or anxiety on his account: we have now no hope for him.
+But it is an engrossing spectacle, and psychologically it is perhaps the
+most remarkable exhibition of the _development_ of a character to be
+found in Shakespeare's tragedies.
+
+That heart-sickness which comes from Macbeth's perception of the
+futility of his crime, and which never leaves him for long, is not,
+however, his habitual state. It could not be so, for two reasons. In the
+first place the consciousness of guilt is stronger in him than the
+consciousness of failure; and it keeps him in a perpetual agony of
+restlessness, and forbids him simply to droop and pine. His mind is
+'full of scorpions.' He cannot sleep. He 'keeps alone,' moody and
+savage. 'All that is within him does condemn itself for being there.'
+There is a fever in his blood which urges him to ceaseless action in the
+search for oblivion. And, in the second place, ambition, the love of
+power, the instinct of self-assertion, are much too potent in Macbeth to
+permit him to resign, even in spirit, the prize for which he has put
+rancours in the vessel of his peace. The 'will to live' is mighty in
+him. The forces which impelled him to aim at the crown re-assert
+themselves. He faces the world, and his own conscience, desperate, but
+never dreaming of acknowledging defeat. He will see 'the frame of things
+disjoint' first. He challenges fate into the lists.
+
+The result is frightful. He speaks no more, as before Duncan's murder,
+of honour or pity. That sleepless torture, he tells himself, is nothing
+but the sense of insecurity and the fear of retaliation. If only he were
+safe, it would vanish. And he looks about for the cause of his fear; and
+his eye falls on Banquo. Banquo, who cannot fail to suspect him, has not
+fled or turned against him: Banquo has become his chief counsellor. Why?
+Because, he answers, the kingdom was promised to Banquo's children.
+Banquo, then, is waiting to attack him, to make a way for them. The
+'bloody instructions' he himself taught when he murdered Duncan, are
+about to return, as he said they would, to plague the inventor. _This_
+then, he tells himself, is the fear that will not let him sleep; and it
+will die with Banquo. There is no hesitation now, and no remorse: he has
+nearly learned his lesson. He hastens feverishly, not to murder Banquo,
+but to procure his murder: some strange idea is in his mind that the
+thought of the dead man will not haunt him, like the memory of Duncan,
+if the deed is done by other hands.[222] The deed is done: but, instead
+of peace descending on him, from the depths of his nature his
+half-murdered conscience rises; his deed confronts him in the apparition
+of Banquo's Ghost, and the horror of the night of his first murder
+returns. But, alas, _it_ has less power, and _he_ has more will.
+Agonised and trembling, he still faces this rebel image, and it yields:
+
+                       Why, so: being gone,
+     I am a man again.
+
+Yes, but his secret is in the hands of the assembled lords. And, worse,
+this deed is as futile as the first. For, though Banquo is dead and even
+his Ghost is conquered, that inner torture is unassuaged. But he will
+not bear it. His guests have hardly left him when he turns roughly to
+his wife:
+
+     How say'st thou, that Macduff denies his person
+     At our great bidding?
+
+Macduff it is that spoils his sleep. He shall perish,--he and aught else
+that bars the road to peace.
+
+                              For mine own good
+     All causes shall give way: I am in blood
+     Stepp'd in so far that, should I wade no more,
+     Returning were as tedious as go o'er:
+     Strange things I have in head that will to hand,
+     Which must be acted ere they may be scann'd.
+
+She answers, sick at heart,
+
+     You lack the season of all natures, sleep.
+
+No doubt: but he has found the way to it now:
+
+     Come, we'll to sleep. My strange and self abuse
+     Is the initiate fear that wants hard use;
+     We are yet but young in deed.
+
+What a change from the man who thought of Duncan's virtues, and of pity
+like a naked new-born babe! What a frightful clearness of
+self-consciousness in this descent to hell, and yet what a furious force
+in the instinct of life and self-assertion that drives him on!
+
+He goes to seek the Witches. He will know, by the worst means, the
+worst. He has no longer any awe of them.
+
+     How now, you secret, black and midnight hags!
+
+--so he greets them, and at once he demands and threatens. They tell him
+he is right to fear Macduff. They tell him to fear nothing, for none of
+woman born can harm him. He feels that the two statements are at
+variance; infatuated, suspects no double meaning; but, that he may
+'sleep in spite of thunder,' determines not to spare Macduff. But his
+heart throbs to know one thing, and he forces from the Witches the
+vision of Banquo's children crowned. The old intolerable thought
+returns, 'for Banquo's issue have I filed my mind'; and with it, for all
+the absolute security apparently promised him, there returns that inward
+fever. Will nothing quiet it? Nothing but destruction. Macduff, one
+comes to tell him, has escaped him; but that does not matter: he can
+still destroy:[223]
+
+                                And even now,
+     To crown my thoughts with acts, be it thought and done:
+     The castle of Macduff I will surprise;
+     Seize upon Fife; give to the edge o' the sword
+     His wife, his babes, and all unfortunate souls
+     That trace him in's line. No boasting like a fool;
+     This deed I'll do before this purpose cool.
+     But no more sights!
+
+No, he need fear no more 'sights.' The Witches have done their work,
+and after this purposeless butchery his own imagination will trouble him
+no more.[224] He has dealt his last blow at the conscience and pity
+which spoke through it.
+
+The whole flood of evil in his nature is now let loose. He becomes an
+open tyrant, dreaded by everyone about him, and a terror to his country.
+She 'sinks beneath the yoke.'
+
+                             Each new morn
+     New widows howl, new orphans cry, new sorrows
+     Strike heaven on the face.
+
+She weeps, she bleeds, 'and each new day a gash is added to her wounds.'
+She is not the mother of her children, but their grave;
+
+                               where nothing,
+     But who knows nothing, is once seen to smile:
+     Where sighs and groans and shrieks that rend the air
+     Are made, not mark'd.
+
+For this wild rage and furious cruelty we are prepared; but vices of
+another kind start up as he plunges on his downward way.
+
+                            I grant him bloody,
+     Luxurious, avaricious, false, deceitful,
+     Sudden, malicious,
+
+says Malcolm; and two of these epithets surprise us. Who would have
+expected avarice or lechery[225] in Macbeth? His ruin seems complete.
+
+Yet it is never complete. To the end he never totally loses our
+sympathy; we never feel towards him as we do to those who appear the
+born children of darkness. There remains something sublime in the
+defiance with which, even when cheated of his last hope, he faces earth
+and hell and heaven. Nor would any soul to whom evil was congenial be
+capable of that heart-sickness which overcomes him when he thinks of the
+'honour, love, obedience, troops of friends' which 'he must not look to
+have' (and which Iago would never have cared to have), and contrasts
+with them
+
+     Curses, not loud but deep, mouth-honour, breath,
+     Which the poor heart would fain deny, and dare not,
+
+(and which Iago would have accepted with indifference). Neither can I
+agree with those who find in his reception of the news of his wife's
+death proof of alienation or utter carelessness. There is no proof of
+these in the words,
+
+                     She should have died hereafter;
+     There would have been a time for such a word,
+
+spoken as they are by a man already in some measure prepared for such
+news, and now transported by the frenzy of his last fight for life. He
+has no time now to feel.[226] Only, as he thinks of the morrow when time
+to feel will come--if anything comes, the vanity of all hopes and
+forward-lookings sinks deep into his soul with an infinite weariness,
+and he murmurs,
+
+     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.
+
+In the very depths a gleam of his native love of goodness, and with it a
+touch of tragic grandeur, rests upon him. The evil he has desperately
+embraced continues to madden or to wither his inmost heart. No
+experience in the world could bring him to glory in it or make his peace
+with it, or to forget what he once was and Iago and Goneril never were.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[Footnote 194: See note BB.]
+
+[Footnote 195: 'Hell is murky' (V. i. 35). This, surely, is not meant
+for a scornful repetition of something said long ago by Macbeth. He
+would hardly in those days have used an argument or expressed a fear
+that could provoke nothing but contempt.]
+
+[Footnote 196: Whether Banquo's ghost is a mere illusion, like the
+dagger, is discussed in Note FF.]
+
+[Footnote 197: In parts of this paragraph I am indebted to Hunter's
+_Illustrations of Shakespeare_.]
+
+[Footnote 198: The line is a foot short.]
+
+[Footnote 199: It should be observed that in some cases the irony would
+escape an audience ignorant of the story and watching the play for the
+first time,--another indication that Shakespeare did not write solely
+for immediate stage purposes.]
+
+[Footnote 200: Their influence on spectators is, I believe, very
+inferior. These scenes, like the Storm-scenes in _King Lear_, belong
+properly to the world of imagination.]
+
+[Footnote 201: 'By yea and no, I think the 'oman is a witch indeed: I
+like not when a 'oman has a great peard' (_Merry Wives_, IV. ii. 202).]
+
+[Footnote 202: Even the metaphor in the lines (II. iii. 127),
+
+     What should be spoken here, where our fate,
+     Hid in an auger-hole, may rush and seize us?
+
+was probably suggested by the words in Scot's first chapter, 'They can
+go in and out at awger-holes.']
+
+[Footnote 203: Once, 'weird women.' Whether Shakespeare knew that
+'weird' signified 'fate' we cannot tell, but it is probable that he did.
+The word occurs six times in _Macbeth_ (it does not occur elsewhere in
+Shakespeare). The first three times it is spelt in the Folio _weyward_,
+the last three _weyard_. This may suggest a miswriting or misprinting of
+_wayward_; but, as that word is always spelt in the Folio either rightly
+or _waiward_, it is more likely that the _weyward_ and _weyard_ of
+_Macbeth_ are the copyist's or printer's misreading of Shakespeare's
+_weird_ or _weyrd_.]
+
+[Footnote 204: The doubt as to these passages (see Note Z) does not
+arise from the mere appearance of this figure. The idea of Hecate's
+connection with witches appears also at II. i. 52, and she is mentioned
+again at III. ii. 41 (cf. _Mid. Night's Dream_, V. i. 391, for her
+connection with fairies). It is part of the common traditional notion of
+the heathen gods being now devils. Scot refers to it several times. See
+the notes in the Clarendon Press edition on III. v. 1, or those in
+Furness's Variorum.
+
+Of course in the popular notion the witch's spirits are devils or
+servants of Satan. If Shakespeare openly introduces this idea only in
+such phrases as 'the instruments of darkness' and 'what! can the devil
+speak true?' the reason is probably his unwillingness to give too much
+prominence to distinctively religious ideas.]
+
+[Footnote 205: If this paragraph is true, some of the statements even of
+Lamb and of Coleridge about the Witches are, taken literally, incorrect.
+What these critics, and notably the former, describe so well is the
+poetic aspect abstracted from the remainder; and in describing this they
+attribute to the Witches themselves what belongs really to the complex
+of Witches, Spirits, and Hecate. For the purposes of imagination, no
+doubt, this inaccuracy is of small consequence; and it is these purposes
+that matter. [I have not attempted to fulfil them.]]
+
+[Footnote 206: See Note CC.]
+
+[Footnote 207: The proclamation of Malcolm as Duncan's successor (I.
+iv.) changes the position, but the design of murder is prior to this.]
+
+[Footnote 208: Schlegel's assertion that the first thought of the murder
+comes from the Witches is thus in flat contradiction with the text. (The
+sentence in which he asserts this is, I may observe, badly mistranslated
+in the English version, which, wherever I have consulted the original,
+shows itself untrustworthy. It ought to be revised, for Schlegel is well
+worth reading.)]
+
+[Footnote 209: It is noticeable that Dr. Forman, who saw the play in
+1610 and wrote a sketch of it in his journal, says nothing about the
+later prophecies. Perhaps he despised them as mere stuff for the
+groundlings. The reader will find, I think, that the great poetic effect
+of Act IV. Sc. i. depends much more on the 'charm' which precedes
+Macbeth's entrance, and on Macbeth himself, than on the predictions.]
+
+[Footnote 210: This comparison was suggested by a passage in Hegel's
+_Aesthetik_, i. 291 ff.]
+
+[Footnote 211: _Il._ i. 188 ff. (Leaf's translation).]
+
+[Footnote 212: The supernaturalism of the modern poet, indeed, is more
+'external' than that of the ancient. We have already had evidence of
+this, and shall find more when we come to the character of Banquo.]
+
+[Footnote 213: The assertion that Lady Macbeth sought a crown for
+herself, or sought anything for herself, apart from her husband, is
+absolutely unjustified by anything in the play. It is based on a
+sentence of Holinshed's which Shakespeare did _not_ use.]
+
+[Footnote 214: The word is used of him (I. ii. 67), but not in a way
+that decides this question or even bears on it.]
+
+[Footnote 215: This view, thus generally stated, is not original, but I
+cannot say who first stated it.]
+
+[Footnote 216: The latter, and more important, point was put quite
+clearly by Coleridge.]
+
+[Footnote 217: It is the consequent insistence on the idea of fear, and
+the frequent repetition of the word, that have principally led to
+misinterpretation.]
+
+[Footnote 218: _E.g._ I. iii. 149, where he excuses his abstraction by
+saying that his 'dull brain was wrought with things forgotten,' when
+nothing could be more natural than that he should be thinking of his new
+honour.]
+
+[Footnote 219: _E.g._ in I. iv. This is so also in II. iii. 114 ff.,
+though here there is some real imaginative excitement mingled with the
+rhetorical antitheses and balanced clauses and forced bombast.]
+
+[Footnote 220: III. i. Lady Macbeth herself could not more naturally
+have introduced at intervals the questions 'Ride you this afternoon?'
+(l. 19), 'Is't far you ride?' (l. 24), 'Goes Fleance with you?' (l.
+36).]
+
+[Footnote 221: We feel here, however, an underlying subdued frenzy which
+awakes some sympathy. There is an almost unendurable impatience
+expressed even in the rhythm of many of the lines; _e.g._:
+
+                                        Well then, now
+     Have you consider'd of my speeches? Know
+     That it was he in the times past which held you
+     So under fortune, which you thought had been
+     Our innocent self: this I made good to you
+     In our last conference, pass'd in probation with you,
+     How you were borne in hand, how cross'd, the instruments,
+     Who wrought with them, and all things else that might
+     To half a soul and to a notion crazed
+     Say, 'Thus did Banquo.'
+
+This effect is heard to the end of the play in Macbeth's less poetic
+speeches, and leaves the same impression of burning energy, though not
+of imaginative exaltation, as his great speeches. In these we find
+either violent, huge, sublime imagery, or a torrent of figurative
+expressions (as in the famous lines about 'the innocent sleep'). Our
+impressions as to the diction of the play are largely derived from these
+speeches of the hero, but not wholly so. The writing almost throughout
+leaves an impression of intense, almost feverish, activity.]
+
+[Footnote 222: See his first words to the Ghost: 'Thou canst not say I
+did it.']
+
+[Footnote 223:
+
+     For only in destroying I find ease
+     To my relentless thoughts.--_Paradise Lost_, ix. 129.
+
+Milton's portrait of Satan's misery here, and at the beginning of Book
+IV., might well have been suggested by _Macbeth_. Coleridge, after
+quoting Duncan's speech, I. iv. 35 ff., says: 'It is a fancy; but I can
+never read this, and the following speeches of Macbeth, without
+involuntarily thinking of the Miltonic Messiah and Satan.' I doubt if it
+was a mere fancy. (It will be remembered that Milton thought at one time
+of writing a tragedy on Macbeth.)]
+
+[Footnote 224: The immediate reference in 'But no more sights' is
+doubtless to the visions called up by the Witches; but one of these, the
+'blood-bolter'd Banquo,' recalls to him the vision of the preceding
+night, of which he had said,
+
+                        You make me strange
+     Even to the disposition that I owe,
+     When now I think you can behold such _sights_,
+     And keep the natural ruby of your cheeks,
+     When mine is blanch'd with fear.]
+
+[Footnote 225: 'Luxurious' and 'luxury' are used by Shakespeare only in
+this older sense. It must be remembered that these lines are spoken by
+Malcolm, but it seems likely that they are meant to be taken as true
+throughout.]
+
+[Footnote 226: I do not at all suggest that his love for his wife
+remains what it was when he greeted her with the words 'My dearest love,
+Duncan comes here to-night.' He has greatly changed; she has ceased to
+help him, sunk in her own despair; and there is no intensity of anxiety
+in the questions he puts to the doctor about her. But his love for her
+was probably never unselfish, never the love of Brutus, who, in somewhat
+similar circumstances, uses, on the death of Cassius, words which remind
+us of Macbeth's:
+
+     I shall find time, Cassius, I shall find time.
+
+For the opposite strain of feeling cf. Sonnet 90:
+
+     Then hate me if thou wilt; if ever, now,
+     Now while the world is bent my deeds to cross.]
+
+
+
+
+LECTURE X
+
+MACBETH
+
+
+1
+
+To regard _Macbeth_ as a play, like the love-tragedies _Romeo and
+Juliet_ and _Antony and Cleopatra_, in which there are two central
+characters of equal importance, is certainly a mistake. But Shakespeare
+himself is in a measure responsible for it, because the first half of
+_Macbeth_ is greater than the second, and in the first half Lady Macbeth
+not only appears more than in the second but exerts the ultimate
+deciding influence on the action. And, in the opening Act at least, Lady
+Macbeth is the most commanding and perhaps the most awe-inspiring figure
+that Shakespeare drew. Sharing, as we have seen, certain traits with her
+husband, she is at once clearly distinguished from him by an
+inflexibility of will, which appears to hold imagination, feeling, and
+conscience completely in check. To her the prophecy of things that will
+be becomes instantaneously the determination that they shall be:
+
+     Glamis thou art, and Cawdor, and shalt be
+     That thou art promised.
+
+She knows her husband's weakness, how he scruples 'to catch the nearest
+way' to the object he desires; and she sets herself without a trace of
+doubt or conflict to counteract this weakness. To her there is no
+separation between will and deed; and, as the deed falls in part to her,
+she is sure it will be done:
+
+                   The raven himself is hoarse
+     That croaks the fatal entrance of Duncan
+     Under my battlements.
+
+On the moment of Macbeth's rejoining her, after braving infinite dangers
+and winning infinite praise, without a syllable on these subjects or a
+word of affection, she goes straight to her purpose and permits him to
+speak of nothing else. She takes the superior position and assumes the
+direction of affairs,--appears to assume it even more than she really
+can, that she may spur him on. She animates him by picturing the deed as
+heroic, 'this night's _great_ business,' or 'our _great_ quell,' while
+she ignores its cruelty and faithlessness. She bears down his faint
+resistance by presenting him with a prepared scheme which may remove
+from him the terror and danger of deliberation. She rouses him with a
+taunt no man can bear, and least of all a soldier,--the word 'coward.'
+She appeals even to his love for her:
+
+                 from this time
+     Such I account thy love;
+
+--such, that is, as the protestations of a drunkard. Her reasonings are
+mere sophisms; they could persuade no man. It is not by them, it is by
+personal appeals, through the admiration she extorts from him, and
+through sheer force of will, that she impels him to the deed. Her eyes
+are fixed upon the crown and the means to it; she does not attend to the
+consequences. Her plan of laying the guilt upon the chamberlains is
+invented on the spur of the moment, and simply to satisfy her husband.
+Her true mind is heard in the ringing cry with which she answers his
+question, 'Will it not be received ... that they have done it?'
+
+     Who _dares_ receive it other?
+
+And this is repeated in the sleep-walking scene: 'What need we fear who
+knows it, when none can call our power to account?' Her passionate
+courage sweeps him off his feet. His decision is taken in a moment of
+enthusiasm:
+
+               Bring forth men-children only;
+     For thy undaunted mettle should compose
+     Nothing but males.
+
+And even when passion has quite died away her will remains supreme. In
+presence of overwhelming horror and danger, in the murder scene and the
+banquet scene, her self-control is perfect. When the truth of what she
+has done dawns on her, no word of complaint, scarcely a word of her own
+suffering, not a single word of her own as apart from his, escapes her
+when others are by. She helps him, but never asks his help. She leans on
+nothing but herself. And from the beginning to the end--though she makes
+once or twice a slip in acting her part--her will never fails her. Its
+grasp upon her nature may destroy her, but it is never relaxed. We are
+sure that she never betrayed her husband or herself by a word or even a
+look, save in sleep. However appalling she may be, she is sublime.
+
+In the earlier scenes of the play this aspect of Lady Macbeth's
+character is far the most prominent. And if she seems invincible she
+seems also inhuman. We find no trace of pity for the kind old king; no
+consciousness of the treachery and baseness of the murder; no sense of
+the value of the lives of the wretched men on whom the guilt is to be
+laid; no shrinking even from the condemnation or hatred of the world.
+Yet if the Lady Macbeth of these scenes were really utterly inhuman, or
+a 'fiend-like queen,' as Malcolm calls her, the Lady Macbeth of the
+sleep-walking scene would be an impossibility. The one woman could never
+become the other. And in fact, if we look below the surface, there is
+evidence enough in the earlier scenes of preparation for the later. I do
+not mean that Lady Macbeth was naturally humane. There is nothing in the
+play to show this, and several passages subsequent to the murder-scene
+supply proof to the contrary. One is that where she exclaims, on being
+informed of Duncan's murder,
+
+                  Woe, alas!
+     What, in our house?
+
+This mistake in acting shows that she does not even know what the
+natural feeling in such circumstances would be; and Banquo's curt
+answer, 'Too cruel anywhere,' is almost a reproof of her insensibility.
+But, admitting this, we have in the first place to remember, in
+imagining the opening scenes, that she is deliberately bent on
+counteracting the 'human kindness' of her husband, and also that she is
+evidently not merely inflexibly determined but in a condition of
+abnormal excitability. That exaltation in the project which is so
+entirely lacking in Macbeth is strongly marked in her. When she tries to
+help him by representing their enterprise as heroic, she is deceiving
+herself as much as him. Their attainment of the crown presents itself to
+her, perhaps has long presented itself, as something so glorious, and
+she has fixed her will upon it so completely, that for the time she sees
+the enterprise in no other light than that of its greatness. When she
+soliloquises,
+
+                               Yet do I fear thy nature:
+     It is too full o' the milk of human kindness
+     To catch the nearest way: thou wouldst be great;
+     Art not without ambition, but without
+     The illness should attend it; what thou wouldst highly,
+     That wouldst thou holily,
+
+one sees that 'ambition' and 'great' and 'highly' and even 'illness' are
+to her simply terms of praise, and 'holily' and 'human kindness' simply
+terms of blame. Moral distinctions do not in this exaltation exist for
+her; or rather they are inverted: 'good' means to her the crown and
+whatever is required to obtain it, 'evil' whatever stands in the way of
+its attainment. This attitude of mind is evident even when she is alone,
+though it becomes still more pronounced when she has to work upon her
+husband. And it persists until her end is attained. But, without being
+exactly forced, it betrays a strain which could not long endure.
+
+Besides this, in these earlier scenes the traces of feminine weakness
+and human feeling, which account for her later failure, are not absent.
+Her will, it is clear, was exerted to overpower not only her husband's
+resistance but some resistance in herself. Imagine Goneril uttering the
+famous words,
+
+                 Had he not resembled
+     My father as he slept, I had done 't.
+
+They are spoken, I think, without any sentiment--impatiently, as though
+she regretted her weakness: but it was there. And in reality, quite
+apart from this recollection of her father, she could never have done
+the murder if her husband had failed. She had to nerve herself with wine
+to give her 'boldness' enough to go through her minor part. That
+appalling invocation to the spirits of evil, to unsex her and fill her
+from the crown to the toe topfull of direst cruelty, tells the same tale
+of determination to crush the inward protest. Goneril had no need of
+such a prayer. In the utterance of the frightful lines,
+
+                I have given suck, and know
+     How tender 'tis to love the babe that milks me:
+     I would, while it was smiling in my face,
+     Have pluck'd my nipple from his boneless gums,
+     And dash'd the brains out, had I so sworn as you
+     Have done to this,
+
+her voice should doubtless rise until it reaches, in 'dash'd the brains
+out,' an almost hysterical scream.[227] These lines show unmistakably
+that strained exaltation which, as soon as the end is reached, vanishes,
+never to return.
+
+The greatness of Lady Macbeth lies almost wholly in courage and force of
+will. It is an error to regard her as remarkable on the intellectual
+side. In acting a part she shows immense self-control, but not much
+skill. Whatever may be thought of the plan of attributing the murder of
+Duncan to the chamberlains, to lay their bloody daggers on their
+pillows, as if they were determined to advertise their guilt, was a
+mistake which can be accounted for only by the excitement of the moment.
+But the limitations of her mind appear most in the point where she is
+most strongly contrasted with Macbeth,--in her comparative dulness of
+imagination. I say 'comparative,' for she sometimes uses highly poetic
+language, as indeed does everyone in Shakespeare who has any greatness
+of soul. Nor is she perhaps less imaginative than the majority of his
+heroines. But as compared with her husband she has little imagination.
+It is not _simply_ that she suppresses what she has. To her, things
+remain at the most terrible moment precisely what they were at the
+calmest, plain facts which stand in a given relation to a certain deed,
+not visions which tremble and flicker in the light of other worlds. The
+probability that the old king will sleep soundly after his long journey
+to Inverness is to her simply a fortunate circumstance; but one can
+fancy the shoot of horror across Macbeth's face as she mentions it. She
+uses familiar and prosaic illustrations, like
+
+     Letting 'I dare not' wait upon 'I would,'
+     Like the poor cat i' the adage,
+
+(the cat who wanted fish but did not like to wet her feet); or,
+
+                                      We fail?
+     But screw your courage to the sticking-place,
+     And we'll not fail;[228]
+
+or,
+
+                           Was the hope drunk
+     Wherein you dress'd yourself? hath it slept since?
+     And wakes it now, to look so green and pale
+     At what it did so freely?
+
+The Witches are practically nothing to her. She feels no sympathy in
+Nature with her guilty purpose, and would never bid the earth not hear
+her steps, which way they walk. The noises before the murder, and during
+it, are heard by her as simple facts, and are referred to their true
+sources. The knocking has no mystery for her: it comes from 'the south
+entry.' She calculates on the drunkenness of the grooms, compares the
+different effects of wine on herself and on them, and listens to their
+snoring. To her the blood upon her husband's hands suggests only the
+taunt,
+
+     My hands are of your colour, but I shame
+     To wear a heart so white;
+
+and the blood to her is merely 'this filthy witness,'--words impossible
+to her husband, to whom it suggested something quite other than sensuous
+disgust or practical danger. The literalism of her mind appears fully in
+two contemptuous speeches where she dismisses his imaginings; in the
+murder scene:
+
+                           Infirm of purpose!
+     Give me the daggers! The sleeping and the dead
+     Are but as pictures: 'tis the eye of childhood
+     That fears a painted devil;
+
+and in the banquet scene:
+
+                         O these flaws and starts,
+     Impostors to true fear, would well become
+     A woman's story at a winter's fire,
+     Authorised by her grandam. Shame itself!
+     Why do you make such faces? When all's done,
+     You look but on a stool.
+
+Even in the awful scene where her imagination breaks loose in sleep she
+uses no such images as Macbeth's. It is the direct appeal of the facts
+to sense that has fastened on her memory. The ghastly realism of 'Yet
+who would have thought the old man to have had so much blood in him?' or
+'Here's the smell of the blood still,' is wholly unlike him. Her most
+poetical words, 'All the perfumes of Arabia will not sweeten this little
+hand,' are equally unlike his words about great Neptune's ocean. Hers,
+like some of her other speeches, are the more moving, from their greater
+simplicity and because they seem to tell of that self-restraint in
+suffering which is so totally lacking in him; but there is in them
+comparatively little of imagination. If we consider most of the passages
+to which I have referred, we shall find that the quality which moves our
+admiration is courage or force of will.
+
+This want of imagination, though it helps to make Lady Macbeth strong
+for immediate action, is fatal to her. If she does not feel beforehand
+the cruelty of Duncan's murder, this is mainly because she hardly
+imagines the act, or at most imagines its outward show, 'the motion of a
+muscle this way or that.' Nor does she in the least foresee those inward
+consequences which reveal themselves immediately in her husband, and
+less quickly in herself. It is often said that she understands him well.
+Had she done so, she never would have urged him on. She knows that he is
+given to strange fancies; but, not realising what they spring from, she
+has no idea either that they may gain such power as to ruin the scheme,
+or that, while they mean present weakness, they mean also perception of
+the future. At one point in the murder scene the force of his
+imagination impresses her, and for a moment she is startled; a light
+threatens to break on her:
+
+                  These deeds must not be thought
+     After these ways: so, it will make us mad,
+
+she says, with a sudden and great seriousness. And when he goes panting
+on, 'Methought I heard a voice cry, "Sleep no more,"' ... she breaks in,
+'What do you mean?' half-doubting whether this was not a real voice that
+he heard. Then, almost directly, she recovers herself, convinced of the
+vanity of his fancy. Nor does she understand herself any better than
+him. She never suspects that these deeds _must_ be thought after these
+ways; that her facile realism,
+
+     A little water clears us of this deed,
+
+will one day be answered by herself, 'Will these hands ne'er be clean?'
+or that the fatal commonplace, 'What's done is done,' will make way for
+her last despairing sentence, 'What's done cannot be undone.'
+
+Hence the development of her character--perhaps it would be more
+strictly accurate to say, the change in her state of mind--is both
+inevitable, and the opposite of the development we traced in Macbeth.
+When the murder has been done, the discovery of its hideousness, first
+reflected in the faces of her guests, comes to Lady Macbeth with the
+shock of a sudden disclosure, and at once her nature begins to sink. The
+first intimation of the change is given when, in the scene of the
+discovery, she faints.[229] When next we see her, Queen of Scotland, the
+glory of her dream has faded. She enters, disillusioned, and weary with
+want of sleep: she has thrown away everything and gained nothing:
+
+               Nought's had, all's spent,
+     Where our desire is got without content:
+     'Tis safer to be that which we destroy
+     Than by destruction dwell in doubtful joy.
+
+Henceforth she has no initiative: the stem of her being seems to be cut
+through. Her husband, physically the stronger, maddened by pangs he had
+foreseen, but still flaming with life, comes into the foreground, and
+she retires. Her will remains, and she does her best to help him; but he
+rarely needs her help. Her chief anxiety appears to be that he should
+not betray his misery. He plans the murder of Banquo without her
+knowledge (not in order to spare her, I think, for he never shows love
+of this quality, but merely because he does not need her now); and even
+when she is told vaguely of his intention she appears but little
+interested. In the sudden emergency of the banquet scene she makes a
+prodigious and magnificent effort; her strength, and with it her
+ascendancy, returns, and she saves her husband at least from an open
+disclosure. But after this she takes no part whatever in the action. We
+only know from her shuddering words in the sleep-walking scene, 'The
+Thane of Fife had a wife: where is she now?' that she has even learned
+of her husband's worst crime; and in all the horrors of his tyranny over
+Scotland she has, so far as we hear, no part. Disillusionment and
+despair prey upon her more and more. That she should seek any relief in
+speech, or should ask for sympathy, would seem to her mere weakness, and
+would be to Macbeth's defiant fury an irritation. Thinking of the change
+in him, we imagine the bond between them slackened, and Lady Macbeth
+left much alone. She sinks slowly downward. She cannot bear darkness,
+and has light by her continually: 'tis her command. At last her nature,
+not her will, gives way. The secrets of the past find vent in a disorder
+of sleep, the beginning perhaps of madness. What the doctor fears is
+clear. He reports to her husband no great physical mischief, but bids
+her attendant to remove from her all means by which she could harm
+herself, and to keep eyes on her constantly. It is in vain. Her death is
+announced by a cry from her women so sudden and direful that it would
+thrill her husband with horror if he were any longer capable of fear. In
+the last words of the play Malcolm tells us it is believed in the
+hostile army that she died by her own hand. And (not to speak of the
+indications just referred to) it is in accordance with her character
+that even in her weakest hour she should cut short by one determined
+stroke the agony of her life.
+
+The sinking of Lady Macbeth's nature, and the marked change in her
+demeanour to her husband, are most strikingly shown in the conclusion of
+the banquet scene; and from this point pathos is mingled with awe. The
+guests are gone. She is completely exhausted, and answers Macbeth in
+listless, submissive words which seem to come with difficulty. How
+strange sounds the reply 'Did you send to him, sir?' to his imperious
+question about Macduff! And when he goes on, 'waxing desperate in
+imagination,' to speak of new deeds of blood, she seems to sicken at the
+thought, and there is a deep pathos in that answer which tells at once
+of her care for him and of the misery she herself has silently endured,
+
+     You lack the season of all natures, sleep.
+
+We begin to think of her now less as the awful instigator of murder than
+as a woman with much that is grand in her, and much that is piteous.
+Strange and almost ludicrous as the statement may sound,[230] she is, up
+to her light, a perfect wife. She gives her husband the best she has;
+and the fact that she never uses to him the terms of affection which, up
+to this point in the play, he employs to her, is certainly no indication
+of want of love. She urges, appeals, reproaches, for a practical end,
+but she never recriminates. The harshness of her taunts is free from
+mere personal feeling, and also from any deep or more than momentary
+contempt. She despises what she thinks the weakness which stands in the
+way of her husband's ambition; but she does not despise _him_. She
+evidently admires him and thinks him a great man, for whom the throne is
+the proper place. Her commanding attitude in the moments of his
+hesitation or fear is probably confined to them. If we consider the
+peculiar circumstances of the earlier scenes and the banquet scene, and
+if we examine the language of the wife and husband at other times, we
+shall come, I think, to the conclusion that their habitual relations are
+better represented by the later scenes than by the earlier, though
+naturally they are not truly represented by either. Her ambition for her
+husband and herself (there was no distinction to her mind) proved fatal
+to him, far more so than the prophecies of the Witches; but even when
+she pushed him into murder she believed she was helping him to do what
+he merely lacked the nerve to attempt; and her part in the crime was so
+much less open-eyed than his, that, if the impossible and undramatic
+task of estimating degrees of culpability were forced on us, we should
+surely have to assign the larger share to Macbeth.
+
+'Lady Macbeth,' says Dr. Johnson, 'is merely detested'; and for a long
+time critics generally spoke of her as though she were Malcolm's
+'fiend-like queen.' In natural reaction we tend to insist, as I have
+been doing, on the other and less obvious side; and in the criticism of
+the last century there is even a tendency to sentimentalise the
+character. But it can hardly be doubted that Shakespeare meant the
+predominant impression to be one of awe, grandeur, and horror, and that
+he never meant this impression to be lost, however it might be modified,
+as Lady Macbeth's activity diminishes and her misery increases. I cannot
+believe that, when she said of Banquo and Fleance,
+
+     But in them nature's copy's not eterne,
+
+she meant only that they would some day die; or that she felt any
+surprise when Macbeth replied,
+
+     There's comfort yet: they are assailable;
+
+though I am sure no light came into her eyes when he added those
+dreadful words, 'Then be thou jocund.' She was listless. She herself
+would not have moved a finger against Banquo. But she thought his death,
+and his son's death, might ease her husband's mind, and she suggested
+the murders indifferently and without remorse. The sleep-walking scene,
+again, inspires pity, but its main effect is one of awe. There is great
+horror in the references to blood, but it cannot be said that there is
+more than horror; and Campbell was surely right when, in alluding to
+Mrs. Jameson's analysis, he insisted that in Lady Macbeth's misery there
+is no trace of contrition.[231] Doubtless she would have given the world
+to undo what she had done; and the thought of it killed her; but,
+regarding her from the tragic point of view, we may truly say she was
+too great to repent.[232]
+
+
+2
+
+The main interest of the character of Banquo arises from the changes
+that take place in him, and from the influence of the Witches upon him.
+And it is curious that Shakespeare's intention here is so frequently
+missed. Banquo being at first strongly contrasted with Macbeth, as an
+innocent man with a guilty, it seems to be supposed that this contrast
+must be continued to his death; while, in reality, though it is never
+removed, it is gradually diminished. Banquo in fact may be described
+much more truly than Macbeth as the victim of the Witches. If we follow
+his story this will be evident.
+
+He bore a part only less distinguished than Macbeth's in the battles
+against Sweno and Macdonwald. He and Macbeth are called 'our captains,'
+and when they meet the Witches they are traversing the 'blasted
+heath'[233] alone together. Banquo accosts the strange shapes without
+the slightest fear. They lay their fingers on their lips, as if to
+signify that they will not, or must not, speak to _him_. To Macbeth's
+brief appeal, 'Speak, if you can: what are you?' they at once reply, not
+by saying what they are, but by hailing him Thane of Glamis, Thane of
+Cawdor, and King hereafter. Banquo is greatly surprised that his partner
+should start as if in fear, and observes that he is at once 'rapt'; and
+he bids the Witches, if they know the future, to prophesy to _him_, who
+neither begs their favour nor fears their hate. Macbeth, looking back at
+a later time, remembers Banquo's daring, and how
+
+                       he chid the sisters,
+     When first they put the name of king upon me,
+     And bade them speak to him.
+
+'Chid' is an exaggeration; but Banquo is evidently a bold man, probably
+an ambitious one, and certainly has no lurking guilt in his ambition. On
+hearing the predictions concerning himself and his descendants he makes
+no answer, and when the Witches are about to vanish he shows none of
+Macbeth's feverish anxiety to know more. On their vanishing he is simply
+amazed, wonders if they were anything but hallucinations, makes no
+reference to the predictions till Macbeth mentions them, and then
+answers lightly.
+
+When Ross and Angus, entering, announce to Macbeth that he has been made
+Thane of Cawdor, Banquo exclaims, aside, to himself or Macbeth, 'What!
+can the devil speak true?' He now believes that the Witches were real
+beings and the 'instruments of darkness.' When Macbeth, turning to him,
+whispers,
+
+     Do you not hope your children shall be kings,
+     When those that gave the Thane of Cawdor to me
+     Promised no less to them?
+
+he draws with the boldness of innocence the inference which is really
+occupying Macbeth, and answers,
+
+                             That, trusted home,
+     Might yet enkindle you unto the crown
+     Besides the thane of Cawdor.
+
+Here he still speaks, I think, in a free, off-hand, even jesting,[234]
+manner ('enkindle' meaning merely 'excite you to _hope_ for'). But then,
+possibly from noticing something in Macbeth's face, he becomes graver,
+and goes on, with a significant 'but,'
+
+                          But 'tis strange:
+     And oftentimes, to win us to our harm,
+     The instruments of darkness tell us truths,
+     Win us with honest trifles, to betray's
+     In deepest consequence.
+
+He afterwards observes for the second time that his partner is 'rapt';
+but he explains his abstraction naturally and sincerely by referring to
+the surprise of his new honours; and at the close of the scene, when
+Macbeth proposes that they shall discuss the predictions together at
+some later time, he answers in the cheerful, rather bluff manner, which
+he has used almost throughout, 'Very gladly.' Nor was there any reason
+why Macbeth's rejoinder, 'Till then, enough,' should excite misgivings
+in him, though it implied a request for silence, and though the whole
+behaviour of his partner during the scene must have looked very
+suspicious to him when the prediction of the crown was made good through
+the murder of Duncan.
+
+In the next scene Macbeth and Banquo join the King, who welcomes them
+both with the kindest expressions of gratitude and with promises of
+favours to come. Macbeth has indeed already received a noble reward.
+Banquo, who is said by the King to have 'no less deserved,' receives as
+yet mere thanks. His brief and frank acknowledgment is contrasted with
+Macbeth's laboured rhetoric; and, as Macbeth goes out, Banquo turns with
+hearty praises of him to the King.
+
+And when next we see him, approaching Macbeth's castle in company with
+Duncan, there is still no sign of change. Indeed he gains on us. It is
+he who speaks the beautiful lines,
+
+                        This guest of summer,
+     The temple-haunting martlet, does approve,
+     By his loved mansionry, that the heaven's breath
+     Smells wooingly here: no jutty, frieze,
+     Buttress, nor coign of vantage, but this bird
+     Hath made his pendent bed and procreant cradle:
+     Where they most breed and haunt, I have observed,
+     The air is delicate;
+
+--lines which tell of that freedom of heart, and that sympathetic sense
+of peace and beauty, which the Macbeth of the tragedy could never feel.
+
+But now Banquo's sky begins to darken. At the opening of the Second Act
+we see him with Fleance crossing the court of the castle on his way to
+bed. The blackness of the moonless, starless night seems to oppress him.
+And he is oppressed by something else.
+
+     A heavy summons lies like lead upon me,
+     And yet I would not sleep: merciful powers,
+     Restrain in me the cursed thoughts that nature
+     Gives way to in repose!
+
+On Macbeth's entrance we know what Banquo means: he says to
+Macbeth--and it is the first time he refers to the subject unprovoked,
+
+     I dreamt last night of the three weird sisters.
+
+His will is still untouched: he would repel the 'cursed thoughts'; and
+they are mere thoughts, not intentions. But still they are 'thoughts,'
+something more, probably, than mere recollections; and they bring with
+them an undefined sense of guilt. The poison has begun to work.
+
+The passage that follows Banquo's words to Macbeth is difficult to
+interpret:
+
+     I dreamt last night of the three weird sisters:
+     To you they have show'd some truth.
+
+     _Macb._                          I think not of them:
+     Yet, when we can entreat an hour to serve,
+     We would spend it in some words upon that business,
+     If you would grant the time.
+
+     _Ban._                       At your kind'st leisure.
+
+     _Macb._ If you shall cleave to my consent, when 'tis,
+     It shall make honour for you.
+
+     _Ban._                         So I lose none
+     In seeking to augment it, but still keep
+     My bosom franchised and allegiance clear,
+     I shall be counsell'd.
+
+     _Macb._                Good repose the while!
+
+     _Ban._ Thanks, sir: the like to you!
+
+Macbeth's first idea is, apparently, simply to free himself from any
+suspicion which the discovery of the murder might suggest, by showing
+himself, just before it, quite indifferent to the predictions, and
+merely looking forward to a conversation about them at some future time.
+But why does he go on, 'If you shall cleave,' etc.? Perhaps he foresees
+that, on the discovery, Banquo cannot fail to suspect him, and thinks it
+safest to prepare the way at once for an understanding with him (in the
+original story he makes Banquo his accomplice _before_ the murder).
+Banquo's answer shows three things,--that he fears a treasonable
+proposal, that he has no idea of accepting it, and that he has no fear
+of Macbeth to restrain him from showing what is in his mind.
+
+Duncan is murdered. In the scene of discovery Banquo of course appears,
+and his behaviour is significant. When he enters, and Macduff cries out
+to him,
+
+                O Banquo, Banquo,
+     Our royal master's murdered,
+
+and Lady Macbeth, who has entered a moment before, exclaims,
+
+                  Woe, alas!
+     What, in our house?
+
+his answer,
+
+     Too cruel anywhere,
+
+shows, as I have pointed out, repulsion, and we may be pretty sure that
+he suspects the truth at once. After a few words to Macduff he remains
+absolutely silent while the scene is continued for nearly forty lines.
+He is watching Macbeth and listening as he tells how he put the
+chamberlains to death in a frenzy of loyal rage. At last Banquo appears
+to have made up his mind. On Lady Macbeth's fainting he proposes that
+they shall all retire, and that they shall afterwards meet,
+
+     And question this most bloody piece of work
+     To know it further. Fears and scruples[235] shake us:
+     In the great hand of God I stand, and thence
+     Against the undivulged pretence[236] I fight
+     Of treasonous malice.
+
+His solemn language here reminds us of his grave words about 'the
+instruments of darkness,' and of his later prayer to the 'merciful
+powers.' He is profoundly shocked, full of indignation, and determined
+to play the part of a brave and honest man.
+
+But he plays no such part. When next we see him, on the last day of his
+life, we find that he has yielded to evil. The Witches and his own
+ambition have conquered him. He alone of the lords knew of the
+prophecies, but he has said nothing of them. He has acquiesced in
+Macbeth's accession, and in the official theory that Duncan's sons had
+suborned the chamberlains to murder him. Doubtless, unlike Macduff, he
+was present at Scone to see the new king invested. He has, not formally
+but in effect, 'cloven to' Macbeth's 'consent'; he is knit to him by 'a
+most indissoluble tie'; his advice in council has been 'most grave and
+prosperous'; he is to be the 'chief guest' at that night's supper. And
+his soliloquy tells us why:
+
+     Thou hast it now: king, Cawdor, Glamis, all,
+     As the weird women promised, and, I fear,
+     Thou play'dst most foully for't: yet it was said
+     It should not stand in thy posterity,
+     But that myself should be the root and father
+     Of many kings. If there come truth from them--
+     As upon thee, Macbeth, their speeches shine--
+     Why, by the verities on thee made good,
+     May they not be my oracles as well,
+     And set me up in hope? But hush! no more.
+
+This 'hush! no more' is not the dismissal of 'cursed thoughts': it only
+means that he hears the trumpets announcing the entrance of the King and
+Queen.
+
+His punishment comes swiftly, much more swiftly than Macbeth's, and
+saves him from any further fall. He is a very fearless man, and still so
+far honourable that he has no thought of acting to bring about the
+fulfilment of the prophecy which has beguiled him. And therefore he has
+no fear of Macbeth. But he little understands him. To Macbeth's
+tormented mind Banquo's conduct appears highly suspicious. _Why_ has
+this bold and circumspect[237] man kept his secret and become his chief
+adviser? In order to make good _his_ part of the predictions after
+Macbeth's own precedent. Banquo, he is sure, will suddenly and secretly
+attack him. It is not the far-off accession of Banquo's descendants that
+he fears; it is (so he tells himself) swift murder; not that the 'barren
+sceptre' will some day droop from his dying hand, but that it will be
+'wrenched' away now (III. i. 62).[238] So he kills Banquo. But the
+Banquo he kills is not the innocent soldier who met the Witches and
+daffed their prophecies aside, nor the man who prayed to be delivered
+from the temptation of his dreams.
+
+_Macbeth_ leaves on most readers a profound impression of the misery of
+a guilty conscience and the retribution of crime. And the strength of
+this impression is one of the reasons why the tragedy is admired by
+readers who shrink from _Othello_ and are made unhappy by _Lear_. But
+what Shakespeare perhaps felt even more deeply, when he wrote this play,
+was the _incalculability_ of evil,--that in meddling with it human
+beings do they know not what. The soul, he seems to feel, is a thing of
+such inconceivable depth, complexity, and delicacy, that when you
+introduce into it, or suffer to develop in it, any change, and
+particularly the change called evil, you can form only the vaguest idea
+of the reaction you will provoke. All you can be sure of is that it will
+not be what you expected, and that you cannot possibly escape it.
+Banquo's story, if truly apprehended, produces this impression quite as
+strongly as the more terrific stories of the chief characters, and
+perhaps even more clearly, inasmuch as he is nearer to average human
+nature, has obviously at first a quiet conscience, and uses with evident
+sincerity the language of religion.
+
+
+3
+
+Apart from his story Banquo's character is not very interesting, nor is
+it, I think, perfectly individual. And this holds good of the rest of
+the minor characters. They are sketched lightly, and are seldom
+developed further than the strict purposes of the action required. From
+this point of view they are inferior to several of the less important
+figures in each of the other three tragedies. The scene in which Lady
+Macduff and her child appear, and the passage where their slaughter is
+reported to Macduff, have much dramatic value, but in neither case is
+the effect due to any great extent to the special characters of the
+persons concerned. Neither they, nor Duncan, nor Malcolm, nor even
+Banquo himself, have been imagined intensely, and therefore they do not
+produce that sense of unique personality which Shakespeare could convey
+in a much smaller number of lines than he gives to most of them.[239]
+And this is of course even more the case with persons like Ross, Angus,
+and Lennox, though each of these has distinguishable features. I doubt
+if any other great play of Shakespeare's contains so many speeches which
+a student of the play, if they were quoted to him, would be puzzled to
+assign to the speakers. Let the reader turn, for instance, to the second
+scene of the Fifth Act, and ask himself why the names of the persons
+should not be interchanged in all the ways mathematically possible. Can
+he find, again, any signs of character by which to distinguish the
+speeches of Ross and Angus in Act I. scenes ii. and iii., or to
+determine that Malcolm must have spoken I. iv. 2-11? Most of this
+writing, we may almost say, is simply Shakespeare's writing, not that of
+Shakespeare become another person. And can anything like the same
+proportion of such writing be found in _Hamlet_, _Othello_, or _King
+Lear_?
+
+Is it possible to guess the reason of this characteristic of _Macbeth_?
+I cannot believe it is due to the presence of a second hand. The
+writing, mangled by the printer and perhaps by 'the players,' seems to
+be sometimes obviously Shakespeare's, sometimes sufficiently
+Shakespearean to repel any attack not based on external evidence. It may
+be, as the shortness of the play has suggested to some, that Shakespeare
+was hurried, and, throwing all his weight on the principal characters,
+did not exert himself in dealing with the rest. But there is another
+possibility which may be worth considering. _Macbeth_ is distinguished
+by its simplicity,--by grandeur in simplicity, no doubt, but still by
+simplicity. The two great figures indeed can hardly be called simple,
+except in comparison with such characters as Hamlet and Iago; but in
+almost every other respect the tragedy has this quality. Its plot is
+quite plain. It has very little intermixture of humour. It has little
+pathos except of the sternest kind. The style, for Shakespeare, has not
+much variety, being generally kept at a higher pitch than in the other
+three tragedies; and there is much less than usual of the interchange of
+verse and prose.[240] All this makes for simplicity of effect. And, this
+being so, is it not possible that Shakespeare instinctively felt, or
+consciously feared, that to give much individuality or attraction to the
+subordinate figures would diminish this effect, and so, like a good
+artist, sacrificed a part to the whole? And was he wrong? He has
+certainly avoided the overloading which distresses us in _King Lear_,
+and has produced a tragedy utterly unlike it, not much less great as a
+dramatic poem, and as a drama superior.
+
+I would add, though without much confidence, another suggestion. The
+simplicity of _Macbeth_ is one of the reasons why many readers feel
+that, in spite of its being intensely 'romantic,' it is less unlike a
+classical tragedy than _Hamlet_ or _Othello_ or _King Lear_. And it is
+possible that this effect is, in a sense, the result of design. I do not
+mean that Shakespeare intended to imitate a classical tragedy; I mean
+only that he may have seen in the bloody story of Macbeth a subject
+suitable for treatment in a manner somewhat nearer to that of Seneca, or
+of the English Senecan plays familiar to him in his youth, than was the
+manner of his own mature tragedies. The Witches doubtless are
+'romantic,' but so is the witch-craft in Seneca's _Medea_ and _Hercules
+Oetaeus_; indeed it is difficult to read the account of Medea's
+preparations (670-739) without being reminded of the incantations in
+_Macbeth_. Banquo's Ghost again is 'romantic,' but so are Seneca's
+ghosts. For the swelling of the style in some of the great
+passages--however immeasurably superior these may be to anything in
+Seneca--and certainly for the turgid bombast which occasionally appears
+in _Macbeth_, and which seems to have horrified Jonson, Shakespeare
+might easily have found a model in Seneca. Did he not think that this
+was the high Roman manner? Does not the Sergeant's speech, as Coleridge
+observed, recall the style of the 'passionate speech' of the Player in
+_Hamlet_,--a speech, be it observed, on a Roman subject?[241] And is it
+entirely an accident that parallels between Seneca and Shakespeare seem
+to be more frequent in _Macbeth_ than in any other of his undoubtedly
+genuine works except perhaps _Richard III._, a tragedy unquestionably
+influenced either by Seneca or by English Senecan plays?[242] If there
+is anything in these suggestions, and if we suppose that Shakespeare
+meant to give to his play a certain classical tinge, he might naturally
+carry out this idea in respect to the characters, as well as in other
+respects, by concentrating almost the whole interest on the important
+figures and leaving the others comparatively shadowy.
+
+
+4
+
+_Macbeth_ being more simple than the other tragedies, and broader and
+more massive in effect, three passages in it are of great importance as
+securing variety in tone, and also as affording relief from the feelings
+excited by the Witch-scenes and the principal characters. They are the
+passage where the Porter appears, the conversation between Lady Macduff
+and her little boy, and the passage where Macduff receives the news of
+the slaughter of his wife and babes. Yet the first of these, we are told
+even by Coleridge, is unworthy of Shakespeare and is not his; and the
+second, with the rest of the scene which contains it, appears to be
+usually omitted in stage representations of _Macbeth_.
+
+I question if either this scene or the exhibition of Macduff's grief is
+required to heighten our abhorrence of Macbeth's cruelty. They have a
+technical value in helping to give the last stage of the action the form
+of a conflict between Macbeth and Macduff. But their chief function is
+of another kind. It is to touch the heart with a sense of beauty and
+pathos, to open the springs of love and of tears. Shakespeare is loved
+for the sweetness of his humanity, and because he makes this kind of
+appeal with such irresistible persuasion; and the reason why _Macbeth_,
+though admired as much as any work of his, is scarcely loved, is that
+the characters who predominate cannot make this kind of appeal, and at
+no point are able to inspire unmingled sympathy. The two passages in
+question supply this want in such measure as Shakespeare thought
+advisable in _Macbeth_, and the play would suffer greatly from their
+excision. The second, on the stage, is extremely moving, and Macbeth's
+reception of the news of his wife's death may be intended to recall it
+by way of contrast. The first brings a relief even greater, because here
+the element of beauty is more marked, and because humour is mingled with
+pathos. In both we escape from the oppression of huge sins and
+sufferings into the presence of the wholesome affections of unambitious
+hearts; and, though both scenes are painful and one dreadful, our
+sympathies can flow unchecked.[243]
+
+Lady Macduff is a simple wife and mother, who has no thought for
+anything beyond her home. Her love for her children shows her at once
+that her husband's flight exposes them to terrible danger. She is in an
+agony of fear for them, and full of indignation against him. It does not
+even occur to her that he has acted from public spirit, or that there is
+such a thing.
+
+     What had he done to make him fly the land?
+
+He must have been mad to do it. He fled for fear. He does not love his
+wife and children. He is a traitor. The poor soul is almost beside
+herself--and with too good reason. But when the murderer bursts in with
+the question 'Where is your husband?' she becomes in a moment the wife,
+and the great noble's wife:
+
+     I hope, in no place so unsanctified
+     Where such as thou may'st find him.
+
+What did Shakespeare mean us to think of Macduff's flight, for which
+Macduff has been much blamed by others beside his wife? Certainly not
+that fear for himself, or want of love for his family, had anything to
+do with it. His love for his country, so strongly marked in the scene
+with Malcolm, is evidently his one motive.
+
+     He is noble, wise, judicious, and best knows
+     The fits o' the season,
+
+says Ross. That his flight was 'noble' is beyond doubt. That it was not
+wise or judicious in the interest of his family is no less clear. But
+that does not show that it was wrong; and, even if it were, to represent
+its consequences as a judgment on him for his want of due consideration
+is equally monstrous and ludicrous.[244] The further question whether he
+did fail in due consideration, or whether for his country's sake he
+deliberately risked a danger which he fully realised, would in
+Shakespeare's theatre have been answered at once by Macduff's expression
+and demeanour on hearing Malcolm's words,
+
+     Why in that rawness left you wife and child,
+     Those precious motives, those strong knots of love,
+     Without leave-taking?
+
+It cannot be decided with certainty from the mere text; but, without
+going into the considerations on each side, I may express the opinion
+that Macduff knew well what he was doing, and that he fled without
+leave-taking for fear his purpose should give way. Perhaps he said to
+himself, with Coriolanus,
+
+     Not of a woman's tenderness to be,
+     Requires nor child nor woman's face to see.
+
+Little Macduff suggests a few words on Shakespeare's boys (there are
+scarcely any little girls). It is somewhat curious that nearly all of
+them appear in tragic or semi-tragic dramas. I remember but two
+exceptions: little William Page, who said his _Hic, haec, hoc_ to Sir
+Hugh Evans; and the page before whom Falstaff walked like a sow that
+hath overwhelmed all her litter but one; and it is to be feared that
+even this page, if he is the Boy of _Henry V._, came to an ill end,
+being killed with the luggage.
+
+     So wise so young, they say, do ne'er live long,
+
+as Richard observed of the little Prince of Wales. Of too many of these
+children (some of the 'boys,' _e.g._ those in _Cymbeline_, are lads, not
+children) the saying comes true. They are pathetic figures, the more so
+because they so often appear in company with their unhappy mothers, and
+can never be thought of apart from them. Perhaps Arthur is even the
+first creation in which Shakespeare's power of pathos showed itself
+mature;[245] and the last of his children, Mamillius, assuredly proves
+that it never decayed. They are almost all of them noble figures,
+too,--affectionate, frank, brave, high-spirited, 'of an open and free
+nature' like Shakespeare's best men. And almost all of them, again, are
+amusing and charming as well as pathetic; comical in their mingled
+acuteness and _naïveté_, charming in their confidence in themselves and
+the world, and in the seriousness with which they receive the jocosity
+of their elders, who commonly address them as strong men, great
+warriors, or profound politicians.
+
+Little Macduff exemplifies most of these remarks. There is nothing in
+the scene of a transcendent kind, like the passage about Mamillius'
+never-finished 'Winter's Tale' of the man who dwelt by a churchyard, or
+the passage about his death, or that about little Marcius and the
+butterfly, or the audacity which introduces him, at the supreme moment
+of the tragedy, outdoing the appeals of Volumnia and Virgilia by the
+statement,
+
+                           'A shall not tread on me:
+     I'll run away till I'm bigger, but then I'll fight.
+
+Still one does not easily forget little Macduff's delightful and
+well-justified confidence in his ability to defeat his mother in
+argument; or the deep impression she made on him when she spoke of his
+father as a 'traitor'; or his immediate response when he heard the
+murderer call his father by the same name,--
+
+     Thou liest, thou shag-haired villain.
+
+Nor am I sure that, if the son of Coriolanus had been murdered, his last
+words to his mother would have been, 'Run away, I pray you.'
+
+I may add two remarks. The presence of this child is one of the things
+in which _Macbeth_ reminds us of _Richard III._ And he is perhaps the
+only person in the tragedy who provokes a smile. I say 'perhaps,' for
+though the anxiety of the Doctor to escape from the company of his
+patient's husband makes one smile, I am not sure that it was meant to.
+
+
+5
+
+The Porter does not make me smile: the moment is too terrific. He is
+grotesque; no doubt the contrast he affords is humorous as well as
+ghastly; I dare say the groundlings roared with laughter at his coarsest
+remarks. But they are not comic enough to allow one to forget for a
+moment what has preceded and what must follow. And I am far from
+complaining of this. I believe that it is what Shakespeare intended, and
+that he despised the groundlings if they laughed. Of course he could
+have written without the least difficulty speeches five times as
+humorous; but he knew better. The Grave-diggers make us laugh: the old
+Countryman who brings the asps to Cleopatra makes us smile at least. But
+the Grave-digger scene does not come at a moment of extreme tension; and
+it is long. Our distress for Ophelia is not so absorbing that we refuse
+to be interested in the man who digs her grave, or even continue
+throughout the long conversation to remember always with pain that the
+grave is hers. It is fitting, therefore, that he should be made
+decidedly humorous. The passage in _Antony and Cleopatra_ is much nearer
+to the passage in _Macbeth_, and seems to have been forgotten by those
+who say that there is nothing in Shakespeare resembling that
+passage.[246] The old Countryman comes at a moment of tragic exaltation,
+and the dialogue is appropriately brief. But the moment, though tragic,
+is emphatically one of exaltation. We have not been feeling horror, nor
+are we feeling a dreadful suspense. We are going to see Cleopatra die,
+but she is to die gloriously and to triumph over Octavius. And therefore
+our amusement at the old Countryman and the contrast he affords to these
+high passions, is untroubled, and it was right to make him really comic.
+But the Porter's case is quite different. We cannot forget how the
+knocking that makes him grumble sounded to Macbeth, or that within a few
+minutes of his opening the gate Duncan will be discovered in his blood;
+nor can we help feeling that in pretending to be porter of hell-gate he
+is terribly near the truth. To give him language so humorous that it
+would ask us almost to lose the sense of these things would have been a
+fatal mistake,--the kind of mistake that means want of dramatic
+imagination. And that was not the sort of error into which Shakespeare
+fell.
+
+To doubt the genuineness of the passage, then, on the ground that it is
+not humorous enough for Shakespeare, seems to me to show this want. It
+is to judge the passage as though it were a separate composition,
+instead of conceiving it in the fulness of its relations to its
+surroundings in a stage-play. Taken by itself, I admit, it would bear no
+indubitable mark of Shakespeare's authorship, not even in the phrase
+'the primrose way to the everlasting bonfire,' which Coleridge thought
+Shakespeare might have added to an interpolation of 'the players.' And
+if there were reason (as in my judgment there is not) to suppose that
+Shakespeare thus permitted an interpolation, or that he collaborated
+with another author, I could believe that he left 'the players' or his
+collaborator to write the words of the passage. But that anyone except
+the author of the scene of Duncan's murder _conceived_ the passage, is
+incredible.[247]
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The speeches of the Porter, a low comic character, are in prose. So is
+the letter of Macbeth to his wife. In both these cases Shakespeare
+follows his general rule or custom. The only other prose-speeches occur
+in the sleep-walking scene, and here the use of prose may seem strange.
+For in great tragic scenes we expect the more poetic medium of
+expression, and this is one of the most famous of such scenes. Besides,
+unless I mistake, Lady Macbeth is the only one of Shakespeare's great
+tragic characters who on a last appearance is denied the dignity of
+verse.
+
+Yet in this scene also he adheres to his custom. Somnambulism is an
+abnormal condition, and it is his general rule to assign prose to
+persons whose state of mind is abnormal. Thus, to illustrate from these
+four plays, Hamlet when playing the madman speaks prose, but in
+soliloquy, in talking with Horatio, and in pleading with his mother, he
+speaks verse.[248] Ophelia in her madness either sings snatches of songs
+or speaks prose. Almost all Lear's speeches, after he has become
+definitely insane, are in prose: where he wakes from sleep recovered,
+the verse returns. The prose enters with that speech which closes with
+his trying to tear off his clothes; but he speaks in verse--some of it
+very irregular--in the Timon-like speeches where his intellect suddenly
+in his madness seems to regain the force of his best days (IV. vi.).
+Othello, in IV. i., speaks in verse till the moment when Iago tells him
+that Cassio has confessed. There follow ten lines of prose--exclamations
+and mutterings of bewildered horror--and he falls to the ground
+unconscious.
+
+The idea underlying this custom of Shakespeare's evidently is that the
+regular rhythm of verse would be inappropriate where the mind is
+supposed to have lost its balance and to be at the mercy of chance
+impressions coming from without (as sometimes with Lear), or of ideas
+emerging from its unconscious depths and pursuing one another across its
+passive surface. The somnambulism of Lady Macbeth is such a condition.
+There is no rational connection in the sequence of images and ideas. The
+sight of blood on her hand, the sound of the clock striking the hour for
+Duncan's murder, the hesitation of her husband before that hour came,
+the vision of the old man in his blood, the idea of the murdered wife of
+Macduff, the sight of the hand again, Macbeth's 'flaws and starts' at
+the sight of Banquo's ghost, the smell on her hand, the washing of hands
+after Duncan's murder again, her husband's fear of the buried Banquo,
+the sound of the knocking at the gate--these possess her, one after
+another, in this chance order. It is not much less accidental than the
+order of Ophelia's ideas; the great difference is that with Ophelia
+total insanity has effaced or greatly weakened the emotional force of
+the ideas, whereas to Lady Macbeth each new image or perception comes
+laden with anguish. There is, again, scarcely a sign of the exaltation
+of disordered imagination; we are conscious rather of an intense
+suffering which forces its way into light against resistance, and speaks
+a language for the most part strikingly bare in its diction and simple
+in its construction. This language stands in strong contrast with that
+of Macbeth in the surrounding scenes, full of a feverish and almost
+furious excitement, and seems to express a far more desolating misery.
+
+The effect is extraordinarily impressive. The soaring pride and power of
+Lady Macbeth's first speeches return on our memory, and the change is
+felt with a breathless awe. Any attempt, even by Shakespeare, to draw
+out the moral enfolded in this awe, would but weaken it. For the moment,
+too, all the language of poetry--even of Macbeth's poetry--seems to be
+touched with unreality, and these brief toneless sentences seem the only
+voice of truth.[249]
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[Footnote 227: So Mrs. Siddons is said to have given the passage.]
+
+[Footnote 228: Surely the usual interpretation of 'We fail?' as a
+question of contemptuous astonishment, is right. 'We fail!' gives
+practically the same sense, but alters the punctuation of the first two
+Folios. In either case, 'But,' I think, means 'Only.' On the other hand
+the proposal to read 'We fail.' with a full stop, as expressive of
+sublime acceptance of the possibility, seems to me, however attractive
+at first sight, quite out of harmony with Lady Macbeth's mood throughout
+these scenes.]
+
+[Footnote 229: See Note DD.]
+
+[Footnote 230: It is not new.]
+
+[Footnote 231: The words about Lady Macduff are of course significant of
+natural human feeling, and may have been introduced expressly to mark
+it, but they do not, I think, show any fundamental change in Lady
+Macbeth, for at no time would she have suggested or approved a
+_purposeless_ atrocity. It is perhaps characteristic that this human
+feeling should show itself most clearly in reference to an act for which
+she was not directly responsible, and in regard to which therefore she
+does not feel the instinct of self-assertion.]
+
+[Footnote 232: The tendency to sentimentalise Lady Macbeth is partly due
+to Mrs. Siddons's fancy that she was a small, fair, blue-eyed woman,
+'perhaps even fragile.' Dr. Bucknill, who was unaquainted with this
+fancy, independently determined that she was 'beautiful and delicate,'
+'unoppressed by weight of flesh,' 'probably small,' but 'a tawny or
+brown blonde,' with grey eyes: and Brandes affirms that she was lean,
+slight, and hard. They know much more than Shakespeare, who tells us
+absolutely nothing on these subjects. That Lady Macbeth, after taking
+part in a murder, was so exhausted as to faint, will hardly demonstrate
+her fragility. That she must have been blue-eyed, fair, or red-haired,
+because she was a Celt, is a bold inference, and it is an idle dream
+that Shakespeare had any idea of making her or her husband
+characteristically Celtic. The only evidence ever offered to prove that
+she was small is the sentence, 'All the perfumes of Arabia will not
+sweeten this little hand'; and Goliath might have called his hand
+'little' in contrast with all the perfumes of Arabia. One might as well
+propose to prove that Othello was a small man by quoting,
+
+                            I have seen the day,
+     That, with this little arm and this good sword,
+     I have made my way through more impediments
+     Than twenty times your stop.
+
+The reader is at liberty to imagine Lady Macbeth's person in the way
+that pleases him best, or to leave it, as Shakespeare very likely did,
+unimagined.
+
+Perhaps it may be well to add that there is not the faintest trace in
+the play of the idea occasionally met with, and to some extent embodied
+in Madame Bernhardt's impersonation of Lady Macbeth, that her hold upon
+her husband lay in seductive attractions deliberately exercised.
+Shakespeare was not unskilled or squeamish in indicating such ideas.]
+
+[Footnote 233: That it is Macbeth who feels the harmony between the
+desolation of the heath and the figures who appear on it is a
+characteristic touch.]
+
+[Footnote 234: So, in Holinshed, 'Banquho jested with him and sayde, now
+Makbeth thou haste obtayned those things which the twoo former sisters
+prophesied, there remayneth onely for thee to purchase that which the
+third sayd should come to passe.']
+
+[Footnote 235: =doubts.]
+
+[Footnote 236: =design.]
+
+[Footnote 237:
+
+                           'tis much he dares,
+     And, to that dauntless temper of his mind,
+     He hath a wisdom that doth guide his valour
+     To act in safety.]
+
+[Footnote 238: So when he hears that Fleance has escaped he is not much
+troubled (III. iv. 29):
+
+                         the worm that's fled
+     Hath nature that in time will venom breed,
+     No teeth for the present.
+
+I have repeated above what I have said before, because the meaning of
+Macbeth's soliloquy is frequently misconceived.]
+
+[Footnote 239: Virgilia in _Coriolanus_ is a famous example. She speaks
+about thirty-five lines.]
+
+[Footnote 240: The percentage of prose is, roughly, in _Hamlet_ 30-2/3,
+in _Othello_ 16-1/3, in _King Lear_ 27-1/2, in _Macbeth_ 8-1/2.]
+
+[Footnote 241: Cf. Note F. There are also in _Macbeth_ several shorter
+passages which recall the Player's speech. Cf. 'Fortune ... showed like
+a rebel's whore' (I. ii. 14) with 'Out! out! thou strumpet Fortune!' The
+form 'eterne' occurs in Shakespeare only in _Macbeth_, III. ii. 38, and
+in the 'proof eterne' of the Player's speech. Cf. 'So, as a painted
+tyrant, Pyrrhus stood,' with _Macbeth_, V. viii. 26; 'the rugged
+Pyrrhus, like the Hyrcanian beast,' with 'the rugged Russian bear ... or
+the Hyrcan tiger' (_Macbeth_, III. iv. 100); 'like a neutral to his will
+and matter' with _Macbeth_, I. v. 47. The words 'Till he unseam'd him
+from the nave to the chaps,' in the Serjeant's speech, recall the words
+'Then from the navel to the throat at once He ript old Priam,' in _Dido
+Queen of Carthage_, where these words follow those others, about Priam
+falling with the mere wind of Pyrrhus' sword, which seem to have
+suggested 'the whiff and wind of his fell sword' in the Player's
+speech.]
+
+[Footnote 242: See Cunliffe, _The Influence of Seneca on Elizabethan
+Tragedy_. The most famous of these parallels is that between 'Will all
+great Neptune's Ocean,' etc., and the following passages:
+
+     Quis eluet me Tanais? aut quae barbaris
+     Maeotis undis Pontico incumbens mari?
+     Non ipse toto magnus Oceano pater
+     Tantum expiarit sceleris. (_Hipp._ 715.)
+
+     Quis Tanais, aut quis Nilus, aut quis Persica
+     Violentus unda Tigris, aut Rhenus ferox,
+     Tagusve Ibera turbidus gaza fluens,
+     Abluere dextram poterit? Arctoum licet
+     Maeotis in me gelida transfundat mare,
+     Et tota Tethys per meas currat manus,
+     Haerebit altum facinus. (_Herc. Furens_, 1323.)
+
+(The reader will remember Othello's 'Pontic sea' with its 'violent
+pace.') Medea's incantation in Ovid's _Metamorphoses_, vii. 197 ff.,
+which certainly suggested Prospero's speech, _Tempest_, V. i. 33 ff.,
+should be compared with Seneca, _Herc. Oet._, 452 ff., 'Artibus
+magicis,' etc. It is of course highly probable that Shakespeare read
+some Seneca at school. I may add that in the _Hippolytus_, beside the
+passage quoted above, there are others which might have furnished him
+with suggestions. Cf. for instance _Hipp._, 30 ff., with the lines about
+the Spartan hounds in _Mids. Night's Dream_, IV. i. 117 ff., and
+Hippolytus' speech, beginning 483, with the Duke's speech in _As You
+Like It_, II. i.]
+
+[Footnote 243: Cf. Coleridge's note on the Lady Macduff scene.]
+
+[Footnote 244: It is nothing to the purpose that Macduff himself says,
+
+                                  Sinful Macduff,
+     They were all struck for thee! naught that I am,
+     Not for their own demerits, but for mine,
+     Fell slaughter on their souls.
+
+There is no reason to suppose that the sin and demerit he speaks of is
+that of leaving his home. And even if it were, it is Macduff that
+speaks, not Shakespeare, any more than Shakespeare speaks in the
+preceding sentence,
+
+                                 Did heaven look on,
+     And would not take their part?
+
+And yet Brandes (ii. 104) hears in these words 'the voice of revolt ...
+that sounds later through the despairing philosophy of _King Lear_.' It
+sounds a good deal earlier too; _e.g._ in _Tit. And._, IV. i. 81, and _2
+Henry VI._, II. i. 154. The idea is a commonplace of Elizabethan
+tragedy.]
+
+[Footnote 245: And the idea that it was the death of his son Hamnet,
+aged eleven, that brought this power to maturity is one of the more
+plausible attempts to find in his dramas a reflection of his private
+history. It implies however as late a date as 1596 for _King John_.]
+
+[Footnote 246: Even if this were true, the retort is obvious that
+neither is there anything resembling the murder-scene in _Macbeth_.]
+
+[Footnote 247: I have confined myself to the single aspect of this
+question on which I had what seemed something new to say. Professor
+Hales's defence of the passage on fuller grounds, in the admirable paper
+reprinted in his _Notes and Essays on Shakespeare_, seems to me quite
+conclusive. I may add two notes. (1) The references in the Porter's
+speeches to 'equivocation,' which have naturally, and probably rightly,
+been taken as allusions to the Jesuit Garnet's appeal to the doctrine of
+equivocation in defence of his perjury when, on trial for participation
+in the Gunpowder Plot, do not stand alone in _Macbeth_. The later
+prophecies of the Witches Macbeth calls 'the equivocation of the fiend
+That lies like truth' (V. v. 43); and the Porter's remarks about the
+equivocator who 'could swear in both the scales against either scale,
+who committed treason enough for God's sake, yet could not equivocate to
+heaven,' may be compared with the following dialogue (IV. ii. 45):
+
+     _Son._           What is a traitor?
+
+     _Lady Macduff._  Why, one that swears and lies.
+
+     _Son._           And be all traitors that do so?
+
+     _Lady Macduff._  Everyone that does so is a traitor, and must
+                        be hanged.
+
+Garnet, as a matter of fact, _was_ hanged in May, 1606; and it is to be
+feared that the audience applauded this passage.
+
+(2) The Porter's soliloquy on the different applicants for admittance
+has, in idea and manner, a marked resemblance to Pompey's soliloquy on
+the inhabitants of the prison, in _Measure for Measure_, IV. iii. 1 ff.;
+and the dialogue between him and Abhorson on the 'mystery' of hanging
+(IV. ii. 22 ff.) is of just the same kind as the Porter's dialogue with
+Macduff about drink.]
+
+[Footnote 248: In the last Act, however, he speaks in verse even in the
+quarrel with Laertes at Ophelia's grave. It would be plausible to
+explain this either from his imitating what he thinks the rant of
+Laertes, or by supposing that his 'towering passion' made him forget to
+act the madman. But in the final scene also he speaks in verse in the
+presence of all. This again might be accounted for by saying that he is
+supposed to be in a lucid interval, as indeed his own language at 239
+ff. implies. But the probability is that Shakespeare's real reason for
+breaking his rule here was simply that he did not choose to deprive
+Hamlet of verse on his last appearance. I wonder the disuse of prose in
+these two scenes has not been observed, and used as an argument, by
+those who think that Hamlet, with the commission in his pocket, is now
+resolute.]
+
+[Footnote 249: The verse-speech of the Doctor, which closes this scene,
+lowers the tension towards that of the next scene. His introductory
+conversation with the Gentlewoman is written in prose (sometimes very
+near verse), partly, perhaps, from its familiar character, but chiefly
+because Lady Macbeth is to speak in prose.]
+
+
+
+
+NOTE A.
+
+EVENTS BEFORE THE OPENING OF THE ACTION IN _HAMLET_.
+
+
+In Hamlet's first soliloquy he speaks of his father as being 'but two
+months dead,--nay, not so much, not two.' He goes on to refer to the
+love between his father and mother, and then says (I. ii. 145):
+
+                          and yet, within a month--
+     Let me not think on't--Frailty, thy name is woman!--
+     A little month, or ere those shoes were old
+     With which she follow'd my poor father's body,
+     Like Niobe, all tears, why she, even she--
+     O God! a beast, that wants discourse of reason,
+     Would have mourn'd longer--married with my uncle.
+
+It seems hence to be usually assumed that at this time--the time when
+the action begins--Hamlet's mother has been married a little less than a
+month.
+
+On this assumption difficulties, however, arise, though I have not found
+them referred to. Why has the Ghost waited nearly a month since the
+marriage before showing itself? Why has the King waited nearly a month
+before appearing in public for the first time, as he evidently does in
+this scene? And why has Laertes waited nearly a month since the
+coronation before asking leave to return to France (I. ii. 53)?
+
+To this it might be replied that the marriage and the coronation were
+separated by some weeks; that, while the former occurred nearly a month
+before the time of this scene, the latter has only just taken place; and
+that what the Ghost cannot bear is, not the mere marriage, but the
+accession of an incestuous murderer to the throne. But anyone who will
+read the King's speech at the opening of the scene will certainly
+conclude that the marriage has only just been celebrated, and also that
+it is conceived as involving the accession of Claudius to the throne.
+Gertrude is described as the 'imperial jointress' of the State, and the
+King says that the lords consented to the marriage, but makes no
+separate mention of his election.
+
+The solution of the difficulty is to be found in the lines quoted above.
+The marriage followed, within a month, not the _death_ of Hamlet's
+father, but the _funeral_. And this makes all clear. The death happened
+nearly two months ago. The funeral did not succeed it immediately, but
+(say) in a fortnight or three weeks. And the marriage and coronation,
+coming rather less than a month after the funeral, have just taken
+place. So that the Ghost has not waited at all; nor has the King, nor
+Laertes.
+
+On this hypothesis it follows that Hamlet's agonised soliloquy is not
+uttered nearly a month after the marriage which has so horrified him,
+but quite soon after it (though presumably he would know rather earlier
+what was coming). And from this hypothesis we get also a partial
+explanation of two other difficulties, (_a_) When Horatio, at the end of
+the soliloquy, enters and greets Hamlet, it is evident that he and
+Hamlet have not recently met at Elsinore. Yet Horatio came to Elsinore
+for the funeral (I. ii. 176). Now even if the funeral took place some
+three weeks ago, it seems rather strange that Hamlet, however absorbed
+in grief and however withdrawn from the Court, has not met Horatio; but
+if the funeral took place some seven weeks ago, the difficulty is
+considerably greater. (_b_) We are twice told that Hamlet has '_of
+late_' been seeking the society of Ophelia and protesting his love for
+her (I. iii. 91, 99). It always seemed to me, on the usual view of the
+chronology, rather difficult (though not, of course, impossible) to
+understand this, considering the state of feeling produced in him by his
+mother's marriage, and in particular the shock it appears to have given
+to his faith in woman. But if the marriage has only just been celebrated
+the words 'of late' would naturally refer to a time before it. This time
+presumably would be subsequent to the death of Hamlet's father, but it
+is not so hard to fancy that Hamlet may have sought relief from mere
+_grief_ in his love for Ophelia.
+
+But here another question arises; May not the words 'of late' include,
+or even wholly refer to,[250] a time prior to the death of Hamlet's
+father? And this question would be answered universally, I suppose, in
+the negative, on the ground that Hamlet was not at Court but at
+Wittenberg when his father died. I will deal with this idea in a
+separate note, and will only add here that, though it is quite possible
+that Shakespeare never imagined any of these matters clearly, and so
+produced these unimportant difficulties, we ought not to assume this
+without examination.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[Footnote 250: This is intrinsically not probable, and is the more
+improbable because in Q1 Hamlet's letter to Ophelia (which must have
+been written before the action of the play begins) is signed 'Thine ever
+the most unhappy Prince _Hamlet_.' 'Unhappy' _might_ be meant to
+describe an unsuccessful lover, but it probably shows that the letter
+was written after his father's death.]
+
+
+
+
+NOTE B.
+
+WHERE WAS HAMLET AT THE TIME OF HIS FATHER'S DEATH?
+
+
+The answer will at once be given: 'At the University of Wittenberg. For
+the king says to him (I. ii. 112):
+
+                         For your intent
+     In going back to school in Wittenberg,
+     It is most retrograde to our desire.
+
+The Queen also prays him not to go to Wittenberg: and he consents to
+remain.'
+
+Now I quite agree that the obvious interpretation of this passage is
+that universally accepted, that Hamlet, like Horatio, was at Wittenberg
+when his father died; and I do not say that it is wrong. But it involves
+difficulties, and ought not to be regarded as certain.
+
+(1) One of these difficulties has long been recognised. Hamlet,
+according to the evidence of Act V., Scene i., is thirty years of age;
+and that is a very late age for a university student. One solution is
+found (by those who admit that Hamlet _was_ thirty) in a passage in
+Nash's _Pierce Penniless_: 'For fashion sake some [Danes] will put their
+children to schoole, but they set them not to it till they are fourteene
+years old, so that you shall see a great boy with a beard learne his
+A.B.C. and sit weeping under the rod when he is thirty years old.'
+Another solution, as we saw (p. 105), is found in Hamlet's character. He
+is a philosopher who lingers on at the University from love of his
+studies there.
+
+(2) But there is a more formidable difficulty, which seems to have
+escaped notice. Horatio certainly came from Wittenberg to the funeral.
+And observe how he and Hamlet meet (I. ii. 160).
+
+     _Hor._  Hail to your lordship!
+
+     _Ham._                    I am glad to see you well:
+             Horatio,--or I do forget myself.
+
+     _Hor._  The same, my lord, and your poor servant ever.
+
+     _Ham._  Sir, my good friend; I'll change that name with you:
+             And what make you from Wittenberg, Horatio?
+             Marcellus?
+
+     _Mar._             My good lord--
+
+     _Ham._  I am very glad to see you. Good even, sir.[251]
+             But what, in faith, make you from Wittenberg?
+
+     _Hor._  A truant disposition, good my lord.
+
+     _Ham._  I would not hear your enemy say so,
+             Nor shall you do my ear that violence,
+             To make it truster of your own report
+             Against yourself: I know you are no truant.
+             But what is your affair in Elsinore?
+             We'll teach you to drink deep ere you depart.
+
+     _Hor._  My lord, I came to see your father's funeral.
+
+     _Ham._  I pray thee, do not mock me, fellow-student;
+             I think it was to see my mother's wedding.
+
+Is not this passing strange? Hamlet and Horatio are supposed to be
+fellow-students at Wittenberg, and to have left it for Elsinore less
+than two months ago. Yet Hamlet hardly recognises Horatio at first, and
+speaks as if he himself lived at Elsinore (I refer to his bitter jest,
+'We'll teach you to drink deep ere you depart'). Who would dream that
+Hamlet had himself just come from Wittenberg, if it were not for the
+previous words about his going back there?
+
+How can this be explained on the usual view? Only, I presume, by
+supposing that Hamlet is so sunk in melancholy that he really does
+almost 'forget himself'[252] and forget everything else, so that he
+actually is in doubt who Horatio is. And this, though not impossible, is
+hard to believe.
+
+'Oh no,' it may be answered, 'for he is doubtful about Marcellus too;
+and yet, if he were living at Elsinore, he must have seen Marcellus
+often.' But he is _not_ doubtful about Marcellus. That note of
+interrogation after 'Marcellus' is Capell's conjecture: it is not in any
+Quarto or any Folio. The fact is that he knows perfectly well the man
+who lives at Elsinore, but is confused by the appearance of the friend
+who comes from Wittenberg.
+
+(3) Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are sent for, to wean Hamlet from his
+melancholy and to worm his secret out of him, because he has known them
+from his youth and is fond of them (II. ii. 1 ff.). They come _to_
+Denmark (II. ii. 247 f.): they come therefore _from_ some other country.
+Where do they come from? They are, we hear, Hamlet's 'school-fellows'
+(III. iv. 202). And in the first Quarto we are directly told that they
+were with him at Wittenberg:
+
+     _Ham._  What, Gilderstone, and Rossencraft,
+             Welcome, kind school-fellows, to Elsanore.
+
+     _Gil._  We thank your grace, and would be very glad
+             You were as when we were at Wittenberg.
+
+Now let the reader look at Hamlet's first greeting of them in the
+received text, and let him ask himself whether it is the greeting of a
+man to fellow-students whom he left two months ago: whether it is not
+rather, like his greeting of Horatio, the welcome of an old
+fellow-student who has not seen his visitors for a considerable time
+(II. ii. 226 f.).
+
+(4) Rosencrantz and Guildenstern tell Hamlet of the players who are
+coming. He asks what players they are, and is told, 'Even those you were
+wont to take such delight in, the tragedians of the city.' He asks, 'Do
+they hold the same estimation they did when I was in the city?'
+Evidently he has not been in the city for some time. And this is still
+more evident when the players come in, and he talks of one having grown
+a beard, and another having perhaps cracked his voice, since they last
+met. What then is this city, where he has not been for some time, but
+where (it would appear) Rosencrantz and Guildenstern live? It is not in
+Denmark ('Comest thou to beard me in Denmark?'). It would seem to be
+Wittenberg.[253]
+
+All these passages, it should be observed, are consistent with one
+another. And the conclusion they point to is that Hamlet has left the
+University for some years and has been living at Court. This again is
+consistent with his being thirty years of age, and with his being
+mentioned as a soldier and a courtier as well as a scholar (III. i.
+159). And it is inconsistent, I believe, with nothing in the play,
+unless with the mention of his 'going back to school in Wittenberg.' But
+it is not really inconsistent with that. The idea may quite well be that
+Hamlet, feeling it impossible to continue at Court after his mother's
+marriage and Claudius' accession, thinks of the University where, years
+ago, he was so happy, and contemplates a return to it. If this were
+Shakespeare's meaning he might easily fail to notice that the expression
+'going back to school in Wittenberg' would naturally suggest that Hamlet
+had only just left 'school.'
+
+I do not see how to account for these passages except on this
+hypothesis. But it in its turn involves a certain difficulty. Horatio,
+Rosencrantz and Guildenstern seem to be of about the same age as Hamlet.
+How then do _they_ come to be at Wittenberg? I had thought that this
+question might be answered in the following way. If 'the city' is
+Wittenberg, Shakespeare would regard it as a place like London, and we
+might suppose that Horatio, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern were living
+there, though they had ceased to be students. But this can hardly be
+true of Horatio, who, when he (to spare Hamlet's feelings) talks of
+being 'a truant,' must mean a truant from his University. The only
+solution I can suggest is that, in the story or play which Shakespeare
+used, Hamlet and the others were all at the time of the murder young
+students at Wittenberg, and that when he determined to make them older
+men (or to make Hamlet, at any rate, older), he did not take trouble
+enough to carry this idea through all the necessary detail, and so left
+some inconsistencies. But in any case the difficulty in the view which I
+suggest seems to me not nearly so great as those which the usual view
+has to meet.[254]
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[Footnote 251: These three words are evidently addressed to Bernardo.]
+
+[Footnote 252: Cf. Antonio in his melancholy (_Merchant of Venice_, I.
+i. 6),
+
+     And such a want-wit sadness makes of me
+     That I have much ado to know myself.]
+
+[Footnote 253: In _Der Bestrafte Brudermord_ it _is_ Wittenberg. Hamlet
+says to the actors: 'Were you not, a few years ago, at the University of
+Wittenberg? I think I saw you act there': Furness's _Variorum_, ii. 129.
+But it is very doubtful whether this play is anything but an adaptation
+and enlargement of _Hamlet_ as it existed in the stage represented by
+Q1.]
+
+[Footnote 254: It is perhaps worth while to note that in _Der Bestrafte
+Brudermord_ Hamlet is said to have been 'in Germany' at the time of his
+father's murder.]
+
+
+
+
+NOTE C.
+
+HAMLET'S AGE.
+
+
+The chief arguments on this question may be found in Furness's _Variorum
+Hamlet_, vol. i., pp. 391 ff. I will merely explain my position briefly.
+
+Even if the general impression I received from the play were that Hamlet
+was a youth of eighteen or twenty, I should feel quite unable to set it
+against the evidence of the statements in V. i. which show him to be
+exactly thirty, unless these statements seemed to be casual. But they
+have to my mind, on the contrary, the appearance of being expressly
+inserted in order to fix Hamlet's age; and the fact that they differ
+decidedly from the statements in Q1 confirms that idea. So does the fact
+that the Player King speaks of having been married thirty years (III.
+ii. 165), where again the number differs from that in Q1.
+
+If V. i. did not contain those decisive statements, I believe my
+impression as to Hamlet's age would be uncertain. His being several
+times called 'young' would not influence me much (nor at all when he is
+called 'young' simply to distinguish him from his father, _as he is in
+the very passage which shows him to be thirty_). But I think we
+naturally take him to be about as old as Laertes, Rosencrantz and
+Guildenstern, and take them to be less than thirty. Further, the
+language used by Laertes and Polonius to Ophelia in I. iii. would
+certainly, by itself, lead one to imagine Hamlet as a good deal less
+than thirty; and the impression it makes is not, to me, altogether
+effaced by the fact that Henry V. at his accession is said to be in 'the
+very May-morn of his youth,'--an expression which corresponds closely
+with those used by Laertes to Ophelia. In some passages, again, there is
+an air of boyish petulance. On the other side, however, we should have
+to set (1) the maturity of Hamlet's thought; (2) his manner, on the
+whole, to other men and to his mother, which, I think, is far from
+suggesting the idea of a mere youth; (3) such a passage as his words to
+Horatio at III. ii. 59 ff., which imply that both he and Horatio have
+seen a good deal of life (this passage has in Q1 nothing corresponding
+to the most significant lines). I have shown in Note B that it is very
+unsafe to argue to Hamlet's youth from the words about his going back to
+Wittenberg.
+
+On the whole I agree with Prof. Dowden that, apart from the statements
+in V. i., one would naturally take Hamlet to be a man of about five and
+twenty.
+
+It has been suggested that in the old play Hamlet was a mere lad; that
+Shakespeare, when he began to work on it,[255] had not determined to
+make Hamlet older; that, as he went on, he did so determine; and that
+this is the reason why the earlier part of the play makes (if it does
+so) a different impression from the later. I see nothing very improbable
+in this idea, but I must point out that it is a mistake to appeal in
+support of it to the passage in V. i. as found in Q1; for that passage
+does not in the least show that the author (if correctly reported)
+imagined Hamlet as a lad. I set out the statements in Q2 and Q1.
+
+Q2 says:
+
+     (1) The grave-digger came to his business on the day when old
+     Hamlet defeated Fortinbras:
+
+     (2) On that day young Hamlet was born:
+
+     (3) The grave-digger has, at the time of speaking, been sexton
+     for thirty years:
+
+     (4) Yorick's skull has been in the earth twenty-three years:
+
+     (5) Yorick used to carry young Hamlet on his back.
+
+This is all explicit and connected, and yields the result that Hamlet is
+now thirty.
+
+Q1 says:
+
+     (1) Yorick's skull has been in the ground a dozen years:
+
+     (2) It has been in the ground ever since old Hamlet overcame
+     Fortinbras:
+
+     (3) Yorick used to carry young Hamlet on his back.
+
+From this nothing whatever follows as to Hamlet's age, except that he is
+more than twelve![256] Evidently the writer (if correctly reported) has
+no intention of telling us how old Hamlet is. That he did not imagine
+him as very young appears from his making him say that he has noted
+'this seven year' (in Q2 'three years') that the toe of the peasant
+comes near the heel of the courtier. The fact that the Player-King in Q1
+speaks of having been married forty years shows that here too the writer
+has not any reference to Hamlet's age in his mind.[257]
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[Footnote 255: Of course we do not know that he did work on it.]
+
+[Footnote 256: I find that I have been anticipated in this remark by H.
+Türck (_Jahrbuch_ for 1900, p. 267 ff.)]
+
+[Footnote 257: I do not know if it has been observed that in the opening
+of the Player-King's speech, as given in Q2 and the Folio (it is quite
+different in Q1), there seems to be a reminiscence of Greene's
+_Alphonsus King of Arragon_, Act IV., lines 33 ff. (Dyce's _Greene and
+Peele_, p. 239):
+
+     Thrice ten times Phoebus with his golden beams
+     Hath compassed the circle of the sky,
+     Thrice ten times Ceres hath her workmen hir'd,
+     And fill'd her barns with fruitful crops of corn,
+     Since first in priesthood I did lead my life.]
+
+
+
+
+NOTE D.
+
+'MY TABLES--MEET IT IS I SET IT DOWN.'
+
+
+This passage has occasioned much difficulty, and to many readers seems
+even absurd. And it has been suggested that it, with much that
+immediately follows it, was adopted by Shakespeare, with very little
+change, from the old play.
+
+It is surely in the highest degree improbable that, at such a critical
+point, when he had to show the first effect on Hamlet of the disclosures
+made by the Ghost, Shakespeare would write slackly or be content with
+anything that did not satisfy his own imagination. But it is not
+surprising that we should find some difficulty in following his
+imagination at such a point.
+
+Let us look at the whole speech. The Ghost leaves Hamlet with the words,
+'Adieu, adieu! Hamlet, remember me'; and he breaks out:
+
+     O all you host of heaven! O earth! what else?
+     And shall I couple hell? O, fie! Hold, hold, my heart;
+     And you, my sinews, grow not instant old,
+     But bear me stiffly up. Remember thee!
+     Ay, thou poor ghost, while memory holds a seat
+     In this distracted globe. Remember thee!
+     Yea, from the table of my memory
+     I'll wipe away all trivial fond records,
+     All saws of books, all forms, all pressures past,
+     That youth and observation copied there;
+     And thy commandment all alone shall live
+     Within the book and volume of my brain,
+     Unmix'd with baser matter: yes, by heaven!
+     O most pernicious woman!
+     O villain, villain, smiling, damned villain!
+     My tables--meet it is I set it down,
+     That one may smile, and smile, and be a villain;
+     At least I'm sure it may be so in Denmark:      [_Writing_
+     So, uncle, there you are. Now to my word;
+     It is 'Adieu, adieu! remember me.'
+     I have sworn 't.
+
+The man who speaks thus was, we must remember, already well-nigh
+overwhelmed with sorrow and disgust when the Ghost appeared to him. He
+has now suffered a tremendous shock. He has learned that his mother was
+not merely what he supposed but an adulteress, and that his father was
+murdered by her paramour. This knowledge too has come to him in such a
+way as, quite apart from the _matter_ of the communication, might make
+any human reason totter. And, finally, a terrible charge has been laid
+upon him. Is it strange, then, that he should say what is strange? Why,
+there would be nothing to wonder at if his mind collapsed on the spot.
+
+Now it is just this that he himself fears. In the midst of the first
+tremendous outburst, he checks himself suddenly with the exclamation 'O,
+fie!' (cf. the precisely similar use of this interjection, II. ii. 617).
+He must not let himself feel: he has to live. He must not let his heart
+break in pieces ('hold' means 'hold together'), his muscles turn into
+those of a trembling old man, his brain dissolve--as they threaten in an
+instant to do. For, if they do, how can he--_remember_? He goes on
+reiterating this 'remember' (the 'word' of the Ghost). He is, literally,
+afraid that he will _forget_--that his mind will lose the message
+entrusted to it. Instinctively, then, he feels that, if he _is_ to
+remember, he must wipe from his memory everything it already contains;
+and the image of his past life rises before him, of all his joy in
+thought and observation and the stores they have accumulated in his
+memory. All that is done with for ever: nothing is to remain for him on
+the 'table' but the command, 'remember me.' He swears it; 'yes, by
+heaven!' That done, suddenly the repressed passion breaks out, and, most
+characteristically, he thinks _first_ of his mother; then of his uncle,
+the smooth-spoken scoundrel who has just been smiling on him and calling
+him 'son.' And in bitter desperate irony he snatches his tables from his
+breast (they are suggested to him by the phrases he has just used,
+'table of my memory,' 'book and volume'). After all, he _will_ use them
+once again; and, perhaps with a wild laugh, he writes with trembling
+fingers his last observation: 'One may smile, and smile, and be a
+villain.'
+
+But that, I believe, is not merely a desperate jest. It springs from
+that _fear of forgetting_. A time will come, he feels, when all this
+appalling experience of the last half-hour will be incredible to him,
+will seem a mere nightmare, will even, conceivably, quite vanish from
+his mind. Let him have something in black and white that will bring it
+back and _force_ him to remember and believe. What is there so unnatural
+in this, if you substitute a note-book or diary for the 'tables'?[258]
+
+But why should he write that particular note, and not rather his 'word,'
+'Adieu, adieu! remember me'? I should answer, first, that a grotesque
+jest at such a moment is thoroughly characteristic of Hamlet (see p.
+151), and that the jocose 'So, uncle, there you are!' shows his state of
+mind; and, secondly, that loathing of his uncle is vehement in his
+thought at this moment. Possibly, too, he might remember that 'tables'
+are stealable, and that if the appearance of the Ghost should be
+reported, a mere observation on the smiling of villains could not betray
+anything of his communication with the Ghost. What follows shows that
+the instinct of secrecy is strong in him.
+
+It seems likely, I may add, that Shakespeare here was influenced,
+consciously or unconsciously, by recollection of a place in _Titus
+Andronicus_ (IV. i.). In that horrible play Chiron and Demetrius, after
+outraging Lavinia, cut out her tongue and cut off her hands, in order
+that she may be unable to reveal the outrage. She reveals it, however,
+by taking a staff in her mouth, guiding it with her arms, and writing in
+the sand, 'Stuprum. Chiron. Demetrius.' Titus soon afterwards says:
+
+                    I will go get a leaf of brass,
+     And with a gad of steel will write these words,
+     And lay it by. The angry northern wind
+     Will blow these sands, like Sibyl's leaves, abroad,
+     And where's your lesson then?
+
+Perhaps in the old _Hamlet_, which may have been a play something like
+_Titus Andronicus_, Hamlet at this point did write something of the
+Ghost's message in his tables. In any case Shakespeare, whether he wrote
+_Titus Andronicus_ or only revised an older play on the subject, might
+well recall this incident, as he frequently reproduces other things in
+that drama.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[Footnote 258: The reader will observe that this suggestion of a
+_further_ reason for his making the note may be rejected without the
+rest of the interpretation being affected.]
+
+
+
+
+NOTE E.
+
+THE GHOST IN THE CELLARAGE.
+
+
+     It has been thought that the whole of the last part of I. v.,
+     from the entrance of Horatio and Marcellus, follows the old
+     play closely, and that Shakespeare is condescending to the
+     groundlings.
+
+     Here again, whether or no he took a suggestion from the old
+     play, I see no reason to think that he wrote down to his
+     public. So far as Hamlet's state of mind is concerned, there
+     is not a trace of this. Anyone who has a difficulty in
+     understanding it should read Coleridge's note. What appears
+     grotesque is the part taken by the Ghost, and Hamlet's
+     consequent removal from one part of the stage to another. But,
+     as to the former, should we feel anything grotesque in the
+     four injunctions 'Swear!' if it were not that they come from
+     under the stage--a fact which to an Elizabethan audience,
+     perfectly indifferent to what is absurdly called stage
+     illusion, was probably not in the least grotesque? And as to
+     the latter, if we knew the Ghost-lore of the time better than
+     we do, perhaps we should see nothing odd in Hamlet's insisting
+     on moving away and proposing the oath afresh when the Ghost
+     intervenes.
+
+     But, further, it is to be observed that he does not merely
+     propose the oath afresh. He first makes Horatio and Marcellus
+     swear never to make known what they have _seen_. Then, on
+     shifting his ground, he makes them swear never to speak of
+     what they have _heard_. Then, moving again, he makes them
+     swear that, if he should think fit to play the antic, they
+     will give no sign of knowing aught of him. The oath is now
+     complete; and, when the Ghost commands them to swear the last
+     time, Hamlet suddenly becomes perfectly serious and bids it
+     rest. [In Fletcher's _Woman's Prize_, V. iii., a passage
+     pointed out to me by Mr. C.J. Wilkinson, a man taking an oath
+     shifts his ground.]
+
+
+
+
+     NOTE F.
+
+     THE PLAYER'S SPEECH IN _HAMLET_.
+
+
+     There are two extreme views about this speech. According to
+     one, Shakespeare quoted it from some play, or composed it for
+     the occasion, simply and solely in order to ridicule, through
+     it, the bombastic style of dramatists contemporary with
+     himself or slightly older; just as he ridicules in _2 Henry
+     IV._ Tamburlaine's rant about the kings who draw his chariot,
+     or puts fragments of similar bombast into the mouth of Pistol.
+     According to Coleridge, on the other hand, this idea is 'below
+     criticism.' No sort of ridicule was intended. 'The lines, as
+     epic narrative, are superb.' It is true that the language is
+     'too poetical--the language of lyric vehemence and epic pomp,
+     and not of the drama'; but this is due to the fact that
+     Shakespeare had to distinguish the style of the speech from
+     that of his own dramatic dialogue.
+
+     In essentials I think that what Coleridge says[259] is true.
+     He goes too far, it seems to me, when he describes the
+     language of the speech as merely 'too poetical'; for with much
+     that is fine there is intermingled a good deal that, in epic
+     as in drama, must be called bombast. But I do not believe
+     Shakespeare meant it for bombast.
+
+     I will briefly put the arguments which point to this
+     conclusion. Warburton long ago stated some of them fully and
+     cogently, but he misinterpreted here and there, and some
+     arguments have to be added to his.
+
+     1. If the speech was meant to be ridiculous, it follows either
+     that Hamlet in praising it spoke ironically, or that
+     Shakespeare, in making Hamlet praise it sincerely, himself
+     wrote ironically. And both these consequences are almost
+     incredible.
+
+     Let us see what Hamlet says. He asks the player to recite 'a
+     passionate speech'; and, being requested to choose one, he
+     refers to a speech he once heard the player declaim. This
+     speech, he says, was never 'acted' or was acted only once; for
+     the play pleased not the million. But he, and others whose
+     opinion was of more importance than his, thought it an
+     excellent play, well constructed, and composed with equal
+     skill and temperance. One of these other judges commended it
+     because it contained neither piquant indecencies nor
+     affectations of phrase, but showed 'an honest method, as
+     wholesome as sweet, and by very much more handsome than
+     fine.'[260] In this play Hamlet 'chiefly loved' one speech;
+     and he asks for a part of it.
+
+     Let the reader now refer to the passage I have just
+     summarised; let him consider its tone and manner; and let him
+     ask himself if Hamlet can possibly be speaking ironically. I
+     am sure he will answer No. And then let him observe what
+     follows. The speech is declaimed. Polonius interrupting it
+     with an objection to its length, Hamlet snubs him, bids the
+     player proceed, and adds, 'He's for a jig or a tale of bawdry:
+     or he sleeps.' 'He,' that is, 'shares the taste of the million
+     for sallets in the lines to make the matter savoury, and is
+     wearied by an honest method.'[261] Polonius later interrupts
+     again, for he thinks the emotion of the player too absurd; but
+     Hamlet respects it; and afterwards, when he is alone (and
+     therefore can hardly be ironical), in contrasting this emotion
+     with his own insensibility, he betrays no consciousness that
+     there was anything unfitting in the speech that caused it.
+
+     So far I have chiefly followed Warburton, but there is an
+     important point which seems not to have been observed. All
+     Hamlet's praise of the speech is in the closest agreement with
+     his conduct and words elsewhere. His later advice to the
+     player (III. ii.) is on precisely the same lines. He is to
+     play to the judicious, not to the crowd, whose opinion is
+     worthless. He is to observe, like the author of Aeneas'
+     speech, the 'modesty' of nature. He must not tear a 'passion'
+     to tatters, to split the ears of the incompetent, but in the
+     very tempest of passion is to keep a temperance and
+     smoothness. The million, we gather from the first passage,
+     cares nothing for construction; and so, we learn in the second
+     passage, the barren spectators want to laugh at the clown
+     instead of attending to some necessary question of the play.
+     Hamlet's hatred of exaggeration is marked in both passages.
+     And so (as already pointed out, p. 133) in the play-scene,
+     when his own lines are going to be delivered, he impatiently
+     calls out to the actor to leave his damnable faces and begin;
+     and at the grave of Ophelia he is furious with what he thinks
+     the exaggeration of Laertes, burlesques his language, and
+     breaks off with the words,
+
+                  Nay, an thou'lt mouth,
+     I'll rant as well as thou.
+
+Now if Hamlet's praise of the Aeneas and Dido play and speech is
+ironical, his later advice to the player must surely be ironical too:
+and who will maintain that? And if in the one passage Hamlet is serious
+but Shakespeare ironical, then in the other passage all those famous
+remarks about drama and acting, which have been cherished as
+Shakespeare's by all the world, express the opposite of Shakespeare's
+opinion: and who will maintain that? And if Hamlet and Shakespeare are
+both serious--and nothing else is credible--then, to Hamlet and
+Shakespeare, the speeches of Laertes and Hamlet at Ophelia's grave are
+rant, but the speech of Aeneas to Dido is not rant. Is it not evident
+that he meant it for an exalted narrative speech of 'passion,' in a
+style which, though he may not have adopted it, he still approved and
+despised the million for not approving,--a speech to be delivered with
+temperance or modesty, but not too tamely neither? Is he not aiming here
+to do precisely what Marlowe aimed to do when he proposed to lead the
+audience
+
+     From jigging veins of rhyming mother-wits,
+     And such conceits as clownage keeps in pay,
+
+to 'stately' themes which beget 'high astounding terms'? And is it
+strange that, like Marlowe in _Tamburlaine_, he adopted a style marred
+in places by that which _we_ think bombast, but which the author meant
+to be more 'handsome than fine'?
+
+2. If this is so, we can easily understand how it comes about that the
+speech of Aeneas contains lines which are unquestionably grand and free
+from any suspicion of bombast, and others which, though not free from
+that suspicion, are nevertheless highly poetic. To the first class
+certainly belongs the passage beginning, 'But as we often see.' To the
+second belongs the description of Pyrrhus, covered with blood that was
+
+     Baked and impasted with the parching streets,
+     That lend a tyrannous and damned light
+     To their lord's murder;
+
+and again the picture of Pyrrhus standing like a tyrant in a picture,
+with his uplifted arm arrested in act to strike by the crash of the
+falling towers of Ilium. It is surely impossible to say that these lines
+are _merely_ absurd and not in the least grand; and with them I should
+join the passage about Fortune's wheel, and the concluding lines.
+
+But how can the insertion of these passages possibly be explained on the
+hypothesis that Shakespeare meant the speech to be ridiculous?
+
+3. 'Still,' it may be answered, 'Shakespeare _must_ have been conscious
+of the bombast in some of these passages. How could he help seeing it?
+And, if he saw it, he cannot have meant seriously to praise the speech.'
+But why must he have seen it? Did Marlowe know when he wrote
+bombastically? Or Marston? Or Heywood? Does not Shakespeare elsewhere
+write bombast? The truth is that the two defects of style in the speech
+are the very defects we do find in his writings. When he wished to make
+his style exceptionally high and passionate he always ran some risk of
+bombast. And he was even more prone to the fault which in this speech
+seems to me the more marked, a use of metaphors which sound to our ears
+'conceited' or grotesque. To me at any rate the metaphors in 'now is he
+total gules' and 'mincing with his sword her husband's limbs' are more
+disturbing than any of the bombast. But, as regards this second defect,
+there are many places in Shakespeare worse than the speech of Aeneas;
+and, as regards the first, though in his undoubtedly genuine works there
+is no passage so faulty, there is also no passage of quite the same
+species (for his narrative poems do not aim at epic grandeur), and there
+are many passages where bombast of the same kind, though not of the same
+degree, occurs.
+
+Let the reader ask himself, for instance, how the following lines would
+strike him if he came on them for the first time out of their context:
+
+                     Whip me, ye devils,
+     From the possession of this heavenly sight!
+     Blow me about in winds! Roast me in sulphur!
+     Wash me in steep-down gulfs of liquid fire!
+
+Are Pyrrhus's 'total gules' any worse than Duncan's 'silver skin laced
+with his golden blood,' or so bad as the chamberlains' daggers
+'unmannerly breech'd with gore'?[262] If 'to bathe in reeking wounds,'
+and 'spongy officers,' and even 'alarum'd by his sentinel the wolf,
+Whose howl's his watch,' and other such phrases in _Macbeth_, had
+occurred in the speech of Aeneas, we should certainly have been told
+that they were meant for burlesque. I open _Troilus and Cressida_
+(because, like the speech of Aeneas, it has to do with the story of
+Troy), and I read, in a perfectly serious context (IV. v. 6 f.):
+
+                Thou, trumpet, there's thy purse.
+     Now crack thy lungs, and split thy brazen pipe:
+     Blow, villain, till thy sphered bias cheek
+     Outswell the colic of puff'd Aquilon:
+     Come, stretch thy chest, and let thy eyes spout blood;
+     Thou blow'st for Hector.
+
+'Splendid!' one cries. Yes, but if you are told it is also bombastic,
+can you deny it? I read again (V. v. 7):
+
+                    bastard Margarelon
+     Hath Doreus prisoner,
+     And stands colossus-wise, waving his beam,
+     Upon the pashed corses of the kings.
+
+Or, to turn to earlier but still undoubted works, Shakespeare wrote in
+_Romeo and Juliet_,
+
+                  here will I remain
+     With worms that are thy chamber-maids;
+
+and in _King John_,
+
+     And pick strong matter of revolt and wrath
+     Out of the bloody finger-ends of John;
+
+and in _Lucrece_,
+
+     And, bubbling from her breast, it doth divide
+     In two slow rivers, that the crimson blood
+     Circles her body in on every side,
+     Who, like a late-sack'd island, vastly stood
+     Bare and unpeopled in this fearful flood.
+       Some of her blood still pure and red remain'd,
+       And some look'd black, and that false Tarquin stain'd.
+
+Is it so very unlikely that the poet who wrote thus might, aiming at a
+peculiarly heightened and passionate style, write the speech of Aeneas?
+
+4. But, pursuing this line of argument, we must go further. There is
+really scarcely one idea, and there is but little phraseology, in the
+speech that cannot be paralleled from Shakespeare's own works. He merely
+exaggerates a little here what he has done elsewhere. I will conclude
+this Note by showing that this is so as regards almost all the passages
+most objected to, as well as some others. (1) 'The Hyrcanian beast' is
+Macbeth's 'Hyrcan tiger' (III. iv. 101), who also occurs in _3 Hen. VI._
+I. iv. 155. (2) With 'total gules' Steevens compared _Timon_ IV. iii. 59
+(an undoubtedly Shakespearean passage),
+
+     With man's blood paint the ground, gules, gules.
+
+(3) With 'baked and impasted' cf. _John_ III. iii. 42, 'If that surly
+spirit melancholy Had baked thy blood.' In the questionable _Tit. And._
+V. ii. 201 we have, 'in that paste let their vile heads be baked' (a
+paste made of blood and bones, _ib._ 188), and in the undoubted _Richard
+II._ III. ii. 154 (quoted by Caldecott) Richard refers to the ground
+
+     Which serves as paste and cover to our bones.
+
+(4) 'O'er-sized with coagulate gore' finds an exact parallel in the
+'blood-siz'd field' of the _Two Noble Kinsmen_, I. i. 99, a scene which,
+whether written by Shakespeare (as I fully believe) or by another poet,
+was certainly written in all seriousness. (5) 'With eyes like
+carbuncles' has been much ridiculed, but Milton (_P.L._ ix. 500) gives
+'carbuncle eyes' to Satan turned into a serpent (Steevens), and why are
+they more outrageous than ruby lips and cheeks (_J.C._ III. i. 260,
+_Macb._ III. iv. 115, _Cym._ II. ii. 17)? (6) Priam falling with the
+mere wind of Pyrrhus's sword is paralleled, not only in _Dido Queen of
+Carthage_, but in _Tr. and Cr._ V. iii. 40 (Warburton). (7) With Pyrrhus
+standing like a painted tyrant cf. _Macb._ V. viii. 25 (Delius). (8) The
+forging of Mars's armour occurs again in _Tr. and Cr._ IV. v. 255, where
+Hector swears by the forge that stithied Mars his helm, just as Hamlet
+himself alludes to Vulcan's stithy (III. ii. 89). (9) The idea of
+'strumpet Fortune' is common: _e.g._ _Macb._ I. ii. 15, 'Fortune ...
+show'd like a rebel's whore.' (10) With the 'rant' about her wheel
+Warburton compares _Ant. and Cl._ IV. xv. 43, where Cleopatra would
+
+                                  rail so high
+     That the false huswife Fortune break her wheel.
+
+(11.) Pyrrhus minces with his sword Priam's limbs, and Timon (IV. iii.
+122) bids Alcibiades 'mince' the babe without remorse.'[263]
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[Footnote 259: It is impossible to tell whether Coleridge formed his
+view independently, or adopted it from Schlegel. For there is no record
+of his having expressed his opinion prior to the time of his reading
+Schlegel's _Lectures_; and, whatever he said to the contrary, his
+borrowings from Schlegel are demonstrable.]
+
+[Footnote 260: Clark and Wright well compare Polonius' antithesis of
+'rich, not gaudy': though I doubt if 'handsome' implies richness.]
+
+[Footnote 261: Is it not possible that 'mobled queen,' to which Hamlet
+seems to object, and which Polonius praises, is meant for an example of
+the second fault of affected phraseology, from which the play was said
+to be free, and an instance of which therefore surprises Hamlet?]
+
+[Footnote 262: The extravagance of these phrases is doubtless
+intentional (for Macbeth in using them is trying to act a part), but the
+_absurdity_ of the second can hardly be so.]
+
+[Footnote 263: Steevens observes that Heywood uses the phrase 'guled
+with slaughter,' and I find in his _Iron Age_ various passages
+indicating that he knew the speech of Aeneas (cf. p. 140 for another
+sign that he knew _Hamlet_). The two parts of the _Iron Age_ were
+published in 1632, but are said, in the preface to the Second, to have
+'been long since writ.' I refer to the pages of vol. 3 of Pearson's
+_Heywood_ (1874). (1) p. 329, Troilus 'lyeth imbak'd In his cold blood.'
+(2) p. 341, of Achilles' armour:
+
+     _Vulcan_ that wrought it out of gadds of Steele
+     With his _Ciclopian_ hammers, never made
+     Such noise upon his Anvile forging it,
+     Than these my arm'd fists in _Ulisses_ wracke.
+
+(3) p. 357, 'till _Hecub's_ reverent lockes Be gul'd in slaughter.' (4)
+p. 357, '_Scamander_ plaines Ore-spread with intrailes bak'd in blood
+and dust.' (5) p. 378, 'We'll rost them at the scorching flames of
+_Troy_.' (6) p. 379, 'tragicke slaughter, clad in gules and sables'
+(cf.'sable arms' in the speech in _Hamlet_). (7) p. 384, 'these lockes,
+now knotted all, As bak't in blood.' Of these, all but (1) and (2) are
+in Part II. Part I. has many passages which recall _Troilus and
+Cressida_. Mr. Fleay's speculation as to its date will be found in his
+_Chronicle History of the English Drama_, i. p. 285.
+
+For the same writer's ingenious theory (which is of course incapable of
+proof) regarding the relation of the player's speech in _Hamlet_ to
+Marlowe and Nash's _Dido_, see Furness's Variorum _Hamlet_.]
+
+
+
+
+NOTE G.
+
+HAMLET'S APOLOGY TO LAERTES.
+
+
+Johnson, in commenting on the passage (V. ii. 237-255), says: 'I wish
+Hamlet had made some other defence; it is unsuitable to the character of
+a good or a brave man to shelter himself in falsehood.' And Seymour
+(according to Furness) thought the falsehood so ignoble that he rejected
+lines 239-250 as an interpolation!
+
+I wish first to remark that we are mistaken when we suppose that Hamlet
+is here apologising specially for his behaviour to Laertes at Ophelia's
+grave. We naturally suppose this because he has told Horatio that he is
+sorry he 'forgot himself' on that occasion, and that he will court
+Laertes' favours (V. ii. 75 ff.). But what he says in that very passage
+shows that he is thinking chiefly of the greater wrong he has done
+Laertes by depriving him of his father:
+
+     For, by the image of my cause, I see
+     The portraiture of his.
+
+And it is also evident in the last words of the apology itself that he
+is referring in it to the deaths of Polonius and Ophelia:
+
+     Sir, in this audience,
+     Let my disclaiming from a purposed evil
+     Free me so far in your most generous thoughts,
+     _That I have shot mine arrow o'er the house,
+     And hurt my brother._
+
+But now, as to the falsehood. The charge is not to be set aside lightly;
+and, for my part, I confess that, while rejecting of course Johnson's
+notion that Shakespeare wanted to paint 'a good man,' I have momentarily
+shared Johnson's wish that Hamlet had made 'some other defence' than
+that of madness. But I think the wish proceeds from failure to imagine
+the situation.
+
+In the first place, _what_ other defence can we wish Hamlet to have
+made? I can think of none. He cannot tell the truth. He cannot say to
+Laertes, 'I meant to stab the King, not your father.' He cannot explain
+why he was unkind to Ophelia. Even on the false supposition that he is
+referring simply to his behaviour at the grave, he can hardly say, I
+suppose, 'You ranted so abominably that you put me into a towering
+passion.' _Whatever_ he said, it would have to be more or less untrue.
+
+Next, what moral difference is there between feigning insanity and
+asserting it? If we are to blame Hamlet for the second, why not equally
+for the first?
+
+And, finally, even if he were referring simply to his behaviour at the
+grave, his excuse, besides falling in with his whole plan of feigning
+insanity, would be as near the truth as any he could devise. For we are
+not to take the account he gives to Horatio, that he was put in a
+passion by the bravery of Laertes' grief, as the whole truth. His raving
+over the grave is not _mere_ acting. On the contrary, that passage is
+the best card that the believers in Hamlet's madness have to play. He is
+really almost beside himself with grief as well as anger, half-maddened
+by the impossibility of explaining to Laertes how he has come to do what
+he has done, full of wild rage and then of sick despair at this wretched
+world which drives him to such deeds and such misery. It is the same
+rage and despair that mingle with other feelings in his outbreak to
+Ophelia in the Nunnery-scene. But of all this, even if he were clearly
+conscious of it, he cannot speak to Horatio; for his love to Ophelia is
+a subject on which he has never opened his lips to his friend.
+
+If we realise the situation, then, we shall, I think, repress the wish
+that Hamlet had 'made some other defence' than that of madness. We shall
+feel only tragic sympathy.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+As I have referred to Hamlet's apology, I will add a remark on it from a
+different point of view. It forms another refutation of the theory that
+Hamlet has delayed his vengeance till he could publicly convict the
+King, and that he has come back to Denmark because now, with the
+evidence of the commission in his pocket, he can safely accuse him. If
+that were so, what better opportunity could he possibly find than this
+occasion, where he has to express his sorrow to Laertes for the grievous
+wrongs which he has unintentionally inflicted on him?
+
+
+
+
+NOTE H.
+
+THE EXCHANGE OF RAPIERS.
+
+
+I am not going to discuss the question how this exchange ought to be
+managed. I wish merely to point out that the stage-direction fails to
+show the sequence of speeches and events. The passage is as follows
+(Globe text):
+
+     _Ham._  Come, for the third, Laertes: you but dally;
+             I pray you, pass with your best violence;
+             I am afeard you make a wanton of me.
+
+     _Laer._ Say you so? come on.                 [_They play._
+
+     _Osr._  Nothing, neither way.
+
+     _Laer._ Have at you now!
+
+                [_Laertes wounds Hamlet; then, in scuffling, they
+                   change rapiers, and Hamlet wounds Laertes._[264]
+
+     _King._  Part them; they are incensed.
+
+     _Ham._   Nay, come, again.             _The Queen falls._[265]
+
+     _Osr._                    Look to the Queen there, ho!
+
+     _Hor._   They bleed on both sides. How is it, my lord?
+
+     _Osr._   How is't, Laertes?
+
+The words 'and Hamlet wounds Laertes' in Rowe's stage-direction destroy
+the point of the words given to the King in the text. If Laertes is
+already wounded, why should the King care whether the fencers are parted
+or not? What makes him cry out is that, while he sees his purpose
+effected as regards Hamlet, he also sees Laertes in danger through the
+exchange of foils in the scuffle. Now it is not to be supposed that
+Laertes is particularly dear to him; but he sees instantaneously that,
+if Laertes escapes the poisoned foil, he will certainly hold his tongue
+about the plot against Hamlet, while, if he is wounded, he may confess
+the truth; for it is no doubt quite evident to the King that Laertes has
+fenced tamely because his conscience is greatly troubled by the
+treachery he is about to practise. The King therefore, as soon as he
+sees the exchange of foils, cries out, 'Part them; they are incensed.'
+But Hamlet's blood is up. 'Nay, come, again,' he calls to Laertes, who
+cannot refuse to play, and _now_ is wounded by Hamlet. At the very same
+moment the Queen falls to the ground; and ruin rushes on the King from
+the right hand and the left.
+
+The passage, therefore, should be printed thus:
+
+     _Laer._ Have at you now!
+
+                     [_Laertes wounds Hamlet; then, in scuffling,
+                                            they change rapiers._
+
+     _King._ Part them; they are incensed.
+
+     _Ham._  Nay, come, again.
+
+       [_They play, and Hamlet wounds Laertes. The Queen falls._
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[Footnote 264: So Rowe. The direction in Q1 is negligible, the text
+being different. Q2 etc. have nothing, Ff. simply 'In scuffling they
+change rapiers.']
+
+[Footnote 265: Capell. The Quartos and Folios have no directions.]
+
+
+
+
+NOTE I.
+
+THE DURATION OF THE ACTION IN _OTHELLO_.
+
+
+The quite unusual difficulties regarding this subject have led to much
+discussion, a synopsis of which may be found in Furness's Variorum
+edition, pp. 358-72. Without detailing the facts I will briefly set out
+the main difficulty, which is that, according to one set of indications
+(which I will call A), Desdemona was murdered within a day or two of her
+arrival in Cyprus, while, according to another set (which I will call
+B), some time elapsed between her arrival and the catastrophe. Let us
+take A first, and run through the play.
+
+(A) Act I. opens on the night of Othello's marriage. On that night he is
+despatched to Cyprus, leaving Desdemona to follow him.
+
+In Act II. Sc. i., there arrive at Cyprus, first, in one ship, Cassio;
+then, in another, Desdemona, Iago, and Emilia; then, in another, Othello
+(Othello, Cassio, and Desdemona being in three different ships, it does
+not matter, for our purpose, how long the voyage lasted). On the night
+following these arrivals in Cyprus the marriage is consummated (II. iii.
+9), Cassio is cashiered, and, on Iago's advice, he resolves to ask
+Desdemona's intercession 'betimes in the morning' (II. iii. 335).
+
+In Act III. Sc. iii. (the Temptation scene), he does so: Desdemona does
+intercede: Iago begins to poison Othello's mind: the handkerchief is
+lost, found by Emilia, and given to Iago: he determines to leave it in
+Cassio's room, and, renewing his attack on Othello, asserts that he has
+seen the handkerchief in Cassio's hand: Othello bids him kill Cassio
+within three days, and resolves to kill Desdemona himself. All this
+occurs in one unbroken scene, and evidently on the day after the arrival
+in Cyprus (see III. i. 33).
+
+In the scene (iv.) following the Temptation scene Desdemona sends to bid
+Cassio come, as she has interceded for him: Othello enters, tests her
+about the handkerchief, and departs in anger: Cassio, arriving, is told
+of the change in Othello, and, being left _solus_, is accosted by
+Bianca, whom he requests to copy the work on the handkerchief which he
+has just found in his room (ll. 188 f.). All this is naturally taken to
+happen in the later part of the day on which the events of III. i.-iii.
+took place, _i.e._ the day after the arrival in Cyprus: but I shall
+return to this point.
+
+In IV. i. Iago tells Othello that Cassio has confessed, and, placing
+Othello where he can watch, he proceeds on Cassio's entrance to rally
+him about Bianca; and Othello, not being near enough to hear what is
+said, believes that Cassio is laughing at his conquest of Desdemona.
+Cassio here says that Bianca haunts him and 'was here _even now_'; and
+Bianca herself, coming in, reproaches him about the handkerchief 'you
+gave me _even now_.' There is therefore no appreciable time between III.
+iv. and IV. i. In this same scene Bianca bids Cassio come to supper
+_to-night_; and Lodovico, arriving, is asked to sup with Othello
+_to-night_. In IV. ii. Iago persuades Roderigo to kill Cassio _that
+night_ as he comes from Bianca's. In IV. iii. Lodovico, after supper,
+takes his leave, and Othello bids Desdemona go to bed on the instant and
+dismiss her attendant.
+
+In Act V., _that night_, the attempted assassination of Cassio, and the
+murder of Desdemona, take place.
+
+From all this, then, it seems clear that the time between the arrival in
+Cyprus and the catastrophe is certainly not more than a few days, and
+most probably only about a day and a half: or, to put it otherwise, that
+most probably Othello kills his wife about twenty-four hours after the
+consummation of their marriage!
+
+The only _possible_ place, it will be seen, where time can elapse is
+between III. iii. and III. iv. And here Mr. Fleay would imagine a gap of
+at least a week. The reader will find that this supposition involves the
+following results, (_a_) Desdemona has allowed at least a week to elapse
+without telling Cassio that she has interceded for him. (_b_) Othello,
+after being convinced of her guilt, after resolving to kill her, and
+after ordering Iago to kill Cassio within three days, has allowed at
+least a week to elapse without even questioning her about the
+handkerchief, and has so behaved during all this time that she is
+totally unconscious of any change in his feelings. (_c_) Desdemona, who
+reserves the handkerchief evermore about her to kiss and talk to (III.
+iii. 295), has lost it for at least a week before she is conscious of
+the loss. (_d_) Iago has waited at least a week to leave the
+handkerchief in Cassio's chamber; for Cassio has evidently only just
+found it, and wants the work on it copied before the owner makes
+inquiries for it. These are all gross absurdities. It is certain that
+only a short time, most probable that not even a night, elapses between
+III. iii. and III. iv.
+
+(B) Now this idea that Othello killed his wife, probably within
+twenty-four hours, certainly within a few days, of the consummation of
+his marriage, contradicts the impression produced by the play on all
+uncritical readers and spectators. It is also in flat contradiction with
+a large number of time-indications in the play itself. It is needless to
+mention more than a few. (_a_) Bianca complains that Cassio has kept
+away from her for a week (III. iv. 173). Cassio and the rest have
+therefore been more than a week in Cyprus, and, we should naturally
+infer, considerably more. (_b_) The ground on which Iago builds
+throughout is the probability of Desdemona's having got tired of the
+Moor; she is accused of having repeatedly committed adultery with Cassio
+(_e.g._ V. ii. 210); these facts and a great many others, such as
+Othello's language in III. iii. 338 ff., are utterly absurd on the
+supposition that he murders his wife within a day or two of the night
+when he consummated his marriage. (_c_) Iago's account of Cassio's dream
+implies (and indeed states) that he had been sleeping with Cassio
+'lately,' _i.e._ after arriving at Cyprus: yet, according to A, he had
+only spent one night in Cyprus, and we are expressly told that Cassio
+never went to bed on that night. Iago doubtless was a liar, but Othello
+was not an absolute idiot.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Thus (1) one set of time-indications clearly shows that Othello murdered
+his wife within a few days, probably a day and a half, of his arrival in
+Cyprus and the consummation of his marriage; (2) another set of
+time-indications implies quite as clearly that some little time must
+have elapsed, probably a few weeks; and this last is certainly the
+impression of a reader who has not closely examined the play.
+
+It is impossible to escape this result. The suggestion that the imputed
+intrigue of Cassio and Desdemona took place at Venice before the
+marriage, not at Cyprus after it, is quite futile. There is no positive
+evidence whatever for it; if the reader will merely refer to the
+difficulties mentioned under B above, he will see that it leaves almost
+all of them absolutely untouched; and Iago's accusation is uniformly one
+of adultery.
+
+How then is this extraordinary contradiction to be explained? It can
+hardly be one of the casual inconsistencies, due to forgetfulness, which
+are found in Shakespeare's other tragedies; for the scheme of time
+indicated under A seems deliberate and self-consistent, and the scheme
+indicated under B seems, if less deliberate, equally self-consistent.
+This does not look as if a single scheme had been so vaguely imagined
+that inconsistencies arose in working it out; it points to some other
+source of contradiction.
+
+'Christopher North,' who dealt very fully with the question, elaborated
+a doctrine of Double Time, Short and Long. To do justice to this theory
+in a few words is impossible, but its essence is the notion that
+Shakespeare, consciously or unconsciously, wanted to produce on the
+spectator (for he did not aim at readers) two impressions. He wanted the
+spectator to feel a passionate and vehement haste in the action; but he
+also wanted him to feel that the action was fairly probable. Consciously
+or unconsciously he used Short Time (the scheme of A) for the first
+purpose, and Long Time (the scheme of B) for the second. The spectator
+is affected in the required manner by both, though without distinctly
+noticing the indications of the two schemes.
+
+The notion underlying this theory is probably true, but the theory
+itself can hardly stand. Passing minor matters by, I would ask the
+reader to consider the following remarks. (_a_) If, as seems to be
+maintained, the spectator does not notice the indications of 'Short
+Time' at all, how can they possibly affect him? The passion, vehemence
+and haste of Othello affect him, because he perceives them; but if he
+does not perceive the hints which show the duration of the action from
+the arrival in Cyprus to the murder, these hints have simply no
+existence for him and are perfectly useless. The theory, therefore, does
+not explain the existence of 'Short Time.' (_b_) It is not the case that
+'Short Time' is wanted only to produce an impression of vehemence and
+haste, and 'Long Time' for probability. The 'Short Time' is equally
+wanted for probability: for it is grossly improbable that Iago's
+intrigue should not break down if Othello spends a week or weeks between
+the successful temptation and his execution of justice. (_c_) And this
+brings me to the most important point, which appears to have escaped
+notice. The place where 'Long Time' is wanted is not _within_ Iago's
+intrigue. 'Long Time' is required simply and solely because the intrigue
+and its circumstances presuppose a marriage consummated, and an adultery
+possible, for (let us say) some weeks. But, granted that lapse between
+the marriage and the temptation, there is no reason whatever why more
+than a few days or even one day should elapse between this temptation
+and the murder. The whole trouble arises because the temptation begins
+on the morning after the consummated marriage. Let some three weeks
+elapse between the first night at Cyprus and the temptation; let the
+brawl which ends in the disgrace of Cassio occur not on that night but
+three weeks later; or again let it occur that night, but let three weeks
+elapse before the intercession of Desdemona and the temptation of Iago
+begin. All will then be clear. Cassio has time to make acquaintance with
+Bianca, and to neglect her: the Senate has time to hear of the perdition
+of the Turkish fleet and to recall Othello: the accusations of Iago
+cease to be ridiculous; and the headlong speed of the action after the
+temptation has begun is quite in place. Now, too, there is no reason why
+we should not be affected by the hints of time ('to-day,' 'to-night,'
+'even now'), which we _do_ perceive (though we do not calculate them
+out). And, lastly, this supposition corresponds with our natural
+impression, which is that the temptation and what follows it take place
+some little while after the marriage, but occupy, themselves, a very
+short time.
+
+Now, of course, the supposition just described is no fact. As the play
+stands, it is quite certain that there is no space of three weeks, or
+anything like it, either between the arrival in Cyprus and the brawl, or
+between the brawl and the temptation. And I draw attention to the
+supposition chiefly to show that quite a small change would remove the
+difficulties, and to insist that there is nothing wrong at all in regard
+to the time from the temptation onward. How to account for the existing
+contradictions I do not at all profess to know, and I will merely
+mention two possibilities.
+
+Possibly, as Mr. Daniel observes, the play has been tampered with. We
+have no text earlier than 1622, six years after Shakespeare's death. It
+may be suggested, then, that in the play, as Shakespeare wrote it, there
+was a gap of some weeks between the arrival in Cyprus and Cassio's
+brawl, or (less probably) between the brawl and the temptation. Perhaps
+there was a scene indicating the lapse of time. Perhaps it was dull, or
+the play was a little too long, or devotees of the unity of time made
+sport of a second breach of that unity coming just after the breach
+caused by the voyage. Perhaps accordingly the owners of the play
+altered, or hired a dramatist to alter, the arrangement at this point,
+and this was unwittingly done in such a way as to produce the
+contradictions we are engaged on. There is nothing intrinsically
+unlikely in this idea; and certainly, I think, the amount of such
+corruption of Shakespeare's texts by the players is usually rather
+underrated than otherwise. But I cannot say I see any signs of foreign
+alteration in the text, though it is somewhat odd that Roderigo, who
+makes no complaint on the day of the arrival in Cyprus when he is being
+persuaded to draw Cassio into a quarrel that night, should, directly
+after the quarrel (II. iii. 370), complain that he is making no advance
+in his pursuit of Desdemona, and should speak as though he had been in
+Cyprus long enough to have spent nearly all the money he brought from
+Venice.
+
+Or, possibly, Shakespeare's original plan was to allow some time to
+elapse after the arrival at Cyprus, but when he reached the point he
+found it troublesome to indicate this lapse in an interesting way, and
+convenient to produce Cassio's fall by means of the rejoicings on the
+night of the arrival, and then almost necessary to let the request for
+intercession, and the temptation, follow on the next day. And perhaps he
+said to himself, No one in the theatre will notice that all this makes
+an impossible position: and I can make all safe by using language that
+implies that Othello has after all been married for some time. If so,
+probably he was right. I do not think anyone does notice the
+impossibilities either in the theatre or in a casual reading of the
+play.
+
+Either of these suppositions is possible: neither is, to me, probable.
+The first seems the less unlikely. If the second is true, Shakespeare
+did in _Othello_ what he seems to do in no other play. I can believe
+that he may have done so; but I find it very hard to believe that he
+produced this impossible situation without knowing it. It is one thing
+to read a drama or see it, quite another to construct and compose it,
+and he appears to have imagined the action in _Othello_ with even more
+than his usual intensity.
+
+
+
+
+NOTE J.
+
+THE 'ADDITIONS' TO _OTHELLO_ IN THE FIRST FOLIO. THE PONTIC SEA.
+
+
+The first printed _Othello_ is the first Quarto (Q1), 1622; the second
+is the first Folio (F1), 1623. These two texts are two distinct versions
+of the play. Q1 contains many oaths and expletives where less
+'objectionable' expressions occur in F1. Partly for this reason it is
+believed to represent the _earlier_ text, perhaps the text as it stood
+before the Act of 1605 against profanity on the stage. Its readings are
+frequently superior to those of F1, but it wants many lines that appear
+in F1, which probably represents the acting version in 1623. I give a
+list of the longer passages absent from Q1:
+
+     (_a_) I. i. 122-138. 'If't' ... 'yourself:'
+
+     (_b_) I. ii 72-77. 'Judge' ... 'thee'
+
+     (_c_) I. iii. 24-30. 'For' ... 'profitless.'
+
+     (_d_) III. iii. 383-390. '_Oth._ By' ... 'satisfied! _Iago._'
+
+     (_e_) III. iii. 453-460. 'Iago.' ... 'heaven,'
+
+     (_f_) IV. i. 38-44. 'To confess' ... 'devil!'
+
+     (_g_) IV. ii. 73-76, 'Committed!' ... 'committed!'
+
+     (_h_) IV. ii. 151-164. 'Here' ... 'make me.'
+
+     (_i_) IV. iii. 31-53. 'I have' ... 'not next'
+                and 55-57. '_Des._ [_Singing_]' ... 'men.'
+
+     (_j_) IV. iii. 60-63. 'I have' ... 'question.'
+
+     (_k_) IV. iii. 87-104. 'But I' ... 'us so.'
+
+     (_l_) V. ii. 151-154. 'O mistress' ... 'Iago.'
+
+     (_m_) V. ii. 185-193. 'My mistress' ... 'villany!'
+
+     (_n_) V. ii. 266-272. 'Be not' ... 'wench!'
+
+Were these passages after-thoughts, composed after the version
+represented by Q1 was written? Or were they in the version represented
+by Q1, and only omitted in printing, whether accidentally or because
+they were also omitted in the theatre? Or were some of them
+after-thoughts, and others in the original version?
+
+I will take them in order. (_a_) can hardly be an after-thought. Up to
+that point Roderigo had hardly said anything, for Iago had always
+interposed; and it is very unlikely that Roderigo would now deliver but
+four lines, and speak at once of 'she' instead of 'your daughter.'
+Probably this 'omission' represents a 'cut' in stage performance. (_b_)
+This may also be the case here. In our texts the omission of the passage
+would make nonsense, but in Q1 the 'cut' (if a cut) has been mended,
+awkwardly enough, by the substitution of 'Such' for 'For' in line 78. In
+any case, the lines cannot be an addition. (_c_) cannot be an
+after-thought, for the sentence is unfinished without it; and that it
+was not meant to be interrupted is clear, because in Q1 line 31 begins
+'And,' not 'Nay'; the Duke might say 'Nay' if he were cutting the
+previous speaker short, but not 'And.' (_d_) is surely no addition. If
+the lines are cut out, not only is the metre spoilt, but the obvious
+reason for Iago's words, 'I see, Sir, you are eaten up with passion,'
+disappears, and so does the reference of his word 'satisfied' in 393 to
+Othello's 'satisfied' in 390. (_e_) is the famous passage about the
+Pontic Sea, and I reserve it for the present. (_f_) As Pope observes,
+'no hint of this trash in the first edition,' the 'trash' including the
+words 'Nature would not invest herself in such shadowing passion without
+some instruction. It is not words that shake me thus'! There is nothing
+to prove these lines to be original or an after-thought. The omission of
+(_g_) is clearly a printer's error, due to the fact that lines 72 and 76
+both end with the word 'committed.' No conclusion can be formed as to
+(_h_), nor perhaps (_i_), which includes the whole of Desdemona's song;
+but if (_j_) is removed the reference in 'such a deed' in 64 is
+destroyed. (_k_) is Emilia's long speech about husbands. It cannot well
+be an after-thought, for 105-6 evidently refer to 103-4 (even the word
+'uses' in 105 refers to 'use' in 103). (_l_) is no after-thought, for
+'if he says so' in 155 must point back to 'my husband say that she was
+false!' in 152. (_m_) might be an after-thought, but, if so, in the
+first version the ending 'to speak' occurred twice within three lines,
+and the reason for Iago's sudden alarm in 193 is much less obvious. If
+(_n_) is an addition the original collocation was:
+
+                          but O vain boast!
+     Who can control his fate? 'Tis not so now.
+     Pale as thy smock!
+
+which does not sound probable.
+
+Thus, as it seems to me, in the great majority of cases there is more or
+less reason to think that the passages wanting in Q1 were nevertheless
+parts of the original play, and I cannot in any one case see any
+positive ground for supposing a subsequent addition. I think that most
+of the gaps in Q1 were accidents of printing (like many other smaller
+gaps in Q1), but that probably one or two were 'cuts'--_e.g._ Emilia's
+long speech (_k_). The omission of (_i_) might be due to the state of
+the MS.: the words of the song may have been left out of the dialogue,
+as appearing on a separate page with the musical notes, or may have been
+inserted in such an illegible way as to baffle the printer.
+
+I come now to (_e_), the famous passage about the Pontic Sea. Pope
+supposed that it formed part of the original version, but approved of
+its omission, as he considered it 'an unnatural excursion in this
+place.' Mr. Swinburne thinks it an after-thought, but defends it. 'In
+other lips indeed than Othello's, at the crowning minute of culminant
+agony, the rush of imaginative reminiscence which brings back upon his
+eyes and ears the lightning foam and tideless thunder of the Pontic Sea
+might seem a thing less natural than sublime. But Othello has the
+passion of a poet closed in as it were and shut up behind the passion of
+a hero' (_Study of Shakespeare_, p. 184). I quote these words all the
+more gladly because they will remind the reader of my lectures of my
+debt to Mr. Swinburne here; and I will only add that the reminiscence
+here is of _precisely the same character_ as the reminiscences of the
+Arabian trees and the base Indian in Othello's final speech. But I find
+it almost impossible to believe that Shakespeare _ever_ wrote the
+passage without the words about the Pontic Sea. It seems to me almost an
+imperative demand of imagination that Iago's set speech, if I may use
+the phrase, should be preceded by a speech of somewhat the same
+dimensions, the contrast of which should heighten the horror of its
+hypocrisy; it seems to me that Shakespeare must have felt this; and it
+is difficult to me to think that he ever made the lines,
+
+     In the due reverence of a sacred vow
+     I here engage my words,
+
+follow directly on the one word 'Never' (however impressive that word in
+its isolation might be). And as I can find no _other_ 'omission' in Q1
+which appears to point to a subsequent addition, I conclude that this
+'omission' _was_ an omission, probably accidental, conceivably due to a
+stupid 'cut.' Indeed it is nothing but Mr. Swinburne's opinion that
+prevents my feeling certainty on the point.
+
+Finally, I may draw attention to certain facts which may be mere
+accidents, but may possibly be significant. Passages (_b_) and (_c_)
+consist respectively of six and seven lines; that is, they are almost of
+the same length, and in a MS. might well fill exactly the same amount of
+space. Passage (_d_) is eight lines long; so is passage (_e_). Now,
+taking at random two editions of Shakespeare, the Globe and that of
+Delius, I find that (_b_) and (_c_) are 6-1/4 inches apart in the Globe,
+8 in Delius; and that (_d_) and (_e_) are separated by 7-3/8 inches in
+the Globe, by 8-3/4 in Delius. In other words, there is about the same
+distance in each case between two passages of about equal dimensions.
+
+The idea suggested by these facts is that the MS. from which Q1 was
+printed was mutilated in various places; that (_b_) and (_c_) occupied
+the bottom inches of two successive pages, and that these inches were
+torn away; and that this was also the case with (_d_) and (_e_).
+
+This speculation has amused me and may amuse some reader. I do not know
+enough of Elizabethan manuscripts to judge of its plausibility.
+
+
+
+
+NOTE K.
+
+OTHELLO'S COURTSHIP.
+
+
+It is curious that in the First Act two impressions are produced which
+have afterwards to be corrected.
+
+1. We must not suppose that Othello's account of his courtship in his
+famous speech before the Senate is intended to be exhaustive. He is
+accused of having used drugs or charms in order to win Desdemona; and
+therefore his purpose in his defence is merely to show that his
+witchcraft was the story of his life. It is no part of his business to
+trouble the Senators with the details of his courtship, and he so
+condenses his narrative of it that it almost appears as though there was
+no courtship at all, and as though Desdemona never imagined that he was
+in love with her until she had practically confessed her love for him.
+Hence she has been praised by some for her courage, and blamed by others
+for her forwardness.
+
+But at III. iii. 70 f. matters are presented in quite a new light. There
+we find the following words of hers:
+
+                             What! Michael Cassio,
+     That came a-wooing with you, and so many a time,
+     When I have spoke of you dispraisingly,
+     Hath ta'en your part.
+
+It seems, then, she understood why Othello came so often to her father's
+house, and was perfectly secure of his love before she gave him that
+very broad 'hint to speak.' I may add that those who find fault with her
+forget that it was necessary for her to take the first open step. She
+was the daughter of a Venetian grandee, and Othello was a black soldier
+of fortune.
+
+2. We learn from the lines just quoted that Cassio used to accompany
+Othello in his visits to the house; and from III. iii. 93 f. we learn
+that he knew of Othello's love from first to last and 'went between' the
+lovers 'very oft.' Yet in Act I. it appears that, while Iago on the
+night of the marriage knows about it and knows where to find Othello (I.
+i. 158 f.), Cassio, even if he knows where to find Othello (which is
+doubtful: see I. ii. 44), seems to know nothing about the marriage. See
+I. ii. 49:
+
+     _Cas._   Ancient, what makes he here?
+
+     _Iago._  'Faith, he to-night hath boarded a land carack:
+              If it prove lawful prize, he's made for ever.
+
+     _Cas._   I do not understand.
+
+     _Iago._                   He's married.
+
+     _Cas._                               To who?
+
+It is possible that Cassio does know, and only pretends ignorance
+because he has not been informed by Othello that Iago also knows. And
+this idea is consistent with Iago's apparent ignorance of Cassio's part
+in the courtship (III. iii. 93). And of course, if this were so, a word
+from Shakespeare to the actor who played Cassio would enable him to make
+all clear to the audience. The alternative, and perhaps more probable,
+explanation would be that, in writing Act I., Shakespeare had not yet
+thought of making Cassio Othello's confidant, and that, after writing
+Act III., he neglected to alter the passage in Act I. In that case the
+further information which Act III. gives regarding Othello's courtship
+would probably also be an after-thought.
+
+
+
+
+NOTE L.
+
+OTHELLO IN THE TEMPTATION SCENE.
+
+
+One reason why some readers think Othello 'easily jealous' is that they
+completely misinterpret him in the early part of this scene. They fancy
+that he is alarmed and suspicious the moment he hears Iago mutter 'Ha! I
+like not that,' as he sees Cassio leaving Desdemona (III. iii. 35). But,
+in fact, it takes a long time for Iago to excite surprise, curiosity,
+and then grave concern--by no means yet jealousy--even about Cassio; and
+it is still longer before Othello understands that Iago is suggesting
+doubts about Desdemona too. ('Wronged' in 143 certainly does not refer
+to her, as 154 and 162 show.) Nor, even at 171, is the exclamation 'O
+misery' meant for an expression of Othello's own present feelings; as
+his next speech clearly shows, it expresses an _imagined_ feeling, as
+also the speech which elicits it professes to do (for Iago would not
+have dared here to apply the term 'cuckold' to Othello). In fact it is
+not until Iago hints that Othello, as a foreigner, might easily be
+deceived, that he is seriously disturbed about Desdemona.
+
+Salvini played this passage, as might be expected, with entire
+understanding. Nor have I ever seen it seriously misinterpreted on the
+stage. I gather from the Furness Variorum that Fechter and Edwin Booth
+took the same view as Salvini. Actors have to ask themselves what was
+the precise state of mind expressed by the words they have to repeat.
+But many readers never think of asking such a question.
+
+The lines which probably do most to lead hasty or unimaginative readers
+astray are those at 90, where, on Desdemona's departure, Othello
+exclaims to himself:
+
+     Excellent wretch! Perdition catch my soul
+     But I do love thee! and when I love thee not,
+     Chaos is come again.
+
+He is supposed to mean by the last words that his love is _now_
+suspended by suspicion, whereas in fact, in his bliss, he has so totally
+forgotten Iago's 'Ha! I like not that,' that the tempter has to begin
+all over again. The meaning is, 'If ever I love thee not, Chaos will
+have come again.' The feeling of insecurity is due to the excess of
+_joy_, as in the wonderful words after he rejoins Desdemona at Cyprus
+(II. i. 191):
+
+                     If it were now to die,
+     'Twere now to be most happy: for, I fear
+     My soul hath her content so absolute
+     That not another comfort like to this
+     Succeeds in unknown fate.
+
+If any reader boggles at the use of the present in 'Chaos _is_ come
+again,' let him observe 'succeeds' in the lines just quoted, or let him
+look at the parallel passage in _Venus and Adonis_, 1019:
+
+     For, he being dead, with him is beauty slain;
+     And, beauty dead, black Chaos comes again.
+
+Venus does not know that Adonis is dead when she speaks thus.
+
+
+
+
+NOTE M.
+
+QUESTIONS AS TO _OTHELLO_, ACT IV. SCENE I.
+
+
+(1) The first part of the scene is hard to understand, and the
+commentators give little help. I take the idea to be as follows. Iago
+sees that he must renew his attack on Othello; for, on the one hand,
+Othello, in spite of the resolution he had arrived at to put Desdemona
+to death, has taken the step, without consulting Iago, of testing her in
+the matter of Iago's report about the handkerchief; and, on the other
+hand, he now seems to have fallen into a dazed lethargic state, and must
+be stimulated to action. Iago's plan seems to be to remind Othello of
+everything that would madden him again, but to do so by professing to
+make light of the whole affair, and by urging Othello to put the best
+construction on the facts, or at any rate to acquiesce. So he says, in
+effect: 'After all, if she did kiss Cassio, that might mean little. Nay,
+she might even go much further without meaning any harm.[266] Of course
+there is the handkerchief (10); but then why should she _not_ give it
+away?' Then, affecting to renounce this hopeless attempt to disguise his
+true opinion, he goes on: 'However, _I_ cannot, as your friend, pretend
+that I really regard her as innocent: the fact is, Cassio boasted to me
+in so many words of his conquest. [Here he is interrupted by Othello's
+swoon.] But, after all, why make such a fuss? You share the fate of most
+married men, and you have the advantage of not being deceived in the
+matter.' It must have been a great pleasure to Iago to express his real
+cynicism thus, with the certainty that he would not be taken seriously
+and would advance his plot by it. At 208-210 he recurs to the same plan
+of maddening Othello by suggesting that, if he is so fond of Desdemona,
+he had better let the matter be, for it concerns no one but him. This
+speech follows Othello's exclamation 'O Iago, the pity of it,' and this
+is perhaps the moment when we most of all long to destroy Iago.
+
+(2) At 216 Othello tells Iago to get him some poison, that he may kill
+Desdemona that night. Iago objects: 'Do it not with poison: strangle her
+in her bed, even the bed she hath contaminated?' Why does he object to
+poison? Because through the sale of the poison he himself would be
+involved? Possibly. Perhaps his idea was that, Desdemona being killed by
+Othello, and Cassio killed by Roderigo, he would then admit that he had
+informed Othello of the adultery, and perhaps even that he had
+undertaken Cassio's death; but he would declare that he never meant to
+fulfil his promise as to Cassio, and that he had nothing to do with
+Desdemona's death (he seems to be preparing for this at 285). His buying
+poison might wreck this plan. But it may be that his objection to poison
+springs merely from contempt for Othello's intellect. He can trust him
+to use violence, but thinks he may bungle anything that requires
+adroitness.
+
+(3) When the conversation breaks off here (225) Iago has brought Othello
+back to the position reached at the end of the Temptation scene (III.
+iii.). Cassio and Desdemona are to be killed; and, in addition, the time
+is hastened; it is to be 'to-night,' not 'within three days.'
+
+The constructional idea clearly is that, after the Temptation scene,
+Othello tends to relapse and wait, which is terribly dangerous to Iago,
+who therefore in this scene quickens his purpose. Yet Othello relapses
+again. He has declared that he will not expostulate with her (IV. i.
+217). But he cannot keep his word, and there follows the scene of
+accusation. Its _dramatic_ purposes are obvious, but Othello seems to
+have no purpose in it. He asks no questions, or, rather, none that shows
+the least glimpse of doubt or hope. He is merely torturing himself.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[Footnote 266: The reader who is puzzled by this passage should refer to
+the conversation at the end of the thirtieth tale in the _Heptameron_.]
+
+
+
+
+NOTE N.
+
+TWO PASSAGES IN THE LAST SCENE OF _OTHELLO_.
+
+
+(1) V. ii. 71 f. Desdemona demands that Cassio be sent for to 'confess'
+the truth that she never gave him the handkerchief. Othello answers that
+Cassio _has_ confessed the truth--has confessed the adultery. The
+dialogue goes on:
+
+     _Des._  He will not say so.
+
+     _Oth._                    No, his mouth is stopp'd:
+             Honest Iago hath ta'en order for 't.
+
+     _Des._  O! my fear interprets: what, is he dead?
+
+     _Oth._  Had all his hairs been lives, my great revenge
+             Had stomach for them all.
+
+     _Des._  Alas! he is _betray'd_ and _I_ undone.
+
+It is a ghastly idea, but I believe Shakespeare means that, at the
+mention of Iago's name, Desdemona suddenly sees that _he_ is the villain
+whose existence he had declared to be impossible when, an hour before,
+Emilia had suggested that someone had poisoned Othello's mind. But her
+words rouse Othello to such furious indignation ('Out, strumpet! Weep'st
+thou for him to my face?') that 'it is too late.'
+
+(2) V. ii. 286 f.
+
+     _Oth._  I look down towards his feet; but that's a fable.
+             If that thou be'st a devil, I cannot kill thee.
+                                           [_Wounds Iago._
+
+     _Lod._  Wrench his sword from him.
+
+     _Iago._                      I bleed, sir, but not killed.
+
+Are Iago's strange words meant to show his absorption of interest in
+himself amidst so much anguish? I think rather he is meant to be
+alluding to Othello's words, and saying, with a cold contemptuous smile,
+'You see he is right; I _am_ a devil.'
+
+
+
+
+NOTE O.
+
+OTHELLO ON DESDEMONA'S LAST WORDS.
+
+
+I have said that the last scene of _Othello_, though terribly painful,
+contains almost nothing to diminish the admiration and love which
+heighten our pity for the hero (p. 198). I said 'almost' in view of the
+following passage (V. ii. 123 ff.):
+
+     _Emil._ O, who hath done this deed?
+
+     _Des._  Nobody; I myself. Farewell:
+             Commend  me to my kind lord: O, farewell!    [_Dies._
+
+     _Oth._  Why, how should she be murdered?[267]
+
+     _Emil._                                Alas, who knows?
+
+     _Oth._  You heard her say herself, it was not I.
+
+     _Emil._ She said so: I must needs report the truth.
+
+     _Oth._  She's, like a liar, gone to burning hell:
+             'Twas I that kill'd her.
+
+     _Emil._                         O, the more angel she,
+             And you the blacker devil!
+
+     _Oth._  She turn'd to folly, and she was a whore.
+
+This is a strange passage. What did Shakespeare mean us to feel? One is
+astonished that Othello should not be startled, nay thunder-struck, when
+he hears such dying words coming from the lips of an obdurate
+adulteress. One is shocked by the moral blindness or obliquity which
+takes them only as a further sign of her worthlessness. Here alone, I
+think, in the scene sympathy with Othello quite disappears. Did
+Shakespeare mean us to feel thus, and to realise how completely confused
+and perverted Othello's mind has become? I suppose so: and yet Othello's
+words continue to strike me as very strange, and also as not _like_
+Othello,--especially as at this point he was not in anger, much less
+enraged. It has sometimes occurred to me that there is a touch of
+personal animus in the passage. One remembers the place in _Hamlet_
+(written but a little while before) where Hamlet thinks he is unwilling
+to kill the King at his prayers, for fear they may take him to heaven;
+and one remembers Shakespeare's irony, how he shows that those prayers
+do _not_ go to heaven, and that the soul of this praying murderer is at
+that moment as murderous as ever (see p. 171), just as here the soul of
+the lying Desdemona is angelic _in_ its lie. Is it conceivable that in
+both passages he was intentionally striking at conventional 'religious'
+ideas; and, in particular, that the belief that a man's everlasting fate
+is decided by the occupation of his last moment excited in him
+indignation as well as contempt? I admit that this fancy seems
+un-Shakespearean, and yet it comes back on me whenever I read this
+passage. [The words 'I suppose so' (l. 3 above) gave my conclusion; but
+I wish to withdraw the whole Note]
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[Footnote 267: He alludes to her cry, 'O falsely, falsely murder'd!']
+
+
+
+
+NOTE P.
+
+DID EMILIA SUSPECT IAGO?
+
+
+I have answered No (p. 216), and have no doubt about the matter; but at
+one time I was puzzled, as perhaps others have been, by a single phrase
+of Emilia's. It occurs in the conversation between her and Iago and
+Desdemona (IV. ii. 130 f.):
+
+     I will be hang'd if some eternal villain,
+     Some busy and insinuating rogue,
+     Some cogging, cozening slave, _to get some office_,
+     Have not devised this slander; I'll be hang'd else.
+
+Emilia, it may be said, knew that Cassio was the suspected man, so that
+she must be thinking of _his_ office, and must mean that Iago has
+poisoned Othello's mind in order to prevent his reinstatement and to get
+the lieutenancy for himself. And, it may be said, she speaks
+indefinitely so that Iago alone may understand her (for Desdemona does
+not know that Cassio is the suspected man). Hence too, it may be said,
+when, at V. ii. 190, she exclaims,
+
+                  Villany, villany, villany!
+     I think upon't, I think: I smell't: O villany!
+     _I thought so then:_--I'll kill myself for grief;
+
+she refers in the words italicised to the occasion of the passage in IV.
+ii., and is reproaching herself for not having taken steps on her
+suspicion of Iago.
+
+I have explained in the text why I think it impossible to suppose that
+Emilia suspected her husband; and I do not think anyone who follows her
+speeches in V. ii., and who realises that, if she did suspect him, she
+must have been simply _pretending_ surprise when Othello told her that
+Iago was his informant, will feel any doubt. Her idea in the lines at
+IV. ii. 130 is, I believe, merely that someone is trying to establish a
+ground for asking a favour from Othello in return for information which
+nearly concerns him. It does not follow that, because she knew Cassio
+was suspected, she must have been referring to Cassio's office. She was
+a stupid woman, and, even if she had not been, she would not put two and
+two together so easily as the reader of the play.
+
+In the line,
+
+     I thought so then: I'll kill myself for grief,
+
+I think she certainly refers to IV. ii. 130 f. and also IV. ii. 15
+(Steevens's idea that she is thinking of the time when she let Iago take
+the handkerchief is absurd). If 'I'll kill myself for grief' is to be
+taken in close connection with the preceding words (which is not
+certain), she may mean that she reproaches herself for not having acted
+on her general suspicion, or (less probably) that she reproaches herself
+for not having suspected that Iago was the rogue.
+
+With regard to my view that she failed to think of the handkerchief when
+she saw how angry Othello was, those who believe that she did think of
+it will of course also believe that she suspected Iago. But in addition
+to other difficulties, they will have to suppose that her astonishment,
+when Othello at last mentioned the handkerchief, was mere acting. And
+anyone who can believe this seems to me beyond argument. [I regret that
+I cannot now discuss some suggestions made to me in regard to the
+subjects of Notes O and P.]
+
+
+
+
+NOTE Q.
+
+IAGO'S SUSPICION REGARDING CASSIO AND EMILIA.
+
+
+The one expression of this suspicion appears in a very curious manner.
+Iago, soliloquising, says (II. i. 311):
+
+                          Which thing to do,
+     If this poor trash of Venice, whom I trash
+     For his quick hunting, stand the putting on,
+     I'll have our Michael Cassio on the hip,
+     Abuse him to the Moor in the rank [F. right] garb--
+     For I fear Cassio with my night-cap too--
+     Make the Moor thank me, etc.
+
+Why '_For_ I fear Cassio,' etc.? He can hardly be giving himself an
+additional reason for involving Cassio; the parenthesis must be
+explanatory of the preceding line or some part of it. I think it
+explains 'rank garb' or 'right garb,' and the meaning is, 'For Cassio
+_is_ what I shall accuse him of being, a seducer of wives.' He is
+returning to the thought with which the soliloquy begins, 'That Cassio
+loves her, I do well believe it.' In saying this he is unconsciously
+trying to believe that Cassio would at any rate _like_ to be an
+adulterer, so that it is not so very abominable to say that he _is_ one.
+And the idea 'I suspect him with Emilia' is a second and stronger
+attempt of the same kind. The idea probably was born and died in one
+moment. It is a curious example of Iago's secret subjection to morality.
+
+
+
+
+NOTE R.
+
+REMINISCENCES OF _OTHELLO_ IN _KING LEAR_.
+
+
+The following is a list, made without any special search, and doubtless
+incomplete, of words and phrases in _King Lear_ which recall words and
+phrases in _Othello_, and many of which occur only in these two plays:
+
+     'waterish,' I. i. 261, appears only here and in _O._
+     III. iii. 15.
+
+     'fortune's alms,' I. i. 281, appears only here and in
+     _O._ III. iv. 122.
+
+     'decline' seems to be used of the advance of age only in
+     I. ii. 78 and _O._ III. iii. 265.
+
+     'slack' in 'if when they chanced to slack you,' II.
+     iv. 248, has no exact parallel in Shakespeare, but recalls
+     'they slack their duties,' _O._ IV. iii. 88.
+
+     'allowance' (=authorisation), I. iv. 228, is used
+     thus only in _K.L._, _O._ I. i. 128, and two places
+     in _Hamlet_ and _Hen. VIII._
+
+     'besort,' vb., I. iv. 272, does not occur elsewhere,
+     but 'besort,' sb., occurs in _O._ I. iii. 239 and
+     nowhere else.
+
+     Edmund's 'Look, sir, I bleed,' II. i. 43, sounds like
+     an echo of Iago's 'I bleed, sir, but not killed,' _O._
+     V. ii. 288.
+
+     'potential,' II. i. 78, appears only here, in _O._
+     I. ii. 13, and in the _Lover's Complaint_ (which, I
+     think, is certainly not an early poem).
+
+     'poise' in 'occasions of some poise,' II. i. 122, is
+     exactly like 'poise' in 'full of poise and difficult weight,'
+     _O._ III. iii. 82, and not exactly like 'poise' in
+     the three other places where it occurs.
+
+     'conjunct,' used only in II. ii. 125 (Q), V.
+     i. 12, recalls 'conjunctive,' used only in _H_. IV.
+     vii. 14, _O._ I. iii. 374 (F).
+
+     'grime,' vb., used only in II. iii. 9, recalls
+     'begrime,' used only in _O._ III. iii. 387 and
+     _Lucrece_.
+
+     'unbonneted,' III. i. 14, appears only here and in
+     _O._ I. ii. 23.
+
+     'delicate,' III. iv. 12, IV. iii. 15,
+     IV. vi. 188, is not a rare word with Shakespeare; he
+     uses it about thirty times in his plays. But it is worth
+     notice that it occurs six times in _O._
+
+     'commit,' used intr. for 'commit adultery,' appears only in
+     III. iv. 83, but cf. the famous iteration in _O._
+     IV. ii. 72 f.
+
+     'stand in hard cure,' III. vi. 107, seems to have no
+     parallel except _O._ II. i. 51, 'stand in bold cure.'
+
+     'secure'=make careless, IV. i. 22, appears only here
+     and in _O._ I. iii. 10 and (not quite the same sense)
+     _Tim._ II. ii. 185.
+
+     Albany's 'perforce must wither,' IV. ii. 35, recalls
+     Othello's 'It must needs wither,' V. ii. 15.
+
+     'deficient,' IV. vi. 23, occurs only here and in _O._
+     I. iii. 63.
+
+     'the safer sense,' IV. vi. 81, recalls 'my blood
+     begins my safer guides to rules,' _O._ II. iii. 205.
+
+     'fitchew,' IV. vi. 124, is used only here, in _O._
+     IV. i. 150, and in _T.C._ V. i. 67 (where it
+     has not the same significance).
+
+     Lear's 'I have seen the day, with my good biting falchion I
+     would have made them skip,' V. iii. 276, recalls
+     Othello's 'I have seen the day, That with this little arm and
+     this good sword,' etc., V. ii. 261.
+
+The fact that more than half of the above occur in the first two Acts of
+_King Lear_ may possibly be significant: for the farther removed
+Shakespeare was from the time of the composition of _Othello_, the less
+likely would be the recurrence of ideas or words used in that play.
+
+
+
+
+NOTE S.
+
+_KING LEAR_ AND _TIMON OF ATHENS_.
+
+
+That these two plays are near akin in character, and probably in date,
+is recognised by many critics now; and I will merely add here a few
+references to the points of resemblance mentioned in the text (p. 246),
+and a few notes on other points.
+
+(1) The likeness between Timon's curses and some of the speeches of Lear
+in his madness is, in one respect, curious. It is natural that Timon,
+speaking to Alcibiades and two courtezans, should inveigh in particular
+against sexual vices and corruption, as he does in the terrific passage
+IV. iii. 82-166; but why should Lear refer at length, and with the same
+loathing, to this particular subject (IV. vi. 112-132)? It almost looks
+as if Shakespeare were expressing feelings which oppressed him at this
+period of his life.
+
+The idea may be a mere fancy, but it has seemed to me that this
+pre-occupation, and sometimes this oppression, are traceable in other
+plays of the period from about 1602 to 1605 (_Hamlet_, _Measure for
+Measure_, _Troilus and Cressida_, _All's Well_, _Othello_); while in
+earlier plays the subject is handled less, and without disgust, and in
+later plays (e.g. _Antony and Cleopatra_, _The Winter's Tale_,
+_Cymbeline_) it is also handled, however freely, without this air of
+repulsion (I omit _Pericles_ because the authorship of the
+brothel-scenes is doubtful).
+
+(2) For references to the lower animals, similar to those in _King
+Lear_, see especially _Timon_, I. i. 259; II. ii. 180; III. vi. 103 f.;
+IV. i. 2, 36; IV. iii. 49 f., 177 ff., 325 ff. (surely a passage written
+or, at the least, rewritten by Shakespeare), 392, 426 f. I ignore the
+constant abuse of the dog in the conversations where Apemantus appears.
+
+(3) Further points of resemblance are noted in the text at pp. 246, 247,
+310, 326, 327, and many likenesses in word, phrase and idea might be
+added, of the type of the parallel 'Thine Do comfort and not burn,'
+_Lear_, II. iv. 176, and 'Thou sun, that comfort'st, burn!' _Timon_, V.
+i. 134.
+
+(4) The likeness in style and versification (so far as the purely
+Shakespearean parts of _Timon_ are concerned) is surely unmistakable,
+but some readers may like to see an example. Lear speaks here (IV. vi.
+164 ff.):
+
+     Thou rascal beadle, hold thy bloody hand!
+     Why dost thou lash that whore? Strip thine own back;
+     Thou hotly lust'st to use her in that kind
+     For which thou whipp'st her. The usurer hangs the cozener.
+     Through tatter'd clothes small vices do appear;
+     Robes and furr'd gowns hide all. Plate sin with gold,
+     And the strong lance of justice hurtless breaks;
+     Arm it in rags, a pigmy's straw does pierce it.
+     None does offend, none, I say, none; I'll able 'em:
+     Take that of me, my friend, who have the power
+     To seal the accuser's lips. Get thee glass eyes;
+     And, like a scurvy politician, seem
+     To see the things thou dost not.
+
+And Timon speaks here (IV. iii. 1 ff.):
+
+     O blessed breeding sun, draw from the earth
+     Rotten humidity; below thy sister's orb
+     Infect the air! Twinn'd brothers of one womb,
+     Whose procreation, residence, and birth,
+     Scarce is dividant, touch them with several fortunes,
+     The greater scorns the lesser: not nature,
+     To whom all sores lay siege, can bear great fortune,
+     But by contempt of nature.
+     Raise me this beggar, and deny't that lord:
+     The senator shall bear contempt hereditary,
+     The beggar native honour.
+     It is the pasture lards the rother's sides,
+     The want that makes him lean. Who dares, who dares.
+     In purity of manhood stand upright
+     And say 'This man's a flatterer'? if one be,
+     So are they all: for every grise of fortune
+     Is smooth'd by that below: the learned pate
+     Ducks to the golden fool: all is oblique;
+     There's nothing level in our cursed natures,
+     But direct villany.
+
+The reader may wish to know whether metrical tests throw any light on
+the chronological position of _Timon_; and he will find such information
+as I can give in Note BB. But he will bear in mind that results arrived
+at by applying these tests to the whole play can have little value,
+since it is practically certain that Shakespeare did not write the whole
+play. It seems to consist (1) of parts that are purely Shakespearean
+(the text, however, being here, as elsewhere, very corrupt); (2) of
+parts untouched or very slightly touched by him; (3) of parts where a
+good deal is Shakespeare's but not all (_e.g._, in my opinion, III. v.,
+which I cannot believe, with Mr. Fleay, to be wholly, or almost wholly,
+by another writer). The tests ought to be applied not only to the whole
+play but separately to (1), about which there is little difference of
+opinion. This has not been done: but Dr. Ingram has applied one test,
+and I have applied another, to the parts assigned by Mr. Fleay to
+Shakespeare (see Note BB.).[268] The result is to place _Timon_ between
+_King Lear_ and _Macbeth_ (a result which happens to coincide with that
+of the application of the main tests to the whole play): and this result
+corresponds, I believe, with the general impression which we derive from
+the three dramas in regard to versification.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[Footnote 268: These are I. i.; II. i.; II. ii., except 194-204; in III.
+vi. Timon's verse speech; IV. i.; IV. ii. 1-28; IV. iii., except
+292-362, 399-413, 454-543; V. i., except 1-50; V. ii.; V. iv. I am not
+to be taken as accepting this division throughout.]
+
+
+
+
+NOTE T.
+
+DID SHAKESPEARE SHORTEN _KING LEAR_?
+
+
+I have remarked in the text (pp. 256 ff.) on the unusual number of
+improbabilities, inconsistencies, etc., in _King Lear_. The list of
+examples given might easily be lengthened. Thus (_a_) in IV. iii. Kent
+refers to a letter which he confided to the Gentleman for Cordelia; but
+in III. i. he had given to the Gentleman not a letter but a message.
+(_b_) In III. i. again he says Cordelia will inform the Gentleman who
+the sender of the message was; but from IV. iii. it is evident that she
+has done no such thing, nor does the Gentleman show any curiosity on the
+subject. (_c_) In the same scene (III. i.) Kent and the Gentleman
+arrange that whichever finds the King first shall halloo to the other;
+but when Kent finds the King he does not halloo. These are all examples
+of mere carelessness as to matters which would escape attention in the
+theatre,--matters introduced not because they are essential to the plot,
+but in order to give an air of verisimilitude to the conversation. And
+here is perhaps another instance. When Lear determines to leave Goneril
+and go to Regan he says, 'call my train together' (I. iv. 275). When he
+arrives at Gloster's house Kent asks why he comes with so small a train,
+and the Fool gives a reply which intimates that the rest have deserted
+him (II. iv. 63 ff.). He and his daughters, however, seem unaware of any
+diminution; and, when Lear 'calls to horse' and leaves Gloster's house,
+the doors are shut against him partly on the excuse that he is 'attended
+with a desperate train' (308). Nevertheless in the storm he has no
+knights with him, and in III. vii. 15 ff. we hear that 'some five or six
+and thirty of his knights'[269] are 'hot questrists after him,' as
+though the real reason of his leaving Goneril with so small a train was
+that he had hurried away so quickly that many of his knights were
+unaware of his departure.
+
+This prevalence of vagueness or inconsistency is probably due to
+carelessness; but it may possibly be due to another cause. There are, it
+has sometimes struck me, slight indications that the details of the plot
+were originally more full and more clearly imagined than one would
+suppose from the play as we have it; and some of the defects to which I
+have drawn attention might have arisen if Shakespeare, finding his
+matter too bulky, had (_a_) omitted to write some things originally
+intended, and (_b_), after finishing his play, had reduced it by
+excision, and had not, in these omissions and excisions, taken
+sufficient pains to remove the obscurities and inconsistencies
+occasioned by them.
+
+Thus, to take examples of (_b_), Lear's 'What, fifty of my followers at
+a clap!' (I. iv. 315) is very easily explained if we suppose that in the
+preceding conversation, as originally written, Goneril had mentioned the
+number. Again the curious absence of any indication why Burgundy should
+have the first choice of Cordelia's hand might easily be due to the same
+cause. So might the ignorance in which we are left as to the fate of the
+Fool, and several more of the defects noticed in the text.
+
+To illustrate the other point (_a_), that Shakespeare may have omitted
+to write some things which he had originally intended, the play would
+obviously gain something if it appeared that, at a time shortly before
+that of the action, Gloster had encouraged the King in his idea of
+dividing the kingdom, while Kent had tried to dissuade him. And there
+are one or two passages which suggest that this is what Shakespeare
+imagined. If it were so, there would be additional point in the Fool's
+reference to the lord who counselled Lear to give away his land (I. iv.
+154), and in Gloster's reflection (III. iv. 168),
+
+     His daughters seek his death: ah, that good Kent!
+     He said it would be thus:
+
+('said,' of course, not to the King but to Gloster and perhaps others of
+the council). Thus too the plots would be still more closely joined.
+Then also we should at once understand the opening of the play. To
+Kent's words, 'I thought the King had more affected the Duke of Albany
+than Cornwall,' Gloster answers, 'It did always seem so to us.' Who are
+the 'us' from whom Kent is excluded? I do not know, for there is no sign
+that Kent has been absent. But if Kent, in consequence of his
+opposition, had fallen out of favour and absented himself from the
+council, it would be clear. So, besides, would be the strange suddenness
+with which, after Gloster's answer, Kent changes the subject; he would
+be avoiding, in presence of Gloster's son, any further reference to a
+subject on which he and Gloster had differed. That Kent, I may add, had
+already the strongest opinion about Goneril and Regan is clear from his
+extremely bold words (I. i. 165),
+
+     Kill thy physician, and the fee bestow
+     Upon thy foul disease.
+
+Did Lear remember this phrase when he called Goneril 'a disease that's
+in my flesh' (II. iv. 225)?
+
+Again, the observant reader may have noticed that Goneril is not only
+represented as the fiercer and more determined of the two sisters but
+also strikes one as the more sensual. And with this may be connected one
+or two somewhat curious points: Kent's comparison of Goneril to the
+figure of Vanity in the Morality plays (II. ii. 38); the Fool's
+apparently quite irrelevant remark (though his remarks are scarcely ever
+so), 'For there was never yet fair woman but she made mouths in a glass'
+(III. ii. 35); Kent's reference to Oswald (long before there is any sign
+of Goneril's intrigue with Edmund) as 'one that would be a bawd in way
+of good service' (II. ii. 20); and Edgar's words to the corpse of Oswald
+(IV. vi. 257), also spoken before he knew anything of the intrigue with
+Edmund,
+
+     I know thee well: a serviceable villain;
+     As duteous to the vices of thy mistress
+     As badness would desire.
+
+Perhaps Shakespeare had conceived Goneril as a woman who before her
+marriage had shown signs of sensual vice; but the distinct indications
+of this idea were crowded out of his exposition when he came to write
+it, or, being inserted, were afterwards excised. I will not go on to
+hint that Edgar had Oswald in his mind when (III. iv. 87) he described
+the serving-man who 'served the lust of his mistress' heart, and did the
+act of darkness with her'; and still less that Lear can have had Goneril
+in his mind in the declamation against lechery referred to in Note S.
+
+I do not mean to imply, by writing this note, that I believe in the
+hypotheses suggested in it. On the contrary I think it more probable
+that the defects referred to arose from carelessness and other causes.
+But this is not, to me, certain; and the reader who rejects the
+hypotheses may be glad to have his attention called to the points which
+suggested them.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[Footnote 269: It has been suggested that 'his' means 'Gloster's'; but
+'him' all through the speech evidently means Lear.]
+
+
+
+
+NOTE U.
+
+MOVEMENTS OF THE DRAMATIS PERSONÆ IN ACT II. OF _KING LEAR_.
+
+
+I have referred in the text to the obscurity of the play on this
+subject, and I will set out the movements here.
+
+When Lear is ill-treated by Goneril his first thought is to seek refuge
+with Regan (I. iv. 274 f., 327 f.). Goneril, accordingly, who had
+foreseen this, and, even before the quarrel, had determined to write to
+Regan (I. iii. 25), now sends Oswald off to her, telling her not to
+receive Lear and his hundred knights (I. iv. 354 f.). In consequence of
+this letter Regan and Cornwall immediately leave their home and ride by
+night to Gloster's house, sending word on that they are coming (II. i. 1
+ff., 81, 120 ff.). Lear, on his part, just before leaving Goneril's
+house, sends Kent with a letter to Regan, and tells him to be quick, or
+Lear will be there before him. And we find that Kent reaches Regan and
+delivers his letter before Oswald, Goneril's messenger. Both the
+messengers are taken on by Cornwall and Regan to Gloster's house.
+
+In II. iv. Lear arrives at Gloster's house, having, it would seem,
+failed to find Regan at her own home. And, later, Goneril arrives at
+Gloster's house, in accordance with an intimation which she had sent in
+her letter to Regan (II. iv. 186 f.).
+
+Thus all the principal persons except Cordelia and Albany are brought
+together; and the crises of the double action--the expulsion of Lear and
+the blinding and expulsion of Gloster--are reached in Act III. And this
+is what was required.
+
+But it needs the closest attention to follow these movements. And, apart
+from this, difficulties remain.
+
+1. Goneril, in despatching Oswald with the letter to Regan, tells him to
+hasten his return (I. iv. 363). Lear again is surprised to find that
+_his_ messenger has not been sent back (II. iv. 1 f., 36 f.). Yet
+apparently both Goneril and Lear themselves start at once, so that their
+messengers _could_ not return in time. It may be said that they expected
+to meet them coming back, but there is no indication of this in the
+text.
+
+2. Lear, in despatching Kent, says (I. v. 1):
+
+     Go you before to Gloster with these letters. Acquaint my
+     daughter no further with anything you know than comes from her
+     demand out of the letter.
+
+This would seem to imply that Lear knew that Regan and Cornwall were at
+Gloster's house, and meant either to go there (so Koppel) or to summon
+her back to her own home to receive him. Yet this is clearly not so, for
+Kent goes straight to Regan's house (II. i. 124, II. iv. 1, 27 ff., 114
+ff.).
+
+Hence it is generally supposed that by 'Gloster,' in the passage just
+quoted, Lear means not the Earl but the _place_; that Regan's home was
+there; and that Gloster's castle was somewhere not very far off. This is
+to some extent confirmed by the fact that Cornwall is the 'arch' or
+patron of Gloster (II. i. 60 f., 112 ff.). But Gloster's home or house
+must not be imagined quite close to Cornwall's, for it takes a night to
+ride from the one to the other, and Gloster's house is in the middle of
+a solitary heath with scarce a bush for many miles about (II. iv. 304).
+
+The plural 'these letters' in the passage quoted need give no trouble,
+for the plural is often used by Shakespeare for a single letter; and the
+natural conjecture that Lear sent one letter to Regan and another to
+Gloster is not confirmed by anything in the text.
+
+The only difficulty is that, as Koppel points out, 'Gloster' is nowhere
+else used in the play for the place (except in the phrase 'Earl of
+Gloster' or 'my lord of Gloster'); and--what is more important--that it
+would unquestionably be taken by the audience to stand in this passage
+for the Earl, especially as there has been no previous indication that
+Cornwall lived at Gloster. One can only suppose that Shakespeare forgot
+that he had given no such indication, and so wrote what was sure to be
+misunderstood,--unless we suppose that 'Gloster' is a mere slip of the
+pen, or even a misprint, for 'Regan.' But, apart from other
+considerations, Lear would hardly have spoken to a servant of 'Regan,'
+and, if he had, the next words would have run 'Acquaint her,' not
+'Acquaint my daughter.'
+
+
+
+
+NOTE V.
+
+SUSPECTED INTERPOLATIONS IN _KING LEAR_.
+
+
+There are three passages in _King Lear_ which have been held to be
+additions made by 'the players.'
+
+The first consists of the two lines of indecent doggerel spoken by the
+Fool at the end of Act I.; the second, of the Fool's prophecy in rhyme
+at the end of III. ii.; the third, of Edgar's soliloquy at the end of
+III. vi.
+
+It is suspicious (1) that all three passages occur at the ends of
+scenes, the place where an addition is most easily made; and (2) that in
+each case the speaker remains behind alone to utter the words after the
+other persons have gone off.
+
+I postpone discussion of the several passages until I have called
+attention to the fact that, if these passages are genuine, the number of
+scenes which end with a soliloquy is larger in _King Lear_ than in any
+other undoubted tragedy. Thus, taking the tragedies in their probable
+chronological order (and ignoring the very short scenes into which a
+battle is sometimes divided),[270] I find that there are in _Romeo and
+Juliet_ four such scenes, in _Julius Cæsar_ two, in _Hamlet_ six, in
+_Othello_ four,[271] in _King Lear_ seven,[272] in _Macbeth_ two,[273]
+in _Antony and Cleopatra_ three, in _Coriolanus_ one. The difference
+between _King Lear_ and the plays that come nearest to it is really much
+greater than it appears from this list, for in _Hamlet_ four of the six
+soliloquies, and in _Othello_ three of the four, are long speeches,
+while most of those in _King Lear_ are quite short.
+
+Of course I do not attach any great importance to the fact just noticed,
+but it should not be left entirely out of account in forming an opinion
+as to the genuineness of the three doubted passages.
+
+(_a_) The first of these, I. v. 54-5, I decidedly believe to be
+spurious. (1) The scene ends quite in Shakespeare's manner without it.
+(2) It does not seem likely that at the _end_ of the scene Shakespeare
+would have introduced anything _violently_ incongruous with the
+immediately preceding words,
+
+     Oh let me not be mad, not mad, sweet heaven!
+     Keep me in temper: I would not be mad!
+
+(3) Even if he had done so, it is very unlikely that the incongruous
+words would have been grossly indecent. (4) Even if they had been,
+surely they would not have been _irrelevantly_ indecent and evidently
+addressed to the audience, two faults which are not in Shakespeare's
+way. (5) The lines are doggerel. Doggerel is not uncommon in the
+earliest plays; there are a few lines even in the _Merchant of Venice_,
+a line and a half, perhaps, in _As You Like It_; but I do not think it
+occurs later, not even where, in an early play, it would certainly have
+been found, _e.g._ in the mouth of the Clown in _All's Well_. The best
+that can be said for these lines is that they appear in the Quartos,
+_i.e._ in reports, however vile, of the play as performed within two or
+three years of its composition.
+
+(_b_) I believe, almost as decidedly, that the second passage, III. ii.
+79 ff., is spurious. (1) The scene ends characteristically without the
+lines. (2) They are addressed directly to the audience. (3) They destroy
+the pathetic and beautiful effect of the immediately preceding words of
+the Fool, and also of Lear's solicitude for him. (4) They involve the
+absurdity that the shivering timid Fool would allow his master and
+protector, Lear and Kent, to go away into the storm and darkness,
+leaving him alone. (5) It is also somewhat against them that they do not
+appear in the Quartos. At the same time I do not think one would
+hesitate to accept them if they occurred at any natural place _within_
+the dialogue.
+
+(_c_) On the other hand I see no sufficient reason for doubting the
+genuineness of Edgar's soliloquy at the end of III. vi. (1) Those who
+doubt it appear not to perceive that _some_ words of soliloquy are
+wanted; for it is evidently intended that, when Kent and Gloster bear
+the King away, they should leave the Bedlam behind. Naturally they do
+so. He is only accidentally connected with the King; he was taken to
+shelter with him merely to gratify his whim, and as the King is now
+asleep there is no occasion to retain the Bedlam; Kent, we know, shrank
+from him, 'shunn'd [his] abhorr'd society' (V. iii. 210). So he is left
+to return to the hovel where he was first found. When the others depart,
+then, he must be left behind, and surely would not go off without a
+word. (2) If his speech is spurious, therefore, it has been substituted
+for some genuine speech; and surely that is a supposition not to be
+entertained except under compulsion. (3) There is no such compulsion in
+the speech. It is not very good, no doubt; but the use of rhymed and
+somewhat antithetic lines in a gnomic passage is quite in Shakespeare's
+manner, _more_ in his manner than, for example, the rhymed passages in
+I. i. 183-190, 257-269, 281-4, which nobody doubts; quite like many
+places in _All's Well_, or the concluding lines of _King Lear_ itself.
+(4) The lines are in spirit of one kind with Edgar's fine lines at the
+beginning of Act IV. (5) Some of them, as Delius observes, emphasize the
+parallelism between the stories of Lear and Gloster. (6) The fact that
+the Folio omits the lines is, of course, nothing against them.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[Footnote 270: I ignore them partly because they are not significant for
+the present purpose, but mainly because it is impossible to accept the
+division of battle-scenes in our modern texts, while to depart from it
+is to introduce intolerable inconvenience in reference. The only proper
+plan in Elizabethan drama is to consider a scene ended as soon as no
+person is left on the stage, and to pay no regard to the question of
+locality,--a question theatrically insignificant and undetermined in
+most scenes of an Elizabethan play, in consequence of the absence of
+movable scenery. In dealing with battles the modern editors seem to have
+gone on the principle (which they could not possibly apply generally)
+that, so long as the place is not changed, you have only one scene.
+Hence in _Macbeth_, Act V., they have included in their Scene vii. three
+distinct scenes; yet in _Antony and Cleopatra_, Act III., following the
+right division for a wrong reason, they have two scenes (viii. and ix.),
+each less than four lines long.]
+
+[Footnote 271: One of these (V. i.) is not marked as such, but it is
+evident that the last line and a half form a soliloquy of one remaining
+character, just as much as some of the soliloquies marked as such in
+other plays.]
+
+[Footnote 272: According to modern editions, eight, Act II., scene ii.,
+being an instance. But it is quite ridiculous to reckon as three scenes
+what are marked as scenes ii., iii., iv. Kent is on the lower stage the
+whole time, Edgar in the so-called scene iii. being on the upper stage
+or balcony. The editors were misled by their ignorance of the stage
+arrangements.]
+
+[Footnote 273: Perhaps three, for V. iii. is perhaps an instance, though
+not so marked.]
+
+
+
+
+NOTE W.
+
+THE STAGING OF THE SCENE OF LEAR'S REUNION WITH CORDELIA.
+
+
+As Koppel has shown, the usual modern stage-directions[274] for this
+scene (IV. vii.) are utterly wrong and do what they can to defeat the
+poet's purpose.
+
+It is evident from the text that the scene shows the _first_ meeting of
+Cordelia and Kent, and _first_ meeting of Cordelia and Lear, since they
+parted in I. i. Kent and Cordelia indeed are doubtless supposed to have
+exchanged a few words before they come on the stage; but Cordelia has
+not seen her father at all until the moment before she begins (line 26),
+'O my dear father!' Hence the tone of the first part of the scene, that
+between Cordelia and Kent, is kept low, in order that the latter part,
+between Cordelia and Lear, may have its full effect.
+
+The modern stage-direction at the beginning of the scene, as found, for
+example, in the Cambridge and Globe editions, is as follows:
+
+     'SCENE vii.--A tent in the French camp. LEAR
+     on a bed asleep, soft music playing; _Gentleman_, and others
+     attending.
+
+     Enter CORDELIA, KENT, and _Doctor_.'
+
+At line 25, where the Doctor says 'Please you, draw near,' Cordelia is
+supposed to approach the bed, which is imagined by some editors visible
+throughout at the back of the stage, by others as behind a curtain at
+the back, this curtain being drawn open at line 25.
+
+Now, to pass by the fact that these arrangements are in flat
+contradiction with the stage-directions of the Quartos and the Folio,
+consider their effect upon the scene. In the first place, the reader at
+once assumes that Cordelia has already seen her father; for otherwise it
+is inconceivable that she would quietly talk with Kent while he was
+within a few yards of her. The edge of the later passage where she
+addresses him is therefore blunted. In the second place, through Lear's
+presence the reader's interest in Lear and his meeting with Cordelia is
+at once excited so strongly that he hardly attends at all to the
+conversation of Cordelia and Kent; and so this effect is blunted too.
+Thirdly, at line 57, where Cordelia says,
+
+                      O, look upon me, sir,
+     And hold your hands in benediction o'er me!
+     No, sir, you must not kneel,
+
+the poor old King must be supposed either to try to get out of bed, or
+actually to do so, or to kneel, or to try to kneel, on the bed.
+Fourthly, consider what happens at line 81.
+
+     _Doctor._ Desire him to _go in_; trouble him no more
+               Till further settling.
+
+     _Cor._                  Will't please your highness _walk?_
+
+     _Lear._   You must bear with me;
+               Pray you now, forget and forgive; I am old and
+                 foolish.    [_Exeunt all but Kent and Gentleman_.
+
+If Lear is in a tent containing his bed, why in the world, when the
+doctor thinks he can bear no more emotion, is he made to walk out of the
+tent? A pretty doctor!
+
+But turn now to the original texts. Of course they say nothing about the
+place. The stage-direction at the beginning runs, in the Quartos, 'Enter
+Cordelia, Kent, and Doctor;' in the Folio, 'Enter Cordelia, Kent, and
+Gentleman.' They differ about the Gentleman and the Doctor, and the
+Folio later wrongly gives to the Gentleman the Doctor's speeches as well
+as his own. This is a minor matter. But they agree in _making no mention
+of Lear_. He is not on the stage at all. Thus Cordelia, and the reader,
+can give their whole attention to Kent.
+
+Her conversation with Kent finished, she turns (line 12) to the Doctor
+and asks 'How does the King?'[275] The Doctor tells her that Lear is
+still asleep, and asks leave to wake him. Cordelia assents and asks if
+he is 'arrayed,' which does not mean whether he has a night-gown on, but
+whether they have taken away his crown of furrow-weeds, and tended him
+duly after his mad wanderings in the fields. The Gentleman says that in
+his sleep 'fresh garments' (not a night-gown) have been put on him. The
+Doctor then asks Cordelia to be present when her father is waked. She
+assents, and the Doctor says, 'Please you, draw near. Louder the music
+there.' The next words are Cordelia's, 'O my dear father!'
+
+What has happened? At the words 'is he arrayed?' according to the Folio,
+'_Enter Lear in a chair carried by Servants._' The moment of this
+entrance, as so often in the original editions, is doubtless too soon.
+It should probably come at the words 'Please you, draw near,' which
+_may_, as Koppel suggests, be addressed to the bearers. But that the
+stage-direction is otherwise right there cannot be a doubt (and that the
+Quartos omit it is no argument against it, seeing that, according to
+their directions, Lear never enters at all).
+
+This arrangement (1) allows Kent his proper place in the scene, (2)
+makes it clear that Cordelia has not seen her father before, (3) makes
+her first sight of him a theatrical crisis in the best sense, (4) makes
+it quite natural that he should kneel, (5) makes it obvious why he
+should leave the stage again when he shows signs of exhaustion, and (6)
+is the only arrangement which has the slightest authority, for 'Lear on
+a bed asleep' was never heard of till Capell proposed it. The ruinous
+change of the staging was probably suggested by the version of that
+unhappy Tate.
+
+Of course the chair arrangement is primitive, but the Elizabethans did
+not care about such things. What they cared for was dramatic effect.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[Footnote 274: There are exceptions: _e.g._, in the editions of Delius
+and Mr. W.J. Craig.]
+
+[Footnote 275: And it is possible that, as Koppel suggests, the Doctor
+should properly enter at this point; for if Kent, as he says, wishes to
+remain unknown, it seems strange that he and Cordelia should talk as
+they do before a third person. This change however is not necessary, for
+the Doctor might naturally stand out of hearing till he was addressed;
+and it is better not to go against the stage-direction without
+necessity.]
+
+
+
+
+NOTE X.
+
+THE BATTLE IN _KING LEAR_.
+
+
+I found my impression of the extraordinary ineffectiveness of this
+battle (p. 255) confirmed by a paper of James Spedding (_New Shakspere
+Society Transactions_, 1877, or Furness's _King Lear_, p. 312 f.); but
+his opinion that this is the one technical defect in _King Lear_ seems
+certainly incorrect, and his view that this defect is not due to
+Shakespeare himself will not, I think, bear scrutiny.
+
+To make Spedding's view quite clear I may remind the reader that in the
+preceding scene the two British armies, that of Edmund and Regan, and
+that of Albany and Goneril, have entered with drum and colours, and have
+departed. Scene ii. is as follows (Globe):
+
+     SCENE II.--_A field between the two camps.
+
+     Alarum within. Enter, with drum and colours_, LEAR, CORDELIA,
+     _and_ Soldiers, _over the stage; and exeunt._ _Enter_ EDGAR
+     _and_ GLOSTER.
+
+     _Edg._  Here, father, take the shadow of this tree
+             For your good host; pray that the right may thrive:
+             If ever I return to you again,
+             I'll bring you comfort.
+
+     _Glo._                        Grace go with you, sir!
+
+                                                    [_Exit_ Edgar
+
+     _Alarum and retreat within._ _Re-enter_ EDGAR.
+
+     _Edg._  Away, old man; give me thy hand; away!
+             King Lear hath lost, he and his daughter ta'en:
+             Give me thy hand; come on.
+
+     _Glo._  No farther, sir; a man may rot even here.
+
+     _Edg._  What, in ill thoughts again? Men must endure
+             Their going hence, even as their coming hither:
+             Ripeness is all: come on.
+
+     _Glo._                        And that's true too. [_Exeunt_.
+
+The battle, it will be seen, is represented only by military music
+within the tiring-house, which formed the back of the stage. 'The
+scene,' says Spedding, 'does not change; but 'alarums' are heard, and
+afterwards a 'retreat,' and on the same field over which that great army
+has this moment passed, fresh and full of hope, re-appears, with tidings
+that all is lost, the same man who last left the stage to follow and
+fight in it.[276] That Shakespeare meant the scene to stand thus, no one
+who has the true faith will believe.'
+
+Spedding's suggestion is that things are here run together which
+Shakespeare meant to keep apart. Shakespeare, he thinks, continued Act
+IV. to the '_exit_ Edgar' after l. 4 of the above passage. Thus, just
+before the close of the Act, the two British armies and the French army
+had passed across the stage, and the interest of the audience in the
+battle about to be fought was raised to a high pitch. Then, after a
+short interval, Act V. opened with the noise of battle in the distance,
+followed by the entrance of Edgar to announce the defeat of Cordelia's
+army. The battle, thus, though not fought on the stage, was shown and
+felt to be an event of the greatest importance.
+
+Apart from the main objection of the entire want of evidence of so great
+a change having been made, there are other objections to this idea and
+to the reasoning on which it is based. (1) The pause at the end of the
+present Fourth Act is far from 'faulty,' as Spedding alleges it to be;
+that Act ends with the most melting scene Shakespeare ever wrote; and a
+pause after it, and before the business of the battle, was perfectly
+right. (2) The Fourth Act is already much longer than the Fifth (about
+fourteen columns of the Globe edition against about eight and a half),
+and Spedding's change would give the Fourth nearly sixteen columns, and
+the Fifth less than seven. (3) Spedding's proposal requires a much
+greater alteration in the existing text than he supposed. It does not
+simply shift the division of the two Acts, it requires the disappearance
+and re-entrance of the blind Gloster. Gloster, as the text stands, is
+alone on the stage while the battle is being fought at a distance, and
+the reference to the tree shows that he was on the main or lower stage.
+The main stage had no front curtain; and therefore, if Act IV. is to end
+where Spedding wished it to end, Gloster must go off unaided at its
+close, and come on again unaided for Act V. And this means that the
+_whole_ arrangement of the present Act V. Sc. ii. must be changed. If
+Spedding had been aware of this it is not likely that he would have
+broached his theory.[277]
+
+It is curious that he does not allude to the one circumstance which
+throws some little suspicion on the existing text. I mean the
+contradiction between Edgar's statement that, if ever he returns to his
+father again, he will bring him comfort, and the fact that immediately
+afterwards he returns to bring him discomfort. It is possible to explain
+this psychologically, of course, but the passage is not one in which we
+should expect psychological subtlety.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[Footnote 276: Where did Spedding find this? I find no trace of it, and
+surely Edgar would not have risked his life in the battle, when he had,
+in case of defeat, to appear and fight Edmund. He does not appear
+'armed,' according to the Folio, till V. iii. 117.]
+
+[Footnote 277: Spedding supposed that there was a front curtain, and
+this idea, coming down from Malone and Collier, is still found in
+English works of authority. But it may be stated without hesitation that
+there is no positive evidence at all for the existence of such a
+curtain, and abundant evidence against it.]
+
+
+
+
+NOTE Y.
+
+SOME DIFFICULT PASSAGES IN _KING LEAR_.
+
+
+The following are notes on some passages where I have not been able to
+accept any of the current interpretations, or on which I wish to express
+an opinion or represent a little-known view.
+
+
+1. _Kent's soliloquy at the end of_ II. ii.
+
+(_a_) In this speech the application of the words 'Nothing, almost sees
+miracles but misery' seems not to have been understood. The 'misery' is
+surely not that of Kent but that of Lear, who has come 'out of heaven's
+benediction to the warm sun,' _i.e._ to misery. This, says Kent, is just
+the situation where something like miraculous help may be looked for;
+and he finds the sign of it in the fact that a letter from Cordelia has
+just reached him; for his course since his banishment has been so
+obscured that it is only by the rarest good fortune (something like a
+miracle) that Cordelia has got intelligence of it. We may suppose that
+this intelligence came from one of Albany's or Cornwall's servants, some
+of whom are, he says (III. i. 23),
+
+             to France the spies and speculations
+     Intelligent of our state.
+
+(_b_) The words 'and shall find time,' etc., have been much discussed.
+Some have thought that they are detached phrases from the letter which
+Kent is reading: but Kent has just implied by his address to the sun
+that he has no light to read the letter by.[278] It has also been
+suggested that the anacoluthon is meant to represent Kent's sleepiness,
+which prevents him from finishing the sentence, and induces him to
+dismiss his thoughts and yield to his drowsiness. But I remember nothing
+like this elsewhere in Shakespeare, and it seems much more probable that
+the passage is corrupt, perhaps from the loss of a line containing words
+like 'to rescue us' before 'From this enormous state' (with 'state' cf.
+'our state' in the lines quoted above).
+
+When we reach III. i. we find that Kent has now read the letter; he
+knows that a force is coming from France and indeed has already 'secret
+feet' in some of the harbours. So he sends the Gentleman to Dover.
+
+
+2. _The Fool's Song in_ II. iv.
+
+At II. iv. 62 Kent asks why the King comes with so small a train. The
+Fool answers, in effect, that most of his followers have deserted him
+because they see that his fortunes are sinking. He proceeds to advise
+Kent ironically to follow their example, though he confesses he does not
+intend to follow it himself. 'Let go thy hold when a great wheel runs
+down a hill, lest it break thy neck with following it: but the great one
+that goes up the hill, let him draw thee after. When a wise man gives
+thee better counsel, give me mine again: I would have none but knaves
+follow it, since a fool gives it.
+
+     That sir which serves and seeks for gain,
+       And follows but for form,
+     Will pack when it begins to rain,
+       And leave thee in the storm.
+     But I will tarry; the fool will stay,
+       And let the wise man fly:
+     The knave turns fool that runs away;
+       The fool no knave, perdy.
+
+The last two lines have caused difficulty. Johnson wanted to read,
+
+     The fool turns knave that runs away,
+       The knave no fool, perdy;
+
+_i.e._ if I ran away, I should prove myself to be a knave and a wise
+man, but, being a fool, I stay, as no knave or wise man would. Those who
+rightly defend the existing reading misunderstand it, I think.
+Shakespeare is not pointing out, in 'The knave turns fool that runs
+away,' that the wise knave who runs away is really a 'fool with a
+circumbendibus,' 'moral miscalculator as well as moral coward.' The Fool
+is referring to his own words, 'I would have none but knaves follow [my
+advice to desert the King], since a fool gives it'; and the last two
+lines of his song mean, 'The knave who runs away follows the advice
+given by a fool; but I, the fool, shall not follow my own advice by
+turning knave.'
+
+For the ideas compare the striking passage in _Timon_, I. i. 64 ff.
+
+
+3. '_Decline your head._'
+
+At IV. ii. 18 Goneril, dismissing Edmund in the presence of Oswald,
+says:
+
+                                  This trusty servant
+     Shall pass between us: ere long you are like to hear,
+     If you dare venture in your own behalf,
+     A mistress's command. Wear this; spare speech;
+     Decline your head: this kiss, if it durst speak,
+     Would stretch thy spirits up into the air.
+
+I copy Furness's note on 'Decline': 'STEEVENS thinks that Goneril bids
+Edmund decline his head that she might, while giving him a kiss, appear
+to Oswald merely to be whispering to him. But this, WRIGHT says, is
+giving Goneril credit for too much delicacy, and Oswald was a
+"serviceable villain." DELIUS suggests that perhaps she wishes to put a
+chain around his neck.'
+
+Surely 'Decline your head' is connected, not with 'Wear this' (whatever
+'this' may be), but with 'this kiss,' etc. Edmund is a good deal taller
+than Goneril, and must stoop to be kissed.
+
+
+4. _Self-cover'd_.
+
+At IV. ii. 59 Albany, horrified at the passions of anger, hate, and
+contempt expressed in his wife's face, breaks out:
+
+                               See thyself, devil!
+             Proper deformity seems not in the fiend
+             So horrid as in woman.
+
+     _Gon._                          O vain fool!
+
+     _Alb._  Thou changed and self-cover'd thing, for shame,
+             Be-monster not thy feature. Were't my fitness
+             To let these hands obey my blood,
+             They are apt enough to dislocate and tear
+             Thy flesh and bones: howe'er thou art a fiend,
+             A woman's shape doth shield thee.
+
+The passage has been much discussed, mainly because of the strange
+expression 'self-cover'd,' for which of course emendations have been
+proposed. The general meaning is clear. Albany tells his wife that she
+is a devil in a woman's shape, and warns her not to cast off that shape
+by be-monstering her feature (appearance), since it is this shape alone
+that protects her from his wrath. Almost all commentators go astray
+because they imagine that, in the words 'thou changed and self-cover'd
+thing,' Albany is speaking to Goneril as a _woman_ who has been changed
+into a fiend. Really he is addressing her as a fiend which has changed
+its own shape and assumed that of a woman; and I suggest that
+'self-cover'd' means either 'which hast covered or concealed thyself,'
+or 'whose self is covered' [so Craig in Arden edition], not (what of
+course it ought to mean) 'which hast been covered _by_ thyself.'
+
+Possibly the last lines of this passage (which does not appear in the
+Folios) should be arranged thus:
+
+             To let these hands obey my blood, they're apt enough
+             To dislocate and tear thy flesh and bones:
+             Howe'er thou art a fiend, a woman's shape
+             Doth shield thee.
+
+     _Gon._                 Marry, your manhood now--
+
+     _Alb._                                          What news?
+
+
+5. _The stage-directions at_ V. i. 37, 39.
+
+In V. i. there first enter Edmund, Regan, and their army or soldiers:
+then, at line 18, Albany, Goneril, and their army or soldiers. Edmund
+and Albany speak very stiffly to one another, and Goneril bids them
+defer their private quarrels and attend to business. Then follows this
+passage (according to the modern texts):
+
+     _Alb._                    Let's then determine
+             With the ancient of war on our proceedings.
+
+     _Edm._  I shall attend you presently at your tent.
+
+     _Reg._  Sister, you'll go with us?
+
+     _Gon._  No.
+
+     _Reg._  'Tis most convenient: pray you, go with us.
+
+     _Gon._  [_Aside_] O, ho, I know the riddle.--I will go.
+
+               _As they are going out, enter_ EDGAR _disguised._
+
+     _Edg._  If e'er your grace had speech with man so poor,
+             Hear me one word.
+
+     _Alb._                   I'll overtake you. Speak.
+
+                              [_Exeunt all but_ ALBANY _and_ EDGAR.
+
+It would appear from this that all the leading persons are to go to a
+Council of War with the ancient (plural) in Albany's tent; and they are
+going out, followed by their armies, when Edgar comes in. Why in the
+world, then, should Goneril propose (as she apparently does) to absent
+herself from the Council; and why, still more, should Regan object to
+her doing so? This is a question which always perplexed me, and I could
+not believe in the only answers I ever found suggested, viz., that Regan
+wanted to keep Edmund and Goneril together in order that she might
+observe them (Moberly, quoted in Furness), or that she could not bear to
+lose sight of Goneril, for fear Goneril should effect a meeting with
+Edmund after the Council (Delius, if I understand him).
+
+But I find in Koppel what seems to be the solution
+(Verbesserungsvorschläge, p. 127 f.). He points out that the modern
+stage-directions are wrong. For the modern direction 'As they are going
+out, enter Edgar disguised,' the Ff. read, 'Exeunt both the armies.
+Enter Edgar.' For 'Exeunt all but Albany and Edgar' the Ff. have
+nothing, but Q1 has 'exeunt' after 'word.' For the first direction
+Koppel would read, 'Exeunt Regan, Goneril, Gentlemen, and Soldiers': for
+the second he would read, after 'overtake you,' 'Exit Edmund.'
+
+This makes all clear. Albany proposes a Council of War. Edmund assents,
+and says he will come at once to Albany's tent for that purpose. The
+Council will consist of Albany, Edmund, and the ancient of war. Regan,
+accordingly, is going away with her soldiers; but she observes that
+Goneril shows no sign of moving with _her_ soldiers; and she at once
+suspects that Goneril means to attend the Council in order to be with
+Edmund. Full of jealousy, she invites Goneril to go with _her_. Goneril
+refuses, but then, seeing Regan's motive, contemptuously and ironically
+consents (I doubt if 'O ho, I know the riddle' should be 'aside,' as in
+modern editions, following Capell). Accordingly the two sisters go out,
+followed by their soldiers; and Edmund and Albany are just going out, in
+a different direction, to Albany's tent when Edgar enters. His words
+cause Albany to stay; Albany says to Edmund, as Edmund leaves, 'I'll
+overtake you'; and then, turning to Edgar, bids him 'speak.'
+
+
+6. V. iii. 151 ff.
+
+When Edmund falls in combat with the disguised Edgar, Albany produces
+the letter from Goneril to Edmund, which Edgar had found in Oswald's
+pocket and had handed over to Albany. This letter suggested to Edmund
+the murder of Albany. The passage in the Globe edition is as follows:
+
+     _Gon._                  This is practice, Gloucester:
+             By the law of arms thou wast not bound to answer
+             An unknown opposite: thou art not vanquish'd,
+             But cozen'd and beguiled.
+
+     _Alb._                           Shut your mouth, dame,
+             Or with this paper shall I stop it: Hold, sir;
+             Thou worse than any name, read thy own evil:
+             No tearing, lady; I perceive you know it.
+                                   [_Gives the letter to Edmund._
+
+     _Gon._  Say, if I do, the laws are mine, not thine:
+             Who can arraign me for't?
+
+     _Alb._                            Most monstrous! oh!
+             Know'st thou this paper?
+
+     _Gon._                       Ask me not what I know. [_Exit._
+
+     _Alb._  Go after her: she's desperate: govern her.
+
+     _Edm._  What you have charged me with, that have I done;
+             And more, much more; the time will bring it out.
+             'Tis past, and so am I. But what art thou
+             That hast this fortune on me?
+
+The first of the stage-directions is not in the Qq. or Ff.: it was
+inserted by Johnson. The second ('Exit') is both in the Qq. and in the
+Ff., but the latter place it after the words 'arraign me for't.' And
+they give the words 'Ask me not what I know' to Edmund, not to Goneril,
+as in the Qq. (followed by the Globe).
+
+I will not go into the various views of these lines, but will simply say
+what seems to me most probable. It does not matter much where precisely
+Goneril's 'exit' comes; but I believe the Folios are right in giving the
+words 'Ask me not what I know' to Edmund. It has been pointed out by
+Knight that the question 'Know'st thou this paper?' cannot very well be
+addressed to Goneril, for Albany has already said to her, 'I perceive
+you know it.' It is possible to get over this difficulty by saying that
+Albany wants her confession: but there is another fact which seems to
+have passed unnoticed. When Albany is undoubtedly speaking to his wife,
+he uses the plural pronoun, 'Shut _your_ mouth, dame,' 'No tearing,
+lady; I perceive _you_ know it.' When then he asks 'Know'st _thou_ this
+paper?' he is probably _not_ speaking to her.
+
+I should take the passage thus. At 'Hold, sir,' [omitted in Qq.] Albany
+holds the letter out towards Edmund for him to see, or possibly gives it
+to him.[279] The next line, with its 'thou,' is addressed to Edmund,
+whose 'reciprocal vows' are mentioned in the letter. Goneril snatches at
+it to tear it up: and Albany, who does not know whether Edmund ever saw
+the letter or not, says to her 'I perceive _you_ know it,' the 'you'
+being emphatic (her very wish to tear it showed she knew what was in
+it). She practically admits her knowledge, defies him, and goes out to
+kill herself. He exclaims in horror at her, and, turning again to
+Edmund, asks if _he_ knows it. Edmund, who of course does not know it,
+refuses to answer (like Iago), not (like Iago) out of defiance, but from
+chivalry towards Goneril; and, having refused to answer _this_ charge,
+he goes on to admit the charges brought against himself previously by
+Albany (82 f.) and Edgar (130 f.). I should explain the change from
+'you' to 'thou' in his speech by supposing that at first he is speaking
+to Albany and Edgar together.
+
+
+7. V. iii. 278.
+
+Lear, looking at Kent, asks,
+
+                                        Who are you?
+             Mine eyes are not o' the best: I'll tell you straight.
+
+     _Kent._ If fortune brag of two she loved _and_ hated (Qq. _or_),
+             One of them we behold.
+
+Kent is not answering Lear, nor is he speaking of himself. He is
+speaking of Lear. The best interpretation is probably that of Malone,
+according to which Kent means, 'We see the man most hated by Fortune,
+whoever may be the man she has loved best'; and perhaps it is supported
+by the variation of the text in the Qq., though their texts are so bad
+in this scene that their support is worth little. But it occurs to me as
+possible that the meaning is rather: 'Did Fortune ever show the extremes
+_both_ of her love _and_ of her hatred to any other man as she has shown
+them to this man?'
+
+
+8. _The last lines._
+
+     _Alb._  Bear them from hence. Our present business
+             Is general woe. [_To Kent and Edgar_] Friends of my
+               soul, you twain
+             Rule in this realm, and the gored state sustain.
+
+     _Kent._ I have a journey, sir, shortly to go;
+             My master calls me, I must not say no.
+
+     _Alb._  The weight of this sad time we must obey;
+             Speak what we feel, not what we ought to say.
+             The oldest hath borne most: we that are young
+             Shall never see so much, nor live so long.
+
+So the Globe. The stage-direction (right, of course) is Johnson's. The
+last four lines are given by the Ff. to Edgar, by the Qq. to Albany. The
+Qq. read '_have_ borne most.'
+
+To whom ought the last four lines to be given, and what do they mean? It
+is proper that the principal person should speak last, and this is in
+favour of Albany. But in this scene at any rate the Ff., which give the
+speech to Edgar, have the better text (though Ff. 2, 3, 4, make Kent die
+after his two lines!); Kent has answered Albany, but Edgar has not; and
+the lines seem to be rather more appropriate to Edgar. For the 'gentle
+reproof' of Kent's despondency (if this phrase of Halliwell's is right)
+is like Edgar; and, although we have no reason to suppose that Albany
+was not young, there is nothing to prove his youth.
+
+As to the meaning of the last two lines (a poor conclusion to such a
+play) I should suppose that 'the oldest' is not Lear, but 'the oldest of
+us,' viz., Kent, the one survivor of the old generation: and this is the
+more probable if there _is_ a reference to him in the preceding lines.
+The last words seem to mean, 'We that are young shall never see so much
+_and yet_ live so long'; _i.e._ if we suffer so much, we shall not bear
+it as he has. If the Qq. 'have' is right, the reference is to Lear,
+Gloster and Kent.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[Footnote 278: The 'beacon' which he bids approach is not the moon, as
+Pope supposed. The moon was up and shining some time ago (II. ii. 35),
+and lines 1 and 141-2 imply that not much of the night is left.]
+
+[Footnote 279: 'Hold' can mean 'take'; but the word 'this' in line 160
+('Know'st thou this paper?') favours the idea that the paper is still in
+Albany's hand.]
+
+
+
+
+NOTE Z.
+
+SUSPECTED INTERPOLATIONS IN _MACBETH_.
+
+
+I have assumed in the text that almost the whole of _Macbeth_ is
+genuine; and, to avoid the repetition of arguments to be found in other
+books,[280] I shall leave this opinion unsupported. But among the
+passages that have been questioned or rejected there are two which seem
+to me open to serious doubt. They are those in which Hecate appears:
+viz. the whole of III. v.; and IV. i. 39-43.
+
+These passages have been suspected (1) because they contain
+stage-directions for two songs which have been found in Middleton's
+_Witch_; (2) because they can be excised without leaving the least trace
+of their excision; and (3) because they contain lines incongruous with
+the spirit and atmosphere of the rest of the Witch-scenes: _e.g._ III.
+v. 10 f.:
+
+                     all you have done
+     Hath been but for a wayward son,
+     Spiteful and wrathful, who, as others do,
+     Loves for his own ends, not for you;
+
+and IV. i. 41, 2:
+
+     And now about the cauldron sing,
+     Like elves and fairies in a ring.
+
+The idea of sexual relation in the first passage, and the trivial
+daintiness of the second (with which cf. III. v. 34,
+
+     Hark! I am call'd; my little spirit, see,
+     Sits in a foggy cloud, and stays for me)
+
+suit Middleton's Witches quite well, but Shakespeare's not at all; and
+it is difficult to believe that, if Shakespeare had meant to introduce a
+personage supreme over the Witches, he would have made her so
+unimpressive as this Hecate. (It may be added that the original
+stage-direction at IV. i. 39, 'Enter Hecat and the other three Witches,'
+is suspicious.)
+
+I doubt if the second and third of these arguments, taken alone, would
+justify a very serious suspicion of interpolation; but the fact,
+mentioned under (1), that the play has here been meddled with, trebles
+their weight. And it gives some weight to the further fact that these
+passages resemble one another, and differ from the bulk of the other
+Witch passages, in being iambic in rhythm. (It must, however, be
+remembered that, supposing Shakespeare _did_ mean to introduce Hecate,
+he might naturally use a special rhythm for the parts where she
+appeared.)
+
+The same rhythm appears in a third passage which has been doubted: IV.
+i. 125-132. But this is not _quite_ on a level with the other two; for
+(1), though it is possible to suppose the Witches, as well as the
+Apparitions, to vanish at 124, and Macbeth's speech to run straight on
+to 133, the cut is not so clean as in the other cases; (2) it is not at
+all clear that Hecate (the most suspicious element) is supposed to be
+present. The original stage-direction at 133 is merely 'The Witches
+Dance, and vanish'; and even if Hecate had been present before, she
+might have vanished at 43, as Dyce makes her do.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[Footnote 280: _E.g._ Mr. Chambers's excellent little edition in the
+Warwick series.]
+
+
+
+
+NOTE AA.
+
+HAS _MACBETH_ BEEN ABRIDGED?
+
+
+_Macbeth_ is a very short play, the shortest of all Shakespeare's except
+the _Comedy of Errors_. It contains only 1993 lines, while _King Lear_
+contains 3298, _Othello_ 3324, and _Hamlet_ 3924. The next shortest of
+the tragedies is _Julius Caesar_, which has 2440 lines. (The figures are
+Mr. Fleay's. I may remark that for our present purpose we want the
+number of the lines in the first Folio, not those in modern composite
+texts.)
+
+Is there any reason to think that the play has been shortened? I will
+briefly consider this question, so far as it can be considered apart
+from the wider one whether Shakespeare's play was re-handled by
+Middleton or some one else.
+
+That the play, as we have it, is _slightly_ shorter than the play
+Shakespeare wrote seems not improbable. (1) We have no Quarto of
+_Macbeth_; and generally, where we have a Quarto or Quartos of a play,
+we find them longer than the Folio text. (2) There are perhaps a few
+signs of omission in our text (over and above the plentiful signs of
+corruption). I will give one example (I. iv. 33-43). Macbeth and Banquo,
+returning from their victories, enter the presence of Duncan (14), who
+receives them with compliments and thanks, which they acknowledge. He
+then speaks as follows:
+
+                        My plenteous joys,
+     Wanton in fulness, seek to hide themselves
+     In drops of sorrow. Sons, kinsmen, thanes,
+     And you whose places are the nearest, know,
+     We will establish our estate upon
+     Our eldest, Malcolm, whom we name hereafter
+     The Prince of Cumberland; which honour must
+     Not unaccompanied invest him only,
+     But signs of nobleness, like stars, shall shine
+     On all deservers. From hence to Inverness,
+     And bind us further to you.
+
+Here the transition to the naming of Malcolm, for which there has been
+no preparation, is extremely sudden; and the matter, considering its
+importance, is disposed of very briefly. But the abruptness and brevity
+of the sentence in which Duncan invites himself to Macbeth's castle are
+still more striking. For not a word has yet been said on the subject;
+nor is it possible to suppose that Duncan had conveyed his intention by
+message, for in that case Macbeth would of course have informed his wife
+of it in his letter (written in the interval between scenes iii. and
+iv.). It is difficult not to suspect some omission or curtailment here.
+On the other hand Shakespeare may have determined to sacrifice
+everything possible to the effect of rapidity in the First Act; and he
+may also have wished, by the suddenness and brevity of Duncan's
+self-invitation, to startle both Macbeth and the audience, and to make
+the latter feel that Fate is hurrying the King and the murderer to their
+doom.
+
+And that any _extensive_ omissions have been made seems not likely. (1)
+There is no internal evidence of the omission of anything essential to
+the plot. (2) Forman, who saw the play in 1610, mentions nothing which
+we do not find in our play; for his statement that Macbeth was made Duke
+of Northumberland is obviously due to a confused recollection of
+Malcolm's being made Duke of Cumberland. (3) Whereabouts could such
+omissions occur? Only in the first part, for the rest is full enough.
+And surely anyone who wanted to cut the play down would have operated,
+say, on Macbeth's talk with Banquo's murderers, or on III. vi., or on
+the very long dialogue of Malcolm and Macduff, instead of reducing the
+most exciting part of the drama. We might indeed suppose that
+Shakespeare himself originally wrote the first part more at length, and
+made the murder of Duncan come in the Third Act, and then _himself_
+reduced his matter so as to bring the murder back to its present place,
+perceiving in a flash of genius the extraordinary effect that might thus
+be produced. But, even if this idea suited those who believe in a
+rehandling of the play, what probability is there in it?
+
+Thus it seems most likely that the play always was an extremely short
+one. Can we, then, at all account for its shortness? It is possible, in
+the first place, that it was not composed originally for the public
+stage, but for some private, perhaps royal, occasion, when time was
+limited. And the presence of the passage about touching for the evil
+(IV. iii. 140 ff.) supports this idea. We must remember, secondly, that
+some of the scenes would take longer to perform than ordinary scenes of
+mere dialogue and action; _e.g._ the Witch-scenes, and the Battle-scenes
+in the last Act, for a broad-sword combat was an occasion for an
+exhibition of skill.[281] And, lastly, Shakespeare may well have felt
+that a play constructed and written like _Macbeth_, a play in which a
+kind of fever-heat is felt almost from beginning to end, and which
+offers very little relief by means of humorous or pathetic scenes, ought
+to be short, and would be unbearable if it lasted so long as _Hamlet_ or
+even _King Lear_. And in fact I do not think that, in reading, we _feel
+Macbeth_ to be short: certainly we are astonished when we hear that it
+is about half as long as _Hamlet_. Perhaps in the Shakespearean theatre
+too it appeared to occupy a longer time than the clock recorded.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[Footnote 281: These two considerations should also be borne in mind in
+regard to the exceptional shortness of the _Midsummer Night's Dream_ and
+the _Tempest_. Both contain scenes which, even on the Elizabethan stage,
+would take an unusual time to perform. And it has been supposed of each
+that it was composed to grace some wedding.]
+
+
+
+
+NOTE BB.
+
+THE DATE OF _MACBETH_. METRICAL TESTS.
+
+
+Dr. Forman saw _Macbeth_ performed at the Globe in 1610. The question is
+how much earlier its composition or first appearance is to be put.
+
+It is agreed that the date is not earlier than that of the accession of
+James I. in 1603. The style and versification would make an earlier date
+almost impossible. And we have the allusions to 'two-fold balls and
+treble sceptres' and to the descent of Scottish kings from Banquo; the
+undramatic description of touching for the King's Evil (James performed
+this ceremony); and the dramatic use of witchcraft, a matter on which
+James considered himself an authority.
+
+Some of these references would have their fullest effect early in
+James's reign. And on this ground, and on account both of resemblances
+in the characters of Hamlet and Macbeth, and of the use of the
+supernatural in the two plays, it has been held that _Macbeth_ was the
+tragedy that came next after _Hamlet_, or, at any rate, next after
+_Othello_.
+
+These arguments seem to me to have no force when set against those that
+point to a later date (about 1606) and place _Macbeth_ after _King
+Lear_.[282] And, as I have already observed, the probability is that it
+also comes after Shakespeare's part of _Timon_, and immediately before
+_Antony and Cleopatra_ and _Coriolanus_.
+
+I will first refer briefly to some of the older arguments in favour of
+this later date, and then more at length to those based on
+versification.
+
+(1) In II. iii. 4-5, 'Here's a farmer that hang'd himself on the
+expectation of plenty,' Malone found a reference to the exceptionally
+low price of wheat in 1606.
+
+(2) In the reference in the same speech to the equivocator who could
+swear in both scales and committed treason enough for God's sake, he
+found an allusion to the trial of the Jesuit Garnet, in the spring of
+1606, for complicity in the Gunpowder Treason and Plot. Garnet protested
+on his soul and salvation that he had not held a certain conversation,
+then was obliged to confess that he had, and thereupon 'fell into a
+large discourse defending equivocation.' This argument, which I have
+barely sketched, seems to me much weightier than the first; and its
+weight is increased by the further references to perjury and treason
+pointed out on p. 397.
+
+(3) Halliwell observed what appears to be an allusion to _Macbeth_ in
+the comedy of the _Puritan_, 4to, 1607: 'we'll ha' the ghost i' th'
+white sheet sit at upper end o' th' table'; and Malone had referred to a
+less striking parallel in _Caesar and Pompey_, also pub. 1607:
+
+     Why, think you, lords, that 'tis _ambition's spur_
+     That _pricketh_ Caesar to these high attempts?
+
+He also found a significance in the references in _Macbeth_ to the
+genius of Mark Antony being rebuked by Caesar, and to the insane root
+that takes the reason prisoner, as showing that Shakespeare, while
+writing _Macbeth_, was reading Plutarch's _Lives_, with a view to his
+next play _Antony and Cleopatra_ (S.R. 1608).
+
+(4) To these last arguments, which by themselves would be of little
+weight, I may add another, of which the same may be said. Marston's
+reminiscences of Shakespeare are only too obvious. In his _Dutch
+Courtezan_, 1605, I have noticed passages which recall _Othello_ and
+_King Lear_, but nothing that even faintly recalls _Macbeth_. But in
+reading _Sophonisba_, 1606, I was several times reminded of _Macbeth_
+(as well as, more decidedly, of _Othello_). I note the parallels for
+what they are worth.
+
+With _Sophonisba_, Act I. Sc. ii.:
+
+     Upon whose tops the Roman eagles stretch'd
+     Their large spread wings, which fann'd the evening aire
+     To us cold breath,
+
+cf. _Macbeth_ I. ii. 49:
+
+     Where the Norweyan banners flout the sky
+     And fan our people cold.
+
+Cf. _Sophonisba_, a page later: 'yet doubtful stood the fight,' with
+_Macbeth_, I. ii. 7, 'Doubtful it stood' ['Doubtful long it stood'?] In
+the same scene of _Macbeth_ the hero in fight is compared to an eagle,
+and his foes to sparrows; and in _Soph._ III. ii. Massinissa in fight is
+compared to a falcon, and his foes to fowls and lesser birds. I should
+not note this were it not that all these reminiscences (if they are
+such) recall one and the same scene. In _Sophonisba_ also there is a
+tremendous description of the witch Erictho (IV. i.), who says to the
+person consulting her, 'I know thy thoughts,' as the Witch says to
+Macbeth, of the Armed Head, 'He knows thy thought.'
+
+(5) The resemblances between _Othello_ and _King Lear_ pointed out on
+pp. 244-5 and in Note R. form, when taken in conjunction with other
+indications, an argument of some strength in favour of the idea that
+_King Lear_ followed directly on _Othello_.
+
+(6) There remains the evidence of style and especially of metre. I will
+not add to what has been said in the text concerning the former; but I
+wish to refer more fully to the latter, in so far as it can be
+represented by the application of metrical tests. It is impossible to
+argue here the whole question of these tests. I will only say that,
+while I am aware, and quite admit the force, of what can be said against
+the independent, rash, or incompetent use of them, I am fully convinced
+of their value when they are properly used.
+
+Of these tests, that of rhyme and that of feminine endings, discreetly
+employed, are of use in broadly distinguishing Shakespeare's plays into
+two groups, earlier and later, and also in marking out the very latest
+dramas; and the feminine-ending test is of service in distinguishing
+Shakespeare's part in _Henry VIII._ and the _Two Noble Kinsmen_. But
+neither of these tests has any power to separate plays composed within a
+few years of one another. There is significance in the fact that the
+_Winter's Tale_, the _Tempest_, _Henry VIII._, contain hardly any rhymed
+five-foot lines; but none, probably, in the fact that _Macbeth_ shows a
+higher percentage of such lines than _King Lear_, _Othello_, or
+_Hamlet_. The percentages of feminine endings, again, in the four
+tragedies, are almost conclusive against their being early plays, and
+would tend to show that they were not among the latest; but the
+differences in their respective percentages, which would place them in
+the chronological order _Hamlet_, _Macbeth_, _Othello_, _King Lear_
+(König), or _Macbeth_, _Hamlet_, _Othello_, _King Lear_ (Hertzberg), are
+of scarcely any account.[283] Nearly all scholars, I think, would accept
+these statements.
+
+The really useful tests, in regard to plays which admittedly are not
+widely separated, are three which concern the endings of speeches and
+lines. It is practically certain that Shakespeare made his verse
+progressively less formal, by making the speeches end more and more
+often within a line and not at the close of it; by making the sense
+overflow more and more often from one line into another; and, at last,
+by sometimes placing at the end of a line a word on which scarcely any
+stress can be laid. The corresponding tests may be called the
+Speech-ending test, the Overflow test, and the Light and Weak Ending
+test.
+
+I. The Speech-ending test has been used by König,[284] and I will first
+give some of his results. But I regret to say that I am unable to
+discover certainly the rule he has gone by. He omits speeches which are
+rhymed throughout, or which end with a rhymed couplet. And he counts
+only speeches which are 'mehrzeilig.' I suppose this means that he
+counts any speech consisting of two lines or more, but omits not only
+one-line speeches, but speeches containing more than one line but less
+than two; but I am not sure.
+
+In the plays admitted by everyone to be early the percentage of speeches
+ending with an incomplete line is quite small. In the _Comedy of
+Errors_, for example, it is only 0.6. It advances to 12.1 in _King
+John_, 18.3 in _Henry V._, and 21.6 in _As You Like It_. It rises
+quickly soon after, and in no play written (according to general belief)
+after about 1600 or 1601 is it less than 30. In the admittedly latest
+plays it rises much higher, the figures being as follows:--_Antony_
+77.5, _Cor._ 79, _Temp._ 84.5, _Cym._ 85, _Win. Tale_ 87.6, _Henry
+VIII._ (parts assigned to Shakespeare by Spedding) 89. Going back, now,
+to the four tragedies, we find the following figures: _Othello_ 41.4,
+_Hamlet_ 51.6, _Lear_ 60.9, _Macbeth_ 77.2. These figures place
+_Macbeth_ decidedly last, with a percentage practically equal to that of
+_Antony_, the first of the final group.
+
+I will now give my own figures for these tragedies, as they differ
+somewhat from König's, probably because my method differs. (1) I have
+included speeches rhymed or ending with rhymes, mainly because I find
+that Shakespeare will sometimes (in later plays) end a speech which is
+partly rhymed with an incomplete line (_e.g. Ham._ III. ii. 187, and the
+last words of the play: or _Macb._ V. i. 87, V. ii. 31). And if such
+speeches are reckoned, as they surely must be (for they may be, and are,
+highly significant), those speeches which end with complete rhymed lines
+must also be reckoned. (2) I have counted any speech exceeding a line in
+length, however little the excess may be; _e.g._
+
+     I'll fight till from my bones my flesh be hacked.
+     Give me my armour:
+
+considering that the incomplete line here may be just as significant as
+an incomplete line ending a longer speech. If a speech begins within a
+line and ends brokenly, of course I have not counted it when it is
+equivalent to a five-foot line; _e.g._
+
+                       Wife, children, servants, all
+     That could be found:
+
+but I do count such a speech (they are very rare) as
+
+                        My lord, I do not know:
+     But truly I do fear it:
+
+for the same reason that I count
+
+                       You know not
+     Whether it was his wisdom or his fear.
+
+Of the speeches thus counted, those which end somewhere within the line
+I find to be in _Othello_ about 54 per cent.; in _Hamlet_ about 57; in
+_King Lear_ about 69; in _Macbeth_ about 75.[285] The order is the same
+as König's, but the figures differ a good deal. I presume in the last
+three cases this comes from the difference in method; but I think
+König's figures for _Othello_ cannot be right, for I have tried several
+methods and find that the result is in no case far from the result of my
+own, and I am almost inclined to conjecture that König's 41.4 is really
+the percentage of speeches ending with the close of a line, which would
+give 58.6 for the percentage of the broken-ended speeches.[286]
+
+We shall find that other tests also would put _Othello_ before _Hamlet_,
+though close to it. This may be due to 'accident'--_i.e._ a cause or
+causes unknown to us; but I have sometimes wondered whether the last
+revision of _Hamlet_ may not have succeeded the composition of
+_Othello_. In this connection the following fact may be worth notice. It
+is well known that the differences of the Second Quarto of _Hamlet_ from
+the First are much greater in the last three Acts than in the first
+two--so much so that the editors of the Cambridge Shakespeare suggested
+that Q1 represents an old play, of which Shakespeare's rehandling had
+not then proceeded much beyond the Second Act, while Q2 represents his
+later completed rehandling. If that were so, the composition of the last
+three Acts would be a good deal later than that of the first two (though
+of course the first two would be revised at the time of the composition
+of the last three). Now I find that the percentage of speeches ending
+with a broken line is about 50 for the first two Acts, but about 62 for
+the last three. It is lowest in the first Act, and in the first two
+scenes of it is less than 32. The percentage for the last two Acts is
+about 65.
+
+II. The Enjambement or Overflow test is also known as the End-stopped
+and Run-on line test. A line may be called 'end-stopped' when the sense,
+as well as the metre, would naturally make one pause at its close;
+'run-on' when the mere sense would lead one to pass to the next line
+without any pause.[287] This distinction is in a great majority of cases
+quite easy to draw: in others it is difficult. The reader cannot judge
+by rules of grammar, or by marks of punctuation (for there is a distinct
+pause at the end of many a line where most editors print no stop): he
+must trust his ear. And readers will differ, one making a distinct pause
+where another does not. This, however, does not matter greatly, so long
+as the reader is consistent; for the important point is not the precise
+number of run-on lines in a play, but the difference in this matter
+between one play and another. Thus one may disagree with König in his
+estimate of many instances, but one can see that he is consistent.
+
+In Shakespeare's early plays, 'overflows' are rare. In the _Comedy of
+Errors_, for example, their percentage is 12.9 according to König[288]
+(who excludes rhymed lines and some others). In the generally admitted
+last plays they are comparatively frequent. Thus, according to König,
+the percentage in the _Winter's Tale_ is 37.5, in the _Tempest_ 41.5, in
+_Antony_ 43.3, in _Coriolanus_ 45.9, in _Cymbeline_ 46, in the parts of
+_Henry VIII._ assigned by Spedding to Shakespeare 53.18. König's results
+for the four tragedies are as follows: _Othello_, 19.5; _Hamlet_, 23.1;
+_King Lear_, 29.3; _Macbeth_, 36.6; (_Timon_, the whole play, 32.5).
+_Macbeth_ here again, therefore, stands decidedly last: indeed it stands
+near the first of the latest plays.
+
+And no one who has ever attended to the versification of _Macbeth_ will
+be surprised at these figures. It is almost obvious, I should say, that
+Shakespeare is passing from one system to another. Some passages show
+little change, but in others the change is almost complete. If the
+reader will compare two somewhat similar soliloquies, 'To be or not to
+be' and 'If it were done when 'tis done,' he will recognise this at
+once. Or let him search the previous plays, even _King Lear_, for twelve
+consecutive lines like these:
+
+     If it were done when 'tis done, then 'twere well
+     It were done quickly: if the assassination
+     Could trammel up the consequence, and catch
+     With his surcease success; that but this blow
+     Might be the be-all and the end-all here,
+     But here, upon this bank and shoal of time,
+     We 'ld jump the life to come. But in these cases
+     We still have judgement here; that we but teach
+     Bloody instructions, which, being taught, return
+     To plague the inventor: this even-handed justice
+     Commends the ingredients of our poison'd chalice
+     To our own lips.
+
+Or let him try to parallel the following (III. vi. 37 f.):
+
+                                     and this report
+             Hath so exasperate the king that he
+             Prepares for some attempt of war.
+
+     _Len._                      Sent he to Macduff?
+
+     _Lord._ He did: and with an absolute 'Sir, not I,'
+             The cloudy messenger turns me his back
+             And hums, as who should say 'You'll rue the time
+             That clogs me with this answer.'
+
+     _Len._                     And that well might
+             Advise him to a caution, to hold what distance
+             His wisdom can provide. Some holy angel
+             Fly to the court of England, and unfold
+             His message ere he come, that a swift blessing
+             May soon return to this our suffering country
+             Under a hand accurs'd!
+
+or this (IV. iii. 118 f.):
+
+                        Macduff, this noble passion,
+     Child of integrity, hath from my soul
+     Wiped the black scruples, reconciled my thoughts
+     To thy good truth and honour. Devilish Macbeth
+     By many of these trains hath sought to win me
+     Into his power, and modest wisdom plucks me
+     From over-credulous haste: but God above
+     Deal between thee and me! for even now
+     I put myself to thy direction, and
+     Unspeak mine own detraction, here abjure
+     The taints and blames I laid upon myself,
+     For strangers to my nature.
+
+I pass to another point. In the last illustration the reader will
+observe not only that 'overflows' abound, but that they follow one
+another in an unbroken series of nine lines. So long a series could not,
+probably, be found outside _Macbeth_ and the last plays. A series of two
+or three is not uncommon; but a series of more than three is rare in the
+early plays, and far from common in the plays of the second period
+(König).
+
+I thought it might be useful for our present purpose, to count the
+series of four and upwards in the four tragedies, in the parts of
+_Timon_ attributed by Mr. Fleay to Shakespeare, and in _Coriolanus_, a
+play of the last period. I have not excluded rhymed lines in the two
+places where they occur, and perhaps I may say that my idea of an
+'overflow' is more exacting than König's. The reader will understand the
+following table at once if I say that, according to it, _Othello_
+contains three passages where a series of four successive overflowing
+lines occurs, and two passages where a series of five such lines occurs:
+
+-----------------------------------------------------------------
+                 4    5    6    7    8    9   10   No. of Lines
+                                                    (Fleay).
+-----------------------------------------------------------------
+Othello,         3    2   --   --   --   --   --     2,758
+Hamlet,          7   --   --   --   --   --   --     2,571
+Lear,            6    2   --   --   --   --   --     2,312
+Timon,           7    2    1    1   --   --   --     1,031 (?)
+Macbeth,         7    5    1    1   --    1   --     1,706
+Coriolanus,     16   14    7    1    2   --    1     2,563
+-----------------------------------------------------------------
+
+(The figures for _Macbeth_ and _Timon_ in the last column must be borne
+in mind. I observed nothing in the non-Shakespeare part of _Timon_ that
+would come into the table, but I did not make a careful search. I felt
+some doubt as to two of the four series in _Othello_ and again in
+_Hamlet_, and also whether the ten-series in _Coriolanus_ should not be
+put in column 7).
+
+III. _The light and weak ending test._
+
+We have just seen that in some cases a doubt is felt whether there is an
+'overflow' or not. The fact is that the 'overflow' has many degrees of
+intensity. If we take, for example, the passage last quoted, and if with
+König we consider the line
+
+     The taints and blames I laid upon myself
+
+to be run-on (as I do not), we shall at least consider the overflow to
+be much less distinct than those in the lines
+
+                               but God above
+     Deal between thee and me! for even now
+     I put myself to thy direction, and
+     Unspeak my own detraction, here abjure
+
+And of these four lines the third runs on into its successor at much the
+greatest speed.
+
+'Above,' 'now,' 'abjure,' are not light or weak endings: 'and' is a weak
+ending. Prof. Ingram gave the name weak ending to certain words on which
+it is scarcely possible to dwell at all, and which, therefore,
+precipitate the line which they close into the following. Light endings
+are certain words which have the same effect in a slighter degree. For
+example, _and_, _from_, _in_, _of_, are weak endings; _am_, _are_, _I_,
+_he_, are light endings.
+
+The test founded on this distinction is, within its limits, the most
+satisfactory of all, partly because the work of its author can be
+absolutely trusted. The result of its application is briefly as follows.
+Until quite a late date light and weak endings occur in Shakespeare's
+works in such small numbers as hardly to be worth consideration.[289]
+But in the well-defined group of last plays the numbers both of light
+and of weak endings increase greatly, and, on the whole, the increase
+apparently is progressive (I say apparently, because the order in which
+the last plays are generally placed depends to some extent on the test
+itself). I give Prof. Ingram's table of these plays, premising that in
+_Pericles_, _Two Noble Kinsmen_, and _Henry VIII._ he uses only those
+parts of the plays which are attributed by certain authorities to
+Shakespeare (_New Shakspere Soc. Trans._, 1874).
+
+------------------------------------------------------------------------
+               | Light  |      | Percentage  | Percentage  | Percentage
+               |endings.| Weak.| of light in | of weak in  |     of
+               |        |      | verse lines.| verse lines.|    both.
+------------------------------------------------------------------------
+Antony &       |        |      |             |             |
+  Cleopatra,   |   71   |  28  |   2.53      |   1.        |    3.53
+Coriolanus,    |   60   |  44  |   2.34      |   1.71      |    4.05
+Pericles,      |   20   |  10  |   2.78      |   1.39      |    4.17
+Tempest,       |   42   |  25  |   2.88      |   1.71      |    4.59
+Cymbeline,     |   78   |  52  |   2.90      |   1.93      |    4.83
+Winter's Tale, |   57   |  43  |   3.12      |   2.36      |    5.48
+Two Noble      |        |      |             |             |
+  Kinsmen,     |   50   |  34  |   3.63      |   2.47      |    6.10
+Henry VIII.,   |   45   |  37  |   3.93      |   3.23      |    7.16
+------------------------------------------------------------------------
+
+Now, let us turn to our four tragedies (with _Timon_). Here again we
+have one doubtful play, and I give the figures for the whole of _Timon_,
+and again for the parts of _Timon_ assigned to Shakespeare by Mr. Fleay,
+both as they appear in his amended text and as they appear in the Globe
+(perhaps the better text).
+
+-----------------------------------------
+                      |  Light. |  Weak.
+-----------------------------------------
+Hamlet,               |    8    |    0
+Othello,              |    2    |    0
+Lear,                 |    5    |    1
+Timon (whole),        |   16    |    5
+      (Sh. in Fleay), |   14    |    7
+      (Sh. in Globe), |   13    |    2
+Macbeth,              |   21    |    2
+-----------------------------------------
+
+Now here the figures for the first three plays tell us practically
+nothing. The tendency to a freer use of these endings is not visible. As
+to _Timon_, the number of weak endings, I think, tells us little, for
+probably only two or three are Shakespeare's; but the rise in the number
+of light endings is so marked as to be significant. And most significant
+is this rise in the case of _Macbeth_, which, like Shakespeare's part of
+_Timon_, is much shorter than the preceding plays. It strongly confirms
+the impression that in _Macbeth_ we have the transition to Shakespeare's
+last style, and that the play is the latest of the five tragedies.[290]
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[Footnote 282: The fact that _King Lear_ was performed at Court on
+December 26, 1606, is of course very far from showing that it had never
+been performed before.]
+
+[Footnote 283: I have not tried to discover the source of the difference
+between these two reckonings.]
+
+[Footnote 284: _Der Vers in Shakspere's Dramen_, 1888.]
+
+[Footnote 285: In the parts of _Timon_ (Globe text) assigned by Mr.
+Fleay to Shakespeare, I find the percentage to be about 74.5. König
+gives 62.8 as the percentage in the whole of the play.]
+
+[Footnote 286: I have noted also what must be a mistake in the case of
+Pericles. König gives 17.1 as the percentage of the speeches with broken
+ends. I was astounded to see the figure, considering the style in the
+undoubtedly Shakespearean parts; and I find that, on my method, in Acts
+III., IV., V. the percentage is about 71, in the first two Acts (which
+show very slight, if any, traces of Shakespeare's hand) about 19. I
+cannot imagine the origin of the mistake here.]
+
+[Footnote 287: I put the matter thus, instead of saying that, with a
+run-on line, one does pass to the next line without any pause, because,
+in common with many others, I should not in any case whatever _wholly_
+ignore the fact that one line ends and another begins.]
+
+[Footnote 288: These overflows are what König calls 'schroffe
+Enjambements,' which he considers to correspond with Furnivall's 'run-on
+lines.']
+
+[Footnote 289: The number of light endings, however, in _Julius Caesar_
+(10) and _All's Well_ (12) is worth notice.]
+
+[Footnote 290: The Editors of the Cambridge Shakespeare might appeal in
+support of their view, that parts of Act V. are not Shakespeare's, to
+the fact that the last of the light endings occurs at IV. iii. 165.]
+
+
+
+
+NOTE CC.
+
+WHEN WAS THE MURDER OF DUNCAN FIRST PLOTTED?
+
+
+A good many readers probably think that, when Macbeth first met the
+Witches, he was perfectly innocent; but a much larger number would say
+that he had already harboured a vaguely guilty ambition, though he had
+not faced the idea of murder. And I think there can be no doubt that
+this is the obvious and natural interpretation of the scene. Only it is
+almost necessary to go rather further, and to suppose that his guilty
+ambition, whatever its precise form, was known to his wife and shared by
+her. Otherwise, surely, she would not, on reading his letter, so
+instantaneously assume that the King must be murdered in their castle;
+nor would Macbeth, as soon as he meets her, be aware (as he evidently
+is) that this thought is in her mind.
+
+But there is a famous passage in _Macbeth_ which, closely considered,
+seems to require us to go further still, and to suppose that, at some
+time before the action of the play begins, the husband and wife had
+explicitly discussed the idea of murdering Duncan at some favourable
+opportunity, and had agreed to execute this idea. Attention seems to
+have been first drawn to this passage by Koester in vol. I. of the
+_Jahrbücher d. deutschen Shakespeare-gesellschaft_, and on it is based
+the interpretation of the play in Werder's very able _Vorlesungen über
+Macbeth_.
+
+The passage occurs in I. vii., where Lady Macbeth is urging her husband
+to the deed:
+
+     _Macb._                                  Prithee, peace:
+               I dare do all that may become a man;
+               Who dares do more is none.
+
+     _Lady M._                         What beast was't, then,
+               That made you break this enterprise to me?
+               When you durst do it, then you were a man;
+               And, to be more than what you were, you would
+               Be so much more the man. Nor time nor place
+               Did then adhere, and yet you would make both:
+               They have made themselves, and that their fitness now
+               Does unmake you. I have given suck, and know
+               How tender 'tis to love the babe that milks me:
+               I would, while it was smiling in my face,
+               Have pluck'd my nipple from his boneless gums,
+               And dash'd the brains out, had I so sworn as you
+               Have done to this.
+
+Here Lady Macbeth asserts (1) that Macbeth proposed the murder to her:
+(2) that he did so at a time when there was no opportunity to attack
+Duncan, no 'adherence' of 'time' and 'place': (3) that he declared he
+wou'd _make_ an opportunity, and swore to carry out the murder.
+
+Now it is possible that Macbeth's 'swearing' might have occurred in an
+interview off the stage between scenes v. and vi., or scenes vi. and
+vii.; and, if in that interview Lady Macbeth had with difficulty worked
+her husband up to a resolution, her irritation at his relapse, in sc.
+vii., would be very natural. But, as for Macbeth's first proposal of
+murder, it certainly does not occur in our play, nor could it possibly
+occur in any interview off the stage; for when Macbeth and his wife
+first meet, 'time' and 'place' _do_ adhere; 'they have made themselves.'
+The conclusion would seem to be, either that the proposal of the murder,
+and probably the oath, occurred in a scene at the very beginning of the
+play, which scene has been lost or cut out; or else that Macbeth
+proposed, and swore to execute, the murder at some time prior to the
+action of the play.[291] The first of these hypotheses is most
+improbable, and we seem driven to adopt the second, unless we consent to
+burden Shakespeare with a careless mistake in a very critical passage.
+
+And, apart from unwillingness to do this, we can find a good deal to say
+in favour of the idea of a plan formed at a past time. It would explain
+Macbeth's start of fear at the prophecy of the kingdom. It would explain
+why Lady Macbeth, on receiving his letter, immediately resolves on
+action; and why, on their meeting, each knows that murder is in the mind
+of the other. And it is in harmony with her remarks on his probable
+shrinking from the act, to which, _ex hypothesi_, she had already
+thought it necessary to make him pledge himself by an oath.
+
+Yet I find it very difficult to believe in this interpretation. It is
+not merely that the interest of Macbeth's struggle with himself and with
+his wife would be seriously diminished if we felt he had been through
+all this before. I think this would be so; but there are two more
+important objections. In the first place the violent agitation described
+in the words,
+
+     If good, why do I yield to that suggestion
+     Whose horrid image doth unfix my hair
+     And make my seated heart knock at my ribs,
+
+would surely not be natural, even in Macbeth, if the idea of murder were
+already quite familiar to him through conversation with his wife, and if
+he had already done more than 'yield' to it. It is not as if the Witches
+had told him that Duncan was coming to his house. In that case the
+perception that the moment had come to execute a merely general design
+might well appal him. But all that he hears is that he will one day be
+King--a statement which, supposing this general design, would not point
+to any immediate action.[292] And, in the second place, it is hard to
+believe that, if Shakespeare really had imagined the murder planned and
+sworn to before the action of the play, he would have written the first
+six scenes in such a manner that practically all readers imagine quite
+another state of affairs, and _continue to imagine it_ even after they
+have read in scene vii. the passage which is troubling us. Is it likely,
+to put it otherwise, that his idea was one which nobody seems to have
+divined till late in the nineteenth century? And for what possible
+reason could he refrain from making this idea clear to his audience, as
+he might so easily have done in the third scene?[293] It seems very much
+more likely that he himself imagined the matter as nearly all his
+readers do.
+
+But, in that case, what are we to say of this passage? I will answer
+first by explaining the way in which I understood it before I was aware
+that it had caused so much difficulty. I supposed that an interview had
+taken place after scene v., a scene which shows Macbeth shrinking, and
+in which his last words were 'we will speak further.' In this interview,
+I supposed, his wife had so wrought upon him that he had at last yielded
+and pledged himself by oath to do the murder. As for her statement that
+he had 'broken the enterprise' to her, I took it to refer to his letter
+to her,--a letter written when time and place did not adhere, for he did
+not yet know that Duncan was coming to visit him. In the letter he does
+not, of course, openly 'break the enterprise' to her, and it is not
+likely that he would do such a thing in a letter; but if they had had
+ambitious conversations, in which each felt that some half-formed guilty
+idea was floating in the mind of the other, she might naturally take the
+words of the letter as indicating much more than they said; and then in
+her passionate contempt at his hesitation, and her passionate eagerness
+to overcome it, she might easily accuse him, doubtless with
+exaggeration, and probably with conscious exaggeration, of having
+actually proposed the murder. And Macbeth, knowing that when he wrote
+the letter he really had been thinking of murder, and indifferent to
+anything except the question whether murder should be done, would easily
+let her statement pass unchallenged.
+
+This interpretation still seems to me not unnatural. The alternative
+(unless we adopt the idea of an agreement prior to the action of the
+play) is to suppose that Lady Macbeth refers throughout the passage to
+some interview subsequent to her husband's return, and that, in making
+her do so, Shakespeare simply forgot her speeches on welcoming Macbeth
+home, and also forgot that at any such interview 'time' and 'place' did
+'adhere.' It is easy to understand such forgetfulness in a spectator and
+even in a reader; but it is less easy to imagine it in a poet whose
+conception of the two characters throughout these scenes was evidently
+so burningly vivid.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[Footnote 291: The 'swearing' _might_ of course, on this view, occur off
+the stage within the play; but there is no occasion to suppose this if
+we are obliged to put the proposal outside the play.]
+
+[Footnote 292: To this it might be answered that the effect of the
+prediction was to make him feel, 'Then I shall succeed if I carry out
+the plan of murder,' and so make him yield to the idea over again. To
+which I can only reply, anticipating the next argument, 'How is it that
+Shakespeare wrote the speech in such a way that practically everybody
+supposes the idea of murder to be occurring to Macbeth for the first
+time?']
+
+[Footnote 293: It might be answered here again that the actor,
+instructed by Shakespeare, could act the start of fear so as to convey
+quite clearly the idea of definite guilt. And this is true; but we ought
+to do our best to interpret the text before we have recourse to this
+kind of suggestion.]
+
+
+
+
+NOTE DD.
+
+DID LADY MACBETH REALLY FAINT?
+
+
+In the scene of confusion where the murder of Duncan is discovered,
+Macbeth and Lennox return from the royal chamber; Lennox describes the
+grooms who, as it seemed, had done the deed:
+
+             Their hands and faces were all badged with blood;
+             So were their daggers, which unwiped we found
+             Upon their pillows:
+             They stared, and were distracted; no man's life
+             Was to be trusted with them.
+
+     _Macb._ O, yet I do repent me of my fury
+             That I did kill them.
+
+     _Macd._                       Wherefore did you so?
+
+     _Macb._ Who can be wise, amazed, temperate and furious,
+             Loyal and neutral, in a moment? No man:
+             The expedition of my violent love
+             Outrun the pauser, reason. Here lay Duncan,
+             His silver skin laced with his golden blood;
+             And his gash'd stabs look'd like a breach in nature
+             For ruin's wasteful entrance: there, the murderers,
+             Steep'd in the colours of their trade, their daggers
+             Unmannerly breech'd with gore: who could refrain,
+             That had a heart to love, and in that heart
+             Courage to make's love known?
+
+At this point Lady Macbeth exclaims, 'Help me hence, ho!' Her husband
+takes no notice, but Macduff calls out 'Look to the lady.' This, after a
+few words 'aside' between Malcolm and Donalbain, is repeated by Banquo,
+and, very shortly after, all except Duncan's sons _exeunt_. (The
+stage-direction 'Lady Macbeth is carried out,' after Banquo's
+exclamation 'Look to the lady,' is not in the Ff. and was introduced by
+Rowe. If the Ff. are right, she can hardly have fainted _away_. But the
+point has no importance here.)
+
+Does Lady Macbeth really turn faint, or does she pretend? The latter
+seems to have been the general view, and Whately pointed out that
+Macbeth's indifference betrays his consciousness that the faint was not
+real. But to this it may be answered that, if he believed it to be real,
+he would equally show indifference, in order to display his horror at
+the murder. And Miss Helen Faucit and others have held that there was no
+pretence.
+
+In favour of the pretence it may be said (1) that Lady Macbeth, who
+herself took back the daggers, saw the old King in his blood, and
+smeared the grooms, was not the woman to faint at a mere description;
+(2) that she saw her husband over-acting his part, and saw the faces of
+the lords, and wished to end the scene,--which she succeeded in doing.
+
+But to the last argument it may be replied that she would not willingly
+have run the risk of leaving her husband to act his part alone. And for
+other reasons (indicated above, p. 373 f.) I decidedly believe that she
+is meant really to faint. She was no Goneril. She knew that she could
+not kill the King herself; and she never expected to have to carry back
+the daggers, see the bloody corpse, and smear the faces and hands of the
+grooms. But Macbeth's agony greatly alarmed her, and she was driven to
+the scene of horror to complete his task; and what an impression it made
+on her we know from that sentence uttered in her sleep, 'Yet who would
+have thought the old man to have had so much blood in him?' She had now,
+further, gone through the ordeal of the discovery. Is it not quite
+natural that the reaction should come, and that it should come just when
+Macbeth's description recalls the scene which had cost her the greatest
+effort? Is it not likely, besides, that the expression on the faces of
+the lords would force her to realise, what before the murder she had
+refused to consider, the horror and the suspicion it must excite? It is
+noticeable, also, that she is far from carrying out her intention of
+bearing a part in making their 'griefs and clamours roar upon his death'
+(I. vii. 78). She has left it all to her husband, and, after uttering
+but two sentences, the second of which is answered very curtly by
+Banquo, for some time (an interval of 33 lines) she has said nothing. I
+believe Shakespeare means this interval to be occupied in desperate
+efforts on her part to prevent herself from giving way, as she sees for
+the first time something of the truth to which she was formerly so
+blind, and which will destroy her in the end.
+
+It should be observed that at the close of the Banquet scene, where she
+has gone through much less, she is evidently exhausted.
+
+Shakespeare, of course, knew whether he meant the faint to be real: but
+I am not aware if an actor of the part could show the audience whether
+it was real or pretended. If he could, he would doubtless receive
+instructions from the author.
+
+
+
+
+NOTE EE.
+
+DURATION OF THE ACTION IN _MACBETH_. MACBETH'S AGE. 'HE HAS NO
+CHILDREN.'
+
+
+1. The duration of the action cannot well be more than a few months. On
+the day following the murder of Duncan his sons fly and Macbeth goes to
+Scone to be invested (II. iv.). Between this scene and Act III. an
+interval must be supposed, sufficient for news to arrive of Malcolm
+being in England and Donalbain in Ireland, and for Banquo to have shown
+himself a good counsellor. But the interval is evidently not long:
+_e.g._ Banquo's first words are 'Thou hast it now' (III. i. 1). Banquo
+is murdered on the day when he speaks these words. Macbeth's visit to
+the Witches takes place the next day (III. iv. 132). At the end of this
+visit (IV. i.) he hears of Macduff's flight to England, and determines
+to have Macduff's wife and children slaughtered without delay; and this
+is the subject of the next scene (IV. ii.). No great interval, then, can
+be supposed between this scene and the next, where Macduff, arrived at
+the English court, hears what has happened at his castle. At the end of
+that scene (IV. iii. 237) Malcolm says that 'Macbeth is ripe for
+shaking, and the powers above put on their instruments': and the events
+of Act V. evidently follow with little delay, and occupy but a short
+time. Holinshed's Macbeth appears to have reigned seventeen years:
+Shakespeare's may perhaps be allowed as many weeks.
+
+But, naturally, Shakespeare creates some difficulties through wishing to
+produce different impressions in different parts of the play. The main
+effect is that of fiery speed, and it would be impossible to imagine the
+torment of Macbeth's mind lasting through a number of years, even if
+Shakespeare had been willing to allow him years of outward success.
+Hence the brevity of the action. On the other hand time is wanted for
+the degeneration of his character hinted at in IV. iii. 57 f., for the
+development of his tyranny, for his attempts to entrap Malcolm (_ib._
+117 f.), and perhaps for the deepening of his feeling that his life had
+passed into the sere and yellow leaf. Shakespeare, as we have seen,
+scarcely provides time for all this, but at certain points he produces
+an impression that a longer time has elapsed than he has provided for,
+and he puts most of the indications of this longer time into a scene
+(IV. iii.) which by its quietness contrasts strongly with almost all the
+rest of the play.
+
+2. There is no unmistakable indication of the ages of the two principal
+characters; but the question, though of no great importance, has an
+interest. I believe most readers imagine Macbeth as a man between forty
+and fifty, and his wife as younger but not young. In many cases this
+impression is doubtless due to the custom of the theatre (which, if it
+can be shown to go back far, should have much weight), but it is shared
+by readers who have never seen the play performed, and is then
+presumably due to a number of slight influences probably incapable of
+complete analysis. Such readers would say, 'The hero and heroine do not
+speak like young people, nor like old ones'; but, though I think this is
+so, it can hardly be demonstrated. Perhaps however the following small
+indications, mostly of a different kind, tend to the same result.
+
+(1) There is no positive sign of youth. (2) A young man would not be
+likely to lead the army. (3) Macbeth is 'cousin' to an old man.[294] (4)
+Macbeth calls Malcolm 'young,' and speaks of him scornfully as 'the boy
+Malcolm.' He is probably therefore considerably his senior. But Malcolm
+is evidently not really a boy (see I. ii. 3 f. as well as the later
+Acts). (5) One gets the impression (possibly without reason) that
+Macbeth and Banquo are of about the same age; and Banquo's son, the boy
+Fleance, is evidently not a mere child. (On the other hand the children
+of Macduff, who is clearly a good deal older than Malcolm, are all
+young; and I do not think there is any sign that Macbeth is older than
+Macduff.) (6) When Lady Macbeth, in the banquet scene, says,
+
+     Sit, worthy friends: my lord is often thus,
+     And hath been from his youth,
+
+we naturally imagine him some way removed from his youth. (7) Lady
+Macbeth saw a resemblance to her father in the aged king. (8) Macbeth
+says,
+
+     I have lived long enough: my way[295] of life
+     Is fall'n into the sere, the yellow leaf:
+     And that which should accompany old age,
+     As honour, love, obedience, troops of friends,
+     I may not look to have.
+
+It is, surely, of the old age of the soul that he speaks in the second
+line, but still the lines would hardly be spoken under any circumstances
+by a man less than middle-aged.
+
+On the other hand I suppose no one ever imagined Macbeth, or on
+consideration could imagine him, as _more_ than middle-aged when the
+action begins. And in addition the reader may observe, if he finds it
+necessary, that Macbeth looks forward to having children (I. vii. 72),
+and that his terms of endearment ('dearest love,' 'dearest chuck') and
+his language in public ('sweet remembrancer') do not suggest that his
+wife and he are old; they even suggest that she at least is scarcely
+middle-aged. But this discussion tends to grow ludicrous.
+
+For Shakespeare's audience these mysteries were revealed by a glance at
+the actors, like the fact that Duncan was an old man, which the text, I
+think, does not disclose till V. i. 44.
+
+3. Whether Macbeth had children or (as seems usually to be supposed) had
+none, is quite immaterial. But it is material that, if he had none, he
+looked forward to having one; for otherwise there would be no point in
+the following words in his soliloquy about Banquo (III. i. 58 f.):
+
+                        Then prophet-like
+     They hail'd him father to a line of kings:
+     Upon my head they placed a fruitless crown,
+     And put a barren sceptre in my gripe,
+     Thence to be wrench'd with an unlineal hand,
+     No son of mine succeeding. If't be so,
+     For Banquo's issue have I filed my mind.
+
+And he is determined that it shall not 'be so':
+
+     Rather than so, come, fate, into the list
+     And champion me to the utterance!
+
+Obviously he contemplates a son of his succeeding, if only he can get
+rid of Banquo and Fleance. What he fears is that Banquo will kill him;
+in which case, supposing he has a son, that son will not be allowed to
+succeed him, and, supposing he has none, he will be unable to beget one.
+
+I hope this is clear; and nothing else matters. Lady Macbeth's child (I.
+vii. 54) may be alive or may be dead. It may even be, or have been, her
+child by a former husband; though, if Shakespeare had followed history
+in making Macbeth marry a widow (as some writers gravely assume) he
+would probably have told us so. It may be that Macbeth had many children
+or that he had none. We cannot say, and it does not concern the play.
+But the interpretation of a statement on which some critics build, 'He
+has no children,' has an interest of another kind, and I proceed to
+consider it.
+
+These words occur at IV. iii. 216. Malcolm and Macduff are talking at
+the English Court, and Ross, arriving from Scotland, brings news to
+Macduff of Macbeth's revenge on him. It is necessary to quote a good
+many lines:
+
+     _Ross._ Your castle is surprised; your wife and babes
+             Savagely slaughter'd: to relate the manner,
+             Were, on the quarry of these murder'd deer,
+             To add the death of you.
+
+     _Mal._                            Merciful heaven!
+             What, man! ne'er pull your hat upon your brows;
+             Give sorrow words: the grief that does not speak
+             Whispers the o'er-fraught heart and bids it break.
+
+     _Macd._ My children too?
+
+     _Ross._                   Wife, children, servants, all
+             That could be found.
+
+     _Macd._                       And I must be from thence!
+             My wife kill'd too?
+
+     _Ross._                     I have said.
+
+     _Mal._                                   Be comforted:
+             Let's makes us medicines of our great revenge,
+             To cure this deadly grief.
+
+     _Macd._ He has no children. All my pretty ones?
+             Did you say all? O hell-kite! All?
+             What, all my pretty chickens and their dam
+             At one fell swoop?
+
+     _Mal_.  Dispute it like a man.
+
+     _Macd._                         I shall do so;
+             But I must also feel it as a man:
+             I cannot but remember such things were,
+             That were most precious to me.--
+
+Three interpretations have been offered of the words 'He has no
+children.'
+
+(_a_) They refer to Malcolm, who, if he had children of his own, would
+not at such a moment suggest revenge, or talk of curing such a grief.
+Cf. _King John_, III. iv. 91, where Pandulph says to Constance,
+
+     You hold too heinous a respect of grief,
+
+and Constance answers,
+
+     He talks to me that never had a son.
+
+(_b_) They refer to Macbeth, who has no children, and on whom therefore
+Macduff cannot take an adequate revenge.
+
+(_c_) They refer to Macbeth, who, if he himself had children, could
+never have ordered the slaughter of children. Cf. _3 Henry VI._ V. v.
+63, where Margaret says to the murderers of Prince Edward,
+
+     You have no children, butchers! if you had,
+     The thought of them would have stirred up remorse.
+
+I cannot think interpretation (_b_) the most natural. The whole idea of
+the passage is that Macduff must feel _grief_ first and before he can
+feel anything else, _e.g._ the desire for vengeance. As he says directly
+after, he cannot at once 'dispute' it like a man, but must 'feel' it as
+a man; and it is not till ten lines later that he is able to pass to the
+thought of revenge. Macduff is not the man to conceive at any time the
+idea of killing children in retaliation; and that he contemplates it
+_here_, even as a suggestion, I find it hard to believe.
+
+For the same main reason interpretation (_a_) seems to me far more
+probable than (_c_). What could be more consonant with the natural
+course of the thought, as developed in the lines which follow, than that
+Macduff, being told to think of revenge, not grief, should answer, 'No
+one who was himself a father would ask that of me in the very first
+moment of loss'? But the thought supposed by interpretation (_c_) has
+not this natural connection.
+
+It has been objected to interpretation (_a_) that, according to it,
+Macduff would naturally say 'You have no children,' not 'He has no
+children.' But what Macduff does is precisely what Constance does in the
+line quoted from _King John_. And it should be noted that, all through
+the passage down to this point, and indeed in the fifteen lines which
+precede our quotation, Macduff listens only to Ross. His questions 'My
+children too?' 'My wife killed too?' show that he cannot fully realise
+what he is told. When Malcolm interrupts, therefore, he puts aside his
+suggestion with four words spoken to himself, or (less probably) to Ross
+(his relative, who knew his wife and children), and continues his
+agonised questions and exclamations. Surely it is not likely that at
+that moment the idea of (_c_), an idea which there is nothing to
+suggest, would occur to him.
+
+In favour of (_c_) as against (_a_) I see no argument except that the
+words of Macduff almost repeat those of Margaret; and this fact does not
+seem to me to have much weight. It shows only that Shakespeare might
+easily use the words in the sense of (_c_) if that sense were suitable
+to the occasion. It is not unlikely, again, I think, that the words came
+to him here because he had used them many years before;[296] but it does
+not follow that he knew he was repeating them; or that, if he did, he
+remembered the sense they had previously borne; or that, if he did
+remember it, he might not use them now in another sense.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[Footnote 294: So in Holinshed, as well as in the play, where however
+'cousin' need not have its specific meaning.]
+
+[Footnote 295: 'May,' Johnson conjectured, without necessity.]
+
+[Footnote 296: As this point occurs here, I may observe that
+Shakespeare's later tragedies contain many such reminiscences of the
+tragic plays of his young days. For instance, cf. _Titus Andronicus_, I.
+i. 150 f.:
+
+     In peace and honour rest you here, my sons,
+
+            *       *       *       *       *
+
+     Secure from worldly chances and mishaps!
+     Here lurks no treason, here no envy swells,
+     Here grow no damned drugs: here are no storms,
+     No noise, but silence and eternal sleep,
+
+with _Macbeth_, III. ii. 22 f.:
+
+                                Duncan is in his grave;
+     After life's fitful fever he sleeps well;
+     Treason has done his worst: nor steel, nor poison,
+     Malice domestic, foreign levy, nothing,
+     Can touch him further.
+
+In writing IV. i. Shakespeare can hardly have failed to remember the
+conjuring of the Spirit, and the ambiguous oracles, in _2 Henry VI._ I.
+iv. The 'Hyrcan tiger' of _Macbeth_ III. iv. 101, which is also alluded
+to in _Hamlet_, appears first in _3 Henry VI._ I. iv. 155. Cf. _Richard
+III._ II. i. 92, 'Nearer in bloody thoughts, but not in blood,' with
+_Macbeth_ II. iii. 146, 'the near in blood, the nearer bloody'; _Richard
+III._ IV. ii. 64, 'But I am in So far in blood that sin will pluck on
+sin,' with _Macbeth_ III. iv. 136, 'I am in blood stepp'd in so far,'
+etc. These are but a few instances. (It makes no difference whether
+Shakespeare was author or reviser of _Titus_ and _Henry VI._).]
+
+
+
+
+NOTE FF.
+
+THE GHOST OF BANQUO.
+
+
+I do not think the suggestions that the Ghost on its first appearance is
+Banquo's, and on its second Duncan's, or _vice versâ_, are worth
+discussion. But the question whether Shakespeare meant the Ghost to be
+real or a mere hallucination, has some interest, and I have not seen it
+fully examined.
+
+The following reasons may be given for the hallucination view:
+
+(1) We remember that Macbeth has already seen one hallucination, that of
+the dagger; and if we failed to remember it Lady Macbeth would remind us
+of it here:
+
+     This is the very painting of your fear;
+     This is the air-drawn dagger which, you said,
+     Led you to Duncan.
+
+(2) The Ghost seems to be created by Macbeth's imagination; for his
+words,
+
+                     now they rise again
+     With twenty mortal murders on their crowns,
+
+describe it, and they echo what the murderer had said to him a little
+before,
+
+                   Safe in a ditch he bides
+     With twenty trenched gashes on his head.
+
+(3) It vanishes the second time on his making a violent effort and
+asserting its unreality:
+
+                     Hence, horrible shadow!
+     Unreal mockery, hence!
+
+This is not quite so the first time, but then too its disappearance
+follows on his defying it:
+
+     Why what care I? If thou canst nod, speak too.
+
+So, apparently, the dagger vanishes when he exclaims, 'There's no such
+thing!'
+
+(4) At the end of the scene Macbeth himself seems to regard it as an
+illusion:
+
+                        My strange and self-abuse
+     Is the initiate fear that wants hard use.
+
+(5) It does not speak, like the Ghost in _Hamlet_ even on its last
+appearance, and like the Ghost in _Julius Caesar_.
+
+(6) It is visible only to Macbeth.
+
+I should attach no weight to (6) taken alone (see p. 140). Of (3) it may
+be remarked that Brutus himself seems to attribute the vanishing of
+Caesar's Ghost to his taking courage: 'now I have taken heart thou
+vanishest:' yet he certainly holds it to be real. It may also be
+remarked on (5) that Caesar's Ghost says nothing that Brutus' own
+forebodings might not have conjured up. And further it may be asked why,
+if the Ghost of Banquo was meant for an illusion, it was represented on
+the stage, as the stage-directions and Forman's account show it to have
+been.
+
+On the whole, and with some doubt, I think that Shakespeare (1) meant
+the judicious to take the Ghost for an hallucination, but (2) knew that
+the bulk of the audience would take it for a reality. And I am more sure
+of (2) than of (1).
+
+
+
+
+INDEX
+
+The titles of plays are in italics. So are the numbers of the pages
+containing the main discussion of a character. The titles of the Notes
+are not repeated in the Index.
+
+
+Aaron, 200, 211.
+
+Abnormal mental conditions, 13, 398.
+
+Accident, in tragedy, 7, 14-16, 26, 28;
+  in _Hamlet_, 143, 173;
+  in _Othello_, 181-2;
+  in _King Lear_, 253, 325.
+
+Act, difficulty in Fourth, 57-8;
+  the five Acts, 49.
+
+Action, tragic, 11, 12, 31;
+  and character, 12, 19;
+  a conflict, 16-19.
+
+Adversity and prosperity in _King Lear_, 326-7.
+
+Albany, _297-8_.
+
+Antonio, 110, 404.
+
+_Antony and Cleopatra_, 3, 7, 45, 80;
+  conflict, 17-8;
+  crisis, 53, 55, 66;
+  humour in catastrophe, 62, 395-6;
+  battle-scenes, 62-3;
+  extended catastrophe, 64;
+  faulty construction, 71, 260;
+  passion in, 82;
+  evil in, 83-4;
+  versification, 87, Note BB.
+
+Antony, 22, 29, 63, 83-4.
+
+_Arden of Feversham_, 9.
+
+Ariel, 264.
+
+Aristotle, 16, 22.
+
+Art, Shakespeare's, conscious, 68-9;
+  defects in, 71-78.
+
+Arthur, 294.
+
+_As You Like It_, 71, 267, 390.
+
+Atmosphere in tragedy, 333.
+
+
+Banquo, 343, _379-86_.
+
+Barbara, the maid, 175.
+
+Battle-scene, 62, 451, 469;
+  in _King Lear_, 255, Note X.
+
+Beast and man, in _King Lear_, 266-8;
+  in _Timon_, 453.
+
+Bernhardt, Mme., 379.
+
+Biblical ideas, in _King Lear_, 328.
+
+Bombast, 73, 75-6, 389, Note F.
+
+Brandes, G., 379, 393.
+
+Brutus, 7, 14, 22, 27, 32, 81-2, 101, 364.
+
+
+Caliban, 264.
+
+Cassio, 211-3, _238-9_, 433-4.
+
+Catastrophe, humour before, 61-2;
+  battle-scenes in, 62;
+  false hope before, 63;
+  extended, 62;
+  in _Antony_ and _Coriolanus_, 83-4.
+  See _Hamlet_, etc.
+
+Character, and plot, 12;
+  is destiny, 13;
+  tragic, 19-23.
+
+Chaucer, 8, 346.
+
+Children, in the plays, 293-5.
+
+Cleopatra, 7, 20, 84, 178, 208.
+
+Coleridge, 104-5, 107, 109, 127, 165, 200, 201, 209, 223, 226, 228, 249,
+  343, 353, 362, 389, 391, 392, 397, 412, 413.
+
+Comedy, 15, 41.
+
+Conflict, tragic, 16-9;
+  originates in evil, 34;
+  oscillating movement in, 50;
+  crisis in, 51-5;
+  descending movement of, 55-62.
+
+Conscience. See Hamlet.
+
+Cordelia, 29, 32, 203-6, 250, 290, 314, _315-26_, Note W.
+
+_Coriolanus_, 3, 9, 43, 394-5;
+  crisis, 53;
+  hero off stage, 57;
+  counter-stroke, 58;
+  humour, 61;
+  passion, 82;
+  catastrophe, 83-4;
+  versification, Note BB.
+
+Coriolanus, 20, 29, 83-4, 196.
+
+Cornwall, 298-9.
+
+Crisis. See Conflict.
+
+Curtain, no front, in Shakespeare's theatre, 185, 458.
+
+_Cymbeline_, 7, 21, 72, 80, Note BB;
+  Queen in, 300.
+
+
+Desdemona, 32, 165, 179, 193, 197, _201-6_, 323, 433, 437-9.
+
+Disillusionment, in tragedies, 175.
+
+Dog, the, Shakespeare and, 268.
+
+Don John, 110, 210.
+
+Double action in _King Lear_, 255-6, 262.
+
+Dowden, E., 82, 105, 330, 408.
+
+Dragging, 57-8, 64.
+
+Drunkenness, invective against, 238.
+
+
+Edgar, _305-7_, 453, 465.
+
+Edmund, 210, 245, 253, _300-3_, Notes P, Q.
+  See Iago.
+
+Emilia, 214-6, 237, _239-42_, Note P.
+
+Emotional tension, variations of, 48-9.
+
+Evil, origin of conflict, 34;
+  negative, 35;
+  in earlier and later tragedies, 82-3;
+  poetic portrayal of, 207-8;
+  aspects of, specially impressive to Shakespeare, 232-3;
+  in _King Lear_, 298, 303-4, 327;
+  in _Tempest_, 328-30;
+  in _Macbeth_, 331, 386.
+
+Exposition, 41-7.
+
+
+Fate, Fatality, 10, 26-30, 45, 59, 177, 181, 287, 340-6.
+
+Fleay, F.G., 419, 424, 445, 467, 479.
+
+Fool in _King Lear_, the, 258, _311-5_, 322, 447, Note V.
+
+Fools, Shakespeare's, 310.
+
+Forman, Dr., 468, 493.
+
+Fortinbras, 90.
+
+Fortune, 9, 10.
+
+Freytag, G., 40, 63.
+
+Furness, H.H., 199, 200.
+
+
+Garnet and equivocation, 397, 470-1.
+
+Ghost, Banquo's, 332, 335, 338, 361, Note FF.
+
+Ghost, Caesar's, Note FF.
+
+Ghost in _Hamlet_, 97, 100, 118, 120, 125, 126, 134, 136, 138-40,
+  _173-4_.
+
+Ghosts, not hallucinations because appearing only to one in a company,
+  140.
+
+Gloster, 272, _293-6_, 447.
+
+Gnomic speeches, 74, 453.
+
+Goethe, 101, 127, 165, 208.
+
+Goneril, 245, _299-300_, 331, 370, 447-8.
+
+Greek tragedy, 7, 16, 30, 33, 182, 276-9, 282.
+
+Greene, 409.
+
+
+Hales, J.W., 397.
+
+_Hamlet_, exposition, 43-7;
+  conflict, 17, 47, 50-1;
+  crisis and counter-stroke, 52, 58-60, 136-7;
+  dragging, 57;
+  humour, and false hope, before catastrophe, 61, 63;
+  obscurities, 73;
+  undramatic passages, 72, 74;
+  place among tragedies, 80-8;
+  position of hero, 89-92;
+  not simply tragedy of thought, 82, 113, 127;
+  in the Romantic Revival, 92, 127-8;
+  lapse of time in, 129, 141;
+  accident, 15, 143, 173;
+  religious ideas, 144-5, 147-8, 172-4;
+  player's speech, 389-90, Note F;
+  grave-digger, 395-6;
+  last scene, 256.
+  See Notes A to H, and BB.
+
+Hamlet, only tragic character in play, 90;
+  contrasted with Laertes and Fortinbras, 90, 106;
+  failure of early criticism of, 91;
+  supposed unintelligible, 93-4;
+  external view, 94-7;
+  'conscience' view, 97-101;
+  sentimental view, 101-4;
+  Schlegel-Coleridge view, 104-8, 116, 123, 126-7;
+  temperament, 109-10;
+  moral idealism, 110-3;
+  reflective genius, 113-5;
+    connection of this with inaction, 115-7;
+  origin of melancholy, 117-20;
+    its nature and effects, 120-7, 103, 158;
+    its diminution, 143-4;
+  his 'insanity,' 121-2, 421;
+  in Act II. 129-31, 155-6;
+  in III. i. 131-3, 157, 421;
+  in play-scene, 133-4;
+  spares King, 134-6, 100, 439;
+  with Queen, 136-8;
+  kills Polonius, 136-7, 104;
+  with Ghost, 138-40;
+  leaving Denmark, 140-1;
+  state after return, 143-5, 421;
+  in grave-yard, 145-6, 153, 158, 421-2;
+  in catastrophe, 102, 146-8, 151, 420-1;
+  and Ophelia, 103, 112, 119, 145-6, 152-9, 402, 420-1;
+  letter to Ophelia, 150, 403;
+  trick of repetition, 148-9;
+  word-play and humour, 149-52, 411;
+  aesthetic feeling, 133, 415;
+  and Iago, 208, 217, 222, 226;
+  other references, 9, 14, 20, 22, 28, 316, 353, Notes A to H.
+
+Hanmer, 91.
+
+Hazlitt, 209, 223, 228, 231, 243, 248.
+
+Hecate, 342, Note Z.
+
+Hegel, 16, 348.
+
+_2 Henry VI._, 492.
+
+_3 Henry VI._, 222, 418, 490, 492.
+
+_Henry VIII._, 80, 472, 479.
+
+Heredity, 30, 266, 303.
+
+Hero, tragic, 7;
+  of 'high degree,' 9-11;
+  contributes to catastrophe, 12;
+  nature of, 19-23, 37;
+  error of, 21, 34;
+  unlucky, 28;
+  place of, in construction, 53-55;
+  absence of, from stage, 57;
+  in earlier and later plays, 81-2, 176;
+  in _King Lear_, 280;
+  feeling at death of, 147-8, 174, 198, 324.
+
+Heywood, 140, 419.
+
+Historical tragedies, 3, 53, 71.
+
+Homer, 348.
+
+Horatio, 99, 112, 310, Notes A, B, C.
+
+Humour, constructional use of, 61;
+  Hamlet's, 149-52;
+  in _Othello_, 177;
+  in _Macbeth_, 395.
+
+Hunter, J., 199, 338.
+
+
+Iachimo, 21, 210.
+
+Iago, and evil, 207, 232-3;
+  false views of, 208-11, 223-7;
+  danger of accepting his own evidence, 211-2, 222-5;
+  how he appeared to others, 213-5;
+    and to Emilia, 215-6, 439-40;
+  inferences hence, 217-8;
+  further analysis, 218-22;
+  source of his action, 222-31;
+  his tragedy, 218, 222, 232;
+  not merely evil, 233-5;
+  nor of supreme intellect, 236;
+  cause of failure, 236-7;
+  and Edmund, 245, 300-1, 464;
+  and Hamlet, 208, 217, 222, 226;
+  other references, 21, 28, 32, 192, 193, 196, 364, Notes L, M, P, Q.
+
+Improbability, not always a defect, 69;
+  in _King Lear_, 249, 256-7.
+
+Inconsistencies, 73;
+  real or supposed, in _Hamlet_, 408;
+  in _Othello_, Note I;
+  in _King Lear_, 256, Note T;
+  in _Macbeth_, Notes CC, EE.
+
+Ingram, Prof., 478.
+
+Insanity in tragedy, 13;
+  Ophelia's, 164-5, 399;
+  Lear's, 288-90.
+
+Intrigue in tragedy, 12, 67, 179.
+
+Irony, 182, 338.
+
+Isabella, 316, 317, 321.
+
+
+Jameson, Mrs., 165, 204, 379.
+
+Jealousy in Othello, 178, 194, Note L.
+
+Job, 11.
+
+Johnson, 31, 91, 294, 298, 304, 377, 420.
+
+Jonson, 69, 282, 389.
+
+Juliet, 7, 204, 210.
+
+_Julius Caesar_, 3, 7, 9, 33, 34, 479;
+  conflict, 17-8;
+  exposition, 43-5;
+  crisis, 52;
+  dragging, 57;
+  counter-stroke, 58;
+  quarrel-scene, 60-1;
+  battle-scenes, 62;
+  and _Hamlet_, 80-2;
+  style, 85-6.
+
+Justice in tragedy, idea of, 31-33, 279, 318.
+
+
+Kean, 99, 243-4.
+
+Kent, _307-10_, 314, 321, 447, Note W.
+
+King Claudius, 28, 102, 133, 137, 142, _168-72_, 402, 422.
+
+_King John_, 394, 490-1.
+
+_King Lear_, exposition, 44, 46-7;
+  conflict, 17, 53-4;
+  scenes of high and low tension, 49;
+  dragging, 57;
+  false hope before catastrophe, 63;
+  battle-scene, 62, 456-8;
+  soliloquy in, 72, 222;
+  place among tragedies, 82, 88, see Tate;
+  Tate's, 243-4;
+  two-fold character, 244-6;
+  not wholly dramatic, 247;
+  opening scene, 71, 249-51, 258, 319-21, 447;
+  blinding of Gloster, 185, 251;
+  catastrophe, 250-4, 271, 290-3, 309, 322-6;
+  structural defects, 254-6;
+  improbabilities, etc., 256-8;
+  vagueness of locality, 259-60;
+  poetic value of defects, 261;
+  double action, 262;
+  characterisation, 263;
+  tendency to symbolism, 264-5;
+  idea of monstrosity, 265-6;
+  beast and man, 266-8;
+  storm-scenes, 269-70, 286-7, 315;
+  question of government of world, in, 271-3;
+  supposed pessimism, 273-9, 284-5, 303-4, 322-30;
+  accident and fatality, 15, 250-4, 287-8;
+  intrigue in, 179;
+  evil in, 298, 303-4;
+  preaching patience, 330;
+  and _Othello_, 176-7, 179, 181, 244-5, 441-3;
+  and _Timon_, 245-7, 310, 326-7, 443-5;
+  other references, 8, 10, 61, 181, Notes R to Y, and BB.
+
+König, G., Note BB.
+
+Koppel, R., 306, 450, 453, 462.
+
+
+Laertes, 90, 111, 142, 422.
+
+Lamb, 202, 243, 248, 253, 255, 269, 343.
+
+Language, Shakespeare's, defects of, 73, 75, 416.
+
+Lear, 13, 14, 20, 28, 29, 32, 249-51, _280-93_, 293-5, Note W.
+
+Leontes, 21, 194.
+
+
+_Macbeth_, exposition, 43, 45-6;
+  conflict, 17-9, 48, 52;
+  crisis, 59, 60;
+  pathos and humour, 61, 391, 395-7;
+  battle-scenes, 62;
+  extended catastrophe, 64;
+  defects in construction, 57, 71;
+  place among tragedies, 82, 87-8, Note BB;
+  religious ideas, 172-4;
+  atmosphere of, 333;
+  effects of darkness, 333-4,
+  colour, 334-6,
+  storm, 336-7,
+  supernatural, etc., 337-8,
+  irony, 338-40;
+  Witches, 340-9, 362, 379-86;
+  imagery, 336, 357;
+  minor characters, 387;
+  simplicity, 388;
+  Senecan effect, 389-90;
+  bombast, 389, 417;
+  prose, 388, 397-400;
+  relief-scenes, 391;
+  sleep-walking scene, 378, 398, 400;
+  references to Gunpowder Plot, 397, 470-1;
+  all genuine? 388, 391, 395-7, Note Z;
+  and _Hamlet_, 331-2;
+  and _Richard III._, 338, 390, 395, 492;
+  other references, 7, 8, 386, and Notes Z to FF.
+
+Macbeth, 13, 14, 20, 22, 28, 32, 63, 172, 343-5, _349-65_, 380, 383,
+  386, Notes CC, EE.
+
+Macbeth, Lady, 13, 28, 32, 349-50, 358, 364, _366-79_, 398-400, Notes
+  CC, DD.
+
+Macduff, 387, 391-2, 490-1.
+
+Macduff, Lady, 61, 387, 391-2.
+
+Macduff, little, 393-5.
+
+Mackenzie, 91.
+
+Marlowe, 211, 415-6.
+
+Marston's possible reminiscences of Shakespeare's plays, 471-2.
+
+_Measure for Measure_, 76, 78, 275, 397.
+
+Mediaeval idea of tragedy, 8, 9.
+
+Melancholy, Shakespeare's representations of, 110, 121.
+  See Hamlet.
+
+Mephistopheles, 208.
+
+_Merchant of Venice_, 21, 200.
+
+Metrical tests, Notes S, BB.
+
+Middleton, 466.
+
+_Midsummer Night's Dream_, 390, 469.
+
+Milton, 207, 362, 418.
+
+Monstrosity, idea of, in _King Lear_, 265-6.
+
+Moral order in tragedy, idea of, 26, 31-9.
+
+Moulton, R.G., 40.
+
+
+Negro? Othello a, 198-202.
+
+
+Opening scene in tragedy, 43-4.
+
+Ophelia, 14, 61, 112, _160-5_, 204, 399.
+  See Hamlet.
+
+Oswald, 298, 448.
+
+_Othello_, exposition, 44-5;
+  conflict, 17, 18, 48;
+  peculiar construction, 54-5, 64-7, 177;
+  inconsistencies, 73;
+  place among tragedies, 82, 83, 88;
+  and _Hamlet_, 175-6;
+  and _King Lear_, 176-7, 179, 181, 244-5, 441-3;
+  distinctive effect, and its causes, 176-80;
+  accident in, 15, 181-2;
+  objections to, considered, 183-5;
+  point of inferiority to other three tragedies, 185-6;
+  elements of reconciliation in catastrophe, 198, 242;
+  other references, 9, 61, Notes I to R, and BB.
+
+Othello, 9, 20, 21, 22, 28, 29, 32, 176, 178, 179, _186-98_, 198-202,
+  211, 212, Notes K to O.
+
+
+Pathos, and tragedy, 14, 103, 160, 203, 281-2;
+  constructional use of, 60-1.
+
+Peele, 200.
+
+_Pericles_, 474.
+
+Period, Shakespeare's tragic, 79-89, 275-6.
+
+Pessimism, supposed, in _King Lear_, 275-9, 327;
+  in _Macbeth_, 359, 393.
+
+Plays, Shakespeare's, list of, in periods, 79.
+
+Plot, 12.
+  See Action, Intrigue.
+
+'Poetic justice,' 31-2.
+
+Poor, goodness of the, in _King Lear_ and _Timon_, 326.
+
+Posthumus, 21.
+
+Problems, probably non-existent for original audience, 73, 157, 159,
+  315, 393, 483, 486, 488.
+
+Prose, in the tragedies, 388, 397-400.
+
+
+Queen Gertrude, 104, 118, 134, 136-8, 161, 164, _166-8_.
+
+
+Reconciliation, feeling of, in tragedy, 31, 36, 84, 147-8, 174, 198,
+  242, 322-6.
+
+Regan, _299-300_.
+
+Religion, in Edgar, 306,
+  Horatio, 310,
+  Banquo, 387.
+
+_Richard II._, 3, 10, 17, 18, 42.
+
+Richard II., 20, 22, 150, 152.
+
+_Richard III._, 3, 18, 42, 62, 82;
+  and _Macbeth_, 338, 390, 395, 492.
+
+Richard III., 14, 20, 22, 32, 63, 152, 207, 210, 217, 218, 233, 301.
+
+_Romeo and Juliet_, 3, 7, 9, 15;
+  conflict, 17, 18, 34;
+  exposition, 41-5;
+  crisis, 52;
+  counter-stroke, 58.
+
+Romeo, 22, 29, 150, 210.
+
+Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, 137, 405-6.
+
+Rules of drama, Shakespeare's supposed ignorance of, 69.
+
+
+Salvini, 434.
+
+Satan, Milton's, 207, 362.
+
+Scenery, no, in Shakespeare's theatre, 49, 71, 451.
+
+Scenes, their number, length, tone, 49;
+  wrong divisions of, 451.
+
+Schlegel, 82, 104, 105, 116, 123, 127, 254, 262, 344, 345, 413.
+
+Scot on Witch-craft, 341.
+
+Seneca, 389-90.
+
+Shakespeare the man, 6, 81, 83, 185-6, 246, 275-6, 282, 285, 327-30,
+  359, 393, 414-5.
+
+Shylock, 21.
+
+Siddons, Mrs., 371, 379.
+
+Soliloquy, 72;
+  of villains, 222;
+  scenes ending with, 451.
+
+Sonnets, Shakespeare's, 264, 364.
+
+Spedding, J., 255, 476, Note X.
+
+Stage-directions, wrong modern, 260, 285, 422, 453-6, 462.
+
+Style in the tragedies, 85-9, 332, 336, 357.
+
+Suffering, tragic, 7, 8, 11.
+
+Supernatural, the, in tragedy, 14, 181, 295-6, 331-2.
+  See Ghost, Witch.
+
+Swinburne, A.C., 80, 179, 191, 209, 218, 223, 228, 231, 276-8, 431.
+
+Symonds, J.A., 10.
+
+
+Tate's version of _King Lear_, 243, 251-3, 313.
+
+Temperament, 110, 282, 306.
+
+_Tempest_, 42, 80, 185, 264, 328-30, 469; Note BB.
+
+Theological ideas in tragedy, 25, 144, 147, 279;
+  in _Hamlet_ and _Macbeth_, 171-4, 439;
+  not in _Othello_, 181, 439;
+  in _King Lear_, 271-3, 296.
+
+Time, short and long, theory of, 426-7.
+
+_Timon of Athens_, 4, 9, 81-3, 88, 245-7, 266, 270, 275, 310, 326-7,
+  443-5, 460; Note BB.
+
+Timon, 9, 82, 112.
+
+_Titus Andronicus_, 4, 200, 211, 411, 491.
+
+Tourgénief, 11, 295.
+
+Toussaint, 198.
+
+Tragedy, Shakespearean; parts, 41, 51;
+  earlier and later, 18, 176;
+  pure and historical, 3, 71.
+  See Accident, Action, Hero, Period, Reconciliation, etc.
+
+Transmigration of souls, 267.
+
+_Troilus and Cressida_, 7, 185-6, 268, 275-6, 302, 417, 419.
+
+_Twelfth Night_, 70, 267.
+
+_Two Noble Kinsmen_, 418, 472, 479.
+
+
+Ultimate power in tragedy, 24-39, 171-4, 271-9.
+  See Fate, Moral Order, Reconciliation, Theological.
+
+Undramatic speeches, 74, 106.
+
+
+Versification. See Style and Metrical tests.
+
+Virgilia, 387.
+
+
+Waste, tragic, 23, 37.
+
+Werder, K., 94, 172, 480.
+
+_Winter's Tale_, 21, Note BB.
+
+Witches, the, and Macbeth, _340-9_, 362;
+  and Banquo, 379-87.
+
+Wittenberg, Hamlet at, 403-6.
+
+Wordsworth, 30, 198.
+
+
+_Yorkshire Tragedy_, 10.
+
+
+GLASGOW: PRINTED AT THE UNIVERSITY PRESS BY ROBERT MACLEHOSE AND CO.
+LTD.
+
+
+
+
+_8vo. 12s. 6d. net._
+
+Oxford Lectures on Poetry
+
+BY
+
+A.C. BRADLEY, LL.D., Litt.D.
+
+_ATHENÆUM._--"A remarkable achievement.... It is probable that this
+volume will attain a permanence for which critical literature generally
+cannot hope. Very many of the things that are said here are finally
+said; they exhaust their subject. Of one thing we are certain--that
+there is no work in English devoted to the interpretation of poetic
+experience which can claim the delicacy and sureness of Mr. Bradley's."
+
+_SPECTATOR._--"In reviewing Professor Bradley's previous book on
+_Shakespearean Tragedy_ we declared our opinion that it was probably the
+best Shakespearean criticism since Coleridge. The new volume shows the
+same complete sanity of judgment, the same subtlety, the same persuasive
+and eloquent exposition."
+
+_TIMES._--"Nothing higher need be said of the present volume than it is
+not unworthy to be the sequel to _Shakespearean Tragedy_."
+
+_DAILY TELEGRAPH._--"This is not a book to be written about in a hasty
+review of a thousand words. It is one to be perused and appreciated at
+leisure--to be returned to again and again, partly because of its
+supreme interest, partly because it provokes, as all good books should
+do, a certain antagonism, partly because it is itself the product of a
+careful, scholarly mind, basing conclusions on a scrupulous perusal of
+documents and authorities.... The whole book is so full of good things
+that it is impossible to make any adequate selection. In an age which is
+not supposed to be very much interested in literary criticism, a book
+like Mr. Bradley's is of no little significance and importance."
+
+_SATURDAY REVIEW._--"The writer of these admirable lectures may claim
+what is rare even in this age of criticism--a note of his own. In type
+he belongs to those critics of the best order, whose view of literature
+is part and parcel of their view of life. His lectures on poetry are
+therefore what they profess to be: not scraps of textual comment, nor
+studies in the craft of verse-making, but broad considerations of poetry
+as a mode of spiritual revelation. An accomplished style and signs of
+careful reading we may justly demand from any professor who sets out to
+lecture in literature. Mr. Bradley has them in full measure. But he has
+also not a little of that priceless quality so seldom found in the
+professional or professorial critic--the capacity of naïve vision and
+admiration. Here he is in a line with the really stimulating essayists,
+the artists in criticism."
+
+MACMILLAN AND CO. LTD., LONDON.
+
+
+_Second Edition. Crown 8vo. 5s. 6d. net._
+
+A Commentary on Tennyson's 'In Memoriam'
+
+BY
+
+A.C. BRADLEY, LL.D., Litt.D.
+
+_THE SATURDAY REVIEW._--"Here we find a model of what a commentary on a
+great work should be, every page instinct with thoughtfulness; complete
+sympathy and appreciation; the most reverent care shown in the attempted
+interpretation of passages whose meaning to a large degree evades, and
+will always evade, readers of 'In Memoriam.' It is clear to us that Mr.
+Bradley has devoted long time and thought to his work, and that he has
+published the result of his labours simply to help those who, like
+himself, have been and are in difficulties as to the drift of various
+passages. He is not of course the first who has addressed himself to the
+interpretation of 'In Memoriam'--in this spirit ... but Mr. Bradley's
+commentary is sure to take rank as the most searching and scholarly of
+any."
+
+_THE PILOT._--"In re-studying 'In Memoriam' with Dr. Bradley's aid, we
+have found his interpretation helpful in numerous passages. The notes
+are prefaced by a long introduction dealing with the origin,
+composition, and structure of the poem, the ideas used in it, the metre
+and the debt to other poems. All of these are good, but more interesting
+than any of them is a section entitled, 'The Way of the Soul,' reviewing
+the spiritual experience which 'In Memoriam' records. This is quite
+admirable throughout, and proves conclusively that Dr. Bradley's keen
+desire to fathom the exact meaning of every phrase has only quickened
+his appreciation of the poem as a whole."
+
+MACMILLAN AND CO. LTD., LONDON.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Shakespearean Tragedy, by A. C. Bradley
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+
+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Shakespearean Tragedy, by A. C. Bradley
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Shakespearean Tragedy
+       Lectures on Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth
+
+Author: A. C. Bradley
+
+Release Date: October 30, 2005 [EBook #16966]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK SHAKESPEAREAN TRAGEDY ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Suzanne Shell, Lisa Reigel and the Online
+Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net
+
+
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+
+
+</pre>
+
+
+<p><a name="Page_i" id="Page_i"></a></p>
+<h1>SHAKESPEAREAN TRAGEDY</h1>
+
+<p class="center"><a name="Page_ii" id="Page_ii"></a>MACMILLAN AND CO., <span class="smcap">Limited</span></p>
+
+<p class="center small">LONDON · BOMBAY · CALCUTTA · MADRAS · MELBOURNE</p>
+
+<p class="center">THE MACMILLAN COMPANY</p>
+
+<p class="center small">NEW YORK · BOSTON · CHICAGO · DALLAS · SAN FRANCISCO</p>
+
+<p class="center">THE MACMILLAN CO. OF CANADA, <span class="smcap">Ltd.</span></p>
+
+<p class="center small">TORONTO</p>
+
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h1><a name="Page_iii" id="Page_iii"></a><a name="SHAKESPEAREAN_TRAGEDY" id="SHAKESPEAREAN_TRAGEDY"></a>SHAKESPEAREAN TRAGEDY</h1>
+
+<h2>LECTURES ON</h2>
+
+<h2>HAMLET, OTHELLO, KING LEAR</h2>
+
+<h2>MACBETH</h2>
+
+<h3>BY</h3>
+
+<h2>A.C. BRADLEY</h2>
+
+<h3>LL.D. LITT.D., FORMERLY PROFESSOR OF POETRY IN THE UNIVERSITY OF OXFORD</h3>
+
+
+<p class="center"><i>SECOND EDITION</i> (<i>THIRTEENTH IMPRESSION</i>)</p>
+
+
+<p class="center">MACMILLAN AND CO., LIMITED ST. MARTIN'S STREET, LONDON</p>
+
+<p class="center">1919</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 45%;" />
+
+<p class="center"><a name="Page_iv" id="Page_iv"></a><i>COPYRIGHT.</i></p>
+
+<p class="center">First Edition 1904.</p>
+
+<p class="center">Second Edition March 1905.</p>
+
+<p class="center">Reprinted August 1905, 1906, 1908, 1910, 1911, 1912, 1914, 1915, 1916,
+1918, 1919.</p>
+
+
+<p class="center">GLASGOW: PRINTED AT THE UNIVERSITY PRESS BY ROBERT MACLEHOSE AND CO.
+LTD.</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 45%;" />
+
+<p class="center"><a name="Page_v" id="Page_v"></a><span class="smcap">To my Students</span></p>
+<p><a name="Page_vi" id="Page_vi"></a></p>
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><a name="Page_vii" id="Page_vii"></a><span class="pagenum">[vii]</span></p>
+<h2><a name="PREFACE" id="PREFACE"></a>PREFACE</h2>
+
+
+<p>These lectures are based on a selection from materials used in teaching
+at Liverpool, Glasgow, and Oxford; and I have for the most part
+preserved the lecture form. The point of view taken in them is explained
+in the Introduction. I should, of course, wish them to be read in their
+order, and a knowledge of the first two is assumed in the remainder; but
+readers who may prefer to enter at once on the discussion of the several
+plays can do so by beginning at page <a href='#Page_79'>89</a>.</p>
+
+<p>Any one who writes on Shakespeare must owe much to his predecessors.
+Where I was conscious of a particular obligation, I have acknowledged
+it; but most of my reading of Shakespearean criticism was done many
+years ago, and I can only hope that I have not often reproduced as my
+own what belongs to another.</p>
+
+<p><a name="Page_viii" id="Page_viii"></a><span class="pagenum">[viii]</span>Many of the Notes will be of interest only to scholars, who may find, I
+hope, something new in them.</p>
+
+<p>I have quoted, as a rule, from the Globe edition, and have referred
+always to its numeration of acts, scenes, and lines.</p>
+
+<p><i>November, 1904.</i></p>
+
+<hr style='width: 65%;' />
+
+
+<h2>NOTE TO SECOND AND SUBSEQUENT IMPRESSIONS</h2>
+
+<p>In these impressions I have confined myself to making some formal
+improvements, correcting indubitable mistakes, and indicating here and
+there my desire to modify or develop at some future time statements
+which seem to me doubtful or open to misunderstanding. The changes,
+where it seemed desirable, are shown by the inclusion of sentences in
+square brackets.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="Page_ix" id="Page_ix"></a><a name="CONTENTS" id="CONTENTS"></a>CONTENTS</h2>
+
+
+<ul class="TOC">
+<li><span class="ralign">PAGE</span><br /></li>
+<li><span class="smcap">Introduction</span>
+    <span class="ralign"><a href='#Page_1'>1</a></span></li>
+
+<li><a href="#LECTURE_I">LECTURE I.</a></li>
+
+<li><span class="smcap">The Substance of Shakespearean Tragedy</span>
+    <span class="ralign"><a href='#Page_5'>5</a></span></li>
+
+<li><a href="#LECTURE_II">LECTURE II.</a></li>
+
+<li><span class="smcap">Construction in Shakespeare's Tragedies</span>
+    <span class="ralign"><a href='#Page_40'>40</a></span></li>
+
+<li><a href="#LECTURE_III">LECTURE III.</a></li>
+
+<li><span class="smcap">Shakespeare's Tragic Period&mdash;Hamlet</span>
+    <span class="ralign"><a href='#Page_79'>79</a></span></li>
+
+<li><a href="#LECTURE_IV">LECTURE IV.</a></li>
+
+<li><span class="smcap">Hamlet</span>
+    <span class="ralign"><a href='#Page_129'>129</a></span></li>
+
+<li><a href="#LECTURE_V">LECTURE V.</a></li>
+
+<li><span class="smcap">Othello</span>
+    <span class="ralign"><a href='#Page_175'>175</a></span></li>
+
+<li><a href="#LECTURE_VI">LECTURE VI.</a></li>
+
+<li><span class="smcap">Othello</span>
+    <span class="ralign"><a href='#Page_207'>207</a></span></li>
+
+<li><a href="#LECTURE_VII">LECTURE VII.</a></li>
+
+<li><span class="smcap">King Lear</span>
+    <span class="ralign"><a href='#Page_243'>243</a></span></li>
+
+<li><a name="Page_x" id="Page_x"></a><a href="#LECTURE_VIII">LECTURE VIII.</a></li>
+
+<li><span class="smcap">King Lear</span>
+    <span class="ralign"><a href='#Page_280'>280</a></span></li>
+
+<li><a href="#LECTURE_IX">LECTURE IX.</a></li>
+
+<li><span class="smcap">Macbeth</span>
+    <span class="ralign"><a href='#Page_331'>331</a></span></li>
+
+<li><a href="#LECTURE_X">LECTURE X.</a></li>
+
+<li><span class="smcap">Macbeth</span>
+    <span class="ralign"><a href='#Page_366'>366</a></span><br />&nbsp;</li>
+
+<li><span class="smcap"><a href="#NOTE_A">Note A</a></span>. Events before the opening of the action in <i>Hamlet</i>
+    <span class="ralign"><a href='#Page_401'>401</a></span></li>
+
+<li><span class="smcap"><a href="#NOTE_B">Note B</a></span>. Where was Hamlet at the time of his father's death?
+    <span class="ralign"><a href='#Page_403'>403</a></span></li>
+
+<li><span class="smcap"><a href="#NOTE_C">Note C</a></span>. Hamlet's age
+    <span class="ralign"><a href='#Page_407'>407</a></span></li>
+
+<li><span class="smcap"><a href="#NOTE_D">Note D</a></span>. 'My tables&mdash;meet it is I set it down'
+    <span class="ralign"><a href='#Page_409'>409</a></span></li>
+
+<li><span class="smcap"><a href="#NOTE_E">Note E</a></span>. The Ghost in the cellarage
+    <span class="ralign"><a href='#Page_412'>412</a></span></li>
+
+<li><span class="smcap"><a href="#NOTE_F">Note F</a></span>. The Player's speech in <i>Hamlet</i>
+    <span class="ralign"><a href='#Page_413'>413</a></span></li>
+
+<li><span class="smcap"><a href="#NOTE_G">Note G</a></span>. Hamlet's apology to Laertes
+    <span class="ralign"><a href='#Page_420'>420</a></span></li>
+
+<li><span class="smcap"><a href="#NOTE_H">Note H</a></span>. The exchange of rapiers
+    <span class="ralign"><a href='#Page_422'>422</a></span></li>
+
+<li><span class="smcap"><a href="#NOTE_I">Note I</a></span>. The duration of the action in <i>Othello</i>
+    <span class="ralign"><a href='#Page_423'>423</a></span></li>
+
+<li><span class="smcap"><a href="#NOTE_J">Note J</a></span>. The 'additions' in the Folio text of <i>Othello</i>. The Pontic sea
+    <span class="ralign"><a href='#Page_429'>429</a></span></li>
+
+<li><span class="smcap"><a href="#NOTE_K">Note K</a></span>. Othello's courtship
+    <span class="ralign"><a href='#Page_432'>432</a></span></li>
+
+<li><span class="smcap"><a href="#NOTE_L">Note L</a></span>. Othello in the Temptation scene
+    <span class="ralign"><a href='#Page_434'>434</a></span></li>
+
+<li><span class="smcap"><a href="#NOTE_M">Note M</a></span>. Questions as to <i>Othello</i>, <span class="smcap">iv.</span> i.
+    <span class="ralign"><a href='#Page_435'>435</a></span></li>
+
+<li><span class="smcap"><a href="#NOTE_N">Note N</a></span>. Two passages in the last scene of <i>Othello</i>
+    <span class="ralign"><a href='#Page_437'>437</a></span></li>
+
+<li><span class="smcap"><a href="#NOTE_O">Note O</a></span>. Othello on Desdemona's last words
+    <span class="ralign"><a href='#Page_438'>438</a></span></li>
+
+<li><a name="Page_xi" id="Page_xi"></a><span class="smcap"><a href="#NOTE_P">Note P</a></span>. Did Emilia suspect Iago?
+    <span class="ralign"><a href='#Page_439'>439</a></span></li>
+
+<li><span class="smcap"><a href="#NOTE_Q">Note Q</a></span>. Iago's suspicion regarding Cassio and Emilia
+    <span class="ralign"><a href='#Page_441'>441</a></span></li>
+
+<li><span class="smcap"><a href="#NOTE_R">Note R</a></span>. Reminiscences of <i>Othello</i> in <i>King Lear</i>
+    <span class="ralign"><a href='#Page_441'>441</a></span></li>
+
+<li><span class="smcap"><a href="#NOTE_S">Note S</a></span>. <i>King Lear</i> and <i>Timon of Athens</i>
+    <span class="ralign"><a href='#Page_443'>443</a></span></li>
+
+<li><span class="smcap"><a href="#NOTE_T">Note T</a></span>. Did Shakespeare shorten <i>King Lear</i>?
+    <span class="ralign"><a href='#Page_445'>445</a></span></li>
+
+<li><span class="smcap"><a href="#NOTE_U">Note U</a></span>. Movements of the <i>dramatis person&aelig;</i> in <i>King Lear</i>, <span class="smcap">ii</span>
+    <span class="ralign"><a href='#Page_448'>448</a></span></li>
+
+<li><span class="smcap"><a href="#NOTE_V">Note V</a></span>. Suspected interpolations in <i>King Lear</i>
+    <span class="ralign"><a href='#Page_450'>450</a></span></li>
+
+<li><span class="smcap"><a href="#NOTE_W">Note W</a></span>. The staging of the scene of Lear's reunion with Cordelia
+    <span class="ralign"><a href='#Page_453'>453</a></span></li>
+
+<li><span class="smcap"><a href="#NOTE_X">Note X</a></span>. The Battle in <i>King Lear</i>
+    <span class="ralign"><a href='#Page_456'>456</a></span></li>
+
+<li><span class="smcap"><a href="#NOTE_Y">Note Y</a></span>. Some difficult passages in <i>King Lear</i>
+    <span class="ralign"><a href='#Page_458'>458</a></span></li>
+
+<li><span class="smcap"><a href="#NOTE_Z">Note Z</a></span>. Suspected interpolations in <i>Macbeth</i>
+    <span class="ralign"><a href='#Page_466'>466</a></span></li>
+
+<li><span class="smcap"><a href="#NOTE_AA">Note AA</a></span>. Has <i>Macbeth</i> been abridged?
+    <span class="ralign"><a href='#Page_467'>467</a></span></li>
+
+<li><span class="smcap"><a href="#NOTE_BB">Note BB</a></span>. The date of <i>Macbeth</i>. Metrical Tests
+    <span class="ralign"><a href='#Page_470'>470</a></span></li>
+
+<li><span class="smcap"><a href="#NOTE_CC">Note CC</a></span>. When was the murder of Duncan first plotted?
+    <span class="ralign"><a href='#Page_480'>480</a></span></li>
+
+<li><span class="smcap"><a href="#NOTE_DD">Note DD</a></span>. Did Lady Macbeth really faint?
+    <span class="ralign"><a href='#Page_484'>484</a></span></li>
+
+<li><span class="smcap"><a href="#NOTE_EE">Note EE</a></span>. Duration of the action in <i>Macbeth</i>. Macbeth's age. 'He has no children'
+    <span class="ralign"><a href='#Page_486'>486</a></span></li>
+
+<li><span class="smcap"><a href="#NOTE_FF">Note FF</a></span>. The Ghost of Banquo
+    <span class="ralign"><a href='#Page_492'>492</a></span></li>
+
+<li><span class="smcap"><a href="#INDEX">Index</a></span>
+    <span class="ralign"><a href='#Page_494'>494</a></span></li>
+</ul>
+
+
+<p><a name="Page_xii" id="Page_xii"></a></p>
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><a name="Page_1" id="Page_1"></a><span class="pagenum">[1]</span></p>
+<h2><a name="INTRODUCTION" id="INTRODUCTION"></a>INTRODUCTION</h2>
+
+
+<p>In these lectures I propose to consider the four principal tragedies of
+Shakespeare from a single point of view. Nothing will be said of
+Shakespeare's place in the history either of English literature or of
+the drama in general. No attempt will be made to compare him with other
+writers. I shall leave untouched, or merely glanced at, questions
+regarding his life and character, the development of his genius and art,
+the genuineness, sources, texts, inter-relations of his various works.
+Even what may be called, in a restricted sense, the 'poetry' of the four
+tragedies&mdash;the beauties of style, diction, versification&mdash;I shall pass
+by in silence. Our one object will be what, again in a restricted sense,
+may be called dramatic appreciation; to increase our understanding and
+enjoyment of these works as dramas; to learn to apprehend the action and
+some of the personages of each with a somewhat greater truth and
+intensity, so that they may assume in our imaginations a shape a little
+less unlike the shape they wore in the imagination of their creator. For
+this end all those studies that were mentioned just now, of literary
+history and the like, are useful and even in various degrees necessary.
+But an overt pursuit of them is not necessary here, nor is any <a name="Page_2" id="Page_2"></a><span class="pagenum">[2]</span>one of
+them so indispensable to our object as that close familiarity with the
+plays, that native strength and justice of perception, and that habit of
+reading with an eager mind, which make many an unscholarly lover of
+Shakespeare a far better critic than many a Shakespeare scholar.</p>
+
+<p>Such lovers read a play more or less as if they were actors who had to
+study all the parts. They do not need, of course, to imagine whereabouts
+the persons are to stand, or what gestures they ought to use; but they
+want to realise fully and exactly the inner movements which produced
+these words and no other, these deeds and no other, at each particular
+moment. This, carried through a drama, is the right way to read the
+dramatist Shakespeare; and the prime requisite here is therefore a vivid
+and intent imagination. But this alone will hardly suffice. It is
+necessary also, especially to a true conception of the whole, to
+compare, to analyse, to dissect. And such readers often shrink from this
+task, which seems to them prosaic or even a desecration. They
+misunderstand, I believe. They would not shrink if they remembered two
+things. In the first place, in this process of comparison and analysis,
+it is not requisite, it is on the contrary ruinous, to set imagination
+aside and to substitute some supposed 'cold reason'; and it is only want
+of practice that makes the concurrent use of analysis and of poetic
+perception difficult or irksome. And, in the second place, these
+dissecting processes, though they are also imaginative, are still, and
+are meant to be, nothing but means to an end. When they have finished
+their work (it can only be finished for the time) they give place to the
+end, which is that same imaginative reading or re-creation of the drama
+from which they set out, but a reading now enriched by the products of
+analysis, and therefore far more adequate and enjoyable.</p>
+
+<p><a name="Page_3" id="Page_3"></a><span class="pagenum">[3]</span>This, at any rate, is the faith in the strength of which I venture,
+with merely personal misgivings, on the path of analytic interpretation.
+And so, before coming to the first of the four tragedies, I propose to
+discuss some preliminary matters which concern them all. Though each is
+individual through and through, they have, in a sense, one and the same
+substance; for in all of them Shakespeare represents the tragic aspect
+of life, the tragic fact. They have, again, up to a certain point, a
+common form or structure. This substance and this structure, which would
+be found to distinguish them, for example, from Greek tragedies, may, to
+diminish repetition, be considered once for all; and in considering them
+we shall also be able to observe characteristic differences among the
+four plays. And to this may be added the little that it seems necessary
+to premise on the position of these dramas in Shakespeare's literary
+career.</p>
+
+<p>Much that is said on our main preliminary subjects will naturally hold
+good, within certain limits, of other dramas of Shakespeare beside
+<i>Hamlet</i>, <i>Othello</i>, <i>King Lear</i>, and <i>Macbeth</i>. But it will often apply
+to these other works only in part, and to some of them more fully than
+to others. <i>Romeo and Juliet</i>, for instance, is a pure tragedy, but it
+is an early work, and in some respects an immature one. <i>Richard III.</i>
+and <i>Richard II.</i>, <i>Julius Caesar</i>, <i>Antony and Cleopatra</i>, and
+<i>Coriolanus</i> are tragic histories or historical tragedies, in which
+Shakespeare acknowledged in practice a certain obligation to follow his
+authority, even when that authority offered him an undramatic material.
+Probably he himself would have met some criticisms to which these plays
+are open by appealing to their historical character, and by denying that
+such works are to be judged by the standard of pure tragedy. In any
+case, most of these plays, perhaps all, do show, as a matter of fact,
+<a name="Page_4" id="Page_4"></a><span class="pagenum">[4]</span>considerable deviations from that standard; and, therefore, what is
+said of the pure tragedies must be applied to them with qualifications
+which I shall often take for granted without mention. There remain
+<i>Titus Andronicus</i> and <i>Timon of Athens</i>. The former I shall leave out
+of account, because, even if Shakespeare wrote the whole of it, he did
+so before he had either a style of his own or any characteristic tragic
+conception. <i>Timon</i> stands on a different footing. Parts of it are
+unquestionably Shakespeare's, and they will be referred to in one of the
+later lectures. But much of the writing is evidently not his, and as it
+seems probable that the conception and construction of the whole tragedy
+should also be attributed to some other writer, I shall omit this work
+too from our preliminary discussions.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><a name="Page_5" id="Page_5"></a><span class="pagenum">[5]</span></p>
+<h2><a name="LECTURE_I" id="LECTURE_I"></a>LECTURE I</h2>
+
+<h3>THE SUBSTANCE OF SHAKESPEAREAN TRAGEDY</h3>
+
+
+<p>The question we are to consider in this lecture may be stated in a
+variety of ways. We may put it thus: What is the substance of a
+Shakespearean tragedy, taken in abstraction both from its form and from
+the differences in point of substance between one tragedy and another?
+Or thus: What is the nature of the tragic aspect of life as represented
+by Shakespeare? What is the general fact shown now in this tragedy and
+now in that? And we are putting the same question when we ask: What is
+Shakespeare's tragic conception, or conception of tragedy?</p>
+
+<p>These expressions, it should be observed, do not imply that Shakespeare
+himself ever asked or answered such a question; that he set himself to
+reflect on the tragic aspects of life, that he framed a tragic
+conception, and still less that, like Aristotle or Corneille, he had a
+theory of the kind of poetry called tragedy. These things are all
+possible; how far any one of them is probable we need not discuss; but
+none of them is presupposed by the question we are going to consider.
+This question implies only that, as a matter of fact, Shakespeare in
+writing tragedy did represent a certain aspect of life in a certain way,
+and that through examination of his writings we ought to <a name="Page_6" id="Page_6"></a><span class="pagenum">[6]</span>be able, to
+some extent, to describe this aspect and way in terms addressed to the
+understanding. Such a description, so far as it is true and adequate,
+may, after these explanations, be called indifferently an account of the
+substance of Shakespearean tragedy, or an account of Shakespeare's
+conception of tragedy or view of the tragic fact.</p>
+
+<p>Two further warnings may be required. In the first place, we must
+remember that the tragic aspect of life is only one aspect. We cannot
+arrive at Shakespeare's whole dramatic way of looking at the world from
+his tragedies alone, as we can arrive at Milton's way of regarding
+things, or at Wordsworth's or at Shelley's, by examining almost any one
+of their important works. Speaking very broadly, one may say that these
+poets at their best always look at things in one light; but <i>Hamlet</i> and
+<i>Henry IV.</i> and <i>Cymbeline</i> reflect things from quite distinct
+positions, and Shakespeare's whole dramatic view is not to be identified
+with any one of these reflections. And, in the second place, I may
+repeat that in these lectures, at any rate for the most part, we are to
+be content with his <i>dramatic</i> view, and are not to ask whether it
+corresponded exactly with his opinions or creed outside his poetry&mdash;the
+opinions or creed of the being whom we sometimes oddly call 'Shakespeare
+the man.' It does not seem likely that outside his poetry he was a very
+simple-minded Catholic or Protestant or Atheist, as some have
+maintained; but we cannot be sure, as with those other poets we can,
+that in his works he expressed his deepest and most cherished
+convictions on ultimate questions, or even that he had any. And in his
+dramatic conceptions there is enough to occupy us.</p>
+
+<p><a name="Page_7" id="Page_7"></a><span class="pagenum">[7]</span></p>
+<h4>1</h4>
+
+<p>In approaching our subject it will be best, without attempting to
+shorten the path by referring to famous theories of the drama, to start
+directly from the facts, and to collect from them gradually an idea of
+Shakespearean Tragedy. And first, to begin from the outside, such a
+tragedy brings before us a considerable number of persons (many more
+than the persons in a Greek play, unless the members of the Chorus are
+reckoned among them); but it is pre-eminently the story of one person,
+the 'hero,'<a name="FNanchor_1" id="FNanchor_1"></a><a href="#Footnote_1" class="fnanchor">[1]</a> or at most of two, the 'hero' and 'heroine.' Moreover, it
+is only in the love-tragedies, <i>Romeo and Juliet</i> and <i>Antony and
+Cleopatra</i>, that the heroine is as much the centre of the action as the
+hero. The rest, including <i>Macbeth</i>, are single stars. So that, having
+noticed the peculiarity of these two dramas, we may henceforth, for the
+sake of brevity, ignore it, and may speak of the tragic story as being
+concerned primarily with one person.</p>
+
+<p>The story, next, leads up to, and includes, the <i>death</i> of the hero. On
+the one hand (whatever may be true of tragedy elsewhere), no play at the
+end of which the hero remains alive is, in the full Shakespearean sense,
+a tragedy; and we no longer class <i>Troilus and Cressida</i> or <i>Cymbeline</i>
+as such, as did the editors of the Folio. On the other hand, the story
+depicts also the troubled part of the hero's life which precedes and
+leads up to his death; and an instantaneous death occurring by
+'accident' in the midst of prosperity would not suffice for it. It is,
+in fact, essentially a tale of suffering and calamity conducting to
+death.</p>
+
+<p><a name="Page_8" id="Page_8"></a><span class="pagenum">[8]</span>The suffering and calamity are, moreover, exceptional. They befall a
+conspicuous person. They are themselves of some striking kind. They are
+also, as a rule, unexpected, and contrasted with previous happiness or
+glory. A tale, for example, of a man slowly worn to death by disease,
+poverty, little cares, sordid vices, petty persecutions, however piteous
+or dreadful it might be, would not be tragic in the Shakespearean sense.</p>
+
+<p>Such exceptional suffering and calamity, then, affecting the hero,
+and&mdash;we must now add&mdash;generally extending far and wide beyond him, so as
+to make the whole scene a scene of woe, are an essential ingredient in
+tragedy and a chief source of the tragic emotions, and especially of
+pity. But the proportions of this ingredient, and the direction taken by
+tragic pity, will naturally vary greatly. Pity, for example, has a much
+larger part in <i>King Lear</i> than in <i>Macbeth</i>, and is directed in the one
+case chiefly to the hero, in the other chiefly to minor characters.</p>
+
+<p>Let us now pause for a moment on the ideas we have so far reached. They
+would more than suffice to describe the whole tragic fact as it
+presented itself to the mediaeval mind. To the mediaeval mind a tragedy
+meant a narrative rather than a play, and its notion of the matter of
+this narrative may readily be gathered from Dante or, still better, from
+Chaucer. Chaucer's <i>Monk's Tale</i> is a series of what he calls
+'tragedies'; and this means in fact a series of tales <i>de Casibus
+Illustrium Virorum</i>,&mdash;stories of the Falls of Illustrious Men, such as
+Lucifer, Adam, Hercules and Nebuchadnezzar. And the Monk ends the tale
+of Croesus thus:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i1">Anhanged was Cresus, the proud&egrave; kyng;<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">His roial tron&egrave; myghte hym nat availle.<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Trag&eacute;die is noon oother maner thyng,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Ne kan in syngyng cri&egrave; ne biwaille<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">But for that Fortune alwey wole assaile<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">With unwar strook the regn&egrave;s that been proude;<br /></span>
+<span class="i1"><a name="Page_9" id="Page_9"></a><span class="pagenum">[9]</span>For whan men trusteth hire, thanne wol she faille,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">And covere hire brighte fac&egrave; with a clowde.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>A total reverse of fortune, coming unawares upon a man who 'stood in
+high degree,' happy and apparently secure,&mdash;such was the tragic fact to
+the mediaeval mind. It appealed strongly to common human sympathy and
+pity; it startled also another feeling, that of fear. It frightened men
+and awed them. It made them feel that man is blind and helpless, the
+plaything of an inscrutable power, called by the name of Fortune or some
+other name,&mdash;a power which appears to smile on him for a little, and
+then on a sudden strikes him down in his pride.</p>
+
+<p>Shakespeare's idea of the tragic fact is larger than this idea and goes
+beyond it; but it includes it, and it is worth while to observe the
+identity of the two in a certain point which is often ignored. Tragedy
+with Shakespeare is concerned always with persons of 'high degree';
+often with kings or princes; if not, with leaders in the state like
+Coriolanus, Brutus, Antony; at the least, as in <i>Romeo and Juliet</i>, with
+members of great houses, whose quarrels are of public moment. There is a
+decided difference here between <i>Othello</i> and our three other tragedies,
+but it is not a difference of kind. Othello himself is no mere private
+person; he is the General of the Republic. At the beginning we see him
+in the Council-Chamber of the Senate. The consciousness of his high
+position never leaves him. At the end, when he is determined to live no
+longer, he is as anxious as Hamlet not to be misjudged by the great
+world, and his last speech begins,</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i1">Soft you; a word or two before you go.<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">I have done the state some service, and they know it.<a name="FNanchor_2" id="FNanchor_2"></a><a href="#Footnote_2" class="fnanchor">[2]</a><br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p><a name="Page_10" id="Page_10"></a><span class="pagenum">[10]</span>And this characteristic of Shakespeare's tragedies, though not the most
+vital, is neither external nor unimportant. The saying that every
+death-bed is the scene of the fifth act of a tragedy has its meaning,
+but it would not be true if the word 'tragedy' bore its dramatic sense.
+The pangs of despised love and the anguish of remorse, we say, are the
+same in a peasant and a prince; but, not to insist that they cannot be
+so when the prince is really a prince, the story of the prince, the
+triumvir, or the general, has a greatness and dignity of its own. His
+fate affects the welfare of a whole nation or empire; and when he falls
+suddenly from the height of earthly greatness to the dust, his fall
+produces a sense of contrast, of the powerlessness of man, and of the
+omnipotence&mdash;perhaps the caprice&mdash;of Fortune or Fate, which no tale of
+private life can possibly rival.</p>
+
+<p>Such feelings are constantly evoked by Shakespeare's tragedies,&mdash;again
+in varying degrees. Perhaps they are the very strongest of the emotions
+awakened by the early tragedy of <i>Richard II.</i>, where they receive a
+concentrated expression in Richard's famous speech about the antic
+Death, who sits in the hollow crown</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i1">That rounds the mortal temples of a king,<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>grinning at his pomp, watching till his vanity and his fancied security
+have wholly encased him round, and then coming and boring with a little
+pin through his castle wall. And these feelings, though their
+predominance is subdued in the mightiest tragedies, remain powerful
+there. In the figure of the maddened Lear we see</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i1">A sight most pitiful in the meanest wretch,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Past speaking of in a king;<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p><a name="Page_11" id="Page_11"></a><span class="pagenum">[11]</span>and if we would realise the truth in this matter we cannot do better
+than compare with the effect of <i>King Lear</i> the effect of Tourg&eacute;nief's
+parallel and remarkable tale of peasant life, <i>A King Lear of the
+Steppes</i>.</p>
+
+
+<h4>2</h4>
+
+<p>A Shakespearean tragedy as so far considered may be called a story of
+exceptional calamity leading to the death of a man in high estate. But
+it is clearly much more than this, and we have now to regard it from
+another side. No amount of calamity which merely befell a man,
+descending from the clouds like lightning, or stealing from the darkness
+like pestilence, could alone provide the substance of its story. Job was
+the greatest of all the children of the east, and his afflictions were
+well-nigh more than he could bear; but even if we imagined them wearing
+him to death, that would not make his story tragic. Nor yet would it
+become so, in the Shakespearean sense, if the fire, and the great wind
+from the wilderness, and the torments of his flesh were conceived as
+sent by a supernatural power, whether just or malignant. The calamities
+of tragedy do not simply happen, nor are they sent; they proceed mainly
+from actions, and those the actions of men.</p>
+
+<p>We see a number of human beings placed in certain circumstances; and we
+see, arising from the co-operation of their characters in these
+circumstances, certain actions. These actions beget others, and these
+others beget others again, until this series of inter-connected deeds
+leads by an apparently inevitable sequence to a catastrophe. The effect
+of such a series on imagination is to make us regard the sufferings
+which accompany it, and the catastrophe in which it ends, not only or
+chiefly as something which happens to the persons concerned, but equally
+as something which is caused <a name="Page_12" id="Page_12"></a><span class="pagenum">[12]</span>by them. This at least may be said of the
+principal persons, and, among them, of the hero, who always contributes
+in some measure to the disaster in which he perishes.</p>
+
+<p>This second aspect of tragedy evidently differs greatly from the first.
+Men, from this point of view, appear to us primarily as agents,
+'themselves the authors of their proper woe'; and our fear and pity,
+though they will not cease or diminish, will be modified accordingly. We
+are now to consider this second aspect, remembering that it too is only
+one aspect, and additional to the first, not a substitute for it.</p>
+
+<p>The 'story' or 'action' of a Shakespearean tragedy does not consist, of
+course, solely of human actions or deeds; but the deeds are the
+predominant factor. And these deeds are, for the most part, actions in
+the full sense of the word; not things done ''tween asleep and wake,'
+but acts or omissions thoroughly expressive of the doer,&mdash;characteristic
+deeds. The centre of the tragedy, therefore, may be said with equal
+truth to lie in action issuing from character, or in character issuing
+in action.</p>
+
+<p>Shakespeare's main interest lay here. To say that it lay in <i>mere</i>
+character, or was a psychological interest, would be a great mistake,
+for he was dramatic to the tips of his fingers. It is possible to find
+places where he has given a certain indulgence to his love of poetry,
+and even to his turn for general reflections; but it would be very
+difficult, and in his later tragedies perhaps impossible, to detect
+passages where he has allowed such freedom to the interest in character
+apart from action. But for the opposite extreme, for the abstraction of
+mere 'plot' (which is a very different thing from the tragic 'action'),
+for the kind of interest which predominates in a novel like <i>The Woman
+in White</i>, it is clear that he <a name="Page_13" id="Page_13"></a><span class="pagenum">[13]</span>cared even less. I do not mean that this
+interest is absent from his dramas; but it is subordinate to others, and
+is so interwoven with them that we are rarely conscious of it apart, and
+rarely feel in any great strength the half-intellectual, half-nervous
+excitement of following an ingenious complication. What we do feel
+strongly, as a tragedy advances to its close, is that the calamities and
+catastrophe follow inevitably from the deeds of men, and that the main
+source of these deeds is character. The dictum that, with Shakespeare,
+'character is destiny' is no doubt an exaggeration, and one that may
+mislead (for many of his tragic personages, if they had not met with
+peculiar circumstances, would have escaped a tragic end, and might even
+have lived fairly untroubled lives); but it is the exaggeration of a
+vital truth.</p>
+
+<p>This truth, with some of its qualifications, will appear more clearly if
+we now go on to ask what elements are to be found in the 'story' or
+'action,' occasionally or frequently, beside the characteristic deeds,
+and the sufferings and circumstances, of the persons. I will refer to
+three of these additional factors.</p>
+
+<p>(<i>a</i>) Shakespeare, occasionally and for reasons which need not be
+discussed here, represents abnormal conditions of mind; insanity, for
+example, somnambulism, hallucinations. And deeds issuing from these are
+certainly not what we called deeds in the fullest sense, deeds
+expressive of character. No; but these abnormal conditions are never
+introduced as the origin of deeds of any dramatic moment. Lady Macbeth's
+sleep-walking has no influence whatever on the events that follow it.
+Macbeth did not murder Duncan because he saw a dagger in the air: he saw
+the dagger because he was about to murder Duncan. Lear's insanity is not
+the cause of a tragic conflict <a name="Page_14" id="Page_14"></a><span class="pagenum">[14]</span>any more than Ophelia's; it is, like
+Ophelia's, the result of a conflict; and in both cases the effect is
+mainly pathetic. If Lear were really mad when he divided his kingdom, if
+Hamlet were really mad at any time in the story, they would cease to be
+tragic characters.</p>
+
+<p>(<i>b</i>) Shakespeare also introduces the supernatural into some of his
+tragedies; he introduces ghosts, and witches who have supernatural
+knowledge. This supernatural element certainly cannot in most cases, if
+in any, be explained away as an illusion in the mind of one of the
+characters. And further, it does contribute to the action, and is in
+more than one instance an indispensable part of it: so that to describe
+human character, with circumstances, as always the <i>sole</i> motive force
+in this action would be a serious error. But the supernatural is always
+placed in the closest relation with character. It gives a confirmation
+and a distinct form to inward movements already present and exerting an
+influence; to the sense of failure in Brutus, to the stifled workings of
+conscience in Richard, to the half-formed thought or the horrified
+memory of guilt in Macbeth, to suspicion in Hamlet. Moreover, its
+influence is never of a compulsive kind. It forms no more than an
+element, however important, in the problem which the hero has to face;
+and we are never allowed to feel that it has removed his capacity or
+responsibility for dealing with this problem. So far indeed are we from
+feeling this, that many readers run to the opposite extreme, and openly
+or privately regard the supernatural as having nothing to do with the
+real interest of the play.</p>
+
+<p>(<i>c</i>) Shakespeare, lastly, in most of his tragedies allows to 'chance'
+or 'accident' an appreciable influence at some point in the action.
+Chance or accident here will be found, I think, to mean any occurrence
+(not supernatural, of course) which <a name="Page_15" id="Page_15"></a><span class="pagenum">[15]</span>enters the dramatic sequence
+neither from the agency of a character, nor from the obvious surrounding
+circumstances.<a name="FNanchor_3" id="FNanchor_3"></a><a href="#Footnote_3" class="fnanchor">[3]</a> It may be called an accident, in this sense, that
+Romeo never got the Friar's message about the potion, and that Juliet
+did not awake from her long sleep a minute sooner; an accident that
+Edgar arrived at the prison just too late to save Cordelia's life; an
+accident that Desdemona dropped her handkerchief at the most fatal of
+moments; an accident that the pirate ship attacked Hamlet's ship, so
+that he was able to return forthwith to Denmark. Now this operation of
+accident is a fact, and a prominent fact, of human life. To exclude it
+<i>wholly</i> from tragedy, therefore, would be, we may say, to fail in
+truth. And, besides, it is not merely a fact. That men may start a
+course of events but can neither calculate nor control it, is a <i>tragic</i>
+fact. The dramatist may use accident so as to make us feel this; and
+there are also other dramatic uses to which it may be put. Shakespeare
+accordingly admits it. On the other hand, any <i>large</i> admission of
+chance into the tragic sequence<a name="FNanchor_4" id="FNanchor_4"></a><a href="#Footnote_4" class="fnanchor">[4]</a> would certainly weaken, and might
+destroy, the sense of the causal connection of character, deed, and
+catastrophe. And Shakespeare really uses it very sparingly. We seldom
+find ourselves exclaiming, 'What an unlucky accident!' I believe most
+readers would have to search painfully for instances. It is, further,
+frequently easy to see the dramatic intention of an accident; and some
+things which look like accidents have really a connection with
+character, and are therefore not in the full sense accidents. Finally, I
+believe it <a name="Page_16" id="Page_16"></a><span class="pagenum">[16]</span>will be found that almost all the prominent accidents occur
+when the action is well advanced and the impression of the causal
+sequence is too firmly fixed to be impaired.</p>
+
+<p>Thus it appears that these three elements in the 'action' are
+subordinate, while the dominant factor consists in deeds which issue
+from character. So that, by way of summary, we may now alter our first
+statement, 'A tragedy is a story of exceptional calamity leading to the
+death of a man in high estate,' and we may say instead (what in its turn
+is one-sided, though less so), that the story is one of human actions
+producing exceptional calamity and ending in the death of such a man.<a name="FNanchor_5" id="FNanchor_5"></a><a href="#Footnote_5" class="fnanchor">[5]</a></p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>Before we leave the 'action,' however, there is another question that
+may usefully be asked. Can we define this 'action' further by describing
+it as a conflict?</p>
+
+<p>The frequent use of this idea in discussions on tragedy is ultimately
+due, I suppose, to the influence of Hegel's theory on the subject,
+certainly the most important theory since Aristotle's. But Hegel's view
+of the tragic conflict is not only unfamiliar to English readers and
+difficult to expound shortly, but it had its origin in reflections on
+Greek tragedy and, as Hegel was well aware, applies only imperfectly to
+the works of Shakespeare.<a name="FNanchor_6" id="FNanchor_6"></a><a href="#Footnote_6" class="fnanchor">[6]</a> I shall, therefore, confine myself to the
+idea of conflict in its more general form. In this form it is obviously
+suitable to Shakespearean tragedy; but it is vague, and I will try to
+make it more precise by putting the question, Who are the combatants in
+this conflict?</p>
+
+<p><a name="Page_17" id="Page_17"></a><span class="pagenum">[17]</span>Not seldom the conflict may quite naturally be conceived as lying
+between two persons, of whom the hero is one; or, more fully, as lying
+between two parties or groups, in one of which the hero is the leading
+figure. Or if we prefer to speak (as we may quite well do if we know
+what we are about) of the passions, tendencies, ideas, principles,
+forces, which animate these persons or groups, we may say that two of
+such passions or ideas, regarded as animating two persons or groups, are
+the combatants. The love of Romeo and Juliet is in conflict with the
+hatred of their houses, represented by various other characters. The
+cause of Brutus and Cassius struggles with that of Julius, Octavius and
+Antony. In <i>Richard II.</i> the King stands on one side, Bolingbroke and
+his party on the other. In <i>Macbeth</i> the hero and heroine are opposed to
+the representatives of Duncan. In all these cases the great majority of
+the <i>dramatis personae</i> fall without difficulty into antagonistic
+groups, and the conflict between these groups ends with the defeat of
+the hero.</p>
+
+<p>Yet one cannot help feeling that in at least one of these cases,
+<i>Macbeth</i>, there is something a little external in this way of looking
+at the action. And when we come to some other plays this feeling
+increases. No doubt most of the characters in <i>Hamlet</i>, <i>King Lear</i>,
+<i>Othello</i>, or <i>Antony and Cleopatra</i> can be arranged in opposed
+groups;<a name="FNanchor_7" id="FNanchor_7"></a><a href="#Footnote_7" class="fnanchor">[7]</a> and no doubt there is a conflict; and yet it seems misleading
+to describe this conflict as one <i>between these groups</i>. It cannot be
+simply this. For though <a name="Page_18" id="Page_18"></a><span class="pagenum">[18]</span>Hamlet and the King are mortal foes, yet that
+which engrosses our interest and dwells in our memory at least as much
+as the conflict between them, is the conflict <i>within</i> one of them. And
+so it is, though not in the same degree, with <i>Antony and Cleopatra</i> and
+even with <i>Othello</i>; and, in fact, in a certain measure, it is so with
+nearly all the tragedies. There is an outward conflict of persons and
+groups, there is also a conflict of forces in the hero's soul; and even
+in <i>Julius Caesar</i> and <i>Macbeth</i> the interest of the former can hardly
+be said to exceed that of the latter.</p>
+
+<p>The truth is, that the type of tragedy in which the hero opposes to a
+hostile force an undivided soul, is not the Shakespearean type. The
+souls of those who contend with the hero may be thus undivided; they
+generally are; but, as a rule, the hero, though he pursues his fated
+way, is, at least at some point in the action, and sometimes at many,
+torn by an inward struggle; and it is frequently at such points that
+Shakespeare shows his most extraordinary power. If further we compare
+the earlier tragedies with the later, we find that it is in the latter,
+the maturest works, that this inward struggle is most emphasised. In the
+last of them, <i>Coriolanus</i>, its interest completely eclipses towards the
+close of the play that of the outward conflict. <i>Romeo and Juliet</i>,
+<i>Richard III.</i>, <i>Richard II.</i>, where the hero contends with an outward
+force, but comparatively little with himself, are all early plays.</p>
+
+<p>If we are to include the outer and the inner struggle in a conception
+more definite than that of conflict in general, we must employ some such
+phrase as 'spiritual force.' This will mean whatever forces act in the
+human spirit, whether good or evil, whether personal passion or
+impersonal principle; doubts, desires, scruples, ideas&mdash;whatever can
+animate, shake, possess, and drive a man's soul. <a name="Page_19" id="Page_19"></a><span class="pagenum">[19]</span>In a Shakespearean
+tragedy some such forces are shown in conflict. They are shown acting in
+men and generating strife between them. They are also shown, less
+universally, but quite as characteristically, generating disturbance and
+even conflict in the soul of the hero. Treasonous ambition in Macbeth
+collides with loyalty and patriotism in Macduff and Malcolm: here is the
+outward conflict. But these powers or principles equally collide in the
+soul of Macbeth himself: here is the inner. And neither by itself could
+make the tragedy.<a name="FNanchor_8" id="FNanchor_8"></a><a href="#Footnote_8" class="fnanchor">[8]</a></p>
+
+<p>We shall see later the importance of this idea. Here we need only
+observe that the notion of tragedy as a conflict emphasises the fact
+that action is the centre of the story, while the concentration of
+interest, in the greater plays, on the inward struggle emphasises the
+fact that this action is essentially the expression of character.</p>
+
+
+<h4>3</h4>
+
+<p>Let us turn now from the 'action' to the central figure in it; and,
+ignoring the characteristics which distinguish the heroes from one
+another, let us ask whether they have any common qualities which appear
+to be essential to the tragic effect.</p>
+
+<p>One they certainly have. They are exceptional beings. We have seen
+already that the hero, with Shakespeare, is a person of high degree or
+of public importance, and that his actions or sufferings are of an
+unusual kind. But this is not all. His nature also is exceptional, and
+generally raises him <a name="Page_20" id="Page_20"></a><span class="pagenum">[20]</span>in some respect much above the average level of
+humanity. This does not mean that he is an eccentric or a paragon.
+Shakespeare never drew monstrosities of virtue; some of his heroes are
+far from being 'good'; and if he drew eccentrics he gave them a
+subordinate position in the plot. His tragic characters are made of the
+stuff we find within ourselves and within the persons who surround them.
+But, by an intensification of the life which they share with others,
+they are raised above them; and the greatest are raised so far that, if
+we fully realise all that is implied in their words and actions, we
+become conscious that in real life we have known scarcely any one
+resembling them. Some, like Hamlet and Cleopatra, have genius. Others,
+like Othello, Lear, Macbeth, Coriolanus, are built on the grand scale;
+and desire, passion, or will attains in them a terrible force. In almost
+all we observe a marked one-sidedness, a predisposition in some
+particular direction; a total incapacity, in certain circumstances, of
+resisting the force which draws in this direction; a fatal tendency to
+identify the whole being with one interest, object, passion, or habit of
+mind. This, it would seem, is, for Shakespeare, the fundamental tragic
+trait. It is present in his early heroes, Romeo and Richard II.,
+infatuated men, who otherwise rise comparatively little above the
+ordinary level. It is a fatal gift, but it carries with it a touch of
+greatness; and when there is joined to it nobility of mind, or genius,
+or immense force, we realise the full power and reach of the soul, and
+the conflict in which it engages acquires that magnitude which stirs not
+only sympathy and pity, but admiration, terror, and awe.</p>
+
+<p>The easiest way to bring home to oneself the nature of the tragic
+character is to compare it with a character of another kind. Dramas like
+<i>Cymbeline</i> and the <i>Winter's Tale</i>, which might seem destined <a name="Page_21" id="Page_21"></a><span class="pagenum">[21]</span>to end
+tragically, but actually end otherwise, owe their happy ending largely
+to the fact that the principal characters fail to reach tragic
+dimensions. And, conversely, if these persons were put in the place of
+the tragic heroes, the dramas in which they appeared would cease to be
+tragedies. Posthumus would never have acted as Othello did; Othello, on
+his side, would have met Iachimo's challenge with something more than
+words. If, like Posthumus, he had remained convinced of his wife's
+infidelity, he would not have repented her execution; if, like Leontes,
+he had come to believe that by an unjust accusation he had caused her
+death, he would never have lived on, like Leontes. In the same way the
+villain Iachimo has no touch of tragic greatness. But Iago comes nearer
+to it, and if Iago had slandered Imogen and had supposed his slanders to
+have led to her death, he certainly would not have turned melancholy and
+wished to die. One reason why the end of the <i>Merchant of Venice</i> fails
+to satisfy us is that Shylock is a tragic character, and that we cannot
+believe in his accepting his defeat and the conditions imposed on him.
+This was a case where Shakespeare's imagination ran away with him, so
+that he drew a figure with which the destined pleasant ending would not
+harmonise.</p>
+
+<p>In the circumstances where we see the hero placed, his tragic trait,
+which is also his greatness, is fatal to him. To meet these
+circumstances something is required which a smaller man might have
+given, but which the hero cannot give. He errs, by action or omission;
+and his error, joining with other causes, brings on him ruin. This is
+always so with Shakespeare. As we have seen, the idea of the tragic hero
+as a being destroyed simply and solely by external forces is quite alien
+to him; and not less so is the idea of the hero as contributing to his
+destruction only by acts in which we see no <a name="Page_22" id="Page_22"></a><span class="pagenum">[22]</span>flaw. But the fatal
+imperfection or error, which is never absent, is of different kinds and
+degrees. At one extreme stands the excess and precipitancy of Romeo,
+which scarcely, if at all, diminish our regard for him; at the other the
+murderous ambition of Richard III. In most cases the tragic error
+involves no conscious breach of right; in some (<i>e.g.</i> that of Brutus or
+Othello) it is accompanied by a full conviction of right. In Hamlet
+there is a painful consciousness that duty is being neglected; in Antony
+a clear knowledge that the worse of two courses is being pursued; but
+Richard and Macbeth are the only heroes who do what they themselves
+recognise to be villainous. It is important to observe that Shakespeare
+does admit such heroes,<a name="FNanchor_9" id="FNanchor_9"></a><a href="#Footnote_9" class="fnanchor">[9]</a> and also that he appears to feel, and exerts
+himself to meet, the difficulty that arises from their admission. The
+difficulty is that the spectator must desire their defeat and even their
+destruction; and yet this desire, and the satisfaction of it, are not
+tragic feelings. Shakespeare gives to Richard therefore a power which
+excites astonishment, and a courage which extorts admiration. He gives
+to Macbeth a similar, though less extraordinary, greatness, and adds to
+it a conscience so terrifying in its warnings and so maddening in its
+reproaches that the spectacle of inward torment compels a horrified
+sympathy and awe which balance, at the least, the desire for the hero's
+ruin.</p>
+
+<p>The tragic hero with Shakespeare, then, need not be 'good,' though
+generally he is 'good' and therefore at once wins sympathy in his error.
+But it is necessary that he should have so much of greatness that in his
+error and fall we may be vividly conscious of the possibilities of human
+nature.<a name="FNanchor_10" id="FNanchor_10"></a><a href="#Footnote_10" class="fnanchor">[10]</a> Hence, in the first place, a Shakespearean <a name="Page_23" id="Page_23"></a><span class="pagenum">[23]</span>tragedy is
+never, like some miscalled tragedies, depressing. No one ever closes the
+book with the feeling that man is a poor mean creature. He may be
+wretched and he may be awful, but he is not small. His lot may be
+heart-rending and mysterious, but it is not contemptible. The most
+confirmed of cynics ceases to be a cynic while he reads these plays. And
+with this greatness of the tragic hero (which is not always confined to
+him) is connected, secondly, what I venture to describe as the centre of
+the tragic impression. This central feeling is the impression of waste.
+With Shakespeare, at any rate, the pity and fear which are stirred by
+the tragic story seem to unite with, and even to merge in, a profound
+sense of sadness and mystery, which is due to this impression of waste.
+'What a piece of work is man,' we cry; 'so much more beautiful and so
+much more terrible than we knew! Why should he be so if this beauty and
+greatness only tortures itself and throws itself away?' We seem to have
+before us a type of the mystery of the whole world, the tragic fact
+which extends far beyond the limits of tragedy. Everywhere, from the
+crushed rocks beneath our feet to the soul of man, we see power,
+intelligence, life and glory, which astound us and seem to call for our
+worship. And everywhere we see them perishing, devouring one another and
+destroying themselves, often with dreadful pain, as though they came
+into being for no other end. Tragedy is the typical form of this
+mystery, because that greatness of soul which it exhibits oppressed,
+conflicting and destroyed, is the highest existence in our view. It
+forces the mystery upon us, and it makes us realise so vividly the worth
+of that which is wasted that we cannot possibly seek comfort in the
+reflection that all is vanity.</p>
+
+<p><a name="Page_24" id="Page_24"></a><span class="pagenum">[24]</span></p>
+<h4>4</h4>
+
+<p>In this tragic world, then, where individuals, however great they may be
+and however decisive their actions may appear, are so evidently not the
+ultimate power, what is this power? What account can we give of it which
+will correspond with the imaginative impressions we receive? This will
+be our final question.</p>
+
+<p>The variety of the answers given to this question shows how difficult it
+is. And the difficulty has many sources. Most people, even among those
+who know Shakespeare well and come into real contact with his mind, are
+inclined to isolate and exaggerate some one aspect of the tragic fact.
+Some are so much influenced by their own habitual beliefs that they
+import them more or less into their interpretation of every author who
+is 'sympathetic' to them. And even where neither of these causes of
+error appears to operate, another is present from which it is probably
+impossible wholly to escape. What I mean is this. Any answer we give to
+the question proposed ought to correspond with, or to represent in terms
+of the understanding, our imaginative and emotional experience in
+reading the tragedies. We have, of course, to do our best by study and
+effort to make this experience true to Shakespeare; but, that done to
+the best of our ability, the experience is the matter to be interpreted,
+and the test by which the interpretation must be tried. But it is
+extremely hard to make out exactly what this experience is, because, in
+the very effort to make it out, our reflecting mind, full of everyday
+ideas, is always tending to transform it by the application of these
+ideas, and so to elicit a result which, instead of representing the
+fact, conventionalises it. And the consequence is not only mistaken
+theories; it is <a name="Page_25" id="Page_25"></a><span class="pagenum">[25]</span>that many a man will declare that he feels in reading a
+tragedy what he never really felt, while he fails to recognise what he
+actually did feel. It is not likely that we shall escape all these
+dangers in our effort to find an answer to the question regarding the
+tragic world and the ultimate power in it.</p>
+
+<p>It will be agreed, however, first, that this question must not be
+answered in 'religious' language. For although this or that <i>dramatis
+persona</i> may speak of gods or of God, of evil spirits or of Satan, of
+heaven and of hell, and although the poet may show us ghosts from
+another world, these ideas do not materially influence his
+representation of life, nor are they used to throw light on the mystery
+of its tragedy. The Elizabethan drama was almost wholly secular; and
+while Shakespeare was writing he practically confined his view to the
+world of non-theological observation and thought, so that he represents
+it substantially in one and the same way whether the period of the story
+is pre-Christian or Christian.<a name="FNanchor_11" id="FNanchor_11"></a><a href="#Footnote_11" class="fnanchor">[11]</a> He looked at this 'secular' world
+most intently and seriously; and he painted it, we cannot but conclude,
+with entire fidelity, without the wish to enforce an opinion of his own,
+and, in essentials, without regard to anyone's hopes, fears, or beliefs.
+His greatness is largely due to this fidelity in a mind of extraordinary
+power; and if, as a private person, he had a religious faith, his tragic
+view can hardly have been in contradiction with this faith, but must
+have been included in it, and supplemented, not abolished, by additional
+ideas.</p>
+
+<p>Two statements, next, may at once be made regarding the tragic fact as
+he represents it: one, that it is and remains to us something piteous,
+fearful and mysterious; the other, that the <a name="Page_26" id="Page_26"></a><span class="pagenum">[26]</span>representation of it does
+not leave us crushed, rebellious or desperate. These statements will be
+accepted, I believe, by any reader who is in touch with Shakespeare's
+mind and can observe his own. Indeed such a reader is rather likely to
+complain that they are painfully obvious. But if they are true as well
+as obvious, something follows from them in regard to our present
+question.</p>
+
+<p>From the first it follows that the ultimate power in the tragic world is
+not adequately described as a law or order which we can see to be just
+and benevolent,&mdash;as, in that sense, a 'moral order': for in that case
+the spectacle of suffering and waste could not seem to us so fearful and
+mysterious as it does. And from the second it follows that this ultimate
+power is not adequately described as a fate, whether malicious and
+cruel, or blind and indifferent to human happiness and goodness: for in
+that case the spectacle would leave us desperate or rebellious. Yet one
+or other of these two ideas will be found to govern most accounts of
+Shakespeare's tragic view or world. These accounts isolate and
+exaggerate single aspects, either the aspect of action or that of
+suffering; either the close and unbroken connection of character, will,
+deed and catastrophe, which, taken alone, shows the individual simply as
+sinning against, or failing to conform to, the moral order and drawing
+his just doom on his own head; or else that pressure of outward forces,
+that sway of accident, and those blind and agonised struggles, which,
+taken alone, show him as the mere victim of some power which cares
+neither for his sins nor for his pain. Such views contradict one
+another, and no third view can unite them; but the several aspects from
+whose isolation and exaggeration they spring are both present in the
+fact, and a view which would be true to the fact and to the whole of our
+imaginative experience must in some way combine these aspects.</p>
+
+<p><a name="Page_27" id="Page_27"></a><span class="pagenum">[27]</span>Let us begin, then, with the idea of fatality and glance at some of the
+impressions which give rise to it, without asking at present whether
+this idea is their natural or fitting expression. There can be no doubt
+that they do arise and that they ought to arise. If we do not feel at
+times that the hero is, in some sense, a doomed man; that he and others
+drift struggling to destruction like helpless creatures borne on an
+irresistible flood towards a cataract; that, faulty as they may be,
+their fault is far from being the sole or sufficient cause of all they
+suffer; and that the power from which they cannot escape is relentless
+and immovable, we have failed to receive an essential part of the full
+tragic effect.</p>
+
+<p>The sources of these impressions are various, and I will refer only to a
+few. One of them is put into words by Shakespeare himself when he makes
+the player-king in <i>Hamlet</i> say:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i1">Our thoughts are ours, their ends none of our own;<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>'their ends' are the issues or outcomes of our thoughts, and these, says
+the speaker, are not our own. The tragic world is a world of action, and
+action is the translation of thought into reality. We see men and women
+confidently attempting it. They strike into the existing order of things
+in pursuance of their ideas. But what they achieve is not what they
+intended; it is terribly unlike it. They understand nothing, we say to
+ourselves, of the world on which they operate. They fight blindly in the
+dark, and the power that works through them makes them the instrument of
+a design which is not theirs. They act freely, and yet their action
+binds them hand and foot. And it makes no difference whether they meant
+well or ill. No one could mean better than Brutus, but he contrives
+misery for his country and death for himself. No one could mean worse
+<a name="Page_28" id="Page_28"></a><span class="pagenum">[28]</span>than Iago, and he too is caught in the web he spins for others. Hamlet,
+recoiling from the rough duty of revenge, is pushed into
+blood-guiltiness he never dreamed of, and forced at last on the revenge
+he could not will. His adversary's murders, and no less his adversary's
+remorse, bring about the opposite of what they sought. Lear follows an
+old man's whim, half generous, half selfish; and in a moment it looses
+all the powers of darkness upon him. Othello agonises over an empty
+fiction, and, meaning to execute solemn justice, butchers innocence and
+strangles love. They understand themselves no better than the world
+about them. Coriolanus thinks that his heart is iron, and it melts like
+snow before a fire. Lady Macbeth, who thought she could dash out her own
+child's brains, finds herself hounded to death by the smell of a
+stranger's blood. Her husband thinks that to gain a crown he would jump
+the life to come, and finds that the crown has brought him all the
+horrors of that life. Everywhere, in this tragic world, man's thought,
+translated into act, is transformed into the opposite of itself. His
+act, the movement of a few ounces of matter in a moment of time, becomes
+a monstrous flood which spreads over a kingdom. And whatsoever he dreams
+of doing, he achieves that which he least dreamed of, his own
+destruction.</p>
+
+<p>All this makes us feel the blindness and helplessness of man. Yet by
+itself it would hardly suggest the idea of fate, because it shows man as
+in some degree, however slight, the cause of his own undoing. But other
+impressions come to aid it. It is aided by everything which makes us
+feel that a man is, as we say, terribly unlucky; and of this there is,
+even in Shakespeare, not a little. Here come in some of the accidents
+already considered, Juliet's waking from her trance a minute too late,
+Desdemona's loss of her handkerchief <a name="Page_29" id="Page_29"></a><span class="pagenum">[29]</span>at the only moment when the loss
+would have mattered, that insignificant delay which cost Cordelia's
+life. Again, men act, no doubt, in accordance with their characters; but
+what is it that brings them just the one problem which is fatal to them
+and would be easy to another, and sometimes brings it to them just when
+they are least fitted to face it? How is it that Othello comes to be the
+companion of the one man in the world who is at once able enough, brave
+enough, and vile enough to ensnare him? By what strange fatality does it
+happen that Lear has such daughters and Cordelia such sisters? Even
+character itself contributes to these feelings of fatality. How could
+men escape, we cry, such vehement propensities as drive Romeo, Antony,
+Coriolanus, to their doom? And why is it that a man's virtues help to
+destroy him, and that his weakness or defect is so intertwined with
+everything that is admirable in him that we can hardly separate them
+even in imagination?</p>
+
+<p>If we find in Shakespeare's tragedies the source of impressions like
+these, it is important, on the other hand, to notice what we do <i>not</i>
+find there. We find practically no trace of fatalism in its more
+primitive, crude and obvious forms. Nothing, again, makes us think of
+the actions and sufferings of the persons as somehow arbitrarily fixed
+beforehand without regard to their feelings, thoughts and resolutions.
+Nor, I believe, are the facts ever so presented that it seems to us as
+if the supreme power, whatever it may be, had a special spite against a
+family or an individual. Neither, lastly, do we receive the impression
+(which, it must be observed, is not purely fatalistic) that a family,
+owing to some hideous crime or impiety in early days, is doomed in later
+days to continue a career of portentous calamities and sins.
+Shakespeare, indeed, does not appear to have taken much interest <a name="Page_30" id="Page_30"></a><span class="pagenum">[30]</span>in
+heredity, or to have attached much importance to it. (See, however,
+'<a href='#Heredity'>heredity</a>' in the Index.)</p>
+
+<p>What, then, is this 'fate' which the impressions already considered lead
+us to describe as the ultimate power in the tragic world? It appears to
+be a mythological expression for the whole system or order, of which the
+individual characters form an inconsiderable and feeble part; which
+seems to determine, far more than they, their native dispositions and
+their circumstances, and, through these, their action; which is so vast
+and complex that they can scarcely at all understand it or control its
+workings; and which has a nature so definite and fixed that whatever
+changes take place in it produce other changes inevitably and without
+regard to men's desires and regrets. And whether this system or order is
+best called by the name of fate or no,<a name="FNanchor_12" id="FNanchor_12"></a><a href="#Footnote_12" class="fnanchor">[12]</a> it can hardly be denied that
+it does appear as the ultimate power in the tragic world, and that it
+has such characteristics as these. But the name 'fate' may be intended
+to imply something more&mdash;to imply that this order is a blank necessity,
+totally regardless alike of human weal and of the difference between
+good and evil or right and wrong. And such an implication many readers
+would at once reject. They would maintain, on the contrary, that this
+order shows characteristics of quite another kind from those which made
+us give it the name of fate, characteristics which certainly should not
+induce us <a name="Page_31" id="Page_31"></a><span class="pagenum">[31]</span>to forget those others, but which would lead us to describe
+it as a moral order and its necessity as a moral necessity.</p>
+
+
+<h4>5</h4>
+
+<p>Let us turn, then, to this idea. It brings into the light those aspects
+of the tragic fact which the idea of fate throws into the shade. And the
+argument which leads to it in its simplest form may be stated briefly
+thus: 'Whatever may be said of accidents, circumstances and the like,
+human action is, after all, presented to us as the central fact in
+tragedy, and also as the main cause of the catastrophe. That necessity
+which so much impresses us is, after all, chiefly the necessary
+connection of actions and consequences. For these actions we, without
+even raising a question on the subject, hold the agents responsible; and
+the tragedy would disappear for us if we did not. The critical action
+is, in greater or less degree, wrong or bad. The catastrophe is, in the
+main, the return of this action on the head of the agent. It is an
+example of justice; and that order which, present alike within the
+agents and outside them, infallibly brings it about, is therefore just.
+The rigour of its justice is terrible, no doubt, for a tragedy is a
+terrible story; but, in spite of fear and pity, we acquiesce, because
+our sense of justice is satisfied.'</p>
+
+<p>Now, if this view is to hold good, the 'justice' of which it speaks
+must be at once distinguished from what is called 'poetic justice.'
+'Poetic justice' means that prosperity and adversity are distributed in
+proportion to the merits of the agents. Such 'poetic justice' is in
+flagrant contradiction with the facts of life, and it is absent from
+Shakespeare's tragic picture of life; indeed, this very absence is a
+ground of constant complaint on the part of Dr. Johnson. <span
+class="greek" title="Drasanti pathein">
+&#916;&#961;&#940;&#963;&#945;&#957;&#964;&#953;
+&#960;&#945;&#952;&#949;&#953;&#957;</span>, 'the doer must
+suffer'&mdash; <a name="Page_32" id="Page_32"></a><span
+class="pagenum">[32]</span>this we find in Shakespeare. We also find
+that villainy never remains victorious and prosperous at the last. But
+an assignment of amounts of happiness and misery, an assignment even of
+life and death, in proportion to merit, we do not find. No one who
+thinks of Desdemona and Cordelia; or who remembers that one end awaits
+Richard III. and Brutus, Macbeth and Hamlet; or who asks himself which
+suffered most, Othello or Iago; will ever accuse Shakespeare of
+representing the ultimate power as 'poetically' just.</p>
+
+<p>And we must go further. I venture to say that it is a mistake to use at
+all these terms of justice and merit or desert. And this for two
+reasons. In the first place, essential as it is to recognise the
+connection between act and consequence, and natural as it may seem in
+some cases (<i>e.g.</i> Macbeth's) to say that the doer only gets what he
+deserves, yet in very many cases to say this would be quite unnatural.
+We might not object to the statement that Lear deserved to suffer for
+his folly, selfishness and tyranny; but to assert that he deserved to
+suffer what he did suffer is to do violence not merely to language but
+to any healthy moral sense. It is, moreover, to obscure the tragic fact
+that the consequences of action cannot be limited to that which would
+appear to us to follow 'justly' from them. And, this being so, when we
+call the order of the tragic world just, we are either using the word in
+some vague and unexplained sense, or we are going beyond what is shown
+us of this order, and are appealing to faith.</p>
+
+<p>But, in the second place, the ideas of justice and desert are, it seems
+to me, in <i>all</i> cases&mdash;even those of Richard III. and of Macbeth and
+Lady Macbeth&mdash;untrue to our imaginative experience. When we are immersed
+in a tragedy, we feel towards dispositions, actions, and persons such
+emotions as attraction and repulsion, pity, wonder, fear, horror,
+<a name="Page_33" id="Page_33"></a><span class="pagenum">[33]</span>perhaps hatred; but we do not <i>judge</i>. This is a point of view which
+emerges only when, in reading a play, we slip, by our own fault or the
+dramatist's, from the tragic position, or when, in thinking about the
+play afterwards, we fall back on our everyday legal and moral notions.
+But tragedy does not belong, any more than religion belongs, to the
+sphere of these notions; neither does the imaginative attitude in
+presence of it. While we are in its world we watch what is, seeing that
+so it happened and must have happened, feeling that it is piteous,
+dreadful, awful, mysterious, but neither passing sentence on the agents,
+nor asking whether the behaviour of the ultimate power towards them is
+just. And, therefore, the use of such language in attempts to render our
+imaginative experience in terms of the understanding is, to say the
+least, full of danger.<a name="FNanchor_13" id="FNanchor_13"></a><a href="#Footnote_13" class="fnanchor">[13]</a></p>
+
+<p>Let us attempt then to re-state the idea that the ultimate power in the
+tragic world is a moral order. Let us put aside the ideas of justice and
+merit, and speak simply of good and evil. Let us understand by these
+words, primarily, moral good and evil, but also everything else in human
+beings which we take to be excellent or the reverse. Let us understand
+the statement that the ultimate power or order is 'moral' to mean that
+it does not show itself indifferent to good and evil, or equally
+favourable or unfavourable to both, but shows itself akin to good and
+alien from evil. <a name="Page_34" id="Page_34"></a><span class="pagenum">[34]</span>And, understanding the statement thus, let us ask what
+grounds it has in the tragic fact as presented by Shakespeare.</p>
+
+<p>Here, as in dealing with the grounds on which the idea of fate rests, I
+choose only two or three out of many. And the most important is this. In
+Shakespearean tragedy the main source of the convulsion which produces
+suffering and death is never good: good contributes to this convulsion
+only from its tragic implication with its opposite in one and the same
+character. The main source, on the contrary, is in every case evil; and,
+what is more (though this seems to have been little noticed), it is in
+almost every case evil in the fullest sense, not mere imperfection but
+plain moral evil. The love of Romeo and Juliet conducts them to death
+only because of the senseless hatred of their houses. Guilty ambition,
+seconded by diabolic malice and issuing in murder, opens the action in
+<i>Macbeth</i>. Iago is the main source of the convulsion in <i>Othello</i>;
+Goneril, Regan and Edmund in <i>King Lear</i>. Even when this plain moral
+evil is not the obviously prime source within the play, it lies behind
+it: the situation with which Hamlet has to deal has been formed by
+adultery and murder. <i>Julius Caesar</i> is the only tragedy in which one is
+even tempted to find an exception to this rule. And the inference is
+obvious. If it is chiefly evil that violently disturbs the order of the
+world, this order cannot be friendly to evil or indifferent between evil
+and good, any more than a body which is convulsed by poison is friendly
+to it or indifferent to the distinction between poison and food.</p>
+
+<p>Again, if we confine our attention to the hero, and to those cases where
+the gross and palpable evil is not in him but elsewhere, we find that
+the comparatively innocent hero still shows some marked imperfection or
+defect,&mdash;irresolution, <a name="Page_35" id="Page_35"></a><span class="pagenum">[35]</span>precipitancy, pride, credulousness, excessive
+simplicity, excessive susceptibility to sexual emotions, and the like.
+These defects or imperfections are certainly, in the wide sense of the
+word, evil, and they contribute decisively to the conflict and
+catastrophe. And the inference is again obvious. The ultimate power
+which shows itself disturbed by this evil and reacts against it, must
+have a nature alien to it. Indeed its reaction is so vehement and
+'relentless' that it would seem to be bent on nothing short of good in
+perfection, and to be ruthless in its demand for it.</p>
+
+<p>To this must be added another fact, or another aspect of the same fact.
+Evil exhibits itself everywhere as something negative, barren,
+weakening, destructive, a principle of death. It isolates, disunites,
+and tends to annihilate not only its opposite but itself. That which
+keeps the evil man<a name="FNanchor_14" id="FNanchor_14"></a><a href="#Footnote_14" class="fnanchor">[14]</a> prosperous, makes him succeed, even permits him
+to exist, is the good in him (I do not mean only the obviously 'moral'
+good). When the evil in him masters the good and has its way, it
+destroys other people through him, but it also destroys <i>him</i>. At the
+close of the struggle he has vanished, and has left behind him nothing
+that can stand. What remains is a family, a city, a country, exhausted,
+pale and feeble, but alive through the principle of good which animates
+it; and, within it, individuals who, if they have not the brilliance or
+greatness of the tragic character, still have won our respect and
+confidence. And the inference would seem clear. If existence in an order
+depends on good, and if the presence of evil is hostile to such
+existence, the inner being or soul of this order must be akin to good.</p>
+
+<p><a name="Page_36" id="Page_36"></a><span class="pagenum">[36]</span>These are aspects of the tragic world at least as clearly marked as
+those which, taken alone, suggest the idea of fate. And the idea which
+they in their turn, when taken alone, may suggest, is that of an order
+which does not indeed award 'poetic justice,' but which reacts through
+the necessity of its own 'moral' nature both against attacks made upon
+it and against failure to conform to it. Tragedy, on this view, is the
+exhibition of that convulsive reaction; and the fact that the spectacle
+does not leave us rebellious or desperate is due to a more or less
+distinct perception that the tragic suffering and death arise from
+collision, not with a fate or blank power, but with a moral power, a
+power akin to all that we admire and revere in the characters
+themselves. This perception produces something like a feeling of
+acquiescence in the catastrophe, though it neither leads us to pass
+judgment on the characters nor diminishes the pity, the fear, and the
+sense of waste, which their struggle, suffering and fall evoke. And,
+finally, this view seems quite able to do justice to those aspects of
+the tragic fact which give rise to the idea of fate. They would appear
+as various expressions of the fact that the moral order acts not
+capriciously or like a human being, but from the necessity of its
+nature, or, if we prefer the phrase, by general laws,&mdash;a necessity or
+law which of course knows no exception and is as 'ruthless' as fate.</p>
+
+<p>It is impossible to deny to this view a large measure of truth. And yet
+without some amendment it can hardly satisfy. For it does not include
+the whole of the facts, and therefore does not wholly correspond with
+the impressions they produce. Let it be granted that the system or order
+which shows itself omnipotent against individuals is, in the sense
+explained, moral. Still&mdash;at any rate for the eye of sight&mdash;the evil
+against which it asserts itself, and <a name="Page_37" id="Page_37"></a><span class="pagenum">[37]</span>the persons whom this evil
+inhabits, are not really something outside the order, so that they can
+attack it or fail to conform to it; they are within it and a part of it.
+It itself produces them,&mdash;produces Iago as well as Desdemona, Iago's
+cruelty as well as Iago's courage. It is not poisoned, it poisons
+itself. Doubtless it shows by its violent reaction that the poison <i>is</i>
+poison, and that its health lies in good. But one significant fact
+cannot remove another, and the spectacle we witness scarcely warrants
+the assertion that the order is responsible for the good in Desdemona,
+but Iago for the evil in Iago. If we make this assertion we make it on
+grounds other than the facts as presented in Shakespeare's tragedies.</p>
+
+<p>Nor does the idea of a moral order asserting itself against attack or
+want of conformity answer in full to our feelings regarding the tragic
+character. We do not think of Hamlet merely as failing to meet its
+demand, of Antony as merely sinning against it, or even of Macbeth as
+simply attacking it. What we feel corresponds quite as much to the idea
+that they are <i>its</i> parts, expressions, products; that in their defect
+or evil <i>it</i> is untrue to its soul of goodness, and falls into conflict
+and collision with itself; that, in making them suffer and waste
+themselves, <i>it</i> suffers and wastes itself; and that when, to save its
+life and regain peace from this intestinal struggle, it casts them out,
+it has lost a part of its own substance,&mdash;a part more dangerous and
+unquiet, but far more valuable and nearer to its heart, than that which
+remains,&mdash;a Fortinbras, a Malcolm, an Octavius. There is no tragedy in
+its expulsion of evil: the tragedy is that this involves the waste of
+good.</p>
+
+<p>Thus we are left at last with an idea showing two sides or aspects which
+we can neither separate nor reconcile. The whole or order against which
+the individual part shows itself powerless seems <a name="Page_38" id="Page_38"></a><span class="pagenum">[38]</span>to be animated by a
+passion for perfection: we cannot otherwise explain its behaviour
+towards evil. Yet it appears to engender this evil within itself, and in
+its effort to overcome and expel it it is agonised with pain, and driven
+to mutilate its own substance and to lose not only evil but priceless
+good. That this idea, though very different from the idea of a blank
+fate, is no solution of the riddle of life is obvious; but why should we
+expect it to be such a solution? Shakespeare was not attempting to
+justify the ways of God to men, or to show the universe as a Divine
+Comedy. He was writing tragedy, and tragedy would not be tragedy if it
+were not a painful mystery. Nor can he be said even to point distinctly,
+like some writers of tragedy, in any direction where a solution might
+lie. We find a few references to gods or God, to the influence of the
+stars, to another life: some of them certainly, all of them perhaps,
+merely dramatic&mdash;appropriate to the person from whose lips they fall. A
+ghost comes from Purgatory to impart a secret out of the reach of its
+hearer&mdash;who presently meditates on the question whether the sleep of
+death is dreamless. Accidents once or twice remind us strangely of the
+words, 'There's a divinity that shapes our ends.' More important are
+other impressions. Sometimes from the very furnace of affliction a
+conviction seems borne to us that somehow, if we could see it, this
+agony counts as nothing against the heroism and love which appear in it
+and thrill our hearts. Sometimes we are driven to cry out that these
+mighty or heavenly spirits who perish are too great for the little space
+in which they move, and that they vanish not into nothingness but into
+freedom. Sometimes from these sources and from others comes a
+presentiment, formless but haunting and even profound, that all the fury
+of conflict, with its waste and woe, is less than half the truth, even
+<a name="Page_39" id="Page_39"></a><span class="pagenum">[39]</span>an illusion, 'such stuff as dreams are made on.' But these faint and
+scattered intimations that the tragic world, being but a fragment of a
+whole beyond our vision, must needs be a contradiction and no ultimate
+truth, avail nothing to interpret the mystery. We remain confronted with
+the inexplicable fact, or the no less inexplicable appearance, of a
+world travailing for perfection, but bringing to birth, together with
+glorious good, an evil which it is able to overcome only by self-torture
+and self-waste. And this fact or appearance is tragedy.<a name="FNanchor_15" id="FNanchor_15"></a><a href="#Footnote_15" class="fnanchor">[15]</a></p>
+
+<div class="footnotes">
+<div class="footnotehead">FOOTNOTES:</div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_1" id="Footnote_1"></a><a href="#FNanchor_1"><span class="label">[1]</span></a> <i>Julius Caesar</i> is not an exception to this rule. Caesar,
+whose murder comes in the Third Act, is in a sense the dominating figure
+in the story, but Brutus is the 'hero.'</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_2" id="Footnote_2"></a><a href="#FNanchor_2"><span class="label">[2]</span></a> <i>Timon of Athens</i>, we have seen, was probably not designed
+by Shakespeare, but even <i>Timon</i> is no exception to the rule. The
+sub-plot is concerned with Alcibiades and his army, and Timon himself is
+treated by the Senate as a man of great importance. <i>Arden of Feversham</i>
+and <i>A Yorkshire Tragedy</i> would certainly be exceptions to the rule; but
+I assume that neither of them is Shakespeare's; and if either is, it
+belongs to a different species from his admitted tragedies. See, on this
+species, Symonds, <i>Shakspere's Predecessors</i>, ch. xi.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_3" id="Footnote_3"></a><a href="#FNanchor_3"><span class="label">[3]</span></a> Even a deed would, I think, be counted an 'accident,' if it
+were the deed of a very minor person whose character had not been
+indicated; because such a deed would not issue from the little world to
+which the dramatist had confined our attention.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_4" id="Footnote_4"></a><a href="#FNanchor_4"><span class="label">[4]</span></a> Comedy stands in a different position. The tricks played by
+chance often form a principal part of the comic action.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_5" id="Footnote_5"></a><a href="#FNanchor_5"><span class="label">[5]</span></a> It may be observed that the influence of the three elements
+just considered is to strengthen the tendency, produced by the
+sufferings considered first, to regard the tragic persons as passive
+rather than as agents.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_6" id="Footnote_6"></a><a href="#FNanchor_6"><span class="label">[6]</span></a> An account of Hegel's view may be found in <i>Oxford Lectures
+on Poetry</i>.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_7" id="Footnote_7"></a><a href="#FNanchor_7"><span class="label">[7]</span></a> The reader, however, will find considerable difficulty in
+placing some very important characters in these and other plays. I will
+give only two or three illustrations. Edgar is clearly not on the same
+side as Edmund, and yet it seems awkward to range him on Gloster's side
+when Gloster wishes to put him to death. Ophelia is in love with Hamlet,
+but how can she be said to be of Hamlet's party against the King and
+Polonius, or of their party against Hamlet? Desdemona worships Othello,
+yet it sounds odd to say that Othello is on the same side with a person
+whom he insults, strikes and murders.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_8" id="Footnote_8"></a><a href="#FNanchor_8"><span class="label">[8]</span></a> I have given names to the 'spiritual forces' in <i>Macbeth</i>
+merely to illustrate the idea, and without any pretension to adequacy.
+Perhaps, in view of some interpretations of Shakespeare's plays, it will
+be as well to add that I do not dream of suggesting that in any of his
+dramas Shakespeare imagined two abstract principles or passions
+conflicting, and incorporated them in persons; or that there is any
+necessity for a reader to define for himself the particular forces which
+conflict in a given case.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_9" id="Footnote_9"></a><a href="#FNanchor_9"><span class="label">[9]</span></a> Aristotle apparently would exclude them.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_10" id="Footnote_10"></a><a href="#FNanchor_10"><span class="label">[10]</span></a> Richard II. is perhaps an exception, and I must confess
+that to me he is scarcely a tragic character, and that, if he is
+nevertheless a tragic figure, he is so only because his fall from
+prosperity to adversity is so great.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_11" id="Footnote_11"></a><a href="#FNanchor_11"><span class="label">[11]</span></a> I say substantially; but the concluding remarks on
+<i>Hamlet</i> will modify a little the statements above.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_12" id="Footnote_12"></a><a href="#FNanchor_12"><span class="label">[12]</span></a> I have raised no objection to the use of the idea of fate,
+because it occurs so often both in conversation and in books about
+Shakespeare's tragedies that I must suppose it to be natural to many
+readers. Yet I doubt whether it would be so if Greek tragedy had never
+been written; and I must in candour confess that to me it does not often
+occur while I am reading, or when I have just read, a tragedy of
+Shakespeare. Wordsworth's lines, for example, about
+</p>
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i3">poor humanity's afflicted will<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Struggling in vain with ruthless destiny<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+<p>
+do not represent the impression I receive; much less do images which
+compare man to a puny creature helpless in the claws of a bird of prey.
+The reader should examine himself closely on this matter.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_13" id="Footnote_13"></a><a href="#FNanchor_13"><span class="label">[13]</span></a> It is dangerous, I think, in reference to all really good
+tragedies, but I am dealing here only with Shakespeare's. In not a few
+Greek tragedies it is almost inevitable that we should think of justice
+and retribution, not only because the <i>dramatis personae</i> often speak of
+them, but also because there is something casuistical about the tragic
+problem itself. The poet treats the story in such a way that the
+question, Is the hero doing right or wrong? is almost forced upon us.
+But this is not so with Shakespeare. <i>Julius Caesar</i> is probably the
+only one of his tragedies in which the question suggests itself to us,
+and this is one of the reasons why that play has something of a classic
+air. Even here, if we ask the question, we have no doubt at all about
+the answer.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_14" id="Footnote_14"></a><a href="#FNanchor_14"><span class="label">[14]</span></a> It is most essential to remember that an evil man is much
+more than the evil in him. I may add that in this paragraph I have, for
+the sake of clearness, considered evil in its most pronounced form; but
+what is said would apply, <i>mutatis mutandis</i>, to evil as imperfection,
+etc.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_15" id="Footnote_15"></a><a href="#FNanchor_15"><span class="label">[15]</span></a> Partly in order not to anticipate later passages, I
+abstained from treating fully here the question why we feel, at the
+death of the tragic hero, not only pain but also reconciliation and
+sometimes even exultation. As I cannot at present make good this defect,
+I would ask the reader to refer to the word <i><a href='#Reconciliation'>Reconciliation</a></i> in the
+Index. See also, in <i>Oxford Lectures on Poetry</i>, <i>Hegel's Theory of
+Tragedy</i>, especially pp. 90, 91.</p></div>
+</div>
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><a name="Page_40" id="Page_40"></a><span class="pagenum">[40]</span></p>
+<h2><a name="LECTURE_II" id="LECTURE_II"></a>LECTURE II</h2>
+
+<h3>CONSTRUCTION IN SHAKESPEARE'S TRAGEDIES</h3>
+
+
+<p>Having discussed the substance of a Shakespearean tragedy, we should
+naturally go on to examine the form. And under this head many things
+might be included; for example, Shakespeare's methods of
+characterisation, his language, his versification, the construction of
+his plots. I intend, however, to speak only of the last of these
+subjects, which has been somewhat neglected;<a name="FNanchor_16" id="FNanchor_16"></a><a href="#Footnote_16" class="fnanchor">[16]</a> and, as construction is
+a more or less technical matter, I shall add some general remarks on
+Shakespeare as an artist.</p>
+
+
+<h4>1</h4>
+
+<p>As a Shakespearean tragedy represents a conflict which terminates in a
+catastrophe, any such <a name="Page_41" id="Page_41"></a><span class="pagenum">[41]</span>tragedy may roughly be divided into three parts.
+The first of these sets forth or expounds the situation,<a name="FNanchor_17" id="FNanchor_17"></a><a href="#Footnote_17" class="fnanchor">[17]</a> or state of
+affairs, out of which the conflict arises; and it may, therefore, be
+called the Exposition. The second deals with the definite beginning, the
+growth and the vicissitudes of the conflict. It forms accordingly the
+bulk of the play, comprising the Second, Third and Fourth Acts, and
+usually a part of the First and a part of the Fifth. The final section
+of the tragedy shows the issue of the conflict in a catastrophe.<a name="FNanchor_18" id="FNanchor_18"></a><a href="#Footnote_18" class="fnanchor">[18]</a></p>
+
+<p>The application of this scheme of division is naturally more or less
+arbitrary. The first part glides into the second, and the second into
+the third, and there may often be difficulty in drawing the lines
+between them. But it is still harder to divide spring from summer, and
+summer from autumn; and yet spring is spring, and summer summer.</p>
+
+<p>The main business of the Exposition, which we will consider first, is to
+introduce us into a little world of persons; to show us their positions
+in life, their circumstances, their relations to one another, and
+perhaps something of their characters; and to leave us keenly interested
+in the question what will come out of this condition of things. We are
+left thus expectant, not merely because some of the persons interest us
+at once, but also because their situation in regard to one another
+points to difficulties in the future. This situation is not one of
+conflict,<a name="FNanchor_19" id="FNanchor_19"></a><a href="#Footnote_19" class="fnanchor">[19]</a> but it threatens conflict. For example, we see first the
+hatred of the Montagues and Capulets; and then we see <a name="Page_42" id="Page_42"></a><span class="pagenum">[42]</span>Romeo ready to
+fall violently in love; and then we hear talk of a marriage between
+Juliet and Paris; but the exposition is not complete, and the conflict
+has not definitely begun to arise, till, in the last scene of the First
+Act, Romeo the Montague sees Juliet the Capulet and becomes her slave.</p>
+
+<p>The dramatist's chief difficulty in the exposition is obvious, and it is
+illustrated clearly enough in the plays of unpractised writers; for
+example, in <i>Remorse</i>, and even in <i>The Cenci</i>. He has to impart to the
+audience a quantity of information about matters of which they generally
+know nothing and never know all that is necessary for his purpose.<a name="FNanchor_20" id="FNanchor_20"></a><a href="#Footnote_20" class="fnanchor">[20]</a>
+But the process of merely acquiring information is unpleasant, and the
+direct imparting of it is undramatic. Unless he uses a prologue,
+therefore, he must conceal from his auditors the fact that they are
+being informed, and must tell them what he wants them to know by means
+which are interesting on their own account. These means, with
+Shakespeare, are not only speeches but actions and events. From the very
+beginning of the play, though the conflict has not arisen, things are
+happening and being done which in some degree arrest, startle, and
+excite; and in a few scenes we have mastered the situation of affairs
+without perceiving the dramatist's designs upon us. Not that this is
+always so with Shakespeare. In the opening scene of his early <i>Comedy of
+Errors</i>, and in the opening speech of <i>Richard III.</i>, we feel that the
+speakers are addressing us; and in the second scene of the <i>Tempest</i>
+(for Shakespeare grew at last rather negligent of technique) the
+<a name="Page_43" id="Page_43"></a><span class="pagenum">[43]</span>purpose of Prospero's long explanation to Miranda is palpable. But in
+general Shakespeare's expositions are masterpieces.<a name="FNanchor_21" id="FNanchor_21"></a><a href="#Footnote_21" class="fnanchor">[21]</a></p>
+
+<p>His usual plan in tragedy is to begin with a short scene, or part of a
+scene, either full of life and stir, or in some other way arresting.
+Then, having secured a hearing, he proceeds to conversations at a lower
+pitch, accompanied by little action but conveying much information. For
+example, <i>Romeo and Juliet</i> opens with a street-fight, <i>Julius Caesar</i>
+and <i>Coriolanus</i> with a crowd in commotion; and when this excitement has
+had its effect on the audience, there follow quiet speeches, in which
+the cause of the excitement, and so a great part of the situation, are
+disclosed. In <i>Hamlet</i> and <i>Macbeth</i> this scheme is employed with great
+boldness. In <i>Hamlet</i> the first appearance of the Ghost occurs at the
+fortieth line, and with such effect that Shakespeare can afford to
+introduce at once a conversation which explains part of the state of
+affairs at Elsinore; and the second appearance, having again increased
+the tension, is followed by a long scene, which contains no action but
+introduces almost all the <i>dramatis personae</i> and adds the information
+left wanting. The opening of <i>Macbeth</i> is even more remarkable, for
+there is probably no parallel to its first scene, where the senses and
+imagination are assaulted by a storm of thunder and supernatural alarm.
+This scene is only eleven lines long, but its influence is so great that
+the next can safely be occupied with a mere report of Macbeth's
+battles,&mdash;a narrative which would have won much less attention if it had
+opened the play.</p>
+
+<p><a name="Page_44" id="Page_44"></a><span class="pagenum">[44]</span>When Shakespeare begins his exposition thus he generally at first makes
+people talk about the hero, but keeps the hero himself for some time out
+of sight, so that we await his entrance with curiosity, and sometimes
+with anxiety. On the other hand, if the play opens with a quiet
+conversation, this is usually brief, and then at once the hero enters
+and takes action of some decided kind. Nothing, for example, can be less
+like the beginning of <i>Macbeth</i> than that of <i>King Lear</i>. The tone is
+pitched so low that the conversation between Kent, Gloster, and Edmund
+is written in prose. But at the thirty-fourth line it is broken off by
+the entrance of Lear and his court, and without delay the King proceeds
+to his fatal division of the kingdom.</p>
+
+<p>This tragedy illustrates another practice of Shakespeare's. <i>King Lear</i>
+has a secondary plot, that which concerns Gloster and his two sons. To
+make the beginning of this plot quite clear, and to mark it off from the
+main action, Shakespeare gives it a separate exposition. The great scene
+of the division of Britain and the rejection of Cordelia and Kent is
+followed by the second scene, in which Gloster and his two sons appear
+alone, and the beginning of Edmund's design is disclosed. In <i>Hamlet</i>,
+though the plot is single, there is a little group of characters
+possessing a certain independent interest,&mdash;Polonius, his son, and his
+daughter; and so the third scene is devoted wholly to them. And again,
+in <i>Othello</i>, since Roderigo is to occupy a peculiar position almost
+throughout the action, he is introduced at once, alone with Iago, and
+his position is explained before the other characters are allowed to
+appear.</p>
+
+<p>But why should Iago open the play? Or, if this seems too presumptuous a
+question, let us put it in the form, What is the effect of his opening
+the play? It is that we receive at the very outset a strong <a name="Page_45" id="Page_45"></a><span class="pagenum">[45]</span>impression
+of the force which is to prove fatal to the hero's happiness, so that,
+when we see the hero himself, the shadow of fate already rests upon him.
+And an effect of this kind is to be noticed in other tragedies. We are
+made conscious at once of some power which is to influence the whole
+action to the hero's undoing. In <i>Macbeth</i> we see and hear the Witches,
+in <i>Hamlet</i> the Ghost. In the first scene of <i>Julius Caesar</i> and of
+<i>Coriolanus</i> those qualities of the crowd are vividly shown which render
+hopeless the enterprise of the one hero and wreck the ambition of the
+other. It is the same with the hatred between the rival houses in <i>Romeo
+and Juliet</i>, and with Antony's infatuated passion. We realise them at
+the end of the first page, and are almost ready to regard the hero as
+doomed. Often, again, at one or more points during the exposition this
+feeling is reinforced by some expression that has an ominous effect. The
+first words we hear from Macbeth, 'So foul and fair a day I have not
+seen,' echo, though he knows it not, the last words we heard from the
+Witches, 'Fair is foul, and foul is fair.' Romeo, on his way with his
+friends to the banquet, where he is to see Juliet for the first time,
+tells Mercutio that he has had a dream. What the dream was we never
+learn, for Mercutio does not care to know, and breaks into his speech
+about Queen Mab; but we can guess its nature from Romeo's last speech in
+the scene:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i10">My mind misgives<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Some consequence yet hanging in the stars<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Shall bitterly begin his fearful date<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">With this night's revels.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>When Brabantio, forced to acquiesce in his daughter's stolen marriage,
+turns, as he leaves the council-chamber, to Othello, with the warning,</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i1">Look to her, Moor, if thou hast eyes to see;<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">She has deceived her father, and may thee,<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p><a name="Page_46" id="Page_46"></a><span class="pagenum">[46]</span>this warning, and no less Othello's answer, 'My life upon her faith,'
+make our hearts sink. The whole of the coming story seems to be
+prefigured in Antony's muttered words (<span class="smcap">i.</span> ii. 120):</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i1">These strong Egyptian fetters I must break,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Or lose myself in dotage;<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>and, again, in Hamlet's weary sigh, following so soon on the passionate
+resolution stirred by the message of the Ghost:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i1">The time is out of joint. Oh cursed spite,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">That ever I was born to set it right.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>These words occur at a point (the end of the First Act) which may be
+held to fall either within the exposition or beyond it. I should take
+the former view, though such questions, as we saw at starting, can
+hardly be decided with certainty. The dimensions of this first section
+of a tragedy depend on a variety of causes, of which the chief seems to
+be the comparative simplicity or complexity of the situation from which
+the conflict arises. Where this is simple the exposition is short, as in
+<i>Julius Caesar</i> and <i>Macbeth</i>. Where it is complicated the exposition
+requires more space, as in <i>Romeo and Juliet</i>, <i>Hamlet</i>, and <i>King
+Lear</i>. Its completion is generally marked in the mind of the reader by a
+feeling that the action it contains is for the moment complete but has
+left a problem. The lovers have met, but their families are at deadly
+enmity; the hero seems at the height of success, but has admitted the
+thought of murdering his sovereign; the old king has divided his kingdom
+between two hypocritical daughters, and has rejected his true child; the
+hero has acknowledged a sacred duty of revenge, but is weary of life:
+and we ask, What will come of this? Sometimes, I may add, a certain time
+is supposed to elapse before the events which answer our question make
+their <a name="Page_47" id="Page_47"></a><span class="pagenum">[47]</span>appearance and the conflict begins; in <i>King Lear</i>, for instance,
+about a fortnight; in <i>Hamlet</i> about two months.</p>
+
+
+<h4>2</h4>
+
+<p>We come now to the conflict itself. And here one or two preliminary
+remarks are necessary. In the first place, it must be remembered that
+our point of view in examining the construction of a play will not
+always coincide with that which we occupy in thinking of its whole
+dramatic effect. For example, that struggle in the hero's soul which
+sometimes accompanies the outward struggle is of the highest importance
+for the total effect of a tragedy; but it is not always necessary or
+desirable to consider it when the question is merely one of
+construction. And this is natural. The play is meant primarily for the
+theatre; and theatrically the outward conflict, with its influence on
+the fortunes of the hero, is the aspect which first catches, if it does
+not engross, attention. For the average play-goer of every period the
+main interest of <i>Hamlet</i> has probably lain in the vicissitudes of his
+long duel with the King; and the question, one may almost say, has been
+which will first kill the other. And so, from the point of view of
+construction, the fact that Hamlet spares the King when he finds him
+praying, is, from its effect on the hero's fortunes, of great moment;
+but the cause of the fact, which lies within Hamlet's character, is not
+so.</p>
+
+<p>In the second place we must be prepared to find that, as the plays vary
+so much, no single way of regarding the conflict will answer precisely
+to the construction of all; that it sometimes appears possible to look
+at the construction of a tragedy in two quite different ways, and that
+it is material to find the best of the two; and that thus, in any given
+instance, it is necessary first to define the opposing sides in the
+conflict. I will give one <a name="Page_48" id="Page_48"></a><span class="pagenum">[48]</span>or two examples. In some tragedies, as we saw
+in our first lecture, the opposing forces can, for practical purposes,
+be identified with opposing persons or groups. So it is in <i>Romeo and
+Juliet</i> and <i>Macbeth</i>. But it is not always so. The love of Othello may
+be said to contend with another force, as the love of Romeo does; but
+Othello cannot be said to contend with Iago as Romeo contends with the
+representatives of the hatred of the houses, or as Macbeth contends with
+Malcolm and Macduff. Again, in <i>Macbeth</i> the hero, however much
+influenced by others, supplies the main driving power of the action; but
+in <i>King Lear</i> he does not. Possibly, therefore, the conflict, and with
+it the construction, may best be regarded from different points of view
+in these two plays, in spite of the fact that the hero is the central
+figure in each. But if we do not observe this we shall attempt to find
+the same scheme in both, and shall either be driven to some unnatural
+view or to a sceptical despair of perceiving any principle of
+construction at all.</p>
+
+<p>With these warnings, I turn to the question whether we can trace any
+distinct method or methods by which Shakespeare represents the rise and
+development of the conflict.</p>
+
+<p>(1) One at least is obvious, and indeed it is followed not merely during
+the conflict but from beginning to end of the play. There are, of
+course, in the action certain places where the tension in the minds of
+the audience becomes extreme. We shall consider these presently. But, in
+addition, there is, all through the tragedy, a constant alternation of
+rises and falls in this tension or in the emotional pitch of the work, a
+regular sequence of more exciting and less exciting sections. Some kind
+of variation of pitch is to be found, of course, in all drama, for it
+rests on the elementary facts that relief must be given after emotional
+strain, and that contrast is <a name="Page_49" id="Page_49"></a><span class="pagenum">[49]</span>required to bring out the full force of an
+effect. But a good drama of our own time shows nothing approaching to
+the <i>regularity</i> with which in the plays of Shakespeare and of his
+contemporaries the principle is applied. And the main cause of this
+difference lies simply in a change of theatrical arrangements. In
+Shakespeare's theatre, as there was no scenery, scene followed scene
+with scarcely any pause; and so the readiest, though not the only, way
+to vary the emotional pitch was to interpose a whole scene where the
+tension was low between scenes where it was high. In our theatres there
+is a great deal of scenery, which takes a long time to set and change;
+and therefore the number of scenes is small, and the variations of
+tension have to be provided within the scenes, and still more by the
+pauses between them. With Shakespeare there are, of course, in any long
+scene variations of tension, but the scenes are numerous and, compared
+with ours, usually short, and variety is given principally by their
+difference in pitch.</p>
+
+<p>It may further be observed that, in a portion of the play which is
+relatively unexciting, the scenes of lower tension may be as long as
+those of higher; while in a portion of the play which is specially
+exciting the scenes of low tension are shorter, often much shorter, than
+the others. The reader may verify this statement by comparing the First
+or the Fourth Act in most of the tragedies with the Third; for, speaking
+very roughly, we may say that the First and Fourth are relatively quiet
+acts, the Third highly critical. A good example is the Third Act of
+<i>King Lear</i>, where the scenes of high tension (ii., iv., vi.) are
+respectively 95, 186 and 122 lines in length, while those of low tension
+(i., iii., v.) are respectively 55, 26 and 26 lines long. Scene vii.,
+the last of the Act, is, I may add, a very exciting scene, though it
+follows scene vi., and therefore the tone of scene vi. is greatly
+lowered during its final thirty lines.</p>
+
+<p><a name="Page_50" id="Page_50"></a><span class="pagenum">[50]</span>(2) If we turn now from the differences of tension to the sequence of
+events within the conflict, we shall find the principle of alternation
+at work again in another and a quite independent way. Let us for the
+sake of brevity call the two sides in the conflict A and B. Now,
+usually, as we shall see presently, through a considerable part of the
+play, perhaps the first half, the cause of A is, on the whole,
+advancing; and through the remaining part it is retiring, while that of
+B advances in turn. But, underlying this broad movement, all through the
+conflict we shall find a regular alternation of smaller advances and
+retirals; first A seeming to win some ground, and then the
+counter-action of B being shown. And since we always more or less
+decidedly prefer A to B or B to A, the result of this oscillating
+movement is a constant alternation of hope and fear, or rather of a
+mixed state predominantly hopeful and a mixed state predominantly
+apprehensive. An example will make the point clear. In <i>Hamlet</i> the
+conflict begins with the hero's feigning to be insane from
+disappointment in love, and we are shown his immediate success in
+convincing Polonius. Let us call this an advance of A. The next scene
+shows the King's great uneasiness about Hamlet's melancholy, and his
+scepticism as to Polonius's explanation of its cause: advance of B.
+Hamlet completely baffles Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, who have been
+sent to discover his secret, and he arranges for the test of the
+play-scene: advance of A. But immediately before the play-scene his
+soliloquy on suicide fills us with misgiving; and his words to Ophelia,
+overheard, so convince the King that love is <i>not</i> the cause of his
+nephew's strange behaviour, that he determines to get rid of him by
+sending him to England: advance of B. The play-scene proves a complete
+success: decided advance of A. Directly after it Hamlet spares the King
+at prayer, and in an interview with his mother <a name="Page_51" id="Page_51"></a><span class="pagenum">[51]</span>unwittingly kills
+Polonius, and so gives his enemy a perfect excuse for sending him away
+(to be executed): decided advance of B. I need not pursue the
+illustration further. This oscillating movement can be traced without
+difficulty in any of the tragedies, though less distinctly in one or two
+of the earliest.</p>
+
+<p>(3) Though this movement continues right up to the catastrophe, its
+effect does not disguise that much broader effect to which I have
+already alluded, and which we have now to study. In all the tragedies,
+though more clearly in some than in others, one side is distinctly felt
+to be on the whole advancing up to a certain point in the conflict, and
+then to be on the whole declining before the reaction of the other.
+There is therefore felt to be a critical point in the action, which
+proves also to be a turning point. It is critical sometimes in the sense
+that, until it is reached, the conflict is not, so to speak, clenched;
+one of the two sets of forces might subside, or a reconciliation might
+somehow be effected; while, as soon as it is reached, we feel this can
+no longer be. It is critical also because the advancing force has
+apparently asserted itself victoriously, gaining, if not all it could
+wish, still a very substantial advantage; whereas really it is on the
+point of turning downward towards its fall. This Crisis, as a rule,
+comes somewhere near the middle of the play; and where it is well marked
+it has the effect, as to construction, of dividing the play into five
+parts instead of three; these parts showing (1) a situation not yet one
+of conflict, (2) the rise and development of the conflict, in which A or
+B advances on the whole till it reaches (3) the Crisis, on which follows
+(4) the decline of A or B towards (5) the Catastrophe. And it will be
+seen that the fourth and fifth parts repeat, though with a reversal of
+direction as regards A or B, the movement of the second and third,
+working towards <a name="Page_52" id="Page_52"></a><span class="pagenum">[52]</span>the catastrophe as the second and third worked towards
+the crisis.</p>
+
+<p>In developing, illustrating and qualifying this statement, it will be
+best to begin with the tragedies in which the movement is most clear and
+simple. These are <i>Julius Caesar</i> and <i>Macbeth</i>. In the former the
+fortunes of the conspiracy rise with vicissitudes up to the crisis of
+the assassination (<span class="smcap">iii.</span> i.); they then sink with vicissitudes
+to the catastrophe, where Brutus and Cassius perish. In the latter,
+Macbeth, hurrying, in spite of much inward resistance, to the murder of
+Duncan, attains the crown, the upward movement being extraordinarily
+rapid, and the crisis arriving early: his cause then turns slowly
+downward, and soon hastens to ruin. In both these tragedies the
+simplicity of the constructional effect, it should be noticed, depends
+in part on the fact that the contending forces may quite naturally be
+identified with certain persons, and partly again on the fact that the
+defeat of one side is the victory of the other. Octavius and Antony,
+Malcolm and Macduff, are left standing over the bodies of their foes.</p>
+
+<p>This is not so in <i>Romeo and Juliet</i> and <i>Hamlet</i>, because here,
+although the hero perishes, the side opposed to him, being the more
+faulty or evil, cannot be allowed to triumph when he falls. Otherwise
+the type of construction is the same. The fortunes of Romeo and Juliet
+rise and culminate in their marriage (<span class="smcap">ii.</span> vi.), and then begin
+to decline before the opposition of their houses, which, aided by
+accidents, produces a catastrophe, but is thereupon converted into a
+remorseful reconciliation. Hamlet's cause reaches its zenith in the
+success of the play-scene (<span class="smcap">iii.</span> ii.). Thereafter the reaction
+makes way, and he perishes through the plot of the King and Laertes. But
+they are not allowed to survive their success.</p>
+
+<p><a name="Page_53" id="Page_53"></a><span class="pagenum">[53]</span>The construction in the remaining Roman plays follows the same plan,
+but in both plays (as in <i>Richard II.</i> and <i>Richard III.</i>) it suffers
+from the intractable nature of the historical material, and is also
+influenced by other causes. In <i>Coriolanus</i> the hero reaches the topmost
+point of success when he is named consul (<span class="smcap">ii.</span> iii.), and the
+rest of the play shows his decline and fall; but in this decline he
+attains again for a time extraordinary power, and triumphs, in a sense,
+over his original adversary, though he succumbs to another. In <i>Antony
+and Cleopatra</i> the advance of the hero's cause depends on his freeing
+himself from the heroine, and he appears to have succeeded when he
+becomes reconciled to Octavius and marries Octavia (<span class="smcap">iii.</span> ii.);
+but he returns to Egypt and is gradually driven to his death, which
+involves that of the heroine.</p>
+
+<p>There remain two of the greatest of the tragedies, and in both of them a
+certain difficulty will be felt. <i>King Lear</i> alone among these plays has
+a distinct double action. Besides this, it is impossible, I think, from
+the point of view of construction, to regard the hero as the leading
+figure. If we attempt to do so, we must either find the crisis in the
+First Act (for after it Lear's course is downward), and this is absurd;
+or else we must say that the usual movement is present but its direction
+is reversed, the hero's cause first sinking to the lowest point (in the
+Storm-scenes) and then rising again. But this also will not do; for
+though his fortunes may be said to rise again for a time, they rise only
+to fall once more to a catastrophe. The truth is, that after the First
+Act, which is really filled by the exposition, Lear suffers but hardly
+initiates action at all; and the right way to look at the matter, <i>from
+the point of view of construction</i>, is to regard Goneril, Regan and
+Edmund as the leading characters. It is they who, in the conflict,
+initiate <a name="Page_54" id="Page_54"></a><span class="pagenum">[54]</span>action. Their fortune mounts to the crisis, where the old King
+is driven out into the storm and loses his reason, and where Gloster is
+blinded and expelled from his home (<span class="smcap">iii.</span> vi. and vii.). Then
+the counter-action begins to gather force, and their cause to decline;
+and, although they win the battle, they are involved in the catastrophe
+which they bring on Cordelia and Lear. Thus we may still find in <i>King
+Lear</i> the usual scheme of an ascending and a descending movement of one
+side in the conflict.</p>
+
+<p>The case of <i>Othello</i> is more peculiar. In its whole constructional
+effect <i>Othello</i> differs from the other tragedies, and the cause of this
+difference is not hard to find, and will be mentioned presently. But
+how, after it is found, are we to define the principle of the
+construction? On the one hand the usual method seems to show itself.
+Othello's fortune certainly advances in the early part of the play, and
+it may be considered to reach its topmost point in the exquisite joy of
+his reunion with Desdemona in Cyprus; while soon afterwards it begins to
+turn, and then falls to the catastrophe. But the topmost point thus
+comes very early (<span class="smcap">ii.</span> i.), and, moreover, is but faintly
+marked; indeed, it is scarcely felt as a crisis at all. And, what is
+still more significant, though reached by conflict, it is not reached by
+conflict with the force which afterwards destroys it. Iago, in the early
+scenes, is indeed shown to cherish a design against Othello, but it is
+not Iago against whom he has at first to assert himself, but Brabantio;
+and Iago does not even begin to poison his mind until the third scene of
+the Third Act.</p>
+
+<p>Can we then, on the other hand, following the precedent of <i>King Lear</i>,
+and remembering the probable chronological juxtaposition of the two
+plays, regard Iago as the leading figure from the point of view of
+construction? This might at first <a name="Page_55" id="Page_55"></a><span class="pagenum">[55]</span>seem the right view; for it is the
+case that <i>Othello</i> resembles <i>King Lear</i> in having a hero more acted
+upon than acting, or rather a hero driven to act by being acted upon.
+But then, if Iago is taken as the leading figure, the usual mode of
+construction is plainly abandoned, for there will nowhere be a crisis
+followed by a descending movement. Iago's cause advances, at first
+slowly and quietly, then rapidly, but it does nothing but advance until
+the catastrophe swallows his dupe and him together. And this way of
+regarding the action does positive violence, I think, to our natural
+impressions of the earlier part of the play.</p>
+
+<p>I think, therefore, that the usual scheme is so far followed that the
+drama represents first the rise of the hero, and then his fall. But,
+however this question may be decided, one striking peculiarity remains,
+and is the cause of the unique effect of <i>Othello</i>. In the first half of
+the play the main conflict is merely incubating; then it bursts into
+life, and goes storming, without intermission or change of direction, to
+its close. Now, in this peculiarity <i>Othello</i> is quite unlike the other
+tragedies; and in the consequent effect, which is that the second half
+of the drama is immeasurably more exciting than the first, it is
+approached only by <i>Antony and Cleopatra</i>. I shall therefore reserve it
+for separate consideration, though in proceeding to speak further of
+Shakespeare's treatment of the tragic conflict I shall have to mention
+some devices which are used in <i>Othello</i> as well as in the other
+tragedies.</p>
+
+
+<h4>3</h4>
+
+<p>Shakespeare's general plan, we have seen, is to show one set of forces
+advancing, in secret or open opposition to the other, to some decisive
+success, and then driven downward to defeat by the reaction it provokes.
+And the advantages of this plan, as seen in such a typical instance as
+<i>Julius</i> <a name="Page_56" id="Page_56"></a><span class="pagenum">[56]</span><i>Caesar</i>, are manifest. It conveys the movement of the conflict
+to the mind with great clearness and force. It helps to produce the
+impression that in his decline and fall the doer's act is returning on
+his own head. And, finally, as used by Shakespeare, it makes the first
+half of the play intensely interesting and dramatic. Action which
+effects a striking change in an existing situation is naturally watched
+with keen interest; and this we find in some of these tragedies. And the
+spectacle, which others exhibit, of a purpose forming itself and, in
+spite of outward obstacles and often of inward resistance, forcing its
+way onward to a happy consummation or a terrible deed, not only gives
+scope to that psychological subtlety in which Shakespeare is scarcely
+rivalled, but is also dramatic in the highest degree.</p>
+
+<p>But when the crisis has been reached there come difficulties and
+dangers, which, if we put Shakespeare for the moment out of mind, are
+easily seen. An immediate and crushing counter-action would, no doubt,
+sustain the interest, but it would precipitate the catastrophe, and
+leave a feeling that there has been too long a preparation for a final
+effect so brief. What seems necessary is a momentary pause, followed by
+a counter-action which mounts at first slowly, and afterwards, as it
+gathers force, with quickening speed. And yet the result of this
+arrangement, it would seem, must be, for a time, a decided slackening of
+tension. Nor is this the only difficulty. The persons who represent the
+counter-action and now take the lead, are likely to be comparatively
+unfamiliar, and therefore unwelcome, to the audience; and, even if
+familiar, they are almost sure to be at first, if not permanently, less
+interesting than those who figured in the ascending movement, and on
+whom attention has been fixed. Possibly, too, their necessary prominence
+<a name="Page_57" id="Page_57"></a><span class="pagenum">[57]</span>may crowd the hero into the back-ground. Hence the point of danger in
+this method of construction seems to lie in that section of the play
+which follows the crisis and has not yet approached the catastrophe. And
+this section will usually comprise the Fourth Act, together, in some
+cases, with a part of the Third and a part of the Fifth.</p>
+
+<p>Shakespeare was so masterly a playwright, and had so wonderful a power
+of giving life to unpromising subjects, that to a large extent he was
+able to surmount this difficulty. But illustrations of it are easily to
+be found in his tragedies, and it is not always surmounted. In almost
+all of them we are conscious of that momentary pause in the action,
+though, as we shall see, it does not generally occur <i>immediately</i> after
+the crisis. Sometimes he allows himself to be driven to keep the hero
+off the stage for a long time while the counter-action is rising;
+Macbeth, Hamlet and Coriolanus during about 450 lines, Lear for nearly
+500, Romeo for about 550 (it matters less here, because Juliet is quite
+as important as Romeo). How can a drama in which this happens compete,
+in its latter part, with <i>Othello</i>? And again, how can deliberations
+between Octavius, Antony and Lepidus, between Malcolm and Macduff,
+between the Capulets, between Laertes and the King, keep us at the
+pitch, I do not say of the crisis, but even of the action which led up
+to it? Good critics&mdash;writers who have criticised Shakespeare's dramas
+from within, instead of applying to them some standard ready-made by
+themselves or derived from dramas and a theatre of quite other kinds
+than his&mdash;have held that some of his greatest tragedies fall off in the
+Fourth Act, and that one or two never wholly recover themselves. And I
+believe most readers would find, if they examined their impressions,
+that to their minds <i>Julius Caesar</i>, <i>Hamlet</i>, <i>King Lear</i> and
+<a name="Page_58" id="Page_58"></a><span class="pagenum">[58]</span><i>Macbeth</i> have all a tendency to 'drag' in this section of the play,
+and that the first and perhaps also the last of these four fail even in
+the catastrophe to reach the height of the greatest scenes that have
+preceded the Fourth Act. I will not ask how far these impressions are
+justified. The difficulties in question will become clearer and will
+gain in interest if we look rather at the means which have been employed
+to meet them, and which certainly have in part, at least, overcome them.</p>
+
+<p>(<i>a</i>) The first of these is always strikingly effective, sometimes
+marvellously so. The crisis in which the ascending force reaches its
+zenith is followed quickly, or even without the slightest pause, by a
+reverse or counter-blow not less emphatic and in some cases even more
+exciting. And the effect is to make us feel a sudden and tragic change
+in the direction of the movement, which, after ascending more or less
+gradually, now turns sharply downward. To the assassination of Caesar
+(<span class="smcap">iii.</span> i.) succeeds the scene in the Forum (<span class="smcap">iii.</span> ii.),
+where Antony carries the people away in a storm of sympathy with the
+dead man and of fury against the conspirators. We have hardly realised
+their victory before we are forced to anticipate their ultimate defeat
+and to take the liveliest interest in their chief antagonist. In
+<i>Hamlet</i> the thrilling success of the play-scene (<span class="smcap">iii.</span> ii.) is
+met and undone at once by the counter-stroke of Hamlet's failure to take
+vengeance (<span class="smcap">iii.</span> iii.) and his misfortune in killing Polonius
+(<span class="smcap">iii.</span> iv.). Coriolanus has no sooner gained the consulship than
+he is excited to frenzy by the tribunes and driven into exile. On the
+marriage of Romeo follows immediately the brawl which leads to
+Mercutio's death and the banishment of the hero (<span class="smcap">ii.</span> vi. and
+<span class="smcap">iii.</span> i.). In all of these instances excepting that of <i>Hamlet</i>
+the scene of the counter-stroke is at least as exciting as that of the
+crisis, perhaps more so. Most people, if asked to mention <a name="Page_59" id="Page_59"></a><span class="pagenum">[59]</span>the scene
+that occupies the <i>centre</i> of the action in <i>Julius Caesar</i> and in
+<i>Coriolanus</i>, would mention the scenes of Antony's speech and
+Coriolanus' banishment. Thus that apparently necessary pause in the
+action does not, in any of these dramas, come directly after the crisis.
+It is deferred; and in several cases it is by various devices deferred
+for some little time; <i>e.g.</i> in <i>Romeo and Juliet</i> till the hero has
+left Verona, and Juliet is told that her marriage with Paris is to take
+place 'next Thursday morn' (end of Act <span class="smcap">iii.</span>); in <i>Macbeth</i> till
+the murder of Duncan has been followed by that of Banquo, and this by
+the banquet-scene. Hence the point where this pause occurs is very
+rarely reached before the end of the Third Act.</p>
+
+<p>(<i>b</i>) Either at this point, or in the scene of the counter-stroke which
+precedes it, we sometimes find a peculiar effect. We are reminded of the
+state of affairs in which the conflict began. The opening of <i>Julius
+Caesar</i> warned us that, among a people so unstable and so easily led
+this way or that, the enterprise of Brutus is hopeless; the days of the
+Republic are done. In the scene of Antony's speech we see this same
+people again. At the beginning of <i>Antony and Cleopatra</i> the hero is
+about to leave Cleopatra for Rome. Where the play takes, as it were, a
+fresh start after the crisis, he leaves Octavia for Egypt. In <i>Hamlet</i>,
+when the counter-stroke succeeds to the crisis, the Ghost, who had
+appeared in the opening scenes, reappears. Macbeth's action in the first
+part of the tragedy followed on the prediction of the Witches who
+promised him the throne. When the action moves forward again after the
+banquet-scene the Witches appear once more, and make those fresh
+promises which again drive him forward. This repetition of a first
+effect produces a fateful feeling. It generally also stimulates
+expectation as to the new movement about to begin. In <i>Macbeth</i> the
+scene is, <a name="Page_60" id="Page_60"></a><span class="pagenum">[60]</span>in addition, of the greatest consequence from the purely
+theatrical point of view.</p>
+
+<p>(<i>c</i>) It has yet another function. It shows, in Macbeth's furious
+irritability and purposeless savagery, the internal reaction which
+accompanies the outward decline of his fortunes. And in other plays also
+the exhibition of such inner changes forms a means by which interest is
+sustained in this difficult section of a tragedy. There is no point in
+<i>Hamlet</i> where we feel more hopeless than that where the hero, having
+missed his chance, moralises over his irresolution and determines to
+cherish now only thoughts of blood, and then departs without an effort
+for England. One purpose, again, of the quarrel-scene between Brutus and
+Cassius (<span class="smcap">iv.</span> iii), as also of the appearance of Caesar's ghost
+just afterwards, is to indicate the inward changes. Otherwise the
+introduction of this famous and wonderful scene can hardly be defended
+on strictly dramatic grounds. No one would consent to part with it, and
+it is invaluable in sustaining interest during the progress of the
+reaction, but it is an episode, the removal of which would not affect
+the actual sequence of events (unless we may hold that, but for the
+emotion caused by the quarrel and reconciliation, Cassius would not have
+allowed Brutus to overcome his objection to the fatal policy of offering
+battle at Philippi).</p>
+
+<p>(<i>d</i>) The quarrel-scene illustrates yet another favourite expedient. In
+this section of a tragedy Shakespeare often appeals to an emotion
+different from any of those excited in the first half of the play, and
+so provides novelty and generally also relief. As a rule this new
+emotion is pathetic; and the pathos is not terrible or lacerating, but,
+even if painful, is accompanied by the sense of beauty and by an outflow
+of admiration or affection, which come with an inexpressible sweetness
+after the tension of the crisis and the first counter-stroke. So it is
+ <a name="Page_61" id="Page_61"></a><span class="pagenum">[61]</span>with the reconciliation of Brutus and Cassius, and the arrival of the
+news of Portia's death. The most famous instance of this effect is the
+scene (<span class="smcap">iv.</span> vii.) where Lear wakes from sleep and finds Cordelia
+bending over him, perhaps the most tear-compelling passage in
+literature. Another is the short scene (<span class="smcap">iv.</span> ii.) in which the
+talk of Lady Macduff and her little boy is interrupted by the entrance
+of the murderers, a passage of touching beauty and heroism. Another is
+the introduction of Ophelia in her madness (twice in different parts of
+<span class="smcap">iv.</span> v.), where the effect, though intensely pathetic, is
+beautiful and moving rather than harrowing; and this effect is repeated
+in a softer tone in the description of Ophelia's death (end of Act
+<span class="smcap">iv.</span>). And in <i>Othello</i> the passage where pathos of <i>this</i> kind
+reaches its height is certainly that where Desdemona and Emilia
+converse, and the willow-song is sung, on the eve of the catastrophe
+(<span class="smcap">iv.</span> iii.).</p>
+
+<p>(<i>e</i>) Sometimes, again, in this section of a tragedy we find humorous or
+semi-humorous passages. On the whole such passages occur most frequently
+in the early or middle part of the play, which naturally grows more
+sombre as it nears the close; but their occasional introduction in the
+Fourth Act, and even later, affords variety and relief, and also
+heightens by contrast the tragic feelings. For example, there is a touch
+of comedy in the conversation of Lady Macduff with her little boy.
+Purely and delightfully humorous are the talk and behaviour of the
+servants in that admirable scene where Coriolanus comes disguised in
+mean apparel to the house of Aufidius (<span class="smcap">iv.</span> v.); of a more
+mingled kind is the effect of the discussion between Menenius and the
+sentinels in <span class="smcap">v.</span> ii.; and in the very middle of the supreme
+scene between the hero, Volumnia and Virgilia, little Marcius makes us
+burst out laughing (<span class="smcap">v.</span> iii.) A little before the catastrophe in
+<i>Hamlet</i> comes the grave-digger passage, a passage ever welcome, but <a name="Page_62" id="Page_62"></a><span class="pagenum">[62]</span>of
+a length which could hardly be defended on purely dramatic grounds; and
+still later, occupying some hundred and twenty lines of the very last
+scene, we have the chatter of Osric with Hamlet's mockery of it. But the
+acme of audacity is reached in <i>Antony and Cleopatra</i>, where, quite
+close to the end, the old countryman who brings the asps to Cleopatra
+discourses on the virtues and vices of the worm, and where his last
+words, 'Yes, forsooth: I wish you joy o' the worm,' are followed,
+without the intervention of a line, by the glorious speech,</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i1">Give me my robe; put on my crown; I have<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Immortal longings in me....<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>In some of the instances of pathos or humour just mentioned we have been
+brought to that part of the play which immediately precedes, or even
+contains, the catastrophe. And I will add at once three remarks which
+refer specially to this final section of a tragedy.</p>
+
+<p>(<i>f</i>) In several plays Shakespeare makes here an appeal which in his own
+time was evidently powerful: he introduces scenes of battle. This is the
+case in <i>Richard III.</i>, <i>Julius Caesar</i>, <i>King Lear</i>, <i>Macbeth</i> and
+<i>Antony and Cleopatra</i>. Richard, Brutus and Cassius, and Macbeth die on
+the battlefield. Even if his use of this expedient were not enough to
+show that battle-scenes were extremely popular in the Elizabethan
+theatre, we know it from other sources. It is a curious comment on the
+futility of our spectacular effects that in our theatre these scenes, in
+which we strive after an 'illusion' of which the Elizabethans never
+dreamt, produce comparatively little excitement, and to many spectators
+are even somewhat distasteful.<a name="FNanchor_22" id="FNanchor_22"></a><a href="#Footnote_22" class="fnanchor">[22]</a> And although some of them thrill the
+imagination of the reader, they rarely, I think, quite satisfy the
+<a name="Page_63" id="Page_63"></a><span class="pagenum">[63]</span><i>dramatic</i> sense. Perhaps this is partly because a battle is not the
+most favourable place for the exhibition of tragic character; and it is
+worth notice that Brutus, Cassius and Antony do not die fighting, but
+commit suicide after defeat. The actual battle, however, does make us
+feel the greatness of Antony, and still more does it help us to regard
+Richard and Macbeth in their day of doom as heroes, and to mingle
+sympathy and enthusiastic admiration with desire for their defeat.</p>
+
+<p>(<i>g</i>) In some of the tragedies, again, an expedient is used, which
+Freytag has pointed out (though he sometimes finds it, I think, where it
+is not really employed). Shakespeare very rarely makes the least attempt
+to surprise by his catastrophes. They are felt to be inevitable, though
+the precise way in which they will be brought about is not, of course,
+foreseen. Occasionally, however, where we dread the catastrophe because
+we love the hero, a moment occurs, just before it, in which a gleam of
+false hope lights up the darkening scene; and, though we know it is
+false, it affects us. Far the most remarkable example is to be found in
+the final Act of <i>King Lear</i>. Here the victory of Edgar and the deaths
+of Edmund and the two sisters have almost made us forget the design on
+the lives of Lear and Cordelia. Even when we are reminded of it there is
+still room for hope that Edgar, who rushes away to the prison, will be
+in time to save them; and, however familiar we are with the play, the
+sudden entrance of Lear, with Cordelia dead in his arms, comes on us
+with a shock. Much slighter, but quite perceptible, is the effect of
+Antony's victory on land, and of the last outburst of pride and joy as
+he and Cleopatra meet (<span class="smcap">iv.</span> viii.). The frank apology of Hamlet
+to Laertes, their reconciliation, and a delusive appearance of quiet and
+even confident firmness in the tone of the hero's conversation with
+Horatio, almost <a name="Page_64" id="Page_64"></a><span class="pagenum">[64]</span>blind us to our better knowledge, and give to the
+catastrophe an added pain. Those in the audience who are ignorant of
+<i>Macbeth</i>, and who take more simply than most readers now can do the
+mysterious prophecies concerning Birnam Wood and the man not born of
+woman, feel, I imagine, just before the catastrophe, a false fear that
+the hero may yet escape.</p>
+
+<p>(<i>h</i>) I will mention only one point more. In some cases Shakespeare
+spreads the catastrophe out, so to speak, over a considerable space, and
+thus shortens that difficult section which has to show the development
+of the counter-action. This is possible only where there is, besides the
+hero, some character who engages our interest in the highest degree, and
+with whose fate his own is bound up. Thus the murder of Desdemona is
+separated by some distance from the death of Othello. The most
+impressive scene in <i>Macbeth</i>, after that of Duncan's murder, is the
+sleep-walking scene; and it may truly, if not literally, be said to show
+the catastrophe of Lady Macbeth. Yet it is the opening scene of the
+Fifth Act, and a number of scenes in which Macbeth's fate is still
+approaching intervene before the close. Finally, in <i>Antony and
+Cleopatra</i> the heroine equals the hero in importance, and here the death
+of Antony actually occurs in the Fourth Act, and the whole of the Fifth
+is devoted to Cleopatra.</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>Let us now turn to <i>Othello</i> and consider briefly its exceptional scheme
+of construction. The advantage of this scheme is obvious. In the second
+half of the tragedy there is no danger of 'dragging,' of any awkward
+pause, any undue lowering of pitch, any need of scenes which, however
+fine, are more or less episodic. The tension is extreme, and it is
+relaxed only for brief intervals to permit of some slight relief. From
+the moment when Iago begins <a name="Page_65" id="Page_65"></a><span class="pagenum">[65]</span>to poison Othello's mind we hold our
+breath. <i>Othello</i> from this point onwards is certainly the most exciting
+of Shakespeare's plays, unless possibly <i>Macbeth</i> in its first part may
+be held to rival it. And <i>Othello</i> is such a masterpiece that we are
+scarcely conscious of any disadvantage attending its method of
+construction, and may even wonder why Shakespeare employed this
+method&mdash;at any rate in its purity&mdash;in this tragedy alone. Nor is it any
+answer to say that it would not elsewhere have suited his material. Even
+if this be granted, how was it that he only once chose a story to which
+this method was appropriate? To his eyes, or for his instinct, there
+must have been some disadvantage in it. And dangers in it are in fact
+not hard to see.</p>
+
+<p>In the first place, where the conflict develops very slowly, or, as in
+<i>Othello</i>, remains in a state of incubation during the first part of a
+tragedy, that part cannot produce the tension proper to the
+corresponding part of a tragedy like <i>Macbeth</i>, and may even run the
+risk of being somewhat flat. This seems obvious, and it is none the less
+true because in <i>Othello</i> the difficulty is overcome. We may even see
+that in <i>Othello</i> a difficulty was felt. The First Act is full of stir,
+but it is so because Shakespeare has filled it with a kind of
+preliminary conflict between the hero and Brabantio,&mdash;a personage who
+then vanishes from the stage. The long first scene of the Second Act is
+largely occupied with mere conversations, artfully drawn out to
+dimensions which can scarcely be considered essential to the plot. These
+expedients are fully justified by their success, and nothing more
+consummate in their way is to be found in Shakespeare than Othello's
+speech to the Senate and Iago's two talks with Roderigo. But the fact
+that Shakespeare can make a plan succeed does not show that the plan is,
+abstractedly considered, a good plan; and if the scheme of <a name="Page_66" id="Page_66"></a><span class="pagenum">[66]</span>construction
+in <i>Othello</i> were placed, in the shape of a mere outline, before a
+play-wright ignorant of the actual drama, he would certainly, I believe,
+feel grave misgivings about the first half of the play.</p>
+
+<p>There is a second difficulty in the scheme. When the middle of the
+tragedy is reached, the audience is not what it was at the beginning. It
+has been attending for some time, and has been through a certain amount
+of agitation. The extreme tension which now arises may therefore easily
+tire and displease it, all the more if the matter which produces the
+tension is very painful, if the catastrophe is not less so, and if the
+limits of the remainder of the play (not to speak of any other
+consideration) permit of very little relief. It is one thing to watch
+the scene of Duncan's assassination at the beginning of the Second Act,
+and another thing to watch the murder of Desdemona at the beginning of
+the Fifth. If Shakespeare has wholly avoided this difficulty in
+<i>Othello</i>, it is by treating the first part of the play in such a manner
+that the sympathies excited are predominantly pleasant and therefore not
+exhausting. The scene in the Council Chamber, and the scene of the
+reunion at Cyprus, give almost unmixed happiness to the audience;
+however repulsive Iago may be, the humour of his gulling of Roderigo is
+agreeable; even the scene of Cassio's intoxication is not, on the whole,
+painful. Hence we come to the great temptation-scene, where the conflict
+emerges into life (<span class="smcap">iii.</span> iii.), with nerves unshaken and
+feelings much fresher than those with which we greet the banquet-scene
+in <i>Macbeth</i> (<span class="smcap">iii.</span> iv.), or the first of the storm-scenes in
+<i>King Lear</i> (<span class="smcap">iii.</span> i.). The same skill may be observed in
+<i>Antony and Cleopatra</i>, where, as we saw, the second half of the tragedy
+is the more exciting. But, again, the success due to Shakespeare's skill
+does not show that the scheme of construction is free from a
+characteristic danger; <a name="Page_67" id="Page_67"></a><span class="pagenum">[67]</span>and on the whole it would appear to be best
+fitted for a plot which, though it may cause painful agitation as it
+nears the end, actually ends with a solution instead of a catastrophe.</p>
+
+<p>But for Shakespeare's scanty use of this method there may have been a
+deeper, though probably an unconscious, reason. The method suits a plot
+based on intrigue. It may produce intense suspense. It may stir most
+powerfully the tragic feelings of pity and fear. And it throws into
+relief that aspect of tragedy in which great or beautiful lives seem
+caught in the net of fate. But it is apt to be less favourable to the
+exhibition of character, to show less clearly how an act returns upon
+the agent, and to produce less strongly the impression of an inexorable
+order working in the passions and actions of men, and labouring through
+their agony and waste towards good. Now, it seems clear from his
+tragedies that what appealed most to Shakespeare was this latter class
+of effects. I do not ask here whether <i>Othello</i> fails to produce, in the
+same degree as the other tragedies, these impressions; but Shakespeare's
+preference for them may have been one reason why he habitually chose a
+scheme of construction which produces in the final Acts but little of
+strained suspense, and presents the catastrophe as a thing foreseen and
+following with a psychological and moral necessity on the action
+exhibited in the first part of the tragedy.</p>
+
+
+<h4>4</h4>
+
+<p>The more minute details of construction cannot well be examined here,
+and I will not pursue the subject further. But its discussion suggests a
+question which will have occurred to some of my hearers. They may have
+asked themselves whether I have not used the words 'art' and 'device'
+and 'expedient' and 'method' too boldly, as though <a name="Page_68" id="Page_68"></a><span class="pagenum">[68]</span>Shakespeare were a
+conscious artist, and not rather a writer who constructed in obedience
+to an extraordinary dramatic instinct, as he composed mainly by
+inspiration. And a brief explanation on this head will enable me to
+allude to a few more points, chiefly of construction, which are not too
+technical for a lecture.</p>
+
+<p>In speaking, for convenience, of devices and expedients, I did not
+intend to imply that Shakespeare always deliberately aimed at the
+effects which he produced. But <i>no</i> artist always does this, and I see
+no reason to doubt that Shakespeare often did it, or to suppose that his
+method of constructing and composing differed, except in degree, from
+that of the most 'conscious' of artists. The antithesis of art and
+inspiration, though not meaningless, is often most misleading.
+Inspiration is surely not incompatible with considerate workmanship. The
+two may be severed, but they need not be so, and where a genuinely
+poetic result is being produced they cannot be so. The glow of a first
+conception must in some measure survive or rekindle itself in the work
+of planning and executing; and what is called a technical expedient may
+'come' to a man with as sudden a glory as a splendid image. Verse may be
+easy and unpremeditated, as Milton says his was, and yet many a word in
+it may be changed many a time, and the last change be more 'inspired'
+than the original. The difference between poets in these matters is no
+doubt considerable, and sometimes important, but it can only be a
+difference of less and more. It is probable that Shakespeare often wrote
+fluently, for Jonson (a better authority than Heminge and Condell) says
+so; and for anything we can tell he may also have constructed with
+unusual readiness. But we know that he revised and re-wrote (for
+instance in <i>Love's Labour's Lost</i> and <i>Romeo and Juliet</i> and <i>Hamlet</i>);
+it is almost impossible that he can have <a name="Page_69" id="Page_69"></a><span class="pagenum">[69]</span>worked out the plots of his
+best plays without much reflection and many experiments; and it appears
+to me scarcely more possible to mistake the signs of deliberate care in
+some of his famous speeches. If a 'conscious artist' means one who holds
+his work away from him, scrutinises and judges it, and, if need be,
+alters it and alters it till it comes as near satisfying him as he can
+make it, I am sure that Shakespeare frequently employed such conscious
+art. If it means, again, an artist who consciously aims at the effects
+he produces, what ground have we for doubting that he frequently
+employed such art, though probably less frequently than a good many
+other poets?</p>
+
+<p>But perhaps the notion of a 'conscious artist' in drama is that of one
+who studies the theory of the art, and even writes with an eye to its
+'rules.' And we know it was long a favourite idea that Shakespeare was
+totally ignorant of the 'rules.' Yet this is quite incredible. The rules
+referred to, such as they were, were not buried in Aristotle's Greek nor
+even hidden away in Italian treatises. He could find pretty well all of
+them in a book so current and famous as Sidney's <i>Defence of Poetry</i>.
+Even if we suppose that he refused to open this book (which is most
+unlikely), how could he possibly remain ignorant of the rules in a
+society of actors and dramatists and amateurs who must have been
+incessantly talking about plays and play-writing, and some of whom were
+ardent champions of the rules and full of contempt for the lawlessness
+of the popular drama? Who can doubt that at the Mermaid Shakespeare
+heard from Jonson's lips much more censure of his offences against 'art'
+than Jonson ever confided to Drummond or to paper? And is it not most
+probable that those battles between the two which Fuller imagines, were
+waged often on the field of dramatic criticism? If Shakespeare, then,
+broke some of the 'rules,' it <a name="Page_70" id="Page_70"></a><span class="pagenum">[70]</span>was not from ignorance. Probably he
+refused, on grounds of art itself, to trouble himself with rules derived
+from forms of drama long extinct. And it is not unlikely that he was
+little interested in theory as such, and more than likely that he was
+impatient of pedantic distinctions between 'pastoral-comical,
+historical-pastoral, tragical-historical,
+tragical-comical-historical-pastoral, scene individable or poem
+unlimited.' But that would not prove that he never reflected on his art,
+or could not explain, if he cared to, what <i>he</i> thought would be good
+general rules for the drama of his own time. He could give advice about
+play-acting. Why should we suppose that he could not give advice about
+play-making?</p>
+
+<p>Still Shakespeare, though in some considerable degree a 'conscious'
+artist, frequently sins against art; and if his sins were not due to
+ignorance or inspiration, they must be accounted for otherwise. Neither
+can there be much doubt about their causes (for they have more than one
+cause), as we shall see if we take some illustrations of the defects
+themselves.</p>
+
+<p>Among these are not to be reckoned certain things which in dramas
+written at the present time would rightly be counted defects. There are,
+for example, in most Elizabethan plays peculiarities of construction
+which would injure a play written for our stage but were perfectly
+well-fitted for that very different stage,&mdash;a stage on which again some
+of the best-constructed plays of our time would appear absurdly faulty.
+Or take the charge of improbability. Shakespeare certainly has
+improbabilities which are defects. They are most frequent in the winding
+up of his comedies (and how many comedies are there in the world which
+end satisfactorily?). But his improbabilities are rarely psychological,
+and in some of his plays there occurs one kind of <a name="Page_71" id="Page_71"></a><span class="pagenum">[71]</span>improbability which
+is no defect, but simply a characteristic which has lost in our day much
+of its former attraction. I mean that the story, in most of the comedies
+and many of the tragedies of the Elizabethans, was <i>intended</i> to be
+strange and wonderful. These plays were tales of romance dramatised, and
+they were meant in part to satisfy the same love of wonder to which the
+romances appealed. It is no defect in the Arthurian legends, or the old
+French romances, or many of the stories in the <i>Decameron</i>, that they
+are improbable: it is a virtue. To criticise them as though they were of
+the same species as a realistic novel, is, we should all say, merely
+stupid. Is it anything else to criticise in the same way <i>Twelfth Night</i>
+or <i>As You Like It</i>? And so, even when the difference between comedy and
+tragedy is allowed for, the improbability of the opening of <i>King Lear</i>,
+so often censured, is no defect. It is not out of character, it is only
+extremely unusual and strange. But it was meant to be so; like the
+marriage of the black Othello with Desdemona, the Venetian senator's
+daughter.</p>
+
+<p>To come then to real defects, (<i>a</i>) one may be found in places where
+Shakespeare strings together a number of scenes, some very short, in
+which the <i>dramatis personae</i> are frequently changed; as though a
+novelist were to tell his story in a succession of short chapters, in
+which he flitted from one group of his characters to another. This
+method shows itself here and there in the pure tragedies (<i>e.g.</i> in the
+last Act of <i>Macbeth</i>), but it appears most decidedly where the
+historical material was undramatic, as in the middle part of <i>Antony and
+Cleopatra</i>. It was made possible by the absence of scenery, and
+doubtless Shakespeare used it because it was the easiest way out of a
+difficulty. But, considered abstractedly, it is a defective method, and,
+even as used by <a name="Page_72" id="Page_72"></a><span class="pagenum">[72]</span>Shakespeare, it sometimes reminds us of the merely
+narrative arrangement common in plays before his time.</p>
+
+<p>(<i>b</i>) We may take next the introduction or excessive development of
+matter neither required by the plot nor essential to the exhibition of
+character: <i>e.g.</i> the references in <i>Hamlet</i> to theatre-quarrels of the
+day, and the length of the player's speech and also of Hamlet's
+directions to him respecting the delivery of the lines to be inserted in
+the 'Murder of Gonzago.' All this was probably of great interest at the
+time when <i>Hamlet</i> was first presented; most of it we should be very
+sorry to miss; some of it seems to bring us close to Shakespeare
+himself; but who can defend it from the point of view of constructive
+art?</p>
+
+<p>(<i>c</i>) Again, we may look at Shakespeare's soliloquies. It will be agreed
+that in listening to a soliloquy we ought never to feel that we are
+being addressed. And in this respect, as in others, many of the
+soliloquies are master-pieces. But certainly in some the purpose of
+giving information lies bare, and in one or two the actor openly speaks
+to the audience. Such faults are found chiefly in the early plays,
+though there is a glaring instance at the end of Belarius's speech in
+<i>Cymbeline</i> (<span class="smcap">iii.</span> iii. 99 ff.), and even in the mature
+tragedies something of this kind may be traced. Let anyone compare, for
+example, Edmund's soliloquy in <i>King Lear</i>, <span class="smcap">i.</span> ii., 'This is
+the excellent foppery of the world,' with Edgar's in <span class="smcap">ii.</span> iii.,
+and he will be conscious that in the latter the purpose of giving
+information is imperfectly disguised.<a name="FNanchor_23" id="FNanchor_23"></a><a href="#Footnote_23" class="fnanchor">[23]</a></p>
+
+<p><a name="Page_73" id="Page_73"></a><span class="pagenum">[73]</span>(<i>d</i>) It cannot be denied, further, that in many of Shakespeare's
+plays, if not in all, there are inconsistencies and contradictions, and
+also that questions are suggested to the reader which it is impossible
+for him to answer with certainty. For instance, some of the indications
+of the lapse of time between Othello's marriage and the events of the
+later Acts flatly contradict one another; and it is impossible to make
+out whether Hamlet was at Court or at the University when his father was
+murdered. But it should be noticed that often what seems a defect of
+this latter kind is not really a defect. For instance, the difficulty
+about Hamlet's age (even if it cannot be resolved by the text alone) did
+not exist for Shakespeare's audience. The moment Burbage entered it must
+have been clear whether the hero was twenty or thirty. And in like
+manner many questions of dramatic interpretation which trouble us could
+never have arisen when the plays were first produced, for the actor
+would be instructed by the author how to render any critical and
+possibly ambiguous passage. (I have heard it remarked, and the remark I
+believe is just, that Shakespeare seems to have relied on such
+instructions less than most of his contemporaries; one fact out of
+several which might be adduced to prove that he did not regard his plays
+as mere stage-dramas of the moment.)</p>
+
+<p>(<i>e</i>) To turn to another field, the early critics were no doubt often
+provokingly wrong when they censured the language of particular passages
+in Shakespeare as obscure, inflated, tasteless, or 'pestered with
+metaphors'; but they were surely right in the general statement that his
+language often shows these faults. And this is a subject which later
+criticism has never fairly faced and examined.</p>
+
+<p><a name="Page_74" id="Page_74"></a><span class="pagenum">[74]</span>(<i>f</i>) Once more, to say that Shakespeare makes all his serious
+characters talk alike,<a name="FNanchor_24" id="FNanchor_24"></a><a href="#Footnote_24" class="fnanchor">[24]</a> and that he constantly speaks through the
+mouths of his <i>dramatis personae</i> without regard to their individual
+natures, would be to exaggerate absurdly; but it is true that in his
+earlier plays these faults are traceable in some degree, and even in
+<i>Hamlet</i> there are striking passages where dramatic appropriateness is
+sacrificed to some other object. When Laertes speaks the lines
+beginning,</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i1">For nature, crescent, does not grow alone<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">In thews and bulk,<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>who can help feeling that Shakespeare is speaking rather than Laertes?
+Or when the player-king discourses for more than twenty lines on the
+instability of human purpose, and when King Claudius afterwards insists
+to Laertes on the same subject at almost equal length, who does not see
+that Shakespeare, thinking but little of dramatic fitness, wishes in
+part simply to write poetry, and partly to impress on the audience
+thoughts which will help them to understand, not the player-king nor yet
+King Claudius, but Hamlet himself, who, on his side,&mdash;and here quite in
+character&mdash;has already enlarged on the same topic in the most famous of
+his soliloquies?</p>
+
+<p>(<i>g</i>) Lastly, like nearly all the dramatists of his day and of times
+much earlier, Shakespeare was fond of 'gnomic' passages, and introduces
+them probably not more freely than his readers like, but more freely
+than, I suppose, a good play-wright now would care to do. These
+passages, it may be observed, are frequently rhymed (<i>e.g.</i> <i>Othello</i>,
+<span class="smcap">i.</span> iii. 201 ff., <span class="smcap">ii.</span> i. 149 ff.). Sometimes they were
+printed in early editions with inverted commas round them, <a name="Page_75" id="Page_75"></a><span class="pagenum">[75]</span>as are in
+the First Quarto Polonius's 'few precepts' to Laertes.</p>
+
+<p>If now we ask whence defects like these arose, we shall observe that
+some of them are shared by the majority of Shakespeare's contemporaries,
+and abound in the dramas immediately preceding his time. They are
+characteristics of an art still undeveloped, and, no doubt, were not
+perceived to be defects. But though it is quite probable that in regard
+to one or two kinds of imperfection (such as the superabundance of
+'gnomic' passages) Shakespeare himself erred thus ignorantly, it is very
+unlikely that in most cases he did so, unless in the first years of his
+career of authorship. And certainly he never can have thought it
+artistic to leave inconsistencies, obscurities, or passages of bombast
+in his work. Most of the defects in his writings must be due to
+indifference or want of care.</p>
+
+<p>I do not say that all were so. In regard, for example, to his occasional
+bombast and other errors of diction, it seems hardly doubtful that his
+perception was sometimes at fault, and that, though he used the English
+language like no one else, he had not that <i>sureness</i> of taste in words
+which has been shown by some much smaller writers. And it seems not
+unlikely that here he suffered from his comparative want of
+'learning,'&mdash;that is, of familiarity with the great writers of
+antiquity. But nine-tenths of his defects are not, I believe, the errors
+of an inspired genius, ignorant of art, but the sins of a great but
+negligent artist. He was often, no doubt, over-worked and pressed for
+time. He knew that the immense majority of his audience were incapable
+of distinguishing between rough and finished work. He often felt the
+degradation of having to live by pleasing them. Probably in hours of
+depression he was quite indifferent to fame, and perhaps in another mood
+the whole business of play-writing seemed to him <a name="Page_76" id="Page_76"></a><span class="pagenum">[76]</span>a little thing. None
+of these thoughts and feelings influenced him when his subject had
+caught hold of him. To imagine that <i>then</i> he 'winged his roving flight'
+for 'gain' or 'glory,' or wrote from any cause on earth but the
+necessity of expression, with all its pains and raptures, is mere folly.
+He was possessed: his mind must have been in a white heat: he worked, no
+doubt, with the <i>furia</i> of Michael Angelo. And if he did not succeed at
+once&mdash;and how can even he have always done so?&mdash;he returned to the
+matter again and again. Such things as the scenes of Duncan's murder or
+Othello's temptation, such speeches as those of the Duke to Claudio and
+of Claudio to his sister about death, were not composed in an hour and
+tossed aside; and if they have defects, they have not what Shakespeare
+thought defects. Nor is it possible that his astonishingly individual
+conceptions of character can have been struck out at a heat: prolonged
+and repeated thought must have gone to them. But of small
+inconsistencies in the plot he was often quite careless. He seems to
+have finished off some of his comedies with a hasty and even
+contemptuous indifference, as if it mattered nothing how the people got
+married, or even who married whom, so long as enough were married
+somehow. And often, when he came to parts of his scheme that were
+necessary but not interesting to him, he wrote with a slack hand, like a
+craftsman of genius who knows that his natural gift and acquired skill
+will turn out something more than good enough for his audience: wrote
+probably fluently but certainly negligently, sometimes only half saying
+what he meant, and sometimes saying the opposite, and now and then, when
+passion was required, lapsing into bombast because he knew he must
+heighten his style but would not take the trouble to inflame his
+imagination. It may truly be said that what injures such <a name="Page_77" id="Page_77"></a><span class="pagenum">[77]</span>passages is
+not inspiration, but the want of it. But, as they are mostly passages
+where no poet could expect to be inspired, it is even more true to say
+that here Shakespeare lacked the conscience of the artist who is
+determined to make everything as good as he can. Such poets as Milton,
+Pope, Tennyson, habitually show this conscience. They left probably
+scarcely anything that they felt they could improve. No one could dream
+of saying that of Shakespeare.</p>
+
+<p>Hence comes what is perhaps the chief difficulty in interpreting his
+works. Where his power or art is fully exerted it really does resemble
+that of nature. It organises and vitalises its product from the centre
+outward to the minutest markings on the surface, so that when you turn
+upon it the most searching light you can command, when you dissect it
+and apply to it the test of a microscope, still you find in it nothing
+formless, general or vague, but everywhere structure, character,
+individuality. In this his great things, which seem to come whenever
+they are wanted, have no companions in literature except the few
+greatest things in Dante; and it is a fatal error to allow his
+carelessness elsewhere to make one doubt whether here one is not seeking
+more than can be found. It is very possible to look for subtlety in the
+wrong places in Shakespeare, but in the right places it is not possible
+to find too much. But then this characteristic, which is one source of
+his endless attraction, is also a source of perplexity. For in those
+parts of his plays which show him neither in his most intense nor in his
+most negligent mood, we are often unable to decide whether something
+that seems inconsistent, indistinct, feeble, exaggerated, is really so,
+or whether it was definitely meant to be as it is, and has an intention
+which we ought to be able to divine; whether, for example, we have
+before us some unusual trait <a name="Page_78" id="Page_78"></a><span class="pagenum">[78]</span>in character, some abnormal movement of
+mind, only surprising to us because we understand so very much less of
+human nature than Shakespeare did, or whether he wanted to get his work
+done and made a slip, or in using an old play adopted hastily something
+that would not square with his own conception, or even refused to
+trouble himself with minutiae which we notice only because we study him,
+but which nobody ever notices in a stage performance. We know well
+enough what Shakespeare is doing when at the end of <i>Measure for
+Measure</i> he marries Isabella to the Duke&mdash;and a scandalous proceeding it
+is; but who can ever feel sure that the doubts which vex him as to some
+not unimportant points in <i>Hamlet</i> are due to his own want of eyesight
+or to Shakespeare's want of care?</p>
+
+<div class="footnotes">
+<div class="footnotehead">FOOTNOTES:</div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_16" id="Footnote_16"></a><a href="#FNanchor_16"><span class="label">[16]</span></a> The famous critics of the Romantic Revival seem to have
+paid very little attention to this subject. Mr. R.G. Moulton has written
+an interesting book on <i>Shakespeare as a Dramatic Artist</i> (1885). In
+parts of my analysis I am much indebted to Gustav Freytag's <i>Technik des
+Dramas</i>, a book which deserves to be much better known than it appears
+to be to Englishmen interested in the drama. I may add, for the benefit
+of classical scholars, that Freytag has a chapter on Sophocles. The
+reader of his book will easily distinguish, if he cares to, the places
+where I follow Freytag, those where I differ from him, and those where I
+write in independence of him. I may add that in speaking of construction
+I have thought it best to assume in my hearers no previous knowledge of
+the subject; that I have not attempted to discuss how much of what is
+said of Shakespeare would apply also to other dramatists; and that I
+have illustrated from the tragedies generally, not only from the chosen
+four.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_17" id="Footnote_17"></a><a href="#FNanchor_17"><span class="label">[17]</span></a> This word throughout the lecture bears the sense it has
+here, which, of course, is not its usual dramatic sense.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_18" id="Footnote_18"></a><a href="#FNanchor_18"><span class="label">[18]</span></a> In the same way a comedy will consist of three parts,
+showing the 'situation,' the 'complication' or 'entanglement,' and the
+<i>d&eacute;nouement</i> or 'solution.'</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_19" id="Footnote_19"></a><a href="#FNanchor_19"><span class="label">[19]</span></a> It is possible, of course, to open the tragedy with the
+conflict already begun, but Shakespeare never does so.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_20" id="Footnote_20"></a><a href="#FNanchor_20"><span class="label">[20]</span></a> When the subject comes from English history, and
+especially when the play forms one of a series, some knowledge may be
+assumed. So in <i>Richard III.</i> Even in <i>Richard II.</i> not a little
+knowledge seems to be assumed, and this fact points to the existence of
+a popular play on the earlier part of Richard's reign. Such a play
+exists, though it is not clear that it is a genuine Elizabethan work.
+See the <i>Jahrbuch d. deutschen Sh.-gesellschaft</i> for 1899.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_21" id="Footnote_21"></a><a href="#FNanchor_21"><span class="label">[21]</span></a> This is one of several reasons why many people enjoy
+reading him, who, on the whole, dislike reading plays. A main cause of
+this very general dislike is that the reader has not a lively enough
+imagination to carry him with pleasure through the exposition, though in
+the theatre, where his imagination is helped, he would experience little
+difficulty.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_22" id="Footnote_22"></a><a href="#FNanchor_22"><span class="label">[22]</span></a> The end of <i>Richard III.</i> is perhaps an exception.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_23" id="Footnote_23"></a><a href="#FNanchor_23"><span class="label">[23]</span></a> I do not discuss the general question of the justification
+of soliloquy, for it concerns not Shakespeare only, but practically all
+dramatists down to quite recent times. I will only remark that neither
+soliloquy nor the use of verse can be condemned on the mere ground that
+they are 'unnatural.' No dramatic language is 'natural'; <i>all</i> dramatic
+language is idealised. So that the question as to soliloquy must be one
+as to the degree of idealisation and the balance of advantages and
+disadvantages. (Since this lecture was written I have read some remarks
+on Shakespeare's soliloquies to much the same effect by E. Kilian in the
+<i>Jahrbuch d. deutschen Shakespeare-Gesellschaft</i> for 1903.)</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_24" id="Footnote_24"></a><a href="#FNanchor_24"><span class="label">[24]</span></a> If by this we mean that these characters all speak what is
+recognisably Shakespeare's style, of course it is true; but it is no
+accusation. Nor does it follow that they all speak alike; and in fact
+they are far from doing so.</p></div>
+</div>
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><a name="Page_79" id="Page_79"></a><span class="pagenum">[79]</span></p>
+<h2><a name="LECTURE_III" id="LECTURE_III"></a>LECTURE III</h2>
+
+<h3>SHAKESPEARE'S TRAGIC PERIOD&mdash;HAMLET</h3>
+
+
+<h4>1</h4>
+
+<p>Before we come to-day to <i>Hamlet</i>, the first of our four tragedies, a
+few remarks must be made on their probable place in Shakespeare's
+literary career. But I shall say no more than seems necessary for our
+restricted purpose, and, therefore, for the most part shall merely be
+stating widely accepted results of investigation, without going into the
+evidence on which they rest.<a name="FNanchor_25" id="FNanchor_25"></a><a href="#Footnote_25" class="fnanchor">[25]</a></p>
+
+<p><a name="Page_80" id="Page_80"></a><span class="pagenum">[80]</span>Shakespeare's tragedies fall into two distinct groups, and these groups
+are separated by a considerable interval. He wrote tragedy&mdash;pure, like
+<i>Romeo and Juliet</i>; historical, like <i>Richard III.</i>&mdash;in the early years
+of his career of authorship, when he was also writing such comedies as
+<i>Love's Labour's Lost</i> and the <i>Midsummer-Night's Dream</i>. Then came a
+time, lasting some half-dozen years, during which he composed the most
+mature and humorous of his English History plays (the plays with
+Falstaff in them), and the best of his romantic comedies (the plays with
+Beatrice and Jaques and Viola in them). There are no tragedies belonging
+to these half-dozen years, nor any dramas approaching tragedy. But now,
+from about 1601 to about 1608, comes tragedy after tragedy&mdash;<i>Julius
+Caesar</i>, <i>Hamlet</i>, <i>Othello</i>, <i>King Lear</i>, <i>Timon of Athens</i>, <i>Macbeth</i>,
+<i>Antony and Cleopatra</i> and <i>Coriolanus</i>; and their companions are plays
+which cannot indeed be called tragedies, but certainly are not comedies
+in the same sense as <i>As You Like It</i> or the <i>Tempest</i>. These seven
+years, accordingly, might, without much risk of misunderstanding, be
+called Shakespeare's tragic period.<a name="FNanchor_26" id="FNanchor_26"></a><a href="#Footnote_26" class="fnanchor">[26]</a> And after it he <a name="Page_81" id="Page_81"></a><span class="pagenum">[81]</span>wrote no more
+tragedies, but chiefly romances more serious and less sunny than <i>As You
+Like It</i>, but not much less serene.</p>
+
+<p>The existence of this distinct tragic period, of a time when the
+dramatist seems to have been occupied almost exclusively with deep and
+painful problems, has naturally helped to suggest the idea that the
+'man' also, in these years of middle age, from thirty-seven to
+forty-four, was heavily burdened in spirit; that Shakespeare turned to
+tragedy not merely for change, or because he felt it to be the greatest
+form of drama and felt himself equal to it, but also because the world
+had come to look dark and terrible to him; and even that the railings of
+Thersites and the maledictions of Timon express his own contempt and
+hatred for mankind. Discussion of this large and difficult subject,
+however, is not necessary to the dramatic appreciation of any of his
+works, and I shall say nothing of it here, but shall pass on at once to
+draw attention to certain stages and changes which may be observed
+within the tragic period. For this purpose too it is needless to raise
+any question as to the respective chronological positions of <i>Othello</i>,
+<i>King Lear</i> and <i>Macbeth</i>. What is important is also generally admitted:
+that <i>Julius Caesar</i> and <i>Hamlet</i> precede these plays, and that <i>Antony
+and Cleopatra</i> and <i>Coriolanus</i> follow them.<a name="FNanchor_27" id="FNanchor_27"></a><a href="#Footnote_27" class="fnanchor">[27]</a></p>
+
+<p>If we consider the tragedies first on the side of their substance, we
+find at once an obvious difference between the first two and the
+remainder. Both Brutus and Hamlet are highly intellectual by nature and
+reflective by habit. Both may even be called, in a popular sense,
+philosophic; Brutus may be called so in a stricter sense. Each, <a name="Page_82" id="Page_82"></a><span class="pagenum">[82]</span>being
+also a 'good' man, shows accordingly, when placed in critical
+circumstances, a sensitive and almost painful anxiety to do right. And
+though they fail&mdash;of course in quite different ways&mdash;to deal
+successfully with these circumstances, the failure in each case is
+connected rather with their intellectual nature and reflective habit
+than with any yielding to passion. Hence the name 'tragedy of thought,'
+which Schlegel gave to <i>Hamlet</i>, may be given also, as in effect it has
+been by Professor Dowden, to <i>Julius Caesar</i>. The later heroes, on the
+other hand, Othello, Lear, Timon, Macbeth, Antony, Coriolanus, have, one
+and all, passionate natures, and, speaking roughly, we may attribute the
+tragic failure in each of these cases to passion. Partly for this
+reason, the later plays are wilder and stormier than the first two. We
+see a greater mass of human nature in commotion, and we see
+Shakespeare's own powers exhibited on a larger scale. Finally,
+examination would show that, in all these respects, the first tragedy,
+<i>Julius Caesar</i>, is further removed from the later type than is the
+second, <i>Hamlet</i>.</p>
+
+<p>These two earlier works are both distinguished from most of the
+succeeding tragedies in another though a kindred respect. Moral evil is
+not so intently scrutinised or so fully displayed in them. In <i>Julius
+Caesar</i>, we may almost say, everybody means well. In <i>Hamlet</i>, though we
+have a villain, he is a small one. The murder which gives rise to the
+action lies outside the play, and the centre of attention within the
+play lies in the hero's efforts to do his duty. It seems clear that
+Shakespeare's interest, since the early days when under Marlowe's
+influence he wrote <i>Richard III.</i>, has not been directed to the more
+extreme or terrible forms of evil. But in the tragedies that follow
+<i>Hamlet</i> the presence of this interest is equally clear. In Iago, in the
+'bad' people of <a name="Page_83" id="Page_83"></a><span class="pagenum">[83]</span><i>King Lear</i>, even in Macbeth and Lady Macbeth, human
+nature assumes shapes which inspire not mere sadness or repulsion but
+horror and dismay. If in <i>Timon</i> no monstrous cruelty is done, we still
+watch ingratitude and selfishness so blank that they provoke a loathing
+we never felt for Claudius; and in this play and <i>King Lear</i> we can
+fancy that we hear at times the <i>saeva indignatio</i>, if not the despair,
+of Swift. This prevalence of abnormal or appalling forms of evil, side
+by side with vehement passion, is another reason why the convulsion
+depicted in these tragedies seems to come from a deeper source, and to
+be vaster in extent, than the conflict in the two earlier plays. And
+here again <i>Julius Caesar</i> is further removed than <i>Hamlet</i> from
+<i>Othello</i>, <i>King Lear</i>, and <i>Macbeth</i>.</p>
+
+<p>But in regard to this second point of difference a reservation must be
+made, on which I will speak a little more fully, because, unlike the
+matter hitherto touched on, its necessity seems hardly to have been
+recognised. <i>All</i> of the later tragedies may be called tragedies of
+passion, but not all of them display these extreme forms of evil.
+Neither of the last two does so. Antony and Coriolanus are, from one
+point of view, victims of passion; but the passion that ruins Antony
+also exalts him, he touches the infinite in it; and the pride and
+self-will of Coriolanus, though terrible in bulk, are scarcely so in
+quality; there is nothing base in them, and the huge creature whom they
+destroy is a noble, even a lovable, being. Nor does either of these
+dramas, though the earlier depicts a corrupt civilisation, include even
+among the minor characters anyone who can be called villainous or
+horrible. Consider, finally, the impression left on us at the close of
+each. It is remarkable that this impression, though very strong, can
+scarcely be called purely tragic; or, if we call it so, at least the
+<a name="Page_84" id="Page_84"></a><span class="pagenum">[84]</span>feeling of reconciliation which mingles with the obviously tragic
+emotions is here exceptionally well-marked. The death of Antony, it will
+be remembered, comes before the opening of the Fifth Act. The death of
+Cleopatra, which closes the play, is greeted by the reader with sympathy
+and admiration, even with exultation at the thought that she has foiled
+Octavius; and these feelings are heightened by the deaths of Charmian
+and Iras, heroically faithful to their mistress, as Emilia was to hers.
+In <i>Coriolanus</i> the feeling of reconciliation is even stronger. The
+whole interest towards the close has been concentrated on the question
+whether the hero will persist in his revengeful design of storming and
+burning his native city, or whether better feelings will at last
+overpower his resentment and pride. He stands on the edge of a crime
+beside which, at least in outward dreadfulness, the slaughter of an
+individual looks insignificant. And when, at the sound of his mother's
+voice and the sight of his wife and child, nature asserts itself and he
+gives way, although we know he will lose his life, we care little for
+that: he has saved his soul. Our relief, and our exultation in the power
+of goodness, are so great that the actual catastrophe which follows and
+mingles sadness with these feelings leaves them but little diminished,
+and as we close the book we feel, it seems to me, more as we do at the
+close of <i>Cymbeline</i> than as we do at the close of <i>Othello</i>. In saying
+this I do not in the least mean to criticise <i>Coriolanus</i>. It is a much
+nobler play as it stands than it would have been if Shakespeare had made
+the hero persist, and we had seen him amid the flaming ruins of Rome,
+awaking suddenly to the enormity of his deed and taking vengeance on
+himself; but that would surely have been an ending more strictly tragic
+than the close of Shakespeare's play. Whether this close was simply due
+to his <a name="Page_85" id="Page_85"></a><span class="pagenum">[85]</span>unwillingness to contradict his historical authority on a point
+of such magnitude we need not ask. In any case <i>Coriolanus</i> is, in more
+than an outward sense, the end of his tragic period. It marks the
+transition to his latest works, in which the powers of repentance and
+forgiveness charm to rest the tempest raised by error and guilt.</p>
+
+<p>If we turn now from the substance of the tragedies to their style and
+versification, we find on the whole a corresponding difference between
+the earlier and the later. The usual assignment of <i>Julius Caesar</i>, and
+even of <i>Hamlet</i>, to the end of Shakespeare's Second Period&mdash;the period
+of <i>Henry V.</i>&mdash;is based mainly, we saw, on considerations of form. The
+general style of the serious parts of the last plays from English
+history is one of full, noble and comparatively equable eloquence. The
+'honey-tongued' sweetness and beauty of Shakespeare's early writing, as
+seen in <i>Romeo and Juliet</i> or the <i>Midsummer-Night's Dream</i>, remain; the
+ease and lucidity remain; but there is an accession of force and weight.
+We find no great change from this style when we come to <i>Julius
+Caesar</i>,<a name="FNanchor_28" id="FNanchor_28"></a><a href="#Footnote_28" class="fnanchor">[28]</a> which may be taken to mark its culmination. At this point
+in Shakespeare's literary development he reaches, if the phrase may be
+pardoned, a limited perfection. Neither thought on the one side, nor
+expression on the other, seems to have any tendency to outrun or contend
+with its fellow. We receive an impression of easy mastery and complete
+harmony, but not so strong an impression of inner power bursting into
+outer life. Shakespeare's style is perhaps nowhere else so free from
+defects, and yet almost every one of his subsequent plays contains
+writing which is greater. To speak <a name="Page_86" id="Page_86"></a><span class="pagenum">[86]</span>familiarly, we feel in <i>Julius
+Caesar</i> that, although not even Shakespeare could better the style he
+has chosen, he has not let himself go.</p>
+
+<p>In reading <i>Hamlet</i> we have no such feeling, and in many parts (for
+there is in the writing of <i>Hamlet</i> an unusual variety<a name="FNanchor_29" id="FNanchor_29"></a><a href="#Footnote_29" class="fnanchor">[29]</a>) we are
+conscious of a decided change. The style in these parts is more rapid
+and vehement, less equable and less simple; and there is a change of the
+same kind in the versification. But on the whole the <i>type</i> is the same
+as in <i>Julius Caesar</i>, and the resemblance of the two plays is decidedly
+more marked than the difference. If Hamlet's soliloquies, considered
+simply as compositions, show a great change from Jaques's speech, 'All
+the world's a stage,' and even from the soliloquies of Brutus, yet
+<i>Hamlet</i> (for instance in the hero's interview with his mother) is like
+<i>Julius Caesar</i>, and unlike the later tragedies, in the fulness of its
+eloquence, and passages like the following belong quite definitely to
+the style of the Second Period:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i1"><i>Mar.</i> It faded on the crowing of the cock.<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Some say that ever 'gainst that season comes<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Wherein our Saviour's birth is celebrated,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">The bird of dawning singeth all night long;<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">And then, they say, no spirit dare stir abroad;<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">The nights are wholesome; then no planets strike,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">No fairy takes, nor witch hath power to charm,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">So hallow'd and so gracious is the time.<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i1"><i>Hor.</i> So have I heard and do in part believe it.<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">But, look, the morn, in russet mantle clad,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Walks o'er the dew of yon high eastward hill.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>This bewitching music is heard again in Hamlet's farewell to Horatio:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i1">If thou didst ever hold me in thy heart,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Absent thee from felicity awhile,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">And in this harsh world draw thy breath in pain,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">To tell my story.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p><a name="Page_87" id="Page_87"></a><span class="pagenum">[87]</span>But after <i>Hamlet</i> this music is heard no more. It is followed by a
+music vaster and deeper, but not the same.</p>
+
+<p>The changes observable in <i>Hamlet</i> are afterwards, and gradually, so
+greatly developed that Shakespeare's style and versification at last
+become almost new things. It is extremely difficult to illustrate this
+briefly in a manner to which no just exception can be taken, for it is
+almost impossible to find in two plays passages bearing a sufficiently
+close resemblance to one another in occasion and sentiment. But I will
+venture to put by the first of those quotations from <i>Hamlet</i> this from
+<i>Macbeth</i>:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i1"><i>Dun.</i> This castle hath a pleasant seat; the air<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Nimbly and sweetly recommends itself<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Unto our gentle senses.<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i1"><i>Ban.</i><span style="margin-left: 7.5em;">This guest of summer,</span><br /></span>
+<span class="i1">The temple-haunting martlet, does approve,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">By his loved mansionry, that the heaven's breath<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Smells wooingly here: no jutty, frieze,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Buttress, nor coign of vantage, but this bird<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Hath made his pendent bed and procreant cradle;<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Where they most breed and haunt, I have observed,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">The air is delicate;<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>and by the second quotation from <i>Hamlet</i> this from <i>Antony and
+Cleopatra</i>:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i1">The miserable change now at my end<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Lament nor sorrow at; but please your thoughts<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">In feeding them with those my former fortunes<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Wherein I lived, the greatest prince o' the world,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">The noblest; and do now not basely die,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Not cowardly put off my helmet to<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">My countryman,&mdash;a Roman by a Roman<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Valiantly vanquish'd. Now my spirit is going;<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">I can no more.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>It would be almost an impertinence to point out in detail how greatly
+these two passages, and especially the second, differ in effect from
+those in <i>Hamlet</i>, written perhaps five or six years earlier. The
+versification, by the time we reach <i>Antony and Cleopatra</i>, has assumed
+a new <a name="Page_88" id="Page_88"></a><span class="pagenum">[88]</span>type; and although this change would appear comparatively slight
+in a typical passage from <i>Othello</i> or even from <i>King Lear</i>, its
+approach through these plays to <i>Timon</i> and <i>Macbeth</i> can easily be
+traced. It is accompanied by a similar change in diction and
+construction. After <i>Hamlet</i> the style, in the more emotional passages,
+is heightened. It becomes grander, sometimes wilder, sometimes more
+swelling, even tumid. It is also more concentrated, rapid, varied, and,
+in construction, less regular, not seldom twisted or elliptical. It is,
+therefore, not so easy and lucid, and in the more ordinary dialogue it
+is sometimes involved and obscure, and from these and other causes
+deficient in charm.<a name="FNanchor_30" id="FNanchor_30"></a><a href="#Footnote_30" class="fnanchor">[30]</a> On the other hand, it is always full of life and
+movement, and in great passages produces sudden, strange, electrifying
+effects which are rarely found in earlier plays, and not so often even
+in <i>Hamlet</i>. The more pervading effect of beauty gives place to what may
+almost be called explosions of sublimity or pathos.</p>
+
+<p>There is room for differences of taste and preference as regards the
+style and versification of the end of Shakespeare's Second Period, and
+those of the later tragedies and last romances. But readers who miss in
+the latter the peculiar enchantment of the earlier will not deny that
+the changes in form are in entire harmony with the inward changes. If
+they object to passages where, to exaggerate a little, the sense has
+rather to be discerned beyond the words than found in them, and if they
+do not wholly enjoy the movement of so typical a speech as this,</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i1">Yes, like enough, high-battled Caesar will<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Unstate his happiness, and be staged to the show,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Against a sworder! I see men's judgements are<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">A parcel of their fortunes; and things outward<br /></span>
+<span class="i1"><a name="Page_89" id="Page_89"></a><span class="pagenum">[89]</span>Do draw the inward quality after them,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">To suffer all alike. That he should dream,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Knowing all measures, the full Caesar will<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Answer his emptiness! Caesar, thou hast subdued<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">His judgement too,<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>they will admit that, in traversing the impatient throng of thoughts not
+always completely embodied, their minds move through an astonishing
+variety of ideas and experiences, and that a style less generally poetic
+than that of <i>Hamlet</i> is also a style more invariably dramatic. It may
+be that, for the purposes of tragedy, the highest point was reached
+during the progress of these changes, in the most critical passages of
+<i>Othello</i>, <i>King Lear</i> and <i>Macbeth</i>.<a name="FNanchor_31" id="FNanchor_31"></a><a href="#Footnote_31" class="fnanchor">[31]</a></p>
+
+
+<h4>2</h4>
+
+<p>Suppose you were to describe the plot of <i>Hamlet</i> to a person quite
+ignorant of the play, and suppose you were careful to tell your hearer
+nothing about Hamlet's character, what impression would your sketch make
+on him? Would he not exclaim: 'What a sensational story! Why, here are
+some eight violent deaths, not to speak of adultery, a ghost, a mad
+woman, and a fight in a grave! If I did not know that the play was
+Shakespeare's, I should have thought it must have been one of those
+early tragedies of blood and horror from which he is said to have
+redeemed the stage'? And would he not then go on to ask: 'But why in the
+world did not Hamlet obey the Ghost at once, and so save seven of those
+eight lives?'</p>
+
+<p>This exclamation and this question both show the same thing, that the
+whole story turns upon the peculiar character of the hero. For without
+this <a name="Page_90" id="Page_90"></a><span class="pagenum">[90]</span>character the story would appear sensational and horrible; and yet
+the actual <i>Hamlet</i> is very far from being so, and even has a less
+terrible effect than <i>Othello</i>, <i>King Lear</i> or <i>Macbeth</i>. And again, if
+we had no knowledge of this character, the story would hardly be
+intelligible; it would at any rate at once suggest that wondering
+question about the conduct of the hero; while the story of any of the
+other three tragedies would sound plain enough and would raise no such
+question. It is further very probable that the main change made by
+Shakespeare in the story as already represented on the stage, lay in a
+new conception of Hamlet's character and so of the cause of his delay.
+And, lastly, when we examine the tragedy, we observe two things which
+illustrate the same point. First, we find by the side of the hero no
+other figure of tragic proportions, no one like Lady Macbeth or Iago, no
+one even like Cordelia or Desdemona; so that, in Hamlet's absence, the
+remaining characters could not yield a Shakespearean tragedy at all.
+And, secondly, we find among them two, Laertes and Fortinbras, who are
+evidently designed to throw the character of the hero into relief. Even
+in the situations there is a curious parallelism; for Fortinbras, like
+Hamlet, is the son of a king, lately dead, and succeeded by his brother;
+and Laertes, like Hamlet, has a father slain, and feels bound to avenge
+him. And with this parallelism in situation there is a strong contrast
+in character; for both Fortinbras and Laertes possess in abundance the
+very quality which the hero seems to lack, so that, as we read, we are
+tempted to exclaim that either of them would have accomplished Hamlet's
+task in a day. Naturally, then, the tragedy of <i>Hamlet</i> with Hamlet left
+out has become the symbol of extreme absurdity; while the character
+itself has probably exerted a greater fascination, and certainly has
+been the subject of more discussion, than any other in the whole
+literature of the world.</p>
+
+<p><a name="Page_91" id="Page_91"></a><span class="pagenum">[91]</span>Before, however, we approach the task of examining it, it is as well to
+remind ourselves that the virtue of the play by no means wholly depends
+on this most subtle creation. We are all aware of this, and if we were
+not so the history of <i>Hamlet</i>, as a stage-play, might bring the fact
+home to us. It is to-day the most popular of Shakespeare's tragedies on
+our stage; and yet a large number, perhaps even the majority of the
+spectators, though they may feel some mysterious attraction in the hero,
+certainly do not question themselves about his character or the cause of
+his delay, and would still find the play exceptionally effective, even
+if he were an ordinary brave young man and the obstacles in his path
+were purely external. And this has probably always been the case.
+<i>Hamlet</i> seems from the first to have been a favourite play; but until
+late in the eighteenth century, I believe, scarcely a critic showed that
+he perceived anything specially interesting in the character. Hanmer, in
+1730, to be sure, remarks that 'there appears no reason at all in nature
+why this young prince did not put the usurper to death as soon as
+possible'; but it does not even cross his mind that this apparent
+'absurdity' is odd and might possibly be due to some design on the part
+of the poet. He simply explains the absurdity by observing that, if
+Shakespeare had made the young man go 'naturally to work,' the play
+would have come to an end at once! Johnson, in like manner, notices that
+'Hamlet is, through the whole piece, rather an instrument than an
+agent,' but it does not occur to him that this peculiar circumstance can
+be anything but a defect in Shakespeare's management of the plot.
+Seeing, they saw not. Henry Mackenzie, the author of <i>The Man of
+Feeling</i>, was, it would seem, the first of our critics to feel the
+'indescribable charm' of Hamlet, and to divine something of
+Shakespeare's intention. 'We see a man,' he writes, 'who in <a name="Page_92" id="Page_92"></a><span class="pagenum">[92]</span>other
+circumstances would have exercised all the moral and social virtues,
+placed in a situation in which even the amiable qualities of his mind
+serve but to aggravate his distress and to perplex his conduct.'<a name="FNanchor_32" id="FNanchor_32"></a><a href="#Footnote_32" class="fnanchor">[32]</a> How
+significant is the fact (if it be the fact) that it was only when the
+slowly rising sun of Romance began to flush the sky that the wonder,
+beauty and pathos of this most marvellous of Shakespeare's creations
+began to be visible! We do not know that they were perceived even in his
+own day, and perhaps those are not wholly wrong who declare that this
+creation, so far from being a characteristic product of the time, was a
+vision of</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i6">the prophetic soul<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Of the wide world dreaming on things to come.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>But the dramatic splendour of the whole tragedy is another matter, and
+must have been manifest not only in Shakespeare's day but even in
+Hanmer's.</p>
+
+<p>It is indeed so obvious that I pass it by, and proceed at once to the
+central question of Hamlet's character. And I believe time will be
+saved, and a good deal of positive interpretation may be introduced, if,
+without examining in detail any one theory, we first distinguish classes
+or types of theory which appear to be in various ways and degrees
+insufficient or mistaken. And we will confine our attention to sane
+theories;&mdash;for on this subject, as on all questions relating to
+Shakespeare, there are plenty of merely lunatic views: the view, for
+example, that Hamlet, being a disguised woman in love with Horatio,
+could hardly help seeming unkind to Ophelia; or the view that, being a
+very clever and wicked young man who wanted to oust his innocent uncle
+from the throne, he 'faked' the Ghost with this intent.</p>
+
+<p><a name="Page_93" id="Page_93"></a><span class="pagenum">[93]</span>But, before we come to our types of theory, it is necessary to touch on
+an idea, not unfrequently met with, which would make it vain labour to
+discuss or propose any theory at all. It is sometimes said that Hamlet's
+character is not only intricate but unintelligible. Now this statement
+might mean something quite unobjectionable and even perhaps true and
+important. It might mean that the character cannot be <i>wholly</i>
+understood. As we saw, there may be questions which we cannot answer
+with certainty now, because we have nothing but the text to guide us,
+but which never arose for the spectators who saw <i>Hamlet</i> acted in
+Shakespeare's day; and we shall have to refer to such questions in these
+lectures. Again, it may be held without any improbability that, from
+carelessness or because he was engaged on this play for several years,
+Shakespeare left inconsistencies in his exhibition of the character
+which must prevent us from being certain of his ultimate meaning. Or,
+possibly, we may be baffled because he has illustrated in it certain
+strange facts of human nature, which he had noticed but of which we are
+ignorant. But then all this would apply in some measure to other
+characters in Shakespeare, and it is not this that is meant by the
+statement that Hamlet is unintelligible. What is meant is that
+Shakespeare <i>intended</i> him to be so, because he himself was feeling
+strongly, and wished his audience to feel strongly, what a mystery life
+is, and how impossible it is for us to understand it. Now here, surely,
+we have mere confusion of mind. The mysteriousness of life is one thing,
+the psychological unintelligibility of a dramatic character is quite
+another; and the second does not show the first, it shows only the
+incapacity or folly of the dramatist. If it did show the first, it would
+be very easy to surpass Shakespeare in producing a sense of mystery: we
+should simply have to portray an absolutely nonsensical character. Of
+course <i>Hamlet</i> appeals powerfully <a name="Page_94" id="Page_94"></a><span class="pagenum">[94]</span>to our sense of the mystery of life,
+but so does <i>every</i> good tragedy; and it does so not because the hero is
+an enigma to us, but because, having a fair understanding of him, we
+feel how strange it is that strength and weakness should be so mingled
+in one soul, and that this soul should be doomed to such misery and
+apparent failure.</p>
+
+<p>(1) To come, then, to our typical views, we may lay it down, first, that
+no theory will hold water which finds the cause of Hamlet's delay
+merely, or mainly, or even to any considerable extent, in external
+difficulties. Nothing is easier than to spin a plausible theory of this
+kind. What, it may be asked,<a name="FNanchor_33" id="FNanchor_33"></a><a href="#Footnote_33" class="fnanchor">[33]</a> was Hamlet to do when the Ghost had
+left him with its commission of vengeance? The King was surrounded not
+merely by courtiers but by a Swiss body-guard: how was Hamlet to get at
+him? Was he then to accuse him publicly of the murder? If he did, what
+would happen? How would he prove the charge? All that he had to offer in
+proof was&mdash;a ghost-story! Others, to be sure, had seen the Ghost, but no
+one else had heard its revelations. Obviously, then, even if the court
+had been honest, instead of subservient and corrupt, it would have voted
+Hamlet mad, or worse, and would have shut him up out of harm's way. He
+could not see what to do, therefore, and so he waited. Then came the
+actors, and at once with admirable promptness he arranged for the
+play-scene, hoping that the King would betray his guilt to the whole
+court. Unfortunately the King did not. It is true that immediately
+afterwards Hamlet got his chance; for he found the King defenceless on
+his knees. But what Hamlet wanted was not a private revenge, to be
+followed by his own imprisonment or execution; it was public justice. So
+he <a name="Page_95" id="Page_95"></a><span class="pagenum">[95]</span>spared the King; and, as he unluckily killed Polonius just
+afterwards, he had to consent to be despatched to England. But, on the
+voyage there, he discovered the King's commission, ordering the King of
+England to put him immediately to death; and, with this in his pocket,
+he made his way back to Denmark. For now, he saw, the proof of the
+King's attempt to murder him would procure belief also for the story of
+the murder of his father. His enemy, however, was too quick for him, and
+his public arraignment of that enemy was prevented by his own death.</p>
+
+<p>A theory like this sounds very plausible&mdash;so long as you do not remember
+the text. But no unsophisticated mind, fresh from the reading of
+<i>Hamlet</i>, will accept it; and, as soon as we begin to probe it, fatal
+objections arise in such numbers that I choose but a few, and indeed I
+think the first of them is enough.</p>
+
+<p>(<i>a</i>) From beginning to end of the play, Hamlet never makes the
+slightest reference to any external difficulty. How is it possible to
+explain this fact in conformity with the theory? For what conceivable
+reason should Shakespeare conceal from us so carefully the key to the
+problem?</p>
+
+<p>(<i>b</i>) Not only does Hamlet fail to allude to such difficulties, but he
+always assumes that he <i>can</i> obey the Ghost,<a name="FNanchor_34" id="FNanchor_34"></a><a href="#Footnote_34" class="fnanchor">[34]</a> and he once asserts
+this in so many words ('Sith I have cause and will and strength and
+means To do't,' <span class="smcap">iv.</span> iv. 45).</p>
+
+<p>(<i>c</i>) Again, why does Shakespeare exhibit Laertes quite easily raising
+the people against the King? Why but to show how much more easily
+Hamlet, whom the people loved, could have done the same thing, if that
+was the plan he preferred?</p>
+
+<p>(<i>d</i>) Again, Hamlet did <i>not</i> plan the play-scene in the hope that the
+King would betray his guilt to <a name="Page_96" id="Page_96"></a><span class="pagenum">[96]</span>the court. He planned it, according to
+his own account, in order to convince <i>himself</i> by the King's agitation
+that the Ghost had spoken the truth. This is perfectly clear from
+<span class="smcap">ii.</span> ii. 625 ff. and from <span class="smcap">iii.</span> ii. 80 ff. Some readers
+are misled by the words in the latter passage:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i7">if his occulted guilt<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Do not itself unkennel in one speech,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">It is a damned ghost that we have seen.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>The meaning obviously is, as the context shows, 'if his hidden guilt do
+not betray itself <i>on occasion of</i> one speech,' viz., the 'dozen or
+sixteen lines' with which Hamlet has furnished the player, and of which
+only six are delivered, because the King does not merely show his guilt
+in his face (which was all Hamlet had hoped, <span class="smcap">iii.</span> ii. 90) but
+rushes from the room.</p>
+
+<p>It may be as well to add that, although Hamlet's own account of his
+reason for arranging the play-scene may be questioned, it is impossible
+to suppose that, if his real design had been to provoke an open
+confession of guilt, he could have been unconscious of this design.</p>
+
+<p>(<i>e</i>) Again, Hamlet never once talks, or shows a sign of thinking, of
+the plan of bringing the King to public justice; he always talks of
+using his 'sword' or his 'arm.' And this is so just as much after he has
+returned to Denmark with the commission in his pocket as it was before
+this event. When he has told Horatio the story of the voyage, he does
+not say, 'Now I can convict him': he says, 'Now am I not justified in
+using this arm?'</p>
+
+<p>This class of theory, then, we must simply reject. But it suggests two
+remarks. It is of course quite probable that, when Hamlet was 'thinking
+too precisely on the event,' he was considering, among other things, the
+question how he could avenge his father without sacrificing his own life
+or freedom. And assuredly, also, he was anxious that his act of
+<a name="Page_97" id="Page_97"></a><span class="pagenum">[97]</span>vengeance should not be misconstrued, and would never have been content
+to leave a 'wounded name' behind him. His dying words prove that.</p>
+
+<p>(2) Assuming, now, that Hamlet's main difficulty&mdash;almost the whole of
+his difficulty&mdash;was internal, I pass to views which, acknowledging this,
+are still unsatisfactory because they isolate one element in his
+character and situation and treat it as the whole.</p>
+
+<p>According to the first of these typical views, Hamlet was restrained by
+conscience or a moral scruple; he could not satisfy himself that it was
+right to avenge his father.</p>
+
+<p>This idea, like the first, can easily be made to look very plausible if
+we vaguely imagine the circumstances without attending to the text. But
+attention to the text is fatal to it. For, on the one hand, scarcely
+anything can be produced in support of it, and, on the other hand, a
+great deal can be produced in its disproof. To take the latter point
+first, Hamlet, it is impossible to deny, habitually assumes, without any
+questioning, that he <i>ought</i> to avenge his father. Even when he doubts,
+or thinks that he doubts, the honesty of the Ghost, he expresses no
+doubt as to what his duty will be if the Ghost turns out honest: 'If he
+but blench I know my course.' In the two soliloquies where he reviews
+his position (<span class="smcap">ii.</span> ii., 'O what a rogue and peasant slave am I,'
+and <span class="smcap">iv.</span> iv., 'How all occasions do inform against me') he
+reproaches himself bitterly for the neglect of his duty. When he
+reflects on the possible causes of this neglect he never mentions among
+them a moral scruple. When the Ghost appears in the Queen's chamber he
+confesses, conscience-stricken, that, lapsed in time and passion, he has
+let go by the acting of its command; but he does not plead that his
+conscience stood in his way. The Ghost itself says that it comes to whet
+his 'almost blunted purpose'; and conscience may unsettle a purpose but
+does not blunt it. <a name="Page_98" id="Page_98"></a><span class="pagenum">[98]</span>What natural explanation of all this can be given on
+the conscience theory?</p>
+
+<p>And now what can be set against this evidence? One solitary passage.<a name="FNanchor_35" id="FNanchor_35"></a><a href="#Footnote_35" class="fnanchor">[35]</a>
+Quite late, after Hamlet has narrated to Horatio the events of his
+voyage, he asks him (<span class="smcap">v.</span> ii. 63):</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i1">Does it not, thinks't thee, stand me now upon&mdash;<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">He that hath kill'd my king and whored my mother,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Popp'd in between the election and my hopes,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Thrown out his angle for my proper life,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">And with such cozenage&mdash;is't not perfect conscience<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">To quit him with this arm? and is't not to be damn'd<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">To let this canker of our nature come<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">In further evil?<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>Here, certainly, is a question of conscience in the usual present sense
+of the word; and, it may be said, does not this show that all along
+Hamlet really has been deterred by moral scruples? But I ask first how,
+in that case, the facts just adduced are to be explained: for they must
+be explained, not ignored. Next, let the reader observe that even if
+this passage did show that <i>one</i> hindrance to Hamlet's action was his
+conscience, it by no means follows that this was the sole or the chief
+hindrance. And, thirdly, let him observe, and let him ask himself
+whether the coincidence is a mere accident, that Hamlet is here almost
+repeating the words <a name="Page_99" id="Page_99"></a><span class="pagenum">[99]</span>he used in vain self-reproach some time before
+(<span class="smcap">iv.</span> iv. 56):</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i9">How stand I then,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">That have a father kill'd, a mother stain'd,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Excitements of my reason and my blood,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">And let all sleep?<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>Is it not clear that he is speculating just as vainly now, and that this
+question of conscience is but one of his many unconscious excuses for
+delay? And, lastly, is it not so that Horatio takes it? He declines to
+discuss that unreal question, and answers simply,</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i1">It must be shortly known to him from England<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">What is the issue of the business there.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>In other words, 'Enough of this endless procrastination. What is wanted
+is not reasons for the deed, but the deed itself.' What can be more
+significant?</p>
+
+<p>Perhaps, however, it may be answered: 'Your explanation of this passage
+may be correct, and the facts you have mentioned do seem to be fatal to
+the theory of conscience in its usual form. But there is another and
+subtler theory of conscience. According to it, Hamlet, so far as his
+explicit consciousness went, was sure that he ought to obey the Ghost;
+but in the depths of his nature, and unknown to himself, there was a
+moral repulsion to the deed. The conventional moral ideas of his time,
+which he shared with the Ghost, told him plainly that he ought to avenge
+his father; but a deeper conscience in him, which was in advance of his
+time, contended with these explicit conventional ideas. It is because
+this deeper conscience remains below the surface that he fails to
+recognise it, and fancies he is hindered by cowardice or sloth or
+passion or what not; but it emerges into light in that speech to
+Horatio. And it is just because he has this nobler moral nature in him
+that we admire and love him.'</p>
+
+<p><a name="Page_100" id="Page_100"></a><span class="pagenum">[100]</span>Now I at once admit not only that this view is much more attractive and
+more truly tragic than the ordinary conscience theory, but that it has
+more verisimilitude. But I feel no doubt that it does not answer to
+Shakespeare's meaning, and I will simply mention, out of many objections
+to it, three which seem to be fatal. (<i>a</i>) If it answers to
+Shakespeare's meaning, why in the world did he conceal that meaning
+until the last Act? The facts adduced above seem to show beyond question
+that, on the hypothesis, he did so. That he did so is surely next door
+to incredible. In any case, it certainly requires an explanation, and
+certainly has not received one. (<i>b</i>) Let us test the theory by
+reference to a single important passage, that where Hamlet finds the
+King at prayer and spares him. The reason Hamlet gives himself for
+sparing the King is that, if he kills him now, he will send him to
+heaven, whereas he desires to send him to hell. Now, this reason may be
+an unconscious excuse, but is it believable that, if the real reason had
+been the stirrings of his deeper conscience, <i>that</i> could have masked
+itself in the form of a desire to send his enemy's soul to hell? Is not
+the idea quite ludicrous? (<i>c</i>) The theory requires us to suppose that,
+when the Ghost enjoins Hamlet to avenge the murder of his father, it is
+laying on him a duty which <i>we</i> are to understand to be no duty but the
+very reverse. And is not that supposition wholly contrary to the natural
+impression which we all receive in reading the play? Surely it is clear
+that, whatever we in the twentieth century may think about Hamlet's
+duty, we are meant in the play to assume that he <i>ought</i> to have obeyed
+the Ghost.</p>
+
+<p>The conscience theory, then, in either of its forms we must reject. But
+it may remind us of points worth noting. In the first place, it is
+certainly true that Hamlet, in spite of some appearances to the
+<a name="Page_101" id="Page_101"></a><span class="pagenum">[101]</span>contrary, was, as Goethe said, of a most moral nature, and had a great
+anxiety to do right. In this anxiety he resembles Brutus, and it is
+stronger in him than in any of the later heroes. And, secondly, it is
+highly probable that in his interminable broodings the kind of paralysis
+with which he was stricken masked itself in the shape of conscientious
+scruples as well as in many other shapes. And, finally, in his shrinking
+from the deed there was probably, together with much else, something
+which may be called a moral, though not a conscientious, repulsion: I
+mean a repugnance to the idea of falling suddenly on a man who could not
+defend himself. This, so far as we can see, was the only plan that
+Hamlet ever contemplated. There is no positive evidence in the play that
+he regarded it with the aversion that any brave and honourable man, one
+must suppose, would feel for it; but, as Hamlet certainly was brave and
+honourable, we may presume that he did so.</p>
+
+<p>(3) We come next to what may be called the sentimental view of Hamlet, a
+view common both among his worshippers and among his defamers. Its germ
+may perhaps be found in an unfortunate phrase of Goethe's (who of course
+is not responsible for the whole view): 'a lovely, pure and most moral
+nature, <i>without the strength of nerve which forms a hero</i>, sinks
+beneath a burden which it cannot bear and must not cast away.' When this
+idea is isolated, developed and popularised, we get the picture of a
+graceful youth, sweet and sensitive, full of delicate sympathies and
+yearning aspirations, shrinking from the touch of everything gross and
+earthly; but frail and weak, a kind of Werther, with a face like
+Shelley's and a voice like Mr. Tree's. And then we ask in tender pity,
+how could such a man perform the terrible duty laid on him?</p>
+
+<p>How, indeed! And what a foolish Ghost even to suggest such a duty! But
+this conception, <a name="Page_102" id="Page_102"></a><span class="pagenum">[102]</span>though not without its basis in certain beautiful
+traits of Hamlet's nature, is utterly untrue. It is too kind to Hamlet
+on one side, and it is quite unjust to him on another. The 'conscience'
+theory at any rate leaves Hamlet a great nature which you can admire and
+even revere. But for the 'sentimental' Hamlet you can feel only pity not
+unmingled with contempt. Whatever else he is, he is no <i>hero</i>.</p>
+
+<p>But consider the text. This shrinking, flower-like youth&mdash;how could he
+possibly have done what we <i>see</i> Hamlet do? What likeness to him is
+there in the Hamlet who, summoned by the Ghost, bursts from his
+terrified friends with the cry:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i9">Unhand me, gentlemen!<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">By heaven, I'll make a ghost of him that lets me;<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>the Hamlet who scarcely once speaks to the King without an insult, or to
+Polonius without a gibe; the Hamlet who storms at Ophelia and speaks
+daggers to his mother; the Hamlet who, hearing a cry behind the arras,
+whips out his sword in an instant and runs the eavesdropper through; the
+Hamlet who sends his 'school-fellows' to their death and never troubles
+his head about them more; the Hamlet who is the first man to board a
+pirate ship, and who fights with Laertes in the grave; the Hamlet of the
+catastrophe, an omnipotent fate, before whom all the court stands
+helpless, who, as the truth breaks upon him, rushes on the King, drives
+his foil right through his body,<a name="FNanchor_36" id="FNanchor_36"></a><a href="#Footnote_36" class="fnanchor">[36]</a> then seizes the poisoned cup and
+forces it violently between the wretched man's lips, and in the throes
+of death has force and fire enough to wrest the cup from Horatio's hand
+('By heaven, I'll have it!') lest he should drink and die? This man, the
+Hamlet of the play, is a heroic, terrible figure. <a name="Page_103" id="Page_103"></a><span class="pagenum">[103]</span>He would have been
+formidable to Othello or Macbeth. If the sentimental Hamlet had crossed
+him, he would have hurled him from his path with one sweep of his arm.</p>
+
+<p>This view, then, or any view that approaches it, is grossly unjust to
+Hamlet, and turns tragedy into mere pathos. But, on the other side, it
+is too kind to him. It ignores the hardness and cynicism which were
+indeed no part of his nature, but yet, in this crisis of his life, are
+indubitably present and painfully marked. His sternness, itself left out
+of sight by this theory, is no defect; but he is much more than stern.
+Polonius possibly deserved nothing better than the words addressed to
+his corpse:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i1">Thou wretched, rash, intruding fool, farewell!<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">I took thee for thy better: take thy fortune:<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Thou find'st to be too busy is some danger;<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>yet this was Ophelia's father, and, whatever he deserved, it pains us,
+for Hamlet's own sake, to hear the words:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i1">This man shall set me packing:<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">I'll lug the guts into the neighbour room.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>There is the same insensibility in Hamlet's language about the fate of
+Rosencrantz and Guildenstern; and, observe, their deaths were not in the
+least required by his purpose. Grant, again, that his cruelty to Ophelia
+was partly due to misunderstanding, partly forced on him, partly
+feigned; still one surely cannot altogether so account for it, and still
+less can one so account for the disgusting and insulting grossness of
+his language to her in the play-scene. I know this is said to be merely
+an example of the custom of Shakespeare's time. But it is not so. It is
+such language as you will find addressed to a woman by no other hero of
+Shakespeare's, not even in that dreadful scene where Othello accuses
+Desdemona. It is a great mistake <a name="Page_104" id="Page_104"></a><span class="pagenum">[104]</span>to ignore these things, or to try to
+soften the impression which they naturally make on one. That this
+embitterment, callousness, grossness, brutality, should be induced on a
+soul so pure and noble is profoundly tragic; and Shakespeare's business
+was to show this tragedy, not to paint an ideally beautiful soul
+unstained and undisturbed by the evil of the world and the anguish of
+conscious failure.<a name="FNanchor_37" id="FNanchor_37"></a><a href="#Footnote_37" class="fnanchor">[37]</a></p>
+
+<p>(4) There remains, finally, that class of view which may be named after
+Schlegel and Coleridge. According to this, <i>Hamlet</i> is the tragedy of
+reflection. The cause of the hero's delay is irresolution; and the cause
+of this irresolution is excess of the reflective or speculative habit of
+mind. He has a general intention to obey the Ghost, but 'the native hue
+of resolution is sicklied o'er with the <a name="Page_105" id="Page_105"></a><span class="pagenum">[105]</span>pale cast of thought.' He is
+'thought-sick.' 'The whole,' says Schlegel, 'is intended to show how a
+calculating consideration which aims at exhausting, so far as human
+foresight can, all the relations and possible consequences of a deed,
+cripples<a name="FNanchor_38" id="FNanchor_38"></a><a href="#Footnote_38" class="fnanchor">[38]</a> the power of acting.... Hamlet is a hypocrite towards
+himself; his far-fetched scruples are often mere pretexts to cover his
+want of determination.... He has no firm belief in himself or in
+anything else.... He loses himself in labyrinths of thought.' So
+Coleridge finds in Hamlet 'an almost enormous intellectual activity and
+a proportionate aversion to real action consequent upon it' (the
+aversion, that is to say, is consequent on the activity). Professor
+Dowden objects to this view, very justly, that it neglects the emotional
+side of Hamlet's character, 'which is quite as important as the
+intellectual'; but, with this supplement, he appears on the whole to
+adopt it. Hamlet, he says, 'loses a sense of fact because with him each
+object and event transforms and expands itself into an idea.... He
+cannot steadily keep alive within himself a sense of the importance of
+any positive, limited thing,&mdash;a deed, for example.' And Professor Dowden
+explains this condition by reference to Hamlet's life. 'When the play
+opens he has reached the age of thirty years ... and he has received
+culture of every kind except the culture of active life. During the
+reign of the strong-willed elder Hamlet there was no call to action for
+his meditative son. He has slipped on into years of full manhood still a
+haunter of the university, a student of philosophies, an amateur in art,
+a ponderer on the things of life and death, who has never formed a
+resolution or executed a deed' (<i>Shakspere, his Mind and Art</i>, 4th ed.,
+pp. 132, 133).</p>
+
+<p>On the whole, the Schlegel-Coleridge theory (with or without Professor
+Dowden's modification <a name="Page_106" id="Page_106"></a><span class="pagenum">[106]</span>and amplification) is the most widely received
+view of Hamlet's character. And with it we come at last into close
+contact with the text of the play. It not only answers, in some
+fundamental respects, to the general impression produced by the drama,
+but it can be supported by Hamlet's own words in his soliloquies&mdash;such
+words, for example, as those about the native hue of resolution, or
+those about the craven scruple of thinking too precisely on the event.
+It is confirmed, also, by the contrast between Hamlet on the one side
+and Laertes and Fortinbras on the other; and, further, by the occurrence
+of those words of the King to Laertes (<span class="smcap">iv.</span> vii. 119 f.), which,
+if they are not in character, are all the more important as showing what
+was in Shakespeare's mind at the time:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i8">that we would do<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">We should do when we would; for this 'would' changes,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">And hath abatements and delays as many<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">As there are tongues, are hands, are accidents;<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">And then this 'should' is like a spendthrift sigh<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">That hurts by easing.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>And, lastly, even if the view itself does not suffice, the <i>description</i>
+given by its adherents of Hamlet's state of mind, as we see him in the
+last four Acts, is, on the whole and so far as it goes, a true
+description. The energy of resolve is dissipated in an endless brooding
+on the deed required. When he acts, his action does not proceed from
+this deliberation and analysis, but is sudden and impulsive, evoked by
+an emergency in which he has no time to think. And most of the reasons
+he assigns for his procrastination are evidently not the true reasons,
+but unconscious excuses.</p>
+
+<p>Nevertheless this theory fails to satisfy. And it fails not merely in
+this or that detail, but as a whole. We feel that its Hamlet does not
+fully answer to our imaginative impression. He is not nearly so
+inadequate to this impression as the <a name="Page_107" id="Page_107"></a><span class="pagenum">[107]</span>sentimental Hamlet, but still we
+feel he is inferior to Shakespeare's man and does him wrong. And when we
+come to examine the theory we find that it is partial and leaves much
+unexplained. I pass that by for the present, for we shall see, I
+believe, that the theory is also positively misleading, and that in a
+most important way. And of this I proceed to speak.</p>
+
+<p>Hamlet's irresolution, or his aversion to real action, is, according to
+the theory, the <i>direct</i> result of 'an almost enormous intellectual
+activity' in the way of 'a calculating consideration which attempts to
+exhaust all the relations and possible consequences of a deed.' And this
+again proceeds from an original one-sidedness of nature, strengthened by
+habit, and, perhaps, by years of speculative inaction. The theory
+describes, therefore, a man in certain respects like Coleridge himself,
+on one side a man of genius, on the other side, the side of will,
+deplorably weak, always procrastinating and avoiding unpleasant duties,
+and often reproaching himself in vain; a man, observe, who at <i>any</i> time
+and in <i>any</i> circumstances would be unequal to the task assigned to
+Hamlet. And thus, I must maintain, it degrades Hamlet and travesties the
+play. For Hamlet, according to all the indications in the text, was not
+naturally or normally such a man, but rather, I venture to affirm, a man
+who at any <i>other</i> time and in any <i>other</i> circumstances than those
+presented would have been perfectly equal to his task; and it is, in
+fact, the very cruelty of his fate that the crisis of his life comes on
+him at the one moment when he cannot meet it, and when his highest
+gifts, instead of helping him, conspire to paralyse him. This aspect of
+the tragedy the theory quite misses; and it does so because it
+misconceives the cause of that irresolution which, on the whole, it
+truly describes. For the cause was not directly or mainly an habitual
+excess <a name="Page_108" id="Page_108"></a><span class="pagenum">[108]</span>of reflectiveness. The direct cause was a state of mind quite
+abnormal and induced by special circumstances,&mdash;a state of profound
+melancholy. Now, Hamlet's reflectiveness doubtless played a certain part
+in the <i>production</i> of that melancholy, and was thus one indirect
+contributory cause of his irresolution. And, again, the melancholy, once
+established, displayed, as one of its <i>symptoms</i>, an excessive
+reflection on the required deed. But excess of reflection was not, as
+the theory makes it, the <i>direct</i> cause of the irresolution at all; nor
+was it the <i>only</i> indirect cause; and in the Hamlet of the last four
+Acts it is to be considered rather a symptom of his state than a cause
+of it.</p>
+
+<p>These assertions may be too brief to be at once clear, but I hope they
+will presently become so.</p>
+
+
+<h4>3</h4>
+
+<p>Let us first ask ourselves what we can gather from the play, immediately
+or by inference, concerning Hamlet as he was just before his father's
+death. And I begin by observing that the text does not bear out the idea
+that he was one-sidedly reflective and indisposed to action. Nobody who
+knew him seems to have noticed this weakness. Nobody regards him as a
+mere scholar who has 'never formed a resolution or executed a deed.' In
+a court which certainly would not much admire such a person he is the
+observed of all observers. Though he has been disappointed of the throne
+everyone shows him respect; and he is the favourite of the people, who
+are not given to worship philosophers. Fortinbras, a sufficiently
+practical man, considered that he was likely, had he been put on, to
+have proved most royally. He has Hamlet borne by four captains 'like a
+soldier' to his grave; and Ophelia says that Hamlet <i>was</i> a soldier. If
+he was fond of acting, an aesthetic <a name="Page_109" id="Page_109"></a><span class="pagenum">[109]</span>pursuit, he was equally fond of
+fencing, an athletic one: he practised it assiduously even in his worst
+days.<a name="FNanchor_39" id="FNanchor_39"></a><a href="#Footnote_39" class="fnanchor">[39]</a> So far as we can conjecture from what we see of him in those
+bad days, he must normally have been charmingly frank, courteous and
+kindly to everyone, of whatever rank, whom he liked or respected, but by
+no means timid or deferential to others; indeed, one would gather that
+he was rather the reverse, and also that he was apt to be decided and
+even imperious if thwarted or interfered with. He must always have been
+fearless,&mdash;in the play he appears insensible to fear of any ordinary
+kind. And, finally, he must have been quick and impetuous in action; for
+it is downright impossible that the man we see rushing after the Ghost,
+killing Polonius, dealing with the King's commission on the ship,
+boarding the pirate, leaping into the grave, executing his final
+vengeance, could <i>ever</i> have been shrinking or slow in an emergency.
+Imagine Coleridge doing any of these things!</p>
+
+<p>If we consider all this, how can we accept the notion that Hamlet's was
+a weak and one-sided character? 'Oh, but he spent ten or twelve years at
+a University!' Well, even if he did, it is possible to do that without
+becoming the victim of excessive thought. But the statement that he did
+rests upon a most insecure foundation.<a name="FNanchor_40" id="FNanchor_40"></a><a href="#Footnote_40" class="fnanchor">[40]</a></p>
+
+<p>Where then are we to look for the seeds of danger?</p>
+
+<p>(1) Trying to reconstruct from the Hamlet of the play, one would not
+judge that his temperament was melancholy in the present sense of the
+word; there seems nothing to show that; but one would judge that by
+temperament he <a name="Page_110" id="Page_110"></a><span class="pagenum">[110]</span>was inclined to nervous instability, to rapid and
+perhaps extreme changes of feeling and mood, and that he was disposed to
+be, for the time, absorbed in the feeling or mood that possessed him,
+whether it were joyous or depressed. This temperament the Elizabethans
+would have called melancholic; and Hamlet seems to be an example of it,
+as Lear is of a temperament mixedly choleric and sanguine. And the
+doctrine of temperaments was so familiar in Shakespeare's time&mdash;as
+Burton, and earlier prose-writers, and many of the dramatists show&mdash;that
+Shakespeare may quite well have given this temperament to Hamlet
+consciously and deliberately. Of melancholy in its developed form, a
+habit, not a mere temperament, he often speaks. He more than once laughs
+at the passing and half-fictitious melancholy of youth and love; in Don
+John in <i>Much Ado</i> he had sketched the sour and surly melancholy of
+discontent; in Jaques a whimsical self-pleasing melancholy; in Antonio
+in the <i>Merchant of Venice</i> a quiet but deep melancholy, for which
+neither the victim nor his friends can assign any cause.<a name="FNanchor_41" id="FNanchor_41"></a><a href="#Footnote_41" class="fnanchor">[41]</a> He gives to
+Hamlet a temperament which would not develop into melancholy unless
+under some exceptional strain, but which still involved a danger. In the
+play we see the danger realised, and find a melancholy quite unlike any
+that Shakespeare had as yet depicted, because the temperament of Hamlet
+is quite different.</p>
+
+<p>(2) Next, we cannot be mistaken in attributing to the Hamlet of earlier
+days an exquisite sensibility, to which we may give the name 'moral,' if
+<a name="Page_111" id="Page_111"></a><span class="pagenum">[111]</span>that word is taken in the wide meaning it ought to bear. This, though
+it suffers cruelly in later days, as we saw in criticising the
+sentimental view of Hamlet, never deserts him; it makes all his
+cynicism, grossness and hardness appear to us morbidities, and has an
+inexpressibly attractive and pathetic effect. He had the soul of the
+youthful poet as Shelley and Tennyson have described it, an unbounded
+delight and faith in everything good and beautiful. We know this from
+himself. The world for him was <i>herrlich wie am ersten Tag</i>&mdash;'this
+goodly frame the earth, this most excellent canopy the air, this brave
+o'erhanging firmament, this majestical roof fretted with golden fire.'
+And not nature only: 'What a piece of work is a man! how noble in
+reason! how infinite in faculty! in form and moving how express and
+admirable! in action how like an angel! in apprehension how like a god!'
+This is no commonplace to Hamlet; it is the language of a heart thrilled
+with wonder and swelling into ecstasy.</p>
+
+<p>Doubtless it was with the same eager enthusiasm he turned to those
+around him. Where else in Shakespeare is there anything like Hamlet's
+adoration of his father? The words melt into music whenever he speaks of
+him. And, if there are no signs of any such feeling towards his mother,
+though many signs of love, it is characteristic that he evidently never
+entertained a suspicion of anything unworthy in her,&mdash;characteristic,
+and significant of his tendency to see only what is good unless he is
+forced to see the reverse. For we find this tendency elsewhere, and find
+it going so far that we must call it a disposition to idealise, to see
+something better than what is there, or at least to ignore deficiencies.
+He says to Laertes, 'I loved you ever,' and he describes Laertes as a
+'very noble youth,' which he was far from being. In his first <a name="Page_112" id="Page_112"></a><span class="pagenum">[112]</span>greeting
+of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, where his old self revives, we trace
+the same affectionateness and readiness to take men at their best. His
+love for Ophelia, too, which seems strange to some, is surely the most
+natural thing in the world. He saw her innocence, simplicity and
+sweetness, and it was like him to ask no more; and it is noticeable that
+Horatio, though entirely worthy of his friendship, is, like Ophelia,
+intellectually not remarkable. To the very end, however clouded, this
+generous disposition, this 'free and open nature,' this unsuspiciousness
+survive. They cost him his life; for the King knew them, and was sure
+that he was too 'generous and free from all contriving' to 'peruse the
+foils.' To the very end, his soul, however sick and tortured it may be,
+answers instantaneously when good and evil are presented to it, loving
+the one and hating the other. He is called a sceptic who has no firm
+belief in anything, but he is never sceptical about <i>them</i>.</p>
+
+<p>And the negative side of his idealism, the aversion to evil, is perhaps
+even more developed in the hero of the tragedy than in the Hamlet of
+earlier days. It is intensely characteristic. Nothing, I believe, is to
+be found elsewhere in Shakespeare (unless in the rage of the
+disillusioned idealist Timon) of quite the same kind as Hamlet's disgust
+at his uncle's drunkenness, his loathing of his mother's sensuality, his
+astonishment and horror at her shallowness, his contempt for everything
+pretentious or false, his indifference to everything merely external.
+This last characteristic appears in his choice of the friend of his
+heart, and in a certain impatience of distinctions of rank or wealth.
+When Horatio calls his father 'a goodly king,' he answers, surely with
+an emphasis on 'man,'</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i1">He was a man, take him for all in all,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">I shall not look upon his like again.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p><a name="Page_113" id="Page_113"></a><span class="pagenum">[113]</span>He will not listen to talk of Horatio being his 'servant.' When the
+others speak of their 'duty' to him, he answers, 'Your love, as mine to
+you.' He speaks to the actor precisely as he does to an honest courtier.
+He is not in the least a revolutionary, but still, in effect, a king and
+a beggar are all one to him. He cares for nothing but human worth, and
+his pitilessness towards Polonius and Osric and his 'school-fellows' is
+not wholly due to morbidity, but belongs in part to his original
+character.</p>
+
+<p>Now, in Hamlet's moral sensibility there undoubtedly lay a danger. Any
+great shock that life might inflict on it would be felt with extreme
+intensity. Such a shock might even produce tragic results. And, in fact,
+<i>Hamlet</i> deserves the title 'tragedy of moral idealism' quite as much as
+the title 'tragedy of reflection.'</p>
+
+<p>(3) With this temperament and this sensibility we find, lastly, in the
+Hamlet of earlier days, as of later, intellectual genius. It is chiefly
+this that makes him so different from all those about him, good and bad
+alike, and hardly less different from most of Shakespeare's other
+heroes. And this, though on the whole the most important trait in his
+nature, is also so obvious and so famous that I need not dwell on it at
+length. But against one prevalent misconception I must say a word of
+warning. Hamlet's intellectual power is not a specific gift, like a
+genius for music or mathematics or philosophy. It shows itself,
+fitfully, in the affairs of life as unusual quickness of perception,
+great agility in shifting the mental attitude, a striking rapidity and
+fertility in resource; so that, when his natural belief in others does
+not make him unwary, Hamlet easily sees through them and masters them,
+and no one can be much less like the typical helpless dreamer. It shows
+itself in conversation chiefly in the form of <a name="Page_114" id="Page_114"></a><span class="pagenum">[114]</span>wit or humour; and, alike
+in conversation and in soliloquy, it shows itself in the form of
+imagination quite as much as in that of thought in the stricter sense.
+Further, where it takes the latter shape, as it very often does, it is
+not philosophic in the technical meaning of the word. There is really
+nothing in the play to show that Hamlet ever was 'a student of
+philosophies,' unless it be the famous lines which, comically enough,
+exhibit this supposed victim of philosophy as its critic:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i1">There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.<a name="FNanchor_42" id="FNanchor_42"></a><a href="#Footnote_42" class="fnanchor">[42]</a><br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>His philosophy, if the word is to be used, was, like Shakespeare's own,
+the immediate product of the wondering and meditating mind; and such
+thoughts as that celebrated one, 'There is nothing either good or bad
+but thinking makes it so,' surely needed no special training to produce
+them. Or does Portia's remark, 'Nothing is good without respect,'
+<i>i.e.</i>, out of relation, prove that she had studied metaphysics?</p>
+
+<p>Still Hamlet had speculative genius without being a philosopher, just as
+he had imaginative genius without being a poet. Doubtless in happier
+days he was a close and constant observer of men and manners, noting his
+results in those tables which he afterwards snatched from his breast to
+make in wild irony his last note of all, that one may smile and smile
+and be a villain. Again and again we remark that passion for
+generalisation which so occupied him, for instance, in reflections
+suggested by the King's drunkenness that he quite forgot what it was he
+was waiting to meet upon the battlements. Doubtless, too, he was always
+considering things, <a name="Page_115" id="Page_115"></a><span class="pagenum">[115]</span>as Horatio thought, too curiously. There was a
+necessity in his soul driving him to penetrate below the surface and to
+question what others took for granted. That fixed habitual look which
+the world wears for most men did not exist for him. He was for ever
+unmaking his world and rebuilding it in thought, dissolving what to
+others were solid facts, and discovering what to others were old truths.
+There were no old truths for Hamlet. It is for Horatio a thing of course
+that there's a divinity that shapes our ends, but for Hamlet it is a
+discovery hardly won. And throughout this kingdom of the mind, where he
+felt that man, who in action is only like an angel, is in apprehension
+like a god, he moved (we must imagine) more than content, so that even
+in his dark days he declares he could be bounded in a nutshell and yet
+count himself a king of infinite space, were it not that he had bad
+dreams.</p>
+
+<p>If now we ask whether any special danger lurked <i>here</i>, how shall we
+answer? We must answer, it seems to me, 'Some danger, no doubt, but,
+granted the ordinary chances of life, not much.' For, in the first
+place, that idea which so many critics quietly take for granted&mdash;the
+idea that the gift and the habit of meditative and speculative thought
+tend to produce irresolution in the affairs of life&mdash;would be found by
+no means easy to verify. Can you verify it, for example, in the lives of
+the philosophers, or again in the lives of men whom you have personally
+known to be addicted to such speculation? I cannot. Of course,
+individual peculiarities being set apart, absorption in <i>any</i>
+intellectual interest, together with withdrawal from affairs, may make a
+man slow and unskilful in affairs; and doubtless, individual
+peculiarities being again set apart, a mere student is likely to be more
+at a loss in a sudden and great practical <a name="Page_116" id="Page_116"></a><span class="pagenum">[116]</span>emergency than a soldier or a
+lawyer. But in all this there is no difference between a physicist, a
+historian, and a philosopher; and again, slowness, want of skill, and
+even helplessness are something totally different from the peculiar kind
+of irresolution that Hamlet shows. The notion that speculative thinking
+specially tends to produce <i>this</i> is really a mere illusion.</p>
+
+<p>In the second place, even if this notion were true, it has appeared that
+Hamlet did <i>not</i> live the life of a mere student, much less of a mere
+dreamer, and that his nature was by no means simply or even one-sidedly
+intellectual, but was healthily active. Hence, granted the ordinary
+chances of life, there would seem to be no great danger in his
+intellectual tendency and his habit of speculation; and I would go
+further and say that there was nothing in them, taken alone, to unfit
+him even for the extraordinary call that was made upon him. In fact, if
+the message of the Ghost had come to him within a week of his father's
+death, I see no reason to doubt that he would have acted on it as
+decisively as Othello himself, though probably after a longer and more
+anxious deliberation. And therefore the Schlegel-Coleridge view (apart
+from its descriptive value) seems to me fatally untrue, for it implies
+that Hamlet's procrastination was the normal response of an
+over-speculative nature confronted with a difficult practical problem.</p>
+
+<p>On the other hand, under conditions of a peculiar kind, Hamlet's
+reflectiveness certainly might prove dangerous to him, and his genius
+might even (to exaggerate a little) become his doom. Suppose that
+violent shock to his moral being of which I spoke; and suppose that
+under this shock, any possible action being denied to him, he began to
+sink into melancholy; then, no doubt, his imaginative and generalising
+habit of mind might extend the effects of this shock through his whole
+being <a name="Page_117" id="Page_117"></a><span class="pagenum">[117]</span>and mental world. And if, the state of melancholy being thus
+deepened and fixed, a sudden demand for difficult and decisive action in
+a matter connected with the melancholy arose, this state might well have
+for one of its symptoms an endless and futile mental dissection of the
+required deed. And, finally, the futility of this process, and the shame
+of his delay, would further weaken him and enslave him to his melancholy
+still more. Thus the speculative habit would be <i>one</i> indirect cause of
+the morbid state which hindered action; and it would also reappear in a
+degenerate form as one of the <i>symptoms</i> of this morbid state.</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>Now this is what actually happens in the play. Turn to the first words
+Hamlet utters when he is alone; turn, that is to say, to the place where
+the author is likely to indicate his meaning most plainly. What do you
+hear?</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i1">O, that this too too solid flesh would melt,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Thaw and resolve itself into a dew!<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Or that the Everlasting had not fix'd<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">His canon 'gainst self-slaughter! O God! God!<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">How weary, stale, flat and unprofitable,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Seem to me all the uses of this world!<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Fie on't! ah fie! 'tis an unweeded garden,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">That grows to seed; things rank and gross in nature<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Possess it merely.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>Here are a sickness of life, and even a longing for death, so intense
+that nothing stands between Hamlet and suicide except religious awe. And
+what has caused them? The rest of the soliloquy so thrusts the answer
+upon us that it might seem impossible to miss it. It was not his
+father's death; that doubtless brought deep grief, but mere grief for
+some one loved and lost does not make a noble spirit loathe the world as
+a place full only of things rank and gross. It was not the vague
+suspicion that we know Hamlet felt. Still less was it the loss of the
+crown; for though <a name="Page_118" id="Page_118"></a><span class="pagenum">[118]</span>the subserviency of the electors might well disgust
+him, there is not a reference to the subject in the soliloquy, nor any
+sign elsewhere that it greatly occupied his mind. It was the moral shock
+of the sudden ghastly disclosure of his mother's true nature, falling on
+him when his heart was aching with love, and his body doubtless was
+weakened by sorrow. And it is essential, however disagreeable, to
+realise the nature of this shock. It matters little here whether
+Hamlet's age was twenty or thirty: in either case his mother was a
+matron of mature years. All his life he had believed in her, we may be
+sure, as such a son would. He had seen her not merely devoted to his
+father, but hanging on him like a newly-wedded bride, hanging on him</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i1">As if increase of appetite had grown<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">By what it fed on.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>He had seen her following his body 'like Niobe, all tears.' And then
+within a month&mdash;'O God! a beast would have mourned longer'&mdash;she married
+again, and married Hamlet's uncle, a man utterly contemptible and
+loathsome in his eyes; married him in what to Hamlet was incestuous
+wedlock;<a name="FNanchor_43" id="FNanchor_43"></a><a href="#Footnote_43" class="fnanchor">[43]</a> married him not for any reason of state, nor even out of
+old family affection, but in such a way that her son was forced to see
+in her action not only an astounding shallowness of feeling but an
+eruption of coarse sensuality, 'rank and gross,'<a name="FNanchor_44" id="FNanchor_44"></a><a href="#Footnote_44" class="fnanchor">[44]</a> speeding post-haste
+to its horrible delight. <a name="Page_119" id="Page_119"></a><span class="pagenum">[119]</span>Is it possible to conceive an experience more
+desolating to a man such as we have seen Hamlet to be; and is its result
+anything but perfectly natural? It brings bewildered horror, then
+loathing, then despair of human nature. His whole mind is poisoned. He
+can never see Ophelia in the same light again: she is a woman, and his
+mother is a woman: if she mentions the word 'brief' to him, the answer
+drops from his lips like venom, 'as woman's love.' The last words of the
+soliloquy, which is <i>wholly</i> concerned with this subject, are,</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i1">But break, my heart, for I must hold my tongue!<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>He can do nothing. He must lock in his heart, not any suspicion of his
+uncle that moves obscurely there, but that horror and loathing; and if
+his heart ever found relief, it was when those feelings, mingled with
+the love that never died out in him, poured themselves forth in a flood
+as he stood in his mother's chamber beside his father's
+marriage-bed.<a name="FNanchor_45" id="FNanchor_45"></a><a href="#Footnote_45" class="fnanchor">[45]</a></p>
+
+<p>If we still wonder, and ask why the effect of this shock should be so
+tremendous, let us observe that <i>now</i> the conditions have arisen under
+which Hamlet's highest endowments, his moral sensibility and his genius,
+become his enemies. A nature morally blunter would have felt even so
+dreadful a revelation less keenly. A slower and more limited and
+positive mind might not have extended so widely through its world the
+disgust and disbelief that have entered it. But Hamlet has the
+imagination which, for evil as well as good, feels and sees all things
+in one. Thought <a name="Page_120" id="Page_120"></a><span class="pagenum">[120]</span>is the element of his life, and his thought is
+infected. He cannot prevent himself from probing and lacerating the
+wound in his soul. One idea, full of peril, holds him fast, and he cries
+out in agony at it, but is impotent to free himself ('Must I remember?'
+'Let me not think on't'). And when, with the fading of his passion, the
+vividness of this idea abates, it does so only to leave behind a
+boundless weariness and a sick longing for death.</p>
+
+<p>And this is the time which his fate chooses. In this hour of uttermost
+weakness, this sinking of his whole being towards annihilation, there
+comes on him, bursting the bounds of the natural world with a shock of
+astonishment and terror, the revelation of his mother's adultery and his
+father's murder, and, with this, the demand on him, in the name of
+everything dearest and most sacred, to arise and act. And for a moment,
+though his brain reels and totters,<a name="FNanchor_46" id="FNanchor_46"></a><a href="#Footnote_46" class="fnanchor">[46]</a> his soul leaps up in passion to
+answer this demand. But it comes too late. It does but strike home the
+last rivet in the melancholy which holds him bound.</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i1">The time is out of joint! O cursed spite<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">That ever I was born to set it right,&mdash;<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>so he mutters within an hour of the moment when he vowed to give his
+life to the duty of revenge; and the rest of the story exhibits his vain
+efforts to fulfil this duty, his unconscious self-excuses and unavailing
+self-reproaches, and the tragic results of his delay.</p>
+
+
+<h4>4</h4>
+
+<p>'Melancholy,' I said, not dejection, nor yet insanity. That Hamlet was
+not far from insanity is very probable. His adoption of the pretence of
+madness may well have been due in part to fear <a name="Page_121" id="Page_121"></a><span class="pagenum">[121]</span>of the reality; to an
+instinct of self-preservation, a fore-feeling that the pretence would
+enable him to give some utterance to the load that pressed on his heart
+and brain, and a fear that he would be unable altogether to repress such
+utterance. And if the pathologist calls his state melancholia, and even
+proceeds to determine its species, I see nothing to object to in that; I
+am grateful to him for emphasising the fact that Hamlet's melancholy was
+no mere common depression of spirits; and I have no doubt that many
+readers of the play would understand it better if they read an account
+of melancholia in a work on mental diseases. If we like to use the word
+'disease' loosely, Hamlet's condition may truly be called diseased. No
+exertion of will could have dispelled it. Even if he had been able at
+once to do the bidding of the Ghost he would doubtless have still
+remained for some time under the cloud. It would be absurdly unjust to
+call <i>Hamlet</i> a study of melancholy, but it contains such a study.</p>
+
+<p>But this melancholy is something very different from insanity, in
+anything like the usual meaning of that word. No doubt it might develop
+into insanity. The longing for death might become an irresistible
+impulse to self-destruction; the disorder of feeling and will might
+extend to sense and intellect; delusions might arise; and the man might
+become, as we say, incapable and irresponsible. But Hamlet's melancholy
+is some way from this condition. It is a totally different thing from
+the madness which he feigns; and he never, when alone or in company with
+Horatio alone, exhibits the signs of that madness. Nor is the dramatic
+use of this melancholy, again, open to the objections which would justly
+be made to the portrayal of an insanity which brought the hero to a
+tragic end. The man who suffers as Hamlet suffers&mdash;and thousands go
+about their business <a name="Page_122" id="Page_122"></a><span class="pagenum">[122]</span>suffering thus in greater or less degree&mdash;is
+considered irresponsible neither by other people nor by himself: he is
+only too keenly conscious of his responsibility. He is therefore, so
+far, quite capable of being a tragic agent, which an insane person, at
+any rate according to Shakespeare's practice, is not.<a name="FNanchor_47" id="FNanchor_47"></a><a href="#Footnote_47" class="fnanchor">[47]</a> And, finally,
+Hamlet's state is not one which a healthy mind is unable sufficiently to
+imagine. It is probably not further from average experience, nor more
+difficult to realise, than the great tragic passions of Othello, Antony
+or Macbeth.</p>
+
+<p>Let me try to show now, briefly, how much this melancholy accounts for.</p>
+
+<p>It accounts for the main fact, Hamlet's inaction. For the <i>immediate</i>
+cause of that is simply that his habitual feeling is one of disgust at
+life and everything in it, himself included,&mdash;a disgust which varies in
+intensity, rising at times into a longing for death, sinking often into
+weary apathy, but is never dispelled for more than brief intervals. Such
+a state of feeling is inevitably adverse to <i>any</i> kind of decided
+action; the body is inert, the mind indifferent or worse; its response
+is, 'it does not matter,' 'it is not worth while,' 'it is no good.' And
+the action required of Hamlet is very exceptional. It is violent,
+dangerous, difficult to accomplish perfectly, on one side repulsive to a
+man of honour and sensitive feeling, on another side involved in a
+certain mystery (here come in thus, in their subordinate place, various
+causes of inaction assigned by various theories). These obstacles would
+not suffice to prevent Hamlet from acting, if his state were normal; and
+against them there operate, even in his morbid state, healthy and
+positive feelings, love of his father, loathing of his uncle, desire of
+revenge, desire to do duty. But the retarding motives acquire an
+unnatural strength because they have an ally in something <a name="Page_123" id="Page_123"></a><span class="pagenum">[123]</span>far stronger
+than themselves, the melancholic disgust and apathy; while the healthy
+motives, emerging with difficulty from the central mass of diseased
+feeling, rapidly sink back into it and 'lose the name of action.' We
+<i>see</i> them doing so; and sometimes the process is quite simple, no
+analytical reflection on the deed intervening between the outburst of
+passion and the relapse into melancholy.<a name="FNanchor_48" id="FNanchor_48"></a><a href="#Footnote_48" class="fnanchor">[48]</a> But this melancholy is
+perfectly consistent also with that incessant dissection of the task
+assigned, of which the Schlegel-Coleridge theory makes so much. For
+those endless questions (as we may imagine them), 'Was I deceived by the
+Ghost? How am I to do the deed? When? Where? What will be the
+consequence of attempting it&mdash;success, my death, utter misunderstanding,
+mere mischief to the State? Can it be right to do it, or noble to kill a
+defenceless man? What is the good of doing it in such a world as
+this?'&mdash;all this, and whatever else passed in a sickening round through
+Hamlet's mind, was not the healthy and right deliberation of a man with
+such a task, but otiose thinking hardly deserving the name of thought,
+an unconscious weaving of pretexts for inaction, aimless tossings on a
+sick bed, symptoms of melancholy which only increased it by deepening
+self-contempt.</p>
+
+<p>Again, (<i>a</i>) this state accounts for Hamlet's energy as well as for his
+lassitude, those quick decided actions of his being the outcome of a
+nature normally far from passive, now suddenly stimulated, and producing
+healthy impulses which work themselves out before they have time to
+subside. (<i>b</i>) It accounts for the evidently keen satisfaction which
+some of these actions give to him. He arranges <a name="Page_124" id="Page_124"></a><span class="pagenum">[124]</span>the play-scene with
+lively interest, and exults in its success, not really because it brings
+him nearer to his goal, but partly because it has hurt his enemy and
+partly because it has demonstrated his own skill (<span class="smcap">iii.</span> ii.
+286-304). He looks forward almost with glee to countermining the King's
+designs in sending him away (<span class="smcap">iii.</span> iv. 209), and looks back with
+obvious satisfaction, even with pride, to the address and vigour he
+displayed on the voyage (<span class="smcap">v.</span> ii. 1-55). These were not <i>the</i>
+action on which his morbid self-feeling had centred; he feels in them
+his old force, and escapes in them from his disgust. (<i>c</i>) It accounts
+for the pleasure with which he meets old acquaintances, like his
+'school-fellows' or the actors. The former observed (and we can observe)
+in him a 'kind of joy' at first, though it is followed by 'much forcing
+of his disposition' as he attempts to keep this joy and his courtesy
+alive in spite of the misery which so soon returns upon him and the
+suspicion he is forced to feel. (<i>d</i>) It accounts no less for the
+painful features of his character as seen in the play, his almost savage
+irritability on the one hand, and on the other his self-absorption, his
+callousness, his insensibility to the fates of those whom he despises,
+and to the feelings even of those whom he loves. These are frequent
+symptoms of such melancholy, and (<i>e</i>) they sometimes alternate, as they
+do in Hamlet, with bursts of transitory, almost hysterical, and quite
+fruitless emotion. It is to these last (of which a part of the
+soliloquy, 'O what a rogue,' gives a good example) that Hamlet alludes
+when, to the Ghost, he speaks of himself as 'lapsed in <i>passion</i>,' and
+it is doubtless partly his conscious weakness in regard to them that
+inspires his praise of Horatio as a man who is not 'passion's
+slave.'<a name="FNanchor_49" id="FNanchor_49"></a><a href="#Footnote_49" class="fnanchor">[49]</a></p>
+
+<p><a name="Page_125" id="Page_125"></a><span class="pagenum">[125]</span>Finally, Hamlet's melancholy accounts for two things which seem to be
+explained by nothing else. The first of these is his apathy or
+'lethargy.' We are bound to consider the evidence which the text
+supplies of this, though it is usual to ignore it. When Hamlet mentions,
+as one possible cause of his inaction, his 'thinking too precisely on
+the event,' he mentions another, 'bestial oblivion'; and the thing
+against which he inveighs in the greater part of that soliloquy
+(<span class="smcap">iv.</span> iv.) is not the excess or the misuse of reason (which for
+him here and always is god-like), but this <i>bestial</i> oblivion or
+'<i>dullness</i>,' this 'letting all <i>sleep</i>,' this allowing of heaven-sent
+reason to 'fust unused':</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i9">What is a man,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">If his chief good and market of his time<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Be but to <i>sleep</i> and feed? a <i>beast</i>, no more.<a name="FNanchor_50" id="FNanchor_50"></a><a href="#Footnote_50" class="fnanchor">[50]</a><br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>So, in the soliloquy in <span class="smcap">ii.</span> ii. he accuses himself of being 'a
+<i>dull</i> and muddy-mettled rascal,' who 'peaks [mopes] like John-a-dreams,
+unpregnant of his cause,' dully indifferent to his cause.<a name="FNanchor_51" id="FNanchor_51"></a><a href="#Footnote_51" class="fnanchor">[51]</a> So, when
+the Ghost appears to him the second time, he accuses himself of being
+tardy and lapsed in <i>time</i>; and the Ghost speaks of his purpose being
+almost <i>blunted</i>, and bids him not to <i>forget</i> (cf. 'oblivion'). And so,
+what is emphasised in those undramatic but significant speeches of the
+player-king and of Claudius is the mere dying away of <a name="Page_126" id="Page_126"></a><span class="pagenum">[126]</span>purpose or of
+love.<a name="FNanchor_52" id="FNanchor_52"></a><a href="#Footnote_52" class="fnanchor">[52]</a> Surely what all this points to is not a condition of excessive
+but useless mental activity (indeed there is, in reality, curiously
+little about that in the text), but rather one of dull, apathetic,
+brooding gloom, in which Hamlet, so far from analysing his duty, is not
+thinking of it at all, but for the time literally <i>forgets</i> it. It seems
+to me we are driven to think of Hamlet <i>chiefly</i> thus during the long
+time which elapsed between the appearance of the Ghost and the events
+presented in the Second Act. The Ghost, in fact, had more reason than we
+suppose at first for leaving with Hamlet as his parting injunction the
+command, 'Remember me,' and for greeting him, on re-appearing, with the
+command, 'Do not forget.'<a name="FNanchor_53" id="FNanchor_53"></a><a href="#Footnote_53" class="fnanchor">[53]</a> These little things in Shakespeare are not
+accidents.</p>
+
+<p>The second trait which is fully explained only by Hamlet's melancholy is
+his own inability to understand why he delays. This emerges in a marked
+degree when an occasion like the player's emotion or the sight of
+Fortinbras's army stings Hamlet into shame at his inaction. '<i>Why</i>,' he
+asks himself in genuine bewilderment, 'do I linger? Can the cause be
+cowardice? Can it be sloth? Can it be thinking too precisely of the
+event? And does <i>that</i> again mean cowardice? What is it that makes me
+sit idle when I feel it is shameful to do so, and when I have <i>cause,
+and will, and strength, and means</i>, to act?' A man irresolute merely
+because he was considering a proposed action too minutely would not feel
+this bewilderment. A man might feel it whose conscience <a name="Page_127" id="Page_127"></a><span class="pagenum">[127]</span>secretly
+condemned the act which his explicit consciousness approved; but we have
+seen that there is no sufficient evidence to justify us in conceiving
+Hamlet thus. These are the questions of a man stimulated for the moment
+to shake off the weight of his melancholy, and, because for the moment
+he is free from it, unable to understand the paralysing pressure which
+it exerts at other times.</p>
+
+<p>I have dwelt thus at length on Hamlet's melancholy because, from the
+psychological point of view, it is the centre of the tragedy, and to
+omit it from consideration or to underrate its intensity is to make
+Shakespeare's story unintelligible. But the psychological point of view
+is not equivalent to the tragic; and, having once given its due weight
+to the fact of Hamlet's melancholy, we may freely admit, or rather may
+be anxious to insist, that this pathological condition would excite but
+little, if any, tragic interest if it were not the condition of a nature
+distinguished by that speculative genius on which the Schlegel-Coleridge
+type of theory lays stress. Such theories misinterpret the connection
+between that genius and Hamlet's failure, but still it is this
+connection which gives to his story its peculiar fascination and makes
+it appear (if the phrase may be allowed) as the symbol of a tragic
+mystery inherent in human nature. Wherever this mystery touches us,
+wherever we are forced to feel the wonder and awe of man's godlike
+'apprehension' and his 'thoughts that wander through eternity,' and at
+the same time are forced to see him powerless in his petty sphere of
+action, and powerless (it would appear) from the very divinity of his
+thought, we remember Hamlet. And this is the reason why, in the great
+ideal movement which began towards the close of the eighteenth century,
+this tragedy acquired a position unique among Shakespeare's dramas, and
+shared only by Goethe's <a name="Page_128" id="Page_128"></a><span class="pagenum">[128]</span><i>Faust</i>. It was not that <i>Hamlet</i> is
+Shakespeare's greatest tragedy or most perfect work of art; it was that
+<i>Hamlet</i> most brings home to us at once the sense of the soul's
+infinity, and the sense of the doom which not only circumscribes that
+infinity but appears to be its offspring.</p>
+
+<div class="footnotes">
+<div class="footnotehead">FOOTNOTES:</div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_25" id="Footnote_25"></a><a href="#FNanchor_25"><span class="label">[25]</span></a> It may be convenient to some readers for the purposes of
+this book to have by them a list of Shakespeare's plays, arranged in
+periods. No such list, of course, can command general assent, but the
+following (which does not throughout represent my own views) would
+perhaps meet with as little objection from scholars as any other. For
+some purposes the Third and Fourth Periods are better considered to be
+one. Within each period the so-called Comedies, Histories, and Tragedies
+are respectively grouped together; and for this reason, as well as for
+others, the order within each period does not profess to be
+chronological (<i>e.g.</i> it is not implied that the <i>Comedy of Errors</i>
+preceded <i>1 Henry VI.</i> or <i>Titus Andronicus</i>). Where Shakespeare's
+authorship of any considerable part of a play is questioned, widely or
+by specially good authority, the name of the play is printed in italics.
+</p><p>
+<i>First Period</i> (to 1595?).&mdash;Comedy of Errors, Love's Labour's Lost, Two
+Gentlemen of Verona, Midsummer-Night's Dream; <i>1 Henry VI.</i>, <i>2 Henry
+VI.</i>, <i>3 Henry VI.</i>, Richard III., Richard II.; <i>Titus Andronicus</i>,
+Romeo and Juliet.
+</p><p>
+<i>Second Period</i> (to 1602?).&mdash;Merchant of Venice, All's Well (better in
+Third Period?), <i>Taming of the Shrew</i>, Much Ado, As You Like it, Merry
+Wives, Twelfth Night; King John, 1 Henry IV., 2 Henry IV., Henry V.;
+Julius Caesar, Hamlet.
+</p><p>
+<i>Third Period</i> (to 1608?).&mdash;Troilus and Cressida, Measure for Measure;
+Othello, King Lear, <i>Timon of Athens</i>, Macbeth, Antony and Cleopatra,
+Coriolanus.
+</p><p>
+<i>Fourth Period.</i>&mdash;<i>Pericles</i>, Cymbeline, Winter's Tale, Tempest, <i>Two
+Noble Kinsmen</i>, <i>Henry VIII.</i></p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_26" id="Footnote_26"></a><a href="#FNanchor_26"><span class="label">[26]</span></a> The reader will observe that this 'tragic period' would
+not exactly coincide with the 'Third Period' of the division given in
+the last note. For <i>Julius Caesar</i> and <i>Hamlet</i> fall in the Second
+Period, not the Third; and I may add that, as <i>Pericles</i> was entered at
+Stationers' Hall in 1608 and published in 1609, it ought strictly to be
+put in the Third Period&mdash;not the Fourth. The truth is that <i>Julius
+Caesar</i> and <i>Hamlet</i> are given to the Second Period mainly on the ground
+of style; while a Fourth Period is admitted, not mainly on that ground
+(for there is no great difference here between <i>Antony</i> and <i>Coriolanus</i>
+on the one side and <i>Cymbeline</i> and the <i>Tempest</i> on the other), but
+because of a difference in substance and spirit. If a Fourth Period were
+admitted on grounds of form, it ought to begin with <i>Antony and
+Cleopatra</i>.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_27" id="Footnote_27"></a><a href="#FNanchor_27"><span class="label">[27]</span></a> I should go perhaps too far if I said that it is generally
+admitted that <i>Timon of Athens</i> also precedes the two Roman tragedies;
+but its precedence seems to me so nearly certain that I assume it in
+what follows.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_28" id="Footnote_28"></a><a href="#FNanchor_28"><span class="label">[28]</span></a> That play, however, is distinguished, I think, by a
+deliberate endeavour after a dignified and unadorned simplicity,&mdash;a
+Roman simplicity perhaps.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_29" id="Footnote_29"></a><a href="#FNanchor_29"><span class="label">[29]</span></a> It is quite probable that this may arise in part from the
+fact, which seems hardly doubtful, that the tragedy was revised, and in
+places re-written, some little time after its first composition.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_30" id="Footnote_30"></a><a href="#FNanchor_30"><span class="label">[30]</span></a> This, if we confine ourselves to the tragedies, is, I
+think, especially the case in <i>King Lear</i> and <i>Timon</i>.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_31" id="Footnote_31"></a><a href="#FNanchor_31"><span class="label">[31]</span></a> The first, at any rate, of these three plays is, of
+course, much nearer to <i>Hamlet</i>, especially in versification, than to
+<i>Antony and Cleopatra</i>, in which Shakespeare's final style first shows
+itself practically complete. It has been impossible, in the brief
+treatment of this subject, to say what is required of the individual
+plays.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_32" id="Footnote_32"></a><a href="#FNanchor_32"><span class="label">[32]</span></a> <i>The Mirror</i>, 18th April, 1780, quoted by Furness,
+<i>Variorum Hamlet</i>, ii. 148. In the above remarks I have relied mainly on
+Furness's collection of extracts from early critics.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_33" id="Footnote_33"></a><a href="#FNanchor_33"><span class="label">[33]</span></a> I do not profess to reproduce any one theory, and, still
+less, to do justice to the ablest exponent of this kind of view, Werder
+(<i>Vorlesungen &uuml;ber Hamlet</i>, 1875), who by no means regards Hamlet's
+difficulties as <i>merely</i> external.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_34" id="Footnote_34"></a><a href="#FNanchor_34"><span class="label">[34]</span></a> I give one instance. When he spares the King, he speaks of
+killing him when he is drunk asleep, when he is in his rage, when he is
+awake in bed, when he is gaming, as if there were in none of these cases
+the least obstacle (<span class="smcap">iii.</span> iii. 89 ff.).</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_35" id="Footnote_35"></a><a href="#FNanchor_35"><span class="label">[35]</span></a> It is surprising to find quoted, in support of the
+conscience view, the line 'Thus conscience does make cowards of us all,'
+and to observe the total misinterpretation of the soliloquy <i>To be or
+not to be</i>, from which the line comes. In this soliloquy Hamlet is not
+thinking of the duty laid upon him at all. He is debating the question
+of suicide. No one oppressed by the ills of life, he says, would
+continue to bear them if it were not for speculation about his possible
+fortune in another life. And then, generalising, he says (what applies
+to himself, no doubt, though he shows no consciousness of the fact) that
+such speculation or reflection makes men hesitate and shrink like
+cowards from great actions and enterprises. 'Conscience' does not mean
+moral sense or scrupulosity, but this reflection on the <i>consequences</i>
+of action. It is the same thing as the 'craven scruple of thinking too
+precisely on the event' of the speech in <span class="smcap">iv.</span> iv. As to this use
+of 'conscience,' see Schmidt, <i>s.v.</i> and the parallels there given. The
+<i>Oxford Dictionary</i> also gives many examples of similar uses of
+'conscience,' though it unfortunately lends its authority to the
+misinterpretation criticised.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_36" id="Footnote_36"></a><a href="#FNanchor_36"><span class="label">[36]</span></a> The King does not die of the <i>poison</i> on the foil, like
+Laertes and Hamlet. They were wounded before he was, but they die after
+him.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_37" id="Footnote_37"></a><a href="#FNanchor_37"><span class="label">[37]</span></a> I may add here a word on one small matter. It is
+constantly asserted that Hamlet wept over the body of Polonius. Now, if
+he did, it would make no difference to my point in the paragraph above;
+but there is no warrant in the text for the assertion. It is based on
+some words of the Queen (<span class="smcap">iv.</span> i. 24), in answer to the King's
+question, 'Where is he gone?':
+</p>
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i1">To draw apart the body he hath killed:<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">O'er whom his very madness, like some ore<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Among a mineral of metals base,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Shows itself pure; he weeps for what is done.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+<p>
+But the Queen, as was pointed out by Doering, is trying to screen her
+son. She has already made the false statement that when Hamlet, crying,
+'A rat! a rat!', ran his rapier through the arras, it was because he
+heard <i>something stir</i> there, whereas we know that what he heard was a
+man's voice crying, 'What ho! help, help, help!' And in this scene she
+has come straight from the interview with her son, terribly agitated,
+shaken with 'sighs' and 'profound heaves,' in the night (line 30). Now
+we know what Hamlet said to the body, and of the body, in that
+interview; and there is assuredly no sound of tears in the voice that
+said those things and others. The only sign of relenting is in the words
+(<span class="smcap">iii.</span> iv. 171):
+</p>
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i9">For this same lord,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">I do repent: but heaven hath pleased it so,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">To punish me with this and this with me,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">That I must be their scourge and minister.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+<p>
+His mother's statement, therefore, is almost certainly untrue, though it
+may be to her credit. (It is just conceivable that Hamlet wept at
+<span class="smcap">iii.</span> iv. 130, and that the Queen supposed he was weeping for
+Polonius.)
+</p><p>
+Perhaps, however, he may have wept over Polonius's body afterwards?
+Well, in the <i>next</i> scene (<span class="smcap">iv.</span> ii.) we see him <i>alone</i> with the
+body, and are therefore likely to witness his genuine feelings. And his
+first words are, 'Safely stowed'!</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_38" id="Footnote_38"></a><a href="#FNanchor_38"><span class="label">[38]</span></a> Not 'must cripple,' as the English translation has it.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_39" id="Footnote_39"></a><a href="#FNanchor_39"><span class="label">[39]</span></a> He says so to Horatio, whom he has no motive for deceiving
+(<span class="smcap">v.</span> ii. 218). His contrary statement (<span class="smcap">ii.</span> ii. 308) is
+made to Rosencrantz and Guildenstern.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_40" id="Footnote_40"></a><a href="#FNanchor_40"><span class="label">[40]</span></a> See <a href='#NOTE_B'>Note B</a>.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_41" id="Footnote_41"></a><a href="#FNanchor_41"><span class="label">[41]</span></a> The critics have laboured to find a cause, but it seems to
+me Shakespeare simply meant to portray a pathological condition; and a
+very touching picture he draws. Antonio's sadness, which he describes in
+the opening lines of the play, would never drive him to suicide, but it
+makes him indifferent to the issue of the trial, as all his speeches in
+the trial-scene show.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_42" id="Footnote_42"></a><a href="#FNanchor_42"><span class="label">[42]</span></a> Of course 'your' does not mean Horatio's philosophy in
+particular. 'Your' is used as the Gravedigger uses it when he says that
+'your water is a sore decayer of your ... dead body.'</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_43" id="Footnote_43"></a><a href="#FNanchor_43"><span class="label">[43]</span></a> This aspect of the matter leaves <i>us</i> comparatively
+unaffected, but Shakespeare evidently means it to be of importance. The
+Ghost speaks of it twice, and Hamlet thrice (once in his last furious
+words to the King). If, as we must suppose, the marriage was universally
+admitted to be incestuous, the corrupt acquiescence of the court and the
+electors to the crown would naturally have a strong effect on Hamlet's
+mind.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_44" id="Footnote_44"></a><a href="#FNanchor_44"><span class="label">[44]</span></a> It is most significant that the metaphor of this soliloquy
+reappears in Hamlet's adjuration to his mother (<span class="smcap">iii.</span> iv. 150):
+</p>
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i1">Repent what's past; avoid what is to come;<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">And do not spread the compost on the weeds<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">To make them ranker.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+</div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_45" id="Footnote_45"></a><a href="#FNanchor_45"><span class="label">[45]</span></a> If the reader will now look at the only speech of Hamlet's
+that precedes the soliloquy, and is more than one line in length&mdash;the
+speech beginning 'Seems, madam! nay, it <i>is</i>'&mdash;he will understand what,
+surely, when first we come to it, sounds very strange and almost
+boastful. It is not, in effect, about Hamlet himself at all; it is about
+his mother (I do not mean that it is intentionally and consciously so;
+and still less that she understood it so).</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_46" id="Footnote_46"></a><a href="#FNanchor_46"><span class="label">[46]</span></a> See <a href='#NOTE_D'>Note D</a>.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_47" id="Footnote_47"></a><a href="#FNanchor_47"><span class="label">[47]</span></a> See p. <a href='#Page_13'>13</a>.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_48" id="Footnote_48"></a><a href="#FNanchor_48"><span class="label">[48]</span></a> <i>E.g.</i> in the transition, referred to above, from desire
+for vengeance into the wish never to have been born; in the soliloquy,
+'O what a rogue'; in the scene at Ophelia's grave. The
+Schlegel-Coleridge theory does not account for the psychological
+movement in these passages.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_49" id="Footnote_49"></a><a href="#FNanchor_49"><span class="label">[49]</span></a> Hamlet's violence at Ophelia's grave, though probably
+intentionally exaggerated, is another example of this want of
+self-control. The Queen's description of him (<span class="smcap">v.</span> i. 307),
+</p>
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i5">This is mere madness;<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">And thus awhile the fit will work on him;<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Anon, as patient as the female dove,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">When that her golden couplets are disclosed,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">His silence will sit drooping.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+<p>
+may be true to life, though it is evidently prompted by anxiety to
+excuse his violence on the ground of his insanity. On this passage see
+further <a href='#NOTE_G'>Note G</a>.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_50" id="Footnote_50"></a><a href="#FNanchor_50"><span class="label">[50]</span></a> Throughout, I italicise to show the connection of ideas.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_51" id="Footnote_51"></a><a href="#FNanchor_51"><span class="label">[51]</span></a> Cf. <i>Measure for Measure</i>, <span class="smcap">iv.</span> iv. 23, 'This deed
+ ... makes me unpregnant and dull to all proceedings.'</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_52" id="Footnote_52"></a><a href="#FNanchor_52"><span class="label">[52]</span></a> <span class="smcap">iii.</span> ii. 196 ff., <span class="smcap">iv.</span> vii. 111 ff.:
+<i>e.g.</i>,
+</p>
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i1">Purpose is but the slave to <i>memory</i>,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Of violent birth but poor validity.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+</div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_53" id="Footnote_53"></a><a href="#FNanchor_53"><span class="label">[53]</span></a> So, before, he had said to him:
+</p>
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i1">And duller should'st thou be than the fat weed<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">That roots itself in ease on Lethe wharf,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Would'st thou not stir in this.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+<p>
+On Hamlet's soliloquy after the Ghost's disappearance see <a href='#NOTE_D'>Note D</a>.</p></div>
+</div>
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><a name="Page_129" id="Page_129"></a><span class="pagenum">[129]</span></p>
+<h2><a name="LECTURE_IV" id="LECTURE_IV"></a>LECTURE IV</h2>
+
+<h3>HAMLET</h3>
+
+
+<p>The only way, if there is any way, in which a conception of Hamlet's
+character could be proved true, would be to show that it, and it alone,
+explains all the relevant facts presented by the text of the drama. To
+attempt such a demonstration here would obviously be impossible, even if
+I felt certain of the interpretation of all the facts. But I propose now
+to follow rapidly the course of the action in so far as it specially
+illustrates the character, reserving for separate consideration one
+important but particularly doubtful point.</p>
+
+
+<h4>1</h4>
+
+<p>We left Hamlet, at the close of the First Act, when he had just received
+his charge from the spirit of his father; and his condition was vividly
+depicted in the fact that, within an hour of receiving this charge, he
+had relapsed into that weariness of life or longing for death which is
+the immediate cause of his later inaction. When next we meet him, at the
+opening of the Second Act, a considerable time has elapsed, apparently
+as much as two months.<a name="FNanchor_54" id="FNanchor_54"></a><a href="#Footnote_54" class="fnanchor">[54]</a> The ambassadors sent to the King of <a name="Page_130" id="Page_130"></a><span class="pagenum">[130]</span>Norway
+(<span class="smcap">i.</span> ii. 27) are just returning. Laertes, whom we saw leaving
+Elsinore (<span class="smcap">i.</span> iii.), has been in Paris long enough to be in want
+of fresh supplies. Ophelia has obeyed her father's command (given in
+<span class="smcap">i.</span> iii.), and has refused to receive Hamlet's visits or
+letters. What has Hamlet done? He has put on an 'antic disposition' and
+established a reputation for lunacy, with the result that his mother has
+become deeply anxious about him, and with the further result that the
+King, who was formerly so entirely at ease regarding him that he wished
+him to stay on at Court, is now extremely uneasy and very desirous to
+discover the cause of his 'transformation.' Hence Rosencrantz and
+Guildenstern have been sent for, to cheer him by their company and to
+worm his secret out of him; and they are just about to arrive. Beyond
+exciting thus the apprehensions of his enemy Hamlet has done absolutely
+nothing; and, as we have seen, we must imagine him during this long
+period sunk for the most part in 'bestial oblivion' or fruitless
+broodings, and falling deeper and deeper into the slough of despond.</p>
+
+<p>Now he takes a further step. He suddenly appears unannounced in
+Ophelia's chamber; and his appearance and behaviour are such as to
+suggest both to Ophelia and to her father that his brain is turned by
+disappointment in love. How far this step was due to the design of
+creating a false impression as to the origin of his lunacy, how far to
+other causes, is a difficult question; but such a design seems certainly
+present. It succeeds, however, only in part; for, although Polonius is
+fully convinced, the King is not so, and it is therefore arranged that
+the two shall secretly witness a meeting between Ophelia and Hamlet.
+Meanwhile Rosencrantz and Guildenstern arrive, and at the King's request
+begin their attempts, easily foiled by Hamlet, to pluck out the heart of
+his mystery. <a name="Page_131" id="Page_131"></a><span class="pagenum">[131]</span>Then the players come to Court, and for a little while one
+of Hamlet's old interests revives, and he is almost happy. But only for
+a little while. The emotion shown by the player in reciting the speech
+which tells of Hecuba's grief for her slaughtered husband awakes into
+burning life the slumbering sense of duty and shame. He must act. With
+the extreme rapidity which always distinguishes him in his healthier
+moments, he conceives and arranges the plan of having the 'Murder of
+Gonzago' played before the King and Queen, with the addition of a speech
+written by himself for the occasion. Then, longing to be alone, he
+abruptly dismisses his guests, and pours out a passion of self-reproach
+for his delay, asks himself in bewilderment what can be its cause,
+lashes himself into a fury of hatred against his foe, checks himself in
+disgust at his futile emotion, and quiets his conscience for the moment
+by trying to convince himself that he has doubts about the Ghost, and by
+assuring himself that, if the King's behaviour at the play-scene shows
+but a sign of guilt, he 'knows his course.'</p>
+
+<p>Nothing, surely, can be clearer than the meaning of this famous
+soliloquy. The doubt which appears at its close, instead of being the
+natural conclusion of the preceding thoughts, is totally inconsistent
+with them. For Hamlet's self-reproaches, his curses on his enemy, and
+his perplexity about his own inaction, one and all imply his faith in
+the identity and truthfulness of the Ghost. Evidently this sudden doubt,
+of which there has not been the slightest trace before, is no genuine
+doubt; it is an unconscious fiction, an excuse for his delay&mdash;and for
+its continuance.</p>
+
+<p>A night passes, and the day that follows it brings the crisis. First
+takes place that interview from which the King is to learn whether
+disappointed love is really the cause of his nephew's lunacy. Hamlet is
+sent for; poor Ophelia is told to walk <a name="Page_132" id="Page_132"></a><span class="pagenum">[132]</span>up and down, reading her
+prayer-book; Polonius and the King conceal themselves behind the arras.
+And Hamlet enters, so deeply absorbed in thought that for some time he
+supposes himself to be alone. What is he thinking of? 'The Murder of
+Gonzago,' which is to be played in a few hours, and on which everything
+depends? Not at all. He is meditating on suicide; and he finds that what
+stands in the way of it, and counterbalances its infinite attraction, is
+not any thought of a sacred unaccomplished duty, but the doubt, quite
+irrelevant to that issue, whether it is not ignoble in the mind to end
+its misery, and, still more, whether death <i>would</i> end it. Hamlet, that
+is to say, is here, in effect, precisely where he was at the time of his
+first soliloquy ('O that this too too solid flesh would melt') two
+months ago, before ever he heard of his father's murder.<a name="FNanchor_55" id="FNanchor_55"></a><a href="#Footnote_55" class="fnanchor">[55]</a> His
+reflections have no reference to this particular moment; they represent
+that habitual weariness of life with which his passing outbursts of
+emotion or energy are contrasted. What can be more significant than the
+fact that he is sunk in these reflections on the very day which is to
+determine for him the truthfulness of the Ghost? And how is it possible
+for us to hope that, if that truthfulness should be established, Hamlet
+will be any nearer to his revenge?<a name="FNanchor_56" id="FNanchor_56"></a><a href="#Footnote_56" class="fnanchor">[56]</a></p>
+
+<p>His interview with Ophelia follows; and its result shows that his delay
+is becoming most dangerous <a name="Page_133" id="Page_133"></a><span class="pagenum">[133]</span>to himself. The King is satisfied that,
+whatever else may be the hidden cause of Hamlet's madness, it is not
+love. He is by no means certain even that Hamlet is mad at all. He has
+heard that infuriated threat, 'I say, we will have no more marriages;
+those that are married, all but one, shall live; the rest shall keep as
+they are.' He is thoroughly alarmed. He at any rate will not delay. On
+the spot he determines to send Hamlet to England. But, as Polonius is
+present, we do not learn at once the meaning of this purpose.</p>
+
+<p>Evening comes. The approach of the play-scene raises Hamlet's spirits.
+He is in his element. He feels that he is doing <i>something</i> towards his
+end, striking a stroke, but a stroke of intellect. In his instructions
+to the actor on the delivery of the inserted speech, and again in his
+conversation with Horatio just before the entry of the Court, we see the
+true Hamlet, the Hamlet of the days before his father's death. But how
+characteristic it is that he appears quite as anxious that his speech
+should not be ranted as that Horatio should observe its effect upon the
+King! This trait appears again even at that thrilling moment when the
+actor is just going to deliver the speech. Hamlet sees him beginning to
+frown and glare like the conventional stage-murderer, and calls to him
+impatiently, 'Leave thy damnable faces and begin!'<a name="FNanchor_57" id="FNanchor_57"></a><a href="#Footnote_57" class="fnanchor">[57]</a></p>
+
+<p>Hamlet's device proves a triumph far more complete than he had dared to
+expect. He had thought the King might 'blench,' but he does much more.
+When only six of the 'dozen or sixteen lines' have been spoken he starts
+to his feet and rushes from the hall, followed by the whole dismayed
+Court. In the elation of success&mdash;<a name="Page_134" id="Page_134"></a><span class="pagenum">[134]</span>an elation at first almost
+hysterical&mdash;Hamlet treats Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, who are sent to
+him, with undisguised contempt. Left to himself, he declares that now he
+could</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i7">drink hot blood,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">And do such bitter business as the day<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Would quake to look on.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>He has been sent for by his mother, and is going to her chamber; and so
+vehement and revengeful is his mood that he actually fancies himself in
+danger of using daggers to her as well as speaking them.<a name="FNanchor_58" id="FNanchor_58"></a><a href="#Footnote_58" class="fnanchor">[58]</a></p>
+
+<p>In this mood, on his way to his mother's chamber, he comes upon the
+King, alone, kneeling, conscience-stricken and attempting to pray. His
+enemy is delivered into his hands.</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i1">Now might I do it pat, now he is praying:<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">And now I'll do it: and so he goes to heaven:<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">And so am I revenged.<a name="FNanchor_59" id="FNanchor_59"></a><a href="#Footnote_59" class="fnanchor">[59]</a> That would be scanned.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>He scans it; and the sword that he drew at the words, 'And now I'll do
+it,' is thrust back into its sheath. If he killed the villain now he
+would send his soul to heaven; and he would fain kill soul as well as
+body.</p>
+
+<p>That this again is an unconscious excuse for delay is now pretty
+generally agreed, and it is needless to describe again the state of mind
+which, on the view explained in our last lecture, is the real cause of
+Hamlet's failure here. The first five words he <a name="Page_135" id="Page_135"></a><span class="pagenum">[135]</span>utters, 'Now might I do
+it,' show that he has no effective <i>desire</i> to 'do it'; and in the
+little sentences that follow, and the long pauses between them, the
+endeavour at a resolution, and the sickening return of melancholic
+paralysis, however difficult a task they set to the actor, are plain
+enough to a reader. And any reader who may retain a doubt should observe
+the fact that, when the Ghost reappears, Hamlet does not think of
+justifying his delay by the plea that he was waiting for a more perfect
+vengeance. But in one point the great majority of critics, I think, go
+astray. The feeling of intense hatred which Hamlet expresses is not the
+cause of his sparing the King, and in his heart he knows this; but it
+does not at all follow that this feeling is unreal. All the evidence
+afforded by the play goes to show that it is perfectly genuine, and I
+see no reason whatever to doubt that Hamlet would have been very sorry
+to send his father's murderer to heaven, nor much to doubt that he would
+have been glad to send him to perdition. The reason for refusing to
+accept his own version of his motive in sparing Claudius is not that his
+sentiments are horrible, but that elsewhere, and also in the opening of
+his speech here, we can see that his reluctance to act is due to other
+causes.</p>
+
+<p>The incident of the sparing of the King is contrived with extraordinary
+dramatic insight. On the one side we feel that the opportunity was
+perfect. Hamlet could not possibly any longer tell himself that he had
+no certainty as to his uncle's guilt. And the external conditions were
+most favourable; for the King's remarkable behaviour at the play-scene
+would have supplied a damning confirmation of the story Hamlet had to
+tell about the Ghost. Even now, probably, in a Court so corrupt as that
+of Elsinore, he could not with perfect security have begun by charging
+the King with the murder; but he could quite safely <a name="Page_136" id="Page_136"></a><span class="pagenum">[136]</span>have killed him
+first and given his justification afterwards, especially as he would
+certainly have had on his side the people, who loved him and despised
+Claudius. On the other hand, Shakespeare has taken care to give this
+perfect opportunity so repulsive a character that we can hardly bring
+ourselves to wish that the hero should accept it. One of his minor
+difficulties, we have seen, probably was that he seemed to be required
+to attack a defenceless man; and here this difficulty is at its maximum.</p>
+
+<p>This incident is, again, the turning-point of the tragedy. So far,
+Hamlet's delay, though it is endangering his freedom and his life, has
+done no irreparable harm; but his failure here is the cause of all the
+disasters that follow. In sparing the King, he sacrifices Polonius,
+Ophelia, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, Laertes, the Queen and himself.
+This central significance of the passage is dramatically indicated in
+the following scene by the reappearance of the Ghost and the repetition
+of its charge.</p>
+
+<p>Polonius is the first to fall. The old courtier, whose vanity would not
+allow him to confess that his diagnosis of Hamlet's lunacy was mistaken,
+had suggested that, after the theatricals, the Queen should endeavour in
+a private interview with her son to penetrate the mystery, while he
+himself would repeat his favourite part of eaves-dropper (<span class="smcap">iii.</span>
+i. 184 ff.). It has now become quite imperative that the Prince should
+be brought to disclose his secret; for his choice of the 'Murder of
+Gonzago,' and perhaps his conduct during the performance, have shown a
+spirit of exaggerated hostility against the King which has excited
+general alarm. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern discourse to Claudius on the
+extreme importance of his preserving his invaluable life, as though
+Hamlet's insanity had now clearly shown itself to be <a name="Page_137" id="Page_137"></a><span class="pagenum">[137]</span>homicidal.<a name="FNanchor_60" id="FNanchor_60"></a><a href="#Footnote_60" class="fnanchor">[60]</a>
+When, then, at the opening of the interview between Hamlet and his
+mother, the son, instead of listening to her remonstrances, roughly
+assumes the offensive, she becomes alarmed; and when, on her attempting
+to leave the room, he takes her by the arm and forces her to sit down,
+she is terrified, cries out, 'Thou wilt not murder me?' and screams for
+help. Polonius, behind the arras, echoes her call; and in a moment
+Hamlet, hoping the concealed person is the King, runs the old man
+through the body.</p>
+
+<p>Evidently this act is intended to stand in sharp contrast with Hamlet's
+sparing of his enemy. The King would have been just as defenceless
+behind the arras as he had been on his knees; but here Hamlet is already
+excited and in action, and the chance comes to him so suddenly that he
+has no time to 'scan' it. It is a minor consideration, but still for the
+dramatist not unimportant, that the audience would wholly sympathise
+with Hamlet's attempt here, as directed against an enemy who is lurking
+to entrap him, instead of being engaged in a business which perhaps to
+the bulk of the audience then, as now, seemed to have a 'relish of
+salvation in't.'</p>
+
+<p>We notice in Hamlet, at the opening of this interview, something of the
+excited levity which followed the <i>d&eacute;nouement</i> of the play-scene. The
+<a name="Page_138" id="Page_138"></a><span class="pagenum">[138]</span>death of Polonius sobers him; and in the remainder of the interview he
+shows, together with some traces of his morbid state, the peculiar
+beauty and nobility of his nature. His chief desire is not by any means
+to ensure his mother's silent acquiescence in his design of revenge; it
+is to save her soul. And while the rough work of vengeance is repugnant
+to him, he is at home in this higher work. Here that fatal feeling, 'it
+is no matter,' never shows itself. No father-confessor could be more
+selflessly set upon his end of redeeming a fellow-creature from
+degradation, more stern or pitiless in denouncing the sin, or more eager
+to welcome the first token of repentance. There is something infinitely
+beautiful in that sudden sunshine of faith and love which breaks out
+when, at the Queen's surrender,</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i1">O Hamlet, thou hast cleft my heart in twain,<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>he answers,</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i1">O throw away the worser part of it,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">And live the purer with the other half.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>The truth is that, though Hamlet hates his uncle and acknowledges the
+duty of vengeance, his whole heart is never in this feeling or this
+task; but his whole heart is in his horror at his mother's fall and in
+his longing to raise her. The former of these feelings was the
+inspiration of his first soliloquy; it combines with the second to form
+the inspiration of his eloquence here. And Shakespeare never wrote more
+eloquently than here.</p>
+
+<p>I have already alluded to the significance of the reappearance of the
+Ghost in this scene; but why does Shakespeare choose for the particular
+moment of its reappearance the middle of a speech in which Hamlet is
+raving against his uncle? There seems to be more than one reason. In the
+first place, Hamlet has already attained his object of stirring shame
+and contrition in his mother's breast, and is now yielding to the old
+temptation of unpacking his <a name="Page_139" id="Page_139"></a><span class="pagenum">[139]</span>heart with words, and exhausting in useless
+emotion the force which should be stored up in his will. And, next, in
+doing this he is agonising his mother to no purpose, and in despite of
+her piteous and repeated appeals for mercy. But the Ghost, when it gave
+him his charge, had expressly warned him to spare her; and here again
+the dead husband shows the same tender regard for his weak unfaithful
+wife. The object of his return is to repeat his charge:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i1">Do not forget: this visitation<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Is but to whet thy almost blunted purpose;<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>but, having uttered this reminder, he immediately bids the son to help
+the mother and 'step between her and her fighting soul.'</p>
+
+<p>And, whether intentionally or not, another purpose is served by
+Shakespeare's choice of this particular moment. It is a moment when the
+state of Hamlet's mind is such that we cannot suppose the Ghost to be
+meant for an hallucination; and it is of great importance here that the
+spectator or reader should not suppose any such thing. He is further
+guarded by the fact that the Ghost proves, so to speak, his identity by
+showing the same traits as were visible on his first appearance&mdash;the
+same insistence on the duty of remembering, and the same concern for the
+Queen. And the result is that we construe the Ghost's interpretation of
+Hamlet's delay ('almost blunted purpose') as the truth, the dramatist's
+own interpretation. Let me add that probably no one in Shakespeare's
+audience had any doubt of his meaning here. The idea of later critics
+and readers that the Ghost is an hallucination is due partly to failure
+to follow the indications just noticed, but partly also to two mistakes,
+the substitution of our present intellectual atmosphere for the
+Elizabethan, and the notion that, because the <a name="Page_140" id="Page_140"></a><span class="pagenum">[140]</span>Queen does not see and
+hear the Ghost, it is meant to be unreal. But a ghost, in Shakespeare's
+day, was able for any sufficient reason to confine its manifestation to
+a single person in a company; and here the sufficient reason, that of
+sparing the Queen, is obvious.<a name="FNanchor_61" id="FNanchor_61"></a><a href="#Footnote_61" class="fnanchor">[61]</a></p>
+
+<p>At the close of this scene it appears that Hamlet has somehow learned of
+the King's design of sending him to England in charge of his two
+'school-fellows.' He has no doubt that this design covers some
+villainous plot against himself, but neither does he doubt that he will
+succeed in defeating it; and, as we saw, he looks forward with pleasure
+to this conflict of wits. The idea of refusing to go appears not to
+occur to him. Perhaps (for here we are left to conjecture) he feels that
+he could not refuse unless at the same time he openly accused the King
+of his father's murder (a course which he seems at no time to
+contemplate); for by the slaughter of Polonius he has supplied his enemy
+with the best possible excuse for getting him out of the country.
+Besides, he has so effectually warned this enemy that, after the death
+of Polonius is discovered, he is kept under guard (<span class="smcap">iv.</span> iii.
+14). He consents, then, to go. But on his way to the shore he meets the
+army of Fortinbras on its march to Poland; and the sight of these men
+going cheerfully to risk death 'for an egg-shell,' and 'making mouths at
+the invisible event,' strikes him with shame as he remembers how he,
+with so much greater cause for action, 'lets all sleep;' and he breaks
+out into the soliloquy, 'How all occasions do inform against me!'</p>
+
+<p><a name="Page_141" id="Page_141"></a><span class="pagenum">[141]</span>This great speech, in itself not inferior to the famous 'To be or not
+to be,' is absent not only from the First Quarto but from the Folio. It
+is therefore probable that, at any rate by the time when the Folio
+appeared (1623), it had become customary to omit it in theatrical
+representation; and this is still the custom. But, while no doubt it is
+dramatically the least indispensable of the soliloquies, it has a direct
+dramatic value, and a great value for the interpretation of Hamlet's
+character. It shows that Hamlet, though he is leaving Denmark, has not
+relinquished the idea of obeying the Ghost. It exhibits very strikingly
+his inability to understand why he has delayed so long. It contains that
+assertion which so many critics forget, that he has 'cause and will and
+strength and means to do it.' On the other hand&mdash;and this was perhaps
+the principal purpose of the speech&mdash;it convinces us that he has learnt
+little or nothing from his delay, or from his failure to seize the
+opportunity presented to him after the play-scene. For, we find, both
+the motive and the gist of the speech are precisely the same as those of
+the soliloquy at the end of the Second Act ('O what a rogue'). There too
+he was stirred to shame when he saw a passionate emotion awakened by a
+cause which, compared with his, was a mere egg-shell. There too he stood
+bewildered at the sight of his own dulness, and was almost ready to
+believe&mdash;what was justly incredible to him&mdash;that it was the mask of mere
+cowardice. There too he determined to delay no longer: if the King
+should but blench, he knew his course. Yet this determination led to
+nothing then; and why, we ask ourselves in despair, should the bloody
+thoughts he now resolves to cherish ever pass beyond the realm of
+thought?</p>
+
+<p>Between this scene (<span class="smcap">iv.</span> iv.) and the remainder of the play we
+must again suppose an interval, though <a name="Page_142" id="Page_142"></a><span class="pagenum">[142]</span>not a very long one. When the
+action recommences, the death of Polonius has led to the insanity of
+Ophelia and the secret return of Laertes from France. The young man
+comes back breathing slaughter. For the King, afraid to put Hamlet on
+his trial (a course likely to raise the question of his own behaviour at
+the play, and perhaps to provoke an open accusation),<a name="FNanchor_62" id="FNanchor_62"></a><a href="#Footnote_62" class="fnanchor">[62]</a> has attempted
+to hush up the circumstances of Polonius's death, and has given him a
+hurried and inglorious burial. The fury of Laertes, therefore, is
+directed in the first instance against the King: and the ease with which
+he raises the people, like the King's fear of a judicial enquiry, shows
+us how purely internal were the obstacles which the hero had to
+overcome. This impression is intensified by the broad contrast between
+Hamlet and Laertes, who rushes headlong to his revenge, and is
+determined to have it though allegiance, conscience, grace and damnation
+stand in his way (<span class="smcap">iv.</span> v. 130). But the King, though he has been
+hard put to it, is now in his element and feels safe. Knowing that he
+will very soon hear of Hamlet's execution in England, he tells Laertes
+that his father died by Hamlet's hand, and expresses his willingness to
+let the friends of Laertes judge whether he himself has any
+responsibility for the deed. And when, to his astonishment and dismay,
+news comes that Hamlet has returned to Denmark, he acts with admirable
+promptitude and address, turns Laertes round his finger, and arranges
+with him for the <a name="Page_143" id="Page_143"></a><span class="pagenum">[143]</span>murder of their common enemy. If there were any risk
+of the young man's resolution faltering, it is removed by the death of
+Ophelia. And now the King has but one anxiety,&mdash;to prevent the young men
+from meeting before the fencing-match. For who can tell what Hamlet
+might say in his defence, or how enchanting his tongue might prove?<a name="FNanchor_63" id="FNanchor_63"></a><a href="#Footnote_63" class="fnanchor">[63]</a></p>
+
+<p>Hamlet's return to Denmark is due partly to his own action, partly to
+accident. On the voyage he secretly possesses himself of the royal
+commission, and substitutes for it another, which he himself writes and
+seals, and in which the King of England is ordered to put to death, not
+Hamlet, but Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. Then the ship is attacked by a
+pirate, which, apparently, finds its intended prize too strong for it,
+and makes off. But as Hamlet 'in the grapple,' eager for fighting, has
+boarded the assailant, he is carried off in it, and by promises induces
+the pirates to put him ashore in Denmark.</p>
+
+<p>In what spirit does he return? Unquestionably, I think, we can observe a
+certain change, though it is not great. First, we notice here and there
+what seems to be a consciousness of power, due probably to his success
+in counter-mining Claudius and blowing the courtiers to the moon, and to
+his vigorous action in the sea-fight. But I doubt if this sense of power
+is more marked than it was in the scenes following the success of the
+'Murder of Gonzago.' Secondly, we nowhere find any direct expression of
+that weariness of life and that longing for death which were so marked
+in the first soliloquy and in the speech 'To be or not to be.' This may
+be a mere accident, and it must be remembered that in the Fifth Act we
+have no soliloquy. But in the earlier Acts the feelings referred to do
+not appear <i>merely</i> in soliloquy, and <a name="Page_144" id="Page_144"></a><span class="pagenum">[144]</span>I incline to think that
+Shakespeare means to show in the Hamlet of the Fifth Act a slight
+thinning of the dark cloud of melancholy, and means us to feel it tragic
+that this change comes too late. And, in the third place, there is a
+trait about which doubt is impossible,&mdash;a sense in Hamlet that he is in
+the hands of Providence. This had, indeed, already shown itself at the
+death of Polonius,<a name="FNanchor_64" id="FNanchor_64"></a><a href="#Footnote_64" class="fnanchor">[64]</a> and perhaps at Hamlet's farewell to the King,<a name="FNanchor_65" id="FNanchor_65"></a><a href="#Footnote_65" class="fnanchor">[65]</a>
+but the idea seems now to be constantly present in his mind. 'There's a
+divinity that shapes our ends,' he declares to Horatio in speaking of
+the fighting in his heart that would not let him sleep, and of his
+rashness in groping his way to the courtiers to find their commission.
+How was he able, Horatio asks, to seal the substituted commission?</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i1">Why, even in that was heaven ordinant,<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>Hamlet answers; he had his father's signet in his purse. And though he
+has a presentiment of evil about the fencing-match he refuses to yield
+to it: 'we defy augury: there is special providence in the fall of a
+sparrow ... the readiness is all.'</p>
+
+<p>Though these passages strike us more when put together thus than when
+they come upon us at intervals in reading the play, they have a marked
+effect on our feeling about Hamlet's character and still more about the
+events of the action. But I find it impossible to believe, with some
+critics, that they indicate any material change in his general
+<a name="Page_145" id="Page_145"></a><span class="pagenum">[145]</span>condition, or the formation of any effective resolution to fulfil the
+appointed duty. On the contrary, they seem to express that kind of
+religious resignation which, however beautiful in one aspect, really
+deserves the name of fatalism rather than that of faith in Providence,
+because it is not united to any determination to do what is believed to
+be the will of Providence. In place of this determination, the Hamlet of
+the Fifth Act shows a kind of sad or indifferent self-abandonment, as if
+he secretly despaired of forcing himself to action, and were ready to
+leave his duty to some other power than his own. <i>This</i> is really the
+main change which appears in him after his return to Denmark, and which
+had begun to show itself before he went,&mdash;this, and not a determination
+to act, nor even an anxiety to do so.</p>
+
+<p>For when he returns he stands in a most perilous position. On one side
+of him is the King, whose safety depends on his death, and who has done
+his best to murder him; on the other, Laertes, whose father and sister
+he has sent to their graves, and of whose behaviour and probable
+attitude he must surely be informed by Horatio. What is required of him,
+therefore, if he is not to perish with his duty undone, is the utmost
+wariness and the swiftest resolution. Yet it is not too much to say
+that, except when Horatio forces the matter on his attention, he shows
+no consciousness of this position. He muses in the graveyard on the
+nothingness of life and fame, and the base uses to which our dust
+returns, whether it be a court-jester's or a world-conqueror's. He
+learns that the open grave over which he muses has been dug for the
+woman he loved; and he suffers one terrible pang, from which he gains
+relief in frenzied words and frenzied action,&mdash;action which must needs
+intensify, if that were possible, the fury of the man whom he has,
+however unwittingly, so cruelly injured. <a name="Page_146" id="Page_146"></a><span class="pagenum">[146]</span>Yet he appears absolutely
+unconscious that he has injured Laertes at all, and asks him:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i1">What is the reason that you use me thus?<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>And as the sharpness of the first pang passes, the old weary misery
+returns, and he might almost say to Ophelia, as he does to her brother:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i1">I loved you ever: but it is no matter.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>'It is no matter': <i>nothing</i> matters.</p>
+
+<p>The last scene opens. He narrates to Horatio the events of the voyage
+and his uncle's attempt to murder him. But the conclusion of the story
+is no plan of action, but the old fatal question, 'Ought I not to
+act?'<a name="FNanchor_66" id="FNanchor_66"></a><a href="#Footnote_66" class="fnanchor">[66]</a> And, while he asks it, his enemies have acted. Osric enters
+with an invitation to him to take part in a fencing-match with Laertes.
+This match&mdash;he is expressly told so&mdash;has been arranged by his deadly
+enemy the King; and his antagonist is a man whose hands but a few hours
+ago were at his throat, and whose voice he had heard shouting 'The devil
+take thy soul!' But he does not think of that. To fence is to show a
+courtesy, and to himself it is a relief,&mdash;action, and not the one
+hateful action. There is something noble in his carelessness, and also
+in his refusal to attend to the presentiment which he suddenly feels
+(and of which he says, not only 'the readiness is all,' but also 'it is
+no matter'). Something noble; and yet, when a sacred duty is still
+undone, ought one to be so ready to die? With the same carelessness, and
+with that trustfulness which makes us love him, but which is here so
+fatally misplaced, he picks up the first foil that comes to his hand,
+asks indifferently, 'These foils have all a length?' and begins. And
+Fate <a name="Page_147" id="Page_147"></a><span class="pagenum">[147]</span>descends upon his enemies, and his mother, and himself.</p>
+
+<p>But he is not left in utter defeat. Not only is his task at last
+accomplished, but Shakespeare seems to have determined that his hero
+should exhibit in his latest hour all the glorious power and all the
+nobility and sweetness of his nature. Of the first, the power, I spoke
+before,<a name="FNanchor_67" id="FNanchor_67"></a><a href="#Footnote_67" class="fnanchor">[67]</a> but there is a wonderful beauty in the revelation of the
+second. His body already labouring in the pangs of death, his mind soars
+above them. He forgives Laertes; he remembers his wretched mother and
+bids her adieu, ignorant that she has preceded him. We hear now no word
+of lamentation or self-reproach. He has will, and just time, to think,
+not of the past or of what might have been, but of the future; to forbid
+his friend's death in words more pathetic in their sadness than even his
+agony of spirit had been; and to take care, so far as in him lies, for
+the welfare of the State which he himself should have guided. Then in
+spite of shipwreck he reaches the haven of silence where he would be.
+What else could his world-wearied flesh desire?</p>
+
+<p>But <i>we</i> desire more; and we receive it. As those mysterious words, 'The
+rest is silence,' die upon Hamlet's lips, Horatio answers:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i1">Now cracks a noble heart. Good night, sweet prince,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">And flights of angels sing thee to thy rest.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>Why did Shakespeare here, so much against his custom, introduce this
+reference to another life? Did he remember that Hamlet is the only one
+of his tragic heroes whom he has not allowed us to see in the days when
+this life smiled on him? Did he feel that, while for the others we might
+be content to imagine after life's fitful fever nothing more than
+release and silence, we must ask more for one whose 'godlike reason' and
+passionate love <a name="Page_148" id="Page_148"></a><span class="pagenum">[148]</span>of goodness have only gleamed upon us through the heavy
+clouds of melancholy, and yet have left us murmuring, as we bow our
+heads, 'This was the noblest spirit of them all'?</p>
+
+
+<h4>2</h4>
+
+<p>How many things still remain to say of Hamlet! Before I touch on his
+relation to Ophelia, I will choose but two. Neither of them, compared
+with the matters so far considered, is of great consequence, but both
+are interesting, and the first seems to have quite escaped observation.</p>
+
+<p>(1) Most people have, beside their more essential traits of character,
+little peculiarities which, for their intimates, form an indissoluble
+part of their personality. In comedy, and in other humorous works of
+fiction, such peculiarities often figure prominently, but they rarely do
+so, I think, in tragedy. Shakespeare, however, seems to have given one
+such idiosyncrasy to Hamlet.</p>
+
+<p>It is a trick of speech, a habit of repetition. And these are simple
+examples of it from the first soliloquy:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i9">O <i>God! God!</i><br /></span>
+<span class="i1">How weary, stale, flat and unprofitable<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Seem to me all the uses of this world!<br /></span>
+<span class="i1"><i>Fie</i> on't! ah <i>fie!</i><br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>Now I ask your patience. You will say: 'There is nothing individual
+here. Everybody repeats words thus. And the tendency, in particular, to
+use such repetitions in moments of great emotion is well-known, and
+frequently illustrated in literature&mdash;for example, in David's cry of
+lament for Absalom.'</p>
+
+<p>This is perfectly true, and plenty of examples could be drawn from
+Shakespeare himself. But what we find in Hamlet's case is, I believe,
+<i>not</i> common. In the first place, this repetition is a <a name="Page_149" id="Page_149"></a><span class="pagenum">[149]</span><i>habit</i> with
+him. Here are some more instances: 'Thrift, thrift, Horatio'; 'Indeed,
+indeed, sirs, but this troubles me'; 'Come, deal justly with me: come,
+come'; 'Wormwood, wormwood!' I do not profess to have made an exhaustive
+search, but I am much mistaken if this <i>habit</i> is to be found in any
+other serious character of Shakespeare.<a name="FNanchor_68" id="FNanchor_68"></a><a href="#Footnote_68" class="fnanchor">[68]</a></p>
+
+<p>And, in the second place&mdash;and here I appeal with confidence to lovers of
+Hamlet&mdash;some of these repetitions strike us as intensely characteristic.
+Some even of those already quoted strike one thus, and still more do the
+following:</p>
+
+<table class ="tabledrama" summary="Repetitve Lines in Hamlet">
+  <tr>
+    <td>(<i>a</i>)</td>
+    <td><i>Horatio.</i></td>
+    <td>It would have much amazed you.</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td><br /></td>
+    <td><i>Hamlet.</i></td>
+    <td>Very like, very like. Stay'd it long?</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr><td><br /></td></tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td>(<i>b</i>)</td>
+    <td><i>Polonius.</i></td>
+    <td>What do you read, my lord?</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td><br /></td>
+    <td><i>Hamlet.</i></td>
+    <td>Words, words, words.</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr><td><br /></td></tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td valign="top">(<i>c</i>)</td>
+    <td valign="top"><i>Polonius.</i></td>
+    <td>My honourable lord, I will most humbly take<br />
+        <span style="margin-left: 1em;">my leave of you.</span></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td><br /></td>
+    <td valign="top"><i>Hamlet.</i></td>
+    <td>You cannot, sir, take from me anything that I<br />
+        <span style="margin-left: 1em;">will more willingly part withal: except my</span><br />
+        <span style="margin-left: 1em;">life, except my life, except my life.</span></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr><td><br /></td></tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td valign="top">(<i>d</i>)</td>
+    <td valign="top"><i>Ophelia.</i></td>
+    <td><span style="margin-left: 6em;">Good my lord,</span><br />
+        How does your honour for this many a day?</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td><br /></td>
+    <td><i>Hamlet.</i></td>
+    <td>I humbly thank you, well, well, well.</td>
+  </tr>
+</table>
+
+
+<p>Is there anything that Hamlet says or does in the whole play more
+unmistakably individual than these replies?<a name="FNanchor_69" id="FNanchor_69"></a><a href="#Footnote_69" class="fnanchor">[69]</a></p>
+
+<p>(2) Hamlet, everyone has noticed, is fond of quibbles and word-play, and
+of 'conceits' and turns of thought such as are common in the poets whom
+Johnson called Metaphysical. Sometimes, no doubt, he plays with words
+and ideas chiefly <a name="Page_150" id="Page_150"></a><span class="pagenum">[150]</span>in order to mystify, thwart and annoy. To some
+extent, again, as we may see from the conversation where Rosencrantz and
+Guildenstern first present themselves (<span class="smcap">ii.</span> ii. 227), he is
+merely following the fashion of the young courtiers about him, just as
+in his love-letter to Ophelia<a name="FNanchor_70" id="FNanchor_70"></a><a href="#Footnote_70" class="fnanchor">[70]</a> he uses for the most part the
+fantastic language of Court Euphuism. Nevertheless in this trait there
+is something very characteristic. We should be greatly surprised to find
+it marked in Othello or Lear or Timon, in Macbeth or Antony or
+Coriolanus; and, in fact, we find it in them hardly at all. One reason
+of this may perhaps be that these characters are all later creations
+than Hamlet, and that Shakespeare's own fondness for this kind of play,
+like the fondness of the theatrical audience for it, diminished with
+time. But the main reason is surely that this tendency, as we see it in
+Hamlet, betokens a nimbleness and flexibility of mind which is
+characteristic of him and not of the later less many-sided heroes.
+Macbeth, for instance, has an imagination quite as sensitive as Hamlet's
+to certain impressions, but he has none of Hamlet's delight in freaks
+and twists of thought, or of his tendency to perceive and play with
+resemblances in the most diverse objects and ideas. Though Romeo shows
+this tendency, the only tragic hero who approaches Hamlet here is
+Richard II., who indeed in several ways recalls the emasculated Hamlet
+of some critics, and may, like the real Hamlet, have owed his existence
+in part to Shakespeare's personal familiarity with the weaknesses and
+dangers of an imaginative temperament.</p>
+
+<p>That Shakespeare meant this trait to be characteristic of Hamlet is
+beyond question. The very <a name="Page_151" id="Page_151"></a><span class="pagenum">[151]</span>first line the hero speaks contains a play on
+words:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i1">A little more than kin and less than kind.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>The fact is significant, though the pun itself is not specially
+characteristic. Much more so, and indeed absolutely individual, are the
+uses of word-play in moments of extreme excitement. Remember the awe and
+terror of the scene where the Ghost beckons Hamlet to leave his friends
+and follow him into the darkness, and then consider this dialogue:</p>
+
+<table class="tabledrama" summary="Word Play in Hamlet" cellpadding="8">
+  <tr>
+    <td valign="top"><i>Hamlet.</i></td>
+    <td><span style="margin-left: 5em;">It waves me still.</span><br />
+        Go on; I'll follow thee.</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td><i>Marcellus.</i></td>
+    <td>You shall not go, my lord.</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td><i>Hamlet.</i></td>
+    <td><span style="margin-left: 5em;">Hold off your hands.</span></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td valign="top"><i>Horatio.</i></td>
+    <td>Be ruled; you shall not go.</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td valign="top"><i>Hamlet.</i></td>
+    <td><span style="margin-left: 5em;">My fate cries out,</span><br />
+        And makes each petty artery in this body<br />
+        As hardy as the Nemean lion's nerve.<br />
+        Still am I called. Unhand me, gentlemen.<br />
+        <i>By heaven I'll make a ghost of him that lets me.</i></td>
+  </tr>
+</table>
+
+<p>Would any other character in Shakespeare have used those words? And,
+again, where is Hamlet more Hamlet than when he accompanies with a pun
+the furious action by which he compels his enemy to drink the 'poison
+tempered by himself'?</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i1">Here, thou incestuous, murderous, damn'd Dane,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Drink off this potion. Is thy union here?<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Follow my mother.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>The 'union' was the pearl which Claudius professed to throw into the
+cup, and in place of which (as Hamlet supposes) he dropped poison in.
+But the 'union' is also that incestuous marriage which must not be
+broken by his remaining alive now that his partner is dead. What rage
+there is in the words, and what a strange lightning of the mind!</p>
+
+<p><a name="Page_152" id="Page_152"></a><span class="pagenum">[152]</span>Much of Hamlet's play with words and ideas is imaginatively humorous.
+That of Richard II. is fanciful, but rarely, if ever, humorous. Antony
+has touches of humour, and Richard III. has more; but Hamlet, we may
+safely assert, is the only one of the tragic heroes who can be called a
+humorist, his humour being first cousin to that speculative tendency
+which keeps his mental world in perpetual movement. Some of his quips
+are, of course, poor enough, and many are not distinctive. Those of his
+retorts which strike one as perfectly individual do so, I think, chiefly
+because they suddenly reveal the misery and bitterness below the
+surface; as when, to Rosencrantz's message from his mother, 'She desires
+to speak with you in her closet, ere you go to bed,' he answers, 'We
+shall obey, were she ten times our mother'; or as when he replies to
+Polonius's invitation, 'Will you walk out of the air, my lord?' with
+words that suddenly turn one cold, 'Into my grave.' Otherwise, what we
+justly call Hamlet's characteristic humour is not his exclusive
+property, but appears in passages spoken by persons as different as
+Mercutio, Falstaff and Rosalind. The truth probably is that it was the
+kind of humour most natural to Shakespeare himself, and that here, as in
+some other traits of the poet's greatest creation, we come into close
+contact with Shakespeare the man.</p>
+
+
+<h4>3</h4>
+
+<p>The actor who plays the part of Hamlet must make up his mind as to the
+interpretation of every word and deed of the character. Even if at some
+point he feels no certainty as to which of two interpretations is right,
+he must still choose one or the other. The mere critic is not obliged to
+do this. Where he remains in doubt he may say so, and, if the matter is
+of importance, he ought to say so.</p>
+
+<p><a name="Page_153" id="Page_153"></a><span class="pagenum">[153]</span>This is the position in which I find myself in regard to Hamlet's love
+for Ophelia. I am unable to arrive at a conviction as to the meaning of
+some of his words and deeds, and I question whether from the mere text
+of the play a sure interpretation of them can be drawn. For this reason
+I have reserved the subject for separate treatment, and have, so far as
+possible, kept it out of the general discussion of Hamlet's character.</p>
+
+<p>On two points no reasonable doubt can, I think, be felt. (1) Hamlet was
+at one time sincerely and ardently in love with Ophelia. For she herself
+says that he had importuned her with love in honourable fashion, and had
+given countenance to his speech with almost all the holy vows of heaven
+(<span class="smcap">i.</span> iii. 110 f.). (2) When, at Ophelia's grave, he declared,</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i1">I loved Ophelia; forty thousand brothers<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Could not, with all their quantity of love,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Make up my sum,<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>he must have spoken sincerely; and, further, we may take it for granted
+that he used the past tense, 'loved,' merely because Ophelia was dead,
+and not to imply that he had once loved her but no longer did so.</p>
+
+<p>So much being assumed, we come to what is doubtful, and I will begin by
+stating what is probably the most popular view. According to this view,
+Hamlet's love for Ophelia never changed. On the revelation made by the
+Ghost, however, he felt that he must put aside all thoughts of it; and
+it also seemed to him necessary to convince Ophelia, as well as others,
+that he was insane, and so to destroy her hopes of any happy issue to
+their love. This was the purpose of his appearance in her chamber,
+though he was probably influenced also by a longing to see her and bid
+her a silent farewell, and possibly by a faint hope that he might safely
+entrust his secret to her. If he <a name="Page_154" id="Page_154"></a><span class="pagenum">[154]</span>entertained any such hope his study of
+her face dispelled it; and thereafter, as in the Nunnery-scene
+(<span class="smcap">iii.</span> i.) and again at the play-scene, he not only feigned
+madness, but, to convince her that he had quite lost his love for her,
+he also addressed her in bitter and insulting language. In all this he
+was acting a part intensely painful to himself; the very violence of his
+language in the Nunnery-scene arose from this pain; and so the actor
+should make him show, in that scene, occasional signs of a tenderness
+which with all his efforts he cannot wholly conceal. Finally, over her
+grave the truth bursts from him in the declaration quoted just now,
+though it is still impossible for him to explain to others why he who
+loved her so profoundly was forced to wring her heart.</p>
+
+<p>Now this theory, if the view of Hamlet's character which I have taken is
+anywhere near the truth, is certainly wrong at one point, viz., in so
+far as it supposes that Hamlet's bitterness to Ophelia was a <i>mere</i>
+pretence forced on him by his design of feigning to be insane; and I
+proceed to call attention to certain facts and considerations, of which
+the theory seems to take no account.</p>
+
+<p>1. How is it that in his first soliloquy Hamlet makes no reference
+whatever to Ophelia?</p>
+
+<p>2. How is it that in his second soliloquy, on the departure of the
+Ghost, he again says nothing about her? When the lover is feeling that
+he must make a complete break with his past, why does it not occur to
+him at once that he must give up his hopes of happiness in love?</p>
+
+<p>3. Hamlet does not, as the popular theory supposes, break with Ophelia
+directly after the Ghost appears to him; on the contrary, he tries to
+see her and sends letters to her (<span class="smcap">ii.</span> i. 109). What really
+happens is that Ophelia suddenly repels his visits and letters. Now,
+<i>we</i> know that she is simply obeying her father's order; but how would
+her action <a name="Page_155" id="Page_155"></a><span class="pagenum">[155]</span>appear to Hamlet, already sick at heart because of his
+mother's frailty,<a name="FNanchor_71" id="FNanchor_71"></a><a href="#Footnote_71" class="fnanchor">[71]</a> and now finding that, the moment fortune has
+turned against him, the woman who had welcomed his love turns against
+him too? Even if he divined (as his insults to Polonius suggest) that
+her father was concerned in this change, would he not still, in that
+morbid condition of mind, certainly suspect her of being less simple
+than she had appeared to him?<a name="FNanchor_72" id="FNanchor_72"></a><a href="#Footnote_72" class="fnanchor">[72]</a> Even if he remained free from <i>this</i>
+suspicion, and merely thought her deplorably weak, would he not probably
+feel anger against <i>her</i>, an anger like that of the hero of <i>Locksley
+Hall</i> against his Amy?</p>
+
+<p>4. When Hamlet made his way into Ophelia's room, why did he go in the
+garb, the conventionally recognised garb, of the distracted <i>lover</i>? If
+it was necessary to convince Ophelia of his insanity, how was it
+necessary to convince her that disappointment in <i>love</i> was the cause of
+his insanity? His <i>main</i> object in the visit appears to have been to
+convince <i>others</i>, through her, that his insanity <a name="Page_156" id="Page_156"></a><span class="pagenum">[156]</span>was not due to any
+mysterious unknown cause, but to this disappointment, and so to allay
+the suspicions of the King. But if his feeling for her had been simply
+that of love, however unhappy, and had not been in any degree that of
+suspicion or resentment, would he have adopted a plan which must involve
+her in so much suffering?<a name="FNanchor_73" id="FNanchor_73"></a><a href="#Footnote_73" class="fnanchor">[73]</a></p>
+
+<p>5. In what way are Hamlet's insults to Ophelia at the play-scene
+necessary either to his purpose of convincing her of his insanity or to
+his purpose of revenge? And, even if he did regard them as somehow means
+to these ends, is it conceivable that he would have uttered them, if his
+feeling for her were one of hopeless but unmingled love?</p>
+
+<p>6. How is it that neither when he kills Polonius, nor afterwards, does
+he appear to reflect that he has killed Ophelia's father, or what the
+effect on Ophelia is likely to be?</p>
+
+<p>7. We have seen that there is no reference to Ophelia in the soliloquies
+of the First Act. Neither is there the faintest allusion to her in any
+one of the soliloquies of the subsequent Acts, unless possibly in the
+words (<span class="smcap">iii.</span> i. 72) 'the pangs of despised love.'<a name="FNanchor_74" id="FNanchor_74"></a><a href="#Footnote_74" class="fnanchor">[74]</a> If the
+popular theory is true, is not this an astounding fact?</p>
+
+<p><a name="Page_157" id="Page_157"></a><span class="pagenum">[157]</span>8. Considering this fact, is there no significance in the further fact
+(which, by itself, would present no difficulty) that in speaking to
+Horatio Hamlet never alludes to Ophelia, and that at his death he says
+nothing of her?</p>
+
+<p>9. If the popular theory is true, how is it that neither in the
+Nunnery-scene nor at the play-scene does Shakespeare insert anything to
+make the truth plain? Four words like Othello's 'O hardness to
+dissemble' would have sufficed.</p>
+
+<p>These considerations, coupled with others as to Hamlet's state of mind,
+seem to point to two conclusions. They suggest, first, that Hamlet's
+love, though never lost, was, after Ophelia's apparent rejection of him,
+mingled with suspicion and resentment, and that his treatment of her was
+due in part to this cause. And I find it impossible to resist this
+conclusion. But the question how much of his harshness is meant to be
+real, and how much assumed, seems to me impossible in some places to
+answer. For example, his behaviour at the play-scene seems to me to show
+an intention to hurt and insult; but in the Nunnery-scene (which cannot
+be discussed briefly) he is evidently acting a part and suffering
+acutely, while at the same time his invective, however exaggerated,
+seems to spring from real feelings; and what is pretence, and what
+sincerity, appears to me an insoluble problem. Something depends here on
+the further question whether or no Hamlet suspects or detects the
+presence of listeners; but, in the absence of an authentic stage
+tradition, this question too seems to be unanswerable.</p>
+
+<p>But something further seems to follow from the considerations adduced.
+Hamlet's love, they seem to show, was not only mingled with bitterness,
+it <a name="Page_158" id="Page_158"></a><span class="pagenum">[158]</span>was also, like all his healthy feelings, weakened and deadened by
+his melancholy.<a name="FNanchor_75" id="FNanchor_75"></a><a href="#Footnote_75" class="fnanchor">[75]</a> It was far from being extinguished; probably it was
+<i>one</i> of the causes which drove him to force his way to Ophelia;
+whenever he saw Ophelia, it awoke and, the circumstances being what they
+were, tormented him. But it was not an absorbing passion; it did not
+habitually occupy his thoughts; and when he declared that it was such a
+love as forty thousand brothers could not equal, he spoke sincerely
+indeed but not truly. What he said was true, if I may put it thus, of
+the inner healthy self which doubtless in time would have fully
+reasserted itself; but it was only partly true of the Hamlet whom we see
+in the play. And the morbid influence of his melancholy on his love is
+the cause of those strange facts, that he never alludes to her in his
+soliloquies, and that he appears not to realise how the death of her
+father must affect her.</p>
+
+<p>The facts seem almost to force this idea on us. That it is less
+'romantic' than the popular view is no argument against it. And
+psychologically it is quite sound, for a frequent symptom of such
+melancholy as Hamlet's is a more or less complete paralysis, or even
+perversion, of the emotion of love. And yet, while feeling no doubt that
+up to a certain point it is true, I confess I am not satisfied that the
+explanation of Hamlet's silence regarding Ophelia lies in it. And the
+reason of this uncertainty is that scarcely any spectators or readers of
+<i>Hamlet</i> notice this silence at all; that I never noticed it myself till
+I began to try to solve the problem of Hamlet's relation to Ophelia; and
+that even now, when I read the play through without pausing to consider
+particular questions, it scarcely strikes me. Now <a name="Page_159" id="Page_159"></a><span class="pagenum">[159]</span>Shakespeare wrote
+primarily for the theatre and not for students, and therefore great
+weight should be attached to the immediate impressions made by his
+works. And so it seems at least possible that the explanation of
+Hamlet's silence may be that Shakespeare, having already a very
+difficult task to perform in the soliloquies&mdash;that of showing the state
+of mind which caused Hamlet to delay his vengeance&mdash;did not choose to
+make his task more difficult by introducing matter which would not only
+add to the complexity of the subject but might, from its 'sentimental'
+interest, distract attention from the main point; while, from his
+theatrical experience, he knew that the audience would not observe how
+unnatural it was that a man deeply in love, and forced not only to
+renounce but to wound the woman he loved, should not think of her when
+he was alone. But, as this explanation is no more completely convincing
+to me than the other, I am driven to suspend judgment, and also to
+suspect that the text admits of no sure interpretation. [This paragraph
+states my view imperfectly.]</p>
+
+<p>This result may seem to imply a serious accusation against Shakespeare.
+But it must be remembered that if we could see a contemporary
+representation of <i>Hamlet</i>, our doubts would probably disappear. The
+actor, instructed by the author, would make it clear to us by looks,
+tones, gestures, and by-play how far Hamlet's feigned harshness to
+Ophelia was mingled with real bitterness, and again how far his
+melancholy had deadened his love.</p>
+
+
+<h4>4</h4>
+
+<p>As we have seen, all the persons in <i>Hamlet</i> except the hero are minor
+characters, who fail to rise to the tragic level. They are not less
+interesting on that account, but the hero has <a name="Page_160" id="Page_160"></a><span class="pagenum">[160]</span>occupied us so long that
+I shall refer only to those in regard to whom Shakespeare's intention
+appears to be not seldom misunderstood or overlooked.</p>
+
+<p>It may seem strange that Ophelia should be one of these; and yet
+Shakespearean literature and the experience of teachers show that there
+is much difference of opinion regarding her, and in particular that a
+large number of readers feel a kind of personal irritation against her.
+They seem unable to forgive her for not having been a heroine, and they
+fancy her much weaker than she was. They think she ought to have been
+able to help Hamlet to fulfil his task. And they betray, it appears to
+me, the strangest misconceptions as to what she actually did.</p>
+
+<p>Now it was essential to Shakespeare's purpose that too great an interest
+should not be aroused in the love-story; essential, therefore, that
+Ophelia should be merely one of the subordinate characters; and
+necessary, accordingly, that she should not be the equal, in spirit,
+power or intelligence, of his famous heroines. If she had been an
+Imogen, a Cordelia, even a Portia or a Juliet, the story must have taken
+another shape. Hamlet would either have been stimulated to do his duty,
+or (which is more likely) he would have gone mad, or (which is
+likeliest) he would have killed himself in despair. Ophelia, therefore,
+was made a character who could not help Hamlet, and for whom on the
+other hand he would not naturally feel a passion so vehement or profound
+as to interfere with the main motive of the play.<a name="FNanchor_76" id="FNanchor_76"></a><a href="#Footnote_76" class="fnanchor">[76]</a> And in the love
+and the fate of Ophelia herself there was introduced an element, not of
+deep tragedy but of pathetic beauty, which makes the analysis of her
+character seem almost a desecration.</p>
+
+<p><a name="Page_161" id="Page_161"></a><span class="pagenum">[161]</span>Ophelia is plainly quite young and inexperienced. She has lost her
+mother, and has only a father and a brother, affectionate but worldly,
+to take care of her. Everyone in the drama who has any heart is drawn to
+her. To the persons in the play, as to the readers of it, she brings the
+thought of flowers. 'Rose of May' Laertes names her.</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i5">Lay her in the earth,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">And from her fair and unpolluted flesh<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">May violets spring!<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>&mdash;so he prays at her burial. 'Sweets to the sweet' the Queen murmurs, as
+she scatters flowers on the grave; and the flowers which Ophelia herself
+gathered&mdash;those which she gave to others, and those which floated about
+her in the brook&mdash;glimmer in the picture of the mind. Her affection for
+her brother is shown in two or three delicate strokes. Her love for her
+father is deep, though mingled with fear. For Hamlet she has, some say,
+no deep love&mdash;and perhaps she is so near childhood that old affections
+have still the strongest hold; but certainly she has given to Hamlet all
+the love of which her nature is as yet capable. Beyond these three
+beloved ones she seems to have eyes and ears for no one. The Queen is
+fond of her, but there is no sign of her returning the Queen's
+affection. Her existence is wrapped up in these three.</p>
+
+<p>On this childlike nature and on Ophelia's inexperience everything
+depends. The knowledge that 'there's tricks in the world' has reached
+her only as a vague report. Her father and brother are jealously anxious
+for her because of her ignorance and innocence; and we resent their
+anxiety chiefly because we know Hamlet better than they. Her whole
+character is that of simple unselfish affection. Naturally she is
+incapable of understanding Hamlet's mind, though she can feel its
+beauty. Naturally, too, she obeys her <a name="Page_162" id="Page_162"></a><span class="pagenum">[162]</span>father when she is forbidden to
+receive Hamlet's visits and letters. If we remember not what <i>we</i> know
+but what <i>she</i> knows of her lover and her father; if we remember that
+she had not, like Juliet, confessed her love; and if we remember that
+she was much below her suitor in station, her compliance surely must
+seem perfectly natural, apart from the fact that the standard of
+obedience to a father was in Shakespeare's day higher than in ours.</p>
+
+<p>'But she does more than obey,' we are told; 'she runs off frightened to
+report to her father Hamlet's strange visit and behaviour; she shows to
+her father one of Hamlet's letters, and tells him<a name="FNanchor_77" id="FNanchor_77"></a><a href="#Footnote_77" class="fnanchor">[77]</a> the whole story of
+the courtship; and she joins in a plot to win Hamlet's secret from him.'
+One must remember, however, that she had never read the tragedy.
+Consider for a moment how matters looked to <i>her</i>. She knows nothing
+about the Ghost and its disclosures. She has undergone for some time the
+pain of repelling her lover and appearing to have turned against him.
+She sees him, or hears of him, sinking daily into deeper gloom, and so
+transformed from what he was that he is considered to be out of his
+mind. She hears the question constantly discussed what the cause of this
+sad change can be; and her heart tells her&mdash;how can it fail to tell
+her?&mdash;that her unkindness is the chief cause. Suddenly Hamlet forces his
+way into her chamber; and his appearance and his behaviour are those of
+a man crazed with love. She is frightened&mdash;why not? She is not Lady
+Macbeth. Rosalind would have been frightened. Which of her censors would
+be wholly unmoved if his room were invaded by a lunatic? She is
+frightened, then; frightened, if you will, like a child. Yes, but,
+observe, her one idea is to help Hamlet. She goes, therefore, <a name="Page_163" id="Page_163"></a><span class="pagenum">[163]</span>at once
+to her father. To whom else should she go? Her brother is away. Her
+father, whom she saw with her own eyes and not with Shakespeare's, is
+kind, and the wisest of men, and concerned about Hamlet's state. Her
+father finds, in her report, the solution of the mystery: Hamlet is mad
+because she has repulsed him. Why should she not tell her father the
+whole story and give him an old letter which may help to convince the
+King and the Queen? Nay, why should she not allow herself to be used as
+a 'decoy' to settle the question why Hamlet is mad? It is all-important
+that it should be settled, in order that he may be cured; all her
+seniors are simply and solely anxious for his welfare; and, if her
+unkindness <i>is</i> the cause of his sad state, they will permit her to
+restore him by kindness (<span class="smcap">iii.</span> i. 40). Was she to refuse to play
+a part just because it would be painful to her to do so? I find in her
+joining the 'plot' (as it is absurdly called) a sign not of weakness,
+but of unselfishness and strength.</p>
+
+<p>'But she practised deception; she even told a lie. Hamlet asked her
+where her father was, and she said he was at home, when he was really
+listening behind a curtain.' Poor Ophelia! It is considered angelic in
+Desdemona to say untruly that she killed herself, but most immoral or
+pusillanimous in Ophelia to tell <i>her</i> lie. I will not discuss these
+casuistical problems; but, if ever an angry lunatic asks me a question
+which I cannot answer truly without great danger to him and to one of my
+relations, I hope that grace may be given me to imitate Ophelia.
+Seriously, at such a terrible moment was it weak, was it not rather
+heroic, in a simple girl not to lose her presence of mind and not to
+flinch, but to go through her task for Hamlet's sake and her father's?
+And, finally, is it really a thing to be taken as matter of course, and
+<a name="Page_164" id="Page_164"></a><span class="pagenum">[164]</span>no matter for admiration, in this girl that, from beginning to end, and
+after a storm of utterly unjust reproach, not a thought of resentment
+should even cross her mind?</p>
+
+<p>Still, we are told, it was ridiculously weak in her to lose her reason.
+And here again her critics seem hardly to realise the situation, hardly
+to put themselves in the place of a girl whose lover, estranged from
+her, goes mad and kills her father. They seem to forget also that
+Ophelia must have believed that these frightful calamities were not mere
+calamities, but followed from <i>her</i> action in repelling her lover. Nor
+do they realise the utter loneliness that must have fallen on her. Of
+the three persons who were all the world to her, her father has been
+killed, Hamlet has been sent out of the country insane, and her brother
+is abroad. Horatio, when her mind gives way, tries to befriend her, but
+there is no sign of any previous relation between them, or of Hamlet's
+having commended her to his friend's care. What support she can gain
+from the Queen we can guess from the Queen's character, and from the
+fact that, when Ophelia is most helpless, the Queen shrinks from the
+very sight of her (<span class="smcap">iv.</span> v. 1). She was left, thus, absolutely
+alone, and if she looked for her brother's return (as she did,
+<span class="smcap">iv.</span> v. 70), she might reflect that it would mean danger to
+Hamlet.</p>
+
+<p>Whether this idea occurred to her we cannot tell. In any case it was
+well for her that her mind gave way before Laertes reached Elsinore; and
+pathetic as Ophelia's madness is, it is also, we feel, the kindest
+stroke that now could fall on her. It is evident, I think, that this was
+the effect Shakespeare intended to produce. In her madness Ophelia
+continues sweet and lovable.</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i1">Thought and affliction, passion, hell itself,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">She turns to favour and to prettiness.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p><a name="Page_165" id="Page_165"></a><span class="pagenum">[165]</span>In her wanderings we hear from time to time an undertone of the deepest
+sorrow, but never the agonised cry of fear or horror which makes madness
+dreadful or shocking.<a name="FNanchor_78" id="FNanchor_78"></a><a href="#Footnote_78" class="fnanchor">[78]</a> And the picture of her death, if our eyes grow
+dim in watching it, is still purely beautiful. Coleridge was true to
+Shakespeare when he wrote of 'the affecting death of Ophelia,&mdash;who in
+the beginning lay like a little projection of land into a lake or
+stream, covered with spray-flowers quietly reflected in the quiet
+waters, but at length is undermined or loosened, and becomes a fairy
+isle, and after a brief vagrancy sinks almost without an eddy.'<a name="FNanchor_79" id="FNanchor_79"></a><a href="#Footnote_79" class="fnanchor">[79]</a></p>
+
+
+<p><a name="Page_166" id="Page_166"></a><span class="pagenum">[166]</span></p>
+<h4>5</h4>
+
+<p>I reluctantly pass by Polonius, Laertes and the beautiful character of
+Horatio, to say something in conclusion of the Queen and the King.</p>
+
+<p>The answers to two questions asked about the Queen are, it seems to me,
+practically certain, (1) She did not merely marry a second time with
+indecent haste; she was false to her husband while he lived. This is
+surely the most natural interpretation of the words of the Ghost
+(<span class="smcap">i.</span> v. 41 f.), coming, as they do, before his account of the
+murder. And against this testimony what force has the objection that the
+queen in the 'Murder of Gonzago' is not represented as an adulteress?
+Hamlet's mark in arranging the play-scene was not his mother, whom
+besides he had been expressly ordered to spare (<span class="smcap">i.</span> v. 84 f.).</p>
+
+<p>(2) On the other hand, she was <i>not</i> privy to the murder of her husband,
+either before the deed or after it. There is no sign of her being so,
+and there are clear signs that she was not. The representation of the
+murder in the play-scene does not move her; and when her husband starts
+from his throne, she innocently asks him, 'How fares my lord?' In the
+interview with Hamlet, when her son says of his slaughter of Polonius,</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i1">'A bloody deed!' Almost as bad, good mother,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">As kill a king and marry with his brother,<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>the astonishment of her repetition 'As kill a king!' is evidently
+genuine; and, if it had not been so, she would never have had the
+hardihood to exclaim:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i1">What have I done, that thou darest wag thy tongue<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">In noise so rude against me?<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>Further, it is most significant that when she and the King speak
+together alone, nothing that is said by her or to her implies her
+knowledge of the secret.</p>
+
+<p><a name="Page_167" id="Page_167"></a><span class="pagenum">[167]</span>The Queen was not a bad-hearted woman, not at all the woman to think
+little of murder. But she had a soft animal nature, and was very dull
+and very shallow. She loved to be happy, like a sheep in the sun; and,
+to do her justice, it pleased her to see others happy, like more sheep
+in the sun. She never saw that drunkenness is disgusting till Hamlet
+told her so; and, though she knew that he considered her marriage
+'o'er-hasty' (<span class="smcap">ii.</span> ii. 57), she was untroubled by any shame at
+the feelings which had led to it. It was pleasant to sit upon her throne
+and see smiling faces round her, and foolish and unkind in Hamlet to
+persist in grieving for his father instead of marrying Ophelia and
+making everything comfortable. She was fond of Ophelia and genuinely
+attached to her son (though willing to see her lover exclude him from
+the throne); and, no doubt, she considered equality of rank a mere
+trifle compared with the claims of love. The belief at the bottom of her
+heart was that the world is a place constructed simply that people may
+be happy in it in a good-humoured sensual fashion.</p>
+
+<p>Her only chance was to be made unhappy. When affliction comes to her,
+the good in her nature struggles to the surface through the heavy mass
+of sloth. Like other faulty characters in Shakespeare's tragedies, she
+dies a better woman than she had lived. When Hamlet shows her what she
+has done she feels genuine remorse. It is true, Hamlet fears it will not
+last, and so at the end of the interview (<span class="smcap">iii.</span> iv. 180 ff.) he
+adds a warning that, if she betrays him, she will ruin herself as
+well.<a name="FNanchor_80" id="FNanchor_80"></a><a href="#Footnote_80" class="fnanchor">[80]</a> It is true too that there is no sign of her obeying Hamlet in
+breaking off her most intimate connection with the King. Still she does
+feel remorse; and she loves her son, and does not betray him. She gives
+her husband a false account of <a name="Page_168" id="Page_168"></a><span class="pagenum">[168]</span>Polonius's death, and is silent about
+the appearance of the Ghost. She becomes miserable;</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i1">To her sick soul, as sin's true nature is,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Each toy seems prologue to some great amiss.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>She shows spirit when Laertes raises the mob, and one respects her for
+standing up for her husband when she can do nothing to help her son. If
+she had sense to realise Hamlet's purpose, or the probability of the
+King's taking some desperate step to foil it, she must have suffered
+torture in those days. But perhaps she was too dull.</p>
+
+<p>The last we see of her, at the fencing-match, is most characteristic.
+She is perfectly serene. Things have slipped back into their groove, and
+she has no apprehensions. She is, however, disturbed and full of
+sympathy for her son, who is out of condition and pants and perspires.
+These are afflictions she can thoroughly feel for, though they are even
+more common than the death of a father. But then she meets her death
+because she cannot resist the wish to please her son by drinking to his
+success. And more: when she falls dying, and the King tries to make out
+that she is merely swooning at the sight of blood, she collects her
+energies to deny it and to warn Hamlet:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i1">No, no, the drink, the drink,&mdash;O my dear Hamlet,&mdash;<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">The drink, the drink! I am poison'd.            [<i>Dies.</i><br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>Was ever any other writer at once so pitiless and so just as
+Shakespeare? Did ever any other mingle the grotesque and the pathetic
+with a realism so daring and yet so true to 'the modesty of nature'?</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>King Claudius rarely gets from the reader the attention he deserves. But
+he is very interesting, both psychologically and dramatically. On the
+one hand, he is not without respectable qualities. As a king he is
+courteous and never undignified; <a name="Page_169" id="Page_169"></a><span class="pagenum">[169]</span>he performs his ceremonial duties
+efficiently; and he takes good care of the national interests. He
+nowhere shows cowardice, and when Laertes and the mob force their way
+into the palace, he confronts a dangerous situation with coolness and
+address. His love for his ill-gotten wife seems to be quite genuine, and
+there is no ground for suspecting him of having used her as a mere means
+to the crown.<a name="FNanchor_81" id="FNanchor_81"></a><a href="#Footnote_81" class="fnanchor">[81]</a> His conscience, though ineffective, is far from being
+dead. In spite of its reproaches he plots new crimes to ensure the prize
+of the old one; but still it makes him unhappy (<span class="smcap">iii.</span> i. 49 f.,
+<span class="smcap">iii.</span> iii. 35 f.). Nor is he cruel or malevolent.</p>
+
+<p>On the other hand, he is no tragic character. He had a small nature. If
+Hamlet may be trusted, he was a man of mean appearance&mdash;a mildewed ear,
+a toad, a bat; and he was also bloated by excess in drinking. People
+made mouths at him in contempt while his brother lived; and though, when
+he came to the throne, they spent large sums in buying his portrait, he
+evidently put little reliance on their loyalty. He was no villain of
+force, who thought of winning his brother's crown by a bold and open
+stroke, but a cut-purse who stole the diadem from a shelf and put it in
+his pocket. He had the inclination of natures physically weak and
+morally small towards intrigue and crooked dealing. His instinctive
+predilection was for poison: this was the means he used in his first
+murder, and he at once recurred to it when he had failed to get Hamlet
+executed by deputy. Though in danger he showed no cowardice, his first
+thought was always for himself.</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i1">I like him not, nor stands it safe with <i>us</i><br /></span>
+<span class="i1">To let his madness range,<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>&mdash;<a name="Page_170" id="Page_170"></a><span class="pagenum">[170]</span>these are the first words we hear him speak after the play-scene. His
+first comment on the death of Polonius is,</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i1">It had been so with <i>us</i> had we been there;<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>and his second is,</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i1">Alas, how shall this bloody deed be answered?<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">It will be laid to <i>us</i>.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>He was not, however, stupid, but rather quick-witted and adroit. He won
+the Queen partly indeed by presents (how pitifully characteristic of
+her!), but also by 'witch-craft of his wit' or intellect. He seems to
+have been soft-spoken, ingratiating in manner, and given to smiling on
+the person he addressed ('that one may smile, and smile, and be a
+villain'). We see this in his speech to Laertes about the young man's
+desire to return to Paris (<span class="smcap">i.</span> ii. 42 f.). Hamlet scarcely ever
+speaks to him without an insult, but he never shows resentment, hardly
+even annoyance. He makes use of Laertes with great dexterity. He had
+evidently found that a clear head, a general complaisance, a willingness
+to bend and oblige where he could not overawe, would lead him to his
+objects,&mdash;that he could trick men and manage them. Unfortunately he
+imagined he could trick something more than men.</p>
+
+<p>This error, together with a decided trait of temperament, leads him to
+his ruin. He has a sanguine disposition. When first we see him, all has
+fallen out to his wishes, and he confidently looks forward to a happy
+life. He believes his secret to be absolutely safe, and he is quite
+ready to be kind to Hamlet, in whose melancholy he sees only excess of
+grief. He has no desire to see him leave the court; he promises him his
+voice for the succession (<span class="smcap">i.</span> ii. 108, <span class="smcap">iii.</span> ii. 355);
+he will be a father to him. Before long, indeed, he becomes very uneasy,
+and then more and more alarmed; <a name="Page_171" id="Page_171"></a><span class="pagenum">[171]</span>but when, much later, he has contrived
+Hamlet's death in England, he has still no suspicion that he need not
+hope for happiness:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i9">till I know 'tis done,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Howe'er my haps, my <i>joys</i> were ne'er begun.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>Nay, his very last words show that he goes to death unchanged:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i1">Oh yet defend me, friends, I am but hurt [=wounded],<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>he cries, although in half a minute he is dead. That his crime has
+failed, and that it could do nothing else, never once comes home to him.
+He thinks he can over-reach Heaven. When he is praying for pardon, he is
+all the while perfectly determined to keep his crown; and he knows it.
+More&mdash;it is one of the grimmest things in Shakespeare, but he puts such
+things so quietly that we are apt to miss them&mdash;when the King is praying
+for pardon for his first murder he has just made his final arrangements
+for a second, the murder of Hamlet. But he does not allude to that fact
+in his prayer. If Hamlet had really wished to kill him at a moment that
+had no relish of salvation in it, he had no need to wait.<a name="FNanchor_82" id="FNanchor_82"></a><a href="#Footnote_82" class="fnanchor">[82]</a> So we are
+inclined to say; and yet it was not so. For this was the crisis for
+Claudius as well as Hamlet. He had better have died at once, before he
+had added to his guilt a share in the responsibility for all the woe and
+death that followed. And so, we may allow ourselves to say, here also
+Hamlet's indiscretion served him well. The power that shaped his end
+shaped the King's no less.</p>
+
+<p>For&mdash;to return in conclusion to the action of the play&mdash;in all that
+happens or is done we seem to apprehend some vaster power. We do not
+define <a name="Page_172" id="Page_172"></a><span class="pagenum">[172]</span>it, or even name it, or perhaps even say to ourselves that it is
+there; but our imagination is haunted by the sense of it, as it works
+its way through the deeds or the delays of men to its inevitable end.
+And most of all do we feel this in regard to Hamlet and the King. For
+these two, the one by his shrinking from his appointed task, and the
+other by efforts growing ever more feverish to rid himself of his enemy,
+seem to be bent on avoiding each other. But they cannot. Through devious
+paths, the very paths they take in order to escape, something is pushing
+them silently step by step towards one another, until they meet and it
+puts the sword into Hamlet's hand. He himself must die, for he needed
+this compulsion before he could fulfil the demand of destiny; but he
+<i>must</i> fulfil it. And the King too, turn and twist as he may, must reach
+the appointed goal, and is only hastening to it by the windings which
+seem to lead elsewhere. Concentration on the character of the hero is
+apt to withdraw our attention from this aspect of the drama; but in no
+other tragedy of Shakespeare's, not even in <i>Macbeth</i>, is this aspect so
+impressive.<a name="FNanchor_83" id="FNanchor_83"></a><a href="#Footnote_83" class="fnanchor">[83]</a></p>
+
+<p>I mention <i>Macbeth</i> for a further reason. In <i>Macbeth</i> and <i>Hamlet</i> not
+only is the feeling of a supreme power or destiny peculiarly marked, but
+it has also at times a peculiar tone, which may be called, in a sense,
+religious. I cannot make my meaning clear without using language too
+definite to describe truly the imaginative impression produced; but it
+is roughly true that, while we do not imagine the supreme power as a
+divine being who avenges crime, or as a providence which supernaturally
+interferes, our sense of it is influenced by the fact that Shakespeare
+uses current religious ideas here much more decidedly than in <i>Othello</i>
+or <i>King Lear</i>. The horror in Macbeth's soul is <a name="Page_173" id="Page_173"></a><span class="pagenum">[173]</span>more than once
+represented as desperation at the thought that he is eternally 'lost';
+the same idea appears in the attempt of Claudius at repentance; and as
+<i>Hamlet</i> nears its close the 'religious' tone of the tragedy is deepened
+in two ways. In the first place, 'accident' is introduced into the plot
+in its barest and least dramatic form, when Hamlet is brought back to
+Denmark by the chance of the meeting with the pirate ship. This incident
+has been therefore severely criticised as a lame expedient,<a name="FNanchor_84" id="FNanchor_84"></a><a href="#Footnote_84" class="fnanchor">[84]</a> but it
+appears probable that the 'accident' is meant to impress the imagination
+as the very reverse of accidental, and with many readers it certainly
+does so. And that this was the intention is made the more likely by a
+second fact, the fact that in connection with the events of the voyage
+Shakespeare introduces that feeling, on Hamlet's part, of his being in
+the hands of Providence. The repeated expressions of this feeling are
+not, I have maintained, a sign that Hamlet has now formed a fixed
+resolution to do his duty forthwith; but their effect is to strengthen
+in the spectator the feeling that, whatever may become of Hamlet, and
+whether he wills it or not, his task will surely be accomplished,
+because it is the purpose of a power against which both he and his enemy
+are impotent, and which makes of them the instruments of its own will.</p>
+
+<p>Observing this, we may remember another significant point of resemblance
+between <i>Hamlet</i> and <i>Macbeth</i>, the appearance in each play of a
+Ghost,&mdash;a figure which seems quite in place in either, whereas it would
+seem utterly out of place in <i>Othello</i> or <i>King Lear</i>. Much might be
+said of the Ghost in <i>Hamlet</i>, but I confine myself to the matter which
+we are now considering. What is the effect of the appearance of the
+Ghost? And, in <a name="Page_174" id="Page_174"></a><span class="pagenum">[174]</span>particular, why does Shakespeare make this Ghost so
+<i>majestical</i> a phantom, giving it that measured and solemn utterance,
+and that air of impersonal abstraction which forbids, for example, all
+expression of affection for Hamlet and checks in Hamlet the outburst of
+pity for his father? Whatever the intention may have been, the result is
+that the Ghost affects imagination not simply as the apparition of a
+dead king who desires the accomplishment of <i>his</i> purposes, but also as
+the representative of that hidden ultimate power, the messenger of
+divine justice set upon the expiation of offences which it appeared
+impossible for man to discover and avenge, a reminder or a symbol of the
+connexion of the limited world of ordinary experience with the vaster
+life of which it is but a partial appearance. And as, at the beginning
+of the play, we have this intimation, conveyed through the medium of the
+received religious idea of a soul come from purgatory, so at the end,
+conveyed through the similar idea of a soul carried by angels to its
+rest, we have an intimation of the same character, and a reminder that
+the apparent failure of Hamlet's life is not the ultimate truth
+concerning him.</p>
+
+<p>If these various peculiarities of the tragedy are considered, it will be
+agreed that, while <i>Hamlet</i> certainly cannot be called in the specific
+sense a 'religious drama,' there is in it nevertheless both a freer use
+of popular religious ideas, and a more decided, though always
+imaginative, intimation of a supreme power concerned in human evil and
+good, than can be found in any other of Shakespeare's tragedies. And
+this is probably one of the causes of the special popularity of this
+play, just as <i>Macbeth</i>, the tragedy which in these respects most nearly
+approaches it, has also the place next to it in general esteem.</p>
+
+<div class="footnotes">
+<div class="footnotehead">FOOTNOTES:</div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_54" id="Footnote_54"></a><a href="#FNanchor_54"><span class="label">[54]</span></a> In the First Act (<span class="smcap">i.</span> ii. 138) Hamlet says that
+his father has been dead not quite two months. In the Third Act
+(<span class="smcap">iii.</span> ii. 135) Ophelia says King Hamlet has been dead 'twice
+two months.' The events of the Third Act are separated from those of the
+Second by one night (<span class="smcap">ii.</span> ii. 565).</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_55" id="Footnote_55"></a><a href="#FNanchor_55"><span class="label">[55]</span></a> The only difference is that in the 'To be or not to be'
+soliloquy there is no reference to the idea that suicide is forbidden by
+'the Everlasting.' Even this, however, seems to have been present in the
+original form of the speech, for the version in the First Quarto has a
+line about our being 'borne before an everlasting Judge.'</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_56" id="Footnote_56"></a><a href="#FNanchor_56"><span class="label">[56]</span></a> The present position of the 'To be or not to be'
+soliloquy, and of the interview with Ophelia, appears to have been due
+to an after-thought of Shakespeare's; for in the First Quarto they
+precede, instead of following, the arrival of the players, and
+consequently the arrangement for the play-scene. This is a notable
+instance of the truth that 'inspiration' is by no means confined to a
+poet's first conceptions.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_57" id="Footnote_57"></a><a href="#FNanchor_57"><span class="label">[57]</span></a> Cf. again the scene at Ophelia's grave, where a strong
+strain of aesthetic disgust is traceable in Hamlet's 'towering passion'
+with Laertes: 'Nay, an thou'lt mouth, I'll rant as well as thou'
+(<span class="smcap">v.</span> i. 306).</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_58" id="Footnote_58"></a><a href="#FNanchor_58"><span class="label">[58]</span></a>
+</p>
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i1">O heart, lose not thy nature; let not ever<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">The soul of Nero enter this firm bosom:<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+<p>
+Nero, who put to death his mother who had poisoned her husband. This
+passage is surely remarkable. And so are the later words (<span class="smcap">iii.</span>
+iv. 28):
+</p>
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i1">A bloody deed! almost as bad, good mother,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">As kill a king, and marry with his brother.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+<p>
+Are we to understand that at this time he really suspected her of
+complicity in the murder? We must remember that the Ghost had not told
+him she was innocent of that.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_59" id="Footnote_59"></a><a href="#FNanchor_59"><span class="label">[59]</span></a> I am inclined to think that the note of interrogation put
+after 'revenged' in a late Quarto is right.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_60" id="Footnote_60"></a><a href="#FNanchor_60"><span class="label">[60]</span></a> <span class="smcap">iii.</span> iii. 1-26. The state of affairs at Court at
+this time, though I have not seen it noticed by critics, seems to me
+puzzling. It is quite clear from <span class="smcap">iii.</span> ii. 310 ff., from the
+passage just cited, and from <span class="smcap">iv.</span> vii. 1-5 and 30 ff., that
+everyone sees in the play-scene a gross and menacing insult to the King.
+Yet no one shows any sign of perceiving in it also an accusation of
+murder. Surely that is strange. Are we perhaps meant to understand that
+they do perceive this, but out of subservience choose to ignore the
+fact? If that were Shakespeare's meaning, the actors could easily
+indicate it by their looks. And if it were so, any sympathy we may feel
+for Rosencrantz and Guildenstern in their fate would be much diminished.
+But the mere text does not suffice to decide either this question or the
+question whether the two courtiers were aware of the contents of the
+commission they bore to England.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_61" id="Footnote_61"></a><a href="#FNanchor_61"><span class="label">[61]</span></a> This passage in <i>Hamlet</i> seems to have been in Heywood's
+mind when, in <i>The Second Part of the Iron Age</i> (Pearson's reprint, vol.
+iii., p. 423), he makes the Ghost of Agamemnon appear in order to
+satisfy the doubts of Orestes as to his mother's guilt. No reader could
+possibly think that this Ghost was meant to be an hallucination; yet
+Clytemnestra cannot see it. The Ghost of King Hamlet, I may add, goes
+further than that of Agamemnon, for he is audible, as well as visible,
+to the privileged person.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_62" id="Footnote_62"></a><a href="#FNanchor_62"><span class="label">[62]</span></a> I think it is clear that it is this fear which stands in
+the way of the obvious plan of bringing Hamlet to trial and getting him
+shut up or executed. It is much safer to hurry him off to his doom in
+England before he can say anything about the murder which he has somehow
+discovered. Perhaps the Queen's resistance, and probably Hamlet's great
+popularity with the people, are additional reasons. (It should be
+observed that as early as <span class="smcap">iii.</span> i. 194 we hear of the idea of
+'confining' Hamlet as an alternative to sending him to England.)</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_63" id="Footnote_63"></a><a href="#FNanchor_63"><span class="label">[63]</span></a> I am inferring from <span class="smcap">iv.</span> vii., 129, 130, and the
+last words of the scene.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_64" id="Footnote_64"></a><a href="#FNanchor_64"><span class="label">[64]</span></a> <span class="smcap">iii.</span> iv. 172:
+</p>
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i8">For this same lord,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">I do repent: but heaven hath pleased it so,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">To punish me with this and this with me,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">That I must be their scourge and minister:<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+<p>
+<i>i.e.</i> the scourge and minister of 'heaven,' which has a plural sense
+elsewhere also in Shakespeare.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_65" id="Footnote_65"></a><a href="#FNanchor_65"><span class="label">[65]</span></a> <span class="smcap">iv.</span> iii. 48:
+</p>
+
+<table class="tabledrama" summary="Hamlet IV. iii. 48ff" cellpadding="6">
+  <tr>
+    <td><i>Ham.</i></td>
+    <td>For England!</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td><i>King.</i></td>
+    <td><span style="margin-left: 6em;">Ay, Hamlet.</span></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td><i>Ham.</i></td>
+    <td><span style="margin-left: 11em;">Good.</span></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td><i>King.</i></td>
+    <td>So is it, if thou knew'st our purposes.</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td><i>Ham.</i></td>
+    <td>I see a cherub that sees them.</td>
+  </tr>
+</table>
+</div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_66" id="Footnote_66"></a><a href="#FNanchor_66"><span class="label">[66]</span></a> On this passage see p. <a href='#Page_98'>98</a>. Hamlet's reply to Horatio's
+warning sounds, no doubt, determined; but so did 'I know my course.' And
+is it not significant that, having given it, he abruptly changes the
+subject?</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_67" id="Footnote_67"></a><a href="#FNanchor_67"><span class="label">[67]</span></a> P. <a href='#Page_102'>102</a>.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_68" id="Footnote_68"></a><a href="#FNanchor_68"><span class="label">[68]</span></a> It should be observed also that many of Hamlet's
+repetitions can hardly be said to occur at moments of great emotion,
+like Cordelia's 'And so I am, I am,' and 'No cause, no cause.'
+</p><p>
+Of course, a habit of repetition quite as marked as Hamlet's may be
+found in comic persons, <i>e.g.</i> Justice Shallow in <i>2 Henry IV.</i></p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_69" id="Footnote_69"></a><a href="#FNanchor_69"><span class="label">[69]</span></a> Perhaps it is from noticing this trait that I find
+something characteristic too in this coincidence of phrase: 'Alas, poor
+ghost!' (<span class="smcap">i.</span> v. 4), 'Alas, poor Yorick!' (<span class="smcap">v.</span> i. 202).</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_70" id="Footnote_70"></a><a href="#FNanchor_70"><span class="label">[70]</span></a> This letter, of course, was written before the time when
+the action of the drama begins, for we know that Ophelia, after her
+father's commands in <span class="smcap">i.</span> iii., received no more letters
+(<span class="smcap">ii.</span> i. 109).</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_71" id="Footnote_71"></a><a href="#FNanchor_71"><span class="label">[71]</span></a> 'Frailty, thy name is woman!' he had exclaimed in the
+first soliloquy. Cf. what he says of his mother's act (<span class="smcap">iii.</span> iv.
+40):
+</p>
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i11">Such an act<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">That blurs the grace and blush of modesty,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Calls virtue hypocrite, takes off the rose<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">From the fair forehead of an innocent love<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">And sets a blister there.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+</div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_72" id="Footnote_72"></a><a href="#FNanchor_72"><span class="label">[72]</span></a> There are signs that Hamlet was haunted by the horrible
+idea that he had been deceived in Ophelia as he had been in his mother;
+that she was shallow and artificial, and even that what had seemed
+simple and affectionate love might really have been something very
+different. The grossness of his language at the play-scene, and some
+lines in the Nunnery-scene, suggest this; and, considering the state of
+his mind, there is nothing unnatural in his suffering from such a
+suspicion. I do not suggest that he <i>believed</i> in it, and in the
+Nunnery-scene it is clear that his healthy perception of her innocence
+is in conflict with it.
+</p><p>
+He seems to have divined that Polonius suspected him of dishonourable
+intentions towards Ophelia; and there are also traces of the idea that
+Polonius had been quite ready to let his daughter run the risk as long
+as Hamlet was prosperous. But it is dangerous, of course, to lay stress
+on inferences drawn from his conversations with Polonius.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_73" id="Footnote_73"></a><a href="#FNanchor_73"><span class="label">[73]</span></a> Many readers and critics imagine that Hamlet went straight
+to Ophelia's room after his interview with the Ghost. But we have just
+seen that on the contrary he tried to visit her and was repelled, and it
+is absolutely certain that a long interval separates the events of
+<span class="smcap">i.</span> v. and <span class="smcap">ii.</span> i. They think also, of course, that
+Hamlet's visit to Ophelia was the first announcement of his madness. But
+the text flatly contradicts that idea also. Hamlet has for some time
+appeared totally changed (<span class="smcap">ii.</span> ii. 1-10); the King is very
+uneasy at his 'transformation,' and has sent for his school-fellows in
+order to discover its cause. Polonius now, after Ophelia has told him of
+the interview, comes to announce his discovery, not of Hamlet's madness,
+but of its cause (<span class="smcap">ii.</span> ii. 49). That, it would seem, was the
+effect Hamlet aimed at in his interview. I may add that Ophelia's
+description of his intent examination of her face suggests doubt rather
+as to her 'honesty' or sincerity than as to her strength of mind. I
+cannot believe that he ever dreamed of confiding his secret to her.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_74" id="Footnote_74"></a><a href="#FNanchor_74"><span class="label">[74]</span></a> If this <i>is</i> an allusion to his own love, the adjective
+'despised' is significant. But I doubt the allusion. The other
+calamities mentioned by Hamlet, 'the oppressor's wrong, the proud man's
+contumely, the law's delay, the insolence of office, and the spurns that
+patient merit of the unworthy takes,' are not at all specially his own.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_75" id="Footnote_75"></a><a href="#FNanchor_75"><span class="label">[75]</span></a> It should be noticed that it was not apparently of long
+standing. See the words 'of late' in <span class="smcap">i.</span> iii. 91, 99.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_76" id="Footnote_76"></a><a href="#FNanchor_76"><span class="label">[76]</span></a> This, I think, may be said on almost any sane view of
+Hamlet's love.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_77" id="Footnote_77"></a><a href="#FNanchor_77"><span class="label">[77]</span></a> Polonius says so, and it <i>may</i> be true.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_78" id="Footnote_78"></a><a href="#FNanchor_78"><span class="label">[78]</span></a> I have heard an actress in this part utter such a cry as
+is described above, but there is absolutely nothing in the text to
+justify her rendering. Even the exclamation 'O, ho!' found in the
+Quartos at <span class="smcap">iv.</span> v. 33, but omitted in the Folios and by almost
+all modern editors, coming as it does after the stanza, 'He is dead and
+gone, lady,' evidently expresses grief, not terror.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_79" id="Footnote_79"></a><a href="#FNanchor_79"><span class="label">[79]</span></a> In the remarks above I have not attempted, of course, a
+complete view of the character, which has often been well described; but
+I cannot forbear a reference to one point which I do not remember to
+have seen noticed. In the Nunnery-scene Ophelia's first words
+pathetically betray her own feeling:
+</p>
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i9">Good my lord,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">How does your honour <i>for this many a day</i>?<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+<p>
+She then offers to return Hamlet's presents. This has not been suggested
+to her by her father: it is her own thought. And the next lines, in
+which she refers to the sweet words which accompanied those gifts, and
+to the unkindness which has succeeded that kindness, imply a reproach.
+So again do those most touching little speeches:
+</p>
+
+<table class="tabledrama" summary="Ophelia Deceived" cellpadding="6">
+  <tr>
+    <td><i>Hamlet.</i></td>
+    <td><span style="margin-left: 0.5em;"> ... I did love you once.</span></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td><i>Ophelia.</i></td>
+    <td>Indeed, my lord, you made me believe so.</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td><i>Hamlet.</i></td>
+    <td>You should not have believed me ... I loved you not.</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td><i>Ophelia.</i></td>
+    <td>I was the more deceived.</td>
+  </tr>
+</table>
+<p>
+Now the obvious surface fact was not that Hamlet had forsaken her, but
+that <i>she</i> had repulsed <i>him</i>; and here, with his usual unobtrusive
+subtlety, Shakespeare shows how Ophelia, even though she may have
+accepted from her elders the theory that her unkindness has driven
+Hamlet mad, knows within herself that she is forsaken, and cannot
+repress the timid attempt to win her lover back by showing that her own
+heart is unchanged.
+</p><p>
+I will add one note. There are critics who, after all the help given
+them in different ways by Goethe and Coleridge and Mrs. Jameson, still
+shake their heads over Ophelia's song, 'To-morrow is Saint Valentine's
+day.' Probably they are incurable, but they may be asked to consider
+that Shakespeare makes Desdemona, 'as chaste as ice, as pure as snow,'
+sing an old song containing the line,
+</p>
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i1">If I court moe women, you'll couch with moe men.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+</div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_80" id="Footnote_80"></a><a href="#FNanchor_80"><span class="label">[80]</span></a> <i>I.e.</i> the King will kill <i>her</i> to make all sure.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_81" id="Footnote_81"></a><a href="#FNanchor_81"><span class="label">[81]</span></a> I do not rely so much on his own statement to Laertes
+(<span class="smcap">iv.</span> vii. 12 f.) as on the absence of contrary indications, on
+his tone in speaking to her, and on such signs as his mention of her in
+soliloquy (<span class="smcap">iii.</span> iii. 55).</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_82" id="Footnote_82"></a><a href="#FNanchor_82"><span class="label">[82]</span></a> This also is quietly indicated. Hamlet spares the King, he
+says, because if the King is killed praying he will <i>go to heaven</i>. On
+Hamlet's departure, the King rises from his knees, and mutters:
+</p>
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i1">My words fly up, my thoughts remain below:<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Words without thoughts <i>never to heaven go</i>.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+</div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_83" id="Footnote_83"></a><a href="#FNanchor_83"><span class="label">[83]</span></a> I am indebted to Werder in this paragraph.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_84" id="Footnote_84"></a><a href="#FNanchor_84"><span class="label">[84]</span></a> The attempt to explain this meeting as pre-arranged by
+Hamlet is scarcely worth mention.</p></div>
+</div>
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><a name="Page_175" id="Page_175"></a><span class="pagenum">[175]</span></p>
+<h2><a name="LECTURE_V" id="LECTURE_V"></a>LECTURE V</h2>
+
+<h3>OTHELLO</h3>
+
+
+<p>There is practically no doubt that <i>Othello</i> was the tragedy written
+next after <i>Hamlet</i>. Such external evidence as we possess points to this
+conclusion, and it is confirmed by similarities of style, diction and
+versification, and also by the fact that ideas and phrases of the
+earlier play are echoed in the later.<a name="FNanchor_85" id="FNanchor_85"></a><a href="#Footnote_85" class="fnanchor">[85]</a> There is, further (not to
+speak of one curious point, to be considered when we come to Iago), a
+certain resemblance in the subjects. The heroes of the two plays are
+doubtless extremely unlike, so unlike that each could have dealt without
+much difficulty with the situation which proved fatal to the other; but
+still each is a man exceptionally noble and trustful, and each endures
+the shock of a terrible disillusionment. This theme is treated by
+Shakespeare for the first time in <i>Hamlet</i>, for the second in <i>Othello</i>.
+It recurs with modifications in <i>King Lear</i>, and it probably formed the
+attraction which drew Shakespeare to refashion in part another writer's
+tragedy of <i>Timon</i>. These four dramas <a name="Page_176" id="Page_176"></a><span class="pagenum">[176]</span>may so far be grouped together in
+distinction from the remaining tragedies.</p>
+
+<p>But in point of substance, and, in certain respects, in point of style,
+the unlikeness of <i>Othello</i> to <i>Hamlet</i> is much greater than the
+likeness, and the later play belongs decidedly to one group with its
+successors. We have seen that, like them, it is a tragedy of passion, a
+description inapplicable to <i>Julius Caesar</i> or <i>Hamlet</i>. And with this
+change goes another, an enlargement in the stature of the hero. There is
+in most of the later heroes something colossal, something which reminds
+us of Michael Angelo's figures. They are not merely exceptional men,
+they are huge men; as it were, survivors of the heroic age living in a
+later and smaller world. We do not receive this impression from Romeo or
+Brutus or Hamlet, nor did it lie in Shakespeare's design to allow more
+than touches of this trait to Julius Caesar himself; but it is strongly
+marked in Lear and Coriolanus, and quite distinct in Macbeth and even in
+Antony. Othello is the first of these men, a being essentially large and
+grand, towering above his fellows, holding a volume of force which in
+repose ensures preeminence without an effort, and in commotion reminds
+us rather of the fury of the elements than of the tumult of common human
+passion.</p>
+
+
+<h4>1</h4>
+
+<p>What is the peculiarity of <i>Othello</i>? What is the distinctive impression
+that it leaves? Of all Shakespeare's tragedies, I would answer, not even
+excepting <i>King Lear</i>, <i>Othello</i> is the most painfully exciting and the
+most terrible. From the moment when the temptation of the hero begins,
+the reader's heart and mind are held in a vice, experiencing the
+extremes of pity and fear, sympathy and repulsion, sickening hope and
+dreadful expectation. <a name="Page_177" id="Page_177"></a><span class="pagenum">[177]</span>Evil is displayed before him, not indeed with the
+profusion found in <i>King Lear</i>, but forming, as it were, the soul of a
+single character, and united with an intellectual superiority so great
+that he watches its advance fascinated and appalled. He sees it, in
+itself almost irresistible, aided at every step by fortunate accidents
+and the innocent mistakes of its victims. He seems to breathe an
+atmosphere as fateful as that of <i>King Lear</i>, but more confined and
+oppressive, the darkness not of night but of a close-shut murderous
+room. His imagination is excited to intense activity, but it is the
+activity of concentration rather than dilation.</p>
+
+<p>I will not dwell now on aspects of the play which modify this
+impression, and I reserve for later discussion one of its principal
+sources, the character of Iago. But if we glance at some of its other
+sources, we shall find at the same time certain distinguishing
+characteristics of <i>Othello</i>.</p>
+
+<p>(1) One of these has been already mentioned in our discussion of
+Shakespeare's technique. <i>Othello</i> is not only the most masterly of the
+tragedies in point of construction, but its method of construction is
+unusual. And this method, by which the conflict begins late, and
+advances without appreciable pause and with accelerating speed to the
+catastrophe, is a main cause of the painful tension just described. To
+this may be added that, after the conflict has begun, there is very
+little relief by way of the ridiculous. Henceforward at any rate Iago's
+humour never raises a smile. The clown is a poor one; we hardly attend
+to him and quickly forget him; I believe most readers of Shakespeare, if
+asked whether there is a clown in <i>Othello</i>, would answer No.</p>
+
+<p>(2) In the second place, there is no subject more exciting than sexual
+jealousy rising to the pitch of passion; and there can hardly be any
+spectacle at once so engrossing and so painful as that of a <a name="Page_178" id="Page_178"></a><span class="pagenum">[178]</span>great
+nature suffering the torment of this passion, and driven by it to a
+crime which is also a hideous blunder. Such a passion as ambition,
+however terrible its results, is not itself ignoble; if we separate it
+in thought from the conditions which make it guilty, it does not appear
+despicable; it is not a kind of suffering, its nature is active; and
+therefore we can watch its course without shrinking. But jealousy, and
+especially sexual jealousy, brings with it a sense of shame and
+humiliation. For this reason it is generally hidden; if we perceive it
+we ourselves are ashamed and turn our eyes away; and when it is not
+hidden it commonly stirs contempt as well as pity. Nor is this all. Such
+jealousy as Othello's converts human nature into chaos, and liberates
+the beast in man; and it does this in relation to one of the most
+intense and also the most ideal of human feelings. What spectacle can be
+more painful than that of this feeling turned into a tortured mixture of
+longing and loathing, the 'golden purity' of passion split by poison
+into fragments, the animal in man forcing itself into his consciousness
+in naked grossness, and he writhing before it but powerless to deny it
+entrance, gasping inarticulate images of pollution, and finding relief
+only in a bestial thirst for blood? This is what we have to witness in
+one who was indeed 'great of heart' and no less pure and tender than he
+was great. And this, with what it leads to, the blow to Desdemona, and
+the scene where she is treated as the inmate of a brothel, a scene far
+more painful than the murder scene, is another cause of the special
+effect of this tragedy.<a name="FNanchor_86" id="FNanchor_86"></a><a href="#Footnote_86" class="fnanchor">[86]</a></p>
+
+<p>(3) The mere mention of these scenes will remind us painfully of a third
+cause; and perhaps it is the most potent of all. I mean the suffering
+<a name="Page_179" id="Page_179"></a><span class="pagenum">[179]</span>of Desdemona. This is, unless I mistake, the most nearly intolerable
+spectacle that Shakespeare offers us. For one thing, it is <i>mere</i>
+suffering; and, <i>ceteris paribus</i>, that is much worse to witness than
+suffering that issues in action. Desdemona is helplessly passive. She
+can do nothing whatever. She cannot retaliate even in speech; no, not
+even in silent feeling. And the chief reason of her helplessness only
+makes the sight of her suffering more exquisitely painful. She is
+helpless because her nature is infinitely sweet and her love absolute. I
+would not challenge Mr. Swinburne's statement that we <i>pity</i> Othello
+even more than Desdemona; but we watch Desdemona with more unmitigated
+distress. We are never wholly uninfluenced by the feeling that Othello
+is a man contending with another man; but Desdemona's suffering is like
+that of the most loving of dumb creatures tortured without cause by the
+being he adores.</p>
+
+<p>(4) Turning from the hero and heroine to the third principal character,
+we observe (what has often been pointed out) that the action and
+catastrophe of <i>Othello</i> depend largely on intrigue. We must not say
+more than this. We must not call the play a tragedy of intrigue as
+distinguished from a tragedy of character. Iago's plot is Iago's
+character in action; and it is built on his knowledge of Othello's
+character, and could not otherwise have succeeded. Still it remains true
+that an elaborate plot was necessary to elicit the catastrophe; for
+Othello was no Leontes, and his was the last nature to engender such
+jealousy from itself. Accordingly Iago's intrigue occupies a position in
+the drama for which no parallel can be found in the other tragedies; the
+only approach, and that a distant one, being the intrigue of Edmund in
+the secondary plot of <i>King Lear</i>. Now in any novel or play, even if the
+persons rouse little interest and are never in serious danger, a
+skilfully-worked <a name="Page_180" id="Page_180"></a><span class="pagenum">[180]</span>intrigue will excite eager attention and suspense. And
+where, as in <i>Othello</i>, the persons inspire the keenest sympathy and
+antipathy, and life and death depend on the intrigue, it becomes the
+source of a tension in which pain almost overpowers pleasure. Nowhere
+else in Shakespeare do we hold our breath in such anxiety and for so
+long a time as in the later Acts of <i>Othello</i>.</p>
+
+<p>(5) One result of the prominence of the element of intrigue is that
+<i>Othello</i> is less unlike a story of private life than any other of the
+great tragedies. And this impression is strengthened in further ways. In
+the other great tragedies the action is placed in a distant period, so
+that its general significance is perceived through a thin veil which
+separates the persons from ourselves and our own world. But <i>Othello</i> is
+a drama of modern life; when it first appeared it was a drama almost of
+contemporary life, for the date of the Turkish attack on Cyprus is 1570.
+The characters come close to us, and the application of the drama to
+ourselves (if the phrase may be pardoned) is more immediate than it can
+be in <i>Hamlet</i> or <i>Lear</i>. Besides this, their fortunes affect us as
+those of private individuals more than is possible in any of the later
+tragedies with the exception of <i>Timon</i>. I have not forgotten the
+Senate, nor Othello's position, nor his service to the State;<a name="FNanchor_87" id="FNanchor_87"></a><a href="#Footnote_87" class="fnanchor">[87]</a> but
+his deed and his death have not that influence on the interests of a
+nation or an empire which serves to idealise, and to remove far from our
+own sphere, the stories of Hamlet and Macbeth, of Coriolanus and Antony.
+Indeed he is already superseded at Cyprus when his fate is consummated,
+and as we leave him no vision rises on us, as in other tragedies, of
+peace descending on a distracted land.</p>
+
+<p>(6) The peculiarities so far considered combine with others to produce
+those feelings of oppression, <a name="Page_181" id="Page_181"></a><span class="pagenum">[181]</span>of confinement to a comparatively narrow
+world, and of dark fatality, which haunt us in reading <i>Othello</i>. In
+<i>Macbeth</i> the fate which works itself out alike in the external conflict
+and in the hero's soul, is obviously hostile to evil; and the
+imagination is dilated both by the consciousness of its presence and by
+the appearance of supernatural agencies. These, as we have seen, produce
+in <i>Hamlet</i> a somewhat similar effect, which is increased by the hero's
+acceptance of the accidents as a providential shaping of his end. <i>King
+Lear</i> is undoubtedly the tragedy which comes nearest to <i>Othello</i> in the
+impression of darkness and fatefulness, and in the absence of direct
+indications of any guiding power.<a name="FNanchor_88" id="FNanchor_88"></a><a href="#Footnote_88" class="fnanchor">[88]</a> But in <i>King Lear</i>, apart from
+other differences to be considered later, the conflict assumes
+proportions so vast that the imagination seems, as in <i>Paradise Lost</i>,
+to traverse spaces wider than the earth. In reading <i>Othello</i> the mind
+is not thus distended. It is more bound down to the spectacle of noble
+beings caught in toils from which there is no escape; while the
+prominence of the intrigue diminishes the sense of the dependence of the
+catastrophe on character, and the part played by accident<a name="FNanchor_89" id="FNanchor_89"></a><a href="#Footnote_89" class="fnanchor">[89]</a> in this
+catastrophe accentuates the feeling of fate. This influence of accident
+is keenly felt in <i>King Lear</i> only once, and at the very end of the
+play. In <i>Othello</i>, after the temptation has <a name="Page_182" id="Page_182"></a><span class="pagenum">[182]</span>begun, it is incessant and
+terrible. The skill of Iago was extraordinary, but so was his good
+fortune. Again and again a chance word from Desdemona, a chance meeting
+of Othello and Cassio, a question which starts to our lips and which
+anyone but Othello would have asked, would have destroyed Iago's plot
+and ended his life. In their stead, Desdemona drops her handkerchief at
+the moment most favourable to him,<a name="FNanchor_90" id="FNanchor_90"></a><a href="#Footnote_90" class="fnanchor">[90]</a> Cassio blunders into the presence
+of Othello only to find him in a swoon, Bianca arrives precisely when
+she is wanted to complete Othello's deception and incense his anger into
+fury. All this and much more seems to us quite natural, so potent is the
+art of the dramatist; but it confounds us with a feeling, such as we
+experience in the <i>Oedipus Tyrannus</i>, that for these star-crossed
+mortals&mdash;both <span class="greek" title="dysdaimones"> &#948;&#965;&#963;&#948;&#945;&#943;&#956;&#959;&#957;&#949;&#962;</span>&mdash;there is no escape from fate, and
+even with a feeling, absent from that play, that fate has taken sides
+with villainy.<a name="FNanchor_91" id="FNanchor_91"></a><a href="#Footnote_91" class="fnanchor">[91]</a> It is not surprising, therefore, that <i>Othello</i>
+should affect us as <i>Hamlet</i> and <i>Macbeth</i> never do, and as <i>King Lear</i>
+does only in slighter measure. On the contrary, it is marvellous that,
+before the tragedy is over, Shakespeare <a name="Page_183" id="Page_183"></a><span class="pagenum">[183]</span>should have succeeded in toning
+down this impression into harmony with others more solemn and serene.</p>
+
+<p>But has he wholly succeeded? Or is there a justification for the fact&mdash;a
+fact it certainly is&mdash;that some readers, while acknowledging, of course,
+the immense power of <i>Othello</i>, and even admitting that it is
+dramatically perhaps Shakespeare's greatest triumph, still regard it
+with a certain distaste, or, at any rate, hardly allow it a place in
+their minds beside <i>Hamlet</i>, <i>King Lear</i> and <i>Macbeth</i>?</p>
+
+<p>The distaste to which I refer is due chiefly to two causes. First, to
+many readers in our time, men as well as women, the subject of sexual
+jealousy, treated with Elizabethan fulness and frankness, is not merely
+painful but so repulsive that not even the intense tragic emotions which
+the story generates can overcome this repulsion. But, while it is easy
+to understand a dislike of <i>Othello</i> thus caused, it does not seem
+necessary to discuss it, for it may fairly be called personal or
+subjective. It would become more than this, and would amount to a
+criticism of the play, only if those who feel it maintained that the
+fulness and frankness which are disagreeable to them are also needless
+from a dramatic point of view, or betray a design of appealing to
+unpoetic feelings in the audience. But I do not think that this is
+maintained, or that such a view would be plausible.</p>
+
+<p>To some readers, again, parts of <i>Othello</i> appear shocking or even
+horrible. They think&mdash;if I may formulate their objection&mdash;that in these
+parts Shakespeare has sinned against the canons of art, by representing
+on the stage a violence or brutality the effect of which is
+unnecessarily painful and rather sensational than tragic. The passages
+which thus give offence are probably those <a name="Page_184" id="Page_184"></a><span class="pagenum">[184]</span>already referred to,&mdash;that
+where Othello strikes Desdemona (<span class="smcap">iv.</span> i. 251), that where he
+affects to treat her as an inmate of a house of ill-fame (<span class="smcap">iv.</span>
+ii.), and finally the scene of her death.</p>
+
+<p>The issues thus raised ought not to be ignored or impatiently dismissed,
+but they cannot be decided, it seems to me, by argument. All we can
+profitably do is to consider narrowly our experience, and to ask
+ourselves this question: If we feel these objections, do we feel them
+when we are reading the play with all our force, or only when we are
+reading it in a half-hearted manner? For, however matters may stand in
+the former case, in the latter case evidently the fault is ours and not
+Shakespeare's. And if we try the question thus, I believe we shall find
+that on the whole the fault is ours. The first, and least important, of
+the three passages&mdash;that of the blow&mdash;seems to me the most doubtful. I
+confess that, do what I will, I cannot reconcile myself with it. It
+seems certain that the blow is by no means a tap on the shoulder with a
+roll of paper, as some actors, feeling the repulsiveness of the passage,
+have made it. It must occur, too, on the open stage. And there is not, I
+think, a sufficiently overwhelming tragic feeling in the passage to make
+it bearable. But in the other two scenes the case is different. There,
+it seems to me, if we fully imagine the inward tragedy in the souls of
+the persons as we read, the more obvious and almost physical sensations
+of pain or horror do not appear in their own likeness, and only serve to
+intensify the tragic feelings in which they are absorbed. Whether this
+would be so in the murder-scene if Desdemona had to be imagined as
+dragged about the open stage (as in some modern performances) may be
+doubtful; but there is absolutely no warrant in the text for imagining
+this, and it is also quite clear <a name="Page_185" id="Page_185"></a><span class="pagenum">[185]</span>that the bed where she is stifled was
+within the curtains,<a name="FNanchor_92" id="FNanchor_92"></a><a href="#Footnote_92" class="fnanchor">[92]</a> and so, presumably, in part concealed.</p>
+
+<p>Here, then, <i>Othello</i> does not appear to be, unless perhaps at one
+point,<a name="FNanchor_93" id="FNanchor_93"></a><a href="#Footnote_93" class="fnanchor">[93]</a> open to criticism, though it has more passages than the other
+three tragedies where, if imagination is not fully exerted, it is
+shocked or else sensationally excited. If nevertheless we feel it to
+occupy a place in our minds a little lower than the other three (and I
+believe this feeling, though not general, is not rare), the reason lies
+not here but in another characteristic, to which I have already
+referred,&mdash;the comparative confinement of the imaginative atmosphere.
+<i>Othello</i> has not equally with the other three the power of dilating the
+imagination by vague suggestions of huge universal powers working in the
+world of individual fate and passion. It is, in a sense, less
+'symbolic.' We seem to be aware in it of a certain limitation, a partial
+suppression of that element in Shakespeare's mind which unites him with
+the mystical poets and with the great musicians and philosophers. In one
+or two of his plays, notably in <i>Troilus and Cressida</i>, we are almost
+painfully conscious of this suppression; we feel an intense intellectual
+activity, but at the same time a certain coldness and hardness, as
+though some power in his soul, at once the highest and the sweetest,
+were for a time in abeyance. In other plays, notably in the <i>Tempest</i>,
+we are constantly aware of the presence of this power; and in such cases
+we seem to be peculiarly near to Shakespeare himself. Now this is so in
+<i>Hamlet</i> and <i>King Lear</i>, and, in a slighter degree, in <i>Macbeth</i>; but
+it is much less so in <i>Othello</i>. I do not mean that in <i>Othello</i> the
+<a name="Page_186" id="Page_186"></a><span class="pagenum">[186]</span>suppression is marked, or that, as in <i>Troilus and Cressida</i>, it
+strikes us as due to some unpleasant mood; it seems rather to follow
+simply from the design of a play on a contemporary and wholly mundane
+subject. Still it makes a difference of the kind I have attempted to
+indicate, and it leaves an impression that in <i>Othello</i> we are not in
+contact with the whole of Shakespeare. And it is perhaps significant in
+this respect that the hero himself strikes us as having, probably, less
+of the poet's personality in him than many characters far inferior both
+as dramatic creations and as men.</p>
+
+
+<h4>2</h4>
+
+<p>The character of Othello is comparatively simple, but, as I have dwelt
+on the prominence of intrigue and accident in the play, it is desirable
+to show how essentially the success of Iago's plot is connected with
+this character. Othello's description of himself as</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i4">one not easily jealous, but, being wrought,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Perplexed in the extreme,<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>is perfectly just. His tragedy lies in this&mdash;that his whole nature was
+indisposed to jealousy, and yet was such that he was unusually open to
+deception, and, if once wrought to passion, likely to act with little
+reflection, with no delay, and in the most decisive manner conceivable.</p>
+
+<p>Let me first set aside a mistaken view. I do not mean the ridiculous
+notion that Othello was jealous by temperament, but the idea, which has
+some little plausibility, that the play is primarily a study of a noble
+barbarian, who has become a Christian and has imbibed some of the
+civilisation of his employers, but who retains beneath the surface the
+savage passions of his Moorish blood and also the suspiciousness
+regarding female chastity common among Oriental peoples, and that the
+last <a name="Page_187" id="Page_187"></a><span class="pagenum">[187]</span>three Acts depict the outburst of these original feelings through
+the thin crust of Venetian culture. It would take too long to discuss
+this idea,<a name="FNanchor_94" id="FNanchor_94"></a><a href="#Footnote_94" class="fnanchor">[94]</a> and it would perhaps be useless to do so, for all
+arguments against it must end in an appeal to the reader's understanding
+of Shakespeare. If he thinks it is like Shakespeare to look at things in
+this manner; that he had a historical mind and occupied himself with
+problems of 'Culturgeschichte'; that he laboured to make his Romans
+perfectly Roman, to give a correct view of the Britons in the days of
+Lear or Cymbeline, to portray in Hamlet a stage of the moral
+consciousness not yet reached by the people around him, the reader will
+also think this interpretation of <i>Othello</i> probable. To me it appears
+hopelessly un-Shakespearean. I could as easily believe that Chaucer
+meant the Wife of Bath for a study of the peculiarities of
+Somersetshire. I do not mean that Othello's race is a matter of no
+account. It has, as we shall presently see, its importance in the play.
+It makes a difference to our idea of him; it makes a difference to the
+action and catastrophe. But in regard to the essentials of his character
+it is not important; and if anyone had told Shakespeare that no
+Englishman would have acted like the Moor, and had congratulated him on
+the accuracy of his racial psychology, I am sure he would have laughed.</p>
+
+<p>Othello is, in one sense of the word, by far the most romantic figure
+among Shakespeare's heroes; and he is so partly from the strange life of
+war and adventure which he has lived from childhood. He does not belong
+to our world, and he seems to enter it we know not whence&mdash;almost as if
+from wonderland. There is something mysterious in his descent from men
+of royal siege; in his wanderings <a name="Page_188" id="Page_188"></a><span class="pagenum">[188]</span>in vast deserts and among marvellous
+peoples; in his tales of magic handkerchiefs and prophetic Sibyls; in
+the sudden vague glimpses we get of numberless battles and sieges in
+which he has played the hero and has borne a charmed life; even in
+chance references to his baptism, his being sold to slavery, his sojourn
+in Aleppo.</p>
+
+<p>And he is not merely a romantic figure; his own nature is romantic. He
+has not, indeed, the meditative or speculative imagination of Hamlet;
+but in the strictest sense of the word he is more poetic than Hamlet.
+Indeed, if one recalls Othello's most famous speeches&mdash;those that begin,
+'Her father loved me,' 'O now for ever,' 'Never, Iago,' 'Had it pleased
+Heaven,' 'It is the cause,' 'Behold, I have a weapon,' 'Soft you, a word
+or two before you go'&mdash;and if one places side by side with these
+speeches an equal number by any other hero, one will not doubt that
+Othello is the greatest poet of them all. There is the same poetry in
+his casual phrases&mdash;like 'These nine moons wasted,' 'Keep up your bright
+swords, for the dew will rust them,' 'You chaste stars,' 'It is a sword
+of Spain, the ice-brook's temper,' 'It is the very error of the
+moon'&mdash;and in those brief expressions of intense feeling which ever
+since have been taken as the absolute expression, like</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i8">If it were now to die,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">'Twere now to be most happy; for, I fear,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">My soul hath her content so absolute<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">That not another comfort like to this<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Succeeds in unknown fate,<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>or</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i1">If she be false, O then Heaven mocks itself.<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">I'll not believe it;<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>or</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i1">No, my heart is turned to stone; I strike it, and it hurts my hand,<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>or</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i1">But yet the pity of it, Iago! O Iago, the pity of it, Iago!<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p><a name="Page_189" id="Page_189"></a><span class="pagenum">[189]</span>or</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i11">O thou weed,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Who art so lovely fair and smell'st so sweet<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">That the sense aches at thee, would thou hadst ne'er been born.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>And this imagination, we feel, has accompanied his whole life. He has
+watched with a poet's eye the Arabian trees dropping their med'cinable
+gum, and the Indian throwing away his chance-found pearl; and has gazed
+in a fascinated dream at the Pontic sea rushing, never to return, to the
+Propontic and the Hellespont; and has felt as no other man ever felt
+(for he speaks of it as none other ever did) the poetry of the pride,
+pomp, and circumstance of glorious war.</p>
+
+<p>So he comes before us, dark and grand, with a light upon him from the
+sun where he was born; but no longer young, and now grave,
+self-controlled, steeled by the experience of countless perils,
+hardships and vicissitudes, at once simple and stately in bearing and in
+speech, a great man naturally modest but fully conscious of his worth,
+proud of his services to the state, unawed by dignitaries and unelated
+by honours, secure, it would seem, against all dangers from without and
+all rebellion from within. And he comes to have his life crowned with
+the final glory of love, a love as strange, adventurous and romantic as
+any passage of his eventful history, filling his heart with tenderness
+and his imagination with ecstasy. For there is no love, not that of
+Romeo in his youth, more steeped in imagination than Othello's.</p>
+
+<p>The sources of danger in this character are revealed but too clearly by
+the story. In the first place, Othello's mind, for all its poetry, is
+very simple. He is not observant. His nature tends outward. He is quite
+free from introspection, and is not given to reflection. Emotion excites
+his imagination, but it confuses and dulls his intellect. <a name="Page_190" id="Page_190"></a><span class="pagenum">[190]</span>On this side
+he is the very opposite of Hamlet, with whom, however, he shares a great
+openness and trustfulness of nature. In addition, he has little
+experience of the corrupt products of civilised life, and is ignorant of
+European women.</p>
+
+<p>In the second place, for all his dignity and massive calm (and he has
+greater dignity than any other of Shakespeare's men), he is by nature
+full of the most vehement passion. Shakespeare emphasises his
+self-control, not only by the wonderful pictures of the First Act, but
+by references to the past. Lodovico, amazed at his violence, exclaims:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i1">Is this the noble Moor whom our full Senate<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Call all in all sufficient? Is this the nature<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Whom passion could not shake? whose solid virtue<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">The shot of accident nor dart of chance<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Could neither graze nor pierce?<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>Iago, who has here no motive for lying, asks:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i1">Can he be angry? I have seen the cannon<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">When it hath blown his ranks into the air,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">And, like the devil, from his very arm<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Puffed his own brother&mdash;and can he be angry?<a name="FNanchor_95" id="FNanchor_95"></a><a href="#Footnote_95" class="fnanchor">[95]</a><br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>This, and other aspects of his character, are best exhibited by a single
+line&mdash;one of Shakespeare's miracles&mdash;the words by which Othello silences
+in a moment the night-brawl between his attendants and those of
+Brabantio:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i1">Keep up your bright swords, for the dew will rust them.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>And the same self-control is strikingly shown where Othello endeavours
+to elicit some explanation of the fight between Cassio and Montano.
+Here, however, there occur ominous words, which make us feel how
+necessary was this self-control, and make us admire it the more:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i10">Now, by heaven,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">My blood begins my safer guides to rule,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">And passion, having my best judgment collied,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Assays to lead the way.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p><a name="Page_191" id="Page_191"></a><span class="pagenum">[191]</span>We remember these words later, when the sun of reason is 'collied,'
+blackened and blotted out in total eclipse.</p>
+
+<p>Lastly, Othello's nature is all of one piece. His trust, where he
+trusts, is absolute. Hesitation is almost impossible to him. He is
+extremely self-reliant, and decides and acts instantaneously. If stirred
+to indignation, as 'in Aleppo once,' he answers with one lightning
+stroke. Love, if he loves, must be to him the heaven where either he
+must live or bear no life. If such a passion as jealousy seizes him, it
+will swell into a well-nigh incontrollable flood. He will press for
+immediate conviction or immediate relief. Convinced, he will act with
+the authority of a judge and the swiftness of a man in mortal pain.
+Undeceived, he will do like execution on himself.</p>
+
+<p>This character is so noble, Othello's feelings and actions follow so
+inevitably from it and from the forces brought to bear on it, and his
+sufferings are so heart-rending, that he stirs, I believe, in most
+readers a passion of mingled love and pity which they feel for no other
+hero in Shakespeare, and to which not even Mr. Swinburne can do more
+than justice. Yet there are some critics and not a few readers who
+cherish a grudge against him. They do not merely think that in the later
+stages of his temptation he showed a certain obtuseness, and that, to
+speak pedantically, he acted with unjustifiable precipitance and
+violence; no one, I suppose, denies that. But, even when they admit that
+he was not of a jealous temper, they consider that he <i>was</i> 'easily
+jealous'; they seem to think that it was inexcusable in him to feel any
+suspicion of his wife at all; and they blame him for never suspecting
+Iago or asking him for evidence. I refer to this attitude of mind
+chiefly in order to draw attention to certain points in the story. It
+comes partly from mere inattention (for Othello did <a name="Page_192" id="Page_192"></a><span class="pagenum">[192]</span>suspect Iago and
+did ask him for evidence); partly from a misconstruction of the text
+which makes Othello appear jealous long before he really is so;<a name="FNanchor_96" id="FNanchor_96"></a><a href="#Footnote_96" class="fnanchor">[96]</a> and
+partly from failure to realise certain essential facts. I will begin
+with these.</p>
+
+<p>(1) Othello, we have seen, was trustful, and thorough in his trust. He
+put entire confidence in the honesty of Iago, who had not only been his
+companion in arms, but, as he believed, had just proved his faithfulness
+in the matter of the marriage. This confidence was misplaced, and we
+happen to know it; but it was no sign of stupidity in Othello. For his
+opinion of Iago was the opinion of practically everyone who knew him:
+and that opinion was that Iago was before all things 'honest,' his very
+faults being those of excess in honesty. This being so, even if Othello
+had not been trustful and simple, it would have been quite unnatural in
+him to be unmoved by the warnings of so honest a friend, warnings
+offered with extreme reluctance and manifestly from a sense of a
+friend's duty.<a name="FNanchor_97" id="FNanchor_97"></a><a href="#Footnote_97" class="fnanchor">[97]</a> <i>Any</i> husband would have been troubled by them.</p>
+
+<p>(2) Iago does not bring these warnings to a husband who had lived with a
+wife for months and years and knew her like his sister or his
+bosom-friend. Nor is there any ground in Othello's character for
+supposing that, if he had been such a man, he would have felt and acted
+as he does in the play. But he was newly married; in the circumstances
+he cannot have known much of Desdemona before his marriage; and further
+he was conscious of being under the spell of a feeling which can <a name="Page_193" id="Page_193"></a><span class="pagenum">[193]</span>give
+glory to the truth but can also give it to a dream.</p>
+
+<p>(3) This consciousness in any imaginative man is enough, in such
+circumstances, to destroy his confidence in his powers of perception. In
+Othello's case, after a long and most artful preparation, there now
+comes, to reinforce its effect, the suggestions that he is not an
+Italian, not even a European; that he is totally ignorant of the
+thoughts and the customary morality of Venetian women;<a name="FNanchor_98" id="FNanchor_98"></a><a href="#Footnote_98" class="fnanchor">[98]</a> that he had
+himself seen in Desdemona's deception of her father how perfect an
+actress she could be. As he listens in horror, for a moment at least the
+past is revealed to him in a new and dreadful light, and the ground
+seems to sink under his feet. These suggestions are followed by a
+tentative but hideous and humiliating insinuation of what his honest and
+much-experienced friend fears may be the true explanation of Desdemona's
+rejection of acceptable suitors, and of her strange, and naturally
+temporary, preference for a black man. Here Iago goes too far. He sees
+something in Othello's face that frightens him, and he breaks off. Nor
+does this idea take any hold of Othello's mind. But it is not surprising
+that his utter powerlessness to repel it on the ground of knowledge of
+his wife, or even of that instinctive interpretation of character which
+is possible between persons of the same race,<a name="FNanchor_99" id="FNanchor_99"></a><a href="#Footnote_99" class="fnanchor">[99]</a> should complete his
+misery, so that he feels <a name="Page_194" id="Page_194"></a><span class="pagenum">[194]</span>he can bear no more, and abruptly dismisses
+his friend (<span class="smcap">iii.</span> iii. 238).</p>
+
+<p>Now I repeat that <i>any</i> man situated as Othello was would have been
+disturbed by Iago's communications, and I add that many men would have
+been made wildly jealous. But up to this point, where Iago is dismissed,
+Othello, I must maintain, does not show jealousy. His confidence is
+shaken, he is confused and deeply troubled, he feels even horror; but he
+is not yet jealous in the proper sense of that word. In his soliloquy
+(<span class="smcap">iii.</span> iii. 258 ff.) the beginning of this passion may be
+traced; but it is only after an interval of solitude, when he has had
+time to dwell on the idea presented to him, and especially after
+statements of fact, not mere general grounds of suspicion, are offered,
+that the passion lays hold of him. Even then, however, and indeed to the
+very end, he is quite unlike the essentially jealous man, quite unlike
+Leontes. No doubt the thought of another man's possessing the woman he
+loves is intolerable to him; no doubt the sense of insult and the
+impulse of revenge are at times most violent; and these are the feelings
+of jealousy proper. But these are not the chief or the deepest source of
+Othello's suffering. It is the wreck of his faith and his love. It is
+the feeling,</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i1">If she be false, oh then Heaven mocks itself;<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>the feeling,</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i1">O Iago, the pity of it, Iago!<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>the feeling,</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i1">But there where I have garner'd up my heart,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Where either I must live, or bear no life;<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">The fountain from the which my current runs,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Or else dries up&mdash;to be discarded thence....<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>You will find nothing like this in Leontes.</p>
+
+<p>Up to this point, it appears to me, there is not a syllable to be said
+against Othello. But the play <a name="Page_195" id="Page_195"></a><span class="pagenum">[195]</span>is a tragedy, and from this point we may
+abandon the ungrateful and undramatic task of awarding praise and blame.
+When Othello, after a brief interval, re-enters (<span class="smcap">iii.</span> iii.
+330), we see at once that the poison has been at work and 'burns like
+the mines of sulphur.'</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i1">Look where he comes! Not poppy, nor mandragora,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Nor all the drowsy syrups of the world,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Shall ever medicine thee to that sweet sleep<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Which thou owedst yesterday.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>He is 'on the rack,' in an agony so unbearable that he cannot endure the
+sight of Iago. Anticipating the probability that Iago has spared him the
+whole truth, he feels that in that case his life is over and his
+'occupation gone' with all its glories. But he has not abandoned hope.
+The bare possibility that his friend is deliberately deceiving
+him&mdash;though such a deception would be a thing so monstrously wicked that
+he can hardly conceive it credible&mdash;is a kind of hope. He furiously
+demands proof, ocular proof. And when he is compelled to see that he is
+demanding an impossibility he still demands evidence. He forces it from
+the unwilling witness, and hears the maddening tale of Cassio's dream.
+It is enough. And if it were not enough, has he not sometimes seen a
+handkerchief spotted with strawberries in his wife's hand? Yes, it was
+his first gift to her.</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i1">I know not that; but such a handkerchief&mdash;<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">I am sure it was your wife's&mdash;did I to-day<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">See Cassio wipe his beard with.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>'If it be that,' he answers&mdash;but what need to test the fact? The
+'madness of revenge' is in his blood, and hesitation is a thing he never
+knew. He passes judgment, and controls himself only to make his sentence
+a solemn vow.</p>
+
+<p>The Othello of the Fourth Act is Othello in his fall. His fall is never
+complete, but he is much changed. Towards the close of the
+Temptation-scene <a name="Page_196" id="Page_196"></a><span class="pagenum">[196]</span>he becomes at times most terrible, but his grandeur
+remains almost undiminished. Even in the following scene (<span class="smcap">iii.</span>
+iv.), where he goes to test Desdemona in the matter of the handkerchief,
+and receives a fatal confirmation of her guilt, our sympathy with him is
+hardly touched by any feeling of humiliation. But in the Fourth Act
+'Chaos has come.' A slight interval of time may be admitted here. It is
+but slight; for it was necessary for Iago to hurry on, and terribly
+dangerous to leave a chance for a meeting of Cassio with Othello; and
+his insight into Othello's nature taught him that his plan was to
+deliver blow on blow, and never to allow his victim to recover from the
+confusion of the first shock. Still there is a slight interval; and when
+Othello reappears we see at a glance that he is a changed man. He is
+physically exhausted, and his mind is dazed.<a name="FNanchor_100" id="FNanchor_100"></a><a href="#Footnote_100" class="fnanchor">[100]</a> He sees everything
+blurred through a mist of blood and tears. He has actually forgotten the
+incident of the handkerchief, and has to be reminded of it. When Iago,
+perceiving that he can now risk almost any lie, tells him that Cassio
+has confessed his guilt, Othello, the hero who has seemed to us only
+second to Coriolanus in physical power, trembles all over; he mutters
+disjointed words; a blackness suddenly intervenes between his eyes and
+the world; he takes it for the shuddering testimony of nature to the
+horror he has just heard,<a name="FNanchor_101" id="FNanchor_101"></a><a href="#Footnote_101" class="fnanchor">[101]</a> and he falls senseless to the ground.
+<a name="Page_197" id="Page_197"></a><span class="pagenum">[197]</span>When he recovers it is to watch Cassio, as he imagines, laughing over
+his shame. It is an imposition so gross, and should have been one so
+perilous, that Iago would never have ventured it before. But he is safe
+now. The sight only adds to the confusion of intellect the madness of
+rage; and a ravenous thirst for revenge, contending with motions of
+infinite longing and regret, conquers them. The delay till night-fall is
+torture to him. His self-control has wholly deserted him, and he strikes
+his wife in the presence of the Venetian envoy. He is so lost to all
+sense of reality that he never asks himself what will follow the deaths
+of Cassio and his wife. An ineradicable instinct of justice, rather than
+any last quiver of hope, leads him to question Emilia; but nothing could
+convince him now, and there follows the dreadful scene of accusation;
+and then, to allow us the relief of burning hatred and burning tears,
+the interview of Desdemona with Iago, and that last talk of hers with
+Emilia, and her last song.</p>
+
+<p>But before the end there is again a change. The supposed death of Cassio
+(<span class="smcap">v.</span> i.) satiates the thirst for vengeance. The Othello who
+enters the bed-chamber with the words,</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i1">It is the cause, it is the cause, my soul,<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>is not the man of the Fourth Act. The deed he is bound to do is no
+murder, but a sacrifice. He is to save Desdemona from herself, not in
+hate but in honour; in honour, and also in love. His anger has passed; a
+boundless sorrow has taken its place; and</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i6">this sorrow's heavenly:<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">It strikes where it doth love.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>Even when, at the sight of her apparent obduracy, and at the hearing of
+words which by a crowning fatality can only reconvince him of her guilt,
+these feelings give way to others, it is to <a name="Page_198" id="Page_198"></a><span class="pagenum">[198]</span>righteous indignation they
+give way, not to rage; and, terribly painful as this scene is, there is
+almost nothing here to diminish the admiration and love which heighten
+pity.<a name="FNanchor_102" id="FNanchor_102"></a><a href="#Footnote_102" class="fnanchor">[102]</a> And pity itself vanishes, and love and admiration alone
+remain, in the majestic dignity and sovereign ascendancy of the close.
+Chaos has come and gone; and the Othello of the Council-chamber and the
+quay of Cyprus has returned, or a greater and nobler Othello still. As
+he speaks those final words in which all the glory and agony of his
+life&mdash;long ago in India and Arabia and Aleppo, and afterwards in Venice,
+and now in Cyprus&mdash;seem to pass before us, like the pictures that flash
+before the eyes of a drowning man, a triumphant scorn for the fetters of
+the flesh and the littleness of all the lives that must survive him
+sweeps our grief away, and when he dies upon a kiss the most painful of
+all tragedies leaves us for the moment free from pain, and exulting in
+the power of 'love and man's unconquerable mind.'</p>
+
+
+<h4>3</h4>
+
+<p>The words just quoted come from Wordsworth's sonnet to Toussaint
+l'Ouverture. Toussaint was a Negro; and there is a question, which,
+though of little consequence, is not without dramatic interest, whether
+Shakespeare imagined Othello as a Negro or as a Moor. Now I will not say
+that Shakespeare imagined him as a Negro and not as a Moor, for that
+might imply that he distinguished Negroes and Moors precisely as we do;
+but what appears to me nearly certain is that he imagined Othello as a
+black man, and not as a light-brown one.</p>
+
+<p>In the first place, we must remember that the brown or bronze to which
+we are now accustomed <a name="Page_199" id="Page_199"></a><span class="pagenum">[199]</span>in the Othellos of our theatres is a recent
+innovation. Down to Edmund Kean's time, so far as is known, Othello was
+always quite black. This stage-tradition goes back to the Restoration,
+and it almost settles our question. For it is impossible that the colour
+of the original Othello should have been forgotten so soon after
+Shakespeare's time, and most improbable that it should have been changed
+from brown to black.</p>
+
+<p>If we turn to the play itself, we find many references to Othello's
+colour and appearance. Most of these are indecisive; for the word
+'black' was of course used then where we should speak of a 'dark'
+complexion now; and even the nickname 'thick-lips,' appealed to as proof
+that Othello was a Negro, might have been applied by an enemy to what we
+call a Moor. On the other hand, it is hard to believe that, if Othello
+had been light-brown, Brabantio would have taunted him with having a
+'sooty bosom,' or that (as Mr. Furness observes) he himself would have
+used the words,</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i7">her name, that was as fresh<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">As Dian's visage, is now begrimed and black<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">As mine own face.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>These arguments cannot be met by pointing out that Othello was of royal
+blood, is not called an Ethiopian, is called a Barbary horse, and is
+said to be going to Mauritania. All this would be of importance if we
+had reason to believe that Shakespeare shared our ideas, knowledge and
+terms. Otherwise it proves nothing. And we know that sixteenth-century
+writers called any dark North-African a Moor, or a black Moor, or a
+blackamoor. Sir Thomas Elyot, according to Hunter,<a name="FNanchor_103" id="FNanchor_103"></a><a href="#Footnote_103" class="fnanchor">[103]</a> calls Ethiopians
+Moors; and the following are the first two illustrations of 'Blackamoor'
+in the Oxford <i>English Dictionary</i>: 1547, <a name="Page_200" id="Page_200"></a><span class="pagenum">[200]</span>'I am a blake More borne in
+Barbary'; 1548, '<i>Ethiopo</i>, a blake More, or a man of Ethiope.' Thus
+geographical names can tell us nothing about the question how
+Shakespeare imagined Othello. He may have known that a Mauritanian is
+not a Negro nor black, but we cannot assume that he did. He may have
+known, again, that the Prince of Morocco, who is described in the
+<i>Merchant of Venice</i> as having, like Othello, the complexion of a devil,
+was no Negro. But we cannot tell: nor is there any reason why he should
+not have imagined the Prince as a brown Moor and Othello as a
+Blackamoor.</p>
+
+<p><i>Titus Andronicus</i> appeared in the Folio among Shakespeare's works. It
+is believed by some good critics to be his: hardly anyone doubts that he
+had a hand in it: it is certain that he knew it, for reminiscences of it
+are scattered through his plays. Now no one who reads <i>Titus Andronicus</i>
+with an open mind can doubt that Aaron was, in our sense, black; and he
+appears to have been a Negro. To mention nothing else, he is twice
+called 'coal-black'; his colour is compared with that of a raven and a
+swan's legs; his child is coal-black and thick-lipped; he himself has a
+'fleece of woolly hair.' Yet he is 'Aaron the Moor,' just as Othello is
+'Othello the Moor.' In the <i>Battle of Alcazar</i> (Dyce's <i>Peele</i>, p. 421)
+Muly the Moor is called 'the negro'; and Shakespeare himself in a single
+line uses 'negro' and 'Moor' of the same person (<i>Merchant of Venice</i>,
+<span class="smcap">iii.</span> v. 42).</p>
+
+<p>The horror of most American critics (Mr. Furness is a bright exception)
+at the idea of a black Othello is very amusing, and their arguments are
+highly instructive. But they were anticipated, I regret to say, by
+Coleridge, and we will hear him. 'No doubt Desdemona saw Othello's
+visage in his mind; yet, as we are constituted, and most surely as an
+English audience was disposed in <a name="Page_201" id="Page_201"></a><span class="pagenum">[201]</span>the beginning of the seventeenth
+century, it would be something monstrous to conceive this beautiful
+Venetian girl falling in love with a veritable negro. It would argue a
+disproportionateness, a want of balance, in Desdemona, which Shakespeare
+does not appear to have in the least contemplated.'<a name="FNanchor_104" id="FNanchor_104"></a><a href="#Footnote_104" class="fnanchor">[104]</a> Could any
+argument be more self-destructive? It actually <i>did</i> appear to Brabantio
+'something monstrous to conceive' his daughter falling in love with
+Othello,&mdash;so monstrous that he could account for her love only by drugs
+and foul charms. And the suggestion that such love would argue
+'disproportionateness' is precisely the suggestion that Iago <i>did</i> make
+in Desdemona's case:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i1">Foh! one may smell in such a will most rank,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Foul <i>disproportion</i>, thoughts unnatural.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>In fact he spoke of the marriage exactly as a filthy-minded cynic now
+might speak of the marriage of an English lady to a negro like
+Toussaint. Thus the argument of Coleridge and others points straight to
+the conclusion against which they argue.</p>
+
+<p>But this is not all. The question whether to Shakespeare Othello was
+black or brown is not a mere question of isolated fact or historical
+curiosity; it concerns the character of Desdemona. Coleridge, and still
+more the American writers, regard her love, in effect, as Brabantio
+regarded it, and not as Shakespeare conceived it. They are simply
+blurring this glorious conception when they try to lessen the distance
+between her and Othello, and to smooth away the obstacle which his
+'visage' offered to her romantic passion for a hero. Desdemona, the
+'eternal womanly' in its most lovely and adorable form, simple and
+innocent as a child, ardent with the courage and idealism of a saint,
+radiant with that heavenly purity of heart which men worship the more
+<a name="Page_202" id="Page_202"></a><span class="pagenum">[202]</span>because nature so rarely permits it to themselves, had no theories
+about universal brotherhood, and no phrases about 'one blood in all the
+nations of the earth' or 'barbarian, Scythian, bond and free'; but when
+her soul came in sight of the noblest soul on earth, she made nothing of
+the shrinking of her senses, but followed her soul until her senses took
+part with it, and 'loved him with the love which was her doom.' It was
+not prudent. It even turned out tragically. She met in life with the
+reward of those who rise too far above our common level; and we continue
+to allot her the same reward when we consent to forgive her for loving a
+brown man, but find it monstrous that she should love a black one.<a name="FNanchor_105" id="FNanchor_105"></a><a href="#Footnote_105" class="fnanchor">[105]</a></p>
+
+<p>There is perhaps a certain excuse for our failure to rise to
+Shakespeare's meaning, and to realise how extraordinary and splendid a
+thing it was in a gentle Venetian girl to love Othello, and to assail
+fortune with such a 'downright violence and storm' as is <a name="Page_203" id="Page_203"></a><span class="pagenum">[203]</span>expected only
+in a hero. It is that when first we hear of her marriage we have not yet
+seen the Desdemona of the later Acts; and therefore we do not perceive
+how astonishing this love and boldness must have been in a maiden so
+quiet and submissive. And when we watch her in her suffering and death
+we are so penetrated by the sense of her heavenly sweetness and
+self-surrender that we almost forget that she had shown herself quite as
+exceptional in the active assertion of her own soul and will. She tends
+to become to us predominantly pathetic, the sweetest and most pathetic
+of Shakespeare's women, as innocent as Miranda and as loving as Viola,
+yet suffering more deeply than Cordelia or Imogen. And she seems to lack
+that independence and strength of spirit which Cordelia and Imogen
+possess, and which in a manner raises them above suffering. She appears
+passive and defenceless, and can oppose to wrong nothing but the
+infinite endurance and forgiveness of a love that knows not how to
+resist or resent. She thus becomes at once the most beautiful example of
+this love, and the most pathetic heroine in Shakespeare's world. If her
+part were acted by an artist equal to Salvini, and with a Salvini for
+Othello, I doubt if the spectacle of the last two Acts would not be
+pronounced intolerable.</p>
+
+<p>Of course this later impression of Desdemona is perfectly right, but it
+must be carried back and united with the earlier before we can see what
+Shakespeare imagined. Evidently, we are to understand, innocence,
+gentleness, sweetness, lovingness were the salient and, in a sense, the
+principal traits in Desdemona's character. She was, as her father
+supposed her to be,</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i7">a maiden never bold,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Of spirit so still and quiet that her motion<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Blushed at herself.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p><a name="Page_204" id="Page_204"></a><span class="pagenum">[204]</span>But suddenly there appeared something quite different&mdash;something which
+could never have appeared, for example, in Ophelia&mdash;a love not only full
+of romance but showing a strange freedom and energy of spirit, and
+leading to a most unusual boldness of action; and this action was
+carried through with a confidence and decision worthy of Juliet or
+Cordelia. Desdemona does not shrink before the Senate; and her language
+to her father, though deeply respectful, is firm enough to stir in us
+some sympathy with the old man who could not survive his daughter's
+loss. This then, we must understand, was the emergence in Desdemona, as
+she passed from girlhood to womanhood, of an individuality and strength
+which, if she had lived, would have been gradually fused with her more
+obvious qualities and have issued in a thousand actions, sweet and good,
+but surprising to her conventional or timid neighbours. And, indeed, we
+have already a slight example in her overflowing kindness, her boldness
+and her ill-fated persistence in pleading Cassio's cause. But the full
+ripening of her lovely and noble nature was not to be. In her brief
+wedded life she appeared again chiefly as the sweet and submissive being
+of her girlhood; and the strength of her soul, first evoked by love,
+found scope to show itself only in a love which, when harshly repulsed,
+blamed only its own pain; when bruised, only gave forth a more exquisite
+fragrance; and, when rewarded with death, summoned its last labouring
+breath to save its murderer.</p>
+
+<p>Many traits in Desdemona's character have been described with
+sympathetic insight by Mrs. Jameson, and I will pass them by and add but
+a few words on the connection between this character and the catastrophe
+of <i>Othello</i>. Desdemona, as Mrs. Jameson remarks, shows less quickness
+of intellect and less tendency to reflection than most <a name="Page_205" id="Page_205"></a><span class="pagenum">[205]</span>of Shakespeare's
+heroines; but I question whether the critic is right in adding that she
+shows much of the 'unconscious address common in women.' She seems to me
+deficient in this address, having in its place a frank childlike
+boldness and persistency, which are full of charm but are unhappily
+united with a certain want of perception. And these graces and this
+deficiency appear to be inextricably intertwined, and in the
+circumstances conspire tragically against her. They, with her innocence,
+hinder her from understanding Othello's state of mind, and lead her to
+the most unlucky acts and words; and unkindness or anger subdues her so
+completely that she becomes passive and seems to drift helplessly
+towards the cataract in front.</p>
+
+<p>In Desdemona's incapacity to resist there is also, in addition to her
+perfect love, something which is very characteristic. She is, in a
+sense, a child of nature. That deep inward division which leads to clear
+and conscious oppositions of right and wrong, duty and inclination,
+justice and injustice, is alien to her beautiful soul. She is not good,
+kind and true in spite of a temptation to be otherwise, any more than
+she is charming in spite of a temptation to be otherwise. She seems to
+know evil only by name, and, her inclinations being good, she acts on
+inclination. This trait, with its results, may be seen if we compare
+her, at the crises of the story, with Cordelia. In Desdemona's place,
+Cordelia, however frightened at Othello's anger about the lost
+handkerchief, would not have denied its loss. Painful experience had
+produced in her a conscious principle of rectitude and a proud hatred of
+falseness, which would have made a lie, even one wholly innocent in
+spirit, impossible to her; and the clear sense of justice and right
+would have led her, instead, to require an explanation of Othello's
+agitation <a name="Page_206" id="Page_206"></a><span class="pagenum">[206]</span>which would have broken Iago's plot to pieces. In the same
+way, at the final crisis, no instinctive terror of death would have
+compelled Cordelia suddenly to relinquish her demand for justice and to
+plead for life. But these moments are fatal to Desdemona, who acts
+precisely as if she were guilty; and they are fatal because they ask for
+something which, it seems to us, could hardly be united with the
+peculiar beauty of her nature.</p>
+
+<p>This beauty is all her own. Something as beautiful may be found in
+Cordelia, but not the same beauty. Desdemona, confronted with Lear's
+foolish but pathetic demand for a profession of love, could have done, I
+think, what Cordelia could not do&mdash;could have refused to compete with
+her sisters, and yet have made her father feel that she loved him well.
+And I doubt if Cordelia, 'falsely murdered,' would have been capable of
+those last words of Desdemona&mdash;her answer to Emilia's 'O, who hath done
+this deed?'</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i6">Nobody: I myself. Farewell.<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Commend me to my kind lord. O, farewell!<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>Were we intended to remember, as we hear this last 'falsehood,' that
+other falsehood, 'It is not lost,' and to feel that, alike in the
+momentary child's fear and the deathless woman's love, Desdemona is
+herself and herself alone?<a name="FNanchor_106" id="FNanchor_106"></a><a href="#Footnote_106" class="fnanchor">[106]</a></p>
+
+<div class="footnotes">
+<div class="footnotehead">FOOTNOTES:</div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_85" id="Footnote_85"></a><a href="#FNanchor_85"><span class="label">[85]</span></a> One instance is worth pointing out, because the passage in
+<i>Othello</i> has, oddly enough, given trouble. Desdemona says of the maid
+Barbara: 'She was in love, and he she loved proved mad And did forsake
+her.' Theobald changed 'mad' to 'bad.' Warburton read 'and he she loved
+forsook her, And she proved mad'! Johnson said 'mad' meant only 'wild,
+frantic, uncertain.' But what Desdemona says of Barbara is just what
+Ophelia might have said of herself.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_86" id="Footnote_86"></a><a href="#FNanchor_86"><span class="label">[86]</span></a> The whole force of the passages referred to can be felt
+only by a reader. The Othello of our stage can never be Shakespeare's
+Othello, any more than the Cleopatra of our stage can be his Cleopatra.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_87" id="Footnote_87"></a><a href="#FNanchor_87"><span class="label">[87]</span></a> See p. <a href='#Page_9'>9</a>.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_88" id="Footnote_88"></a><a href="#FNanchor_88"><span class="label">[88]</span></a> Even here, however, there is a great difference; for
+although the idea of such a power is not suggested by <i>King Lear</i> as it
+is by <i>Hamlet</i> and <i>Macbeth</i>, it is repeatedly expressed by persons <i>in</i>
+the drama. Of such references there are very few in <i>Othello</i>. But for
+somewhat frequent allusions to hell and the devil the view of the
+characters is almost strictly secular. Desdemona's sweetness and
+forgivingness are not based on religion, and her only way of accounting
+for her undeserved suffering is by an appeal to Fortune: 'It is my
+wretched fortune' (<span class="smcap">iv.</span> ii. 128). In like manner Othello can
+only appeal to Fate (<span class="smcap">v.</span> ii. 264):
+</p>
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i4">but, oh vain boast!<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Who can control his fate?<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+</div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_89" id="Footnote_89"></a><a href="#FNanchor_89"><span class="label">[89]</span></a> Ulrici has good remarks, though he exaggerates, on this
+point and the element of intrigue.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_90" id="Footnote_90"></a><a href="#FNanchor_90"><span class="label">[90]</span></a> And neither she nor Othello observes what handkerchief it
+is. Else she would have remembered how she came to lose it, and would
+have told Othello; and Othello, too, would at once have detected Iago's
+lie (<span class="smcap">iii.</span> iii. 438) that he had seen Cassio wipe his beard with
+the handkerchief 'to-day.' For in fact the handkerchief had been lost
+<i>not an hour</i> before Iago told that lie (line 288 of the <i>same scene</i>),
+and it was at that moment in his pocket. He lied therefore most rashly,
+but with his usual luck.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_91" id="Footnote_91"></a><a href="#FNanchor_91"><span class="label">[91]</span></a> For those who know the end of the story there is a
+terrible irony in the enthusiasm with which Cassio greets the arrival of
+Desdemona in Cyprus. Her ship (which is also Iago's) sets out from
+Venice a week later than the others, but reaches Cyprus on the same day
+with them:
+</p>
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i1">Tempests themselves, high seas and howling winds,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">The gutter'd rocks and congregated sands&mdash;<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Traitors ensteep'd to clog the guiltless keel&mdash;<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">As having sense of beauty, do omit<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Their mortal natures, letting go safely by<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">The divine Desdemona.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+<p>
+So swiftly does Fate conduct her to her doom.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_92" id="Footnote_92"></a><a href="#FNanchor_92"><span class="label">[92]</span></a> The dead bodies are not carried out at the end, as they
+must have been if the bed had been on the main stage (for this had no
+front curtain). The curtains within which the bed stood were drawn
+together at the words, 'Let it be hid' (<span class="smcap">v.</span> ii. 365).</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_93" id="Footnote_93"></a><a href="#FNanchor_93"><span class="label">[93]</span></a> Against which may be set the scene of the blinding of
+Gloster in <i>King Lear</i>.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_94" id="Footnote_94"></a><a href="#FNanchor_94"><span class="label">[94]</span></a> The reader who is tempted by it should, however, first ask
+himself whether Othello does act like a barbarian, or like a man who,
+though wrought almost to madness, does 'all in honour.'</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_95" id="Footnote_95"></a><a href="#FNanchor_95"><span class="label">[95]</span></a> For the actor, then, to represent him as violently angry
+when he cashiers Cassio is an utter mistake.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_96" id="Footnote_96"></a><a href="#FNanchor_96"><span class="label">[96]</span></a> I cannot deal fully with this point in the lecture. See
+<a href="#NOTE_L">Note L</a>.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_97" id="Footnote_97"></a><a href="#FNanchor_97"><span class="label">[97]</span></a> It is important to observe that, in his attempt to arrive
+at the facts about Cassio's drunken misdemeanour, Othello had just had
+an example of Iago's unwillingness to tell the whole truth where it must
+injure a friend. No wonder he feels in the Temptation-scene that 'this
+honest creature doubtless Sees and knows more, much more, than he
+unfolds.'</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_98" id="Footnote_98"></a><a href="#FNanchor_98"><span class="label">[98]</span></a> To represent that Venetian women do not regard adultery so
+seriously as Othello does, and again that Othello would be wise to
+accept the situation like an Italian husband, is one of Iago's most
+artful and most maddening devices.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_99" id="Footnote_99"></a><a href="#FNanchor_99"><span class="label">[99]</span></a> If the reader has ever chanced to see an African violently
+excited, he may have been startled to observe how completely at a loss
+he was to interpret those bodily expressions of passion which in a
+fellow-countryman he understands at once, and in a European foreigner
+with somewhat less certainty. The effect of difference in blood in
+increasing Othello's bewilderment regarding his wife is not sufficiently
+realised. The same effect has to be remembered in regard to Desdemona's
+mistakes in dealing with Othello in his anger.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_100" id="Footnote_100"></a><a href="#FNanchor_100"><span class="label">[100]</span></a> See <a href="#NOTE_M">Note M</a>.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_101" id="Footnote_101"></a><a href="#FNanchor_101"><span class="label">[101]</span></a> Cf. <i>Winter's Tale</i>, <span class="smcap">i.</span> ii. 137 ff.:
+</p>
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i5">Can thy dam?&mdash;may't be?&mdash;<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Affection! thy intention stabs the centre:<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Thou dost make possible things not so held,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Communicatest with dreams;&mdash;how can this be?<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">With what's unreal thou coactive art,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">And fellow'st nothing: then 'tis very credent<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Thou may'st cojoin with something; and thou dost,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">And that beyond commission, and I find it,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">And that to the infection of my brains<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">And hardening of my brows.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+</div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_102" id="Footnote_102"></a><a href="#FNanchor_102"><span class="label">[102]</span></a> See <a href="#NOTE_O">Note O</a>.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_103" id="Footnote_103"></a><a href="#FNanchor_103"><span class="label">[103]</span></a> New Illustrations, ii. 281.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_104" id="Footnote_104"></a><a href="#FNanchor_104"><span class="label">[104]</span></a> <i>Lectures on Shakespeare</i>, ed. Ashe, p. 386.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_105" id="Footnote_105"></a><a href="#FNanchor_105"><span class="label">[105]</span></a> I will not discuss the further question whether, granted
+that to Shakespeare Othello was a black, he should be represented as a
+black in our theatres now. I dare say not. We do not like the real
+Shakespeare. We like to have his language pruned and his conceptions
+flattened into something that suits our mouths and minds. And even if we
+were prepared to make an effort, still, as Lamb observes, to imagine is
+one thing and to see is another. Perhaps if we saw Othello coal-black
+with the bodily eye, the aversion of our blood, an aversion which comes
+as near to being merely physical as anything human can, would overpower
+our imagination and sink us below not Shakespeare only but the audiences
+of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
+</p><p>
+As I have mentioned Lamb, I may observe that he differed from Coleridge
+as to Othello's colour, but, I am sorry to add, thought Desdemona to
+stand in need of excuse. 'This noble lady, with a singularity rather to
+be wondered at than imitated, had chosen for the object of her
+affections a Moor, a black.... Neither is Desdemona to be altogether
+condemned for the unsuitableness of the person whom she selected for her
+lover' (<i>Tales from Shakespeare</i>). Others, of course, have gone much
+further and have treated all the calamities of the tragedy as a sort of
+judgment on Desdemona's rashness, wilfulness and undutifulness. There is
+no arguing with opinions like this; but I cannot believe that even Lamb
+is true to Shakespeare in implying that Desdemona is in some degree to
+be condemned. What is there in the play to show that Shakespeare
+regarded her marriage differently from Imogen's?</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_106" id="Footnote_106"></a><a href="#FNanchor_106"><span class="label">[106]</span></a> When Desdemona spoke her last words, perhaps that line of
+the ballad which she sang an hour before her death was still busy in her
+brain,
+</p>
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i1">Let nobody blame him: his scorn I approve.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+<p>
+Nature plays such strange tricks, and Shakespeare almost alone among
+poets seems to create in somewhat the same manner as Nature. In the same
+way, as Malone pointed out, Othello's exclamation, 'Goats and monkeys!'
+(<span class="smcap">iv.</span> i. 274) is an unconscious reminiscence of Iago's words at
+<span class="smcap">iii.</span> iii. 403.</p></div>
+</div>
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><a name="Page_207" id="Page_207"></a><span class="pagenum">[207]</span></p>
+<h2><a name="LECTURE_VI" id="LECTURE_VI"></a>LECTURE VI</h2>
+
+<h3>OTHELLO</h3>
+
+
+<h4>1</h4>
+
+<p>Evil has nowhere else been portrayed with such mastery as in the
+character of Iago. Richard III., for example, beside being less subtly
+conceived, is a far greater figure and a less repellent. His physical
+deformity, separating him from other men, seems to offer some excuse for
+his egoism. In spite of his egoism, too, he appears to us more than a
+mere individual: he is the representative of his family, the Fury of the
+House of York. Nor is he so negative as Iago: he has strong passions, he
+has admirations, and his conscience disturbs him. There is the glory of
+power about him. Though an excellent actor, he prefers force to fraud,
+and in his world there is no general illusion as to his true nature.
+Again, to compare Iago with the Satan of <i>Paradise Lost</i> seems almost
+absurd, so immensely does Shakespeare's man exceed Milton's Fiend in
+evil. That mighty Spirit, whose</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i6">form had yet not lost<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">All her original brightness, nor appeared<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Less than archangel ruined and the excess<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Of glory obscured;<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p><a name="Page_208" id="Page_208"></a><span class="pagenum">[208]</span>who knew loyalty to comrades and pity for victims; who</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i5">felt how awful goodness is, and saw<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Virtue in her shape how lovely; saw, and pined<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">His loss;<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>who could still weep&mdash;how much further distant is he than Iago from
+spiritual death, even when, in procuring the fall of Man, he completes
+his own fall! It is only in Goethe's Mephistopheles that a fit companion
+for Iago can be found. Here there is something of the same deadly
+coldness, the same gaiety in destruction. But then Mephistopheles, like
+so many scores of literary villains, has Iago for his father. And
+Mephistopheles, besides, is not, in the strict sense, a character. He is
+half person, half symbol. A metaphysical idea speaks through him. He is
+earthy, but could never live upon the earth.</p>
+
+<p>Of Shakespeare's characters Falstaff, Hamlet, Iago, and Cleopatra (I
+name them in the order of their births) are probably the most wonderful.
+Of these, again, Hamlet and Iago, whose births come nearest together,
+are perhaps the most subtle. And if Iago had been a person as attractive
+as Hamlet, as many thousands of pages might have been written about him,
+containing as much criticism good and bad. As it is, the majority of
+interpretations of his character are inadequate not only to
+Shakespeare's conception, but, I believe, to the impressions of most
+readers of taste who are unbewildered by analysis. These false
+interpretations, if we set aside the usual lunacies,<a name="FNanchor_107" id="FNanchor_107"></a><a href="#Footnote_107" class="fnanchor">[107]</a> fall into two
+groups. The first contains views which reduce Shakespeare to
+common-place. In different ways and degrees they convert his <a name="Page_209" id="Page_209"></a><span class="pagenum">[209]</span>Iago into
+an ordinary villain. Their Iago is simply a man who has been slighted
+and revenges himself; or a husband who believes he has been wronged, and
+will make his enemy suffer a jealousy worse than his own; or an
+ambitious man determined to ruin his successful rival&mdash;one of these, or
+a combination of these, endowed with unusual ability and cruelty. These
+are the more popular views. The second group of false interpretations is
+much smaller, but it contains much weightier matter than the first. Here
+Iago is a being who hates good simply because it is good, and loves evil
+purely for itself. His action is not prompted by any plain motive like
+revenge, jealousy or ambition. It springs from a 'motiveless malignity,'
+or a disinterested delight in the pain of others; and Othello, Cassio
+and Desdemona are scarcely more than the material requisite for the full
+attainment of this delight. This second Iago, evidently, is no
+conventional villain, and he is much nearer to Shakespeare's Iago than
+the first. Only he is, if not a psychological impossibility, at any rate
+not a <i>human</i> being. He might be in place, therefore, in a symbolical
+poem like <i>Faust</i>, but in a purely human drama like <i>Othello</i> he would
+be a ruinous blunder. Moreover, he is not in <i>Othello</i>: he is a product
+of imperfect observation and analysis.</p>
+
+<p>Coleridge, the author of that misleading phrase 'motiveless malignity,'
+has some fine remarks on Iago; and the essence of the character has been
+described, first in some of the best lines Hazlitt ever wrote, and then
+rather more fully by Mr. Swinburne,&mdash;so admirably described that I am
+tempted merely to read and illustrate these two criticisms. This plan,
+however, would make it difficult to introduce all that I wish to say. I
+propose, therefore, to approach the subject directly, and, first, to
+consider how Iago appeared to those <a name="Page_210" id="Page_210"></a><span class="pagenum">[210]</span>who knew him, and what inferences
+may be drawn from their illusions; and then to ask what, if we judge
+from the play, his character really was. And I will indicate the points
+where I am directly indebted to the criticisms just mentioned.</p>
+
+<p>But two warnings are first required. One of these concerns Iago's
+nationality. It has been held that he is a study of that peculiarly
+Italian form of villainy which is considered both too clever and too
+diabolical for an Englishman. I doubt if there is much more to be said
+for this idea than for the notion that Othello is a study of Moorish
+character. No doubt the belief in that Italian villainy was prevalent in
+Shakespeare's time, and it may perhaps have influenced him in some
+slight degree both here and in drawing the character of Iachimo in
+<i>Cymbeline</i>. But even this slight influence seems to me doubtful. If Don
+John in <i>Much Ado</i> had been an Englishman, critics would have admired
+Shakespeare's discernment in making his English villain sulky and
+stupid. If Edmund's father had been Duke of Ferrara instead of Earl of
+Gloster, they would have said that Edmund could have been nothing but an
+Italian. Change the name and country of Richard III., and he would be
+called a typical despot of the Italian Renaissance. Change those of
+Juliet, and we should find her wholesome English nature contrasted with
+the southern dreaminess of Romeo. But this way of interpreting
+Shakespeare is not Shakespearean. With him the differences of period,
+race, nationality and locality have little bearing on the inward
+character, though they sometimes have a good deal on the total
+imaginative effect, of his figures. When he does lay stress on such
+differences his intention is at once obvious, as in characters like
+Fluellen or Sir Hugh Evans, or in the talk of the French princes before
+the battle of Agincourt. I may add that Iago certainly <a name="Page_211" id="Page_211"></a><span class="pagenum">[211]</span>cannot be taken
+to exemplify the popular Elizabethan idea of a disciple of Macchiavelli.
+There is no sign that he is in theory an atheist or even an unbeliever
+in the received religion. On the contrary, he uses its language, and
+says nothing resembling the words of the prologue to the <i>Jew of Malta</i>:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i1">I count religion but a childish toy,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">And hold there is no sin but ignorance.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>Aaron in <i>Titus Andronicus</i> might have said this (and is not more likely
+to be Shakespeare's creation on that account), but not Iago.</p>
+
+<p>I come to a second warning. One must constantly remember not to believe
+a syllable that Iago utters on any subject, including himself, until one
+has tested his statement by comparing it with known facts and with other
+statements of his own or of other people, and by considering whether he
+had in the particular circumstances any reason for telling a lie or for
+telling the truth. The implicit confidence which his acquaintances
+placed in his integrity has descended to most of his critics; and this,
+reinforcing the comical habit of quoting as Shakespeare's own statement
+everything said by his characters, has been a fruitful source of
+misinterpretation. I will take as an instance the very first assertions
+made by Iago. In the opening scene he tells his dupe Roderigo that three
+great men of Venice went to Othello and begged him to make Iago his
+lieutenant; that Othello, out of pride and obstinacy, refused; that in
+refusing he talked a deal of military rigmarole, and ended by declaring
+(falsely, we are to understand) that he had already filled up the
+vacancy; that Cassio, whom he chose, had absolutely no practical
+knowledge of war, nothing but bookish theoric, mere prattle, arithmetic,
+whereas Iago himself had often fought by Othello's side, and by 'old
+gradation' <a name="Page_212" id="Page_212"></a><span class="pagenum">[212]</span>too ought to have been preferred. Most or all of this is
+repeated by some critics as though it were information given by
+Shakespeare, and the conclusion is quite naturally drawn that Iago had
+some reason to feel aggrieved. But if we ask ourselves how much of all
+this is true we shall answer, I believe, as follows. It is absolutely
+certain that Othello appointed Cassio his lieutenant, and <i>nothing</i> else
+is absolutely certain. But there is no reason to doubt the statement
+that Iago had seen service with him, nor is there anything inherently
+improbable in the statement that he was solicited by three great
+personages on Iago's behalf. On the other hand, the suggestions that he
+refused out of pride and obstinacy, and that he lied in saying he had
+already chosen his officer, have no verisimilitude; and if there is any
+fact at all (as there probably is) behind Iago's account of the
+conversation, it doubtless is the fact that Iago himself was ignorant of
+military science, while Cassio was an expert, and that Othello explained
+this to the great personages. That Cassio, again, was an interloper and
+a mere closet-student without experience of war is incredible,
+considering first that Othello chose him for lieutenant, and secondly
+that the senate appointed him to succeed Othello in command at Cyprus;
+and we have direct evidence that part of Iago's statement is a lie, for
+Desdemona happens to mention that Cassio was a man who 'all his time had
+founded his good fortunes' on Othello's love and had 'shared dangers'
+with him (<span class="smcap">iii.</span> iv. 93). There remains only the implied
+assertion that, if promotion had gone by old gradation, Iago, as the
+senior, would have been preferred. It may be true: Othello was not the
+man to hesitate to promote a junior for good reasons. But it is just as
+likely to be a pure invention; and, though Cassio was young, there is
+nothing to show that he was younger, in years <a name="Page_213" id="Page_213"></a><span class="pagenum">[213]</span>or in service, than Iago.
+Iago, for instance, never calls him 'young,' as he does Roderigo; and a
+mere youth would not have been made Governor of Cyprus. What is certain,
+finally, in the whole business is that Othello's mind was perfectly at
+ease about the appointment, and that he never dreamed of Iago's being
+discontented at it, not even when the intrigue was disclosed and he
+asked himself how he had offended Iago.</p>
+
+
+<h4>2</h4>
+
+<p>It is necessary to examine in this manner every statement made by Iago.
+But it is not necessary to do so in public, and I proceed to the
+question what impression he made on his friends and acquaintances. In
+the main there is here no room for doubt. Nothing could be less like
+Iago than the melodramatic villain so often substituted for him on the
+stage, a person whom everyone in the theatre knows for a scoundrel at
+the first glance. Iago, we gather, was a Venetian<a name="FNanchor_108" id="FNanchor_108"></a><a href="#Footnote_108" class="fnanchor">[108]</a> soldier,
+eight-and-twenty years of age, who had seen a good deal of service and
+had a high reputation for courage. Of his origin we are ignorant, but,
+unless I am mistaken, he was not of gentle birth or breeding.<a name="FNanchor_109" id="FNanchor_109"></a><a href="#Footnote_109" class="fnanchor">[109]</a> He
+does not strike one as a degraded <a name="Page_214" id="Page_214"></a><span class="pagenum">[214]</span>man of culture: for all his great
+powers, he is vulgar, and his probable want of military science may well
+be significant. He was married to a wife who evidently lacked
+refinement, and who appears in the drama almost in the relation of a
+servant to Desdemona. His manner was that of a blunt, bluff soldier, who
+spoke his mind freely and plainly. He was often hearty, and could be
+thoroughly jovial; but he was not seldom rather rough and caustic of
+speech, and he was given to making remarks somewhat disparaging to human
+nature. He was aware of this trait in himself, and frankly admitted that
+he was nothing if not critical, and that it was his nature to spy into
+abuses. In these admissions he characteristically exaggerated his fault,
+as plain-dealers are apt to do; and he was liked none the less for it,
+seeing that his satire was humorous, that on serious matters he did not
+speak lightly (<span class="smcap">iii.</span> iii. 119), and that the one thing perfectly
+obvious about him was his honesty. 'Honest' is the word that springs to
+the lips of everyone who speaks of him. It is applied to him some
+fifteen times in the play, not to mention some half-dozen where he
+employs it, in derision, of himself. In fact he was one of those
+sterling men who, in disgust at gush, say cynical things which they do
+not believe, and then, the moment you are in trouble, put in practice
+the very sentiment they had laughed at. On such occasions he showed the
+kindliest sympathy and the most eager desire to help. When Cassio
+misbehaved so dreadfully and was found fighting with Montano, did not
+Othello see that 'honest Iago looked dead with grieving'? With what
+difficulty was he induced, nay, compelled, to speak the truth against
+the lieutenant! Another man might have felt a touch of satisfaction at
+the thought that the post he had coveted was now vacant; but Iago not
+only comforted Cassio, talking <a name="Page_215" id="Page_215"></a><span class="pagenum">[215]</span>to him cynically about reputation, just
+to help him over his shame, but he set his wits to work and at once
+perceived that the right plan for Cassio to get his post again was to
+ask Desdemona to intercede. So troubled was he at his friend's disgrace
+that his own wife was sure 'it grieved her husband as if the case was
+his.' What wonder that anyone in sore trouble, like Desdemona, should
+send at once for Iago (<span class="smcap">iv.</span> ii. 106)? If this rough diamond had
+any flaw, it was that Iago's warm loyal heart incited him to too
+impulsive action. If he merely heard a friend like Othello calumniated,
+his hand flew to his sword; and though he restrained himself he almost
+regretted his own virtue (<span class="smcap">i.</span> ii. 1-10).</p>
+
+<p>Such seemed Iago to the people about him, even to those who, like
+Othello, had known him for some time. And it is a fact too little
+noticed but most remarkable, that he presented an appearance not very
+different to his wife. There is no sign either that Emilia's marriage
+was downright unhappy, or that she suspected the true nature of her
+husband.<a name="FNanchor_110" id="FNanchor_110"></a><a href="#Footnote_110" class="fnanchor">[110]</a> No doubt she knew rather more of him than others. Thus we
+gather that he was given to chiding and sometimes spoke shortly and
+sharply to her (<span class="smcap">iii.</span> iii. 300 f.); and it is quite likely that
+she gave him a good deal of her tongue in exchange (<span class="smcap">ii.</span> i. 101
+f.). He was also unreasonably jealous; for his own statement that he was
+jealous of Othello is confirmed by Emilia herself, and must therefore be
+believed (<span class="smcap">iv.</span> ii. 145).<a name="FNanchor_111" id="FNanchor_111"></a><a href="#Footnote_111" class="fnanchor">[111]</a> But it seems clear that these
+defects of his had not seriously impaired Emilia's confidence in her
+husband or her affection for him. She knew in <a name="Page_216" id="Page_216"></a><span class="pagenum">[216]</span>addition that he was not
+quite so honest as he seemed, for he had often begged her to steal
+Desdemona's handkerchief. But Emilia's nature was not very delicate or
+scrupulous about trifles. She thought her husband odd and 'wayward,' and
+looked on his fancy for the handkerchief as an instance of this
+(<span class="smcap">iii.</span> iii. 292); but she never dreamed he was a villain, and
+there is no reason to doubt the sincerity of her belief that he was
+heartily sorry for Cassio's disgrace. Her failure, on seeing Othello's
+agitation about the handkerchief, to form any suspicion of an intrigue,
+shows how little she doubted her husband. Even when, later, the idea
+strikes her that some scoundrel has poisoned Othello's mind, the tone of
+all her speeches, and her mention of the rogue who (she believes) had
+stirred up Iago's jealousy of her, prove beyond doubt that the thought
+of Iago's being the scoundrel has not crossed her mind (<span class="smcap">iv.</span> ii.
+115-147). And if any hesitation on the subject could remain, surely it
+must be dispelled by the thrice-repeated cry of astonishment and horror,
+'My husband!', which follows Othello's words, 'Thy husband knew it all';
+and by the choking indignation and desperate hope which we hear in her
+appeal when Iago comes in:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i1">Disprove this villain if thou be'st a man:<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">He says thou told'st him that his wife was false:<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">I know thou did'st not, thou'rt not such a villain:<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Speak, for my heart is full.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>Even if Iago <i>had</i> betrayed much more of his true self to his wife than
+to others, it would make no difference to the contrast between his true
+self and the self he presented to the world in general. But he never did
+so. Only the feeble eyes of the poor gull Roderigo were allowed a
+glimpse into that pit.</p>
+
+<p>The bearing of this contrast upon the apparently excessive credulity of
+Othello has been already <a name="Page_217" id="Page_217"></a><span class="pagenum">[217]</span>pointed out. What further conclusions can be
+drawn from it? Obviously, to begin with, the inference, which is
+accompanied by a thrill of admiration, that Iago's powers of
+dissimulation and of self-control must have been prodigious: for he was
+not a youth, like Edmund, but had worn this mask for years, and he had
+apparently never enjoyed, like Richard, occasional explosions of the
+reality within him. In fact so prodigious does his self-control appear
+that a reader might be excused for feeling a doubt of its possibility.
+But there are certain observations and further inferences which, apart
+from confidence in Shakespeare, would remove this doubt. It is to be
+observed, first, that Iago was able to find a certain relief from the
+discomfort of hypocrisy in those caustic or cynical speeches which,
+being misinterpreted, only heightened confidence in his honesty. They
+acted as a safety-valve, very much as Hamlet's pretended insanity did.
+Next, I would infer from the entire success of his hypocrisy&mdash;what may
+also be inferred on other grounds, and is of great importance&mdash;that he
+was by no means a man of strong feelings and passions, like Richard, but
+decidedly cold by temperament. Even so, his self-control was wonderful,
+but there never was in him any violent storm to be controlled. Thirdly,
+I would suggest that Iago, though thoroughly selfish and unfeeling, was
+not by nature malignant, nor even morose, but that, on the contrary, he
+had a superficial good-nature, the kind of good-nature that wins
+popularity and is often taken as the sign, not of a good digestion, but
+of a good heart. And lastly, it may be inferred that, before the giant
+crime which we witness, Iago had never been detected in any serious
+offence and may even never have been guilty of one, but had pursued a
+selfish but outwardly decent life, enjoying the excitement of war and of
+casual pleasures, but never yet meeting with any sufficient <a name="Page_218" id="Page_218"></a><span class="pagenum">[218]</span>temptation to risk his position and advancement by a dangerous crime. So that, in
+fact, the tragedy of <i>Othello</i> is in a sense his tragedy too. It shows
+us not a violent man, like Richard, who spends his life in murder, but a
+thoroughly bad, <i>cold</i> man, who is at last tempted to let loose the
+forces within him, and is at once destroyed.</p>
+
+
+<h4>3</h4>
+
+<p>In order to see how this tragedy arises let us now look more closely
+into Iago's inner man. We find here, in the first place, as has been
+implied in part, very remarkable powers both of intellect and of will.
+Iago's insight, within certain limits, into human nature; his ingenuity
+and address in working upon it; his quickness and versatility in dealing
+with sudden difficulties and unforeseen opportunities, have probably no
+parallel among dramatic characters. Equally remarkable is his strength
+of will. Not Socrates himself, not the ideal sage of the Stoics, was
+more lord of himself than Iago appears to be. It is not merely that he
+never betrays his true nature; he seems to be master of <i>all</i> the
+motions that might affect his will. In the most dangerous moments of his
+plot, when the least slip or accident would be fatal, he never shows a
+trace of nervousness. When Othello takes him by the throat he merely
+shifts his part with his usual instantaneous adroitness. When he is
+attacked and wounded at the end he is perfectly unmoved. As Mr.
+Swinburne says, you cannot believe for a moment that the pain of torture
+will ever open Iago's lips. He is equally unassailable by the
+temptations of indolence or of sensuality. It is difficult to imagine
+him inactive; and though he has an obscene mind, and doubtless took his
+pleasures when and how he chose, he certainly took them by choice and
+not from weakness, <a name="Page_219" id="Page_219"></a><span class="pagenum">[219]</span>and if pleasure interfered with his purposes the
+holiest of ascetics would not put it more resolutely by. 'What should I
+do?' Roderigo whimpers to him; 'I confess it is my shame to be so fond;
+but it is not in my virtue to amend it.' He answers: 'Virtue! a fig!
+'tis in ourselves that we are thus and thus. It all depends on our will.
+Love is merely a lust of the blood and a permission of the will. Come,
+be a man.... Ere I would say I would drown myself for the love of a
+guinea-hen, I would change my humanity with a baboon.' Forget for a
+moment that love is for Iago the appetite of a baboon; forget that he is
+as little assailable by pity as by fear or pleasure; and you will
+acknowledge that this lordship of the will, which is his practice as
+well as his doctrine, is great, almost sublime. Indeed, in intellect
+(always within certain limits) and in will (considered as a mere power,
+and without regard to its objects) Iago <i>is</i> great.</p>
+
+<p>To what end does he use these great powers? His creed&mdash;for he is no
+sceptic, he has a definite creed&mdash;is that absolute egoism is the only
+rational and proper attitude, and that conscience or honour or any kind
+of regard for others is an absurdity. He does not deny that this
+absurdity exists. He does not suppose that most people secretly share
+his creed, while pretending to hold and practise another. On the
+contrary, he regards most people as honest fools. He declares that he
+has never yet met a man who knew how to love himself; and his one
+expression of admiration in the play is for servants</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i1">Who, trimmed in forms and visages of duty,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Keep yet their hearts attending on themselves.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>'These fellows,' he says, 'have some soul.' He professes to stand, and
+he, attempts to stand, wholly outside the world of morality.</p>
+
+<p><a name="Page_220" id="Page_220"></a><span class="pagenum">[220]</span>The existence of Iago's creed and of his corresponding practice is
+evidently connected with a characteristic in which he surpasses nearly
+all the other inhabitants of Shakespeare's world. Whatever he may once
+have been, he appears, when we meet him, to be almost destitute of
+humanity, of sympathetic or social feeling. He shows no trace of
+affection, and in presence of the most terrible suffering he shows
+either pleasure or an indifference which, if not complete, is nearly so.
+Here, however, we must be careful. It is important to realise, and few
+readers are in danger of ignoring, this extraordinary deadness of
+feeling, but it is also important not to confuse it with a general
+positive ill-will. When Iago has no dislike or hostility to a person he
+does <i>not</i> show pleasure in the suffering of that person: he shows at
+most the absence of pain. There is, for instance, not the least sign of
+his enjoying the distress of Desdemona. But his sympathetic feelings are
+so abnormally feeble and cold that, when his dislike is roused, or when
+an indifferent person comes in the way of his purpose, there is scarcely
+anything within him to prevent his applying the torture.</p>
+
+<p>What is it that provokes his dislike or hostility? Here again we must
+look closely. Iago has been represented as an incarnation of envy, as a
+man who, being determined to get on in the world, regards everyone else
+with enmity as his rival. But this idea, though containing truth, seems
+much exaggerated. Certainly he is devoted to himself; but if he were an
+eagerly ambitious man, surely we should see much more positive signs of
+this ambition; and surely too, with his great powers, he would already
+have risen high, instead of being a mere ensign, short of money, and
+playing Captain Rook to Roderigo's Mr. Pigeon. Taking all the facts, one
+must conclude that his desires were comparatively moderate and his
+ambition weak; <a name="Page_221" id="Page_221"></a><span class="pagenum">[221]</span>that he probably enjoyed war keenly, but, if he had
+money enough, did not exert himself greatly to acquire reputation or
+position; and, therefore, that he was not habitually burning with envy
+and actively hostile to other men as possible competitors.</p>
+
+<p>But what is clear is that Iago is keenly sensitive to anything that
+touches his pride or self-esteem. It would be most unjust to call him
+vain, but he has a high opinion of himself and a great contempt for
+others. He is quite aware of his superiority to them in certain
+respects; and he either disbelieves in or despises the qualities in
+which they are superior to him. Whatever disturbs or wounds his sense of
+superiority irritates him at once; and in <i>that</i> sense he is highly
+competitive. This is why the appointment of Cassio provokes him. This is
+why Cassio's scientific attainments provoke him. This is the reason of
+his jealousy of Emilia. He does not care for his wife; but the fear of
+another man's getting the better of him, and exposing him to pity or
+derision as an unfortunate husband, is wormwood to him; and as he is
+sure that no woman is virtuous at heart, this fear is ever with him. For
+much the same reason he has a spite against goodness in men (for it is
+characteristic that he is less blind to its existence in men, the
+stronger, than in women, the weaker). He has a spite against it, not
+from any love of evil for evil's sake, but partly because it annoys his
+intellect as a stupidity; partly (though he hardly knows this) because
+it weakens his satisfaction with himself, and disturbs his faith that
+egoism is the right and proper thing; partly because, the world being
+such a fool, goodness is popular and prospers. But he, a man ten times
+as able as Cassio or even Othello, does not greatly prosper. Somehow,
+for all the stupidity of these open and generous people, they get on
+better than the 'fellow of some soul' And this, though he <a name="Page_222" id="Page_222"></a><span class="pagenum">[222]</span>is not
+particularly eager to get on, wounds his pride. Goodness therefore
+annoys him. He is always ready to scoff at it, and would like to strike
+at it. In ordinary circumstances these feelings of irritation are not
+vivid in Iago&mdash;<i>no</i> feeling is so&mdash;but they are constantly present.</p>
+
+
+<h4>4</h4>
+
+<p>Our task of analysis is not finished; but we are now in a position to
+consider the rise of Iago's tragedy. Why did he act as we see him acting
+in the play? What is the answer to that appeal of Othello's:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i1">Will you, I pray, demand that demi-devil<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Why he hath thus ensnared my soul and body?<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>This question Why? is <i>the</i> question about Iago, just as the question
+Why did Hamlet delay? is <i>the</i> question about Hamlet. Iago refused to
+answer it; but I will venture to say that he <i>could</i> not have answered
+it, any more than Hamlet could tell why he delayed. But Shakespeare knew
+the answer, and if these characters are great creations and not blunders
+we ought to be able to find it too.</p>
+
+<p>Is it possible to elicit it from Iago himself against his will? He makes
+various statements to Roderigo, and he has several soliloquies. From
+these sources, and especially from the latter, we should learn
+something. For with Shakespeare soliloquy generally gives information
+regarding the secret springs as well as the outward course of the plot;
+and, moreover, it is a curious point of technique with him that the
+soliloquies of his villains sometimes read almost like explanations
+offered to the audience.<a name="FNanchor_112" id="FNanchor_112"></a><a href="#Footnote_112" class="fnanchor">[112]</a> Now, Iago repeatedly offers explanations
+either to <a name="Page_223" id="Page_223"></a><span class="pagenum">[223]</span>Roderigo or to himself. In the first place, he says more than
+once that he 'hates' Othello. He gives two reasons for his hatred.
+Othello has made Cassio lieutenant; and he suspects, and has heard it
+reported, that Othello has an intrigue with Emilia. Next there is
+Cassio. He never says he hates Cassio, but he finds in him three causes
+of offence: Cassio has been preferred to him; he suspects <i>him</i> too of
+an intrigue with Emilia; and, lastly, Cassio has a daily beauty in his
+life which makes Iago ugly. In addition to these annoyances he wants
+Cassio's place. As for Roderigo, he calls him a snipe, and who can hate
+a snipe? But Roderigo knows too much; and he is becoming a nuisance,
+getting angry, and asking for the gold and jewels he handed to Iago to
+give to Desdemona. So Iago kills Roderigo. Then for Desdemona: a
+fig's-end for her virtue! but he has no ill-will to her. In fact he
+'loves' her, though he is good enough to explain, varying the word, that
+his 'lust' is mixed with a desire to pay Othello in his own coin. To be
+sure she must die, and so must Emilia, and so would Bianca if only the
+authorities saw things in their true light; but he did not set out with
+any hostile design against these persons.</p>
+
+<p>Is the account which Iago gives of the causes of his action the true
+account? The answer of the most popular view will be, 'Yes. Iago was, as
+he says, chiefly incited by two things, the desire of advancement, and a
+hatred of Othello due principally to the affair of the lieutenancy.
+These are perfectly intelligible causes; we have only to add to them
+unusual ability and cruelty, and all is explained. Why should Coleridge
+and Hazlitt and Swinburne go further afield?' To which last question I
+will at once oppose these: If your view is correct, why should Iago be
+considered an extraordinary creation; and is it not odd that the people
+<a name="Page_224" id="Page_224"></a><span class="pagenum">[224]</span>who reject it are the people who elsewhere show an exceptional
+understanding of Shakespeare?</p>
+
+<p>The difficulty about this popular view is, in the first place, that it
+attributes to Iago what cannot be found in the Iago of the play. Its
+Iago is impelled by <i>passions</i>, a passion of ambition and a passion of
+hatred; for no ambition or hatred short of passion could drive a man who
+is evidently so clear-sighted, and who must hitherto have been so
+prudent, into a plot so extremely hazardous. Why, then, in the Iago of
+the play do we find no sign of these passions or of anything approaching
+to them? Why, if Shakespeare meant that Iago was impelled by them, does
+he suppress the signs of them? Surely not from want of ability to
+display them. The poet who painted Macbeth and Shylock understood his
+business. Who ever doubted Macbeth's ambition or Shylock's hate? And
+what resemblance is there between these passions and any feeling that we
+can trace in Iago? The resemblance between a volcano in eruption and a
+flameless fire of coke; the resemblance between a consuming desire to
+hack and hew your enemy's flesh, and the resentful wish, only too
+familiar in common life, to inflict pain in return for a slight.
+Passion, in Shakespeare's plays, is perfectly easy to recognise. What
+vestige of it, of passion unsatisfied or of passion gratified, is
+visible in Iago? None: that is the very horror of him. He has <i>less</i>
+passion than an ordinary man, and yet he does these frightful things.
+The only ground for attributing to him, I do not say a passionate
+hatred, but anything deserving the name of hatred at all, is his own
+statement, 'I hate Othello'; and we know what his statements are worth.</p>
+
+<p>But the popular view, beside attributing to Iago what he does not show,
+ignores what he does show. It selects from his own account of his
+motives one or two, and drops the rest; and so it <a name="Page_225" id="Page_225"></a><span class="pagenum">[225]</span>makes everything
+natural. But it fails to perceive how unnatural, how strange and
+suspicious, his own account is. Certainly he assigns motives enough; the
+difficulty is that he assigns so many. A man moved by simple passions
+due to simple causes does not stand fingering his feelings,
+industriously enumerating their sources, and groping about for new ones.
+But this is what Iago does. And this is not all. These motives appear
+and disappear in the most extraordinary manner. Resentment at Cassio's
+appointment is expressed in the first conversation with Roderigo, and
+from that moment is never once mentioned again in the whole play. Hatred
+of Othello is expressed in the First Act alone. Desire to get Cassio's
+place scarcely appears after the first soliloquy, and when it is
+gratified Iago does not refer to it by a single word. The suspicion of
+Cassio's intrigue with Emilia emerges suddenly, as an after-thought, not
+in the first soliloquy but the second, and then disappears for
+ever.<a name="FNanchor_113" id="FNanchor_113"></a><a href="#Footnote_113" class="fnanchor">[113]</a> Iago's 'love' of Desdemona is alluded to in the second
+soliloquy; there is not the faintest trace of it in word or deed either
+before or after. The mention of jealousy of Othello is followed by
+declarations that Othello is infatuated about Desdemona and is of a
+constant nature, and during Othello's sufferings Iago never shows a sign
+of the idea that he is now paying his rival in his own coin. In the
+second soliloquy he declares that he quite believes Cassio to be in love
+with Desdemona; it is obvious that he believes no such thing, for he
+never alludes to the idea again, and within a few hours describes Cassio
+in soliloquy as an honest fool. His final reason for ill-will to Cassio
+never appears till the Fifth Act.</p>
+
+<p>What is the meaning of all this? Unless Shakespeare was out of his mind,
+it must have a <a name="Page_226" id="Page_226"></a><span class="pagenum">[226]</span>meaning. And certainly this meaning is not contained in
+any of the popular accounts of Iago.</p>
+
+<p>Is it contained then in Coleridge's word 'motive-hunting'? Yes,
+'motive-hunting' exactly answers to the impression that Iago's
+soliloquies produce. He is pondering his design, and unconsciously
+trying to justify it to himself. He speaks of one or two real feelings,
+such as resentment against Othello, and he mentions one or two real
+causes of these feelings. But these are not enough for him. Along with
+them, or alone, there come into his head, only to leave it again, ideas
+and suspicions, the creations of his own baseness or uneasiness, some
+old, some new, caressed for a moment to feed his purpose and give it a
+reasonable look, but never really believed in, and never the main forces
+which are determining his action. In fact, I would venture to describe
+Iago in these soliloquies as a man setting out on a project which
+strongly attracts his desire, but at the same time conscious of a
+resistance to the desire, and unconsciously trying to argue the
+resistance away by assigning reasons for the project. He is the
+counterpart of Hamlet, who tries to find reasons for his delay in
+pursuing a design which excites his aversion. And most of Iago's reasons
+for action are no more the real ones than Hamlet's reasons for delay
+were the real ones. Each is moved by forces which he does not
+understand; and it is probably no accident that these two studies of
+states psychologically so similar were produced at about the same
+period.</p>
+
+<p>What then were the real moving forces of Iago's action? Are we to fall
+back on the idea of a 'motiveless malignity;'<a name="FNanchor_114" id="FNanchor_114"></a><a href="#Footnote_114" class="fnanchor">[114]</a> that is to say, a
+disinterested love of evil, or a delight in the pain of others as simple
+and direct as the delight in one's <a name="Page_227" id="Page_227"></a><span class="pagenum">[227]</span>own pleasure? Surely not. I will not
+insist that this thing or these things are inconceivable, mere phrases,
+not ideas; for, even so, it would remain possible that Shakespeare had
+tried to represent an inconceivability. But there is not the slightest
+reason to suppose that he did so. Iago's action is intelligible; and
+indeed the popular view contains enough truth to refute this desperate
+theory. It greatly exaggerates his desire for advancement, and the
+ill-will caused by his disappointment, and it ignores other forces more
+important than these; but it is right in insisting on the presence of
+this desire and this ill-will, and their presence is enough to destroy
+Iago's claims to be more than a demi-devil. For love of the evil that
+advances my interest and hurts a person I dislike, is a very different
+thing from love of evil simply as evil; and pleasure in the pain of a
+person disliked or regarded as a competitor is quite distinct from
+pleasure in the pain of others simply as others. The first is
+intelligible, and we find it in Iago. The second, even if it were
+intelligible, we do not find in Iago.</p>
+
+<p>Still, desire of advancement and resentment about the lieutenancy,
+though factors and indispensable factors in the cause of Iago's action,
+are neither the principal nor the most characteristic factors. To find
+these, let us return to our half-completed analysis of the character.
+Let us remember especially the keen sense of superiority, the contempt
+of others, the sensitiveness to everything which wounds these feelings,
+the spite against goodness in men as a thing not only stupid but, both
+in its nature and by its success, contrary to Iago's nature and
+irritating to his pride. Let us remember in addition the annoyance of
+having always to play a part, the consciousness of exceptional but
+unused ingenuity and address, the enjoyment of action, and the absence
+of <a name="Page_228" id="Page_228"></a><span class="pagenum">[228]</span>fear. And let us ask what would be the greatest pleasure of such a
+man, and what the situation which might tempt him to abandon his
+habitual prudence and pursue this pleasure. Hazlitt and Mr. Swinburne do
+not put this question, but the answer I proceed to give to it is in
+principle theirs.<a name="FNanchor_115" id="FNanchor_115"></a><a href="#Footnote_115" class="fnanchor">[115]</a></p>
+
+<p>The most delightful thing to such a man would be something that gave an
+extreme satisfaction to his sense of power and superiority; and if it
+involved, secondly, the triumphant exertion of his abilities, and,
+thirdly, the excitement of danger, his delight would be consummated. And
+the moment most dangerous to such a man would be one when his sense of
+superiority had met with an affront, so that its habitual craving was
+reinforced by resentment, while at the same time he saw an opportunity
+of satisfying it by subjecting to his will the very persons who had
+affronted it. Now, this is the temptation that comes to Iago. Othello's
+eminence, Othello's goodness, and his own dependence on Othello, must
+have been a perpetual annoyance to him. At <i>any</i> time he would have
+enjoyed befooling and tormenting Othello. Under ordinary circumstances
+he was restrained, chiefly by self-interest, in some slight degree
+perhaps by the faint pulsations of conscience or humanity. But
+disappointment at the loss of the lieutenancy supplied the touch of
+lively resentment that was required to overcome these obstacles; and the
+prospect of satisfying the sense of power by mastering Othello <a name="Page_229" id="Page_229"></a><span class="pagenum">[229]</span>through
+an intricate and hazardous intrigue now became irresistible. Iago did
+not clearly understand what was moving his desire; though he tried to
+give himself reasons for his action, even those that had some reality
+made but a small part of the motive force; one may almost say they were
+no more than the turning of the handle which admits the driving power
+into the machine. Only once does he appear to see something of the
+truth. It is when he uses the phrase '<i>to plume up my will</i> in double
+knavery.'</p>
+
+<p>To 'plume up the will,' to heighten the sense of power or
+superiority&mdash;this seems to be the unconscious motive of many acts of
+cruelty which evidently do not spring chiefly from ill-will, and which
+therefore puzzle and sometimes horrify us most. It is often this that
+makes a man bully the wife or children of whom he is fond. The boy who
+torments another boy, as we say, 'for no reason,' or who without any
+hatred for frogs tortures a frog, is pleased with his victim's pain, not
+from any disinterested love of evil or pleasure in pain, but mainly
+because this pain is the unmistakable proof of his own power over his
+victim. So it is with Iago. His thwarted sense of superiority wants
+satisfaction. What fuller satisfaction could it find than the
+consciousness that he is the master of the General who has undervalued
+him and of the rival who has been preferred to him; that these worthy
+people, who are so successful and popular and stupid, are mere puppets
+in his hands, but living puppets, who at the motion of his finger must
+contort themselves in agony, while all the time they believe that he is
+their one true friend and comforter? It must have been an ecstasy of
+bliss to him. And this, granted a most abnormal deadness of human
+feeling, is, however horrible, perfectly intelligible. There is no
+mystery in the psychology of Iago; <a name="Page_230" id="Page_230"></a><span class="pagenum">[230]</span>the mystery lies in a further
+question, which the drama has not to answer, the question why such a
+being should exist.</p>
+
+<p>Iago's longing to satisfy the sense of power is, I think, the strongest
+of the forces that drive him on. But there are two others to be noticed.
+One is the pleasure in an action very difficult and perilous and,
+therefore, intensely exciting. This action sets all his powers on the
+strain. He feels the delight of one who executes successfully a feat
+thoroughly congenial to his special aptitude, and only just within his
+compass; and, as he is fearless by nature, the fact that a single slip
+will cost him his life only increases his pleasure. His exhilaration
+breaks out in the ghastly words with which he greets the sunrise after
+the night of the drunken tumult which has led to Cassio's disgrace: 'By
+the mass, 'tis morning. Pleasure and action make the hours seem short.'
+Here, however, the joy in exciting action is quickened by other
+feelings. It appears more simply elsewhere in such a way as to suggest
+that nothing but such actions gave him happiness, and that his happiness
+was greater if the action was destructive as well as exciting. We find
+it, for instance, in his gleeful cry to Roderigo, who proposes to shout
+to Brabantio in order to wake him and tell him of his daughter's flight:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i1">Do, with like timorous<a name="FNanchor_116" id="FNanchor_116"></a><a href="#Footnote_116" class="fnanchor">[116]</a> accent and dire yell<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">As when, by night and negligence, the fire<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Is spied in populous cities.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>All through that scene; again, in the scene where Cassio is attacked and
+Roderigo murdered; everywhere where Iago is in physical action, we catch
+this sound of almost feverish enjoyment. His blood, usually so cold and
+slow, is racing through his veins.</p>
+
+<p>But Iago, finally, is not simply a man of action; he is an artist. His
+action is a plot, the intricate plot of a drama, and in the conception
+and <a name="Page_231" id="Page_231"></a><span class="pagenum">[231]</span>execution of it he experiences the tension and the joy of artistic
+creation. 'He is,' says Hazlitt, 'an amateur of tragedy in real life;
+and, instead of employing his invention on imaginary characters or
+long-forgotten incidents, he takes the bolder and more dangerous course
+of getting up his plot at home, casts the principal parts among his
+newest friends and connections, and rehearses it in downright earnest,
+with steady nerves and unabated resolution.' Mr. Swinburne lays even
+greater stress on this aspect of Iago's character, and even declares
+that 'the very subtlest and strongest component of his complex nature'
+is 'the instinct of what Mr. Carlyle would call an inarticulate poet.'
+And those to whom this idea is unfamiliar, and who may suspect it at
+first sight of being fanciful, will find, if they examine the play in
+the light of Mr. Swinburne's exposition, that it rests on a true and
+deep perception, will stand scrutiny, and might easily be illustrated.
+They may observe, to take only one point, the curious analogy between
+the early stages of dramatic composition and those soliloquies in which
+Iago broods over his plot, drawing at first only an outline, puzzled how
+to fix more than the main idea, and gradually seeing it develop and
+clarify as he works upon it or lets it work. Here at any rate
+Shakespeare put a good deal of himself into Iago. But the tragedian in
+real life was not the equal of the tragic poet. His psychology, as we
+shall see, was at fault at a critical point, as Shakespeare's never was.
+And so his catastrophe came out wrong, and his piece was ruined.</p>
+
+<p>Such, then, seem to be the chief ingredients of the force which,
+liberated by his resentment at Cassio's promotion, drives Iago from
+inactivity into action, and sustains him through it. And, to pass to a
+new point, this force completely possesses him; it is his fate. It is
+like the passion with which <a name="Page_232" id="Page_232"></a><span class="pagenum">[232]</span>a tragic hero wholly identifies himself,
+and which bears him on to his doom. It is true that, once embarked on
+his course, Iago <i>could</i> not turn back, even if this passion did abate;
+and it is also true that he is compelled, by his success in convincing
+Othello, to advance to conclusions of which at the outset he did not
+dream. He is thus caught in his own web, and could not liberate himself
+if he would. But, in fact, he never shows a trace of wishing to do so,
+not a trace of hesitation, of looking back, or of fear, any more than of
+remorse; there is no ebb in the tide. As the crisis approaches there
+passes through his mind a fleeting doubt whether the deaths of Cassio
+and Roderigo are indispensable; but that uncertainty, which does not
+concern the main issue, is dismissed, and he goes forward with
+undiminished zest. Not even in his sleep&mdash;as in Richard's before his
+final battle&mdash;does any rebellion of outraged conscience or pity, or any
+foreboding of despair, force itself into clear consciousness. His
+fate&mdash;which is himself&mdash;has completely mastered him: so that, in the
+later scenes, where the improbability of the entire success of a design
+built on so many different falsehoods forces itself on the reader, Iago
+appears for moments not as a consummate schemer, but as a man absolutely
+infatuated and delivered over to certain destruction.</p>
+
+
+<h4>5</h4>
+
+<p>Iago stands supreme among Shakespeare's evil characters because the
+greatest intensity and subtlety of imagination have gone to his making,
+and because he illustrates in the most perfect combination the two facts
+concerning evil which seem to have impressed Shakespeare most. The first
+of these is the fact that perfectly sane people exist in whom
+fellow-feeling of any kind is so weak that an almost absolute egoism
+becomes possible to them, and with <a name="Page_233" id="Page_233"></a><span class="pagenum">[233]</span>it those hard vices&mdash;such as
+ingratitude and cruelty&mdash;which to Shakespeare were far the worst. The
+second is that such evil is compatible, and even appears to ally itself
+easily, with exceptional powers of will and intellect. In the latter
+respect Iago is nearly or quite the equal of Richard, in egoism he is
+the superior, and his inferiority in passion and massive force only
+makes him more repulsive. How is it then that we can bear to contemplate
+him; nay, that, if we really imagine him, we feel admiration and some
+kind of sympathy? Henry the Fifth tells us:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i1">There is some soul of goodness in things evil,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Would men observingly distil it out;<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>but here, it may be said, we are shown a thing absolutely evil,
+and&mdash;what is more dreadful still&mdash;this absolute evil is united with
+supreme intellectual power. Why is the representation tolerable, and why
+do we not accuse its author either of untruth or of a desperate
+pessimism?</p>
+
+<p>To these questions it might at once be replied: Iago does not stand
+alone; he is a factor in a whole; and we perceive him there and not in
+isolation, acted upon as well as acting, destroyed as well as
+destroying.<a name="FNanchor_117" id="FNanchor_117"></a><a href="#Footnote_117" class="fnanchor">[117]</a> But, although this is true and important, I pass it by
+and, continuing to regard him by himself, I would make three remarks in
+answer to the questions.</p>
+
+<p>In the first place, Iago is not merely negative or evil&mdash;far from it.
+Those very forces that moved him and made his fate&mdash;sense of power,
+delight in performing a difficult and dangerous action, delight in the
+exercise of artistic skill&mdash;are not at all evil things. We sympathise
+with one or other of them almost every day of our lives. And,
+accordingly, though in Iago they are combined with something detestable
+and so contribute to evil, our perception <a name="Page_234" id="Page_234"></a><span class="pagenum">[234]</span>of them is accompanied with
+sympathy. In the same way, Iago's insight, dexterity, quickness,
+address, and the like, are in themselves admirable things; the perfect
+man would possess them. And certainly he would possess also Iago's
+courage and self-control, and, like Iago, would stand above the impulses
+of mere feeling, lord of his inner world. All this goes to evil ends in
+Iago, but in itself it has a great worth; and, although in reading, of
+course, we do not sift it out and regard it separately, it inevitably
+affects us and mingles admiration with our hatred or horror.</p>
+
+<p>All this, however, might apparently co-exist with absolute egoism and
+total want of humanity. But, in the second place, it is not true that in
+Iago this egoism and this want are absolute, and that in this sense he
+is a thing of mere evil. They are frightful, but if they were absolute
+Iago would be a monster, not a man. The fact is, he <i>tries</i> to make them
+absolute and cannot succeed; and the traces of conscience, shame and
+humanity, though faint, are discernible. If his egoism were absolute he
+would be perfectly indifferent to the opinion of others; and he clearly
+is not so. His very irritation at goodness, again, is a sign that his
+faith in his creed is not entirely firm; and it is not entirely firm
+because he himself has a perception, however dim, of the goodness of
+goodness. What is the meaning of the last reason he gives himself for
+killing Cassio:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i1">He hath a daily beauty in his life<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">That makes me ugly?<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>Does he mean that he is ugly to others? Then he is not an absolute
+egoist. Does he mean that he is ugly to himself? Then he makes an open
+confession of moral sense. And, once more, if he really possessed no
+moral sense, we should never have heard those soliloquies which so
+clearly betray <a name="Page_235" id="Page_235"></a><span class="pagenum">[235]</span>his uneasiness and his unconscious desire to persuade
+himself that he has some excuse for the villainy he contemplates. These
+seem to be indubitable proofs that, against his will, Iago is a little
+better than his creed, and has failed to withdraw himself wholly from
+the human atmosphere about him. And to these proofs I would add, though
+with less confidence, two others. Iago's momentary doubt towards the end
+whether Roderigo and Cassio must be killed has always surprised me. As a
+mere matter of calculation it is perfectly obvious that they must; and I
+believe his hesitation is not merely intellectual, it is another symptom
+of the obscure working of conscience or humanity. Lastly, is it not
+significant that, when once his plot has begun to develop, Iago never
+seeks the presence of Desdemona; that he seems to leave her as quickly
+as he can (<span class="smcap">iii.</span> iv. 138); and that, when he is fetched by
+Emilia to see her in her distress (<span class="smcap">iv.</span> ii. 110 ff.), we fail to
+catch in his words any sign of the pleasure he shows in Othello's
+misery, and seem rather to perceive a certain discomfort, and, if one
+dare say it, a faint touch of shame or remorse? This interpretation of
+the passage, I admit, is not inevitable, but to my mind (quite apart
+from any theorising about Iago) it seems the natural one.<a name="FNanchor_118" id="FNanchor_118"></a><a href="#Footnote_118" class="fnanchor">[118]</a> And if it
+is right, Iago's discomfort is easily understood; for Desdemona is the
+one person concerned against whom it is impossible for him even to
+imagine a ground of resentment, and so an excuse for cruelty.<a name="FNanchor_119" id="FNanchor_119"></a><a href="#Footnote_119" class="fnanchor">[119]</a></p>
+
+<p><a name="Page_236" id="Page_236"></a><span class="pagenum">[236]</span>There remains, thirdly, the idea that Iago is a man of supreme
+intellect who is at the same time supremely wicked. That he is supremely
+wicked nobody will doubt; and I have claimed for him nothing that will
+interfere with his right to that title. But to say that his intellectual
+power is supreme is to make a great mistake. Within certain limits he
+has indeed extraordinary penetration, quickness, inventiveness,
+adaptiveness; but the limits are defined with the hardest of lines, and
+they are narrow limits. It would scarcely be unjust to call him simply
+astonishingly clever, or simply a consummate master of intrigue. But
+compare him with one who may perhaps be roughly called a bad man of
+supreme intellectual power, Napoleon, and you see how small and negative
+Iago's mind is, incapable of Napoleon's military achievements, and much
+more incapable of his political constructions. Or, to keep within the
+Shakespearean world, compare him with Hamlet, and you perceive how
+miserably close is his intellectual horizon; that such a thing as a
+thought beyond the reaches of his soul has never come near him; that he
+is prosaic through and through, deaf and blind to all but a tiny
+fragment of the meaning of things. Is it not quite absurd, then, to call
+him a man of supreme intellect?</p>
+
+<p>And observe, lastly, that his failure in perception is closely connected
+with his badness. He was destroyed by the power that he attacked, the
+power of love; and he was destroyed by it because he could not
+understand it; and he could not understand it because it was not in him.
+Iago never meant his plot to be so dangerous to himself. He knew that
+jealousy is painful, but the jealousy of a love like Othello's he could
+not imagine, and he found himself involved in murders which were no part
+of his original design. That difficulty he surmounted, and his changed
+plot still seemed to <a name="Page_237" id="Page_237"></a><span class="pagenum">[237]</span>prosper. Roderigo and Cassio and Desdemona once
+dead, all will be well. Nay, when he fails to kill Cassio, all may still
+be well. He will avow that he told Othello of the adultery, and persist
+that he told the truth, and Cassio will deny it in vain. And then, in a
+moment, his plot is shattered by a blow from a quarter where he never
+dreamt of danger. He knows his wife, he thinks. She is not
+over-scrupulous, she will do anything to please him, and she has learnt
+obedience. But one thing in her he does not know&mdash;that she <i>loves</i> her
+mistress and would face a hundred deaths sooner than see her fair fame
+darkened. There is genuine astonishment in his outburst 'What! Are you
+mad?' as it dawns upon him that she means to speak the truth about the
+handkerchief. But he might well have applied to himself the words she
+flings at Othello,</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i9">O gull! O dolt!<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">As ignorant as dirt!<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>The foulness of his own soul made him so ignorant that he built into the
+marvellous structure of his plot a piece of crass stupidity.</p>
+
+<p>To the thinking mind the divorce of unusual intellect from goodness is a
+thing to startle; and Shakespeare clearly felt it so. The combination of
+unusual intellect with extreme evil is more than startling, it is
+frightful. It is rare, but it exists; and Shakespeare represented it in
+Iago. But the alliance of evil like Iago's with <i>supreme</i> intellect is
+an impossible fiction; and Shakespeare's fictions were truth.</p>
+
+
+<h4>6</h4>
+
+<p>The characters of Cassio and Emilia hardly require analysis, and I will
+touch on them only from a single point of view. In their combination of
+excellences and defects they are good <a name="Page_238" id="Page_238"></a><span class="pagenum">[238]</span>examples of that truth to nature
+which in dramatic art is the one unfailing source of moral instruction.</p>
+
+<p>Cassio is a handsome, light-hearted, good-natured young fellow, who
+takes life gaily, and is evidently very attractive and popular. Othello,
+who calls him by his Christian name, is fond of him; Desdemona likes him
+much; Emilia at once interests herself on his behalf. He has warm
+generous feelings, an enthusiastic admiration for the General, and a
+chivalrous adoration for his peerless wife. But he is too easy-going. He
+finds it hard to say No; and accordingly, although he is aware that he
+has a very weak head, and that the occasion is one on which he is bound
+to run no risk, he gets drunk&mdash;not disgustingly so, but ludicrously
+so.<a name="FNanchor_120" id="FNanchor_120"></a><a href="#Footnote_120" class="fnanchor">[120]</a> And, besides, he amuses himself without any scruple by
+frequenting the company of a woman of more than doubtful reputation, who
+has fallen in love with his good looks. Moralising critics point out
+that he pays for the first offence by losing his post, and for the
+second by nearly losing his life. They are quite entitled to do so,
+though the careful reader will not forget Iago's part in these
+transactions. But they ought also to point out that Cassio's looseness
+does not in the least disturb our confidence in him in his relations
+with Desdemona and Othello. He is loose, and we are sorry for it; but we
+never doubt that there was 'a daily beauty in his life,' or that his
+rapturous admiration of Desdemona was as wholly beautiful a thing as it
+appears, or that Othello was perfectly safe when in his courtship he
+employed Cassio to 'go between' Desdemona and himself. It is fortunately
+a fact in human nature that these aspects of Cassio's character are
+quite compatible. Shakespeare simply sets it down; and it is just
+because <a name="Page_239" id="Page_239"></a><span class="pagenum">[239]</span>he is truthful in these smaller things that in greater things
+we trust him absolutely never to pervert the truth for the sake of some
+doctrine or purpose of his own.</p>
+
+<p>There is something very lovable about Cassio, with his fresh eager
+feelings; his distress at his disgrace and still more at having lost
+Othello's trust; his hero-worship; and at the end his sorrow and pity,
+which are at first too acute for words. He is carried in, wounded, on a
+chair. He looks at Othello and cannot speak. His first words come later
+when, to Lodovico's question, 'Did you and he consent in Cassio's
+death?' Othello answers 'Ay.' Then he falters out, 'Dear General, I
+never gave you cause.' One is sure he had never used that adjective
+before. The love in it makes it beautiful, but there is something else
+in it, unknown to Cassio, which goes to one's heart. It tells us that
+his hero is no longer unapproachably above him.</p>
+
+<p>Few of Shakespeare's minor characters are more distinct than Emilia, and
+towards few do our feelings change so much within the course of a play.
+Till close to the end she frequently sets one's teeth on edge; and at
+the end one is ready to worship her. She nowhere shows any sign of
+having a bad heart; but she is common, sometimes vulgar, in minor
+matters far from scrupulous, blunt in perception and feeling, and quite
+destitute of imagination. She let Iago take the handkerchief though she
+knew how much its loss would distress Desdemona; and she said nothing
+about it though she saw that Othello was jealous. We rightly resent her
+unkindness in permitting the theft, but&mdash;it is an important point&mdash;we
+are apt to misconstrue her subsequent silence, because we know that
+Othello's jealousy was intimately connected with the loss of the
+handkerchief. Emilia, however, certainly failed to perceive this; for
+otherwise, when Othello's anger showed itself violently and she was
+really <a name="Page_240" id="Page_240"></a><span class="pagenum">[240]</span>distressed for her mistress, she could not have failed to think
+of the handkerchief, and would, I believe, undoubtedly have told the
+truth about it. But, in fact, she never thought of it, although she
+guessed that Othello was being deceived by some scoundrel. Even after
+Desdemona's death, nay, even when she knew that Iago had brought it
+about, she still did not remember the handkerchief; and when Othello at
+last mentions, as a proof of his wife's guilt, that he had seen the
+handkerchief in Cassio's hand, the truth falls on Emilia like a
+thunder-bolt. 'O God!' she bursts out, 'O heavenly God!'<a name="FNanchor_121" id="FNanchor_121"></a><a href="#Footnote_121" class="fnanchor">[121]</a> Her
+stupidity in this matter is gross, but it is stupidity and nothing
+worse.</p>
+
+<p>But along with it goes a certain coarseness of nature. The contrast
+between Emilia and Desdemona in their conversation about the infidelity
+of wives (<span class="smcap">iv.</span> iii.) is too famous to need a word,&mdash;unless it be
+a word of warning against critics who take her light talk too seriously.
+But the contrast in the preceding scene is hardly less remarkable.
+Othello, affecting to treat Emilia as the keeper of a brothel, sends her
+away, bidding her shut the door behind her; and then he proceeds to
+torture himself as well as Desdemona by accusations of adultery. But, as
+a critic has pointed out, Emilia listens at the door, for we find, as
+soon as Othello is gone and Iago has been summoned, that she knows what
+Othello has said to Desdemona. And what could better illustrate those
+defects of hers which make one wince, than her repeating again and again
+in Desdemona's presence the word Desdemona could not repeat; than her
+talking before Desdemona of Iago's suspicions regarding Othello and
+herself; than her speaking to Desdemona of husbands who strike their
+wives; than <a name="Page_241" id="Page_241"></a><span class="pagenum">[241]</span>the expression of her honest indignation in the words,</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i1">Has she forsook so many noble matches,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Her father and her country and her friends,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">To be called whore?<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>If one were capable of laughing or even of smiling when this point in
+the play is reached, the difference between Desdemona's anguish at the
+loss of Othello's love, and Emilia's recollection of the noble matches
+she might have secured, would be irresistibly ludicrous.</p>
+
+<p>And yet how all this, and all her defects, vanish into nothingness when
+we see her face to face with that which she can understand and feel!
+From the moment of her appearance after the murder to the moment of her
+death she is transfigured; and yet she remains perfectly true to
+herself, and we would not have her one atom less herself. She is the
+only person who utters for us the violent common emotions which we feel,
+together with those more tragic emotions which she does not comprehend.
+She has done this once already, to our great comfort. When she suggests
+that some villain has poisoned Othello's mind, and Iago answers,</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i1">Fie, there is no such man; it is impossible;<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>and Desdemona answers,</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i1">If any such there be, Heaven pardon him;<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>Emilia's retort,</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i1">A halter pardon him, and Hell gnaw his bones,<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>says what we long to say, and helps us. And who has not felt in the last
+scene how her glorious carelessness of her own life, and her outbursts
+against Othello&mdash;even that most characteristic one,</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i1">She was too fond of her most filthy bargain&mdash;<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>lift the overwhelming weight of calamity that oppresses us, and bring us
+an extraordinary <a name="Page_242" id="Page_242"></a><span class="pagenum">[242]</span>lightening of the heart? Terror and pity are here too
+much to bear; we long to be allowed to feel also indignation, if not
+rage; and Emilia lets us feel them and gives them words. She brings us
+too the relief of joy and admiration,&mdash;a joy that is not lessened by her
+death. Why should she live? If she lived for ever she never could soar a
+higher pitch, and nothing in her life became her like the losing
+it.<a name="FNanchor_122" id="FNanchor_122"></a><a href="#Footnote_122" class="fnanchor">[122]</a></p>
+
+<div class="footnotes">
+<div class="footnotehead">FOOTNOTES:</div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_107" id="Footnote_107"></a><a href="#FNanchor_107"><span class="label">[107]</span></a> It has been held, for example, that Othello treated Iago
+abominably in preferring Cassio to him; that he <i>did</i> seduce Emilia;
+that he and Desdemona were too familiar before marriage; and that in any
+case his fate was a moral judgment on his sins, and Iago a righteous, if
+sharp, instrument of Providence.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_108" id="Footnote_108"></a><a href="#FNanchor_108"><span class="label">[108]</span></a> See <span class="smcap">iii.</span> iii. 201, <span class="smcap">v.</span> i. 89 f. The
+statements are his own, but he has no particular reason for lying. One
+reason of his disgust at Cassio's appointment was that Cassio was a
+Florentine (<span class="smcap">i.</span> i. 20). When Cassio says (<span class="smcap">iii.</span> i. 42)
+'I never knew a Florentine more kind and honest,' of course he means,
+not that Iago is a Florentine, but that he could not be kinder and
+honester if he were one.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_109" id="Footnote_109"></a><a href="#FNanchor_109"><span class="label">[109]</span></a> I am here merely recording a general impression. There is
+no specific evidence, unless we take Cassio's language in his drink
+(<span class="smcap">ii.</span> ii. 105 f.) to imply that Iago was not a 'man of quality'
+like himself. I do not know if it has been observed that Iago uses more
+nautical phrases and metaphors than is at all usual with Shakespeare's
+characters. This might naturally be explained by his roving military
+life, but it is curious that almost all the examples occur in the
+earlier scenes (see <i>e.g.</i> <span class="smcap">i.</span> i. 30, 153, 157; <span class="smcap">i.</span> ii.
+17, 50; <span class="smcap">i.</span> iii. 343; <span class="smcap">ii.</span> iii. 65), so that the use of
+these phrases and metaphors may not be characteristic of Iago but
+symptomatic of a particular state of Shakespeare's mind.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_110" id="Footnote_110"></a><a href="#FNanchor_110"><span class="label">[110]</span></a> See further <a href="#NOTE_P">Note P</a>.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_111" id="Footnote_111"></a><a href="#FNanchor_111"><span class="label">[111]</span></a> But it by no means follows that we are to believe his
+statement that there was a report abroad about an intrigue between his
+wife and Othello (<span class="smcap">i.</span> iii. 393), or his statement (which may be
+divined from <span class="smcap">iv.</span> ii. 145) that someone had spoken to him on the
+subject.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_112" id="Footnote_112"></a><a href="#FNanchor_112"><span class="label">[112]</span></a> See, for instance, Aaron in <i>Titus Andronicus</i>,
+<span class="smcap">ii.</span> iii.; Richard in <i>3 Henry VI.</i>, <span class="smcap">iii.</span> ii. and
+<span class="smcap">v.</span> vi., and in <i>Richard III.</i>, <span class="smcap">i.</span> i. (twice),
+<span class="smcap">i.</span> ii.; Edmund in <i>King Lear</i>, <span class="smcap">i.</span> ii. (twice),
+<span class="smcap">iii.</span> iii. and v., <span class="smcap">v.</span> i.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_113" id="Footnote_113"></a><a href="#FNanchor_113"><span class="label">[113]</span></a> See, further, <a href="#NOTE_Q">Note Q</a>.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_114" id="Footnote_114"></a><a href="#FNanchor_114"><span class="label">[114]</span></a> On the meaning which this phrase had for its author,
+Coleridge, see <a href="#Footnote_115">note on p. 228</a>.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_115" id="Footnote_115"></a><a href="#FNanchor_115"><span class="label">[115]</span></a> Coleridge's view is not materially different, though less
+complete. When he speaks of 'the motive-hunting of a motiveless
+malignity,' he does not mean by the last two words that 'disinterested
+love of evil' or 'love of evil for evil's sake' of which I spoke just
+now, and which other critics attribute to Iago. He means really that
+Iago's malignity does not spring from the causes to which Iago himself
+refers it, nor from any 'motive' in the sense of an idea present to
+consciousness. But unfortunately his phrase suggests the theory which
+has been criticised above. On the question whether there is such a thing
+as this supposed pure malignity, the reader may refer to a discussion
+between Professor Bain and F.H. Bradley in <i>Mind</i>, vol. viii.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_116" id="Footnote_116"></a><a href="#FNanchor_116"><span class="label">[116]</span></a> <i>I.e.</i> terrifying.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_117" id="Footnote_117"></a><a href="#FNanchor_117"><span class="label">[117]</span></a> Cf. <a href="#Footnote_122">note at end of lecture</a>.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_118" id="Footnote_118"></a><a href="#FNanchor_118"><span class="label">[118]</span></a> It was suggested to me by a Glasgow student.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_119" id="Footnote_119"></a><a href="#FNanchor_119"><span class="label">[119]</span></a> A curious proof of Iago's inability to hold by his creed
+that absolute egoism is the only proper attitude, and that loyalty and
+affection are mere stupidity or want of spirit, may be found in his one
+moment of real passion, where he rushes at Emilia with the cry,
+'Villainous whore!' (<span class="smcap">v.</span> ii. 229). There is more than fury in
+his cry, there is indignation. She has been false to him, she has
+betrayed him. Well, but why should she not, if his creed is true? And
+what a melancholy exhibition of human inconsistency it is that he should
+use as terms of reproach words which, according to him, should be quite
+neutral, if not complimentary!</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_120" id="Footnote_120"></a><a href="#FNanchor_120"><span class="label">[120]</span></a> Cassio's invective against drink may be compared with
+Hamlet's expressions of disgust at his uncle's drunkenness. Possibly the
+subject may for some reason have been prominent in Shakespeare's mind
+about this time.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_121" id="Footnote_121"></a><a href="#FNanchor_121"><span class="label">[121]</span></a> So the Quarto, and certainly rightly, though modern
+editors reprint the feeble alteration of the Folio, due to fear of the
+Censor, 'O heaven! O heavenly Powers!'</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_122" id="Footnote_122"></a><a href="#FNanchor_122"><span class="label">[122]</span></a> The feelings evoked by Emilia are one of the causes which
+mitigate the excess of tragic pain at the conclusion. Others are the
+downfall of Iago, and the fact, already alluded to, that both Desdemona
+and Othello show themselves at their noblest just before death.</p></div>
+</div>
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><a name="Page_243" id="Page_243"></a><span class="pagenum">[243]</span></p>
+<h2><a name="LECTURE_VII" id="LECTURE_VII"></a>LECTURE VII</h2>
+
+<h3>KING LEAR</h3>
+
+
+<p><i>King Lear</i> has again and again been described as Shakespeare's greatest
+work, the best of his plays, the tragedy in which he exhibits most fully
+his multitudinous powers; and if we were doomed to lose all his dramas
+except one, probably the majority of those who know and appreciate him
+best would pronounce for keeping <i>King Lear</i>.</p>
+
+<p>Yet this tragedy is certainly the least popular of the famous four. The
+'general reader' reads it less often than the others, and, though he
+acknowledges its greatness, he will sometimes speak of it with a certain
+distaste. It is also the least often presented on the stage, and the
+least successful there. And when we look back on its history we find a
+curious fact. Some twenty years after the Restoration, Nahum Tate
+altered <i>King Lear</i> for the stage, giving it a happy ending, and putting
+Edgar in the place of the King of France as Cordelia's lover. From that
+time Shakespeare's tragedy in its original form was never seen on the
+stage for a century and a half. Betterton acted Tate's version; Garrick
+acted it and Dr. Johnson approved it. Kemble acted it, Kean acted it. In
+1823 Kean, 'stimulated by Hazlitt's remonstrances and Charles Lamb's
+essays,' restored the original tragic ending. At last, in <a name="Page_244" id="Page_244"></a><span class="pagenum">[244]</span>1838,
+Macready returned to Shakespeare's text throughout.</p>
+
+<p>What is the meaning of these opposite sets of facts? Are the lovers of
+Shakespeare wholly in the right; and is the general reader and
+play-goer, were even Tate and Dr. Johnson, altogether in the wrong? I
+venture to doubt it. When I read <i>King Lear</i> two impressions are left on
+my mind, which seem to answer roughly to the two sets of facts. <i>King
+Lear</i> seems to me Shakespeare's greatest achievement, but it seems to me
+<i>not</i> his best play. And I find that I tend to consider it from two
+rather different points of view. When I regard it strictly as a drama,
+it appears to me, though in certain parts overwhelming, decidedly
+inferior as a whole to <i>Hamlet</i>, <i>Othello</i> and <i>Macbeth</i>. When I am
+feeling that it is greater than any of these, and the fullest revelation
+of Shakespeare's power, I find I am not regarding it simply as a drama,
+but am grouping it in my mind with works like the <i>Prometheus Vinctus</i>
+and the <i>Divine Comedy</i>, and even with the greatest symphonies of
+Beethoven and the statues in the Medici Chapel.</p>
+
+<p>This two-fold character of the play is to some extent illustrated by the
+affinities and the probable chronological position of <i>King Lear</i>. It is
+allied with two tragedies, <i>Othello</i> and <i>Timon of Athens</i>; and these
+two tragedies are utterly unlike.<a name="FNanchor_123" id="FNanchor_123"></a><a href="#Footnote_123" class="fnanchor">[123]</a> <i>Othello</i> was probably composed
+about 1604, and <i>King Lear</i> about 1605; and though there is a somewhat
+marked change in style and versification, there are obvious resemblances
+between the two. The most important have been touched on already: these
+are the most painful and the most pathetic of the four tragedies, those
+in which evil appears in its coldest <a name="Page_245" id="Page_245"></a><span class="pagenum">[245]</span>and most inhuman forms, and those
+which exclude the supernatural from the action. But there is also in
+<i>King Lear</i> a good deal which sounds like an echo of <i>Othello</i>,&mdash;a fact
+which should not surprise us, since there are other instances where the
+matter of a play seems to go on working in Shakespeare's mind and
+re-appears, generally in a weaker form, in his next play. So, in <i>King
+Lear</i>, the conception of Edmund is not so fresh as that of Goneril.
+Goneril has no predecessor; but Edmund, though of course essentially
+distinguished from Iago, often reminds us of him, and the soliloquy,
+'This is the excellent foppery of the world,' is in the very tone of
+Iago's discourse on the sovereignty of the will. The gulling of Gloster,
+again, recalls the gulling of Othello. Even Edmund's idea (not carried
+out) of making his father witness, without over-hearing, his
+conversation with Edgar, reproduces the idea of the passage where
+Othello watches Iago and Cassio talking about Bianca; and the conclusion
+of the temptation, where Gloster says to Edmund:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i10">and of my land,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Loyal and natural boy, I'll work the means<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">To make thee capable,<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>reminds us of Othello's last words in the scene of temptation, 'Now art
+thou my lieutenant.' This list might be extended; and the appearance of
+certain unusual words and phrases in both the plays increases the
+likelihood that the composition of the one followed at no great distance
+on that of the other.<a name="FNanchor_124" id="FNanchor_124"></a><a href="#Footnote_124" class="fnanchor">[124]</a></p>
+
+<p>When we turn from <i>Othello</i> to <i>Timon of Athens</i> we find a play of quite
+another kind. <i>Othello</i> is dramatically the most perfect of the
+tragedies. <i>Timon</i>, on the contrary, is weak, ill-constructed and
+confused; and, though care might have made it clear, no mere care could
+make it really dramatic. <a name="Page_246" id="Page_246"></a><span class="pagenum">[246]</span>Yet it is undoubtedly Shakespearean in part,
+probably in great part; and it immediately reminds us of <i>King Lear</i>.
+Both plays deal with the tragic effects of ingratitude. In both the
+victim is exceptionally unsuspicious, soft-hearted and vehement. In both
+he is completely overwhelmed, passing through fury to madness in the one
+case, to suicide in the other. Famous passages in both plays are curses.
+The misanthropy of Timon pours itself out in a torrent of maledictions
+on the whole race of man; and these at once recall, alike by their form
+and their substance, the most powerful speeches uttered by Lear in his
+madness. In both plays occur repeated comparisons between man and the
+beasts; the idea that 'the strain of man's bred out into baboon,' wolf,
+tiger, fox; the idea that this bestial degradation will end in a furious
+struggle of all with all, in which the race will perish. The
+'pessimistic' strain in <i>Timon</i> suggests to many readers, even more
+imperatively than <i>King Lear</i>, the notion that Shakespeare was giving
+vent to some personal feeling, whether present or past; for the signs of
+his hand appear most unmistakably when the hero begins to pour the vials
+of his wrath upon mankind. <i>Timon</i>, lastly, in some of the
+unquestionably Shakespearean parts, bears (as it appears to me) so
+strong a resemblance to <i>King Lear</i> in style and in versification that
+it is hard to understand how competent judges can suppose that it
+belongs to a time at all near that of the final romances, or even that
+it was written so late as the last Roman plays. It is more likely to
+have been composed immediately after <i>King Lear</i> and before
+<i>Macbeth</i>.<a name="FNanchor_125" id="FNanchor_125"></a><a href="#Footnote_125" class="fnanchor">[125]</a></p>
+
+<p>Drawing these comparisons together, we may say that, while as a work of
+art and in tragic power <i>King Lear</i> is infinitely nearer to <i>Othello</i>
+than to <i>Timon</i>, in its spirit and substance its affinity <a name="Page_247" id="Page_247"></a><span class="pagenum">[247]</span>with <i>Timon</i>
+is a good deal the stronger. And, returning to the point from which
+these comparisons began, I would now add that there is in <i>King Lear</i> a
+reflection or anticipation, however faint, of the structural weakness of
+<i>Timon</i>. This weakness in <i>King Lear</i> is not due, however, to anything
+intrinsically undramatic in the story, but to characteristics which were
+necessary to an effect not wholly dramatic. The stage is the test of
+strictly dramatic quality, and <i>King Lear</i> is too huge for the stage. Of
+course, I am not denying that it is a great stage-play. It has scenes
+immensely effective in the theatre; three of them&mdash;the two between Lear
+and Goneril and between Lear, Goneril and Regan, and the ineffably
+beautiful scene in the Fourth Act between Lear and Cordelia&mdash;lose in the
+theatre very little of the spell they have for imagination; and the
+gradual interweaving of the two plots is almost as masterly as in <i>Much
+Ado</i>. But (not to speak of defects due to mere carelessness) that which
+makes the <i>peculiar</i> greatness of King Lear,&mdash;the immense scope of the
+work; the mass and variety of intense experience which it contains; the
+interpenetration of sublime imagination, piercing pathos, and humour
+almost as moving as the pathos; the vastness of the convulsion both of
+nature and of human passion; the vagueness of the scene where the action
+takes place, and of the movements of the figures which cross this scene;
+the strange atmosphere, cold and dark, which strikes on us as we enter
+this scene, enfolding these figures and magnifying their dim outlines
+like a winter mist; the half-realised suggestions of vast universal
+powers working in the world of individual fates and passions,&mdash;all this
+interferes with dramatic clearness even when the play is read, and in
+the theatre not only refuses to reveal itself fully through the senses
+but seems to be almost in contradiction with their reports. This is not
+so with the other <a name="Page_248" id="Page_248"></a><span class="pagenum">[248]</span>great tragedies. No doubt, as Lamb declared,
+theatrical representation gives only a part of what we imagine when we
+read them; but there is no <i>conflict</i> between the representation and the
+imagination, because these tragedies are, in essentials, perfectly
+dramatic. But <i>King Lear</i>, as a whole, is imperfectly dramatic, and
+there is something in its very essence which is at war with the senses,
+and demands a purely imaginative realisation. It is therefore
+Shakespeare's greatest work, but it is not what Hazlitt called it, the
+best of his plays; and its comparative unpopularity is due, not merely
+to the extreme painfulness of the catastrophe, but in part to its
+dramatic defects, and in part to a failure in many readers to catch the
+peculiar effects to which I have referred,&mdash;a failure which is natural
+because the appeal is made not so much to dramatic perception as to a
+rarer and more strictly poetic kind of imagination. For this reason,
+too, even the best attempts at exposition of <i>King Lear</i> are
+disappointing; they remind us of attempts to reduce to prose the
+impalpable spirit of the <i>Tempest</i>.</p>
+
+<p>I propose to develop some of these ideas by considering, first, the
+dramatic defects of the play, and then some of the causes of its
+extraordinary imaginative effect.</p>
+
+
+<h4>1</h4>
+
+<p>We may begin, however, by referring to two passages which have often
+been criticised with injustice. The first is that where the blinded
+Gloster, believing that he is going to leap down Dover cliff, does in
+fact fall flat on the ground at his feet, and then is persuaded that he
+<i>has</i> leaped down Dover cliff but has been miraculously preserved.
+Imagine this incident transferred to <i>Othello</i>, and you realise how
+completely the two tragedies differ in dramatic atmosphere. In <i>Othello</i>
+it would be a shocking or a ludicrous <a name="Page_249" id="Page_249"></a><span class="pagenum">[249]</span>dissonance, but it is in harmony
+with the spirit of <i>King Lear</i>. And not only is this so, but, contrary
+to expectation, it is not, if properly acted, in the least absurd on the
+stage. The imagination and the feelings have been worked upon with such
+effect by the description of the cliff, and by the portrayal of the old
+man's despair and his son's courageous and loving wisdom, that we are
+unconscious of the grotesqueness of the incident for common sense.</p>
+
+<p>The second passage is more important, for it deals with the origin of
+the whole conflict. The oft-repeated judgment that the first scene of
+<i>King Lear</i> is absurdly improbable, and that no sane man would think of
+dividing his kingdom among his daughters in proportion to the strength
+of their several protestations of love, is much too harsh and is based
+upon a strange misunderstanding. This scene acts effectively, and to
+imagination the story is not at all incredible. It is merely strange,
+like so many of the stories on which our romantic dramas are based.
+Shakespeare, besides, has done a good deal to soften the improbability
+of the legend, and he has done much more than the casual reader
+perceives. The very first words of the drama, as Coleridge pointed out,
+tell us that the division of the kingdom is already settled in all its
+details, so that only the public announcement of it remains.<a name="FNanchor_126" id="FNanchor_126"></a><a href="#Footnote_126" class="fnanchor">[126]</a> Later
+we find that the lines of division have already been drawn on the map of
+Britain (l. 38), and again that Cordelia's share, which is her dowry, is
+perfectly well known to Burgundy, if not to France (ll. 197, 245). That
+<a name="Page_250" id="Page_250"></a><span class="pagenum">[250]</span>then which is censured as absurd, the dependence of the division on the
+speeches of the daughters, was in Lear's intention a mere form, devised
+as a childish scheme to gratify his love of absolute power and his
+hunger for assurances of devotion. And this scheme is perfectly in
+character. We may even say that the main cause of its failure was not
+that Goneril and Regan were exceptionally hypocritical, but that
+Cordelia was exceptionally sincere and unbending. And it is essential to
+observe that its failure, and the consequent necessity of publicly
+reversing his whole well-known intention, is one source of Lear's
+extreme anger. He loved Cordelia most and knew that she loved him best,
+and the supreme moment to which he looked forward was that in which she
+should outdo her sisters in expressions of affection, and should be
+rewarded by that 'third' of the kingdom which was the most 'opulent.'
+And then&mdash;so it naturally seemed to him&mdash;she put him to open shame.</p>
+
+<p>There is a further point, which seems to have escaped the attention of
+Coleridge and others. Part of the absurdity of Lear's plan is taken to
+be his idea of living with his three daughters in turn. But he never
+meant to do this. He meant to live with Cordelia, and with her
+alone.<a name="FNanchor_127" id="FNanchor_127"></a><a href="#Footnote_127" class="fnanchor">[127]</a> The scheme of his alternate monthly stay with Goneril and
+Regan is forced on him at the moment by what he thinks the undutifulness
+of his favourite child. In fact his whole original plan, though foolish
+and rash, was not a 'hideous rashness'<a name="FNanchor_128" id="FNanchor_128"></a><a href="#Footnote_128" class="fnanchor">[128]</a> or incredible folly. If
+carried out it would have had no such consequences as followed its
+alteration. It would probably have led quickly to war,<a name="FNanchor_129" id="FNanchor_129"></a><a href="#Footnote_129" class="fnanchor">[129]</a> <a name="Page_251" id="Page_251"></a><span class="pagenum">[251]</span>but not to
+the agony which culminated in the storm upon the heath. The first scene,
+therefore, is not absurd, though it must be pronounced dramatically
+faulty in so far as it discloses the true position of affairs only to an
+attention more alert than can be expected in a theatrical audience or
+has been found in many critics of the play.</p>
+
+<p>Let us turn next to two passages of another kind, the two which are
+mainly responsible for the accusation of excessive painfulness, and so
+for the distaste of many readers and the long theatrical eclipse of
+<i>King Lear</i>. The first of these is much the less important; it is the
+scene of the blinding of Gloster. The blinding of Gloster on the stage
+has been condemned almost universally; and surely with justice, because
+the mere physical horror of such a spectacle would in the theatre be a
+sensation so violent as to overpower the purely tragic emotions, and
+therefore the spectacle would seem revolting or shocking. But it is
+otherwise in reading. For mere imagination the physical horror, though
+not lost, is so far deadened that it can do its duty as a stimulus to
+pity, and to that appalled dismay at the extremity of human cruelty
+which it is of the essence of the tragedy to excite. Thus the blinding
+of Gloster belongs rightly to <i>King Lear</i> in its proper world of
+imagination; it is a blot upon <i>King Lear</i> as a stage-play.</p>
+
+<p>But what are we to say of the second and far more important passage, the
+conclusion of the tragedy, the 'unhappy ending,' as it is called, though
+the word 'unhappy' sounds almost ironical in its weakness? Is this too a
+blot upon <i>King Lear</i> as a stage-play? The question is not so easily
+answered as might appear. Doubtless we are right when we turn with
+disgust from Tate's sentimental alterations, from his marriage of Edgar
+and Cordelia, and from that cheap moral which <a name="Page_252" id="Page_252"></a><span class="pagenum">[252]</span>every one of
+Shakespeare's tragedies contradicts, 'that Truth and Virtue shall at
+last succeed.' But are we so sure that we are right when we unreservedly
+condemn the feeling which prompted these alterations, or at all events
+the feeling which beyond question comes naturally to many readers of
+<i>King Lear</i> who would like Tate as little as we? What they wish, though
+they have not always the courage to confess it even to themselves, is
+that the deaths of Edmund, Goneril, Regan and Gloster should be followed
+by the escape of Lear and Cordelia from death, and that we should be
+allowed to imagine the poor old King passing quietly in the home of his
+beloved child to the end which cannot be far off. Now, I do not dream of
+saying that we ought to wish this, so long as we regard <i>King Lear</i>
+simply as a work of poetic imagination. But if <i>King Lear</i> is to be
+considered strictly as a drama, or simply as we consider <i>Othello</i>, it
+is not so clear that the wish is unjustified. In fact I will take my
+courage in both hands and say boldly that I share it, and also that I
+believe Shakespeare would have ended his play thus had he taken the
+subject in hand a few years later, in the days of <i>Cymbeline</i> and the
+<i>Winter's Tale</i>. If I read <i>King Lear</i> simply as a drama, I find that my
+feelings call for this 'happy ending.' I do not mean the human, the
+philanthropic, feelings, but the dramatic sense. The former wish Hamlet
+and Othello to escape their doom; the latter does not; but it does wish
+Lear and Cordelia to be saved. Surely, it says, the tragic emotions have
+been sufficiently stirred already. Surely the tragic outcome of Lear's
+error and his daughters' ingratitude has been made clear enough and
+moving enough. And, still more surely, such a tragic catastrophe as this
+should seem <i>inevitable</i>. But this catastrophe, unlike those of all the
+other mature tragedies, does not seem at all inevitable. It is not even
+satisfactorily <a name="Page_253" id="Page_253"></a><span class="pagenum">[253]</span>motived.<a name="FNanchor_130" id="FNanchor_130"></a><a href="#Footnote_130" class="fnanchor">[130]</a> In fact it seems expressly designed to
+fall suddenly like a bolt from a sky cleared by the vanished storm. And
+although from a wider point of view one may fully recognise the value of
+this effect, and may even reject with horror the wish for a 'happy
+ending,' this wider point of view, I must maintain, is not strictly
+dramatic or tragic.</p>
+
+<p>Of course this is a heresy and all the best authority is against it. But
+then the best authority, it seems to me, is either influenced
+unconsciously by disgust at Tate's sentimentalism or unconsciously takes
+that wider point of view. When Lamb&mdash;there is no higher
+authority&mdash;writes, 'A happy ending!&mdash;as if the living martyrdom that
+<a name="Page_254" id="Page_254"></a><span class="pagenum">[254]</span>Lear had gone through, the flaying of his feelings alive, did not make
+a fair dismissal from the stage of life the only decorous thing for
+him,' I answer, first, that it is precisely this <i>fair</i> dismissal which
+we desire for him instead of renewed anguish; and, secondly, that what
+we desire for him during the brief remainder of his days is not 'the
+childish pleasure of getting his gilt robes and sceptre again,' not what
+Tate gives him, but what Shakespeare himself might have given him&mdash;peace
+and happiness by Cordelia's fireside. And if I am told that he has
+suffered too much for this, how can I possibly believe it with these
+words ringing in my ears:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i8">Come, let's away to prison:<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">We two alone will sing like birds i' the cage.<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">When thou dost ask me blessing, I'll kneel down,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">And ask of thee forgiveness: so we'll live,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">And pray, and sing, and tell old tales, and laugh<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">At gilded butterflies?<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>And again when Schlegel declares that, if Lear were saved, 'the whole'
+would 'lose its significance,' because it would no longer show us that
+the belief in Providence 'requires a wider range than the dark
+pilgrimage on earth to be established in its whole extent,' I answer
+that, if the drama does show us that, it takes us beyond the strictly
+tragic point of view.<a name="FNanchor_131" id="FNanchor_131"></a><a href="#Footnote_131" class="fnanchor">[131]</a></p>
+
+<p>A dramatic mistake in regard to the catastrophe, however, even supposing
+it to exist, would not seriously affect the whole play. The principal
+structural weakness of <i>King Lear</i> lies elsewhere. It is felt to some
+extent in the earlier Acts, but still more (as from our study of
+Shakespeare's technique we have learnt to expect) in the Fourth and the
+first part of the Fifth. And it arises chiefly from the double action,
+which is a peculiarity <a name="Page_255" id="Page_255"></a><span class="pagenum">[255]</span>of <i>King Lear</i> among the tragedies. By the side
+of Lear, his daughters, Kent, and the Fool, who are the principal
+figures in the main plot, stand Gloster and his two sons, the chief
+persons of the secondary plot. Now by means of this double action
+Shakespeare secured certain results highly advantageous even from the
+strictly dramatic point of view, and easy to perceive. But the
+disadvantages were dramatically greater. The number of essential
+characters is so large, their actions and movements are so complicated,
+and events towards the close crowd on one another so thickly, that the
+reader's attention,<a name="FNanchor_132" id="FNanchor_132"></a><a href="#Footnote_132" class="fnanchor">[132]</a> rapidly transferred from one centre of interest
+to another, is overstrained. He becomes, if not intellectually confused,
+at least emotionally fatigued. The battle, on which everything turns,
+scarcely affects him. The deaths of Edmund, Goneril, Regan and Gloster
+seem 'but trifles here'; and anything short of the incomparable pathos
+of the close would leave him cold. There is something almost ludicrous
+in the insignificance of this battle, when it is compared with the
+corresponding battles in <i>Julius Caesar</i> and <i>Macbeth</i>; and though there
+may have been further reasons for its insignificance, the main one is
+simply that there was no room to give it its due effect among such a
+host of competing interests.<a name="FNanchor_133" id="FNanchor_133"></a><a href="#Footnote_133" class="fnanchor">[133]</a></p>
+
+<p>A comparison of the last two Acts of <i>Othello</i> with the last two Acts of
+<i>King Lear</i> would show how unfavourable to dramatic clearness is a
+multiplicity of figures. But that this multiplicity is not in <a name="Page_256" id="Page_256"></a><span class="pagenum">[256]</span>itself a
+fatal obstacle is evident from the last two Acts of <i>Hamlet</i>, and
+especially from the final scene. This is in all respects one of
+Shakespeare's triumphs, yet the stage is crowded with characters. Only
+they are not <i>leading</i> characters. The plot is single; Hamlet and the
+King are the 'mighty opposites'; and Ophelia, the only other person in
+whom we are obliged to take a vivid interest, has already disappeared.
+It is therefore natural and right that the deaths of Laertes and the
+Queen should affect us comparatively little. But in <i>King Lear</i>, because
+the plot is double, we have present in the last scene no less than five
+persons who are technically of the first importance&mdash;Lear, his three
+daughters and Edmund; not to speak of Kent and Edgar, of whom the latter
+at any rate is technically quite as important as Laertes. And again,
+owing to the pressure of persons and events, and owing to the
+concentration of our anxiety on Lear and Cordelia, the combat of Edgar
+and Edmund, which occupies so considerable a space, fails to excite a
+tithe of the interest of the fencing-match in <i>Hamlet</i>. The truth is
+that all through these Acts Shakespeare has too vast a material to use
+with complete dramatic effectiveness, however essential this very
+vastness was for effects of another kind.</p>
+
+<p>Added to these defects there are others, which suggest that in <i>King
+Lear</i> Shakespeare was less concerned than usual with dramatic fitness:
+improbabilities, inconsistencies, sayings and doings which suggest
+questions only to be answered by conjecture. The improbabilities in
+<i>King Lear</i> surely far surpass those of the other great tragedies in
+number and in grossness. And they are particularly noticeable in the
+secondary plot. For example, no sort of reason is given why Edgar, who
+lives in the same house with Edmund, should write a letter to him
+instead of speaking; and <a name="Page_257" id="Page_257"></a><span class="pagenum">[257]</span>this is a letter absolutely damning to his
+character. Gloster was very foolish, but surely not so foolish as to
+pass unnoticed this improbability; or, if so foolish, what need for
+Edmund to forge a letter rather than a conversation, especially as
+Gloster appears to be unacquainted with his son's handwriting?<a name="FNanchor_134" id="FNanchor_134"></a><a href="#Footnote_134" class="fnanchor">[134]</a> Is
+it in character that Edgar should be persuaded without the slightest
+demur to avoid his father instead of confronting him and asking him the
+cause of his anger? Why in the world should Gloster, when expelled from
+his castle, wander painfully all the way to Dover simply in order to
+destroy himself (<span class="smcap">iv.</span> i. 80)? And is it not extraordinary that,
+after Gloster's attempted suicide, Edgar should first talk to him in the
+language of a gentleman, then to Oswald in his presence in broad peasant
+dialect, then again to Gloster in gentle language, and yet that Gloster
+should not manifest the least surprise?</p>
+
+<p>Again, to take three instances of another kind; (<i>a</i>) only a fortnight
+seems to have elapsed between the first scene and the breach with
+Goneril; yet already there are rumours not only of war between Goneril
+and Regan but of the coming of a French army; and this, Kent says, is
+perhaps connected with the harshness of <i>both</i> the sisters to their
+father, although Regan has apparently had no opportunity of showing any
+harshness till the day before. (<i>b</i>) In the quarrel with Goneril Lear
+speaks of his having to dismiss fifty of his followers at a clap, yet
+she has neither mentioned any number nor had any opportunity of
+mentioning it off the stage. (<i>c</i>) Lear and Goneril, intending to hurry
+to Regan, both send off messengers to her, and both tell the messengers
+to bring back an answer. But it does not appear <a name="Page_258" id="Page_258"></a><span class="pagenum">[258]</span>either how the
+messengers <i>could</i> return or what answer could be required, as their
+superiors are following them with the greatest speed.</p>
+
+<p>Once more, (<i>a</i>) why does Edgar not reveal himself to his blind father,
+as he truly says he ought to have done? The answer is left to mere
+conjecture. (<i>b</i>) Why does Kent so carefully preserve his incognito till
+the last scene? He says he does it for an important purpose, but what
+the purpose is we have to guess. (<i>c</i>) Why Burgundy rather than France
+should have first choice of Cordelia's hand is a question we cannot help
+asking, but there is no hint of any answer.<a name="FNanchor_135" id="FNanchor_135"></a><a href="#Footnote_135" class="fnanchor">[135]</a> (<i>d</i>) I have referred
+already to the strange obscurity regarding Edmund's delay in trying to
+save his victims, and I will not extend this list of examples. No one of
+such defects is surprising when considered by itself, but their number
+is surely significant. Taken in conjunction with other symptoms it means
+that Shakespeare, set upon the dramatic effect of the great scenes and
+upon certain effects not wholly dramatic, was exceptionally careless of
+probability, clearness and consistency in smaller matters, introducing
+what was convenient or striking for a momentary purpose without
+troubling himself about anything more than the moment. In presence of
+these signs it seems doubtful whether his failure to give information
+about the fate of the Fool was due to anything more than carelessness or
+an impatient desire to reduce his overloaded material.<a name="FNanchor_136" id="FNanchor_136"></a><a href="#Footnote_136" class="fnanchor">[136]</a></p>
+
+<p><a name="Page_259" id="Page_259"></a><span class="pagenum">[259]</span>Before I turn to the other side of the subject I will refer to one more
+characteristic of this play which is dramatically disadvantageous. In
+Shakespeare's dramas, owing to the absence of scenery from the
+Elizabethan stage, the question, so vexatious to editors, of the exact
+locality of a particular scene is usually unimportant and often
+unanswerable; but, as a rule, we know, broadly speaking, where the
+persons live and what their journeys are. The text makes this plain, for
+example, almost throughout <i>Hamlet</i>, <i>Othello</i> and <i>Macbeth</i>; and the
+imagination is therefore untroubled. But in <i>King Lear</i> the indications
+are so scanty that the reader's mind is left not seldom both vague and
+bewildered. Nothing enables us to imagine whereabouts in Britain Lear's
+palace lies, or where the Duke of Albany lives. In referring to the
+dividing-lines on the map, Lear tells us of shadowy forests and
+plenteous rivers, but, unlike Hotspur and his companions, he studiously
+avoids proper names. The Duke of Cornwall, we presume in the absence of
+information, is likely to live in Cornwall; but we suddenly find, from
+the introduction of a place-name which all readers take at first for a
+surname, that he lives at Gloster (<span class="smcap">i.</span> v. 1).<a name="FNanchor_137" id="FNanchor_137"></a><a href="#Footnote_137" class="fnanchor">[137]</a> This seems
+likely to be also the home of the Earl of Gloster, to whom Cornwall is
+patron. But no: it is a night's journey from Cornwall's 'house' to
+Gloster's, and Gloster's is in the middle of an uninhabited heath.<a name="FNanchor_138" id="FNanchor_138"></a><a href="#Footnote_138" class="fnanchor">[138]</a>
+Here, for the purpose of the crisis, nearly all the persons assemble,
+but they do so in a manner which no casual spectator or reader could
+follow. Afterwards they all drift towards Dover for the purpose of the
+catastrophe; but <a name="Page_260" id="Page_260"></a><span class="pagenum">[260]</span>again the localities and movements are unusually
+indefinite. And this indefiniteness is found in smaller matters. One
+cannot help asking, for example, and yet one feels one had better not
+ask, where that 'lodging' of Edmund's can be, in which he hides Edgar
+from his father, and whether Edgar is mad that he should return from his
+hollow tree (in a district where 'for many miles about there's scarce a
+bush') to his father's castle in order to soliloquise (<span class="smcap">ii.</span>
+iii.):&mdash;for the favourite stage-direction, 'a wood' (which is more than
+'a bush'), however convenient to imagination, is scarcely compatible
+with the presence of Kent asleep in the stocks.<a name="FNanchor_139" id="FNanchor_139"></a><a href="#Footnote_139" class="fnanchor">[139]</a> Something of the
+confusion which bewilders the reader's mind in <i>King Lear</i> recurs in
+<i>Antony and Cleopatra</i>, the most faultily constructed of all the
+tragedies; but there it is due not so much to the absence or vagueness
+of the indications as to the necessity of taking frequent and fatiguing
+journeys over thousands of miles. Shakespeare could not help himself in
+the Roman play: in <i>King Lear</i> he did not choose to help himself,
+perhaps deliberately chose to be vague.</p>
+
+<p>From these defects, or from some of them, follows one result which must
+be familiar to many readers of <i>King Lear</i>. It is far more difficult to
+retrace in memory the steps of the action in this tragedy than in
+<i>Hamlet</i>, <i>Othello</i>, or <i>Macbeth</i>. The outline is of course quite clear;
+anyone could write an 'argument' of the play. But when an attempt is
+made to fill in the detail, it issues sooner or later in confusion even
+with readers whose dramatic memory is unusually strong.<a name="FNanchor_140" id="FNanchor_140"></a><a href="#Footnote_140" class="fnanchor">[140]</a></p>
+
+
+<p><a name="Page_261" id="Page_261"></a><span class="pagenum">[261]</span></p>
+<h4>2</h4>
+
+<p>How is it, now, that this defective drama so overpowers us that we are
+either unconscious of its blemishes or regard them as almost irrelevant?
+As soon as we turn to this question we recognise, not merely that <i>King
+Lear</i> possesses purely dramatic qualities which far outweigh its
+defects, but that its greatness consists partly in imaginative effects
+of a wider kind. And, looking for the sources of these effects, we find
+among them some of those very things which appeared to us dramatically
+faulty or injurious. Thus, to take at once two of the simplest examples
+of this, that very vagueness in the sense of locality which we have just
+considered, and again that excess in the bulk of the material and the
+number of figures, events and movements, while they interfere with the
+clearness of vision, have at the same time a positive value for
+imagination. They give the feeling of vastness, the feeling not of a
+scene or particular place, but of a world; or, to speak more accurately,
+of a particular place which is also a world. This world is dim to us,
+partly from its immensity, and partly because it is filled with gloom;
+and in the gloom shapes approach and recede, whose half-seen faces and
+motions touch us with dread, horror, or the most painful
+pity,&mdash;sympathies and antipathies which we seem to be feeling not only
+for them but for the whole race. This world, we are told, is called
+Britain; but we should no more look for it in an atlas than for the
+place, called Caucasus, where Prometheus was chained by Strength and
+Force and comforted by the daughters of Ocean, or the place where
+Farinata stands erect in his glowing tomb, 'Come avesse lo Inferno in
+gran dispitto.'</p>
+
+<p><a name="Page_262" id="Page_262"></a><span class="pagenum">[262]</span>Consider next the double action. It has certain strictly dramatic
+advantages, and may well have had its origin in purely dramatic
+considerations. To go no further, the secondary plot fills out a story
+which would by itself have been somewhat thin, and it provides a most
+effective contrast between its personages and those of the main plot,
+the tragic strength and stature of the latter being heightened by
+comparison with the slighter build of the former. But its chief value
+lies elsewhere, and is not merely dramatic. It lies in the fact&mdash;in
+Shakespeare without a parallel&mdash;that the sub-plot simply repeats the
+theme of the main story. Here, as there, we see an old man 'with a white
+beard.' He, like Lear, is affectionate, unsuspicious, foolish, and
+self-willed. He, too, wrongs deeply a child who loves him not less for
+the wrong. He, too, meets with monstrous ingratitude from the child whom
+he favours, and is tortured and driven to death. This repetition does
+not simply double the pain with which the tragedy is witnessed: it
+startles and terrifies by suggesting that the folly of Lear and the
+ingratitude of his daughters are no accidents or merely individual
+aberrations, but that in that dark cold world some fateful malignant
+influence is abroad, turning the hearts of the fathers against their
+children and of the children against their fathers, smiting the earth
+with a curse, so that the brother gives the brother to death and the
+father the son, blinding the eyes, maddening the brain, freezing the
+springs of pity, numbing all powers except the nerves of anguish and the
+dull lust of life.<a name="FNanchor_141" id="FNanchor_141"></a><a href="#Footnote_141" class="fnanchor">[141]</a></p>
+
+<p>Hence too, as well as from other sources, comes that feeling which
+haunts us in <i>King Lear</i>, as though we were witnessing something
+universal,&mdash;a conflict not so much of particular persons as <a name="Page_263" id="Page_263"></a><span class="pagenum">[263]</span>of the
+powers of good and evil in the world. And the treatment of many of the
+characters confirms this feeling. Considered simply as psychological
+studies few of them, surely, are of the highest interest. Fine and
+subtle touches could not be absent from a work of Shakespeare's
+maturity; but, with the possible exception of Lear himself, no one of
+the characters strikes us as psychologically a <i>wonderful</i> creation,
+like Hamlet or Iago or even Macbeth; one or two seem even to be somewhat
+faint and thin. And, what is more significant, it is not quite natural
+to us to regard them from this point of view at all. Rather we observe a
+most unusual circumstance. If Lear, Gloster and Albany are set apart,
+the rest fall into two distinct groups, which are strongly, even
+violently, contrasted: Cordelia, Kent, Edgar, the Fool on one side,
+Goneril, Regan, Edmund, Cornwall, Oswald on the other. These characters
+are in various degrees individualised, most of them completely so; but
+still in each group there is a quality common to all the members, or one
+spirit breathing through them all. Here we have unselfish and devoted
+love, there hard self-seeking. On both sides, further, the common
+quality takes an extreme form; the love is incapable of being chilled by
+injury, the selfishness of being softened by pity; and, it may be added,
+this tendency to extremes is found again in the characters of Lear and
+Gloster, and is the main source of the accusations of improbability
+directed against their conduct at certain points. Hence the members of
+each group tend to appear, at least in part, as varieties of one
+species; the radical differences of the two species are emphasized in
+broad hard strokes; and the two are set in conflict, almost as if
+Shakespeare, like Empedocles, were regarding Love and Hate as the two
+ultimate forces of the universe.</p>
+
+<p><a name="Page_264" id="Page_264"></a><span class="pagenum">[264]</span>The presence in <i>King Lear</i> of so large a number of characters in whom
+love or self-seeking is so extreme, has another effect. They do not
+merely inspire in us emotions of unusual strength, but they also stir
+the intellect to wonder and speculation. How can there be such men and
+women? we ask ourselves. How comes it that humanity can take such
+absolutely opposite forms? And, in particular, to what omission of
+elements which should be present in human nature, or, if there is no
+omission, to what distortion of these elements is it due that such
+beings as some of these come to exist? This is a question which Iago
+(and perhaps no previous creation of Shakespeare's) forces us to ask,
+but in <i>King Lear</i> it is provoked again and again. And more, it seems to
+us that the author himself is asking this question. 'Then let them
+anatomise Regan, see what breeds about her heart. Is there any cause in
+nature that makes these hard hearts?'&mdash;the strain of thought which
+appears here seems to be present in some degree throughout the play. We
+seem to trace the tendency which, a few years later, produced Ariel and
+Caliban, the tendency of imagination to analyse and abstract, to
+decompose human nature into its constituent factors, and then to
+construct beings in whom one or more of these factors is absent or
+atrophied or only incipient. This, of course, is a tendency which
+produces symbols, allegories, personifications of qualities and abstract
+ideas; and we are accustomed to think it quite foreign to Shakespeare's
+genius, which was in the highest degree concrete. No doubt in the main
+we are right here; but it is hazardous to set limits to that genius. The
+Sonnets, if nothing else, may show us how easy it was to Shakespeare's
+mind to move in a world of 'Platonic' ideas;<a name="FNanchor_142" id="FNanchor_142"></a><a href="#Footnote_142" class="fnanchor">[142]</a> and, while <a name="Page_265" id="Page_265"></a><span class="pagenum">[265]</span>it would
+be going too far to suggest that he was employing conscious symbolism or
+allegory in <i>King Lear</i>, it does appear to disclose a mode of
+imagination not so very far removed from the mode with which, we must
+remember, Shakespeare was perfectly familiar in Morality plays and in
+the <i>Fairy Queen</i>.</p>
+
+<p>This same tendency shows itself in <i>King Lear</i> in other forms. To it is
+due the idea of monstrosity&mdash;of beings, actions, states of mind, which
+appear not only abnormal but absolutely contrary to nature; an idea,
+which, of course, is common enough in Shakespeare, but appears with
+unusual frequency in <i>King Lear</i>, for instance in the lines:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i1">Ingratitude, thou marble-hearted fiend,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">More hideous when thou show'st thee in a child<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Than the sea-monster!<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>or in the exclamation,</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i10">Filial ingratitude!<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Is it not as this mouth should tear this hand<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">For lifting food to't?<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>It appears in another shape in that most vivid passage where Albany, as
+he looks at the face which had bewitched him, now distorted with
+dreadful passions, suddenly sees it in a new light and exclaims in
+horror:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i1">Thou changed and self-cover'd thing, for shame.<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Be-monster not thy feature. Were't my fitness<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">To let these hands obey my blood,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">They are apt enough to dislocate and tear<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Thy flesh and bones: howe'er thou art a fiend,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">A woman's shape doth shield thee.<a name="FNanchor_143" id="FNanchor_143"></a><a href="#Footnote_143" class="fnanchor">[143]</a><br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p><a name="Page_266" id="Page_266"></a><span class="pagenum">[266]</span>It appears once more in that exclamation of Kent's, as he listens to
+the description of Cordelia's grief:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i11">It is the stars,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">The stars above us, govern our conditions;<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Else one self mate and mate could not beget<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Such different issues.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>(This is not the only sign that Shakespeare had been musing over
+heredity, and wondering how it comes about that the composition of two
+strains of blood or two parent souls can produce such astonishingly
+different products.)</p>
+
+<p>This mode of thought is responsible, lastly, for a very striking
+characteristic of <i>King Lear</i>&mdash;one in which it has no parallel except
+<i>Timon</i>&mdash;the incessant references to the lower animals<a name="FNanchor_144" id="FNanchor_144"></a><a href="#Footnote_144" class="fnanchor">[144]</a> and man's
+likeness to them. These references are scattered broadcast through the
+whole play, as though Shakespeare's mind were so busy with the subject
+that he could hardly write a page without some allusion to it. The dog,
+the horse, the cow, the sheep, the hog, the lion, the bear, the wolf,
+the fox, the monkey, the pole-cat, the civet-cat, the pelican, the owl,
+the crow, the chough, the wren, the fly, the butterfly, the rat, the
+mouse, the frog, the tadpole, the wall-newt, the water-newt, the worm&mdash;I
+am sure I cannot have completed the list, and some of them are mentioned
+again and again. Often, of course, and especially in the talk of Edgar
+as the Bedlam, they have no symbolical meaning; but not seldom, even in
+his talk, they are expressly referred to for their typical
+qualities&mdash;'hog in sloth, fox in stealth, wolf in greediness, dog in
+madness, lion in prey,' 'The fitchew nor the soiled horse goes to't With
+a more riotous appetite.' Sometimes a person in the drama is compared,
+openly or implicitly, with one of them. <a name="Page_267" id="Page_267"></a><span class="pagenum">[267]</span>Goneril is a kite: her
+ingratitude has a serpent's tooth: she has struck her father most
+serpent-like upon the very heart: her visage is wolvish: she has tied
+sharp-toothed unkindness like a vulture on her father's breast: for her
+husband she is a gilded serpent: to Gloster her cruelty seems to have
+the fangs of a boar. She and Regan are dog-hearted: they are tigers, not
+daughters: each is an adder to the other: the flesh of each is covered
+with the fell of a beast. Oswald is a mongrel, and the son and heir of a
+mongrel: ducking to everyone in power, he is a wag-tail: white with
+fear, he is a goose. Gloster, for Regan, is an ingrateful fox: Albany,
+for his wife, has a cowish spirit and is milk-liver'd: when Edgar as the
+Bedlam first appeared to Lear he made him think a man a worm. As we
+read, the souls of all the beasts in turn seem to us to have entered the
+bodies of these mortals; horrible in their venom, savagery, lust,
+deceitfulness, sloth, cruelty, filthiness; miserable in their
+feebleness, nakedness, defencelessness, blindness; and man, 'consider
+him well,' is even what they are. Shakespeare, to whom the idea of the
+transmigration of souls was familiar and had once been material for
+jest,<a name="FNanchor_145" id="FNanchor_145"></a><a href="#Footnote_145" class="fnanchor">[145]</a> seems to have been brooding on humanity in the light of it.
+It <a name="Page_268" id="Page_268"></a><span class="pagenum">[268]</span>is remarkable, and somewhat sad, that he seems to find none of man's
+better qualities in the world of the brutes (though he might well have
+found the prototype of the self-less love of Kent and Cordelia in the
+dog whom he so habitually maligns);<a name="FNanchor_146" id="FNanchor_146"></a><a href="#Footnote_146" class="fnanchor">[146]</a> but he seems to have been
+asking himself whether that which he loathes in man may not be due to
+some strange wrenching of this frame of things, through which the lower
+animal souls have found a lodgment in human forms, and there found&mdash;to
+the horror and confusion of the thinking mind&mdash;brains to forge, tongues
+to speak, and hands to act, enormities which no mere brute can conceive
+or execute. He shows us in <i>King Lear</i> these terrible forces bursting
+into monstrous life and flinging themselves upon those human beings who
+are weak and defenceless, partly from old age, but partly because they
+<i>are</i> human and lack the dreadful undivided energy of the beast. And the
+only comfort he might seem to hold out to us is the prospect that at
+least this bestial race, strong only where it is vile, cannot endure:
+though stars and gods are powerless, or careless, or empty dreams, yet
+there must be an end of this horrible world:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i1">It will come;<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Humanity must perforce prey on itself<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Like monsters of the deep.<a name="FNanchor_147" id="FNanchor_147"></a><a href="#Footnote_147" class="fnanchor">[147]</a><br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p><a name="Page_269" id="Page_269"></a><span class="pagenum">[269]</span>The influence of all this on imagination as we read <i>King Lear</i> is very
+great; and it combines with other influences to convey to us, not in the
+form of distinct ideas but in the manner proper to poetry, the wider or
+universal significance of the spectacle presented to the inward eye. But
+the effect of theatrical exhibition is precisely the reverse. There the
+poetic atmosphere is dissipated; the meaning of the very words which
+create it passes half-realised; in obedience to the tyranny of the eye
+we conceive the characters as mere particular men and women; and all
+that mass of vague suggestion, if it enters the mind at all, appears in
+the shape of an allegory which we immediately reject. A similar conflict
+between imagination and sense will be found if we consider the dramatic
+centre of the whole tragedy, the Storm-scenes. The temptation of Othello
+and the scene of Duncan's murder may lose upon the stage, but they do
+not lose their essence, and they gain as well as lose. The Storm-scenes
+in <i>King Lear</i> gain nothing and their very essence is destroyed. It is
+comparatively a small thing that the theatrical storm, not to drown the
+dialogue, must be silent whenever a human being wishes to speak, and is
+wretchedly inferior to many a storm we have witnessed. Nor is it simply
+that, as Lamb observed, the corporal presence of Lear, 'an old man
+tottering about the stage with a walking-stick,' disturbs and depresses
+that sense of the greatness of his mind which fills the imagination.
+There is a further reason, which is not expressed, but still emerges, in
+these words of Lamb's: 'the explosions of his <a name="Page_270" id="Page_270"></a><span class="pagenum">[270]</span>passion are terrible as a
+volcano: they are storms turning up and disclosing to the bottom that
+sea, his mind, with all its vast riches.' Yes, 'they are <i>storms</i>.' For
+imagination, that is to say, the explosions of Lear's passion, and the
+bursts of rain and thunder, are not, what for the senses they must be,
+two things, but manifestations of one thing. It is the powers of the
+tormented soul that we hear and see in the 'groans of roaring wind and
+rain' and the 'sheets of fire'; and they that, at intervals almost more
+overwhelming, sink back into darkness and silence. Nor yet is even this
+all; but, as those incessant references to wolf and tiger made us see
+humanity 'reeling back into the beast' and ravening against itself, so
+in the storm we seem to see Nature herself convulsed by the same
+horrible passions; the 'common mother,'</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i1">Whose womb immeasurable and infinite breast<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Teems and feeds all,<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>turning on her children, to complete the ruin they have wrought upon
+themselves. Surely something not less, but much more, than these
+helpless words convey, is what comes to us in these astounding scenes;
+and if, translated thus into the language of prose, it becomes confused
+and inconsistent, the reason is simply that it itself is poetry, and
+such poetry as cannot be transferred to the space behind the
+foot-lights, but has its being only in imagination. Here then is
+Shakespeare at his very greatest, but not the mere dramatist
+Shakespeare.<a name="FNanchor_148" id="FNanchor_148"></a><a href="#Footnote_148" class="fnanchor">[148]</a></p>
+
+<p><a name="Page_271" id="Page_271"></a><span class="pagenum">[271]</span>And now we may say this also of the catastrophe, which we found
+questionable from the strictly dramatic point of view. Its purpose is
+not merely dramatic. This sudden blow out of the darkness, which seems
+so far from inevitable, and which strikes down our reviving hopes for
+the victims of so much cruelty, seems now only what we might have
+expected in a world so wild and monstrous. It is as if Shakespeare said
+to us: 'Did you think weakness and innocence have any chance here? Were
+you beginning to dream that? I will show you it is not so.'</p>
+
+<p>I come to a last point. As we contemplate this world, the question
+presses on us, What can be the ultimate power that moves it, that
+excites this gigantic war and waste, or, perhaps, that suffers them and
+overrules them? And in <i>King Lear</i> this question is not left to us to
+ask, it is raised by the characters themselves. References to religious
+or irreligious beliefs and feelings are more frequent than is usual in
+Shakespeare's tragedies, as frequent perhaps as in his final plays. He
+introduces characteristic differences in the language of the different
+persons about fortune or the stars or the gods, and shows how the
+question What rules the world? is forced upon their minds. They answer
+it in their turn: Kent, for instance:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i10">It is the stars,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">The stars above us, govern our condition:<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>Edmund:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i1">Thou, nature, art my goddess; to thy law<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">My services are bound:<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>and again,</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>This is the excellent foppery of the world, that, when we are
+sick in fortune&mdash;often the surfeit of our own behaviour&mdash;we
+make guilty of our disasters the sun, the moon and the stars;
+as if we were villains by necessity, fools by heavenly
+compulsion, ... and all that we are evil in by a divine
+thrusting on:</p></div>
+
+<p><a name="Page_272" id="Page_272"></a><span class="pagenum">[272]</span>Gloster:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i1">As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods;<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">They kill us for their sport;<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>Edgar:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i1">Think that the clearest gods, who make them honours<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Of men's impossibilities, have preserved thee.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>Here we have four distinct theories of the nature of the ruling power.
+And besides this, in such of the characters as have any belief in gods
+who love good and hate evil, the spectacle of triumphant injustice or
+cruelty provokes questionings like those of Job, or else the thought,
+often repeated, of divine retribution. To Lear at one moment the storm
+seems the messenger of heaven:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i9">Let the great gods,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">That keep this dreadful pother o'er our heads,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Find out their enemies now. Tremble, thou wretch,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">That hast within thee undivulged crimes....<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>At another moment those habitual miseries of the poor, of which he has
+taken too little account, seem to him to accuse the gods of injustice:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i5">Take physic, pomp;<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Expose thyself to feel what wretches feel,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">That thou mayst shake the superflux to them<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">And show the heavens more just;<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>and Gloster has almost the same thought (<span class="smcap">iv.</span> i. 67 ff.).
+Gloster again, thinking of the cruelty of Lear's daughters, breaks out,</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i9">but I shall see<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">The winged vengeance overtake such children.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>The servants who have witnessed the blinding of Gloster by Cornwall and
+Regan, cannot believe that cruelty so atrocious will pass unpunished.
+One cries,</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i1">I'll never care what wickedness I do,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">If this man come to good;<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>and another,</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i9">if she live long,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">And in the end meet the old course of death,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Women will all turn monsters.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p><a name="Page_273" id="Page_273"></a><span class="pagenum">[273]</span>Albany greets the news of Cornwall's death with the exclamation,</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i4">This shows you are above,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">You justicers, that these our nether crimes<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">So speedily can venge;<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>and the news of the deaths of the sisters with the words,</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i1">This judgment<a name="FNanchor_149" id="FNanchor_149"></a><a href="#Footnote_149" class="fnanchor">[149]</a> of the heavens, that makes us tremble,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Touches us not with pity.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>Edgar, speaking to Edmund of their father, declares</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i1">The gods are just, and of our pleasant vices<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Make instruments to plague us,<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>and Edmund himself assents. Almost throughout the latter half of the
+drama we note in most of the better characters a pre-occupation with the
+question of the ultimate power, and a passionate need to explain by
+reference to it what otherwise would drive them to despair. And the
+influence of this pre-occupation and need joins with other influences in
+affecting the imagination, and in causing it to receive from <i>King Lear</i>
+an impression which is at least as near of kin to the <i>Divine Comedy</i> as
+to <i>Othello</i>.</p>
+
+
+<h4>3</h4>
+
+<p>For Dante that which is recorded in the <i>Divine Comedy</i> was the justice
+and love of God. What did <i>King Lear</i> record for Shakespeare? Something,
+it would seem, very different. This is certainly the most terrible
+picture that Shakespeare painted of the world. In no other of his
+tragedies does humanity appear more pitiably infirm or more hopelessly
+bad. What is Iago's malignity against an envied stranger compared with
+the cruelty of the son of Gloster and the daughters of Lear? What <a name="Page_274" id="Page_274"></a><span class="pagenum">[274]</span>are
+the sufferings of a strong man like Othello to those of helpless age?
+Much too that we have already observed&mdash;the repetition of the main theme
+in that of the under-plot, the comparisons of man with the most wretched
+and the most horrible of the beasts, the impression of Nature's
+hostility to him, the irony of the unexpected catastrophe&mdash;these, with
+much else, seem even to indicate an intention to show things at their
+worst, and to return the sternest of replies to that question of the
+ultimate power and those appeals for retribution. Is it an accident, for
+example, that Lear's first appeal to something beyond the earth,</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i7">O heavens,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">If you do love old men, if your sweet sway<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Allow<a name="FNanchor_150" id="FNanchor_150"></a><a href="#Footnote_150" class="fnanchor">[150]</a> obedience, if yourselves are old,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Make it your cause:<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>is immediately answered by the iron voices of his daughters, raising by
+turns the conditions on which they will give him a humiliating
+harbourage; or that his second appeal, heart-rending in its piteousness,</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i1">You see me here, you gods, a poor old man,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">As full of grief as age; wretched in both:<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>is immediately answered from the heavens by the sounds of the breaking
+storm?<a name="FNanchor_151" id="FNanchor_151"></a><a href="#Footnote_151" class="fnanchor">[151]</a> Albany and Edgar may moralise on the divine justice as they
+will, but how, in face of all that we see, shall we believe that they
+speak Shakespeare's mind? Is not his mind rather expressed in the bitter
+contrast between their faith and the events we witness, or in the
+scornful rebuke of those who take upon them the mystery of things as if
+they were God's spies?<a name="FNanchor_152" id="FNanchor_152"></a><a href="#Footnote_152" class="fnanchor">[152]</a> <a name="Page_275" id="Page_275"></a><span class="pagenum">[275]</span>Is it not Shakespeare's judgment on his
+kind that we hear in Lear's appeal,</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i6">And thou, all-shaking thunder,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Smite flat the thick rotundity o' the world!<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Crack nature's moulds, all germens spill at once,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">That make ingrateful man!<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>and Shakespeare's judgment on the worth of existence that we hear in
+Lear's agonised cry, 'No, no, no life!'?</p>
+
+<p>Beyond doubt, I think, some such feelings as these possess us, and, if
+we follow Shakespeare, ought to possess us, from time to time as we read
+<i>King Lear</i>. And some readers will go further and maintain that this is
+also the ultimate and total impression left by the tragedy. <i>King Lear</i>
+has been held to be profoundly 'pessimistic' in the full meaning of that
+word,&mdash;the record of a time when contempt and loathing for his kind had
+overmastered the poet's soul, and in despair he pronounced man's life to
+be simply hateful and hideous. And if we exclude the biographical part
+of this view,<a name="FNanchor_153" id="FNanchor_153"></a><a href="#Footnote_153" class="fnanchor">[153]</a> the rest may claim some support even <a name="Page_276" id="Page_276"></a><span class="pagenum">[276]</span>from the
+greatest of Shakespearean critics since the days of Coleridge, Hazlitt
+and Lamb. Mr. Swinburne, after observing that <i>King Lear</i> is 'by far the
+most Aeschylean' of Shakespeare's works, proceeds thus:</p>
+
+<p>'But in one main point it differs radically from the work and the spirit
+of Aeschylus. Its fatalism is of a darker and harder nature. To
+Prometheus the fetters of the lord and enemy of mankind <a name="Page_277" id="Page_277"></a><span class="pagenum">[277]</span>were bitter;
+upon Orestes the hand of heaven was laid too heavily to bear; yet in the
+not utterly infinite or everlasting distance we see beyond them the
+promise of the morning on which mystery and justice shall be made one;
+when righteousness and omnipotence at last shall kiss each other. But on
+the horizon of Shakespeare's tragic fatalism we see no such twilight of
+atonement, such pledge of reconciliation as this. Requital, redemption,
+amends, equity, explanation, pity and mercy, are words without a meaning
+here.</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i1">As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods;<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">They kill us for their sport.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>Here is no need of the Eumenides, children of Night everlasting; for
+here is very Night herself.</p>
+
+<p>'The words just cited are not casual or episodical; they strike the
+keynote of the whole poem, lay the keystone of the whole arch of
+thought. There is no contest of conflicting forces, no judgment so much
+as by casting of lots: far less is there any light of heavenly harmony
+or of heavenly wisdom, of Apollo or Athene from above. We have heard
+much and often from theologians of the light of revelation: and some
+such thing indeed we find in Aeschylus; but the darkness of revelation
+is here.'<a name="FNanchor_154" id="FNanchor_154"></a><a href="#Footnote_154" class="fnanchor">[154]</a></p>
+
+<p>It is hard to refuse assent to these eloquent words, for they express in
+the language of a poet what we feel at times in reading <i>King Lear</i> but
+cannot express. But do they represent the total and final impression
+produced by the play? If they do, this impression, so far as the
+substance of the drama is concerned (and nothing else is in question
+here), must, it would seem, be one composed almost wholly of painful
+feelings,&mdash;utter depression, or indignant rebellion, or appalled
+despair. And that would surely be strange. For <i>King Lear</i> is admittedly
+one of the world's greatest poems, and <a name="Page_278" id="Page_278"></a><span class="pagenum">[278]</span>yet there is surely no other of
+these poems which produces on the whole this effect, and we regard it as
+a very serious flaw in any considerable work of art that this should be
+its ultimate effect.<a name="FNanchor_155" id="FNanchor_155"></a><a href="#Footnote_155" class="fnanchor">[155]</a> So that Mr. Swinburne's description, if taken
+as final, and any description of King Lear as 'pessimistic' in the
+proper sense of that word, would imply a criticism which is not
+intended, and which would make it difficult to leave the work in the
+position almost universally assigned to it.</p>
+
+<p>But in fact these descriptions, like most of the remarks made on <i>King
+Lear</i> in the present lecture, emphasise only certain aspects of the play
+and certain elements in the total impression; and in that impression the
+effect of these aspects, though far from being lost, is modified by that
+of others. I do not mean that the final effect resembles that of the
+<i>Divine Comedy</i> or the <i>Oresteia</i>: how should it, when the first of
+these can be called by its author a 'Comedy,' and when the second,
+ending (as doubtless the <i>Prometheus</i> trilogy also ended) with a
+solution, is not in the Shakespearean sense a tragedy at all?<a name="FNanchor_156" id="FNanchor_156"></a><a href="#Footnote_156" class="fnanchor">[156]</a> Nor
+do I mean that <i>King Lear</i> <a name="Page_279" id="Page_279"></a><span class="pagenum">[279]</span>contains a revelation of righteous
+omnipotence or heavenly harmony, or even a promise of the reconciliation
+of mystery and justice. But then, as we saw, neither do Shakespeare's
+other tragedies contain these things. Any theological interpretation of
+the world on the author's part is excluded from them, and their effect
+would be disordered or destroyed equally by the ideas of righteous or of
+unrighteous omnipotence. Nor, in reading them, do we think of 'justice'
+or 'equity' in the sense of a strict requital or such an adjustment of
+merit and prosperity as our moral sense is said to demand; and there
+never was vainer labour than that of critics who try to make out that
+the persons in these dramas meet with 'justice' or their 'deserts.'<a name="FNanchor_157" id="FNanchor_157"></a><a href="#Footnote_157" class="fnanchor">[157]</a>
+But, on the other hand, man is not represented in these tragedies as the
+mere plaything of a blind or capricious power, suffering woes which have
+no relation to his character and actions; nor is the world represented
+as given over to darkness. And in these respects <i>King Lear</i>, though the
+most terrible of these works, does not differ in essence from the rest.
+Its keynote is surely to be heard neither in the words wrung from
+Gloster in his anguish, nor in Edgar's words 'the gods are just.' Its
+final and total result is one in which pity and terror, carried perhaps
+to the extreme limits of art, are so blended with a sense of law and
+beauty that we feel at last, not depression and much less despair, but a
+consciousness of greatness in pain, and of solemnity in the mystery we
+cannot fathom.</p>
+
+<div class="footnotes">
+<div class="footnotehead">FOOTNOTES:</div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_123" id="Footnote_123"></a><a href="#FNanchor_123"><span class="label">[123]</span></a> I leave undiscussed the position of <i>King Lear</i> in
+relation to the 'comedies' of <i>Measure for Measure</i>, <i>Troilus and
+Cressida</i> and <i>All's Well</i>.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_124" id="Footnote_124"></a><a href="#FNanchor_124"><span class="label">[124]</span></a> See <a href="#NOTE_R">Note R</a>.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_125" id="Footnote_125"></a><a href="#FNanchor_125"><span class="label">[125]</span></a> On some of the points mentioned in this paragraph see
+<a href="#NOTE_S">Note S</a>.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_126" id="Footnote_126"></a><a href="#FNanchor_126"><span class="label">[126]</span></a>
+</p>
+<div class="blockquot"><p>'<i>Kent.</i> I thought the king had more affected the Duke of
+Albany than Cornwall.
+</p><p>
+<i>Glos.</i> It did always seem so to us: but now, in the division
+of the kingdom, it appears not which of the dukes he values
+most.'</p></div>
+<p>
+For (Gloster goes on to say) their shares are exactly equal in value.
+And if the shares of the two elder daughters are fixed, obviously that
+of the third is so too.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_127" id="Footnote_127"></a><a href="#FNanchor_127"><span class="label">[127]</span></a>
+</p>
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i1">I loved her most, and thought to set my rest<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">On her kind nursery.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+</div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_128" id="Footnote_128"></a><a href="#FNanchor_128"><span class="label">[128]</span></a> It is to Lear's altered plan that Kent applies these
+words.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_129" id="Footnote_129"></a><a href="#FNanchor_129"><span class="label">[129]</span></a> There is talk of a war between Goneril and Regan within a
+fortnight of the division of the kingdom (<span class="smcap">ii.</span> i. 11 f.).</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_130" id="Footnote_130"></a><a href="#FNanchor_130"><span class="label">[130]</span></a> I mean that no sufficiently clear reason is supplied for
+Edmund's delay in attempting to save Cordelia and Lear. The matter
+stands thus. Edmund, after the defeat of the opposing army, sends Lear
+and Cordelia to prison. Then, in accordance with a plan agreed on
+between himself and Goneril, he despatches a captain with secret orders
+to put them both to death <i>instantly</i> (<span class="smcap">v.</span> iii. 26-37, 244,
+252). He then has to fight with the disguised Edgar. He is mortally
+wounded, and, as he lies dying, he says to Edgar (at line 162, <i>more
+than a hundred lines</i> after he gave that commission to the captain):
+</p>
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i1">What you have charged me with, that have I done;<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">And more, much more; the time will bring it out;<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">'Tis past, and so am I.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+<p>
+In 'more, much more' he seems to be thinking of the order for the deaths
+of Lear and Cordelia (what else remained undisclosed?); yet he says
+nothing about it. A few lines later he recognises the justice of his
+fate, yet still says nothing. Then he hears the story of his father's
+death, says it has moved him and 'shall perchance do good' (What good
+except saving his victims?); yet he still says nothing. Even when he
+hears that Goneril is dead and Regan poisoned, he <i>still</i> says nothing.
+It is only when directly questioned about Lear and Cordelia that he
+tries to save the victims who were to be killed 'instantly' (242). How
+can we explain his delay? Perhaps, thinking the deaths of Lear and
+Cordelia would be of use to Goneril and Regan, he will not speak till he
+is sure that both the sisters are dead. Or perhaps, though he can
+recognise the justice of his fate and can be touched by the account of
+his father's death, he is still too self-absorbed to rise to the active
+effort to 'do some good, despite of his own nature.' But, while either
+of these conjectures is possible, it is surely far from satisfactory
+that we should be left to mere conjecture as to the cause of the delay
+which permits the catastrophe to take place. The <i>real</i> cause lies
+outside the dramatic <i>nexus</i>. It is Shakespeare's wish to deliver a
+sudden and crushing blow to the hopes which he has excited.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_131" id="Footnote_131"></a><a href="#FNanchor_131"><span class="label">[131]</span></a> Everything in these paragraphs must, of course, be taken
+in connection with later remarks.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_132" id="Footnote_132"></a><a href="#FNanchor_132"><span class="label">[132]</span></a> I say 'the reader's,' because on the stage, whenever I
+have seen <i>King Lear</i>, the 'cuts' necessitated by modern scenery would
+have made this part of the play absolutely unintelligible to me if I had
+not been familiar with it. It is significant that Lamb in his <i>Tale of
+King Lear</i> almost omits the sub-plot.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_133" id="Footnote_133"></a><a href="#FNanchor_133"><span class="label">[133]</span></a> Even if Cordelia had won the battle, Shakespeare would
+probably have hesitated to concentrate interest on it, for her victory
+would have been a British defeat. On Spedding's view, that he did mean
+to make the battle more interesting, and that his purpose has been
+defeated by our wrong division of Acts <span class="smcap">iv.</span> and <span class="smcap">v.</span>, see
+<a href="#NOTE_X">Note X</a>.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_134" id="Footnote_134"></a><a href="#FNanchor_134"><span class="label">[134]</span></a> It is vain to suggest that Edmund has only just come
+home, and that the letter is supposed to have been sent to him when he
+was 'out' See <span class="smcap">i.</span> ii. 38-40, 65 f.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_135" id="Footnote_135"></a><a href="#FNanchor_135"><span class="label">[135]</span></a> The idea in scene i., perhaps, is that Cordelia's
+marriage, like the division of the kingdom, has really been
+pre-arranged, and that the ceremony of choosing between France and
+Burgundy (<span class="smcap">i.</span> i. 46 f.) is a mere fiction. Burgundy is to be her
+husband, and that is why, when Lear has cast her off, he offers her to
+Burgundy first (l. 192 ff.). It might seem from 211 ff. that Lear's
+reason for doing so is that he prefers France, or thinks him the greater
+man, and therefore will not offer him first what is worthless: but the
+language of France (240 ff.) seems to show that he recognises a prior
+right in Burgundy.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_136" id="Footnote_136"></a><a href="#FNanchor_136"><span class="label">[136]</span></a> See <a href="#NOTE_T">Note T</a>. and p. <a href='#Page_315'>315</a>.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_137" id="Footnote_137"></a><a href="#FNanchor_137"><span class="label">[137]</span></a> See <a href="#NOTE_U">Note U</a>.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_138" id="Footnote_138"></a><a href="#FNanchor_138"><span class="label">[138]</span></a> The word 'heath' in the stage-directions of the
+storm-scenes is, I may remark, Rowe's, not Shakespeare's, who never used
+the word till he wrote <i>Macbeth</i>.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_139" id="Footnote_139"></a><a href="#FNanchor_139"><span class="label">[139]</span></a> It is pointed out in <a href="#NOTE_V">Note V</a>. that what modern editors
+call Scenes ii., iii., iv. of Act <span class="smcap">ii.</span> are really one scene, for
+Kent is on the stage through them all.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_140" id="Footnote_140"></a><a href="#FNanchor_140"><span class="label">[140]</span></a> [On the locality of Act <span class="smcap">i.</span>, Sc. ii., see <i>Modern
+Language Review</i> for Oct., 1908, and Jan., 1909.]</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_141" id="Footnote_141"></a><a href="#FNanchor_141"><span class="label">[141]</span></a> This effect of the double action seems to have been
+pointed out first by Schlegel.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_142" id="Footnote_142"></a><a href="#FNanchor_142"><span class="label">[142]</span></a> How prevalent these are is not recognised by readers
+familiar only with English poetry. See Simpson's <i>Introduction to the
+Philosophy of Shakespeare's Sonnets</i> (1868) and Mr. Wyndham's edition of
+Shakespeare's Poems. Perhaps both writers overstate, and Simpson's
+interpretations are often forced or arbitrary, but his book is valuable
+and ought not to remain out of print.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_143" id="Footnote_143"></a><a href="#FNanchor_143"><span class="label">[143]</span></a> The monstrosity here is a being with a woman's body and a
+fiend's soul. For the interpretation of the lines see <a href="#NOTE_Y">Note Y</a>.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_144" id="Footnote_144"></a><a href="#FNanchor_144"><span class="label">[144]</span></a> Since this paragraph was written I have found that the
+abundance of these references has been pointed out and commented on by
+J. Kirkman, <i>New Shaks. Soc. Trans.</i>, 1877.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_145" id="Footnote_145"></a><a href="#FNanchor_145"><span class="label">[145]</span></a> <i>E.g.</i> in <i>As You Like It</i>, <span class="smcap">iii.</span> ii. 187, 'I was
+never so berhymed since Pythagoras' time, that I was an Irish rat, which
+I can hardly remember'; <i>Twelfth Night</i>, <span class="smcap">iv.</span> ii. 55, '<i>Clown.</i>
+What is the opinion of Pythagoras concerning wild fowl? <i>Mal.</i> That the
+soul of our grandam might haply inhabit a bird. <i>Clown.</i> What thinkest
+thou of his opinion? <i>Mal.</i> I think nobly of the soul, and no way
+approve his opinion,' etc. But earlier comes a passage which reminds us
+of <i>King Lear</i>, <i>Merchant of Venice</i>, <span class="smcap">iv.</span> i. 128:
+</p>
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i1">O be thou damn'd, inexecrable dog!<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">And for thy life let justice be accused.<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Thou almost makest me waver in my faith<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">To hold opinion with Pythagoras,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">That souls of animals infuse themselves<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Into the trunks of men: thy currish spirit<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Govern'd a wolf, who, hang'd for human slaughter,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Even from the gallows did his fell soul fleet,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">And, whilst thou lay'st in thy unhallow'd dam,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Infused itself in thee; for thy desires<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Are wolvish, bloody, starved and ravenous.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+</div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_146" id="Footnote_146"></a><a href="#FNanchor_146"><span class="label">[146]</span></a> I fear it is not possible, however, to refute, on the
+whole, one charge,&mdash;that the dog is a snob, in the sense that he
+respects power and prosperity, and objects to the poor and despised. It
+is curious that Shakespeare refers to this trait three times in <i>King
+Lear</i>, as if he were feeling a peculiar disgust at it. See <span class="smcap">iii.</span>
+vi. 65, 'The little dogs and all,' etc.: <span class="smcap">iv.</span> vi. 159, 'Thou
+hast seen a farmer's dog bark at a beggar ... and the creature run from
+the cur? There thou mightst behold the great image of authority':
+<span class="smcap">v.</span> iii. 186, 'taught me to shift Into a madman's rags; to
+assume a semblance That very dogs disdain'd.' Cf. <i>Oxford Lectures</i>, p.
+341.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_147" id="Footnote_147"></a><a href="#FNanchor_147"><span class="label">[147]</span></a> With this compare the following lines in the great speech
+on 'degree' in <i>Troilus and Cressida</i>, <span class="smcap">i.</span> iii.:
+</p>
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i1">Take but degree away, untune that string,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">And, hark, what discord follows! Each thing meets<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">In mere oppugnancy: the bounded waters<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Should lift their bosoms higher than the shores<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">And make a sop of all this solid globe:<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Strength should be lord of imbecility,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">And the rude son should strike his father dead:<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Force should be right; or, rather, right and wrong,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Between whose endless jar justice resides,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Should lose their names, and so should justice too.<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Then everything includes itself in power,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Power into will, will into appetite;<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">And appetite, an universal wolf,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">So doubly seconded with will and power,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Must make perforce an universal prey,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">And last eat up himself.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+</div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_148" id="Footnote_148"></a><a href="#FNanchor_148"><span class="label">[148]</span></a> Nor is it believable that Shakespeare, whose means of
+imitating a storm were so greatly inferior even to ours, had the
+stage-performance only or chiefly in view in composing these scenes. He
+may not have thought of readers (or he may), but he must in any case
+have written to satisfy his own imagination. I have taken no notice of
+the part played in these scenes by anyone except Lear. The matter is too
+huge, and too strictly poetic, for analysis. I may observe that in our
+present theatres, owing to the use of elaborate scenery, the three
+Storm-scenes are usually combined, with disastrous effect. Shakespeare,
+as we saw (p. <a href='#Page_49'>49</a>), interposed between them short scenes of much lower
+tone.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_149" id="Footnote_149"></a><a href="#FNanchor_149"><span class="label">[149]</span></a> 'justice,' Qq.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_150" id="Footnote_150"></a><a href="#FNanchor_150"><span class="label">[150]</span></a> =approve.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_151" id="Footnote_151"></a><a href="#FNanchor_151"><span class="label">[151]</span></a> The direction 'Storm and tempest' at the end of this
+speech is not modern, it is in the Folio.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_152" id="Footnote_152"></a><a href="#FNanchor_152"><span class="label">[152]</span></a> The gods are mentioned many times in <i>King Lear</i>, but
+'God' only here (<span class="smcap">v.</span> ii. 16).</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_153" id="Footnote_153"></a><a href="#FNanchor_153"><span class="label">[153]</span></a> The whole question how far Shakespeare's works represent
+his personal feelings and attitude, and the changes in them, would carry
+us so far beyond the bounds of the four tragedies, is so needless for
+the understanding of them, and is so little capable of decision, that I
+have excluded it from these lectures; and I will add here a note on it
+only as it concerns the 'tragic period.'
+</p><p>
+There are here two distinct sets of facts, equally important, (1) On the
+one side there is the fact that, so far as we can make out, after
+<i>Twelfth Night</i> Shakespeare wrote, for seven or eight years, no play
+which, like many of his earlier works, can be called happy, much less
+merry or sunny. He wrote tragedies; and if the chronological order
+<i>Hamlet</i>, <i>Othello</i>, <i>King Lear</i>, <i>Timon</i>, <i>Macbeth</i>, is correct, these
+tragedies show for some time a deepening darkness, and <i>King Lear</i> and
+<i>Timon</i> lie at the nadir. He wrote also in these years (probably in the
+earlier of them) certain 'comedies,' <i>Measure for Measure</i> and <i>Troilus
+and Cressida</i>, and perhaps <i>All's Well</i>. But about these comedies there
+is a peculiar air of coldness; there is humour, of course, but little
+mirth; in <i>Measure for Measure</i> perhaps, certainly in <i>Troilus and
+Cressida</i>, a spirit of bitterness and contempt seems to pervade an
+intellectual atmosphere of an intense but hard clearness. With <i>Macbeth</i>
+perhaps, and more decidedly in the two Roman tragedies which followed,
+the gloom seems to lift; and the final romances show a mellow serenity
+which sometimes warms into radiant sympathy, and even into a mirth
+almost as light-hearted as that of younger days. When we consider these
+facts, not as barely stated thus but as they affect us in reading the
+plays, it is, to my mind, very hard to believe that their origin was
+simply and solely a change in dramatic methods or choice of subjects, or
+even merely such inward changes as may be expected to accompany the
+arrival and progress of middle age.
+</p><p>
+(2) On the other side, and over against these facts, we have to set the
+multitudinousness of Shakespeare's genius, and his almost unlimited
+power of conceiving and expressing human experience of all kinds. And we
+have to set more. Apparently during this period of years he never ceased
+to write busily, or to exhibit in his writings the greatest mental
+activity. He wrote also either nothing or very little (<i>Troilus and
+Cressida</i> and his part of <i>Timon</i> are the possible exceptions) in which
+there is any appearance of personal feeling overcoming or seriously
+endangering the self-control or 'objectivity' of the artist. And finally
+it is not possible to make out any continuously deepening <i>personal</i>
+note: for although <i>Othello</i> is darker than <i>Hamlet</i> it surely strikes
+one as about as impersonal as a play can be; and, on grounds of style
+and versification, it appears (to me, at least) impossible to bring
+<i>Troilus and Cressida</i> chronologically close to <i>King Lear</i> and <i>Timon</i>;
+even if parts of it are later than others, the late parts must be
+decidedly earlier than those plays.
+</p><p>
+The conclusion we may very tentatively draw from these sets of facts
+would seem to be as follows. Shakespeare during these years was probably
+not a happy man, and it is quite likely that he felt at times even an
+intense melancholy, bitterness, contempt, anger, possibly even loathing
+and despair. It is quite likely too that he used these experiences of
+his in writing such plays as <i>Hamlet</i>, <i>Troilus and Cressida</i>, <i>King
+Lear</i>, <i>Timon</i>. But it is evident that he cannot have been for any
+considerable time, if, ever, overwhelmed by such feelings, and there is
+no appearance of their having issued in any settled 'pessimistic'
+conviction which coloured his whole imagination and expressed itself in
+his works. The choice of the subject of ingratitude, for instance, in
+<i>King Lear</i> and <i>Timon</i>, and the method of handling it, may have been
+due in part to personal feeling; but it does not follow that this
+feeling was particularly acute at this particular time, and, even if it
+was, it certainly was not so absorbing as to hinder Shakespeare from
+representing in the most sympathetic manner aspects of life the very
+reverse of pessimistic. Whether the total impression of <i>King Lear</i> can
+be called pessimistic is a further question, which is considered in the
+text.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_154" id="Footnote_154"></a><a href="#FNanchor_154"><span class="label">[154]</span></a> <i>A Study of Shakespeare</i>, pp. 171, 172.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_155" id="Footnote_155"></a><a href="#FNanchor_155"><span class="label">[155]</span></a> A flaw, I mean, in a work of art considered not as a
+moral or theological document but as a work of art,&mdash;an aesthetic flaw.
+I add the word 'considerable' because we do not regard the effect in
+question as a flaw in a work like a lyric or a short piece of music,
+which may naturally be taken as expressions merely of a mood or a
+subordinate aspect of things.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_156" id="Footnote_156"></a><a href="#FNanchor_156"><span class="label">[156]</span></a> Caution is very necessary in making comparisons between
+Shakespeare and the Greek dramatists. A tragedy like the <i>Antigone</i>
+stands, in spite of differences, on the same ground as a Shakespearean
+tragedy; it is a self-contained whole with a catastrophe. A drama like
+the <i>Philoctetes</i> is a self-contained whole, but, ending with a
+solution, it corresponds not with a Shakespearean tragedy but with a
+play like <i>Cymbeline</i>. A drama like the <i>Agamemnon</i> or the <i>Prometheus
+Vinctus</i> answers to no Shakespearean form of play. It is not a
+self-contained whole, but a part of a trilogy. If the trilogy is
+considered as a unit, it answers not to <i>Hamlet</i> but to <i>Cymbeline</i>. If
+the part is considered as a whole, it answers to <i>Hamlet</i>, but may then
+be open to serious criticism. Shakespeare never made a tragedy end with
+the complete triumph of the worse side: the <i>Agamemnon</i> and
+<i>Prometheus</i>, if wrongly taken as wholes, would do this, and would so
+far, I must think, be bad tragedies. [It can scarcely be necessary to
+remind the reader that, in point of 'self-containedness,' there is a
+difference of degree between the pure tragedies of Shakespeare and some
+of the historical.]</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_157" id="Footnote_157"></a><a href="#FNanchor_157"><span class="label">[157]</span></a> I leave it to better authorities to say how far these
+remarks apply also to Greek Tragedy, however much the language of
+'justice' may be used there.</p></div>
+</div>
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><a name="Page_280" id="Page_280"></a><span class="pagenum">[280]</span></p>
+<h2><a name="LECTURE_VIII" id="LECTURE_VIII"></a>LECTURE VIII</h2>
+
+<h3>KING LEAR</h3>
+
+
+<p>We have now to look at the characters in <i>King Lear</i>; and I propose to
+consider them to some extent from the point of view indicated at the
+close of the last lecture, partly because we have so far been regarding
+the tragedy mainly from an opposite point of view, and partly because
+these characters are so numerous that it would not be possible within
+our limits to examine them fully.</p>
+
+
+<h4>1</h4>
+
+<p>The position of the hero in this tragedy is in one important respect
+peculiar. The reader of <i>Hamlet</i>, <i>Othello</i>, or <i>Macbeth</i>, is in no
+danger of forgetting, when the catastrophe is reached, the part played
+by the hero in bringing it on. His fatal weakness, error, wrong-doing,
+continues almost to the end. It is otherwise with <i>King Lear</i>. When the
+conclusion arrives, the old King has for a long while been passive. We
+have long regarded him not only as 'a man more sinned against than
+sinning,' but almost wholly as a sufferer, hardly at all as an agent.
+His sufferings too have been so cruel, and our indignation against those
+who inflicted them has been so intense, that recollection of the wrong
+he did to Cordelia, to Kent, and to his realm, has been well-nigh
+effaced. Lastly, for nearly four Acts he <a name="Page_281" id="Page_281"></a><span class="pagenum">[281]</span>has inspired in us, together
+with this pity, much admiration and affection. The force of his passion
+has made us feel that his nature was great; and his frankness and
+generosity, his heroic efforts to be patient, the depth of his shame and
+repentance, and the ecstasy of his re-union with Cordelia, have melted
+our very hearts. Naturally, therefore, at the close we are in some
+danger of forgetting that the storm which has overwhelmed him was
+liberated by his own deed.</p>
+
+<p>Yet it is essential that Lear's contribution to the action of the drama
+should be remembered; not at all in order that we may feel that he
+'deserved' what he suffered, but because otherwise his fate would appear
+to us at best pathetic, at worst shocking, but certainly not tragic. And
+when we were reading the earlier scenes of the play we recognised this
+contribution clearly enough. At the very beginning, it is true, we are
+inclined to feel merely pity and misgivings. The first lines tell us
+that Lear's mind is beginning to fail with age.<a name="FNanchor_158" id="FNanchor_158"></a><a href="#Footnote_158" class="fnanchor">[158]</a> Formerly he had
+perceived how different were the characters of Albany and Cornwall, but
+now he seems either to have lost this perception or to be unwisely
+ignoring it. The rashness of his division of the kingdom troubles us,
+and we cannot but see with concern that its motive is mainly selfish.
+The absurdity of the pretence of making the division depend on
+protestations of love from his daughters, his complete blindness to the
+hypocrisy which is patent to us at a glance, his piteous delight in
+these protestations, the openness of his expressions of preference for
+his youngest daughter&mdash;all make us smile, but all pain us. But pity
+begins to give way to another feeling when we witness the precipitance,
+the despotism, the uncontrolled anger of his injustice to Cordelia and
+Kent, <a name="Page_282" id="Page_282"></a><span class="pagenum">[282]</span>and the 'hideous rashness' of his persistence in dividing the
+kingdom after the rejection of his one dutiful child. We feel now the
+presence of force, as well as weakness, but we feel also the presence of
+the tragic <span class="greek" title="hubris">&#8019;&#946;&#961;&#953;&#962;</span>. Lear, we see, is generous and unsuspicious,
+of an open and free nature, like Hamlet and Othello and indeed most of
+Shakespeare's heroes, who in this, according to Ben Jonson, resemble the
+poet who made them. Lear, we see, is also choleric by temperament&mdash;the
+first of Shakespeare's heroes who is so. And a long life of absolute
+power, in which he has been flattered to the top of his bent, has
+produced in him that blindness to human limitations, and that
+presumptuous self-will, which in Greek tragedy we have so often seen
+stumbling against the altar of Nemesis. Our consciousness that the decay
+of old age contributes to this condition deepens our pity and our sense
+of human infirmity, but certainly does not lead us to regard the old
+King as irresponsible, and so to sever the tragic <i>nexus</i> which binds
+together his error and his calamities.</p>
+
+<p>The magnitude of this first error is generally fully recognised by the
+reader owing to his sympathy with Cordelia, though, as we have seen, he
+often loses the memory of it as the play advances. But this is not so, I
+think, with the repetition of this error, in the quarrel with Goneril.
+Here the daughter excites so much detestation, and the father so much
+sympathy, that we often fail to receive the due impression of his
+violence. There is not here, of course, the <i>injustice</i> of his rejection
+of Cordelia, but there is precisely the same <span class="greek" title="hubris">&#8019;&#946;&#961;&#953;&#962;</span>. This had
+been shown most strikingly in the first scene when, <i>immediately</i> upon
+the apparently cold words of Cordelia, 'So young, my lord, and true,'
+there comes this dreadful answer:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i1">Let it be so; thy truth then be thy dower.<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">For, by the sacred radiance of the sun,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1"><a name="Page_283" id="Page_283"></a><span class="pagenum">[283]</span>The mysteries of Hecate and the night;<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">By all the operation of the orbs<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">From whom we do exist and cease to be;<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Here I disclaim all my paternal care,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Propinquity and property of blood,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">And as a stranger to my heart and me<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Hold thee from this for ever. The barbarous Scythian,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Or he that makes his generation messes<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">To gorge his appetite, shall to my bosom<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Be as well neighbour'd, pitied and relieved,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">As thou my sometime daughter.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>Now the dramatic effect of this passage is exactly, and doubtless
+intentionally, repeated in the curse pronounced against Goneril. This
+does not come after the daughters have openly and wholly turned against
+their father. Up to the moment of its utterance Goneril has done no more
+than to require him 'a little to disquantity' and reform his train of
+knights. Certainly her manner and spirit in making this demand are
+hateful, and probably her accusations against the knights are false; and
+we should expect from any father in Lear's position passionate distress
+and indignation. But surely the famous words which form Lear's immediate
+reply were meant to be nothing short of frightful:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i1">Hear, nature, hear; dear goddess, hear!<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Suspend thy purpose, if thou didst intend<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">To make this creature fruitful!<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Into her womb convey sterility!<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Dry up in her the organs of increase;<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">And from her derogate body never spring<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">A babe to honour her! If she must teem,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Create her child of spleen; that it may live,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">And be a thwart disnatured torment to her!<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Let it stamp wrinkles in her brow of youth;<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">With cadent tears fret channels in her cheeks;<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Turn all her mother's pains and benefits<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">To laughter and contempt; that she may feel<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">How sharper than a serpent's tooth it is<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">To have a thankless child!<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>The question is not whether Goneril deserves these appalling
+imprecations, but what they tell us about Lear. They show that, although
+he has <a name="Page_284" id="Page_284"></a><span class="pagenum">[284]</span>already recognised his injustice towards Cordelia, is secretly
+blaming himself, and is endeavouring to do better, the disposition from
+which his first error sprang is still unchanged. And it is precisely the
+disposition to give rise, in evil surroundings, to calamities dreadful
+but at the same time tragic, because due in some measure to the person
+who endures them.</p>
+
+<p>The perception of this connection, if it is not lost as the play
+advances, does not at all diminish our pity for Lear, but it makes it
+impossible for us permanently to regard the world displayed in this
+tragedy as subject to a mere arbitrary or malicious power. It makes us
+feel that this world is so far at least a rational and a moral order,
+that there holds in it the law, not of proportionate requital, but of
+strict connection between act and consequence. It is, so far, the world
+of all Shakespeare's tragedies.</p>
+
+<p>But there is another aspect of Lear's story, the influence of which
+modifies, in a way quite different and more peculiar to this tragedy,
+the impressions called pessimistic and even this impression of law.
+There is nothing more noble and beautiful in literature than
+Shakespeare's exposition of the effect of suffering in reviving the
+greatness and eliciting the sweetness of Lear's nature. The occasional
+recurrence, during his madness, of autocratic impatience or of desire
+for revenge serves only to heighten this effect, and the moments when
+his insanity becomes merely infinitely piteous do not weaken it. The old
+King who in pleading with his daughters feels so intensely his own
+humiliation and their horrible ingratitude, and who yet, at fourscore
+and upward, constrains himself to practise a self-control and patience
+so many years disused; who out of old affection for his Fool, and in
+repentance for his injustice to the Fool's beloved mistress, tolerates
+incessant and cutting reminders of his own folly and wrong; in whom the
+rage of the storm awakes a <a name="Page_285" id="Page_285"></a><span class="pagenum">[285]</span>power and a poetic grandeur surpassing even
+that of Othello's anguish; who comes in his affliction to think of
+others first, and to seek, in tender solicitude for his poor boy, the
+shelter he scorns for his own bare head; who learns to feel and to pray
+for the miserable and houseless poor, to discern the falseness of
+flattery and the brutality of authority, and to pierce below the
+differences of rank and raiment to the common humanity beneath; whose
+sight is so purged by scalding tears that it sees at last how power and
+place and all things in the world are vanity except love; who tastes in
+his last hours the extremes both of love's rapture and of its agony, but
+could never, if he lived on or lived again, care a jot for aught
+beside&mdash;there is no figure, surely, in the world of poetry at once so
+grand, so pathetic, and so beautiful as his. Well, but Lear owes the
+whole of this to those sufferings which made us doubt whether life were
+not simply evil, and men like the flies which wanton boys torture for
+their sport. Should we not be at least as near the truth if we called
+this poem <i>The Redemption of King Lear</i>, and declared that the business
+of 'the gods' with him was neither to torment him, nor to teach him a
+'noble anger,' but to lead him to attain through apparently hopeless
+failure the very end and aim of life? One can believe that Shakespeare
+had been tempted at times to feel misanthropy and despair, but it is
+quite impossible that he can have been mastered by such feelings at the
+time when he produced this conception.</p>
+
+<p>To dwell on the stages of this process of purification (the word is
+Professor Dowden's) is impossible here; and there are scenes, such as
+that of the meeting of Lear and Cordelia, which it seems almost a
+profanity to touch.<a name="FNanchor_159" id="FNanchor_159"></a><a href="#Footnote_159" class="fnanchor">[159]</a> But I will refer to two <a name="Page_286" id="Page_286"></a><span class="pagenum">[286]</span>scenes which may
+remind us more in detail of some of the points just mentioned. The third
+and fourth scenes of Act <span class="smcap">iii.</span> present one of those contrasts
+which speak as eloquently even as Shakespeare's words, and which were
+made possible in his theatre by the absence of scenery and the
+consequent absence of intervals between the scenes. First, in a scene of
+twenty-three lines, mostly in prose, Gloster is shown, telling his son
+Edmund how Goneril and Regan have forbidden him on pain of death to
+succour the houseless King; how a secret letter has reached him,
+announcing the arrival of a French force; and how, whatever the
+consequences may be, he is determined to relieve his old master. Edmund,
+left alone, soliloquises in words which seem to freeze one's blood:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i1">This courtesy, forbid thee, shall the duke<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Instantly know; and of that letter too:<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">This seems a fair deserving, and must draw me<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">That which my father loses; no less than all:<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">The younger rises when the old doth fall.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>He goes out; and the next moment, as the fourth scene opens, we find
+ourselves in the icy storm with Lear, Kent and the Fool, and yet in the
+inmost shrine of love. I am not speaking of the devotion of the others
+to Lear, but of Lear himself. He had consented, merely for the Fool's
+sake, to seek shelter in the hovel:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i11">Come, your hovel.<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Poor fool and knave, I have one part in my heart<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">That's sorry yet for thee.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>But on the way he has broken down and has been weeping (<span class="smcap">iii.</span>
+iv. 17), and now he resists Kent's efforts to persuade him to enter. He
+does not feel the storm:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i11">when the mind's free<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">The body's delicate: the tempest in my mind<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Doth from my senses take all feeling else<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Save what beats there:<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p><a name="Page_287" id="Page_287"></a><span class="pagenum">[287]</span>and the thoughts that will drive him mad are burning in his brain:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i10">Filial ingratitude!<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Is it not as this mouth should tear this hand<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">For lifting food to't? But I will punish home.<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">No, I will weep no more. In such a night<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">To shut me out! Pour on; I will endure.<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">In such a night as this! O Regan, Goneril!<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Your old kind father, whose frank heart gave all,&mdash;<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">O, that way madness lies; let me shun that;<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">No more of that.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>And then suddenly, as he controls himself, the blessed spirit of
+kindness breathes on him 'like a meadow gale of spring,' and he turns
+gently to Kent:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i1">Prithee, go in thyself; seek thine own ease:<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">This tempest will not give me leave to ponder<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">On things would hurt me more. But I'll go in.<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">In, boy; go first. You houseless poverty&mdash;<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Nay, get thee in. I'll pray, and then I'll sleep.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>But his prayer is not for himself.</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i1">Poor naked wretches, wheresoe'er you are,<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>it begins, and I need not quote more. This is one of those passages
+which make one worship Shakespeare.<a name="FNanchor_160" id="FNanchor_160"></a><a href="#Footnote_160" class="fnanchor">[160]</a></p>
+
+<p><a name="Page_288" id="Page_288"></a><span class="pagenum">[288]</span>Much has been written on the representation of insanity in <i>King Lear</i>,
+and I will confine myself to one or two points which may have escaped
+notice. The most obvious symptom of Lear's insanity, especially in its
+first stages, is of course the domination of a fixed idea. Whatever
+presents itself to his senses, is seized on by this idea and compelled
+to express it; as for example in those words, already quoted, which
+first show that his mind has actually given way:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i10">Hast thou given all<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">To thy two daughters? And art thou come to this?<a name="FNanchor_161" id="FNanchor_161"></a><a href="#Footnote_161" class="fnanchor">[161]</a><br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>But it is remarkable that what we have here is only, in an exaggerated
+and perverted form, the very same action of imagination that, just
+before the breakdown of reason, produced those sublime appeals:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i8">O heavens,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">If you do love old men, if your sweet sway<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Allow obedience, if yourselves are old,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Make it your cause;<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>and:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i1">Rumble thy bellyful! Spit, fire! spout, rain!<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Nor rain, wind, thunder, fire, are my daughters:<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">I tax not you, you elements, with unkindness;<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">I never gave you kingdom, call'd you children,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">You owe me no subscription: then let fall<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Your horrible pleasure; here I stand, your slave,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">A poor, infirm, weak, and despised old man:<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">But yet I call you servile ministers,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">That have with two pernicious daughters join'd<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Your high engender'd battles 'gainst a head<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">So old and white as this. O! O! 'tis foul!<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>Shakespeare, long before this, in the <i>Midsummer Night's Dream</i>, had
+noticed the resemblance between <a name="Page_289" id="Page_289"></a><span class="pagenum">[289]</span>the lunatic, the lover, and the poet;
+and the partial truth that genius is allied to insanity was quite
+familiar to him. But he presents here the supplementary half-truth that
+insanity is allied to genius.</p>
+
+<p>He does not, however, put into the mouth of the insane Lear any such
+sublime passages as those just quoted. Lear's insanity, which destroys
+the coherence, also reduces the poetry of his imagination. What it
+stimulates is that power of moral perception and reflection which had
+already been quickened by his sufferings. This, however partial and
+however disconnectedly used, first appears, quite soon after the
+insanity has declared itself, in the idea that the naked beggar
+represents truth and reality, in contrast with those conventions,
+flatteries, and corruptions of the great world, by which Lear has so
+long been deceived and will never be deceived again:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>Is man no more than this? Consider him well. Thou owest the
+worm no silk, the beast no hide, the sheep no wool, the cat no
+perfume. Ha! here's three on's are sophisticated: thou art the
+thing itself.</p></div>
+
+<p>Lear regards the beggar therefore with reverence and delight, as a
+person who is in the secret of things, and he longs to question him
+about their causes. It is this same strain of thought which much later
+(<span class="smcap">iv.</span> vi.), gaining far greater force, though the insanity has
+otherwise advanced, issues in those famous Timon-like speeches which
+make us realise the original strength of the old King's mind. And when
+this strain, on his recovery, unites with the streams of repentance and
+love, it produces that serene renunciation of the world, with its power
+and glory and resentments and revenges, which is expressed in the speech
+(<span class="smcap">v.</span> iii.):</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i1">No, no, no, no! Come, let's away to prison:<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">We two alone will sing like birds i' the cage:<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">When thou dost ask me blessing, I'll kneel down,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">And ask of thee forgiveness: so we'll live,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1"><a name="Page_290" id="Page_290"></a><span class="pagenum">[290]</span>And pray, and sing, and tell old tales, and laugh<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">At gilded butterflies, and hear poor rogues<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Talk of court news; and we'll talk with them too,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Who loses, and who wins; who's in, who's out;<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">And take upon's the mystery of things,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">As if we were God's spies: and we'll wear out,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">In a wall'd prison, packs and sets of great ones,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">That ebb and flow by the moon.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>This is that renunciation which is at the same time a sacrifice offered
+to the gods, and on which the gods themselves throw incense; and, it may
+be, it would never have been offered but for the knowledge that came to
+Lear in his madness.</p>
+
+<p>I spoke of Lear's 'recovery,' but the word is too strong. The Lear of
+the Fifth Act is not indeed insane, but his mind is greatly enfeebled.
+The speech just quoted is followed by a sudden flash of the old
+passionate nature, reminding us most pathetically of Lear's efforts,
+just before his madness, to restrain his tears:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i10">Wipe thine eyes:<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">The good-years shall devour them, flesh and fell,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Ere they shall make us weep: we'll see 'em starve first.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>And this weakness is still more pathetically shown in the blindness of
+the old King to his position now that he and Cordelia are made
+prisoners. It is evident that Cordelia knows well what mercy her father
+is likely to receive from her sisters; that is the reason of her
+weeping. But he does not understand her tears; it never crosses his mind
+that they have anything more than imprisonment to fear. And what is that
+to them? They have made that sacrifice, and all is well:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i8">Have I caught thee?<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">He that parts us shall bring a brand from heaven,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">And fire us hence like foxes.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>This blindness is most affecting to us, who know in what manner they
+will be parted; but it is also comforting. And we find the same mingling
+of effects in the overwhelming conclusion of the <a name="Page_291" id="Page_291"></a><span class="pagenum">[291]</span>story. If to the
+reader, as to the bystanders, that scene brings one unbroken pain, it is
+not so with Lear himself. His shattered mind passes from the first
+transports of hope and despair, as he bends over Cordelia's body and
+holds the feather to her lips, into an absolute forgetfulness of the
+cause of these transports. This continues so long as he can converse
+with Kent; becomes an almost complete vacancy; and is disturbed only to
+yield, as his eyes suddenly fall again on his child's corpse, to an
+agony which at once breaks his heart. And, finally, though he is killed
+by an agony of pain, the agony in which he actually dies is one not of
+pain but of ecstasy. Suddenly, with a cry represented in the oldest text
+by a four-times repeated 'O,' he exclaims:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i1">Do you see this? Look on her, look, her lips,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Look there, look there!<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>These are the last words of Lear. He is sure, at last, that she <i>lives</i>:
+and what had he said when he was still in doubt?</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i6">She lives! if it be so,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">It is a chance which does redeem all sorrows<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">That ever I have felt!<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>To us, perhaps, the knowledge that he is deceived may bring a
+culmination of pain: but, if it brings <i>only</i> that, I believe we are
+false to Shakespeare, and it seems almost beyond question that any actor
+is false to the text who does not attempt to express, in Lear's last
+accents and gestures and look, an unbearable <i>joy</i>.<a name="FNanchor_162" id="FNanchor_162"></a><a href="#Footnote_162" class="fnanchor">[162]</a></p>
+
+<p><a name="Page_292" id="Page_292"></a><span class="pagenum">[292]</span>To dwell on the pathos of Lear's last speech would be an impertinence,
+but I may add a remark on the speech from the literary point of view. In
+the simplicity of its language, which consists almost wholly of
+monosyllables of native origin, composed in very brief sentences of the
+plainest structure, it presents an extraordinary contrast to the dying
+speech of Hamlet and the last words of Othello to the by-standers. The
+fact that Lear speaks in passion is one cause of the difference, but not
+the sole cause. The language is more than simple, it is familiar. And
+this familiarity is characteristic of Lear (except at certain moments,
+already referred to) from the time of his madness onwards, and is the
+source of the peculiarly poignant effect of some of his sentences (such
+as 'The little dogs and all....'). We feel in them the loss of power to
+sustain his royal dignity; we feel also that everything external has
+become nothingness to him, and that what remains is 'the thing itself,'
+the soul in its bare greatness. Hence also it is that two lines in this
+last speech show, better perhaps than any other passage of poetry, one
+of the qualities we have in mind when we distinguish poetry as
+<a name="Page_293" id="Page_293"></a><span class="pagenum">[293]</span>'romantic.' Nothing like Hamlet's mysterious sigh 'The rest is
+silence,' nothing like Othello's memories of his life of marvel and
+achievement, was possible to Lear. Those last thoughts are romantic in
+their strangeness: Lear's five-times repeated 'Never,' in which the
+simplest and most unanswerable cry of anguish rises note by note till
+the heart breaks, is romantic in its naturalism; and to make a verse out
+of this one word required the boldness as well as the inspiration which
+came infallibly to Shakespeare at the greatest moments. But the
+familiarity, boldness and inspiration are surpassed (if that can be) by
+the next line, which shows the bodily oppression asking for bodily
+relief. The imagination that produced Lear's curse or his defiance of
+the storm may be paralleled in its kind, but where else are we to seek
+the imagination that could venture to follow that cry of 'Never' with
+such a phrase as 'undo this button,' and yet could leave us on the
+topmost peaks of poetry?<a name="FNanchor_163" id="FNanchor_163"></a><a href="#Footnote_163" class="fnanchor">[163]</a></p>
+
+
+<h4>2</h4>
+
+<p>Gloster and Albany are the two neutral characters of the tragedy. The
+parallel between Lear and Gloster, already noticed, is, up to a certain
+point, so marked that it cannot possibly be accidental. Both are old
+white-haired men (<span class="smcap">iii.</span> vii. 37); both, it would seem, widowers,
+with children comparatively young. Like Lear, Gloster is tormented, and
+his life is sought, by the child whom he favours; he is tended and
+healed by the child whom he has wronged. His sufferings, like Lear's,
+are partly traceable to his own extreme folly and injustice, and, it may
+be <a name="Page_294" id="Page_294"></a><span class="pagenum">[294]</span>added, to a selfish pursuit of his own pleasure.<a name="FNanchor_164" id="FNanchor_164"></a><a href="#Footnote_164" class="fnanchor">[164]</a> His
+sufferings, again, like Lear's, purify and enlighten him: he dies a
+better and wiser man than he showed himself at first. They even learn
+the same lesson, and Gloster's repetition (noticed and blamed by
+Johnson) of the thought in a famous speech of Lear's is surely
+intentional.<a name="FNanchor_165" id="FNanchor_165"></a><a href="#Footnote_165" class="fnanchor">[165]</a> And, finally, Gloster dies almost as Lear dies. Edgar
+reveals himself to him and asks his blessing (as Cordelia asks Lear's):</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i8">but his flaw'd heart&mdash;<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Alack, too weak the conflict to support&mdash;<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">'Twixt two extremes of passion, joy and grief,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Burst smilingly.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>So far, the resemblance of the two stories, and also of the ways in
+which their painful effect is modified, is curiously close. And in
+character too Gloster is, like his master, affectionate,<a name="FNanchor_166" id="FNanchor_166"></a><a href="#Footnote_166" class="fnanchor">[166]</a> credulous
+<a name="Page_295" id="Page_295"></a><span class="pagenum">[295]</span>and hasty. But otherwise he is sharply contrasted with the tragic Lear,
+who is a towering figure, every inch a king,<a name="FNanchor_167" id="FNanchor_167"></a><a href="#Footnote_167" class="fnanchor">[167]</a> while Gloster is built
+on a much smaller scale, and has infinitely less force and fire. He is,
+indeed, a decidedly weak though good-hearted man; and, failing wholly to
+support Kent in resisting Lear's original folly and injustice,<a name="FNanchor_168" id="FNanchor_168"></a><a href="#Footnote_168" class="fnanchor">[168]</a> he
+only gradually takes the better part. Nor is his character either very
+interesting or very distinct. He often gives one the impression of being
+wanted mainly to fill a place in the scheme of the play; and, though it
+would be easy to give a long list of his characteristics, they scarcely,
+it seems to me, compose an individual, a person whom we are sure we
+should recognise at once. If this is so, the fact is curious,
+considering how much we see and hear of him.</p>
+
+<p>I will add a single note. Gloster is the superstitious character of the
+drama,&mdash;the only one. He thinks much of 'these late eclipses in the sun
+and moon.' His two sons, from opposite points of view, make nothing of
+them. His easy acceptance of the calumny against Edgar is partly due to
+this weakness, and Edmund builds upon it, for an evil purpose, when he
+describes Edgar thus:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i1">Here stood he in the dark, his sharp sword out,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Mumbling of wicked charms, conjuring the moon,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">To prove's auspicious mistress.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p><a name="Page_296" id="Page_296"></a><span class="pagenum">[296]</span>Edgar in turn builds upon it, for a good purpose, when he persuades his
+blind father that he was led to jump down Dover cliff by the temptation
+of a fiend in the form of a beggar, and was saved by a miracle:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i1">As I stood here below, methought his eyes<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Were two full moons; he had a thousand noses,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Horns whelk'd and waved like the enridged sea:<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">It was some fiend; therefore, thou happy father,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Think that the clearest gods, who make them honours<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Of men's impossibilities, have preserved thee.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>This passage is odd in its collocation of the thousand noses and the
+clearest gods, of grotesque absurdity and extreme seriousness. Edgar
+knew that the 'fiend' was really Gloster's 'worser spirit,' and that
+'the gods' were himself. Doubtless, however&mdash;for he is the most
+religious person in the play&mdash;he thought that it <i>was</i> the gods who,
+through him, had preserved his father; but he knew that the truth could
+only enter this superstitious mind in a superstitious form.</p>
+
+<p>The combination of parallelism and contrast that we observe in Lear and
+Gloster, and again in the attitude of the two brothers to their father's
+superstition, is one of many indications that in <i>King Lear</i> Shakespeare
+was working more than usual on a basis of conscious and reflective
+ideas. Perhaps it is not by accident, then, that he makes Edgar and Lear
+preach to Gloster in precisely the same strain. Lear says to him:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i1">If thou wilt weep my fortunes, take my eyes.<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">I know thee well enough; thy name is Gloster:<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Thou must be patient; we came crying hither:<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Thou know'st, the first time that we smell the air,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">We wawl and cry. I will preach to thee: mark.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>Edgar's last words to him are:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i1">What, in ill thoughts again? Men must endure<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Their going hence, even as their coming hither:<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Ripeness is all.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p><a name="Page_297" id="Page_297"></a><span class="pagenum">[297]</span>Albany is merely sketched, and he is so generally neglected that a few
+words about him may be in place. He too ends a better and wiser man than
+he began. When the play opens he is, of course, only just married to
+Goneril; and the idea is, I think, that he has been bewitched by her
+fiery beauty not less than by her dowry. He is an inoffensive
+peace-loving man, and is overborne at first by his 'great love' for his
+wife and by her imperious will. He is not free from responsibility for
+the treatment which the King receives in his house; the Knight says to
+Lear, 'there's a great abatement of kindness appears as well in the
+general dependants as in <i>the duke himself also</i> and your daughter.' But
+he takes no part in the quarrel, and doubtless speaks truly when he
+protests that he is as guiltless as ignorant of the cause of Lear's
+violent passion. When the King departs, he begins to remonstrate with
+Goneril, but shrinks in a cowardly manner, which is a trifle comical,
+from contest with her. She leaves him behind when she goes to join
+Regan, and he is not further responsible for what follows. When he hears
+of it, he is struck with horror: the scales drop from his eyes, Goneril
+becomes hateful to him, he determines to revenge Gloster's eyes. His
+position is however very difficult, as he is willing to fight against
+Cordelia in so far as her army is French, and unwilling in so far as she
+represents her father. This difficulty, and his natural inferiority to
+Edmund in force and ability, pushes him into the background; the battle
+is not won by him but by Edmund; and but for Edgar he would certainly
+have fallen a victim to the murderous plot against him. When it is
+discovered, however, he is fearless and resolute enough, beside being
+full of kind feeling towards Kent and Edgar, and of sympathetic distress
+at Gloster's death. And one would be sure that he is meant to retain
+this strength till the end, but for his last words. He has <a name="Page_298" id="Page_298"></a><span class="pagenum">[298]</span>announced
+his intention of resigning, during Lear's life, the 'absolute power'
+which has come to him; and that may be right. But after Lear's death he
+says to Kent and Edgar:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i8">Friends of my soul, you twain<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Rule in this realm, and the gored state sustain.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>If this means that he wishes to hand over his absolute power to them,
+Shakespeare's intention is certainly to mark the feebleness of a
+well-meaning but weak man. But possibly he means by 'this realm' only
+that half of Britain which had belonged to Cornwall and Regan.</p>
+
+
+<h4>3</h4>
+
+<p>I turn now to those two strongly contrasted groups of good and evil
+beings; and to the evil first. The members of this group are by no means
+on a level. Far the most contemptible of them is Oswald, and Kent has
+fortunately expressed our feelings towards him. Yet twice we are able to
+feel sympathy with him. Regan cannot tempt him to let her open Goneril's
+letter to Edmund; and his last thought as he dies is given to the
+fulfilment of his trust. It is to a monster that he is faithful, and he
+is faithful to her in a monstrous design. Still faithfulness is
+faithfulness, and he is not wholly worthless. Dr. Johnson says: 'I know
+not well why Shakespeare gives to Oswald, who is a mere factor of
+wickedness, so much fidelity'; but in any other tragedy this touch, so
+true to human nature, is only what we should expect. If it surprises us
+in <i>King Lear</i>, the reason is that Shakespeare, in dealing with the
+other members of the group, seems to have been less concerned than usual
+with such mingling of light with darkness, and intent rather on making
+the shadows as utterly black as a regard for truth would permit.</p>
+
+<p>Cornwall seems to have been a fit mate for <a name="Page_299" id="Page_299"></a><span class="pagenum">[299]</span>Regan; and what worse can be
+said of him? It is a great satisfaction to think that he endured what to
+him must have seemed the dreadful disgrace of being killed by a servant.
+He shows, I believe, no redeeming trait, and he is a coward, as may be
+seen from the sudden rise in his courage when Goneril arrives at the
+castle and supports him and Regan against Lear (<span class="smcap">ii.</span> iv. 202).
+But as his cruelties are not aimed at a blood-relation, he is not, in
+this sense, a 'monster,' like the remaining three.</p>
+
+<p>Which of these three is the least and which the most detestable there
+can surely be no question. For Edmund, not to mention other
+alleviations, is at any rate not a woman. And the differences between
+the sisters, which are distinctly marked and need not be exhibited once
+more in full, are all in favour of 'the elder and more terrible.' That
+Regan did not commit adultery, did not murder her sister or plot to
+murder her husband, did not join her name with Edmund's on the order for
+the deaths of Cordelia and Lear, and in other respects failed to take
+quite so active a part as Goneril in atrocious wickedness, is quite true
+but not in the least to her credit. It only means that she had much less
+force, courage and initiative than her sister, and for that reason is
+less formidable and more loathsome. Edmund judged right when, caring for
+neither sister but aiming at the crown, he preferred Goneril, for he
+could trust her to remove the living impediments to her desires. The
+scornful and fearless exclamation, 'An interlude!' with which she greets
+the exposure of her design, was quite beyond Regan. Her unhesitating
+suicide was perhaps no less so. She would not have condescended to the
+lie which Regan so needlessly tells to Oswald:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i1">It was great ignorance, Gloster's eyes being out,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">To let him live: where he arrives he moves<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">All hearts against us: Edmund, I think, is gone,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1"><i>In pity of his misery</i>, to dispatch<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">His nighted life.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p><a name="Page_300" id="Page_300"></a><span class="pagenum">[300]</span>Her father's curse is nothing to her. She scorns even to mention the
+gods.<a name="FNanchor_169" id="FNanchor_169"></a><a href="#Footnote_169" class="fnanchor">[169]</a> Horrible as she is, she is almost awful. But, to set against
+Regan's inferiority in power, there is nothing: she is superior only in
+a venomous meanness which is almost as hateful as her cruelty. She is
+the most hideous human being (if she is one) that Shakespeare ever drew.</p>
+
+<p>I have already noticed the resemblance between Edmund and Iago in one
+point; and Edmund recalls his greater forerunner also in courage,
+strength of will, address, egoism, an abnormal want of feeling, and the
+possession of a sense of humour. But here the likeness ends. Indeed a
+decided difference is observable even in the humour. Edmund is
+apparently a good deal younger than Iago. He has a lighter and more
+superficial nature, and there is a certain genuine gaiety in him which
+makes one smile not unsympathetically as one listens to his first
+soliloquy, with its cheery conclusion, so unlike Iago's references to
+the powers of darkness,</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i1">Now, gods, stand up for bastards!<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>Even after we have witnessed his dreadful deeds, a touch of this
+sympathy is felt again when we hear his nonchalant reflections before
+the battle:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i1">To both these sisters have I sworn my love:<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Each jealous of the other, as the stung<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Are of the adder. Which of them shall I take?<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Both? one? or neither?<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p><a name="Page_301" id="Page_301"></a><span class="pagenum">[301]</span>Besides, there is nothing in Edmund of Iago's motive-hunting, and very
+little of any of the secret forces which impelled Iago. He is
+comparatively a straightforward character, as straightforward as the
+Iago of some critics. He moves wonder and horror merely because the fact
+that a man so young can have a nature so bad is a dark mystery.</p>
+
+<p>Edmund is an adventurer pure and simple. He acts in pursuance of a
+purpose, and, if he has any affections or dislikes, ignores them. He is
+determined to make his way, first to his brother's lands, then&mdash;as the
+prospect widens&mdash;to the crown; and he regards men and women, with their
+virtues and vices, together with the bonds of kinship, friendship, or
+allegiance, merely as hindrances or helps to his end. They are for him
+divested of all quality except their relation to this end; as
+indifferent as mathematical quantities or mere physical agents.</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i1">A credulous father and a brother noble,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1"><span style="margin-left: 0.5em;">... I see the business,</span><br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>he says, as if he were talking of <i>x</i> and <i>y</i>.</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i1">This seems a fair deserving, and must draw me<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">That which my father loses; no less than all:<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">The younger rises when the old doth fall:<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>he meditates, as if he were considering a problem in mechanics. He
+preserves this attitude with perfect consistency until the possibility
+of attaining his end is snatched from him by death.</p>
+
+<p>Like the deformity of Richard, Edmund's illegitimacy furnishes, of
+course, no excuse for his villainy, but it somewhat influences our
+feelings. It is no fault of his, and yet it separates him from other
+men. He is the product of Nature&mdash;of a natural appetite asserting itself
+against the social order; and he has no recognised place within this
+order. So he devotes himself to Nature, whose law is that of the
+stronger, and who does not recognise those moral obligations which
+<a name="Page_302" id="Page_302"></a><span class="pagenum">[302]</span>exist only by convention,&mdash;by 'custom' or 'the curiosity of
+nations.'<a name="FNanchor_170" id="FNanchor_170"></a><a href="#Footnote_170" class="fnanchor">[170]</a> Practically, his attitude is that of a professional
+criminal. 'You tell me I do not belong to you,' he seems to say to
+society: 'very well: I will make my way into your treasure-house if I
+can. And if I have to take life in doing so, that is your affair.' How
+far he is serious in this attitude, and really indignant at the brand of
+bastardy, how far his indignation is a half-conscious self-excuse for
+his meditated villainy, it is hard to say; but the end shows that he is
+not entirely in earnest.</p>
+
+<p>As he is an adventurer, with no more ill-will to anyone than good-will,
+it is natural that, when he has lost the game, he should accept his
+failure without showing personal animosity. But he does more. He admits
+the truth of Edgar's words about the justice of the gods, and applies
+them to his own case (though the fact that he himself refers to
+fortune's wheel rather than to the gods may be significant). He shows
+too that he is not destitute of feeling; for he is touched by the story
+of his father's death, and at last 'pants for life' in the effort to do
+'some good' by saving Lear and Cordelia. There is something pathetic
+here which tempts one to dream that, if Edmund had been whole brother to
+Edgar, and had been at home during those 'nine years' when he was 'out,'
+he might have been a very different man. But perhaps his words,</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i5">Some good I mean to do,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1"><i>Despite of mine own nature</i>,<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>suggest rather that Shakespeare is emphasising the mysterious fact,
+commented on by Kent in the <a name="Page_303" id="Page_303"></a><span class="pagenum">[303]</span>case of the three daughters of Lear, of an
+immense original difference between children of one father. Stranger
+than this emergence of better feelings, and curiously pathetic, is the
+pleasure of the dying man in the thought that he was loved by both the
+women whose corpses are almost the last sight he is to see. Perhaps, as
+we conjectured, the cause of his delay in saving Lear and Cordelia even
+after he hears of the deaths of the sisters is that he is sunk in dreamy
+reflections on his past. When he murmurs, 'Yet Edmund was beloved,' one
+is almost in danger of forgetting that he had done much more than reject
+the love of his father and half-brother. The passage is one of several
+in Shakespeare's plays where it strikes us that he is recording some
+fact about human nature with which he had actually met, and which had
+seemed to him peculiarly strange.</p>
+
+<p>What are we to say of the world which contains these five beings,
+Goneril, Regan, Edmund, Cornwall, Oswald? I have tried to answer this
+question in our first lecture; for in its representation of evil <i>King
+Lear</i> differs from the other tragedies only in degree and manner. It is
+the tragedy in which evil is shown in the greatest abundance; and the
+evil characters are peculiarly repellent from their hard savagery, and
+because so little good is mingled with their evil. The effect is
+therefore more startling than elsewhere; it is even appalling. But in
+substance it is the same as elsewhere; and accordingly, although it may
+be useful to recall here our previous discussion, I will do so only by
+the briefest statement.</p>
+
+<p>On the one hand we see a world which generates terrible evil in
+profusion. Further, the beings in whom this evil appears at its
+strongest are able, to a certain extent, to thrive. They are not
+unhappy, and they have power to spread misery and destruction around
+them. All this is undeniable fact.</p>
+
+<p><a name="Page_304" id="Page_304"></a><span class="pagenum">[304]</span>On the other hand this evil is <i>merely</i> destructive: it founds nothing,
+and seems capable of existing only on foundations laid by its opposite.
+It is also self-destructive: it sets these beings at enmity; they can
+scarcely unite against a common and pressing danger; if it were averted
+they would be at each other's throats in a moment; the sisters do not
+even wait till it is past. Finally, these beings, all five of them, are
+dead a few weeks after we see them first; three at least die young; the
+outburst of their evil is fatal to them. These also are undeniable
+facts; and, in face of them, it seems odd to describe <i>King Lear</i> as 'a
+play in which the wicked prosper' (Johnson).</p>
+
+<p>Thus the world in which evil appears seems to be at heart unfriendly to
+it. And this impression is confirmed by the fact that the convulsion of
+this world is due to evil, mainly in the worst forms here considered,
+partly in the milder forms which we call the errors or defects of the
+better characters. Good, in the widest sense, seems thus to be the
+principle of life and health in the world; evil, at least in these worst
+forms, to be a poison. The world reacts against it violently, and, in
+the struggle to expel it, is driven to devastate itself.</p>
+
+<p>If we ask why the world should generate that which convulses and wastes
+it, the tragedy gives no answer, and we are trying to go beyond tragedy
+in seeking one. But the world, in this tragic picture, is convulsed by
+evil, and rejects it.</p>
+
+
+<h4>4</h4>
+
+<p>And if here there is 'very Night herself,' she comes 'with stars in her
+raiment.' Cordelia, Kent, Edgar, the Fool&mdash;these form a group not less
+remarkable than that which we have just left. There is in the world of
+<i>King Lear</i> the same abundance of extreme good as of extreme evil. It
+generates <a name="Page_305" id="Page_305"></a><span class="pagenum">[305]</span>in profusion self-less devotion and unconquerable love. And
+the strange thing is that neither Shakespeare nor we are surprised. We
+approve these characters, admire them, love them; but we feel no
+mystery. We do not ask in bewilderment, Is there any cause in nature
+that makes these kind hearts? Such hardened optimists are we, and
+Shakespeare,&mdash;and those who find the darkness of revelation in a tragedy
+which reveals Cordelia. Yet surely, if we condemn the universe for
+Cordelia's death, we ought also to remember that it gave her birth. The
+fact that Socrates was executed does not remove the fact that he lived,
+and the inference thence to be drawn about the world that produced him.</p>
+
+<p>Of these four characters Edgar excites the least enthusiasm, but he is
+the one whose development is the most marked. His behaviour in the early
+part of the play, granted that it is not too improbable, is so foolish
+as to provoke one. But he learns by experience, and becomes the most
+capable person in the story, without losing any of his purity and
+nobility of mind. There remain in him, however, touches which a little
+chill one's feeling for him.</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i1">The gods are just, and of our pleasant vices<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Make instruments to plague us:<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">The dark and vicious place where thee he got<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Cost him his eyes:<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>&mdash;one wishes he had not said to his dying brother those words about
+their dead father. 'The gods are just' would have been enough.<a name="FNanchor_171" id="FNanchor_171"></a><a href="#Footnote_171" class="fnanchor">[171]</a> It
+may be <a name="Page_306" id="Page_306"></a><span class="pagenum">[306]</span>suggested that Shakespeare merely wished to introduce this moral
+somehow, and did not mean the speech to be characteristic of the
+speaker. But I doubt this: he might well have delivered it through
+Albany, if he was determined to deliver it. This trait in Edgar <i>is</i>
+characteristic. It seems to be connected with his pronounced and
+conscious religiousness. He interprets everything religiously, and is
+speaking here from an intense conviction which overrides personal
+feelings. With this religiousness, on the other side, is connected his
+cheerful and confident endurance, and his practical helpfulness and
+resource. He never thinks of despairing; in the worst circumstances he
+is sure there is something to be done to make things better. And he is
+sure of this, not only from temperament, but from faith in 'the clearest
+gods.' He is the man on whom we are to rely at the end for the recovery
+and welfare of the state: and we do rely on him.</p>
+
+<p>I spoke of his temperament. There is in Edgar, with much else that is
+fine, something of that buoyancy of spirit which charms us in Imogen.
+Nothing can subdue in him the feeling that life is sweet and must be
+cherished. At his worst, misconstrued, contemned, exiled, under sentence
+of death, 'the lowest and most dejected thing of fortune,' he keeps his
+head erect. The inextinguishable spirit of youth and delight is in him;
+he <i>embraces</i> the unsubstantial air which has blown him to the worst;
+for him 'the worst returns to laughter.'<a name="FNanchor_172" id="FNanchor_172"></a><a href="#Footnote_172" class="fnanchor">[172]</a> 'Bear free and patient
+thoughts,' he says to his father. His own thoughts are more than
+patient, they are 'free,' even joyous, in spite of the tender sympathies
+which strive in vain to overwhelm him. This ability to feel and offer
+great sympathy with distress, without losing through the sympathy any
+elasticity or strength, is a noble quality, sometimes <a name="Page_307" id="Page_307"></a><span class="pagenum">[307]</span>found in souls
+like Edgar's, naturally buoyant and also religious. It may even be
+characteristic of him that, when Lear is sinking down in death, he tries
+to rouse him and bring him back to life. 'Look up, my lord!' he cries.
+It is Kent who feels that</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i8">he hates him,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">That would upon the rack of this tough world<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Stretch him out longer.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>Kent is one of the best-loved characters in Shakespeare. He is beloved
+for his own sake, and also for the sake of Cordelia and of Lear. We are
+grateful to him because he stands up for Cordelia, and because, when she
+is out of sight, he constantly keeps her in our minds. And how well
+these two love each other we see when they meet. Yet it is not Cordelia
+who is dearest to Kent. His love for Lear is the passion of his life: it
+<i>is</i> his life. At the beginning he braves Lear's wrath even more for
+Lear's sake than Cordelia's.<a name="FNanchor_173" id="FNanchor_173"></a><a href="#Footnote_173" class="fnanchor">[173]</a> At the end he seems to realise
+Cordelia's death only as it is reflected in Lear's agony. Nor does he
+merely love his master passionately, as Cordelia loves her father. That
+word 'master,' and Kent's appeal to the 'authority' he saw in the old
+King's face, are significant. He belongs to Lear, body and soul, as a
+dog does to his master and god. The King is not to him old, wayward,
+unreasonable, piteous: he is still terrible, grand, the king of men.
+Through his eyes we see the Lear of Lear's prime, whom Cordelia never
+saw. Kent never forgets this Lear. In the Storm-scenes, even after the
+King becomes insane, Kent never addresses <a name="Page_308" id="Page_308"></a><span class="pagenum">[308]</span>him without the old terms of
+respect, 'your grace,' 'my lord,' 'sir.' How characteristic it is that
+in the scene of Lear's recovery Kent speaks to him but once: it is when
+the King asks 'Am I in France?' and he answers 'In your own kingdom,
+sir.'</p>
+
+<p>In acting the part of a blunt and eccentric serving-man Kent retains
+much of his natural character. The eccentricity seems to be put on, but
+the plainness which gets him set in the stocks is but an exaggeration of
+his plainness in the opening scene, and Shakespeare certainly meant him
+for one of those characters whom we love none the less for their
+defects. He is hot and rash; noble but far from skilful in his
+resistance to the King; he might well have chosen wiser words to gain
+his point. But, as he himself says, he has more man than wit about him.
+He shows this again when he rejoins Lear as a servant, for he at once
+brings the quarrel with Goneril to a head; and, later, by falling upon
+Oswald, whom he so detests that he cannot keep his hands off him, he
+provides Regan and Cornwall with a pretext for their inhospitality. One
+has not the heart to wish him different, but he illustrates the truth
+that to run one's head unselfishly against a wall is not the best way to
+help one's friends.</p>
+
+<p>One fact about Kent is often overlooked. He is an old man. He tells Lear
+that he is eight and forty, but it is clear that he is much older; not
+so old as his master, who was 'four-score and upward' and whom he 'loved
+as his father,' but, one may suppose, three-score and upward. From the
+first scene we get this impression, and in the scene with Oswald it is
+repeatedly confirmed. His beard is grey. 'Ancient ruffian,' 'old
+fellow,' 'you stubborn ancient knave, you reverent braggart'&mdash;these are
+some of the expressions applied to him. 'Sir,' he says to Cornwall, 'I
+am too old to learn.' If his age is not remembered, we fail to realise
+the full beauty of his thoughtlessness of himself, his incessant <a name="Page_309" id="Page_309"></a><span class="pagenum">[309]</span>care
+of the King, his light-hearted indifference to fortune or fate.<a name="FNanchor_174" id="FNanchor_174"></a><a href="#Footnote_174" class="fnanchor">[174]</a> We
+lose also some of the naturalness and pathos of his feeling that his
+task is nearly done. Even at the end of the Fourth Act we find him
+saying,</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i1">My point and period will be throughly wrought<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Or well or ill, as this day's battle's fought.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>His heart is ready to break when he falls with his strong arms about
+Edgar's neck; bellows out as he'd burst heaven (how like him!);</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i7">threw him on my father,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Told the most piteous tale of Lear and him<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">That ever ear received; which in recounting<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">His grief grew puissant, and the strings of life<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Began to crack. Twice then the trumpet sounded,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">And there I left him tranced;<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>and a little after, when he enters, we hear the sound of death in his
+voice:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i9">I am come<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">To bid my king and master aye goodnight.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>This desire possesses him wholly. When the bodies of Goneril and Regan
+are brought in he asks merely, 'Alack, why thus?' How can he care? He is
+waiting for one thing alone. He cannot but yearn for recognition, cannot
+but beg for it even when Lear is bending over the body of Cordelia; and
+even in that scene of unmatched pathos we feel a sharp pang at his
+failure to receive it. It is of himself he is speaking, perhaps, when he
+murmurs, as his master dies, 'Break, heart, I prithee, break!' He puts
+aside Albany's invitation to take part in the government; his task is
+over:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i1">I have a journey, sir, shortly to go:<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">My master calls me; I must not say no.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>Kent in his devotion, his self-effacement, his cheerful stoicism, his
+desire to follow his dead lord, <a name="Page_310" id="Page_310"></a><span class="pagenum">[310]</span>has been well likened to Horatio. But
+Horatio is not old; nor is he hot-headed; and though he is stoical he is
+also religious. Kent, as compared with him and with Edgar, is not so. He
+has not Edgar's ever-present faith in the 'clearest gods.' He refers to
+them, in fact, less often than to fortune or the stars. He lives mainly
+by the love in his own heart.<a name="FNanchor_175" id="FNanchor_175"></a><a href="#Footnote_175" class="fnanchor">[175]</a></p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>The theatrical fool or clown (we need not distinguish them here) was a
+sore trial to the cultured poet and spectator in Shakespeare's day. He
+came down from the Morality plays, and was beloved of the groundlings.
+His antics, his songs, his dances, his jests, too often unclean,
+delighted them, and did something to make the drama, what the vulgar,
+poor or rich, like it to be, a variety entertainment. Even if he
+confined himself to what was set down for him, he often disturbed the
+dramatic unity of the piece; and the temptation to 'gag' was too strong
+for him to resist. Shakespeare makes Hamlet object to it in emphatic
+terms. The more learned critics and poets went further and would have
+abolished the fool altogether. His part declines as the drama advances,
+diminishing markedly at the end of the sixteenth century. Jonson and
+Massinger exclude him. Shakespeare used him&mdash;we know to what effect&mdash;as
+he used all the other popular elements of the drama; but he abstained
+from introducing him into the Roman plays,<a name="FNanchor_176" id="FNanchor_176"></a><a href="#Footnote_176" class="fnanchor">[176]</a> and <a name="Page_311" id="Page_311"></a><span class="pagenum">[311]</span>there is no fool in
+the last of the pure tragedies, <i>Macbeth</i>.</p>
+
+<p>But the Fool is one of Shakespeare's triumphs in <i>King Lear</i>. Imagine
+the tragedy without him, and you hardly know it. To remove him would
+spoil its harmony, as the harmony of a picture would be spoiled if one
+of the colours were extracted. One can almost imagine that Shakespeare,
+going home from an evening at the Mermaid, where he had listened to
+Jonson fulminating against fools in general and perhaps criticising the
+Clown in <i>Twelfth Night</i> in particular, had said to himself: 'Come, my
+friends, I will show you once for all that the mischief is in you, and
+not in the fool or the audience. I will have a fool in the most tragic
+of my tragedies. He shall not play a little part. He shall keep from
+first to last the company in which you most object to see him, the
+company of a king. Instead of amusing the king's idle hours, he shall
+stand by him in the very tempest and whirlwind of passion. Before I have
+done you shall confess, between laughter and tears, that he is of the
+very essence of life, that you have known him all your days though you
+never recognised him till now, and that you would as soon go without
+Hamlet as miss him.'</p>
+
+<p>The Fool in <i>King Lear</i> has been so favourite a subject with good
+critics that I will confine myself to one or two points on which a
+difference of opinion is possible. To suppose that the Fool is, like
+many a domestic fool at that time, a perfectly sane man pretending to be
+half-witted, is surely a most prosaic blunder. There is no difficulty in
+imagining that, being slightly touched in the brain, and holding the
+office of fool, he performs the duties of his office intentionally as
+well as involuntarily: it is evident that he does so. But unless we
+suppose <a name="Page_312" id="Page_312"></a><span class="pagenum">[312]</span>that he <i>is</i> touched in the brain we lose half the effect of
+his appearance in the Storm-scenes. The effect of those scenes (to state
+the matter as plainly as possible) depends largely on the presence of
+three characters, and on the affinities and contrasts between them; on
+our perception that the differences of station in King, Fool, and
+beggar-noble, are levelled by one blast of calamity; but also on our
+perception of the differences between these three in one respect,&mdash;viz.
+in regard to the peculiar affliction of insanity. The insanity of the
+King differs widely in its nature from that of the Fool, and that of the
+Fool from that of the beggar. But the insanity of the King differs from
+that of the beggar not only in its nature, but also in the fact that one
+is real and the other simply a pretence. Are we to suppose then that the
+insanity of the third character, the Fool, is, in this respect, a mere
+repetition of that of the second, the beggar,&mdash;that it too is <i>mere</i>
+pretence? To suppose this is not only to impoverish miserably the
+impression made by the trio as a whole, it is also to diminish the
+heroic and pathetic effect of the character of the Fool. For his heroism
+consists largely in this, that his efforts to outjest his master's
+injuries are the efforts of a being to whom a responsible and consistent
+course of action, nay even a responsible use of language, is at the best
+of times difficult, and from whom it is never at the best of times
+expected. It is a heroism something like that of Lear himself in his
+endeavour to learn patience at the age of eighty. But arguments against
+the idea that the Fool is wholly sane are either needless or futile; for
+in the end they are appeals to the perception that this idea almost
+destroys the poetry of the character.</p>
+
+<p>This is not the case with another question, the question whether the
+Fool is a man or a boy. Here the evidence and the grounds for discussion
+<a name="Page_313" id="Page_313"></a><span class="pagenum">[313]</span>are more tangible. He is frequently addressed as 'boy.' This is not
+decisive; but Lear's first words to him, 'How now, my pretty knave, how
+dost thou?' are difficult to reconcile with the idea of his being a man,
+and the use of this phrase on his first entrance may show Shakespeare's
+desire to prevent any mistake on the point. As a boy, too, he would be
+more strongly contrasted in the Storm-scenes with Edgar as well as with
+Lear; his faithfulness and courage would be even more heroic and
+touching; his devotion to Cordelia, and the consequent bitterness of
+some of his speeches to Lear, would be even more natural. Nor does he
+seem to show a knowledge of the world impossible to a quick-witted
+though not whole-witted lad who had lived at Court. The only serious
+obstacle to this view, I think, is the fact that he is not known to have
+been represented as a boy or youth till Macready produced <i>King
+Lear</i>.<a name="FNanchor_177" id="FNanchor_177"></a><a href="#Footnote_177" class="fnanchor">[177]</a></p>
+
+<p>But even if this obstacle were serious and the Fool were imagined as a
+grown man, we may still insist that he must also be imagined as a timid,
+delicate and frail being, who on that account and from the expression of
+his face has a boyish look.<a name="FNanchor_178" id="FNanchor_178"></a><a href="#Footnote_178" class="fnanchor">[178]</a> He pines away when Cordelia goes to
+France. Though he takes great liberties with his master he is frightened
+by Goneril, and becomes quite silent when the quarrel rises high. In the
+terrible scene between Lear and his two daughters and Cornwall
+(<span class="smcap">ii.</span> iv. 129-289), he says not a word; we have almost forgotten
+his presence when, at the topmost <a name="Page_314" id="Page_314"></a><span class="pagenum">[314]</span>pitch of passion, Lear suddenly turns
+to him from the hateful faces that encompass him:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i8">You think I'll weep;<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">No, I'll not weep:<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">I have full cause of weeping; but this heart<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Shall break into a hundred thousand flaws<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Or ere I'll weep. O fool, I shall go mad.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>From the beginning of the Storm-scenes, though he thinks of his master
+alone, we perceive from his words that the cold and rain are almost more
+than he can bear. His childishness comes home to us when he runs out of
+the hovel, terrified by the madman and crying out to the King 'Help me,
+help me,' and the good Kent takes him by the hand and draws him to his
+side. A little later he exclaims, 'This cold night will turn us all to
+fools and madmen'; and almost from that point he leaves the King to
+Edgar, speaking only once again in the remaining hundred lines of the
+scene. In the shelter of the 'farm-house' (<span class="smcap">iii.</span> vi.) he
+revives, and resumes his office of love; but I think that critic is
+right who considers his last words significant. 'We'll go to supper i'
+the morning,' says Lear; and the Fool answers 'And I'll go to bed at
+noon,' as though he felt he had taken his death. When, a little later,
+the King is being carried away on a litter, the Fool sits idle. He is so
+benumbed and worn out that he scarcely notices what is going on. Kent
+has to rouse him with the words,</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i5">Come, help to bear thy master,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Thou must not stay behind.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>We know no more. For the famous exclamation 'And my poor fool is hanged'
+unquestionably refers to Cordelia; and even if it is intended to show a
+confused association in Lear's mind between his child and the Fool who
+so loved her (as a very old man may confuse two of his children), still
+it tells us nothing of the Fool's fate. It seems strange indeed that
+Shakespeare should have left us thus in ignorance. But we have seen that
+there are many <a name="Page_315" id="Page_315"></a><span class="pagenum">[315]</span>marks of haste and carelessness in <i>King Lear</i>; and it
+may also be observed that, if the poet imagined the Fool dying on the
+way to Dover of the effects of that night upon the heath, he could
+perhaps convey this idea to the audience by instructing the actor who
+took the part to show, as he left the stage for the last time, the
+recognised tokens of approaching death.<a name="FNanchor_179" id="FNanchor_179"></a><a href="#Footnote_179" class="fnanchor">[179]</a></p>
+
+<p>Something has now been said of the four characters, Lear, Edgar, Kent
+and the Fool, who are together in the storm upon the heath. I have made
+no attempt to analyse the whole effect of these scenes, but one remark
+may be added. These scenes, as we observed, suggest the idea of a
+convulsion in which Nature herself joins with the forces of evil in man
+to overpower the weak; and they are thus one of the main sources of the
+more terrible impressions produced by <i>King Lear</i>. But they have at the
+same time an effect of a totally different kind, because in them are
+exhibited also the strength and the beauty of Lear's nature, and, in
+Kent and the Fool and Edgar, the ideal of faithful devoted love. Hence
+from the beginning to the end of these scenes we have, mingled with pain
+and awe and a sense of man's infirmity, an equally strong feeling of his
+greatness; and this becomes at times even an exulting sense of the
+powerlessness of outward calamity or the malice of others against his
+soul. And this is one reason why imagination and emotion are never here
+pressed painfully inward, as in the scenes between Lear and his
+daughters, but are liberated and dilated.</p>
+
+
+<h4>5</h4>
+
+<p>The character of Cordelia is not a masterpiece of invention or subtlety
+like that of Cleopatra; yet in its own way it is a creation as
+wonderful. Cordelia appears in only four of the twenty-six scenes of
+<a name="Page_316" id="Page_316"></a><span class="pagenum">[316]</span><i>King Lear</i>; she speaks&mdash;it is hard to believe it&mdash;scarcely more than a
+hundred lines; and yet no character in Shakespeare is more absolutely
+individual or more ineffaceably stamped on the memory of his readers.
+There is a harmony, strange but perhaps the result of intention, between
+the character itself and this reserved or parsimonious method of
+depicting it. An expressiveness almost inexhaustible gained through
+paucity of expression; the suggestion of infinite wealth and beauty
+conveyed by the very refusal to reveal this beauty in expansive
+speech&mdash;this is at once the nature of Cordelia herself and the chief
+characteristic of Shakespeare's art in representing it. Perhaps it is
+not fanciful to find a parallel in his drawing of a person very
+different, Hamlet. It was natural to Hamlet to examine himself minutely,
+to discuss himself at large, and yet to remain a mystery to himself; and
+Shakespeare's method of drawing the character answers to it; it is
+extremely detailed and searching, and yet its effect is to enhance the
+sense of mystery. The results in the two cases differ correspondingly.
+No one hesitates to enlarge upon Hamlet, who speaks of himself so much;
+but to use many words about Cordelia seems to be a kind of impiety.</p>
+
+<p>I am obliged to speak of her chiefly because the devotion she inspires
+almost inevitably obscures her part in the tragedy. This devotion is
+composed, so to speak, of two contrary elements, reverence and pity. The
+first, because Cordelia's is a higher nature than that of most even of
+Shakespeare's heroines. With the tenderness of Viola or Desdemona she
+unites something of the resolution, power, and dignity of Hermione, and
+reminds us sometimes of Helena, sometimes of Isabella, though she has
+none of the traits which prevent Isabella from winning our hearts. Her
+assertion of truth and right, her allegiance to them, even the touch of
+severity that accompanies it, instead of compelling <a name="Page_317" id="Page_317"></a><span class="pagenum">[317]</span>mere respect or
+admiration, become adorable in a nature so loving as Cordelia's. She is
+a thing enskyed and sainted, and yet we feel no incongruity in the love
+of the King of France for her, as we do in the love of the Duke for
+Isabella.</p>
+
+<p>But with this reverence or worship is combined in the reader's mind a
+passion of championship, of pity, even of protecting pity. She is so
+deeply wronged, and she appears, for all her strength, so defenceless.
+We think of her as unable to speak for herself. We think of her as quite
+young, and as slight and small.<a name="FNanchor_180" id="FNanchor_180"></a><a href="#Footnote_180" class="fnanchor">[180]</a> 'Her voice was ever soft, gentle,
+and low'; ever so, whether the tone was that of resolution, or rebuke,
+or love.<a name="FNanchor_181" id="FNanchor_181"></a><a href="#Footnote_181" class="fnanchor">[181]</a> Of all Shakespeare's heroines she knew least of joy. She
+grew up with Goneril and Regan for sisters. Even her love for her father
+must have been mingled with pain and anxiety. She must early have
+learned to school and repress emotion. She never knew the bliss of young
+love: there is no trace of such love for the King of France. She had
+knowingly to wound most deeply the being dearest to her. He cast her
+off; and, after suffering an agony for him, and before she could see him
+safe in death, she was brutally murdered. We have to thank the poet for
+passing lightly over the circumstances of her death. We do not think of
+them. Her image comes before us calm and bright and still.</p>
+
+<p>The memory of Cordelia thus becomes detached in a manner from the action
+of the drama. The reader refuses to admit into it any idea of
+imperfection, and is outraged when any share in her father's <a name="Page_318" id="Page_318"></a><span class="pagenum">[318]</span>sufferings
+is attributed to the part she plays in the opening scene. Because she
+was deeply wronged he is ready to insist that she was wholly right. He
+refuses, that is, to take the tragic point of view, and, when it is
+taken, he imagines that Cordelia is being attacked, or is being declared
+to have 'deserved' all that befell her. But Shakespeare's was the tragic
+point of view. He exhibits in the opening scene a situation tragic for
+Cordelia as well as for Lear. At a moment where terrible issues join,
+Fate makes on her the one demand which she is unable to meet. As I have
+already remarked in speaking of Desdemona, it was a demand which other
+heroines of Shakespeare could have met. Without loss of self-respect,
+and refusing even to appear to compete for a reward, they could have
+made the unreasonable old King feel that he was fondly loved. Cordelia
+cannot, because she is Cordelia. And so she is not merely rejected and
+banished, but her father is left to the mercies of her sisters. And the
+cause of her failure&mdash;a failure a thousand-fold redeemed&mdash;is a compound
+in which imperfection appears so intimately mingled with the noblest
+qualities that&mdash;if we are true to Shakespeare&mdash;we do not think either of
+justifying her or of blaming her: we feel simply the tragic emotions of
+fear and pity.</p>
+
+<p>In this failure a large part is played by that obvious characteristic to
+which I have already referred. Cordelia is not, indeed, always
+tongue-tied, as several passages in the drama, and even in this scene,
+clearly show. But tender emotion, and especially a tender love for the
+person to whom she has to speak, makes her dumb. Her love, as she says,
+is more ponderous than her tongue:<a name="FNanchor_182" id="FNanchor_182"></a><a href="#Footnote_182" class="fnanchor">[182]</a></p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i6">Unhappy that I am, I cannot heave<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">My heart into my mouth.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p><a name="Page_319" id="Page_319"></a><span class="pagenum">[319]</span>This expressive word 'heave' is repeated in the passage which describes
+her reception of Kent's letter:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i1">Faith, once or twice she heaved the name of 'Father'<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Pantingly forth, as if it press'd her heart:<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>two or three broken ejaculations escape her lips, and she 'starts' away
+'to deal with grief alone.' The same trait reappears with an ineffable
+beauty in the stifled repetitions with which she attempts to answer her
+father in the moment of his restoration:</p>
+
+<table class="tabledrama" summary="Cordelia Repeats Herself" cellpadding="8">
+  <tr>
+    <td valign="top"><i>Lear.</i></td>
+    <td><span style="margin-left: 6em;">Do not laugh at me;</span><br />
+        For, as I am a man, I think this lady<br />
+        To be my child Cordelia.</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td><i>Cor.</i></td>
+    <td><span style="margin-left: 10em;">And so I am, I am.</span></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td valign="top"><i>Lear.</i></td>
+    <td>Be your tears wet? yes, faith. I pray, weep not;<br />
+        If you have poison for me, I will drink it.<br />
+        I know you do not love me; for your sisters<br />
+        Have, as I do remember, done me wrong:<br />
+        You have some cause, they have not.</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td><i>Cor.</i></td>
+    <td><span style="margin-left: 10em;">No cause, no cause.</span></td>
+  </tr>
+</table>
+
+<p>We see this trait for the last time, marked by Shakespeare with a
+decision clearly intentional, in her inability to answer one syllable to
+the last words we hear her father speak to her:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i1">No, no, no, no! Come, let's away to prison:<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">We two alone will sing like birds i' the cage:<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">When thou dost ask me blessing, I'll kneel down,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">And ask of thee forgiveness: so we'll live,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">And pray, and sing, and tell old tales, and laugh<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">At gilded butterflies....<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>She stands and weeps, and goes out with him silent. And we see her alive
+no more.</p>
+
+<p>But (I am forced to dwell on the point, because I am sure to slur it
+over is to be false to Shakespeare) <a name="Page_320" id="Page_320"></a><span class="pagenum">[320]</span>this dumbness of love was not the
+sole source of misunderstanding. If this had been all, even Lear could
+have seen the love in Cordelia's eyes when, to his question 'What can
+you say to draw a third more opulent than your sisters?' she answered
+'Nothing.' But it did not shine there. She is not merely silent, nor
+does she merely answer 'Nothing.' She tells him that she loves him
+'according to her bond, nor more nor less'; and his answer,</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i1">How now, Cordelia! mend your speech a little,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Lest it may mar your fortunes,<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>so intensifies her horror at the hypocrisy of her sisters that she
+replies,</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i11">Good my Lord,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">You have begot me, bred me, loved me: I<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Return those duties back as are right fit,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Obey you, love you, and most honour you.<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Why have my sisters husbands, if they say<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">They love you all? Haply, when I shall wed,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">That lord whose hand must take my plight shall carry<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Half my love with him, half my care and duty:<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Sure, I shall never marry like my sisters,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">To love my father all.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>What words for the ear of an old father, unreasonable, despotic, but
+fondly loving, indecent in his own expressions of preference, and blind
+to the indecency of his appeal for protestations of fondness! Blank
+astonishment, anger, wounded love, contend within him; but for the
+moment he restrains himself and asks,</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i1">But goes thy heart with this?<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>Imagine Imogen's reply! But Cordelia answers,</p>
+
+<table class="tabledrama" summary="Cordelia Is True" cellpadding="8">
+  <tr>
+    <td><br /></td>
+    <td><span style="margin-left: 4em;">Ay, good my lord.</span></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td><i>Lear.</i></td>
+    <td>So young, and so untender?</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td><i>Cor.</i></td>
+    <td>So young, my lord, and true.</td>
+  </tr>
+</table>
+
+<p>Yes, 'heavenly true.' But truth is not the only good in the world, nor
+is the obligation to tell truth the only obligation. The matter here
+<a name="Page_321" id="Page_321"></a><span class="pagenum">[321]</span>was to keep it inviolate, but also to preserve a father. And even if
+truth <i>were</i> the one and only obligation, to tell much less than truth
+is not to tell it. And Cordelia's speech not only tells much less than
+truth about her love, it actually perverts the truth when it implies
+that to give love to a husband is to take it from a father. There surely
+never was a more unhappy speech.</p>
+
+<p>When Isabella goes to plead with Angelo for her brother's life, her
+horror of her brother's sin is so intense, and her perception of the
+justice of Angelo's reasons for refusing her is so clear and keen, that
+she is ready to abandon her appeal before it is well begun; she would
+actually do so but that the warm-hearted profligate Lucio reproaches her
+for her coldness and urges her on. Cordelia's hatred of hypocrisy and of
+the faintest appearance of mercenary professions reminds us of
+Isabella's hatred of impurity; but Cordelia's position is infinitely
+more difficult, and on the other hand there is mingled with her hatred a
+touch of personal antagonism and of pride. Lear's words,</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i1">Let pride, which she calls plainness, marry her!<a name="FNanchor_183" id="FNanchor_183"></a><a href="#Footnote_183" class="fnanchor">[183]</a><br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>are monstrously unjust, but they contain one grain of truth; and indeed
+it was scarcely possible that a nature so strong as Cordelia's, and with
+so keen a sense of dignity, should feel here nothing whatever of pride
+and resentment. This side of her character is emphatically shown in her
+language to her sisters in the first scene&mdash;language perfectly just, but
+little adapted to soften their hearts towards their father&mdash;and again in
+the very last words we hear her speak. She and her father are brought
+in, prisoners, to the enemy's camp; but she sees only Edmund, not those
+'greater' ones on whose <a name="Page_322" id="Page_322"></a><span class="pagenum">[322]</span>pleasure hangs her father's fate and her own.
+For her own she is little concerned; she knows how to meet adversity:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i1">For thee, oppressed king, am I cast down;<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Myself could else out-frown false fortune's frown.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>Yes, that is how she would meet fortune, frowning it down, even as
+Goneril would have met it; nor, if her father had been already dead,
+would there have been any great improbability in the false story that
+was to be told of her death, that, like Goneril, she 'fordid herself.'
+Then, after those austere words about fortune, she suddenly asks,</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i1">Shall we not see these daughters and these sisters?<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>Strange last words for us to hear from a being so worshipped and
+beloved; but how characteristic! Their tone is unmistakable. I doubt if
+she could have brought herself to plead with her sisters for her
+father's life; and if she had attempted the task, she would have
+performed it but ill. Nor is our feeling towards her altered one whit by
+that. But what is true of Kent and the Fool<a name="FNanchor_184" id="FNanchor_184"></a><a href="#Footnote_184" class="fnanchor">[184]</a> is, in its measure,
+true of her. Any one of them would gladly have died a hundred deaths to
+help King Lear; and they do help his soul; but they harm his cause. They
+are all involved in tragedy.</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>Why does Cordelia die? I suppose no reader ever failed to ask that
+question, and to ask it with something more than pain,&mdash;to ask it, if
+only for a moment, in bewilderment or dismay, and even perhaps in tones
+of protest. These feelings are probably evoked more strongly here than
+at the death of any other notable character in Shakespeare; and it may
+sound a wilful paradox to assert that the slightest element of
+reconciliation is mingled with them or succeeds them. Yet it seems to me
+indubitable that such an <a name="Page_323" id="Page_323"></a><span class="pagenum">[323]</span>element is present, though difficult to make
+out with certainty what it is or whence it proceeds. And I will try to
+make this out, and to state it methodically.</p>
+
+<p>(<i>a</i>) It is not due in any perceptible degree to the fact, which we have
+just been examining, that Cordelia through her tragic imperfection
+contributes something to the conflict and catastrophe; and I drew
+attention to that imperfection without any view to our present problem.
+The critics who emphasise it at this point in the drama are surely
+untrue to Shakespeare's mind; and still more completely astray are those
+who lay stress on the idea that Cordelia, in bringing a foreign army to
+help her father, was guilty of treason to her country. When she dies we
+regard her, practically speaking, simply as we regard Ophelia or
+Desdemona, as an innocent victim swept away in the convulsion caused by
+the error or guilt of others.</p>
+
+<p>(<i>b</i>) Now this destruction of the good through the evil of others is one
+of the tragic facts of life, and no one can object to the use of it,
+within certain limits, in tragic art. And, further, those who because of
+it declaim against the nature of things, declaim without thinking. It is
+obviously the other side of the fact that the effects of good spread far
+and wide beyond the doer of good; and we should ask ourselves whether we
+really could wish (supposing it conceivable) to see this double-sided
+fact abolished. Nevertheless the touch of reconciliation that we feel in
+contemplating the death of Cordelia is not due, or is due only in some
+slight degree, to a perception that the event is true to life,
+admissible in tragedy, and a case of a law which we cannot seriously
+desire to see abrogated.</p>
+
+<p>(<i>c</i>) What then is this feeling, and whence does it come? I believe we
+shall find that it is a <a name="Page_324" id="Page_324"></a><span class="pagenum">[324]</span>feeling not confined to <i>King Lear</i>, but
+present at the close of other tragedies; and that the reason why it has
+an exceptional tone or force at the close of <i>King Lear</i>, lies in that
+very peculiarity of the close which also&mdash;at least for the
+moment&mdash;excites bewilderment, dismay, or protest. The feeling I mean is
+the impression that the heroic being, though in one sense and outwardly
+he has failed, is yet in another sense superior to the world in which he
+appears; is, in some way which we do not seek to define, untouched by
+the doom that overtakes him; and is rather set free from life than
+deprived of it. Some such feeling as this&mdash;some feeling which, from this
+description of it, may be recognised as their own even by those who
+would dissent from the description&mdash;we surely have in various degrees at
+the deaths of Hamlet and Othello and Lear, and of Antony and Cleopatra
+and Coriolanus.<a name="FNanchor_185" id="FNanchor_185"></a><a href="#Footnote_185" class="fnanchor">[185]</a> It accompanies the more prominent tragic
+impressions, and, regarded alone, could hardly be called tragic. For it
+seems to imply (though we are probably quite unconscious of the
+implication) an idea which, if developed, would transform the tragic
+view of things. It implies that the tragic world, if taken as it is
+presented, with all its error, guilt, failure, woe and waste, is no
+final reality, but only a part of reality taken for the whole, and, when
+so taken, illusive; and that if we could see the whole, and the tragic
+facts in their true place in it, we should find them, not abolished, of
+course, but so transmuted that they had ceased to be strictly
+tragic,&mdash;find, perhaps, the suffering and death counting for little or
+nothing, the greatness of the soul for much or all, and the heroic
+spirit, in spite of failure, nearer to the heart of things <a name="Page_325" id="Page_325"></a><span class="pagenum">[325]</span>than the
+smaller, more circumspect, and perhaps even 'better' beings who survived
+the catastrophe. The feeling which I have tried to describe, as
+accompanying the more obvious tragic emotions at the deaths of heroes,
+corresponds with some such idea as this.<a name="FNanchor_186" id="FNanchor_186"></a><a href="#Footnote_186" class="fnanchor">[186]</a></p>
+
+<p>Now this feeling is evoked with a quite exceptional strength by the
+death of Cordelia.<a name="FNanchor_187" id="FNanchor_187"></a><a href="#Footnote_187" class="fnanchor">[187]</a> It is not due to the perception that she, like
+Lear, has attained through suffering; we know that she had suffered and
+attained in his days of prosperity. It is simply the feeling that what
+happens to such a being does not matter; all that matters is what she
+is. How this can be when, for anything the tragedy tells us, she has
+ceased to exist, we do not ask; but the tragedy itself makes us feel
+that somehow it is so. And the force with which this impression is
+conveyed depends largely on the very fact which excites our bewilderment
+and protest, that her death, following on the deaths of all the evil
+characters, and brought about by an unexplained delay in Edmund's effort
+to save her, comes on us, not as an inevitable conclusion to the
+sequence of events, but as the sudden stroke of mere fate or chance. The
+force of the impression, that is to say, depends on the very violence of
+the contrast between the outward and the inward, Cordelia's death and
+Cordelia's soul. The more unmotived, unmerited, senseless, monstrous,
+her fate, the more do we feel that it does not concern <a name="Page_326" id="Page_326"></a><span class="pagenum">[326]</span>her. The
+extremity of the disproportion between prosperity and goodness first
+shocks us, and then flashes on us the conviction that our whole attitude
+in asking or expecting that goodness should be prosperous is wrong;
+that, if only we could see things as they are, we should see that the
+outward is nothing and the inward is all.</p>
+
+<p>And some such thought as this (which, to bring it clearly out, I have
+stated, and still state, in a form both exaggerated and much too
+explicit) is really present through the whole play. Whether Shakespeare
+knew it or not, it is present. I might almost say that the 'moral' of
+<i>King Lear</i> is presented in the irony of this collocation:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i4"><i>Albany.</i> The gods defend her!<br /></span>
+<span class="i1"><i>Enter Lear with Cordelia dead in his arms.</i><br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>The 'gods,' it seems, do <i>not</i> show their approval by 'defending' their
+own from adversity or death, or by giving them power and prosperity.
+These, on the contrary, are worthless, or worse; it is not on them, but
+on the renunciation of them, that the gods throw incense. They breed
+lust, pride, hardness of heart, the insolence of office, cruelty, scorn,
+hypocrisy, contention, war, murder, self-destruction. The whole story
+beats this indictment of prosperity into the brain. Lear's great
+speeches in his madness proclaim it like the curses of Timon on life and
+man. But here, as in <i>Timon</i>, the poor and humble are, almost without
+exception, sound and sweet at heart, faithful and pitiful.<a name="FNanchor_188" id="FNanchor_188"></a><a href="#Footnote_188" class="fnanchor">[188]</a> And here
+<a name="Page_327" id="Page_327"></a><span class="pagenum">[327]</span>adversity, to the blessed in spirit, is blessed. It wins fragrance from
+the crushed flower. It melts in aged hearts sympathies which prosperity
+had frozen. It purges the soul's sight by blinding that of the
+eyes.<a name="FNanchor_189" id="FNanchor_189"></a><a href="#Footnote_189" class="fnanchor">[189]</a> Throughout that stupendous Third Act the good are seen
+growing better through suffering, and the bad worse through success. The
+warm castle is a room in hell, the storm-swept heath a sanctuary. The
+judgment of this world is a lie; its goods, which we covet, corrupt us;
+its ills, which break our bodies, set our souls free;</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i1">Our means secure us,<a name="FNanchor_190" id="FNanchor_190"></a><a href="#Footnote_190" class="fnanchor">[190]</a> and our mere defects<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Prove our commodities.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>Let us renounce the world, hate it, and lose it gladly. The only real
+thing in it is the soul, with its courage, patience, devotion. And
+nothing outward can touch that.</p>
+
+<p>This, if we like to use the word, is Shakespeare's 'pessimism' in <i>King
+Lear</i>. As we have seen, it is not by any means the whole spirit of the
+tragedy, which presents the world as a place where heavenly good grows
+side by side with evil, where extreme evil cannot long endure, and where
+all that survives the storm is good, if not great. But still this strain
+of thought, to which the world appears as the kingdom of evil and
+therefore worthless, is in the tragedy, and may well be the record of
+many hours of exasperated feeling and troubled brooding. Pursued further
+and allowed to dominate, it would destroy the tragedy; for it is
+necessary to tragedy that we should feel that suffering and death do
+matter greatly, and that happiness and life are not to be renounced as
+worthless. Pursued further, again, it leads to the idea that the world,
+in that obvious <a name="Page_328" id="Page_328"></a><span class="pagenum">[328]</span>appearance of it which tragedy cannot dissolve without
+dissolving itself, is illusive. And its tendency towards this idea is
+traceable in <i>King Lear</i>, in the shape of the notion that this 'great
+world' is transitory, or 'will wear out to nought' like the little world
+called 'man' (<span class="smcap">iv.</span> vi. 137), or that humanity will destroy
+itself.<a name="FNanchor_191" id="FNanchor_191"></a><a href="#Footnote_191" class="fnanchor">[191]</a> In later days, in the drama that was probably Shakespeare's
+last complete work, the <i>Tempest</i>, this notion of the transitoriness of
+things appears, side by side with the simpler feeling that man's life is
+an illusion or dream, in some of the most famous lines he ever wrote:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i1">Our revels now are ended. These our actors,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">As I foretold you, were all spirits and<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Are melted into air, into thin air:<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">And, like the baseless fabric of this vision,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">The cloud-capp'd towers, the gorgeous palaces,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">The solemn temples, the great globe itself,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">And, like this insubstantial pageant faded,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">As dreams are made on, and our little life<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Is rounded with a sleep.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>These lines, detached from their context, are familiar to everyone; but,
+in the <i>Tempest</i>, they are dramatic as well as poetical. The sudden
+emergence of the thought expressed in them has a specific and most
+significant cause; and as I have not seen it remarked I will point it
+out.</p>
+
+<p>Prospero, by means of his spirits, has been exhibiting to Ferdinand and
+Miranda a masque <a name="Page_329" id="Page_329"></a><span class="pagenum">[329]</span>in which goddesses appear, and which is so majestic
+and harmonious that to the young man, standing beside such a father and
+such a wife, the place seems Paradise,&mdash;as perhaps the world once seemed
+to Shakespeare. Then, at the bidding of Iris, there begins a dance of
+Nymphs with Reapers, sunburnt, weary of their August labour, but now in
+their holiday garb. But, as this is nearing its end, Prospero 'starts
+suddenly, and speaks'; and the visions vanish. And what he 'speaks' is
+shown in these lines, which introduce the famous passage just quoted:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i1"><i>Pros.</i> [<i>Aside</i>] I had forgot that foul conspiracy<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Of the beast Caliban and his confederates<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Against my life: the minute of their plot<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Is almost come. [<i>To the Spirits.</i>] Well done! avoid; no more.<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i1"><i>Fer.</i> This is strange; your father's in some passion<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">That works him strongly.<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i1"><i>Mir.</i><span style="margin-left: 8em;">Never till this day</span><br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Saw I him touch'd with anger so distemper'd.<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i1"><i>Pros.</i> You do look, my son, in a moved sort,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">As if you were dismay'd: be cheerful, sir.<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Our revels....<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>And then, after the famous lines, follow these:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i12">Sir, I am vex'd:<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Bear with my weakness; my old brain is troubled;<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Be not disturb'd with my infirmity;<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">If you be pleased, retire into my cell<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">And there repose: a turn or two I'll walk,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">To still my beating mind.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>We seem to see here the whole mind of Shakespeare in his last years.
+That which provokes in Prospero first a 'passion' of anger, and, a
+moment later, that melancholy and mystical thought that the great world
+must perish utterly and that man is but a dream, is the sudden
+recollection of gross and apparently incurable evil in the 'monster'
+whom he had tried in vain to raise and soften, and in the monster's
+human confederates. It is this, which is but the repetition of his
+earlier experience <a name="Page_330" id="Page_330"></a><span class="pagenum">[330]</span>of treachery and ingratitude, that troubles his old
+brain, makes his mind 'beat,'<a name="FNanchor_192" id="FNanchor_192"></a><a href="#Footnote_192" class="fnanchor">[192]</a> and forces on him the sense of
+unreality and evanescence in the world and the life that are haunted by
+such evil. Nor, though Prospero can spare and forgive, is there any sign
+to the end that he believes the evil curable either in the monster, the
+'born devil,' or in the more monstrous villains, the 'worse than
+devils,' whom he so sternly dismisses. But he has learned patience, has
+come to regard his anger and loathing as a weakness or infirmity, and
+would not have it disturb the young and innocent. And so, in the days of
+<i>King Lear</i>, it was chiefly the power of 'monstrous' and apparently
+cureless evil in the 'great world' that filled Shakespeare's soul with
+horror, and perhaps forced him sometimes to yield to the infirmity of
+misanthropy and despair, to cry 'No, no, no life,' and to take refuge in
+the thought that this fitful fever is a dream that must soon fade into a
+dreamless sleep; until, to free himself from the perilous stuff that
+weighed upon his heart, he summoned to his aid his 'so potent art,' and
+wrought this stuff into the stormy music of his greatest poem, which
+seems to cry,</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i1">You heavens, give me that patience, patience I need,<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>and, like the <i>Tempest</i>, seems to preach to us from end to end, 'Thou
+must be patient,' 'Bear free and patient thoughts.'<a name="FNanchor_193" id="FNanchor_193"></a><a href="#Footnote_193" class="fnanchor">[193]</a></p>
+
+<div class="footnotes">
+<div class="footnotehead">FOOTNOTES:</div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_158" id="Footnote_158"></a><a href="#FNanchor_158"><span class="label">[158]</span></a> Of course I do not mean that he is beginning to be
+insane, and still less that he <i>is</i> insane (as some medical critics
+suggest).</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_159" id="Footnote_159"></a><a href="#FNanchor_159"><span class="label">[159]</span></a> I must however point out that the modern stage-directions
+are most unfortunate in concealing the fact that here Cordelia sees her
+father again <i>for the first time</i>. See <a href="#NOTE_W">Note W</a>.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_160" id="Footnote_160"></a><a href="#FNanchor_160"><span class="label">[160]</span></a> What immediately follows is as striking an illustration
+of quite another quality, and of the effects which make us think of Lear
+as pursued by a relentless fate. If he could go in and sleep after his
+prayer, as he intends, his mind, one feels, might be saved: so far there
+has been only the menace of madness. But from within the hovel
+Edgar&mdash;the last man who would willingly have injured Lear&mdash;cries,
+'Fathom and half, fathom and half! Poor Tom!'; the Fool runs out
+terrified; Edgar, summoned by Kent, follows him; and, at sight of Edgar,
+in a moment something gives way in Lear's brain, and he exclaims:
+</p>
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i10">Hast thou given all<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">To thy two daughters? And art thou come to this?<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+<p>
+Henceforth he is mad. And they remain out in the storm.
+</p><p>
+I have not seen it noticed that this stroke of fate is repeated&mdash;surely
+intentionally&mdash;in the sixth scene. Gloster has succeeded in persuading
+Lear to come into the 'house'; he then leaves, and Kent after much
+difficulty induces Lear to lie down and rest upon the cushions. Sleep
+begins to come to him again, and he murmurs,
+</p>
+<div class="blockquot"><p>'Make no noise, make no noise; draw the curtains; so, so, so.
+We'll go to supper i' the morning. So, so, so.'</p></div>
+<p>
+At that moment Gloster enters with the news that he has discovered a
+plot to kill the King; the rest that 'might yet have balm'd his broken
+senses' is again interrupted; and he is hurried away on a litter towards
+Dover. (His recovery, it will be remembered, is due to a long sleep
+artificially induced.)</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_161" id="Footnote_161"></a><a href="#FNanchor_161"><span class="label">[161]</span></a> <span class="smcap">iii.</span> iv. 49. This is printed as prose in the
+Globe edition, but is surely verse. Lear has not yet spoken prose in
+this scene, and his next three speeches are in verse. The next is in
+prose, and, ending, in his tearing off his clothes, shows the advance of
+insanity.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_162" id="Footnote_162"></a><a href="#FNanchor_162"><span class="label">[162]</span></a> [Lear's death is thus, I am reminded, like <i>p&egrave;re</i>
+Goriot's.] This interpretation may be condemned as fantastic, but the
+text, it appears to me, will bear no other. This is the whole speech (in
+the Globe text):
+</p>
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i1">And my poor fool is hang'd! No, no, no life!<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Why should a dog, a horse, a rat, have life,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">And thou no breath at all? Thou'lt come no more,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Never, never, never, never, never!<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Pray you, undo this button: thank you, sir.<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Do you see this? Look on her, look, her lips,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Look there, look there!<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+<p>
+The transition at 'Do you see this?' from despair to something more than
+hope is exactly the same as in the preceding passage at the word 'Ha!':
+</p>
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i1">A plague upon you, murderers, traitors all!<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">I might have saved her; now she's gone for ever!<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Cordelia, Cordelia, stay a little.<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Ha!<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">What is't thou say'st? Her voice was ever soft,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Gentle, and low, an excellent thing in woman.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+<p>
+As to my other remarks, I will ask the reader to notice that the passage
+from Lear's entrance with the body of Cordelia to the stage-direction
+<i>He dies</i> (which probably comes a few lines too soon) is 54 lines in
+length, and that 30 of them represent the interval during which he has
+absolutely forgotten Cordelia. (It begins when he looks up at the
+Captain's words, line 275.) To make Lear during this interval turn
+continually in anguish to the corpse, is to act the passage in a manner
+irreconcilable with the text, and insufferable in its effect. I speak
+from experience. I have seen the passage acted thus, and my sympathies
+were so exhausted long before Lear's death that his last speech, the
+most pathetic speech ever written, left me disappointed and weary.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_163" id="Footnote_163"></a><a href="#FNanchor_163"><span class="label">[163]</span></a> The Quartos give the 'Never' only thrice (surely
+wrongly), and all the actors I have heard have preferred this easier
+task. I ought perhaps to add that the Quartos give the words 'Break,
+heart; I prithee, break!' to Lear, not Kent. They and the Folio are at
+odds throughout the last sixty lines of King Lear, and all good modern
+texts are eclectic.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_164" id="Footnote_164"></a><a href="#FNanchor_164"><span class="label">[164]</span></a> The connection of these sufferings with the sin of
+earlier days (not, it should be noticed, of youth) is almost thrust upon
+our notice by the levity of Gloster's own reference to the subject in
+the first scene, and by Edgar's often quoted words 'The gods are just,'
+etc. The following collocation, also, may be intentional (<span class="smcap">iii.</span>
+iv. 116):
+</p>
+<div class="blockquot"><p><i>Fool</i>. Now a little fire in a wild field were like an old
+lecher's heart; a small spark, all the rest on's body cold.
+Look, here comes a walking fire. [<i>Enter</i> <span class="smcap">Gloster</span>
+with a torch.]</p></div>
+<p>
+Pope destroyed the collocation by transferring the stage-direction to a
+point some dozen lines later.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_165" id="Footnote_165"></a><a href="#FNanchor_165"><span class="label">[165]</span></a> The passages are here printed together (<span class="smcap">iii.</span> iv.
+28 ff. and <span class="smcap">iv.</span> i. 67 ff.):
+</p>
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i1"><i>Lear.</i> Poor naked wretches, wheresoe'er you are,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">That bide the pelting of this pitiless storm,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">How shall your houseless heads and unfed sides,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Your loop'd and window'd raggedness, defend you<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">From seasons such as these? O, I have ta'en<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Too little care of this! Take physic, pomp;<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Expose thyself to feel what wretches feel,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">That thou mayst shake the superflux to them,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">And show the heavens just.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i1"><i>Glo.</i> Here, take this purse, thou whom the heavens' plagues<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Have humbled to all strokes: that I am wretched<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Makes thee the happier: heavens, deal so still!<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Let the superfluous and lust-dieted man,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">That slaves your ordinance, that will not see<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Because he doth not feel, feel your power quickly;<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">So distribution should undo excess,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">And each man have enough.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+</div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_166" id="Footnote_166"></a><a href="#FNanchor_166"><span class="label">[166]</span></a> Schmidt's idea&mdash;based partly on the omission from the
+Folios at <span class="smcap">i.</span> ii. 103 (see Furness' Variorum) of the words 'To
+his father that so tenderly and entirely loves him'&mdash;that Gloster loved
+neither of his sons, is surely an entire mistake. See, not to speak of
+general impressions, <span class="smcap">iii.</span> iv. 171 ff.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_167" id="Footnote_167"></a><a href="#FNanchor_167"><span class="label">[167]</span></a> Imagination demands for Lear, even more than for Othello,
+majesty of stature and mien. Tourg&eacute;nief felt this and made his 'Lear of
+the Steppes' a <i>gigantic</i> peasant. If Shakespeare's texts give no
+express authority for ideas like these, the reason probably is that he
+wrote primarily for the theatre, where the principal actor might not be
+a large man.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_168" id="Footnote_168"></a><a href="#FNanchor_168"><span class="label">[168]</span></a> He is not present, of course, till France and Burgundy
+enter; but while he is present he says not a word beyond 'Here's France
+and Burgundy, my noble lord.' For some remarks on the possibility that
+Shakespeare imagined him as having encouraged Lear in his idea of
+dividing the kingdom see <a href="#NOTE_T">Note T</a>. It must be remembered that Cornwall was
+Gloster's 'arch and patron.'</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_169" id="Footnote_169"></a><a href="#FNanchor_169"><span class="label">[169]</span></a> In this she stands alone among the more notable
+characters of the play. Doubtless Regan's exclamation 'O the blest gods'
+means nothing, but the fact that it is given to her means something. For
+some further remarks on Goneril see <a href="#NOTE_T">Note T</a>. I may add that touches of
+Goneril reappear in the heroine of the next tragedy, <i>Macbeth</i>; and that
+we are sometimes reminded of her again by the character of the Queen in
+<i>Cymbeline</i>, who bewitched the feeble King by her beauty, and married
+him for greatness while she abhorred his person (<i>Cymbeline</i>,
+<span class="smcap">v.</span> v. 62 f., 31 f.); who tried to poison her step-daughter and
+intended to poison her husband; who died despairing because she could
+not execute all the evil she purposed; and who inspirited her husband to
+defy the Romans by words that still stir the blood (<i>Cymbeline</i>,
+<span class="smcap">iii.</span> i. 14 f. Cf. <i>King Lear</i>, <span class="smcap">iv.</span> ii. 50 f.).</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_170" id="Footnote_170"></a><a href="#FNanchor_170"><span class="label">[170]</span></a> <span class="smcap">i.</span> ii. 1 f. Shakespeare seems to have in mind
+the idea expressed in the speech of Ulysses about the dependence of the
+world on degree, order, system, custom, and about the chaos which would
+result from the free action of appetite, the 'universal wolf' (<i>Troilus
+and Cr.</i> <span class="smcap">i.</span> iii. 83 f.). Cf. the contrast between 'particular
+will' and 'the moral laws of nature and of nations,' <span class="smcap">ii.</span> ii.
+53, 185 ('nature' here of course is the opposite of the 'nature' of
+Edmund's speech).</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_171" id="Footnote_171"></a><a href="#FNanchor_171"><span class="label">[171]</span></a> The line last quoted is continued by Edmund in the Folios
+thus: 'Th' hast spoken right; 'tis true,' but in the Quartos thus: 'Thou
+hast spoken truth,' which leaves the line imperfect. This, and the
+imperfect line 'Make instruments to plague us,' suggest that Shakespeare
+wrote at first simply,
+</p>
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i4">Make instruments to plague us.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i1"><i>Edm.</i><span style="margin-left: 9em;">Th' hast spoken truth.</span><br /></span>
+</div></div>
+<p>
+The Quartos show other variations which seem to point to the fact that
+the MS. was here difficult to make out.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_172" id="Footnote_172"></a><a href="#FNanchor_172"><span class="label">[172]</span></a> <span class="smcap">iv.</span> i. 1-9. I am indebted here to Koppel,
+<i>Verbesserungsvorschl&auml;ge zu den Erl&auml;uterungen und der Textlesung des
+Lear</i> (1899).</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_173" id="Footnote_173"></a><a href="#FNanchor_173"><span class="label">[173]</span></a> See <span class="smcap">i.</span> i. 142 ff. Kent speaks, not of the
+<i>injustice</i> of Lear's action, but of its 'folly,' its 'hideous
+rashness.' When the King exclaims 'Kent, on thy life, no more,' he
+answers:
+</p>
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i1">My life I never held but as a pawn<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">To wage against thy enemies; nor fear to lose it,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1"><i>Thy safety being the motive</i>.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+<p>
+(The first Folio omits 'a,' and in the next line reads 'nere' for 'nor.'
+Perhaps the first line should read 'My life I ne'er held but as pawn to
+wage.')</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_174" id="Footnote_174"></a><a href="#FNanchor_174"><span class="label">[174]</span></a> See <span class="smcap">ii.</span> ii. 162 to end. The light-heartedness
+disappears, of course, as Lear's misfortunes thicken.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_175" id="Footnote_175"></a><a href="#FNanchor_175"><span class="label">[175]</span></a> This difference, however, must not be pressed too far;
+nor must we take Kent's retort,
+</p>
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i6">Now by Apollo, king,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Thou swear'st thy gods in vain,<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+<p>
+for a sign of disbelief. He twice speaks of the gods in another manner
+(<span class="smcap">i.</span> i. 185, <span class="smcap">iii.</span> vi. 5), and he was accustomed to
+think of Lear in his 'prayers' (<span class="smcap">i.</span> i. 144).</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_176" id="Footnote_176"></a><a href="#FNanchor_176"><span class="label">[176]</span></a> The 'clown' in <i>Antony and Cleopatra</i> is merely an old
+peasant. There is a fool in <i>Timon of Athens</i>, however, and he appears
+in a scene (<span class="smcap">ii.</span> ii.) generally attributed to Shakespeare. His
+talk sometimes reminds one of Lear's fool; and Kent's remark, 'This is
+not altogether fool, my lord,' is repeated in <i>Timon</i>, <span class="smcap">ii.</span> ii.
+122, 'Thou art not altogether a fool.'</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_177" id="Footnote_177"></a><a href="#FNanchor_177"><span class="label">[177]</span></a> [This is no obstacle. There could hardly be a stage
+tradition hostile to his youth, since he does not appear in Tate's
+version, which alone was acted during the century and a half before
+Macready's production. I had forgotten this; and my memory must also
+have been at fault regarding an engraving to which I referred in the
+first edition. Both mistakes were pointed out by Mr. Archer.]</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_178" id="Footnote_178"></a><a href="#FNanchor_178"><span class="label">[178]</span></a> In parts of what follows I am indebted to remarks by
+Cowden Clarke, quoted by Furness on <span class="smcap">i.</span> iv. 91.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_179" id="Footnote_179"></a><a href="#FNanchor_179"><span class="label">[179]</span></a> See also <a href="#NOTE_T">Note T</a>.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_180" id="Footnote_180"></a><a href="#FNanchor_180"><span class="label">[180]</span></a> 'Our last and least' (according to the Folio reading).
+Lear speaks again of 'this little seeming substance.' He can carry her
+dead body in his arms.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_181" id="Footnote_181"></a><a href="#FNanchor_181"><span class="label">[181]</span></a> Perhaps then the 'low sound' is not merely metaphorical
+in Kent's speech in <span class="smcap">i.</span> i. 153 f.:
+</p>
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i9">answer my life my judgment,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Thy youngest daughter does not love thee least;<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Nor are those empty-hearted whose low sound<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Reverbs no hollowness.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+</div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_182" id="Footnote_182"></a><a href="#FNanchor_182"><span class="label">[182]</span></a> <span class="smcap">i.</span> i. 80. 'More ponderous' is the reading of the
+Folios, 'more richer' that of the Quartos. The latter is usually
+preferred, and Mr. Aldis Wright says 'more ponderous' has the appearance
+of being a player's correction to avoid a piece of imaginary bad
+grammar. Does it not sound more like the author's improvement of a
+phrase that he thought a little flat? And, apart from that, is it not
+significant that it expresses the same idea of weight that appears in
+the phrase 'I cannot heave my heart into my mouth'?</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_183" id="Footnote_183"></a><a href="#FNanchor_183"><span class="label">[183]</span></a> Cf. Cornwall's satirical remarks on Kent's 'plainness' in
+<span class="smcap">ii.</span> ii. 101 ff.,&mdash;a plainness which did no service to Kent's
+master. (As a matter of fact, Cordelia had said nothing about
+'plainness.')</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_184" id="Footnote_184"></a><a href="#FNanchor_184"><span class="label">[184]</span></a> Who, like Kent, hastens on the quarrel with Goneril.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_185" id="Footnote_185"></a><a href="#FNanchor_185"><span class="label">[185]</span></a> I do not wish to complicate the discussion by examining
+the differences, in degree or otherwise, in the various cases, or by
+introducing numerous qualifications; and therefore I do not add the
+names of Macbeth and Lady Macbeth.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_186" id="Footnote_186"></a><a href="#FNanchor_186"><span class="label">[186]</span></a> It follows from the above that, if this idea were made
+explicit and accompanied our reading of a tragedy throughout, it would
+confuse or even destroy the tragic impression. So would the constant
+presence of Christian beliefs. The reader most attached to these beliefs
+holds them in temporary suspension while he is immersed in a
+Shakespearean tragedy. Such tragedy assumes that the world, as it is
+presented, is the truth, though it also provokes feelings which imply
+that this world is not the whole truth, and therefore not the truth.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_187" id="Footnote_187"></a><a href="#FNanchor_187"><span class="label">[187]</span></a> Though Cordelia, of course, does not occupy the position
+of the hero.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_188" id="Footnote_188"></a><a href="#FNanchor_188"><span class="label">[188]</span></a> <i>E.g.</i> in <i>King Lear</i> the servants, and the old man who
+succours Gloster and brings to the naked beggar 'the best 'parel that he
+has, come on't what will,' <i>i.e.</i> whatever vengeance Regan can inflict.
+Cf. the Steward and the Servants in <i>Timon</i>. Cf. there also (<span class="smcap">v.</span>
+i. 23), 'Promising is the very air o' the time ... performance is ever
+the duller for his act; and, <i>but in the plainer and simpler kind of
+people</i>, the deed of saying [performance of promises] is quite out of
+use.' Shakespeare's feeling on this subject, though apparently specially
+keen at this time of his life, is much the same throughout (cf. Adam in
+<i>As You Like It</i>). He has no respect for the plainer and simpler kind of
+people as politicians, but a great respect and regard for their hearts.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_189" id="Footnote_189"></a><a href="#FNanchor_189"><span class="label">[189]</span></a> 'I stumbled when I saw,' says Gloster.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_190" id="Footnote_190"></a><a href="#FNanchor_190"><span class="label">[190]</span></a> Our advantages give us a blind confidence in our
+security. Cf. <i>Timon</i>, <span class="smcap">iv.</span> iii. 76,
+</p>
+
+<table class="tabledrama" summary="Timon IV. iii. 76" cellpadding="6">
+  <tr>
+    <td><i>Alc.</i></td>
+    <td>I have heard in some sort of thy miseries.</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td><i>Tim.</i></td>
+    <td>Thou saw'st them when I had prosperity.</td>
+  </tr>
+</table>
+</div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_191" id="Footnote_191"></a><a href="#FNanchor_191"><span class="label">[191]</span></a> Biblical ideas seem to have been floating in
+Shakespeare's mind. Cf. the words of Kent, when Lear enters with
+Cordelia's body, 'Is this the promised end?' and Edgar's answer, 'Or
+image of that horror?' The 'promised end' is certainly the end of the
+world (cf. with 'image' 'the great doom's image,' <i>Macbeth</i>,
+<span class="smcap">ii.</span> iii. 83); and the next words, Albany's 'Fall and cease,'
+<i>may</i> be addressed to the heavens or stars, not to Lear. It seems
+probable that in writing Gloster's speech about the predicted horrors to
+follow 'these late eclipses' Shakespeare had a vague recollection of the
+passage in <i>Matthew</i> xxiv., or of that in <i>Mark</i> xiii., about the
+tribulations which were to be the sign of 'the end of the world.' (I do
+not mean, of course, that the 'prediction' of <span class="smcap">i.</span> ii. 119 is the
+prediction to be found in one of these passages.)</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_192" id="Footnote_192"></a><a href="#FNanchor_192"><span class="label">[192]</span></a> Cf. <i>Hamlet</i>, <span class="smcap">iii.</span> i. 181:
+</p>
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i1">This something-settled matter in his heart,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Whereon his brains still beating puts him thus<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">From fashion of himself.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+</div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_193" id="Footnote_193"></a><a href="#FNanchor_193"><span class="label">[193]</span></a> I believe the criticism of <i>King Lear</i> which has
+influenced me most is that in Prof. Dowden's <i>Shakspere, his Mind and
+Art</i> (though, when I wrote my lectures, I had not read that criticism
+for many years); and I am glad that this acknowledgment gives me the
+opportunity of repeating in print an opinion which I have often
+expressed to students, that anyone entering on the study of Shakespeare,
+and unable or unwilling to read much criticism, would do best to take
+Prof. Dowden for his guide.</p></div>
+</div>
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><a name="Page_331" id="Page_331"></a><span class="pagenum">[331]</span></p>
+<h2><a name="LECTURE_IX" id="LECTURE_IX"></a>LECTURE IX</h2>
+
+<h3>MACBETH</h3>
+
+
+<p><i>Macbeth</i>, it is probable, was the last-written of the four great
+tragedies, and immediately preceded <i>Antony and Cleopatra</i>.<a name="FNanchor_194" id="FNanchor_194"></a><a href="#Footnote_194" class="fnanchor">[194]</a> In that
+play Shakespeare's final style appears for the first time completely
+formed, and the transition to this style is much more decidedly visible
+in <i>Macbeth</i> than in <i>King Lear</i>. Yet in certain respects <i>Macbeth</i>
+recalls <i>Hamlet</i> rather than <i>Othello</i> or <i>King Lear</i>. In the heroes of
+both plays the passage from thought to a critical resolution and action
+is difficult, and excites the keenest interest. In neither play, as in
+<i>Othello</i> and <i>King Lear</i>, is painful pathos one of the main effects.
+Evil, again, though it shows in <i>Macbeth</i> a prodigious energy, is not
+the icy or stony inhumanity of Iago or Goneril; and, as in <i>Hamlet</i>, it
+is pursued by remorse. Finally, Shakespeare no longer restricts the
+action to purely human agencies, as in the two preceding tragedies;
+portents once more fill the heavens, ghosts rise from their graves, an
+unearthly light flickers about the head of the doomed man. The special
+popularity of <i>Hamlet</i> and <i>Macbeth</i> is due in part to some of these
+common characteristics, notably to the fascination of the supernatural,
+the absence of the spectacle of extreme undeserved suffering, the
+<a name="Page_332" id="Page_332"></a><span class="pagenum">[332]</span>absence of characters which horrify and repel and yet are destitute of
+grandeur. The reader who looks unwillingly at Iago gazes at Lady Macbeth
+in awe, because though she is dreadful she is also sublime. The whole
+tragedy is sublime.</p>
+
+<p>In this, however, and in other respects, <i>Macbeth</i> makes an impression
+quite different from that of <i>Hamlet</i>. The dimensions of the principal
+characters, the rate of movement in the action, the supernatural effect,
+the style, the versification, are all changed; and they are all changed
+in much the same manner. In many parts of <i>Macbeth</i> there is in the
+language a peculiar compression, pregnancy, energy, even violence; the
+harmonious grace and even flow, often conspicuous in <i>Hamlet</i>, have
+almost disappeared. The cruel characters, built on a scale at least as
+large as that of <i>Othello</i>, seem to attain at times an almost superhuman
+stature. The diction has in places a huge and rugged grandeur, which
+degenerates here and there into tumidity. The solemn majesty of the
+royal Ghost in <i>Hamlet</i>, appearing in armour and standing silent in the
+moonlight, is exchanged for shapes of horror, dimly seen in the murky
+air or revealed by the glare of the caldron fire in a dark cavern, or
+for the ghastly face of Banquo badged with blood and staring with blank
+eyes. The other three tragedies all open with conversations which lead
+into the action: here the action bursts into wild life amidst the sounds
+of a thunder-storm and the echoes of a distant battle. It hurries
+through seven very brief scenes of mounting suspense to a terrible
+crisis, which is reached, in the murder of Duncan, at the beginning of
+the Second Act. Pausing a moment and changing its shape, it hastes again
+with scarcely diminished speed to fresh horrors. And even when the speed
+of the outward action is slackened, the same effect is continued in
+another form: we are shown a soul <a name="Page_333" id="Page_333"></a><span class="pagenum">[333]</span>tortured by an agony which admits not
+a moment's repose, and rushing in frenzy towards its doom. <i>Macbeth</i> is
+very much shorter than the other three tragedies, but our experience in
+traversing it is so crowded and intense that it leaves an impression not
+of brevity but of speed. It is the most vehement, the most concentrated,
+perhaps we may say the most tremendous, of the tragedies.</p>
+
+
+<h4>1</h4>
+
+<p>A Shakespearean tragedy, as a rule, has a special tone or atmosphere of
+its own, quite perceptible, however difficult to describe. The effect of
+this atmosphere is marked with unusual strength in <i>Macbeth</i>. It is due
+to a variety of influences which combine with those just noticed, so
+that, acting and reacting, they form a whole; and the desolation of the
+blasted heath, the design of the Witches, the guilt in the hero's soul,
+the darkness of the night, seem to emanate from one and the same source.
+This effect is strengthened by a multitude of small touches, which at
+the moment may be little noticed but still leave their mark on the
+imagination. We may approach the consideration of the characters and the
+action by distinguishing some of the ingredients of this general effect.</p>
+
+<p>Darkness, we may even say blackness, broods over this tragedy. It is
+remarkable that almost all the scenes which at once recur to memory take
+place either at night or in some dark spot. The vision of the dagger,
+the murder of Duncan, the murder of Banquo, the sleep-walking of Lady
+Macbeth, all come in night-scenes. The Witches dance in the thick air of
+a storm, or, 'black and midnight hags,' receive Macbeth in a cavern. The
+blackness of night is to the hero a thing of fear, even of horror; and
+that which he feels becomes the spirit of the play. The faint
+glimmerings of the <a name="Page_334" id="Page_334"></a><span class="pagenum">[334]</span>western sky at twilight are here menacing: it is the
+hour when the traveller hastens to reach safety in his inn, and when
+Banquo rides homeward to meet his assassins; the hour when 'light
+thickens,' when 'night's black agents to their prey do rouse,' when the
+wolf begins to howl, and the owl to scream, and withered murder steals
+forth to his work. Macbeth bids the stars hide their fires that his
+'black' desires may be concealed; Lady Macbeth calls on thick night to
+come, palled in the dunnest smoke of hell. The moon is down and no stars
+shine when Banquo, dreading the dreams of the coming night, goes
+unwillingly to bed, and leaves Macbeth to wait for the summons of the
+little bell. When the next day should dawn, its light is 'strangled,'
+and 'darkness does the face of earth entomb.' In the whole drama the sun
+seems to shine only twice: first, in the beautiful but ironical passage
+where Duncan sees the swallows flitting round the castle of death; and,
+afterwards, when at the close the avenging army gathers to rid the earth
+of its shame. Of the many slighter touches which deepen this effect I
+notice only one. The failure of nature in Lady Macbeth is marked by her
+fear of darkness; 'she has light by her continually.' And in the one
+phrase of fear that escapes her lips even in sleep, it is of the
+darkness of the place of torment that she speaks.<a name="FNanchor_195" id="FNanchor_195"></a><a href="#Footnote_195" class="fnanchor">[195]</a></p>
+
+<p>The atmosphere of <i>Macbeth</i>, however, is not that of unrelieved
+blackness. On the contrary, as compared with <i>King Lear</i> and its cold
+dim gloom, <i>Macbeth</i> leaves a decided impression of colour; it is really
+the impression of a black night broken by flashes of light and colour,
+sometimes vivid and even glaring. They are the lights and colours of the
+thunder-storm in the first scene; of the dagger <a name="Page_335" id="Page_335"></a><span class="pagenum">[335]</span>hanging before
+Macbeth's eyes and glittering alone in the midnight air; of the torch
+borne by the servant when he and his lord come upon Banquo crossing the
+castle-court to his room; of the torch, again, which Fleance carried to
+light his father to death, and which was dashed out by one of the
+murderers; of the torches that flared in the hall on the face of the
+Ghost and the blanched cheeks of Macbeth; of the flames beneath the
+boiling caldron from which the apparitions in the cavern rose; of the
+taper which showed to the Doctor and Gentlewoman the wasted face and
+blank eyes of Lady Macbeth. And, above all, the colour is the colour of
+blood. It cannot be an accident that the image of blood is forced upon
+us continually, not merely by the events themselves, but by full
+descriptions, and even by reiteration of the word in unlikely parts of
+the dialogue. The Witches, after their first wild appearance, have
+hardly quitted the stage when there staggers onto it a 'bloody man,'
+gashed with wounds. His tale is of a hero whose 'brandished steel smoked
+with bloody execution,' 'carved out a passage' to his enemy, and
+'unseam'd him from the nave to the chaps.' And then he tells of a second
+battle so bloody that the combatants seemed as if they 'meant to bathe
+in reeking wounds.' What metaphors! What a dreadful image is that with
+which Lady Macbeth greets us almost as she enters, when she prays the
+spirits of cruelty so to thicken her blood that pity cannot flow along
+her veins! What pictures are those of the murderer appearing at the door
+of the banquet-room with Banquo's 'blood upon his face'; of Banquo
+himself 'with twenty trenched gashes on his head,' or 'blood-bolter'd'
+and smiling in derision at his murderer; of Macbeth, gazing at his hand,
+and watching it dye the whole green ocean red; of Lady Macbeth, gazing
+at hers, and stretching it away from her face to escape the smell of
+blood that all the <a name="Page_336" id="Page_336"></a><span class="pagenum">[336]</span>perfumes of Arabia will not subdue! The most
+horrible lines in the whole tragedy are those of her shuddering cry,
+'Yet who would have thought the old man to have had so much blood in
+him?' And it is not only at such moments that these images occur. Even
+in the quiet conversation of Malcolm and Macduff, Macbeth is imagined as
+holding a bloody sceptre, and Scotland as a country bleeding and
+receiving every day a new gash added to her wounds. It is as if the poet
+saw the whole story through an ensanguined mist, and as if it stained
+the very blackness of the night. When Macbeth, before Banquo's murder,
+invokes night to scarf up the tender eye of pitiful day, and to tear in
+pieces the great bond that keeps him pale, even the invisible hand that
+is to tear the bond is imagined as covered with blood.</p>
+
+<p>Let us observe another point. The vividness, magnitude, and violence of
+the imagery in some of these passages are characteristic of <i>Macbeth</i>
+almost throughout; and their influence contributes to form its
+atmosphere. Images like those of the babe torn smiling from the breast
+and dashed to death; of pouring the sweet milk of concord into hell; of
+the earth shaking in fever; of the frame of things disjointed; of
+sorrows striking heaven on the face, so that it resounds and yells out
+like syllables of dolour; of the mind lying in restless ecstasy on a
+rack; of the mind full of scorpions; of the tale told by an idiot, full
+of sound and fury;&mdash;all keep the imagination moving on a 'wild and
+violent sea,' while it is scarcely for a moment permitted to dwell on
+thoughts of peace and beauty. In its language, as in its action, the
+drama is full of tumult and storm. Whenever the Witches are present we
+see and hear a thunder-storm: when they are absent we hear of
+ship-wrecking storms and direful thunders; of tempests that blow down
+trees and churches, castles, <a name="Page_337" id="Page_337"></a><span class="pagenum">[337]</span>palaces and pyramids; of the frightful
+hurricane of the night when Duncan was murdered; of the blast on which
+pity rides like a new-born babe, or on which Heaven's cherubim are
+horsed. There is thus something magnificently appropriate in the cry
+'Blow, wind! Come, wrack!' with which Macbeth, turning from the sight of
+the moving wood of Birnam, bursts from his castle. He was borne to his
+throne on a whirlwind, and the fate he goes to meet comes on the wings
+of storm.</p>
+
+<p>Now all these agencies&mdash;darkness, the lights and colours that illuminate
+it, the storm that rushes through it, the violent and gigantic
+images&mdash;conspire with the appearances of the Witches and the Ghost to
+awaken horror, and in some degree also a supernatural dread. And to this
+effect other influences contribute. The pictures called up by the mere
+words of the Witches stir the same feelings,&mdash;those, for example, of the
+spell-bound sailor driven tempest-tost for nine times nine weary weeks,
+and never visited by sleep night or day; of the drop of poisonous foam
+that forms on the moon, and, falling to earth, is collected for
+pernicious ends; of the sweltering venom of the toad, the finger of the
+babe killed at its birth by its own mother, the tricklings from the
+murderer's gibbet. In Nature, again, something is felt to be at work,
+sympathetic with human guilt and supernatural malice. She labours with
+portents.</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i1">Lamentings heard in the air, strange screams of death,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">And prophesying with accents terrible,<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>burst from her. The owl clamours all through the night; Duncan's horses
+devour each other in frenzy; the dawn comes, but no light with it.
+Common sights and sounds, the crying of crickets, the croak of the
+raven, the light thickening after sunset, the home-coming of the rooks,
+are all ominous. Then, as if to deepen these impressions, Shakespeare
+has <a name="Page_338" id="Page_338"></a><span class="pagenum">[338]</span>concentrated attention on the obscurer regions of man's being, on
+phenomena which make it seem that he is in the power of secret forces
+lurking below, and independent of his consciousness and will: such as
+the relapse of Macbeth from conversation into a reverie, during which he
+gazes fascinated at the image of murder drawing closer and closer; the
+writing on his face of strange things he never meant to show; the
+pressure of imagination heightening into illusion, like the vision of a
+dagger in the air, at first bright, then suddenly splashed with blood,
+or the sound of a voice that cried 'Sleep no more' and would not be
+silenced.<a name="FNanchor_196" id="FNanchor_196"></a><a href="#Footnote_196" class="fnanchor">[196]</a> To these are added other, and constant, allusions to
+sleep, man's strange half-conscious life; to the misery of its
+withholding; to the terrible dreams of remorse; to the cursed thoughts
+from which Banquo is free by day, but which tempt him in his sleep: and
+again to abnormal disturbances of sleep; in the two men, of whom one
+during the murder of Duncan laughed in his sleep, and the other raised a
+cry of murder; and in Lady Macbeth, who rises to re-enact in
+somnambulism those scenes the memory of which is pushing her on to
+madness or suicide. All this has one effect, to excite supernatural
+alarm and, even more, a dread of the presence of evil not only in its
+recognised seat but all through and around our mysterious nature.
+Perhaps there is no other work equal to <i>Macbeth</i> in the production of
+this effect.<a name="FNanchor_197" id="FNanchor_197"></a><a href="#Footnote_197" class="fnanchor">[197]</a></p>
+
+<p>It is enhanced&mdash;to take a last point&mdash;by the use of a literary
+expedient. Not even in <i>Richard III.</i>, which in this, as in other
+respects, has resemblances to <i>Macbeth</i>, is there so much of Irony. I do
+not refer to irony in the ordinary sense; to speeches, for example,
+where the speaker is intentionally <a name="Page_339" id="Page_339"></a><span class="pagenum">[339]</span>ironical, like that of Lennox in
+<span class="smcap">iii.</span> vi. I refer to irony on the part of the author himself, to
+ironical juxtapositions of persons and events, and especially to the
+'Sophoclean irony' by which a speaker is made to use words bearing to
+the audience, in addition to his own meaning, a further and ominous
+sense, hidden from himself and, usually, from the other persons on the
+stage. The very first words uttered by Macbeth,</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i1">So foul and fair a day I have not seen,<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>are an example to which attention has often been drawn; for they startle
+the reader by recalling the words of the Witches in the first scene,</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i1">Fair is foul, and foul is fair.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>When Macbeth, emerging from his murderous reverie, turns to the nobles
+saying, 'Let us toward the King,' his words are innocent, but to the
+reader have a double meaning. Duncan's comment on the treachery of
+Cawdor,</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i8">There's no art<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">To find the mind's construction in the face:<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">He was a gentleman on whom I built<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">An absolute trust,<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>is interrupted<a name="FNanchor_198" id="FNanchor_198"></a><a href="#Footnote_198" class="fnanchor">[198]</a> by the entrance of the traitor Macbeth, who is
+greeted with effusive gratitude and a like 'absolute trust.' I have
+already referred to the ironical effect of the beautiful lines in which
+Duncan and Banquo describe the castle they are about to enter. To the
+reader Lady Macbeth's light words,</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i1">A little water clears us of this deed:<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">How easy is it then,<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>summon up the picture of the sleep-walking scene. The idea of the
+Porter's speech, in which he imagines himself the keeper of hell-gate,
+shows the same irony. So does the contrast between the obvious and the
+hidden meanings of the <a name="Page_340" id="Page_340"></a><span class="pagenum">[340]</span>apparitions of the armed head, the bloody child,
+and the child with the tree in his hand. It would be easy to add further
+examples. Perhaps the most striking is the answer which Banquo, as he
+rides away, never to return alive, gives to Macbeth's reminder, 'Fail
+not our feast.' 'My lord, I will not,' he replies, and he keeps his
+promise. It cannot be by accident that Shakespeare so frequently in this
+play uses a device which contributes to excite the vague fear of hidden
+forces operating on minds unconscious of their influence.<a name="FNanchor_199" id="FNanchor_199"></a><a href="#Footnote_199" class="fnanchor">[199]</a></p>
+
+
+<h4>2</h4>
+
+<p>But of course he had for this purpose an agency more potent than any yet
+considered. It would be almost an impertinence to attempt to describe
+anew the influence of the Witch-scenes on the imagination of the
+reader.<a name="FNanchor_200" id="FNanchor_200"></a><a href="#Footnote_200" class="fnanchor">[200]</a> Nor do I believe that among different readers this
+influence differs greatly except in degree. But when critics begin to
+analyse the imaginative effect, and still more when, going behind it,
+they try to determine the truth which lay for Shakespeare or lies for us
+in these creations, they too often offer us results which, either
+through perversion or through inadequacy, fail to correspond with that
+effect. This happens in opposite ways. On the one hand the Witches,
+whose contribution to the 'atmosphere' of Macbeth can hardly be
+exaggerated, are credited with far too great an influence upon the
+action; sometimes they are described as goddesses, or even as fates,
+whom Macbeth is powerless to <a name="Page_341" id="Page_341"></a><span class="pagenum">[341]</span>resist. And this is perversion. On the
+other hand, we are told that, great as is their influence on the action,
+it is so because they are merely symbolic representations of the
+unconscious or half-conscious guilt in Macbeth himself. And this is
+inadequate. The few remarks I have to make may take the form of a
+criticism on these views.</p>
+
+<p>(1) As to the former, Shakespeare took, as material for his purposes,
+the ideas about witch-craft that he found existing in people around him
+and in books like Reginald Scot's <i>Discovery</i> (1584). And he used these
+ideas without changing their substance at all. He selected and improved,
+avoiding the merely ridiculous, dismissing (unlike Middleton) the
+sexually loathsome or stimulating, rehandling and heightening whatever
+could touch the imagination with fear, horror, and mysterious
+attraction. The Witches, that is to say, are not goddesses, or fates,
+or, in any way whatever, supernatural beings. They are old women, poor
+and ragged, skinny and hideous, full of vulgar spite, occupied in
+killing their neighbours' swine or revenging themselves on sailors'
+wives who have refused them chestnuts. If Banquo considers their beards
+a proof that they are not women, that only shows his ignorance: Sir Hugh
+Evans would have known better.<a name="FNanchor_201" id="FNanchor_201"></a><a href="#Footnote_201" class="fnanchor">[201]</a> There is not a syllable in <i>Macbeth</i>
+to imply that they are anything but women. But, again in accordance with
+the popular ideas, they have received from evil spirits certain
+supernatural powers. They can 'raise haile, tempests, and hurtfull
+weather; as lightening, thunder etc.' They can 'passe from place to
+place in the aire invisible.' They can 'keepe divels and spirits in the
+likenesse of todes and cats,' Paddock or Graymalkin. They can
+'transferre corne in the blade from one place to another.' They can
+'manifest unto others things hidden and lost, and foreshew <a name="Page_342" id="Page_342"></a><span class="pagenum">[342]</span>things to
+come, and see them as though they were present.' The reader will apply
+these phrases and sentences at once to passages in <i>Macbeth</i>. They are
+all taken from Scot's first chapter, where he is retailing the current
+superstitions of his time; and, in regard to the Witches, Shakespeare
+mentions scarcely anything, if anything, that was not to be found, of
+course in a more prosaic shape, either in Scot or in some other easily
+accessible authority.<a name="FNanchor_202" id="FNanchor_202"></a><a href="#Footnote_202" class="fnanchor">[202]</a> He read, to be sure, in Holinshed, his main
+source for the story of Macbeth, that, according to the common opinion,
+the 'women' who met Macbeth 'were eyther the weird sisters, that is (as
+ye would say) y<sup>e</sup> Goddesses of destinee, or els some Nimphes or
+Feiries.' But what does that matter? What he read in his authority was
+absolutely nothing to his audience, and remains nothing to us, unless he
+<i>used</i> what he read. And he did not use this idea. He used nothing but
+the phrase 'weird sisters,'<a name="FNanchor_203" id="FNanchor_203"></a><a href="#Footnote_203" class="fnanchor">[203]</a> which certainly no more suggested to a
+London audience the Parcae of one mythology or the Norns of another than
+it does to-day. His Witches owe all their power to the spirits; they are
+'<i>instruments</i> of darkness'; the spirits are their 'masters'
+(<span class="smcap">iv.</span> i. 63). Fancy the fates having masters! Even if the
+passages where Hecate appears are Shakespeare's,<a name="FNanchor_204" id="FNanchor_204"></a><a href="#Footnote_204" class="fnanchor">[204]</a> that will not help
+the <a name="Page_343" id="Page_343"></a><span class="pagenum">[343]</span>Witches; for they are subject to Hecate, who is herself a goddess
+or superior devil, not a fate.<a name="FNanchor_205" id="FNanchor_205"></a><a href="#Footnote_205" class="fnanchor">[205]</a></p>
+
+<p>Next, while the influence of the Witches' prophecies on Macbeth is very
+great, it is quite clearly shown to be an influence and nothing more.
+There is no sign whatever in the play that Shakespeare meant the actions
+of Macbeth to be forced on him by an external power, whether that of the
+Witches, or of their 'masters,' or of Hecate. It is needless therefore
+to insist that such a conception would be in contradiction with his
+whole tragic practice. The prophecies of the Witches are presented
+simply as dangerous circumstances with which Macbeth has to deal: they
+are dramatically on the same level as the story of the Ghost in
+<i>Hamlet</i>, or the falsehoods told by Iago to Othello. Macbeth is, in the
+ordinary sense, perfectly free in regard to them: and if we speak of
+degrees of freedom, he is even more free than Hamlet, who was crippled
+by melancholy when the Ghost appeared to him. That the influence of the
+first prophecies upon him came as much from himself as from them, is
+made abundantly clear by the obviously intentional contrast between him
+and Banquo. Banquo, ambitious but perfectly honest, is scarcely even
+startled <a name="Page_344" id="Page_344"></a><span class="pagenum">[344]</span>by them, and he remains throughout the scene indifferent to
+them. But when Macbeth heard them he was not an innocent man. Precisely
+how far his mind was guilty may be a question; but no innocent man would
+have started, as he did, with a start of <i>fear</i> at the mere prophecy of
+a crown, or have conceived thereupon <i>immediately</i> the thought of
+murder. Either this thought was not new to him,<a name="FNanchor_206" id="FNanchor_206"></a><a href="#Footnote_206" class="fnanchor">[206]</a> or he had cherished
+at least some vaguer dishonourable dream, the instantaneous recurrence
+of which, at the moment of his hearing the prophecy, revealed to him an
+inward and terrifying guilt. In either case not only was he free to
+accept or resist the temptation, but the temptation was already within
+him. We are admitting too much, therefore, when we compare him with
+Othello, for Othello's mind was perfectly free from suspicion when his
+temptation came to him. And we are admitting, again, too much when we
+use the word 'temptation' in reference to the first prophecies of the
+Witches. Speaking strictly we must affirm that he was tempted only by
+himself. <i>He</i> speaks indeed of their 'supernatural soliciting'; but in
+fact they did not solicit. They merely announced events: they hailed him
+as Thane of Glamis, Thane of Cawdor, and King hereafter. No connection
+of these announcements with any action of his was even hinted by them.
+For all that appears, the natural death of an old man might have
+fulfilled the prophecy any day.<a name="FNanchor_207" id="FNanchor_207"></a><a href="#Footnote_207" class="fnanchor">[207]</a> In any case, the idea of fulfilling
+it by murder was entirely his own.<a name="FNanchor_208" id="FNanchor_208"></a><a href="#Footnote_208" class="fnanchor">[208]</a></p>
+
+<p><a name="Page_345" id="Page_345"></a><span class="pagenum">[345]</span>When Macbeth sees the Witches again, after the murders of Duncan and
+Banquo, we observe, however, a striking change. They no longer need to
+go and meet him; he seeks them out. He has committed himself to his
+course of evil. Now accordingly they do 'solicit.' They prophesy, but
+they also give advice: they bid him be bloody, bold, and secure. We have
+no hope that he will reject their advice; but so far are they from
+having, even now, any power to compel him to accept it, that they make
+careful preparations to deceive him into doing so. And, almost as though
+to intimate how entirely the responsibility for his deeds still lies
+with Macbeth, Shakespeare makes his first act after this interview one
+for which his tempters gave him not a hint&mdash;the slaughter of Macduff's
+wife and children.</p>
+
+<p>To all this we must add that Macbeth himself nowhere betrays a suspicion
+that his action is, or has been, thrust on him by an external power. He
+curses the Witches for deceiving him, but he never attempts to shift to
+them the burden of his guilt. Neither has Shakespeare placed in the
+mouth of any other character in this play such fatalistic expressions as
+may be found in <i>King Lear</i> and occasionally elsewhere. He appears
+actually to have taken pains to make the natural psychological genesis
+of Macbeth's crimes perfectly clear, and it was a most unfortunate
+notion of Schlegel's that the Witches were required because natural
+agencies would have seemed too weak to drive such a man as Macbeth to
+his first murder.</p>
+
+<p>'Still,' it may be said, 'the Witches did foreknow Macbeth's future; and
+what is foreknown is fixed; and how can a man be responsible when his
+future is fixed?' With this question, as a speculative one, we have no
+concern here; but, in so far as it relates to the play, I answer, first,
+that not one of the things foreknown is an action. This is <a name="Page_346" id="Page_346"></a><span class="pagenum">[346]</span>just as true
+of the later prophecies as of the first. That Macbeth will be harmed by
+none of woman born, and will never be vanquished till Birnam Wood shall
+come against him, involves (so far as we are informed) no action of his.
+It may be doubted, indeed, whether Shakespeare would have introduced
+prophecies of Macbeth's deeds, even if it had been convenient to do so;
+he would probably have felt that to do so would interfere with the
+interest of the inward struggle and suffering. And, in the second place,
+<i>Macbeth</i> was not written for students of metaphysics or theology, but
+for people at large; and, however it may be with prophecies of actions,
+prophecies of mere events do not suggest to people at large any sort of
+difficulty about responsibility. Many people, perhaps most, habitually
+think of their 'future' as something fixed, and of themselves as 'free.'
+The Witches nowadays take a room in Bond Street and charge a guinea; and
+when the victim enters they hail him the possessor of &pound;1000 a year, or
+prophesy to him of journeys, wives, and children. But though he is
+struck dumb by their prescience, it does not even cross his mind that he
+is going to lose his glorious 'freedom'&mdash;not though journeys and
+marriages imply much more agency on his part than anything foretold to
+Macbeth. This whole difficulty is undramatic; and I may add that
+Shakespeare nowhere shows, like Chaucer, any interest in speculative
+problems concerning foreknowledge, predestination and freedom.</p>
+
+<p>(2) We may deal more briefly with the opposite interpretation. According
+to it the Witches and their prophecies are to be taken merely as
+symbolical representations of thoughts and desires which have slumbered
+in Macbeth's breast and now rise into consciousness and confront him.
+With this idea, which springs from the wish to get rid of a mere
+external supernaturalism, and to find a psychological <a name="Page_347" id="Page_347"></a><span class="pagenum">[347]</span>and spiritual
+meaning in that which the groundlings probably received as hard facts,
+one may feel sympathy. But it is evident that it is rather a
+'philosophy' of the Witches than an immediate dramatic apprehension of
+them; and even so it will be found both incomplete and, in other
+respects, inadequate.</p>
+
+<p>It is incomplete because it cannot possibly be applied to all the facts.
+Let us grant that it will apply to the most important prophecy, that of
+the crown; and that the later warning which Macbeth receives, to beware
+of Macduff, also answers to something in his own breast and 'harps his
+fear aright' But there we have to stop. Macbeth had evidently no
+suspicion of that treachery in Cawdor through which he himself became
+Thane; and who will suggest that he had any idea, however subconscious,
+about Birnam Wood or the man not born of woman? It may be held&mdash;and
+rightly, I think&mdash;that the prophecies which answer to nothing inward,
+the prophecies which are merely supernatural, produce, now at any rate,
+much less imaginative effect than the others,&mdash;even that they are in
+<i>Macbeth</i> an element which was of an age and not for all time; but still
+they are there, and they are essential to the plot.<a name="FNanchor_209" id="FNanchor_209"></a><a href="#Footnote_209" class="fnanchor">[209]</a> And as the
+theory under consideration will not apply to them at all, it is not
+likely that it gives an adequate account even of those prophecies to
+which it can in some measure be applied.</p>
+
+<p>It is inadequate here chiefly because it is much too narrow. The Witches
+and their prophecies, if they are to be rationalised or taken
+symbolically, <a name="Page_348" id="Page_348"></a><span class="pagenum">[348]</span>must represent not only the evil slumbering in the hero's
+soul, but all those obscurer influences of the evil around him in the
+world which aid his own ambition and the incitements of his wife. Such
+influences, even if we put aside all belief in evil 'spirits,' are as
+certain, momentous, and terrifying facts as the presence of inchoate
+evil in the soul itself; and if we exclude all reference to these facts
+from our idea of the Witches, it will be greatly impoverished and will
+certainly fail to correspond with the imaginative effect. The union of
+the outward and inward here may be compared with something of the same
+kind in Greek poetry.<a name="FNanchor_210" id="FNanchor_210"></a><a href="#Footnote_210" class="fnanchor">[210]</a> In the first Book of the <i>Iliad</i> we are told
+that, when Agamemnon threatened to take Briseis from Achilles, 'grief
+came upon Peleus' son, and his heart within his shaggy breast was
+divided in counsel, whether to draw his keen blade from his thigh and
+set the company aside and so slay Atreides, or to assuage his anger and
+curb his soul. While yet he doubted thereof in heart and soul, and was
+drawing his great sword from his sheath, Athene came to him from heaven,
+sent forth of the white-armed goddess Hera, whose heart loved both alike
+and had care for them. She stood behind Peleus' son and caught him by
+his golden hair, to him only visible, and of the rest no man beheld
+her.' And at her bidding he mastered his wrath, 'and stayed his heavy
+hand on the silver hilt, and thrust the great sword back into the
+sheath, and was not disobedient to the saying of Athene.'<a name="FNanchor_211" id="FNanchor_211"></a><a href="#Footnote_211" class="fnanchor">[211]</a> The
+succour of the goddess here only strengthens an inward movement in the
+mind of Achilles, but we should lose something besides a poetic effect
+if for that reason we struck her out of the account. We should lose the
+idea <a name="Page_349" id="Page_349"></a><span class="pagenum">[349]</span>that the inward powers of the soul answer in their essence to
+vaster powers without, which support them and assure the effect of their
+exertion. So it is in <i>Macbeth</i>.<a name="FNanchor_212" id="FNanchor_212"></a><a href="#Footnote_212" class="fnanchor">[212]</a> The words of the Witches are fatal
+to the hero only because there is in him something which leaps into
+light at the sound of them; but they are at the same time the witness of
+forces which never cease to work in the world around him, and, on the
+instant of his surrender to them, entangle him inextricably in the web
+of Fate. If the inward connection is once realised (and Shakespeare has
+left us no excuse for missing it), we need not fear, and indeed shall
+scarcely be able, to exaggerate the effect of the Witch-scenes in
+heightening and deepening the sense of fear, horror, and mystery which
+pervades the atmosphere of the tragedy.</p>
+
+
+<h4>3</h4>
+
+<p>From this murky background stand out the two great terrible figures, who
+dwarf all the remaining characters of the drama. Both are sublime, and
+both inspire, far more than the other tragic heroes, the feeling of awe.
+They are never detached in imagination from the atmosphere which
+surrounds them and adds to their grandeur and terror. It is, as it were,
+continued into their souls. For within them is all that we felt
+without&mdash;the darkness of night, lit with the flame of tempest and the
+hues of blood, and haunted by wild and direful shapes, 'murdering
+ministers,' spirits of remorse, and maddening visions of peace lost and
+judgment to come. The way to be untrue to Shakespeare here, as always,
+is to relax the tension of imagination, to conventionalise, to conceive
+Macbeth, for <a name="Page_350" id="Page_350"></a><span class="pagenum">[350]</span>example, as a half-hearted cowardly criminal, and Lady
+Macbeth as a whole-hearted fiend.</p>
+
+<p>These two characters are fired by one and the same passion of ambition;
+and to a considerable extent they are alike. The disposition of each is
+high, proud, and commanding. They are born to rule, if not to reign.
+They are peremptory or contemptuous to their inferiors. They are not
+children of light, like Brutus and Hamlet; they are of the world. We
+observe in them no love of country, and no interest in the welfare of
+anyone outside their family. Their habitual thoughts and aims are, and,
+we imagine, long have been, all of station and power. And though in both
+there is something, and in one much, of what is higher&mdash;honour,
+conscience, humanity&mdash;they do not live consciously in the light of these
+things or speak their language. Not that they are egoists, like Iago;
+or, if they are egoists, theirs is an <i>ego&iuml;sme &agrave; deux</i>. They have no
+separate ambitions.<a name="FNanchor_213" id="FNanchor_213"></a><a href="#Footnote_213" class="fnanchor">[213]</a> They support and love one another. They suffer
+together. And if, as time goes on, they drift a little apart, they are
+not vulgar souls, to be alienated and recriminate when they experience
+the fruitlessness of their ambition. They remain to the end tragic, even
+grand.</p>
+
+<p>So far there is much likeness between them. Otherwise they are
+contrasted, and the action is built upon this contrast. Their attitudes
+towards the projected murder of Duncan are quite different; and it
+produces in them equally different effects. In consequence, they appear
+in the earlier part of the play as of equal importance, if indeed Lady
+Macbeth does not overshadow her husband; but afterwards she retires more
+and more into the background, and he becomes unmistakably the <a name="Page_351" id="Page_351"></a><span class="pagenum">[351]</span>leading
+figure. His is indeed far the more complex character: and I will speak
+of it first.</p>
+
+<p>Macbeth, the cousin of a King mild, just, and beloved, but now too old
+to lead his army, is introduced to us as a general of extraordinary
+prowess, who has covered himself with glory in putting down a rebellion
+and repelling the invasion of a foreign army. In these conflicts he
+showed great personal courage, a quality which he continues to display
+throughout the drama in regard to all plain dangers. It is difficult to
+be sure of his customary demeanour, for in the play we see him either in
+what appears to be an exceptional relation to his wife, or else in the
+throes of remorse and desperation; but from his behaviour during his
+journey home after the war, from his <i>later</i> conversations with Lady
+Macbeth, and from his language to the murderers of Banquo and to others,
+we imagine him as a great warrior, somewhat masterful, rough, and
+abrupt, a man to inspire some fear and much admiration. He was thought
+'honest,' or honourable; he was trusted, apparently, by everyone;
+Macduff, a man of the highest integrity, 'loved him well.' And there
+was, in fact, much good in him. We have no warrant, I think, for
+describing him, with many writers, as of a 'noble' nature, like Hamlet
+or Othello;<a name="FNanchor_214" id="FNanchor_214"></a><a href="#Footnote_214" class="fnanchor">[214]</a> but he had a keen sense both of honour and of the worth
+of a good name. The phrase, again, 'too much of the milk of human
+kindness,' is applied to him in impatience by his wife, who did not
+fully understand him; but certainly he was far from devoid of humanity
+and pity.</p>
+
+<p>At the same time he was exceedingly ambitious. He must have been so by
+temper. The tendency must have been greatly strengthened by his
+marriage. When we see him, it has been further <a name="Page_352" id="Page_352"></a><span class="pagenum">[352]</span>stimulated by his
+remarkable success and by the consciousness of exceptional powers and
+merit. It becomes a passion. The course of action suggested by it is
+extremely perilous: it sets his good name, his position, and even his
+life on the hazard. It is also abhorrent to his better feelings. Their
+defeat in the struggle with ambition leaves him utterly wretched, and
+would have kept him so, however complete had been his outward success
+and security. On the other hand, his passion for power and his instinct
+of self-assertion are so vehement that no inward misery could persuade
+him to relinquish the fruits of crime, or to advance from remorse to
+repentance.</p>
+
+<p>In the character as so far sketched there is nothing very peculiar,
+though the strength of the forces contending in it is unusual. But there
+is in Macbeth one marked peculiarity, the true apprehension of which is
+the key to Shakespeare's conception.<a name="FNanchor_215" id="FNanchor_215"></a><a href="#Footnote_215" class="fnanchor">[215]</a> This bold ambitious man of
+action has, within certain limits, the imagination of a poet,&mdash;an
+imagination on the one hand extremely sensitive to impressions of a
+certain kind, and, on the other, productive of violent disturbance both
+of mind and body. Through it he is kept in contact with supernatural
+impressions and is liable to supernatural fears. And through it,
+especially, come to him the intimations of conscience and honour.
+Macbeth's better nature&mdash;to put the matter for clearness' sake too
+broadly&mdash;instead of speaking to him in the overt language of moral
+ideas, commands, and prohibitions, incorporates itself in images which
+alarm and horrify. His imagination is thus the best of him, something
+usually deeper and higher than his conscious thoughts; and if he had
+obeyed it he would have been safe. But his wife quite misunderstands it,
+and he himself understands it only in part. The <a name="Page_353" id="Page_353"></a><span class="pagenum">[353]</span>terrifying images which
+deter him from crime and follow its commission, and which are really the
+protest of his deepest self, seem to his wife the creations of mere
+nervous fear, and are sometimes referred by himself to the dread of
+vengeance or the restlessness of insecurity.<a name="FNanchor_216" id="FNanchor_216"></a><a href="#Footnote_216" class="fnanchor">[216]</a> His conscious or
+reflective mind, that is, moves chiefly among considerations of outward
+success and failure, while his inner being is convulsed by conscience.
+And his inability to understand himself is repeated and exaggerated in
+the interpretations of actors and critics, who represent him as a
+coward, cold-blooded, calculating, and pitiless, who shrinks from crime
+simply because it is dangerous, and suffers afterwards simply because he
+is not safe. In reality his courage is frightful. He strides from crime
+to crime, though his soul never ceases to bar his advance with shapes of
+terror, or to clamour in his ears that he is murdering his peace and
+casting away his 'eternal jewel.'</p>
+
+<p>It is of the first importance to realise the strength, and also (what
+has not been so clearly recognised) the limits, of Macbeth's
+imagination. It is not the universal meditative imagination of Hamlet.
+He came to see in man, as Hamlet sometimes did, the 'quintessence of
+dust'; but he must always have been incapable of Hamlet's reflections on
+man's noble reason and infinite faculty, or of seeing with Hamlet's eyes
+'this brave o'erhanging firmament, this majestical roof fretted with
+golden fire.' Nor could he feel, like Othello, the romance of war or the
+infinity of love. He shows no sign of any unusual sensitiveness to the
+glory or beauty in the world or the soul; and it is partly for this
+reason that we have no inclination to love him, and that we regard him
+with more of awe than of pity. His imagination is excitable and intense,
+but <a name="Page_354" id="Page_354"></a><span class="pagenum">[354]</span>narrow. That which stimulates it is, almost solely, that which
+thrills with sudden, startling, and often supernatural fear.<a name="FNanchor_217" id="FNanchor_217"></a><a href="#Footnote_217" class="fnanchor">[217]</a> There
+is a famous passage late in the play (<span class="smcap">v.</span> v. 10) which is here
+very significant, because it refers to a time before his conscience was
+burdened, and so shows his native disposition:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i1">The time has been, my senses would have cool'd<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">To hear a night-shriek; and my fell of hair<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Would at a dismal treatise rise and stir<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">As life were in't.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>This 'time' must have been in his youth, or at least before we see him.
+And, in the drama, everything which terrifies him is of this character,
+only it has now a deeper and a moral significance. Palpable dangers
+leave him unmoved or fill him with fire. He does himself mere justice
+when he asserts he 'dare do all that may become a man,' or when he
+exclaims to Banquo's ghost,</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i8">What man dare, I dare:<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Approach thou like the rugged Russian bear,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">The arm'd rhinoceros, or the Hyrcan tiger;<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Take any shape but that, and my firm nerves<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Shall never tremble.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>What appals him is always the image of his own guilty heart or bloody
+deed, or some image which derives from them its terror or gloom. These,
+when they arise, hold him spell-bound and possess him wholly, like a
+hypnotic trance which is at the same time the ecstasy of a poet. As the
+first 'horrid image' of Duncan's murder&mdash;of himself murdering
+Duncan&mdash;rises from unconsciousness and confronts him, his hair stands on
+end and the outward scene vanishes from his eyes. Why? For fear of
+'consequences'? The idea is ridiculous. Or because the deed is bloody?
+The man who with his 'smoking' steel 'carved out his passage' to the
+<a name="Page_355" id="Page_355"></a><span class="pagenum">[355]</span>rebel leader, and 'unseam'd him from the nave to the chaps,' would
+hardly be frightened by blood. How could fear of consequences make the
+dagger he is to use hang suddenly glittering before him in the air, and
+then as suddenly dash it with gouts of blood? Even when he <i>talks</i> of
+consequences, and declares that if he were safe against them he would
+'jump the life to come,' his imagination bears witness against him, and
+shows us that what really holds him back is the hideous vileness of the
+deed:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i9">He's here in double trust;<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">First, as I am his kinsman and his subject,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Strong both against the deed; then, as his host,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Who should against his murderer shut the door,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Not bear the knife myself. Besides, this Duncan<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Hath borne his faculties so meek, hath been<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">So clear in his great office, that his virtues<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Will plead like angels, trumpet-tongued, against<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">The deep damnation of his taking-off;<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">And pity, like a naked new-born babe,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Striding the blast, or heaven's cherubim, horsed<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Upon the sightless couriers of the air,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Shall blow the horrid deed in every eye,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">That tears shall drown the wind.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>It may be said that he is here thinking of the horror that others will
+feel at the deed&mdash;thinking therefore of consequences. Yes, but could he
+realise thus how horrible the deed would look to others if it were not
+equally horrible to himself?</p>
+
+<p>It is the same when the murder is done. He is well-nigh mad with horror,
+but it is not the horror of detection. It is not he who thinks of
+washing his hands or getting his nightgown on. He has brought away the
+daggers he should have left on the pillows of the grooms, but what does
+he care for that? What <i>he</i> thinks of is that, when he heard one of the
+men awaked from sleep say 'God bless us,' he could not say 'Amen'; for
+his imagination presents to him the parching of his throat as an
+immediate judgment from heaven. His wife heard the owl scream and the
+crickets cry; but what <a name="Page_356" id="Page_356"></a><span class="pagenum">[356]</span><i>he</i> heard was the voice that first cried
+'Macbeth doth murder sleep,' and then, a minute later, with a change of
+tense, denounced on him, as if his three names gave him three
+personalities to suffer in, the doom of sleeplessness:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i1">Glamis hath murdered sleep, and therefore Cawdor<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Shall sleep no more, Macbeth shall sleep no more.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>There comes a sound of knocking. It should be perfectly familiar to him;
+but he knows not whence, or from what world, it comes. He looks down at
+his hands, and starts violently: 'What hands are here?' For they seem
+alive, they move, they mean to pluck out his eyes. He looks at one of
+them again; it does not move; but the blood upon it is enough to dye the
+whole ocean red. What has all this to do with fear of 'consequences'? It
+is his soul speaking in the only shape in which it can speak freely,
+that of imagination.</p>
+
+<p>So long as Macbeth's imagination is active, we watch him fascinated; we
+feel suspense, horror, awe; in which are latent, also, admiration and
+sympathy. But so soon as it is quiescent these feelings vanish. He is no
+longer 'infirm of purpose': he becomes domineering, even brutal, or he
+becomes a cool pitiless hypocrite. He is generally said to be a very bad
+actor, but this is not wholly true. Whenever his imagination stirs, he
+acts badly. It so possesses him, and is so much stronger than his
+reason, that his face betrays him, and his voice utters the most
+improbable untruths<a name="FNanchor_218" id="FNanchor_218"></a><a href="#Footnote_218" class="fnanchor">[218]</a> or the most artificial rhetoric<a name="FNanchor_219" id="FNanchor_219"></a><a href="#Footnote_219" class="fnanchor">[219]</a> But when
+it is asleep he is firm, self-controlled and practical, as in the
+conversation where he skilfully elicits from Banquo that <a name="Page_357" id="Page_357"></a><span class="pagenum">[357]</span>information
+about his movements which is required for the successful arrangement of
+his murder.<a name="FNanchor_220" id="FNanchor_220"></a><a href="#Footnote_220" class="fnanchor">[220]</a> Here he is hateful; and so he is in the conversation
+with the murderers, who are not professional cut-throats but old
+soldiers, and whom, without a vestige of remorse, he beguiles with
+calumnies against Banquo and with such appeals as his wife had used to
+him.<a name="FNanchor_221" id="FNanchor_221"></a><a href="#Footnote_221" class="fnanchor">[221]</a> On the other hand, we feel much pity as well as anxiety in the
+scene (<span class="smcap">i.</span> vii.) where she overcomes his opposition to the
+murder; and we feel it (though his imagination is not specially active)
+because this scene shows us how little he understands himself. This is
+his great misfortune here. Not that he fails to realise in reflection
+the baseness of the deed (the soliloquy with which the scene opens shows
+that he does not). But he has never, to put it pedantically, accepted as
+the principle of his conduct the morality which takes shape in his
+imaginative fears. Had he done so, and said plainly to his wife, 'The
+thing is vile, and, however much I have sworn to do it, I will not,' she
+would have been helpless; for all her <a name="Page_358" id="Page_358"></a><span class="pagenum">[358]</span>arguments proceed on the
+assumption that there is for them no such point of view. Macbeth does
+approach this position once, when, resenting the accusation of
+cowardice, he answers,</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i1">I dare do all that may become a man;<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Who dares do more is none.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>She feels in an instant that everything is at stake, and, ignoring the
+point, overwhelms him with indignant and contemptuous personal reproach.
+But he yields to it because he is himself half-ashamed of that answer of
+his, and because, for want of habit, the simple idea which it expresses
+has no hold on him comparable to the force it acquires when it becomes
+incarnate in visionary fears and warnings.</p>
+
+<p>Yet these were so insistent, and they offered to his ambition a
+resistance so strong, that it is impossible to regard him as falling
+through the blindness or delusion of passion. On the contrary, he
+himself feels with such intensity the enormity of his purpose that, it
+seems clear, neither his ambition nor yet the prophecy of the Witches
+would ever without the aid of Lady Macbeth have overcome this feeling.
+As it is, the deed is done in horror and without the faintest desire or
+sense of glory,&mdash;done, one may almost say, as if it were an appalling
+duty; and, the instant it is finished, its futility is revealed to
+Macbeth as clearly as its vileness had been revealed beforehand. As he
+staggers from the scene he mutters in despair,</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i1">Wake Duncan with thy knocking! I would thou could'st.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>When, half an hour later, he returns with Lennox from the room of the
+murder, he breaks out:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i1">Had I but died an hour before this chance,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">I had lived a blessed time; for from this instant<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">There's nothing serious in mortality:<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">All is but toys: renown and grace is dead;<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">The wine of life is drawn, and the mere lees<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Is left this vault to brag of.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p><a name="Page_359" id="Page_359"></a><span class="pagenum">[359]</span>This is no mere acting. The language here has none of the false
+rhetoric of his merely hypocritical speeches. It is meant to deceive,
+but it utters at the same time his profoundest feeling. And this he can
+henceforth never hide from himself for long. However he may try to drown
+it in further enormities, he hears it murmuring,</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i7">Duncan is in his grave:<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">After life's fitful fever he sleeps well:<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>or,</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i1">better be with the dead:<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>or,</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i1">I have lived long enough:<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>and it speaks its last words on the last day of his life:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i7">Out, out, brief candle!<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">That struts and frets his hour upon the stage<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">And then is heard no more: it is a tale<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Signifying nothing.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>How strange that this judgment on life, the despair of a man who had
+knowingly made mortal war on his own soul, should be frequently quoted
+as Shakespeare's own judgment, and should even be adduced, in serious
+criticism, as a proof of his pessimism!</p>
+
+<p>It remains to look a little more fully at the history of Macbeth after
+the murder of Duncan. Unlike his first struggle this history excites
+little suspense or anxiety on his account: we have now no hope for him.
+But it is an engrossing spectacle, and psychologically it is perhaps the
+most remarkable exhibition of the <i>development</i> of a character to be
+found in Shakespeare's tragedies.</p>
+
+<p>That heart-sickness which comes from Macbeth's perception of the
+futility of his crime, and which never leaves him for long, is not,
+however, his habitual state. It could not be so, for two reasons. In the
+first place the consciousness of guilt is <a name="Page_360" id="Page_360"></a><span class="pagenum">[360]</span>stronger in him than the
+consciousness of failure; and it keeps him in a perpetual agony of
+restlessness, and forbids him simply to droop and pine. His mind is
+'full of scorpions.' He cannot sleep. He 'keeps alone,' moody and
+savage. 'All that is within him does condemn itself for being there.'
+There is a fever in his blood which urges him to ceaseless action in the
+search for oblivion. And, in the second place, ambition, the love of
+power, the instinct of self-assertion, are much too potent in Macbeth to
+permit him to resign, even in spirit, the prize for which he has put
+rancours in the vessel of his peace. The 'will to live' is mighty in
+him. The forces which impelled him to aim at the crown re-assert
+themselves. He faces the world, and his own conscience, desperate, but
+never dreaming of acknowledging defeat. He will see 'the frame of things
+disjoint' first. He challenges fate into the lists.</p>
+
+<p>The result is frightful. He speaks no more, as before Duncan's murder,
+of honour or pity. That sleepless torture, he tells himself, is nothing
+but the sense of insecurity and the fear of retaliation. If only he were
+safe, it would vanish. And he looks about for the cause of his fear; and
+his eye falls on Banquo. Banquo, who cannot fail to suspect him, has not
+fled or turned against him: Banquo has become his chief counsellor. Why?
+Because, he answers, the kingdom was promised to Banquo's children.
+Banquo, then, is waiting to attack him, to make a way for them. The
+'bloody instructions' he himself taught when he murdered Duncan, are
+about to return, as he said they would, to plague the inventor. <i>This</i>
+then, he tells himself, is the fear that will not let him sleep; and it
+will die with Banquo. There is no hesitation now, and no remorse: he has
+nearly learned his lesson. He hastens feverishly, not to murder Banquo,
+but to procure his murder: some strange idea is in his <a name="Page_361" id="Page_361"></a><span class="pagenum">[361]</span>mind that the
+thought of the dead man will not haunt him, like the memory of Duncan,
+if the deed is done by other hands.<a name="FNanchor_222" id="FNanchor_222"></a><a href="#Footnote_222" class="fnanchor">[222]</a> The deed is done: but, instead
+of peace descending on him, from the depths of his nature his
+half-murdered conscience rises; his deed confronts him in the apparition
+of Banquo's Ghost, and the horror of the night of his first murder
+returns. But, alas, <i>it</i> has less power, and <i>he</i> has more will.
+Agonised and trembling, he still faces this rebel image, and it yields:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i8">Why, so: being gone,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">I am a man again.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>Yes, but his secret is in the hands of the assembled lords. And, worse,
+this deed is as futile as the first. For, though Banquo is dead and even
+his Ghost is conquered, that inner torture is unassuaged. But he will
+not bear it. His guests have hardly left him when he turns roughly to
+his wife:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i1">How say'st thou, that Macduff denies his person<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">At our great bidding?<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>Macduff it is that spoils his sleep. He shall perish,&mdash;he and aught else
+that bars the road to peace.</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i10">For mine own good<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">All causes shall give way: I am in blood<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Stepp'd in so far that, should I wade no more,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Returning were as tedious as go o'er:<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Strange things I have in head that will to hand,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Which must be acted ere they may be scann'd.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>She answers, sick at heart,</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i1">You lack the season of all natures, sleep.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>No doubt: but he has found the way to it now:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i1">Come, we'll to sleep. My strange and self abuse<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Is the initiate fear that wants hard use;<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">We are yet but young in deed.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>What a change from the man who thought of Duncan's virtues, and of pity
+like a naked new-born <a name="Page_362" id="Page_362"></a><span class="pagenum">[362]</span>babe! What a frightful clearness of
+self-consciousness in this descent to hell, and yet what a furious force
+in the instinct of life and self-assertion that drives him on!</p>
+
+<p>He goes to seek the Witches. He will know, by the worst means, the
+worst. He has no longer any awe of them.</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i1">How now, you secret, black and midnight hags!<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>&mdash;so he greets them, and at once he demands and threatens. They tell him
+he is right to fear Macduff. They tell him to fear nothing, for none of
+woman born can harm him. He feels that the two statements are at
+variance; infatuated, suspects no double meaning; but, that he may
+'sleep in spite of thunder,' determines not to spare Macduff. But his
+heart throbs to know one thing, and he forces from the Witches the
+vision of Banquo's children crowned. The old intolerable thought
+returns, 'for Banquo's issue have I filed my mind'; and with it, for all
+the absolute security apparently promised him, there returns that inward
+fever. Will nothing quiet it? Nothing but destruction. Macduff, one
+comes to tell him, has escaped him; but that does not matter: he can
+still destroy:<a name="FNanchor_223" id="FNanchor_223"></a><a href="#Footnote_223" class="fnanchor">[223]</a></p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i12">And even now,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">To crown my thoughts with acts, be it thought and done:<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">The castle of Macduff I will surprise;<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Seize upon Fife; give to the edge o' the sword<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">His wife, his babes, and all unfortunate souls<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">That trace him in's line. No boasting like a fool;<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">This deed I'll do before this purpose cool.<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">But no more sights!<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p><a name="Page_363" id="Page_363"></a><span class="pagenum">[363]</span>No, he need fear no more 'sights.' The Witches have done their work,
+and after this purposeless butchery his own imagination will trouble him
+no more.<a name="FNanchor_224" id="FNanchor_224"></a><a href="#Footnote_224" class="fnanchor">[224]</a> He has dealt his last blow at the conscience and pity
+which spoke through it.</p>
+
+<p>The whole flood of evil in his nature is now let loose. He becomes an
+open tyrant, dreaded by everyone about him, and a terror to his country.
+She 'sinks beneath the yoke.'</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i12">Each new morn<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">New widows howl, new orphans cry, new sorrows<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Strike heaven on the face.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>She weeps, she bleeds, 'and each new day a gash is added to her wounds.'
+She is not the mother of her children, but their grave;</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i11">where nothing,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">But who knows nothing, is once seen to smile:<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Where sighs and groans and shrieks that rend the air<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Are made, not mark'd.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>For this wild rage and furious cruelty we are prepared; but vices of
+another kind start up as he plunges on his downward way.</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i9">I grant him bloody,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Luxurious, avaricious, false, deceitful,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Sudden, malicious,<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>says Malcolm; and two of these epithets surprise us. Who would have
+expected avarice or lechery<a name="FNanchor_225" id="FNanchor_225"></a><a href="#Footnote_225" class="fnanchor">[225]</a> in Macbeth? His ruin seems complete.</p>
+
+<p><a name="Page_364" id="Page_364"></a><span class="pagenum">[364]</span>Yet it is never complete. To the end he never totally loses our
+sympathy; we never feel towards him as we do to those who appear the
+born children of darkness. There remains something sublime in the
+defiance with which, even when cheated of his last hope, he faces earth
+and hell and heaven. Nor would any soul to whom evil was congenial be
+capable of that heart-sickness which overcomes him when he thinks of the
+'honour, love, obedience, troops of friends' which 'he must not look to
+have' (and which Iago would never have cared to have), and contrasts
+with them</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i1">Curses, not loud but deep, mouth-honour, breath,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Which the poor heart would fain deny, and dare not,<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>(and which Iago would have accepted with indifference). Neither can I
+agree with those who find in his reception of the news of his wife's
+death proof of alienation or utter carelessness. There is no proof of
+these in the words,</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i8">She should have died hereafter;<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">There would have been a time for such a word,<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>spoken as they are by a man already in some measure prepared for such
+news, and now transported by the frenzy of his last fight for life. He
+has no time now to feel.<a name="FNanchor_226" id="FNanchor_226"></a><a href="#Footnote_226" class="fnanchor">[226]</a> Only, as he thinks of the morrow when time
+to feel will come&mdash;if anything comes, the vanity of all hopes and
+forward-lookings <a name="Page_365" id="Page_365"></a><span class="pagenum">[365]</span>sinks deep into his soul with an infinite weariness,
+and he murmurs,</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i1">To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Creeps in this petty pace from day to day<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">To the last syllable of recorded time,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">And all our yesterdays have lighted fools<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">The way to dusty death.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>In the very depths a gleam of his native love of goodness, and with it a
+touch of tragic grandeur, rests upon him. The evil he has desperately
+embraced continues to madden or to wither his inmost heart. No
+experience in the world could bring him to glory in it or make his peace
+with it, or to forget what he once was and Iago and Goneril never were.</p>
+
+<div class="footnotes">
+<div class="footnotehead">FOOTNOTES:</div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_194" id="Footnote_194"></a><a href="#FNanchor_194"><span class="label">[194]</span></a> See <a href="#NOTE_BB">note BB</a>.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_195" id="Footnote_195"></a><a href="#FNanchor_195"><span class="label">[195]</span></a> 'Hell is murky' (<span class="smcap">v.</span> i. 35). This, surely, is not
+meant for a scornful repetition of something said long ago by Macbeth.
+He would hardly in those days have used an argument or expressed a fear
+that could provoke nothing but contempt.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_196" id="Footnote_196"></a><a href="#FNanchor_196"><span class="label">[196]</span></a> Whether Banquo's ghost is a mere illusion, like the
+dagger, is discussed in <a href="#NOTE_FF">Note FF</a>.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_197" id="Footnote_197"></a><a href="#FNanchor_197"><span class="label">[197]</span></a> In parts of this paragraph I am indebted to Hunter's
+<i>Illustrations of Shakespeare</i>.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_198" id="Footnote_198"></a><a href="#FNanchor_198"><span class="label">[198]</span></a> The line is a foot short.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_199" id="Footnote_199"></a><a href="#FNanchor_199"><span class="label">[199]</span></a> It should be observed that in some cases the irony would
+escape an audience ignorant of the story and watching the play for the
+first time,&mdash;another indication that Shakespeare did not write solely
+for immediate stage purposes.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_200" id="Footnote_200"></a><a href="#FNanchor_200"><span class="label">[200]</span></a> Their influence on spectators is, I believe, very
+inferior. These scenes, like the Storm-scenes in <i>King Lear</i>, belong
+properly to the world of imagination.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_201" id="Footnote_201"></a><a href="#FNanchor_201"><span class="label">[201]</span></a> 'By yea and no, I think the 'oman is a witch indeed: I
+like not when a 'oman has a great peard' (<i>Merry Wives</i>, <span class="smcap">iv.</span>
+ii. 202).</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_202" id="Footnote_202"></a><a href="#FNanchor_202"><span class="label">[202]</span></a> Even the metaphor in the lines (<span class="smcap">ii.</span> iii. 127),
+</p>
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i1">What should be spoken here, where our fate,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Hid in an auger-hole, may rush and seize us?<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+<p>
+was probably suggested by the words in Scot's first chapter, 'They can
+go in and out at awger-holes.'</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_203" id="Footnote_203"></a><a href="#FNanchor_203"><span class="label">[203]</span></a> Once, 'weird women.' Whether Shakespeare knew that
+'weird' signified 'fate' we cannot tell, but it is probable that he did.
+The word occurs six times in <i>Macbeth</i> (it does not occur elsewhere in
+Shakespeare). The first three times it is spelt in the Folio <i>weyward</i>,
+the last three <i>weyard</i>. This may suggest a miswriting or misprinting of
+<i>wayward</i>; but, as that word is always spelt in the Folio either rightly
+or <i>waiward</i>, it is more likely that the <i>weyward</i> and <i>weyard</i> of
+<i>Macbeth</i> are the copyist's or printer's misreading of Shakespeare's
+<i>weird</i> or <i>weyrd</i>.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_204" id="Footnote_204"></a><a href="#FNanchor_204"><span class="label">[204]</span></a> The doubt as to these passages (see <a href="#NOTE_Z">Note Z</a>) does not
+arise from the mere appearance of this figure. The idea of Hecate's
+connection with witches appears also at <span class="smcap">ii.</span> i. 52, and she is
+mentioned again at <span class="smcap">iii.</span> ii. 41 (cf. <i>Mid. Night's Dream</i>,
+<span class="smcap">v.</span> i. 391, for her connection with fairies). It is part of the
+common traditional notion of the heathen gods being now devils. Scot
+refers to it several times. See the notes in the Clarendon Press edition
+on <span class="smcap">iii.</span> v. 1, or those in Furness's Variorum.
+</p><p>
+Of course in the popular notion the witch's spirits are devils or
+servants of Satan. If Shakespeare openly introduces this idea only in
+such phrases as 'the instruments of darkness' and 'what! can the devil
+speak true?' the reason is probably his unwillingness to give too much
+prominence to distinctively religious ideas.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_205" id="Footnote_205"></a><a href="#FNanchor_205"><span class="label">[205]</span></a> If this paragraph is true, some of the statements even of
+Lamb and of Coleridge about the Witches are, taken literally, incorrect.
+What these critics, and notably the former, describe so well is the
+poetic aspect abstracted from the remainder; and in describing this they
+attribute to the Witches themselves what belongs really to the complex
+of Witches, Spirits, and Hecate. For the purposes of imagination, no
+doubt, this inaccuracy is of small consequence; and it is these purposes
+that matter. [I have not attempted to fulfil them.]</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_206" id="Footnote_206"></a><a href="#FNanchor_206"><span class="label">[206]</span></a> See <a href="#NOTE_CC">Note CC</a>.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_207" id="Footnote_207"></a><a href="#FNanchor_207"><span class="label">[207]</span></a> The proclamation of Malcolm as Duncan's successor
+(<span class="smcap">i.</span> iv.) changes the position, but the design of murder is
+prior to this.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_208" id="Footnote_208"></a><a href="#FNanchor_208"><span class="label">[208]</span></a> Schlegel's assertion that the first thought of the murder
+comes from the Witches is thus in flat contradiction with the text. (The
+sentence in which he asserts this is, I may observe, badly mistranslated
+in the English version, which, wherever I have consulted the original,
+shows itself untrustworthy. It ought to be revised, for Schlegel is well
+worth reading.)</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_209" id="Footnote_209"></a><a href="#FNanchor_209"><span class="label">[209]</span></a> It is noticeable that Dr. Forman, who saw the play in
+1610 and wrote a sketch of it in his journal, says nothing about the
+later prophecies. Perhaps he despised them as mere stuff for the
+groundlings. The reader will find, I think, that the great poetic effect
+of Act <span class="smcap">iv.</span> Sc. i. depends much more on the 'charm' which
+precedes Macbeth's entrance, and on Macbeth himself, than on the
+predictions.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_210" id="Footnote_210"></a><a href="#FNanchor_210"><span class="label">[210]</span></a> This comparison was suggested by a passage in Hegel's
+<i>Aesthetik</i>, i. 291 ff.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_211" id="Footnote_211"></a><a href="#FNanchor_211"><span class="label">[211]</span></a> <i>Il.</i> i. 188 ff. (Leaf's translation).</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_212" id="Footnote_212"></a><a href="#FNanchor_212"><span class="label">[212]</span></a> The supernaturalism of the modern poet, indeed, is more
+'external' than that of the ancient. We have already had evidence of
+this, and shall find more when we come to the character of Banquo.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_213" id="Footnote_213"></a><a href="#FNanchor_213"><span class="label">[213]</span></a> The assertion that Lady Macbeth sought a crown for
+herself, or sought anything for herself, apart from her husband, is
+absolutely unjustified by anything in the play. It is based on a
+sentence of Holinshed's which Shakespeare did <i>not</i> use.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_214" id="Footnote_214"></a><a href="#FNanchor_214"><span class="label">[214]</span></a> The word is used of him (<span class="smcap">i.</span> ii. 67), but not in
+a way that decides this question or even bears on it.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_215" id="Footnote_215"></a><a href="#FNanchor_215"><span class="label">[215]</span></a> This view, thus generally stated, is not original, but I
+cannot say who first stated it.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_216" id="Footnote_216"></a><a href="#FNanchor_216"><span class="label">[216]</span></a> The latter, and more important, point was put quite
+clearly by Coleridge.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_217" id="Footnote_217"></a><a href="#FNanchor_217"><span class="label">[217]</span></a> It is the consequent insistence on the idea of fear, and
+the frequent repetition of the word, that have principally led to
+misinterpretation.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_218" id="Footnote_218"></a><a href="#FNanchor_218"><span class="label">[218]</span></a> <i>E.g.</i> <span class="smcap">i.</span> iii. 149, where he excuses his
+abstraction by saying that his 'dull brain was wrought with things
+forgotten,' when nothing could be more natural than that he should be
+thinking of his new honour.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_219" id="Footnote_219"></a><a href="#FNanchor_219"><span class="label">[219]</span></a> <i>E.g.</i> in <span class="smcap">i.</span> iv. This is so also in <span class="smcap">ii.</span>
+iii. 114 ff., though here there is some real imaginative excitement
+mingled with the rhetorical antitheses and balanced clauses and forced
+bombast.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_220" id="Footnote_220"></a><a href="#FNanchor_220"><span class="label">[220]</span></a> <span class="smcap">iii.</span> i. Lady Macbeth herself could not more
+naturally have introduced at intervals the questions 'Ride you this
+afternoon?' (l. 19), 'Is't far you ride?' (l. 24), 'Goes Fleance with
+you?' (l. 36).</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_221" id="Footnote_221"></a><a href="#FNanchor_221"><span class="label">[221]</span></a> We feel here, however, an underlying subdued frenzy which
+awakes some sympathy. There is an almost unendurable impatience
+expressed even in the rhythm of many of the lines; <i>e.g.</i>:
+</p>
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i16">Well then, now<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Have you consider'd of my speeches? Know<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">That it was he in the times past which held you<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">So under fortune, which you thought had been<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Our innocent self: this I made good to you<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">In our last conference, pass'd in probation with you,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">How you were borne in hand, how cross'd, the instruments,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Who wrought with them, and all things else that might<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">To half a soul and to a notion crazed<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Say, 'Thus did Banquo.'<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+<p>
+This effect is heard to the end of the play in Macbeth's less poetic
+speeches, and leaves the same impression of burning energy, though not
+of imaginative exaltation, as his great speeches. In these we find
+either violent, huge, sublime imagery, or a torrent of figurative
+expressions (as in the famous lines about 'the innocent sleep'). Our
+impressions as to the diction of the play are largely derived from these
+speeches of the hero, but not wholly so. The writing almost throughout
+leaves an impression of intense, almost feverish, activity.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_222" id="Footnote_222"></a><a href="#FNanchor_222"><span class="label">[222]</span></a> See his first words to the Ghost: 'Thou canst not say I
+did it.'</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_223" id="Footnote_223"></a><a href="#FNanchor_223"><span class="label">[223]</span></a>
+</p>
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i1">For only in destroying I find ease<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">To my relentless thoughts.&mdash;<i>Paradise Lost</i>, ix. 129.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+<p>
+Milton's portrait of Satan's misery here, and at the beginning of Book
+IV., might well have been suggested by <i>Macbeth</i>. Coleridge, after
+quoting Duncan's speech, <span class="smcap">i.</span> iv. 35 ff., says: 'It is a fancy;
+but I can never read this, and the following speeches of Macbeth,
+without involuntarily thinking of the Miltonic Messiah and Satan.' I
+doubt if it was a mere fancy. (It will be remembered that Milton thought
+at one time of writing a tragedy on Macbeth.)</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_224" id="Footnote_224"></a><a href="#FNanchor_224"><span class="label">[224]</span></a> The immediate reference in 'But no more sights' is
+doubtless to the visions called up by the Witches; but one of these, the
+'blood-bolter'd Banquo,' recalls to him the vision of the preceding
+night, of which he had said,
+</p>
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i8">You make me strange<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Even to the disposition that I owe,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">When now I think you can behold such <i>sights</i>,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">And keep the natural ruby of your cheeks,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">When mine is blanch'd with fear.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+</div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_225" id="Footnote_225"></a><a href="#FNanchor_225"><span class="label">[225]</span></a> 'Luxurious' and 'luxury' are used by Shakespeare only in
+this older sense. It must be remembered that these lines are spoken by
+Malcolm, but it seems likely that they are meant to be taken as true
+throughout.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_226" id="Footnote_226"></a><a href="#FNanchor_226"><span class="label">[226]</span></a> I do not at all suggest that his love for his wife
+remains what it was when he greeted her with the words 'My dearest love,
+Duncan comes here to-night.' He has greatly changed; she has ceased to
+help him, sunk in her own despair; and there is no intensity of anxiety
+in the questions he puts to the doctor about her. But his love for her
+was probably never unselfish, never the love of Brutus, who, in somewhat
+similar circumstances, uses, on the death of Cassius, words which remind
+us of Macbeth's:
+</p>
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i1">I shall find time, Cassius, I shall find time.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+<p>
+For the opposite strain of feeling cf. Sonnet 90:
+</p>
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i1">Then hate me if thou wilt; if ever, now,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Now while the world is bent my deeds to cross.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+</div>
+</div>
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><a name="Page_366" id="Page_366"></a><span class="pagenum">[366]</span></p>
+<h2><a name="LECTURE_X" id="LECTURE_X"></a>LECTURE X</h2>
+
+<h3>MACBETH</h3>
+
+
+<h4>1</h4>
+
+<p>To regard <i>Macbeth</i> as a play, like the love-tragedies <i>Romeo and
+Juliet</i> and <i>Antony and Cleopatra</i>, in which there are two central
+characters of equal importance, is certainly a mistake. But Shakespeare
+himself is in a measure responsible for it, because the first half of
+<i>Macbeth</i> is greater than the second, and in the first half Lady Macbeth
+not only appears more than in the second but exerts the ultimate
+deciding influence on the action. And, in the opening Act at least, Lady
+Macbeth is the most commanding and perhaps the most awe-inspiring figure
+that Shakespeare drew. Sharing, as we have seen, certain traits with her
+husband, she is at once clearly distinguished from him by an
+inflexibility of will, which appears to hold imagination, feeling, and
+conscience completely in check. To her the prophecy of things that will
+be becomes instantaneously the determination that they shall be:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i1">Glamis thou art, and Cawdor, and shalt be<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">That thou art promised.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>She knows her husband's weakness, how he scruples 'to catch the nearest
+way' to the object he desires; and she sets herself without a trace of
+doubt or conflict to counteract this weakness. To her there <a name="Page_367" id="Page_367"></a><span class="pagenum">[367]</span>is no
+separation between will and deed; and, as the deed falls in part to her,
+she is sure it will be done:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i7">The raven himself is hoarse<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">That croaks the fatal entrance of Duncan<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Under my battlements.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>On the moment of Macbeth's rejoining her, after braving infinite dangers
+and winning infinite praise, without a syllable on these subjects or a
+word of affection, she goes straight to her purpose and permits him to
+speak of nothing else. She takes the superior position and assumes the
+direction of affairs,&mdash;appears to assume it even more than she really
+can, that she may spur him on. She animates him by picturing the deed as
+heroic, 'this night's <i>great</i> business,' or 'our <i>great</i> quell,' while
+she ignores its cruelty and faithlessness. She bears down his faint
+resistance by presenting him with a prepared scheme which may remove
+from him the terror and danger of deliberation. She rouses him with a
+taunt no man can bear, and least of all a soldier,&mdash;the word 'coward.'
+She appeals even to his love for her:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i6">from this time<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Such I account thy love;<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>&mdash;such, that is, as the protestations of a drunkard. Her reasonings are
+mere sophisms; they could persuade no man. It is not by them, it is by
+personal appeals, through the admiration she extorts from him, and
+through sheer force of will, that she impels him to the deed. Her eyes
+are fixed upon the crown and the means to it; she does not attend to the
+consequences. Her plan of laying the guilt upon the chamberlains is
+invented on the spur of the moment, and simply to satisfy her husband.
+Her true mind is heard in the ringing cry with which she answers his
+question, 'Will it not be received ... that they have done it?'</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i1">Who <i>dares</i> receive it other?<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p><a name="Page_368" id="Page_368"></a><span class="pagenum">[368]</span>And this is repeated in the sleep-walking scene: 'What need we fear who
+knows it, when none can call our power to account?' Her passionate
+courage sweeps him off his feet. His decision is taken in a moment of
+enthusiasm:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i5">Bring forth men-children only;<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">For thy undaunted mettle should compose<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Nothing but males.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>And even when passion has quite died away her will remains supreme. In
+presence of overwhelming horror and danger, in the murder scene and the
+banquet scene, her self-control is perfect. When the truth of what she
+has done dawns on her, no word of complaint, scarcely a word of her own
+suffering, not a single word of her own as apart from his, escapes her
+when others are by. She helps him, but never asks his help. She leans on
+nothing but herself. And from the beginning to the end&mdash;though she makes
+once or twice a slip in acting her part&mdash;her will never fails her. Its
+grasp upon her nature may destroy her, but it is never relaxed. We are
+sure that she never betrayed her husband or herself by a word or even a
+look, save in sleep. However appalling she may be, she is sublime.</p>
+
+<p>In the earlier scenes of the play this aspect of Lady Macbeth's
+character is far the most prominent. And if she seems invincible she
+seems also inhuman. We find no trace of pity for the kind old king; no
+consciousness of the treachery and baseness of the murder; no sense of
+the value of the lives of the wretched men on whom the guilt is to be
+laid; no shrinking even from the condemnation or hatred of the world.
+Yet if the Lady Macbeth of these scenes were really utterly inhuman, or
+a 'fiend-like queen,' as Malcolm calls her, the Lady Macbeth of the
+sleep-walking scene would be an impossibility. The one woman could never
+become the other. And in fact, if we look <a name="Page_369" id="Page_369"></a><span class="pagenum">[369]</span>below the surface, there is
+evidence enough in the earlier scenes of preparation for the later. I do
+not mean that Lady Macbeth was naturally humane. There is nothing in the
+play to show this, and several passages subsequent to the murder-scene
+supply proof to the contrary. One is that where she exclaims, on being
+informed of Duncan's murder,</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i6">Woe, alas!<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">What, in our house?<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>This mistake in acting shows that she does not even know what the
+natural feeling in such circumstances would be; and Banquo's curt
+answer, 'Too cruel anywhere,' is almost a reproof of her insensibility.
+But, admitting this, we have in the first place to remember, in
+imagining the opening scenes, that she is deliberately bent on
+counteracting the 'human kindness' of her husband, and also that she is
+evidently not merely inflexibly determined but in a condition of
+abnormal excitability. That exaltation in the project which is so
+entirely lacking in Macbeth is strongly marked in her. When she tries to
+help him by representing their enterprise as heroic, she is deceiving
+herself as much as him. Their attainment of the crown presents itself to
+her, perhaps has long presented itself, as something so glorious, and
+she has fixed her will upon it so completely, that for the time she sees
+the enterprise in no other light than that of its greatness. When she
+soliloquises,</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i9">Yet do I fear thy nature:<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">It is too full o' the milk of human kindness<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">To catch the nearest way: thou wouldst be great;<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Art not without ambition, but without<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">The illness should attend it; what thou wouldst highly,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">That wouldst thou holily,<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>one sees that 'ambition' and 'great' and 'highly' and even 'illness' are
+to her simply terms of praise, <a name="Page_370" id="Page_370"></a><span class="pagenum">[370]</span>and 'holily' and 'human kindness' simply
+terms of blame. Moral distinctions do not in this exaltation exist for
+her; or rather they are inverted: 'good' means to her the crown and
+whatever is required to obtain it, 'evil' whatever stands in the way of
+its attainment. This attitude of mind is evident even when she is alone,
+though it becomes still more pronounced when she has to work upon her
+husband. And it persists until her end is attained. But, without being
+exactly forced, it betrays a strain which could not long endure.</p>
+
+<p>Besides this, in these earlier scenes the traces of feminine weakness
+and human feeling, which account for her later failure, are not absent.
+Her will, it is clear, was exerted to overpower not only her husband's
+resistance but some resistance in herself. Imagine Goneril uttering the
+famous words,</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i6">Had he not resembled<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">My father as he slept, I had done 't.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>They are spoken, I think, without any sentiment&mdash;impatiently, as though
+she regretted her weakness: but it was there. And in reality, quite
+apart from this recollection of her father, she could never have done
+the murder if her husband had failed. She had to nerve herself with wine
+to give her 'boldness' enough to go through her minor part. That
+appalling invocation to the spirits of evil, to unsex her and fill her
+from the crown to the toe topfull of direst cruelty, tells the same tale
+of determination to crush the inward protest. Goneril had no need of
+such a prayer. In the utterance of the frightful lines,</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i6">I have given suck, and know<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">How tender 'tis to love the babe that milks me:<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">I would, while it was smiling in my face,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Have pluck'd my nipple from his boneless gums,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">And dash'd the brains out, had I so sworn as you<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Have done to this,<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p><a name="Page_371" id="Page_371"></a><span class="pagenum">[371]</span>her voice should doubtless rise until it reaches, in 'dash'd the brains
+out,' an almost hysterical scream.<a name="FNanchor_227" id="FNanchor_227"></a><a href="#Footnote_227" class="fnanchor">[227]</a> These lines show unmistakably
+that strained exaltation which, as soon as the end is reached, vanishes,
+never to return.</p>
+
+<p>The greatness of Lady Macbeth lies almost wholly in courage and force of
+will. It is an error to regard her as remarkable on the intellectual
+side. In acting a part she shows immense self-control, but not much
+skill. Whatever may be thought of the plan of attributing the murder of
+Duncan to the chamberlains, to lay their bloody daggers on their
+pillows, as if they were determined to advertise their guilt, was a
+mistake which can be accounted for only by the excitement of the moment.
+But the limitations of her mind appear most in the point where she is
+most strongly contrasted with Macbeth,&mdash;in her comparative dulness of
+imagination. I say 'comparative,' for she sometimes uses highly poetic
+language, as indeed does everyone in Shakespeare who has any greatness
+of soul. Nor is she perhaps less imaginative than the majority of his
+heroines. But as compared with her husband she has little imagination.
+It is not <i>simply</i> that she suppresses what she has. To her, things
+remain at the most terrible moment precisely what they were at the
+calmest, plain facts which stand in a given relation to a certain deed,
+not visions which tremble and flicker in the light of other worlds. The
+probability that the old king will sleep soundly after his long journey
+to Inverness is to her simply a fortunate circumstance; but one can
+fancy the shoot of horror across Macbeth's face as she mentions it. She
+uses familiar and prosaic illustrations, like</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i1">Letting 'I dare not' wait upon 'I would,'<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Like the poor cat i' the adage,<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p><a name="Page_372" id="Page_372"></a><span class="pagenum">[372]</span>(the cat who wanted fish but did not like to wet her feet); or,</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i13">We fail?<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">But screw your courage to the sticking-place,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">And we'll not fail;<a name="FNanchor_228" id="FNanchor_228"></a><a href="#Footnote_228" class="fnanchor">[228]</a><br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>or,</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i9">Was the hope drunk<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Wherein you dress'd yourself? hath it slept since?<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">And wakes it now, to look so green and pale<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">At what it did so freely?<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>The Witches are practically nothing to her. She feels no sympathy in
+Nature with her guilty purpose, and would never bid the earth not hear
+her steps, which way they walk. The noises before the murder, and during
+it, are heard by her as simple facts, and are referred to their true
+sources. The knocking has no mystery for her: it comes from 'the south
+entry.' She calculates on the drunkenness of the grooms, compares the
+different effects of wine on herself and on them, and listens to their
+snoring. To her the blood upon her husband's hands suggests only the
+taunt,</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i1">My hands are of your colour, but I shame<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">To wear a heart so white;<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>and the blood to her is merely 'this filthy witness,'&mdash;words impossible
+to her husband, to whom it suggested something quite other than sensuous
+disgust or practical danger. The literalism of her mind appears fully in
+two contemptuous speeches where she dismisses his imaginings; in the
+murder scene:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i10">Infirm of purpose!<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Give me the daggers! The sleeping and the dead<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Are but as pictures: 'tis the eye of childhood<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">That fears a painted devil;<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p><a name="Page_373" id="Page_373"></a><span class="pagenum">[373]</span>and in the banquet scene:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i8">O these flaws and starts,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Impostors to true fear, would well become<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">A woman's story at a winter's fire,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Authorised by her grandam. Shame itself!<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Why do you make such faces? When all's done,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">You look but on a stool.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>Even in the awful scene where her imagination breaks loose in sleep she
+uses no such images as Macbeth's. It is the direct appeal of the facts
+to sense that has fastened on her memory. The ghastly realism of 'Yet
+who would have thought the old man to have had so much blood in him?' or
+'Here's the smell of the blood still,' is wholly unlike him. Her most
+poetical words, 'All the perfumes of Arabia will not sweeten this little
+hand,' are equally unlike his words about great Neptune's ocean. Hers,
+like some of her other speeches, are the more moving, from their greater
+simplicity and because they seem to tell of that self-restraint in
+suffering which is so totally lacking in him; but there is in them
+comparatively little of imagination. If we consider most of the passages
+to which I have referred, we shall find that the quality which moves our
+admiration is courage or force of will.</p>
+
+<p>This want of imagination, though it helps to make Lady Macbeth strong
+for immediate action, is fatal to her. If she does not feel beforehand
+the cruelty of Duncan's murder, this is mainly because she hardly
+imagines the act, or at most imagines its outward show, 'the motion of a
+muscle this way or that.' Nor does she in the least foresee those inward
+consequences which reveal themselves immediately in her husband, and
+less quickly in herself. It is often said that she understands him well.
+Had she done so, she never would have urged him on. She knows that he is
+given to strange fancies; but, not realising what they spring from, she
+has no idea <a name="Page_374" id="Page_374"></a><span class="pagenum">[374]</span>either that they may gain such power as to ruin the scheme,
+or that, while they mean present weakness, they mean also perception of
+the future. At one point in the murder scene the force of his
+imagination impresses her, and for a moment she is startled; a light
+threatens to break on her:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i6">These deeds must not be thought<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">After these ways: so, it will make us mad,<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>she says, with a sudden and great seriousness. And when he goes panting
+on, 'Methought I heard a voice cry, "Sleep no more,"' ... she breaks in,
+'What do you mean?' half-doubting whether this was not a real voice that
+he heard. Then, almost directly, she recovers herself, convinced of the
+vanity of his fancy. Nor does she understand herself any better than
+him. She never suspects that these deeds <i>must</i> be thought after these
+ways; that her facile realism,</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i1">A little water clears us of this deed,<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>will one day be answered by herself, 'Will these hands ne'er be clean?'
+or that the fatal commonplace, 'What's done is done,' will make way for
+her last despairing sentence, 'What's done cannot be undone.'</p>
+
+<p>Hence the development of her character&mdash;perhaps it would be more
+strictly accurate to say, the change in her state of mind&mdash;is both
+inevitable, and the opposite of the development we traced in Macbeth.
+When the murder has been done, the discovery of its hideousness, first
+reflected in the faces of her guests, comes to Lady Macbeth with the
+shock of a sudden disclosure, and at once her nature begins to sink. The
+first intimation of the change is given when, in the scene of the
+discovery, she faints.<a name="FNanchor_229" id="FNanchor_229"></a><a href="#Footnote_229" class="fnanchor">[229]</a> When next we see her, Queen of Scotland, the
+glory of her dream has faded. She enters, <a name="Page_375" id="Page_375"></a><span class="pagenum">[375]</span>disillusioned, and weary with
+want of sleep: she has thrown away everything and gained nothing:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i5">Nought's had, all's spent,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Where our desire is got without content:<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">'Tis safer to be that which we destroy<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Than by destruction dwell in doubtful joy.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>Henceforth she has no initiative: the stem of her being seems to be cut
+through. Her husband, physically the stronger, maddened by pangs he had
+foreseen, but still flaming with life, comes into the foreground, and
+she retires. Her will remains, and she does her best to help him; but he
+rarely needs her help. Her chief anxiety appears to be that he should
+not betray his misery. He plans the murder of Banquo without her
+knowledge (not in order to spare her, I think, for he never shows love
+of this quality, but merely because he does not need her now); and even
+when she is told vaguely of his intention she appears but little
+interested. In the sudden emergency of the banquet scene she makes a
+prodigious and magnificent effort; her strength, and with it her
+ascendancy, returns, and she saves her husband at least from an open
+disclosure. But after this she takes no part whatever in the action. We
+only know from her shuddering words in the sleep-walking scene, 'The
+Thane of Fife had a wife: where is she now?' that she has even learned
+of her husband's worst crime; and in all the horrors of his tyranny over
+Scotland she has, so far as we hear, no part. Disillusionment and
+despair prey upon her more and more. That she should seek any relief in
+speech, or should ask for sympathy, would seem to her mere weakness, and
+would be to Macbeth's defiant fury an irritation. Thinking of the change
+in him, we imagine the bond between them slackened, and Lady Macbeth
+left much alone. She sinks slowly downward. She cannot bear darkness,
+and has <a name="Page_376" id="Page_376"></a><span class="pagenum">[376]</span>light by her continually: 'tis her command. At last her nature,
+not her will, gives way. The secrets of the past find vent in a disorder
+of sleep, the beginning perhaps of madness. What the doctor fears is
+clear. He reports to her husband no great physical mischief, but bids
+her attendant to remove from her all means by which she could harm
+herself, and to keep eyes on her constantly. It is in vain. Her death is
+announced by a cry from her women so sudden and direful that it would
+thrill her husband with horror if he were any longer capable of fear. In
+the last words of the play Malcolm tells us it is believed in the
+hostile army that she died by her own hand. And (not to speak of the
+indications just referred to) it is in accordance with her character
+that even in her weakest hour she should cut short by one determined
+stroke the agony of her life.</p>
+
+<p>The sinking of Lady Macbeth's nature, and the marked change in her
+demeanour to her husband, are most strikingly shown in the conclusion of
+the banquet scene; and from this point pathos is mingled with awe. The
+guests are gone. She is completely exhausted, and answers Macbeth in
+listless, submissive words which seem to come with difficulty. How
+strange sounds the reply 'Did you send to him, sir?' to his imperious
+question about Macduff! And when he goes on, 'waxing desperate in
+imagination,' to speak of new deeds of blood, she seems to sicken at the
+thought, and there is a deep pathos in that answer which tells at once
+of her care for him and of the misery she herself has silently endured,</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i1">You lack the season of all natures, sleep.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>We begin to think of her now less as the awful instigator of murder than
+as a woman with much that is grand in her, and much that is piteous.
+Strange and almost ludicrous as the statement may <a name="Page_377" id="Page_377"></a><span class="pagenum">[377]</span>sound,<a name="FNanchor_230" id="FNanchor_230"></a><a href="#Footnote_230" class="fnanchor">[230]</a> she is,
+up to her light, a perfect wife. She gives her husband the best she has;
+and the fact that she never uses to him the terms of affection which, up
+to this point in the play, he employs to her, is certainly no indication
+of want of love. She urges, appeals, reproaches, for a practical end,
+but she never recriminates. The harshness of her taunts is free from
+mere personal feeling, and also from any deep or more than momentary
+contempt. She despises what she thinks the weakness which stands in the
+way of her husband's ambition; but she does not despise <i>him</i>. She
+evidently admires him and thinks him a great man, for whom the throne is
+the proper place. Her commanding attitude in the moments of his
+hesitation or fear is probably confined to them. If we consider the
+peculiar circumstances of the earlier scenes and the banquet scene, and
+if we examine the language of the wife and husband at other times, we
+shall come, I think, to the conclusion that their habitual relations are
+better represented by the later scenes than by the earlier, though
+naturally they are not truly represented by either. Her ambition for her
+husband and herself (there was no distinction to her mind) proved fatal
+to him, far more so than the prophecies of the Witches; but even when
+she pushed him into murder she believed she was helping him to do what
+he merely lacked the nerve to attempt; and her part in the crime was so
+much less open-eyed than his, that, if the impossible and undramatic
+task of estimating degrees of culpability were forced on us, we should
+surely have to assign the larger share to Macbeth.</p>
+
+<p>'Lady Macbeth,' says Dr. Johnson, 'is merely detested'; and for a long
+time critics generally spoke of her as though she were Malcolm's
+'fiend-like queen.' In natural reaction we tend to insist, as I have
+been doing, on the other and less obvious <a name="Page_378" id="Page_378"></a><span class="pagenum">[378]</span>side; and in the criticism of
+the last century there is even a tendency to sentimentalise the
+character. But it can hardly be doubted that Shakespeare meant the
+predominant impression to be one of awe, grandeur, and horror, and that
+he never meant this impression to be lost, however it might be modified,
+as Lady Macbeth's activity diminishes and her misery increases. I cannot
+believe that, when she said of Banquo and Fleance,</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i1">But in them nature's copy's not eterne,<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>she meant only that they would some day die; or that she felt any
+surprise when Macbeth replied,</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i1">There's comfort yet: they are assailable;<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>though I am sure no light came into her eyes when he added those
+dreadful words, 'Then be thou jocund.' She was listless. She herself
+would not have moved a finger against Banquo. But she thought his death,
+and his son's death, might ease her husband's mind, and she suggested
+the murders indifferently and without remorse. The sleep-walking scene,
+again, inspires pity, but its main effect is one of awe. There is great
+horror in the references to blood, but it cannot be said that there is
+more than horror; and Campbell was surely right when, in alluding to
+Mrs. Jameson's analysis, he insisted that in Lady Macbeth's misery there
+is no trace of contrition.<a name="FNanchor_231" id="FNanchor_231"></a><a href="#Footnote_231" class="fnanchor">[231]</a> Doubtless she would have given the world
+to undo what she had done; and the thought of it killed her; but,
+regarding her <a name="Page_379" id="Page_379"></a><span class="pagenum">[379]</span>from the tragic point of view, we may truly say she was
+too great to repent.<a name="FNanchor_232" id="FNanchor_232"></a><a href="#Footnote_232" class="fnanchor">[232]</a></p>
+
+
+<h4>2</h4>
+
+<p>The main interest of the character of Banquo arises from the changes
+that take place in him, and from the influence of the Witches upon him.
+And it is curious that Shakespeare's intention here is so frequently
+missed. Banquo being at first strongly contrasted with Macbeth, as an
+innocent man with a guilty, it seems to be supposed that this contrast
+must be continued to his death; while, in reality, though it is never
+removed, it is gradually diminished. Banquo in fact may be described
+much more truly than Macbeth as the victim <a name="Page_380" id="Page_380"></a><span class="pagenum">[380]</span>of the Witches. If we follow
+his story this will be evident.</p>
+
+<p>He bore a part only less distinguished than Macbeth's in the battles
+against Sweno and Macdonwald. He and Macbeth are called 'our captains,'
+and when they meet the Witches they are traversing the 'blasted
+heath'<a name="FNanchor_233" id="FNanchor_233"></a><a href="#Footnote_233" class="fnanchor">[233]</a> alone together. Banquo accosts the strange shapes without
+the slightest fear. They lay their fingers on their lips, as if to
+signify that they will not, or must not, speak to <i>him</i>. To Macbeth's
+brief appeal, 'Speak, if you can: what are you?' they at once reply, not
+by saying what they are, but by hailing him Thane of Glamis, Thane of
+Cawdor, and King hereafter. Banquo is greatly surprised that his partner
+should start as if in fear, and observes that he is at once 'rapt'; and
+he bids the Witches, if they know the future, to prophesy to <i>him</i>, who
+neither begs their favour nor fears their hate. Macbeth, looking back at
+a later time, remembers Banquo's daring, and how</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i8">he chid the sisters,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">When first they put the name of king upon me,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">And bade them speak to him.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>'Chid' is an exaggeration; but Banquo is evidently a bold man, probably
+an ambitious one, and certainly has no lurking guilt in his ambition. On
+hearing the predictions concerning himself and his descendants he makes
+no answer, and when the Witches are about to vanish he shows none of
+Macbeth's feverish anxiety to know more. On their vanishing he is simply
+amazed, wonders if they were anything but hallucinations, makes no
+reference to the predictions till Macbeth mentions them, and then
+answers lightly.</p>
+
+<p>When Ross and Angus, entering, announce to Macbeth that he has been made
+Thane of Cawdor, <a name="Page_381" id="Page_381"></a><span class="pagenum">[381]</span>Banquo exclaims, aside, to himself or Macbeth, 'What!
+can the devil speak true?' He now believes that the Witches were real
+beings and the 'instruments of darkness.' When Macbeth, turning to him,
+whispers,</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i1">Do you not hope your children shall be kings,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">When those that gave the Thane of Cawdor to me<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Promised no less to them?<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>he draws with the boldness of innocence the inference which is really
+occupying Macbeth, and answers,</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i10">That, trusted home,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Might yet enkindle you unto the crown<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Besides the thane of Cawdor.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>Here he still speaks, I think, in a free, off-hand, even jesting,<a name="FNanchor_234" id="FNanchor_234"></a><a href="#Footnote_234" class="fnanchor">[234]</a>
+manner ('enkindle' meaning merely 'excite you to <i>hope</i> for'). But then,
+possibly from noticing something in Macbeth's face, he becomes graver,
+and goes on, with a significant 'but,'</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i9">But 'tis strange:<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">And oftentimes, to win us to our harm,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">The instruments of darkness tell us truths,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Win us with honest trifles, to betray's<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">In deepest consequence.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>He afterwards observes for the second time that his partner is 'rapt';
+but he explains his abstraction naturally and sincerely by referring to
+the surprise of his new honours; and at the close of the scene, when
+Macbeth proposes that they shall discuss the predictions together at
+some later time, he answers in the cheerful, rather bluff manner, which
+he has used almost throughout, 'Very gladly.' Nor was there any reason
+why Macbeth's rejoinder, 'Till then, enough,' should excite misgivings
+in him, though it implied a request for silence, and though the <a name="Page_382" id="Page_382"></a><span class="pagenum">[382]</span>whole
+behaviour of his partner during the scene must have looked very
+suspicious to him when the prediction of the crown was made good through
+the murder of Duncan.</p>
+
+<p>In the next scene Macbeth and Banquo join the King, who welcomes them
+both with the kindest expressions of gratitude and with promises of
+favours to come. Macbeth has indeed already received a noble reward.
+Banquo, who is said by the King to have 'no less deserved,' receives as
+yet mere thanks. His brief and frank acknowledgment is contrasted with
+Macbeth's laboured rhetoric; and, as Macbeth goes out, Banquo turns with
+hearty praises of him to the King.</p>
+
+<p>And when next we see him, approaching Macbeth's castle in company with
+Duncan, there is still no sign of change. Indeed he gains on us. It is
+he who speaks the beautiful lines,</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i9">This guest of summer,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">The temple-haunting martlet, does approve,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">By his loved mansionry, that the heaven's breath<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Smells wooingly here: no jutty, frieze,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Buttress, nor coign of vantage, but this bird<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Hath made his pendent bed and procreant cradle:<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Where they most breed and haunt, I have observed,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">The air is delicate;<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>&mdash;lines which tell of that freedom of heart, and that sympathetic sense
+of peace and beauty, which the Macbeth of the tragedy could never feel.</p>
+
+<p>But now Banquo's sky begins to darken. At the opening of the Second Act
+we see him with Fleance crossing the court of the castle on his way to
+bed. The blackness of the moonless, starless night seems to oppress him.
+And he is oppressed by something else.</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i1">A heavy summons lies like lead upon me,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">And yet I would not sleep: merciful powers,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Restrain in me the cursed thoughts that nature<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Gives way to in repose!<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p><a name="Page_383" id="Page_383"></a><span class="pagenum">[383]</span>On Macbeth's entrance we know what Banquo means: he says to
+Macbeth&mdash;and it is the first time he refers to the subject unprovoked,</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i1">I dreamt last night of the three weird sisters.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>His will is still untouched: he would repel the 'cursed thoughts'; and
+they are mere thoughts, not intentions. But still they are 'thoughts,'
+something more, probably, than mere recollections; and they bring with
+them an undefined sense of guilt. The poison has begun to work.</p>
+
+<p>The passage that follows Banquo's words to Macbeth is difficult to
+interpret:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i1">I dreamt last night of the three weird sisters:<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">To you they have show'd some truth.<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i1"><i>Macb.</i><span style="margin-left: 12em;">I think not of them:</span><br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Yet, when we can entreat an hour to serve,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">We would spend it in some words upon that business,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">If you would grant the time.<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i1"><i>Ban.</i><span style="margin-left: 9em;">At your kind'st leisure.</span><br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i1"><i>Macb.</i> If you shall cleave to my consent, when 'tis,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">It shall make honour for you.<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i1"><i>Ban.</i><span style="margin-left: 10em;">So I lose none</span><br /></span>
+<span class="i1">In seeking to augment it, but still keep<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">My bosom franchised and allegiance clear,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">I shall be counsell'd.<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i1"><i>Macb.</i><span style="margin-left: 6em;">Good repose the while!</span><br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i1"><i>Ban.</i> Thanks, sir: the like to you!<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>Macbeth's first idea is, apparently, simply to free himself from any
+suspicion which the discovery of the murder might suggest, by showing
+himself, just before it, quite indifferent to the predictions, and
+merely looking forward to a conversation about them at some future time.
+But why does he go on, 'If you shall cleave,' etc.? Perhaps he foresees
+that, on the discovery, Banquo cannot fail to suspect him, and thinks it
+safest to prepare the way at once for an understanding with him (in the
+original story he makes Banquo his accomplice <i>before</i> the murder).
+Banquo's answer shows three things,&mdash;that he fears a treasonable
+proposal, that he has no idea of <a name="Page_384" id="Page_384"></a><span class="pagenum">[384]</span>accepting it, and that he has no fear
+of Macbeth to restrain him from showing what is in his mind.</p>
+
+<p>Duncan is murdered. In the scene of discovery Banquo of course appears,
+and his behaviour is significant. When he enters, and Macduff cries out
+to him,</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i5">O Banquo, Banquo,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Our royal master's murdered,<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>and Lady Macbeth, who has entered a moment before, exclaims,</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i6">Woe, alas!<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">What, in our house?<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>his answer,</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i9">Too cruel anywhere,<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>shows, as I have pointed out, repulsion, and we may be pretty sure that
+he suspects the truth at once. After a few words to Macduff he remains
+absolutely silent while the scene is continued for nearly forty lines.
+He is watching Macbeth and listening as he tells how he put the
+chamberlains to death in a frenzy of loyal rage. At last Banquo appears
+to have made up his mind. On Lady Macbeth's fainting he proposes that
+they shall all retire, and that they shall afterwards meet,</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i1">And question this most bloody piece of work<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">To know it further. Fears and scruples<a name="FNanchor_235" id="FNanchor_235"></a><a href="#Footnote_235" class="fnanchor">[235]</a> shake us:<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">In the great hand of God I stand, and thence<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Against the undivulged pretence<a name="FNanchor_236" id="FNanchor_236"></a><a href="#Footnote_236" class="fnanchor">[236]</a> I fight<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Of treasonous malice.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>His solemn language here reminds us of his grave words about 'the
+instruments of darkness,' and of his later prayer to the 'merciful
+powers.' He is profoundly shocked, full of indignation, and determined
+to play the part of a brave and honest man.</p>
+
+<p>But he plays no such part. When next we see him, on the last day of his
+life, we find that he has <a name="Page_385" id="Page_385"></a><span class="pagenum">[385]</span>yielded to evil. The Witches and his own
+ambition have conquered him. He alone of the lords knew of the
+prophecies, but he has said nothing of them. He has acquiesced in
+Macbeth's accession, and in the official theory that Duncan's sons had
+suborned the chamberlains to murder him. Doubtless, unlike Macduff, he
+was present at Scone to see the new king invested. He has, not formally
+but in effect, 'cloven to' Macbeth's 'consent'; he is knit to him by 'a
+most indissoluble tie'; his advice in council has been 'most grave and
+prosperous'; he is to be the 'chief guest' at that night's supper. And
+his soliloquy tells us why:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i1">Thou hast it now: king, Cawdor, Glamis, all,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">As the weird women promised, and, I fear,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Thou play'dst most foully for't: yet it was said<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">It should not stand in thy posterity,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">But that myself should be the root and father<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Of many kings. If there come truth from them&mdash;<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">As upon thee, Macbeth, their speeches shine&mdash;<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Why, by the verities on thee made good,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">May they not be my oracles as well,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">And set me up in hope? But hush! no more.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>This 'hush! no more' is not the dismissal of 'cursed thoughts': it only
+means that he hears the trumpets announcing the entrance of the King and
+Queen.</p>
+
+<p>His punishment comes swiftly, much more swiftly than Macbeth's, and
+saves him from any further fall. He is a very fearless man, and still so
+far honourable that he has no thought of acting to bring about the
+fulfilment of the prophecy which has beguiled him. And therefore he has
+no fear of Macbeth. But he little understands him. To Macbeth's
+tormented mind Banquo's conduct appears highly suspicious. <i>Why</i> has
+this bold and circumspect<a name="FNanchor_237" id="FNanchor_237"></a><a href="#Footnote_237" class="fnanchor">[237]</a> man kept his secret and become his <a name="Page_386" id="Page_386"></a><span class="pagenum">[386]</span>chief
+adviser? In order to make good <i>his</i> part of the predictions after
+Macbeth's own precedent. Banquo, he is sure, will suddenly and secretly
+attack him. It is not the far-off accession of Banquo's descendants that
+he fears; it is (so he tells himself) swift murder; not that the 'barren
+sceptre' will some day droop from his dying hand, but that it will be
+'wrenched' away now (<span class="smcap">iii.</span> i. 62).<a name="FNanchor_238" id="FNanchor_238"></a><a href="#Footnote_238" class="fnanchor">[238]</a> So he kills Banquo. But
+the Banquo he kills is not the innocent soldier who met the Witches and
+daffed their prophecies aside, nor the man who prayed to be delivered
+from the temptation of his dreams.</p>
+
+<p><i>Macbeth</i> leaves on most readers a profound impression of the misery of
+a guilty conscience and the retribution of crime. And the strength of
+this impression is one of the reasons why the tragedy is admired by
+readers who shrink from <i>Othello</i> and are made unhappy by <i>Lear</i>. But
+what Shakespeare perhaps felt even more deeply, when he wrote this play,
+was the <i>incalculability</i> of evil,&mdash;that in meddling with it human
+beings do they know not what. The soul, he seems to feel, is a thing of
+such inconceivable depth, complexity, and delicacy, that when you
+introduce into it, or suffer to develop in it, any change, and
+particularly the change called evil, you can form only the vaguest idea
+of the reaction you will provoke. All you can be sure of is that it will
+not be what you expected, and that you cannot possibly escape it.
+Banquo's story, if truly apprehended, produces this impression quite as
+strongly as the more terrific stories of the chief characters, and
+perhaps even more clearly, inasmuch <a name="Page_387" id="Page_387"></a><span class="pagenum">[387]</span>as he is nearer to average human
+nature, has obviously at first a quiet conscience, and uses with evident
+sincerity the language of religion.</p>
+
+
+<h4>3</h4>
+
+<p>Apart from his story Banquo's character is not very interesting, nor is
+it, I think, perfectly individual. And this holds good of the rest of
+the minor characters. They are sketched lightly, and are seldom
+developed further than the strict purposes of the action required. From
+this point of view they are inferior to several of the less important
+figures in each of the other three tragedies. The scene in which Lady
+Macduff and her child appear, and the passage where their slaughter is
+reported to Macduff, have much dramatic value, but in neither case is
+the effect due to any great extent to the special characters of the
+persons concerned. Neither they, nor Duncan, nor Malcolm, nor even
+Banquo himself, have been imagined intensely, and therefore they do not
+produce that sense of unique personality which Shakespeare could convey
+in a much smaller number of lines than he gives to most of them.<a name="FNanchor_239" id="FNanchor_239"></a><a href="#Footnote_239" class="fnanchor">[239]</a>
+And this is of course even more the case with persons like Ross, Angus,
+and Lennox, though each of these has distinguishable features. I doubt
+if any other great play of Shakespeare's contains so many speeches which
+a student of the play, if they were quoted to him, would be puzzled to
+assign to the speakers. Let the reader turn, for instance, to the second
+scene of the Fifth Act, and ask himself why the names of the persons
+should not be interchanged in all the ways mathematically possible. Can
+he find, again, any signs of character by which to distinguish the
+speeches of Ross and Angus in Act <span class="smcap">i.</span> scenes ii. and iii., or to
+determine that <a name="Page_388" id="Page_388"></a><span class="pagenum">[388]</span>Malcolm must have spoken <span class="smcap">i.</span> iv. 2-11? Most of
+this writing, we may almost say, is simply Shakespeare's writing, not
+that of Shakespeare become another person. And can anything like the
+same proportion of such writing be found in <i>Hamlet</i>, <i>Othello</i>, or
+<i>King Lear</i>?</p>
+
+<p>Is it possible to guess the reason of this characteristic of <i>Macbeth</i>?
+I cannot believe it is due to the presence of a second hand. The
+writing, mangled by the printer and perhaps by 'the players,' seems to
+be sometimes obviously Shakespeare's, sometimes sufficiently
+Shakespearean to repel any attack not based on external evidence. It may
+be, as the shortness of the play has suggested to some, that Shakespeare
+was hurried, and, throwing all his weight on the principal characters,
+did not exert himself in dealing with the rest. But there is another
+possibility which may be worth considering. <i>Macbeth</i> is distinguished
+by its simplicity,&mdash;by grandeur in simplicity, no doubt, but still by
+simplicity. The two great figures indeed can hardly be called simple,
+except in comparison with such characters as Hamlet and Iago; but in
+almost every other respect the tragedy has this quality. Its plot is
+quite plain. It has very little intermixture of humour. It has little
+pathos except of the sternest kind. The style, for Shakespeare, has not
+much variety, being generally kept at a higher pitch than in the other
+three tragedies; and there is much less than usual of the interchange of
+verse and prose.<a name="FNanchor_240" id="FNanchor_240"></a><a href="#Footnote_240" class="fnanchor">[240]</a> All this makes for simplicity of effect. And, this
+being so, is it not possible that Shakespeare instinctively felt, or
+consciously feared, that to give much individuality or attraction to the
+subordinate figures would diminish this effect, and so, like a good
+artist, sacrificed a part to the whole? <a name="Page_389" id="Page_389"></a><span class="pagenum">[389]</span>And was he wrong? He has
+certainly avoided the overloading which distresses us in <i>King Lear</i>,
+and has produced a tragedy utterly unlike it, not much less great as a
+dramatic poem, and as a drama superior.</p>
+
+<p>I would add, though without much confidence, another suggestion. The
+simplicity of <i>Macbeth</i> is one of the reasons why many readers feel
+that, in spite of its being intensely 'romantic,' it is less unlike a
+classical tragedy than <i>Hamlet</i> or <i>Othello</i> or <i>King Lear</i>. And it is
+possible that this effect is, in a sense, the result of design. I do not
+mean that Shakespeare intended to imitate a classical tragedy; I mean
+only that he may have seen in the bloody story of Macbeth a subject
+suitable for treatment in a manner somewhat nearer to that of Seneca, or
+of the English Senecan plays familiar to him in his youth, than was the
+manner of his own mature tragedies. The Witches doubtless are
+'romantic,' but so is the witch-craft in Seneca's <i>Medea</i> and <i>Hercules
+Oetaeus</i>; indeed it is difficult to read the account of Medea's
+preparations (670-739) without being reminded of the incantations in
+<i>Macbeth</i>. Banquo's Ghost again is 'romantic,' but so are Seneca's
+ghosts. For the swelling of the style in some of the great
+passages&mdash;however immeasurably superior these may be to anything in
+Seneca&mdash;and certainly for the turgid bombast which occasionally appears
+in <i>Macbeth</i>, and which seems to have horrified Jonson, Shakespeare
+might easily have found a model in Seneca. Did he not think that this
+was the high Roman manner? Does not the Sergeant's speech, as Coleridge
+observed, recall the style of the 'passionate speech' of the Player in
+<i>Hamlet</i>,&mdash;a speech, be it observed, on a Roman subject?<a name="FNanchor_241" id="FNanchor_241"></a><a href="#Footnote_241" class="fnanchor">[241]</a> And is it
+entirely an accident <a name="Page_390" id="Page_390"></a><span class="pagenum">[390]</span>that parallels between Seneca and Shakespeare seem
+to be more frequent in <i>Macbeth</i> than in any other of his undoubtedly
+genuine works except perhaps <i>Richard III.</i>, a tragedy unquestionably
+influenced either by Seneca or by English Senecan plays?<a name="FNanchor_242" id="FNanchor_242"></a><a href="#Footnote_242" class="fnanchor">[242]</a> If there
+is anything in these suggestions, and if we suppose that Shakespeare
+meant to give to his play a certain classical tinge, he might naturally
+carry out this idea in respect to the characters, as well as in other
+respects, by concentrating almost the whole interest on the important
+figures and leaving the others comparatively shadowy.</p>
+
+<p><a name="Page_391" id="Page_391"></a><span class="pagenum">[391]</span></p>
+<h4>4</h4>
+
+<p><i>Macbeth</i> being more simple than the other tragedies, and broader and
+more massive in effect, three passages in it are of great importance as
+securing variety in tone, and also as affording relief from the feelings
+excited by the Witch-scenes and the principal characters. They are the
+passage where the Porter appears, the conversation between Lady Macduff
+and her little boy, and the passage where Macduff receives the news of
+the slaughter of his wife and babes. Yet the first of these, we are told
+even by Coleridge, is unworthy of Shakespeare and is not his; and the
+second, with the rest of the scene which contains it, appears to be
+usually omitted in stage representations of <i>Macbeth</i>.</p>
+
+<p>I question if either this scene or the exhibition of Macduff's grief is
+required to heighten our abhorrence of Macbeth's cruelty. They have a
+technical value in helping to give the last stage of the action the form
+of a conflict between Macbeth and Macduff. But their chief function is
+of another kind. It is to touch the heart with a sense of beauty and
+pathos, to open the springs of love and of tears. Shakespeare is loved
+for the sweetness of his humanity, and because he makes this kind of
+appeal with such irresistible persuasion; and the reason why <i>Macbeth</i>,
+though admired as much as any work of his, is scarcely loved, is that
+the characters who predominate cannot make this kind of appeal, and at
+no point are able to inspire unmingled sympathy. The two passages in
+question supply this want in such measure as Shakespeare thought
+advisable in <i>Macbeth</i>, and the play would suffer greatly from their
+excision. The second, on the stage, is extremely moving, and Macbeth's
+reception of the news of his wife's death may be intended to recall it
+by way of contrast. The first brings a relief <a name="Page_392" id="Page_392"></a><span class="pagenum">[392]</span>even greater, because
+here the element of beauty is more marked, and because humour is mingled
+with pathos. In both we escape from the oppression of huge sins and
+sufferings into the presence of the wholesome affections of unambitious
+hearts; and, though both scenes are painful and one dreadful, our
+sympathies can flow unchecked.<a name="FNanchor_243" id="FNanchor_243"></a><a href="#Footnote_243" class="fnanchor">[243]</a></p>
+
+<p>Lady Macduff is a simple wife and mother, who has no thought for
+anything beyond her home. Her love for her children shows her at once
+that her husband's flight exposes them to terrible danger. She is in an
+agony of fear for them, and full of indignation against him. It does not
+even occur to her that he has acted from public spirit, or that there is
+such a thing.</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i1">What had he done to make him fly the land?<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>He must have been mad to do it. He fled for fear. He does not love his
+wife and children. He is a traitor. The poor soul is almost beside
+herself&mdash;and with too good reason. But when the murderer bursts in with
+the question 'Where is your husband?' she becomes in a moment the wife,
+and the great noble's wife:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i1">I hope, in no place so unsanctified<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Where such as thou may'st find him.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>What did Shakespeare mean us to think of Macduff's flight, for which
+Macduff has been much blamed by others beside his wife? Certainly not
+that fear for himself, or want of love for his family, had anything to
+do with it. His love for his country, so strongly marked in the scene
+with Malcolm, is evidently his one motive.</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i1">He is noble, wise, judicious, and best knows<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">The fits o' the season,<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>says Ross. That his flight was 'noble' is beyond doubt. That it was not
+wise or judicious in the <a name="Page_393" id="Page_393"></a><span class="pagenum">[393]</span>interest of his family is no less clear. But
+that does not show that it was wrong; and, even if it were, to represent
+its consequences as a judgment on him for his want of due consideration
+is equally monstrous and ludicrous.<a name="FNanchor_244" id="FNanchor_244"></a><a href="#Footnote_244" class="fnanchor">[244]</a> The further question whether he
+did fail in due consideration, or whether for his country's sake he
+deliberately risked a danger which he fully realised, would in
+Shakespeare's theatre have been answered at once by Macduff's expression
+and demeanour on hearing Malcolm's words,</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i1">Why in that rawness left you wife and child,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Those precious motives, those strong knots of love,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Without leave-taking?<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>It cannot be decided with certainty from the mere text; but, without
+going into the considerations on each side, I may express the opinion
+that Macduff knew well what he was doing, and that he fled without
+leave-taking for fear his purpose should give way. Perhaps he said to
+himself, with Coriolanus,</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i1">Not of a woman's tenderness to be,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Requires nor child nor woman's face to see.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>Little Macduff suggests a few words on Shakespeare's boys (there are
+scarcely any little girls). It is somewhat curious that nearly all of
+them appear in tragic or semi-tragic dramas. I remember but two
+exceptions: little William Page, who said <a name="Page_394" id="Page_394"></a><span class="pagenum">[394]</span>his <i>Hic, haec, hoc</i> to Sir
+Hugh Evans; and the page before whom Falstaff walked like a sow that
+hath overwhelmed all her litter but one; and it is to be feared that
+even this page, if he is the Boy of <i>Henry V.</i>, came to an ill end,
+being killed with the luggage.</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i1">So wise so young, they say, do ne'er live long,<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>as Richard observed of the little Prince of Wales. Of too many of these
+children (some of the 'boys,' <i>e.g.</i> those in <i>Cymbeline</i>, are lads, not
+children) the saying comes true. They are pathetic figures, the more so
+because they so often appear in company with their unhappy mothers, and
+can never be thought of apart from them. Perhaps Arthur is even the
+first creation in which Shakespeare's power of pathos showed itself
+mature;<a name="FNanchor_245" id="FNanchor_245"></a><a href="#Footnote_245" class="fnanchor">[245]</a> and the last of his children, Mamillius, assuredly proves
+that it never decayed. They are almost all of them noble figures,
+too,&mdash;affectionate, frank, brave, high-spirited, 'of an open and free
+nature' like Shakespeare's best men. And almost all of them, again, are
+amusing and charming as well as pathetic; comical in their mingled
+acuteness and <i>na&iuml;vet&eacute;</i>, charming in their confidence in themselves and
+the world, and in the seriousness with which they receive the jocosity
+of their elders, who commonly address them as strong men, great
+warriors, or profound politicians.</p>
+
+<p>Little Macduff exemplifies most of these remarks. There is nothing in
+the scene of a transcendent kind, like the passage about Mamillius'
+never-finished 'Winter's Tale' of the man who dwelt by a churchyard, or
+the passage about his death, or that about little Marcius and the
+butterfly, or the audacity which introduces him, at the supreme <a name="Page_395" id="Page_395"></a><span class="pagenum">[395]</span>moment
+of the tragedy, outdoing the appeals of Volumnia and Virgilia by the
+statement,</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i8">'A shall not tread on me:<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">I'll run away till I'm bigger, but then I'll fight.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>Still one does not easily forget little Macduff's delightful and
+well-justified confidence in his ability to defeat his mother in
+argument; or the deep impression she made on him when she spoke of his
+father as a 'traitor'; or his immediate response when he heard the
+murderer call his father by the same name,&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i1">Thou liest, thou shag-haired villain.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>Nor am I sure that, if the son of Coriolanus had been murdered, his last
+words to his mother would have been, 'Run away, I pray you.'</p>
+
+<p>I may add two remarks. The presence of this child is one of the things
+in which <i>Macbeth</i> reminds us of <i>Richard III.</i> And he is perhaps the
+only person in the tragedy who provokes a smile. I say 'perhaps,' for
+though the anxiety of the Doctor to escape from the company of his
+patient's husband makes one smile, I am not sure that it was meant to.</p>
+
+
+<h4>5</h4>
+
+<p>The Porter does not make me smile: the moment is too terrific. He is
+grotesque; no doubt the contrast he affords is humorous as well as
+ghastly; I dare say the groundlings roared with laughter at his coarsest
+remarks. But they are not comic enough to allow one to forget for a
+moment what has preceded and what must follow. And I am far from
+complaining of this. I believe that it is what Shakespeare intended, and
+that he despised the groundlings if they laughed. Of course he could
+have written without the least difficulty speeches five times as
+humorous; but he knew better. The Grave-diggers make us laugh: the old
+Countryman who brings the <a name="Page_396" id="Page_396"></a><span class="pagenum">[396]</span>asps to Cleopatra makes us smile at least.
+But the Grave-digger scene does not come at a moment of extreme tension;
+and it is long. Our distress for Ophelia is not so absorbing that we
+refuse to be interested in the man who digs her grave, or even continue
+throughout the long conversation to remember always with pain that the
+grave is hers. It is fitting, therefore, that he should be made
+decidedly humorous. The passage in <i>Antony and Cleopatra</i> is much nearer
+to the passage in <i>Macbeth</i>, and seems to have been forgotten by those
+who say that there is nothing in Shakespeare resembling that
+passage.<a name="FNanchor_246" id="FNanchor_246"></a><a href="#Footnote_246" class="fnanchor">[246]</a> The old Countryman comes at a moment of tragic exaltation,
+and the dialogue is appropriately brief. But the moment, though tragic,
+is emphatically one of exaltation. We have not been feeling horror, nor
+are we feeling a dreadful suspense. We are going to see Cleopatra die,
+but she is to die gloriously and to triumph over Octavius. And therefore
+our amusement at the old Countryman and the contrast he affords to these
+high passions, is untroubled, and it was right to make him really comic.
+But the Porter's case is quite different. We cannot forget how the
+knocking that makes him grumble sounded to Macbeth, or that within a few
+minutes of his opening the gate Duncan will be discovered in his blood;
+nor can we help feeling that in pretending to be porter of hell-gate he
+is terribly near the truth. To give him language so humorous that it
+would ask us almost to lose the sense of these things would have been a
+fatal mistake,&mdash;the kind of mistake that means want of dramatic
+imagination. And that was not the sort of error into which Shakespeare
+fell.</p>
+
+<p>To doubt the genuineness of the passage, then, on the ground that it is
+not humorous enough for Shakespeare, seems to me to show this want. It
+<a name="Page_397" id="Page_397"></a><span class="pagenum">[397]</span>is to judge the passage as though it were a separate composition,
+instead of conceiving it in the fulness of its relations to its
+surroundings in a stage-play. Taken by itself, I admit, it would bear no
+indubitable mark of Shakespeare's authorship, not even in the phrase
+'the primrose way to the everlasting bonfire,' which Coleridge thought
+Shakespeare might have added to an interpolation of 'the players.' And
+if there were reason (as in my judgment there is not) to suppose that
+Shakespeare thus permitted an interpolation, or that he collaborated
+with another author, I could believe that he left 'the players' or his
+collaborator to write the words of the passage. But that anyone except
+the author of the scene of Duncan's murder <i>conceived</i> the passage, is
+incredible.<a name="FNanchor_247" id="FNanchor_247"></a><a href="#Footnote_247" class="fnanchor">[247]</a></p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>The speeches of the Porter, a low comic character, are in prose. So is
+the letter of Macbeth to <a name="Page_398" id="Page_398"></a><span class="pagenum">[398]</span>his wife. In both these cases Shakespeare
+follows his general rule or custom. The only other prose-speeches occur
+in the sleep-walking scene, and here the use of prose may seem strange.
+For in great tragic scenes we expect the more poetic medium of
+expression, and this is one of the most famous of such scenes. Besides,
+unless I mistake, Lady Macbeth is the only one of Shakespeare's great
+tragic characters who on a last appearance is denied the dignity of
+verse.</p>
+
+<p>Yet in this scene also he adheres to his custom. Somnambulism is an
+abnormal condition, and it is his general rule to assign prose to
+persons whose state of mind is abnormal. Thus, to illustrate from these
+four plays, Hamlet when playing the madman speaks prose, but in
+soliloquy, in talking with Horatio, and in pleading with his mother, he
+speaks verse.<a name="FNanchor_248" id="FNanchor_248"></a><a href="#Footnote_248" class="fnanchor">[248]</a> Ophelia in her madness either sings snatches of songs
+or speaks prose. Almost all Lear's speeches, after he has become
+definitely insane, are in prose: where he wakes from sleep recovered,
+the verse returns. The prose enters with that speech which closes with
+his trying to tear off his clothes; but he speaks in verse&mdash;some of it
+very irregular&mdash;in the Timon-like speeches where his intellect suddenly
+in his madness seems to regain the force of his best days (<span class="smcap">iv.</span>
+vi.). Othello, in <span class="smcap">iv.</span> i., speaks in verse till the moment when
+Iago tells him that Cassio has confessed. <a name="Page_399" id="Page_399"></a><span class="pagenum">[399]</span>There follow ten lines of
+prose&mdash;exclamations and mutterings of bewildered horror&mdash;and he falls to
+the ground unconscious.</p>
+
+<p>The idea underlying this custom of Shakespeare's evidently is that the
+regular rhythm of verse would be inappropriate where the mind is
+supposed to have lost its balance and to be at the mercy of chance
+impressions coming from without (as sometimes with Lear), or of ideas
+emerging from its unconscious depths and pursuing one another across its
+passive surface. The somnambulism of Lady Macbeth is such a condition.
+There is no rational connection in the sequence of images and ideas. The
+sight of blood on her hand, the sound of the clock striking the hour for
+Duncan's murder, the hesitation of her husband before that hour came,
+the vision of the old man in his blood, the idea of the murdered wife of
+Macduff, the sight of the hand again, Macbeth's 'flaws and starts' at
+the sight of Banquo's ghost, the smell on her hand, the washing of hands
+after Duncan's murder again, her husband's fear of the buried Banquo,
+the sound of the knocking at the gate&mdash;these possess her, one after
+another, in this chance order. It is not much less accidental than the
+order of Ophelia's ideas; the great difference is that with Ophelia
+total insanity has effaced or greatly weakened the emotional force of
+the ideas, whereas to Lady Macbeth each new image or perception comes
+laden with anguish. There is, again, scarcely a sign of the exaltation
+of disordered imagination; we are conscious rather of an intense
+suffering which forces its way into light against resistance, and speaks
+a language for the most part strikingly bare in its diction and simple
+in its construction. This language stands in strong contrast with that
+of Macbeth in the surrounding scenes, full of a feverish and almost
+furious excitement, and seems to express a far more desolating misery.</p>
+
+<p><a name="Page_400" id="Page_400"></a><span class="pagenum">[400]</span>The effect is extraordinarily impressive. The soaring pride and power
+of Lady Macbeth's first speeches return on our memory, and the change is
+felt with a breathless awe. Any attempt, even by Shakespeare, to draw
+out the moral enfolded in this awe, would but weaken it. For the moment,
+too, all the language of poetry&mdash;even of Macbeth's poetry&mdash;seems to be
+touched with unreality, and these brief toneless sentences seem the only
+voice of truth.<a name="FNanchor_249" id="FNanchor_249"></a><a href="#Footnote_249" class="fnanchor">[249]</a></p>
+
+<div class="footnotes">
+<div class="footnotehead">FOOTNOTES:</div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_227" id="Footnote_227"></a><a href="#FNanchor_227"><span class="label">[227]</span></a> So Mrs. Siddons is said to have given the passage.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_228" id="Footnote_228"></a><a href="#FNanchor_228"><span class="label">[228]</span></a> Surely the usual interpretation of 'We fail?' as a
+question of contemptuous astonishment, is right. 'We fail!' gives
+practically the same sense, but alters the punctuation of the first two
+Folios. In either case, 'But,' I think, means 'Only.' On the other hand
+the proposal to read 'We fail.' with a full stop, as expressive of
+sublime acceptance of the possibility, seems to me, however attractive
+at first sight, quite out of harmony with Lady Macbeth's mood throughout
+these scenes.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_229" id="Footnote_229"></a><a href="#FNanchor_229"><span class="label">[229]</span></a> See <a href="#NOTE_DD">Note DD</a>.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_230" id="Footnote_230"></a><a href="#FNanchor_230"><span class="label">[230]</span></a> It is not new.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_231" id="Footnote_231"></a><a href="#FNanchor_231"><span class="label">[231]</span></a> The words about Lady Macduff are of course significant of
+natural human feeling, and may have been introduced expressly to mark
+it, but they do not, I think, show any fundamental change in Lady
+Macbeth, for at no time would she have suggested or approved a
+<i>purposeless</i> atrocity. It is perhaps characteristic that this human
+feeling should show itself most clearly in reference to an act for which
+she was not directly responsible, and in regard to which therefore she
+does not feel the instinct of self-assertion.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_232" id="Footnote_232"></a><a href="#FNanchor_232"><span class="label">[232]</span></a> The tendency to sentimentalise Lady Macbeth is partly due
+to Mrs. Siddons's fancy that she was a small, fair, blue-eyed woman,
+'perhaps even fragile.' Dr. Bucknill, who was unaquainted with this
+fancy, independently determined that she was 'beautiful and delicate,'
+'unoppressed by weight of flesh,' 'probably small,' but 'a tawny or
+brown blonde,' with grey eyes: and Brandes affirms that she was lean,
+slight, and hard. They know much more than Shakespeare, who tells us
+absolutely nothing on these subjects. That Lady Macbeth, after taking
+part in a murder, was so exhausted as to faint, will hardly demonstrate
+her fragility. That she must have been blue-eyed, fair, or red-haired,
+because she was a Celt, is a bold inference, and it is an idle dream
+that Shakespeare had any idea of making her or her husband
+characteristically Celtic. The only evidence ever offered to prove that
+she was small is the sentence, 'All the perfumes of Arabia will not
+sweeten this little hand'; and Goliath might have called his hand
+'little' in contrast with all the perfumes of Arabia. One might as well
+propose to prove that Othello was a small man by quoting,
+</p>
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i9">I have seen the day,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">That, with this little arm and this good sword,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">I have made my way through more impediments<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Than twenty times your stop.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+<p>
+The reader is at liberty to imagine Lady Macbeth's person in the way
+that pleases him best, or to leave it, as Shakespeare very likely did,
+unimagined.
+</p><p>
+Perhaps it may be well to add that there is not the faintest trace in
+the play of the idea occasionally met with, and to some extent embodied
+in Madame Bernhardt's impersonation of Lady Macbeth, that her hold upon
+her husband lay in seductive attractions deliberately exercised.
+Shakespeare was not unskilled or squeamish in indicating such ideas.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_233" id="Footnote_233"></a><a href="#FNanchor_233"><span class="label">[233]</span></a> That it is Macbeth who feels the harmony between the
+desolation of the heath and the figures who appear on it is a
+characteristic touch.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_234" id="Footnote_234"></a><a href="#FNanchor_234"><span class="label">[234]</span></a> So, in Holinshed, 'Banquho jested with him and sayde, now
+Makbeth thou haste obtayned those things which the twoo former sisters
+prophesied, there remayneth onely for thee to purchase that which the
+third sayd should come to passe.'</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_235" id="Footnote_235"></a><a href="#FNanchor_235"><span class="label">[235]</span></a> =doubts.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_236" id="Footnote_236"></a><a href="#FNanchor_236"><span class="label">[236]</span></a> =design.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_237" id="Footnote_237"></a><a href="#FNanchor_237"><span class="label">[237]</span></a>
+</p>
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i9">'tis much he dares,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">And, to that dauntless temper of his mind,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">He hath a wisdom that doth guide his valour<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">To act in safety.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+</div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_238" id="Footnote_238"></a><a href="#FNanchor_238"><span class="label">[238]</span></a> So when he hears that Fleance has escaped he is not much
+troubled (<span class="smcap">iii.</span> iv. 29):
+</p>
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i8">the worm that's fled<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Hath nature that in time will venom breed,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">No teeth for the present.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+<p>
+I have repeated above what I have said before, because the meaning of
+Macbeth's soliloquy is frequently misconceived.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_239" id="Footnote_239"></a><a href="#FNanchor_239"><span class="label">[239]</span></a> Virgilia in <i>Coriolanus</i> is a famous example. She speaks
+about thirty-five lines.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_240" id="Footnote_240"></a><a href="#FNanchor_240"><span class="label">[240]</span></a> The percentage of prose is, roughly, in <i>Hamlet</i> 30-2/3,
+in <i>Othello</i> 16-1/3, in <i>King Lear</i> 27-1/2, in <i>Macbeth</i> 8-1/2.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_241" id="Footnote_241"></a><a href="#FNanchor_241"><span class="label">[241]</span></a> Cf. <a href="#NOTE_F">Note F</a>. There are also in <i>Macbeth</i> several shorter
+passages which recall the Player's speech. Cf. 'Fortune ... showed like
+a rebel's whore' (<span class="smcap">i.</span> ii. 14) with 'Out! out! thou strumpet
+Fortune!' The form 'eterne' occurs in Shakespeare only in <i>Macbeth</i>,
+<span class="smcap">iii.</span> ii. 38, and in the 'proof eterne' of the Player's speech.
+Cf. 'So, as a painted tyrant, Pyrrhus stood,' with <i>Macbeth</i>,
+<span class="smcap">v.</span> viii. 26; 'the rugged Pyrrhus, like the Hyrcanian beast,'
+with 'the rugged Russian bear ... or the Hyrcan tiger' (<i>Macbeth</i>,
+<span class="smcap">iii.</span> iv. 100); 'like a neutral to his will and matter' with
+<i>Macbeth</i>, <span class="smcap">i.</span> v. 47. The words 'Till he unseam'd him from the
+nave to the chaps,' in the Serjeant's speech, recall the words 'Then
+from the navel to the throat at once He ript old Priam,' in <i>Dido Queen
+of Carthage</i>, where these words follow those others, about Priam falling
+with the mere wind of Pyrrhus' sword, which seem to have suggested 'the
+whiff and wind of his fell sword' in the Player's speech.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_242" id="Footnote_242"></a><a href="#FNanchor_242"><span class="label">[242]</span></a> See Cunliffe, <i>The Influence of Seneca on Elizabethan
+Tragedy</i>. The most famous of these parallels is that between 'Will all
+great Neptune's Ocean,' etc., and the following passages:
+</p>
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i1">Quis eluet me Tanais? aut quae barbaris<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Maeotis undis Pontico incumbens mari?<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Non ipse toto magnus Oceano pater<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Tantum expiarit sceleris. (<i>Hipp.</i> 715.)<br /></span>
+</div>
+<div class="stanza">
+<span class="i1">Quis Tanais, aut quis Nilus, aut quis Persica<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Violentus unda Tigris, aut Rhenus ferox,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Tagusve Ibera turbidus gaza fluens,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Abluere dextram poterit? Arctoum licet<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Maeotis in me gelida transfundat mare,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Et tota Tethys per meas currat manus,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Haerebit altum facinus. (<i>Herc. Furens</i>, 1323.)<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+<p>(The reader will remember Othello's 'Pontic sea' with its 'violent
+pace.') Medea's incantation in Ovid's <i>Metamorphoses</i>, vii. 197 ff.,
+which certainly suggested Prospero's speech, <i>Tempest</i>, <span class="smcap">v.</span> i.
+33 ff., should be compared with Seneca, <i>Herc. Oet.</i>, 452 ff., 'Artibus
+magicis,' etc. It is of course highly probable that Shakespeare read
+some Seneca at school. I may add that in the <i>Hippolytus</i>, beside the
+passage quoted above, there are others which might have furnished him
+with suggestions. Cf. for instance <i>Hipp.</i>, 30 ff., with the lines about
+the Spartan hounds in <i>Mids. Night's Dream</i>, <span class="smcap">iv.</span> i. 117 ff.,
+and Hippolytus' speech, beginning 483, with the Duke's speech in <i>As You
+Like It</i>, <span class="smcap">ii.</span> i.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_243" id="Footnote_243"></a><a href="#FNanchor_243"><span class="label">[243]</span></a> Cf. Coleridge's note on the Lady Macduff scene.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_244" id="Footnote_244"></a><a href="#FNanchor_244"><span class="label">[244]</span></a> It is nothing to the purpose that Macduff himself says,
+</p>
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i12">Sinful Macduff,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">They were all struck for thee! naught that I am,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Not for their own demerits, but for mine,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Fell slaughter on their souls.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+<p>
+There is no reason to suppose that the sin and demerit he speaks of is
+that of leaving his home. And even if it were, it is Macduff that
+speaks, not Shakespeare, any more than Shakespeare speaks in the
+preceding sentence,
+</p>
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i12">Did heaven look on,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">And would not take their part?<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+<p>
+And yet Brandes (ii. 104) hears in these words 'the voice of revolt ...
+that sounds later through the despairing philosophy of <i>King Lear</i>.' It
+sounds a good deal earlier too; <i>e.g.</i> in <i>Tit. And.</i>, <span class="smcap">iv.</span> i.
+81, and <i>2 Henry VI.</i>, <span class="smcap">ii.</span> i. 154. The idea is a commonplace of
+Elizabethan tragedy.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_245" id="Footnote_245"></a><a href="#FNanchor_245"><span class="label">[245]</span></a> And the idea that it was the death of his son Hamnet,
+aged eleven, that brought this power to maturity is one of the more
+plausible attempts to find in his dramas a reflection of his private
+history. It implies however as late a date as 1596 for <i>King John</i>.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_246" id="Footnote_246"></a><a href="#FNanchor_246"><span class="label">[246]</span></a> Even if this were true, the retort is obvious that
+neither is there anything resembling the murder-scene in <i>Macbeth</i>.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_247" id="Footnote_247"></a><a href="#FNanchor_247"><span class="label">[247]</span></a> I have confined myself to the single aspect of this
+question on which I had what seemed something new to say. Professor
+Hales's defence of the passage on fuller grounds, in the admirable paper
+reprinted in his <i>Notes and Essays on Shakespeare</i>, seems to me quite
+conclusive. I may add two notes. (1) The references in the Porter's
+speeches to 'equivocation,' which have naturally, and probably rightly,
+been taken as allusions to the Jesuit Garnet's appeal to the doctrine of
+equivocation in defence of his perjury when, on trial for participation
+in the Gunpowder Plot, do not stand alone in <i>Macbeth</i>. The later
+prophecies of the Witches Macbeth calls 'the equivocation of the fiend
+That lies like truth' (<span class="smcap">v.</span> v. 43); and the Porter's remarks
+about the equivocator who 'could swear in both the scales against either
+scale, who committed treason enough for God's sake, yet could not
+equivocate to heaven,' may be compared with the following dialogue
+(<span class="smcap">iv.</span> ii. 45):
+</p>
+
+<table class="tabledrama" summary="Lady McDuff and Her Son" cellpadding="6">
+  <tr>
+    <td><i>Son.</i></td>
+    <td>What is a traitor?</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td><i>Lady Macduff.</i></td>
+    <td>Why, one that swears and lies.</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td><i>Son.</i></td>
+    <td>And be all traitors that do so?</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td><i>Lady Macduff.</i></td>
+    <td>Everyone that does so is a traitor, and must be hanged.</td>
+  </tr>
+</table>
+
+<p>
+Garnet, as a matter of fact, <i>was</i> hanged in May, 1606; and it is to be
+feared that the audience applauded this passage.
+</p><p>
+(2) The Porter's soliloquy on the different applicants for admittance
+has, in idea and manner, a marked resemblance to Pompey's soliloquy on
+the inhabitants of the prison, in <i>Measure for Measure</i>, <span class="smcap">iv.</span>
+iii. 1 ff.; and the dialogue between him and Abhorson on the 'mystery'
+of hanging (<span class="smcap">iv.</span> ii. 22 ff.) is of just the same kind as the
+Porter's dialogue with Macduff about drink.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_248" id="Footnote_248"></a><a href="#FNanchor_248"><span class="label">[248]</span></a> In the last Act, however, he speaks in verse even in the
+quarrel with Laertes at Ophelia's grave. It would be plausible to
+explain this either from his imitating what he thinks the rant of
+Laertes, or by supposing that his 'towering passion' made him forget to
+act the madman. But in the final scene also he speaks in verse in the
+presence of all. This again might be accounted for by saying that he is
+supposed to be in a lucid interval, as indeed his own language at 239
+ff. implies. But the probability is that Shakespeare's real reason for
+breaking his rule here was simply that he did not choose to deprive
+Hamlet of verse on his last appearance. I wonder the disuse of prose in
+these two scenes has not been observed, and used as an argument, by
+those who think that Hamlet, with the commission in his pocket, is now
+resolute.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_249" id="Footnote_249"></a><a href="#FNanchor_249"><span class="label">[249]</span></a> The verse-speech of the Doctor, which closes this scene,
+lowers the tension towards that of the next scene. His introductory
+conversation with the Gentlewoman is written in prose (sometimes very
+near verse), partly, perhaps, from its familiar character, but chiefly
+because Lady Macbeth is to speak in prose.</p></div>
+</div>
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><a name="Page_401" id="Page_401"></a><span class="pagenum">[401]</span></p>
+<h2><a name="NOTE_A" id="NOTE_A"></a>NOTE A.</h2>
+
+<h3>EVENTS BEFORE THE OPENING OF THE ACTION IN <i>HAMLET</i>.</h3>
+
+
+<p>In Hamlet's first soliloquy he speaks of his father as being 'but two
+months dead,&mdash;nay, not so much, not two.' He goes on to refer to the
+love between his father and mother, and then says (<span class="smcap">i.</span> ii. 145):</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i8">and yet, within a month&mdash;<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Let me not think on't&mdash;Frailty, thy name is woman!&mdash;<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">A little month, or ere those shoes were old<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">With which she follow'd my poor father's body,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Like Niobe, all tears, why she, even she&mdash;<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">O God! a beast, that wants discourse of reason,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Would have mourn'd longer&mdash;married with my uncle.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>It seems hence to be usually assumed that at this time&mdash;the time when
+the action begins&mdash;Hamlet's mother has been married a little less than a
+month.</p>
+
+<p>On this assumption difficulties, however, arise, though I have not found
+them referred to. Why has the Ghost waited nearly a month since the
+marriage before showing itself? Why has the King waited nearly a month
+before appearing in public for the first time, as he evidently does in
+this scene? And why has Laertes waited nearly a month since the
+coronation before asking leave to return to France (<span class="smcap">i.</span> ii. 53)?</p>
+
+<p>To this it might be replied that the marriage and the coronation were
+separated by some weeks; that, while the former occurred nearly a month
+before the time of this scene, the latter has only just taken place; and
+that what the Ghost cannot bear is, not the mere marriage, but the
+accession of an incestuous murderer to the throne. But anyone who will
+read <a name="Page_402" id="Page_402"></a><span class="pagenum">[402]</span>the King's speech at the opening of the scene will certainly
+conclude that the marriage has only just been celebrated, and also that
+it is conceived as involving the accession of Claudius to the throne.
+Gertrude is described as the 'imperial jointress' of the State, and the
+King says that the lords consented to the marriage, but makes no
+separate mention of his election.</p>
+
+<p>The solution of the difficulty is to be found in the lines quoted above.
+The marriage followed, within a month, not the <i>death</i> of Hamlet's
+father, but the <i>funeral</i>. And this makes all clear. The death happened
+nearly two months ago. The funeral did not succeed it immediately, but
+(say) in a fortnight or three weeks. And the marriage and coronation,
+coming rather less than a month after the funeral, have just taken
+place. So that the Ghost has not waited at all; nor has the King, nor
+Laertes.</p>
+
+<p>On this hypothesis it follows that Hamlet's agonised soliloquy is not
+uttered nearly a month after the marriage which has so horrified him,
+but quite soon after it (though presumably he would know rather earlier
+what was coming). And from this hypothesis we get also a partial
+explanation of two other difficulties, (<i>a</i>) When Horatio, at the end of
+the soliloquy, enters and greets Hamlet, it is evident that he and
+Hamlet have not recently met at Elsinore. Yet Horatio came to Elsinore
+for the funeral (<span class="smcap">i.</span> ii. 176). Now even if the funeral took
+place some three weeks ago, it seems rather strange that Hamlet, however
+absorbed in grief and however withdrawn from the Court, has not met
+Horatio; but if the funeral took place some seven weeks ago, the
+difficulty is considerably greater. (<i>b</i>) We are twice told that Hamlet
+has '<i>of late</i>' been seeking the society of Ophelia and protesting his
+love for her (<span class="smcap">i.</span> iii. 91, 99). It always seemed to me, on the
+usual view of the chronology, rather difficult (though not, of course,
+impossible) to understand this, considering the state of feeling
+produced in him by his mother's marriage, and in particular the shock it
+appears to have given to his faith in woman. But if the marriage has
+only just been celebrated the words 'of late' would naturally refer to a
+time before it. This time presumably would be subsequent to the death of
+Hamlet's father, but it is not so hard to fancy that Hamlet may have
+sought relief from mere <i>grief</i> in his love for Ophelia.</p>
+
+<p>But here another question arises; May not the words 'of late' <a name="Page_403" id="Page_403"></a><span class="pagenum">[403]</span>include,
+or even wholly refer to,<a name="FNanchor_250" id="FNanchor_250"></a><a href="#Footnote_250" class="fnanchor">[250]</a> a time prior to the death of Hamlet's
+father? And this question would be answered universally, I suppose, in
+the negative, on the ground that Hamlet was not at Court but at
+Wittenberg when his father died. I will deal with this idea in a
+separate note, and will only add here that, though it is quite possible
+that Shakespeare never imagined any of these matters clearly, and so
+produced these unimportant difficulties, we ought not to assume this
+without examination.</p>
+
+<div class="footnotes">
+<div class="footnotehead">FOOTNOTES:</div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_250" id="Footnote_250"></a><a href="#FNanchor_250"><span class="label">[250]</span></a> This is intrinsically not probable, and is the more
+improbable because in <a href="#Q1">Q1</a> Hamlet's letter to Ophelia (which must have
+been written before the action of the play begins) is signed 'Thine ever
+the most unhappy Prince <i>Hamlet</i>.' 'Unhappy' <i>might</i> be meant to
+describe an unsuccessful lover, but it probably shows that the letter
+was written after his father's death.</p></div>
+</div>
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="NOTE_B" id="NOTE_B"></a>NOTE B.</h2>
+
+<h3>WHERE WAS HAMLET AT THE TIME OF HIS FATHER'S DEATH?</h3>
+
+
+<p>The answer will at once be given: 'At the University of Wittenberg. For
+the king says to him (<span class="smcap">i.</span> ii. 112):</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i9">For your intent<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">In going back to school in Wittenberg,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">It is most retrograde to our desire.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>The Queen also prays him not to go to Wittenberg: and he consents to
+remain.'</p>
+
+<p>Now I quite agree that the obvious interpretation of this passage is
+that universally accepted, that Hamlet, like Horatio, was at Wittenberg
+when his father died; and I do not say that it is wrong. But it involves
+difficulties, and ought not to be regarded as certain.</p>
+
+<p>(1) One of these difficulties has long been recognised. Hamlet,
+according to the evidence of Act <span class="smcap">v.</span>, Scene i., is thirty years
+of age; and that is a very late age for a university student. One
+solution is found (by those who admit that Hamlet <i>was</i> thirty) in a
+passage in Nash's <i>Pierce Penniless</i>: 'For fashion sake some [Danes]
+will put their children to schoole, but they set them not to it till
+they are fourteene years old, so that you shall see a great boy with a
+beard learne his A.B.C. and sit weeping under the rod when he is <a name="Page_404" id="Page_404"></a><span class="pagenum">[404]</span>thirty
+years old.' Another solution, as we saw (p. <a href='#Page_105'>105</a>), is found in Hamlet's
+character. He is a philosopher who lingers on at the University from
+love of his studies there.</p>
+
+<p>(2) But there is a more formidable difficulty, which seems to have
+escaped notice. Horatio certainly came from Wittenberg to the funeral.
+And observe how he and Hamlet meet (<span class="smcap">i.</span> ii. 160).</p>
+
+<table class="tabledrama" summary="Hamlet I. ii. 160" cellpadding="8">
+  <tr>
+    <td><i>Hor.</i></td>
+    <td>Hail to your lordship!</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td valign="top"><i>Ham.</i></td>
+    <td><span style="margin-left: 7em;">I am glad to see you well:</span><br />
+        Horatio,&mdash;or I do forget myself.</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td><i>Hor.</i></td>
+    <td>The same, my lord, and your poor servant ever.</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td valign="top"><i>Ham.</i></td>
+    <td>Sir, my good friend; I'll change that name with you:<br />
+        And what make you from Wittenberg, Horatio?<br />
+        Marcellus?</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td><i>Mar.</i></td>
+    <td><span style="margin-left: 5em;">My good lord&mdash;</span></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td valign="top"><i>Ham.</i></td>
+    <td>I am very glad to see you. Good even, sir.<a name="FNanchor_251" id="FNanchor_251"></a><a href="#Footnote_251" class="fnanchor">[251]</a><br />
+        But what, in faith, make you from Wittenberg?</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td><i>Hor.</i></td>
+    <td>A truant disposition, good my lord.</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td valign="top"><i>Ham.</i></td>
+    <td>I would not hear your enemy say so,<br />
+        Nor shall you do my ear that violence,<br />
+        To make it truster of your own report<br />
+        Against yourself: I know you are no truant.<br />
+        But what is your affair in Elsinore?<br />
+        We'll teach you to drink deep ere you depart.</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td><i>Hor.</i></td>
+    <td>My lord, I came to see your father's funeral.</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td valign="top"><i>Ham.</i></td>
+    <td>I pray thee, do not mock me, fellow-student;<br />
+        I think it was to see my mother's wedding.</td>
+  </tr>
+</table>
+
+<p>Is not this passing strange? Hamlet and Horatio are supposed to be
+fellow-students at Wittenberg, and to have left it for Elsinore less
+than two months ago. Yet Hamlet hardly recognises Horatio at first, and
+speaks as if he himself lived at Elsinore (I refer to his bitter jest,
+'We'll teach you to drink deep ere you depart'). Who would dream that
+Hamlet had himself just come from Wittenberg, if it were not for the
+previous words about his going back there?</p>
+
+<p>How can this be explained on the usual view? Only, I presume, by
+supposing that Hamlet is so sunk in melancholy that he really does
+almost 'forget himself'<a name="FNanchor_252" id="FNanchor_252"></a><a href="#Footnote_252" class="fnanchor">[252]</a> and forget everything else, so <a name="Page_405" id="Page_405"></a><span class="pagenum">[405]</span>that he
+actually is in doubt who Horatio is. And this, though not impossible, is
+hard to believe.</p>
+
+<p>'Oh no,' it may be answered, 'for he is doubtful about Marcellus too;
+and yet, if he were living at Elsinore, he must have seen Marcellus
+often.' But he is <i>not</i> doubtful about Marcellus. That note of
+interrogation after 'Marcellus' is Capell's conjecture: it is not in any
+Quarto or any Folio. The fact is that he knows perfectly well the man
+who lives at Elsinore, but is confused by the appearance of the friend
+who comes from Wittenberg.</p>
+
+<p>(3) Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are sent for, to wean Hamlet from his
+melancholy and to worm his secret out of him, because he has known them
+from his youth and is fond of them (<span class="smcap">ii.</span> ii. 1 ff.). They come
+<i>to</i> Denmark (<span class="smcap">ii.</span> ii. 247 f.): they come therefore <i>from</i> some
+other country. Where do they come from? They are, we hear, Hamlet's
+'school-fellows' (<span class="smcap">iii.</span> iv. 202). And in the first Quarto we are
+directly told that they were with him at Wittenberg:</p>
+
+<table class="tabledrama" summary="Gilderstone and Rossencraft" cellpadding="8">
+  <tr>
+    <td valign="top"><i>Ham.</i></td>
+    <td>What, Gilderstone, and Rossencraft,<br />
+        Welcome, kind school-fellows, to Elsanore.</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td valign="top"><i>Gil.</i></td>
+    <td>We thank your grace, and would be very glad<br />
+        You were as when we were at Wittenberg.</td>
+  </tr>
+</table>
+
+<p>Now let the reader look at Hamlet's first greeting of them in the
+received text, and let him ask himself whether it is the greeting of a
+man to fellow-students whom he left two months ago: whether it is not
+rather, like his greeting of Horatio, the welcome of an old
+fellow-student who has not seen his visitors for a considerable time
+(<span class="smcap">ii.</span> ii. 226 f.).</p>
+
+<p>(4) Rosencrantz and Guildenstern tell Hamlet of the players who are
+coming. He asks what players they are, and is told, 'Even those you were
+wont to take such delight in, the tragedians of the city.' He asks, 'Do
+they hold the same estimation they did when I was in the city?'
+Evidently he has not been in the city for some time. And this is still
+more evident when the players come in, and he talks of one having grown
+a beard, and another having perhaps cracked his voice, since they last
+met. What then is this city, where he has not been for some time, but
+where (it would appear) Rosencrantz and Guildenstern live? It is not in
+Denmark ('Comest thou to beard me in Denmark?'). It would seem to be
+Wittenberg.<a name="FNanchor_253" id="FNanchor_253"></a><a href="#Footnote_253" class="fnanchor">[253]</a></p>
+
+<p><a name="Page_406" id="Page_406"></a><span class="pagenum">[406]</span>All these passages, it should be observed, are consistent with one
+another. And the conclusion they point to is that Hamlet has left the
+University for some years and has been living at Court. This again is
+consistent with his being thirty years of age, and with his being
+mentioned as a soldier and a courtier as well as a scholar
+(<span class="smcap">iii.</span> i. 159). And it is inconsistent, I believe, with nothing
+in the play, unless with the mention of his 'going back to school in
+Wittenberg.' But it is not really inconsistent with that. The idea may
+quite well be that Hamlet, feeling it impossible to continue at Court
+after his mother's marriage and Claudius' accession, thinks of the
+University where, years ago, he was so happy, and contemplates a return
+to it. If this were Shakespeare's meaning he might easily fail to notice
+that the expression 'going back to school in Wittenberg' would naturally
+suggest that Hamlet had only just left 'school.'</p>
+
+<p>I do not see how to account for these passages except on this
+hypothesis. But it in its turn involves a certain difficulty. Horatio,
+Rosencrantz and Guildenstern seem to be of about the same age as Hamlet.
+How then do <i>they</i> come to be at Wittenberg? I had thought that this
+question might be answered in the following way. If 'the city' is
+Wittenberg, Shakespeare would regard it as a place like London, and we
+might suppose that Horatio, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern were living
+there, though they had ceased to be students. But this can hardly be
+true of Horatio, who, when he (to spare Hamlet's feelings) talks of
+being 'a truant,' must mean a truant from his University. The only
+solution I can suggest is that, in the story or play which Shakespeare
+used, Hamlet and the others were all at the time of the murder young
+students at Wittenberg, and that when he determined to make them older
+men (or to make Hamlet, at any rate, older), he did not take trouble
+enough to carry this idea through all the necessary detail, and so left
+some inconsistencies. But in any case the difficulty in the view which I
+suggest seems to me not nearly so great as those which the usual view
+has to meet.<a name="FNanchor_254" id="FNanchor_254"></a><a href="#Footnote_254" class="fnanchor">[254]</a></p>
+
+<div class="footnotes">
+<div class="footnotehead">FOOTNOTES:</div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_251" id="Footnote_251"></a><a href="#FNanchor_251"><span class="label">[251]</span></a> These three words are evidently addressed to Bernardo.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_252" id="Footnote_252"></a><a href="#FNanchor_252"><span class="label">[252]</span></a> Cf. Antonio in his melancholy (<i>Merchant of Venice</i>,
+<span class="smcap">i.</span> i. 6),
+</p>
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i1">And such a want-wit sadness makes of me<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">That I have much ado to know myself.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+</div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_253" id="Footnote_253"></a><a href="#FNanchor_253"><span class="label">[253]</span></a> In <i>Der Bestrafte Brudermord</i> it <i>is</i> Wittenberg. Hamlet
+says to the actors: 'Were you not, a few years ago, at the University of
+Wittenberg? I think I saw you act there': Furness's <i>Variorum</i>, ii. 129.
+But it is very doubtful whether this play is anything but an adaptation
+and enlargement of <i>Hamlet</i> as it existed in the stage represented by
+<a href="#Q1">Q1</a>.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_254" id="Footnote_254"></a><a href="#FNanchor_254"><span class="label">[254]</span></a> It is perhaps worth while to note that in <i>Der Bestrafte
+Brudermord</i> Hamlet is said to have been 'in Germany' at the time of his
+father's murder.</p></div>
+</div>
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><a name="Page_407" id="Page_407"></a><span class="pagenum">[407]</span></p>
+<h2><a name="NOTE_C" id="NOTE_C"></a>NOTE C.</h2>
+
+<h3>HAMLET'S AGE.</h3>
+
+
+<p>The chief arguments on this question may be found in Furness's <i>Variorum
+Hamlet</i>, vol. i., pp. 391 ff. I will merely explain my position briefly.</p>
+
+<p>Even if the general impression I received from the play were that Hamlet
+was a youth of eighteen or twenty, I should feel quite unable to set it
+against the evidence of the statements in <span class="smcap">v.</span> i. which show him
+to be exactly thirty, unless these statements seemed to be casual. But
+they have to my mind, on the contrary, the appearance of being expressly
+inserted in order to fix Hamlet's age; and the fact that they differ
+decidedly from the statements in Q1 confirms that idea. So does the fact
+that the Player King speaks of having been married thirty years
+(<span class="smcap">iii.</span> ii. 165), where again the number differs from that in Q1.</p>
+
+<p>If <span class="smcap">v.</span> i. did not contain those decisive statements, I believe
+my impression as to Hamlet's age would be uncertain. His being several
+times called 'young' would not influence me much (nor at all when he is
+called 'young' simply to distinguish him from his father, <i>as he is in
+the very passage which shows him to be thirty</i>). But I think we
+naturally take him to be about as old as Laertes, Rosencrantz and
+Guildenstern, and take them to be less than thirty. Further, the
+language used by Laertes and Polonius to Ophelia in <span class="smcap">i.</span> iii.
+would certainly, by itself, lead one to imagine Hamlet as a good deal
+less than thirty; and the impression it makes is not, to me, altogether
+effaced by the fact that Henry V. at his accession is said to be in 'the
+very May-morn of his youth,'&mdash;an expression which corresponds closely
+with those used by Laertes to Ophelia. In some passages, again, there is
+an air of boyish petulance. On the other side, however, we should have
+to set (1) the maturity of Hamlet's thought; (2) his manner, on the
+whole, to other men and to his mother, which, I think, is far from
+suggesting the idea of a mere youth; (3) such a passage as his words to
+Horatio at <span class="smcap">iii.</span> ii. 59 ff., which imply that both he and
+Horatio have seen a good deal of life (this passage has in Q1 nothing
+corresponding to the <a name="Page_408" id="Page_408"></a><span class="pagenum">[408]</span>most significant lines). I have shown in <a href="#NOTE_B">Note B</a>
+that it is very unsafe to argue to Hamlet's youth from the words about
+his going back to Wittenberg.</p>
+
+<p>On the whole I agree with Prof. Dowden that, apart from the statements
+in <span class="smcap">v.</span> i., one would naturally take Hamlet to be a man of about
+five and twenty.</p>
+
+<p>It has been suggested that in the old play Hamlet was a mere lad; that
+Shakespeare, when he began to work on it,<a name="FNanchor_255" id="FNanchor_255"></a><a href="#Footnote_255" class="fnanchor">[255]</a> had not determined to
+make Hamlet older; that, as he went on, he did so determine; and that
+this is the reason why the earlier part of the play makes (if it does
+so) a different impression from the later. I see nothing very improbable
+in this idea, but I must point out that it is a mistake to appeal in
+support of it to the passage in <span class="smcap">v.</span> i. as found in Q1; for that
+passage does not in the least show that the author (if correctly
+reported) imagined Hamlet as a lad. I set out the statements in Q2 and
+Q1.</p>
+
+<p><a name="Q2" id="Q2"></a>Q2 says:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>(1) The grave-digger came to his business on the day when old
+Hamlet defeated Fortinbras:</p>
+
+<p>(2) On that day young Hamlet was born:</p>
+
+<p>(3) The grave-digger has, at the time of speaking, been sexton
+for thirty years:</p>
+
+<p>(4) Yorick's skull has been in the earth twenty-three years:</p>
+
+<p>(5) Yorick used to carry young Hamlet on his back.</p></div>
+
+<p>This is all explicit and connected, and yields the result that Hamlet is
+now thirty.</p>
+
+<p><a name="Q1" id="Q1"></a>Q1 says:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>(1) Yorick's skull has been in the ground a dozen years:</p>
+
+<p>(2) It has been in the ground ever since old Hamlet overcame
+Fortinbras:</p>
+
+<p>(3) Yorick used to carry young Hamlet on his back.</p></div>
+
+<p>From this nothing whatever follows as to Hamlet's age, except that he is
+more than twelve!<a name="FNanchor_256" id="FNanchor_256"></a><a href="#Footnote_256" class="fnanchor">[256]</a> Evidently the writer (if correctly reported) has
+no intention of telling us how old Hamlet is. That he did not imagine
+him as very young appears from his <a name="Page_409" id="Page_409"></a><span class="pagenum">[409]</span>making him say that he has noted
+'this seven year' (in Q2 'three years') that the toe of the peasant
+comes near the heel of the courtier. The fact that the Player-King in Q1
+speaks of having been married forty years shows that here too the writer
+has not any reference to Hamlet's age in his mind.<a name="FNanchor_257" id="FNanchor_257"></a><a href="#Footnote_257" class="fnanchor">[257]</a></p>
+
+<div class="footnotes">
+<div class="footnotehead">FOOTNOTES:</div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_255" id="Footnote_255"></a><a href="#FNanchor_255"><span class="label">[255]</span></a> Of course we do not know that he did work on it.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_256" id="Footnote_256"></a><a href="#FNanchor_256"><span class="label">[256]</span></a> I find that I have been anticipated in this remark by H.
+T&uuml;rck (<i>Jahrbuch</i> for 1900, p. 267 ff.)</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_257" id="Footnote_257"></a><a href="#FNanchor_257"><span class="label">[257]</span></a> I do not know if it has been observed that in the opening
+of the Player-King's speech, as given in <a href="#Q2">Q2</a> and the Folio (it is quite
+different in <a href="#Q1">Q1</a>), there seems to be a reminiscence of Greene's
+<i>Alphonsus King of Arragon</i>, Act <span class="smcap">iv.</span>, lines 33 ff. (Dyce's
+<i>Greene and Peele</i>, p. 239):
+</p>
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i1">Thrice ten times Ph&oelig;bus with his golden beams<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Hath compassed the circle of the sky,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Thrice ten times Ceres hath her workmen hir'd,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">And fill'd her barns with fruitful crops of corn,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Since first in priesthood I did lead my life.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+</div>
+</div>
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="NOTE_D" id="NOTE_D"></a>NOTE D.</h2>
+
+<h3>'MY TABLES&mdash;MEET IT IS I SET IT DOWN.'</h3>
+
+
+<p>This passage has occasioned much difficulty, and to many readers seems
+even absurd. And it has been suggested that it, with much that
+immediately follows it, was adopted by Shakespeare, with very little
+change, from the old play.</p>
+
+<p>It is surely in the highest degree improbable that, at such a critical
+point, when he had to show the first effect on Hamlet of the disclosures
+made by the Ghost, Shakespeare would write slackly or be content with
+anything that did not satisfy his own imagination. But it is not
+surprising that we should find some difficulty in following his
+imagination at such a point.</p>
+
+<p>Let us look at the whole speech. The Ghost leaves Hamlet with the words,
+'Adieu, adieu! Hamlet, remember me'; and he breaks out:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i1">O all you host of heaven! O earth! what else?<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">And shall I couple hell? O, fie! Hold, hold, my heart;<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">And you, my sinews, grow not instant old,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">But bear me stiffly up. Remember thee!<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Ay, thou poor ghost, while memory holds a seat<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">In this distracted globe. Remember thee!<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Yea, from the table of my memory<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">I'll wipe away all trivial fond records,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1"><a name="Page_410" id="Page_410"></a><span class="pagenum">[410]</span>All saws of books, all forms, all pressures past,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">That youth and observation copied there;<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">And thy commandment all alone shall live<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Within the book and volume of my brain,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Unmix'd with baser matter: yes, by heaven!<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">O most pernicious woman!<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">O villain, villain, smiling, damned villain!<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">My tables&mdash;meet it is I set it down,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">That one may smile, and smile, and be a villain;<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">At least I'm sure it may be so in Denmark:<span style="margin-left: 5em;">[<i>Writing</i></span><br /></span>
+<span class="i1">So, uncle, there you are. Now to my word;<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">It is 'Adieu, adieu! remember me.'<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">I have sworn 't.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>The man who speaks thus was, we must remember, already well-nigh
+overwhelmed with sorrow and disgust when the Ghost appeared to him. He
+has now suffered a tremendous shock. He has learned that his mother was
+not merely what he supposed but an adulteress, and that his father was
+murdered by her paramour. This knowledge too has come to him in such a
+way as, quite apart from the <i>matter</i> of the communication, might make
+any human reason totter. And, finally, a terrible charge has been laid
+upon him. Is it strange, then, that he should say what is strange? Why,
+there would be nothing to wonder at if his mind collapsed on the spot.</p>
+
+<p>Now it is just this that he himself fears. In the midst of the first
+tremendous outburst, he checks himself suddenly with the exclamation 'O,
+fie!' (cf. the precisely similar use of this interjection, <span class="smcap">ii.</span>
+ii. 617). He must not let himself feel: he has to live. He must not let
+his heart break in pieces ('hold' means 'hold together'), his muscles
+turn into those of a trembling old man, his brain dissolve&mdash;as they
+threaten in an instant to do. For, if they do, how can he&mdash;<i>remember</i>?
+He goes on reiterating this 'remember' (the 'word' of the Ghost). He is,
+literally, afraid that he will <i>forget</i>&mdash;that his mind will lose the
+message entrusted to it. Instinctively, then, he feels that, if he <i>is</i>
+to remember, he must wipe from his memory everything it already
+contains; and the image of his past life rises before him, of all his
+joy in thought and observation and the stores they have accumulated in
+his memory. All that is done with for ever: nothing is to remain for him
+on the 'table' but the command, 'remember me.' He swears <a name="Page_411" id="Page_411"></a><span class="pagenum">[411]</span>it; 'yes, by
+heaven!' That done, suddenly the repressed passion breaks out, and, most
+characteristically, he thinks <i>first</i> of his mother; then of his uncle,
+the smooth-spoken scoundrel who has just been smiling on him and calling
+him 'son.' And in bitter desperate irony he snatches his tables from his
+breast (they are suggested to him by the phrases he has just used,
+'table of my memory,' 'book and volume'). After all, he <i>will</i> use them
+once again; and, perhaps with a wild laugh, he writes with trembling
+fingers his last observation: 'One may smile, and smile, and be a
+villain.'</p>
+
+<p>But that, I believe, is not merely a desperate jest. It springs from
+that <i>fear of forgetting</i>. A time will come, he feels, when all this
+appalling experience of the last half-hour will be incredible to him,
+will seem a mere nightmare, will even, conceivably, quite vanish from
+his mind. Let him have something in black and white that will bring it
+back and <i>force</i> him to remember and believe. What is there so unnatural
+in this, if you substitute a note-book or diary for the 'tables'?<a name="FNanchor_258" id="FNanchor_258"></a><a href="#Footnote_258" class="fnanchor">[258]</a></p>
+
+<p>But why should he write that particular note, and not rather his 'word,'
+'Adieu, adieu! remember me'? I should answer, first, that a grotesque
+jest at such a moment is thoroughly characteristic of Hamlet (see p.<a href="#Page_151">
+151</a>), and that the jocose 'So, uncle, there you are!' shows his state of
+mind; and, secondly, that loathing of his uncle is vehement in his
+thought at this moment. Possibly, too, he might remember that 'tables'
+are stealable, and that if the appearance of the Ghost should be
+reported, a mere observation on the smiling of villains could not betray
+anything of his communication with the Ghost. What follows shows that
+the instinct of secrecy is strong in him.</p>
+
+<p>It seems likely, I may add, that Shakespeare here was influenced,
+consciously or unconsciously, by recollection of a place in <i>Titus
+Andronicus</i> (<span class="smcap">iv.</span> i.). In that horrible play Chiron and
+Demetrius, after outraging Lavinia, cut out her tongue and cut off her
+hands, in order that she may be unable to reveal the outrage. She
+reveals it, however, by taking a staff in her mouth, guiding it with her
+arms, and writing in the <a name="Page_412" id="Page_412"></a><span class="pagenum">[412]</span>sand, 'Stuprum. Chiron. Demetrius.' Titus soon
+afterwards says:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i7">I will go get a leaf of brass,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">And with a gad of steel will write these words,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">And lay it by. The angry northern wind<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Will blow these sands, like Sibyl's leaves, abroad,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">And where's your lesson then?<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>Perhaps in the old <i>Hamlet</i>, which may have been a play something like
+<i>Titus Andronicus</i>, Hamlet at this point did write something of the
+Ghost's message in his tables. In any case Shakespeare, whether he wrote
+<i>Titus Andronicus</i> or only revised an older play on the subject, might
+well recall this incident, as he frequently reproduces other things in
+that drama.</p>
+
+<div class="footnotes">
+<div class="footnotehead">FOOTNOTES:</div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_258" id="Footnote_258"></a><a href="#FNanchor_258"><span class="label">[258]</span></a> The reader will observe that this suggestion of a
+<i>further</i> reason for his making the note may be rejected without the
+rest of the interpretation being affected.</p></div>
+</div>
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="NOTE_E" id="NOTE_E"></a>NOTE E.</h2>
+
+<h3>THE GHOST IN THE CELLARAGE.</h3>
+
+
+<p>It has been thought that the whole of the last part of <span class="smcap">i.</span> v.,
+from the entrance of Horatio and Marcellus, follows the old play
+closely, and that Shakespeare is condescending to the groundlings.</p>
+
+<p>Here again, whether or no he took a suggestion from the old play, I see
+no reason to think that he wrote down to his public. So far as Hamlet's
+state of mind is concerned, there is not a trace of this. Anyone who has
+a difficulty in understanding it should read Coleridge's note. What
+appears grotesque is the part taken by the Ghost, and Hamlet's
+consequent removal from one part of the stage to another. But, as to the
+former, should we feel anything grotesque in the four injunctions
+'Swear!' if it were not that they come from under the stage&mdash;a fact
+which to an Elizabethan audience, perfectly indifferent to what is
+absurdly called stage illusion, was probably not in the least grotesque?
+And as to the latter, if we knew the Ghost-lore of the time better than
+we do, perhaps we should see nothing odd in Hamlet's insisting on moving
+away and proposing the oath afresh when the Ghost intervenes.</p>
+
+<p>But, further, it is to be observed that he does not merely propose the
+oath afresh. He first makes Horatio and Marcellus swear never to make
+known what they have <i>seen</i>. Then, on shifting his ground, he makes them
+swear never to speak of <a name="Page_413" id="Page_413"></a><span class="pagenum">[413]</span>what they have <i>heard</i>. Then, moving again, he
+makes them swear that, if he should think fit to play the antic, they
+will give no sign of knowing aught of him. The oath is now complete;
+and, when the Ghost commands them to swear the last time, Hamlet
+suddenly becomes perfectly serious and bids it rest. [In Fletcher's
+<i>Woman's Prize</i>, <span class="smcap">v.</span> iii., a passage pointed out to me by Mr.
+C.J. Wilkinson, a man taking an oath shifts his ground.]</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="NOTE_F" id="NOTE_F"></a>NOTE F.</h2>
+
+<h3>THE PLAYER'S SPEECH IN <i>HAMLET</i>.</h3>
+
+
+<p>There are two extreme views about this speech. According to one,
+Shakespeare quoted it from some play, or composed it for the occasion,
+simply and solely in order to ridicule, through it, the bombastic style
+of dramatists contemporary with himself or slightly older; just as he
+ridicules in <i>2 Henry IV.</i> Tamburlaine's rant about the kings who draw
+his chariot, or puts fragments of similar bombast into the mouth of
+Pistol. According to Coleridge, on the other hand, this idea is 'below
+criticism.' No sort of ridicule was intended. 'The lines, as epic
+narrative, are superb.' It is true that the language is 'too
+poetical&mdash;the language of lyric vehemence and epic pomp, and not of the
+drama'; but this is due to the fact that Shakespeare had to distinguish
+the style of the speech from that of his own dramatic dialogue.</p>
+
+<p>In essentials I think that what Coleridge says<a name="FNanchor_259" id="FNanchor_259"></a><a href="#Footnote_259" class="fnanchor">[259]</a> is true. He goes too
+far, it seems to me, when he describes the language of the speech as
+merely 'too poetical'; for with much that is fine there is intermingled
+a good deal that, in epic as in drama, must be called bombast. But I do
+not believe Shakespeare meant it for bombast.</p>
+
+<p>I will briefly put the arguments which point to this conclusion.
+Warburton long ago stated some of them fully and cogently, but he
+misinterpreted here and there, and some arguments have to be added to
+his.</p>
+
+<p><a name="Page_414" id="Page_414"></a><span class="pagenum">[414]</span>1. If the speech was meant to be ridiculous, it follows either that
+Hamlet in praising it spoke ironically, or that Shakespeare, in making
+Hamlet praise it sincerely, himself wrote ironically. And both these
+consequences are almost incredible.</p>
+
+<p>Let us see what Hamlet says. He asks the player to recite 'a passionate
+speech'; and, being requested to choose one, he refers to a speech he
+once heard the player declaim. This speech, he says, was never 'acted'
+or was acted only once; for the play pleased not the million. But he,
+and others whose opinion was of more importance than his, thought it an
+excellent play, well constructed, and composed with equal skill and
+temperance. One of these other judges commended it because it contained
+neither piquant indecencies nor affectations of phrase, but showed 'an
+honest method, as wholesome as sweet, and by very much more handsome
+than fine.'<a name="FNanchor_260" id="FNanchor_260"></a><a href="#Footnote_260" class="fnanchor">[260]</a> In this play Hamlet 'chiefly loved' one speech; and he
+asks for a part of it.</p>
+
+<p>Let the reader now refer to the passage I have just summarised; let him
+consider its tone and manner; and let him ask himself if Hamlet can
+possibly be speaking ironically. I am sure he will answer No. And then
+let him observe what follows. The speech is declaimed. Polonius
+interrupting it with an objection to its length, Hamlet snubs him, bids
+the player proceed, and adds, 'He's for a jig or a tale of bawdry: or he
+sleeps.' 'He,' that is, 'shares the taste of the million for sallets in
+the lines to make the matter savoury, and is wearied by an honest
+method.'<a name="FNanchor_261" id="FNanchor_261"></a><a href="#Footnote_261" class="fnanchor">[261]</a> Polonius later interrupts again, for he thinks the emotion
+of the player too absurd; but Hamlet respects it; and afterwards, when
+he is alone (and therefore can hardly be ironical), in contrasting this
+emotion with his own insensibility, he betrays no consciousness that
+there was anything unfitting in the speech that caused it.</p>
+
+<p>So far I have chiefly followed Warburton, but there is an important
+point which seems not to have been observed. All <a name="Page_415" id="Page_415"></a><span class="pagenum">[415]</span>Hamlet's praise of the
+speech is in the closest agreement with his conduct and words elsewhere.
+His later advice to the player (<span class="smcap">iii.</span> ii.) is on precisely the
+same lines. He is to play to the judicious, not to the crowd, whose
+opinion is worthless. He is to observe, like the author of Aeneas'
+speech, the 'modesty' of nature. He must not tear a 'passion' to
+tatters, to split the ears of the incompetent, but in the very tempest
+of passion is to keep a temperance and smoothness. The million, we
+gather from the first passage, cares nothing for construction; and so,
+we learn in the second passage, the barren spectators want to laugh at
+the clown instead of attending to some necessary question of the play.
+Hamlet's hatred of exaggeration is marked in both passages. And so (as
+already pointed out, p. <a href='#Page_133'>133</a>) in the play-scene, when his own lines are
+going to be delivered, he impatiently calls out to the actor to leave
+his damnable faces and begin; and at the grave of Ophelia he is furious
+with what he thinks the exaggeration of Laertes, burlesques his
+language, and breaks off with the words,</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i5">Nay, an thou'lt mouth,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">I'll rant as well as thou.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>Now if Hamlet's praise of the Aeneas and Dido play and speech is
+ironical, his later advice to the player must surely be ironical too:
+and who will maintain that? And if in the one passage Hamlet is serious
+but Shakespeare ironical, then in the other passage all those famous
+remarks about drama and acting, which have been cherished as
+Shakespeare's by all the world, express the opposite of Shakespeare's
+opinion: and who will maintain that? And if Hamlet and Shakespeare are
+both serious&mdash;and nothing else is credible&mdash;then, to Hamlet and
+Shakespeare, the speeches of Laertes and Hamlet at Ophelia's grave are
+rant, but the speech of Aeneas to Dido is not rant. Is it not evident
+that he meant it for an exalted narrative speech of 'passion,' in a
+style which, though he may not have adopted it, he still approved and
+despised the million for not approving,&mdash;a speech to be delivered with
+temperance or modesty, but not too tamely neither? Is he not aiming here
+to do precisely what Marlowe aimed to do when he proposed to lead the
+audience</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i1">From jigging veins of rhyming mother-wits,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">And such conceits as clownage keeps in pay,<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p><a name="Page_416" id="Page_416"></a><span class="pagenum">[416]</span>to 'stately' themes which beget 'high astounding terms'? And is it
+strange that, like Marlowe in <i>Tamburlaine</i>, he adopted a style marred
+in places by that which <i>we</i> think bombast, but which the author meant
+to be more 'handsome than fine'?</p>
+
+<p>2. If this is so, we can easily understand how it comes about that the
+speech of Aeneas contains lines which are unquestionably grand and free
+from any suspicion of bombast, and others which, though not free from
+that suspicion, are nevertheless highly poetic. To the first class
+certainly belongs the passage beginning, 'But as we often see.' To the
+second belongs the description of Pyrrhus, covered with blood that was</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i1">Baked and impasted with the parching streets,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">That lend a tyrannous and damned light<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">To their lord's murder;<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>and again the picture of Pyrrhus standing like a tyrant in a picture,
+with his uplifted arm arrested in act to strike by the crash of the
+falling towers of Ilium. It is surely impossible to say that these lines
+are <i>merely</i> absurd and not in the least grand; and with them I should
+join the passage about Fortune's wheel, and the concluding lines.</p>
+
+<p>But how can the insertion of these passages possibly be explained on the
+hypothesis that Shakespeare meant the speech to be ridiculous?</p>
+
+<p>3. 'Still,' it may be answered, 'Shakespeare <i>must</i> have been conscious
+of the bombast in some of these passages. How could he help seeing it?
+And, if he saw it, he cannot have meant seriously to praise the speech.'
+But why must he have seen it? Did Marlowe know when he wrote
+bombastically? Or Marston? Or Heywood? Does not Shakespeare elsewhere
+write bombast? The truth is that the two defects of style in the speech
+are the very defects we do find in his writings. When he wished to make
+his style exceptionally high and passionate he always ran some risk of
+bombast. And he was even more prone to the fault which in this speech
+seems to me the more marked, a use of metaphors which sound to our ears
+'conceited' or grotesque. To me at any rate the metaphors in 'now is he
+total gules' and 'mincing with his sword her husband's limbs' are more
+disturbing than any of the bombast. But, as regards this second defect,
+there are many places in Shakespeare worse than the speech of <a name="Page_417" id="Page_417"></a><span class="pagenum">[417]</span>Aeneas;
+and, as regards the first, though in his undoubtedly genuine works there
+is no passage so faulty, there is also no passage of quite the same
+species (for his narrative poems do not aim at epic grandeur), and there
+are many passages where bombast of the same kind, though not of the same
+degree, occurs.</p>
+
+<p>Let the reader ask himself, for instance, how the following lines would
+strike him if he came on them for the first time out of their context:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i7">Whip me, ye devils,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">From the possession of this heavenly sight!<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Blow me about in winds! Roast me in sulphur!<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Wash me in steep-down gulfs of liquid fire!<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>Are Pyrrhus's 'total gules' any worse than Duncan's 'silver skin laced
+with his golden blood,' or so bad as the chamberlains' daggers
+'unmannerly breech'd with gore'?<a name="FNanchor_262" id="FNanchor_262"></a><a href="#Footnote_262" class="fnanchor">[262]</a> If 'to bathe in reeking wounds,'
+and 'spongy officers,' and even 'alarum'd by his sentinel the wolf,
+Whose howl's his watch,' and other such phrases in <i>Macbeth</i>, had
+occurred in the speech of Aeneas, we should certainly have been told
+that they were meant for burlesque. I open <i>Troilus and Cressida</i>
+(because, like the speech of Aeneas, it has to do with the story of
+Troy), and I read, in a perfectly serious context (<span class="smcap">iv.</span> v. 6
+f.):</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i6">Thou, trumpet, there's thy purse.<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Now crack thy lungs, and split thy brazen pipe:<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Blow, villain, till thy sphered bias cheek<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Outswell the colic of puff'd Aquilon:<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Come, stretch thy chest, and let thy eyes spout blood;<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Thou blow'st for Hector.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>'Splendid!' one cries. Yes, but if you are told it is also bombastic,
+can you deny it? I read again (<span class="smcap">v.</span> v. 7):</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i7">bastard Margarelon<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Hath Doreus prisoner,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">And stands colossus-wise, waving his beam,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Upon the pashed corses of the kings.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>Or, to turn to earlier but still undoubted works, Shakespeare wrote in
+<i>Romeo and Juliet</i>,</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i6">here will I remain<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">With worms that are thy chamber-maids;<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p><a name="Page_418" id="Page_418"></a><span class="pagenum">[418]</span>and in <i>King John</i>,</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i1">And pick strong matter of revolt and wrath<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Out of the bloody finger-ends of John;<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>and in <i>Lucrece</i>,</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i1">And, bubbling from her breast, it doth divide<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">In two slow rivers, that the crimson blood<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Circles her body in on every side,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Who, like a late-sack'd island, vastly stood<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Bare and unpeopled in this fearful flood.<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Some of her blood still pure and red remain'd,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">And some look'd black, and that false Tarquin stain'd.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>Is it so very unlikely that the poet who wrote thus might, aiming at a
+peculiarly heightened and passionate style, write the speech of Aeneas?</p>
+
+<p>4. But, pursuing this line of argument, we must go further. There is
+really scarcely one idea, and there is but little phraseology, in the
+speech that cannot be paralleled from Shakespeare's own works. He merely
+exaggerates a little here what he has done elsewhere. I will conclude
+this Note by showing that this is so as regards almost all the passages
+most objected to, as well as some others. (1) 'The Hyrcanian beast' is
+Macbeth's 'Hyrcan tiger' (<span class="smcap">iii.</span> iv. 101), who also occurs in <i>3
+Hen. VI.</i> <span class="smcap">i.</span> iv. 155. (2) With 'total gules' Steevens compared
+<i>Timon</i> <span class="smcap">iv.</span> iii. 59 (an undoubtedly Shakespearean passage),</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i1">With man's blood paint the ground, gules, gules.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>(3) With 'baked and impasted' cf. <i>John</i> <span class="smcap">iii.</span> iii. 42, 'If that
+surly spirit melancholy Had baked thy blood.' In the questionable <i>Tit.
+And.</i> <span class="smcap">v.</span> ii. 201 we have, 'in that paste let their vile heads
+be baked' (a paste made of blood and bones, <i>ib.</i> 188), and in the
+undoubted <i>Richard II.</i> <span class="smcap">iii.</span> ii. 154 (quoted by Caldecott)
+Richard refers to the ground</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i1">Which serves as paste and cover to our bones.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>(4) 'O'er-sized with coagulate gore' finds an exact parallel in the
+'blood-siz'd field' of the <i>Two Noble Kinsmen</i>, <span class="smcap">i.</span> i. 99, a
+scene which, whether written by Shakespeare (as I fully believe) or by
+another poet, was certainly written in all seriousness. (5) 'With eyes
+like carbuncles' has been much ridiculed, but Milton (<i>P.L.</i> ix. 500)
+gives 'carbuncle eyes' to Satan turned into a serpent (Steevens), and
+why are they more outrageous than ruby lips <a name="Page_419" id="Page_419"></a><span class="pagenum">[419]</span>and cheeks (<i>J.C.</i>
+<span class="smcap">iii.</span> i. 260, <i>Macb.</i> <span class="smcap">iii.</span> iv. 115, <i>Cym.</i> <span class="smcap">ii.</span>
+ii. 17)? (6) Priam falling with the mere wind of Pyrrhus's sword is
+paralleled, not only in <i>Dido Queen of Carthage</i>, but in <i>Tr. and Cr.</i>
+<span class="smcap">v.</span> iii. 40 (Warburton). (7) With Pyrrhus standing like a
+painted tyrant cf. <i>Macb.</i> <span class="smcap">v.</span> viii. 25 (Delius). (8) The
+forging of Mars's armour occurs again in <i>Tr. and Cr.</i> <span class="smcap">iv.</span> v.
+255, where Hector swears by the forge that stithied Mars his helm, just
+as Hamlet himself alludes to Vulcan's stithy (<span class="smcap">iii.</span> ii. 89). (9)
+The idea of 'strumpet Fortune' is common: <i>e.g.</i> <i>Macb.</i> <span class="smcap">i.</span> ii.
+15, 'Fortune ... show'd like a rebel's whore.' (10) With the 'rant'
+about her wheel Warburton compares <i>Ant. and Cl.</i> <span class="smcap">iv.</span> xv. 43,
+where Cleopatra would</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i12">rail so high<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">That the false huswife Fortune break her wheel.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>(11.) Pyrrhus minces with his sword Priam's limbs, and Timon
+(<span class="smcap">iv.</span> iii. 122) bids Alcibiades 'mince' the babe without
+remorse.'<a name="FNanchor_263" id="FNanchor_263"></a><a href="#Footnote_263" class="fnanchor">[263]</a></p>
+
+<div class="footnotes">
+<div class="footnotehead">FOOTNOTES:</div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_259" id="Footnote_259"></a><a href="#FNanchor_259"><span class="label">[259]</span></a> It is impossible to tell whether Coleridge formed his
+view independently, or adopted it from Schlegel. For there is no record
+of his having expressed his opinion prior to the time of his reading
+Schlegel's <i>Lectures</i>; and, whatever he said to the contrary, his
+borrowings from Schlegel are demonstrable.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_260" id="Footnote_260"></a><a href="#FNanchor_260"><span class="label">[260]</span></a> Clark and Wright well compare Polonius' antithesis of
+'rich, not gaudy': though I doubt if 'handsome' implies richness.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_261" id="Footnote_261"></a><a href="#FNanchor_261"><span class="label">[261]</span></a> Is it not possible that 'mobled queen,' to which Hamlet
+seems to object, and which Polonius praises, is meant for an example of
+the second fault of affected phraseology, from which the play was said
+to be free, and an instance of which therefore surprises Hamlet?</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_262" id="Footnote_262"></a><a href="#FNanchor_262"><span class="label">[262]</span></a> The extravagance of these phrases is doubtless
+intentional (for Macbeth in using them is trying to act a part), but the
+<i>absurdity</i> of the second can hardly be so.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_263" id="Footnote_263"></a><a href="#FNanchor_263"><span class="label">[263]</span></a> Steevens observes that Heywood uses the phrase 'guled
+with slaughter,' and I find in his <i>Iron Age</i> various passages
+indicating that he knew the speech of Aeneas (cf. p. <a href='#Page_140'>140</a> for another
+sign that he knew <i>Hamlet</i>). The two parts of the <i>Iron Age</i> were
+published in 1632, but are said, in the preface to the Second, to have
+'been long since writ.' I refer to the pages of vol. 3 of Pearson's
+<i>Heywood</i> (1874). (1) p. 329, Troilus 'lyeth imbak'd In his cold blood.'
+(2) p. 341, of Achilles' armour:
+</p>
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i1"><i>Vulcan</i> that wrought it out of gadds of Steele<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">With his <i>Ciclopian</i> hammers, never made<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Such noise upon his Anvile forging it,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Than these my arm'd fists in <i>Ulisses</i> wracke.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+<p>
+(3) p. 357, 'till <i>Hecub's</i> reverent lockes Be gul'd in slaughter.' (4)
+p. 357, '<i>Scamander</i> plaines Ore-spread with intrailes bak'd in blood
+and dust.' (5) p. 378, 'We'll rost them at the scorching flames of
+<i>Troy</i>.' (6) p. 379, 'tragicke slaughter, clad in gules and sables'
+(cf.'sable arms' in the speech in <i>Hamlet</i>). (7) p. 384, 'these lockes,
+now knotted all, As bak't in blood.' Of these, all but (1) and (2) are
+in Part II. Part I. has many passages which recall <i>Troilus and
+Cressida</i>. Mr. Fleay's speculation as to its date will be found in his
+<i>Chronicle History of the English Drama</i>, i. p. 285.
+</p><p>
+For the same writer's ingenious theory (which is of course incapable of
+proof) regarding the relation of the player's speech in <i>Hamlet</i> to
+Marlowe and Nash's <i>Dido</i>, see Furness's Variorum <i>Hamlet</i>.</p></div>
+</div>
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><a name="Page_420" id="Page_420"></a><span class="pagenum">[420]</span></p>
+<h2><a name="NOTE_G" id="NOTE_G"></a>NOTE G.</h2>
+
+<h3>HAMLET'S APOLOGY TO LAERTES.</h3>
+
+
+<p>Johnson, in commenting on the passage (<span class="smcap">v.</span> ii. 237-255), says:
+'I wish Hamlet had made some other defence; it is unsuitable to the
+character of a good or a brave man to shelter himself in falsehood.' And
+Seymour (according to Furness) thought the falsehood so ignoble that he
+rejected lines 239-250 as an interpolation!</p>
+
+<p>I wish first to remark that we are mistaken when we suppose that Hamlet
+is here apologising specially for his behaviour to Laertes at Ophelia's
+grave. We naturally suppose this because he has told Horatio that he is
+sorry he 'forgot himself' on that occasion, and that he will court
+Laertes' favours (<span class="smcap">v.</span> ii. 75 ff.). But what he says in that very
+passage shows that he is thinking chiefly of the greater wrong he has
+done Laertes by depriving him of his father:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i1">For, by the image of my cause, I see<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">The portraiture of his.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>And it is also evident in the last words of the apology itself that he
+is referring in it to the deaths of Polonius and Ophelia:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i1">Sir, in this audience,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Let my disclaiming from a purposed evil<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Free me so far in your most generous thoughts,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1"><i>That I have shot mine arrow o'er the house,</i><br /></span>
+<span class="i1"><i>And hurt my brother.</i><br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>But now, as to the falsehood. The charge is not to be set aside lightly;
+and, for my part, I confess that, while rejecting of course Johnson's
+notion that Shakespeare wanted to paint 'a good man,' I have momentarily
+shared Johnson's wish that Hamlet had made 'some other defence' than
+that of madness. But I think the wish proceeds from failure to imagine
+the situation.</p>
+
+<p>In the first place, <i>what</i> other defence can we wish Hamlet to have
+made? I can think of none. He cannot tell the truth. He cannot say to
+Laertes, 'I meant to stab the King, not your father.' He cannot explain
+why he was unkind to Ophelia. Even on the false supposition that he is
+referring simply to his <a name="Page_421" id="Page_421"></a><span class="pagenum">[421]</span>behaviour at the grave, he can hardly say, I
+suppose, 'You ranted so abominably that you put me into a towering
+passion.' <i>Whatever</i> he said, it would have to be more or less untrue.</p>
+
+<p>Next, what moral difference is there between feigning insanity and
+asserting it? If we are to blame Hamlet for the second, why not equally
+for the first?</p>
+
+<p>And, finally, even if he were referring simply to his behaviour at the
+grave, his excuse, besides falling in with his whole plan of feigning
+insanity, would be as near the truth as any he could devise. For we are
+not to take the account he gives to Horatio, that he was put in a
+passion by the bravery of Laertes' grief, as the whole truth. His raving
+over the grave is not <i>mere</i> acting. On the contrary, that passage is
+the best card that the believers in Hamlet's madness have to play. He is
+really almost beside himself with grief as well as anger, half-maddened
+by the impossibility of explaining to Laertes how he has come to do what
+he has done, full of wild rage and then of sick despair at this wretched
+world which drives him to such deeds and such misery. It is the same
+rage and despair that mingle with other feelings in his outbreak to
+Ophelia in the Nunnery-scene. But of all this, even if he were clearly
+conscious of it, he cannot speak to Horatio; for his love to Ophelia is
+a subject on which he has never opened his lips to his friend.</p>
+
+<p>If we realise the situation, then, we shall, I think, repress the wish
+that Hamlet had 'made some other defence' than that of madness. We shall
+feel only tragic sympathy.</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>As I have referred to Hamlet's apology, I will add a remark on it from a
+different point of view. It forms another refutation of the theory that
+Hamlet has delayed his vengeance till he could publicly convict the
+King, and that he has come back to Denmark because now, with the
+evidence of the commission in his pocket, he can safely accuse him. If
+that were so, what better opportunity could he possibly find than this
+occasion, where he has to express his sorrow to Laertes for the grievous
+wrongs which he has unintentionally inflicted on him?</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><a name="Page_422" id="Page_422"></a><span class="pagenum">[422]</span></p>
+<h2><a name="NOTE_H" id="NOTE_H"></a>NOTE H.</h2>
+
+<h3>THE EXCHANGE OF RAPIERS.</h3>
+
+
+<p>I am not going to discuss the question how this exchange ought to be
+managed. I wish merely to point out that the stage-direction fails to
+show the sequence of speeches and events. The passage is as follows
+(Globe text):</p>
+
+<table class="tabledrama" summary="Exchange of Rapiers in Hamlet" cellpadding="8">
+  <tr>
+    <td valign="top"><i>Ham.</i></td>
+    <td>Come, for the third, Laertes: you but dally;<br />
+        I pray you, pass with your best violence;<br />
+        I am afeard you make a wanton of me.</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td><i>Laer.</i></td>
+    <td>Say you so? come on. <span style="margin-left: 7em;">[<i>They play.</i></span></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td><i>Osr.</i></td>
+    <td>Nothing, neither way.</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td><i>Laer.</i></td>
+    <td>Have at you now!</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td><br /></td>
+    <td><span style="margin-left: 3em;">[<i>Laertes wounds Hamlet; then, in scuffling, they</i></span><br />
+        <span style="margin-left: 5em;"><i>change rapiers, and Hamlet wounds Laertes.</i></span><a name="FNanchor_264" id="FNanchor_264"></a><a href="#Footnote_264" class="fnanchor">[264]</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td><i>King.</i></td>
+    <td>Part them; they are incensed.</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td><i>Ham.</i></td>
+    <td>Nay, come, again. <span style="margin-left: 5em;">[<i>The Queen falls.</i></span><a name="FNanchor_265" id="FNanchor_265"></a><a href="#Footnote_265" class="fnanchor">[265]</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td><i>Osr.</i></td>
+    <td><span style="margin-left: 7em;">Look to the Queen there, ho!</span></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td><i>Hor.</i></td>
+    <td>They bleed on both sides. How is it, my lord?</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td><i>Osr.</i></td>
+    <td>How is't, Laertes?</td>
+  </tr>
+</table>
+
+<p>The words 'and Hamlet wounds Laertes' in Rowe's stage-direction destroy
+the point of the words given to the King in the text. If Laertes is
+already wounded, why should the King care whether the fencers are parted
+or not? What makes him cry out is that, while he sees his purpose
+effected as regards Hamlet, he also sees Laertes in danger through the
+exchange of foils in the scuffle. Now it is not to be supposed that
+Laertes is particularly dear to him; but he sees instantaneously that,
+if Laertes escapes the poisoned foil, he will certainly hold his tongue
+about the plot against Hamlet, while, if he is wounded, he may confess
+the truth; for it is no doubt quite evident to the King that Laertes has
+fenced tamely because his conscience is greatly troubled by the
+treachery he is about to practise. The King therefore, as soon as he
+sees the exchange of foils, cries out, 'Part them; they are incensed.'
+But Hamlet's blood is up. 'Nay, <a name="Page_423" id="Page_423"></a><span class="pagenum">[423]</span>come, again,' he calls to Laertes, who
+cannot refuse to play, and <i>now</i> is wounded by Hamlet. At the very same
+moment the Queen falls to the ground; and ruin rushes on the King from
+the right hand and the left.</p>
+
+<p>The passage, therefore, should be printed thus:</p>
+
+<table class="tabledrama" summary="Stage Directions in Exchange of Rapiers in Hamlet" cellpadding="8">
+  <tr>
+    <td><i>Laer.</i></td>
+    <td>Have at you now!</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td><br /></td>
+    <td><span style="margin-left: 3em;">[<i>Laertes wounds Hamlet; then, in scuffling, they change rapiers.</i></span></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td><i>King.</i></td>
+    <td>Part them; they are incensed.</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td><i>Ham.</i></td>
+    <td>Nay, come, again.</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td><br /></td>
+    <td><span style="margin-left: 3em;">[<i>They play, and Hamlet wounds Laertes. The Queen falls.</i></span></td>
+  </tr>
+</table>
+
+<div class="footnotes">
+<div class="footnotehead">FOOTNOTES:</div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_264" id="Footnote_264"></a><a href="#FNanchor_264"><span class="label">[264]</span></a> So Rowe. The direction in Q1 is negligible, the text
+being different. Q2 etc. have nothing, Ff. simply 'In scuffling they
+change rapiers.'</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_265" id="Footnote_265"></a><a href="#FNanchor_265"><span class="label">[265]</span></a> Capell. The Quartos and Folios have no directions.</p></div>
+</div>
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="NOTE_I" id="NOTE_I"></a>NOTE I.</h2>
+
+<h3>THE DURATION OF THE ACTION IN <i>OTHELLO</i>.</h3>
+
+
+<p>The quite unusual difficulties regarding this subject have led to much
+discussion, a synopsis of which may be found in Furness's Variorum
+edition, pp. 358-72. Without detailing the facts I will briefly set out
+the main difficulty, which is that, according to one set of indications
+(which I will call A), Desdemona was murdered within a day or two of her
+arrival in Cyprus, while, according to another set (which I will call
+B), some time elapsed between her arrival and the catastrophe. Let us
+take A first, and run through the play.</p>
+
+<p>(A) Act <span class="smcap">i.</span> opens on the night of Othello's marriage. On that
+night he is despatched to Cyprus, leaving Desdemona to follow him.</p>
+
+<p>In Act <span class="smcap">ii.</span> Sc. i., there arrive at Cyprus, first, in one ship,
+Cassio; then, in another, Desdemona, Iago, and Emilia; then, in another,
+Othello (Othello, Cassio, and Desdemona being in three different ships,
+it does not matter, for our purpose, how long the voyage lasted). On the
+night following these arrivals in Cyprus the marriage is consummated
+(<span class="smcap">ii.</span> iii. 9), Cassio is cashiered, and, on Iago's advice, he
+resolves to ask Desdemona's intercession 'betimes in the morning'
+(<span class="smcap">ii.</span> iii. 335).</p>
+
+<p>In Act <span class="smcap">iii.</span> Sc. iii. (the Temptation scene), he does so:
+Desdemona does intercede: Iago begins to poison Othello's mind: the
+handkerchief is lost, found by Emilia, and given to Iago: he determines
+to leave it in Cassio's room, and, renewing his <a name="Page_424" id="Page_424"></a><span class="pagenum">[424]</span>attack on Othello,
+asserts that he has seen the handkerchief in Cassio's hand: Othello bids
+him kill Cassio within three days, and resolves to kill Desdemona
+himself. All this occurs in one unbroken scene, and evidently on the day
+after the arrival in Cyprus (see <span class="smcap">iii.</span> i. 33).</p>
+
+<p>In the scene (iv.) following the Temptation scene Desdemona sends to bid
+Cassio come, as she has interceded for him: Othello enters, tests her
+about the handkerchief, and departs in anger: Cassio, arriving, is told
+of the change in Othello, and, being left <i>solus</i>, is accosted by
+Bianca, whom he requests to copy the work on the handkerchief which he
+has just found in his room (ll. 188 f.). All this is naturally taken to
+happen in the later part of the day on which the events of <span class="smcap">iii.</span>
+i.-iii. took place, <i>i.e.</i> the day after the arrival in Cyprus: but I
+shall return to this point.</p>
+
+<p>In <span class="smcap">iv.</span> i. Iago tells Othello that Cassio has confessed, and,
+placing Othello where he can watch, he proceeds on Cassio's entrance to
+rally him about Bianca; and Othello, not being near enough to hear what
+is said, believes that Cassio is laughing at his conquest of Desdemona.
+Cassio here says that Bianca haunts him and 'was here <i>even now</i>'; and
+Bianca herself, coming in, reproaches him about the handkerchief 'you
+gave me <i>even now</i>.' There is therefore no appreciable time between
+<span class="smcap">iii.</span> iv. and <span class="smcap">iv.</span> i. In this same scene Bianca bids
+Cassio come to supper <i>to-night</i>; and Lodovico, arriving, is asked to
+sup with Othello <i>to-night</i>. In <span class="smcap">iv.</span> ii. Iago persuades Roderigo
+to kill Cassio <i>that night</i> as he comes from Bianca's. In <span class="smcap">iv.</span>
+iii. Lodovico, after supper, takes his leave, and Othello bids Desdemona
+go to bed on the instant and dismiss her attendant.</p>
+
+<p>In Act <span class="smcap">v.</span>, <i>that night</i>, the attempted assassination of Cassio,
+and the murder of Desdemona, take place.</p>
+
+<p>From all this, then, it seems clear that the time between the arrival in
+Cyprus and the catastrophe is certainly not more than a few days, and
+most probably only about a day and a half: or, to put it otherwise, that
+most probably Othello kills his wife about twenty-four hours after the
+consummation of their marriage!</p>
+
+<p>The only <i>possible</i> place, it will be seen, where time can elapse is
+between <span class="smcap">iii.</span> iii. and <span class="smcap">iii.</span> iv. And here Mr. Fleay
+would imagine a gap of at least a week. The reader will find that this
+supposition involves the following results, (<i>a</i>) Desdemona has allowed
+<a name="Page_425" id="Page_425"></a><span class="pagenum">[425]</span>at least a week to elapse without telling Cassio that she has
+interceded for him. (<i>b</i>) Othello, after being convinced of her guilt,
+after resolving to kill her, and after ordering Iago to kill Cassio
+within three days, has allowed at least a week to elapse without even
+questioning her about the handkerchief, and has so behaved during all
+this time that she is totally unconscious of any change in his feelings.
+(<i>c</i>) Desdemona, who reserves the handkerchief evermore about her to
+kiss and talk to (<span class="smcap">iii.</span> iii. 295), has lost it for at least a
+week before she is conscious of the loss. (<i>d</i>) Iago has waited at least
+a week to leave the handkerchief in Cassio's chamber; for Cassio has
+evidently only just found it, and wants the work on it copied before the
+owner makes inquiries for it. These are all gross absurdities. It is
+certain that only a short time, most probable that not even a night,
+elapses between <span class="smcap">iii.</span> iii. and <span class="smcap">iii.</span> iv.</p>
+
+<p>(B) Now this idea that Othello killed his wife, probably within
+twenty-four hours, certainly within a few days, of the consummation of
+his marriage, contradicts the impression produced by the play on all
+uncritical readers and spectators. It is also in flat contradiction with
+a large number of time-indications in the play itself. It is needless to
+mention more than a few. (<i>a</i>) Bianca complains that Cassio has kept
+away from her for a week (<span class="smcap">iii.</span> iv. 173). Cassio and the rest
+have therefore been more than a week in Cyprus, and, we should naturally
+infer, considerably more. (<i>b</i>) The ground on which Iago builds
+throughout is the probability of Desdemona's having got tired of the
+Moor; she is accused of having repeatedly committed adultery with Cassio
+(<i>e.g.</i> <span class="smcap">v.</span> ii. 210); these facts and a great many others, such
+as Othello's language in <span class="smcap">iii.</span> iii. 338 ff., are utterly absurd
+on the supposition that he murders his wife within a day or two of the
+night when he consummated his marriage. (<i>c</i>) Iago's account of Cassio's
+dream implies (and indeed states) that he had been sleeping with Cassio
+'lately,' <i>i.e.</i> after arriving at Cyprus: yet, according to A, he had
+only spent one night in Cyprus, and we are expressly told that Cassio
+never went to bed on that night. Iago doubtless was a liar, but Othello
+was not an absolute idiot.</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>Thus (1) one set of time-indications clearly shows that Othello murdered
+his wife within a few days, probably a day and a half, of his arrival in
+Cyprus and the consummation of his marriage; <a name="Page_426" id="Page_426"></a><span class="pagenum">[426]</span>(2) another set of
+time-indications implies quite as clearly that some little time must
+have elapsed, probably a few weeks; and this last is certainly the
+impression of a reader who has not closely examined the play.</p>
+
+<p>It is impossible to escape this result. The suggestion that the imputed
+intrigue of Cassio and Desdemona took place at Venice before the
+marriage, not at Cyprus after it, is quite futile. There is no positive
+evidence whatever for it; if the reader will merely refer to the
+difficulties mentioned under B above, he will see that it leaves almost
+all of them absolutely untouched; and Iago's accusation is uniformly one
+of adultery.</p>
+
+<p>How then is this extraordinary contradiction to be explained? It can
+hardly be one of the casual inconsistencies, due to forgetfulness, which
+are found in Shakespeare's other tragedies; for the scheme of time
+indicated under A seems deliberate and self-consistent, and the scheme
+indicated under B seems, if less deliberate, equally self-consistent.
+This does not look as if a single scheme had been so vaguely imagined
+that inconsistencies arose in working it out; it points to some other
+source of contradiction.</p>
+
+<p>'Christopher North,' who dealt very fully with the question, elaborated
+a doctrine of Double Time, Short and Long. To do justice to this theory
+in a few words is impossible, but its essence is the notion that
+Shakespeare, consciously or unconsciously, wanted to produce on the
+spectator (for he did not aim at readers) two impressions. He wanted the
+spectator to feel a passionate and vehement haste in the action; but he
+also wanted him to feel that the action was fairly probable. Consciously
+or unconsciously he used Short Time (the scheme of A) for the first
+purpose, and Long Time (the scheme of B) for the second. The spectator
+is affected in the required manner by both, though without distinctly
+noticing the indications of the two schemes.</p>
+
+<p>The notion underlying this theory is probably true, but the theory
+itself can hardly stand. Passing minor matters by, I would ask the
+reader to consider the following remarks. (<i>a</i>) If, as seems to be
+maintained, the spectator does not notice the indications of 'Short
+Time' at all, how can they possibly affect him? The passion, vehemence
+and haste of Othello affect him, because he perceives them; but if he
+does not perceive the hints which <a name="Page_427" id="Page_427"></a><span class="pagenum">[427]</span>show the duration of the action from
+the arrival in Cyprus to the murder, these hints have simply no
+existence for him and are perfectly useless. The theory, therefore, does
+not explain the existence of 'Short Time.' (<i>b</i>) It is not the case that
+'Short Time' is wanted only to produce an impression of vehemence and
+haste, and 'Long Time' for probability. The 'Short Time' is equally
+wanted for probability: for it is grossly improbable that Iago's
+intrigue should not break down if Othello spends a week or weeks between
+the successful temptation and his execution of justice. (<i>c</i>) And this
+brings me to the most important point, which appears to have escaped
+notice. The place where 'Long Time' is wanted is not <i>within</i> Iago's
+intrigue. 'Long Time' is required simply and solely because the intrigue
+and its circumstances presuppose a marriage consummated, and an adultery
+possible, for (let us say) some weeks. But, granted that lapse between
+the marriage and the temptation, there is no reason whatever why more
+than a few days or even one day should elapse between this temptation
+and the murder. The whole trouble arises because the temptation begins
+on the morning after the consummated marriage. Let some three weeks
+elapse between the first night at Cyprus and the temptation; let the
+brawl which ends in the disgrace of Cassio occur not on that night but
+three weeks later; or again let it occur that night, but let three weeks
+elapse before the intercession of Desdemona and the temptation of Iago
+begin. All will then be clear. Cassio has time to make acquaintance with
+Bianca, and to neglect her: the Senate has time to hear of the perdition
+of the Turkish fleet and to recall Othello: the accusations of Iago
+cease to be ridiculous; and the headlong speed of the action after the
+temptation has begun is quite in place. Now, too, there is no reason why
+we should not be affected by the hints of time ('to-day,' 'to-night,'
+'even now'), which we <i>do</i> perceive (though we do not calculate them
+out). And, lastly, this supposition corresponds with our natural
+impression, which is that the temptation and what follows it take place
+some little while after the marriage, but occupy, themselves, a very
+short time.</p>
+
+<p>Now, of course, the supposition just described is no fact. As the play
+stands, it is quite certain that there is no space of three weeks, or
+anything like it, either between the arrival in Cyprus and the brawl, or
+between the brawl and the temptation. And <a name="Page_428" id="Page_428"></a><span class="pagenum">[428]</span>I draw attention to the
+supposition chiefly to show that quite a small change would remove the
+difficulties, and to insist that there is nothing wrong at all in regard
+to the time from the temptation onward. How to account for the existing
+contradictions I do not at all profess to know, and I will merely
+mention two possibilities.</p>
+
+<p>Possibly, as Mr. Daniel observes, the play has been tampered with. We
+have no text earlier than 1622, six years after Shakespeare's death. It
+may be suggested, then, that in the play, as Shakespeare wrote it, there
+was a gap of some weeks between the arrival in Cyprus and Cassio's
+brawl, or (less probably) between the brawl and the temptation. Perhaps
+there was a scene indicating the lapse of time. Perhaps it was dull, or
+the play was a little too long, or devotees of the unity of time made
+sport of a second breach of that unity coming just after the breach
+caused by the voyage. Perhaps accordingly the owners of the play
+altered, or hired a dramatist to alter, the arrangement at this point,
+and this was unwittingly done in such a way as to produce the
+contradictions we are engaged on. There is nothing intrinsically
+unlikely in this idea; and certainly, I think, the amount of such
+corruption of Shakespeare's texts by the players is usually rather
+underrated than otherwise. But I cannot say I see any signs of foreign
+alteration in the text, though it is somewhat odd that Roderigo, who
+makes no complaint on the day of the arrival in Cyprus when he is being
+persuaded to draw Cassio into a quarrel that night, should, directly
+after the quarrel (<span class="smcap">ii.</span> iii. 370), complain that he is making no
+advance in his pursuit of Desdemona, and should speak as though he had
+been in Cyprus long enough to have spent nearly all the money he brought
+from Venice.</p>
+
+<p>Or, possibly, Shakespeare's original plan was to allow some time to
+elapse after the arrival at Cyprus, but when he reached the point he
+found it troublesome to indicate this lapse in an interesting way, and
+convenient to produce Cassio's fall by means of the rejoicings on the
+night of the arrival, and then almost necessary to let the request for
+intercession, and the temptation, follow on the next day. And perhaps he
+said to himself, No one in the theatre will notice that all this makes
+an impossible position: and I can make all safe by using language that
+implies that Othello has after all been married for some time. If so,
+probably he was right. I do not think anyone does notice the
+<a name="Page_429" id="Page_429"></a><span class="pagenum">[429]</span>impossibilities either in the theatre or in a casual reading of the
+play.</p>
+
+<p>Either of these suppositions is possible: neither is, to me, probable.
+The first seems the less unlikely. If the second is true, Shakespeare
+did in <i>Othello</i> what he seems to do in no other play. I can believe
+that he may have done so; but I find it very hard to believe that he
+produced this impossible situation without knowing it. It is one thing
+to read a drama or see it, quite another to construct and compose it,
+and he appears to have imagined the action in <i>Othello</i> with even more
+than his usual intensity.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="NOTE_J" id="NOTE_J"></a>NOTE J.</h2>
+
+<h3>THE 'ADDITIONS' TO <i>OTHELLO</i> IN THE FIRST FOLIO. THE PONTIC SEA.</h3>
+
+
+<p>The first printed <i>Othello</i> is the first Quarto (Q1), 1622; the second
+is the first Folio (F1), 1623. These two texts are two distinct versions
+of the play. Q1 contains many oaths and expletives where less
+'objectionable' expressions occur in F1. Partly for this reason it is
+believed to represent the <i>earlier</i> text, perhaps the text as it stood
+before the Act of 1605 against profanity on the stage. Its readings are
+frequently superior to those of F1, but it wants many lines that appear
+in F1, which probably represents the acting version in 1623. I give a
+list of the longer passages absent from Q1:</p>
+
+<table class="drama" summary="Passages Added to Othello in First Folio">
+  <tr>
+    <td>(<i>a</i>)</td>
+    <td><span class="smcap">i.</span> i. 122-138.</td>
+    <td>'If't' ... 'yourself:'</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td>(<i>b</i>)</td>
+    <td><span class="smcap">i.</span> ii 72-77.</td>
+    <td>'Judge' ... 'thee'</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td>(<i>c</i>)</td>
+    <td><span class="smcap">i.</span> iii. 24-30.</td>
+    <td>'For' ... 'profitless.'</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td>(<i>d</i>)</td>
+    <td><span class="smcap">iii.</span> iii. 383-390.</td>
+    <td>'<i>Oth.</i> By' ... 'satisfied! <i>Iago.</i>'</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td>(<i>e</i>)</td>
+    <td><span class="smcap">iii.</span> iii. 453-460.</td>
+    <td>'Iago.' ... 'heaven,'</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td>(<i>f</i>)</td>
+    <td><span class="smcap">iv.</span> i. 38-44.</td>
+    <td>'To confess' ... 'devil!'</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td>(<i>g</i>)</td>
+    <td><span class="smcap">iv.</span> ii. 73-76,</td>
+    <td>'Committed!' ... 'committed!'</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td>(<i>h</i>)</td>
+    <td><span class="smcap">iv.</span> ii. 151-164.</td>
+    <td>'Here' ... 'make me.'</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td>(<i>i</i>)</td>
+    <td><span class="smcap">iv.</span> iii. 31-53.</td>
+    <td>'I have' ... 'not next'</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td><br /></td>
+    <td>and 55-57.</td>
+    <td>'<i>Des.</i> [<i>Singing</i>]' ... 'men.'</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td>(<i>j</i>)</td>
+    <td><span class="smcap">iv.</span> iii. 60-63.</td>
+    <td>'I have' ... 'question.'</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td>(<i>k</i>)</td>
+    <td><span class="smcap">iv.</span> iii. 87-104.</td>
+    <td>'But I' ... 'us so.'</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td>(<i>l</i>)</td>
+    <td><span class="smcap">v.</span> ii. 151-154.</td>
+    <td>'O mistress' ... 'Iago.'</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td>(<i>m</i>)</td>
+    <td><span class="smcap">v.</span> ii. 185-193.</td>
+    <td>'My mistress' ... 'villany!'</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td>(<i>n</i>)</td>
+    <td><span class="smcap">v.</span> ii. 266-272.</td>
+    <td>'Be not' ... 'wench!'</td>
+  </tr>
+</table>
+
+<p><a name="Page_430" id="Page_430"></a><span class="pagenum">[430]</span>Were these passages after-thoughts, composed after the version
+represented by Q1 was written? Or were they in the version represented
+by Q1, and only omitted in printing, whether accidentally or because
+they were also omitted in the theatre? Or were some of them
+after-thoughts, and others in the original version?</p>
+
+<p>I will take them in order. (<i>a</i>) can hardly be an after-thought. Up to
+that point Roderigo had hardly said anything, for Iago had always
+interposed; and it is very unlikely that Roderigo would now deliver but
+four lines, and speak at once of 'she' instead of 'your daughter.'
+Probably this 'omission' represents a 'cut' in stage performance. (<i>b</i>)
+This may also be the case here. In our texts the omission of the passage
+would make nonsense, but in Q1 the 'cut' (if a cut) has been mended,
+awkwardly enough, by the substitution of 'Such' for 'For' in line 78. In
+any case, the lines cannot be an addition. (<i>c</i>) cannot be an
+after-thought, for the sentence is unfinished without it; and that it
+was not meant to be interrupted is clear, because in Q1 line 31 begins
+'And,' not 'Nay'; the Duke might say 'Nay' if he were cutting the
+previous speaker short, but not 'And.' (<i>d</i>) is surely no addition. If
+the lines are cut out, not only is the metre spoilt, but the obvious
+reason for Iago's words, 'I see, Sir, you are eaten up with passion,'
+disappears, and so does the reference of his word 'satisfied' in 393 to
+Othello's 'satisfied' in 390. (<i>e</i>) is the famous passage about the
+Pontic Sea, and I reserve it for the present. (<i>f</i>) As Pope observes,
+'no hint of this trash in the first edition,' the 'trash' including the
+words 'Nature would not invest herself in such shadowing passion without
+some instruction. It is not words that shake me thus'! There is nothing
+to prove these lines to be original or an after-thought. The omission of
+(<i>g</i>) is clearly a printer's error, due to the fact that lines 72 and 76
+both end with the word 'committed.' No conclusion can be formed as to
+(<i>h</i>), nor perhaps (<i>i</i>), which includes the whole of Desdemona's song;
+but if (<i>j</i>) is removed the reference in 'such a deed' in 64 is
+destroyed. (<i>k</i>) is Emilia's long speech about husbands. It cannot well
+be an after-thought, for 105-6 evidently refer to 103-4 (even the word
+'uses' in 105 refers to 'use' in 103). (<i>l</i>) is no after-thought, for
+'if he says so' in 155 must point back to 'my husband say that she was
+false!' in 152. (<i>m</i>) might be <a name="Page_431" id="Page_431"></a><span class="pagenum">[431]</span>an after-thought, but, if so, in the
+first version the ending 'to speak' occurred twice within three lines,
+and the reason for Iago's sudden alarm in 193 is much less obvious. If
+(<i>n</i>) is an addition the original collocation was:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i9">but O vain boast!<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Who can control his fate? 'Tis not so now.<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Pale as thy smock!<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>which does not sound probable.</p>
+
+<p>Thus, as it seems to me, in the great majority of cases there is more or
+less reason to think that the passages wanting in Q1 were nevertheless
+parts of the original play, and I cannot in any one case see any
+positive ground for supposing a subsequent addition. I think that most
+of the gaps in Q1 were accidents of printing (like many other smaller
+gaps in Q1), but that probably one or two were 'cuts'&mdash;<i>e.g.</i> Emilia's
+long speech (<i>k</i>). The omission of (<i>i</i>) might be due to the state of
+the MS.: the words of the song may have been left out of the dialogue,
+as appearing on a separate page with the musical notes, or may have been
+inserted in such an illegible way as to baffle the printer.</p>
+
+<p>I come now to (<i>e</i>), the famous passage about the Pontic Sea. Pope
+supposed that it formed part of the original version, but approved of
+its omission, as he considered it 'an unnatural excursion in this
+place.' Mr. Swinburne thinks it an after-thought, but defends it. 'In
+other lips indeed than Othello's, at the crowning minute of culminant
+agony, the rush of imaginative reminiscence which brings back upon his
+eyes and ears the lightning foam and tideless thunder of the Pontic Sea
+might seem a thing less natural than sublime. But Othello has the
+passion of a poet closed in as it were and shut up behind the passion of
+a hero' (<i>Study of Shakespeare</i>, p. 184). I quote these words all the
+more gladly because they will remind the reader of my lectures of my
+debt to Mr. Swinburne here; and I will only add that the reminiscence
+here is of <i>precisely the same character</i> as the reminiscences of the
+Arabian trees and the base Indian in Othello's final speech. But I find
+it almost impossible to believe that Shakespeare <i>ever</i> wrote the
+passage without the words about the Pontic Sea. It seems to me almost an
+imperative demand of imagination that Iago's set speech, if I may use
+the phrase, should be <a name="Page_432" id="Page_432"></a><span class="pagenum">[432]</span>preceded by a speech of somewhat the same
+dimensions, the contrast of which should heighten the horror of its
+hypocrisy; it seems to me that Shakespeare must have felt this; and it
+is difficult to me to think that he ever made the lines,</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i1">In the due reverence of a sacred vow<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">I here engage my words,<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>follow directly on the one word 'Never' (however impressive that word in
+its isolation might be). And as I can find no <i>other</i> 'omission' in Q1
+which appears to point to a subsequent addition, I conclude that this
+'omission' <i>was</i> an omission, probably accidental, conceivably due to a
+stupid 'cut.' Indeed it is nothing but Mr. Swinburne's opinion that
+prevents my feeling certainty on the point.</p>
+
+<p>Finally, I may draw attention to certain facts which may be mere
+accidents, but may possibly be significant. Passages (<i>b</i>) and (<i>c</i>)
+consist respectively of six and seven lines; that is, they are almost of
+the same length, and in a MS. might well fill exactly the same amount of
+space. Passage (<i>d</i>) is eight lines long; so is passage (<i>e</i>). Now,
+taking at random two editions of Shakespeare, the Globe and that of
+Delius, I find that (<i>b</i>) and (<i>c</i>) are 6-1/4 inches apart in the Globe,
+8 in Delius; and that (<i>d</i>) and (<i>e</i>) are separated by 7-3/8 inches in
+the Globe, by 8-3/4 in Delius. In other words, there is about the same
+distance in each case between two passages of about equal dimensions.</p>
+
+<p>The idea suggested by these facts is that the MS. from which Q1 was
+printed was mutilated in various places; that (<i>b</i>) and (<i>c</i>) occupied
+the bottom inches of two successive pages, and that these inches were
+torn away; and that this was also the case with (<i>d</i>) and (<i>e</i>).</p>
+
+<p>This speculation has amused me and may amuse some reader. I do not know
+enough of Elizabethan manuscripts to judge of its plausibility.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="NOTE_K" id="NOTE_K"></a>NOTE K.</h2>
+
+<h4>OTHELLO'S COURTSHIP.</h4>
+
+
+<p>It is curious that in the First Act two impressions are produced which
+have afterwards to be corrected.</p>
+
+<p>1. We must not suppose that Othello's account of his courtship <a name="Page_433" id="Page_433"></a><span class="pagenum">[433]</span>in his
+famous speech before the Senate is intended to be exhaustive. He is
+accused of having used drugs or charms in order to win Desdemona; and
+therefore his purpose in his defence is merely to show that his
+witchcraft was the story of his life. It is no part of his business to
+trouble the Senators with the details of his courtship, and he so
+condenses his narrative of it that it almost appears as though there was
+no courtship at all, and as though Desdemona never imagined that he was
+in love with her until she had practically confessed her love for him.
+Hence she has been praised by some for her courage, and blamed by others
+for her forwardness.</p>
+
+<p>But at <span class="smcap">iii.</span> iii. 70 f. matters are presented in quite a new
+light. There we find the following words of hers:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i10">What! Michael Cassio,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">That came a-wooing with you, and so many a time,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">When I have spoke of you dispraisingly,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Hath ta'en your part.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>It seems, then, she understood why Othello came so often to her father's
+house, and was perfectly secure of his love before she gave him that
+very broad 'hint to speak.' I may add that those who find fault with her
+forget that it was necessary for her to take the first open step. She
+was the daughter of a Venetian grandee, and Othello was a black soldier
+of fortune.</p>
+
+<p>2. We learn from the lines just quoted that Cassio used to accompany
+Othello in his visits to the house; and from <span class="smcap">iii.</span> iii. 93 f. we
+learn that he knew of Othello's love from first to last and 'went
+between' the lovers 'very oft.' Yet in Act <span class="smcap">i.</span> it appears that,
+while Iago on the night of the marriage knows about it and knows where
+to find Othello (<span class="smcap">i.</span> i. 158 f.), Cassio, even if he knows where
+to find Othello (which is doubtful: see <span class="smcap">i.</span> ii. 44), seems to
+know nothing about the marriage. See <span class="smcap">i.</span> ii. 49:</p>
+
+<table class="tabledrama" summary="Othello I. ii. 49ff" cellpadding="8">
+  <tr>
+    <td><i>Cas.</i></td>
+    <td>Ancient, what makes he here?</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td valign="top"><i>Iago.</i></td>
+    <td>'Faith, he to-night hath boarded a land carack:<br />
+        If it prove lawful prize, he's made for ever.</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td><i>Cas.</i></td>
+    <td>I do not understand.</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td><i>Iago.</i></td>
+    <td><span style="margin-left: 7em;">He's married.</span></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td><i>Cas.</i></td>
+    <td><span style="margin-left: 12em;">To who?</span></td>
+  </tr>
+</table>
+
+<p>It is possible that Cassio does know, and only pretends ignorance
+because he has not been informed by Othello that Iago also <a name="Page_434" id="Page_434"></a><span class="pagenum">[434]</span>knows. And
+this idea is consistent with Iago's apparent ignorance of Cassio's part
+in the courtship (<span class="smcap">iii.</span> iii. 93). And of course, if this were
+so, a word from Shakespeare to the actor who played Cassio would enable
+him to make all clear to the audience. The alternative, and perhaps more
+probable, explanation would be that, in writing Act <span class="smcap">i.</span>,
+Shakespeare had not yet thought of making Cassio Othello's confidant,
+and that, after writing Act <span class="smcap">iii.</span>, he neglected to alter the
+passage in Act <span class="smcap">i.</span> In that case the further information which
+Act <span class="smcap">iii.</span> gives regarding Othello's courtship would probably
+also be an after-thought.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="NOTE_L" id="NOTE_L"></a>NOTE L.</h2>
+
+<h3>OTHELLO IN THE TEMPTATION SCENE.</h3>
+
+
+<p>One reason why some readers think Othello 'easily jealous' is that they
+completely misinterpret him in the early part of this scene. They fancy
+that he is alarmed and suspicious the moment he hears Iago mutter 'Ha! I
+like not that,' as he sees Cassio leaving Desdemona (<span class="smcap">iii.</span> iii.
+35). But, in fact, it takes a long time for Iago to excite surprise,
+curiosity, and then grave concern&mdash;by no means yet jealousy&mdash;even about
+Cassio; and it is still longer before Othello understands that Iago is
+suggesting doubts about Desdemona too. ('Wronged' in 143 certainly does
+not refer to her, as 154 and 162 show.) Nor, even at 171, is the
+exclamation 'O misery' meant for an expression of Othello's own present
+feelings; as his next speech clearly shows, it expresses an <i>imagined</i>
+feeling, as also the speech which elicits it professes to do (for Iago
+would not have dared here to apply the term 'cuckold' to Othello). In
+fact it is not until Iago hints that Othello, as a foreigner, might
+easily be deceived, that he is seriously disturbed about Desdemona.</p>
+
+<p>Salvini played this passage, as might be expected, with entire
+understanding. Nor have I ever seen it seriously misinterpreted on the
+stage. I gather from the Furness Variorum that Fechter and Edwin Booth
+took the same view as Salvini. Actors have to ask themselves what was
+the precise state of mind <a name="Page_435" id="Page_435"></a><span class="pagenum">[435]</span>expressed by the words they have to repeat.
+But many readers never think of asking such a question.</p>
+
+<p>The lines which probably do most to lead hasty or unimaginative readers
+astray are those at 90, where, on Desdemona's departure, Othello
+exclaims to himself:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i1">Excellent wretch! Perdition catch my soul<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">But I do love thee! and when I love thee not,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Chaos is come again.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>He is supposed to mean by the last words that his love is <i>now</i>
+suspended by suspicion, whereas in fact, in his bliss, he has so totally
+forgotten Iago's 'Ha! I like not that,' that the tempter has to begin
+all over again. The meaning is, 'If ever I love thee not, Chaos will
+have come again.' The feeling of insecurity is due to the excess of
+<i>joy</i>, as in the wonderful words after he rejoins Desdemona at Cyprus
+(<span class="smcap">ii.</span> i. 191):</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i7">If it were now to die,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">'Twere now to be most happy: for, I fear<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">My soul hath her content so absolute<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">That not another comfort like to this<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Succeeds in unknown fate.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>If any reader boggles at the use of the present in 'Chaos <i>is</i> come
+again,' let him observe 'succeeds' in the lines just quoted, or let him
+look at the parallel passage in <i>Venus and Adonis</i>, 1019:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i1">For, he being dead, with him is beauty slain;<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">And, beauty dead, black Chaos comes again.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>Venus does not know that Adonis is dead when she speaks thus.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="NOTE_M" id="NOTE_M"></a>NOTE M.</h2>
+
+<h3>QUESTIONS AS TO <i>OTHELLO</i>, <span class="smcap">Act iv. Scene i.</span></h3>
+
+
+<p>(1) The first part of the scene is hard to understand, and the
+commentators give little help. I take the idea to be as follows. Iago
+sees that he must renew his attack on Othello; for, on the one hand,
+Othello, in spite of the resolution he had arrived at to put Desdemona
+to death, has taken the step, without consulting Iago, of testing her in
+the matter of Iago's <a name="Page_436" id="Page_436"></a><span class="pagenum">[436]</span>report about the handkerchief; and, on the other
+hand, he now seems to have fallen into a dazed lethargic state, and must
+be stimulated to action. Iago's plan seems to be to remind Othello of
+everything that would madden him again, but to do so by professing to
+make light of the whole affair, and by urging Othello to put the best
+construction on the facts, or at any rate to acquiesce. So he says, in
+effect: 'After all, if she did kiss Cassio, that might mean little. Nay,
+she might even go much further without meaning any harm.<a name="FNanchor_266" id="FNanchor_266"></a><a href="#Footnote_266" class="fnanchor">[266]</a> Of course
+there is the handkerchief (10); but then why should she <i>not</i> give it
+away?' Then, affecting to renounce this hopeless attempt to disguise his
+true opinion, he goes on: 'However, <i>I</i> cannot, as your friend, pretend
+that I really regard her as innocent: the fact is, Cassio boasted to me
+in so many words of his conquest. [Here he is interrupted by Othello's
+swoon.] But, after all, why make such a fuss? You share the fate of most
+married men, and you have the advantage of not being deceived in the
+matter.' It must have been a great pleasure to Iago to express his real
+cynicism thus, with the certainty that he would not be taken seriously
+and would advance his plot by it. At 208-210 he recurs to the same plan
+of maddening Othello by suggesting that, if he is so fond of Desdemona,
+he had better let the matter be, for it concerns no one but him. This
+speech follows Othello's exclamation 'O Iago, the pity of it,' and this
+is perhaps the moment when we most of all long to destroy Iago.</p>
+
+<p>(2) At 216 Othello tells Iago to get him some poison, that he may kill
+Desdemona that night. Iago objects: 'Do it not with poison: strangle her
+in her bed, even the bed she hath contaminated?' Why does he object to
+poison? Because through the sale of the poison he himself would be
+involved? Possibly. Perhaps his idea was that, Desdemona being killed by
+Othello, and Cassio killed by Roderigo, he would then admit that he had
+informed Othello of the adultery, and perhaps even that he had
+undertaken Cassio's death; but he would declare that he never meant to
+fulfil his promise as to Cassio, and that he had nothing to do with
+Desdemona's death (he seems to be preparing for this at 285). His buying
+poison might wreck this plan. But it may be that his objection to poison
+springs <a name="Page_437" id="Page_437"></a><span class="pagenum">[437]</span>merely from contempt for Othello's intellect. He can trust him
+to use violence, but thinks he may bungle anything that requires
+adroitness.</p>
+
+<p>(3) When the conversation breaks off here (225) Iago has brought Othello
+back to the position reached at the end of the Temptation scene
+(<span class="smcap">iii.</span> iii.). Cassio and Desdemona are to be killed; and, in
+addition, the time is hastened; it is to be 'to-night,' not 'within
+three days.'</p>
+
+<p>The constructional idea clearly is that, after the Temptation scene,
+Othello tends to relapse and wait, which is terribly dangerous to Iago,
+who therefore in this scene quickens his purpose. Yet Othello relapses
+again. He has declared that he will not expostulate with her
+(<span class="smcap">iv.</span> i. 217). But he cannot keep his word, and there follows
+the scene of accusation. Its <i>dramatic</i> purposes are obvious, but
+Othello seems to have no purpose in it. He asks no questions, or,
+rather, none that shows the least glimpse of doubt or hope. He is merely
+torturing himself.</p>
+
+<div class="footnotes">
+<div class="footnotehead">FOOTNOTES:</div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_266" id="Footnote_266"></a><a href="#FNanchor_266"><span class="label">[266]</span></a> The reader who is puzzled by this passage should refer to
+the conversation at the end of the thirtieth tale in the <i>Heptameron</i>.</p></div>
+</div>
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="NOTE_N" id="NOTE_N"></a>NOTE N.</h2>
+
+<h3>TWO PASSAGES IN THE LAST SCENE OF <i>OTHELLO</i>.</h3>
+
+
+<p>(1) <span class="smcap">v.</span> ii. 71 f. Desdemona demands that Cassio be sent for to
+'confess' the truth that she never gave him the handkerchief. Othello
+answers that Cassio <i>has</i> confessed the truth&mdash;has confessed the
+adultery. The dialogue goes on:</p>
+
+<table class="tabledrama" summary="Othello V. ii. 86ff" cellpadding="8">
+  <tr>
+    <td><i>Des.</i></td>
+    <td>He will not say so.</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td valign="top"><i>Oth.</i></td>
+    <td><span style="margin-left: 7em;">No, his mouth is stopp'd:</span><br />
+        Honest Iago hath ta'en order for 't.</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td><i>Des.</i></td>
+    <td>O! my fear interprets: what, is he dead?</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td valign="top"><i>Oth.</i></td>
+    <td>Had all his hairs been lives, my great revenge<br />
+        Had stomach for them all.</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td><i>Des.</i></td>
+    <td>Alas! he is <i>betray'd</i> and <i>I</i> undone.</td>
+  </tr>
+</table>
+
+<p>It is a ghastly idea, but I believe Shakespeare means that, at the
+mention of Iago's name, Desdemona suddenly sees that <i>he</i> is the villain
+whose existence he had declared to be impossible when, an hour before,
+Emilia had suggested that someone had poisoned Othello's mind. But her
+words rouse Othello to such furious <a name="Page_438" id="Page_438"></a><span class="pagenum">[438]</span>indignation ('Out, strumpet!
+Weep'st thou for him to my face?') that 'it is too late.'</p>
+
+<p>(2) <span class="smcap">v.</span> ii. 286 f.</p>
+
+<table class="tabledrama" summary="Othello V. ii. 286ff" cellpadding="8">
+  <tr>
+    <td valign="top"><i>Oth.</i></td>
+    <td>I look down towards his feet; but that's a fable.<br />
+        If that thou be'st a devil, I cannot kill thee.<span style="margin-left: 2em;">[<i>Wounds Iago.</i></span></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td><i>Lod.</i></td>
+    <td>Wrench his sword from him.</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td><i>Iago.</i></td>
+    <td><span style="margin-left: 9em;">I bleed, sir, but not killed.</span></td>
+  </tr>
+</table>
+
+<p>Are Iago's strange words meant to show his absorption of interest in
+himself amidst so much anguish? I think rather he is meant to be
+alluding to Othello's words, and saying, with a cold contemptuous smile,
+'You see he is right; I <i>am</i> a devil.'</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="NOTE_O" id="NOTE_O"></a>NOTE O.</h2>
+
+<h3>OTHELLO ON DESDEMONA'S LAST WORDS.</h3>
+
+
+<p>I have said that the last scene of <i>Othello</i>, though terribly painful,
+contains almost nothing to diminish the admiration and love which
+heighten our pity for the hero (p. <a href='#Page_198'>198</a>). I said 'almost' in view of the
+following passage (<span class="smcap">v.</span> ii. 123 ff.):</p>
+
+<table class="tabledrama" summary="Othello V. ii. 123ff" cellpadding="8">
+  <tr>
+    <td><i>Emil.</i></td>
+    <td>O, who hath done this deed?</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td valign="top"><i>Des.</i></td>
+    <td>Nobody; I myself. Farewell:<br />
+        Commend me to my kind lord: O, farewell! <span style="margin-left: 2em;">[<i>Dies.</i></span></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td><i>Oth.</i></td>
+    <td>Why, how should she be murdered?<a name="FNanchor_267" id="FNanchor_267"></a><a href="#Footnote_267" class="fnanchor">[267]</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td><i>Emil.</i></td>
+    <td><span style="margin-left: 14em;">Alas, who knows?</span></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td><i>Oth.</i></td>
+    <td>You heard her say herself, it was not I.</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td><i>Emil.</i></td>
+    <td>She said so: I must needs report the truth.</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td valign="top"><i>Oth.</i></td>
+    <td>She's, like a liar, gone to burning hell:<br />
+        'Twas I that kill'd her.</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td valign="top"><i>Emil.</i></td>
+    <td><span style="margin-left: 8em;">O, the more angel she,</span><br />
+        And you the blacker devil!</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td><i>Oth.</i></td>
+    <td>She turn'd to folly, and she was a whore.</td>
+  </tr>
+</table>
+
+<p>This is a strange passage. What did Shakespeare mean us to feel? One is
+astonished that Othello should not be startled, nay thunder-struck, when
+he hears such dying words coming from the lips of an obdurate
+adulteress. One is shocked by the moral blindness or obliquity which
+takes them only as a further sign of her worthlessness. Here alone, I
+think, in the scene <a name="Page_439" id="Page_439"></a><span class="pagenum">[439]</span>sympathy with Othello quite disappears. Did
+Shakespeare mean us to feel thus, and to realise how completely confused
+and perverted Othello's mind has become? I suppose so: and yet Othello's
+words continue to strike me as very strange, and also as not <i>like</i>
+Othello,&mdash;especially as at this point he was not in anger, much less
+enraged. It has sometimes occurred to me that there is a touch of
+personal animus in the passage. One remembers the place in <i>Hamlet</i>
+(written but a little while before) where Hamlet thinks he is unwilling
+to kill the King at his prayers, for fear they may take him to heaven;
+and one remembers Shakespeare's irony, how he shows that those prayers
+do <i>not</i> go to heaven, and that the soul of this praying murderer is at
+that moment as murderous as ever (see p. <a href='#Page_171'>171</a>), just as here the soul of
+the lying Desdemona is angelic <i>in</i> its lie. Is it conceivable that in
+both passages he was intentionally striking at conventional 'religious'
+ideas; and, in particular, that the belief that a man's everlasting fate
+is decided by the occupation of his last moment excited in him
+indignation as well as contempt? I admit that this fancy seems
+un-Shakespearean, and yet it comes back on me whenever I read this
+passage. [The words 'I suppose so' (l. 3 above) gave my conclusion; but
+I wish to withdraw the whole Note]</p>
+
+<div class="footnotes">
+<div class="footnotehead">FOOTNOTES:</div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_267" id="Footnote_267"></a><a href="#FNanchor_267"><span class="label">[267]</span></a> He alludes to her cry, 'O falsely, falsely murder'd!'</p></div>
+</div>
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="NOTE_P" id="NOTE_P"></a>NOTE P.</h2>
+
+<h3>DID EMILIA SUSPECT IAGO?</h3>
+
+
+<p>I have answered No (p. <a href='#Page_216'>216</a>), and have no doubt about the matter; but at
+one time I was puzzled, as perhaps others have been, by a single phrase
+of Emilia's. It occurs in the conversation between her and Iago and
+Desdemona (<span class="smcap">iv.</span> ii. 130 f.):</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i1">I will be hang'd if some eternal villain,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Some busy and insinuating rogue,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Some cogging, cozening slave, <i>to get some office</i>,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Have not devised this slander; I'll be hang'd else.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>Emilia, it may be said, knew that Cassio was the suspected man, so that
+she must be thinking of <i>his</i> office, and must mean that Iago has
+poisoned Othello's mind in order to prevent his reinstatement and to get
+the lieutenancy for himself. And, it may be said, she speaks
+indefinitely so that Iago alone may understand her (for Desdemona does
+not know that Cassio is the suspected <a name="Page_440" id="Page_440"></a><span class="pagenum">[440]</span>man). Hence too, it may be said,
+when, at <span class="smcap">v.</span> ii. 190, she exclaims,</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i6">Villany, villany, villany!<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">I think upon't, I think: I smell't: O villany!<br /></span>
+<span class="i1"><i>I thought so then:</i>&mdash;I'll kill myself for grief;<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>she refers in the words italicised to the occasion of the passage in
+<span class="smcap">iv.</span> ii., and is reproaching herself for not having taken steps
+on her suspicion of Iago.</p>
+
+<p>I have explained in the text why I think it impossible to suppose that
+Emilia suspected her husband; and I do not think anyone who follows her
+speeches in <span class="smcap">v.</span> ii., and who realises that, if she did suspect
+him, she must have been simply <i>pretending</i> surprise when Othello told
+her that Iago was his informant, will feel any doubt. Her idea in the
+lines at <span class="smcap">iv.</span> ii. 130 is, I believe, merely that someone is
+trying to establish a ground for asking a favour from Othello in return
+for information which nearly concerns him. It does not follow that,
+because she knew Cassio was suspected, she must have been referring to
+Cassio's office. She was a stupid woman, and, even if she had not been,
+she would not put two and two together so easily as the reader of the
+play.</p>
+
+<p>In the line,</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i1">I thought so then: I'll kill myself for grief,<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>I think she certainly refers to <span class="smcap">iv.</span> ii. 130 f. and also
+<span class="smcap">iv.</span> ii. 15 (Steevens's idea that she is thinking of the time
+when she let Iago take the handkerchief is absurd). If 'I'll kill myself
+for grief' is to be taken in close connection with the preceding words
+(which is not certain), she may mean that she reproaches herself for not
+having acted on her general suspicion, or (less probably) that she
+reproaches herself for not having suspected that Iago was the rogue.</p>
+
+<p>With regard to my view that she failed to think of the handkerchief when
+she saw how angry Othello was, those who believe that she did think of
+it will of course also believe that she suspected Iago. But in addition
+to other difficulties, they will have to suppose that her astonishment,
+when Othello at last mentioned the handkerchief, was mere acting. And
+anyone who can believe this seems to me beyond argument. [I regret that
+I cannot now discuss some suggestions made to me in regard to the
+subjects of Notes O and P.]</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><a name="Page_441" id="Page_441"></a><span class="pagenum">[441]</span></p>
+<h2><a name="NOTE_Q" id="NOTE_Q"></a>NOTE Q.</h2>
+
+<h3>IAGO'S SUSPICION REGARDING CASSIO AND EMILIA.</h3>
+
+
+<p>The one expression of this suspicion appears in a very curious manner.
+Iago, soliloquising, says (<span class="smcap">ii.</span> i. 311):</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i8">Which thing to do,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">If this poor trash of Venice, whom I trash<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">For his quick hunting, stand the putting on,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">I'll have our Michael Cassio on the hip,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Abuse him to the Moor in the rank [F. right] garb&mdash;<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">For I fear Cassio with my night-cap too&mdash;<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Make the Moor thank me, etc.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>Why '<i>For</i> I fear Cassio,' etc.? He can hardly be giving himself an
+additional reason for involving Cassio; the parenthesis must be
+explanatory of the preceding line or some part of it. I think it
+explains 'rank garb' or 'right garb,' and the meaning is, 'For Cassio
+<i>is</i> what I shall accuse him of being, a seducer of wives.' He is
+returning to the thought with which the soliloquy begins, 'That Cassio
+loves her, I do well believe it.' In saying this he is unconsciously
+trying to believe that Cassio would at any rate <i>like</i> to be an
+adulterer, so that it is not so very abominable to say that he <i>is</i> one.
+And the idea 'I suspect him with Emilia' is a second and stronger
+attempt of the same kind. The idea probably was born and died in one
+moment. It is a curious example of Iago's secret subjection to morality.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="NOTE_R" id="NOTE_R"></a>NOTE R.</h2>
+
+<h3>REMINISCENCES OF <i>OTHELLO</i> IN <i>KING LEAR</i>.</h3>
+
+
+<p>The following is a list, made without any special search, and doubtless
+incomplete, of words and phrases in <i>King Lear</i> which recall words and
+phrases in <i>Othello</i>, and many of which occur only in these two plays:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>'waterish,' <span class="smcap">i.</span> i. 261, appears only here and in <i>O.</i>
+<span class="smcap">iii.</span> iii. 15.</p>
+
+<p>'fortune's alms,' <span class="smcap">i.</span> i. 281, appears only here and in
+<i>O.</i> <span class="smcap">iii.</span> iv. 122.</p>
+
+<p><a name="Page_442" id="Page_442"></a><span class="pagenum">[442]</span>'decline' seems to be used of the advance of age only in
+<span class="smcap">i.</span> ii. 78 and <i>O.</i> <span class="smcap">iii.</span> iii. 265.</p>
+
+<p>'slack' in 'if when they chanced to slack you,' <span class="smcap">ii.</span>
+iv. 248, has no exact parallel in Shakespeare, but recalls
+'they slack their duties,' <i>O.</i> <span class="smcap">iv.</span> iii. 88.</p>
+
+<p>'allowance' (=authorisation), <span class="smcap">i.</span> iv. 228, is used
+thus only in <i>K.L.</i>, <i>O.</i> <span class="smcap">i.</span> i. 128, and two places
+in <i>Hamlet</i> and <i>Hen. VIII.</i></p>
+
+<p>'besort,' vb., <span class="smcap">i.</span> iv. 272, does not occur elsewhere,
+but 'besort,' sb., occurs in <i>O.</i> <span class="smcap">i.</span> iii. 239 and
+nowhere else.</p>
+
+<p>Edmund's 'Look, sir, I bleed,' <span class="smcap">ii.</span> i. 43, sounds like
+an echo of Iago's 'I bleed, sir, but not killed,' <i>O.</i>
+<span class="smcap">v.</span> ii. 288.</p>
+
+<p>'potential,' <span class="smcap">ii.</span> i. 78, appears only here, in <i>O.</i>
+<span class="smcap">i.</span> ii. 13, and in the <i>Lover's Complaint</i> (which, I
+think, is certainly not an early poem).</p>
+
+<p>'poise' in 'occasions of some poise,' <span class="smcap">ii.</span> i. 122, is
+exactly like 'poise' in 'full of poise and difficult weight,'
+<i>O.</i> <span class="smcap">iii.</span> iii. 82, and not exactly like 'poise' in
+the three other places where it occurs.</p>
+
+<p>'conjunct,' used only in <span class="smcap">ii.</span> ii. 125 (Q), <span class="smcap">v.</span>
+i. 12, recalls 'conjunctive,' used only in <i>H</i>. <span class="smcap">iv.</span>
+vii. 14, <i>O.</i> <span class="smcap">i.</span> iii. 374 (F).</p>
+
+<p>'grime,' vb., used only in <span class="smcap">ii.</span> iii. 9, recalls
+'begrime,' used only in <i>O.</i> <span class="smcap">iii.</span> iii. 387 and
+<i>Lucrece</i>.</p>
+
+<p>'unbonneted,' <span class="smcap">iii.</span> i. 14, appears only here and in
+<i>O.</i> <span class="smcap">i.</span> ii. 23.</p>
+
+<p>'delicate,' <span class="smcap">iii.</span> iv. 12, <span class="smcap">iv.</span> iii. 15,
+<span class="smcap">iv.</span> vi. 188, is not a rare word with Shakespeare; he
+uses it about thirty times in his plays. But it is worth
+notice that it occurs six times in <i>O.</i></p>
+
+<p>'commit,' used intr. for 'commit adultery,' appears only in
+<span class="smcap">iii.</span> iv. 83, but cf. the famous iteration in <i>O.</i>
+<span class="smcap">iv.</span> ii. 72 f.</p>
+
+<p>'stand in hard cure,' <span class="smcap">iii.</span> vi. 107, seems to have no
+parallel except <i>O.</i> <span class="smcap">ii.</span> i. 51, 'stand in bold cure.'</p>
+
+<p>'secure'=make careless, <span class="smcap">iv.</span> i. 22, appears only here
+and in <i>O.</i> <span class="smcap">i.</span> iii. 10 and (not quite the same sense)
+<i>Tim.</i> <span class="smcap">ii.</span> ii. 185.</p>
+
+<p>Albany's 'perforce must wither,' <span class="smcap">iv.</span> ii. 35, recalls
+Othello's 'It must needs wither,' <span class="smcap">v.</span> ii. 15.</p>
+
+<p>'deficient,' <span class="smcap">iv.</span> vi. 23, occurs only here and in <i>O.</i>
+<span class="smcap">i.</span> iii. 63.</p>
+
+<p>'the safer sense,' <span class="smcap">iv.</span> vi. 81, recalls 'my blood
+begins my safer guides to rules,' <i>O.</i> <span class="smcap">ii.</span> iii. 205.</p>
+
+<p>'fitchew,' <span class="smcap">iv.</span> vi. 124, is used only here, in <i>O.</i>
+<span class="smcap">iv.</span> i. 150, and in <i>T.C.</i> <span class="smcap">v.</span> i. 67 (where it
+has not the same significance).</p>
+
+<p>Lear's 'I have seen the day, with my good biting falchion I
+would have made them skip,' <span class="smcap">v.</span> iii. 276, recalls
+Othello's 'I have seen the day, That with this little arm and
+this good sword,' etc., <span class="smcap">v.</span> ii. 261.</p></div>
+
+<p>The fact that more than half of the above occur in the first two Acts of
+<i>King Lear</i> may possibly be significant: for the <a name="Page_443" id="Page_443"></a><span class="pagenum">[443]</span>farther removed
+Shakespeare was from the time of the composition of <i>Othello</i>, the less
+likely would be the recurrence of ideas or words used in that play.</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="NOTE_S" id="NOTE_S"></a>NOTE S.</h2>
+
+<h3><i>KING LEAR</i> AND <i>TIMON OF ATHENS</i>.</h3>
+
+<p>That these two plays are near akin in character, and probably in date,
+is recognised by many critics now; and I will merely add here a few
+references to the points of resemblance mentioned in the text (p. <a href='#Page_246'>246</a>),
+and a few notes on other points.</p>
+
+<p>(1) The likeness between Timon's curses and some of the speeches of Lear
+in his madness is, in one respect, curious. It is natural that Timon,
+speaking to Alcibiades and two courtezans, should inveigh in particular
+against sexual vices and corruption, as he does in the terrific passage
+<span class="smcap">iv.</span> iii. 82-166; but why should Lear refer at length, and with
+the same loathing, to this particular subject (<span class="smcap">iv.</span> vi.
+112-132)? It almost looks as if Shakespeare were expressing feelings
+which oppressed him at this period of his life.</p>
+
+<p>The idea may be a mere fancy, but it has seemed to me that this
+pre-occupation, and sometimes this oppression, are traceable in other
+plays of the period from about 1602 to 1605 (<i>Hamlet</i>, <i>Measure for
+Measure</i>, <i>Troilus and Cressida</i>, <i>All's Well</i>, <i>Othello</i>); while in
+earlier plays the subject is handled less, and without disgust, and in
+later plays (e.g. <i>Antony and Cleopatra</i>, <i>The Winter's Tale</i>,
+<i>Cymbeline</i>) it is also handled, however freely, without this air of
+repulsion (I omit <i>Pericles</i> because the authorship of the
+brothel-scenes is doubtful).</p>
+
+<p>(2) For references to the lower animals, similar to those in <i>King
+Lear</i>, see especially <i>Timon</i>, <span class="smcap">i.</span> i. 259; <span class="smcap">ii.</span> ii. 180;
+<span class="smcap">iii.</span> vi. 103 f.; <span class="smcap">iv.</span> i. 2, 36; <span class="smcap">iv.</span> iii. 49
+f., 177 ff., 325 ff. (surely a passage written or, at the least,
+rewritten by Shakespeare), 392, 426 f. I ignore the constant abuse of
+the dog in the conversations where Apemantus appears.</p>
+
+<p>(3) Further points of resemblance are noted in the text at pp. <a href='#Page_246'>246</a>, <a href='#Page_247'>247</a>,
+<a href='#Page_310'>310</a>, <a href='#Page_326'>326</a>, <a href='#Page_327'>327</a>, and many likenesses in word, phrase and idea might be
+added, of the type of the parallel 'Thine <a name="Page_444" id="Page_444"></a><span class="pagenum">[444]</span>Do comfort and not burn,'
+<i>Lear</i>, <span class="smcap">ii.</span> iv. 176, and 'Thou sun, that comfort'st, burn!'
+<i>Timon</i>, <span class="smcap">v.</span> i. 134.</p>
+
+<p>(4) The likeness in style and versification (so far as the purely
+Shakespearean parts of <i>Timon</i> are concerned) is surely unmistakable,
+but some readers may like to see an example. Lear speaks here
+(<span class="smcap">iv.</span> vi. 164 ff.):</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i1">Thou rascal beadle, hold thy bloody hand!<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Why dost thou lash that whore? Strip thine own back;<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Thou hotly lust'st to use her in that kind<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">For which thou whipp'st her. The usurer hangs the cozener.<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Through tatter'd clothes small vices do appear;<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Robes and furr'd gowns hide all. Plate sin with gold,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">And the strong lance of justice hurtless breaks;<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Arm it in rags, a pigmy's straw does pierce it.<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">None does offend, none, I say, none; I'll able 'em:<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Take that of me, my friend, who have the power<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">To seal the accuser's lips. Get thee glass eyes;<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">And, like a scurvy politician, seem<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">To see the things thou dost not.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>And Timon speaks here (<span class="smcap">iv.</span> iii. 1 ff.):</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i1">O blessed breeding sun, draw from the earth<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Rotten humidity; below thy sister's orb<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Infect the air! Twinn'd brothers of one womb,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Whose procreation, residence, and birth,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Scarce is dividant, touch them with several fortunes,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">The greater scorns the lesser: not nature,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">To whom all sores lay siege, can bear great fortune,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">But by contempt of nature.<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Raise me this beggar, and deny't that lord:<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">The senator shall bear contempt hereditary,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">The beggar native honour.<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">It is the pasture lards the rother's sides,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">The want that makes him lean. Who dares, who dares.<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">In purity of manhood stand upright<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">And say 'This man's a flatterer'? if one be,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">So are they all: for every grise of fortune<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Is smooth'd by that below: the learned pate<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Ducks to the golden fool: all is oblique;<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">There's nothing level in our cursed natures,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">But direct villany.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>The reader may wish to know whether metrical tests throw any light on
+the chronological position of <i>Timon</i>; and he will find <a name="Page_445" id="Page_445"></a><span class="pagenum">[445]</span>such
+information as I can give in <a href='#NOTE_BB'>Note BB</a>. But he will bear in mind that
+results arrived at by applying these tests to the whole play can have
+little value, since it is practically certain that Shakespeare did not
+write the whole play. It seems to consist (1) of parts that are purely
+Shakespearean (the text, however, being here, as elsewhere, very
+corrupt); (2) of parts untouched or very slightly touched by him; (3) of
+parts where a good deal is Shakespeare's but not all (<i>e.g.</i>, in my
+opinion, <span class="smcap">iii.</span> v., which I cannot believe, with Mr. Fleay, to be
+wholly, or almost wholly, by another writer). The tests ought to be
+applied not only to the whole play but separately to (1), about which
+there is little difference of opinion. This has not been done: but Dr.
+Ingram has applied one test, and I have applied another, to the parts
+assigned by Mr. Fleay to Shakespeare (see <a href='#NOTE_BB'>Note BB</a>.).<a name="FNanchor_268" id="FNanchor_268"></a><a href="#Footnote_268" class="fnanchor">[268]</a> The result is
+to place <i>Timon</i> between <i>King Lear</i> and <i>Macbeth</i> (a result which
+happens to coincide with that of the application of the main tests to
+the whole play): and this result corresponds, I believe, with the
+general impression which we derive from the three dramas in regard to
+versification.</p>
+
+<div class="footnotes">
+<div class="footnotehead">FOOTNOTES:</div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_268" id="Footnote_268"></a><a href="#FNanchor_268"><span class="label">[268]</span></a> These are <span class="smcap">i.</span> i.; <span class="smcap">ii.</span> i.; <span class="smcap">ii.</span>
+ii., except 194-204; in <span class="smcap">iii.</span> vi. Timon's verse speech;
+<span class="smcap">iv.</span> i.; <span class="smcap">iv.</span> ii. 1-28; <span class="smcap">iv.</span> iii., except
+292-362, 399-413, 454-543; <span class="smcap">v.</span> i., except 1-50; <span class="smcap">v.</span> ii.;
+<span class="smcap">v.</span> iv. I am not to be taken as accepting this division
+throughout.</p></div>
+</div>
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="NOTE_T" id="NOTE_T"></a>NOTE T.</h2>
+
+<h3>DID SHAKESPEARE SHORTEN <i>KING LEAR</i>?</h3>
+
+
+<p>I have remarked in the text (pp. <a href='#Page_256'>256 ff.</a>) on the unusual number of
+improbabilities, inconsistencies, etc., in <i>King Lear</i>. The list of
+examples given might easily be lengthened. Thus (<i>a</i>) in <span class="smcap">iv.</span>
+iii. Kent refers to a letter which he confided to the Gentleman for
+Cordelia; but in <span class="smcap">iii.</span> i. he had given to the Gentleman not a
+letter but a message. (<i>b</i>) In <span class="smcap">iii.</span> i. again he says Cordelia
+will inform the Gentleman who the sender of the message was; but from
+<span class="smcap">iv.</span> iii. it is evident that she has done no such thing, nor
+does the Gentleman show any curiosity on the subject. (<i>c</i>) In the same
+scene (<span class="smcap">iii.</span> i.) Kent and the Gentleman arrange that whichever
+finds the King first shall halloo to <a name="Page_446" id="Page_446"></a><span class="pagenum">[446]</span>the other; but when Kent finds the
+King he does not halloo. These are all examples of mere carelessness as
+to matters which would escape attention in the theatre,&mdash;matters
+introduced not because they are essential to the plot, but in order to
+give an air of verisimilitude to the conversation. And here is perhaps
+another instance. When Lear determines to leave Goneril and go to Regan
+he says, 'call my train together' (<span class="smcap">i.</span> iv. 275). When he arrives
+at Gloster's house Kent asks why he comes with so small a train, and the
+Fool gives a reply which intimates that the rest have deserted him
+(<span class="smcap">ii.</span> iv. 63 ff.). He and his daughters, however, seem unaware
+of any diminution; and, when Lear 'calls to horse' and leaves Gloster's
+house, the doors are shut against him partly on the excuse that he is
+'attended with a desperate train' (308). Nevertheless in the storm he
+has no knights with him, and in <span class="smcap">iii.</span> vii. 15 ff. we hear that
+'some five or six and thirty of his knights'<a name="FNanchor_269" id="FNanchor_269"></a><a href="#Footnote_269" class="fnanchor">[269]</a> are 'hot questrists
+after him,' as though the real reason of his leaving Goneril with so
+small a train was that he had hurried away so quickly that many of his
+knights were unaware of his departure.</p>
+
+<p>This prevalence of vagueness or inconsistency is probably due to
+carelessness; but it may possibly be due to another cause. There are, it
+has sometimes struck me, slight indications that the details of the plot
+were originally more full and more clearly imagined than one would
+suppose from the play as we have it; and some of the defects to which I
+have drawn attention might have arisen if Shakespeare, finding his
+matter too bulky, had (<i>a</i>) omitted to write some things originally
+intended, and (<i>b</i>), after finishing his play, had reduced it by
+excision, and had not, in these omissions and excisions, taken
+sufficient pains to remove the obscurities and inconsistencies
+occasioned by them.</p>
+
+<p>Thus, to take examples of (<i>b</i>), Lear's 'What, fifty of my followers at
+a clap!' (<span class="smcap">i.</span> iv. 315) is very easily explained if we suppose
+that in the preceding conversation, as originally written, Goneril had
+mentioned the number. Again the curious absence of any indication why
+Burgundy should have the first choice of Cordelia's hand might easily be
+due to the same cause. <a name="Page_447" id="Page_447"></a><span class="pagenum">[447]</span>So might the ignorance in which we are left as
+to the fate of the Fool, and several more of the defects noticed in the
+text.</p>
+
+<p>To illustrate the other point (<i>a</i>), that Shakespeare may have omitted
+to write some things which he had originally intended, the play would
+obviously gain something if it appeared that, at a time shortly before
+that of the action, Gloster had encouraged the King in his idea of
+dividing the kingdom, while Kent had tried to dissuade him. And there
+are one or two passages which suggest that this is what Shakespeare
+imagined. If it were so, there would be additional point in the Fool's
+reference to the lord who counselled Lear to give away his land
+(<span class="smcap">i.</span> iv. 154), and in Gloster's reflection (<span class="smcap">iii.</span> iv.
+168),</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i1">His daughters seek his death: ah, that good Kent!<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">He said it would be thus:<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>('said,' of course, not to the King but to Gloster and perhaps others of
+the council). Thus too the plots would be still more closely joined.
+Then also we should at once understand the opening of the play. To
+Kent's words, 'I thought the King had more affected the Duke of Albany
+than Cornwall,' Gloster answers, 'It did always seem so to us.' Who are
+the 'us' from whom Kent is excluded? I do not know, for there is no sign
+that Kent has been absent. But if Kent, in consequence of his
+opposition, had fallen out of favour and absented himself from the
+council, it would be clear. So, besides, would be the strange suddenness
+with which, after Gloster's answer, Kent changes the subject; he would
+be avoiding, in presence of Gloster's son, any further reference to a
+subject on which he and Gloster had differed. That Kent, I may add, had
+already the strongest opinion about Goneril and Regan is clear from his
+extremely bold words (<span class="smcap">i.</span> i. 165),</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i1">Kill thy physician, and the fee bestow<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Upon thy foul disease.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>Did Lear remember this phrase when he called Goneril 'a disease that's
+in my flesh' (<span class="smcap">ii.</span> iv. 225)?</p>
+
+<p>Again, the observant reader may have noticed that Goneril is not only
+represented as the fiercer and more determined of the two sisters but
+also strikes one as the more sensual. And with this may be connected one
+or two somewhat curious <a name="Page_448" id="Page_448"></a><span class="pagenum">[448]</span>points: Kent's comparison of Goneril to the
+figure of Vanity in the Morality plays (<span class="smcap">ii.</span> ii. 38); the Fool's
+apparently quite irrelevant remark (though his remarks are scarcely ever
+so), 'For there was never yet fair woman but she made mouths in a glass'
+(<span class="smcap">iii.</span> ii. 35); Kent's reference to Oswald (long before there is
+any sign of Goneril's intrigue with Edmund) as 'one that would be a bawd
+in way of good service' (<span class="smcap">ii.</span> ii. 20); and Edgar's words to the
+corpse of Oswald (<span class="smcap">iv.</span> vi. 257), also spoken before he knew
+anything of the intrigue with Edmund,</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i1">I know thee well: a serviceable villain;<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">As duteous to the vices of thy mistress<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">As badness would desire.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>Perhaps Shakespeare had conceived Goneril as a woman who before her
+marriage had shown signs of sensual vice; but the distinct indications
+of this idea were crowded out of his exposition when he came to write
+it, or, being inserted, were afterwards excised. I will not go on to
+hint that Edgar had Oswald in his mind when (<span class="smcap">iii.</span> iv. 87) he
+described the serving-man who 'served the lust of his mistress' heart,
+and did the act of darkness with her'; and still less that Lear can have
+had Goneril in his mind in the declamation against lechery referred to
+in <a href='#NOTE_S'>Note S</a>.</p>
+
+<p>I do not mean to imply, by writing this note, that I believe in the
+hypotheses suggested in it. On the contrary I think it more probable
+that the defects referred to arose from carelessness and other causes.
+But this is not, to me, certain; and the reader who rejects the
+hypotheses may be glad to have his attention called to the points which
+suggested them.</p>
+
+<div class="footnotes">
+<div class="footnotehead">FOOTNOTES:</div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_269" id="Footnote_269"></a><a href="#FNanchor_269"><span class="label">[269]</span></a> It has been suggested that 'his' means 'Gloster's'; but
+'him' all through the speech evidently means Lear.</p></div>
+</div>
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="NOTE_U" id="NOTE_U"></a>NOTE U.</h2>
+
+<h3>MOVEMENTS OF THE DRAMATIS PERSON&AElig; IN ACT II. OF <i>KING LEAR</i>.</h3>
+
+
+<p>I have referred in the text to the obscurity of the play on this
+subject, and I will set out the movements here.</p>
+
+<p>When Lear is ill-treated by Goneril his first thought is to seek refuge
+with Regan (<span class="smcap">i.</span> iv. 274 f., 327 f.). Goneril, accordingly, <a name="Page_449" id="Page_449"></a><span class="pagenum">[449]</span>who
+had foreseen this, and, even before the quarrel, had determined to write
+to Regan (<span class="smcap">i.</span> iii. 25), now sends Oswald off to her, telling her
+not to receive Lear and his hundred knights (<span class="smcap">i.</span> iv. 354 f.). In
+consequence of this letter Regan and Cornwall immediately leave their
+home and ride by night to Gloster's house, sending word on that they are
+coming (<span class="smcap">ii.</span> i. 1 ff., 81, 120 ff.). Lear, on his part, just
+before leaving Goneril's house, sends Kent with a letter to Regan, and
+tells him to be quick, or Lear will be there before him. And we find
+that Kent reaches Regan and delivers his letter before Oswald, Goneril's
+messenger. Both the messengers are taken on by Cornwall and Regan to
+Gloster's house.</p>
+
+<p>In <span class="smcap">ii.</span> iv. Lear arrives at Gloster's house, having, it would
+seem, failed to find Regan at her own home. And, later, Goneril arrives
+at Gloster's house, in accordance with an intimation which she had sent
+in her letter to Regan (<span class="smcap">ii.</span> iv. 186 f.).</p>
+
+<p>Thus all the principal persons except Cordelia and Albany are brought
+together; and the crises of the double action&mdash;the expulsion of Lear and
+the blinding and expulsion of Gloster&mdash;are reached in Act <span class="smcap">iii.</span>
+And this is what was required.</p>
+
+<p>But it needs the closest attention to follow these movements. And, apart
+from this, difficulties remain.</p>
+
+<p>1. Goneril, in despatching Oswald with the letter to Regan, tells him to
+hasten his return (<span class="smcap">i.</span> iv. 363). Lear again is surprised to find
+that <i>his</i> messenger has not been sent back (<span class="smcap">ii.</span> iv. 1 f., 36
+f.). Yet apparently both Goneril and Lear themselves start at once, so
+that their messengers <i>could</i> not return in time. It may be said that
+they expected to meet them coming back, but there is no indication of
+this in the text.</p>
+
+<p>2. Lear, in despatching Kent, says (<span class="smcap">i.</span> v. 1):</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>Go you before to Gloster with these letters. Acquaint my
+daughter no further with anything you know than comes from her
+demand out of the letter.</p></div>
+
+<p>This would seem to imply that Lear knew that Regan and Cornwall were at
+Gloster's house, and meant either to go there (so Koppel) or to summon
+her back to her own home to receive him. Yet this is clearly not so, for
+Kent goes straight to Regan's house (<span class="smcap">ii.</span> i. 124, <span class="smcap">ii.</span>
+iv. 1, 27 ff., 114 ff.).</p>
+
+<p>Hence it is generally supposed that by 'Gloster,' in the passage just
+quoted, Lear means not the Earl but the <i>place</i>; that Regan's <a name="Page_450" id="Page_450"></a><span class="pagenum">[450]</span>home was
+there; and that Gloster's castle was somewhere not very far off. This is
+to some extent confirmed by the fact that Cornwall is the 'arch' or
+patron of Gloster (<span class="smcap">ii.</span> i. 60 f., 112 ff.). But Gloster's home
+or house must not be imagined quite close to Cornwall's, for it takes a
+night to ride from the one to the other, and Gloster's house is in the
+middle of a solitary heath with scarce a bush for many miles about
+(<span class="smcap">ii.</span> iv. 304).</p>
+
+<p>The plural 'these letters' in the passage quoted need give no trouble,
+for the plural is often used by Shakespeare for a single letter; and the
+natural conjecture that Lear sent one letter to Regan and another to
+Gloster is not confirmed by anything in the text.</p>
+
+<p>The only difficulty is that, as Koppel points out, 'Gloster' is nowhere
+else used in the play for the place (except in the phrase 'Earl of
+Gloster' or 'my lord of Gloster'); and&mdash;what is more important&mdash;that it
+would unquestionably be taken by the audience to stand in this passage
+for the Earl, especially as there has been no previous indication that
+Cornwall lived at Gloster. One can only suppose that Shakespeare forgot
+that he had given no such indication, and so wrote what was sure to be
+misunderstood,&mdash;unless we suppose that 'Gloster' is a mere slip of the
+pen, or even a misprint, for 'Regan.' But, apart from other
+considerations, Lear would hardly have spoken to a servant of 'Regan,'
+and, if he had, the next words would have run 'Acquaint her,' not
+'Acquaint my daughter.'</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="NOTE_V" id="NOTE_V"></a>NOTE V.</h2>
+
+<h3>SUSPECTED INTERPOLATIONS IN <i>KING LEAR</i>.</h3>
+
+
+<p>There are three passages in <i>King Lear</i> which have been held to be
+additions made by 'the players.'</p>
+
+<p>The first consists of the two lines of indecent doggerel spoken by the
+Fool at the end of Act <span class="smcap">i.</span>; the second, of the Fool's prophecy
+in rhyme at the end of <span class="smcap">iii.</span> ii.; the third, of Edgar's
+soliloquy at the end of <span class="smcap">iii.</span> vi.</p>
+
+<p>It is suspicious (1) that all three passages occur at the ends of
+scenes, the place where an addition is most easily made; <a name="Page_451" id="Page_451"></a><span class="pagenum">[451]</span>and (2) that
+in each case the speaker remains behind alone to utter the words after
+the other persons have gone off.</p>
+
+<p>I postpone discussion of the several passages until I have called
+attention to the fact that, if these passages are genuine, the number of
+scenes which end with a soliloquy is larger in <i>King Lear</i> than in any
+other undoubted tragedy. Thus, taking the tragedies in their probable
+chronological order (and ignoring the very short scenes into which a
+battle is sometimes divided),<a name="FNanchor_270" id="FNanchor_270"></a><a href="#Footnote_270" class="fnanchor">[270]</a> I find that there are in <i>Romeo and
+Juliet</i> four such scenes, in <i>Julius C&aelig;sar</i> two, in <i>Hamlet</i> six, in
+<i>Othello</i> four,<a name="FNanchor_271" id="FNanchor_271"></a><a href="#Footnote_271" class="fnanchor">[271]</a> in <i>King Lear</i> seven,<a name="FNanchor_272" id="FNanchor_272"></a><a href="#Footnote_272" class="fnanchor">[272]</a> in <i>Macbeth</i> two,<a name="FNanchor_273" id="FNanchor_273"></a><a href="#Footnote_273" class="fnanchor">[273]</a>
+in <i>Antony and Cleopatra</i> three, in <i>Coriolanus</i> one. The difference
+between <i>King Lear</i> and the plays that come nearest to it is really much
+greater than it appears from this list, for in <i>Hamlet</i> four of the six
+soliloquies, and in <i>Othello</i> three of the four, are long speeches,
+while most of those in <i>King Lear</i> are quite short.</p>
+
+<p>Of course I do not attach any great importance to the fact just noticed,
+but it should not be left entirely out of account in forming an opinion
+as to the genuineness of the three doubted passages.</p>
+
+<p><a name="Page_452" id="Page_452"></a><span class="pagenum">[452]</span>(<i>a</i>) The first of these, <span class="smcap">i.</span> v. 54-5, I decidedly believe to
+be spurious. (1) The scene ends quite in Shakespeare's manner without
+it. (2) It does not seem likely that at the <i>end</i> of the scene
+Shakespeare would have introduced anything <i>violently</i> incongruous with
+the immediately preceding words,</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i1">Oh let me not be mad, not mad, sweet heaven!<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Keep me in temper: I would not be mad!<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>(3) Even if he had done so, it is very unlikely that the incongruous
+words would have been grossly indecent. (4) Even if they had been,
+surely they would not have been <i>irrelevantly</i> indecent and evidently
+addressed to the audience, two faults which are not in Shakespeare's
+way. (5) The lines are doggerel. Doggerel is not uncommon in the
+earliest plays; there are a few lines even in the <i>Merchant of Venice</i>,
+a line and a half, perhaps, in <i>As You Like It</i>; but I do not think it
+occurs later, not even where, in an early play, it would certainly have
+been found, <i>e.g.</i> in the mouth of the Clown in <i>All's Well</i>. The best
+that can be said for these lines is that they appear in the Quartos,
+<i>i.e.</i> in reports, however vile, of the play as performed within two or
+three years of its composition.</p>
+
+<p>(<i>b</i>) I believe, almost as decidedly, that the second passage,
+<span class="smcap">iii.</span> ii. 79 ff., is spurious. (1) The scene ends
+characteristically without the lines. (2) They are addressed directly to
+the audience. (3) They destroy the pathetic and beautiful effect of the
+immediately preceding words of the Fool, and also of Lear's solicitude
+for him. (4) They involve the absurdity that the shivering timid Fool
+would allow his master and protector, Lear and Kent, to go away into the
+storm and darkness, leaving him alone. (5) It is also somewhat against
+them that they do not appear in the Quartos. At the same time I do not
+think one would hesitate to accept them if they occurred at any natural
+place <i>within</i> the dialogue.</p>
+
+<p>(<i>c</i>) On the other hand I see no sufficient reason for doubting the
+genuineness of Edgar's soliloquy at the end of <span class="smcap">iii.</span> vi. (1)
+Those who doubt it appear not to perceive that <i>some</i> words of soliloquy
+are wanted; for it is evidently intended that, when Kent and Gloster
+bear the King away, they should leave the Bedlam behind. Naturally they
+do so. He is only accidentally connected with the King; he was taken to
+shelter with him merely to gratify his whim, and as the King is now
+asleep <a name="Page_453" id="Page_453"></a><span class="pagenum">[453]</span>there is no occasion to retain the Bedlam; Kent, we know, shrank
+from him, 'shunn'd [his] abhorr'd society' (<span class="smcap">v.</span> iii. 210). So he
+is left to return to the hovel where he was first found. When the others
+depart, then, he must be left behind, and surely would not go off
+without a word. (2) If his speech is spurious, therefore, it has been
+substituted for some genuine speech; and surely that is a supposition
+not to be entertained except under compulsion. (3) There is no such
+compulsion in the speech. It is not very good, no doubt; but the use of
+rhymed and somewhat antithetic lines in a gnomic passage is quite in
+Shakespeare's manner, <i>more</i> in his manner than, for example, the rhymed
+passages in <span class="smcap">i.</span> i. 183-190, 257-269, 281-4, which nobody doubts;
+quite like many places in <i>All's Well</i>, or the concluding lines of <i>King
+Lear</i> itself. (4) The lines are in spirit of one kind with Edgar's fine
+lines at the beginning of Act <span class="smcap">iv.</span> (5) Some of them, as Delius
+observes, emphasize the parallelism between the stories of Lear and
+Gloster. (6) The fact that the Folio omits the lines is, of course,
+nothing against them.</p>
+
+<div class="footnotes">
+<div class="footnotehead">FOOTNOTES:</div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_270" id="Footnote_270"></a><a href="#FNanchor_270"><span class="label">[270]</span></a> I ignore them partly because they are not significant for
+the present purpose, but mainly because it is impossible to accept the
+division of battle-scenes in our modern texts, while to depart from it
+is to introduce intolerable inconvenience in reference. The only proper
+plan in Elizabethan drama is to consider a scene ended as soon as no
+person is left on the stage, and to pay no regard to the question of
+locality,&mdash;a question theatrically insignificant and undetermined in
+most scenes of an Elizabethan play, in consequence of the absence of
+movable scenery. In dealing with battles the modern editors seem to have
+gone on the principle (which they could not possibly apply generally)
+that, so long as the place is not changed, you have only one scene.
+Hence in <i>Macbeth</i>, Act <span class="smcap">v.</span>, they have included in their Scene
+vii. three distinct scenes; yet in <i>Antony and Cleopatra</i>, Act
+<span class="smcap">iii.</span>, following the right division for a wrong reason, they
+have two scenes (viii. and ix.), each less than four lines long.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_271" id="Footnote_271"></a><a href="#FNanchor_271"><span class="label">[271]</span></a> One of these (<span class="smcap">v.</span> i.) is not marked as such, but
+it is evident that the last line and a half form a soliloquy of one
+remaining character, just as much as some of the soliloquies marked as
+such in other plays.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_272" id="Footnote_272"></a><a href="#FNanchor_272"><span class="label">[272]</span></a> According to modern editions, eight, Act <span class="smcap">ii.</span>,
+scene ii., being an instance. But it is quite ridiculous to reckon as
+three scenes what are marked as scenes ii., iii., iv. Kent is on the
+lower stage the whole time, Edgar in the so-called scene iii. being on
+the upper stage or balcony. The editors were misled by their ignorance
+of the stage arrangements.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_273" id="Footnote_273"></a><a href="#FNanchor_273"><span class="label">[273]</span></a> Perhaps three, for <span class="smcap">v.</span> iii. is perhaps an
+instance, though not so marked.</p></div>
+</div>
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="NOTE_W" id="NOTE_W"></a>NOTE W.</h2>
+
+<h3>THE STAGING OF THE SCENE OF LEAR'S REUNION WITH CORDELIA.</h3>
+
+
+<p>As Koppel has shown, the usual modern stage-directions<a name="FNanchor_274" id="FNanchor_274"></a><a href="#Footnote_274" class="fnanchor">[274]</a> for this
+scene (<span class="smcap">iv.</span> vii.) are utterly wrong and do what they can to
+defeat the poet's purpose.</p>
+
+<p>It is evident from the text that the scene shows the <i>first</i> meeting of
+Cordelia and Kent, and <i>first</i> meeting of Cordelia and Lear, since they
+parted in <span class="smcap">i.</span> i. Kent and Cordelia indeed are doubtless supposed
+to have exchanged a few words before they come on the stage; but
+Cordelia has not seen her father at all until the moment before she
+begins (line 26), 'O my dear father!' Hence the tone of the first part
+of the scene, that between Cordelia and Kent, is kept low, in order that
+the latter part, between Cordelia and Lear, may have its full effect.</p>
+
+<p><a name="Page_454" id="Page_454"></a><span class="pagenum">[454]</span>The modern stage-direction at the beginning of the scene, as found, for
+example, in the Cambridge and Globe editions, is as follows:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>'<span class="smcap">Scene</span> vii.&mdash;A tent in the French camp. <span class="smcap">Lear</span>
+on a bed asleep, soft music playing; <i>Gentleman</i>, and others
+attending.</p>
+
+<p>Enter <span class="smcap">Cordelia, Kent</span>, and <i>Doctor</i>.'</p></div>
+
+<p>At line 25, where the Doctor says 'Please you, draw near,' Cordelia is
+supposed to approach the bed, which is imagined by some editors visible
+throughout at the back of the stage, by others as behind a curtain at
+the back, this curtain being drawn open at line 25.</p>
+
+<p>Now, to pass by the fact that these arrangements are in flat
+contradiction with the stage-directions of the Quartos and the Folio,
+consider their effect upon the scene. In the first place, the reader at
+once assumes that Cordelia has already seen her father; for otherwise it
+is inconceivable that she would quietly talk with Kent while he was
+within a few yards of her. The edge of the later passage where she
+addresses him is therefore blunted. In the second place, through Lear's
+presence the reader's interest in Lear and his meeting with Cordelia is
+at once excited so strongly that he hardly attends at all to the
+conversation of Cordelia and Kent; and so this effect is blunted too.
+Thirdly, at line 57, where Cordelia says,</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i8">O, look upon me, sir,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">And hold your hands in benediction o'er me!<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">No, sir, you must not kneel,<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>the poor old King must be supposed either to try to get out of bed, or
+actually to do so, or to kneel, or to try to kneel, on the bed.
+Fourthly, consider what happens at line 81.</p>
+
+<table class="tabledrama" summary="King Lear IV. vii. 81ff" cellpadding="8">
+  <tr>
+  <td valign="top"><i>Doctor.</i></td>
+  <td>Desire him to <i>go in</i>; trouble him no more<br />
+      Till further settling.</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td><i>Cor.</i></td>
+    <td><span style="margin-left: 4em;">Will't</span> please your highness <i>walk?</i></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td valign="top"><i>Lear.</i></td>
+    <td>You must bear with me;<br />
+        Pray you now, forget and forgive; I am old and foolish.<br />
+        <span style="margin-left: 6em;">[<i>Exeunt all but Kent and Gentleman</i>.</span></td>
+  </tr>
+</table>
+
+<p>If Lear is in a tent containing his bed, why in the world, when the
+doctor thinks he can bear no more emotion, is he made to walk out of the
+tent? A pretty doctor!</p>
+
+<p>But turn now to the original texts. Of course they say nothing <a name="Page_455" id="Page_455"></a><span class="pagenum">[455]</span>about
+the place. The stage-direction at the beginning runs, in the Quartos,
+'Enter Cordelia, Kent, and Doctor;' in the Folio, 'Enter Cordelia, Kent,
+and Gentleman.' They differ about the Gentleman and the Doctor, and the
+Folio later wrongly gives to the Gentleman the Doctor's speeches as well
+as his own. This is a minor matter. But they agree in <i>making no mention
+of Lear</i>. He is not on the stage at all. Thus Cordelia, and the reader,
+can give their whole attention to Kent.</p>
+
+<p>Her conversation with Kent finished, she turns (line 12) to the Doctor
+and asks 'How does the King?'<a name="FNanchor_275" id="FNanchor_275"></a><a href="#Footnote_275" class="fnanchor">[275]</a> The Doctor tells her that Lear is
+still asleep, and asks leave to wake him. Cordelia assents and asks if
+he is 'arrayed,' which does not mean whether he has a night-gown on, but
+whether they have taken away his crown of furrow-weeds, and tended him
+duly after his mad wanderings in the fields. The Gentleman says that in
+his sleep 'fresh garments' (not a night-gown) have been put on him. The
+Doctor then asks Cordelia to be present when her father is waked. She
+assents, and the Doctor says, 'Please you, draw near. Louder the music
+there.' The next words are Cordelia's, 'O my dear father!'</p>
+
+<p>What has happened? At the words 'is he arrayed?' according to the Folio,
+'<i>Enter Lear in a chair carried by Servants.</i>' The moment of this
+entrance, as so often in the original editions, is doubtless too soon.
+It should probably come at the words 'Please you, draw near,' which
+<i>may</i>, as Koppel suggests, be addressed to the bearers. But that the
+stage-direction is otherwise right there cannot be a doubt (and that the
+Quartos omit it is no argument against it, seeing that, according to
+their directions, Lear never enters at all).</p>
+
+<p>This arrangement (1) allows Kent his proper place in the scene, (2)
+makes it clear that Cordelia has not seen her father before, (3) makes
+her first sight of him a theatrical crisis in the best sense, (4) makes
+it quite natural that he should kneel, (5) makes it obvious why he
+should leave the stage again when he shows signs of exhaustion, and (6)
+is the only arrangement <a name="Page_456" id="Page_456"></a><span class="pagenum">[456]</span>which has the slightest authority, for 'Lear on
+a bed asleep' was never heard of till Capell proposed it. The ruinous
+change of the staging was probably suggested by the version of that
+unhappy Tate.</p>
+
+<p>Of course the chair arrangement is primitive, but the Elizabethans did
+not care about such things. What they cared for was dramatic effect.</p>
+
+<div class="footnotes">
+<div class="footnotehead">FOOTNOTES:</div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_274" id="Footnote_274"></a><a href="#FNanchor_274"><span class="label">[274]</span></a> There are exceptions: <i>e.g.</i>, in the editions of Delius
+and Mr. W.J. Craig.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_275" id="Footnote_275"></a><a href="#FNanchor_275"><span class="label">[275]</span></a> And it is possible that, as Koppel suggests, the Doctor
+should properly enter at this point; for if Kent, as he says, wishes to
+remain unknown, it seems strange that he and Cordelia should talk as
+they do before a third person. This change however is not necessary, for
+the Doctor might naturally stand out of hearing till he was addressed;
+and it is better not to go against the stage-direction without
+necessity.</p></div>
+</div>
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="NOTE_X" id="NOTE_X"></a>NOTE X.</h2>
+
+<h3>THE BATTLE IN <i>KING LEAR</i>.</h3>
+
+
+<p>I found my impression of the extraordinary ineffectiveness of this
+battle (p. <a href='#Page_255'>255</a>) confirmed by a paper of James Spedding (<i>New Shakspere
+Society Transactions</i>, 1877, or Furness's <i>King Lear</i>, p. 312 f.); but
+his opinion that this is the one technical defect in <i>King Lear</i> seems
+certainly incorrect, and his view that this defect is not due to
+Shakespeare himself will not, I think, bear scrutiny.</p>
+
+<p>To make Spedding's view quite clear I may remind the reader that in the
+preceding scene the two British armies, that of Edmund and Regan, and
+that of Albany and Goneril, have entered with drum and colours, and have
+departed. Scene ii. is as follows (Globe):</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p class="center"><span class="smcap">Scene ii</span>.&mdash;<i>A field between the two camps.</i></p>
+
+<p><i>Alarum within. Enter, with drum and colours</i>, <span class="smcap">Lear, Cordelia</span>,
+<i>and</i> Soldiers, <i>over the stage; and exeunt.</i> <i>Enter</i> <span class="smcap">Edgar</span> <i>and</i>
+<i><span class="smcap">Gloster</span>.</i></p>
+</div>
+
+<table class="tabledrama" summary="Battle in King Lear" cellpadding="8">
+  <tr>
+    <td valign="top"><i>Edg.</i></td>
+    <td>Here, father, take the shadow of this tree<br />
+        For your good host; pray that the right may thrive:<br />
+        If ever I return to you again,<br />
+        I'll bring you comfort.</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td valign="top"><i>Glo.</i></td>
+    <td><span style="margin-left: 8em;">Grace go with you, sir!</span><br />
+        <span style="margin-left: 17em;">[<i>Exit</i> Edgar</span><br />
+        <i>Alarum and retreat within. Re-enter</i> <span class="smcap">Edgar</span>.</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td valign="top"><i>Edg.</i></td>
+    <td>Away, old man; give me thy hand; away!<br />
+        King Lear hath lost, he and his daughter ta'en:<br />
+        Give me thy hand; come on.</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td><i>Glo.</i></td>
+    <td>No farther, sir; a man may rot even here.</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td valign="top"><a name="Page_457" id="Page_457"></a><span class="pagenum">[457]</span><i>Edg.</i></td>
+    <td>What, in ill thoughts again? Men must endure<br />
+        Their going hence, even as their coming hither:<br />
+        Ripeness is all: come on.</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td><i>Glo.</i></td>
+    <td><span style="margin-left: 10em;">And that's true too.</span><span style="margin-left: 1em;">[<i>Exeunt</i>.</span></td>
+  </tr>
+</table>
+
+<p>The battle, it will be seen, is represented only by military music
+within the tiring-house, which formed the back of the stage. 'The
+scene,' says Spedding, 'does not change; but 'alarums' are heard, and
+afterwards a 'retreat,' and on the same field over which that great army
+has this moment passed, fresh and full of hope, re-appears, with tidings
+that all is lost, the same man who last left the stage to follow and
+fight in it.<a name="FNanchor_276" id="FNanchor_276"></a><a href="#Footnote_276" class="fnanchor">[276]</a> That Shakespeare meant the scene to stand thus, no one
+who has the true faith will believe.'</p>
+
+<p>Spedding's suggestion is that things are here run together which
+Shakespeare meant to keep apart. Shakespeare, he thinks, continued Act
+<span class="smcap">iv.</span> to the '<i>exit</i> Edgar' after l. 4 of the above passage.
+Thus, just before the close of the Act, the two British armies and the
+French army had passed across the stage, and the interest of the
+audience in the battle about to be fought was raised to a high pitch.
+Then, after a short interval, Act <span class="smcap">v.</span> opened with the noise of
+battle in the distance, followed by the entrance of Edgar to announce
+the defeat of Cordelia's army. The battle, thus, though not fought on
+the stage, was shown and felt to be an event of the greatest importance.</p>
+
+<p>Apart from the main objection of the entire want of evidence of so great
+a change having been made, there are other objections to this idea and
+to the reasoning on which it is based. (1) The pause at the end of the
+present Fourth Act is far from 'faulty,' as Spedding alleges it to be;
+that Act ends with the most melting scene Shakespeare ever wrote; and a
+pause after it, and before the business of the battle, was perfectly
+right. (2) The Fourth Act is already much longer than the Fifth (about
+fourteen columns of the Globe edition against about eight and a half),
+and Spedding's change would give the Fourth nearly sixteen columns, and
+the Fifth less than seven. (3) Spedding's proposal requires a much
+greater alteration in the existing text than he <a name="Page_458" id="Page_458"></a><span class="pagenum">[458]</span>supposed. It does not
+simply shift the division of the two Acts, it requires the disappearance
+and re-entrance of the blind Gloster. Gloster, as the text stands, is
+alone on the stage while the battle is being fought at a distance, and
+the reference to the tree shows that he was on the main or lower stage.
+The main stage had no front curtain; and therefore, if Act <span class="smcap">iv.</span>
+is to end where Spedding wished it to end, Gloster must go off unaided
+at its close, and come on again unaided for Act <span class="smcap">v.</span> And this
+means that the <i>whole</i> arrangement of the present Act <span class="smcap">v.</span> Sc.
+ii. must be changed. If Spedding had been aware of this it is not likely
+that he would have broached his theory.<a name="FNanchor_277" id="FNanchor_277"></a><a href="#Footnote_277" class="fnanchor">[277]</a></p>
+
+<p>It is curious that he does not allude to the one circumstance which
+throws some little suspicion on the existing text. I mean the
+contradiction between Edgar's statement that, if ever he returns to his
+father again, he will bring him comfort, and the fact that immediately
+afterwards he returns to bring him discomfort. It is possible to explain
+this psychologically, of course, but the passage is not one in which we
+should expect psychological subtlety.</p>
+
+<div class="footnotes">
+<div class="footnotehead">FOOTNOTES:</div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_276" id="Footnote_276"></a><a href="#FNanchor_276"><span class="label">[276]</span></a> Where did Spedding find this? I find no trace of it, and
+surely Edgar would not have risked his life in the battle, when he had,
+in case of defeat, to appear and fight Edmund. He does not appear
+'armed,' according to the Folio, till <span class="smcap">v.</span> iii. 117.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_277" id="Footnote_277"></a><a href="#FNanchor_277"><span class="label">[277]</span></a> Spedding supposed that there was a front curtain, and
+this idea, coming down from Malone and Collier, is still found in
+English works of authority. But it may be stated without hesitation that
+there is no positive evidence at all for the existence of such a
+curtain, and abundant evidence against it.</p></div>
+</div>
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="NOTE_Y" id="NOTE_Y"></a>NOTE Y.</h2>
+
+<h3>SOME DIFFICULT PASSAGES IN <i>KING LEAR</i>.</h3>
+
+
+<p>The following are notes on some passages where I have not been able to
+accept any of the current interpretations, or on which I wish to express
+an opinion or represent a little-known view.</p>
+
+
+<p>1. <i>Kent's soliloquy at the end of</i> <span class="smcap">ii.</span> ii.</p>
+
+<p>(<i>a</i>) In this speech the application of the words 'Nothing, almost sees
+miracles but misery' seems not to have been understood. The 'misery' is
+surely not that of Kent but that of Lear, who has come 'out of heaven's
+benediction to the warm sun,' <i>i.e.</i> to misery. This, says Kent, is just
+the situation where something like miraculous help may be looked for;
+and he finds the sign of it in the fact that a letter from Cordelia has
+just reached him; for his course since his banishment has been so
+obscured that <a name="Page_459" id="Page_459"></a><span class="pagenum">[459]</span>it is only by the rarest good fortune (something like a
+miracle) that Cordelia has got intelligence of it. We may suppose that
+this intelligence came from one of Albany's or Cornwall's servants, some
+of whom are, he says (<span class="smcap">iii.</span> i. 23),</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i3">to France the spies and speculations<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Intelligent of our state.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>(<i>b</i>) The words 'and shall find time,' etc., have been much discussed.
+Some have thought that they are detached phrases from the letter which
+Kent is reading: but Kent has just implied by his address to the sun
+that he has no light to read the letter by.<a name="FNanchor_278" id="FNanchor_278"></a><a href="#Footnote_278" class="fnanchor">[278]</a> It has also been
+suggested that the anacoluthon is meant to represent Kent's sleepiness,
+which prevents him from finishing the sentence, and induces him to
+dismiss his thoughts and yield to his drowsiness. But I remember nothing
+like this elsewhere in Shakespeare, and it seems much more probable that
+the passage is corrupt, perhaps from the loss of a line containing words
+like 'to rescue us' before 'From this enormous state' (with 'state' cf.
+'our state' in the lines quoted above).</p>
+
+<p>When we reach <span class="smcap">iii.</span> i. we find that Kent has now read the
+letter; he knows that a force is coming from France and indeed has
+already 'secret feet' in some of the harbours. So he sends the Gentleman
+to Dover.</p>
+
+
+<p>2. <i>The Fool's Song in</i> <span class="smcap">ii.</span> iv.</p>
+
+<p>At <span class="smcap">ii.</span> iv. 62 Kent asks why the King comes with so small a
+train. The Fool answers, in effect, that most of his followers have
+deserted him because they see that his fortunes are sinking. He proceeds
+to advise Kent ironically to follow their example, though he confesses
+he does not intend to follow it himself. 'Let go thy hold when a great
+wheel runs down a hill, lest it break thy neck with following it: but
+the great one that goes up the hill, let him draw thee after. When a
+wise man gives thee better counsel, give me mine again: I would have
+none but knaves follow it, since a fool gives it.</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i1">That sir which serves and seeks for gain,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">And follows but for form,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Will pack when it begins to rain,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">And leave thee in the storm.<br /></span>
+<span class="i1"><a name="Page_460" id="Page_460"></a><span class="pagenum">[460]</span>But I will tarry; the fool will stay,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">And let the wise man fly:<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">The knave turns fool that runs away;<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">The fool no knave, perdy.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>The last two lines have caused difficulty. Johnson wanted to read,</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i1">The fool turns knave that runs away,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">The knave no fool, perdy;<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p><i>i.e.</i> if I ran away, I should prove myself to be a knave and a wise
+man, but, being a fool, I stay, as no knave or wise man would. Those who
+rightly defend the existing reading misunderstand it, I think.
+Shakespeare is not pointing out, in 'The knave turns fool that runs
+away,' that the wise knave who runs away is really a 'fool with a
+circumbendibus,' 'moral miscalculator as well as moral coward.' The Fool
+is referring to his own words, 'I would have none but knaves follow [my
+advice to desert the King], since a fool gives it'; and the last two
+lines of his song mean, 'The knave who runs away follows the advice
+given by a fool; but I, the fool, shall not follow my own advice by
+turning knave.'</p>
+
+<p>For the ideas compare the striking passage in <i>Timon</i>, <span class="smcap">i.</span> i. 64
+ff.</p>
+
+
+<p>3. '<i>Decline your head.</i>'</p>
+
+<p>At <span class="smcap">iv.</span> ii. 18 Goneril, dismissing Edmund in the presence of
+Oswald, says:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i12">This trusty servant<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Shall pass between us: ere long you are like to hear,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">If you dare venture in your own behalf,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">A mistress's command. Wear this; spare speech;<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Decline your head: this kiss, if it durst speak,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Would stretch thy spirits up into the air.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>I copy Furness's note on 'Decline': '<span class="smcap">Steevens</span> thinks that
+Goneril bids Edmund decline his head that she might, while giving him a
+kiss, appear to Oswald merely to be whispering to him. But this,
+<span class="smcap">Wright</span> says, is giving Goneril credit for too much delicacy,
+and Oswald was a "serviceable villain." <span class="smcap">Delius</span> suggests that
+perhaps she wishes to put a chain around his neck.'</p>
+
+<p>Surely 'Decline your head' is connected, not with 'Wear this' (whatever
+'this' may be), but with 'this kiss,' etc. Edmund is a good deal taller
+than Goneril, and must stoop to be kissed.</p>
+
+
+<p><a name="Page_461" id="Page_461"></a><span class="pagenum">[461]</span>4. <i>Self-cover'd</i>.</p>
+
+<p>At <span class="smcap">iv.</span> ii. 59 Albany, horrified at the passions of anger, hate,
+and contempt expressed in his wife's face, breaks out:</p>
+
+<table class="tabledrama" summary="King Lear IV. ii. 59ff." cellpadding="8">
+  <tr>
+   <td><br /></td>
+   <td><span style="margin-left: 7em;">See thyself, devil!</span><br />
+       Proper deformity seems not in the fiend<br />
+       So horrid as in woman.</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td><i>Gon.</i></td>
+    <td>O vain fool!</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td valign="top"><i>Alb.</i></td>
+    <td>Thou changed and self-cover'd thing, for shame,<br />
+        Be-monster not thy feature. Were't my fitness<br />
+        To let these hands obey my blood,<br />
+        They are apt enough to dislocate and tear<br />
+        Thy flesh and bones: howe'er thou art a fiend,<br />
+        A woman's shape doth shield thee.</td>
+  </tr>
+</table>
+
+<p>The passage has been much discussed, mainly because of the strange
+expression 'self-cover'd,' for which of course emendations have been
+proposed. The general meaning is clear. Albany tells his wife that she
+is a devil in a woman's shape, and warns her not to cast off that shape
+by be-monstering her feature (appearance), since it is this shape alone
+that protects her from his wrath. Almost all commentators go astray
+because they imagine that, in the words 'thou changed and self-cover'd
+thing,' Albany is speaking to Goneril as a <i>woman</i> who has been changed
+into a fiend. Really he is addressing her as a fiend which has changed
+its own shape and assumed that of a woman; and I suggest that
+'self-cover'd' means either 'which hast covered or concealed thyself,'
+or 'whose self is covered' [so Craig in Arden edition], not (what of
+course it ought to mean) 'which hast been covered <i>by</i> thyself.'</p>
+
+<p>Possibly the last lines of this passage (which does not appear in the
+Folios) should be arranged thus:</p>
+
+<table class="tabledrama" summary="Albany and Goneril" cellpadding="8">
+  <tr>
+    <td><br /></td>
+    <td>To let these hands obey my blood, they're apt enough<br />
+        To dislocate and tear thy flesh and bones:<br />
+        Howe'er thou art a fiend, a woman's shape<br />
+        Doth shield thee.</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td><i>Gon.</i></td>
+    <td><span style="margin-left: 7em;">Marry, your manhood now&mdash;</span></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td><i>Alb.</i></td>
+    <td><span style="margin-left: 18em;">What news?</span></td>
+  </tr>
+</table>
+
+
+<p>5. <i>The stage-directions at</i> <span class="smcap">v.</span> i. 37, 39.</p>
+
+<p>In <span class="smcap">v.</span> i. there first enter Edmund, Regan, and their army or
+soldiers: then, at line 18, Albany, Goneril, and their army or soldiers.
+Edmund and Albany speak very stiffly to one another, and Goneril bids
+them defer their private quarrels and attend to <a name="Page_462" id="Page_462"></a><span class="pagenum">[462]</span>business. Then follows
+this passage (according to the modern texts):</p>
+
+<table class="tabledrama" summary="King Lear V. i." cellpadding="8">
+  <tr>
+    <td valign="top"><i>Alb.</i></td>
+    <td><span style="margin-left: 7em;">Let's then determine</span><br />
+        With the ancient of war on our proceedings.</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td><i>Edm.</i></td>
+    <td>I shall attend you presently at your tent.</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td><i>Reg.</i></td>
+    <td>Sister, you'll go with us?</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td><i>Gon.</i></td>
+    <td>No.</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td><i>Reg.</i></td>
+    <td>'Tis most convenient: pray you, go with us.</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td><i>Gon.</i></td>
+    <td>[<i>Aside</i>] O, ho, I know the riddle.&mdash;I will go.</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td><br /></td>
+    <td><span style="margin-left: 3em;"><i>As they are going out, enter</i> <span class="smcap">Edgar</span></span> <i>disguised.</i></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td valign="top"><i>Edg.</i></td>
+    <td>If e'er your grace had speech with man so poor,<br />
+        Hear me one word.</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td><i>Alb.</i></td>
+    <td><span style="margin-left: 8em;">I'll overtake you. Speak.</span></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td><br /></td>
+    <td><span style="margin-left: 9em;">[<i>Exeunt all but</i> <span class="smcap">Albany</span> <i>and</i> <span class="smcap">Edgar</span>.</span></td>
+  </tr>
+</table>
+
+<p>It would appear from this that all the leading persons are to go to a
+Council of War with the ancient (plural) in Albany's tent; and they are
+going out, followed by their armies, when Edgar comes in. Why in the
+world, then, should Goneril propose (as she apparently does) to absent
+herself from the Council; and why, still more, should Regan object to
+her doing so? This is a question which always perplexed me, and I could
+not believe in the only answers I ever found suggested, viz., that Regan
+wanted to keep Edmund and Goneril together in order that she might
+observe them (Moberly, quoted in Furness), or that she could not bear to
+lose sight of Goneril, for fear Goneril should effect a meeting with
+Edmund after the Council (Delius, if I understand him).</p>
+
+<p>But I find in Koppel what seems to be the solution
+(Verbesserungsvorschl&auml;ge, p. 127 f.). He points out that the modern
+stage-directions are wrong. For the modern direction 'As they are going
+out, enter Edgar disguised,' the Ff. read, 'Exeunt both the armies.
+Enter Edgar.' For 'Exeunt all but Albany and Edgar' the Ff. have
+nothing, but Q1 has 'exeunt' after 'word.' For the first direction
+Koppel would read, 'Exeunt Regan, Goneril, Gentlemen, and Soldiers': for
+the second he would read, after 'overtake you,' 'Exit Edmund.'</p>
+
+<p>This makes all clear. Albany proposes a Council of War. Edmund assents,
+and says he will come at once to Albany's tent for that purpose. The
+Council will consist of Albany, Edmund, and the ancient of war. Regan,
+accordingly, is going away with her soldiers; but she observes that
+Goneril shows no sign of moving with <i>her</i> soldiers; and she at once
+suspects that Goneril <a name="Page_463" id="Page_463"></a><span class="pagenum">[463]</span>means to attend the Council in order to be with
+Edmund. Full of jealousy, she invites Goneril to go with <i>her</i>. Goneril
+refuses, but then, seeing Regan's motive, contemptuously and ironically
+consents (I doubt if 'O ho, I know the riddle' should be 'aside,' as in
+modern editions, following Capell). Accordingly the two sisters go out,
+followed by their soldiers; and Edmund and Albany are just going out, in
+a different direction, to Albany's tent when Edgar enters. His words
+cause Albany to stay; Albany says to Edmund, as Edmund leaves, 'I'll
+overtake you'; and then, turning to Edgar, bids him 'speak.'</p>
+
+
+<p>6. <span class="smcap">v.</span> iii. 151 ff.</p>
+
+<p>When Edmund falls in combat with the disguised Edgar, Albany produces
+the letter from Goneril to Edmund, which Edgar had found in Oswald's
+pocket and had handed over to Albany. This letter suggested to Edmund
+the murder of Albany. The passage in the Globe edition is as follows:</p>
+
+<table class="tabledrama" summary="Goneril's Letter Exposed" cellpadding="8">
+  <tr>
+    <td valign="top"><i>Gon.</i></td>
+    <td><span style="margin-left: 6em;">This is practice, Gloucester:</span><br />
+        By the law of arms thou wast not bound to answer<br />
+        An unknown opposite: thou art not vanquish'd,<br />
+        But cozen'd and beguiled.</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td valign="top"><i>Alb.</i></td>
+    <td><span style="margin-left: 10em;">Shut your mouth, dame,</span><br />
+        Or with this paper shall I stop it: Hold, sir;<br />
+        Thou worse than any name, read thy own evil:<br />
+        No tearing, lady; I perceive you know it.<br />
+        <span style="margin-left: 11em;">[<i>Gives the letter to Edmund.</i></span></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td valign="top"><i>Gon.</i></td>
+    <td>Say, if I do, the laws are mine, not thine:<br />
+        Who can arraign me for't?</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td valign="top"><i>Alb.</i></td>
+    <td><span style="margin-left: 10em;">Most monstrous! oh!</span><br />
+        Know'st thou this paper?</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td><i>Gon.</i></td>
+    <td><span style="margin-left: 10em;">Ask me not what I know.</span> <span style="margin-left: 2em;">[<i>Exit.</i></span></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td><i>Alb.</i></td>
+    <td>Go after her: she's desperate: govern her.</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td valign="top"><i>Edm.</i></td>
+    <td>What you have charged me with, that have I done;<br />
+        And more, much more; the time will bring it out.<br />
+        'Tis past, and so am I. But what art thou<br />
+        That hast this fortune on me?</td>
+  </tr>
+</table>
+
+<p>The first of the stage-directions is not in the Qq. or Ff.: it was
+inserted by Johnson. The second ('Exit') is both in the Qq. and in the
+Ff., but the latter place it after the words 'arraign me for't.' And
+they give the words 'Ask me not what I know' to Edmund, not to Goneril,
+as in the Qq. (followed by the Globe).</p>
+
+<p><a name="Page_464" id="Page_464"></a><span class="pagenum">[464]</span>I will not go into the various views of these lines, but will simply
+say what seems to me most probable. It does not matter much where
+precisely Goneril's 'exit' comes; but I believe the Folios are right in
+giving the words 'Ask me not what I know' to Edmund. It has been pointed
+out by Knight that the question 'Know'st thou this paper?' cannot very
+well be addressed to Goneril, for Albany has already said to her, 'I
+perceive you know it.' It is possible to get over this difficulty by
+saying that Albany wants her confession: but there is another fact which
+seems to have passed unnoticed. When Albany is undoubtedly speaking to
+his wife, he uses the plural pronoun, 'Shut <i>your</i> mouth, dame,' 'No
+tearing, lady; I perceive <i>you</i> know it.' When then he asks 'Know'st
+<i>thou</i> this paper?' he is probably <i>not</i> speaking to her.</p>
+
+<p>I should take the passage thus. At 'Hold, sir,' [omitted in Qq.] Albany
+holds the letter out towards Edmund for him to see, or possibly gives it
+to him.<a name="FNanchor_279" id="FNanchor_279"></a><a href="#Footnote_279" class="fnanchor">[279]</a> The next line, with its 'thou,' is addressed to Edmund,
+whose 'reciprocal vows' are mentioned in the letter. Goneril snatches at
+it to tear it up: and Albany, who does not know whether Edmund ever saw
+the letter or not, says to her 'I perceive <i>you</i> know it,' the 'you'
+being emphatic (her very wish to tear it showed she knew what was in
+it). She practically admits her knowledge, defies him, and goes out to
+kill herself. He exclaims in horror at her, and, turning again to
+Edmund, asks if <i>he</i> knows it. Edmund, who of course does not know it,
+refuses to answer (like Iago), not (like Iago) out of defiance, but from
+chivalry towards Goneril; and, having refused to answer <i>this</i> charge,
+he goes on to admit the charges brought against himself previously by
+Albany (82 f.) and Edgar (130 f.). I should explain the change from
+'you' to 'thou' in his speech by supposing that at first he is speaking
+to Albany and Edgar together.</p>
+
+
+<p>7. <span class="smcap">v.</span> iii. 278.</p>
+
+<p>Lear, looking at Kent, asks,</p>
+
+<table class="tabledrama" summary ="King Lear V. iii. 278ff" cellpadding="8">
+  <tr>
+    <td><br /></td>
+    <td><span style="margin-left: 10em;">Who are you?</span><br />
+         Mine eyes are not o' the best: I'll tell you straight.</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td valign="top"><i>Kent.</i></td>
+    <td>If fortune brag of two she loved <i>and</i> hated (Qq. <i>or</i>),<br />
+        One of them we behold.</td>
+  </tr>
+</table>
+
+<p><a name="Page_465" id="Page_465"></a><span class="pagenum">[465]</span>Kent is not answering Lear, nor is he speaking of himself. He is
+speaking of Lear. The best interpretation is probably that of Malone,
+according to which Kent means, 'We see the man most hated by Fortune,
+whoever may be the man she has loved best'; and perhaps it is supported
+by the variation of the text in the Qq., though their texts are so bad
+in this scene that their support is worth little. But it occurs to me as
+possible that the meaning is rather: 'Did Fortune ever show the extremes
+<i>both</i> of her love <i>and</i> of her hatred to any other man as she has shown
+them to this man?'</p>
+
+
+<p>8. <i>The last lines.</i></p>
+
+<table class="tabledrama" summary="Last Lines of King Lear" cellpadding="8">
+  <tr>
+    <td valign="top"><i>Alb.</i></td>
+    <td>Bear them from hence. Our present business<br />
+        Is general woe. [<i>To Kent and Edgar</i>] Friends of my soul, you twain<br />
+        Rule in this realm, and the gored state sustain.</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td valign="top"><i>Kent.</i></td>
+    <td>I have a journey, sir, shortly to go;<br />
+        My master calls me, I must not say no.</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td valign="top"><i>Alb.</i></td>
+    <td>The weight of this sad time we must obey;<br />
+        Speak what we feel, not what we ought to say.<br />
+        The oldest hath borne most: we that are young<br />
+        Shall never see so much, nor live so long.</td>
+  </tr>
+</table>
+
+<p>So the Globe. The stage-direction (right, of course) is Johnson's. The
+last four lines are given by the Ff. to Edgar, by the Qq. to Albany. The
+Qq. read '<i>have</i> borne most.'</p>
+
+<p>To whom ought the last four lines to be given, and what do they mean? It
+is proper that the principal person should speak last, and this is in
+favour of Albany. But in this scene at any rate the Ff., which give the
+speech to Edgar, have the better text (though Ff. 2, 3, 4, make Kent die
+after his two lines!); Kent has answered Albany, but Edgar has not; and
+the lines seem to be rather more appropriate to Edgar. For the 'gentle
+reproof' of Kent's despondency (if this phrase of Halliwell's is right)
+is like Edgar; and, although we have no reason to suppose that Albany
+was not young, there is nothing to prove his youth.</p>
+
+<p>As to the meaning of the last two lines (a poor conclusion to such a
+play) I should suppose that 'the oldest' is not Lear, but 'the oldest of
+us,' viz., Kent, the one survivor of the old generation: and this is the
+more probable if there <i>is</i> a reference to him in the preceding lines.
+The last words seem to mean, 'We that are young shall never see so much
+<i>and yet</i> live so long'; <a name="Page_466" id="Page_466"></a><span class="pagenum">[466]</span><i>i.e.</i> if we suffer so much, we shall not bear
+it as he has. If the Qq. 'have' is right, the reference is to Lear,
+Gloster and Kent.</p>
+
+<div class="footnotes">
+<div class="footnotehead">FOOTNOTES:</div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_278" id="Footnote_278"></a><a href="#FNanchor_278"><span class="label">[278]</span></a> The 'beacon' which he bids approach is not the moon, as
+Pope supposed. The moon was up and shining some time ago (<span class="smcap">ii.</span>
+ii. 35), and lines 1 and 141-2 imply that not much of the night is
+left.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_279" id="Footnote_279"></a><a href="#FNanchor_279"><span class="label">[279]</span></a> 'Hold' can mean 'take'; but the word 'this' in line 160
+('Know'st thou this paper?') favours the idea that the paper is still in
+Albany's hand.</p></div>
+</div>
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="NOTE_Z" id="NOTE_Z"></a>NOTE Z.</h2>
+
+<h3>SUSPECTED INTERPOLATIONS IN <i>MACBETH</i>.</h3>
+
+
+<p>I have assumed in the text that almost the whole of <i>Macbeth</i> is
+genuine; and, to avoid the repetition of arguments to be found in other
+books,<a name="FNanchor_280" id="FNanchor_280"></a><a href="#Footnote_280" class="fnanchor">[280]</a> I shall leave this opinion unsupported. But among the
+passages that have been questioned or rejected there are two which seem
+to me open to serious doubt. They are those in which Hecate appears:
+viz. the whole of <span class="smcap">iii.</span> v.; and <span class="smcap">iv.</span> i. 39-43.</p>
+
+<p>These passages have been suspected (1) because they contain
+stage-directions for two songs which have been found in Middleton's
+<i>Witch</i>; (2) because they can be excised without leaving the least trace
+of their excision; and (3) because they contain lines incongruous with
+the spirit and atmosphere of the rest of the Witch-scenes: <i>e.g.</i>
+<span class="smcap">iii.</span> v. 10 f.:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i7">all you have done<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Hath been but for a wayward son,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Spiteful and wrathful, who, as others do,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Loves for his own ends, not for you;<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>and <span class="smcap">iv.</span> i. 41, 2:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i1">And now about the cauldron sing,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Like elves and fairies in a ring.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>The idea of sexual relation in the first passage, and the trivial
+daintiness of the second (with which cf. <span class="smcap">iii.</span> v. 34,</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i1">Hark! I am call'd; my little spirit, see,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Sits in a foggy cloud, and stays for me)<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>suit Middleton's Witches quite well, but Shakespeare's not at all; and
+it is difficult to believe that, if Shakespeare had meant to introduce a
+personage supreme over the Witches, he would have made her so
+unimpressive as this Hecate. (It may be added that the original
+stage-direction at <span class="smcap">iv.</span> i. 39, 'Enter Hecat and the other three
+Witches,' is suspicious.)</p>
+
+<p><a name="Page_467" id="Page_467"></a><span class="pagenum">[467]</span>I doubt if the second and third of these arguments, taken alone, would
+justify a very serious suspicion of interpolation; but the fact,
+mentioned under (1), that the play has here been meddled with, trebles
+their weight. And it gives some weight to the further fact that these
+passages resemble one another, and differ from the bulk of the other
+Witch passages, in being iambic in rhythm. (It must, however, be
+remembered that, supposing Shakespeare <i>did</i> mean to introduce Hecate,
+he might naturally use a special rhythm for the parts where she
+appeared.)</p>
+
+<p>The same rhythm appears in a third passage which has been doubted:
+<span class="smcap">iv.</span> i. 125-132. But this is not <i>quite</i> on a level with the
+other two; for (1), though it is possible to suppose the Witches, as
+well as the Apparitions, to vanish at 124, and Macbeth's speech to run
+straight on to 133, the cut is not so clean as in the other cases; (2)
+it is not at all clear that Hecate (the most suspicious element) is
+supposed to be present. The original stage-direction at 133 is merely
+'The Witches Dance, and vanish'; and even if Hecate had been present
+before, she might have vanished at 43, as Dyce makes her do.</p>
+
+<div class="footnotes">
+<div class="footnotehead">FOOTNOTES:</div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_280" id="Footnote_280"></a><a href="#FNanchor_280"><span class="label">[280]</span></a> <i>E.g.</i> Mr. Chambers's excellent little edition in the
+Warwick series.</p></div>
+</div>
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="NOTE_AA" id="NOTE_AA"></a>NOTE AA.</h2>
+
+<h3>HAS <i>MACBETH</i> BEEN ABRIDGED?</h3>
+
+
+<p><i>Macbeth</i> is a very short play, the shortest of all Shakespeare's except
+the <i>Comedy of Errors</i>. It contains only 1993 lines, while <i>King Lear</i>
+contains 3298, <i>Othello</i> 3324, and <i>Hamlet</i> 3924. The next shortest of
+the tragedies is <i>Julius Caesar</i>, which has 2440 lines. (The figures are
+Mr. Fleay's. I may remark that for our present purpose we want the
+number of the lines in the first Folio, not those in modern composite
+texts.)</p>
+
+<p>Is there any reason to think that the play has been shortened? I will
+briefly consider this question, so far as it can be considered apart
+from the wider one whether Shakespeare's play was re-handled by
+Middleton or some one else.</p>
+
+<p>That the play, as we have it, is <i>slightly</i> shorter than the play
+Shakespeare wrote seems not improbable. (1) We have no Quarto of
+<i>Macbeth</i>; and generally, where we have a Quarto or <a name="Page_468" id="Page_468"></a><span class="pagenum">[468]</span>Quartos of a play,
+we find them longer than the Folio text. (2) There are perhaps a few
+signs of omission in our text (over and above the plentiful signs of
+corruption). I will give one example (<span class="smcap">i.</span> iv. 33-43). Macbeth
+and Banquo, returning from their victories, enter the presence of Duncan
+(14), who receives them with compliments and thanks, which they
+acknowledge. He then speaks as follows:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i8">My plenteous joys,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Wanton in fulness, seek to hide themselves<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">In drops of sorrow. Sons, kinsmen, thanes,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">And you whose places are the nearest, know,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">We will establish our estate upon<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Our eldest, Malcolm, whom we name hereafter<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">The Prince of Cumberland; which honour must<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Not unaccompanied invest him only,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">But signs of nobleness, like stars, shall shine<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">On all deservers. From hence to Inverness,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">And bind us further to you.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>Here the transition to the naming of Malcolm, for which there has been
+no preparation, is extremely sudden; and the matter, considering its
+importance, is disposed of very briefly. But the abruptness and brevity
+of the sentence in which Duncan invites himself to Macbeth's castle are
+still more striking. For not a word has yet been said on the subject;
+nor is it possible to suppose that Duncan had conveyed his intention by
+message, for in that case Macbeth would of course have informed his wife
+of it in his letter (written in the interval between scenes iii. and
+iv.). It is difficult not to suspect some omission or curtailment here.
+On the other hand Shakespeare may have determined to sacrifice
+everything possible to the effect of rapidity in the First Act; and he
+may also have wished, by the suddenness and brevity of Duncan's
+self-invitation, to startle both Macbeth and the audience, and to make
+the latter feel that Fate is hurrying the King and the murderer to their
+doom.</p>
+
+<p>And that any <i>extensive</i> omissions have been made seems not likely. (1)
+There is no internal evidence of the omission of anything essential to
+the plot. (2) Forman, who saw the play in 1610, mentions nothing which
+we do not find in our play; for his statement that Macbeth was made Duke
+of Northumberland is obviously due to a confused recollection of
+Malcolm's <a name="Page_469" id="Page_469"></a><span class="pagenum">[469]</span>being made Duke of Cumberland. (3) Whereabouts could such
+omissions occur? Only in the first part, for the rest is full enough.
+And surely anyone who wanted to cut the play down would have operated,
+say, on Macbeth's talk with Banquo's murderers, or on <span class="smcap">iii.</span> vi.,
+or on the very long dialogue of Malcolm and Macduff, instead of reducing
+the most exciting part of the drama. We might indeed suppose that
+Shakespeare himself originally wrote the first part more at length, and
+made the murder of Duncan come in the Third Act, and then <i>himself</i>
+reduced his matter so as to bring the murder back to its present place,
+perceiving in a flash of genius the extraordinary effect that might thus
+be produced. But, even if this idea suited those who believe in a
+rehandling of the play, what probability is there in it?</p>
+
+<p>Thus it seems most likely that the play always was an extremely short
+one. Can we, then, at all account for its shortness? It is possible, in
+the first place, that it was not composed originally for the public
+stage, but for some private, perhaps royal, occasion, when time was
+limited. And the presence of the passage about touching for the evil
+(<span class="smcap">iv.</span> iii. 140 ff.) supports this idea. We must remember,
+secondly, that some of the scenes would take longer to perform than
+ordinary scenes of mere dialogue and action; <i>e.g.</i> the Witch-scenes,
+and the Battle-scenes in the last Act, for a broad-sword combat was an
+occasion for an exhibition of skill.<a name="FNanchor_281" id="FNanchor_281"></a><a href="#Footnote_281" class="fnanchor">[281]</a> And, lastly, Shakespeare may
+well have felt that a play constructed and written like <i>Macbeth</i>, a
+play in which a kind of fever-heat is felt almost from beginning to end,
+and which offers very little relief by means of humorous or pathetic
+scenes, ought to be short, and would be unbearable if it lasted so long
+as <i>Hamlet</i> or even <i>King Lear</i>. And in fact I do not think that, in
+reading, we <i>feel Macbeth</i> to be short: certainly we are astonished when
+we hear that it is about half as long as <i>Hamlet</i>. Perhaps in the
+Shakespearean theatre too it appeared to occupy a longer time than the
+clock recorded.</p>
+
+<div class="footnotes">
+<div class="footnotehead">FOOTNOTES:</div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_281" id="Footnote_281"></a><a href="#FNanchor_281"><span class="label">[281]</span></a> These two considerations should also be borne in mind in
+regard to the exceptional shortness of the <i>Midsummer Night's Dream</i> and
+the <i>Tempest</i>. Both contain scenes which, even on the Elizabethan stage,
+would take an unusual time to perform. And it has been supposed of each
+that it was composed to grace some wedding.</p></div>
+</div>
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><a name="Page_470" id="Page_470"></a><span class="pagenum">[470]</span></p>
+<h2><a name="NOTE_BB" id="NOTE_BB"></a>NOTE BB.</h2>
+
+<h3>THE DATE OF <i>MACBETH</i>. METRICAL TESTS.</h3>
+
+
+<p>Dr. Forman saw <i>Macbeth</i> performed at the Globe in 1610. The question is
+how much earlier its composition or first appearance is to be put.</p>
+
+<p>It is agreed that the date is not earlier than that of the accession of
+James I. in 1603. The style and versification would make an earlier date
+almost impossible. And we have the allusions to 'two-fold balls and
+treble sceptres' and to the descent of Scottish kings from Banquo; the
+undramatic description of touching for the King's Evil (James performed
+this ceremony); and the dramatic use of witchcraft, a matter on which
+James considered himself an authority.</p>
+
+<p>Some of these references would have their fullest effect early in
+James's reign. And on this ground, and on account both of resemblances
+in the characters of Hamlet and Macbeth, and of the use of the
+supernatural in the two plays, it has been held that <i>Macbeth</i> was the
+tragedy that came next after <i>Hamlet</i>, or, at any rate, next after
+<i>Othello</i>.</p>
+
+<p>These arguments seem to me to have no force when set against those that
+point to a later date (about 1606) and place <i>Macbeth</i> after <i>King
+Lear</i>.<a name="FNanchor_282" id="FNanchor_282"></a><a href="#Footnote_282" class="fnanchor">[282]</a> And, as I have already observed, the probability is that it
+also comes after Shakespeare's part of <i>Timon</i>, and immediately before
+<i>Antony and Cleopatra</i> and <i>Coriolanus</i>.</p>
+
+<p>I will first refer briefly to some of the older arguments in favour of
+this later date, and then more at length to those based on
+versification.</p>
+
+<p>(1) In <span class="smcap">ii.</span> iii. 4-5, 'Here's a farmer that hang'd himself on
+the expectation of plenty,' Malone found a reference to the
+exceptionally low price of wheat in 1606.</p>
+
+<p>(2) In the reference in the same speech to the equivocator who could
+swear in both scales and committed treason enough for God's sake, he
+found an allusion to the trial of the Jesuit Garnet, in the spring of
+1606, for complicity in the Gunpowder <a name="Page_471" id="Page_471"></a><span class="pagenum">[471]</span>Treason and Plot. Garnet
+protested on his soul and salvation that he had not held a certain
+conversation, then was obliged to confess that he had, and thereupon
+'fell into a large discourse defending equivocation.' This argument,
+which I have barely sketched, seems to me much weightier than the first;
+and its weight is increased by the further references to perjury and
+treason pointed out on p. <a href='#Page_397'>397</a>.</p>
+
+<p>(3) Halliwell observed what appears to be an allusion to <i>Macbeth</i> in
+the comedy of the <i>Puritan</i>, 4to, 1607: 'we'll ha' the ghost i' th'
+white sheet sit at upper end o' th' table'; and Malone had referred to a
+less striking parallel in <i>Caesar and Pompey</i>, also pub. 1607:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i1">Why, think you, lords, that 'tis <i>ambition's spur</i><br /></span>
+<span class="i1">That <i>pricketh</i> Caesar to these high attempts?<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>He also found a significance in the references in <i>Macbeth</i> to the
+genius of Mark Antony being rebuked by Caesar, and to the insane root
+that takes the reason prisoner, as showing that Shakespeare, while
+writing <i>Macbeth</i>, was reading Plutarch's <i>Lives</i>, with a view to his
+next play <i>Antony and Cleopatra</i> (S.R. 1608).</p>
+
+<p>(4) To these last arguments, which by themselves would be of little
+weight, I may add another, of which the same may be said. Marston's
+reminiscences of Shakespeare are only too obvious. In his <i>Dutch
+Courtezan</i>, 1605, I have noticed passages which recall <i>Othello</i> and
+<i>King Lear</i>, but nothing that even faintly recalls <i>Macbeth</i>. But in
+reading <i>Sophonisba</i>, 1606, I was several times reminded of <i>Macbeth</i>
+(as well as, more decidedly, of <i>Othello</i>). I note the parallels for
+what they are worth.</p>
+
+<p>With <i>Sophonisba</i>, Act <span class="smcap">i.</span> Sc. ii.:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i1">Upon whose tops the Roman eagles stretch'd<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Their large spread wings, which fann'd the evening aire<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">To us cold breath,<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>cf. <i>Macbeth</i> <span class="smcap">i.</span> ii. 49:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i1">Where the Norweyan banners flout the sky<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">And fan our people cold.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>Cf. <i>Sophonisba</i>, a page later: 'yet doubtful stood the fight,' with
+<i>Macbeth</i>, <span class="smcap">i.</span> ii. 7, 'Doubtful it stood' ['Doubtful long it
+<a name="Page_472" id="Page_472"></a><span class="pagenum">[472]</span>stood'?] In the same scene of <i>Macbeth</i> the hero in fight is compared
+to an eagle, and his foes to sparrows; and in <i>Soph.</i> <span class="smcap">iii.</span> ii.
+Massinissa in fight is compared to a falcon, and his foes to fowls and
+lesser birds. I should not note this were it not that all these
+reminiscences (if they are such) recall one and the same scene. In
+<i>Sophonisba</i> also there is a tremendous description of the witch Erictho
+(<span class="smcap">iv.</span> i.), who says to the person consulting her, 'I know thy
+thoughts,' as the Witch says to Macbeth, of the Armed Head, 'He knows
+thy thought.'</p>
+
+<p>(5) The resemblances between <i>Othello</i> and <i>King Lear</i> pointed out on
+pp. <a href='#Page_244'>244-5</a> and in <a href='#NOTE_R'>Note R</a>. form, when taken in conjunction with other
+indications, an argument of some strength in favour of the idea that
+<i>King Lear</i> followed directly on <i>Othello</i>.</p>
+
+<p>(6) There remains the evidence of style and especially of metre. I will
+not add to what has been said in the text concerning the former; but I
+wish to refer more fully to the latter, in so far as it can be
+represented by the application of metrical tests. It is impossible to
+argue here the whole question of these tests. I will only say that,
+while I am aware, and quite admit the force, of what can be said against
+the independent, rash, or incompetent use of them, I am fully convinced
+of their value when they are properly used.</p>
+
+<p>Of these tests, that of rhyme and that of feminine endings, discreetly
+employed, are of use in broadly distinguishing Shakespeare's plays into
+two groups, earlier and later, and also in marking out the very latest
+dramas; and the feminine-ending test is of service in distinguishing
+Shakespeare's part in <i>Henry VIII.</i> and the <i>Two Noble Kinsmen</i>. But
+neither of these tests has any power to separate plays composed within a
+few years of one another. There is significance in the fact that the
+<i>Winter's Tale</i>, the <i>Tempest</i>, <i>Henry VIII.</i>, contain hardly any rhymed
+five-foot lines; but none, probably, in the fact that <i>Macbeth</i> shows a
+higher percentage of such lines than <i>King Lear</i>, <i>Othello</i>, or
+<i>Hamlet</i>. The percentages of feminine endings, again, in the four
+tragedies, are almost conclusive against their being early plays, and
+would tend to show that they were not among the latest; but the
+differences in their respective percentages, which would place them in
+the chronological order <i>Hamlet</i>, <i>Macbeth</i>, <i>Othello</i>, <i>King Lear</i>
+(K&ouml;nig), or <i>Macbeth</i>, <i>Hamlet</i>, <i>Othello</i>, <i>King Lear</i> (Hertzberg), are
+<a name="Page_473" id="Page_473"></a><span class="pagenum">[473]</span>of scarcely any account.<a name="FNanchor_283" id="FNanchor_283"></a><a href="#Footnote_283" class="fnanchor">[283]</a> Nearly all scholars, I think, would
+accept these statements.</p>
+
+<p>The really useful tests, in regard to plays which admittedly are not
+widely separated, are three which concern the endings of speeches and
+lines. It is practically certain that Shakespeare made his verse
+progressively less formal, by making the speeches end more and more
+often within a line and not at the close of it; by making the sense
+overflow more and more often from one line into another; and, at last,
+by sometimes placing at the end of a line a word on which scarcely any
+stress can be laid. The corresponding tests may be called the
+Speech-ending test, the Overflow test, and the Light and Weak Ending
+test.</p>
+
+<p>I. The Speech-ending test has been used by K&ouml;nig,<a name="FNanchor_284" id="FNanchor_284"></a><a href="#Footnote_284" class="fnanchor">[284]</a> and I will first
+give some of his results. But I regret to say that I am unable to
+discover certainly the rule he has gone by. He omits speeches which are
+rhymed throughout, or which end with a rhymed couplet. And he counts
+only speeches which are 'mehrzeilig.' I suppose this means that he
+counts any speech consisting of two lines or more, but omits not only
+one-line speeches, but speeches containing more than one line but less
+than two; but I am not sure.</p>
+
+<p>In the plays admitted by everyone to be early the percentage of speeches
+ending with an incomplete line is quite small. In the <i>Comedy of
+Errors</i>, for example, it is only 0.6. It advances to 12.1 in <i>King
+John</i>, 18.3 in <i>Henry V.</i>, and 21.6 in <i>As You Like It</i>. It rises
+quickly soon after, and in no play written (according to general belief)
+after about 1600 or 1601 is it less than 30. In the admittedly latest
+plays it rises much higher, the figures being as follows:&mdash;<i>Antony</i>
+77.5, <i>Cor.</i> 79, <i>Temp.</i> 84.5, <i>Cym.</i> 85, <i>Win. Tale</i> 87.6, <i>Henry
+VIII.</i> (parts assigned to Shakespeare by Spedding) 89. Going back, now,
+to the four tragedies, we find the following figures: <i>Othello</i> 41.4,
+<i>Hamlet</i> 51.6, <i>Lear</i> 60.9, <i>Macbeth</i> 77.2. These figures place
+<i>Macbeth</i> decidedly last, with a percentage practically equal to that of
+<i>Antony</i>, the first of the final group.</p>
+
+<p>I will now give my own figures for these tragedies, as they differ
+somewhat from K&ouml;nig's, probably because my method differs. <a name="Page_474" id="Page_474"></a><span class="pagenum">[474]</span>(1) I have
+included speeches rhymed or ending with rhymes, mainly because I find
+that Shakespeare will sometimes (in later plays) end a speech which is
+partly rhymed with an incomplete line (<i>e.g. Ham.</i> <span class="smcap">iii.</span> ii.
+187, and the last words of the play: or <i>Macb.</i> <span class="smcap">v.</span> i. 87,
+<span class="smcap">v.</span> ii. 31). And if such speeches are reckoned, as they surely
+must be (for they may be, and are, highly significant), those speeches
+which end with complete rhymed lines must also be reckoned. (2) I have
+counted any speech exceeding a line in length, however little the excess
+may be; <i>e.g.</i></p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i1">I'll fight till from my bones my flesh be hacked.<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Give me my armour:<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>considering that the incomplete line here may be just as significant as
+an incomplete line ending a longer speech. If a speech begins within a
+line and ends brokenly, of course I have not counted it when it is
+equivalent to a five-foot line; <i>e.g.</i></p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i8">Wife, children, servants, all<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">That could be found:<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>but I do count such a speech (they are very rare) as</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i8">My lord, I do not know:<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">But truly I do fear it:<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>for the same reason that I count</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i8">You know not<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Whether it was his wisdom or his fear.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>Of the speeches thus counted, those which end somewhere within the line
+I find to be in <i>Othello</i> about 54 per cent.; in <i>Hamlet</i> about 57; in
+<i>King Lear</i> about 69; in <i>Macbeth</i> about 75.<a name="FNanchor_285" id="FNanchor_285"></a><a href="#Footnote_285" class="fnanchor">[285]</a> The order is the same
+as K&ouml;nig's, but the figures differ a good deal. I presume in the last
+three cases this comes from the difference in method; but I think
+K&ouml;nig's figures for <i>Othello</i> cannot be right, for I have tried several
+methods and find that the result is in no case far from the result of my
+own, and I am almost inclined to conjecture that K&ouml;nig's 41.4 is really
+the percentage of speeches ending with the close of a line, which would
+give 58.6 for the percentage of the broken-ended speeches.<a name="FNanchor_286" id="FNanchor_286"></a><a href="#Footnote_286" class="fnanchor">[286]</a></p>
+
+<p><a name="Page_475" id="Page_475"></a><span class="pagenum">[475]</span>We shall find that other tests also would put <i>Othello</i> before
+<i>Hamlet</i>, though close to it. This may be due to 'accident'&mdash;<i>i.e.</i> a
+cause or causes unknown to us; but I have sometimes wondered whether the
+last revision of <i>Hamlet</i> may not have succeeded the composition of
+<i>Othello</i>. In this connection the following fact may be worth notice. It
+is well known that the differences of the Second Quarto of <i>Hamlet</i> from
+the First are much greater in the last three Acts than in the first
+two&mdash;so much so that the editors of the Cambridge Shakespeare suggested
+that <a href="#Q1">Q1</a> represents an old play, of which Shakespeare's rehandling had
+not then proceeded much beyond the Second Act, while <a href="#Q2">Q2</a> represents his
+later completed rehandling. If that were so, the composition of the last
+three Acts would be a good deal later than that of the first two (though
+of course the first two would be revised at the time of the composition
+of the last three). Now I find that the percentage of speeches ending
+with a broken line is about 50 for the first two Acts, but about 62 for
+the last three. It is lowest in the first Act, and in the first two
+scenes of it is less than 32. The percentage for the last two Acts is
+about 65.</p>
+
+<p>II. The Enjambement or Overflow test is also known as the End-stopped
+and Run-on line test. A line may be called 'end-stopped' when the sense,
+as well as the metre, would naturally make one pause at its close;
+'run-on' when the mere sense would lead one to pass to the next line
+without any pause.<a name="FNanchor_287" id="FNanchor_287"></a><a href="#Footnote_287" class="fnanchor">[287]</a> This distinction is in a great majority of cases
+quite easy to draw: in others it is difficult. The reader cannot judge
+by rules of grammar, or by marks of punctuation (for there is a distinct
+pause at the end of many a line where most editors print no stop): he
+must trust his ear. And readers will differ, one making a distinct pause
+where another does not. This, however, does not matter greatly, so long
+as the reader is consistent; for the important point is not the precise
+number of run-on lines <a name="Page_476" id="Page_476"></a><span class="pagenum">[476]</span>in a play, but the difference in this matter
+between one play and another. Thus one may disagree with K&ouml;nig in his
+estimate of many instances, but one can see that he is consistent.</p>
+
+<p>In Shakespeare's early plays, 'overflows' are rare. In the <i>Comedy of
+Errors</i>, for example, their percentage is 12.9 according to K&ouml;nig<a name="FNanchor_288" id="FNanchor_288"></a><a href="#Footnote_288" class="fnanchor">[288]</a>
+(who excludes rhymed lines and some others). In the generally admitted
+last plays they are comparatively frequent. Thus, according to K&ouml;nig,
+the percentage in the <i>Winter's Tale</i> is 37.5, in the <i>Tempest</i> 41.5, in
+<i>Antony</i> 43.3, in <i>Coriolanus</i> 45.9, in <i>Cymbeline</i> 46, in the parts of
+<i>Henry VIII.</i> assigned by Spedding to Shakespeare 53.18. K&ouml;nig's results
+for the four tragedies are as follows: <i>Othello</i>, 19.5; <i>Hamlet</i>, 23.1;
+<i>King Lear</i>, 29.3; <i>Macbeth</i>, 36.6; (<i>Timon</i>, the whole play, 32.5).
+<i>Macbeth</i> here again, therefore, stands decidedly last: indeed it stands
+near the first of the latest plays.</p>
+
+<p>And no one who has ever attended to the versification of <i>Macbeth</i> will
+be surprised at these figures. It is almost obvious, I should say, that
+Shakespeare is passing from one system to another. Some passages show
+little change, but in others the change is almost complete. If the
+reader will compare two somewhat similar soliloquies, 'To be or not to
+be' and 'If it were done when 'tis done,' he will recognise this at
+once. Or let him search the previous plays, even <i>King Lear</i>, for twelve
+consecutive lines like these:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i1">If it were done when 'tis done, then 'twere well<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">It were done quickly: if the assassination<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Could trammel up the consequence, and catch<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">With his surcease success; that but this blow<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Might be the be-all and the end-all here,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">But here, upon this bank and shoal of time,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">We 'ld jump the life to come. But in these cases<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">We still have judgement here; that we but teach<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Bloody instructions, which, being taught, return<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">To plague the inventor: this even-handed justice<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Commends the ingredients of our poison'd chalice<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">To our own lips.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>Or let him try to parallel the following (<span class="smcap">iii.</span> vi. 37 f.):</p>
+
+<table class="tabledrama" summary="Macbeth III. vi. 37ff" cellpadding="8">
+  <tr>
+    <td><br /></td>
+    <td><span style="margin-left: 9em;">and this report</span><br />
+        Hath so exasperate the king that he<br />
+        Prepares for some attempt of war.</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td><a name="Page_477" id="Page_477"></a><span class="pagenum">[477]</span><i>Len.</i></td>
+    <td><span style="margin-left: 8em;">Sent he to Macduff?</span></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td valign="top"><i>Lord.</i></td>
+    <td>He did: and with an absolute 'Sir, not I,'<br />
+        The cloudy messenger turns me his back<br />
+        And hums, as who should say 'You'll rue the time<br />
+        That clogs me with this answer.'</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td valign="top"><i>Len.</i></td>
+    <td><span style="margin-left: 7em;">And that well might</span><br />
+        Advise him to a caution, to hold what distance<br />
+        His wisdom can provide. Some holy angel<br />
+        Fly to the court of England, and unfold<br />
+        His message ere he come, that a swift blessing<br />
+        May soon return to this our suffering country<br />
+        Under a hand accurs'd!</td>
+  </tr>
+</table>
+
+<p>or this (<span class="smcap">iv.</span> iii. 118 f.):</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i7">Macduff, this noble passion,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Child of integrity, hath from my soul<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Wiped the black scruples, reconciled my thoughts<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">To thy good truth and honour. Devilish Macbeth<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">By many of these trains hath sought to win me<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Into his power, and modest wisdom plucks me<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">From over-credulous haste: but God above<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Deal between thee and me! for even now<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">I put myself to thy direction, and<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Unspeak mine own detraction, here abjure<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">The taints and blames I laid upon myself,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">For strangers to my nature.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>I pass to another point. In the last illustration the reader will
+observe not only that 'overflows' abound, but that they follow one
+another in an unbroken series of nine lines. So long a series could not,
+probably, be found outside <i>Macbeth</i> and the last plays. A series of two
+or three is not uncommon; but a series of more than three is rare in the
+early plays, and far from common in the plays of the second period
+(K&ouml;nig).</p>
+
+<p>I thought it might be useful for our present purpose, to count the
+series of four and upwards in the four tragedies, in the parts of
+<i>Timon</i> attributed by Mr. Fleay to Shakespeare, and in <i>Coriolanus</i>, a
+play of the last period. I have not excluded rhymed lines in the two
+places where they occur, and perhaps I may say that my idea of an
+'overflow' is more exacting than K&ouml;nig's. The reader will understand the
+following table at once if I say that, according to it, <i>Othello</i>
+contains three passages where a series of four successive overflowing
+<a name="Page_478" id="Page_478"></a><span class="pagenum">[478]</span>lines occurs, and two passages where a series of five such lines
+occurs:</p>
+
+<table border="1" summary="Overflow comparisons" cellpadding="4">
+  <tr>
+    <th><br /></th>
+    <th valign="bottom">4</th>
+    <th valign="bottom">5</th>
+    <th valign="bottom">6</th>
+    <th valign="bottom">7</th>
+    <th valign="bottom">8</th>
+    <th valign="bottom">9</th>
+    <th valign="bottom">10</th>
+    <th>No. of Lines<br />
+        (Fleay).</th>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td>Othello,</td>
+    <td class="right">3</td>
+    <td class="right">2</td>
+    <td>&mdash;</td>
+    <td>&mdash;</td>
+    <td>&mdash;</td>
+    <td>&mdash;</td>
+    <td>&mdash;</td>
+    <td>2,758</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td>Hamlet,</td>
+    <td class="right">7</td>
+    <td>&mdash;</td>
+    <td>&mdash;</td>
+    <td>&mdash;</td>
+    <td>&mdash;</td>
+    <td>&mdash;</td>
+    <td>&mdash;</td>
+    <td>2,571</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td>Lear,</td>
+    <td class="right">6</td>
+    <td class="right">2</td>
+    <td>&mdash;</td>
+    <td>&mdash;</td>
+    <td>&mdash;</td>
+    <td>&mdash;</td>
+    <td>&mdash;</td>
+    <td>2,312</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td>Timon,</td>
+    <td class="right">7</td>
+    <td class="right">2</td>
+    <td class="right">1</td>
+    <td class="right">1</td>
+    <td>&mdash;</td>
+    <td>&mdash;</td>
+    <td>&mdash;</td>
+    <td>1,031 (?)</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td>Macbeth,</td>
+    <td class="right">7</td>
+    <td class="right">5</td>
+    <td class="right">1</td>
+    <td class="right">1</td>
+    <td>&mdash;</td>
+    <td class="right">1</td>
+    <td>&mdash;</td>
+    <td>1,706</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td>Coriolanus,</td>
+    <td class="right">16</td>
+    <td class="right">14</td>
+    <td class="right">7</td>
+    <td class="right">1</td>
+    <td class="right">2</td>
+    <td>&mdash;</td>
+    <td class="right">1</td>
+    <td>2,563</td>
+  </tr>
+</table>
+
+<p>(The figures for <i>Macbeth</i> and <i>Timon</i> in the last column must be borne
+in mind. I observed nothing in the non-Shakespeare part of <i>Timon</i> that
+would come into the table, but I did not make a careful search. I felt
+some doubt as to two of the four series in <i>Othello</i> and again in
+<i>Hamlet</i>, and also whether the ten-series in <i>Coriolanus</i> should not be
+put in column 7).</p>
+
+<p>III. <i>The light and weak ending test.</i></p>
+
+<p>We have just seen that in some cases a doubt is felt whether there is an
+'overflow' or not. The fact is that the 'overflow' has many degrees of
+intensity. If we take, for example, the passage last quoted, and if with
+K&ouml;nig we consider the line</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i1">The taints and blames I laid upon myself<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>to be run-on (as I do not), we shall at least consider the overflow to
+be much less distinct than those in the lines</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i12">but God above<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Deal between thee and me! for even now<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">I put myself to thy direction, and<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Unspeak my own detraction, here abjure<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>And of these four lines the third runs on into its successor at much the
+greatest speed.</p>
+
+<p>'Above,' 'now,' 'abjure,' are not light or weak endings: 'and' is a weak
+ending. Prof. Ingram gave the name weak ending to certain words on which
+it is scarcely possible to dwell at all, and which, therefore,
+precipitate the line which they close into the following. Light endings
+are certain words which have the same effect in a slighter degree. For
+example, <i>and</i>, <i>from</i>, <i>in</i>, <i>of</i>, are weak endings; <i>am</i>, <i>are</i>, <i>I</i>,
+<i>he</i>, are light endings.</p>
+
+<p>The test founded on this distinction is, within its limits, the most
+satisfactory of all, partly because the work of its author <a name="Page_479" id="Page_479"></a><span class="pagenum">[479]</span>can be
+absolutely trusted. The result of its application is briefly as follows.
+Until quite a late date light and weak endings occur in Shakespeare's
+works in such small numbers as hardly to be worth consideration.<a name="FNanchor_289" id="FNanchor_289"></a><a href="#Footnote_289" class="fnanchor">[289]</a>
+But in the well-defined group of last plays the numbers both of light
+and of weak endings increase greatly, and, on the whole, the increase
+apparently is progressive (I say apparently, because the order in which
+the last plays are generally placed depends to some extent on the test
+itself). I give Prof. Ingram's table of these plays, premising that in
+<i>Pericles</i>, <i>Two Noble Kinsmen</i>, and <i>Henry VIII.</i> he uses only those
+parts of the plays which are attributed by certain authorities to
+Shakespeare (<i>New Shakspere Soc. Trans.</i>, 1874).</p>
+
+<table border="1" summary="Light and Weak Endings" cellpadding="4">
+  <tr>
+    <th><br /></th>
+    <th valign="bottom">Light<br />
+        endings.</th>
+    <th valign="bottom">Weak.</th>
+    <th>Percentage<br />
+        of light in<br />
+        verse lines.</th>
+    <th>Percentage<br />
+        of weak in<br />
+        verse lines.</th>
+    <th valign="bottom">Percentage<br />
+        of both.</th>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td>Antony &amp; Cleopatra,</td>
+    <td class="right">71</td>
+    <td class="right">28</td>
+    <td class="right">2.53</td>
+    <td class="right">1.&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;</td>
+    <td class="right">3.53</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td>Coriolanus,</td>
+    <td class="right">60</td>
+    <td class="right">44</td>
+    <td class="right">2.34</td>
+    <td class="right">1.71</td>
+    <td class="right">4.05</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td>Pericles,</td>
+    <td class="right">20</td>
+    <td class="right">10</td>
+    <td class="right">2.78</td>
+    <td class="right">1.39</td>
+    <td class="right">4.17</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td>Tempest,</td>
+    <td class="right">42</td>
+    <td class="right">25</td>
+    <td class="right">2.88</td>
+    <td class="right">1.71</td>
+    <td class="right">4.59</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td>Cymbeline,</td>
+    <td class="right">78</td>
+    <td class="right">52</td>
+    <td class="right">2.90</td>
+    <td class="right">1.93</td>
+    <td class="right">4.83</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td>Winter's Tale,</td>
+    <td class="right">57</td>
+    <td class="right">43</td>
+    <td class="right">3.12</td>
+    <td class="right">2.36</td>
+    <td class="right">5.48</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td>Two Noble Kinsmen,</td>
+    <td class="right">50</td>
+    <td class="right">34</td>
+    <td class="right">3.63</td>
+    <td class="right">2.47</td>
+    <td class="right">6.10</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td>Henry VIII.,</td>
+    <td class="right">45</td>
+    <td class="right">37</td>
+    <td class="right">3.93</td>
+    <td class="right">3.23</td>
+    <td class="right">7.16</td>
+  </tr>
+</table>
+
+<p>Now, let us turn to our four tragedies (with <i>Timon</i>). Here again we
+have one doubtful play, and I give the figures for the whole of <i>Timon</i>,
+and again for the parts of <i>Timon</i> assigned to Shakespeare by Mr. Fleay,
+both as they appear in his amended text and as they appear in the Globe
+(perhaps the better text).</p>
+
+<table border="1" summary="Light and Weak Endings in Tragedies" cellpadding="4">
+  <tr>
+    <th><br /></th>
+    <th>Light.</th>
+    <th>Weak.</th>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td>Hamlet,</td>
+    <td class="right">8</td>
+    <td class="right">0</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td>Othello,</td>
+    <td class="right">2</td>
+    <td class="right">0</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td>Lear,</td>
+    <td class="right">5</td>
+    <td class="right">1</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td>Timon (whole),</td>
+    <td class="right">16</td>
+    <td class="right">5</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td><span style="margin-left: 3em;">(Sh. in Fleay),</span></td>
+    <td class="right">14</td>
+    <td class="right">7</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td><span style="margin-left: 3em;">(Sh. in Globe),</span></td>
+    <td class="right">13</td>
+    <td class="right">2</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td>Macbeth,</td>
+    <td class="right">21</td>
+    <td class="right">2</td>
+  </tr>
+</table>
+
+<p>Now here the figures for the first three plays tell us practically
+nothing. The tendency to a freer use of these endings is not <a name="Page_480" id="Page_480"></a><span class="pagenum">[480]</span>visible.
+As to <i>Timon</i>, the number of weak endings, I think, tells us little, for
+probably only two or three are Shakespeare's; but the rise in the number
+of light endings is so marked as to be significant. And most significant
+is this rise in the case of <i>Macbeth</i>, which, like Shakespeare's part of
+<i>Timon</i>, is much shorter than the preceding plays. It strongly confirms
+the impression that in <i>Macbeth</i> we have the transition to Shakespeare's
+last style, and that the play is the latest of the five tragedies.<a name="FNanchor_290" id="FNanchor_290"></a><a href="#Footnote_290" class="fnanchor">[290]</a></p>
+
+<div class="footnotes">
+<div class="footnotehead">FOOTNOTES:</div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_282" id="Footnote_282"></a><a href="#FNanchor_282"><span class="label">[282]</span></a> The fact that <i>King Lear</i> was performed at Court on
+December 26, 1606, is of course very far from showing that it had never
+been performed before.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_283" id="Footnote_283"></a><a href="#FNanchor_283"><span class="label">[283]</span></a> I have not tried to discover the source of the difference
+between these two reckonings.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_284" id="Footnote_284"></a><a href="#FNanchor_284"><span class="label">[284]</span></a> <i>Der Vers in Shakspere's Dramen</i>, 1888.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_285" id="Footnote_285"></a><a href="#FNanchor_285"><span class="label">[285]</span></a> In the parts of <i>Timon</i> (Globe text) assigned by Mr.
+Fleay to Shakespeare, I find the percentage to be about 74.5. K&ouml;nig
+gives 62.8 as the percentage in the whole of the play.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_286" id="Footnote_286"></a><a href="#FNanchor_286"><span class="label">[286]</span></a> I have noted also what must be a mistake in the case of
+Pericles. K&ouml;nig gives 17.1 as the percentage of the speeches with broken
+ends. I was astounded to see the figure, considering the style in the
+undoubtedly Shakespearean parts; and I find that, on my method, in Acts
+<span class="smcap">iii., iv., v.</span> the percentage is about 71, in the first two Acts
+(which show very slight, if any, traces of Shakespeare's hand) about 19.
+I cannot imagine the origin of the mistake here.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_287" id="Footnote_287"></a><a href="#FNanchor_287"><span class="label">[287]</span></a> I put the matter thus, instead of saying that, with a
+run-on line, one does pass to the next line without any pause, because,
+in common with many others, I should not in any case whatever <i>wholly</i>
+ignore the fact that one line ends and another begins.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_288" id="Footnote_288"></a><a href="#FNanchor_288"><span class="label">[288]</span></a> These overflows are what K&ouml;nig calls 'schroffe
+Enjambements,' which he considers to correspond with Furnivall's 'run-on
+lines.'</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_289" id="Footnote_289"></a><a href="#FNanchor_289"><span class="label">[289]</span></a> The number of light endings, however, in <i>Julius Caesar</i>
+(10) and <i>All's Well</i> (12) is worth notice.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_290" id="Footnote_290"></a><a href="#FNanchor_290"><span class="label">[290]</span></a> The Editors of the Cambridge Shakespeare might appeal in
+support of their view, that parts of Act <span class="smcap">v.</span> are not
+Shakespeare's, to the fact that the last of the light endings occurs at
+<span class="smcap">iv.</span> iii. 165.</p></div>
+</div>
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="NOTE_CC" id="NOTE_CC"></a>NOTE CC.</h2>
+
+<h3>WHEN WAS THE MURDER OF DUNCAN FIRST PLOTTED?</h3>
+
+
+<p>A good many readers probably think that, when Macbeth first met the
+Witches, he was perfectly innocent; but a much larger number would say
+that he had already harboured a vaguely guilty ambition, though he had
+not faced the idea of murder. And I think there can be no doubt that
+this is the obvious and natural interpretation of the scene. Only it is
+almost necessary to go rather further, and to suppose that his guilty
+ambition, whatever its precise form, was known to his wife and shared by
+her. Otherwise, surely, she would not, on reading his letter, so
+instantaneously assume that the King must be murdered in their castle;
+nor would Macbeth, as soon as he meets her, be aware (as he evidently
+is) that this thought is in her mind.</p>
+
+<p>But there is a famous passage in <i>Macbeth</i> which, closely considered,
+seems to require us to go further still, and to suppose that, at some
+time before the action of the play begins, the husband and wife had
+explicitly discussed the idea of murdering Duncan at some favourable
+opportunity, and had agreed to execute this idea. Attention seems to
+have been first drawn to this passage by Koester in vol. <span class="smcap">i.</span> of
+the <i>Jahrb&uuml;cher d. deutschen Shakespeare-gesellschaft</i>, and on it is
+based the interpretation of the play in Werder's very able <i>Vorlesungen
+&uuml;ber Macbeth</i>.</p>
+
+<p><a name="Page_481" id="Page_481"></a><span class="pagenum">[481]</span>The passage occurs in <span class="smcap">i.</span> vii., where Lady Macbeth is urging
+her husband to the deed:</p>
+
+<table class="tabledrama" summary="Macbeth I. vii." cellpadding="8">
+  <tr>
+    <td valign="top"><i>Macb.</i></td>
+    <td><span style="margin-left: 12em;">Prithee, peace:</span><br />
+        I dare do all that may become a man;<br />
+        Who dares do more is none.</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td valign="top"><i>Lady M.</i></td>
+    <td><span style="margin-left: 9em;">What beast was't, then,</span><br />
+        That made you break this enterprise to me?<br />
+        When you durst do it, then you were a man;<br />
+        And, to be more than what you were, you would<br />
+        Be so much more the man. Nor time nor place<br />
+        Did then adhere, and yet you would make both:<br />
+        They have made themselves, and that their fitness now<br />
+        Does unmake you. I have given suck, and know<br />
+        How tender 'tis to love the babe that milks me:<br />
+        I would, while it was smiling in my face,<br />
+        Have pluck'd my nipple from his boneless gums,<br />
+        And dash'd the brains out, had I so sworn as you<br />
+        Have done to this.</td>
+  </tr>
+</table>
+
+<p>Here Lady Macbeth asserts (1) that Macbeth proposed the murder to her:
+(2) that he did so at a time when there was no opportunity to attack
+Duncan, no 'adherence' of 'time' and 'place': (3) that he declared he
+wou'd <i>make</i> an opportunity, and swore to carry out the murder.</p>
+
+<p>Now it is possible that Macbeth's 'swearing' might have occurred in an
+interview off the stage between scenes v. and vi., or scenes vi. and
+vii.; and, if in that interview Lady Macbeth had with difficulty worked
+her husband up to a resolution, her irritation at his relapse, in sc.
+vii., would be very natural. But, as for Macbeth's first proposal of
+murder, it certainly does not occur in our play, nor could it possibly
+occur in any interview off the stage; for when Macbeth and his wife
+first meet, 'time' and 'place' <i>do</i> adhere; 'they have made themselves.'
+The conclusion would seem to be, either that the proposal of the murder,
+and probably the oath, occurred in a scene at the very beginning of the
+play, which scene has been lost or cut out; or else that Macbeth
+proposed, and swore to execute, the murder at some time prior to the
+action of the play.<a name="FNanchor_291" id="FNanchor_291"></a><a href="#Footnote_291" class="fnanchor">[291]</a> The first of these hypotheses is most
+improbable, and we seem driven to <a name="Page_482" id="Page_482"></a><span class="pagenum">[482]</span>adopt the second, unless we consent
+to burden Shakespeare with a careless mistake in a very critical
+passage.</p>
+
+<p>And, apart from unwillingness to do this, we can find a good deal to say
+in favour of the idea of a plan formed at a past time. It would explain
+Macbeth's start of fear at the prophecy of the kingdom. It would explain
+why Lady Macbeth, on receiving his letter, immediately resolves on
+action; and why, on their meeting, each knows that murder is in the mind
+of the other. And it is in harmony with her remarks on his probable
+shrinking from the act, to which, <i>ex hypothesi</i>, she had already
+thought it necessary to make him pledge himself by an oath.</p>
+
+<p>Yet I find it very difficult to believe in this interpretation. It is
+not merely that the interest of Macbeth's struggle with himself and with
+his wife would be seriously diminished if we felt he had been through
+all this before. I think this would be so; but there are two more
+important objections. In the first place the violent agitation described
+in the words,</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i1">If good, why do I yield to that suggestion<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Whose horrid image doth unfix my hair<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">And make my seated heart knock at my ribs,<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>would surely not be natural, even in Macbeth, if the idea of murder were
+already quite familiar to him through conversation with his wife, and if
+he had already done more than 'yield' to it. It is not as if the Witches
+had told him that Duncan was coming to his house. In that case the
+perception that the moment had come to execute a merely general design
+might well appal him. But all that he hears is that he will one day be
+King&mdash;a statement which, supposing this general design, would not point
+to any immediate action.<a name="FNanchor_292" id="FNanchor_292"></a><a href="#Footnote_292" class="fnanchor">[292]</a> And, in the second place, it is hard to
+believe that, if Shakespeare really had imagined the murder planned and
+sworn to before the action of the play, he would have written the first
+six scenes in such a manner that practically all readers imagine quite
+another state of affairs, and <a name="Page_483" id="Page_483"></a><span class="pagenum">[483]</span><i>continue to imagine it</i> even after they
+have read in scene vii. the passage which is troubling us. Is it likely,
+to put it otherwise, that his idea was one which nobody seems to have
+divined till late in the nineteenth century? And for what possible
+reason could he refrain from making this idea clear to his audience, as
+he might so easily have done in the third scene?<a name="FNanchor_293" id="FNanchor_293"></a><a href="#Footnote_293" class="fnanchor">[293]</a> It seems very much
+more likely that he himself imagined the matter as nearly all his
+readers do.</p>
+
+<p>But, in that case, what are we to say of this passage? I will answer
+first by explaining the way in which I understood it before I was aware
+that it had caused so much difficulty. I supposed that an interview had
+taken place after scene v., a scene which shows Macbeth shrinking, and
+in which his last words were 'we will speak further.' In this interview,
+I supposed, his wife had so wrought upon him that he had at last yielded
+and pledged himself by oath to do the murder. As for her statement that
+he had 'broken the enterprise' to her, I took it to refer to his letter
+to her,&mdash;a letter written when time and place did not adhere, for he did
+not yet know that Duncan was coming to visit him. In the letter he does
+not, of course, openly 'break the enterprise' to her, and it is not
+likely that he would do such a thing in a letter; but if they had had
+ambitious conversations, in which each felt that some half-formed guilty
+idea was floating in the mind of the other, she might naturally take the
+words of the letter as indicating much more than they said; and then in
+her passionate contempt at his hesitation, and her passionate eagerness
+to overcome it, she might easily accuse him, doubtless with
+exaggeration, and probably with conscious exaggeration, of having
+actually proposed the murder. And Macbeth, knowing that when he wrote
+the letter he really had been thinking of murder, and indifferent to
+anything except the question whether murder should be done, would easily
+let her statement pass unchallenged.</p>
+
+<p>This interpretation still seems to me not unnatural. The alternative
+(unless we adopt the idea of an agreement prior to the action of the
+play) is to suppose that Lady Macbeth refers <a name="Page_484" id="Page_484"></a><span class="pagenum">[484]</span>throughout the passage to
+some interview subsequent to her husband's return, and that, in making
+her do so, Shakespeare simply forgot her speeches on welcoming Macbeth
+home, and also forgot that at any such interview 'time' and 'place' did
+'adhere.' It is easy to understand such forgetfulness in a spectator and
+even in a reader; but it is less easy to imagine it in a poet whose
+conception of the two characters throughout these scenes was evidently
+so burningly vivid.</p>
+
+<div class="footnotes">
+<div class="footnotehead">FOOTNOTES:</div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_291" id="Footnote_291"></a><a href="#FNanchor_291"><span class="label">[291]</span></a> The 'swearing' <i>might</i> of course, on this view, occur off
+the stage within the play; but there is no occasion to suppose this if
+we are obliged to put the proposal outside the play.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_292" id="Footnote_292"></a><a href="#FNanchor_292"><span class="label">[292]</span></a> To this it might be answered that the effect of the
+prediction was to make him feel, 'Then I shall succeed if I carry out
+the plan of murder,' and so make him yield to the idea over again. To
+which I can only reply, anticipating the next argument, 'How is it that
+Shakespeare wrote the speech in such a way that practically everybody
+supposes the idea of murder to be occurring to Macbeth for the first
+time?'</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_293" id="Footnote_293"></a><a href="#FNanchor_293"><span class="label">[293]</span></a> It might be answered here again that the actor,
+instructed by Shakespeare, could act the start of fear so as to convey
+quite clearly the idea of definite guilt. And this is true; but we ought
+to do our best to interpret the text before we have recourse to this
+kind of suggestion.</p></div>
+</div>
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="NOTE_DD" id="NOTE_DD"></a>NOTE DD.</h2>
+
+<h3>DID LADY MACBETH REALLY FAINT?</h3>
+
+
+<p>In the scene of confusion where the murder of Duncan is discovered,
+Macbeth and Lennox return from the royal chamber; Lennox describes the
+grooms who, as it seemed, had done the deed:</p>
+
+<table class="tabledrama" summary="Death of Duncan's Guards" cellpadding="8">
+  <tr>
+    <td><br /></td>
+    <td>Their hands and faces were all badged with blood;<br />
+        So were their daggers, which unwiped we found<br />
+        Upon their pillows:<br />
+        They stared, and were distracted; no man's life<br />
+        Was to be trusted with them.</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td valign="top"><i>Macb.</i></td>
+    <td>O, yet I do repent me of my fury<br />
+        That I did kill them.</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td><i>Macd.</i></td>
+    <td><span style="margin-left: 8em;">Wherefore did you so?</span></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td valign="top"><i>Macb.</i></td>
+    <td>Who can be wise, amazed, temperate and furious,<br />
+        Loyal and neutral, in a moment? No man:<br />
+        The expedition of my violent love<br />
+        Outrun the pauser, reason. Here lay Duncan,<br />
+        His silver skin laced with his golden blood;<br />
+        And his gash'd stabs look'd like a breach in nature<br />
+        For ruin's wasteful entrance: there, the murderers,<br />
+        Steep'd in the colours of their trade, their daggers<br />
+        Unmannerly breech'd with gore: who could refrain,<br />
+        That had a heart to love, and in that heart<br />
+        Courage to make's love known?</td>
+  </tr>
+</table>
+
+<p>At this point Lady Macbeth exclaims, 'Help me hence, ho!' Her husband
+takes no notice, but Macduff calls out 'Look to the lady.' This, after a
+few words 'aside' between Malcolm and Donalbain, is repeated by Banquo,
+and, very shortly after, all <a name="Page_485" id="Page_485"></a><span class="pagenum">[485]</span>except Duncan's sons <i>exeunt</i>. (The
+stage-direction 'Lady Macbeth is carried out,' after Banquo's
+exclamation 'Look to the lady,' is not in the Ff. and was introduced by
+Rowe. If the Ff. are right, she can hardly have fainted <i>away</i>. But the
+point has no importance here.)</p>
+
+<p>Does Lady Macbeth really turn faint, or does she pretend? The latter
+seems to have been the general view, and Whately pointed out that
+Macbeth's indifference betrays his consciousness that the faint was not
+real. But to this it may be answered that, if he believed it to be real,
+he would equally show indifference, in order to display his horror at
+the murder. And Miss Helen Faucit and others have held that there was no
+pretence.</p>
+
+<p>In favour of the pretence it may be said (1) that Lady Macbeth, who
+herself took back the daggers, saw the old King in his blood, and
+smeared the grooms, was not the woman to faint at a mere description;
+(2) that she saw her husband over-acting his part, and saw the faces of
+the lords, and wished to end the scene,&mdash;which she succeeded in doing.</p>
+
+<p>But to the last argument it may be replied that she would not willingly
+have run the risk of leaving her husband to act his part alone. And for
+other reasons (indicated above, p. <a href='#Page_373'>373 f.</a>) I decidedly believe that she
+is meant really to faint. She was no Goneril. She knew that she could
+not kill the King herself; and she never expected to have to carry back
+the daggers, see the bloody corpse, and smear the faces and hands of the
+grooms. But Macbeth's agony greatly alarmed her, and she was driven to
+the scene of horror to complete his task; and what an impression it made
+on her we know from that sentence uttered in her sleep, 'Yet who would
+have thought the old man to have had so much blood in him?' She had now,
+further, gone through the ordeal of the discovery. Is it not quite
+natural that the reaction should come, and that it should come just when
+Macbeth's description recalls the scene which had cost her the greatest
+effort? Is it not likely, besides, that the expression on the faces of
+the lords would force her to realise, what before the murder she had
+refused to consider, the horror and the suspicion it must excite? It is
+noticeable, also, that she is far from carrying out her intention of
+bearing a part in making their 'griefs and clamours roar upon his death'
+(<span class="smcap">i.</span> vii. 78). She has left it all to <a name="Page_486" id="Page_486"></a><span class="pagenum">[486]</span>her husband, and, after
+uttering but two sentences, the second of which is answered very curtly
+by Banquo, for some time (an interval of 33 lines) she has said nothing.
+I believe Shakespeare means this interval to be occupied in desperate
+efforts on her part to prevent herself from giving way, as she sees for
+the first time something of the truth to which she was formerly so
+blind, and which will destroy her in the end.</p>
+
+<p>It should be observed that at the close of the Banquet scene, where she
+has gone through much less, she is evidently exhausted.</p>
+
+<p>Shakespeare, of course, knew whether he meant the faint to be real: but
+I am not aware if an actor of the part could show the audience whether
+it was real or pretended. If he could, he would doubtless receive
+instructions from the author.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="NOTE_EE" id="NOTE_EE"></a>NOTE EE.</h2>
+
+<h3>DURATION OF THE ACTION IN <i>MACBETH</i>. MACBETH'S AGE. 'HE HAS NO
+CHILDREN.'</h3>
+
+
+<p>1. The duration of the action cannot well be more than a few months. On
+the day following the murder of Duncan his sons fly and Macbeth goes to
+Scone to be invested (<span class="smcap">ii.</span> iv.). Between this scene and Act
+<span class="smcap">iii.</span> an interval must be supposed, sufficient for news to
+arrive of Malcolm being in England and Donalbain in Ireland, and for
+Banquo to have shown himself a good counsellor. But the interval is
+evidently not long: <i>e.g.</i> Banquo's first words are 'Thou hast it now'
+(<span class="smcap">iii.</span> i. 1). Banquo is murdered on the day when he speaks these
+words. Macbeth's visit to the Witches takes place the next day
+(<span class="smcap">iii.</span> iv. 132). At the end of this visit (<span class="smcap">iv.</span> i.) he
+hears of Macduff's flight to England, and determines to have Macduff's
+wife and children slaughtered without delay; and this is the subject of
+the next scene (<span class="smcap">iv.</span> ii.). No great interval, then, can be
+supposed between this scene and the next, where Macduff, arrived at the
+English court, hears what has happened at his castle. At the end of that
+scene (<span class="smcap">iv.</span> iii. 237) Malcolm says that 'Macbeth is ripe for
+shaking, and the powers above put on their instruments': and the events
+of Act <span class="smcap">v.</span> evidently follow with little delay, and occupy <a name="Page_487" id="Page_487"></a><span class="pagenum">[487]</span>but a
+short time. Holinshed's Macbeth appears to have reigned seventeen years:
+Shakespeare's may perhaps be allowed as many weeks.</p>
+
+<p>But, naturally, Shakespeare creates some difficulties through wishing to
+produce different impressions in different parts of the play. The main
+effect is that of fiery speed, and it would be impossible to imagine the
+torment of Macbeth's mind lasting through a number of years, even if
+Shakespeare had been willing to allow him years of outward success.
+Hence the brevity of the action. On the other hand time is wanted for
+the degeneration of his character hinted at in <span class="smcap">iv.</span> iii. 57 f.,
+for the development of his tyranny, for his attempts to entrap Malcolm
+(<i>ib.</i> 117 f.), and perhaps for the deepening of his feeling that his
+life had passed into the sere and yellow leaf. Shakespeare, as we have
+seen, scarcely provides time for all this, but at certain points he
+produces an impression that a longer time has elapsed than he has
+provided for, and he puts most of the indications of this longer time
+into a scene (<span class="smcap">iv.</span> iii.) which by its quietness contrasts
+strongly with almost all the rest of the play.</p>
+
+<p>2. There is no unmistakable indication of the ages of the two principal
+characters; but the question, though of no great importance, has an
+interest. I believe most readers imagine Macbeth as a man between forty
+and fifty, and his wife as younger but not young. In many cases this
+impression is doubtless due to the custom of the theatre (which, if it
+can be shown to go back far, should have much weight), but it is shared
+by readers who have never seen the play performed, and is then
+presumably due to a number of slight influences probably incapable of
+complete analysis. Such readers would say, 'The hero and heroine do not
+speak like young people, nor like old ones'; but, though I think this is
+so, it can hardly be demonstrated. Perhaps however the following small
+indications, mostly of a different kind, tend to the same result.</p>
+
+<p>(1) There is no positive sign of youth. (2) A young man would not be
+likely to lead the army. (3) Macbeth is 'cousin' to an old man.<a name="FNanchor_294" id="FNanchor_294"></a><a href="#Footnote_294" class="fnanchor">[294]</a> (4)
+Macbeth calls Malcolm 'young,' and speaks of him scornfully as 'the boy
+Malcolm.' He is probably therefore considerably his senior. But Malcolm
+is evidently not <a name="Page_488" id="Page_488"></a><span class="pagenum">[488]</span>really a boy (see <span class="smcap">i.</span> ii. 3 f. as well as the
+later Acts). (5) One gets the impression (possibly without reason) that
+Macbeth and Banquo are of about the same age; and Banquo's son, the boy
+Fleance, is evidently not a mere child. (On the other hand the children
+of Macduff, who is clearly a good deal older than Malcolm, are all
+young; and I do not think there is any sign that Macbeth is older than
+Macduff.) (6) When Lady Macbeth, in the banquet scene, says,</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i1">Sit, worthy friends: my lord is often thus,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">And hath been from his youth,<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>we naturally imagine him some way removed from his youth. (7) Lady
+Macbeth saw a resemblance to her father in the aged king. (8) Macbeth
+says,</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i1">I have lived long enough: my way<a name="FNanchor_295" id="FNanchor_295"></a><a href="#Footnote_295" class="fnanchor">[295]</a> of life<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Is fall'n into the sere, the yellow leaf:<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">And that which should accompany old age,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">As honour, love, obedience, troops of friends,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">I may not look to have.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>It is, surely, of the old age of the soul that he speaks in the second
+line, but still the lines would hardly be spoken under any circumstances
+by a man less than middle-aged.</p>
+
+<p>On the other hand I suppose no one ever imagined Macbeth, or on
+consideration could imagine him, as <i>more</i> than middle-aged when the
+action begins. And in addition the reader may observe, if he finds it
+necessary, that Macbeth looks forward to having children (<span class="smcap">i.</span>
+vii. 72), and that his terms of endearment ('dearest love,' 'dearest
+chuck') and his language in public ('sweet remembrancer') do not suggest
+that his wife and he are old; they even suggest that she at least is
+scarcely middle-aged. But this discussion tends to grow ludicrous.</p>
+
+<p>For Shakespeare's audience these mysteries were revealed by a glance at
+the actors, like the fact that Duncan was an old man, which the text, I
+think, does not disclose till <span class="smcap">v.</span> i. 44.</p>
+
+<p>3. Whether Macbeth had children or (as seems usually to be supposed) had
+none, is quite immaterial. But it is material that, if he had none, he
+looked forward to having one; for <a name="Page_489" id="Page_489"></a><span class="pagenum">[489]</span>otherwise there would be no point in
+the following words in his soliloquy about Banquo (<span class="smcap">iii.</span> i. 58
+f.):</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i8">Then prophet-like<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">They hail'd him father to a line of kings:<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Upon my head they placed a fruitless crown,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">And put a barren sceptre in my gripe,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Thence to be wrench'd with an unlineal hand,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">No son of mine succeeding. If't be so,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">For Banquo's issue have I filed my mind.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>And he is determined that it shall not 'be so':</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i1">Rather than so, come, fate, into the list<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">And champion me to the utterance!<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>Obviously he contemplates a son of his succeeding, if only he can get
+rid of Banquo and Fleance. What he fears is that Banquo will kill him;
+in which case, supposing he has a son, that son will not be allowed to
+succeed him, and, supposing he has none, he will be unable to beget one.</p>
+
+<p>I hope this is clear; and nothing else matters. Lady Macbeth's child
+(<span class="smcap">i.</span> vii. 54) may be alive or may be dead. It may even be, or
+have been, her child by a former husband; though, if Shakespeare had
+followed history in making Macbeth marry a widow (as some writers
+gravely assume) he would probably have told us so. It may be that
+Macbeth had many children or that he had none. We cannot say, and it
+does not concern the play. But the interpretation of a statement on
+which some critics build, 'He has no children,' has an interest of
+another kind, and I proceed to consider it.</p>
+
+<p>These words occur at <span class="smcap">iv.</span> iii. 216. Malcolm and Macduff are
+talking at the English Court, and Ross, arriving from Scotland, brings
+news to Macduff of Macbeth's revenge on him. It is necessary to quote a
+good many lines:</p>
+
+<table class="tabledrama" summary="Macbeth IV. iii." cellpadding="8">
+  <tr>
+    <td valign="top"><i>Ross.</i></td>
+    <td>Your castle is surprised; your wife and babes<br />
+        Savagely slaughter'd: to relate the manner,<br />
+        Were, on the quarry of these murder'd deer,<br />
+        To add the death of you.</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td valign="top"><i>Mal.</i></td>
+    <td><span style="margin-left: 10em;">Merciful heaven!</span><br />
+        What, man! ne'er pull your hat upon your brows;<br />
+        Give sorrow words: the grief that does not speak<br />
+        Whispers the o'er-fraught heart and bids it break.</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td><i>Macd.</i></td>
+    <td>My children too?</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td valign="top"><a name="Page_490" id="Page_490"></a><span class="pagenum">[490]</span><i>Ross.</i></td>
+    <td><span style="margin-left: 7em;">Wife, children, servants, all</span><br />
+        That could be found.</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td valign="top"><i>Macd.</i></td>
+    <td><span style="margin-left: 8em;">And I must be from thence!</span><br />
+        My wife kill'd too?</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td><i>Ross.</i></td>
+    <td><span style="margin-left: 8em;">I have said.</span></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td><i>Mal.</i></td>
+    <td><span style="margin-left: 13em;">Be comforted:</span><br />
+        Let's makes us medicines of our great revenge,<br />
+        To cure this deadly grief.</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td valign="top"><i>Macd.</i></td>
+    <td>He has no children. All my pretty ones?<br />
+        Did you say all? O hell-kite! All?<br />
+        What, all my pretty chickens and their dam<br />
+        At one fell swoop?</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td><i>Mal</i>.</td>
+    <td>Dispute it like a man.</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td valign="top"><i>Macd.</i></td>
+    <td><span style="margin-left: 8em;">I shall do so;</span><br />
+        But I must also feel it as a man:<br />
+        I cannot but remember such things were,<br />
+        That were most precious to me.&mdash;</td>
+  </tr>
+</table>
+
+<p>Three interpretations have been offered of the words 'He has no
+children.'</p>
+
+<p>(<i>a</i>) They refer to Malcolm, who, if he had children of his own, would
+not at such a moment suggest revenge, or talk of curing such a grief.
+Cf. <i>King John</i>, <span class="smcap">iii.</span> iv. 91, where Pandulph says to Constance,</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i1">You hold too heinous a respect of grief,<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>and Constance answers,</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i1">He talks to me that never had a son.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>(<i>b</i>) They refer to Macbeth, who has no children, and on whom therefore
+Macduff cannot take an adequate revenge.</p>
+
+<p>(<i>c</i>) They refer to Macbeth, who, if he himself had children, could
+never have ordered the slaughter of children. Cf. <i>3 Henry VI.</i>
+<span class="smcap">v.</span> v. 63, where Margaret says to the murderers of Prince
+Edward,</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i1">You have no children, butchers! if you had,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">The thought of them would have stirred up remorse.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>I cannot think interpretation (<i>b</i>) the most natural. The whole idea of
+the passage is that Macduff must feel <i>grief</i> first and before he can
+feel anything else, <i>e.g.</i> the desire for vengeance. As he says directly
+after, he cannot at once 'dispute' it like a man, but must 'feel' it as
+a man; and it is not till ten lines later that he is able to pass to the
+thought of revenge. <a name="Page_491" id="Page_491"></a><span class="pagenum">[491]</span>Macduff is not the man to conceive at any time the
+idea of killing children in retaliation; and that he contemplates it
+<i>here</i>, even as a suggestion, I find it hard to believe.</p>
+
+<p>For the same main reason interpretation (<i>a</i>) seems to me far more
+probable than (<i>c</i>). What could be more consonant with the natural
+course of the thought, as developed in the lines which follow, than that
+Macduff, being told to think of revenge, not grief, should answer, 'No
+one who was himself a father would ask that of me in the very first
+moment of loss'? But the thought supposed by interpretation (<i>c</i>) has
+not this natural connection.</p>
+
+<p>It has been objected to interpretation (<i>a</i>) that, according to it,
+Macduff would naturally say 'You have no children,' not 'He has no
+children.' But what Macduff does is precisely what Constance does in the
+line quoted from <i>King John</i>. And it should be noted that, all through
+the passage down to this point, and indeed in the fifteen lines which
+precede our quotation, Macduff listens only to Ross. His questions 'My
+children too?' 'My wife killed too?' show that he cannot fully realise
+what he is told. When Malcolm interrupts, therefore, he puts aside his
+suggestion with four words spoken to himself, or (less probably) to Ross
+(his relative, who knew his wife and children), and continues his
+agonised questions and exclamations. Surely it is not likely that at
+that moment the idea of (<i>c</i>), an idea which there is nothing to
+suggest, would occur to him.</p>
+
+<p>In favour of (<i>c</i>) as against (<i>a</i>) I see no argument except that the
+words of Macduff almost repeat those of Margaret; and this fact does not
+seem to me to have much weight. It shows only that Shakespeare might
+easily use the words in the sense of (<i>c</i>) if that sense were suitable
+to the occasion. It is not unlikely, again, I think, that the words came
+to him here because he had used them many years before;<a name="FNanchor_296" id="FNanchor_296"></a><a href="#Footnote_296" class="fnanchor">[296]</a> but it does
+<a name="Page_492" id="Page_492"></a><span class="pagenum">[492]</span>not follow that he knew he was repeating them; or that, if he did, he
+remembered the sense they had previously borne; or that, if he did
+remember it, he might not use them now in another sense.</p>
+
+<div class="footnotes">
+<div class="footnotehead">FOOTNOTES:</div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_294" id="Footnote_294"></a><a href="#FNanchor_294"><span class="label">[294]</span></a> So in Holinshed, as well as in the play, where however
+'cousin' need not have its specific meaning.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_295" id="Footnote_295"></a><a href="#FNanchor_295"><span class="label">[295]</span></a> 'May,' Johnson conjectured, without necessity.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_296" id="Footnote_296"></a><a href="#FNanchor_296"><span class="label">[296]</span></a> As this point occurs here, I may observe that
+Shakespeare's later tragedies contain many such reminiscences of the
+tragic plays of his young days. For instance, cf. <i>Titus Andronicus</i>,
+<span class="smcap">i.</span> i. 150 f.:
+</p>
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i1">In peace and honour rest you here, my sons,</span>
+<hr class="fnline" />
+<span class="i1">Secure from worldly chances and mishaps!<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Here lurks no treason, here no envy swells,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Here grow no damned drugs: here are no storms,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">No noise, but silence and eternal sleep,<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+<p>
+with <i>Macbeth</i>, <span class="smcap">iii.</span> ii. 22 f.:
+</p>
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i10">Duncan is in his grave;<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">After life's fitful fever he sleeps well;<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Treason has done his worst: nor steel, nor poison,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Malice domestic, foreign levy, nothing,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Can touch him further.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+<p>
+In writing <span class="smcap">iv.</span> i. Shakespeare can hardly have failed to
+remember the conjuring of the Spirit, and the ambiguous oracles, in <i>2
+Henry VI.</i> <span class="smcap">i.</span> iv. The 'Hyrcan tiger' of <i>Macbeth</i>
+<span class="smcap">iii.</span> iv. 101, which is also alluded to in <i>Hamlet</i>, appears
+first in <i>3 Henry VI.</i> <span class="smcap">i.</span> iv. 155. Cf. <i>Richard III.</i>
+<span class="smcap">ii.</span> i. 92, 'Nearer in bloody thoughts, but not in blood,' with
+<i>Macbeth</i> <span class="smcap">ii.</span> iii. 146, 'the near in blood, the nearer bloody';
+<i>Richard III.</i> <span class="smcap">iv.</span> ii. 64, 'But I am in So far in blood that
+sin will pluck on sin,' with <i>Macbeth</i> <span class="smcap">iii.</span> iv. 136, 'I am in
+blood stepp'd in so far,' etc. These are but a few instances. (It makes
+no difference whether Shakespeare was author or reviser of <i>Titus</i> and
+<i>Henry VI.</i>).</p></div>
+</div>
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="NOTE_FF" id="NOTE_FF"></a>NOTE FF.</h2>
+
+<h3>THE GHOST OF BANQUO.</h3>
+
+
+<p>I do not think the suggestions that the Ghost on its first appearance is
+Banquo's, and on its second Duncan's, or <i>vice vers&acirc;</i>, are worth
+discussion. But the question whether Shakespeare meant the Ghost to be
+real or a mere hallucination, has some interest, and I have not seen it
+fully examined.</p>
+
+<p>The following reasons may be given for the hallucination view:</p>
+
+<p>(1) We remember that Macbeth has already seen one hallucination, that of
+the dagger; and if we failed to remember it Lady Macbeth would remind us
+of it here:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i1">This is the very painting of your fear;<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">This is the air-drawn dagger which, you said,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Led you to Duncan.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>(2) The Ghost seems to be created by Macbeth's imagination; for his
+words,</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i7">now they rise again<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">With twenty mortal murders on their crowns,<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p><a name="Page_493" id="Page_493"></a><span class="pagenum">[493]</span>describe it, and they echo what the murderer had said to him a little
+before,</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i7">Safe in a ditch he bides<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">With twenty trenched gashes on his head.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>(3) It vanishes the second time on his making a violent effort and
+asserting its unreality:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i8">Hence, horrible shadow!<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Unreal mockery, hence!<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>This is not quite so the first time, but then too its disappearance
+follows on his defying it:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i1">Why what care I? If thou canst nod, speak too.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>So, apparently, the dagger vanishes when he exclaims, 'There's no such
+thing!'</p>
+
+<p>(4) At the end of the scene Macbeth himself seems to regard it as an
+illusion:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i7">My strange and self-abuse<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Is the initiate fear that wants hard use.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>(5) It does not speak, like the Ghost in <i>Hamlet</i> even on its last
+appearance, and like the Ghost in <i>Julius Caesar</i>.</p>
+
+<p>(6) It is visible only to Macbeth.</p>
+
+<p>I should attach no weight to (6) taken alone (see p. <a href='#Page_140'>140</a>). Of (3) it may
+be remarked that Brutus himself seems to attribute the vanishing of
+Caesar's Ghost to his taking courage: 'now I have taken heart thou
+vanishest:' yet he certainly holds it to be real. It may also be
+remarked on (5) that Caesar's Ghost says nothing that Brutus' own
+forebodings might not have conjured up. And further it may be asked why,
+if the Ghost of Banquo was meant for an illusion, it was represented on
+the stage, as the stage-directions and Forman's account show it to have
+been.</p>
+
+<p>On the whole, and with some doubt, I think that Shakespeare (1) meant
+the judicious to take the Ghost for an hallucination, but (2) knew that
+the bulk of the audience would take it for a reality. And I am more sure
+of (2) than of (1).</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><a name="Page_494" id="Page_494"></a><span class="pagenum">[494]</span></p>
+<h2><a name="INDEX" id="INDEX"></a>INDEX</h2>
+
+<p>The titles of plays are in italics. So are the numbers of the pages
+containing the main discussion of a character. The titles of the Notes
+are not repeated in the Index.</p>
+
+
+<div class="index">
+<ul class="list">
+  <li>Aaron, <a href='#Page_200'>200</a>, <a href='#Page_211'>211</a>.</li>
+  <li>Abnormal mental conditions, <a href='#Page_13'>13</a>, <a href='#Page_398'>398</a>.</li>
+  <li><a name="Accident" id="Accident"></a>Accident, in tragedy, <a href='#Page_7'>7</a>, <a href='#Page_14'>14-16</a>, <a href='#Page_26'>26</a>, <a href='#Page_28'>28</a>;
+    <ul class="list">
+      <li>in <i>Hamlet</i>, <a href='#Page_143'>143</a>, <a href='#Page_173'>173</a>;</li>
+      <li>in <i>Othello</i>, <a href='#Page_181'>181-2</a>;</li>
+      <li>in <i>King Lear</i>, <a href='#Footnote_130'>253</a>, <a href='#Page_325'>325</a>.</li>
+    </ul></li>
+  <li>Act, difficulty in Fourth, <a href='#Page_57'>57-8</a>;
+    <ul class="list">
+      <li>the five Acts, <a href='#Page_49'>49</a>.</li>
+    </ul></li>
+  <li><a name="Action" id="Action"></a>Action, tragic, <a href='#Page_11'>11</a>, <a href='#Page_12'>12</a>, <a href='#Page_31'>31</a>;
+    <ul class="list">
+      <li>and character, <a href='#Page_12'>12</a>, <a href='#Page_19'>19</a>;</li>
+      <li>a conflict, <a href='#Page_16'>16-19</a>.</li>
+    </ul></li>
+  <li>Adversity and prosperity in <i>King Lear</i>, <a href='#Page_326'>326-7</a>.</li>
+  <li>Albany, <i><a href='#Page_297'>297-8</a></i>.</li>
+  <li>Antonio, <a href='#Page_110'>110</a>, <a href='#Footnote_252'>404</a>.</li>
+  <li><i>Antony and Cleopatra</i>, <a href='#Page_3'>3</a>, <a href='#Page_7'>7</a>, <a href='#Page_45'>45</a>, <a href='#Page_80'>80</a>;
+    <ul class="list">
+      <li>conflict, <a href='#Page_17'>17-8</a>;</li>
+      <li>crisis, <a href='#Page_53'>53</a>, <a href='#Page_55'>55</a>, <a href='#Page_66'>66</a>;</li>
+      <li>humour in catastrophe, <a href='#Page_62'>62</a>, <a href='#Page_395'>395-6</a>;</li>
+      <li>battle-scenes, <a href='#Page_62'>62-3</a>;</li>
+      <li>extended catastrophe, <a href='#Page_64'>64</a>;</li>
+      <li>faulty construction, <a href='#Page_71'>71</a>, <a href='#Page_260'>260</a>;</li>
+      <li>passion in, <a href='#Page_82'>82</a>;</li>
+      <li>evil in, <a href='#Page_83'>83-4</a>;</li>
+      <li>versification, <a href='#Page_87'>87</a>, <a href='#NOTE_BB'>Note BB</a>.</li>
+    </ul></li>
+  <li>Antony, <a href='#Page_22'>22</a>, <a href='#Page_29'>29</a>, <a href='#Page_63'>63</a>, <a href='#Page_83'>83-4</a>.</li>
+  <li><i>Arden of Feversham</i>, <a href='#Footnote_2'>9</a>.</li>
+  <li>Ariel, <a href='#Page_264'>264</a>.</li>
+  <li>Aristotle, <a href='#Page_16'>16</a>, <a href='#Footnote_9'>22</a>.</li>
+  <li>Art, Shakespeare's, conscious, <a href='#Page_68'>68-9</a>;
+    <ul class="list">
+      <li>defects in, <a href='#Page_71'>71-78</a>.</li>
+    </ul></li>
+  <li>Arthur, <a href='#Page_394'>294</a>.</li>
+  <li><i>As You Like It</i>, <a href='#Page_71'>71</a>, <a href='#Footnote_145'>267</a>, <a href='#Footnote_242'>390</a>.</li>
+  <li>Atmosphere in tragedy, <a href='#Page_333'>333</a>.</li>
+</ul>
+
+<ul class="list">
+  <li>Banquo, <a href='#Page_343'>343</a>, <i><a href='#Page_379'>379-86</a></i>.</li>
+  <li>Barbara, the maid, <a href='#Footnote_85'>175</a>.</li>
+  <li>Battle-scene, <a href='#Page_62'>62</a>, <a href='#Page_451'>451</a>, <a href='#Page_469'>469</a>;
+    <ul class="list">
+      <li>in <i>King Lear</i>, <a href='#Page_255'>255</a>, <a href='#NOTE_X'>Note X</a>.</li>
+    </ul></li>
+  <li>Beast and man, in <i>King Lear</i>, <a href='#Page_266'>266-8</a>;
+    <ul class="list">
+      <li>in <i>Timon</i>, <a href='#Page_443'>453</a>.</li>
+    </ul></li>
+  <li>Bernhardt, Mme., <a href='#Footnote_232'>379</a>.</li>
+  <li>Biblical ideas, in <i>King Lear</i>, <a href='#Footnote_191'>328</a>.</li>
+  <li>Bombast, <a href='#Page_73'>73</a>, <a href='#Page_75'>75-6</a>, <a href='#Page_389'>389</a>, <a href='#NOTE_F'>Note F</a>.</li>
+  <li>Brandes, G., <a href='#Footnote_232'>379</a>, <a href='#Footnote_244'>393</a>.</li>
+  <li>Brutus, <a href='#Page_9'>7</a>, <a href='#Page_14'>14</a>, <a href='#Page_22'>22</a>, <a href='#Page_27'>27</a>, <a href='#Page_32'>32</a>, <a href='#Page_81'>81-2</a>, <a href='#Page_101'>101</a>, <a href='#Footnote_226'>364</a>.</li>
+</ul>
+
+<ul class="list">
+  <li>Caliban, <a href='#Page_264'>264</a>.</li>
+  <li>Cassio, <a href='#Page_211'>211-3</a>, <i><a href='#Page_238'>238-9</a></i>, <a href='#Page_433'>433-4</a>.</li>
+  <li>Catastrophe, humour before, <a href='#Page_61'>61-2</a>;
+    <ul class="list">
+      <li>battle-scenes in, <a href='#Page_62'>62</a>;</li>
+      <li>false hope before, <a href='#Page_63'>63</a>;</li>
+      <li>extended, <a href='#Page_62'>62</a>;</li>
+      <li>in <i>Antony</i> and <i>Coriolanus</i>, <a href='#Page_83'>83-4</a>.</li>
+      <li>See <a href='#playHamlet'><i>Hamlet</i></a>, etc.</li>
+    </ul></li>
+  <li>Character, and plot, <a href='#Page_12'>12</a>;
+    <ul class="list">
+      <li>is destiny, <a href='#Page_13'>13</a>;</li>
+      <li>tragic, <a href='#Page_19'>19-23</a>.</li>
+    </ul></li>
+  <li>Chaucer, <a href='#Page_8'>8</a>, <a href='#Page_346'>346</a>.</li>
+  <li>Children, in the plays, <a href='#Page_293'>293-5</a>.</li>
+  <li>Cleopatra, <a href='#Page_7'>7</a>, <a href='#Page_20'>20</a>, <a href='#Page_84'>84</a>, <a href='#Footnote_86'>178</a>, <a href='#Page_208'>208</a>.</li>
+  <li>Coleridge, <a href='#Page_104'>104-5</a>, <a href='#Page_107'>107</a>, <a href='#Page_109'>109</a>, <a href='#Page_127'>127</a>, <a href='#Page_165'>165</a>, <a href='#Page_200'>200</a>, <a href='#Page_201'>201</a>, <a href='#Page_209'>209</a>, <a href='#Page_223'>223</a>, <a href='#Page_226'>226</a>, <a href='#Footnote_115'>228</a>, <a href='#Page_249'>249</a>, <a href='#Footnote_205'>343</a>, <a href='#Footnote_216'>353</a>, <a href='#Footnote_223'>362</a>, <a href='#Page_389'>389</a>, <a href='#Page_391'>391</a>, <a href='#Footnote_243'>392</a>, <a href='#Page_397'>397</a>, <a href='#Page_412'>412</a>, <a href='#Page_413'>413</a>.</li>
+  <li>Comedy, <a href='#Footnote_4'>15</a>, <a href='#Footnote_18'>41</a>.</li>
+  <li><a name="Conflict" id="Conflict">Conflict</a>, tragic, <a href='#Page_16'>16-9</a>;
+    <ul class="list">
+      <li>originates in evil, <a href='#Page_34'>34</a>;</li>
+      <li>oscillating movement in, <a href='#Page_50'>50</a>;</li>
+      <li>crisis in, <a href='#Page_51'>51-5</a>;</li>
+      <li>descending movement of, <a href='#Page_55'>55-62</a>.</li>
+    </ul></li>
+  <li>Conscience. See <a href='#manHamlet'>Hamlet</a>.</li>
+  <li>Cordelia, <a href='#Page_29'>29</a>, <a href='#Page_32'>32</a>, <a href='#Page_203'>203-6</a>, <a href='#Page_250'>250</a>, <a href='#Page_290'>290</a>, <a href='#Page_314'>314</a>, <i><a href='#Page_315'>315-26</a></i>, <a href='#NOTE_W'>Note W</a>.</li>
+  <li><i>Coriolanus</i>, <a href='#Page_3'>3</a>, <a href='#Page_9'>9</a>, <a href='#Page_43'>43</a>, <a href='#Page_394'>394-5</a>;
+    <ul class="list">
+      <li>crisis, <a href='#Page_53'>53</a>;</li>
+      <li>hero off stage, <a href='#Page_57'>57</a>;</li>
+      <li>counter-stroke, <a href='#Page_58'>58</a>;</li>
+      <li>humour, <a href='#Page_61'>61</a>;</li>
+      <li>passion, <a href='#Page_82'>82</a>;</li>
+      <li>catastrophe, <a href='#Page_83'>83-4</a>;</li>
+      <li>versification, <a href='#NOTE_BB'>Note BB</a>.</li>
+    </ul></li>
+  <li>Coriolanus, <a href='#Page_20'>20</a>, <a href='#Page_29'>29</a>, <a href='#Page_83'>83-4</a>, <a href='#Page_196'>196</a>.</li>
+  <li>Cornwall, <a href='#Page_298'>298-9</a>.</li>
+  <li>Crisis. See <a href='#Conflict'>Conflict</a>.</li>
+  <li>Curtain, no front, in Shakespeare's theatre, <a href='#Footnote_92'>185</a>, <a href='#Page_458'>458</a>.</li>
+  <li><i>Cymbeline</i>, <a href='#Page_7'>7</a>, <a href='#Page_21'>21</a>, <a href='#Page_72'>72</a>, <a href='#Footnote_26'>80</a>, <a href='#Page_476'>Note BB</a>;
+    <ul class="list">
+      <li>Queen in, <a href='#Footnote_169'>300</a>.</li>
+    </ul></li>
+</ul>
+
+<ul class="list">
+  <li>Desdemona, <a href='#Page_32'>32</a>, <a href='#Page_163'>165</a>, <a href='#Page_179'>179</a>, <a href='#Page_193'>193</a>, <a href='#Page_197'>197</a>, <i><a href='#Page_201'>201-6</a></i>, <a href='#Page_323'>323</a>, <a href='#Page_433'>433</a>, <a href='#Page_437'>437-9</a>.</li>
+  <li>Disillusionment, in tragedies, <a href='#Page_175'>175</a>.</li>
+  <li>Dog, the, Shakespeare and, <a href='#Page_268'>268</a>.</li>
+  <li>Don John, <a href='#Page_110'>110</a>, <a href='#Page_210'>210</a>.</li>
+  <li><a name="Page_495" id="Page_495"></a><span class="pagenum">[495]</span>Double action in <i>King Lear</i>, <a href='#Page_255'>255-6</a>, <a href='#Page_262'>262</a>.</li>
+  <li>Dowden, E., <a href='#Page_82'>82</a>, <a href='#Page_105'>105</a>, <a href='#Footnote_193'>330</a>, <a href='#Page_408'>408</a>.</li>
+  <li>Dragging, <a href='#Page_57'>57-8</a>, <a href='#Page_64'>64</a>.</li>
+  <li>Drunkenness, invective against, <a href='#Page_238'>238</a>.</li>
+</ul>
+
+<ul class="list">
+  <li>Edgar, <i><a href='#Page_305'>305-7</a></i>, <a href='#Page_453'>453</a>, <a href='#Page_465'>465</a>.</li>
+  <li>Edmund, <a href='#Page_210'>210</a>, <a href='#Page_245'>245</a>, <a href='#Footnote_130'>253</a>, <i><a href='#Page_300'>300-3</a></i>, Notes <a href='#NOTE_P'>P</a>, <a href='#NOTE_Q'>Q</a>.
+    <ul class="list">
+      <li>See <a href='#Iago'>Iago</a>.</li>
+    </ul></li>
+  <li>Emilia, <a href='#Page_214'>214-6</a>, <a href='#Page_237'>237</a>, <i><a href='#Page_239'>239-42</a></i>, <a href='#NOTE_P'>Note P</a>.</li>
+  <li>Emotional tension, variations of, <a href='#Page_48'>48-9</a>.</li>
+  <li>Evil, origin of conflict, <a href='#Page_34'>34</a>;
+    <ul class="list">
+      <li>negative, <a href='#Page_35'>35</a>;</li>
+      <li>in earlier and later tragedies, <a href='#Page_82'>82-3</a>;</li>
+      <li>poetic portrayal of, <a href='#Page_207'>207-8</a>;</li>
+      <li>aspects of, specially impressive to Shakespeare, <a href='#Page_232'>232-3</a>;</li>
+      <li>in <i>King Lear</i>, <a href='#Page_298'>298</a>, <a href='#Page_303'>303-4</a>, <a href='#Page_327'>327</a>;</li>
+      <li>in <i>Tempest</i>, <a href='#Page_328'>328-30</a>;</li>
+      <li>in <i>Macbeth</i>, <a href='#Page_331'>331</a>, <a href='#Page_386'>386</a>.</li>
+    </ul></li>
+  <li>Exposition, <a href='#Page_41'>41-7</a>.</li>
+</ul>
+
+<ul class="list">
+  <li><a name="Fate" id="Fate"></a>Fate, Fatality, <a href='#Page_10'>10</a>, <a href='#Page_26'>26-30</a>, <a href='#Page_45'>45</a>, <a href='#Page_59'>59</a>, <a href='#Page_177'>177</a>, <a href='#Page_181'>181</a>, <a href='#Footnote_160'>287</a>, <a href='#Page_340'>340-6</a>.</li>
+  <li>Fleay, F.G., <a href='#Footnote_263'>419</a>, <a href='#Page_424'>424</a>, <a href='#Page_445'>445</a>, <a href='#Page_467'>467</a>, <a href='#Page_479'>479</a>.</li>
+  <li>Fool in <i>King Lear</i>, the, <a href='#Page_258'>258</a>, <i><a href='#Page_311'>311-5</a></i>, <a href='#Page_322'>322</a>, <a href='#Page_447'>447</a>, <a href='#NOTE_V'>Note V</a>.</li>
+  <li>Fools, Shakespeare's, <a href='#Page_310'>310</a>.</li>
+  <li>Forman, Dr., <a href='#Page_468'>468</a>, <a href='#Page_493'>493</a>.</li>
+  <li>Fortinbras, <a href='#Page_90'>90</a>.</li>
+  <li>Fortune, <a href='#Page_9'>9</a>, <a href='#Page_10'>10</a>.</li>
+  <li>Freytag, G., <a href='#Footnote_16'>40</a>, <a href='#Page_63'>63</a>.</li>
+  <li>Furness, H.H., <a href='#Page_199'>199</a>, <a href='#Page_200'>200</a>.</li>
+</ul>
+
+<ul class="list">
+  <li>Garnet and equivocation, <a href='#Footnote_247'>397</a>, <a href='#Page_470'>470-1</a>.</li>
+  <li><a name="Ghost" id="Ghost"></a>Ghost, Banquo's, <a href='#Page_332'>332</a>, <a href='#Page_335'>335</a>, <a href='#Page_338'>338</a>, <a href='#Page_361'>361</a>, <a href='#NOTE_FF'>Note FF</a>.</li>
+  <li>Ghost, Caesar's, <a href='#Page_493'>Note FF</a>.</li>
+  <li>Ghost in <i>Hamlet</i>, <a href='#Page_97'>97</a>, <a href='#Page_100'>100</a>, <a href='#Footnote_43'>118</a>, <a href='#Page_120'>120</a>, <a href='#Page_125'>125</a>, <a href='#Page_126'>126</a>, <a href='#Page_134'>134</a>, <a href='#Page_136'>136</a>, <a href='#Page_138'>138-40</a>, <i><a href='#Page_173'>173-4</a></i>.</li>
+  <li>Ghosts, not hallucinations because appearing only to one in a company, <a href='#Page_140'>140</a>.</li>
+  <li>Gloster, <a href='#Page_272'>272</a>, <i><a href='#Page_293'>293-6</a></i>, <a href='#Page_447'>447</a>.</li>
+  <li>Gnomic speeches, <a href='#Page_74'>74</a>, <a href='#Page_453'>453</a>.</li>
+  <li>Goethe, <a href='#Page_101'>101</a>, <a href='#Page_127'>127</a>, <a href='#Footnote_79'>165</a>, <a href='#Page_208'>208</a>.</li>
+  <li>Goneril, <a href='#Page_245'>245</a>, <i><a href='#Page_299'>299-300</a></i>, <a href='#Page_331'>331</a>, <a href='#Page_370'>370</a>, <a href='#Page_447'>447-8</a>.</li>
+  <li>Greek tragedy, <a href='#Page_7'>7</a>, <a href='#Page_16'>16</a>, <a href='#Footnote_12'>30</a>, <a href='#Footnote_13'>33</a>, <a href='#Page_182'>182</a>, <a href='#Page_276'>276-9</a>, <a href='#Page_282'>282</a>.</li>
+  <li>Greene, <a href='#Page_409'>409</a>.</li>
+</ul>
+
+<ul class="list">
+  <li>Hales, J.W., <a href='#Footnote_247'>397</a>.</li>
+  <li><a name="playHamlet" id="playHamlet"></a><i>Hamlet</i>, exposition, <a href='#Page_43'>43-7</a>;
+    <ul class="list">
+      <li>conflict, <a href='#Page_17'>17</a>, <a href='#Page_47'>47</a>, <a href='#Page_50'>50-1</a>;</li>
+      <li>crisis and counter-stroke, <a href='#Page_52'>52</a>, <a href='#Page_58'>58-60</a>, <a href='#Page_136'>136-7</a>;</li>
+      <li>dragging, <a href='#Page_57'>57</a>;</li>
+      <li>humour, and false hope, before catastrophe, <a href='#Page_61'>61</a>, <a href='#Page_63'>63</a>;</li>
+      <li>obscurities, <a href='#Page_73'>73</a>;</li>
+      <li>undramatic passages, <a href='#Page_72'>72</a>, <a href='#Page_74'>74</a>;</li>
+      <li>place among tragedies, <a href='#Page_80'>80-8</a>;</li>
+      <li>position of hero, <a href='#Page_89'>89-92</a>;</li>
+      <li>not simply tragedy of thought, <a href='#Page_82'>82</a>, <a href='#Page_113'>113</a>, <a href='#Page_127'>127</a>;</li>
+      <li>in the Romantic Revival, <a href='#Page_92'>92</a>, <a href='#Page_127'>127-8</a>;</li>
+      <li>lapse of time in, <a href='#Page_129'>129</a>, <a href='#Page_141'>141</a>;</li>
+      <li>accident, <a href='#Page_15'>15</a>, <a href='#Page_143'>143</a>, <a href='#Page_173'>173</a>;</li>
+      <li>religious ideas, <a href='#Page_144'>144-5</a>, <a href='#Page_147'>147-8</a>, <a href='#Page_172'>172-4</a>;</li>
+      <li>player's speech, <a href='#Page_389'>389-90</a>, <a href='#NOTE_F'>Note F</a>;</li>
+      <li>grave-digger, <a href='#Page_395'>395-6</a>;</li>
+      <li>last scene, <a href='#Page_256'>256</a>.</li>
+      <li>See Notes <a href='#NOTE_A'>A</a> to <a href='#NOTE_H'>H</a>, and<a href='#NOTE_BB'> BB</a>.</li>
+    </ul></li>
+  <li><a name="manHamlet" id="manHamlet"></a>Hamlet, only tragic character in play, <a href='#Page_90'>90</a>;
+    <ul class="list">
+      <li>contrasted with Laertes and Fortinbras, <a href='#Page_90'>90</a>, <a href='#Page_106'>106</a>;</li>
+      <li>failure of early criticism of, <a href='#Page_91'>91</a>;</li>
+      <li>supposed unintelligible, <a href='#Page_93'>93-4</a>;</li>
+      <li>external view, <a href='#Page_94'>94-7</a>;</li>
+      <li>'conscience' view, <a href='#Page_97'>97-101</a>;</li>
+      <li>sentimental view, <a href='#Page_101'>101-4</a>;</li>
+      <li>Schlegel-Coleridge view, <a href='#Page_104'>104-8</a>, <a href='#Page_116'>116</a>, <a href='#Page_123'>123</a>, <a href='#Page_126'>126-7</a>;</li>
+      <li>temperament, <a href='#Page_109'>109-10</a>;</li>
+      <li>moral idealism, <a href='#Page_110'>110-3</a>;</li>
+      <li>reflective genius, <a href='#Page_113'>113-5</a>;
+        <ul class="list">
+          <li>connection of this with inaction, <a href='#Page_115'>115-7</a>;</li>
+        </ul></li>
+      <li>origin of melancholy, <a href='#Page_117'>117-20</a>;
+        <ul class="list">
+          <li>its nature and effects, <a href='#Page_120'>120-7</a>, <a href='#Page_103'>103</a>, <a href='#Page_158'>158</a>;</li>
+          <li>its diminution, <a href='#Page_143'>143-4</a>;</li>
+        </ul></li>
+      <li>his 'insanity,'<a href='#Page_121'>121-2</a>, <a href='#Page_421'>421</a>;</li>
+      <li>in Act <span class="smcap">ii.</span><a href='#Page_129'>129-31</a>, <a href='#Page_155'>155-6</a>;</li>
+      <li>in <span class="smcap">iii.</span> i.<a href='#Page_131'>131-3</a>, <a href='#Page_157'>157</a>, <a href='#Page_421'>421</a>;</li>
+      <li>in play-scene, <a href='#Page_133'>133-4</a>;</li>
+      <li>spares King, <a href='#Page_134'>134-6</a>, <a href='#Page_100'>100</a>, <a href='#Page_439'>439</a>;</li>
+      <li>with Queen, <a href='#Page_136'>136-8</a>;</li>
+      <li>kills Polonius, <a href='#Page_136'>136-7</a>, <a href='#Footnote_37'>104</a>;</li>
+      <li>with Ghost, <a href='#Page_138'>138-40</a>;</li>
+      <li>leaving Denmark, <a href='#Page_140'>140-1</a>;</li>
+      <li>state after return, <a href='#Page_143'>143-5</a>, <a href='#Page_421'>421</a>;</li>
+      <li>in grave-yard, <a href='#Page_145'>145-6</a>, <a href='#Page_153'>153</a>, <a href='#Page_154'>158</a>, <a href='#Page_421'>421-2</a>;</li>
+      <li>in catastrophe, <a href='#Page_102'>102</a>, <a href='#Page_146'>146-8</a>, <a href='#Page_151'>151</a>, <a href='#Page_420'>420-1</a>;</li>
+      <li>and Ophelia, <a href='#Page_103'>103</a>, <a href='#Page_112'>112</a>, <a href='#Page_119'>119</a>, <a href='#Page_145'>145-6</a>, <a href='#Page_152'>152-9</a>, <a href='#Page_402'>402</a>, <a href='#Page_420'>420-1</a>;</li>
+      <li>letter to Ophelia, <a href='#Page_150'>150</a>, <a href='#Page_403'>403</a>;</li>
+      <li>trick of repetition, <a href='#Page_148'>148-9</a>;</li>
+      <li>word-play and humour, <a href='#Page_149'>149-52</a>, <a href='#Page_411'>411</a>;</li>
+      <li>aesthetic feeling, <a href='#Footnote_57'>133</a>, <a href='#Page_415'>415</a>;</li>
+      <li>and Iago, <a href='#Page_208'>208</a>, <a href='#Page_217'>217</a>, <a href='#Page_222'>222</a>, <a href='#Page_226'>226</a>;</li>
+      <li>other references, <a href='#Page_9'>9</a>, <a href='#Page_14'>14</a>, <a href='#Page_20'>20</a>, <a href='#Page_22'>22</a>, <a href='#Page_28'>28</a>, <a href='#Page_316'>316</a>, <a href='#Page_353'>353</a>, Notes <a href='#NOTE_A'>A</a> to <a href='#NOTE_H'>H</a>.</li>
+    </ul></li>
+  <li>Hanmer, <a href='#Page_91'>91</a>.</li>
+  <li>Hazlitt, <a href='#Page_209'>209</a>, <a href='#Page_223'>223</a>, <a href='#Page_228'>228</a>, <a href='#Page_231'>231</a>, <a href='#Page_243'>243</a>, <a href='#Page_248'>248</a>.</li>
+  <li>Hecate, <a href='#Page_342'>342</a>, <a href='#NOTE_Z'>Note Z</a>.</li>
+  <li>Hegel, <a href='#Page_16'>16</a>, <a href='#Footnote_210'>348</a>.</li>
+  <li><i>2 Henry VI.</i>, <a href='#Footnote_296'>492</a>.</li>
+  <li><i>3 Henry VI.</i>, <a href='#Footnote_112'>222</a>, <a href='#Page_418'>418</a>, <a href='#Page_490'>490</a>, <a href='#Footnote_296'>492</a>.</li>
+  <li><i>Henry VIII.</i>, <a href='#Page_80'>80</a>, <a href='#Page_472'>472</a>, <a href='#Page_479'>479</a>.</li>
+  <li><a name="Heredity" id="Heredity"></a>Heredity, <a href='#Page_30'>30</a>, <a href='#Page_266'>266</a>, <a href='#Page_303'>303</a>.</li>
+  <li><a name="Hero" id="Hero"></a>Hero, tragic, <a href='#Page_7'>7</a>;
+    <ul class="list">
+      <li>of 'high degree,' <a href='#Page_9'>9-11</a>;</li>
+      <li>contributes to catastrophe, <a href='#Page_12'>12</a>;</li>
+      <li>nature of, <a href='#Page_19'>19-23</a>, <a href='#Page_37'>37</a>;</li>
+      <li>error of, <a href='#Page_21'>21</a>, <a href='#Page_34'>34</a>;</li>
+      <li>unlucky, <a href='#Page_28'>28</a>;</li>
+      <li>place of, in construction, <a href='#Page_53'>53-55</a>;</li>
+      <li>absence of, from stage, <a href='#Page_57'>57</a>;</li>
+      <li>in earlier and later plays, <a href='#Page_81'>81-2</a>, <a href='#Page_176'>176</a>;</li>
+      <li>in <i>King Lear</i>, <a href='#Page_280'>280</a>;</li>
+      <li>feeling at death of, <a href='#Page_147'>147-8</a>, <a href='#Page_174'>174</a>, <a href='#Page_198'>198</a>, <a href='#Page_324'>324</a>.</li>
+    </ul></li>
+  <li>Heywood, <a href='#Footnote_61'>140</a>, <a href='#Footnote_263'>419</a>.</li>
+  <li>Historical tragedies, <a href='#Page_3'>3</a>, <a href='#Page_53'>53</a>, <a href='#Page_71'>71</a>.</li>
+  <li>Homer, <a href='#Page_348'>348</a>.</li>
+  <li>Horatio, <a href='#Page_99'>99</a>, <a href='#Page_112'>112</a>, <a href='#Page_310'>310</a>, Notes <a href='#NOTE_A'>A</a>, <a href='#NOTE_B'>B</a>, <a href='#NOTE_C'>C</a>.</li>
+  <li>Humour, constructional use of, <a href='#Page_61'>61</a>;
+    <ul class="list">
+      <li>Hamlet's, <a href='#Page_149'>149-52</a>;</li>
+      <li>in <i>Othello</i>, <a href='#Page_177'>177</a>;</li>
+      <li>in <i>Macbeth</i>, <a href='#Page_395'>395</a>.</li>
+    </ul></li>
+  <li>Hunter, J., <a href='#Page_199'>199</a>, <a href='#Footnote_197'>338</a>.</li>
+</ul>
+
+<ul class="list">
+  <li><a name="Page_496" id="Page_496"></a><span class="pagenum">[496]</span>Iachimo, <a href='#Page_21'>21</a>, <a href='#Page_210'>210</a>.</li>
+  <li><a name="Iago" id="Iago"></a>Iago, and evil, <a href='#Page_207'>207</a>, <a href='#Page_232'>232-3</a>;
+    <ul class="list">
+      <li>false views of, <a href='#Page_208'>208-11</a>, <a href='#Page_223'>223-7</a>;</li>
+      <li>danger of accepting his own evidence, <a href='#Page_211'>211-2</a>, <a href='#Page_222'>222-5</a>;</li>
+      <li>how he appeared to others, <a href='#Page_213'>213-5</a>;
+        <ul class="list">
+          <li>and to Emilia, <a href='#Page_215'>215-6</a>, <a href='#NOTE_P'>439-40</a>;</li>
+        </ul></li>
+      <li>inferences hence, <a href='#Page_217'>217-8</a>;</li>
+      <li>further analysis, <a href='#Page_218'>218-22</a>;</li>
+      <li>source of his action, <a href='#Page_222'>222-31</a>;</li>
+      <li>his tragedy, <a href='#Page_218'>218</a>, <a href='#Page_222'>222</a>, <a href='#Page_232'>232</a>;</li>
+      <li>not merely evil, <a href='#Page_233'>233-5</a>;</li>
+      <li>nor of supreme intellect, <a href='#Page_236'>236</a>;</li>
+      <li>cause of failure, <a href='#Page_236'>236-7</a>;</li>
+      <li>and Edmund, <a href='#Page_245'>245</a>, <a href='#Page_300'>300-1</a>, <a href='#Page_464'>464</a>;</li>
+      <li>and Hamlet, <a href='#Page_208'>208</a>, <a href='#Page_217'>217</a>, <a href='#Page_222'>222</a>, <a href='#Page_226'>226</a>;</li>
+      <li>other references, <a href='#Page_21'>21</a>, <a href='#Page_28'>28</a>, <a href='#Page_32'>32</a>, <a href='#Page_192'>192</a>, <a href='#Page_193'>193</a>, <a href='#Page_196'>196</a>, <a href='#Page_364'>364</a>, Notes <a href='#NOTE_L'>L</a>, <a href='#NOTE_M'>M</a>, <a href='#NOTE_P'>P</a>, <a href='#NOTE_Q'>Q</a>.</li>
+    </ul></li>
+  <li>Improbability, not always a defect, <a href='#Page_69'>69</a>;
+    <ul class="list">
+      <li>in <i>King Lear</i>, <a href='#Page_249'>249</a>, <a href='#Page_256'>256-7</a>.</li>
+    </ul></li>
+  <li>Inconsistencies, <a href='#Page_73'>73</a>;
+    <ul class="list">
+      <li>real or supposed, in <i>Hamlet</i>, <a href='#Page_408'>408</a>;</li>
+      <li>in <i>Othello</i>, <a href='#NOTE_I'>Note I</a>;</li>
+      <li>in <i>King Lear</i>, <a href='#Page_256'>256</a>, <a href='#NOTE_T'>Note T</a>;</li>
+      <li>in <i>Macbeth</i>, Notes <a href='#NOTE_CC'>CC</a>, <a href='#NOTE_EE'>EE</a>.</li>
+    </ul></li>
+  <li>Ingram, Prof., <a href='#Page_478'>478</a>.</li>
+  <li>Insanity in tragedy, <a href='#Page_13'>13</a>;
+    <ul class="list">
+      <li>Ophelia's, <a href='#Page_164'>164-5</a>, <a href='#Page_399'>399</a>;</li>
+      <li>Lear's, <a href='#Page_288'>288-90</a>.</li>
+    </ul></li>
+  <li><a name="Intrigue" id="Intrigue"></a>Intrigue in tragedy, <a href='#Page_12'>12</a>, <a href='#Page_67'>67</a>, <a href='#Page_179'>179</a>.</li>
+  <li>Irony, <a href='#Page_182'>182</a>, <a href='#Page_338'>338</a>.</li>
+  <li>Isabella, <a href='#Page_316'>316</a>, <a href='#Page_317'>317</a>, <a href='#Page_321'>321</a>.</li>
+</ul>
+
+<ul class="list">
+  <li>Jameson, Mrs., <a href='#Footnote_79'>165</a>, <a href='#Page_204'>204</a>, <a href='#Page_378'>379</a>.</li>
+  <li>Jealousy in Othello, <a href='#Page_178'>178</a>, <a href='#Page_194'>194</a>, <a href='#NOTE_L'>Note L</a>.</li>
+  <li>Job, <a href='#Page_11'>11</a>.</li>
+  <li>Johnson, <a href='#Page_31'>31</a>, <a href='#Page_91'>91</a>, <a href='#Page_294'>294</a>, <a href='#Page_298'>298</a>, <a href='#Page_304'>304</a>, <a href='#Page_377'>377</a>, <a href='#Page_420'>420</a>.</li>
+  <li>Jonson, <a href='#Page_69'>69</a>, <a href='#Page_282'>282</a>, <a href='#Page_389'>389</a>.</li>
+  <li>Juliet, <a href='#Page_7'>7</a>, <a href='#Page_204'>204</a>, <a href='#Page_210'>210</a>.</li>
+  <li><i>Julius Caesar</i>, <a href='#Page_3'>3</a>, <a href='#Footnote_1'>7</a>, <a href='#Page_9'>9</a>, <a href='#Page_33'>33</a>, <a href='#Page_34'>34</a>, <a href='#Footnote_289'>479</a>;
+    <ul class="list">
+      <li>conflict, <a href='#Page_17'>17-8</a>;</li>
+      <li>exposition, <a href='#Page_43'>43-5</a>;</li>
+      <li>crisis, <a href='#Page_52'>52</a>;</li>
+      <li>dragging, <a href='#Page_57'>57</a>;</li>
+      <li>counter-stroke, <a href='#Page_58'>58</a>;</li>
+      <li>quarrel-scene, <a href='#Page_60'>60-1</a>;</li>
+      <li>battle-scenes, <a href='#Page_62'>62</a>;</li>
+      <li>and <i>Hamlet</i>, <a href='#Page_80'>80-2</a>;</li>
+      <li>style, <a href='#Page_85'>85-6</a>.</li>
+    </ul></li>
+  <li>Justice in tragedy, idea of, <a href='#Page_31'>31-33</a>, <a href='#Page_279'>279</a>, <a href='#Page_318'>318</a>.</li>
+</ul>
+
+<ul class="list">
+  <li>Kean, <a href='#Page_199'>99</a>, <a href='#Page_243'>243-4</a>.</li>
+  <li>Kent, <i><a href='#Page_307'>307-10</a></i>, <a href='#Page_314'>314</a>, <a href='#Footnote_183'>321</a>, <a href='#Page_447'>447</a>, <a href='#NOTE_W'>Note W</a>.</li>
+  <li>King Claudius, <a href='#Page_28'>28</a>, <a href='#Page_102'>102</a>, <a href='#Page_133'>133</a>, <a href='#Page_137'>137</a>, <a href='#Page_142'>142</a>, <i><a href='#Page_168'>168-72</a></i>, <a href='#Page_402'>402</a>, <a href='#Page_422'>422</a>.</li>
+  <li><i>King John</i>, <a href='#Footnote_245'>394</a>, <a href='#Page_490'>490-1</a>.</li>
+  <li><i>King Lear</i>, exposition, <a href='#Page_44'>44</a>, <a href='#Page_46'>46-7</a>;
+    <ul class="list">
+      <li>conflict, <a href='#Page_17'>17</a>, <a href='#Page_53'>53-4</a>;</li>
+      <li>scenes of high and low tension, <a href='#Page_49'>49</a>;</li>
+      <li>dragging, <a href='#Page_57'>57</a>;</li>
+      <li>false hope before catastrophe, <a href='#Page_63'>63</a>;</li>
+      <li>battle-scene, <a href='#Page_62'>62</a>, <a href='#NOTE_X'>456-8</a>;</li>
+      <li>soliloquy in, <a href='#Page_72'>72</a>, <a href='#Footnote_112'>222</a>;</li>
+      <li>place among tragedies, <a href='#Page_82'>82</a>, <a href='#Page_88'>88</a>, see <a href='#Tate'>Tate</a>;</li>
+      <li>Tate's, <a href='#Page_243'>243-4</a>;</li>
+      <li>two-fold character, <a href='#Page_244'>244-6</a>;</li>
+      <li>not wholly dramatic, <a href='#Page_247'>247</a>;</li>
+      <li>opening scene, <a href='#Page_71'>71</a>, <a href='#Page_249'>249-51</a>, <a href='#Page_258'>258</a>, <a href='#Page_319'>319-21</a>, <a href='#Page_447'>447</a>;</li>
+      <li>blinding of Gloster, <a href='#Footnote_93'>185</a>, <a href='#Page_251'>251</a>;</li>
+      <li>catastrophe, <a href='#Page_250'>250-4</a>, <a href='#Page_271'>271</a>, <a href='#Page_290'>290-3</a>, <a href='#Page_309'>309</a>, <a href='#Page_322'>322-6</a>;</li>
+      <li>structural defects, <a href='#Page_254'>254-6</a>;</li>
+      <li>improbabilities, etc., <a href='#Page_256'>256-8</a>;</li>
+      <li>vagueness of locality, <a href='#Page_259'>259-60</a>;</li>
+      <li>poetic value of defects, <a href='#Page_261'>261</a>;</li>
+      <li>double action, <a href='#Page_262'>262</a>;</li>
+      <li>characterisation, <a href='#Page_263'>263</a>;</li>
+      <li>tendency to symbolism, <a href='#Page_264'>264-5</a>;</li>
+      <li>idea of monstrosity, <a href='#Page_265'>265-6</a>;</li>
+      <li>beast and man, <a href='#Page_266'>266-8</a>;</li>
+      <li>storm-scenes, <a href='#Page_269'>269-70</a>, <a href='#Page_286'>286-7</a>, <a href='#Page_315'>315</a>;</li>
+      <li>question of government of world, in, <a href='#Page_271'>271-3</a>;</li>
+      <li>supposed pessimism, <a href='#Page_273'>273-9</a>, <a href='#Page_284'>284-5</a>, <a href='#Page_303'>303-4</a>, <a href='#Page_322'>322-30</a>;</li>
+      <li>accident and fatality, <a href='#Page_15'>15</a>, <a href='#Page_250'>250-4</a>, <a href='#Page_287'>287-8</a>;</li>
+      <li>intrigue in, <a href='#Page_179'>179</a>;</li>
+      <li>evil in, <a href='#Page_298'>298</a>, <a href='#Page_303'>303-4</a>;</li>
+      <li>preaching patience, <a href='#Page_330'>330</a>;</li>
+      <li>and <i>Othello</i>, <a href='#Page_176'>176-7</a>, <a href='#Page_179'>179</a>, <a href='#Page_181'>181</a>, <a href='#Page_244'>244-5</a>, <a href='#NOTE_R'>441-3</a>;</li>
+      <li>and <i>Timon</i>, <a href='#Page_245'>245-7</a>, <a href='#Footnote_176'>310</a>, <a href='#Page_326'>326-7</a>, <a href='#Page_443'>443-5</a>;</li>
+      <li>other references, <a href='#Page_8'>8</a>, <a href='#Page_10'>10</a>, <a href='#Page_61'>61</a>, <a href='#Page_181'>181</a>, Notes <a href='#NOTE_R'>R</a> to <a href='#NOTE_Y'>Y</a>, and <a href='#NOTE_BB'>BB</a>.</li>
+    </ul></li>
+  <li>K&ouml;nig, G., <a href='#NOTE_BB'>Note BB</a>.</li>
+  <li>Koppel, R., <a href='#Footnote_172'>306</a>, <a href='#Page_450'>450</a>, <a href='#NOTE_W'>453</a>, <a href='#Page_462'>462</a>.</li>
+</ul>
+
+<ul class="list">
+  <li>Laertes, <a href='#Page_90'>90</a>, <a href='#Page_111'>111</a>, <a href='#Page_142'>142</a>, <a href='#Page_422'>422</a>.</li>
+  <li>Lamb, <a href='#Footnote_105'>202</a>, <a href='#Page_243'>243</a>, <a href='#Page_248'>248</a>, <a href='#Page_253'>253</a>, <a href='#Footnote_132'>255</a>, <a href='#Page_269'>269</a>, <a href='#Footnote_205'>343</a>.</li>
+  <li>Language, Shakespeare's, defects of, <a href='#Page_73'>73</a>, <a href='#Page_75'>75</a>, <a href='#Page_416'>416</a>.</li>
+  <li>Lear, <a href='#Page_13'>13</a>, <a href='#Page_14'>14</a>, <a href='#Page_20'>20</a>, <a href='#Page_28'>28</a>, <a href='#Page_29'>29</a>, <a href='#Page_32'>32</a>, <a href='#Page_249'>249-51</a>, <i><a href='#Page_289'>280-93</a></i>, <a href='#Page_293'>293-5</a>, <a href='#NOTE_W'>Note W</a>.</li>
+  <li>Leontes, <a href='#Page_21'>21</a>, <a href='#Page_194'>194</a>.</li>
+</ul>
+
+<ul class="list">
+  <li><i>Macbeth</i>, exposition, <a href='#Page_43'>43</a>, <a href='#Page_45'>45-6</a>;
+    <ul class="list">
+      <li>conflict, <a href='#Page_17'>17-9</a>, <a href='#Page_48'>48</a>, <a href='#Page_52'>52</a>;</li>
+      <li>crisis, <a href='#Page_59'>59</a>, <a href='#Page_60'>60</a>;</li>
+      <li>pathos and humour, <a href='#Page_61'>61</a>, <a href='#Page_391'>391</a>, <a href='#Page_395'>395-7</a>;</li>
+      <li>battle-scenes, <a href='#Page_62'>62</a>;</li>
+      <li>extended catastrophe, <a href='#Page_64'>64</a>;</li>
+      <li>defects in construction, <a href='#Page_57'>57</a>, <a href='#Page_71'>71</a>;</li>
+      <li>place among tragedies, <a href='#Page_82'>82</a>, <a href='#Page_87'>87-8</a>, <a href='#NOTE_BB'>Note BB</a>;</li>
+      <li>religious ideas, <a href='#Page_172'>172-4</a>;</li>
+      <li>atmosphere of, <a href='#Page_333'>333</a>;</li>
+      <li>effects of darkness, <a href='#Page_333'>333-4</a>,</li>
+      <li>colour, <a href='#Page_334'>334-6</a>,</li>
+      <li>storm, <a href='#Page_336'>336-7</a>,</li>
+      <li>supernatural, etc., <a href='#Page_337'>337-8</a>,</li>
+      <li>irony, <a href='#Page_338'>338-40</a>;</li>
+      <li>Witches, <a href='#Page_340'>340-9</a>, <a href='#Page_362'>362</a>, <a href='#Page_379'>379-86</a>;</li>
+      <li>imagery, <a href='#Page_336'>336</a>, <a href='#Page_357'>357</a>;</li>
+      <li>minor characters, <a href='#Page_387'>387</a>;</li>
+      <li>simplicity, <a href='#Page_388'>388</a>;</li>
+      <li>Senecan effect, <a href='#Page_389'>389-90</a>;</li>
+      <li>bombast, <a href='#Page_389'>389</a>, <a href='#Page_417'>417</a>;</li>
+      <li>prose, <a href='#Page_388'>388</a>, <a href='#Page_397'>397-400</a>;</li>
+      <li>relief-scenes, <a href='#Page_391'>391</a>;</li>
+      <li>sleep-walking scene, <a href='#Page_378'>378</a>, <a href='#Page_398'>398</a>, <a href='#Page_399'>400</a>;</li>
+      <li>references to Gunpowder Plot, <a href='#Footnote_247'>397</a>, <a href='#Page_470'>470-1</a>;</li>
+      <li>all genuine? <a href='#Page_388'>388</a>, <a href='#Page_391'>391</a>, <a href='#Page_395'>395-7</a>, <a href='#NOTE_Z'>Note Z</a>;</li>
+      <li>and <i>Hamlet</i>, <a href='#Page_331'>331-2</a>;</li>
+      <li>and <i>Richard III.</i>, <a href='#Page_338'>338</a>, <a href='#Page_390'>390</a>, <a href='#Page_395'>395</a>, <a href='#Footnote_296'>492</a>;</li>
+      <li>other references, <a href='#Page_7'>7</a>, <a href='#Page_8'>8</a>, <a href='#Page_386'>386</a>, and Notes <a href='#NOTE_Z'>Z</a> to <a href='#NOTE_FF'>FF</a>.</li>
+    </ul></li>
+  <li>Macbeth, <a href='#Page_13'>13</a>, <a href='#Page_14'>14</a>, <a href='#Page_20'>20</a>, <a href='#Page_22'>22</a>, <a href='#Page_28'>28</a>, <a href='#Page_32'>32</a>, <a href='#Page_63'>63</a>, <a href='#Page_172'>172</a>, <a href='#Page_343'>343-5</a>, <i><a href='#Page_349'>349-65</a></i>, <a href='#Page_380'>380</a>, <a href='#Page_383'>383</a>, <a href='#Page_386'>386</a>, Notes <a href='#NOTE_CC'>CC</a>, <a href='#NOTE_EE'>EE</a>.</li>
+  <li>Macbeth, Lady, <a href='#Page_13'>13</a>, <a href='#Page_28'>28</a>, <a href='#Page_32'>32</a>, <a href='#Page_349'>349-50</a>, <a href='#Page_358'>358</a>, <a href='#Page_364'>364</a>, <i><a href='#Page_366'>366-79</a></i>, <a href='#Page_398'>398-400</a>, Notes <a href='#NOTE_CC'>CC</a>, <a href='#NOTE_DD'>DD</a>.</li>
+  <li>Macduff, <a href='#Page_387'>387</a>, <a href='#Page_391'>391-2</a>, <a href='#Page_490'>490-1</a>.</li>
+  <li>Macduff, Lady, <a href='#Page_61'>61</a>, <a href='#Page_387'>387</a>, <a href='#Page_391'>391-2</a>.</li>
+  <li><a name="Page_497" id="Page_497"></a><span class="pagenum">[497]</span>Macduff, little, <a href='#Page_393'>393-5</a>.</li>
+  <li>Mackenzie, <a href='#Page_91'>91</a>.</li>
+  <li>Marlowe, <a href='#Page_211'>211</a>, <a href='#Page_415'>415-6</a>.</li>
+  <li>Marston's possible reminiscences of Shakespeare's plays, <a href='#Page_471'>471-2</a>.</li>
+  <li><i>Measure for Measure</i>, <a href='#Page_76'>76</a>, <a href='#Page_78'>78</a>, <a href='#Footnote_153'>275</a>, <a href='#Footnote_247'>397</a>.</li>
+  <li>Mediaeval idea of tragedy, <a href='#Page_8'>8</a>, <a href='#Page_9'>9</a>.</li>
+  <li>Melancholy, Shakespeare's representations of, <a href='#Page_110'>110</a>, <a href='#Page_121'>121</a>.
+    <ul class="list">
+      <li>See <a href='#manHamlet'>Hamlet</a>.</li>
+    </ul></li>
+  <li>Mephistopheles, <a href='#Page_208'>208</a>.</li>
+  <li><i>Merchant of Venice</i>, <a href='#Page_21'>21</a>, <a href='#Page_200'>200</a>.</li>
+  <li><a name="Metrical_tests" id="Metrical_tests"></a>Metrical tests, Notes <a href='#NOTE_S'>S</a>, <a href='#NOTE_BB'>BB</a>.</li>
+  <li>Middleton, <a href='#Page_466'>466</a>.</li>
+  <li><i>Midsummer Night's Dream</i>, <a href='#Footnote_242'>390</a>, <a href='#Page_469'>469</a>.</li>
+  <li>Milton, <a href='#Page_207'>207</a>, <a href='#Footnote_223'>362</a>, <a href='#Page_418'>418</a>.</li>
+  <li>Monstrosity, idea of, in <i>King Lear</i>, <a href='#Page_265'>265-6</a>.</li>
+  <li><a name="Moral_order" id="Moral_order"></a>Moral order in tragedy, idea of, <a href='#Page_26'>26</a>, <a href='#Page_31'>31-9</a>.</li>
+  <li>Moulton, R.G., <a href='#Footnote_16'>40</a>.</li>
+</ul>
+
+<ul class="list">
+  <li>Negro? Othello a, <a href='#Page_198'>198-202</a>.</li>
+</ul>
+
+<ul class="list">
+  <li>Opening scene in tragedy, <a href='#Page_43'>43-4</a>.</li>
+  <li>Ophelia, <a href='#Page_14'>14</a>, <a href='#Page_61'>61</a>, <a href='#Page_112'>112</a>, <i><a href='#Page_160'>160-5</a></i>, <a href='#Page_204'>204</a>, <a href='#Page_399'>399</a>.
+    <ul class="list">
+      <li>See <a href='#manHamlet'>Hamlet</a>.</li>
+    </ul></li>
+  <li>Oswald, <a href='#Page_298'>298</a>, <a href='#Page_448'>448</a>.</li>
+  <li><i>Othello</i>, exposition, <a href='#Page_44'>44-5</a>;
+    <ul class="list">
+      <li>conflict, <a href='#Page_17'>17</a>, <a href='#Page_18'>18</a>, <a href='#Page_48'>48</a>;</li>
+      <li>peculiar construction, <a href='#Page_54'>54-5</a>, <a href='#Page_64'>64-7</a>, <a href='#Page_177'>177</a>;</li>
+      <li>inconsistencies, <a href='#Page_73'>73</a>;</li>
+      <li>place among tragedies, <a href='#Page_82'>82</a>, <a href='#Page_83'>83</a>, <a href='#Page_88'>88</a>;</li>
+      <li>and <i>Hamlet</i>, <a href='#Page_175'>175-6</a>;</li>
+      <li>and <i>King Lear</i>, <a href='#Page_176'>176-7</a>, <a href='#Page_179'>179</a>, <a href='#Page_181'>181</a>, <a href='#Page_244'>244-5</a>, <a href='#NOTE_R'>441-3</a>;</li>
+      <li>distinctive effect, and its causes, <a href='#Page_176'>176-80</a>;</li>
+      <li>accident in, <a href='#Page_15'>15</a>, <a href='#Page_181'>181-2</a>;</li>
+      <li>objections to, considered, <a href='#Page_183'>183-5</a>;</li>
+      <li>point of inferiority to other three tragedies, <a href='#Page_185'>185-6</a>;</li>
+      <li>elements of reconciliation in catastrophe, <a href='#Page_198'>198</a>, <a href='#Footnote_122'>242</a>;</li>
+      <li>other references, <a href='#Page_9'>9</a>, <a href='#Page_61'>61</a>, Notes <a href='#NOTE_I'>I</a> to <a href='#NOTE_R'>R</a>, and <a href='#NOTE_BB'>BB</a>.</li>
+    </ul></li>
+  <li>Othello, <a href='#Page_9'>9</a>, <a href='#Page_20'>20</a>, <a href='#Page_21'>21</a>, <a href='#Page_22'>22</a>, <a href='#Page_28'>28</a>, <a href='#Page_29'>29</a>, <a href='#Page_32'>32</a>, <a href='#Page_176'>176</a>, <a href='#Page_178'>178</a>, <a href='#Page_179'>179</a>, <i><a href='#Page_186'>186-98</a></i>, <a href='#Page_198'>198-202</a>, <a href='#Page_211'>211</a>, <a href='#Page_212'>212</a>, Notes <a href='#NOTE_K'>K</a> to <a href='#NOTE_O'>O</a>.</li>
+</ul>
+
+<ul class="list">
+  <li>Pathos, and tragedy, <a href='#Page_14'>14</a>, <a href='#Page_103'>103</a>, <a href='#Page_160'>160</a>, <a href='#Page_203'>203</a>, <a href='#Page_281'>281-2</a>;
+    <ul class="list">
+      <li>constructional use of, <a href='#Page_60'>60-1</a>.</li>
+    </ul></li>
+  <li>Peele, <a href='#Page_200'>200</a>.</li>
+  <li><i>Pericles</i>, <a href='#Footnote_286'>474</a>.</li>
+  <li><a name="Period" id="Period"></a>Period, Shakespeare's tragic, <a href='#Page_79'>79-89</a>, <a href='#Page_275'>275-6</a>.</li>
+  <li>Pessimism, supposed, in <i>King Lear</i>, <a href='#Page_275'>275-9</a>, <a href='#Page_327'>327</a>;
+    <ul class="list">
+      <li>in <i>Macbeth</i>, <a href='#Page_359'>359</a>, <a href='#Page_393'>393</a>.</li>
+    </ul></li>
+  <li>Plays, Shakespeare's, list of, in periods, <a href='#Footnote_25'>79</a>.</li>
+  <li>Plot, <a href='#Page_12'>12</a>.
+    <ul class="list">
+      <li>See <a href='#Action'>Action</a>, <a href='#Intrigue'>Intrigue</a>.</li>
+    </ul></li>
+  <li>'Poetic justice,' <a href='#Page_31'>31-2</a>.</li>
+  <li>Poor, goodness of the, in <i>King Lear</i> and <i>Timon</i>, <a href='#Page_326'>326</a>.</li>
+  <li>Posthumus, <a href='#Page_21'>21</a>.</li>
+  <li>Problems, probably non-existent for original audience, <a href='#Page_73'>73</a>, <a href='#Page_157'>157</a>, <a href='#Page_159'>159</a>, <a href='#Page_315'>315</a>, <a href='#Page_393'>393</a>, <a href='#Page_483'>483</a>, <a href='#Page_486'>486</a>, <a href='#Page_488'>488</a>.</li>
+  <li>Prose, in the tragedies, <a href='#Page_388'>388</a>, <a href='#Page_397'>397-400</a>.</li>
+</ul>
+
+<ul class="list">
+  <li>Queen Gertrude, <a href='#Footnote_37'>104</a>, <a href='#Page_118'>118</a>, <a href='#Page_134'>134</a>, <a href='#Page_136'>136-8</a>, <a href='#Page_161'>161</a>, <a href='#Page_164'>164</a>, <i><a href='#Page_166'>166-8</a></i>.</li>
+</ul>
+
+<ul class="list">
+  <li><a name="Reconciliation" id="Reconciliation"></a>Reconciliation, feeling of, in tragedy, <a href='#Page_31'>31</a>, <a href='#Page_36'>36</a>, <a href='#Page_84'>84</a>, <a href='#Page_147'>147-8</a>, <a href='#Page_174'>174</a>, <a href='#Page_198'>198</a>, <a href='#Page_242'>242</a>, <a href='#Page_322'>322-6</a>.</li>
+  <li>Regan, <i><a href='#Page_299'>299-300</a></i>.</li>
+  <li>Religion, in Edgar, <a href='#Page_306'>306</a>,
+    <ul class="list">
+      <li>Horatio, <a href='#Page_310'>310</a>,</li>
+      <li>Banquo, <a href='#Page_387'>387</a>.</li>
+    </ul></li>
+  <li><i>Richard II.</i>, <a href='#Page_3'>3</a>, <a href='#Page_10'>10</a>, <a href='#Page_17'>17</a>, <a href='#Page_18'>18</a>, <a href='#Footnote_20'>42</a>.</li>
+  <li>Richard II., <a href='#Page_20'>20</a>, <a href='#Footnote_10'>22</a>, <a href='#Page_150'>150</a>, <a href='#Page_152'>152</a>.</li>
+  <li><i>Richard III.</i>, <a href='#Page_3'>3</a>, <a href='#Page_18'>18</a>, <a href='#Page_42'>42</a>, <a href='#Page_62'>62</a>, <a href='#Page_82'>82</a>;
+    <ul class="list">
+      <li>and <i>Macbeth</i>, <a href='#Page_338'>338</a>, <a href='#Page_390'>390</a>, <a href='#Page_395'>395</a>, <a href='#Page_492'>492</a>.</li>
+    </ul></li>
+  <li>Richard III., <a href='#Page_14'>14</a>, <a href='#Page_20'>20</a>, <a href='#Page_22'>22</a>, <a href='#Page_32'>32</a>, <a href='#Page_63'>63</a>, <a href='#Page_152'>152</a>, <a href='#Page_207'>207</a>, <a href='#Page_210'>210</a>, <a href='#Page_217'>217</a>, <a href='#Page_218'>218</a>, <a href='#Page_233'>233</a>, <a href='#Page_301'>301</a>.</li>
+  <li><i>Romeo and Juliet</i>, <a href='#Page_3'>3</a>, <a href='#Page_7'>7</a>, <a href='#Page_9'>9</a>, <a href='#Page_15'>15</a>;
+    <ul class="list">
+      <li>conflict, <a href='#Page_17'>17</a>, <a href='#Page_18'>18</a>, <a href='#Page_34'>34</a>;</li>
+      <li>exposition, <a href='#Page_41'>41-5</a>;</li>
+      <li>crisis, <a href='#Page_52'>52</a>;</li>
+      <li>counter-stroke, <a href='#Page_58'>58</a>.</li>
+    </ul></li>
+  <li>Romeo, <a href='#Page_22'>22</a>, <a href='#Page_29'>29</a>, <a href='#Page_150'>150</a>, <a href='#Page_210'>210</a>.</li>
+  <li>Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, <a href='#Page_130'>137</a>, <a href='#Page_405'>405-6</a>.</li>
+  <li>Rules of drama, Shakespeare's supposed ignorance of, <a href='#Page_69'>69</a>.</li>
+</ul>
+
+<ul class="list">
+  <li>Salvini, <a href='#Page_434'>434</a>.</li>
+  <li>Satan, Milton's, <a href='#Page_207'>207</a>, <a href='#Footnote_223'>362</a>.</li>
+  <li>Scenery, no, in Shakespeare's theatre, <a href='#Page_49'>49</a>, <a href='#Page_71'>71</a>, <a href='#Page_451'>451</a>.</li>
+  <li>Scenes, their number, length, tone, <a href='#Page_49'>49</a>;
+    <ul class="list">
+      <li>wrong divisions of, <a href='#Page_451'>451</a>.</li>
+    </ul></li>
+  <li>Schlegel, <a href='#Page_82'>82</a>, <a href='#Page_104'>104</a>, <a href='#Page_105'>105</a>, <a href='#Page_116'>116</a>, <a href='#Page_123'>123</a>, <a href='#Page_127'>127</a>, <a href='#Page_254'>254</a>, <a href='#Footnote_141'>262</a>, <a href='#Footnote_208'>344</a>, <a href='#Page_345'>345</a>, <a href='#Footnote_259'>413</a>.</li>
+  <li>Scot on Witch-craft, <a href='#Page_341'>341</a>.</li>
+  <li>Seneca, <a href='#Page_389'>389-90</a>.</li>
+  <li>Shakespeare the man, <a href='#Page_6'>6</a>, <a href='#Page_81'>81</a>, <a href='#Page_83'>83</a>, <a href='#Page_185'>185-6</a>, <a href='#Page_246'>246</a>, <a href='#Page_275'>275-6</a>, <a href='#Page_282'>282</a>, <a href='#Page_285'>285</a>, <a href='#Page_327'>327-30</a>, <a href='#Page_359'>359</a>, <a href='#Page_393'>393</a>, <a href='#Page_414'>414-5</a>.</li>
+  <li>Shylock, <a href='#Page_21'>21</a>.</li>
+  <li>Siddons, Mrs., <a href='#Footnote_227'>371</a>, <a href='#Footnote_232'>379</a>.</li>
+  <li>Soliloquy, <a href='#Page_72'>72</a>;
+    <ul class="list">
+      <li>of villains, <a href='#Page_222'>222</a>;</li>
+      <li>scenes ending with, <a href='#Page_451'>451</a>.</li>
+    </ul></li>
+  <li>Sonnets, Shakespeare's, <a href='#Page_264'>264</a>, <a href='#Footnote_226'>364</a>.</li>
+  <li>Spedding, J., <a href='#Footnote_133'>255</a>, <a href='#Page_476'>476</a>, <a href='#NOTE_X'>Note X</a>.</li>
+  <li>Stage-directions, wrong modern, <a href='#Page_260'>260</a>, <a href='#Page_285'>285</a>, <a href='#Page_422'>422</a>, <a href='#NOTE_W'>453-6</a>, <a href='#Page_462'>462</a>.</li>
+  <li><a name="Style" id="Style"></a>Style in the tragedies, <a href='#Page_85'>85-9</a>, <a href='#Page_332'>332</a>, <a href='#Page_336'>336</a>, <a href='#Page_357'>357</a>.</li>
+  <li>Suffering, tragic, <a href='#Page_7'>7</a>, <a href='#Page_8'>8</a>, <a href='#Page_11'>11</a>.</li>
+  <li>Supernatural, the, in tragedy, <a href='#Page_14'>14</a>, <a href='#Page_181'>181</a>, <a href='#Page_295'>295-6</a>, <a href='#Page_331'>331-2</a>.
+    <ul class="list">
+      <li>See <a href='#Ghost'>Ghost</a>, <a href='#Witch'>Witch</a>.</li>
+    </ul></li>
+  <li>Swinburne, A.C., <a href='#Page_80'>80</a>, <a href='#Page_179'>179</a>, <a href='#Page_191'>191</a>, <a href='#Page_209'>209</a>, <a href='#Page_218'>218</a>, <a href='#Page_223'>223</a>, <a href='#Page_228'>228</a>, <a href='#Page_231'>231</a>, <a href='#Page_276'>276-8</a>, <a href='#Page_431'>431</a>.</li>
+  <li>Symonds, J.A., <a href='#Footnote_2'>10</a>.</li>
+</ul>
+
+<ul class="list">
+  <li><a name="Tate" id="Tate"></a>Tate's version of <i>King Lear</i>, <a href='#Page_243'>243</a>, <a href='#Page_251'>251-3</a>, <a href='#Footnote_177'>313</a>.</li>
+  <li>Temperament, <a href='#Page_110'>110</a>, <a href='#Page_282'>282</a>, <a href='#Page_306'>306</a>.</li>
+  <li><i>Tempest</i>, <a href='#Page_42'>42</a>, <a href='#Page_80'>80</a>, <a href='#Page_185'>185</a>, <a href='#Page_264'>264</a>, <a href='#Page_328'>328-30</a>, <a href='#Page_469'>469</a>; <a href='#NOTE_BB'>Note BB</a>.</li>
+  <li><a name="Page_498" id="Page_498"></a><span class="pagenum">[498]</span><a name="Theological" id="Theological"></a>Theological ideas in tragedy, <a href='#Page_25'>25</a>, <a href='#Page_144'>144</a>, <a href='#Page_147'>147</a>, <a href='#Page_279'>279</a>;
+    <ul class="list">
+      <li>in <i>Hamlet</i> and <i>Macbeth</i>, <a href='#Page_171'>171-4</a>, <a href='#Page_439'>439</a>;</li>
+      <li>not in <i>Othello</i>, <a href='#Page_181'>181</a>, <a href='#Page_439'>439</a>;</li>
+      <li>in <i>King Lear</i>, <a href='#Page_271'>271-3</a>, <a href='#Page_296'>296</a>.</li>
+    </ul></li>
+  <li>Time, short and long, theory of, <a href='#Page_426'>426-7</a>.</li>
+  <li><i>Timon of Athens</i>, <a href='#Page_4'>4</a>, <a href='#Footnote_2'>9</a>, <a href='#Page_81'>81-3</a>, <a href='#Page_88'>88</a>, <a href='#Page_245'>245-7</a>, <a href='#Page_266'>266</a>, <a href='#Page_270'>270</a>, <a href='#Footnote_153'>275</a>, <a href='#Footnote_176'>310</a>, <a href='#Page_326'>326-7</a>, <a href='#NOTE_S'>443-5</a>, <a href='#Page_460'>460</a>; <a href='#NOTE_BB'>Note BB</a>.</li>
+  <li>Timon, <a href='#Footnote_2'>9</a>, <a href='#Page_82'>82</a>, <a href='#Page_112'>112</a>.</li>
+  <li><i>Titus Andronicus</i>, <a href='#Page_4'>4</a>, <a href='#Page_200'>200</a>, <a href='#Page_211'>211</a>, <a href='#Page_411'>411</a>, <a href='#Footnote_296'>491</a>.</li>
+  <li>Tourg&eacute;nief, <a href='#Page_11'>11</a>, <a href='#Footnote_167'>295</a>.</li>
+  <li>Toussaint, <a href='#Page_198'>198</a>.</li>
+  <li>Tragedy, Shakespearean; parts, <a href='#Page_41'>41</a>, <a href='#Page_51'>51</a>;
+    <ul class="list">
+      <li>earlier and later, <a href='#Page_18'>18</a>, <a href='#Page_176'>176</a>;</li>
+      <li>pure and historical, <a href='#Page_3'>3</a>, <a href='#Page_71'>71</a>.</li>
+      <li>See <a href='#Accident'>Accident</a>, <a href='#Action'>Action</a>, <a href='#Hero'>Hero</a>, <a href='#Period'>Period</a>, <a href='#Reconciliation'>Reconciliation</a>, etc.</li>
+    </ul></li>
+  <li>Transmigration of souls, <a href='#Page_267'>267</a>.</li>
+  <li><i>Troilus and Cressida</i>, <a href='#Page_7'>7</a>, <a href='#Page_185'>185-6</a>, <a href='#Footnote_147'>268</a>, <a href='#Footnote_153'>275-6</a>, <a href='#Footnote_170'>302</a>, <a href='#Page_417'>417</a>, <a href='#Page_419'>419</a>.</li>
+  <li><i>Twelfth Night</i>, <a href='#Page_70'>70</a>, <a href='#Footnote_145'>267</a>.</li>
+  <li><i>Two Noble Kinsmen</i>, <a href='#Page_418'>418</a>, <a href='#Page_472'>472</a>, <a href='#Page_479'>479</a>.</li>
+</ul>
+
+<ul class="list">
+  <li>Ultimate power in tragedy, <a href='#Page_24'>24-39</a>, <a href='#Page_171'>171-4</a>, <a href='#Page_271'>271-9</a>.
+    <ul class="list">
+      <li>See <a href='#Fate'>Fate</a>, <a href='#Moral_order'>Moral Order</a>, <a href='#Reconciliation'>Reconciliation</a>, <a href='#Theological'>Theological</a>.</li>
+    </ul></li>
+  <li>Undramatic speeches, <a href='#Page_74'>74</a>, <a href='#Page_106'>106</a>.</li>
+</ul>
+
+<ul class="list">
+  <li>Versification. See <a href='#Style'>Style</a> and <a href='#Metrical_tests'>Metrical tests</a>.</li>
+  <li>Wordsworth, <a href='#Footnote_239'>387</a>.</li>
+</ul>
+
+<ul class="list">
+  <li>Waste, tragic, <a href='#Page_23'>23</a>, <a href='#Page_37'>37</a>.</li>
+  <li>Werder, K., <a href='#Footnote_33'>94</a>, <a href='#Footnote_83'>172</a>, <a href='#NOTE_CC'>480</a>.</li>
+  <li><i>Winter's Tale</i>, <a href='#Page_21'>21</a>, <a href='#NOTE_BB'>Note BB</a>.</li>
+  <li><a name="Witch" id="Witch"></a>Witches, the, and Macbeth, <i><a href='#Page_340'>340-9</a></i>, <a href='#Page_362'>362</a>;
+    <ul class="list">
+      <li>and Banquo, <a href='#Page_379'>379-87</a>.</li>
+    </ul></li>
+  <li>Wittenberg, Hamlet at, <a href='#NOTE_B'>403-6</a>.</li>
+<li>Wordsworth, <a href='#Footnote_12'>30</a>, <a href='#Page_198'>198</a>.</li>
+</ul>
+
+<ul class="list">
+  <li><i>Yorkshire Tragedy</i>, <a href='#Footnote_2'>10</a>.</li>
+</ul>
+</div>
+<h4>GLASGOW: PRINTED AT THE UNIVERSITY PRESS BY ROBERT MACLEHOSE AND CO.
+LTD.</h4>
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><a name="Page_499" id="Page_499"></a><span class="pagenum">[499]</span></p>
+<h4><i>8vo. 12s. 6d. net.</i></h4>
+
+<h2>Oxford Lectures on Poetry</h2>
+
+<h4>BY</h4>
+
+<h3>A.C. BRADLEY, LL.D., Litt.D.</h3>
+
+<p><i>ATHEN&AElig;UM.</i>&mdash;"A remarkable achievement.... It is probable that this
+volume will attain a permanence for which critical literature generally
+cannot hope. Very many of the things that are said here are finally
+said; they exhaust their subject. Of one thing we are certain&mdash;that
+there is no work in English devoted to the interpretation of poetic
+experience which can claim the delicacy and sureness of Mr. Bradley's."</p>
+
+<p><i>SPECTATOR.</i>&mdash;"In reviewing Professor Bradley's previous book on
+<i>Shakespearean Tragedy</i> we declared our opinion that it was probably the
+best Shakespearean criticism since Coleridge. The new volume shows the
+same complete sanity of judgment, the same subtlety, the same persuasive
+and eloquent exposition."</p>
+
+<p><i>TIMES.</i>&mdash;"Nothing higher need be said of the present volume than it is
+not unworthy to be the sequel to <i>Shakespearean Tragedy</i>."</p>
+
+<p><i>DAILY TELEGRAPH.</i>&mdash;"This is not a book to be written about in a hasty
+review of a thousand words. It is one to be perused and appreciated at
+leisure&mdash;to be returned to again and again, partly because of its
+supreme interest, partly because it provokes, as all good books should
+do, a certain antagonism, partly because it is itself the product of a
+careful, scholarly mind, basing conclusions on a scrupulous perusal of
+documents and authorities.... The whole book is so full of good things
+that it is impossible to make any adequate selection. In an age which is
+not supposed to be very much interested in literary criticism, a book
+like Mr. Bradley's is of no little significance and importance."</p>
+
+<p><i>SATURDAY REVIEW.</i>&mdash;"The writer of these admirable lectures may claim
+what is rare even in this age of criticism&mdash;a note of his own. In type
+he belongs to those critics of the best order, whose view of literature
+is part and parcel of their view of life. His lectures on poetry are
+therefore what they profess to be: not scraps of textual comment, nor
+studies in the craft of verse-making, but broad considerations of poetry
+as a mode of spiritual revelation. An accomplished style and signs of
+careful reading we may justly demand from any professor who sets out to
+lecture in literature. Mr. Bradley has them in full measure. But he has
+also not a little of that priceless quality so seldom found in the
+professional or professorial critic&mdash;the capacity of na&iuml;ve vision and
+admiration. Here he is in a line with the really stimulating essayists,
+the artists in criticism."</p>
+
+<h4>MACMILLAN AND CO. <span class="smcap">Ltd.</span>, LONDON.</h4>
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><a name="Page_500" id="Page_500"></a><span class="pagenum">[500]</span></p>
+<h4><i>Second Edition. Crown 8vo. 5s. 6d. net.</i></h4>
+
+<h2>A Commentary on Tennyson's 'In Memoriam'</h2>
+
+<h4>BY</h4>
+
+<h3>A.C. BRADLEY, LL.D., Litt.D.</h3>
+
+<p><i>THE SATURDAY REVIEW.</i>&mdash;"Here we find a model of what a commentary on a
+great work should be, every page instinct with thoughtfulness; complete
+sympathy and appreciation; the most reverent care shown in the attempted
+interpretation of passages whose meaning to a large degree evades, and
+will always evade, readers of 'In Memoriam.' It is clear to us that Mr.
+Bradley has devoted long time and thought to his work, and that he has
+published the result of his labours simply to help those who, like
+himself, have been and are in difficulties as to the drift of various
+passages. He is not of course the first who has addressed himself to the
+interpretation of 'In Memoriam'&mdash;in this spirit ... but Mr. Bradley's
+commentary is sure to take rank as the most searching and scholarly of
+any."</p>
+
+<p><i>THE PILOT.</i>&mdash;"In re-studying 'In Memoriam' with Dr. Bradley's aid, we
+have found his interpretation helpful in numerous passages. The notes
+are prefaced by a long introduction dealing with the origin,
+composition, and structure of the poem, the ideas used in it, the metre
+and the debt to other poems. All of these are good, but more interesting
+than any of them is a section entitled, 'The Way of the Soul,' reviewing
+the spiritual experience which 'In Memoriam' records. This is quite
+admirable throughout, and proves conclusively that Dr. Bradley's keen
+desire to fathom the exact meaning of every phrase has only quickened
+his appreciation of the poem as a whole."</p>
+
+<h4>MACMILLAN AND CO. <span class="smcap">Ltd.</span>, LONDON.</h4>
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+<pre>
+
+
+
+
+
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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Shakespearean Tragedy, by A. C. Bradley
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Shakespearean Tragedy
+       Lectures on Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth
+
+Author: A. C. Bradley
+
+Release Date: October 30, 2005 [EBook #16966]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK SHAKESPEAREAN TRAGEDY ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Suzanne Shell, Lisa Reigel and the Online
+Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+SHAKESPEAREAN TRAGEDY
+
+
+MACMILLAN AND CO., LIMITED
+
+LONDON.BOMBAY.CALCUTTA.MADRAS.MELBOURNE
+
+
+THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
+
+NEW YORK.BOSTON.CHICAGO.DALLAS.SAN FRANCISCO
+
+
+THE MACMILLAN CO. OF CANADA, LTD.
+
+TORONTO
+
+
+
+
+SHAKESPEAREAN TRAGEDY
+
+LECTURES ON
+
+HAMLET, OTHELLO, KING LEAR
+
+MACBETH
+
+BY
+
+A.C. BRADLEY
+
+LL.D. LITT.D., FORMERLY PROFESSOR OF POETRY IN THE UNIVERSITY OF OXFORD
+
+
+_SECOND EDITION_ (_THIRTEENTH IMPRESSION_)
+
+
+MACMILLAN AND CO., LIMITED ST. MARTIN'S STREET, LONDON
+
+1919
+
+
+_COPYRIGHT._
+
+First Edition 1904.
+
+Second Edition March 1905.
+
+Reprinted August 1905, 1906, 1908, 1910, 1911, 1912, 1914, 1915, 1916,
+1918, 1919.
+
+
+GLASGOW: PRINTED AT THE UNIVERSITY PRESS BY ROBERT MACLEHOSE AND CO.
+LTD.
+
+
+TO MY STUDENTS
+
+
+
+
+PREFACE
+
+
+These lectures are based on a selection from materials used in teaching
+at Liverpool, Glasgow, and Oxford; and I have for the most part
+preserved the lecture form. The point of view taken in them is explained
+in the Introduction. I should, of course, wish them to be read in their
+order, and a knowledge of the first two is assumed in the remainder; but
+readers who may prefer to enter at once on the discussion of the several
+plays can do so by beginning at page 89.
+
+Any one who writes on Shakespeare must owe much to his predecessors.
+Where I was conscious of a particular obligation, I have acknowledged
+it; but most of my reading of Shakespearean criticism was done many
+years ago, and I can only hope that I have not often reproduced as my
+own what belongs to another.
+
+Many of the Notes will be of interest only to scholars, who may find, I
+hope, something new in them.
+
+I have quoted, as a rule, from the Globe edition, and have referred
+always to its numeration of acts, scenes, and lines.
+
+_November, 1904._
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+
+NOTE TO SECOND AND SUBSEQUENT IMPRESSIONS
+
+In these impressions I have confined myself to making some formal
+improvements, correcting indubitable mistakes, and indicating here and
+there my desire to modify or develop at some future time statements
+which seem to me doubtful or open to misunderstanding. The changes,
+where it seemed desirable, are shown by the inclusion of sentences in
+square brackets.
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+
+                                                              PAGE
+INTRODUCTION                                                    1
+
+
+LECTURE I.
+
+THE SUBSTANCE OF SHAKESPEAREAN TRAGEDY                          5
+
+
+LECTURE II.
+
+CONSTRUCTION IN SHAKESPEARE'S TRAGEDIES                        40
+
+
+LECTURE III.
+
+SHAKESPEARE'S TRAGIC PERIOD--HAMLET                            79
+
+
+LECTURE IV.
+
+HAMLET                                                        129
+
+
+LECTURE V.
+
+OTHELLO                                                       175
+
+
+LECTURE VI.
+
+OTHELLO                                                       207
+
+
+LECTURE VII.
+
+KING LEAR                                                     243
+
+
+LECTURE VIII.
+
+KING LEAR                                                     280
+
+
+LECTURE IX.
+
+MACBETH                                                       331
+
+
+LECTURE X.
+
+MACBETH                                                       366
+
+
+NOTE A. Events before the opening of the action in _Hamlet_   401
+
+NOTE B. Where was Hamlet at the time of his father's death?   403
+
+NOTE C. Hamlet's age                                          407
+
+NOTE D. 'My tables--meet it is I set it down'                 409
+
+NOTE E. The Ghost in the cellarage                            412
+
+NOTE F. The Player's speech in _Hamlet_                       413
+
+NOTE G. Hamlet's apology to Laertes                           420
+
+NOTE H. The exchange of rapiers                               422
+
+NOTE I. The duration of the action in
+  _Othello_                                                   423
+
+NOTE J. The 'additions' in the Folio text of _Othello_. The
+  Pontic sea                                                  429
+
+NOTE K. Othello's courtship                                   432
+
+NOTE L. Othello in the Temptation scene                       434
+
+NOTE M. Questions as to _Othello_, IV. i.                     435
+
+NOTE N. Two passages in the last scene of _Othello_           437
+
+NOTE O. Othello on Desdemona's last words                     438
+
+NOTE P. Did Emilia suspect Iago?                              439
+
+NOTE Q. Iago's suspicion regarding Cassio and Emilia          441
+
+NOTE R. Reminiscences of _Othello_ in _King Lear_             441
+
+NOTE S. _King Lear_ and _Timon of Athens_                     443
+
+NOTE T. Did Shakespeare shorten _King Lear_?                  445
+
+NOTE U. Movements of the _dramatis personae_ in _King
+  Lear_, II                                                   448
+
+NOTE V. Suspected interpolations in _King Lear_               450
+
+NOTE W. The staging of the scene of Lear's reunion with
+  Cordelia                                                    453
+
+NOTE X. The Battle in _King Lear_                             456
+
+NOTE Y. Some difficult passages in _King Lear_                458
+
+NOTE Z. Suspected interpolations in _Macbeth_                 466
+
+NOTE AA. Has _Macbeth_ been abridged?                         467
+
+NOTE BB. The date of _Macbeth_. Metrical Tests                470
+
+NOTE CC. When was the murder of Duncan first plotted?         480
+
+NOTE DD. Did Lady Macbeth really faint?                       484
+
+NOTE EE. Duration of the action in _Macbeth_. Macbeth's age.
+  'He has no children'                                        486
+
+NOTE FF. The Ghost of Banquo                                  492
+
+INDEX                                                         494
+
+
+
+
+INTRODUCTION
+
+
+In these lectures I propose to consider the four principal tragedies of
+Shakespeare from a single point of view. Nothing will be said of
+Shakespeare's place in the history either of English literature or of
+the drama in general. No attempt will be made to compare him with other
+writers. I shall leave untouched, or merely glanced at, questions
+regarding his life and character, the development of his genius and art,
+the genuineness, sources, texts, inter-relations of his various works.
+Even what may be called, in a restricted sense, the 'poetry' of the four
+tragedies--the beauties of style, diction, versification--I shall pass
+by in silence. Our one object will be what, again in a restricted sense,
+may be called dramatic appreciation; to increase our understanding and
+enjoyment of these works as dramas; to learn to apprehend the action and
+some of the personages of each with a somewhat greater truth and
+intensity, so that they may assume in our imaginations a shape a little
+less unlike the shape they wore in the imagination of their creator. For
+this end all those studies that were mentioned just now, of literary
+history and the like, are useful and even in various degrees necessary.
+But an overt pursuit of them is not necessary here, nor is any one of
+them so indispensable to our object as that close familiarity with the
+plays, that native strength and justice of perception, and that habit of
+reading with an eager mind, which make many an unscholarly lover of
+Shakespeare a far better critic than many a Shakespeare scholar.
+
+Such lovers read a play more or less as if they were actors who had to
+study all the parts. They do not need, of course, to imagine whereabouts
+the persons are to stand, or what gestures they ought to use; but they
+want to realise fully and exactly the inner movements which produced
+these words and no other, these deeds and no other, at each particular
+moment. This, carried through a drama, is the right way to read the
+dramatist Shakespeare; and the prime requisite here is therefore a vivid
+and intent imagination. But this alone will hardly suffice. It is
+necessary also, especially to a true conception of the whole, to
+compare, to analyse, to dissect. And such readers often shrink from this
+task, which seems to them prosaic or even a desecration. They
+misunderstand, I believe. They would not shrink if they remembered two
+things. In the first place, in this process of comparison and analysis,
+it is not requisite, it is on the contrary ruinous, to set imagination
+aside and to substitute some supposed 'cold reason'; and it is only want
+of practice that makes the concurrent use of analysis and of poetic
+perception difficult or irksome. And, in the second place, these
+dissecting processes, though they are also imaginative, are still, and
+are meant to be, nothing but means to an end. When they have finished
+their work (it can only be finished for the time) they give place to the
+end, which is that same imaginative reading or re-creation of the drama
+from which they set out, but a reading now enriched by the products of
+analysis, and therefore far more adequate and enjoyable.
+
+This, at any rate, is the faith in the strength of which I venture, with
+merely personal misgivings, on the path of analytic interpretation. And
+so, before coming to the first of the four tragedies, I propose to
+discuss some preliminary matters which concern them all. Though each is
+individual through and through, they have, in a sense, one and the same
+substance; for in all of them Shakespeare represents the tragic aspect
+of life, the tragic fact. They have, again, up to a certain point, a
+common form or structure. This substance and this structure, which would
+be found to distinguish them, for example, from Greek tragedies, may, to
+diminish repetition, be considered once for all; and in considering them
+we shall also be able to observe characteristic differences among the
+four plays. And to this may be added the little that it seems necessary
+to premise on the position of these dramas in Shakespeare's literary
+career.
+
+Much that is said on our main preliminary subjects will naturally hold
+good, within certain limits, of other dramas of Shakespeare beside
+_Hamlet_, _Othello_, _King Lear_, and _Macbeth_. But it will often apply
+to these other works only in part, and to some of them more fully than
+to others. _Romeo and Juliet_, for instance, is a pure tragedy, but it
+is an early work, and in some respects an immature one. _Richard III._
+and _Richard II._, _Julius Caesar_, _Antony and Cleopatra_, and
+_Coriolanus_ are tragic histories or historical tragedies, in which
+Shakespeare acknowledged in practice a certain obligation to follow his
+authority, even when that authority offered him an undramatic material.
+Probably he himself would have met some criticisms to which these plays
+are open by appealing to their historical character, and by denying that
+such works are to be judged by the standard of pure tragedy. In any
+case, most of these plays, perhaps all, do show, as a matter of fact,
+considerable deviations from that standard; and, therefore, what is said
+of the pure tragedies must be applied to them with qualifications which
+I shall often take for granted without mention. There remain _Titus
+Andronicus_ and _Timon of Athens_. The former I shall leave out of
+account, because, even if Shakespeare wrote the whole of it, he did so
+before he had either a style of his own or any characteristic tragic
+conception. _Timon_ stands on a different footing. Parts of it are
+unquestionably Shakespeare's, and they will be referred to in one of the
+later lectures. But much of the writing is evidently not his, and as it
+seems probable that the conception and construction of the whole tragedy
+should also be attributed to some other writer, I shall omit this work
+too from our preliminary discussions.
+
+
+
+
+LECTURE I
+
+THE SUBSTANCE OF SHAKESPEAREAN TRAGEDY
+
+
+The question we are to consider in this lecture may be stated in a
+variety of ways. We may put it thus: What is the substance of a
+Shakespearean tragedy, taken in abstraction both from its form and from
+the differences in point of substance between one tragedy and another?
+Or thus: What is the nature of the tragic aspect of life as represented
+by Shakespeare? What is the general fact shown now in this tragedy and
+now in that? And we are putting the same question when we ask: What is
+Shakespeare's tragic conception, or conception of tragedy?
+
+These expressions, it should be observed, do not imply that Shakespeare
+himself ever asked or answered such a question; that he set himself to
+reflect on the tragic aspects of life, that he framed a tragic
+conception, and still less that, like Aristotle or Corneille, he had a
+theory of the kind of poetry called tragedy. These things are all
+possible; how far any one of them is probable we need not discuss; but
+none of them is presupposed by the question we are going to consider.
+This question implies only that, as a matter of fact, Shakespeare in
+writing tragedy did represent a certain aspect of life in a certain way,
+and that through examination of his writings we ought to be able, to
+some extent, to describe this aspect and way in terms addressed to the
+understanding. Such a description, so far as it is true and adequate,
+may, after these explanations, be called indifferently an account of the
+substance of Shakespearean tragedy, or an account of Shakespeare's
+conception of tragedy or view of the tragic fact.
+
+Two further warnings may be required. In the first place, we must
+remember that the tragic aspect of life is only one aspect. We cannot
+arrive at Shakespeare's whole dramatic way of looking at the world from
+his tragedies alone, as we can arrive at Milton's way of regarding
+things, or at Wordsworth's or at Shelley's, by examining almost any one
+of their important works. Speaking very broadly, one may say that these
+poets at their best always look at things in one light; but _Hamlet_ and
+_Henry IV._ and _Cymbeline_ reflect things from quite distinct
+positions, and Shakespeare's whole dramatic view is not to be identified
+with any one of these reflections. And, in the second place, I may
+repeat that in these lectures, at any rate for the most part, we are to
+be content with his _dramatic_ view, and are not to ask whether it
+corresponded exactly with his opinions or creed outside his poetry--the
+opinions or creed of the being whom we sometimes oddly call 'Shakespeare
+the man.' It does not seem likely that outside his poetry he was a very
+simple-minded Catholic or Protestant or Atheist, as some have
+maintained; but we cannot be sure, as with those other poets we can,
+that in his works he expressed his deepest and most cherished
+convictions on ultimate questions, or even that he had any. And in his
+dramatic conceptions there is enough to occupy us.
+
+
+1
+
+In approaching our subject it will be best, without attempting to
+shorten the path by referring to famous theories of the drama, to start
+directly from the facts, and to collect from them gradually an idea of
+Shakespearean Tragedy. And first, to begin from the outside, such a
+tragedy brings before us a considerable number of persons (many more
+than the persons in a Greek play, unless the members of the Chorus are
+reckoned among them); but it is pre-eminently the story of one person,
+the 'hero,'[1] or at most of two, the 'hero' and 'heroine.' Moreover, it
+is only in the love-tragedies, _Romeo and Juliet_ and _Antony and
+Cleopatra_, that the heroine is as much the centre of the action as the
+hero. The rest, including _Macbeth_, are single stars. So that, having
+noticed the peculiarity of these two dramas, we may henceforth, for the
+sake of brevity, ignore it, and may speak of the tragic story as being
+concerned primarily with one person.
+
+The story, next, leads up to, and includes, the _death_ of the hero. On
+the one hand (whatever may be true of tragedy elsewhere), no play at the
+end of which the hero remains alive is, in the full Shakespearean sense,
+a tragedy; and we no longer class _Troilus and Cressida_ or _Cymbeline_
+as such, as did the editors of the Folio. On the other hand, the story
+depicts also the troubled part of the hero's life which precedes and
+leads up to his death; and an instantaneous death occurring by
+'accident' in the midst of prosperity would not suffice for it. It is,
+in fact, essentially a tale of suffering and calamity conducting to
+death.
+
+The suffering and calamity are, moreover, exceptional. They befall a
+conspicuous person. They are themselves of some striking kind. They are
+also, as a rule, unexpected, and contrasted with previous happiness or
+glory. A tale, for example, of a man slowly worn to death by disease,
+poverty, little cares, sordid vices, petty persecutions, however piteous
+or dreadful it might be, would not be tragic in the Shakespearean sense.
+
+Such exceptional suffering and calamity, then, affecting the hero,
+and--we must now add--generally extending far and wide beyond him, so as
+to make the whole scene a scene of woe, are an essential ingredient in
+tragedy and a chief source of the tragic emotions, and especially of
+pity. But the proportions of this ingredient, and the direction taken by
+tragic pity, will naturally vary greatly. Pity, for example, has a much
+larger part in _King Lear_ than in _Macbeth_, and is directed in the one
+case chiefly to the hero, in the other chiefly to minor characters.
+
+Let us now pause for a moment on the ideas we have so far reached. They
+would more than suffice to describe the whole tragic fact as it
+presented itself to the mediaeval mind. To the mediaeval mind a tragedy
+meant a narrative rather than a play, and its notion of the matter of
+this narrative may readily be gathered from Dante or, still better, from
+Chaucer. Chaucer's _Monk's Tale_ is a series of what he calls
+'tragedies'; and this means in fact a series of tales _de Casibus
+Illustrium Virorum_,--stories of the Falls of Illustrious Men, such as
+Lucifer, Adam, Hercules and Nebuchadnezzar. And the Monk ends the tale
+of Croesus thus:
+
+     Anhanged was Cresus, the proude kyng;
+     His roial trone myghte hym nat availle.
+     Tragedie is noon oother maner thyng,
+     Ne kan in syngyng crie ne biwaille
+     But for that Fortune alwey wole assaile
+     With unwar strook the regnes that been proude;
+     For whan men trusteth hire, thanne wol she faille,
+     And covere hire brighte face with a clowde.
+
+A total reverse of fortune, coming unawares upon a man who 'stood in
+high degree,' happy and apparently secure,--such was the tragic fact to
+the mediaeval mind. It appealed strongly to common human sympathy and
+pity; it startled also another feeling, that of fear. It frightened men
+and awed them. It made them feel that man is blind and helpless, the
+plaything of an inscrutable power, called by the name of Fortune or some
+other name,--a power which appears to smile on him for a little, and
+then on a sudden strikes him down in his pride.
+
+Shakespeare's idea of the tragic fact is larger than this idea and goes
+beyond it; but it includes it, and it is worth while to observe the
+identity of the two in a certain point which is often ignored. Tragedy
+with Shakespeare is concerned always with persons of 'high degree';
+often with kings or princes; if not, with leaders in the state like
+Coriolanus, Brutus, Antony; at the least, as in _Romeo and Juliet_, with
+members of great houses, whose quarrels are of public moment. There is a
+decided difference here between _Othello_ and our three other tragedies,
+but it is not a difference of kind. Othello himself is no mere private
+person; he is the General of the Republic. At the beginning we see him
+in the Council-Chamber of the Senate. The consciousness of his high
+position never leaves him. At the end, when he is determined to live no
+longer, he is as anxious as Hamlet not to be misjudged by the great
+world, and his last speech begins,
+
+     Soft you; a word or two before you go.
+     I have done the state some service, and they know it.[2]
+
+And this characteristic of Shakespeare's tragedies, though not the most
+vital, is neither external nor unimportant. The saying that every
+death-bed is the scene of the fifth act of a tragedy has its meaning,
+but it would not be true if the word 'tragedy' bore its dramatic sense.
+The pangs of despised love and the anguish of remorse, we say, are the
+same in a peasant and a prince; but, not to insist that they cannot be
+so when the prince is really a prince, the story of the prince, the
+triumvir, or the general, has a greatness and dignity of its own. His
+fate affects the welfare of a whole nation or empire; and when he falls
+suddenly from the height of earthly greatness to the dust, his fall
+produces a sense of contrast, of the powerlessness of man, and of the
+omnipotence--perhaps the caprice--of Fortune or Fate, which no tale of
+private life can possibly rival.
+
+Such feelings are constantly evoked by Shakespeare's tragedies,--again
+in varying degrees. Perhaps they are the very strongest of the emotions
+awakened by the early tragedy of _Richard II._, where they receive a
+concentrated expression in Richard's famous speech about the antic
+Death, who sits in the hollow crown
+
+     That rounds the mortal temples of a king,
+
+grinning at his pomp, watching till his vanity and his fancied security
+have wholly encased him round, and then coming and boring with a little
+pin through his castle wall. And these feelings, though their
+predominance is subdued in the mightiest tragedies, remain powerful
+there. In the figure of the maddened Lear we see
+
+     A sight most pitiful in the meanest wretch,
+     Past speaking of in a king;
+
+and if we would realise the truth in this matter we cannot do better
+than compare with the effect of _King Lear_ the effect of Tourgenief's
+parallel and remarkable tale of peasant life, _A King Lear of the
+Steppes_.
+
+
+2
+
+A Shakespearean tragedy as so far considered may be called a story of
+exceptional calamity leading to the death of a man in high estate. But
+it is clearly much more than this, and we have now to regard it from
+another side. No amount of calamity which merely befell a man,
+descending from the clouds like lightning, or stealing from the darkness
+like pestilence, could alone provide the substance of its story. Job was
+the greatest of all the children of the east, and his afflictions were
+well-nigh more than he could bear; but even if we imagined them wearing
+him to death, that would not make his story tragic. Nor yet would it
+become so, in the Shakespearean sense, if the fire, and the great wind
+from the wilderness, and the torments of his flesh were conceived as
+sent by a supernatural power, whether just or malignant. The calamities
+of tragedy do not simply happen, nor are they sent; they proceed mainly
+from actions, and those the actions of men.
+
+We see a number of human beings placed in certain circumstances; and we
+see, arising from the co-operation of their characters in these
+circumstances, certain actions. These actions beget others, and these
+others beget others again, until this series of inter-connected deeds
+leads by an apparently inevitable sequence to a catastrophe. The effect
+of such a series on imagination is to make us regard the sufferings
+which accompany it, and the catastrophe in which it ends, not only or
+chiefly as something which happens to the persons concerned, but equally
+as something which is caused by them. This at least may be said of the
+principal persons, and, among them, of the hero, who always contributes
+in some measure to the disaster in which he perishes.
+
+This second aspect of tragedy evidently differs greatly from the first.
+Men, from this point of view, appear to us primarily as agents,
+'themselves the authors of their proper woe'; and our fear and pity,
+though they will not cease or diminish, will be modified accordingly. We
+are now to consider this second aspect, remembering that it too is only
+one aspect, and additional to the first, not a substitute for it.
+
+The 'story' or 'action' of a Shakespearean tragedy does not consist, of
+course, solely of human actions or deeds; but the deeds are the
+predominant factor. And these deeds are, for the most part, actions in
+the full sense of the word; not things done ''tween asleep and wake,'
+but acts or omissions thoroughly expressive of the doer,--characteristic
+deeds. The centre of the tragedy, therefore, may be said with equal
+truth to lie in action issuing from character, or in character issuing
+in action.
+
+Shakespeare's main interest lay here. To say that it lay in _mere_
+character, or was a psychological interest, would be a great mistake,
+for he was dramatic to the tips of his fingers. It is possible to find
+places where he has given a certain indulgence to his love of poetry,
+and even to his turn for general reflections; but it would be very
+difficult, and in his later tragedies perhaps impossible, to detect
+passages where he has allowed such freedom to the interest in character
+apart from action. But for the opposite extreme, for the abstraction of
+mere 'plot' (which is a very different thing from the tragic 'action'),
+for the kind of interest which predominates in a novel like _The Woman
+in White_, it is clear that he cared even less. I do not mean that this
+interest is absent from his dramas; but it is subordinate to others, and
+is so interwoven with them that we are rarely conscious of it apart, and
+rarely feel in any great strength the half-intellectual, half-nervous
+excitement of following an ingenious complication. What we do feel
+strongly, as a tragedy advances to its close, is that the calamities and
+catastrophe follow inevitably from the deeds of men, and that the main
+source of these deeds is character. The dictum that, with Shakespeare,
+'character is destiny' is no doubt an exaggeration, and one that may
+mislead (for many of his tragic personages, if they had not met with
+peculiar circumstances, would have escaped a tragic end, and might even
+have lived fairly untroubled lives); but it is the exaggeration of a
+vital truth.
+
+This truth, with some of its qualifications, will appear more clearly if
+we now go on to ask what elements are to be found in the 'story' or
+'action,' occasionally or frequently, beside the characteristic deeds,
+and the sufferings and circumstances, of the persons. I will refer to
+three of these additional factors.
+
+(_a_) Shakespeare, occasionally and for reasons which need not be
+discussed here, represents abnormal conditions of mind; insanity, for
+example, somnambulism, hallucinations. And deeds issuing from these are
+certainly not what we called deeds in the fullest sense, deeds
+expressive of character. No; but these abnormal conditions are never
+introduced as the origin of deeds of any dramatic moment. Lady Macbeth's
+sleep-walking has no influence whatever on the events that follow it.
+Macbeth did not murder Duncan because he saw a dagger in the air: he saw
+the dagger because he was about to murder Duncan. Lear's insanity is not
+the cause of a tragic conflict any more than Ophelia's; it is, like
+Ophelia's, the result of a conflict; and in both cases the effect is
+mainly pathetic. If Lear were really mad when he divided his kingdom, if
+Hamlet were really mad at any time in the story, they would cease to be
+tragic characters.
+
+(_b_) Shakespeare also introduces the supernatural into some of his
+tragedies; he introduces ghosts, and witches who have supernatural
+knowledge. This supernatural element certainly cannot in most cases, if
+in any, be explained away as an illusion in the mind of one of the
+characters. And further, it does contribute to the action, and is in
+more than one instance an indispensable part of it: so that to describe
+human character, with circumstances, as always the _sole_ motive force
+in this action would be a serious error. But the supernatural is always
+placed in the closest relation with character. It gives a confirmation
+and a distinct form to inward movements already present and exerting an
+influence; to the sense of failure in Brutus, to the stifled workings of
+conscience in Richard, to the half-formed thought or the horrified
+memory of guilt in Macbeth, to suspicion in Hamlet. Moreover, its
+influence is never of a compulsive kind. It forms no more than an
+element, however important, in the problem which the hero has to face;
+and we are never allowed to feel that it has removed his capacity or
+responsibility for dealing with this problem. So far indeed are we from
+feeling this, that many readers run to the opposite extreme, and openly
+or privately regard the supernatural as having nothing to do with the
+real interest of the play.
+
+(_c_) Shakespeare, lastly, in most of his tragedies allows to 'chance'
+or 'accident' an appreciable influence at some point in the action.
+Chance or accident here will be found, I think, to mean any occurrence
+(not supernatural, of course) which enters the dramatic sequence neither
+from the agency of a character, nor from the obvious surrounding
+circumstances.[3] It may be called an accident, in this sense, that
+Romeo never got the Friar's message about the potion, and that Juliet
+did not awake from her long sleep a minute sooner; an accident that
+Edgar arrived at the prison just too late to save Cordelia's life; an
+accident that Desdemona dropped her handkerchief at the most fatal of
+moments; an accident that the pirate ship attacked Hamlet's ship, so
+that he was able to return forthwith to Denmark. Now this operation of
+accident is a fact, and a prominent fact, of human life. To exclude it
+_wholly_ from tragedy, therefore, would be, we may say, to fail in
+truth. And, besides, it is not merely a fact. That men may start a
+course of events but can neither calculate nor control it, is a _tragic_
+fact. The dramatist may use accident so as to make us feel this; and
+there are also other dramatic uses to which it may be put. Shakespeare
+accordingly admits it. On the other hand, any _large_ admission of
+chance into the tragic sequence[4] would certainly weaken, and might
+destroy, the sense of the causal connection of character, deed, and
+catastrophe. And Shakespeare really uses it very sparingly. We seldom
+find ourselves exclaiming, 'What an unlucky accident!' I believe most
+readers would have to search painfully for instances. It is, further,
+frequently easy to see the dramatic intention of an accident; and some
+things which look like accidents have really a connection with
+character, and are therefore not in the full sense accidents. Finally, I
+believe it will be found that almost all the prominent accidents occur
+when the action is well advanced and the impression of the causal
+sequence is too firmly fixed to be impaired.
+
+Thus it appears that these three elements in the 'action' are
+subordinate, while the dominant factor consists in deeds which issue
+from character. So that, by way of summary, we may now alter our first
+statement, 'A tragedy is a story of exceptional calamity leading to the
+death of a man in high estate,' and we may say instead (what in its turn
+is one-sided, though less so), that the story is one of human actions
+producing exceptional calamity and ending in the death of such a man.[5]
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Before we leave the 'action,' however, there is another question that
+may usefully be asked. Can we define this 'action' further by describing
+it as a conflict?
+
+The frequent use of this idea in discussions on tragedy is ultimately
+due, I suppose, to the influence of Hegel's theory on the subject,
+certainly the most important theory since Aristotle's. But Hegel's view
+of the tragic conflict is not only unfamiliar to English readers and
+difficult to expound shortly, but it had its origin in reflections on
+Greek tragedy and, as Hegel was well aware, applies only imperfectly to
+the works of Shakespeare.[6] I shall, therefore, confine myself to the
+idea of conflict in its more general form. In this form it is obviously
+suitable to Shakespearean tragedy; but it is vague, and I will try to
+make it more precise by putting the question, Who are the combatants in
+this conflict?
+
+Not seldom the conflict may quite naturally be conceived as lying
+between two persons, of whom the hero is one; or, more fully, as lying
+between two parties or groups, in one of which the hero is the leading
+figure. Or if we prefer to speak (as we may quite well do if we know
+what we are about) of the passions, tendencies, ideas, principles,
+forces, which animate these persons or groups, we may say that two of
+such passions or ideas, regarded as animating two persons or groups, are
+the combatants. The love of Romeo and Juliet is in conflict with the
+hatred of their houses, represented by various other characters. The
+cause of Brutus and Cassius struggles with that of Julius, Octavius and
+Antony. In _Richard II._ the King stands on one side, Bolingbroke and
+his party on the other. In _Macbeth_ the hero and heroine are opposed to
+the representatives of Duncan. In all these cases the great majority of
+the _dramatis personae_ fall without difficulty into antagonistic
+groups, and the conflict between these groups ends with the defeat of
+the hero.
+
+Yet one cannot help feeling that in at least one of these cases,
+_Macbeth_, there is something a little external in this way of looking
+at the action. And when we come to some other plays this feeling
+increases. No doubt most of the characters in _Hamlet_, _King Lear_,
+_Othello_, or _Antony and Cleopatra_ can be arranged in opposed
+groups;[7] and no doubt there is a conflict; and yet it seems misleading
+to describe this conflict as one _between these groups_. It cannot be
+simply this. For though Hamlet and the King are mortal foes, yet that
+which engrosses our interest and dwells in our memory at least as much
+as the conflict between them, is the conflict _within_ one of them. And
+so it is, though not in the same degree, with _Antony and Cleopatra_ and
+even with _Othello_; and, in fact, in a certain measure, it is so with
+nearly all the tragedies. There is an outward conflict of persons and
+groups, there is also a conflict of forces in the hero's soul; and even
+in _Julius Caesar_ and _Macbeth_ the interest of the former can hardly
+be said to exceed that of the latter.
+
+The truth is, that the type of tragedy in which the hero opposes to a
+hostile force an undivided soul, is not the Shakespearean type. The
+souls of those who contend with the hero may be thus undivided; they
+generally are; but, as a rule, the hero, though he pursues his fated
+way, is, at least at some point in the action, and sometimes at many,
+torn by an inward struggle; and it is frequently at such points that
+Shakespeare shows his most extraordinary power. If further we compare
+the earlier tragedies with the later, we find that it is in the latter,
+the maturest works, that this inward struggle is most emphasised. In the
+last of them, _Coriolanus_, its interest completely eclipses towards the
+close of the play that of the outward conflict. _Romeo and Juliet_,
+_Richard III._, _Richard II._, where the hero contends with an outward
+force, but comparatively little with himself, are all early plays.
+
+If we are to include the outer and the inner struggle in a conception
+more definite than that of conflict in general, we must employ some such
+phrase as 'spiritual force.' This will mean whatever forces act in the
+human spirit, whether good or evil, whether personal passion or
+impersonal principle; doubts, desires, scruples, ideas--whatever can
+animate, shake, possess, and drive a man's soul. In a Shakespearean
+tragedy some such forces are shown in conflict. They are shown acting in
+men and generating strife between them. They are also shown, less
+universally, but quite as characteristically, generating disturbance and
+even conflict in the soul of the hero. Treasonous ambition in Macbeth
+collides with loyalty and patriotism in Macduff and Malcolm: here is the
+outward conflict. But these powers or principles equally collide in the
+soul of Macbeth himself: here is the inner. And neither by itself could
+make the tragedy.[8]
+
+We shall see later the importance of this idea. Here we need only
+observe that the notion of tragedy as a conflict emphasises the fact
+that action is the centre of the story, while the concentration of
+interest, in the greater plays, on the inward struggle emphasises the
+fact that this action is essentially the expression of character.
+
+
+3
+
+Let us turn now from the 'action' to the central figure in it; and,
+ignoring the characteristics which distinguish the heroes from one
+another, let us ask whether they have any common qualities which appear
+to be essential to the tragic effect.
+
+One they certainly have. They are exceptional beings. We have seen
+already that the hero, with Shakespeare, is a person of high degree or
+of public importance, and that his actions or sufferings are of an
+unusual kind. But this is not all. His nature also is exceptional, and
+generally raises him in some respect much above the average level of
+humanity. This does not mean that he is an eccentric or a paragon.
+Shakespeare never drew monstrosities of virtue; some of his heroes are
+far from being 'good'; and if he drew eccentrics he gave them a
+subordinate position in the plot. His tragic characters are made of the
+stuff we find within ourselves and within the persons who surround them.
+But, by an intensification of the life which they share with others,
+they are raised above them; and the greatest are raised so far that, if
+we fully realise all that is implied in their words and actions, we
+become conscious that in real life we have known scarcely any one
+resembling them. Some, like Hamlet and Cleopatra, have genius. Others,
+like Othello, Lear, Macbeth, Coriolanus, are built on the grand scale;
+and desire, passion, or will attains in them a terrible force. In almost
+all we observe a marked one-sidedness, a predisposition in some
+particular direction; a total incapacity, in certain circumstances, of
+resisting the force which draws in this direction; a fatal tendency to
+identify the whole being with one interest, object, passion, or habit of
+mind. This, it would seem, is, for Shakespeare, the fundamental tragic
+trait. It is present in his early heroes, Romeo and Richard II.,
+infatuated men, who otherwise rise comparatively little above the
+ordinary level. It is a fatal gift, but it carries with it a touch of
+greatness; and when there is joined to it nobility of mind, or genius,
+or immense force, we realise the full power and reach of the soul, and
+the conflict in which it engages acquires that magnitude which stirs not
+only sympathy and pity, but admiration, terror, and awe.
+
+The easiest way to bring home to oneself the nature of the tragic
+character is to compare it with a character of another kind. Dramas like
+_Cymbeline_ and the _Winter's Tale_, which might seem destined to end
+tragically, but actually end otherwise, owe their happy ending largely
+to the fact that the principal characters fail to reach tragic
+dimensions. And, conversely, if these persons were put in the place of
+the tragic heroes, the dramas in which they appeared would cease to be
+tragedies. Posthumus would never have acted as Othello did; Othello, on
+his side, would have met Iachimo's challenge with something more than
+words. If, like Posthumus, he had remained convinced of his wife's
+infidelity, he would not have repented her execution; if, like Leontes,
+he had come to believe that by an unjust accusation he had caused her
+death, he would never have lived on, like Leontes. In the same way the
+villain Iachimo has no touch of tragic greatness. But Iago comes nearer
+to it, and if Iago had slandered Imogen and had supposed his slanders to
+have led to her death, he certainly would not have turned melancholy and
+wished to die. One reason why the end of the _Merchant of Venice_ fails
+to satisfy us is that Shylock is a tragic character, and that we cannot
+believe in his accepting his defeat and the conditions imposed on him.
+This was a case where Shakespeare's imagination ran away with him, so
+that he drew a figure with which the destined pleasant ending would not
+harmonise.
+
+In the circumstances where we see the hero placed, his tragic trait,
+which is also his greatness, is fatal to him. To meet these
+circumstances something is required which a smaller man might have
+given, but which the hero cannot give. He errs, by action or omission;
+and his error, joining with other causes, brings on him ruin. This is
+always so with Shakespeare. As we have seen, the idea of the tragic hero
+as a being destroyed simply and solely by external forces is quite alien
+to him; and not less so is the idea of the hero as contributing to his
+destruction only by acts in which we see no flaw. But the fatal
+imperfection or error, which is never absent, is of different kinds and
+degrees. At one extreme stands the excess and precipitancy of Romeo,
+which scarcely, if at all, diminish our regard for him; at the other the
+murderous ambition of Richard III. In most cases the tragic error
+involves no conscious breach of right; in some (_e.g._ that of Brutus or
+Othello) it is accompanied by a full conviction of right. In Hamlet
+there is a painful consciousness that duty is being neglected; in Antony
+a clear knowledge that the worse of two courses is being pursued; but
+Richard and Macbeth are the only heroes who do what they themselves
+recognise to be villainous. It is important to observe that Shakespeare
+does admit such heroes,[9] and also that he appears to feel, and exerts
+himself to meet, the difficulty that arises from their admission. The
+difficulty is that the spectator must desire their defeat and even their
+destruction; and yet this desire, and the satisfaction of it, are not
+tragic feelings. Shakespeare gives to Richard therefore a power which
+excites astonishment, and a courage which extorts admiration. He gives
+to Macbeth a similar, though less extraordinary, greatness, and adds to
+it a conscience so terrifying in its warnings and so maddening in its
+reproaches that the spectacle of inward torment compels a horrified
+sympathy and awe which balance, at the least, the desire for the hero's
+ruin.
+
+The tragic hero with Shakespeare, then, need not be 'good,' though
+generally he is 'good' and therefore at once wins sympathy in his error.
+But it is necessary that he should have so much of greatness that in his
+error and fall we may be vividly conscious of the possibilities of human
+nature.[10] Hence, in the first place, a Shakespearean tragedy is never,
+like some miscalled tragedies, depressing. No one ever closes the book
+with the feeling that man is a poor mean creature. He may be wretched
+and he may be awful, but he is not small. His lot may be heart-rending
+and mysterious, but it is not contemptible. The most confirmed of cynics
+ceases to be a cynic while he reads these plays. And with this greatness
+of the tragic hero (which is not always confined to him) is connected,
+secondly, what I venture to describe as the centre of the tragic
+impression. This central feeling is the impression of waste. With
+Shakespeare, at any rate, the pity and fear which are stirred by the
+tragic story seem to unite with, and even to merge in, a profound sense
+of sadness and mystery, which is due to this impression of waste. 'What
+a piece of work is man,' we cry; 'so much more beautiful and so much
+more terrible than we knew! Why should he be so if this beauty and
+greatness only tortures itself and throws itself away?' We seem to have
+before us a type of the mystery of the whole world, the tragic fact
+which extends far beyond the limits of tragedy. Everywhere, from the
+crushed rocks beneath our feet to the soul of man, we see power,
+intelligence, life and glory, which astound us and seem to call for our
+worship. And everywhere we see them perishing, devouring one another and
+destroying themselves, often with dreadful pain, as though they came
+into being for no other end. Tragedy is the typical form of this
+mystery, because that greatness of soul which it exhibits oppressed,
+conflicting and destroyed, is the highest existence in our view. It
+forces the mystery upon us, and it makes us realise so vividly the worth
+of that which is wasted that we cannot possibly seek comfort in the
+reflection that all is vanity.
+
+
+4
+
+In this tragic world, then, where individuals, however great they may be
+and however decisive their actions may appear, are so evidently not the
+ultimate power, what is this power? What account can we give of it which
+will correspond with the imaginative impressions we receive? This will
+be our final question.
+
+The variety of the answers given to this question shows how difficult it
+is. And the difficulty has many sources. Most people, even among those
+who know Shakespeare well and come into real contact with his mind, are
+inclined to isolate and exaggerate some one aspect of the tragic fact.
+Some are so much influenced by their own habitual beliefs that they
+import them more or less into their interpretation of every author who
+is 'sympathetic' to them. And even where neither of these causes of
+error appears to operate, another is present from which it is probably
+impossible wholly to escape. What I mean is this. Any answer we give to
+the question proposed ought to correspond with, or to represent in terms
+of the understanding, our imaginative and emotional experience in
+reading the tragedies. We have, of course, to do our best by study and
+effort to make this experience true to Shakespeare; but, that done to
+the best of our ability, the experience is the matter to be interpreted,
+and the test by which the interpretation must be tried. But it is
+extremely hard to make out exactly what this experience is, because, in
+the very effort to make it out, our reflecting mind, full of everyday
+ideas, is always tending to transform it by the application of these
+ideas, and so to elicit a result which, instead of representing the
+fact, conventionalises it. And the consequence is not only mistaken
+theories; it is that many a man will declare that he feels in reading a
+tragedy what he never really felt, while he fails to recognise what he
+actually did feel. It is not likely that we shall escape all these
+dangers in our effort to find an answer to the question regarding the
+tragic world and the ultimate power in it.
+
+It will be agreed, however, first, that this question must not be
+answered in 'religious' language. For although this or that _dramatis
+persona_ may speak of gods or of God, of evil spirits or of Satan, of
+heaven and of hell, and although the poet may show us ghosts from
+another world, these ideas do not materially influence his
+representation of life, nor are they used to throw light on the mystery
+of its tragedy. The Elizabethan drama was almost wholly secular; and
+while Shakespeare was writing he practically confined his view to the
+world of non-theological observation and thought, so that he represents
+it substantially in one and the same way whether the period of the story
+is pre-Christian or Christian.[11] He looked at this 'secular' world
+most intently and seriously; and he painted it, we cannot but conclude,
+with entire fidelity, without the wish to enforce an opinion of his own,
+and, in essentials, without regard to anyone's hopes, fears, or beliefs.
+His greatness is largely due to this fidelity in a mind of extraordinary
+power; and if, as a private person, he had a religious faith, his tragic
+view can hardly have been in contradiction with this faith, but must
+have been included in it, and supplemented, not abolished, by additional
+ideas.
+
+Two statements, next, may at once be made regarding the tragic fact as
+he represents it: one, that it is and remains to us something piteous,
+fearful and mysterious; the other, that the representation of it does
+not leave us crushed, rebellious or desperate. These statements will be
+accepted, I believe, by any reader who is in touch with Shakespeare's
+mind and can observe his own. Indeed such a reader is rather likely to
+complain that they are painfully obvious. But if they are true as well
+as obvious, something follows from them in regard to our present
+question.
+
+From the first it follows that the ultimate power in the tragic world is
+not adequately described as a law or order which we can see to be just
+and benevolent,--as, in that sense, a 'moral order': for in that case
+the spectacle of suffering and waste could not seem to us so fearful and
+mysterious as it does. And from the second it follows that this ultimate
+power is not adequately described as a fate, whether malicious and
+cruel, or blind and indifferent to human happiness and goodness: for in
+that case the spectacle would leave us desperate or rebellious. Yet one
+or other of these two ideas will be found to govern most accounts of
+Shakespeare's tragic view or world. These accounts isolate and
+exaggerate single aspects, either the aspect of action or that of
+suffering; either the close and unbroken connection of character, will,
+deed and catastrophe, which, taken alone, shows the individual simply as
+sinning against, or failing to conform to, the moral order and drawing
+his just doom on his own head; or else that pressure of outward forces,
+that sway of accident, and those blind and agonised struggles, which,
+taken alone, show him as the mere victim of some power which cares
+neither for his sins nor for his pain. Such views contradict one
+another, and no third view can unite them; but the several aspects from
+whose isolation and exaggeration they spring are both present in the
+fact, and a view which would be true to the fact and to the whole of our
+imaginative experience must in some way combine these aspects.
+
+Let us begin, then, with the idea of fatality and glance at some of the
+impressions which give rise to it, without asking at present whether
+this idea is their natural or fitting expression. There can be no doubt
+that they do arise and that they ought to arise. If we do not feel at
+times that the hero is, in some sense, a doomed man; that he and others
+drift struggling to destruction like helpless creatures borne on an
+irresistible flood towards a cataract; that, faulty as they may be,
+their fault is far from being the sole or sufficient cause of all they
+suffer; and that the power from which they cannot escape is relentless
+and immovable, we have failed to receive an essential part of the full
+tragic effect.
+
+The sources of these impressions are various, and I will refer only to a
+few. One of them is put into words by Shakespeare himself when he makes
+the player-king in _Hamlet_ say:
+
+     Our thoughts are ours, their ends none of our own;
+
+'their ends' are the issues or outcomes of our thoughts, and these, says
+the speaker, are not our own. The tragic world is a world of action, and
+action is the translation of thought into reality. We see men and women
+confidently attempting it. They strike into the existing order of things
+in pursuance of their ideas. But what they achieve is not what they
+intended; it is terribly unlike it. They understand nothing, we say to
+ourselves, of the world on which they operate. They fight blindly in the
+dark, and the power that works through them makes them the instrument of
+a design which is not theirs. They act freely, and yet their action
+binds them hand and foot. And it makes no difference whether they meant
+well or ill. No one could mean better than Brutus, but he contrives
+misery for his country and death for himself. No one could mean worse
+than Iago, and he too is caught in the web he spins for others. Hamlet,
+recoiling from the rough duty of revenge, is pushed into
+blood-guiltiness he never dreamed of, and forced at last on the revenge
+he could not will. His adversary's murders, and no less his adversary's
+remorse, bring about the opposite of what they sought. Lear follows an
+old man's whim, half generous, half selfish; and in a moment it looses
+all the powers of darkness upon him. Othello agonises over an empty
+fiction, and, meaning to execute solemn justice, butchers innocence and
+strangles love. They understand themselves no better than the world
+about them. Coriolanus thinks that his heart is iron, and it melts like
+snow before a fire. Lady Macbeth, who thought she could dash out her own
+child's brains, finds herself hounded to death by the smell of a
+stranger's blood. Her husband thinks that to gain a crown he would jump
+the life to come, and finds that the crown has brought him all the
+horrors of that life. Everywhere, in this tragic world, man's thought,
+translated into act, is transformed into the opposite of itself. His
+act, the movement of a few ounces of matter in a moment of time, becomes
+a monstrous flood which spreads over a kingdom. And whatsoever he dreams
+of doing, he achieves that which he least dreamed of, his own
+destruction.
+
+All this makes us feel the blindness and helplessness of man. Yet by
+itself it would hardly suggest the idea of fate, because it shows man as
+in some degree, however slight, the cause of his own undoing. But other
+impressions come to aid it. It is aided by everything which makes us
+feel that a man is, as we say, terribly unlucky; and of this there is,
+even in Shakespeare, not a little. Here come in some of the accidents
+already considered, Juliet's waking from her trance a minute too late,
+Desdemona's loss of her handkerchief at the only moment when the loss
+would have mattered, that insignificant delay which cost Cordelia's
+life. Again, men act, no doubt, in accordance with their characters; but
+what is it that brings them just the one problem which is fatal to them
+and would be easy to another, and sometimes brings it to them just when
+they are least fitted to face it? How is it that Othello comes to be the
+companion of the one man in the world who is at once able enough, brave
+enough, and vile enough to ensnare him? By what strange fatality does it
+happen that Lear has such daughters and Cordelia such sisters? Even
+character itself contributes to these feelings of fatality. How could
+men escape, we cry, such vehement propensities as drive Romeo, Antony,
+Coriolanus, to their doom? And why is it that a man's virtues help to
+destroy him, and that his weakness or defect is so intertwined with
+everything that is admirable in him that we can hardly separate them
+even in imagination?
+
+If we find in Shakespeare's tragedies the source of impressions like
+these, it is important, on the other hand, to notice what we do _not_
+find there. We find practically no trace of fatalism in its more
+primitive, crude and obvious forms. Nothing, again, makes us think of
+the actions and sufferings of the persons as somehow arbitrarily fixed
+beforehand without regard to their feelings, thoughts and resolutions.
+Nor, I believe, are the facts ever so presented that it seems to us as
+if the supreme power, whatever it may be, had a special spite against a
+family or an individual. Neither, lastly, do we receive the impression
+(which, it must be observed, is not purely fatalistic) that a family,
+owing to some hideous crime or impiety in early days, is doomed in later
+days to continue a career of portentous calamities and sins.
+Shakespeare, indeed, does not appear to have taken much interest in
+heredity, or to have attached much importance to it. (See, however,
+'heredity' in the Index.)
+
+What, then, is this 'fate' which the impressions already considered lead
+us to describe as the ultimate power in the tragic world? It appears to
+be a mythological expression for the whole system or order, of which the
+individual characters form an inconsiderable and feeble part; which
+seems to determine, far more than they, their native dispositions and
+their circumstances, and, through these, their action; which is so vast
+and complex that they can scarcely at all understand it or control its
+workings; and which has a nature so definite and fixed that whatever
+changes take place in it produce other changes inevitably and without
+regard to men's desires and regrets. And whether this system or order is
+best called by the name of fate or no,[12] it can hardly be denied that
+it does appear as the ultimate power in the tragic world, and that it
+has such characteristics as these. But the name 'fate' may be intended
+to imply something more--to imply that this order is a blank necessity,
+totally regardless alike of human weal and of the difference between
+good and evil or right and wrong. And such an implication many readers
+would at once reject. They would maintain, on the contrary, that this
+order shows characteristics of quite another kind from those which made
+us give it the name of fate, characteristics which certainly should not
+induce us to forget those others, but which would lead us to describe it
+as a moral order and its necessity as a moral necessity.
+
+
+5
+
+Let us turn, then, to this idea. It brings into the light those aspects
+of the tragic fact which the idea of fate throws into the shade. And the
+argument which leads to it in its simplest form may be stated briefly
+thus: 'Whatever may be said of accidents, circumstances and the like,
+human action is, after all, presented to us as the central fact in
+tragedy, and also as the main cause of the catastrophe. That necessity
+which so much impresses us is, after all, chiefly the necessary
+connection of actions and consequences. For these actions we, without
+even raising a question on the subject, hold the agents responsible; and
+the tragedy would disappear for us if we did not. The critical action
+is, in greater or less degree, wrong or bad. The catastrophe is, in the
+main, the return of this action on the head of the agent. It is an
+example of justice; and that order which, present alike within the
+agents and outside them, infallibly brings it about, is therefore just.
+The rigour of its justice is terrible, no doubt, for a tragedy is a
+terrible story; but, in spite of fear and pity, we acquiesce, because
+our sense of justice is satisfied.'
+
+Now, if this view is to hold good, the 'justice' of which it speaks must
+be at once distinguished from what is called 'poetic justice.' 'Poetic
+justice' means that prosperity and adversity are distributed in
+proportion to the merits of the agents. Such 'poetic justice' is in
+flagrant contradiction with the facts of life, and it is absent from
+Shakespeare's tragic picture of life; indeed, this very absence is a
+ground of constant complaint on the part of Dr. Johnson. [Greek:
+Drasanti pathein], 'the doer must suffer'--this we find in Shakespeare.
+We also find that villainy never remains victorious and prosperous at
+the last. But an assignment of amounts of happiness and misery, an
+assignment even of life and death, in proportion to merit, we do not
+find. No one who thinks of Desdemona and Cordelia; or who remembers that
+one end awaits Richard III. and Brutus, Macbeth and Hamlet; or who asks
+himself which suffered most, Othello or Iago; will ever accuse
+Shakespeare of representing the ultimate power as 'poetically' just.
+
+And we must go further. I venture to say that it is a mistake to use at
+all these terms of justice and merit or desert. And this for two
+reasons. In the first place, essential as it is to recognise the
+connection between act and consequence, and natural as it may seem in
+some cases (_e.g._ Macbeth's) to say that the doer only gets what he
+deserves, yet in very many cases to say this would be quite unnatural.
+We might not object to the statement that Lear deserved to suffer for
+his folly, selfishness and tyranny; but to assert that he deserved to
+suffer what he did suffer is to do violence not merely to language but
+to any healthy moral sense. It is, moreover, to obscure the tragic fact
+that the consequences of action cannot be limited to that which would
+appear to us to follow 'justly' from them. And, this being so, when we
+call the order of the tragic world just, we are either using the word in
+some vague and unexplained sense, or we are going beyond what is shown
+us of this order, and are appealing to faith.
+
+But, in the second place, the ideas of justice and desert are, it seems
+to me, in _all_ cases--even those of Richard III. and of Macbeth and
+Lady Macbeth--untrue to our imaginative experience. When we are immersed
+in a tragedy, we feel towards dispositions, actions, and persons such
+emotions as attraction and repulsion, pity, wonder, fear, horror,
+perhaps hatred; but we do not _judge_. This is a point of view which
+emerges only when, in reading a play, we slip, by our own fault or the
+dramatist's, from the tragic position, or when, in thinking about the
+play afterwards, we fall back on our everyday legal and moral notions.
+But tragedy does not belong, any more than religion belongs, to the
+sphere of these notions; neither does the imaginative attitude in
+presence of it. While we are in its world we watch what is, seeing that
+so it happened and must have happened, feeling that it is piteous,
+dreadful, awful, mysterious, but neither passing sentence on the agents,
+nor asking whether the behaviour of the ultimate power towards them is
+just. And, therefore, the use of such language in attempts to render our
+imaginative experience in terms of the understanding is, to say the
+least, full of danger.[13]
+
+Let us attempt then to re-state the idea that the ultimate power in the
+tragic world is a moral order. Let us put aside the ideas of justice and
+merit, and speak simply of good and evil. Let us understand by these
+words, primarily, moral good and evil, but also everything else in human
+beings which we take to be excellent or the reverse. Let us understand
+the statement that the ultimate power or order is 'moral' to mean that
+it does not show itself indifferent to good and evil, or equally
+favourable or unfavourable to both, but shows itself akin to good and
+alien from evil. And, understanding the statement thus, let us ask what
+grounds it has in the tragic fact as presented by Shakespeare.
+
+Here, as in dealing with the grounds on which the idea of fate rests, I
+choose only two or three out of many. And the most important is this. In
+Shakespearean tragedy the main source of the convulsion which produces
+suffering and death is never good: good contributes to this convulsion
+only from its tragic implication with its opposite in one and the same
+character. The main source, on the contrary, is in every case evil; and,
+what is more (though this seems to have been little noticed), it is in
+almost every case evil in the fullest sense, not mere imperfection but
+plain moral evil. The love of Romeo and Juliet conducts them to death
+only because of the senseless hatred of their houses. Guilty ambition,
+seconded by diabolic malice and issuing in murder, opens the action in
+_Macbeth_. Iago is the main source of the convulsion in _Othello_;
+Goneril, Regan and Edmund in _King Lear_. Even when this plain moral
+evil is not the obviously prime source within the play, it lies behind
+it: the situation with which Hamlet has to deal has been formed by
+adultery and murder. _Julius Caesar_ is the only tragedy in which one is
+even tempted to find an exception to this rule. And the inference is
+obvious. If it is chiefly evil that violently disturbs the order of the
+world, this order cannot be friendly to evil or indifferent between evil
+and good, any more than a body which is convulsed by poison is friendly
+to it or indifferent to the distinction between poison and food.
+
+Again, if we confine our attention to the hero, and to those cases where
+the gross and palpable evil is not in him but elsewhere, we find that
+the comparatively innocent hero still shows some marked imperfection or
+defect,--irresolution, precipitancy, pride, credulousness, excessive
+simplicity, excessive susceptibility to sexual emotions, and the like.
+These defects or imperfections are certainly, in the wide sense of the
+word, evil, and they contribute decisively to the conflict and
+catastrophe. And the inference is again obvious. The ultimate power
+which shows itself disturbed by this evil and reacts against it, must
+have a nature alien to it. Indeed its reaction is so vehement and
+'relentless' that it would seem to be bent on nothing short of good in
+perfection, and to be ruthless in its demand for it.
+
+To this must be added another fact, or another aspect of the same fact.
+Evil exhibits itself everywhere as something negative, barren,
+weakening, destructive, a principle of death. It isolates, disunites,
+and tends to annihilate not only its opposite but itself. That which
+keeps the evil man[14] prosperous, makes him succeed, even permits him
+to exist, is the good in him (I do not mean only the obviously 'moral'
+good). When the evil in him masters the good and has its way, it
+destroys other people through him, but it also destroys _him_. At the
+close of the struggle he has vanished, and has left behind him nothing
+that can stand. What remains is a family, a city, a country, exhausted,
+pale and feeble, but alive through the principle of good which animates
+it; and, within it, individuals who, if they have not the brilliance or
+greatness of the tragic character, still have won our respect and
+confidence. And the inference would seem clear. If existence in an order
+depends on good, and if the presence of evil is hostile to such
+existence, the inner being or soul of this order must be akin to good.
+
+These are aspects of the tragic world at least as clearly marked as
+those which, taken alone, suggest the idea of fate. And the idea which
+they in their turn, when taken alone, may suggest, is that of an order
+which does not indeed award 'poetic justice,' but which reacts through
+the necessity of its own 'moral' nature both against attacks made upon
+it and against failure to conform to it. Tragedy, on this view, is the
+exhibition of that convulsive reaction; and the fact that the spectacle
+does not leave us rebellious or desperate is due to a more or less
+distinct perception that the tragic suffering and death arise from
+collision, not with a fate or blank power, but with a moral power, a
+power akin to all that we admire and revere in the characters
+themselves. This perception produces something like a feeling of
+acquiescence in the catastrophe, though it neither leads us to pass
+judgment on the characters nor diminishes the pity, the fear, and the
+sense of waste, which their struggle, suffering and fall evoke. And,
+finally, this view seems quite able to do justice to those aspects of
+the tragic fact which give rise to the idea of fate. They would appear
+as various expressions of the fact that the moral order acts not
+capriciously or like a human being, but from the necessity of its
+nature, or, if we prefer the phrase, by general laws,--a necessity or
+law which of course knows no exception and is as 'ruthless' as fate.
+
+It is impossible to deny to this view a large measure of truth. And yet
+without some amendment it can hardly satisfy. For it does not include
+the whole of the facts, and therefore does not wholly correspond with
+the impressions they produce. Let it be granted that the system or order
+which shows itself omnipotent against individuals is, in the sense
+explained, moral. Still--at any rate for the eye of sight--the evil
+against which it asserts itself, and the persons whom this evil
+inhabits, are not really something outside the order, so that they can
+attack it or fail to conform to it; they are within it and a part of it.
+It itself produces them,--produces Iago as well as Desdemona, Iago's
+cruelty as well as Iago's courage. It is not poisoned, it poisons
+itself. Doubtless it shows by its violent reaction that the poison _is_
+poison, and that its health lies in good. But one significant fact
+cannot remove another, and the spectacle we witness scarcely warrants
+the assertion that the order is responsible for the good in Desdemona,
+but Iago for the evil in Iago. If we make this assertion we make it on
+grounds other than the facts as presented in Shakespeare's tragedies.
+
+Nor does the idea of a moral order asserting itself against attack or
+want of conformity answer in full to our feelings regarding the tragic
+character. We do not think of Hamlet merely as failing to meet its
+demand, of Antony as merely sinning against it, or even of Macbeth as
+simply attacking it. What we feel corresponds quite as much to the idea
+that they are _its_ parts, expressions, products; that in their defect
+or evil _it_ is untrue to its soul of goodness, and falls into conflict
+and collision with itself; that, in making them suffer and waste
+themselves, _it_ suffers and wastes itself; and that when, to save its
+life and regain peace from this intestinal struggle, it casts them out,
+it has lost a part of its own substance,--a part more dangerous and
+unquiet, but far more valuable and nearer to its heart, than that which
+remains,--a Fortinbras, a Malcolm, an Octavius. There is no tragedy in
+its expulsion of evil: the tragedy is that this involves the waste of
+good.
+
+Thus we are left at last with an idea showing two sides or aspects which
+we can neither separate nor reconcile. The whole or order against which
+the individual part shows itself powerless seems to be animated by a
+passion for perfection: we cannot otherwise explain its behaviour
+towards evil. Yet it appears to engender this evil within itself, and in
+its effort to overcome and expel it it is agonised with pain, and driven
+to mutilate its own substance and to lose not only evil but priceless
+good. That this idea, though very different from the idea of a blank
+fate, is no solution of the riddle of life is obvious; but why should we
+expect it to be such a solution? Shakespeare was not attempting to
+justify the ways of God to men, or to show the universe as a Divine
+Comedy. He was writing tragedy, and tragedy would not be tragedy if it
+were not a painful mystery. Nor can he be said even to point distinctly,
+like some writers of tragedy, in any direction where a solution might
+lie. We find a few references to gods or God, to the influence of the
+stars, to another life: some of them certainly, all of them perhaps,
+merely dramatic--appropriate to the person from whose lips they fall. A
+ghost comes from Purgatory to impart a secret out of the reach of its
+hearer--who presently meditates on the question whether the sleep of
+death is dreamless. Accidents once or twice remind us strangely of the
+words, 'There's a divinity that shapes our ends.' More important are
+other impressions. Sometimes from the very furnace of affliction a
+conviction seems borne to us that somehow, if we could see it, this
+agony counts as nothing against the heroism and love which appear in it
+and thrill our hearts. Sometimes we are driven to cry out that these
+mighty or heavenly spirits who perish are too great for the little space
+in which they move, and that they vanish not into nothingness but into
+freedom. Sometimes from these sources and from others comes a
+presentiment, formless but haunting and even profound, that all the fury
+of conflict, with its waste and woe, is less than half the truth, even
+an illusion, 'such stuff as dreams are made on.' But these faint and
+scattered intimations that the tragic world, being but a fragment of a
+whole beyond our vision, must needs be a contradiction and no ultimate
+truth, avail nothing to interpret the mystery. We remain confronted with
+the inexplicable fact, or the no less inexplicable appearance, of a
+world travailing for perfection, but bringing to birth, together with
+glorious good, an evil which it is able to overcome only by self-torture
+and self-waste. And this fact or appearance is tragedy.[15]
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[Footnote 1: _Julius Caesar_ is not an exception to this rule. Caesar,
+whose murder comes in the Third Act, is in a sense the dominating figure
+in the story, but Brutus is the 'hero.']
+
+[Footnote 2: _Timon of Athens_, we have seen, was probably not designed
+by Shakespeare, but even _Timon_ is no exception to the rule. The
+sub-plot is concerned with Alcibiades and his army, and Timon himself is
+treated by the Senate as a man of great importance. _Arden of Feversham_
+and _A Yorkshire Tragedy_ would certainly be exceptions to the rule; but
+I assume that neither of them is Shakespeare's; and if either is, it
+belongs to a different species from his admitted tragedies. See, on this
+species, Symonds, _Shakspere's Predecessors_, ch. xi.]
+
+[Footnote 3: Even a deed would, I think, be counted an 'accident,' if it
+were the deed of a very minor person whose character had not been
+indicated; because such a deed would not issue from the little world to
+which the dramatist had confined our attention.]
+
+[Footnote 4: Comedy stands in a different position. The tricks played by
+chance often form a principal part of the comic action.]
+
+[Footnote 5: It may be observed that the influence of the three elements
+just considered is to strengthen the tendency, produced by the
+sufferings considered first, to regard the tragic persons as passive
+rather than as agents.]
+
+[Footnote 6: An account of Hegel's view may be found in _Oxford Lectures
+on Poetry_.]
+
+[Footnote 7: The reader, however, will find considerable difficulty in
+placing some very important characters in these and other plays. I will
+give only two or three illustrations. Edgar is clearly not on the same
+side as Edmund, and yet it seems awkward to range him on Gloster's side
+when Gloster wishes to put him to death. Ophelia is in love with Hamlet,
+but how can she be said to be of Hamlet's party against the King and
+Polonius, or of their party against Hamlet? Desdemona worships Othello,
+yet it sounds odd to say that Othello is on the same side with a person
+whom he insults, strikes and murders.]
+
+[Footnote 8: I have given names to the 'spiritual forces' in _Macbeth_
+merely to illustrate the idea, and without any pretension to adequacy.
+Perhaps, in view of some interpretations of Shakespeare's plays, it will
+be as well to add that I do not dream of suggesting that in any of his
+dramas Shakespeare imagined two abstract principles or passions
+conflicting, and incorporated them in persons; or that there is any
+necessity for a reader to define for himself the particular forces which
+conflict in a given case.]
+
+[Footnote 9: Aristotle apparently would exclude them.]
+
+[Footnote 10: Richard II. is perhaps an exception, and I must confess
+that to me he is scarcely a tragic character, and that, if he is
+nevertheless a tragic figure, he is so only because his fall from
+prosperity to adversity is so great.]
+
+[Footnote 11: I say substantially; but the concluding remarks on
+_Hamlet_ will modify a little the statements above.]
+
+[Footnote 12: I have raised no objection to the use of the idea of fate,
+because it occurs so often both in conversation and in books about
+Shakespeare's tragedies that I must suppose it to be natural to many
+readers. Yet I doubt whether it would be so if Greek tragedy had never
+been written; and I must in candour confess that to me it does not often
+occur while I am reading, or when I have just read, a tragedy of
+Shakespeare. Wordsworth's lines, for example, about
+
+         poor humanity's afflicted will
+     Struggling in vain with ruthless destiny
+
+do not represent the impression I receive; much less do images which
+compare man to a puny creature helpless in the claws of a bird of prey.
+The reader should examine himself closely on this matter.]
+
+[Footnote 13: It is dangerous, I think, in reference to all really good
+tragedies, but I am dealing here only with Shakespeare's. In not a few
+Greek tragedies it is almost inevitable that we should think of justice
+and retribution, not only because the _dramatis personae_ often speak of
+them, but also because there is something casuistical about the tragic
+problem itself. The poet treats the story in such a way that the
+question, Is the hero doing right or wrong? is almost forced upon us.
+But this is not so with Shakespeare. _Julius Caesar_ is probably the
+only one of his tragedies in which the question suggests itself to us,
+and this is one of the reasons why that play has something of a classic
+air. Even here, if we ask the question, we have no doubt at all about
+the answer.]
+
+[Footnote 14: It is most essential to remember that an evil man is much
+more than the evil in him. I may add that in this paragraph I have, for
+the sake of clearness, considered evil in its most pronounced form; but
+what is said would apply, _mutatis mutandis_, to evil as imperfection,
+etc.]
+
+[Footnote 15: Partly in order not to anticipate later passages, I
+abstained from treating fully here the question why we feel, at the
+death of the tragic hero, not only pain but also reconciliation and
+sometimes even exultation. As I cannot at present make good this defect,
+I would ask the reader to refer to the word _Reconciliation_ in the
+Index. See also, in _Oxford Lectures on Poetry_, _Hegel's Theory of
+Tragedy_, especially pp. 90, 91.]
+
+
+
+
+LECTURE II
+
+CONSTRUCTION IN SHAKESPEARE'S TRAGEDIES
+
+
+Having discussed the substance of a Shakespearean tragedy, we should
+naturally go on to examine the form. And under this head many things
+might be included; for example, Shakespeare's methods of
+characterisation, his language, his versification, the construction of
+his plots. I intend, however, to speak only of the last of these
+subjects, which has been somewhat neglected;[16] and, as construction is
+a more or less technical matter, I shall add some general remarks on
+Shakespeare as an artist.
+
+
+1
+
+As a Shakespearean tragedy represents a conflict which terminates in a
+catastrophe, any such tragedy may roughly be divided into three parts.
+The first of these sets forth or expounds the situation,[17] or state of
+affairs, out of which the conflict arises; and it may, therefore, be
+called the Exposition. The second deals with the definite beginning, the
+growth and the vicissitudes of the conflict. It forms accordingly the
+bulk of the play, comprising the Second, Third and Fourth Acts, and
+usually a part of the First and a part of the Fifth. The final section
+of the tragedy shows the issue of the conflict in a catastrophe.[18]
+
+The application of this scheme of division is naturally more or less
+arbitrary. The first part glides into the second, and the second into
+the third, and there may often be difficulty in drawing the lines
+between them. But it is still harder to divide spring from summer, and
+summer from autumn; and yet spring is spring, and summer summer.
+
+The main business of the Exposition, which we will consider first, is to
+introduce us into a little world of persons; to show us their positions
+in life, their circumstances, their relations to one another, and
+perhaps something of their characters; and to leave us keenly interested
+in the question what will come out of this condition of things. We are
+left thus expectant, not merely because some of the persons interest us
+at once, but also because their situation in regard to one another
+points to difficulties in the future. This situation is not one of
+conflict,[19] but it threatens conflict. For example, we see first the
+hatred of the Montagues and Capulets; and then we see Romeo ready to
+fall violently in love; and then we hear talk of a marriage between
+Juliet and Paris; but the exposition is not complete, and the conflict
+has not definitely begun to arise, till, in the last scene of the First
+Act, Romeo the Montague sees Juliet the Capulet and becomes her slave.
+
+The dramatist's chief difficulty in the exposition is obvious, and it is
+illustrated clearly enough in the plays of unpractised writers; for
+example, in _Remorse_, and even in _The Cenci_. He has to impart to the
+audience a quantity of information about matters of which they generally
+know nothing and never know all that is necessary for his purpose.[20]
+But the process of merely acquiring information is unpleasant, and the
+direct imparting of it is undramatic. Unless he uses a prologue,
+therefore, he must conceal from his auditors the fact that they are
+being informed, and must tell them what he wants them to know by means
+which are interesting on their own account. These means, with
+Shakespeare, are not only speeches but actions and events. From the very
+beginning of the play, though the conflict has not arisen, things are
+happening and being done which in some degree arrest, startle, and
+excite; and in a few scenes we have mastered the situation of affairs
+without perceiving the dramatist's designs upon us. Not that this is
+always so with Shakespeare. In the opening scene of his early _Comedy of
+Errors_, and in the opening speech of _Richard III._, we feel that the
+speakers are addressing us; and in the second scene of the _Tempest_
+(for Shakespeare grew at last rather negligent of technique) the purpose
+of Prospero's long explanation to Miranda is palpable. But in general
+Shakespeare's expositions are masterpieces.[21]
+
+His usual plan in tragedy is to begin with a short scene, or part of a
+scene, either full of life and stir, or in some other way arresting.
+Then, having secured a hearing, he proceeds to conversations at a lower
+pitch, accompanied by little action but conveying much information. For
+example, _Romeo and Juliet_ opens with a street-fight, _Julius Caesar_
+and _Coriolanus_ with a crowd in commotion; and when this excitement has
+had its effect on the audience, there follow quiet speeches, in which
+the cause of the excitement, and so a great part of the situation, are
+disclosed. In _Hamlet_ and _Macbeth_ this scheme is employed with great
+boldness. In _Hamlet_ the first appearance of the Ghost occurs at the
+fortieth line, and with such effect that Shakespeare can afford to
+introduce at once a conversation which explains part of the state of
+affairs at Elsinore; and the second appearance, having again increased
+the tension, is followed by a long scene, which contains no action but
+introduces almost all the _dramatis personae_ and adds the information
+left wanting. The opening of _Macbeth_ is even more remarkable, for
+there is probably no parallel to its first scene, where the senses and
+imagination are assaulted by a storm of thunder and supernatural alarm.
+This scene is only eleven lines long, but its influence is so great that
+the next can safely be occupied with a mere report of Macbeth's
+battles,--a narrative which would have won much less attention if it had
+opened the play.
+
+When Shakespeare begins his exposition thus he generally at first makes
+people talk about the hero, but keeps the hero himself for some time out
+of sight, so that we await his entrance with curiosity, and sometimes
+with anxiety. On the other hand, if the play opens with a quiet
+conversation, this is usually brief, and then at once the hero enters
+and takes action of some decided kind. Nothing, for example, can be less
+like the beginning of _Macbeth_ than that of _King Lear_. The tone is
+pitched so low that the conversation between Kent, Gloster, and Edmund
+is written in prose. But at the thirty-fourth line it is broken off by
+the entrance of Lear and his court, and without delay the King proceeds
+to his fatal division of the kingdom.
+
+This tragedy illustrates another practice of Shakespeare's. _King Lear_
+has a secondary plot, that which concerns Gloster and his two sons. To
+make the beginning of this plot quite clear, and to mark it off from the
+main action, Shakespeare gives it a separate exposition. The great scene
+of the division of Britain and the rejection of Cordelia and Kent is
+followed by the second scene, in which Gloster and his two sons appear
+alone, and the beginning of Edmund's design is disclosed. In _Hamlet_,
+though the plot is single, there is a little group of characters
+possessing a certain independent interest,--Polonius, his son, and his
+daughter; and so the third scene is devoted wholly to them. And again,
+in _Othello_, since Roderigo is to occupy a peculiar position almost
+throughout the action, he is introduced at once, alone with Iago, and
+his position is explained before the other characters are allowed to
+appear.
+
+But why should Iago open the play? Or, if this seems too presumptuous a
+question, let us put it in the form, What is the effect of his opening
+the play? It is that we receive at the very outset a strong impression
+of the force which is to prove fatal to the hero's happiness, so that,
+when we see the hero himself, the shadow of fate already rests upon him.
+And an effect of this kind is to be noticed in other tragedies. We are
+made conscious at once of some power which is to influence the whole
+action to the hero's undoing. In _Macbeth_ we see and hear the Witches,
+in _Hamlet_ the Ghost. In the first scene of _Julius Caesar_ and of
+_Coriolanus_ those qualities of the crowd are vividly shown which render
+hopeless the enterprise of the one hero and wreck the ambition of the
+other. It is the same with the hatred between the rival houses in _Romeo
+and Juliet_, and with Antony's infatuated passion. We realise them at
+the end of the first page, and are almost ready to regard the hero as
+doomed. Often, again, at one or more points during the exposition this
+feeling is reinforced by some expression that has an ominous effect. The
+first words we hear from Macbeth, 'So foul and fair a day I have not
+seen,' echo, though he knows it not, the last words we heard from the
+Witches, 'Fair is foul, and foul is fair.' Romeo, on his way with his
+friends to the banquet, where he is to see Juliet for the first time,
+tells Mercutio that he has had a dream. What the dream was we never
+learn, for Mercutio does not care to know, and breaks into his speech
+about Queen Mab; but we can guess its nature from Romeo's last speech in
+the scene:
+
+                          My mind misgives
+     Some consequence yet hanging in the stars
+     Shall bitterly begin his fearful date
+     With this night's revels.
+
+When Brabantio, forced to acquiesce in his daughter's stolen marriage,
+turns, as he leaves the council-chamber, to Othello, with the warning,
+
+     Look to her, Moor, if thou hast eyes to see;
+     She has deceived her father, and may thee,
+
+this warning, and no less Othello's answer, 'My life upon her faith,'
+make our hearts sink. The whole of the coming story seems to be
+prefigured in Antony's muttered words (I. ii. 120):
+
+     These strong Egyptian fetters I must break,
+     Or lose myself in dotage;
+
+and, again, in Hamlet's weary sigh, following so soon on the passionate
+resolution stirred by the message of the Ghost:
+
+     The time is out of joint. Oh cursed spite,
+     That ever I was born to set it right.
+
+These words occur at a point (the end of the First Act) which may be
+held to fall either within the exposition or beyond it. I should take
+the former view, though such questions, as we saw at starting, can
+hardly be decided with certainty. The dimensions of this first section
+of a tragedy depend on a variety of causes, of which the chief seems to
+be the comparative simplicity or complexity of the situation from which
+the conflict arises. Where this is simple the exposition is short, as in
+_Julius Caesar_ and _Macbeth_. Where it is complicated the exposition
+requires more space, as in _Romeo and Juliet_, _Hamlet_, and _King
+Lear_. Its completion is generally marked in the mind of the reader by a
+feeling that the action it contains is for the moment complete but has
+left a problem. The lovers have met, but their families are at deadly
+enmity; the hero seems at the height of success, but has admitted the
+thought of murdering his sovereign; the old king has divided his kingdom
+between two hypocritical daughters, and has rejected his true child; the
+hero has acknowledged a sacred duty of revenge, but is weary of life:
+and we ask, What will come of this? Sometimes, I may add, a certain time
+is supposed to elapse before the events which answer our question make
+their appearance and the conflict begins; in _King Lear_, for instance,
+about a fortnight; in _Hamlet_ about two months.
+
+
+2
+
+We come now to the conflict itself. And here one or two preliminary
+remarks are necessary. In the first place, it must be remembered that
+our point of view in examining the construction of a play will not
+always coincide with that which we occupy in thinking of its whole
+dramatic effect. For example, that struggle in the hero's soul which
+sometimes accompanies the outward struggle is of the highest importance
+for the total effect of a tragedy; but it is not always necessary or
+desirable to consider it when the question is merely one of
+construction. And this is natural. The play is meant primarily for the
+theatre; and theatrically the outward conflict, with its influence on
+the fortunes of the hero, is the aspect which first catches, if it does
+not engross, attention. For the average play-goer of every period the
+main interest of _Hamlet_ has probably lain in the vicissitudes of his
+long duel with the King; and the question, one may almost say, has been
+which will first kill the other. And so, from the point of view of
+construction, the fact that Hamlet spares the King when he finds him
+praying, is, from its effect on the hero's fortunes, of great moment;
+but the cause of the fact, which lies within Hamlet's character, is not
+so.
+
+In the second place we must be prepared to find that, as the plays vary
+so much, no single way of regarding the conflict will answer precisely
+to the construction of all; that it sometimes appears possible to look
+at the construction of a tragedy in two quite different ways, and that
+it is material to find the best of the two; and that thus, in any given
+instance, it is necessary first to define the opposing sides in the
+conflict. I will give one or two examples. In some tragedies, as we saw
+in our first lecture, the opposing forces can, for practical purposes,
+be identified with opposing persons or groups. So it is in _Romeo and
+Juliet_ and _Macbeth_. But it is not always so. The love of Othello may
+be said to contend with another force, as the love of Romeo does; but
+Othello cannot be said to contend with Iago as Romeo contends with the
+representatives of the hatred of the houses, or as Macbeth contends with
+Malcolm and Macduff. Again, in _Macbeth_ the hero, however much
+influenced by others, supplies the main driving power of the action; but
+in _King Lear_ he does not. Possibly, therefore, the conflict, and with
+it the construction, may best be regarded from different points of view
+in these two plays, in spite of the fact that the hero is the central
+figure in each. But if we do not observe this we shall attempt to find
+the same scheme in both, and shall either be driven to some unnatural
+view or to a sceptical despair of perceiving any principle of
+construction at all.
+
+With these warnings, I turn to the question whether we can trace any
+distinct method or methods by which Shakespeare represents the rise and
+development of the conflict.
+
+(1) One at least is obvious, and indeed it is followed not merely during
+the conflict but from beginning to end of the play. There are, of
+course, in the action certain places where the tension in the minds of
+the audience becomes extreme. We shall consider these presently. But, in
+addition, there is, all through the tragedy, a constant alternation of
+rises and falls in this tension or in the emotional pitch of the work, a
+regular sequence of more exciting and less exciting sections. Some kind
+of variation of pitch is to be found, of course, in all drama, for it
+rests on the elementary facts that relief must be given after emotional
+strain, and that contrast is required to bring out the full force of an
+effect. But a good drama of our own time shows nothing approaching to
+the _regularity_ with which in the plays of Shakespeare and of his
+contemporaries the principle is applied. And the main cause of this
+difference lies simply in a change of theatrical arrangements. In
+Shakespeare's theatre, as there was no scenery, scene followed scene
+with scarcely any pause; and so the readiest, though not the only, way
+to vary the emotional pitch was to interpose a whole scene where the
+tension was low between scenes where it was high. In our theatres there
+is a great deal of scenery, which takes a long time to set and change;
+and therefore the number of scenes is small, and the variations of
+tension have to be provided within the scenes, and still more by the
+pauses between them. With Shakespeare there are, of course, in any long
+scene variations of tension, but the scenes are numerous and, compared
+with ours, usually short, and variety is given principally by their
+difference in pitch.
+
+It may further be observed that, in a portion of the play which is
+relatively unexciting, the scenes of lower tension may be as long as
+those of higher; while in a portion of the play which is specially
+exciting the scenes of low tension are shorter, often much shorter, than
+the others. The reader may verify this statement by comparing the First
+or the Fourth Act in most of the tragedies with the Third; for, speaking
+very roughly, we may say that the First and Fourth are relatively quiet
+acts, the Third highly critical. A good example is the Third Act of
+_King Lear_, where the scenes of high tension (ii., iv., vi.) are
+respectively 95, 186 and 122 lines in length, while those of low tension
+(i., iii., v.) are respectively 55, 26 and 26 lines long. Scene vii.,
+the last of the Act, is, I may add, a very exciting scene, though it
+follows scene vi., and therefore the tone of scene vi. is greatly
+lowered during its final thirty lines.
+
+(2) If we turn now from the differences of tension to the sequence of
+events within the conflict, we shall find the principle of alternation
+at work again in another and a quite independent way. Let us for the
+sake of brevity call the two sides in the conflict A and B. Now,
+usually, as we shall see presently, through a considerable part of the
+play, perhaps the first half, the cause of A is, on the whole,
+advancing; and through the remaining part it is retiring, while that of
+B advances in turn. But, underlying this broad movement, all through the
+conflict we shall find a regular alternation of smaller advances and
+retirals; first A seeming to win some ground, and then the
+counter-action of B being shown. And since we always more or less
+decidedly prefer A to B or B to A, the result of this oscillating
+movement is a constant alternation of hope and fear, or rather of a
+mixed state predominantly hopeful and a mixed state predominantly
+apprehensive. An example will make the point clear. In _Hamlet_ the
+conflict begins with the hero's feigning to be insane from
+disappointment in love, and we are shown his immediate success in
+convincing Polonius. Let us call this an advance of A. The next scene
+shows the King's great uneasiness about Hamlet's melancholy, and his
+scepticism as to Polonius's explanation of its cause: advance of B.
+Hamlet completely baffles Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, who have been
+sent to discover his secret, and he arranges for the test of the
+play-scene: advance of A. But immediately before the play-scene his
+soliloquy on suicide fills us with misgiving; and his words to Ophelia,
+overheard, so convince the King that love is _not_ the cause of his
+nephew's strange behaviour, that he determines to get rid of him by
+sending him to England: advance of B. The play-scene proves a complete
+success: decided advance of A. Directly after it Hamlet spares the King
+at prayer, and in an interview with his mother unwittingly kills
+Polonius, and so gives his enemy a perfect excuse for sending him away
+(to be executed): decided advance of B. I need not pursue the
+illustration further. This oscillating movement can be traced without
+difficulty in any of the tragedies, though less distinctly in one or two
+of the earliest.
+
+(3) Though this movement continues right up to the catastrophe, its
+effect does not disguise that much broader effect to which I have
+already alluded, and which we have now to study. In all the tragedies,
+though more clearly in some than in others, one side is distinctly felt
+to be on the whole advancing up to a certain point in the conflict, and
+then to be on the whole declining before the reaction of the other.
+There is therefore felt to be a critical point in the action, which
+proves also to be a turning point. It is critical sometimes in the sense
+that, until it is reached, the conflict is not, so to speak, clenched;
+one of the two sets of forces might subside, or a reconciliation might
+somehow be effected; while, as soon as it is reached, we feel this can
+no longer be. It is critical also because the advancing force has
+apparently asserted itself victoriously, gaining, if not all it could
+wish, still a very substantial advantage; whereas really it is on the
+point of turning downward towards its fall. This Crisis, as a rule,
+comes somewhere near the middle of the play; and where it is well marked
+it has the effect, as to construction, of dividing the play into five
+parts instead of three; these parts showing (1) a situation not yet one
+of conflict, (2) the rise and development of the conflict, in which A or
+B advances on the whole till it reaches (3) the Crisis, on which follows
+(4) the decline of A or B towards (5) the Catastrophe. And it will be
+seen that the fourth and fifth parts repeat, though with a reversal of
+direction as regards A or B, the movement of the second and third,
+working towards the catastrophe as the second and third worked towards
+the crisis.
+
+In developing, illustrating and qualifying this statement, it will be
+best to begin with the tragedies in which the movement is most clear and
+simple. These are _Julius Caesar_ and _Macbeth_. In the former the
+fortunes of the conspiracy rise with vicissitudes up to the crisis of
+the assassination (III. i.); they then sink with vicissitudes to the
+catastrophe, where Brutus and Cassius perish. In the latter, Macbeth,
+hurrying, in spite of much inward resistance, to the murder of Duncan,
+attains the crown, the upward movement being extraordinarily rapid, and
+the crisis arriving early: his cause then turns slowly downward, and
+soon hastens to ruin. In both these tragedies the simplicity of the
+constructional effect, it should be noticed, depends in part on the fact
+that the contending forces may quite naturally be identified with
+certain persons, and partly again on the fact that the defeat of one
+side is the victory of the other. Octavius and Antony, Malcolm and
+Macduff, are left standing over the bodies of their foes.
+
+This is not so in _Romeo and Juliet_ and _Hamlet_, because here,
+although the hero perishes, the side opposed to him, being the more
+faulty or evil, cannot be allowed to triumph when he falls. Otherwise
+the type of construction is the same. The fortunes of Romeo and Juliet
+rise and culminate in their marriage (II. vi.), and then begin to
+decline before the opposition of their houses, which, aided by
+accidents, produces a catastrophe, but is thereupon converted into a
+remorseful reconciliation. Hamlet's cause reaches its zenith in the
+success of the play-scene (III. ii.). Thereafter the reaction makes way,
+and he perishes through the plot of the King and Laertes. But they are
+not allowed to survive their success.
+
+The construction in the remaining Roman plays follows the same plan, but
+in both plays (as in _Richard II._ and _Richard III._) it suffers from
+the intractable nature of the historical material, and is also
+influenced by other causes. In _Coriolanus_ the hero reaches the topmost
+point of success when he is named consul (II. iii.), and the rest of the
+play shows his decline and fall; but in this decline he attains again
+for a time extraordinary power, and triumphs, in a sense, over his
+original adversary, though he succumbs to another. In _Antony and
+Cleopatra_ the advance of the hero's cause depends on his freeing
+himself from the heroine, and he appears to have succeeded when he
+becomes reconciled to Octavius and marries Octavia (III. ii.); but he
+returns to Egypt and is gradually driven to his death, which involves
+that of the heroine.
+
+There remain two of the greatest of the tragedies, and in both of them a
+certain difficulty will be felt. _King Lear_ alone among these plays has
+a distinct double action. Besides this, it is impossible, I think, from
+the point of view of construction, to regard the hero as the leading
+figure. If we attempt to do so, we must either find the crisis in the
+First Act (for after it Lear's course is downward), and this is absurd;
+or else we must say that the usual movement is present but its direction
+is reversed, the hero's cause first sinking to the lowest point (in the
+Storm-scenes) and then rising again. But this also will not do; for
+though his fortunes may be said to rise again for a time, they rise only
+to fall once more to a catastrophe. The truth is, that after the First
+Act, which is really filled by the exposition, Lear suffers but hardly
+initiates action at all; and the right way to look at the matter, _from
+the point of view of construction_, is to regard Goneril, Regan and
+Edmund as the leading characters. It is they who, in the conflict,
+initiate action. Their fortune mounts to the crisis, where the old King
+is driven out into the storm and loses his reason, and where Gloster is
+blinded and expelled from his home (III. vi. and vii.). Then the
+counter-action begins to gather force, and their cause to decline; and,
+although they win the battle, they are involved in the catastrophe which
+they bring on Cordelia and Lear. Thus we may still find in _King Lear_
+the usual scheme of an ascending and a descending movement of one side
+in the conflict.
+
+The case of _Othello_ is more peculiar. In its whole constructional
+effect _Othello_ differs from the other tragedies, and the cause of this
+difference is not hard to find, and will be mentioned presently. But
+how, after it is found, are we to define the principle of the
+construction? On the one hand the usual method seems to show itself.
+Othello's fortune certainly advances in the early part of the play, and
+it may be considered to reach its topmost point in the exquisite joy of
+his reunion with Desdemona in Cyprus; while soon afterwards it begins to
+turn, and then falls to the catastrophe. But the topmost point thus
+comes very early (II. i.), and, moreover, is but faintly marked; indeed,
+it is scarcely felt as a crisis at all. And, what is still more
+significant, though reached by conflict, it is not reached by conflict
+with the force which afterwards destroys it. Iago, in the early scenes,
+is indeed shown to cherish a design against Othello, but it is not Iago
+against whom he has at first to assert himself, but Brabantio; and Iago
+does not even begin to poison his mind until the third scene of the
+Third Act.
+
+Can we then, on the other hand, following the precedent of _King Lear_,
+and remembering the probable chronological juxtaposition of the two
+plays, regard Iago as the leading figure from the point of view of
+construction? This might at first seem the right view; for it is the
+case that _Othello_ resembles _King Lear_ in having a hero more acted
+upon than acting, or rather a hero driven to act by being acted upon.
+But then, if Iago is taken as the leading figure, the usual mode of
+construction is plainly abandoned, for there will nowhere be a crisis
+followed by a descending movement. Iago's cause advances, at first
+slowly and quietly, then rapidly, but it does nothing but advance until
+the catastrophe swallows his dupe and him together. And this way of
+regarding the action does positive violence, I think, to our natural
+impressions of the earlier part of the play.
+
+I think, therefore, that the usual scheme is so far followed that the
+drama represents first the rise of the hero, and then his fall. But,
+however this question may be decided, one striking peculiarity remains,
+and is the cause of the unique effect of _Othello_. In the first half of
+the play the main conflict is merely incubating; then it bursts into
+life, and goes storming, without intermission or change of direction, to
+its close. Now, in this peculiarity _Othello_ is quite unlike the other
+tragedies; and in the consequent effect, which is that the second half
+of the drama is immeasurably more exciting than the first, it is
+approached only by _Antony and Cleopatra_. I shall therefore reserve it
+for separate consideration, though in proceeding to speak further of
+Shakespeare's treatment of the tragic conflict I shall have to mention
+some devices which are used in _Othello_ as well as in the other
+tragedies.
+
+
+3
+
+Shakespeare's general plan, we have seen, is to show one set of forces
+advancing, in secret or open opposition to the other, to some decisive
+success, and then driven downward to defeat by the reaction it provokes.
+And the advantages of this plan, as seen in such a typical instance as
+_Julius Caesar_, are manifest. It conveys the movement of the conflict
+to the mind with great clearness and force. It helps to produce the
+impression that in his decline and fall the doer's act is returning on
+his own head. And, finally, as used by Shakespeare, it makes the first
+half of the play intensely interesting and dramatic. Action which
+effects a striking change in an existing situation is naturally watched
+with keen interest; and this we find in some of these tragedies. And the
+spectacle, which others exhibit, of a purpose forming itself and, in
+spite of outward obstacles and often of inward resistance, forcing its
+way onward to a happy consummation or a terrible deed, not only gives
+scope to that psychological subtlety in which Shakespeare is scarcely
+rivalled, but is also dramatic in the highest degree.
+
+But when the crisis has been reached there come difficulties and
+dangers, which, if we put Shakespeare for the moment out of mind, are
+easily seen. An immediate and crushing counter-action would, no doubt,
+sustain the interest, but it would precipitate the catastrophe, and
+leave a feeling that there has been too long a preparation for a final
+effect so brief. What seems necessary is a momentary pause, followed by
+a counter-action which mounts at first slowly, and afterwards, as it
+gathers force, with quickening speed. And yet the result of this
+arrangement, it would seem, must be, for a time, a decided slackening of
+tension. Nor is this the only difficulty. The persons who represent the
+counter-action and now take the lead, are likely to be comparatively
+unfamiliar, and therefore unwelcome, to the audience; and, even if
+familiar, they are almost sure to be at first, if not permanently, less
+interesting than those who figured in the ascending movement, and on
+whom attention has been fixed. Possibly, too, their necessary prominence
+may crowd the hero into the back-ground. Hence the point of danger in
+this method of construction seems to lie in that section of the play
+which follows the crisis and has not yet approached the catastrophe. And
+this section will usually comprise the Fourth Act, together, in some
+cases, with a part of the Third and a part of the Fifth.
+
+Shakespeare was so masterly a playwright, and had so wonderful a power
+of giving life to unpromising subjects, that to a large extent he was
+able to surmount this difficulty. But illustrations of it are easily to
+be found in his tragedies, and it is not always surmounted. In almost
+all of them we are conscious of that momentary pause in the action,
+though, as we shall see, it does not generally occur _immediately_ after
+the crisis. Sometimes he allows himself to be driven to keep the hero
+off the stage for a long time while the counter-action is rising;
+Macbeth, Hamlet and Coriolanus during about 450 lines, Lear for nearly
+500, Romeo for about 550 (it matters less here, because Juliet is quite
+as important as Romeo). How can a drama in which this happens compete,
+in its latter part, with _Othello_? And again, how can deliberations
+between Octavius, Antony and Lepidus, between Malcolm and Macduff,
+between the Capulets, between Laertes and the King, keep us at the
+pitch, I do not say of the crisis, but even of the action which led up
+to it? Good critics--writers who have criticised Shakespeare's dramas
+from within, instead of applying to them some standard ready-made by
+themselves or derived from dramas and a theatre of quite other kinds
+than his--have held that some of his greatest tragedies fall off in the
+Fourth Act, and that one or two never wholly recover themselves. And I
+believe most readers would find, if they examined their impressions,
+that to their minds _Julius Caesar_, _Hamlet_, _King Lear_ and _Macbeth_
+have all a tendency to 'drag' in this section of the play, and that the
+first and perhaps also the last of these four fail even in the
+catastrophe to reach the height of the greatest scenes that have
+preceded the Fourth Act. I will not ask how far these impressions are
+justified. The difficulties in question will become clearer and will
+gain in interest if we look rather at the means which have been employed
+to meet them, and which certainly have in part, at least, overcome them.
+
+(_a_) The first of these is always strikingly effective, sometimes
+marvellously so. The crisis in which the ascending force reaches its
+zenith is followed quickly, or even without the slightest pause, by a
+reverse or counter-blow not less emphatic and in some cases even more
+exciting. And the effect is to make us feel a sudden and tragic change
+in the direction of the movement, which, after ascending more or less
+gradually, now turns sharply downward. To the assassination of Caesar
+(III. i.) succeeds the scene in the Forum (III. ii.), where Antony
+carries the people away in a storm of sympathy with the dead man and of
+fury against the conspirators. We have hardly realised their victory
+before we are forced to anticipate their ultimate defeat and to take the
+liveliest interest in their chief antagonist. In _Hamlet_ the thrilling
+success of the play-scene (III. ii.) is met and undone at once by the
+counter-stroke of Hamlet's failure to take vengeance (III. iii.) and his
+misfortune in killing Polonius (III. iv.). Coriolanus has no sooner
+gained the consulship than he is excited to frenzy by the tribunes and
+driven into exile. On the marriage of Romeo follows immediately the
+brawl which leads to Mercutio's death and the banishment of the hero
+(II. vi. and III. i.). In all of these instances excepting that of
+_Hamlet_ the scene of the counter-stroke is at least as exciting as that
+of the crisis, perhaps more so. Most people, if asked to mention the
+scene that occupies the _centre_ of the action in _Julius Caesar_ and in
+_Coriolanus_, would mention the scenes of Antony's speech and
+Coriolanus' banishment. Thus that apparently necessary pause in the
+action does not, in any of these dramas, come directly after the crisis.
+It is deferred; and in several cases it is by various devices deferred
+for some little time; _e.g._ in _Romeo and Juliet_ till the hero has
+left Verona, and Juliet is told that her marriage with Paris is to take
+place 'next Thursday morn' (end of Act III.); in _Macbeth_ till the
+murder of Duncan has been followed by that of Banquo, and this by the
+banquet-scene. Hence the point where this pause occurs is very rarely
+reached before the end of the Third Act.
+
+(_b_) Either at this point, or in the scene of the counter-stroke which
+precedes it, we sometimes find a peculiar effect. We are reminded of the
+state of affairs in which the conflict began. The opening of _Julius
+Caesar_ warned us that, among a people so unstable and so easily led
+this way or that, the enterprise of Brutus is hopeless; the days of the
+Republic are done. In the scene of Antony's speech we see this same
+people again. At the beginning of _Antony and Cleopatra_ the hero is
+about to leave Cleopatra for Rome. Where the play takes, as it were, a
+fresh start after the crisis, he leaves Octavia for Egypt. In _Hamlet_,
+when the counter-stroke succeeds to the crisis, the Ghost, who had
+appeared in the opening scenes, reappears. Macbeth's action in the first
+part of the tragedy followed on the prediction of the Witches who
+promised him the throne. When the action moves forward again after the
+banquet-scene the Witches appear once more, and make those fresh
+promises which again drive him forward. This repetition of a first
+effect produces a fateful feeling. It generally also stimulates
+expectation as to the new movement about to begin. In _Macbeth_ the
+scene is, in addition, of the greatest consequence from the purely
+theatrical point of view.
+
+(_c_) It has yet another function. It shows, in Macbeth's furious
+irritability and purposeless savagery, the internal reaction which
+accompanies the outward decline of his fortunes. And in other plays also
+the exhibition of such inner changes forms a means by which interest is
+sustained in this difficult section of a tragedy. There is no point in
+_Hamlet_ where we feel more hopeless than that where the hero, having
+missed his chance, moralises over his irresolution and determines to
+cherish now only thoughts of blood, and then departs without an effort
+for England. One purpose, again, of the quarrel-scene between Brutus and
+Cassius (IV. iii), as also of the appearance of Caesar's ghost just
+afterwards, is to indicate the inward changes. Otherwise the
+introduction of this famous and wonderful scene can hardly be defended
+on strictly dramatic grounds. No one would consent to part with it, and
+it is invaluable in sustaining interest during the progress of the
+reaction, but it is an episode, the removal of which would not affect
+the actual sequence of events (unless we may hold that, but for the
+emotion caused by the quarrel and reconciliation, Cassius would not have
+allowed Brutus to overcome his objection to the fatal policy of offering
+battle at Philippi).
+
+(_d_) The quarrel-scene illustrates yet another favourite expedient. In
+this section of a tragedy Shakespeare often appeals to an emotion
+different from any of those excited in the first half of the play, and
+so provides novelty and generally also relief. As a rule this new
+emotion is pathetic; and the pathos is not terrible or lacerating, but,
+even if painful, is accompanied by the sense of beauty and by an outflow
+of admiration or affection, which come with an inexpressible sweetness
+after the tension of the crisis and the first counter-stroke. So it is
+with the reconciliation of Brutus and Cassius, and the arrival of the
+news of Portia's death. The most famous instance of this effect is the
+scene (IV. vii.) where Lear wakes from sleep and finds Cordelia bending
+over him, perhaps the most tear-compelling passage in literature.
+Another is the short scene (IV. ii.) in which the talk of Lady Macduff
+and her little boy is interrupted by the entrance of the murderers, a
+passage of touching beauty and heroism. Another is the introduction of
+Ophelia in her madness (twice in different parts of IV. v.), where the
+effect, though intensely pathetic, is beautiful and moving rather than
+harrowing; and this effect is repeated in a softer tone in the
+description of Ophelia's death (end of Act IV.). And in _Othello_ the
+passage where pathos of _this_ kind reaches its height is certainly that
+where Desdemona and Emilia converse, and the willow-song is sung, on the
+eve of the catastrophe (IV. iii.).
+
+(_e_) Sometimes, again, in this section of a tragedy we find humorous or
+semi-humorous passages. On the whole such passages occur most frequently
+in the early or middle part of the play, which naturally grows more
+sombre as it nears the close; but their occasional introduction in the
+Fourth Act, and even later, affords variety and relief, and also
+heightens by contrast the tragic feelings. For example, there is a touch
+of comedy in the conversation of Lady Macduff with her little boy.
+Purely and delightfully humorous are the talk and behaviour of the
+servants in that admirable scene where Coriolanus comes disguised in
+mean apparel to the house of Aufidius (IV. v.); of a more mingled kind
+is the effect of the discussion between Menenius and the sentinels in V.
+ii.; and in the very middle of the supreme scene between the hero,
+Volumnia and Virgilia, little Marcius makes us burst out laughing (V.
+iii.) A little before the catastrophe in _Hamlet_ comes the grave-digger
+passage, a passage ever welcome, but of a length which could hardly be
+defended on purely dramatic grounds; and still later, occupying some
+hundred and twenty lines of the very last scene, we have the chatter of
+Osric with Hamlet's mockery of it. But the acme of audacity is reached
+in _Antony and Cleopatra_, where, quite close to the end, the old
+countryman who brings the asps to Cleopatra discourses on the virtues
+and vices of the worm, and where his last words, 'Yes, forsooth: I wish
+you joy o' the worm,' are followed, without the intervention of a line,
+by the glorious speech,
+
+     Give me my robe; put on my crown; I have
+     Immortal longings in me....
+
+In some of the instances of pathos or humour just mentioned we have been
+brought to that part of the play which immediately precedes, or even
+contains, the catastrophe. And I will add at once three remarks which
+refer specially to this final section of a tragedy.
+
+(_f_) In several plays Shakespeare makes here an appeal which in his own
+time was evidently powerful: he introduces scenes of battle. This is the
+case in _Richard III._, _Julius Caesar_, _King Lear_, _Macbeth_ and
+_Antony and Cleopatra_. Richard, Brutus and Cassius, and Macbeth die on
+the battlefield. Even if his use of this expedient were not enough to
+show that battle-scenes were extremely popular in the Elizabethan
+theatre, we know it from other sources. It is a curious comment on the
+futility of our spectacular effects that in our theatre these scenes, in
+which we strive after an 'illusion' of which the Elizabethans never
+dreamt, produce comparatively little excitement, and to many spectators
+are even somewhat distasteful.[22] And although some of them thrill the
+imagination of the reader, they rarely, I think, quite satisfy the
+_dramatic_ sense. Perhaps this is partly because a battle is not the
+most favourable place for the exhibition of tragic character; and it is
+worth notice that Brutus, Cassius and Antony do not die fighting, but
+commit suicide after defeat. The actual battle, however, does make us
+feel the greatness of Antony, and still more does it help us to regard
+Richard and Macbeth in their day of doom as heroes, and to mingle
+sympathy and enthusiastic admiration with desire for their defeat.
+
+(_g_) In some of the tragedies, again, an expedient is used, which
+Freytag has pointed out (though he sometimes finds it, I think, where it
+is not really employed). Shakespeare very rarely makes the least attempt
+to surprise by his catastrophes. They are felt to be inevitable, though
+the precise way in which they will be brought about is not, of course,
+foreseen. Occasionally, however, where we dread the catastrophe because
+we love the hero, a moment occurs, just before it, in which a gleam of
+false hope lights up the darkening scene; and, though we know it is
+false, it affects us. Far the most remarkable example is to be found in
+the final Act of _King Lear_. Here the victory of Edgar and the deaths
+of Edmund and the two sisters have almost made us forget the design on
+the lives of Lear and Cordelia. Even when we are reminded of it there is
+still room for hope that Edgar, who rushes away to the prison, will be
+in time to save them; and, however familiar we are with the play, the
+sudden entrance of Lear, with Cordelia dead in his arms, comes on us
+with a shock. Much slighter, but quite perceptible, is the effect of
+Antony's victory on land, and of the last outburst of pride and joy as
+he and Cleopatra meet (IV. viii.). The frank apology of Hamlet to
+Laertes, their reconciliation, and a delusive appearance of quiet and
+even confident firmness in the tone of the hero's conversation with
+Horatio, almost blind us to our better knowledge, and give to the
+catastrophe an added pain. Those in the audience who are ignorant of
+_Macbeth_, and who take more simply than most readers now can do the
+mysterious prophecies concerning Birnam Wood and the man not born of
+woman, feel, I imagine, just before the catastrophe, a false fear that
+the hero may yet escape.
+
+(_h_) I will mention only one point more. In some cases Shakespeare
+spreads the catastrophe out, so to speak, over a considerable space, and
+thus shortens that difficult section which has to show the development
+of the counter-action. This is possible only where there is, besides the
+hero, some character who engages our interest in the highest degree, and
+with whose fate his own is bound up. Thus the murder of Desdemona is
+separated by some distance from the death of Othello. The most
+impressive scene in _Macbeth_, after that of Duncan's murder, is the
+sleep-walking scene; and it may truly, if not literally, be said to show
+the catastrophe of Lady Macbeth. Yet it is the opening scene of the
+Fifth Act, and a number of scenes in which Macbeth's fate is still
+approaching intervene before the close. Finally, in _Antony and
+Cleopatra_ the heroine equals the hero in importance, and here the death
+of Antony actually occurs in the Fourth Act, and the whole of the Fifth
+is devoted to Cleopatra.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Let us now turn to _Othello_ and consider briefly its exceptional scheme
+of construction. The advantage of this scheme is obvious. In the second
+half of the tragedy there is no danger of 'dragging,' of any awkward
+pause, any undue lowering of pitch, any need of scenes which, however
+fine, are more or less episodic. The tension is extreme, and it is
+relaxed only for brief intervals to permit of some slight relief. From
+the moment when Iago begins to poison Othello's mind we hold our breath.
+_Othello_ from this point onwards is certainly the most exciting of
+Shakespeare's plays, unless possibly _Macbeth_ in its first part may be
+held to rival it. And _Othello_ is such a masterpiece that we are
+scarcely conscious of any disadvantage attending its method of
+construction, and may even wonder why Shakespeare employed this
+method--at any rate in its purity--in this tragedy alone. Nor is it any
+answer to say that it would not elsewhere have suited his material. Even
+if this be granted, how was it that he only once chose a story to which
+this method was appropriate? To his eyes, or for his instinct, there
+must have been some disadvantage in it. And dangers in it are in fact
+not hard to see.
+
+In the first place, where the conflict develops very slowly, or, as in
+_Othello_, remains in a state of incubation during the first part of a
+tragedy, that part cannot produce the tension proper to the
+corresponding part of a tragedy like _Macbeth_, and may even run the
+risk of being somewhat flat. This seems obvious, and it is none the less
+true because in _Othello_ the difficulty is overcome. We may even see
+that in _Othello_ a difficulty was felt. The First Act is full of stir,
+but it is so because Shakespeare has filled it with a kind of
+preliminary conflict between the hero and Brabantio,--a personage who
+then vanishes from the stage. The long first scene of the Second Act is
+largely occupied with mere conversations, artfully drawn out to
+dimensions which can scarcely be considered essential to the plot. These
+expedients are fully justified by their success, and nothing more
+consummate in their way is to be found in Shakespeare than Othello's
+speech to the Senate and Iago's two talks with Roderigo. But the fact
+that Shakespeare can make a plan succeed does not show that the plan is,
+abstractedly considered, a good plan; and if the scheme of construction
+in _Othello_ were placed, in the shape of a mere outline, before a
+play-wright ignorant of the actual drama, he would certainly, I believe,
+feel grave misgivings about the first half of the play.
+
+There is a second difficulty in the scheme. When the middle of the
+tragedy is reached, the audience is not what it was at the beginning. It
+has been attending for some time, and has been through a certain amount
+of agitation. The extreme tension which now arises may therefore easily
+tire and displease it, all the more if the matter which produces the
+tension is very painful, if the catastrophe is not less so, and if the
+limits of the remainder of the play (not to speak of any other
+consideration) permit of very little relief. It is one thing to watch
+the scene of Duncan's assassination at the beginning of the Second Act,
+and another thing to watch the murder of Desdemona at the beginning of
+the Fifth. If Shakespeare has wholly avoided this difficulty in
+_Othello_, it is by treating the first part of the play in such a manner
+that the sympathies excited are predominantly pleasant and therefore not
+exhausting. The scene in the Council Chamber, and the scene of the
+reunion at Cyprus, give almost unmixed happiness to the audience;
+however repulsive Iago may be, the humour of his gulling of Roderigo is
+agreeable; even the scene of Cassio's intoxication is not, on the whole,
+painful. Hence we come to the great temptation-scene, where the conflict
+emerges into life (III. iii.), with nerves unshaken and feelings much
+fresher than those with which we greet the banquet-scene in _Macbeth_
+(III. iv.), or the first of the storm-scenes in _King Lear_ (III. i.).
+The same skill may be observed in _Antony and Cleopatra_, where, as we
+saw, the second half of the tragedy is the more exciting. But, again,
+the success due to Shakespeare's skill does not show that the scheme of
+construction is free from a characteristic danger; and on the whole it
+would appear to be best fitted for a plot which, though it may cause
+painful agitation as it nears the end, actually ends with a solution
+instead of a catastrophe.
+
+But for Shakespeare's scanty use of this method there may have been a
+deeper, though probably an unconscious, reason. The method suits a plot
+based on intrigue. It may produce intense suspense. It may stir most
+powerfully the tragic feelings of pity and fear. And it throws into
+relief that aspect of tragedy in which great or beautiful lives seem
+caught in the net of fate. But it is apt to be less favourable to the
+exhibition of character, to show less clearly how an act returns upon
+the agent, and to produce less strongly the impression of an inexorable
+order working in the passions and actions of men, and labouring through
+their agony and waste towards good. Now, it seems clear from his
+tragedies that what appealed most to Shakespeare was this latter class
+of effects. I do not ask here whether _Othello_ fails to produce, in the
+same degree as the other tragedies, these impressions; but Shakespeare's
+preference for them may have been one reason why he habitually chose a
+scheme of construction which produces in the final Acts but little of
+strained suspense, and presents the catastrophe as a thing foreseen and
+following with a psychological and moral necessity on the action
+exhibited in the first part of the tragedy.
+
+
+4
+
+The more minute details of construction cannot well be examined here,
+and I will not pursue the subject further. But its discussion suggests a
+question which will have occurred to some of my hearers. They may have
+asked themselves whether I have not used the words 'art' and 'device'
+and 'expedient' and 'method' too boldly, as though Shakespeare were a
+conscious artist, and not rather a writer who constructed in obedience
+to an extraordinary dramatic instinct, as he composed mainly by
+inspiration. And a brief explanation on this head will enable me to
+allude to a few more points, chiefly of construction, which are not too
+technical for a lecture.
+
+In speaking, for convenience, of devices and expedients, I did not
+intend to imply that Shakespeare always deliberately aimed at the
+effects which he produced. But _no_ artist always does this, and I see
+no reason to doubt that Shakespeare often did it, or to suppose that his
+method of constructing and composing differed, except in degree, from
+that of the most 'conscious' of artists. The antithesis of art and
+inspiration, though not meaningless, is often most misleading.
+Inspiration is surely not incompatible with considerate workmanship. The
+two may be severed, but they need not be so, and where a genuinely
+poetic result is being produced they cannot be so. The glow of a first
+conception must in some measure survive or rekindle itself in the work
+of planning and executing; and what is called a technical expedient may
+'come' to a man with as sudden a glory as a splendid image. Verse may be
+easy and unpremeditated, as Milton says his was, and yet many a word in
+it may be changed many a time, and the last change be more 'inspired'
+than the original. The difference between poets in these matters is no
+doubt considerable, and sometimes important, but it can only be a
+difference of less and more. It is probable that Shakespeare often wrote
+fluently, for Jonson (a better authority than Heminge and Condell) says
+so; and for anything we can tell he may also have constructed with
+unusual readiness. But we know that he revised and re-wrote (for
+instance in _Love's Labour's Lost_ and _Romeo and Juliet_ and _Hamlet_);
+it is almost impossible that he can have worked out the plots of his
+best plays without much reflection and many experiments; and it appears
+to me scarcely more possible to mistake the signs of deliberate care in
+some of his famous speeches. If a 'conscious artist' means one who holds
+his work away from him, scrutinises and judges it, and, if need be,
+alters it and alters it till it comes as near satisfying him as he can
+make it, I am sure that Shakespeare frequently employed such conscious
+art. If it means, again, an artist who consciously aims at the effects
+he produces, what ground have we for doubting that he frequently
+employed such art, though probably less frequently than a good many
+other poets?
+
+But perhaps the notion of a 'conscious artist' in drama is that of one
+who studies the theory of the art, and even writes with an eye to its
+'rules.' And we know it was long a favourite idea that Shakespeare was
+totally ignorant of the 'rules.' Yet this is quite incredible. The
+rules referred to, such as they were, were not buried in Aristotle's
+Greek nor even hidden away in Italian treatises. He could find pretty
+well all of them in a book so current and famous as Sidney's _Defence
+of Poetry_. Even if we suppose that he refused to open this book
+(which is most unlikely), how could he possibly remain ignorant of the
+rules in a society of actors and dramatists and amateurs who must have
+been incessantly talking about plays and play-writing, and some of
+whom were ardent champions of the rules and full of contempt for the
+lawlessness of the popular drama? Who can doubt that at the Mermaid
+Shakespeare heard from Jonson's lips much more censure of his offences
+against 'art' than Jonson ever confided to Drummond or to paper? And
+is it not most probable that those battles between the two which
+Fuller imagines, were waged often on the field of dramatic criticism?
+If Shakespeare, then, broke some of the 'rules,' it was not from
+ignorance. Probably he refused, on grounds of art itself, to trouble
+himself with rules derived from forms of drama long extinct. And it is
+not unlikely that he was little interested in theory as such, and more
+than likely that he was impatient of pedantic distinctions between
+'pastoral-comical, historical-pastoral, tragical-historical,
+tragical-comical-historical-pastoral, scene individable or poem
+unlimited.' But that would not prove that he never reflected on his
+art, or could not explain, if he cared to, what _he_ thought would be
+good general rules for the drama of his own time. He could give advice
+about play-acting. Why should we suppose that he could not give advice
+about play-making?
+
+Still Shakespeare, though in some considerable degree a 'conscious'
+artist, frequently sins against art; and if his sins were not due to
+ignorance or inspiration, they must be accounted for otherwise. Neither
+can there be much doubt about their causes (for they have more than one
+cause), as we shall see if we take some illustrations of the defects
+themselves.
+
+Among these are not to be reckoned certain things which in dramas
+written at the present time would rightly be counted defects. There are,
+for example, in most Elizabethan plays peculiarities of construction
+which would injure a play written for our stage but were perfectly
+well-fitted for that very different stage,--a stage on which again some
+of the best-constructed plays of our time would appear absurdly faulty.
+Or take the charge of improbability. Shakespeare certainly has
+improbabilities which are defects. They are most frequent in the winding
+up of his comedies (and how many comedies are there in the world which
+end satisfactorily?). But his improbabilities are rarely psychological,
+and in some of his plays there occurs one kind of improbability which is
+no defect, but simply a characteristic which has lost in our day much of
+its former attraction. I mean that the story, in most of the comedies
+and many of the tragedies of the Elizabethans, was _intended_ to be
+strange and wonderful. These plays were tales of romance dramatised, and
+they were meant in part to satisfy the same love of wonder to which the
+romances appealed. It is no defect in the Arthurian legends, or the old
+French romances, or many of the stories in the _Decameron_, that they
+are improbable: it is a virtue. To criticise them as though they were of
+the same species as a realistic novel, is, we should all say, merely
+stupid. Is it anything else to criticise in the same way _Twelfth Night_
+or _As You Like It_? And so, even when the difference between comedy and
+tragedy is allowed for, the improbability of the opening of _King Lear_,
+so often censured, is no defect. It is not out of character, it is only
+extremely unusual and strange. But it was meant to be so; like the
+marriage of the black Othello with Desdemona, the Venetian senator's
+daughter.
+
+To come then to real defects, (_a_) one may be found in places where
+Shakespeare strings together a number of scenes, some very short, in
+which the _dramatis personae_ are frequently changed; as though a
+novelist were to tell his story in a succession of short chapters, in
+which he flitted from one group of his characters to another. This
+method shows itself here and there in the pure tragedies (_e.g._ in the
+last Act of _Macbeth_), but it appears most decidedly where the
+historical material was undramatic, as in the middle part of _Antony and
+Cleopatra_. It was made possible by the absence of scenery, and
+doubtless Shakespeare used it because it was the easiest way out of a
+difficulty. But, considered abstractedly, it is a defective method, and,
+even as used by Shakespeare, it sometimes reminds us of the merely
+narrative arrangement common in plays before his time.
+
+(_b_) We may take next the introduction or excessive development of
+matter neither required by the plot nor essential to the exhibition of
+character: _e.g._ the references in _Hamlet_ to theatre-quarrels of the
+day, and the length of the player's speech and also of Hamlet's
+directions to him respecting the delivery of the lines to be inserted in
+the 'Murder of Gonzago.' All this was probably of great interest at the
+time when _Hamlet_ was first presented; most of it we should be very
+sorry to miss; some of it seems to bring us close to Shakespeare
+himself; but who can defend it from the point of view of constructive
+art?
+
+(_c_) Again, we may look at Shakespeare's soliloquies. It will be agreed
+that in listening to a soliloquy we ought never to feel that we are
+being addressed. And in this respect, as in others, many of the
+soliloquies are master-pieces. But certainly in some the purpose of
+giving information lies bare, and in one or two the actor openly speaks
+to the audience. Such faults are found chiefly in the early plays,
+though there is a glaring instance at the end of Belarius's speech in
+_Cymbeline_ (III. iii. 99 ff.), and even in the mature tragedies
+something of this kind may be traced. Let anyone compare, for example,
+Edmund's soliloquy in _King Lear_, I. ii., 'This is the excellent
+foppery of the world,' with Edgar's in II. iii., and he will be
+conscious that in the latter the purpose of giving information is
+imperfectly disguised.[23]
+
+(_d_) It cannot be denied, further, that in many of Shakespeare's plays,
+if not in all, there are inconsistencies and contradictions, and also
+that questions are suggested to the reader which it is impossible for
+him to answer with certainty. For instance, some of the indications of
+the lapse of time between Othello's marriage and the events of the later
+Acts flatly contradict one another; and it is impossible to make out
+whether Hamlet was at Court or at the University when his father was
+murdered. But it should be noticed that often what seems a defect of
+this latter kind is not really a defect. For instance, the difficulty
+about Hamlet's age (even if it cannot be resolved by the text alone) did
+not exist for Shakespeare's audience. The moment Burbage entered it must
+have been clear whether the hero was twenty or thirty. And in like
+manner many questions of dramatic interpretation which trouble us could
+never have arisen when the plays were first produced, for the actor
+would be instructed by the author how to render any critical and
+possibly ambiguous passage. (I have heard it remarked, and the remark I
+believe is just, that Shakespeare seems to have relied on such
+instructions less than most of his contemporaries; one fact out of
+several which might be adduced to prove that he did not regard his plays
+as mere stage-dramas of the moment.)
+
+(_e_) To turn to another field, the early critics were no doubt often
+provokingly wrong when they censured the language of particular passages
+in Shakespeare as obscure, inflated, tasteless, or 'pestered with
+metaphors'; but they were surely right in the general statement that his
+language often shows these faults. And this is a subject which later
+criticism has never fairly faced and examined.
+
+(_f_) Once more, to say that Shakespeare makes all his serious
+characters talk alike,[24] and that he constantly speaks through the
+mouths of his _dramatis personae_ without regard to their individual
+natures, would be to exaggerate absurdly; but it is true that in his
+earlier plays these faults are traceable in some degree, and even in
+_Hamlet_ there are striking passages where dramatic appropriateness is
+sacrificed to some other object. When Laertes speaks the lines
+beginning,
+
+     For nature, crescent, does not grow alone
+     In thews and bulk,
+
+who can help feeling that Shakespeare is speaking rather than Laertes?
+Or when the player-king discourses for more than twenty lines on the
+instability of human purpose, and when King Claudius afterwards insists
+to Laertes on the same subject at almost equal length, who does not see
+that Shakespeare, thinking but little of dramatic fitness, wishes in
+part simply to write poetry, and partly to impress on the audience
+thoughts which will help them to understand, not the player-king nor yet
+King Claudius, but Hamlet himself, who, on his side,--and here quite in
+character--has already enlarged on the same topic in the most famous of
+his soliloquies?
+
+(_g_) Lastly, like nearly all the dramatists of his day and of times
+much earlier, Shakespeare was fond of 'gnomic' passages, and introduces
+them probably not more freely than his readers like, but more freely
+than, I suppose, a good play-wright now would care to do. These
+passages, it may be observed, are frequently rhymed (_e.g._ _Othello_,
+I. iii. 201 ff., II. i. 149 ff.). Sometimes they were printed in early
+editions with inverted commas round them, as are in the First Quarto
+Polonius's 'few precepts' to Laertes.
+
+If now we ask whence defects like these arose, we shall observe that
+some of them are shared by the majority of Shakespeare's contemporaries,
+and abound in the dramas immediately preceding his time. They are
+characteristics of an art still undeveloped, and, no doubt, were not
+perceived to be defects. But though it is quite probable that in regard
+to one or two kinds of imperfection (such as the superabundance of
+'gnomic' passages) Shakespeare himself erred thus ignorantly, it is very
+unlikely that in most cases he did so, unless in the first years of his
+career of authorship. And certainly he never can have thought it
+artistic to leave inconsistencies, obscurities, or passages of bombast
+in his work. Most of the defects in his writings must be due to
+indifference or want of care.
+
+I do not say that all were so. In regard, for example, to his occasional
+bombast and other errors of diction, it seems hardly doubtful that his
+perception was sometimes at fault, and that, though he used the English
+language like no one else, he had not that _sureness_ of taste in words
+which has been shown by some much smaller writers. And it seems not
+unlikely that here he suffered from his comparative want of
+'learning,'--that is, of familiarity with the great writers of
+antiquity. But nine-tenths of his defects are not, I believe, the errors
+of an inspired genius, ignorant of art, but the sins of a great but
+negligent artist. He was often, no doubt, over-worked and pressed for
+time. He knew that the immense majority of his audience were incapable
+of distinguishing between rough and finished work. He often felt the
+degradation of having to live by pleasing them. Probably in hours of
+depression he was quite indifferent to fame, and perhaps in another mood
+the whole business of play-writing seemed to him a little thing. None of
+these thoughts and feelings influenced him when his subject had caught
+hold of him. To imagine that _then_ he 'winged his roving flight' for
+'gain' or 'glory,' or wrote from any cause on earth but the necessity of
+expression, with all its pains and raptures, is mere folly. He was
+possessed: his mind must have been in a white heat: he worked, no doubt,
+with the _furia_ of Michael Angelo. And if he did not succeed at
+once--and how can even he have always done so?--he returned to the
+matter again and again. Such things as the scenes of Duncan's murder or
+Othello's temptation, such speeches as those of the Duke to Claudio and
+of Claudio to his sister about death, were not composed in an hour and
+tossed aside; and if they have defects, they have not what Shakespeare
+thought defects. Nor is it possible that his astonishingly individual
+conceptions of character can have been struck out at a heat: prolonged
+and repeated thought must have gone to them. But of small
+inconsistencies in the plot he was often quite careless. He seems to
+have finished off some of his comedies with a hasty and even
+contemptuous indifference, as if it mattered nothing how the people got
+married, or even who married whom, so long as enough were married
+somehow. And often, when he came to parts of his scheme that were
+necessary but not interesting to him, he wrote with a slack hand, like a
+craftsman of genius who knows that his natural gift and acquired skill
+will turn out something more than good enough for his audience: wrote
+probably fluently but certainly negligently, sometimes only half saying
+what he meant, and sometimes saying the opposite, and now and then, when
+passion was required, lapsing into bombast because he knew he must
+heighten his style but would not take the trouble to inflame his
+imagination. It may truly be said that what injures such passages is not
+inspiration, but the want of it. But, as they are mostly passages where
+no poet could expect to be inspired, it is even more true to say that
+here Shakespeare lacked the conscience of the artist who is determined
+to make everything as good as he can. Such poets as Milton, Pope,
+Tennyson, habitually show this conscience. They left probably scarcely
+anything that they felt they could improve. No one could dream of saying
+that of Shakespeare.
+
+Hence comes what is perhaps the chief difficulty in interpreting his
+works. Where his power or art is fully exerted it really does resemble
+that of nature. It organises and vitalises its product from the centre
+outward to the minutest markings on the surface, so that when you turn
+upon it the most searching light you can command, when you dissect it
+and apply to it the test of a microscope, still you find in it nothing
+formless, general or vague, but everywhere structure, character,
+individuality. In this his great things, which seem to come whenever
+they are wanted, have no companions in literature except the few
+greatest things in Dante; and it is a fatal error to allow his
+carelessness elsewhere to make one doubt whether here one is not seeking
+more than can be found. It is very possible to look for subtlety in the
+wrong places in Shakespeare, but in the right places it is not possible
+to find too much. But then this characteristic, which is one source of
+his endless attraction, is also a source of perplexity. For in those
+parts of his plays which show him neither in his most intense nor in his
+most negligent mood, we are often unable to decide whether something
+that seems inconsistent, indistinct, feeble, exaggerated, is really so,
+or whether it was definitely meant to be as it is, and has an intention
+which we ought to be able to divine; whether, for example, we have
+before us some unusual trait in character, some abnormal movement of
+mind, only surprising to us because we understand so very much less of
+human nature than Shakespeare did, or whether he wanted to get his work
+done and made a slip, or in using an old play adopted hastily something
+that would not square with his own conception, or even refused to
+trouble himself with minutiae which we notice only because we study him,
+but which nobody ever notices in a stage performance. We know well
+enough what Shakespeare is doing when at the end of _Measure for
+Measure_ he marries Isabella to the Duke--and a scandalous proceeding it
+is; but who can ever feel sure that the doubts which vex him as to some
+not unimportant points in _Hamlet_ are due to his own want of eyesight
+or to Shakespeare's want of care?
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[Footnote 16: The famous critics of the Romantic Revival seem to have
+paid very little attention to this subject. Mr. R.G. Moulton has written
+an interesting book on _Shakespeare as a Dramatic Artist_ (1885). In
+parts of my analysis I am much indebted to Gustav Freytag's _Technik des
+Dramas_, a book which deserves to be much better known than it appears
+to be to Englishmen interested in the drama. I may add, for the benefit
+of classical scholars, that Freytag has a chapter on Sophocles. The
+reader of his book will easily distinguish, if he cares to, the places
+where I follow Freytag, those where I differ from him, and those where I
+write in independence of him. I may add that in speaking of construction
+I have thought it best to assume in my hearers no previous knowledge of
+the subject; that I have not attempted to discuss how much of what is
+said of Shakespeare would apply also to other dramatists; and that I
+have illustrated from the tragedies generally, not only from the chosen
+four.]
+
+[Footnote 17: This word throughout the lecture bears the sense it has
+here, which, of course, is not its usual dramatic sense.]
+
+[Footnote 18: In the same way a comedy will consist of three parts,
+showing the 'situation,' the 'complication' or 'entanglement,' and the
+_denouement_ or 'solution.']
+
+[Footnote 19: It is possible, of course, to open the tragedy with the
+conflict already begun, but Shakespeare never does so.]
+
+[Footnote 20: When the subject comes from English history, and
+especially when the play forms one of a series, some knowledge may be
+assumed. So in _Richard III._ Even in _Richard II._ not a little
+knowledge seems to be assumed, and this fact points to the existence of
+a popular play on the earlier part of Richard's reign. Such a play
+exists, though it is not clear that it is a genuine Elizabethan work.
+See the _Jahrbuch d. deutschen Sh.-gesellschaft_ for 1899.]
+
+[Footnote 21: This is one of several reasons why many people enjoy
+reading him, who, on the whole, dislike reading plays. A main cause of
+this very general dislike is that the reader has not a lively enough
+imagination to carry him with pleasure through the exposition, though in
+the theatre, where his imagination is helped, he would experience little
+difficulty.]
+
+[Footnote 22: The end of _Richard III._ is perhaps an exception.]
+
+[Footnote 23: I do not discuss the general question of the justification
+of soliloquy, for it concerns not Shakespeare only, but practically all
+dramatists down to quite recent times. I will only remark that neither
+soliloquy nor the use of verse can be condemned on the mere ground that
+they are 'unnatural.' No dramatic language is 'natural'; _all_ dramatic
+language is idealised. So that the question as to soliloquy must be one
+as to the degree of idealisation and the balance of advantages and
+disadvantages. (Since this lecture was written I have read some remarks
+on Shakespeare's soliloquies to much the same effect by E. Kilian in the
+_Jahrbuch d. deutschen Shakespeare-Gesellschaft_ for 1903.)]
+
+[Footnote 24: If by this we mean that these characters all speak what is
+recognisably Shakespeare's style, of course it is true; but it is no
+accusation. Nor does it follow that they all speak alike; and in fact
+they are far from doing so.]
+
+
+
+
+LECTURE III
+
+SHAKESPEARE'S TRAGIC PERIOD--HAMLET
+
+
+1
+
+Before we come to-day to _Hamlet_, the first of our four tragedies, a
+few remarks must be made on their probable place in Shakespeare's
+literary career. But I shall say no more than seems necessary for our
+restricted purpose, and, therefore, for the most part shall merely be
+stating widely accepted results of investigation, without going into the
+evidence on which they rest.[25]
+
+Shakespeare's tragedies fall into two distinct groups, and these groups
+are separated by a considerable interval. He wrote tragedy--pure, like
+_Romeo and Juliet_; historical, like _Richard III._--in the early years
+of his career of authorship, when he was also writing such comedies as
+_Love's Labour's Lost_ and the _Midsummer-Night's Dream_. Then came a
+time, lasting some half-dozen years, during which he composed the most
+mature and humorous of his English History plays (the plays with
+Falstaff in them), and the best of his romantic comedies (the plays with
+Beatrice and Jaques and Viola in them). There are no tragedies belonging
+to these half-dozen years, nor any dramas approaching tragedy. But now,
+from about 1601 to about 1608, comes tragedy after tragedy--_Julius
+Caesar_, _Hamlet_, _Othello_, _King Lear_, _Timon of Athens_, _Macbeth_,
+_Antony and Cleopatra_ and _Coriolanus_; and their companions are plays
+which cannot indeed be called tragedies, but certainly are not comedies
+in the same sense as _As You Like It_ or the _Tempest_. These seven
+years, accordingly, might, without much risk of misunderstanding, be
+called Shakespeare's tragic period.[26] And after it he wrote no more
+tragedies, but chiefly romances more serious and less sunny than _As You
+Like It_, but not much less serene.
+
+The existence of this distinct tragic period, of a time when the
+dramatist seems to have been occupied almost exclusively with deep and
+painful problems, has naturally helped to suggest the idea that the
+'man' also, in these years of middle age, from thirty-seven to
+forty-four, was heavily burdened in spirit; that Shakespeare turned to
+tragedy not merely for change, or because he felt it to be the greatest
+form of drama and felt himself equal to it, but also because the world
+had come to look dark and terrible to him; and even that the railings of
+Thersites and the maledictions of Timon express his own contempt and
+hatred for mankind. Discussion of this large and difficult subject,
+however, is not necessary to the dramatic appreciation of any of his
+works, and I shall say nothing of it here, but shall pass on at once to
+draw attention to certain stages and changes which may be observed
+within the tragic period. For this purpose too it is needless to raise
+any question as to the respective chronological positions of _Othello_,
+_King Lear_ and _Macbeth_. What is important is also generally admitted:
+that _Julius Caesar_ and _Hamlet_ precede these plays, and that _Antony
+and Cleopatra_ and _Coriolanus_ follow them.[27]
+
+If we consider the tragedies first on the side of their substance, we
+find at once an obvious difference between the first two and the
+remainder. Both Brutus and Hamlet are highly intellectual by nature and
+reflective by habit. Both may even be called, in a popular sense,
+philosophic; Brutus may be called so in a stricter sense. Each, being
+also a 'good' man, shows accordingly, when placed in critical
+circumstances, a sensitive and almost painful anxiety to do right. And
+though they fail--of course in quite different ways--to deal
+successfully with these circumstances, the failure in each case is
+connected rather with their intellectual nature and reflective habit
+than with any yielding to passion. Hence the name 'tragedy of thought,'
+which Schlegel gave to _Hamlet_, may be given also, as in effect it has
+been by Professor Dowden, to _Julius Caesar_. The later heroes, on the
+other hand, Othello, Lear, Timon, Macbeth, Antony, Coriolanus, have, one
+and all, passionate natures, and, speaking roughly, we may attribute the
+tragic failure in each of these cases to passion. Partly for this
+reason, the later plays are wilder and stormier than the first two. We
+see a greater mass of human nature in commotion, and we see
+Shakespeare's own powers exhibited on a larger scale. Finally,
+examination would show that, in all these respects, the first tragedy,
+_Julius Caesar_, is further removed from the later type than is the
+second, _Hamlet_.
+
+These two earlier works are both distinguished from most of the
+succeeding tragedies in another though a kindred respect. Moral evil is
+not so intently scrutinised or so fully displayed in them. In _Julius
+Caesar_, we may almost say, everybody means well. In _Hamlet_, though we
+have a villain, he is a small one. The murder which gives rise to the
+action lies outside the play, and the centre of attention within the
+play lies in the hero's efforts to do his duty. It seems clear that
+Shakespeare's interest, since the early days when under Marlowe's
+influence he wrote _Richard III._, has not been directed to the more
+extreme or terrible forms of evil. But in the tragedies that follow
+_Hamlet_ the presence of this interest is equally clear. In Iago, in the
+'bad' people of _King Lear_, even in Macbeth and Lady Macbeth, human
+nature assumes shapes which inspire not mere sadness or repulsion but
+horror and dismay. If in _Timon_ no monstrous cruelty is done, we still
+watch ingratitude and selfishness so blank that they provoke a loathing
+we never felt for Claudius; and in this play and _King Lear_ we can
+fancy that we hear at times the _saeva indignatio_, if not the despair,
+of Swift. This prevalence of abnormal or appalling forms of evil, side
+by side with vehement passion, is another reason why the convulsion
+depicted in these tragedies seems to come from a deeper source, and to
+be vaster in extent, than the conflict in the two earlier plays. And
+here again _Julius Caesar_ is further removed than _Hamlet_ from
+_Othello_, _King Lear_, and _Macbeth_.
+
+But in regard to this second point of difference a reservation must be
+made, on which I will speak a little more fully, because, unlike the
+matter hitherto touched on, its necessity seems hardly to have been
+recognised. _All_ of the later tragedies may be called tragedies of
+passion, but not all of them display these extreme forms of evil.
+Neither of the last two does so. Antony and Coriolanus are, from one
+point of view, victims of passion; but the passion that ruins Antony
+also exalts him, he touches the infinite in it; and the pride and
+self-will of Coriolanus, though terrible in bulk, are scarcely so in
+quality; there is nothing base in them, and the huge creature whom they
+destroy is a noble, even a lovable, being. Nor does either of these
+dramas, though the earlier depicts a corrupt civilisation, include even
+among the minor characters anyone who can be called villainous or
+horrible. Consider, finally, the impression left on us at the close of
+each. It is remarkable that this impression, though very strong, can
+scarcely be called purely tragic; or, if we call it so, at least the
+feeling of reconciliation which mingles with the obviously tragic
+emotions is here exceptionally well-marked. The death of Antony, it will
+be remembered, comes before the opening of the Fifth Act. The death of
+Cleopatra, which closes the play, is greeted by the reader with sympathy
+and admiration, even with exultation at the thought that she has foiled
+Octavius; and these feelings are heightened by the deaths of Charmian
+and Iras, heroically faithful to their mistress, as Emilia was to hers.
+In _Coriolanus_ the feeling of reconciliation is even stronger. The
+whole interest towards the close has been concentrated on the question
+whether the hero will persist in his revengeful design of storming and
+burning his native city, or whether better feelings will at last
+overpower his resentment and pride. He stands on the edge of a crime
+beside which, at least in outward dreadfulness, the slaughter of an
+individual looks insignificant. And when, at the sound of his mother's
+voice and the sight of his wife and child, nature asserts itself and he
+gives way, although we know he will lose his life, we care little for
+that: he has saved his soul. Our relief, and our exultation in the power
+of goodness, are so great that the actual catastrophe which follows and
+mingles sadness with these feelings leaves them but little diminished,
+and as we close the book we feel, it seems to me, more as we do at the
+close of _Cymbeline_ than as we do at the close of _Othello_. In saying
+this I do not in the least mean to criticise _Coriolanus_. It is a much
+nobler play as it stands than it would have been if Shakespeare had made
+the hero persist, and we had seen him amid the flaming ruins of Rome,
+awaking suddenly to the enormity of his deed and taking vengeance on
+himself; but that would surely have been an ending more strictly tragic
+than the close of Shakespeare's play. Whether this close was simply due
+to his unwillingness to contradict his historical authority on a point
+of such magnitude we need not ask. In any case _Coriolanus_ is, in more
+than an outward sense, the end of his tragic period. It marks the
+transition to his latest works, in which the powers of repentance and
+forgiveness charm to rest the tempest raised by error and guilt.
+
+If we turn now from the substance of the tragedies to their style and
+versification, we find on the whole a corresponding difference between
+the earlier and the later. The usual assignment of _Julius Caesar_, and
+even of _Hamlet_, to the end of Shakespeare's Second Period--the period
+of _Henry V._--is based mainly, we saw, on considerations of form. The
+general style of the serious parts of the last plays from English
+history is one of full, noble and comparatively equable eloquence. The
+'honey-tongued' sweetness and beauty of Shakespeare's early writing, as
+seen in _Romeo and Juliet_ or the _Midsummer-Night's Dream_, remain; the
+ease and lucidity remain; but there is an accession of force and weight.
+We find no great change from this style when we come to _Julius
+Caesar_,[28] which may be taken to mark its culmination. At this point
+in Shakespeare's literary development he reaches, if the phrase may be
+pardoned, a limited perfection. Neither thought on the one side, nor
+expression on the other, seems to have any tendency to outrun or contend
+with its fellow. We receive an impression of easy mastery and complete
+harmony, but not so strong an impression of inner power bursting into
+outer life. Shakespeare's style is perhaps nowhere else so free from
+defects, and yet almost every one of his subsequent plays contains
+writing which is greater. To speak familiarly, we feel in _Julius
+Caesar_ that, although not even Shakespeare could better the style he
+has chosen, he has not let himself go.
+
+In reading _Hamlet_ we have no such feeling, and in many parts (for
+there is in the writing of _Hamlet_ an unusual variety[29]) we are
+conscious of a decided change. The style in these parts is more rapid
+and vehement, less equable and less simple; and there is a change of the
+same kind in the versification. But on the whole the _type_ is the same
+as in _Julius Caesar_, and the resemblance of the two plays is decidedly
+more marked than the difference. If Hamlet's soliloquies, considered
+simply as compositions, show a great change from Jaques's speech, 'All
+the world's a stage,' and even from the soliloquies of Brutus, yet
+_Hamlet_ (for instance in the hero's interview with his mother) is like
+_Julius Caesar_, and unlike the later tragedies, in the fulness of its
+eloquence, and passages like the following belong quite definitely to
+the style of the Second Period:
+
+     _Mar._ It faded on the crowing of the cock.
+     Some say that ever 'gainst that season comes
+     Wherein our Saviour's birth is celebrated,
+     The bird of dawning singeth all night long;
+     And then, they say, no spirit dare stir abroad;
+     The nights are wholesome; then no planets strike,
+     No fairy takes, nor witch hath power to charm,
+     So hallow'd and so gracious is the time.
+
+     _Hor._ So have I heard and do in part believe it.
+     But, look, the morn, in russet mantle clad,
+     Walks o'er the dew of yon high eastward hill.
+
+This bewitching music is heard again in Hamlet's farewell to Horatio:
+
+     If thou didst ever hold me in thy heart,
+     Absent thee from felicity awhile,
+     And in this harsh world draw thy breath in pain,
+     To tell my story.
+
+But after _Hamlet_ this music is heard no more. It is followed by a
+music vaster and deeper, but not the same.
+
+The changes observable in _Hamlet_ are afterwards, and gradually, so
+greatly developed that Shakespeare's style and versification at last
+become almost new things. It is extremely difficult to illustrate this
+briefly in a manner to which no just exception can be taken, for it is
+almost impossible to find in two plays passages bearing a sufficiently
+close resemblance to one another in occasion and sentiment. But I will
+venture to put by the first of those quotations from _Hamlet_ this from
+_Macbeth_:
+
+     _Dun._ This castle hath a pleasant seat; the air
+     Nimbly and sweetly recommends itself
+     Unto our gentle senses.
+
+     _Ban._                 This guest of summer,
+     The temple-haunting martlet, does approve,
+     By his loved mansionry, that the heaven's breath
+     Smells wooingly here: no jutty, frieze,
+     Buttress, nor coign of vantage, but this bird
+     Hath made his pendent bed and procreant cradle;
+     Where they most breed and haunt, I have observed,
+     The air is delicate;
+
+and by the second quotation from _Hamlet_ this from _Antony and
+Cleopatra_:
+
+     The miserable change now at my end
+     Lament nor sorrow at; but please your thoughts
+     In feeding them with those my former fortunes
+     Wherein I lived, the greatest prince o' the world,
+     The noblest; and do now not basely die,
+     Not cowardly put off my helmet to
+     My countryman,--a Roman by a Roman
+     Valiantly vanquish'd. Now my spirit is going;
+     I can no more.
+
+It would be almost an impertinence to point out in detail how greatly
+these two passages, and especially the second, differ in effect from
+those in _Hamlet_, written perhaps five or six years earlier. The
+versification, by the time we reach _Antony and Cleopatra_, has assumed
+a new type; and although this change would appear comparatively slight
+in a typical passage from _Othello_ or even from _King Lear_, its
+approach through these plays to _Timon_ and _Macbeth_ can easily be
+traced. It is accompanied by a similar change in diction and
+construction. After _Hamlet_ the style, in the more emotional passages,
+is heightened. It becomes grander, sometimes wilder, sometimes more
+swelling, even tumid. It is also more concentrated, rapid, varied, and,
+in construction, less regular, not seldom twisted or elliptical. It is,
+therefore, not so easy and lucid, and in the more ordinary dialogue it
+is sometimes involved and obscure, and from these and other causes
+deficient in charm.[30] On the other hand, it is always full of life and
+movement, and in great passages produces sudden, strange, electrifying
+effects which are rarely found in earlier plays, and not so often even
+in _Hamlet_. The more pervading effect of beauty gives place to what may
+almost be called explosions of sublimity or pathos.
+
+There is room for differences of taste and preference as regards the
+style and versification of the end of Shakespeare's Second Period, and
+those of the later tragedies and last romances. But readers who miss in
+the latter the peculiar enchantment of the earlier will not deny that
+the changes in form are in entire harmony with the inward changes. If
+they object to passages where, to exaggerate a little, the sense has
+rather to be discerned beyond the words than found in them, and if they
+do not wholly enjoy the movement of so typical a speech as this,
+
+     Yes, like enough, high-battled Caesar will
+     Unstate his happiness, and be staged to the show,
+     Against a sworder! I see men's judgements are
+     A parcel of their fortunes; and things outward
+     Do draw the inward quality after them,
+     To suffer all alike. That he should dream,
+     Knowing all measures, the full Caesar will
+     Answer his emptiness! Caesar, thou hast subdued
+     His judgement too,
+
+they will admit that, in traversing the impatient throng of thoughts not
+always completely embodied, their minds move through an astonishing
+variety of ideas and experiences, and that a style less generally poetic
+than that of _Hamlet_ is also a style more invariably dramatic. It may
+be that, for the purposes of tragedy, the highest point was reached
+during the progress of these changes, in the most critical passages of
+_Othello_, _King Lear_ and _Macbeth_.[31]
+
+
+2
+
+Suppose you were to describe the plot of _Hamlet_ to a person quite
+ignorant of the play, and suppose you were careful to tell your hearer
+nothing about Hamlet's character, what impression would your sketch make
+on him? Would he not exclaim: 'What a sensational story! Why, here are
+some eight violent deaths, not to speak of adultery, a ghost, a mad
+woman, and a fight in a grave! If I did not know that the play was
+Shakespeare's, I should have thought it must have been one of those
+early tragedies of blood and horror from which he is said to have
+redeemed the stage'? And would he not then go on to ask: 'But why in the
+world did not Hamlet obey the Ghost at once, and so save seven of those
+eight lives?'
+
+This exclamation and this question both show the same thing, that the
+whole story turns upon the peculiar character of the hero. For without
+this character the story would appear sensational and horrible; and yet
+the actual _Hamlet_ is very far from being so, and even has a less
+terrible effect than _Othello_, _King Lear_ or _Macbeth_. And again, if
+we had no knowledge of this character, the story would hardly be
+intelligible; it would at any rate at once suggest that wondering
+question about the conduct of the hero; while the story of any of the
+other three tragedies would sound plain enough and would raise no such
+question. It is further very probable that the main change made by
+Shakespeare in the story as already represented on the stage, lay in a
+new conception of Hamlet's character and so of the cause of his delay.
+And, lastly, when we examine the tragedy, we observe two things which
+illustrate the same point. First, we find by the side of the hero no
+other figure of tragic proportions, no one like Lady Macbeth or Iago, no
+one even like Cordelia or Desdemona; so that, in Hamlet's absence, the
+remaining characters could not yield a Shakespearean tragedy at all.
+And, secondly, we find among them two, Laertes and Fortinbras, who are
+evidently designed to throw the character of the hero into relief. Even
+in the situations there is a curious parallelism; for Fortinbras, like
+Hamlet, is the son of a king, lately dead, and succeeded by his brother;
+and Laertes, like Hamlet, has a father slain, and feels bound to avenge
+him. And with this parallelism in situation there is a strong contrast
+in character; for both Fortinbras and Laertes possess in abundance the
+very quality which the hero seems to lack, so that, as we read, we are
+tempted to exclaim that either of them would have accomplished Hamlet's
+task in a day. Naturally, then, the tragedy of _Hamlet_ with Hamlet left
+out has become the symbol of extreme absurdity; while the character
+itself has probably exerted a greater fascination, and certainly has
+been the subject of more discussion, than any other in the whole
+literature of the world.
+
+Before, however, we approach the task of examining it, it is as well to
+remind ourselves that the virtue of the play by no means wholly depends
+on this most subtle creation. We are all aware of this, and if we were
+not so the history of _Hamlet_, as a stage-play, might bring the fact
+home to us. It is to-day the most popular of Shakespeare's tragedies on
+our stage; and yet a large number, perhaps even the majority of the
+spectators, though they may feel some mysterious attraction in the hero,
+certainly do not question themselves about his character or the cause of
+his delay, and would still find the play exceptionally effective, even
+if he were an ordinary brave young man and the obstacles in his path
+were purely external. And this has probably always been the case.
+_Hamlet_ seems from the first to have been a favourite play; but until
+late in the eighteenth century, I believe, scarcely a critic showed that
+he perceived anything specially interesting in the character. Hanmer, in
+1730, to be sure, remarks that 'there appears no reason at all in nature
+why this young prince did not put the usurper to death as soon as
+possible'; but it does not even cross his mind that this apparent
+'absurdity' is odd and might possibly be due to some design on the part
+of the poet. He simply explains the absurdity by observing that, if
+Shakespeare had made the young man go 'naturally to work,' the play
+would have come to an end at once! Johnson, in like manner, notices that
+'Hamlet is, through the whole piece, rather an instrument than an
+agent,' but it does not occur to him that this peculiar circumstance can
+be anything but a defect in Shakespeare's management of the plot.
+Seeing, they saw not. Henry Mackenzie, the author of _The Man of
+Feeling_, was, it would seem, the first of our critics to feel the
+'indescribable charm' of Hamlet, and to divine something of
+Shakespeare's intention. 'We see a man,' he writes, 'who in other
+circumstances would have exercised all the moral and social virtues,
+placed in a situation in which even the amiable qualities of his mind
+serve but to aggravate his distress and to perplex his conduct.'[32] How
+significant is the fact (if it be the fact) that it was only when the
+slowly rising sun of Romance began to flush the sky that the wonder,
+beauty and pathos of this most marvellous of Shakespeare's creations
+began to be visible! We do not know that they were perceived even in his
+own day, and perhaps those are not wholly wrong who declare that this
+creation, so far from being a characteristic product of the time, was a
+vision of
+
+                  the prophetic soul
+     Of the wide world dreaming on things to come.
+
+But the dramatic splendour of the whole tragedy is another matter, and
+must have been manifest not only in Shakespeare's day but even in
+Hanmer's.
+
+It is indeed so obvious that I pass it by, and proceed at once to the
+central question of Hamlet's character. And I believe time will be
+saved, and a good deal of positive interpretation may be introduced, if,
+without examining in detail any one theory, we first distinguish classes
+or types of theory which appear to be in various ways and degrees
+insufficient or mistaken. And we will confine our attention to sane
+theories;--for on this subject, as on all questions relating to
+Shakespeare, there are plenty of merely lunatic views: the view, for
+example, that Hamlet, being a disguised woman in love with Horatio,
+could hardly help seeming unkind to Ophelia; or the view that, being a
+very clever and wicked young man who wanted to oust his innocent uncle
+from the throne, he 'faked' the Ghost with this intent.
+
+But, before we come to our types of theory, it is necessary to touch on
+an idea, not unfrequently met with, which would make it vain labour to
+discuss or propose any theory at all. It is sometimes said that Hamlet's
+character is not only intricate but unintelligible. Now this statement
+might mean something quite unobjectionable and even perhaps true and
+important. It might mean that the character cannot be _wholly_
+understood. As we saw, there may be questions which we cannot answer
+with certainty now, because we have nothing but the text to guide us,
+but which never arose for the spectators who saw _Hamlet_ acted in
+Shakespeare's day; and we shall have to refer to such questions in these
+lectures. Again, it may be held without any improbability that, from
+carelessness or because he was engaged on this play for several years,
+Shakespeare left inconsistencies in his exhibition of the character
+which must prevent us from being certain of his ultimate meaning. Or,
+possibly, we may be baffled because he has illustrated in it certain
+strange facts of human nature, which he had noticed but of which we are
+ignorant. But then all this would apply in some measure to other
+characters in Shakespeare, and it is not this that is meant by the
+statement that Hamlet is unintelligible. What is meant is that
+Shakespeare _intended_ him to be so, because he himself was feeling
+strongly, and wished his audience to feel strongly, what a mystery life
+is, and how impossible it is for us to understand it. Now here, surely,
+we have mere confusion of mind. The mysteriousness of life is one thing,
+the psychological unintelligibility of a dramatic character is quite
+another; and the second does not show the first, it shows only the
+incapacity or folly of the dramatist. If it did show the first, it would
+be very easy to surpass Shakespeare in producing a sense of mystery: we
+should simply have to portray an absolutely nonsensical character. Of
+course _Hamlet_ appeals powerfully to our sense of the mystery of life,
+but so does _every_ good tragedy; and it does so not because the hero is
+an enigma to us, but because, having a fair understanding of him, we
+feel how strange it is that strength and weakness should be so mingled
+in one soul, and that this soul should be doomed to such misery and
+apparent failure.
+
+(1) To come, then, to our typical views, we may lay it down, first, that
+no theory will hold water which finds the cause of Hamlet's delay
+merely, or mainly, or even to any considerable extent, in external
+difficulties. Nothing is easier than to spin a plausible theory of this
+kind. What, it may be asked,[33] was Hamlet to do when the Ghost had
+left him with its commission of vengeance? The King was surrounded not
+merely by courtiers but by a Swiss body-guard: how was Hamlet to get at
+him? Was he then to accuse him publicly of the murder? If he did, what
+would happen? How would he prove the charge? All that he had to offer in
+proof was--a ghost-story! Others, to be sure, had seen the Ghost, but no
+one else had heard its revelations. Obviously, then, even if the court
+had been honest, instead of subservient and corrupt, it would have voted
+Hamlet mad, or worse, and would have shut him up out of harm's way. He
+could not see what to do, therefore, and so he waited. Then came the
+actors, and at once with admirable promptness he arranged for the
+play-scene, hoping that the King would betray his guilt to the whole
+court. Unfortunately the King did not. It is true that immediately
+afterwards Hamlet got his chance; for he found the King defenceless on
+his knees. But what Hamlet wanted was not a private revenge, to be
+followed by his own imprisonment or execution; it was public justice. So
+he spared the King; and, as he unluckily killed Polonius just
+afterwards, he had to consent to be despatched to England. But, on the
+voyage there, he discovered the King's commission, ordering the King of
+England to put him immediately to death; and, with this in his pocket,
+he made his way back to Denmark. For now, he saw, the proof of the
+King's attempt to murder him would procure belief also for the story of
+the murder of his father. His enemy, however, was too quick for him, and
+his public arraignment of that enemy was prevented by his own death.
+
+A theory like this sounds very plausible--so long as you do not remember
+the text. But no unsophisticated mind, fresh from the reading of
+_Hamlet_, will accept it; and, as soon as we begin to probe it, fatal
+objections arise in such numbers that I choose but a few, and indeed I
+think the first of them is enough.
+
+(_a_) From beginning to end of the play, Hamlet never makes the
+slightest reference to any external difficulty. How is it possible to
+explain this fact in conformity with the theory? For what conceivable
+reason should Shakespeare conceal from us so carefully the key to the
+problem?
+
+(_b_) Not only does Hamlet fail to allude to such difficulties, but he
+always assumes that he _can_ obey the Ghost,[34] and he once asserts
+this in so many words ('Sith I have cause and will and strength and
+means To do't,' IV. iv. 45).
+
+(_c_) Again, why does Shakespeare exhibit Laertes quite easily raising
+the people against the King? Why but to show how much more easily
+Hamlet, whom the people loved, could have done the same thing, if that
+was the plan he preferred?
+
+(_d_) Again, Hamlet did _not_ plan the play-scene in the hope that the
+King would betray his guilt to the court. He planned it, according to
+his own account, in order to convince _himself_ by the King's agitation
+that the Ghost had spoken the truth. This is perfectly clear from II.
+ii. 625 ff. and from III. ii. 80 ff. Some readers are misled by the
+words in the latter passage:
+
+                     if his occulted guilt
+     Do not itself unkennel in one speech,
+     It is a damned ghost that we have seen.
+
+The meaning obviously is, as the context shows, 'if his hidden guilt do
+not betray itself _on occasion of_ one speech,' viz., the 'dozen or
+sixteen lines' with which Hamlet has furnished the player, and of which
+only six are delivered, because the King does not merely show his guilt
+in his face (which was all Hamlet had hoped, III. ii. 90) but
+rushes from the room.
+
+It may be as well to add that, although Hamlet's own account of his
+reason for arranging the play-scene may be questioned, it is impossible
+to suppose that, if his real design had been to provoke an open
+confession of guilt, he could have been unconscious of this design.
+
+(_e_) Again, Hamlet never once talks, or shows a sign of thinking, of
+the plan of bringing the King to public justice; he always talks of
+using his 'sword' or his 'arm.' And this is so just as much after he has
+returned to Denmark with the commission in his pocket as it was before
+this event. When he has told Horatio the story of the voyage, he does
+not say, 'Now I can convict him': he says, 'Now am I not justified in
+using this arm?'
+
+This class of theory, then, we must simply reject. But it suggests two
+remarks. It is of course quite probable that, when Hamlet was 'thinking
+too precisely on the event,' he was considering, among other things, the
+question how he could avenge his father without sacrificing his own life
+or freedom. And assuredly, also, he was anxious that his act of
+vengeance should not be misconstrued, and would never have been content
+to leave a 'wounded name' behind him. His dying words prove that.
+
+(2) Assuming, now, that Hamlet's main difficulty--almost the whole of
+his difficulty--was internal, I pass to views which, acknowledging this,
+are still unsatisfactory because they isolate one element in his
+character and situation and treat it as the whole.
+
+According to the first of these typical views, Hamlet was restrained by
+conscience or a moral scruple; he could not satisfy himself that it was
+right to avenge his father.
+
+This idea, like the first, can easily be made to look very plausible if
+we vaguely imagine the circumstances without attending to the text. But
+attention to the text is fatal to it. For, on the one hand, scarcely
+anything can be produced in support of it, and, on the other hand, a
+great deal can be produced in its disproof. To take the latter point
+first, Hamlet, it is impossible to deny, habitually assumes, without any
+questioning, that he _ought_ to avenge his father. Even when he doubts,
+or thinks that he doubts, the honesty of the Ghost, he expresses no
+doubt as to what his duty will be if the Ghost turns out honest: 'If he
+but blench I know my course.' In the two soliloquies where he reviews
+his position (II. ii., 'O what a rogue and peasant slave am I,'
+and IV. iv., 'How all occasions do inform against me') he
+reproaches himself bitterly for the neglect of his duty. When he
+reflects on the possible causes of this neglect he never mentions among
+them a moral scruple. When the Ghost appears in the Queen's chamber he
+confesses, conscience-stricken, that, lapsed in time and passion, he has
+let go by the acting of its command; but he does not plead that his
+conscience stood in his way. The Ghost itself says that it comes to whet
+his 'almost blunted purpose'; and conscience may unsettle a purpose but
+does not blunt it. What natural explanation of all this can be given on
+the conscience theory?
+
+And now what can be set against this evidence? One solitary passage.[35]
+Quite late, after Hamlet has narrated to Horatio the events of his
+voyage, he asks him (V. ii. 63):
+
+     Does it not, thinks't thee, stand me now upon--
+     He that hath kill'd my king and whored my mother,
+     Popp'd in between the election and my hopes,
+     Thrown out his angle for my proper life,
+     And with such cozenage--is't not perfect conscience
+     To quit him with this arm? and is't not to be damn'd
+     To let this canker of our nature come
+     In further evil?
+
+Here, certainly, is a question of conscience in the usual present sense
+of the word; and, it may be said, does not this show that all along
+Hamlet really has been deterred by moral scruples? But I ask first how,
+in that case, the facts just adduced are to be explained: for they must
+be explained, not ignored. Next, let the reader observe that even if
+this passage did show that _one_ hindrance to Hamlet's action was his
+conscience, it by no means follows that this was the sole or the chief
+hindrance. And, thirdly, let him observe, and let him ask himself
+whether the coincidence is a mere accident, that Hamlet is here almost
+repeating the words he used in vain self-reproach some time before
+(IV. iv. 56):
+
+                             How stand I then,
+     That have a father kill'd, a mother stain'd,
+     Excitements of my reason and my blood,
+     And let all sleep?
+
+Is it not clear that he is speculating just as vainly now, and that this
+question of conscience is but one of his many unconscious excuses for
+delay? And, lastly, is it not so that Horatio takes it? He declines to
+discuss that unreal question, and answers simply,
+
+     It must be shortly known to him from England
+     What is the issue of the business there.
+
+In other words, 'Enough of this endless procrastination. What is wanted
+is not reasons for the deed, but the deed itself.' What can be more
+significant?
+
+Perhaps, however, it may be answered: 'Your explanation of this passage
+may be correct, and the facts you have mentioned do seem to be fatal to
+the theory of conscience in its usual form. But there is another and
+subtler theory of conscience. According to it, Hamlet, so far as his
+explicit consciousness went, was sure that he ought to obey the Ghost;
+but in the depths of his nature, and unknown to himself, there was a
+moral repulsion to the deed. The conventional moral ideas of his time,
+which he shared with the Ghost, told him plainly that he ought to avenge
+his father; but a deeper conscience in him, which was in advance of his
+time, contended with these explicit conventional ideas. It is because
+this deeper conscience remains below the surface that he fails to
+recognise it, and fancies he is hindered by cowardice or sloth or
+passion or what not; but it emerges into light in that speech to
+Horatio. And it is just because he has this nobler moral nature in him
+that we admire and love him.'
+
+Now I at once admit not only that this view is much more attractive and
+more truly tragic than the ordinary conscience theory, but that it has
+more verisimilitude. But I feel no doubt that it does not answer to
+Shakespeare's meaning, and I will simply mention, out of many objections
+to it, three which seem to be fatal. (_a_) If it answers to
+Shakespeare's meaning, why in the world did he conceal that meaning
+until the last Act? The facts adduced above seem to show beyond question
+that, on the hypothesis, he did so. That he did so is surely next door
+to incredible. In any case, it certainly requires an explanation, and
+certainly has not received one. (_b_) Let us test the theory by
+reference to a single important passage, that where Hamlet finds the
+King at prayer and spares him. The reason Hamlet gives himself for
+sparing the King is that, if he kills him now, he will send him to
+heaven, whereas he desires to send him to hell. Now, this reason may be
+an unconscious excuse, but is it believable that, if the real reason had
+been the stirrings of his deeper conscience, _that_ could have masked
+itself in the form of a desire to send his enemy's soul to hell? Is not
+the idea quite ludicrous? (_c_) The theory requires us to suppose that,
+when the Ghost enjoins Hamlet to avenge the murder of his father, it is
+laying on him a duty which _we_ are to understand to be no duty but the
+very reverse. And is not that supposition wholly contrary to the natural
+impression which we all receive in reading the play? Surely it is clear
+that, whatever we in the twentieth century may think about Hamlet's
+duty, we are meant in the play to assume that he _ought_ to have obeyed
+the Ghost.
+
+The conscience theory, then, in either of its forms we must reject. But
+it may remind us of points worth noting. In the first place, it is
+certainly true that Hamlet, in spite of some appearances to the
+contrary, was, as Goethe said, of a most moral nature, and had a great
+anxiety to do right. In this anxiety he resembles Brutus, and it is
+stronger in him than in any of the later heroes. And, secondly, it is
+highly probable that in his interminable broodings the kind of paralysis
+with which he was stricken masked itself in the shape of conscientious
+scruples as well as in many other shapes. And, finally, in his shrinking
+from the deed there was probably, together with much else, something
+which may be called a moral, though not a conscientious, repulsion: I
+mean a repugnance to the idea of falling suddenly on a man who could not
+defend himself. This, so far as we can see, was the only plan that
+Hamlet ever contemplated. There is no positive evidence in the play that
+he regarded it with the aversion that any brave and honourable man, one
+must suppose, would feel for it; but, as Hamlet certainly was brave and
+honourable, we may presume that he did so.
+
+(3) We come next to what may be called the sentimental view of Hamlet, a
+view common both among his worshippers and among his defamers. Its germ
+may perhaps be found in an unfortunate phrase of Goethe's (who of course
+is not responsible for the whole view): 'a lovely, pure and most moral
+nature, _without the strength of nerve which forms a hero_, sinks
+beneath a burden which it cannot bear and must not cast away.' When this
+idea is isolated, developed and popularised, we get the picture of a
+graceful youth, sweet and sensitive, full of delicate sympathies and
+yearning aspirations, shrinking from the touch of everything gross and
+earthly; but frail and weak, a kind of Werther, with a face like
+Shelley's and a voice like Mr. Tree's. And then we ask in tender pity,
+how could such a man perform the terrible duty laid on him?
+
+How, indeed! And what a foolish Ghost even to suggest such a duty! But
+this conception, though not without its basis in certain beautiful
+traits of Hamlet's nature, is utterly untrue. It is too kind to Hamlet
+on one side, and it is quite unjust to him on another. The 'conscience'
+theory at any rate leaves Hamlet a great nature which you can admire and
+even revere. But for the 'sentimental' Hamlet you can feel only pity not
+unmingled with contempt. Whatever else he is, he is no _hero_.
+
+But consider the text. This shrinking, flower-like youth--how could he
+possibly have done what we _see_ Hamlet do? What likeness to him is
+there in the Hamlet who, summoned by the Ghost, bursts from his
+terrified friends with the cry:
+
+                          Unhand me, gentlemen!
+     By heaven, I'll make a ghost of him that lets me;
+
+the Hamlet who scarcely once speaks to the King without an insult, or to
+Polonius without a gibe; the Hamlet who storms at Ophelia and speaks
+daggers to his mother; the Hamlet who, hearing a cry behind the arras,
+whips out his sword in an instant and runs the eavesdropper through; the
+Hamlet who sends his 'school-fellows' to their death and never troubles
+his head about them more; the Hamlet who is the first man to board a
+pirate ship, and who fights with Laertes in the grave; the Hamlet of the
+catastrophe, an omnipotent fate, before whom all the court stands
+helpless, who, as the truth breaks upon him, rushes on the King, drives
+his foil right through his body,[36] then seizes the poisoned cup and
+forces it violently between the wretched man's lips, and in the throes
+of death has force and fire enough to wrest the cup from Horatio's hand
+('By heaven, I'll have it!') lest he should drink and die? This man, the
+Hamlet of the play, is a heroic, terrible figure. He would have been
+formidable to Othello or Macbeth. If the sentimental Hamlet had crossed
+him, he would have hurled him from his path with one sweep of his arm.
+
+This view, then, or any view that approaches it, is grossly unjust to
+Hamlet, and turns tragedy into mere pathos. But, on the other side, it
+is too kind to him. It ignores the hardness and cynicism which were
+indeed no part of his nature, but yet, in this crisis of his life, are
+indubitably present and painfully marked. His sternness, itself left out
+of sight by this theory, is no defect; but he is much more than stern.
+Polonius possibly deserved nothing better than the words addressed to
+his corpse:
+
+     Thou wretched, rash, intruding fool, farewell!
+     I took thee for thy better: take thy fortune:
+     Thou find'st to be too busy is some danger;
+
+yet this was Ophelia's father, and, whatever he deserved, it pains us,
+for Hamlet's own sake, to hear the words:
+
+     This man shall set me packing:
+     I'll lug the guts into the neighbour room.
+
+There is the same insensibility in Hamlet's language about the fate of
+Rosencrantz and Guildenstern; and, observe, their deaths were not in the
+least required by his purpose. Grant, again, that his cruelty to Ophelia
+was partly due to misunderstanding, partly forced on him, partly
+feigned; still one surely cannot altogether so account for it, and still
+less can one so account for the disgusting and insulting grossness of
+his language to her in the play-scene. I know this is said to be merely
+an example of the custom of Shakespeare's time. But it is not so. It is
+such language as you will find addressed to a woman by no other hero of
+Shakespeare's, not even in that dreadful scene where Othello accuses
+Desdemona. It is a great mistake to ignore these things, or to try to
+soften the impression which they naturally make on one. That this
+embitterment, callousness, grossness, brutality, should be induced on a
+soul so pure and noble is profoundly tragic; and Shakespeare's business
+was to show this tragedy, not to paint an ideally beautiful soul
+unstained and undisturbed by the evil of the world and the anguish of
+conscious failure.[37]
+
+(4) There remains, finally, that class of view which may be named after
+Schlegel and Coleridge. According to this, _Hamlet_ is the tragedy of
+reflection. The cause of the hero's delay is irresolution; and the cause
+of this irresolution is excess of the reflective or speculative habit of
+mind. He has a general intention to obey the Ghost, but 'the native hue
+of resolution is sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought.' He is
+'thought-sick.' 'The whole,' says Schlegel, 'is intended to show how a
+calculating consideration which aims at exhausting, so far as human
+foresight can, all the relations and possible consequences of a deed,
+cripples[38] the power of acting.... Hamlet is a hypocrite towards
+himself; his far-fetched scruples are often mere pretexts to cover his
+want of determination.... He has no firm belief in himself or in
+anything else.... He loses himself in labyrinths of thought.' So
+Coleridge finds in Hamlet 'an almost enormous intellectual activity and
+a proportionate aversion to real action consequent upon it' (the
+aversion, that is to say, is consequent on the activity). Professor
+Dowden objects to this view, very justly, that it neglects the emotional
+side of Hamlet's character, 'which is quite as important as the
+intellectual'; but, with this supplement, he appears on the whole to
+adopt it. Hamlet, he says, 'loses a sense of fact because with him each
+object and event transforms and expands itself into an idea.... He
+cannot steadily keep alive within himself a sense of the importance of
+any positive, limited thing,--a deed, for example.' And Professor Dowden
+explains this condition by reference to Hamlet's life. 'When the play
+opens he has reached the age of thirty years ... and he has received
+culture of every kind except the culture of active life. During the
+reign of the strong-willed elder Hamlet there was no call to action for
+his meditative son. He has slipped on into years of full manhood still a
+haunter of the university, a student of philosophies, an amateur in art,
+a ponderer on the things of life and death, who has never formed a
+resolution or executed a deed' (_Shakspere, his Mind and Art_, 4th ed.,
+pp. 132, 133).
+
+On the whole, the Schlegel-Coleridge theory (with or without Professor
+Dowden's modification and amplification) is the most widely received
+view of Hamlet's character. And with it we come at last into close
+contact with the text of the play. It not only answers, in some
+fundamental respects, to the general impression produced by the drama,
+but it can be supported by Hamlet's own words in his soliloquies--such
+words, for example, as those about the native hue of resolution, or
+those about the craven scruple of thinking too precisely on the event.
+It is confirmed, also, by the contrast between Hamlet on the one side
+and Laertes and Fortinbras on the other; and, further, by the occurrence
+of those words of the King to Laertes (IV. vii. 119 f.), which,
+if they are not in character, are all the more important as showing what
+was in Shakespeare's mind at the time:
+
+                     that we would do
+     We should do when we would; for this 'would' changes,
+     And hath abatements and delays as many
+     As there are tongues, are hands, are accidents;
+     And then this 'should' is like a spendthrift sigh
+     That hurts by easing.
+
+And, lastly, even if the view itself does not suffice, the _description_
+given by its adherents of Hamlet's state of mind, as we see him in the
+last four Acts, is, on the whole and so far as it goes, a true
+description. The energy of resolve is dissipated in an endless brooding
+on the deed required. When he acts, his action does not proceed from
+this deliberation and analysis, but is sudden and impulsive, evoked by
+an emergency in which he has no time to think. And most of the reasons
+he assigns for his procrastination are evidently not the true reasons,
+but unconscious excuses.
+
+Nevertheless this theory fails to satisfy. And it fails not merely in
+this or that detail, but as a whole. We feel that its Hamlet does not
+fully answer to our imaginative impression. He is not nearly so
+inadequate to this impression as the sentimental Hamlet, but still we
+feel he is inferior to Shakespeare's man and does him wrong. And when we
+come to examine the theory we find that it is partial and leaves much
+unexplained. I pass that by for the present, for we shall see, I
+believe, that the theory is also positively misleading, and that in a
+most important way. And of this I proceed to speak.
+
+Hamlet's irresolution, or his aversion to real action, is, according to
+the theory, the _direct_ result of 'an almost enormous intellectual
+activity' in the way of 'a calculating consideration which attempts to
+exhaust all the relations and possible consequences of a deed.' And this
+again proceeds from an original one-sidedness of nature, strengthened by
+habit, and, perhaps, by years of speculative inaction. The theory
+describes, therefore, a man in certain respects like Coleridge himself,
+on one side a man of genius, on the other side, the side of will,
+deplorably weak, always procrastinating and avoiding unpleasant duties,
+and often reproaching himself in vain; a man, observe, who at _any_ time
+and in _any_ circumstances would be unequal to the task assigned to
+Hamlet. And thus, I must maintain, it degrades Hamlet and travesties the
+play. For Hamlet, according to all the indications in the text, was not
+naturally or normally such a man, but rather, I venture to affirm, a man
+who at any _other_ time and in any _other_ circumstances than those
+presented would have been perfectly equal to his task; and it is, in
+fact, the very cruelty of his fate that the crisis of his life comes on
+him at the one moment when he cannot meet it, and when his highest
+gifts, instead of helping him, conspire to paralyse him. This aspect of
+the tragedy the theory quite misses; and it does so because it
+misconceives the cause of that irresolution which, on the whole, it
+truly describes. For the cause was not directly or mainly an habitual
+excess of reflectiveness. The direct cause was a state of mind quite
+abnormal and induced by special circumstances,--a state of profound
+melancholy. Now, Hamlet's reflectiveness doubtless played a certain part
+in the _production_ of that melancholy, and was thus one indirect
+contributory cause of his irresolution. And, again, the melancholy, once
+established, displayed, as one of its _symptoms_, an excessive
+reflection on the required deed. But excess of reflection was not, as
+the theory makes it, the _direct_ cause of the irresolution at all; nor
+was it the _only_ indirect cause; and in the Hamlet of the last four
+Acts it is to be considered rather a symptom of his state than a cause
+of it.
+
+These assertions may be too brief to be at once clear, but I hope they
+will presently become so.
+
+
+3
+
+Let us first ask ourselves what we can gather from the play, immediately
+or by inference, concerning Hamlet as he was just before his father's
+death. And I begin by observing that the text does not bear out the idea
+that he was one-sidedly reflective and indisposed to action. Nobody who
+knew him seems to have noticed this weakness. Nobody regards him as a
+mere scholar who has 'never formed a resolution or executed a deed.' In
+a court which certainly would not much admire such a person he is the
+observed of all observers. Though he has been disappointed of the throne
+everyone shows him respect; and he is the favourite of the people, who
+are not given to worship philosophers. Fortinbras, a sufficiently
+practical man, considered that he was likely, had he been put on, to
+have proved most royally. He has Hamlet borne by four captains 'like a
+soldier' to his grave; and Ophelia says that Hamlet _was_ a soldier. If
+he was fond of acting, an aesthetic pursuit, he was equally fond of
+fencing, an athletic one: he practised it assiduously even in his worst
+days.[39] So far as we can conjecture from what we see of him in those
+bad days, he must normally have been charmingly frank, courteous and
+kindly to everyone, of whatever rank, whom he liked or respected, but by
+no means timid or deferential to others; indeed, one would gather that
+he was rather the reverse, and also that he was apt to be decided and
+even imperious if thwarted or interfered with. He must always have been
+fearless,--in the play he appears insensible to fear of any ordinary
+kind. And, finally, he must have been quick and impetuous in action; for
+it is downright impossible that the man we see rushing after the Ghost,
+killing Polonius, dealing with the King's commission on the ship,
+boarding the pirate, leaping into the grave, executing his final
+vengeance, could _ever_ have been shrinking or slow in an emergency.
+Imagine Coleridge doing any of these things!
+
+If we consider all this, how can we accept the notion that Hamlet's was
+a weak and one-sided character? 'Oh, but he spent ten or twelve years at
+a University!' Well, even if he did, it is possible to do that without
+becoming the victim of excessive thought. But the statement that he did
+rests upon a most insecure foundation.[40]
+
+Where then are we to look for the seeds of danger?
+
+(1) Trying to reconstruct from the Hamlet of the play, one would not
+judge that his temperament was melancholy in the present sense of the
+word; there seems nothing to show that; but one would judge that by
+temperament he was inclined to nervous instability, to rapid and
+perhaps extreme changes of feeling and mood, and that he was disposed to
+be, for the time, absorbed in the feeling or mood that possessed him,
+whether it were joyous or depressed. This temperament the Elizabethans
+would have called melancholic; and Hamlet seems to be an example of it,
+as Lear is of a temperament mixedly choleric and sanguine. And the
+doctrine of temperaments was so familiar in Shakespeare's time--as
+Burton, and earlier prose-writers, and many of the dramatists show--that
+Shakespeare may quite well have given this temperament to Hamlet
+consciously and deliberately. Of melancholy in its developed form, a
+habit, not a mere temperament, he often speaks. He more than once laughs
+at the passing and half-fictitious melancholy of youth and love; in Don
+John in _Much Ado_ he had sketched the sour and surly melancholy of
+discontent; in Jaques a whimsical self-pleasing melancholy; in Antonio
+in the _Merchant of Venice_ a quiet but deep melancholy, for which
+neither the victim nor his friends can assign any cause.[41] He gives to
+Hamlet a temperament which would not develop into melancholy unless
+under some exceptional strain, but which still involved a danger. In the
+play we see the danger realised, and find a melancholy quite unlike any
+that Shakespeare had as yet depicted, because the temperament of Hamlet
+is quite different.
+
+(2) Next, we cannot be mistaken in attributing to the Hamlet of earlier
+days an exquisite sensibility, to which we may give the name 'moral,' if
+that word is taken in the wide meaning it ought to bear. This, though
+it suffers cruelly in later days, as we saw in criticising the
+sentimental view of Hamlet, never deserts him; it makes all his
+cynicism, grossness and hardness appear to us morbidities, and has an
+inexpressibly attractive and pathetic effect. He had the soul of the
+youthful poet as Shelley and Tennyson have described it, an unbounded
+delight and faith in everything good and beautiful. We know this from
+himself. The world for him was _herrlich wie am ersten Tag_--'this
+goodly frame the earth, this most excellent canopy the air, this brave
+o'erhanging firmament, this majestical roof fretted with golden fire.'
+And not nature only: 'What a piece of work is a man! how noble in
+reason! how infinite in faculty! in form and moving how express and
+admirable! in action how like an angel! in apprehension how like a god!'
+This is no commonplace to Hamlet; it is the language of a heart thrilled
+with wonder and swelling into ecstasy.
+
+Doubtless it was with the same eager enthusiasm he turned to those
+around him. Where else in Shakespeare is there anything like Hamlet's
+adoration of his father? The words melt into music whenever he speaks of
+him. And, if there are no signs of any such feeling towards his mother,
+though many signs of love, it is characteristic that he evidently never
+entertained a suspicion of anything unworthy in her,--characteristic,
+and significant of his tendency to see only what is good unless he is
+forced to see the reverse. For we find this tendency elsewhere, and find
+it going so far that we must call it a disposition to idealise, to see
+something better than what is there, or at least to ignore deficiencies.
+He says to Laertes, 'I loved you ever,' and he describes Laertes as a
+'very noble youth,' which he was far from being. In his first greeting
+of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, where his old self revives, we trace
+the same affectionateness and readiness to take men at their best. His
+love for Ophelia, too, which seems strange to some, is surely the most
+natural thing in the world. He saw her innocence, simplicity and
+sweetness, and it was like him to ask no more; and it is noticeable that
+Horatio, though entirely worthy of his friendship, is, like Ophelia,
+intellectually not remarkable. To the very end, however clouded, this
+generous disposition, this 'free and open nature,' this unsuspiciousness
+survive. They cost him his life; for the King knew them, and was sure
+that he was too 'generous and free from all contriving' to 'peruse the
+foils.' To the very end, his soul, however sick and tortured it may be,
+answers instantaneously when good and evil are presented to it, loving
+the one and hating the other. He is called a sceptic who has no firm
+belief in anything, but he is never sceptical about _them_.
+
+And the negative side of his idealism, the aversion to evil, is perhaps
+even more developed in the hero of the tragedy than in the Hamlet of
+earlier days. It is intensely characteristic. Nothing, I believe, is to
+be found elsewhere in Shakespeare (unless in the rage of the
+disillusioned idealist Timon) of quite the same kind as Hamlet's disgust
+at his uncle's drunkenness, his loathing of his mother's sensuality, his
+astonishment and horror at her shallowness, his contempt for everything
+pretentious or false, his indifference to everything merely external.
+This last characteristic appears in his choice of the friend of his
+heart, and in a certain impatience of distinctions of rank or wealth.
+When Horatio calls his father 'a goodly king,' he answers, surely with
+an emphasis on 'man,'
+
+     He was a man, take him for all in all,
+     I shall not look upon his like again.
+
+He will not listen to talk of Horatio being his 'servant.' When the
+others speak of their 'duty' to him, he answers, 'Your love, as mine to
+you.' He speaks to the actor precisely as he does to an honest courtier.
+He is not in the least a revolutionary, but still, in effect, a king and
+a beggar are all one to him. He cares for nothing but human worth, and
+his pitilessness towards Polonius and Osric and his 'school-fellows' is
+not wholly due to morbidity, but belongs in part to his original
+character.
+
+Now, in Hamlet's moral sensibility there undoubtedly lay a danger. Any
+great shock that life might inflict on it would be felt with extreme
+intensity. Such a shock might even produce tragic results. And, in fact,
+_Hamlet_ deserves the title 'tragedy of moral idealism' quite as much as
+the title 'tragedy of reflection.'
+
+(3) With this temperament and this sensibility we find, lastly, in the
+Hamlet of earlier days, as of later, intellectual genius. It is chiefly
+this that makes him so different from all those about him, good and bad
+alike, and hardly less different from most of Shakespeare's other
+heroes. And this, though on the whole the most important trait in his
+nature, is also so obvious and so famous that I need not dwell on it at
+length. But against one prevalent misconception I must say a word of
+warning. Hamlet's intellectual power is not a specific gift, like a
+genius for music or mathematics or philosophy. It shows itself,
+fitfully, in the affairs of life as unusual quickness of perception,
+great agility in shifting the mental attitude, a striking rapidity and
+fertility in resource; so that, when his natural belief in others does
+not make him unwary, Hamlet easily sees through them and masters them,
+and no one can be much less like the typical helpless dreamer. It shows
+itself in conversation chiefly in the form of wit or humour; and, alike
+in conversation and in soliloquy, it shows itself in the form of
+imagination quite as much as in that of thought in the stricter sense.
+Further, where it takes the latter shape, as it very often does, it is
+not philosophic in the technical meaning of the word. There is really
+nothing in the play to show that Hamlet ever was 'a student of
+philosophies,' unless it be the famous lines which, comically enough,
+exhibit this supposed victim of philosophy as its critic:
+
+     There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,
+     Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.[42]
+
+His philosophy, if the word is to be used, was, like Shakespeare's own,
+the immediate product of the wondering and meditating mind; and such
+thoughts as that celebrated one, 'There is nothing either good or bad
+but thinking makes it so,' surely needed no special training to produce
+them. Or does Portia's remark, 'Nothing is good without respect,'
+_i.e._, out of relation, prove that she had studied metaphysics?
+
+Still Hamlet had speculative genius without being a philosopher, just as
+he had imaginative genius without being a poet. Doubtless in happier
+days he was a close and constant observer of men and manners, noting his
+results in those tables which he afterwards snatched from his breast to
+make in wild irony his last note of all, that one may smile and smile
+and be a villain. Again and again we remark that passion for
+generalisation which so occupied him, for instance, in reflections
+suggested by the King's drunkenness that he quite forgot what it was he
+was waiting to meet upon the battlements. Doubtless, too, he was always
+considering things, as Horatio thought, too curiously. There was a
+necessity in his soul driving him to penetrate below the surface and to
+question what others took for granted. That fixed habitual look which
+the world wears for most men did not exist for him. He was for ever
+unmaking his world and rebuilding it in thought, dissolving what to
+others were solid facts, and discovering what to others were old truths.
+There were no old truths for Hamlet. It is for Horatio a thing of course
+that there's a divinity that shapes our ends, but for Hamlet it is a
+discovery hardly won. And throughout this kingdom of the mind, where he
+felt that man, who in action is only like an angel, is in apprehension
+like a god, he moved (we must imagine) more than content, so that even
+in his dark days he declares he could be bounded in a nutshell and yet
+count himself a king of infinite space, were it not that he had bad
+dreams.
+
+If now we ask whether any special danger lurked _here_, how shall we
+answer? We must answer, it seems to me, 'Some danger, no doubt, but,
+granted the ordinary chances of life, not much.' For, in the first
+place, that idea which so many critics quietly take for granted--the
+idea that the gift and the habit of meditative and speculative thought
+tend to produce irresolution in the affairs of life--would be found by
+no means easy to verify. Can you verify it, for example, in the lives of
+the philosophers, or again in the lives of men whom you have personally
+known to be addicted to such speculation? I cannot. Of course,
+individual peculiarities being set apart, absorption in _any_
+intellectual interest, together with withdrawal from affairs, may make a
+man slow and unskilful in affairs; and doubtless, individual
+peculiarities being again set apart, a mere student is likely to be more
+at a loss in a sudden and great practical emergency than a soldier or a
+lawyer. But in all this there is no difference between a physicist, a
+historian, and a philosopher; and again, slowness, want of skill, and
+even helplessness are something totally different from the peculiar kind
+of irresolution that Hamlet shows. The notion that speculative thinking
+specially tends to produce _this_ is really a mere illusion.
+
+In the second place, even if this notion were true, it has appeared that
+Hamlet did _not_ live the life of a mere student, much less of a mere
+dreamer, and that his nature was by no means simply or even one-sidedly
+intellectual, but was healthily active. Hence, granted the ordinary
+chances of life, there would seem to be no great danger in his
+intellectual tendency and his habit of speculation; and I would go
+further and say that there was nothing in them, taken alone, to unfit
+him even for the extraordinary call that was made upon him. In fact, if
+the message of the Ghost had come to him within a week of his father's
+death, I see no reason to doubt that he would have acted on it as
+decisively as Othello himself, though probably after a longer and more
+anxious deliberation. And therefore the Schlegel-Coleridge view (apart
+from its descriptive value) seems to me fatally untrue, for it implies
+that Hamlet's procrastination was the normal response of an
+over-speculative nature confronted with a difficult practical problem.
+
+On the other hand, under conditions of a peculiar kind, Hamlet's
+reflectiveness certainly might prove dangerous to him, and his genius
+might even (to exaggerate a little) become his doom. Suppose that
+violent shock to his moral being of which I spoke; and suppose that
+under this shock, any possible action being denied to him, he began to
+sink into melancholy; then, no doubt, his imaginative and generalising
+habit of mind might extend the effects of this shock through his whole
+being and mental world. And if, the state of melancholy being thus
+deepened and fixed, a sudden demand for difficult and decisive action in
+a matter connected with the melancholy arose, this state might well have
+for one of its symptoms an endless and futile mental dissection of the
+required deed. And, finally, the futility of this process, and the shame
+of his delay, would further weaken him and enslave him to his melancholy
+still more. Thus the speculative habit would be _one_ indirect cause of
+the morbid state which hindered action; and it would also reappear in a
+degenerate form as one of the _symptoms_ of this morbid state.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Now this is what actually happens in the play. Turn to the first words
+Hamlet utters when he is alone; turn, that is to say, to the place where
+the author is likely to indicate his meaning most plainly. What do you
+hear?
+
+     O, that this too too solid flesh would melt,
+     Thaw and resolve itself into a dew!
+     Or that the Everlasting had not fix'd
+     His canon 'gainst self-slaughter! O God! God!
+     How weary, stale, flat and unprofitable,
+     Seem to me all the uses of this world!
+     Fie on't! ah fie! 'tis an unweeded garden,
+     That grows to seed; things rank and gross in nature
+     Possess it merely.
+
+Here are a sickness of life, and even a longing for death, so intense
+that nothing stands between Hamlet and suicide except religious awe. And
+what has caused them? The rest of the soliloquy so thrusts the answer
+upon us that it might seem impossible to miss it. It was not his
+father's death; that doubtless brought deep grief, but mere grief for
+some one loved and lost does not make a noble spirit loathe the world as
+a place full only of things rank and gross. It was not the vague
+suspicion that we know Hamlet felt. Still less was it the loss of the
+crown; for though the subserviency of the electors might well disgust
+him, there is not a reference to the subject in the soliloquy, nor any
+sign elsewhere that it greatly occupied his mind. It was the moral shock
+of the sudden ghastly disclosure of his mother's true nature, falling on
+him when his heart was aching with love, and his body doubtless was
+weakened by sorrow. And it is essential, however disagreeable, to
+realise the nature of this shock. It matters little here whether
+Hamlet's age was twenty or thirty: in either case his mother was a
+matron of mature years. All his life he had believed in her, we may be
+sure, as such a son would. He had seen her not merely devoted to his
+father, but hanging on him like a newly-wedded bride, hanging on him
+
+     As if increase of appetite had grown
+     By what it fed on.
+
+He had seen her following his body 'like Niobe, all tears.' And then
+within a month--'O God! a beast would have mourned longer'--she married
+again, and married Hamlet's uncle, a man utterly contemptible and
+loathsome in his eyes; married him in what to Hamlet was incestuous
+wedlock;[43] married him not for any reason of state, nor even out of
+old family affection, but in such a way that her son was forced to see
+in her action not only an astounding shallowness of feeling but an
+eruption of coarse sensuality, 'rank and gross,'[44] speeding post-haste
+to its horrible delight. Is it possible to conceive an experience more
+desolating to a man such as we have seen Hamlet to be; and is its result
+anything but perfectly natural? It brings bewildered horror, then
+loathing, then despair of human nature. His whole mind is poisoned. He
+can never see Ophelia in the same light again: she is a woman, and his
+mother is a woman: if she mentions the word 'brief' to him, the answer
+drops from his lips like venom, 'as woman's love.' The last words of the
+soliloquy, which is _wholly_ concerned with this subject, are,
+
+     But break, my heart, for I must hold my tongue!
+
+He can do nothing. He must lock in his heart, not any suspicion of his
+uncle that moves obscurely there, but that horror and loathing; and if
+his heart ever found relief, it was when those feelings, mingled with
+the love that never died out in him, poured themselves forth in a flood
+as he stood in his mother's chamber beside his father's
+marriage-bed.[45]
+
+If we still wonder, and ask why the effect of this shock should be so
+tremendous, let us observe that _now_ the conditions have arisen under
+which Hamlet's highest endowments, his moral sensibility and his genius,
+become his enemies. A nature morally blunter would have felt even so
+dreadful a revelation less keenly. A slower and more limited and
+positive mind might not have extended so widely through its world the
+disgust and disbelief that have entered it. But Hamlet has the
+imagination which, for evil as well as good, feels and sees all things
+in one. Thought is the element of his life, and his thought is
+infected. He cannot prevent himself from probing and lacerating the
+wound in his soul. One idea, full of peril, holds him fast, and he cries
+out in agony at it, but is impotent to free himself ('Must I remember?'
+'Let me not think on't'). And when, with the fading of his passion, the
+vividness of this idea abates, it does so only to leave behind a
+boundless weariness and a sick longing for death.
+
+And this is the time which his fate chooses. In this hour of uttermost
+weakness, this sinking of his whole being towards annihilation, there
+comes on him, bursting the bounds of the natural world with a shock of
+astonishment and terror, the revelation of his mother's adultery and his
+father's murder, and, with this, the demand on him, in the name of
+everything dearest and most sacred, to arise and act. And for a moment,
+though his brain reels and totters,[46] his soul leaps up in passion to
+answer this demand. But it comes too late. It does but strike home the
+last rivet in the melancholy which holds him bound.
+
+     The time is out of joint! O cursed spite
+     That ever I was born to set it right,--
+
+so he mutters within an hour of the moment when he vowed to give his
+life to the duty of revenge; and the rest of the story exhibits his vain
+efforts to fulfil this duty, his unconscious self-excuses and unavailing
+self-reproaches, and the tragic results of his delay.
+
+
+4
+
+'Melancholy,' I said, not dejection, nor yet insanity. That Hamlet was
+not far from insanity is very probable. His adoption of the pretence of
+madness may well have been due in part to fear of the reality; to an
+instinct of self-preservation, a fore-feeling that the pretence would
+enable him to give some utterance to the load that pressed on his heart
+and brain, and a fear that he would be unable altogether to repress such
+utterance. And if the pathologist calls his state melancholia, and even
+proceeds to determine its species, I see nothing to object to in that; I
+am grateful to him for emphasising the fact that Hamlet's melancholy was
+no mere common depression of spirits; and I have no doubt that many
+readers of the play would understand it better if they read an account
+of melancholia in a work on mental diseases. If we like to use the word
+'disease' loosely, Hamlet's condition may truly be called diseased. No
+exertion of will could have dispelled it. Even if he had been able at
+once to do the bidding of the Ghost he would doubtless have still
+remained for some time under the cloud. It would be absurdly unjust to
+call _Hamlet_ a study of melancholy, but it contains such a study.
+
+But this melancholy is something very different from insanity, in
+anything like the usual meaning of that word. No doubt it might develop
+into insanity. The longing for death might become an irresistible
+impulse to self-destruction; the disorder of feeling and will might
+extend to sense and intellect; delusions might arise; and the man might
+become, as we say, incapable and irresponsible. But Hamlet's melancholy
+is some way from this condition. It is a totally different thing from
+the madness which he feigns; and he never, when alone or in company with
+Horatio alone, exhibits the signs of that madness. Nor is the dramatic
+use of this melancholy, again, open to the objections which would justly
+be made to the portrayal of an insanity which brought the hero to a
+tragic end. The man who suffers as Hamlet suffers--and thousands go
+about their business suffering thus in greater or less degree--is
+considered irresponsible neither by other people nor by himself: he is
+only too keenly conscious of his responsibility. He is therefore, so
+far, quite capable of being a tragic agent, which an insane person, at
+any rate according to Shakespeare's practice, is not.[47] And, finally,
+Hamlet's state is not one which a healthy mind is unable sufficiently to
+imagine. It is probably not further from average experience, nor more
+difficult to realise, than the great tragic passions of Othello, Antony
+or Macbeth.
+
+Let me try to show now, briefly, how much this melancholy accounts for.
+
+It accounts for the main fact, Hamlet's inaction. For the _immediate_
+cause of that is simply that his habitual feeling is one of disgust at
+life and everything in it, himself included,--a disgust which varies in
+intensity, rising at times into a longing for death, sinking often into
+weary apathy, but is never dispelled for more than brief intervals. Such
+a state of feeling is inevitably adverse to _any_ kind of decided
+action; the body is inert, the mind indifferent or worse; its response
+is, 'it does not matter,' 'it is not worth while,' 'it is no good.' And
+the action required of Hamlet is very exceptional. It is violent,
+dangerous, difficult to accomplish perfectly, on one side repulsive to a
+man of honour and sensitive feeling, on another side involved in a
+certain mystery (here come in thus, in their subordinate place, various
+causes of inaction assigned by various theories). These obstacles would
+not suffice to prevent Hamlet from acting, if his state were normal; and
+against them there operate, even in his morbid state, healthy and
+positive feelings, love of his father, loathing of his uncle, desire of
+revenge, desire to do duty. But the retarding motives acquire an
+unnatural strength because they have an ally in something far stronger
+than themselves, the melancholic disgust and apathy; while the healthy
+motives, emerging with difficulty from the central mass of diseased
+feeling, rapidly sink back into it and 'lose the name of action.' We
+_see_ them doing so; and sometimes the process is quite simple, no
+analytical reflection on the deed intervening between the outburst of
+passion and the relapse into melancholy.[48] But this melancholy is
+perfectly consistent also with that incessant dissection of the task
+assigned, of which the Schlegel-Coleridge theory makes so much. For
+those endless questions (as we may imagine them), 'Was I deceived by the
+Ghost? How am I to do the deed? When? Where? What will be the
+consequence of attempting it--success, my death, utter misunderstanding,
+mere mischief to the State? Can it be right to do it, or noble to kill a
+defenceless man? What is the good of doing it in such a world as
+this?'--all this, and whatever else passed in a sickening round through
+Hamlet's mind, was not the healthy and right deliberation of a man with
+such a task, but otiose thinking hardly deserving the name of thought,
+an unconscious weaving of pretexts for inaction, aimless tossings on a
+sick bed, symptoms of melancholy which only increased it by deepening
+self-contempt.
+
+Again, (_a_) this state accounts for Hamlet's energy as well as for his
+lassitude, those quick decided actions of his being the outcome of a
+nature normally far from passive, now suddenly stimulated, and producing
+healthy impulses which work themselves out before they have time to
+subside. (_b_) It accounts for the evidently keen satisfaction which
+some of these actions give to him. He arranges the play-scene with
+lively interest, and exults in its success, not really because it brings
+him nearer to his goal, but partly because it has hurt his enemy and
+partly because it has demonstrated his own skill (III. ii.
+286-304). He looks forward almost with glee to countermining the King's
+designs in sending him away (III. iv. 209), and looks back with
+obvious satisfaction, even with pride, to the address and vigour he
+displayed on the voyage (V. ii. 1-55). These were not _the_
+action on which his morbid self-feeling had centred; he feels in them
+his old force, and escapes in them from his disgust. (_c_) It accounts
+for the pleasure with which he meets old acquaintances, like his
+'school-fellows' or the actors. The former observed (and we can observe)
+in him a 'kind of joy' at first, though it is followed by 'much forcing
+of his disposition' as he attempts to keep this joy and his courtesy
+alive in spite of the misery which so soon returns upon him and the
+suspicion he is forced to feel. (_d_) It accounts no less for the
+painful features of his character as seen in the play, his almost savage
+irritability on the one hand, and on the other his self-absorption, his
+callousness, his insensibility to the fates of those whom he despises,
+and to the feelings even of those whom he loves. These are frequent
+symptoms of such melancholy, and (_e_) they sometimes alternate, as they
+do in Hamlet, with bursts of transitory, almost hysterical, and quite
+fruitless emotion. It is to these last (of which a part of the
+soliloquy, 'O what a rogue,' gives a good example) that Hamlet alludes
+when, to the Ghost, he speaks of himself as 'lapsed in _passion_,' and
+it is doubtless partly his conscious weakness in regard to them that
+inspires his praise of Horatio as a man who is not 'passion's
+slave.'[49]
+
+Finally, Hamlet's melancholy accounts for two things which seem to be
+explained by nothing else. The first of these is his apathy or
+'lethargy.' We are bound to consider the evidence which the text
+supplies of this, though it is usual to ignore it. When Hamlet mentions,
+as one possible cause of his inaction, his 'thinking too precisely on
+the event,' he mentions another, 'bestial oblivion'; and the thing
+against which he inveighs in the greater part of that soliloquy
+(IV. iv.) is not the excess or the misuse of reason (which for
+him here and always is god-like), but this _bestial_ oblivion or
+'_dullness_,' this 'letting all _sleep_,' this allowing of heaven-sent
+reason to 'fust unused':
+
+                            What is a man,
+     If his chief good and market of his time
+     Be but to _sleep_ and feed? a _beast_, no more.[50]
+
+So, in the soliloquy in II. ii. he accuses himself of being 'a
+_dull_ and muddy-mettled rascal,' who 'peaks [mopes] like John-a-dreams,
+unpregnant of his cause,' dully indifferent to his cause.[51] So, when
+the Ghost appears to him the second time, he accuses himself of being
+tardy and lapsed in _time_; and the Ghost speaks of his purpose being
+almost _blunted_, and bids him not to _forget_ (cf. 'oblivion'). And so,
+what is emphasised in those undramatic but significant speeches of the
+player-king and of Claudius is the mere dying away of purpose or of
+love.[52] Surely what all this points to is not a condition of excessive
+but useless mental activity (indeed there is, in reality, curiously
+little about that in the text), but rather one of dull, apathetic,
+brooding gloom, in which Hamlet, so far from analysing his duty, is not
+thinking of it at all, but for the time literally _forgets_ it. It seems
+to me we are driven to think of Hamlet _chiefly_ thus during the long
+time which elapsed between the appearance of the Ghost and the events
+presented in the Second Act. The Ghost, in fact, had more reason than we
+suppose at first for leaving with Hamlet as his parting injunction the
+command, 'Remember me,' and for greeting him, on re-appearing, with the
+command, 'Do not forget.'[53] These little things in Shakespeare are not
+accidents.
+
+The second trait which is fully explained only by Hamlet's melancholy is
+his own inability to understand why he delays. This emerges in a marked
+degree when an occasion like the player's emotion or the sight of
+Fortinbras's army stings Hamlet into shame at his inaction. '_Why_,' he
+asks himself in genuine bewilderment, 'do I linger? Can the cause be
+cowardice? Can it be sloth? Can it be thinking too precisely of the
+event? And does _that_ again mean cowardice? What is it that makes me
+sit idle when I feel it is shameful to do so, and when I have _cause,
+and will, and strength, and means_, to act?' A man irresolute merely
+because he was considering a proposed action too minutely would not feel
+this bewilderment. A man might feel it whose conscience secretly
+condemned the act which his explicit consciousness approved; but we have
+seen that there is no sufficient evidence to justify us in conceiving
+Hamlet thus. These are the questions of a man stimulated for the moment
+to shake off the weight of his melancholy, and, because for the moment
+he is free from it, unable to understand the paralysing pressure which
+it exerts at other times.
+
+I have dwelt thus at length on Hamlet's melancholy because, from the
+psychological point of view, it is the centre of the tragedy, and to
+omit it from consideration or to underrate its intensity is to make
+Shakespeare's story unintelligible. But the psychological point of view
+is not equivalent to the tragic; and, having once given its due weight
+to the fact of Hamlet's melancholy, we may freely admit, or rather may
+be anxious to insist, that this pathological condition would excite but
+little, if any, tragic interest if it were not the condition of a nature
+distinguished by that speculative genius on which the Schlegel-Coleridge
+type of theory lays stress. Such theories misinterpret the connection
+between that genius and Hamlet's failure, but still it is this
+connection which gives to his story its peculiar fascination and makes
+it appear (if the phrase may be allowed) as the symbol of a tragic
+mystery inherent in human nature. Wherever this mystery touches us,
+wherever we are forced to feel the wonder and awe of man's godlike
+'apprehension' and his 'thoughts that wander through eternity,' and at
+the same time are forced to see him powerless in his petty sphere of
+action, and powerless (it would appear) from the very divinity of his
+thought, we remember Hamlet. And this is the reason why, in the great
+ideal movement which began towards the close of the eighteenth century,
+this tragedy acquired a position unique among Shakespeare's dramas, and
+shared only by Goethe's _Faust_. It was not that _Hamlet_ is
+Shakespeare's greatest tragedy or most perfect work of art; it was that
+_Hamlet_ most brings home to us at once the sense of the soul's
+infinity, and the sense of the doom which not only circumscribes that
+infinity but appears to be its offspring.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[Footnote 25: It may be convenient to some readers for the purposes of
+this book to have by them a list of Shakespeare's plays, arranged in
+periods. No such list, of course, can command general assent, but the
+following (which does not throughout represent my own views) would
+perhaps meet with as little objection from scholars as any other. For
+some purposes the Third and Fourth Periods are better considered to be
+one. Within each period the so-called Comedies, Histories, and Tragedies
+are respectively grouped together; and for this reason, as well as for
+others, the order within each period does not profess to be
+chronological (_e.g._ it is not implied that the _Comedy of Errors_
+preceded _1 Henry VI._ or _Titus Andronicus_). Where Shakespeare's
+authorship of any considerable part of a play is questioned, widely or
+by specially good authority, the name of the play is printed in italics.
+
+_First Period_ (to 1595?).--Comedy of Errors, Love's Labour's Lost, Two
+Gentlemen of Verona, Midsummer-Night's Dream; _1 Henry VI._, _2 Henry
+VI._, _3 Henry VI._, Richard III., Richard II.; _Titus Andronicus_,
+Romeo and Juliet.
+
+_Second Period_ (to 1602?).--Merchant of Venice, All's Well (better in
+Third Period?), _Taming of the Shrew_, Much Ado, As You Like it, Merry
+Wives, Twelfth Night; King John, 1 Henry IV., 2 Henry IV., Henry V.;
+Julius Caesar, Hamlet.
+
+_Third Period_ (to 1608?).--Troilus and Cressida, Measure for Measure;
+Othello, King Lear, _Timon of Athens_, Macbeth, Antony and Cleopatra,
+Coriolanus.
+
+_Fourth Period._--_Pericles_, Cymbeline, Winter's Tale, Tempest, _Two
+Noble Kinsmen_, _Henry VIII._]
+
+[Footnote 26: The reader will observe that this 'tragic period' would
+not exactly coincide with the 'Third Period' of the division given in
+the last note. For _Julius Caesar_ and _Hamlet_ fall in the Second
+Period, not the Third; and I may add that, as _Pericles_ was entered at
+Stationers' Hall in 1608 and published in 1609, it ought strictly to be
+put in the Third Period--not the Fourth. The truth is that _Julius
+Caesar_ and _Hamlet_ are given to the Second Period mainly on the ground
+of style; while a Fourth Period is admitted, not mainly on that ground
+(for there is no great difference here between _Antony_ and _Coriolanus_
+on the one side and _Cymbeline_ and the _Tempest_ on the other), but
+because of a difference in substance and spirit. If a Fourth Period were
+admitted on grounds of form, it ought to begin with _Antony and
+Cleopatra_.]
+
+[Footnote 27: I should go perhaps too far if I said that it is generally
+admitted that _Timon of Athens_ also precedes the two Roman tragedies;
+but its precedence seems to me so nearly certain that I assume it in
+what follows.]
+
+[Footnote 28: That play, however, is distinguished, I think, by a
+deliberate endeavour after a dignified and unadorned simplicity,--a
+Roman simplicity perhaps.]
+
+[Footnote 29: It is quite probable that this may arise in part from the
+fact, which seems hardly doubtful, that the tragedy was revised, and in
+places re-written, some little time after its first composition.]
+
+[Footnote 30: This, if we confine ourselves to the tragedies, is, I
+think, especially the case in _King Lear_ and _Timon_.]
+
+[Footnote 31: The first, at any rate, of these three plays is, of
+course, much nearer to _Hamlet_, especially in versification, than to
+_Antony and Cleopatra_, in which Shakespeare's final style first shows
+itself practically complete. It has been impossible, in the brief
+treatment of this subject, to say what is required of the individual
+plays.]
+
+[Footnote 32: _The Mirror_, 18th April, 1780, quoted by Furness,
+_Variorum Hamlet_, ii. 148. In the above remarks I have relied mainly on
+Furness's collection of extracts from early critics.]
+
+[Footnote 33: I do not profess to reproduce any one theory, and, still
+less, to do justice to the ablest exponent of this kind of view, Werder
+(_Vorlesungen ueber Hamlet_, 1875), who by no means regards Hamlet's
+difficulties as _merely_ external.]
+
+[Footnote 34: I give one instance. When he spares the King, he speaks of
+killing him when he is drunk asleep, when he is in his rage, when he is
+awake in bed, when he is gaming, as if there were in none of these cases
+the least obstacle (III. iii. 89 ff.).]
+
+[Footnote 35: It is surprising to find quoted, in support of the
+conscience view, the line 'Thus conscience does make cowards of us all,'
+and to observe the total misinterpretation of the soliloquy _To be or
+not to be_, from which the line comes. In this soliloquy Hamlet is not
+thinking of the duty laid upon him at all. He is debating the question
+of suicide. No one oppressed by the ills of life, he says, would
+continue to bear them if it were not for speculation about his possible
+fortune in another life. And then, generalising, he says (what applies
+to himself, no doubt, though he shows no consciousness of the fact) that
+such speculation or reflection makes men hesitate and shrink like
+cowards from great actions and enterprises. 'Conscience' does not mean
+moral sense or scrupulosity, but this reflection on the _consequences_
+of action. It is the same thing as the 'craven scruple of thinking too
+precisely on the event' of the speech in IV. iv. As to this use
+of 'conscience,' see Schmidt, _s.v._ and the parallels there given. The
+_Oxford Dictionary_ also gives many examples of similar uses of
+'conscience,' though it unfortunately lends its authority to the
+misinterpretation criticised.]
+
+[Footnote 36: The King does not die of the _poison_ on the foil, like
+Laertes and Hamlet. They were wounded before he was, but they die after
+him.]
+
+[Footnote 37: I may add here a word on one small matter. It is
+constantly asserted that Hamlet wept over the body of Polonius. Now, if
+he did, it would make no difference to my point in the paragraph above;
+but there is no warrant in the text for the assertion. It is based on
+some words of the Queen (IV. i. 24), in answer to the King's
+question, 'Where is he gone?':
+
+     To draw apart the body he hath killed:
+     O'er whom his very madness, like some ore
+     Among a mineral of metals base,
+     Shows itself pure; he weeps for what is done.
+
+But the Queen, as was pointed out by Doering, is trying to screen her
+son. She has already made the false statement that when Hamlet, crying,
+'A rat! a rat!', ran his rapier through the arras, it was because he
+heard _something stir_ there, whereas we know that what he heard was a
+man's voice crying, 'What ho! help, help, help!' And in this scene she
+has come straight from the interview with her son, terribly agitated,
+shaken with 'sighs' and 'profound heaves,' in the night (line 30). Now
+we know what Hamlet said to the body, and of the body, in that
+interview; and there is assuredly no sound of tears in the voice that
+said those things and others. The only sign of relenting is in the words
+(III. iv. 171):
+
+                         For this same lord,
+     I do repent: but heaven hath pleased it so,
+     To punish me with this and this with me,
+     That I must be their scourge and minister.
+
+His mother's statement, therefore, is almost certainly untrue, though it
+may be to her credit. (It is just conceivable that Hamlet wept at
+III. iv. 130, and that the Queen supposed he was weeping for
+Polonius.)
+
+Perhaps, however, he may have wept over Polonius's body afterwards?
+Well, in the _next_ scene (IV. ii.) we see him _alone_ with the
+body, and are therefore likely to witness his genuine feelings. And his
+first words are, 'Safely stowed'!]
+
+[Footnote 38: Not 'must cripple,' as the English translation has it.]
+
+[Footnote 39: He says so to Horatio, whom he has no motive for deceiving
+(V. ii. 218). His contrary statement (II. ii. 308) is made to
+Rosencrantz and Guildenstern.]
+
+[Footnote 40: See Note B.]
+
+[Footnote 41: The critics have laboured to find a cause, but it seems to
+me Shakespeare simply meant to portray a pathological condition; and a
+very touching picture he draws. Antonio's sadness, which he describes in
+the opening lines of the play, would never drive him to suicide, but it
+makes him indifferent to the issue of the trial, as all his speeches in
+the trial-scene show.]
+
+[Footnote 42: Of course 'your' does not mean Horatio's philosophy in
+particular. 'Your' is used as the Gravedigger uses it when he says that
+'your water is a sore decayer of your ... dead body.']
+
+[Footnote 43: This aspect of the matter leaves _us_ comparatively
+unaffected, but Shakespeare evidently means it to be of importance. The
+Ghost speaks of it twice, and Hamlet thrice (once in his last furious
+words to the King). If, as we must suppose, the marriage was universally
+admitted to be incestuous, the corrupt acquiescence of the court and the
+electors to the crown would naturally have a strong effect on Hamlet's
+mind.]
+
+[Footnote 44: It is most significant that the metaphor of this soliloquy
+reappears in Hamlet's adjuration to his mother (III. iv. 150):
+
+     Repent what's past; avoid what is to come;
+     And do not spread the compost on the weeds
+     To make them ranker.]
+
+[Footnote 45: If the reader will now look at the only speech of Hamlet's
+that precedes the soliloquy, and is more than one line in length--the
+speech beginning 'Seems, madam! nay, it _is_'--he will understand what,
+surely, when first we come to it, sounds very strange and almost
+boastful. It is not, in effect, about Hamlet himself at all; it is about
+his mother (I do not mean that it is intentionally and consciously so;
+and still less that she understood it so).]
+
+[Footnote 46: See Note D.]
+
+[Footnote 47: See p. 13.]
+
+[Footnote 48: _E.g._ in the transition, referred to above, from
+desire for vengeance into the wish never to have been born; in
+the soliloquy, 'O what a rogue'; in the scene at Ophelia's grave.
+The Schlegel-Coleridge theory does not account for the psychological
+movement in these passages.]
+
+[Footnote 49: Hamlet's violence at Ophelia's grave, though probably
+intentionally exaggerated, is another example of this want of
+self-control. The Queen's description of him (V. i. 307),
+
+               This is mere madness;
+     And thus awhile the fit will work on him;
+     Anon, as patient as the female dove,
+     When that her golden couplets are disclosed,
+     His silence will sit drooping.
+
+may be true to life, though it is evidently prompted by anxiety to
+excuse his violence on the ground of his insanity. On this passage see
+further Note G.]
+
+[Footnote 50: Throughout, I italicise to show the connection of ideas.]
+
+[Footnote 51: Cf. _Measure for Measure_, IV. iv. 23, 'This deed
+ ... makes me unpregnant and dull to all proceedings.']
+
+[Footnote 52: III. ii. 196 ff., IV. vii. 111 ff.:
+_e.g._,
+
+     Purpose is but the slave to _memory_,
+     Of violent birth but poor validity.]
+
+[Footnote 53: So, before, he had said to him:
+
+     And duller should'st thou be than the fat weed
+     That roots itself in ease on Lethe wharf,
+     Would'st thou not stir in this.
+
+On Hamlet's soliloquy after the Ghost's disappearance see Note D.]
+
+
+
+
+LECTURE IV
+
+HAMLET
+
+
+The only way, if there is any way, in which a conception of Hamlet's
+character could be proved true, would be to show that it, and it alone,
+explains all the relevant facts presented by the text of the drama. To
+attempt such a demonstration here would obviously be impossible, even if
+I felt certain of the interpretation of all the facts. But I propose now
+to follow rapidly the course of the action in so far as it specially
+illustrates the character, reserving for separate consideration one
+important but particularly doubtful point.
+
+
+1
+
+We left Hamlet, at the close of the First Act, when he had just received
+his charge from the spirit of his father; and his condition was vividly
+depicted in the fact that, within an hour of receiving this charge, he
+had relapsed into that weariness of life or longing for death which is
+the immediate cause of his later inaction. When next we meet him, at the
+opening of the Second Act, a considerable time has elapsed, apparently
+as much as two months.[54] The ambassadors sent to the King of Norway
+(I. ii. 27) are just returning. Laertes, whom we saw leaving Elsinore
+(I. iii.), has been in Paris long enough to be in want of fresh
+supplies. Ophelia has obeyed her father's command (given in I. iii.),
+and has refused to receive Hamlet's visits or letters. What has Hamlet
+done? He has put on an 'antic disposition' and established a reputation
+for lunacy, with the result that his mother has become deeply anxious
+about him, and with the further result that the King, who was formerly
+so entirely at ease regarding him that he wished him to stay on at
+Court, is now extremely uneasy and very desirous to discover the cause
+of his 'transformation.' Hence Rosencrantz and Guildenstern have been
+sent for, to cheer him by their company and to worm his secret out of
+him; and they are just about to arrive. Beyond exciting thus the
+apprehensions of his enemy Hamlet has done absolutely nothing; and, as
+we have seen, we must imagine him during this long period sunk for the
+most part in 'bestial oblivion' or fruitless broodings, and falling
+deeper and deeper into the slough of despond.
+
+Now he takes a further step. He suddenly appears unannounced in
+Ophelia's chamber; and his appearance and behaviour are such as to
+suggest both to Ophelia and to her father that his brain is turned by
+disappointment in love. How far this step was due to the design of
+creating a false impression as to the origin of his lunacy, how far to
+other causes, is a difficult question; but such a design seems certainly
+present. It succeeds, however, only in part; for, although Polonius is
+fully convinced, the King is not so, and it is therefore arranged that
+the two shall secretly witness a meeting between Ophelia and Hamlet.
+Meanwhile Rosencrantz and Guildenstern arrive, and at the King's request
+begin their attempts, easily foiled by Hamlet, to pluck out the heart of
+his mystery. Then the players come to Court, and for a little while one
+of Hamlet's old interests revives, and he is almost happy. But only for
+a little while. The emotion shown by the player in reciting the speech
+which tells of Hecuba's grief for her slaughtered husband awakes into
+burning life the slumbering sense of duty and shame. He must act. With
+the extreme rapidity which always distinguishes him in his healthier
+moments, he conceives and arranges the plan of having the 'Murder of
+Gonzago' played before the King and Queen, with the addition of a speech
+written by himself for the occasion. Then, longing to be alone, he
+abruptly dismisses his guests, and pours out a passion of self-reproach
+for his delay, asks himself in bewilderment what can be its cause,
+lashes himself into a fury of hatred against his foe, checks himself in
+disgust at his futile emotion, and quiets his conscience for the moment
+by trying to convince himself that he has doubts about the Ghost, and by
+assuring himself that, if the King's behaviour at the play-scene shows
+but a sign of guilt, he 'knows his course.'
+
+Nothing, surely, can be clearer than the meaning of this famous
+soliloquy. The doubt which appears at its close, instead of being the
+natural conclusion of the preceding thoughts, is totally inconsistent
+with them. For Hamlet's self-reproaches, his curses on his enemy, and
+his perplexity about his own inaction, one and all imply his faith in
+the identity and truthfulness of the Ghost. Evidently this sudden doubt,
+of which there has not been the slightest trace before, is no genuine
+doubt; it is an unconscious fiction, an excuse for his delay--and for
+its continuance.
+
+A night passes, and the day that follows it brings the crisis. First
+takes place that interview from which the King is to learn whether
+disappointed love is really the cause of his nephew's lunacy. Hamlet is
+sent for; poor Ophelia is told to walk up and down, reading her
+prayer-book; Polonius and the King conceal themselves behind the arras.
+And Hamlet enters, so deeply absorbed in thought that for some time he
+supposes himself to be alone. What is he thinking of? 'The Murder of
+Gonzago,' which is to be played in a few hours, and on which everything
+depends? Not at all. He is meditating on suicide; and he finds that what
+stands in the way of it, and counterbalances its infinite attraction, is
+not any thought of a sacred unaccomplished duty, but the doubt, quite
+irrelevant to that issue, whether it is not ignoble in the mind to end
+its misery, and, still more, whether death _would_ end it. Hamlet, that
+is to say, is here, in effect, precisely where he was at the time of his
+first soliloquy ('O that this too too solid flesh would melt') two
+months ago, before ever he heard of his father's murder.[55] His
+reflections have no reference to this particular moment; they represent
+that habitual weariness of life with which his passing outbursts of
+emotion or energy are contrasted. What can be more significant than the
+fact that he is sunk in these reflections on the very day which is to
+determine for him the truthfulness of the Ghost? And how is it possible
+for us to hope that, if that truthfulness should be established, Hamlet
+will be any nearer to his revenge?[56]
+
+His interview with Ophelia follows; and its result shows that his delay
+is becoming most dangerous to himself. The King is satisfied that,
+whatever else may be the hidden cause of Hamlet's madness, it is not
+love. He is by no means certain even that Hamlet is mad at all. He has
+heard that infuriated threat, 'I say, we will have no more marriages;
+those that are married, all but one, shall live; the rest shall keep as
+they are.' He is thoroughly alarmed. He at any rate will not delay. On
+the spot he determines to send Hamlet to England. But, as Polonius is
+present, we do not learn at once the meaning of this purpose.
+
+Evening comes. The approach of the play-scene raises Hamlet's spirits.
+He is in his element. He feels that he is doing _something_ towards his
+end, striking a stroke, but a stroke of intellect. In his instructions
+to the actor on the delivery of the inserted speech, and again in his
+conversation with Horatio just before the entry of the Court, we see the
+true Hamlet, the Hamlet of the days before his father's death. But how
+characteristic it is that he appears quite as anxious that his speech
+should not be ranted as that Horatio should observe its effect upon the
+King! This trait appears again even at that thrilling moment when the
+actor is just going to deliver the speech. Hamlet sees him beginning to
+frown and glare like the conventional stage-murderer, and calls to him
+impatiently, 'Leave thy damnable faces and begin!'[57]
+
+Hamlet's device proves a triumph far more complete than he had dared to
+expect. He had thought the King might 'blench,' but he does much more.
+When only six of the 'dozen or sixteen lines' have been spoken he starts
+to his feet and rushes from the hall, followed by the whole dismayed
+Court. In the elation of success--an elation at first almost
+hysterical--Hamlet treats Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, who are sent to
+him, with undisguised contempt. Left to himself, he declares that now he
+could
+
+                   drink hot blood,
+     And do such bitter business as the day
+     Would quake to look on.
+
+He has been sent for by his mother, and is going to her chamber; and so
+vehement and revengeful is his mood that he actually fancies himself in
+danger of using daggers to her as well as speaking them.[58]
+
+In this mood, on his way to his mother's chamber, he comes upon the
+King, alone, kneeling, conscience-stricken and attempting to pray. His
+enemy is delivered into his hands.
+
+     Now might I do it pat, now he is praying:
+     And now I'll do it: and so he goes to heaven:
+     And so am I revenged.[59] That would be scanned.
+
+He scans it; and the sword that he drew at the words, 'And now I'll do
+it,' is thrust back into its sheath. If he killed the villain now he
+would send his soul to heaven; and he would fain kill soul as well as
+body.
+
+That this again is an unconscious excuse for delay is now pretty
+generally agreed, and it is needless to describe again the state of mind
+which, on the view explained in our last lecture, is the real cause of
+Hamlet's failure here. The first five words he utters, 'Now might I do
+it,' show that he has no effective _desire_ to 'do it'; and in the
+little sentences that follow, and the long pauses between them, the
+endeavour at a resolution, and the sickening return of melancholic
+paralysis, however difficult a task they set to the actor, are plain
+enough to a reader. And any reader who may retain a doubt should observe
+the fact that, when the Ghost reappears, Hamlet does not think of
+justifying his delay by the plea that he was waiting for a more perfect
+vengeance. But in one point the great majority of critics, I think, go
+astray. The feeling of intense hatred which Hamlet expresses is not the
+cause of his sparing the King, and in his heart he knows this; but it
+does not at all follow that this feeling is unreal. All the evidence
+afforded by the play goes to show that it is perfectly genuine, and I
+see no reason whatever to doubt that Hamlet would have been very sorry
+to send his father's murderer to heaven, nor much to doubt that he would
+have been glad to send him to perdition. The reason for refusing to
+accept his own version of his motive in sparing Claudius is not that his
+sentiments are horrible, but that elsewhere, and also in the opening of
+his speech here, we can see that his reluctance to act is due to other
+causes.
+
+The incident of the sparing of the King is contrived with extraordinary
+dramatic insight. On the one side we feel that the opportunity was
+perfect. Hamlet could not possibly any longer tell himself that he had
+no certainty as to his uncle's guilt. And the external conditions were
+most favourable; for the King's remarkable behaviour at the play-scene
+would have supplied a damning confirmation of the story Hamlet had to
+tell about the Ghost. Even now, probably, in a Court so corrupt as that
+of Elsinore, he could not with perfect security have begun by charging
+the King with the murder; but he could quite safely have killed him
+first and given his justification afterwards, especially as he would
+certainly have had on his side the people, who loved him and despised
+Claudius. On the other hand, Shakespeare has taken care to give this
+perfect opportunity so repulsive a character that we can hardly bring
+ourselves to wish that the hero should accept it. One of his minor
+difficulties, we have seen, probably was that he seemed to be required
+to attack a defenceless man; and here this difficulty is at its maximum.
+
+This incident is, again, the turning-point of the tragedy. So far,
+Hamlet's delay, though it is endangering his freedom and his life, has
+done no irreparable harm; but his failure here is the cause of all the
+disasters that follow. In sparing the King, he sacrifices Polonius,
+Ophelia, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, Laertes, the Queen and himself.
+This central significance of the passage is dramatically indicated in
+the following scene by the reappearance of the Ghost and the repetition
+of its charge.
+
+Polonius is the first to fall. The old courtier, whose vanity would not
+allow him to confess that his diagnosis of Hamlet's lunacy was mistaken,
+had suggested that, after the theatricals, the Queen should endeavour in
+a private interview with her son to penetrate the mystery, while he
+himself would repeat his favourite part of eaves-dropper (III. i. 184
+ff.). It has now become quite imperative that the Prince should be
+brought to disclose his secret; for his choice of the 'Murder of
+Gonzago,' and perhaps his conduct during the performance, have shown a
+spirit of exaggerated hostility against the King which has excited
+general alarm. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern discourse to Claudius on the
+extreme importance of his preserving his invaluable life, as though
+Hamlet's insanity had now clearly shown itself to be homicidal.[60]
+When, then, at the opening of the interview between Hamlet and his
+mother, the son, instead of listening to her remonstrances, roughly
+assumes the offensive, she becomes alarmed; and when, on her attempting
+to leave the room, he takes her by the arm and forces her to sit down,
+she is terrified, cries out, 'Thou wilt not murder me?' and screams for
+help. Polonius, behind the arras, echoes her call; and in a moment
+Hamlet, hoping the concealed person is the King, runs the old man
+through the body.
+
+Evidently this act is intended to stand in sharp contrast with Hamlet's
+sparing of his enemy. The King would have been just as defenceless
+behind the arras as he had been on his knees; but here Hamlet is already
+excited and in action, and the chance comes to him so suddenly that he
+has no time to 'scan' it. It is a minor consideration, but still for the
+dramatist not unimportant, that the audience would wholly sympathise
+with Hamlet's attempt here, as directed against an enemy who is lurking
+to entrap him, instead of being engaged in a business which perhaps to
+the bulk of the audience then, as now, seemed to have a 'relish of
+salvation in't.'
+
+We notice in Hamlet, at the opening of this interview, something of the
+excited levity which followed the _denouement_ of the play-scene. The
+death of Polonius sobers him; and in the remainder of the interview he
+shows, together with some traces of his morbid state, the peculiar
+beauty and nobility of his nature. His chief desire is not by any means
+to ensure his mother's silent acquiescence in his design of revenge; it
+is to save her soul. And while the rough work of vengeance is repugnant
+to him, he is at home in this higher work. Here that fatal feeling, 'it
+is no matter,' never shows itself. No father-confessor could be more
+selflessly set upon his end of redeeming a fellow-creature from
+degradation, more stern or pitiless in denouncing the sin, or more eager
+to welcome the first token of repentance. There is something infinitely
+beautiful in that sudden sunshine of faith and love which breaks out
+when, at the Queen's surrender,
+
+     O Hamlet, thou hast cleft my heart in twain,
+
+he answers,
+
+     O throw away the worser part of it,
+     And live the purer with the other half.
+
+The truth is that, though Hamlet hates his uncle and acknowledges the
+duty of vengeance, his whole heart is never in this feeling or this
+task; but his whole heart is in his horror at his mother's fall and in
+his longing to raise her. The former of these feelings was the
+inspiration of his first soliloquy; it combines with the second to form
+the inspiration of his eloquence here. And Shakespeare never wrote more
+eloquently than here.
+
+I have already alluded to the significance of the reappearance of the
+Ghost in this scene; but why does Shakespeare choose for the particular
+moment of its reappearance the middle of a speech in which Hamlet is
+raving against his uncle? There seems to be more than one reason. In the
+first place, Hamlet has already attained his object of stirring shame
+and contrition in his mother's breast, and is now yielding to the old
+temptation of unpacking his heart with words, and exhausting in useless
+emotion the force which should be stored up in his will. And, next, in
+doing this he is agonising his mother to no purpose, and in despite of
+her piteous and repeated appeals for mercy. But the Ghost, when it gave
+him his charge, had expressly warned him to spare her; and here again
+the dead husband shows the same tender regard for his weak unfaithful
+wife. The object of his return is to repeat his charge:
+
+     Do not forget: this visitation
+     Is but to whet thy almost blunted purpose;
+
+but, having uttered this reminder, he immediately bids the son to help
+the mother and 'step between her and her fighting soul.'
+
+And, whether intentionally or not, another purpose is served by
+Shakespeare's choice of this particular moment. It is a moment when the
+state of Hamlet's mind is such that we cannot suppose the Ghost to be
+meant for an hallucination; and it is of great importance here that the
+spectator or reader should not suppose any such thing. He is further
+guarded by the fact that the Ghost proves, so to speak, his identity by
+showing the same traits as were visible on his first appearance--the
+same insistence on the duty of remembering, and the same concern for the
+Queen. And the result is that we construe the Ghost's interpretation of
+Hamlet's delay ('almost blunted purpose') as the truth, the dramatist's
+own interpretation. Let me add that probably no one in Shakespeare's
+audience had any doubt of his meaning here. The idea of later critics
+and readers that the Ghost is an hallucination is due partly to failure
+to follow the indications just noticed, but partly also to two mistakes,
+the substitution of our present intellectual atmosphere for the
+Elizabethan, and the notion that, because the Queen does not see and
+hear the Ghost, it is meant to be unreal. But a ghost, in Shakespeare's
+day, was able for any sufficient reason to confine its manifestation to
+a single person in a company; and here the sufficient reason, that of
+sparing the Queen, is obvious.[61]
+
+At the close of this scene it appears that Hamlet has somehow learned of
+the King's design of sending him to England in charge of his two
+'school-fellows.' He has no doubt that this design covers some
+villainous plot against himself, but neither does he doubt that he will
+succeed in defeating it; and, as we saw, he looks forward with pleasure
+to this conflict of wits. The idea of refusing to go appears not to
+occur to him. Perhaps (for here we are left to conjecture) he feels that
+he could not refuse unless at the same time he openly accused the King
+of his father's murder (a course which he seems at no time to
+contemplate); for by the slaughter of Polonius he has supplied his enemy
+with the best possible excuse for getting him out of the country.
+Besides, he has so effectually warned this enemy that, after the death
+of Polonius is discovered, he is kept under guard (IV. iii. 14). He
+consents, then, to go. But on his way to the shore he meets the army of
+Fortinbras on its march to Poland; and the sight of these men going
+cheerfully to risk death 'for an egg-shell,' and 'making mouths at the
+invisible event,' strikes him with shame as he remembers how he, with so
+much greater cause for action, 'lets all sleep;' and he breaks out into
+the soliloquy, 'How all occasions do inform against me!'
+
+This great speech, in itself not inferior to the famous 'To be or not to
+be,' is absent not only from the First Quarto but from the Folio. It is
+therefore probable that, at any rate by the time when the Folio appeared
+(1623), it had become customary to omit it in theatrical representation;
+and this is still the custom. But, while no doubt it is dramatically the
+least indispensable of the soliloquies, it has a direct dramatic value,
+and a great value for the interpretation of Hamlet's character. It shows
+that Hamlet, though he is leaving Denmark, has not relinquished the idea
+of obeying the Ghost. It exhibits very strikingly his inability to
+understand why he has delayed so long. It contains that assertion which
+so many critics forget, that he has 'cause and will and strength and
+means to do it.' On the other hand--and this was perhaps the principal
+purpose of the speech--it convinces us that he has learnt little or
+nothing from his delay, or from his failure to seize the opportunity
+presented to him after the play-scene. For, we find, both the motive and
+the gist of the speech are precisely the same as those of the soliloquy
+at the end of the Second Act ('O what a rogue'). There too he was
+stirred to shame when he saw a passionate emotion awakened by a cause
+which, compared with his, was a mere egg-shell. There too he stood
+bewildered at the sight of his own dulness, and was almost ready to
+believe--what was justly incredible to him--that it was the mask of mere
+cowardice. There too he determined to delay no longer: if the King
+should but blench, he knew his course. Yet this determination led to
+nothing then; and why, we ask ourselves in despair, should the bloody
+thoughts he now resolves to cherish ever pass beyond the realm of
+thought?
+
+Between this scene (IV. iv.) and the remainder of the play we must again
+suppose an interval, though not a very long one. When the action
+recommences, the death of Polonius has led to the insanity of Ophelia
+and the secret return of Laertes from France. The young man comes back
+breathing slaughter. For the King, afraid to put Hamlet on his trial (a
+course likely to raise the question of his own behaviour at the play,
+and perhaps to provoke an open accusation),[62] has attempted to hush up
+the circumstances of Polonius's death, and has given him a hurried and
+inglorious burial. The fury of Laertes, therefore, is directed in the
+first instance against the King: and the ease with which he raises the
+people, like the King's fear of a judicial enquiry, shows us how purely
+internal were the obstacles which the hero had to overcome. This
+impression is intensified by the broad contrast between Hamlet and
+Laertes, who rushes headlong to his revenge, and is determined to have
+it though allegiance, conscience, grace and damnation stand in his way
+(IV. v. 130). But the King, though he has been hard put to it, is now in
+his element and feels safe. Knowing that he will very soon hear of
+Hamlet's execution in England, he tells Laertes that his father died by
+Hamlet's hand, and expresses his willingness to let the friends of
+Laertes judge whether he himself has any responsibility for the deed.
+And when, to his astonishment and dismay, news comes that Hamlet has
+returned to Denmark, he acts with admirable promptitude and address,
+turns Laertes round his finger, and arranges with him for the murder of
+their common enemy. If there were any risk of the young man's resolution
+faltering, it is removed by the death of Ophelia. And now the King has
+but one anxiety,--to prevent the young men from meeting before the
+fencing-match. For who can tell what Hamlet might say in his defence, or
+how enchanting his tongue might prove?[63]
+
+Hamlet's return to Denmark is due partly to his own action, partly to
+accident. On the voyage he secretly possesses himself of the royal
+commission, and substitutes for it another, which he himself writes and
+seals, and in which the King of England is ordered to put to death, not
+Hamlet, but Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. Then the ship is attacked by a
+pirate, which, apparently, finds its intended prize too strong for it,
+and makes off. But as Hamlet 'in the grapple,' eager for fighting, has
+boarded the assailant, he is carried off in it, and by promises induces
+the pirates to put him ashore in Denmark.
+
+In what spirit does he return? Unquestionably, I think, we can observe a
+certain change, though it is not great. First, we notice here and there
+what seems to be a consciousness of power, due probably to his success
+in counter-mining Claudius and blowing the courtiers to the moon, and to
+his vigorous action in the sea-fight. But I doubt if this sense of power
+is more marked than it was in the scenes following the success of the
+'Murder of Gonzago.' Secondly, we nowhere find any direct expression of
+that weariness of life and that longing for death which were so marked
+in the first soliloquy and in the speech 'To be or not to be.' This may
+be a mere accident, and it must be remembered that in the Fifth Act we
+have no soliloquy. But in the earlier Acts the feelings referred to do
+not appear _merely_ in soliloquy, and I incline to think that
+Shakespeare means to show in the Hamlet of the Fifth Act a slight
+thinning of the dark cloud of melancholy, and means us to feel it tragic
+that this change comes too late. And, in the third place, there is a
+trait about which doubt is impossible,--a sense in Hamlet that he is in
+the hands of Providence. This had, indeed, already shown itself at the
+death of Polonius,[64] and perhaps at Hamlet's farewell to the King,[65]
+but the idea seems now to be constantly present in his mind. 'There's a
+divinity that shapes our ends,' he declares to Horatio in speaking of
+the fighting in his heart that would not let him sleep, and of his
+rashness in groping his way to the courtiers to find their commission.
+How was he able, Horatio asks, to seal the substituted commission?
+
+     Why, even in that was heaven ordinant,
+
+Hamlet answers; he had his father's signet in his purse. And though he
+has a presentiment of evil about the fencing-match he refuses to yield
+to it: 'we defy augury: there is special providence in the fall of a
+sparrow ... the readiness is all.'
+
+Though these passages strike us more when put together thus than when
+they come upon us at intervals in reading the play, they have a marked
+effect on our feeling about Hamlet's character and still more about the
+events of the action. But I find it impossible to believe, with some
+critics, that they indicate any material change in his general
+condition, or the formation of any effective resolution to fulfil the
+appointed duty. On the contrary, they seem to express that kind of
+religious resignation which, however beautiful in one aspect, really
+deserves the name of fatalism rather than that of faith in Providence,
+because it is not united to any determination to do what is believed to
+be the will of Providence. In place of this determination, the Hamlet of
+the Fifth Act shows a kind of sad or indifferent self-abandonment, as if
+he secretly despaired of forcing himself to action, and were ready to
+leave his duty to some other power than his own. _This_ is really the
+main change which appears in him after his return to Denmark, and which
+had begun to show itself before he went,--this, and not a determination
+to act, nor even an anxiety to do so.
+
+For when he returns he stands in a most perilous position. On one side
+of him is the King, whose safety depends on his death, and who has done
+his best to murder him; on the other, Laertes, whose father and sister
+he has sent to their graves, and of whose behaviour and probable
+attitude he must surely be informed by Horatio. What is required of him,
+therefore, if he is not to perish with his duty undone, is the utmost
+wariness and the swiftest resolution. Yet it is not too much to say
+that, except when Horatio forces the matter on his attention, he shows
+no consciousness of this position. He muses in the graveyard on the
+nothingness of life and fame, and the base uses to which our dust
+returns, whether it be a court-jester's or a world-conqueror's. He
+learns that the open grave over which he muses has been dug for the
+woman he loved; and he suffers one terrible pang, from which he gains
+relief in frenzied words and frenzied action,--action which must needs
+intensify, if that were possible, the fury of the man whom he has,
+however unwittingly, so cruelly injured. Yet he appears absolutely
+unconscious that he has injured Laertes at all, and asks him:
+
+     What is the reason that you use me thus?
+
+And as the sharpness of the first pang passes, the old weary misery
+returns, and he might almost say to Ophelia, as he does to her brother:
+
+     I loved you ever: but it is no matter.
+
+'It is no matter': _nothing_ matters.
+
+The last scene opens. He narrates to Horatio the events of the voyage
+and his uncle's attempt to murder him. But the conclusion of the story
+is no plan of action, but the old fatal question, 'Ought I not to
+act?'[66] And, while he asks it, his enemies have acted. Osric enters
+with an invitation to him to take part in a fencing-match with Laertes.
+This match--he is expressly told so--has been arranged by his deadly
+enemy the King; and his antagonist is a man whose hands but a few hours
+ago were at his throat, and whose voice he had heard shouting 'The devil
+take thy soul!' But he does not think of that. To fence is to show a
+courtesy, and to himself it is a relief,--action, and not the one
+hateful action. There is something noble in his carelessness, and also
+in his refusal to attend to the presentiment which he suddenly feels
+(and of which he says, not only 'the readiness is all,' but also 'it is
+no matter'). Something noble; and yet, when a sacred duty is still
+undone, ought one to be so ready to die? With the same carelessness, and
+with that trustfulness which makes us love him, but which is here so
+fatally misplaced, he picks up the first foil that comes to his hand,
+asks indifferently, 'These foils have all a length?' and begins. And
+Fate descends upon his enemies, and his mother, and himself.
+
+But he is not left in utter defeat. Not only is his task at last
+accomplished, but Shakespeare seems to have determined that his hero
+should exhibit in his latest hour all the glorious power and all the
+nobility and sweetness of his nature. Of the first, the power, I spoke
+before,[67] but there is a wonderful beauty in the revelation of the
+second. His body already labouring in the pangs of death, his mind soars
+above them. He forgives Laertes; he remembers his wretched mother and
+bids her adieu, ignorant that she has preceded him. We hear now no word
+of lamentation or self-reproach. He has will, and just time, to think,
+not of the past or of what might have been, but of the future; to forbid
+his friend's death in words more pathetic in their sadness than even his
+agony of spirit had been; and to take care, so far as in him lies, for
+the welfare of the State which he himself should have guided. Then in
+spite of shipwreck he reaches the haven of silence where he would be.
+What else could his world-wearied flesh desire?
+
+But _we_ desire more; and we receive it. As those mysterious words, 'The
+rest is silence,' die upon Hamlet's lips, Horatio answers:
+
+     Now cracks a noble heart. Good night, sweet prince,
+     And flights of angels sing thee to thy rest.
+
+Why did Shakespeare here, so much against his custom, introduce this
+reference to another life? Did he remember that Hamlet is the only one
+of his tragic heroes whom he has not allowed us to see in the days when
+this life smiled on him? Did he feel that, while for the others we might
+be content to imagine after life's fitful fever nothing more than
+release and silence, we must ask more for one whose 'godlike reason' and
+passionate love of goodness have only gleamed upon us through the heavy
+clouds of melancholy, and yet have left us murmuring, as we bow our
+heads, 'This was the noblest spirit of them all'?
+
+
+2
+
+How many things still remain to say of Hamlet! Before I touch on his
+relation to Ophelia, I will choose but two. Neither of them, compared
+with the matters so far considered, is of great consequence, but both
+are interesting, and the first seems to have quite escaped observation.
+
+(1) Most people have, beside their more essential traits of character,
+little peculiarities which, for their intimates, form an indissoluble
+part of their personality. In comedy, and in other humorous works of
+fiction, such peculiarities often figure prominently, but they rarely do
+so, I think, in tragedy. Shakespeare, however, seems to have given one
+such idiosyncrasy to Hamlet.
+
+It is a trick of speech, a habit of repetition. And these are simple
+examples of it from the first soliloquy:
+
+                            O _God! God!_
+     How weary, stale, flat and unprofitable
+     Seem to me all the uses of this world!
+     _Fie_ on't! ah _fie!_
+
+Now I ask your patience. You will say: 'There is nothing individual
+here. Everybody repeats words thus. And the tendency, in particular, to
+use such repetitions in moments of great emotion is well-known, and
+frequently illustrated in literature--for example, in David's cry of
+lament for Absalom.'
+
+This is perfectly true, and plenty of examples could be drawn from
+Shakespeare himself. But what we find in Hamlet's case is, I believe,
+_not_ common. In the first place, this repetition is a _habit_ with him.
+Here are some more instances: 'Thrift, thrift, Horatio'; 'Indeed,
+indeed, sirs, but this troubles me'; 'Come, deal justly with me: come,
+come'; 'Wormwood, wormwood!' I do not profess to have made an exhaustive
+search, but I am much mistaken if this _habit_ is to be found in any
+other serious character of Shakespeare.[68]
+
+And, in the second place--and here I appeal with confidence to lovers of
+Hamlet--some of these repetitions strike us as intensely characteristic.
+Some even of those already quoted strike one thus, and still more do the
+following:
+
+     (_a_)  _Horatio._   It would have much amazed you.
+            _Hamlet._    Very like, very like. Stay'd it long?
+
+     (_b_)  _Polonius._  What do you read, my lord?
+            _Hamlet._    Words, words, words.
+
+     (_c_)  _Polonius._  My honourable lord, I will most humbly take
+                           my leave of you.
+            _Hamlet._    You cannot, sir, take from me anything that I
+                           will more willingly part withal: except my
+                           life, except my life, except my life.
+
+     (_d_)  _Ophelia._                  Good my lord,
+                         How does your honour for this many a day?
+            _Hamlet._    I humbly thank you, well, well, well.
+
+Is there anything that Hamlet says or does in the whole play more
+unmistakably individual than these replies?[69]
+
+(2) Hamlet, everyone has noticed, is fond of quibbles and word-play, and
+of 'conceits' and turns of thought such as are common in the poets whom
+Johnson called Metaphysical. Sometimes, no doubt, he plays with words
+and ideas chiefly in order to mystify, thwart and annoy. To some extent,
+again, as we may see from the conversation where Rosencrantz and
+Guildenstern first present themselves (II. ii. 227), he is merely
+following the fashion of the young courtiers about him, just as in his
+love-letter to Ophelia[70] he uses for the most part the fantastic
+language of Court Euphuism. Nevertheless in this trait there is
+something very characteristic. We should be greatly surprised to find it
+marked in Othello or Lear or Timon, in Macbeth or Antony or Coriolanus;
+and, in fact, we find it in them hardly at all. One reason of this may
+perhaps be that these characters are all later creations than Hamlet,
+and that Shakespeare's own fondness for this kind of play, like the
+fondness of the theatrical audience for it, diminished with time. But
+the main reason is surely that this tendency, as we see it in Hamlet,
+betokens a nimbleness and flexibility of mind which is characteristic of
+him and not of the later less many-sided heroes. Macbeth, for instance,
+has an imagination quite as sensitive as Hamlet's to certain
+impressions, but he has none of Hamlet's delight in freaks and twists of
+thought, or of his tendency to perceive and play with resemblances in
+the most diverse objects and ideas. Though Romeo shows this tendency,
+the only tragic hero who approaches Hamlet here is Richard II., who
+indeed in several ways recalls the emasculated Hamlet of some critics,
+and may, like the real Hamlet, have owed his existence in part to
+Shakespeare's personal familiarity with the weaknesses and dangers of an
+imaginative temperament.
+
+That Shakespeare meant this trait to be characteristic of Hamlet is
+beyond question. The very first line the hero speaks contains a play on
+words:
+
+     A little more than kin and less than kind.
+
+The fact is significant, though the pun itself is not specially
+characteristic. Much more so, and indeed absolutely individual, are the
+uses of word-play in moments of extreme excitement. Remember the awe and
+terror of the scene where the Ghost beckons Hamlet to leave his friends
+and follow him into the darkness, and then consider this dialogue:
+
+     _Hamlet._                    It waves me still.
+                   Go on; I'll follow thee.
+
+     _Marcellus._  You shall not go, my lord.
+
+     _Hamlet._                    Hold off your hands.
+
+     _Horatio._    Be ruled; you shall not go.
+
+     _Hamlet._                    My fate cries out,
+                   And makes each petty artery in this body
+                   As hardy as the Nemean lion's nerve.
+                   Still am I called. Unhand me, gentlemen.
+                   _By heaven I'll make a ghost of him that lets me._
+
+Would any other character in Shakespeare have used those words? And,
+again, where is Hamlet more Hamlet than when he accompanies with a pun
+the furious action by which he compels his enemy to drink the 'poison
+tempered by himself'?
+
+     Here, thou incestuous, murderous, damn'd Dane,
+     Drink off this potion. Is thy union here?
+     Follow my mother.
+
+The 'union' was the pearl which Claudius professed to throw into the
+cup, and in place of which (as Hamlet supposes) he dropped poison in.
+But the 'union' is also that incestuous marriage which must not be
+broken by his remaining alive now that his partner is dead. What rage
+there is in the words, and what a strange lightning of the mind!
+
+Much of Hamlet's play with words and ideas is imaginatively humorous.
+That of Richard II. is fanciful, but rarely, if ever, humorous. Antony
+has touches of humour, and Richard III. has more; but Hamlet, we may
+safely assert, is the only one of the tragic heroes who can be called a
+humorist, his humour being first cousin to that speculative tendency
+which keeps his mental world in perpetual movement. Some of his quips
+are, of course, poor enough, and many are not distinctive. Those of his
+retorts which strike one as perfectly individual do so, I think, chiefly
+because they suddenly reveal the misery and bitterness below the
+surface; as when, to Rosencrantz's message from his mother, 'She desires
+to speak with you in her closet, ere you go to bed,' he answers, 'We
+shall obey, were she ten times our mother'; or as when he replies to
+Polonius's invitation, 'Will you walk out of the air, my lord?' with
+words that suddenly turn one cold, 'Into my grave.' Otherwise, what we
+justly call Hamlet's characteristic humour is not his exclusive
+property, but appears in passages spoken by persons as different as
+Mercutio, Falstaff and Rosalind. The truth probably is that it was the
+kind of humour most natural to Shakespeare himself, and that here, as in
+some other traits of the poet's greatest creation, we come into close
+contact with Shakespeare the man.
+
+
+3
+
+The actor who plays the part of Hamlet must make up his mind as to the
+interpretation of every word and deed of the character. Even if at some
+point he feels no certainty as to which of two interpretations is right,
+he must still choose one or the other. The mere critic is not obliged to
+do this. Where he remains in doubt he may say so, and, if the matter is
+of importance, he ought to say so.
+
+This is the position in which I find myself in regard to Hamlet's love
+for Ophelia. I am unable to arrive at a conviction as to the meaning of
+some of his words and deeds, and I question whether from the mere text
+of the play a sure interpretation of them can be drawn. For this reason
+I have reserved the subject for separate treatment, and have, so far as
+possible, kept it out of the general discussion of Hamlet's character.
+
+On two points no reasonable doubt can, I think, be felt. (1) Hamlet was
+at one time sincerely and ardently in love with Ophelia. For she herself
+says that he had importuned her with love in honourable fashion, and had
+given countenance to his speech with almost all the holy vows of heaven
+(I. iii. 110 f.). (2) When, at Ophelia's grave, he declared,
+
+     I loved Ophelia; forty thousand brothers
+     Could not, with all their quantity of love,
+     Make up my sum,
+
+he must have spoken sincerely; and, further, we may take it for granted
+that he used the past tense, 'loved,' merely because Ophelia was dead,
+and not to imply that he had once loved her but no longer did so.
+
+So much being assumed, we come to what is doubtful, and I will begin by
+stating what is probably the most popular view. According to this view,
+Hamlet's love for Ophelia never changed. On the revelation made by the
+Ghost, however, he felt that he must put aside all thoughts of it; and
+it also seemed to him necessary to convince Ophelia, as well as others,
+that he was insane, and so to destroy her hopes of any happy issue to
+their love. This was the purpose of his appearance in her chamber,
+though he was probably influenced also by a longing to see her and bid
+her a silent farewell, and possibly by a faint hope that he might safely
+entrust his secret to her. If he entertained any such hope his study of
+her face dispelled it; and thereafter, as in the Nunnery-scene (III. i.)
+and again at the play-scene, he not only feigned madness, but, to
+convince her that he had quite lost his love for her, he also addressed
+her in bitter and insulting language. In all this he was acting a part
+intensely painful to himself; the very violence of his language in the
+Nunnery-scene arose from this pain; and so the actor should make him
+show, in that scene, occasional signs of a tenderness which with all his
+efforts he cannot wholly conceal. Finally, over her grave the truth
+bursts from him in the declaration quoted just now, though it is still
+impossible for him to explain to others why he who loved her so
+profoundly was forced to wring her heart.
+
+Now this theory, if the view of Hamlet's character which I have taken is
+anywhere near the truth, is certainly wrong at one point, viz., in so
+far as it supposes that Hamlet's bitterness to Ophelia was a _mere_
+pretence forced on him by his design of feigning to be insane; and I
+proceed to call attention to certain facts and considerations, of which
+the theory seems to take no account.
+
+1. How is it that in his first soliloquy Hamlet makes no reference
+whatever to Ophelia?
+
+2. How is it that in his second soliloquy, on the departure of the
+Ghost, he again says nothing about her? When the lover is feeling that
+he must make a complete break with his past, why does it not occur to
+him at once that he must give up his hopes of happiness in love?
+
+3. Hamlet does not, as the popular theory supposes, break with Ophelia
+directly after the Ghost appears to him; on the contrary, he tries to
+see her and sends letters to her (II. i. 109). What really happens is
+that Ophelia suddenly repels his visits and letters. Now, _we_ know that
+she is simply obeying her father's order; but how would her action
+appear to Hamlet, already sick at heart because of his mother's
+frailty,[71] and now finding that, the moment fortune has turned against
+him, the woman who had welcomed his love turns against him too? Even if
+he divined (as his insults to Polonius suggest) that her father was
+concerned in this change, would he not still, in that morbid condition
+of mind, certainly suspect her of being less simple than she had
+appeared to him?[72] Even if he remained free from _this_ suspicion, and
+merely thought her deplorably weak, would he not probably feel anger
+against _her_, an anger like that of the hero of _Locksley Hall_ against
+his Amy?
+
+4. When Hamlet made his way into Ophelia's room, why did he go in the
+garb, the conventionally recognised garb, of the distracted _lover_? If
+it was necessary to convince Ophelia of his insanity, how was it
+necessary to convince her that disappointment in _love_ was the cause of
+his insanity? His _main_ object in the visit appears to have been to
+convince _others_, through her, that his insanity was not due to any
+mysterious unknown cause, but to this disappointment, and so to allay
+the suspicions of the King. But if his feeling for her had been simply
+that of love, however unhappy, and had not been in any degree that of
+suspicion or resentment, would he have adopted a plan which must involve
+her in so much suffering?[73]
+
+5. In what way are Hamlet's insults to Ophelia at the play-scene
+necessary either to his purpose of convincing her of his insanity or to
+his purpose of revenge? And, even if he did regard them as somehow means
+to these ends, is it conceivable that he would have uttered them, if his
+feeling for her were one of hopeless but unmingled love?
+
+6. How is it that neither when he kills Polonius, nor afterwards, does
+he appear to reflect that he has killed Ophelia's father, or what the
+effect on Ophelia is likely to be?
+
+7. We have seen that there is no reference to Ophelia in the soliloquies
+of the First Act. Neither is there the faintest allusion to her in any
+one of the soliloquies of the subsequent Acts, unless possibly in the
+words (III. i. 72) 'the pangs of despised love.'[74] If the popular
+theory is true, is not this an astounding fact?
+
+8. Considering this fact, is there no significance in the further fact
+(which, by itself, would present no difficulty) that in speaking to
+Horatio Hamlet never alludes to Ophelia, and that at his death he says
+nothing of her?
+
+9. If the popular theory is true, how is it that neither in the
+Nunnery-scene nor at the play-scene does Shakespeare insert anything to
+make the truth plain? Four words like Othello's 'O hardness to
+dissemble' would have sufficed.
+
+These considerations, coupled with others as to Hamlet's state of mind,
+seem to point to two conclusions. They suggest, first, that Hamlet's
+love, though never lost, was, after Ophelia's apparent rejection of him,
+mingled with suspicion and resentment, and that his treatment of her was
+due in part to this cause. And I find it impossible to resist this
+conclusion. But the question how much of his harshness is meant to be
+real, and how much assumed, seems to me impossible in some places to
+answer. For example, his behaviour at the play-scene seems to me to show
+an intention to hurt and insult; but in the Nunnery-scene (which cannot
+be discussed briefly) he is evidently acting a part and suffering
+acutely, while at the same time his invective, however exaggerated,
+seems to spring from real feelings; and what is pretence, and what
+sincerity, appears to me an insoluble problem. Something depends here on
+the further question whether or no Hamlet suspects or detects the
+presence of listeners; but, in the absence of an authentic stage
+tradition, this question too seems to be unanswerable.
+
+But something further seems to follow from the considerations adduced.
+Hamlet's love, they seem to show, was not only mingled with bitterness,
+it was also, like all his healthy feelings, weakened and deadened by his
+melancholy.[75] It was far from being extinguished; probably it was
+_one_ of the causes which drove him to force his way to Ophelia;
+whenever he saw Ophelia, it awoke and, the circumstances being what they
+were, tormented him. But it was not an absorbing passion; it did not
+habitually occupy his thoughts; and when he declared that it was such a
+love as forty thousand brothers could not equal, he spoke sincerely
+indeed but not truly. What he said was true, if I may put it thus, of
+the inner healthy self which doubtless in time would have fully
+reasserted itself; but it was only partly true of the Hamlet whom we see
+in the play. And the morbid influence of his melancholy on his love is
+the cause of those strange facts, that he never alludes to her in his
+soliloquies, and that he appears not to realise how the death of her
+father must affect her.
+
+The facts seem almost to force this idea on us. That it is less
+'romantic' than the popular view is no argument against it. And
+psychologically it is quite sound, for a frequent symptom of such
+melancholy as Hamlet's is a more or less complete paralysis, or even
+perversion, of the emotion of love. And yet, while feeling no doubt that
+up to a certain point it is true, I confess I am not satisfied that the
+explanation of Hamlet's silence regarding Ophelia lies in it. And the
+reason of this uncertainty is that scarcely any spectators or readers of
+_Hamlet_ notice this silence at all; that I never noticed it myself till
+I began to try to solve the problem of Hamlet's relation to Ophelia; and
+that even now, when I read the play through without pausing to consider
+particular questions, it scarcely strikes me. Now Shakespeare wrote
+primarily for the theatre and not for students, and therefore great
+weight should be attached to the immediate impressions made by his
+works. And so it seems at least possible that the explanation of
+Hamlet's silence may be that Shakespeare, having already a very
+difficult task to perform in the soliloquies--that of showing the state
+of mind which caused Hamlet to delay his vengeance--did not choose to
+make his task more difficult by introducing matter which would not only
+add to the complexity of the subject but might, from its 'sentimental'
+interest, distract attention from the main point; while, from his
+theatrical experience, he knew that the audience would not observe how
+unnatural it was that a man deeply in love, and forced not only to
+renounce but to wound the woman he loved, should not think of her when
+he was alone. But, as this explanation is no more completely convincing
+to me than the other, I am driven to suspend judgment, and also to
+suspect that the text admits of no sure interpretation. [This paragraph
+states my view imperfectly.]
+
+This result may seem to imply a serious accusation against Shakespeare.
+But it must be remembered that if we could see a contemporary
+representation of _Hamlet_, our doubts would probably disappear. The
+actor, instructed by the author, would make it clear to us by looks,
+tones, gestures, and by-play how far Hamlet's feigned harshness to
+Ophelia was mingled with real bitterness, and again how far his
+melancholy had deadened his love.
+
+
+4
+
+As we have seen, all the persons in _Hamlet_ except the hero are minor
+characters, who fail to rise to the tragic level. They are not less
+interesting on that account, but the hero has occupied us so long that I
+shall refer only to those in regard to whom Shakespeare's intention
+appears to be not seldom misunderstood or overlooked.
+
+It may seem strange that Ophelia should be one of these; and yet
+Shakespearean literature and the experience of teachers show that there
+is much difference of opinion regarding her, and in particular that a
+large number of readers feel a kind of personal irritation against her.
+They seem unable to forgive her for not having been a heroine, and they
+fancy her much weaker than she was. They think she ought to have been
+able to help Hamlet to fulfil his task. And they betray, it appears to
+me, the strangest misconceptions as to what she actually did.
+
+Now it was essential to Shakespeare's purpose that too great an interest
+should not be aroused in the love-story; essential, therefore, that
+Ophelia should be merely one of the subordinate characters; and
+necessary, accordingly, that she should not be the equal, in spirit,
+power or intelligence, of his famous heroines. If she had been an
+Imogen, a Cordelia, even a Portia or a Juliet, the story must have taken
+another shape. Hamlet would either have been stimulated to do his duty,
+or (which is more likely) he would have gone mad, or (which is
+likeliest) he would have killed himself in despair. Ophelia, therefore,
+was made a character who could not help Hamlet, and for whom on the
+other hand he would not naturally feel a passion so vehement or profound
+as to interfere with the main motive of the play.[76] And in the love
+and the fate of Ophelia herself there was introduced an element, not of
+deep tragedy but of pathetic beauty, which makes the analysis of her
+character seem almost a desecration.
+
+Ophelia is plainly quite young and inexperienced. She has lost her
+mother, and has only a father and a brother, affectionate but worldly,
+to take care of her. Everyone in the drama who has any heart is drawn to
+her. To the persons in the play, as to the readers of it, she brings the
+thought of flowers. 'Rose of May' Laertes names her.
+
+             Lay her in the earth,
+     And from her fair and unpolluted flesh
+     May violets spring!
+
+--so he prays at her burial. 'Sweets to the sweet' the Queen murmurs, as
+she scatters flowers on the grave; and the flowers which Ophelia herself
+gathered--those which she gave to others, and those which floated about
+her in the brook--glimmer in the picture of the mind. Her affection for
+her brother is shown in two or three delicate strokes. Her love for her
+father is deep, though mingled with fear. For Hamlet she has, some say,
+no deep love--and perhaps she is so near childhood that old affections
+have still the strongest hold; but certainly she has given to Hamlet all
+the love of which her nature is as yet capable. Beyond these three
+beloved ones she seems to have eyes and ears for no one. The Queen is
+fond of her, but there is no sign of her returning the Queen's
+affection. Her existence is wrapped up in these three.
+
+On this childlike nature and on Ophelia's inexperience everything
+depends. The knowledge that 'there's tricks in the world' has reached
+her only as a vague report. Her father and brother are jealously anxious
+for her because of her ignorance and innocence; and we resent their
+anxiety chiefly because we know Hamlet better than they. Her whole
+character is that of simple unselfish affection. Naturally she is
+incapable of understanding Hamlet's mind, though she can feel its
+beauty. Naturally, too, she obeys her father when she is forbidden to
+receive Hamlet's visits and letters. If we remember not what _we_ know
+but what _she_ knows of her lover and her father; if we remember that
+she had not, like Juliet, confessed her love; and if we remember that
+she was much below her suitor in station, her compliance surely must
+seem perfectly natural, apart from the fact that the standard of
+obedience to a father was in Shakespeare's day higher than in ours.
+
+'But she does more than obey,' we are told; 'she runs off frightened to
+report to her father Hamlet's strange visit and behaviour; she shows to
+her father one of Hamlet's letters, and tells him[77] the whole story of
+the courtship; and she joins in a plot to win Hamlet's secret from him.'
+One must remember, however, that she had never read the tragedy.
+Consider for a moment how matters looked to _her_. She knows nothing
+about the Ghost and its disclosures. She has undergone for some time the
+pain of repelling her lover and appearing to have turned against him.
+She sees him, or hears of him, sinking daily into deeper gloom, and so
+transformed from what he was that he is considered to be out of his
+mind. She hears the question constantly discussed what the cause of this
+sad change can be; and her heart tells her--how can it fail to tell
+her?--that her unkindness is the chief cause. Suddenly Hamlet forces his
+way into her chamber; and his appearance and his behaviour are those of
+a man crazed with love. She is frightened--why not? She is not Lady
+Macbeth. Rosalind would have been frightened. Which of her censors would
+be wholly unmoved if his room were invaded by a lunatic? She is
+frightened, then; frightened, if you will, like a child. Yes, but,
+observe, her one idea is to help Hamlet. She goes, therefore, at once to
+her father. To whom else should she go? Her brother is away. Her father,
+whom she saw with her own eyes and not with Shakespeare's, is kind, and
+the wisest of men, and concerned about Hamlet's state. Her father finds,
+in her report, the solution of the mystery: Hamlet is mad because she
+has repulsed him. Why should she not tell her father the whole story and
+give him an old letter which may help to convince the King and the
+Queen? Nay, why should she not allow herself to be used as a 'decoy' to
+settle the question why Hamlet is mad? It is all-important that it
+should be settled, in order that he may be cured; all her seniors are
+simply and solely anxious for his welfare; and, if her unkindness _is_
+the cause of his sad state, they will permit her to restore him by
+kindness (III. i. 40). Was she to refuse to play a part just because it
+would be painful to her to do so? I find in her joining the 'plot' (as
+it is absurdly called) a sign not of weakness, but of unselfishness and
+strength.
+
+'But she practised deception; she even told a lie. Hamlet asked her
+where her father was, and she said he was at home, when he was really
+listening behind a curtain.' Poor Ophelia! It is considered angelic in
+Desdemona to say untruly that she killed herself, but most immoral or
+pusillanimous in Ophelia to tell _her_ lie. I will not discuss these
+casuistical problems; but, if ever an angry lunatic asks me a question
+which I cannot answer truly without great danger to him and to one of my
+relations, I hope that grace may be given me to imitate Ophelia.
+Seriously, at such a terrible moment was it weak, was it not rather
+heroic, in a simple girl not to lose her presence of mind and not to
+flinch, but to go through her task for Hamlet's sake and her father's?
+And, finally, is it really a thing to be taken as matter of course, and
+no matter for admiration, in this girl that, from beginning to end, and
+after a storm of utterly unjust reproach, not a thought of resentment
+should even cross her mind?
+
+Still, we are told, it was ridiculously weak in her to lose her reason.
+And here again her critics seem hardly to realise the situation, hardly
+to put themselves in the place of a girl whose lover, estranged from
+her, goes mad and kills her father. They seem to forget also that
+Ophelia must have believed that these frightful calamities were not mere
+calamities, but followed from _her_ action in repelling her lover. Nor
+do they realise the utter loneliness that must have fallen on her. Of
+the three persons who were all the world to her, her father has been
+killed, Hamlet has been sent out of the country insane, and her brother
+is abroad. Horatio, when her mind gives way, tries to befriend her, but
+there is no sign of any previous relation between them, or of Hamlet's
+having commended her to his friend's care. What support she can gain
+from the Queen we can guess from the Queen's character, and from the
+fact that, when Ophelia is most helpless, the Queen shrinks from the
+very sight of her (IV. v. 1). She was left, thus, absolutely alone, and
+if she looked for her brother's return (as she did, IV. v. 70), she
+might reflect that it would mean danger to Hamlet.
+
+Whether this idea occurred to her we cannot tell. In any case it was
+well for her that her mind gave way before Laertes reached Elsinore; and
+pathetic as Ophelia's madness is, it is also, we feel, the kindest
+stroke that now could fall on her. It is evident, I think, that this was
+the effect Shakespeare intended to produce. In her madness Ophelia
+continues sweet and lovable.
+
+     Thought and affliction, passion, hell itself,
+     She turns to favour and to prettiness.
+
+In her wanderings we hear from time to time an undertone of the deepest
+sorrow, but never the agonised cry of fear or horror which makes madness
+dreadful or shocking.[78] And the picture of her death, if our eyes grow
+dim in watching it, is still purely beautiful. Coleridge was true to
+Shakespeare when he wrote of 'the affecting death of Ophelia,--who in
+the beginning lay like a little projection of land into a lake or
+stream, covered with spray-flowers quietly reflected in the quiet
+waters, but at length is undermined or loosened, and becomes a fairy
+isle, and after a brief vagrancy sinks almost without an eddy.'[79]
+
+
+5
+
+I reluctantly pass by Polonius, Laertes and the beautiful character of
+Horatio, to say something in conclusion of the Queen and the King.
+
+The answers to two questions asked about the Queen are, it seems to me,
+practically certain, (1) She did not merely marry a second time with
+indecent haste; she was false to her husband while he lived. This is
+surely the most natural interpretation of the words of the Ghost (I. v.
+41 f.), coming, as they do, before his account of the murder. And
+against this testimony what force has the objection that the queen in
+the 'Murder of Gonzago' is not represented as an adulteress? Hamlet's
+mark in arranging the play-scene was not his mother, whom besides he had
+been expressly ordered to spare (I. v. 84 f.).
+
+(2) On the other hand, she was _not_ privy to the murder of her husband,
+either before the deed or after it. There is no sign of her being so,
+and there are clear signs that she was not. The representation of the
+murder in the play-scene does not move her; and when her husband starts
+from his throne, she innocently asks him, 'How fares my lord?' In the
+interview with Hamlet, when her son says of his slaughter of Polonius,
+
+     'A bloody deed!' Almost as bad, good mother,
+     As kill a king and marry with his brother,
+
+the astonishment of her repetition 'As kill a king!' is evidently
+genuine; and, if it had not been so, she would never have had the
+hardihood to exclaim:
+
+     What have I done, that thou darest wag thy tongue
+     In noise so rude against me?
+
+Further, it is most significant that when she and the King speak
+together alone, nothing that is said by her or to her implies her
+knowledge of the secret.
+
+The Queen was not a bad-hearted woman, not at all the woman to think
+little of murder. But she had a soft animal nature, and was very dull
+and very shallow. She loved to be happy, like a sheep in the sun; and,
+to do her justice, it pleased her to see others happy, like more sheep
+in the sun. She never saw that drunkenness is disgusting till Hamlet
+told her so; and, though she knew that he considered her marriage
+'o'er-hasty' (II. ii. 57), she was untroubled by any shame at the
+feelings which had led to it. It was pleasant to sit upon her throne and
+see smiling faces round her, and foolish and unkind in Hamlet to persist
+in grieving for his father instead of marrying Ophelia and making
+everything comfortable. She was fond of Ophelia and genuinely attached
+to her son (though willing to see her lover exclude him from the
+throne); and, no doubt, she considered equality of rank a mere trifle
+compared with the claims of love. The belief at the bottom of her heart
+was that the world is a place constructed simply that people may be
+happy in it in a good-humoured sensual fashion.
+
+Her only chance was to be made unhappy. When affliction comes to her,
+the good in her nature struggles to the surface through the heavy mass
+of sloth. Like other faulty characters in Shakespeare's tragedies, she
+dies a better woman than she had lived. When Hamlet shows her what she
+has done she feels genuine remorse. It is true, Hamlet fears it will not
+last, and so at the end of the interview (III. iv. 180 ff.) he adds a
+warning that, if she betrays him, she will ruin herself as well.[80] It
+is true too that there is no sign of her obeying Hamlet in breaking off
+her most intimate connection with the King. Still she does feel remorse;
+and she loves her son, and does not betray him. She gives her husband a
+false account of Polonius's death, and is silent about the appearance of
+the Ghost. She becomes miserable;
+
+     To her sick soul, as sin's true nature is,
+     Each toy seems prologue to some great amiss.
+
+She shows spirit when Laertes raises the mob, and one respects her for
+standing up for her husband when she can do nothing to help her son. If
+she had sense to realise Hamlet's purpose, or the probability of the
+King's taking some desperate step to foil it, she must have suffered
+torture in those days. But perhaps she was too dull.
+
+The last we see of her, at the fencing-match, is most characteristic.
+She is perfectly serene. Things have slipped back into their groove, and
+she has no apprehensions. She is, however, disturbed and full of
+sympathy for her son, who is out of condition and pants and perspires.
+These are afflictions she can thoroughly feel for, though they are even
+more common than the death of a father. But then she meets her death
+because she cannot resist the wish to please her son by drinking to his
+success. And more: when she falls dying, and the King tries to make out
+that she is merely swooning at the sight of blood, she collects her
+energies to deny it and to warn Hamlet:
+
+     No, no, the drink, the drink,--O my dear Hamlet,--
+     The drink, the drink! I am poison'd.                [_Dies._
+
+Was ever any other writer at once so pitiless and so just as
+Shakespeare? Did ever any other mingle the grotesque and the pathetic
+with a realism so daring and yet so true to 'the modesty of nature'?
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+King Claudius rarely gets from the reader the attention he deserves. But
+he is very interesting, both psychologically and dramatically. On the
+one hand, he is not without respectable qualities. As a king he is
+courteous and never undignified; he performs his ceremonial duties
+efficiently; and he takes good care of the national interests. He
+nowhere shows cowardice, and when Laertes and the mob force their way
+into the palace, he confronts a dangerous situation with coolness and
+address. His love for his ill-gotten wife seems to be quite genuine, and
+there is no ground for suspecting him of having used her as a mere means
+to the crown.[81] His conscience, though ineffective, is far from being
+dead. In spite of its reproaches he plots new crimes to ensure the prize
+of the old one; but still it makes him unhappy (III. i. 49 f., III. iii.
+35 f.). Nor is he cruel or malevolent.
+
+On the other hand, he is no tragic character. He had a small nature. If
+Hamlet may be trusted, he was a man of mean appearance--a mildewed ear,
+a toad, a bat; and he was also bloated by excess in drinking. People
+made mouths at him in contempt while his brother lived; and though, when
+he came to the throne, they spent large sums in buying his portrait, he
+evidently put little reliance on their loyalty. He was no villain of
+force, who thought of winning his brother's crown by a bold and open
+stroke, but a cut-purse who stole the diadem from a shelf and put it in
+his pocket. He had the inclination of natures physically weak and
+morally small towards intrigue and crooked dealing. His instinctive
+predilection was for poison: this was the means he used in his first
+murder, and he at once recurred to it when he had failed to get Hamlet
+executed by deputy. Though in danger he showed no cowardice, his first
+thought was always for himself.
+
+     I like him not, nor stands it safe with _us_
+     To let his madness range,
+
+--these are the first words we hear him speak after the play-scene. His
+first comment on the death of Polonius is,
+
+     It had been so with _us_ had we been there;
+
+and his second is,
+
+     Alas, how shall this bloody deed be answered?
+     It will be laid to _us_.
+
+He was not, however, stupid, but rather quick-witted and adroit. He won
+the Queen partly indeed by presents (how pitifully characteristic of
+her!), but also by 'witch-craft of his wit' or intellect. He seems to
+have been soft-spoken, ingratiating in manner, and given to smiling on
+the person he addressed ('that one may smile, and smile, and be a
+villain'). We see this in his speech to Laertes about the young man's
+desire to return to Paris (I. ii. 42 f.). Hamlet scarcely ever speaks to
+him without an insult, but he never shows resentment, hardly even
+annoyance. He makes use of Laertes with great dexterity. He had
+evidently found that a clear head, a general complaisance, a willingness
+to bend and oblige where he could not overawe, would lead him to his
+objects,--that he could trick men and manage them. Unfortunately he
+imagined he could trick something more than men.
+
+This error, together with a decided trait of temperament, leads him to
+his ruin. He has a sanguine disposition. When first we see him, all has
+fallen out to his wishes, and he confidently looks forward to a happy
+life. He believes his secret to be absolutely safe, and he is quite
+ready to be kind to Hamlet, in whose melancholy he sees only excess of
+grief. He has no desire to see him leave the court; he promises him his
+voice for the succession (I. ii. 108, III. ii. 355); he will be a father
+to him. Before long, indeed, he becomes very uneasy, and then more and
+more alarmed; but when, much later, he has contrived Hamlet's death in
+England, he has still no suspicion that he need not hope for happiness:
+
+                       till I know 'tis done,
+     Howe'er my haps, my _joys_ were ne'er begun.
+
+Nay, his very last words show that he goes to death unchanged:
+
+     Oh yet defend me, friends, I am but hurt [=wounded],
+
+he cries, although in half a minute he is dead. That his crime has
+failed, and that it could do nothing else, never once comes home to him.
+He thinks he can over-reach Heaven. When he is praying for pardon, he is
+all the while perfectly determined to keep his crown; and he knows it.
+More--it is one of the grimmest things in Shakespeare, but he puts such
+things so quietly that we are apt to miss them--when the King is praying
+for pardon for his first murder he has just made his final arrangements
+for a second, the murder of Hamlet. But he does not allude to that fact
+in his prayer. If Hamlet had really wished to kill him at a moment that
+had no relish of salvation in it, he had no need to wait.[82] So we are
+inclined to say; and yet it was not so. For this was the crisis for
+Claudius as well as Hamlet. He had better have died at once, before he
+had added to his guilt a share in the responsibility for all the woe and
+death that followed. And so, we may allow ourselves to say, here also
+Hamlet's indiscretion served him well. The power that shaped his end
+shaped the King's no less.
+
+For--to return in conclusion to the action of the play--in all that
+happens or is done we seem to apprehend some vaster power. We do not
+define it, or even name it, or perhaps even say to ourselves that it is
+there; but our imagination is haunted by the sense of it, as it works
+its way through the deeds or the delays of men to its inevitable end.
+And most of all do we feel this in regard to Hamlet and the King. For
+these two, the one by his shrinking from his appointed task, and the
+other by efforts growing ever more feverish to rid himself of his enemy,
+seem to be bent on avoiding each other. But they cannot. Through devious
+paths, the very paths they take in order to escape, something is pushing
+them silently step by step towards one another, until they meet and it
+puts the sword into Hamlet's hand. He himself must die, for he needed
+this compulsion before he could fulfil the demand of destiny; but he
+_must_ fulfil it. And the King too, turn and twist as he may, must reach
+the appointed goal, and is only hastening to it by the windings which
+seem to lead elsewhere. Concentration on the character of the hero is
+apt to withdraw our attention from this aspect of the drama; but in no
+other tragedy of Shakespeare's, not even in _Macbeth_, is this aspect so
+impressive.[83]
+
+I mention _Macbeth_ for a further reason. In _Macbeth_ and _Hamlet_ not
+only is the feeling of a supreme power or destiny peculiarly marked, but
+it has also at times a peculiar tone, which may be called, in a sense,
+religious. I cannot make my meaning clear without using language too
+definite to describe truly the imaginative impression produced; but it
+is roughly true that, while we do not imagine the supreme power as a
+divine being who avenges crime, or as a providence which supernaturally
+interferes, our sense of it is influenced by the fact that Shakespeare
+uses current religious ideas here much more decidedly than in _Othello_
+or _King Lear_. The horror in Macbeth's soul is more than once
+represented as desperation at the thought that he is eternally 'lost';
+the same idea appears in the attempt of Claudius at repentance; and as
+_Hamlet_ nears its close the 'religious' tone of the tragedy is deepened
+in two ways. In the first place, 'accident' is introduced into the plot
+in its barest and least dramatic form, when Hamlet is brought back to
+Denmark by the chance of the meeting with the pirate ship. This incident
+has been therefore severely criticised as a lame expedient,[84] but it
+appears probable that the 'accident' is meant to impress the imagination
+as the very reverse of accidental, and with many readers it certainly
+does so. And that this was the intention is made the more likely by a
+second fact, the fact that in connection with the events of the voyage
+Shakespeare introduces that feeling, on Hamlet's part, of his being in
+the hands of Providence. The repeated expressions of this feeling are
+not, I have maintained, a sign that Hamlet has now formed a fixed
+resolution to do his duty forthwith; but their effect is to strengthen
+in the spectator the feeling that, whatever may become of Hamlet, and
+whether he wills it or not, his task will surely be accomplished,
+because it is the purpose of a power against which both he and his enemy
+are impotent, and which makes of them the instruments of its own will.
+
+Observing this, we may remember another significant point of resemblance
+between _Hamlet_ and _Macbeth_, the appearance in each play of a
+Ghost,--a figure which seems quite in place in either, whereas it would
+seem utterly out of place in _Othello_ or _King Lear_. Much might be
+said of the Ghost in _Hamlet_, but I confine myself to the matter which
+we are now considering. What is the effect of the appearance of the
+Ghost? And, in particular, why does Shakespeare make this Ghost so
+_majestical_ a phantom, giving it that measured and solemn utterance,
+and that air of impersonal abstraction which forbids, for example, all
+expression of affection for Hamlet and checks in Hamlet the outburst of
+pity for his father? Whatever the intention may have been, the result is
+that the Ghost affects imagination not simply as the apparition of a
+dead king who desires the accomplishment of _his_ purposes, but also as
+the representative of that hidden ultimate power, the messenger of
+divine justice set upon the expiation of offences which it appeared
+impossible for man to discover and avenge, a reminder or a symbol of the
+connexion of the limited world of ordinary experience with the vaster
+life of which it is but a partial appearance. And as, at the beginning
+of the play, we have this intimation, conveyed through the medium of the
+received religious idea of a soul come from purgatory, so at the end,
+conveyed through the similar idea of a soul carried by angels to its
+rest, we have an intimation of the same character, and a reminder that
+the apparent failure of Hamlet's life is not the ultimate truth
+concerning him.
+
+If these various peculiarities of the tragedy are considered, it will be
+agreed that, while _Hamlet_ certainly cannot be called in the specific
+sense a 'religious drama,' there is in it nevertheless both a freer use
+of popular religious ideas, and a more decided, though always
+imaginative, intimation of a supreme power concerned in human evil and
+good, than can be found in any other of Shakespeare's tragedies. And
+this is probably one of the causes of the special popularity of this
+play, just as _Macbeth_, the tragedy which in these respects most nearly
+approaches it, has also the place next to it in general esteem.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[Footnote 54: In the First Act (I. ii. 138) Hamlet says that his father
+has been dead not quite two months. In the Third Act (III. ii. 135)
+Ophelia says King Hamlet has been dead 'twice two months.' The events of
+the Third Act are separated from those of the Second by one night (II.
+ii. 565).]
+
+[Footnote 55: The only difference is that in the 'To be or not to be'
+soliloquy there is no reference to the idea that suicide is forbidden by
+'the Everlasting.' Even this, however, seems to have been present in the
+original form of the speech, for the version in the First Quarto has a
+line about our being 'borne before an everlasting Judge.']
+
+[Footnote 56: The present position of the 'To be or not to be'
+soliloquy, and of the interview with Ophelia, appears to have been due
+to an after-thought of Shakespeare's; for in the First Quarto they
+precede, instead of following, the arrival of the players, and
+consequently the arrangement for the play-scene. This is a notable
+instance of the truth that 'inspiration' is by no means confined to a
+poet's first conceptions.]
+
+[Footnote 57: Cf. again the scene at Ophelia's grave, where a strong
+strain of aesthetic disgust is traceable in Hamlet's 'towering passion'
+with Laertes: 'Nay, an thou'lt mouth, I'll rant as well as thou' (V. i.
+306).]
+
+[Footnote 58:
+
+     O heart, lose not thy nature; let not ever
+     The soul of Nero enter this firm bosom:
+
+Nero, who put to death his mother who had poisoned her husband. This
+passage is surely remarkable. And so are the later words (III. iv. 28):
+
+     A bloody deed! almost as bad, good mother,
+     As kill a king, and marry with his brother.
+
+Are we to understand that at this time he really suspected her of
+complicity in the murder? We must remember that the Ghost had not told
+him she was innocent of that.]
+
+[Footnote 59: I am inclined to think that the note of interrogation put
+after 'revenged' in a late Quarto is right.]
+
+[Footnote 60: III. iii. 1-26. The state of affairs at Court at this
+time, though I have not seen it noticed by critics, seems to me
+puzzling. It is quite clear from III. ii. 310 ff., from the passage just
+cited, and from IV. vii. 1-5 and 30 ff., that everyone sees in the
+play-scene a gross and menacing insult to the King. Yet no one shows any
+sign of perceiving in it also an accusation of murder. Surely that is
+strange. Are we perhaps meant to understand that they do perceive this,
+but out of subservience choose to ignore the fact? If that were
+Shakespeare's meaning, the actors could easily indicate it by their
+looks. And if it were so, any sympathy we may feel for Rosencrantz and
+Guildenstern in their fate would be much diminished. But the mere text
+does not suffice to decide either this question or the question whether
+the two courtiers were aware of the contents of the commission they bore
+to England.]
+
+[Footnote 61: This passage in _Hamlet_ seems to have been in Heywood's
+mind when, in _The Second Part of the Iron Age_ (Pearson's reprint, vol.
+iii., p. 423), he makes the Ghost of Agamemnon appear in order to
+satisfy the doubts of Orestes as to his mother's guilt. No reader could
+possibly think that this Ghost was meant to be an hallucination; yet
+Clytemnestra cannot see it. The Ghost of King Hamlet, I may add, goes
+further than that of Agamemnon, for he is audible, as well as visible,
+to the privileged person.]
+
+[Footnote 62: I think it is clear that it is this fear which stands in
+the way of the obvious plan of bringing Hamlet to trial and getting him
+shut up or executed. It is much safer to hurry him off to his doom in
+England before he can say anything about the murder which he has somehow
+discovered. Perhaps the Queen's resistance, and probably Hamlet's great
+popularity with the people, are additional reasons. (It should be
+observed that as early as III. i. 194 we hear of the idea of 'confining'
+Hamlet as an alternative to sending him to England.)]
+
+[Footnote 63: I am inferring from IV. vii., 129, 130, and the last words
+of the scene.]
+
+[Footnote 64: III. iv. 172:
+
+                         For this same lord,
+     I do repent: but heaven hath pleased it so,
+     To punish me with this and this with me,
+     That I must be their scourge and minister:
+
+_i.e._ the scourge and minister of 'heaven,' which has a plural sense
+elsewhere also in Shakespeare.]
+
+[Footnote 65: IV. iii. 48:
+
+     _Ham._   For England!
+
+     _King._               Ay, Hamlet.
+
+     _Ham._                            Good.
+
+     _King._  So is it, if thou knew'st our purposes.
+
+     _Ham._   I see a cherub that sees them.]
+
+[Footnote 66: On this passage see p. 98. Hamlet's reply to Horatio's
+warning sounds, no doubt, determined; but so did 'I know my course.' And
+is it not significant that, having given it, he abruptly changes the
+subject?]
+
+[Footnote 67: P. 102.]
+
+[Footnote 68: It should be observed also that many of Hamlet's
+repetitions can hardly be said to occur at moments of great emotion,
+like Cordelia's 'And so I am, I am,' and 'No cause, no cause.'
+
+Of course, a habit of repetition quite as marked as Hamlet's may be
+found in comic persons, _e.g._ Justice Shallow in _2 Henry IV._]
+
+[Footnote 69: Perhaps it is from noticing this trait that I find
+something characteristic too in this coincidence of phrase: 'Alas, poor
+ghost!' (I. v. 4), 'Alas, poor Yorick!' (V. i. 202).]
+
+[Footnote 70: This letter, of course, was written before the time when
+the action of the drama begins, for we know that Ophelia, after her
+father's commands in I. iii., received no more letters (II. i. 109).]
+
+[Footnote 71: 'Frailty, thy name is woman!' he had exclaimed in the
+first soliloquy. Cf. what he says of his mother's act (III. iv. 40):
+
+                               Such an act
+     That blurs the grace and blush of modesty,
+     Calls virtue hypocrite, takes off the rose
+     From the fair forehead of an innocent love
+     And sets a blister there.]
+
+[Footnote 72: There are signs that Hamlet was haunted by the horrible
+idea that he had been deceived in Ophelia as he had been in his mother;
+that she was shallow and artificial, and even that what had seemed
+simple and affectionate love might really have been something very
+different. The grossness of his language at the play-scene, and some
+lines in the Nunnery-scene, suggest this; and, considering the state of
+his mind, there is nothing unnatural in his suffering from such a
+suspicion. I do not suggest that he _believed_ in it, and in the
+Nunnery-scene it is clear that his healthy perception of her innocence
+is in conflict with it.
+
+He seems to have divined that Polonius suspected him of dishonourable
+intentions towards Ophelia; and there are also traces of the idea that
+Polonius had been quite ready to let his daughter run the risk as long
+as Hamlet was prosperous. But it is dangerous, of course, to lay stress
+on inferences drawn from his conversations with Polonius.]
+
+[Footnote 73: Many readers and critics imagine that Hamlet went straight
+to Ophelia's room after his interview with the Ghost. But we have just
+seen that on the contrary he tried to visit her and was repelled, and it
+is absolutely certain that a long interval separates the events of I. v.
+and II. i. They think also, of course, that Hamlet's visit to Ophelia
+was the first announcement of his madness. But the text flatly
+contradicts that idea also. Hamlet has for some time appeared totally
+changed (II. ii. 1-10); the King is very uneasy at his 'transformation,'
+and has sent for his school-fellows in order to discover its cause.
+Polonius now, after Ophelia has told him of the interview, comes to
+announce his discovery, not of Hamlet's madness, but of its cause (II.
+ii. 49). That, it would seem, was the effect Hamlet aimed at in his
+interview. I may add that Ophelia's description of his intent
+examination of her face suggests doubt rather as to her 'honesty' or
+sincerity than as to her strength of mind. I cannot believe that he ever
+dreamed of confiding his secret to her.]
+
+[Footnote 74: If this _is_ an allusion to his own love, the adjective
+'despised' is significant. But I doubt the allusion. The other
+calamities mentioned by Hamlet, 'the oppressor's wrong, the proud man's
+contumely, the law's delay, the insolence of office, and the spurns that
+patient merit of the unworthy takes,' are not at all specially his own.]
+
+[Footnote 75: It should be noticed that it was not apparently of long
+standing. See the words 'of late' in I. iii. 91, 99.]
+
+[Footnote 76: This, I think, may be said on almost any sane view of
+Hamlet's love.]
+
+[Footnote 77: Polonius says so, and it _may_ be true.]
+
+[Footnote 78: I have heard an actress in this part utter such a cry as
+is described above, but there is absolutely nothing in the text to
+justify her rendering. Even the exclamation 'O, ho!' found in the
+Quartos at IV. v. 33, but omitted in the Folios and by almost all modern
+editors, coming as it does after the stanza, 'He is dead and gone,
+lady,' evidently expresses grief, not terror.]
+
+[Footnote 79: In the remarks above I have not attempted, of course, a
+complete view of the character, which has often been well described; but
+I cannot forbear a reference to one point which I do not remember to
+have seen noticed. In the Nunnery-scene Ophelia's first words
+pathetically betray her own feeling:
+
+                       Good my lord,
+     How does your honour _for this many a day_?
+
+She then offers to return Hamlet's presents. This has not been suggested
+to her by her father: it is her own thought. And the next lines, in
+which she refers to the sweet words which accompanied those gifts, and
+to the unkindness which has succeeded that kindness, imply a reproach.
+So again do those most touching little speeches:
+
+     _Hamlet._    ... I did love you once.
+
+     _Ophelia._  Indeed, my lord, you made me believe so.
+
+     _Hamlet._   You should not have believed me ... I loved you not.
+
+     _Ophelia._  I was the more deceived.
+
+Now the obvious surface fact was not that Hamlet had forsaken her, but
+that _she_ had repulsed _him_; and here, with his usual unobtrusive
+subtlety, Shakespeare shows how Ophelia, even though she may have
+accepted from her elders the theory that her unkindness has driven
+Hamlet mad, knows within herself that she is forsaken, and cannot
+repress the timid attempt to win her lover back by showing that her own
+heart is unchanged.
+
+I will add one note. There are critics who, after all the help given
+them in different ways by Goethe and Coleridge and Mrs. Jameson, still
+shake their heads over Ophelia's song, 'To-morrow is Saint Valentine's
+day.' Probably they are incurable, but they may be asked to consider
+that Shakespeare makes Desdemona, 'as chaste as ice, as pure as snow,'
+sing an old song containing the line,
+
+     If I court moe women, you'll couch with moe men.]
+
+[Footnote 80: _I.e._ the King will kill _her_ to make all sure.]
+
+[Footnote 81: I do not rely so much on his own statement to Laertes (IV.
+vii. 12 f.) as on the absence of contrary indications, on his tone in
+speaking to her, and on such signs as his mention of her in soliloquy
+(III. iii. 55).]
+
+[Footnote 82: This also is quietly indicated. Hamlet spares the King, he
+says, because if the King is killed praying he will _go to heaven_. On
+Hamlet's departure, the King rises from his knees, and mutters:
+
+     My words fly up, my thoughts remain below:
+     Words without thoughts _never to heaven go_.]
+
+[Footnote 83: I am indebted to Werder in this paragraph.]
+
+[Footnote 84: The attempt to explain this meeting as pre-arranged by
+Hamlet is scarcely worth mention.]
+
+
+
+
+LECTURE V
+
+OTHELLO
+
+
+There is practically no doubt that _Othello_ was the tragedy written
+next after _Hamlet_. Such external evidence as we possess points to this
+conclusion, and it is confirmed by similarities of style, diction and
+versification, and also by the fact that ideas and phrases of the
+earlier play are echoed in the later.[85] There is, further (not to
+speak of one curious point, to be considered when we come to Iago), a
+certain resemblance in the subjects. The heroes of the two plays are
+doubtless extremely unlike, so unlike that each could have dealt without
+much difficulty with the situation which proved fatal to the other; but
+still each is a man exceptionally noble and trustful, and each endures
+the shock of a terrible disillusionment. This theme is treated by
+Shakespeare for the first time in _Hamlet_, for the second in _Othello_.
+It recurs with modifications in _King Lear_, and it probably formed the
+attraction which drew Shakespeare to refashion in part another writer's
+tragedy of _Timon_. These four dramas may so far be grouped together in
+distinction from the remaining tragedies.
+
+But in point of substance, and, in certain respects, in point of style,
+the unlikeness of _Othello_ to _Hamlet_ is much greater than the
+likeness, and the later play belongs decidedly to one group with its
+successors. We have seen that, like them, it is a tragedy of passion, a
+description inapplicable to _Julius Caesar_ or _Hamlet_. And with this
+change goes another, an enlargement in the stature of the hero. There is
+in most of the later heroes something colossal, something which reminds
+us of Michael Angelo's figures. They are not merely exceptional men,
+they are huge men; as it were, survivors of the heroic age living in a
+later and smaller world. We do not receive this impression from Romeo or
+Brutus or Hamlet, nor did it lie in Shakespeare's design to allow more
+than touches of this trait to Julius Caesar himself; but it is strongly
+marked in Lear and Coriolanus, and quite distinct in Macbeth and even in
+Antony. Othello is the first of these men, a being essentially large and
+grand, towering above his fellows, holding a volume of force which in
+repose ensures preeminence without an effort, and in commotion reminds
+us rather of the fury of the elements than of the tumult of common human
+passion.
+
+
+1
+
+What is the peculiarity of _Othello_? What is the distinctive impression
+that it leaves? Of all Shakespeare's tragedies, I would answer, not even
+excepting _King Lear_, _Othello_ is the most painfully exciting and the
+most terrible. From the moment when the temptation of the hero begins,
+the reader's heart and mind are held in a vice, experiencing the
+extremes of pity and fear, sympathy and repulsion, sickening hope and
+dreadful expectation. Evil is displayed before him, not indeed with the
+profusion found in _King Lear_, but forming, as it were, the soul of a
+single character, and united with an intellectual superiority so great
+that he watches its advance fascinated and appalled. He sees it, in
+itself almost irresistible, aided at every step by fortunate accidents
+and the innocent mistakes of its victims. He seems to breathe an
+atmosphere as fateful as that of _King Lear_, but more confined and
+oppressive, the darkness not of night but of a close-shut murderous
+room. His imagination is excited to intense activity, but it is the
+activity of concentration rather than dilation.
+
+I will not dwell now on aspects of the play which modify this
+impression, and I reserve for later discussion one of its principal
+sources, the character of Iago. But if we glance at some of its other
+sources, we shall find at the same time certain distinguishing
+characteristics of _Othello_.
+
+(1) One of these has been already mentioned in our discussion of
+Shakespeare's technique. _Othello_ is not only the most masterly of the
+tragedies in point of construction, but its method of construction is
+unusual. And this method, by which the conflict begins late, and
+advances without appreciable pause and with accelerating speed to the
+catastrophe, is a main cause of the painful tension just described. To
+this may be added that, after the conflict has begun, there is very
+little relief by way of the ridiculous. Henceforward at any rate Iago's
+humour never raises a smile. The clown is a poor one; we hardly attend
+to him and quickly forget him; I believe most readers of Shakespeare, if
+asked whether there is a clown in _Othello_, would answer No.
+
+(2) In the second place, there is no subject more exciting than sexual
+jealousy rising to the pitch of passion; and there can hardly be any
+spectacle at once so engrossing and so painful as that of a great nature
+suffering the torment of this passion, and driven by it to a crime which
+is also a hideous blunder. Such a passion as ambition, however terrible
+its results, is not itself ignoble; if we separate it in thought from
+the conditions which make it guilty, it does not appear despicable; it
+is not a kind of suffering, its nature is active; and therefore we can
+watch its course without shrinking. But jealousy, and especially sexual
+jealousy, brings with it a sense of shame and humiliation. For this
+reason it is generally hidden; if we perceive it we ourselves are
+ashamed and turn our eyes away; and when it is not hidden it commonly
+stirs contempt as well as pity. Nor is this all. Such jealousy as
+Othello's converts human nature into chaos, and liberates the beast in
+man; and it does this in relation to one of the most intense and also
+the most ideal of human feelings. What spectacle can be more painful
+than that of this feeling turned into a tortured mixture of longing and
+loathing, the 'golden purity' of passion split by poison into fragments,
+the animal in man forcing itself into his consciousness in naked
+grossness, and he writhing before it but powerless to deny it entrance,
+gasping inarticulate images of pollution, and finding relief only in a
+bestial thirst for blood? This is what we have to witness in one who was
+indeed 'great of heart' and no less pure and tender than he was great.
+And this, with what it leads to, the blow to Desdemona, and the scene
+where she is treated as the inmate of a brothel, a scene far more
+painful than the murder scene, is another cause of the special effect of
+this tragedy.[86]
+
+(3) The mere mention of these scenes will remind us painfully of a third
+cause; and perhaps it is the most potent of all. I mean the suffering of
+Desdemona. This is, unless I mistake, the most nearly intolerable
+spectacle that Shakespeare offers us. For one thing, it is _mere_
+suffering; and, _ceteris paribus_, that is much worse to witness than
+suffering that issues in action. Desdemona is helplessly passive. She
+can do nothing whatever. She cannot retaliate even in speech; no, not
+even in silent feeling. And the chief reason of her helplessness only
+makes the sight of her suffering more exquisitely painful. She is
+helpless because her nature is infinitely sweet and her love absolute. I
+would not challenge Mr. Swinburne's statement that we _pity_ Othello
+even more than Desdemona; but we watch Desdemona with more unmitigated
+distress. We are never wholly uninfluenced by the feeling that Othello
+is a man contending with another man; but Desdemona's suffering is like
+that of the most loving of dumb creatures tortured without cause by the
+being he adores.
+
+(4) Turning from the hero and heroine to the third principal character,
+we observe (what has often been pointed out) that the action and
+catastrophe of _Othello_ depend largely on intrigue. We must not say
+more than this. We must not call the play a tragedy of intrigue as
+distinguished from a tragedy of character. Iago's plot is Iago's
+character in action; and it is built on his knowledge of Othello's
+character, and could not otherwise have succeeded. Still it remains true
+that an elaborate plot was necessary to elicit the catastrophe; for
+Othello was no Leontes, and his was the last nature to engender such
+jealousy from itself. Accordingly Iago's intrigue occupies a position in
+the drama for which no parallel can be found in the other tragedies; the
+only approach, and that a distant one, being the intrigue of Edmund in
+the secondary plot of _King Lear_. Now in any novel or play, even if the
+persons rouse little interest and are never in serious danger, a
+skilfully-worked intrigue will excite eager attention and suspense. And
+where, as in _Othello_, the persons inspire the keenest sympathy and
+antipathy, and life and death depend on the intrigue, it becomes the
+source of a tension in which pain almost overpowers pleasure. Nowhere
+else in Shakespeare do we hold our breath in such anxiety and for so
+long a time as in the later Acts of _Othello_.
+
+(5) One result of the prominence of the element of intrigue is that
+_Othello_ is less unlike a story of private life than any other of the
+great tragedies. And this impression is strengthened in further ways. In
+the other great tragedies the action is placed in a distant period, so
+that its general significance is perceived through a thin veil which
+separates the persons from ourselves and our own world. But _Othello_ is
+a drama of modern life; when it first appeared it was a drama almost of
+contemporary life, for the date of the Turkish attack on Cyprus is 1570.
+The characters come close to us, and the application of the drama to
+ourselves (if the phrase may be pardoned) is more immediate than it can
+be in _Hamlet_ or _Lear_. Besides this, their fortunes affect us as
+those of private individuals more than is possible in any of the later
+tragedies with the exception of _Timon_. I have not forgotten the
+Senate, nor Othello's position, nor his service to the State;[87] but
+his deed and his death have not that influence on the interests of a
+nation or an empire which serves to idealise, and to remove far from our
+own sphere, the stories of Hamlet and Macbeth, of Coriolanus and Antony.
+Indeed he is already superseded at Cyprus when his fate is consummated,
+and as we leave him no vision rises on us, as in other tragedies, of
+peace descending on a distracted land.
+
+(6) The peculiarities so far considered combine with others to produce
+those feelings of oppression, of confinement to a comparatively narrow
+world, and of dark fatality, which haunt us in reading _Othello_. In
+_Macbeth_ the fate which works itself out alike in the external conflict
+and in the hero's soul, is obviously hostile to evil; and the
+imagination is dilated both by the consciousness of its presence and by
+the appearance of supernatural agencies. These, as we have seen, produce
+in _Hamlet_ a somewhat similar effect, which is increased by the hero's
+acceptance of the accidents as a providential shaping of his end. _King
+Lear_ is undoubtedly the tragedy which comes nearest to _Othello_ in the
+impression of darkness and fatefulness, and in the absence of direct
+indications of any guiding power.[88] But in _King Lear_, apart from
+other differences to be considered later, the conflict assumes
+proportions so vast that the imagination seems, as in _Paradise Lost_,
+to traverse spaces wider than the earth. In reading _Othello_ the mind
+is not thus distended. It is more bound down to the spectacle of noble
+beings caught in toils from which there is no escape; while the
+prominence of the intrigue diminishes the sense of the dependence of the
+catastrophe on character, and the part played by accident[89] in this
+catastrophe accentuates the feeling of fate. This influence of accident
+is keenly felt in _King Lear_ only once, and at the very end of the
+play. In _Othello_, after the temptation has begun, it is incessant and
+terrible. The skill of Iago was extraordinary, but so was his good
+fortune. Again and again a chance word from Desdemona, a chance meeting
+of Othello and Cassio, a question which starts to our lips and which
+anyone but Othello would have asked, would have destroyed Iago's plot
+and ended his life. In their stead, Desdemona drops her handkerchief at
+the moment most favourable to him,[90] Cassio blunders into the presence
+of Othello only to find him in a swoon, Bianca arrives precisely when
+she is wanted to complete Othello's deception and incense his anger into
+fury. All this and much more seems to us quite natural, so potent is the
+art of the dramatist; but it confounds us with a feeling, such as we
+experience in the _Oedipus Tyrannus_, that for these star-crossed
+mortals--both [Greek: dysdaimones]--there is no escape from fate, and
+even with a feeling, absent from that play, that fate has taken sides
+with villainy.[91] It is not surprising, therefore, that _Othello_
+should affect us as _Hamlet_ and _Macbeth_ never do, and as _King Lear_
+does only in slighter measure. On the contrary, it is marvellous that,
+before the tragedy is over, Shakespeare should have succeeded in toning
+down this impression into harmony with others more solemn and serene.
+
+But has he wholly succeeded? Or is there a justification for the fact--a
+fact it certainly is--that some readers, while acknowledging, of course,
+the immense power of _Othello_, and even admitting that it is
+dramatically perhaps Shakespeare's greatest triumph, still regard it
+with a certain distaste, or, at any rate, hardly allow it a place in
+their minds beside _Hamlet_, _King Lear_ and _Macbeth_?
+
+The distaste to which I refer is due chiefly to two causes. First, to
+many readers in our time, men as well as women, the subject of sexual
+jealousy, treated with Elizabethan fulness and frankness, is not merely
+painful but so repulsive that not even the intense tragic emotions which
+the story generates can overcome this repulsion. But, while it is easy
+to understand a dislike of _Othello_ thus caused, it does not seem
+necessary to discuss it, for it may fairly be called personal or
+subjective. It would become more than this, and would amount to a
+criticism of the play, only if those who feel it maintained that the
+fulness and frankness which are disagreeable to them are also needless
+from a dramatic point of view, or betray a design of appealing to
+unpoetic feelings in the audience. But I do not think that this is
+maintained, or that such a view would be plausible.
+
+To some readers, again, parts of _Othello_ appear shocking or even
+horrible. They think--if I may formulate their objection--that in these
+parts Shakespeare has sinned against the canons of art, by representing
+on the stage a violence or brutality the effect of which is
+unnecessarily painful and rather sensational than tragic. The passages
+which thus give offence are probably those already referred to,--that
+where Othello strikes Desdemona (IV. i. 251), that where he affects to
+treat her as an inmate of a house of ill-fame (IV. ii.), and finally the
+scene of her death.
+
+The issues thus raised ought not to be ignored or impatiently dismissed,
+but they cannot be decided, it seems to me, by argument. All we can
+profitably do is to consider narrowly our experience, and to ask
+ourselves this question: If we feel these objections, do we feel them
+when we are reading the play with all our force, or only when we are
+reading it in a half-hearted manner? For, however matters may stand in
+the former case, in the latter case evidently the fault is ours and not
+Shakespeare's. And if we try the question thus, I believe we shall find
+that on the whole the fault is ours. The first, and least important, of
+the three passages--that of the blow--seems to me the most doubtful. I
+confess that, do what I will, I cannot reconcile myself with it. It
+seems certain that the blow is by no means a tap on the shoulder with a
+roll of paper, as some actors, feeling the repulsiveness of the passage,
+have made it. It must occur, too, on the open stage. And there is not, I
+think, a sufficiently overwhelming tragic feeling in the passage to make
+it bearable. But in the other two scenes the case is different. There,
+it seems to me, if we fully imagine the inward tragedy in the souls of
+the persons as we read, the more obvious and almost physical sensations
+of pain or horror do not appear in their own likeness, and only serve to
+intensify the tragic feelings in which they are absorbed. Whether this
+would be so in the murder-scene if Desdemona had to be imagined as
+dragged about the open stage (as in some modern performances) may be
+doubtful; but there is absolutely no warrant in the text for imagining
+this, and it is also quite clear that the bed where she is stifled was
+within the curtains,[92] and so, presumably, in part concealed.
+
+Here, then, _Othello_ does not appear to be, unless perhaps at one
+point,[93] open to criticism, though it has more passages than the other
+three tragedies where, if imagination is not fully exerted, it is
+shocked or else sensationally excited. If nevertheless we feel it to
+occupy a place in our minds a little lower than the other three (and I
+believe this feeling, though not general, is not rare), the reason lies
+not here but in another characteristic, to which I have already
+referred,--the comparative confinement of the imaginative atmosphere.
+_Othello_ has not equally with the other three the power of dilating the
+imagination by vague suggestions of huge universal powers working in the
+world of individual fate and passion. It is, in a sense, less
+'symbolic.' We seem to be aware in it of a certain limitation, a partial
+suppression of that element in Shakespeare's mind which unites him with
+the mystical poets and with the great musicians and philosophers. In one
+or two of his plays, notably in _Troilus and Cressida_, we are almost
+painfully conscious of this suppression; we feel an intense intellectual
+activity, but at the same time a certain coldness and hardness, as
+though some power in his soul, at once the highest and the sweetest,
+were for a time in abeyance. In other plays, notably in the _Tempest_,
+we are constantly aware of the presence of this power; and in such cases
+we seem to be peculiarly near to Shakespeare himself. Now this is so in
+_Hamlet_ and _King Lear_, and, in a slighter degree, in _Macbeth_; but
+it is much less so in _Othello_. I do not mean that in _Othello_ the
+suppression is marked, or that, as in _Troilus and Cressida_, it strikes
+us as due to some unpleasant mood; it seems rather to follow simply from
+the design of a play on a contemporary and wholly mundane subject. Still
+it makes a difference of the kind I have attempted to indicate, and it
+leaves an impression that in _Othello_ we are not in contact with the
+whole of Shakespeare. And it is perhaps significant in this respect that
+the hero himself strikes us as having, probably, less of the poet's
+personality in him than many characters far inferior both as dramatic
+creations and as men.
+
+
+2
+
+The character of Othello is comparatively simple, but, as I have dwelt
+on the prominence of intrigue and accident in the play, it is desirable
+to show how essentially the success of Iago's plot is connected with
+this character. Othello's description of himself as
+
+              one not easily jealous, but, being wrought,
+     Perplexed in the extreme,
+
+is perfectly just. His tragedy lies in this--that his whole nature was
+indisposed to jealousy, and yet was such that he was unusually open to
+deception, and, if once wrought to passion, likely to act with little
+reflection, with no delay, and in the most decisive manner conceivable.
+
+Let me first set aside a mistaken view. I do not mean the ridiculous
+notion that Othello was jealous by temperament, but the idea, which has
+some little plausibility, that the play is primarily a study of a noble
+barbarian, who has become a Christian and has imbibed some of the
+civilisation of his employers, but who retains beneath the surface the
+savage passions of his Moorish blood and also the suspiciousness
+regarding female chastity common among Oriental peoples, and that the
+last three Acts depict the outburst of these original feelings through
+the thin crust of Venetian culture. It would take too long to discuss
+this idea,[94] and it would perhaps be useless to do so, for all
+arguments against it must end in an appeal to the reader's understanding
+of Shakespeare. If he thinks it is like Shakespeare to look at things in
+this manner; that he had a historical mind and occupied himself with
+problems of 'Culturgeschichte'; that he laboured to make his Romans
+perfectly Roman, to give a correct view of the Britons in the days of
+Lear or Cymbeline, to portray in Hamlet a stage of the moral
+consciousness not yet reached by the people around him, the reader will
+also think this interpretation of _Othello_ probable. To me it appears
+hopelessly un-Shakespearean. I could as easily believe that Chaucer
+meant the Wife of Bath for a study of the peculiarities of
+Somersetshire. I do not mean that Othello's race is a matter of no
+account. It has, as we shall presently see, its importance in the play.
+It makes a difference to our idea of him; it makes a difference to the
+action and catastrophe. But in regard to the essentials of his character
+it is not important; and if anyone had told Shakespeare that no
+Englishman would have acted like the Moor, and had congratulated him on
+the accuracy of his racial psychology, I am sure he would have laughed.
+
+Othello is, in one sense of the word, by far the most romantic figure
+among Shakespeare's heroes; and he is so partly from the strange life of
+war and adventure which he has lived from childhood. He does not belong
+to our world, and he seems to enter it we know not whence--almost as if
+from wonderland. There is something mysterious in his descent from men
+of royal siege; in his wanderings in vast deserts and among marvellous
+peoples; in his tales of magic handkerchiefs and prophetic Sibyls; in
+the sudden vague glimpses we get of numberless battles and sieges in
+which he has played the hero and has borne a charmed life; even in
+chance references to his baptism, his being sold to slavery, his sojourn
+in Aleppo.
+
+And he is not merely a romantic figure; his own nature is romantic. He
+has not, indeed, the meditative or speculative imagination of Hamlet;
+but in the strictest sense of the word he is more poetic than Hamlet.
+Indeed, if one recalls Othello's most famous speeches--those that begin,
+'Her father loved me,' 'O now for ever,' 'Never, Iago,' 'Had it pleased
+Heaven,' 'It is the cause,' 'Behold, I have a weapon,' 'Soft you, a word
+or two before you go'--and if one places side by side with these
+speeches an equal number by any other hero, one will not doubt that
+Othello is the greatest poet of them all. There is the same poetry in
+his casual phrases--like 'These nine moons wasted,' 'Keep up your bright
+swords, for the dew will rust them,' 'You chaste stars,' 'It is a sword
+of Spain, the ice-brook's temper,' 'It is the very error of the
+moon'--and in those brief expressions of intense feeling which ever
+since have been taken as the absolute expression, like
+
+                      If it were now to die,
+     'Twere now to be most happy; for, I fear,
+     My soul hath her content so absolute
+     That not another comfort like to this
+     Succeeds in unknown fate,
+
+or
+
+     If she be false, O then Heaven mocks itself.
+     I'll not believe it;
+
+or
+
+     No, my heart is turned to stone; I strike it, and it hurts my hand,
+
+or
+
+     But yet the pity of it, Iago! O Iago, the pity of it, Iago!
+
+or
+
+                                 O thou weed,
+     Who art so lovely fair and smell'st so sweet
+     That the sense aches at thee, would thou hadst ne'er been born.
+
+And this imagination, we feel, has accompanied his whole life. He has
+watched with a poet's eye the Arabian trees dropping their med'cinable
+gum, and the Indian throwing away his chance-found pearl; and has gazed
+in a fascinated dream at the Pontic sea rushing, never to return, to the
+Propontic and the Hellespont; and has felt as no other man ever felt
+(for he speaks of it as none other ever did) the poetry of the pride,
+pomp, and circumstance of glorious war.
+
+So he comes before us, dark and grand, with a light upon him from the
+sun where he was born; but no longer young, and now grave,
+self-controlled, steeled by the experience of countless perils,
+hardships and vicissitudes, at once simple and stately in bearing and in
+speech, a great man naturally modest but fully conscious of his worth,
+proud of his services to the state, unawed by dignitaries and unelated
+by honours, secure, it would seem, against all dangers from without and
+all rebellion from within. And he comes to have his life crowned with
+the final glory of love, a love as strange, adventurous and romantic as
+any passage of his eventful history, filling his heart with tenderness
+and his imagination with ecstasy. For there is no love, not that of
+Romeo in his youth, more steeped in imagination than Othello's.
+
+The sources of danger in this character are revealed but too clearly by
+the story. In the first place, Othello's mind, for all its poetry, is
+very simple. He is not observant. His nature tends outward. He is quite
+free from introspection, and is not given to reflection. Emotion excites
+his imagination, but it confuses and dulls his intellect. On this side
+he is the very opposite of Hamlet, with whom, however, he shares a great
+openness and trustfulness of nature. In addition, he has little
+experience of the corrupt products of civilised life, and is ignorant of
+European women.
+
+In the second place, for all his dignity and massive calm (and he has
+greater dignity than any other of Shakespeare's men), he is by nature
+full of the most vehement passion. Shakespeare emphasises his
+self-control, not only by the wonderful pictures of the First Act, but
+by references to the past. Lodovico, amazed at his violence, exclaims:
+
+     Is this the noble Moor whom our full Senate
+     Call all in all sufficient? Is this the nature
+     Whom passion could not shake? whose solid virtue
+     The shot of accident nor dart of chance
+     Could neither graze nor pierce?
+
+Iago, who has here no motive for lying, asks:
+
+     Can he be angry? I have seen the cannon
+     When it hath blown his ranks into the air,
+     And, like the devil, from his very arm
+     Puffed his own brother--and can he be angry?[95]
+
+This, and other aspects of his character, are best exhibited by a single
+line--one of Shakespeare's miracles--the words by which Othello silences
+in a moment the night-brawl between his attendants and those of
+Brabantio:
+
+     Keep up your bright swords, for the dew will rust them.
+
+And the same self-control is strikingly shown where Othello endeavours
+to elicit some explanation of the fight between Cassio and Montano.
+Here, however, there occur ominous words, which make us feel how
+necessary was this self-control, and make us admire it the more:
+
+                          Now, by heaven,
+     My blood begins my safer guides to rule,
+     And passion, having my best judgment collied,
+     Assays to lead the way.
+
+We remember these words later, when the sun of reason is 'collied,'
+blackened and blotted out in total eclipse.
+
+Lastly, Othello's nature is all of one piece. His trust, where he
+trusts, is absolute. Hesitation is almost impossible to him. He is
+extremely self-reliant, and decides and acts instantaneously. If stirred
+to indignation, as 'in Aleppo once,' he answers with one lightning
+stroke. Love, if he loves, must be to him the heaven where either he
+must live or bear no life. If such a passion as jealousy seizes him, it
+will swell into a well-nigh incontrollable flood. He will press for
+immediate conviction or immediate relief. Convinced, he will act with
+the authority of a judge and the swiftness of a man in mortal pain.
+Undeceived, he will do like execution on himself.
+
+This character is so noble, Othello's feelings and actions follow so
+inevitably from it and from the forces brought to bear on it, and his
+sufferings are so heart-rending, that he stirs, I believe, in most
+readers a passion of mingled love and pity which they feel for no other
+hero in Shakespeare, and to which not even Mr. Swinburne can do more
+than justice. Yet there are some critics and not a few readers who
+cherish a grudge against him. They do not merely think that in the later
+stages of his temptation he showed a certain obtuseness, and that, to
+speak pedantically, he acted with unjustifiable precipitance and
+violence; no one, I suppose, denies that. But, even when they admit that
+he was not of a jealous temper, they consider that he _was_ 'easily
+jealous'; they seem to think that it was inexcusable in him to feel any
+suspicion of his wife at all; and they blame him for never suspecting
+Iago or asking him for evidence. I refer to this attitude of mind
+chiefly in order to draw attention to certain points in the story. It
+comes partly from mere inattention (for Othello did suspect Iago and did
+ask him for evidence); partly from a misconstruction of the text which
+makes Othello appear jealous long before he really is so;[96] and partly
+from failure to realise certain essential facts. I will begin with
+these.
+
+(1) Othello, we have seen, was trustful, and thorough in his trust. He
+put entire confidence in the honesty of Iago, who had not only been his
+companion in arms, but, as he believed, had just proved his faithfulness
+in the matter of the marriage. This confidence was misplaced, and we
+happen to know it; but it was no sign of stupidity in Othello. For his
+opinion of Iago was the opinion of practically everyone who knew him:
+and that opinion was that Iago was before all things 'honest,' his very
+faults being those of excess in honesty. This being so, even if Othello
+had not been trustful and simple, it would have been quite unnatural in
+him to be unmoved by the warnings of so honest a friend, warnings
+offered with extreme reluctance and manifestly from a sense of a
+friend's duty.[97] _Any_ husband would have been troubled by them.
+
+(2) Iago does not bring these warnings to a husband who had lived with a
+wife for months and years and knew her like his sister or his
+bosom-friend. Nor is there any ground in Othello's character for
+supposing that, if he had been such a man, he would have felt and acted
+as he does in the play. But he was newly married; in the circumstances
+he cannot have known much of Desdemona before his marriage; and further
+he was conscious of being under the spell of a feeling which can give
+glory to the truth but can also give it to a dream.
+
+(3) This consciousness in any imaginative man is enough, in such
+circumstances, to destroy his confidence in his powers of perception. In
+Othello's case, after a long and most artful preparation, there now
+comes, to reinforce its effect, the suggestions that he is not an
+Italian, not even a European; that he is totally ignorant of the
+thoughts and the customary morality of Venetian women;[98] that he had
+himself seen in Desdemona's deception of her father how perfect an
+actress she could be. As he listens in horror, for a moment at least the
+past is revealed to him in a new and dreadful light, and the ground
+seems to sink under his feet. These suggestions are followed by a
+tentative but hideous and humiliating insinuation of what his honest and
+much-experienced friend fears may be the true explanation of Desdemona's
+rejection of acceptable suitors, and of her strange, and naturally
+temporary, preference for a black man. Here Iago goes too far. He sees
+something in Othello's face that frightens him, and he breaks off. Nor
+does this idea take any hold of Othello's mind. But it is not surprising
+that his utter powerlessness to repel it on the ground of knowledge of
+his wife, or even of that instinctive interpretation of character which
+is possible between persons of the same race,[99] should complete his
+misery, so that he feels he can bear no more, and abruptly dismisses his
+friend (III. iii. 238).
+
+Now I repeat that _any_ man situated as Othello was would have been
+disturbed by Iago's communications, and I add that many men would have
+been made wildly jealous. But up to this point, where Iago is dismissed,
+Othello, I must maintain, does not show jealousy. His confidence is
+shaken, he is confused and deeply troubled, he feels even horror; but he
+is not yet jealous in the proper sense of that word. In his soliloquy
+(III. iii. 258 ff.) the beginning of this passion may be traced; but it
+is only after an interval of solitude, when he has had time to dwell on
+the idea presented to him, and especially after statements of fact, not
+mere general grounds of suspicion, are offered, that the passion lays
+hold of him. Even then, however, and indeed to the very end, he is quite
+unlike the essentially jealous man, quite unlike Leontes. No doubt the
+thought of another man's possessing the woman he loves is intolerable to
+him; no doubt the sense of insult and the impulse of revenge are at
+times most violent; and these are the feelings of jealousy proper. But
+these are not the chief or the deepest source of Othello's suffering. It
+is the wreck of his faith and his love. It is the feeling,
+
+     If she be false, oh then Heaven mocks itself;
+
+the feeling,
+
+     O Iago, the pity of it, Iago!
+
+the feeling,
+
+     But there where I have garner'd up my heart,
+     Where either I must live, or bear no life;
+     The fountain from the which my current runs,
+     Or else dries up--to be discarded thence....
+
+You will find nothing like this in Leontes.
+
+Up to this point, it appears to me, there is not a syllable to be said
+against Othello. But the play is a tragedy, and from this point we may
+abandon the ungrateful and undramatic task of awarding praise and blame.
+When Othello, after a brief interval, re-enters (III. iii. 330), we see
+at once that the poison has been at work and 'burns like the mines of
+sulphur.'
+
+     Look where he comes! Not poppy, nor mandragora,
+     Nor all the drowsy syrups of the world,
+     Shall ever medicine thee to that sweet sleep
+     Which thou owedst yesterday.
+
+He is 'on the rack,' in an agony so unbearable that he cannot endure the
+sight of Iago. Anticipating the probability that Iago has spared him the
+whole truth, he feels that in that case his life is over and his
+'occupation gone' with all its glories. But he has not abandoned hope.
+The bare possibility that his friend is deliberately deceiving
+him--though such a deception would be a thing so monstrously wicked that
+he can hardly conceive it credible--is a kind of hope. He furiously
+demands proof, ocular proof. And when he is compelled to see that he is
+demanding an impossibility he still demands evidence. He forces it from
+the unwilling witness, and hears the maddening tale of Cassio's dream.
+It is enough. And if it were not enough, has he not sometimes seen a
+handkerchief spotted with strawberries in his wife's hand? Yes, it was
+his first gift to her.
+
+     I know not that; but such a handkerchief--
+     I am sure it was your wife's--did I to-day
+     See Cassio wipe his beard with.
+
+'If it be that,' he answers--but what need to test the fact? The
+'madness of revenge' is in his blood, and hesitation is a thing he never
+knew. He passes judgment, and controls himself only to make his sentence
+a solemn vow.
+
+The Othello of the Fourth Act is Othello in his fall. His fall is never
+complete, but he is much changed. Towards the close of the
+Temptation-scene he becomes at times most terrible, but his grandeur
+remains almost undiminished. Even in the following scene (III. iv.),
+where he goes to test Desdemona in the matter of the handkerchief, and
+receives a fatal confirmation of her guilt, our sympathy with him is
+hardly touched by any feeling of humiliation. But in the Fourth Act
+'Chaos has come.' A slight interval of time may be admitted here. It is
+but slight; for it was necessary for Iago to hurry on, and terribly
+dangerous to leave a chance for a meeting of Cassio with Othello; and
+his insight into Othello's nature taught him that his plan was to
+deliver blow on blow, and never to allow his victim to recover from the
+confusion of the first shock. Still there is a slight interval; and when
+Othello reappears we see at a glance that he is a changed man. He is
+physically exhausted, and his mind is dazed.[100] He sees everything
+blurred through a mist of blood and tears. He has actually forgotten the
+incident of the handkerchief, and has to be reminded of it. When Iago,
+perceiving that he can now risk almost any lie, tells him that Cassio
+has confessed his guilt, Othello, the hero who has seemed to us only
+second to Coriolanus in physical power, trembles all over; he mutters
+disjointed words; a blackness suddenly intervenes between his eyes and
+the world; he takes it for the shuddering testimony of nature to the
+horror he has just heard,[101] and he falls senseless to the ground.
+When he recovers it is to watch Cassio, as he imagines, laughing over
+his shame. It is an imposition so gross, and should have been one so
+perilous, that Iago would never have ventured it before. But he is safe
+now. The sight only adds to the confusion of intellect the madness of
+rage; and a ravenous thirst for revenge, contending with motions of
+infinite longing and regret, conquers them. The delay till night-fall is
+torture to him. His self-control has wholly deserted him, and he strikes
+his wife in the presence of the Venetian envoy. He is so lost to all
+sense of reality that he never asks himself what will follow the deaths
+of Cassio and his wife. An ineradicable instinct of justice, rather than
+any last quiver of hope, leads him to question Emilia; but nothing could
+convince him now, and there follows the dreadful scene of accusation;
+and then, to allow us the relief of burning hatred and burning tears,
+the interview of Desdemona with Iago, and that last talk of hers with
+Emilia, and her last song.
+
+But before the end there is again a change. The supposed death of Cassio
+(V. i.) satiates the thirst for vengeance. The Othello who enters the
+bed-chamber with the words,
+
+     It is the cause, it is the cause, my soul,
+
+is not the man of the Fourth Act. The deed he is bound to do is no
+murder, but a sacrifice. He is to save Desdemona from herself, not in
+hate but in honour; in honour, and also in love. His anger has passed; a
+boundless sorrow has taken its place; and
+
+                  this sorrow's heavenly:
+     It strikes where it doth love.
+
+Even when, at the sight of her apparent obduracy, and at the hearing of
+words which by a crowning fatality can only reconvince him of her guilt,
+these feelings give way to others, it is to righteous indignation they
+give way, not to rage; and, terribly painful as this scene is, there is
+almost nothing here to diminish the admiration and love which heighten
+pity.[102] And pity itself vanishes, and love and admiration alone
+remain, in the majestic dignity and sovereign ascendancy of the close.
+Chaos has come and gone; and the Othello of the Council-chamber and the
+quay of Cyprus has returned, or a greater and nobler Othello still. As
+he speaks those final words in which all the glory and agony of his
+life--long ago in India and Arabia and Aleppo, and afterwards in Venice,
+and now in Cyprus--seem to pass before us, like the pictures that flash
+before the eyes of a drowning man, a triumphant scorn for the fetters of
+the flesh and the littleness of all the lives that must survive him
+sweeps our grief away, and when he dies upon a kiss the most painful of
+all tragedies leaves us for the moment free from pain, and exulting in
+the power of 'love and man's unconquerable mind.'
+
+
+3
+
+The words just quoted come from Wordsworth's sonnet to Toussaint
+l'Ouverture. Toussaint was a Negro; and there is a question, which,
+though of little consequence, is not without dramatic interest, whether
+Shakespeare imagined Othello as a Negro or as a Moor. Now I will not say
+that Shakespeare imagined him as a Negro and not as a Moor, for that
+might imply that he distinguished Negroes and Moors precisely as we do;
+but what appears to me nearly certain is that he imagined Othello as a
+black man, and not as a light-brown one.
+
+In the first place, we must remember that the brown or bronze to which
+we are now accustomed in the Othellos of our theatres is a recent
+innovation. Down to Edmund Kean's time, so far as is known, Othello was
+always quite black. This stage-tradition goes back to the Restoration,
+and it almost settles our question. For it is impossible that the colour
+of the original Othello should have been forgotten so soon after
+Shakespeare's time, and most improbable that it should have been changed
+from brown to black.
+
+If we turn to the play itself, we find many references to Othello's
+colour and appearance. Most of these are indecisive; for the word
+'black' was of course used then where we should speak of a 'dark'
+complexion now; and even the nickname 'thick-lips,' appealed to as proof
+that Othello was a Negro, might have been applied by an enemy to what we
+call a Moor. On the other hand, it is hard to believe that, if Othello
+had been light-brown, Brabantio would have taunted him with having a
+'sooty bosom,' or that (as Mr. Furness observes) he himself would have
+used the words,
+
+                    her name, that was as fresh
+     As Dian's visage, is now begrimed and black
+     As mine own face.
+
+These arguments cannot be met by pointing out that Othello was of royal
+blood, is not called an Ethiopian, is called a Barbary horse, and is
+said to be going to Mauritania. All this would be of importance if we
+had reason to believe that Shakespeare shared our ideas, knowledge and
+terms. Otherwise it proves nothing. And we know that sixteenth-century
+writers called any dark North-African a Moor, or a black Moor, or a
+blackamoor. Sir Thomas Elyot, according to Hunter,[103] calls Ethiopians
+Moors; and the following are the first two illustrations of 'Blackamoor'
+in the Oxford _English Dictionary_: 1547, 'I am a blake More borne in
+Barbary'; 1548, '_Ethiopo_, a blake More, or a man of Ethiope.' Thus
+geographical names can tell us nothing about the question how
+Shakespeare imagined Othello. He may have known that a Mauritanian is
+not a Negro nor black, but we cannot assume that he did. He may have
+known, again, that the Prince of Morocco, who is described in the
+_Merchant of Venice_ as having, like Othello, the complexion of a devil,
+was no Negro. But we cannot tell: nor is there any reason why he should
+not have imagined the Prince as a brown Moor and Othello as a
+Blackamoor.
+
+_Titus Andronicus_ appeared in the Folio among Shakespeare's works. It
+is believed by some good critics to be his: hardly anyone doubts that he
+had a hand in it: it is certain that he knew it, for reminiscences of it
+are scattered through his plays. Now no one who reads _Titus Andronicus_
+with an open mind can doubt that Aaron was, in our sense, black; and he
+appears to have been a Negro. To mention nothing else, he is twice
+called 'coal-black'; his colour is compared with that of a raven and a
+swan's legs; his child is coal-black and thick-lipped; he himself has a
+'fleece of woolly hair.' Yet he is 'Aaron the Moor,' just as Othello is
+'Othello the Moor.' In the _Battle of Alcazar_ (Dyce's _Peele_, p. 421)
+Muly the Moor is called 'the negro'; and Shakespeare himself in a single
+line uses 'negro' and 'Moor' of the same person (_Merchant of Venice_,
+III. v. 42).
+
+The horror of most American critics (Mr. Furness is a bright exception)
+at the idea of a black Othello is very amusing, and their arguments are
+highly instructive. But they were anticipated, I regret to say, by
+Coleridge, and we will hear him. 'No doubt Desdemona saw Othello's
+visage in his mind; yet, as we are constituted, and most surely as an
+English audience was disposed in the beginning of the seventeenth
+century, it would be something monstrous to conceive this beautiful
+Venetian girl falling in love with a veritable negro. It would argue a
+disproportionateness, a want of balance, in Desdemona, which Shakespeare
+does not appear to have in the least contemplated.'[104] Could any
+argument be more self-destructive? It actually _did_ appear to Brabantio
+'something monstrous to conceive' his daughter falling in love with
+Othello,--so monstrous that he could account for her love only by drugs
+and foul charms. And the suggestion that such love would argue
+'disproportionateness' is precisely the suggestion that Iago _did_ make
+in Desdemona's case:
+
+     Foh! one may smell in such a will most rank,
+     Foul _disproportion_, thoughts unnatural.
+
+In fact he spoke of the marriage exactly as a filthy-minded cynic now
+might speak of the marriage of an English lady to a negro like
+Toussaint. Thus the argument of Coleridge and others points straight to
+the conclusion against which they argue.
+
+But this is not all. The question whether to Shakespeare Othello was
+black or brown is not a mere question of isolated fact or historical
+curiosity; it concerns the character of Desdemona. Coleridge, and still
+more the American writers, regard her love, in effect, as Brabantio
+regarded it, and not as Shakespeare conceived it. They are simply
+blurring this glorious conception when they try to lessen the distance
+between her and Othello, and to smooth away the obstacle which his
+'visage' offered to her romantic passion for a hero. Desdemona, the
+'eternal womanly' in its most lovely and adorable form, simple and
+innocent as a child, ardent with the courage and idealism of a saint,
+radiant with that heavenly purity of heart which men worship the more
+because nature so rarely permits it to themselves, had no theories about
+universal brotherhood, and no phrases about 'one blood in all the
+nations of the earth' or 'barbarian, Scythian, bond and free'; but when
+her soul came in sight of the noblest soul on earth, she made nothing of
+the shrinking of her senses, but followed her soul until her senses took
+part with it, and 'loved him with the love which was her doom.' It was
+not prudent. It even turned out tragically. She met in life with the
+reward of those who rise too far above our common level; and we continue
+to allot her the same reward when we consent to forgive her for loving a
+brown man, but find it monstrous that she should love a black one.[105]
+
+There is perhaps a certain excuse for our failure to rise to
+Shakespeare's meaning, and to realise how extraordinary and splendid a
+thing it was in a gentle Venetian girl to love Othello, and to assail
+fortune with such a 'downright violence and storm' as is expected only
+in a hero. It is that when first we hear of her marriage we have not yet
+seen the Desdemona of the later Acts; and therefore we do not perceive
+how astonishing this love and boldness must have been in a maiden so
+quiet and submissive. And when we watch her in her suffering and death
+we are so penetrated by the sense of her heavenly sweetness and
+self-surrender that we almost forget that she had shown herself quite as
+exceptional in the active assertion of her own soul and will. She tends
+to become to us predominantly pathetic, the sweetest and most pathetic
+of Shakespeare's women, as innocent as Miranda and as loving as Viola,
+yet suffering more deeply than Cordelia or Imogen. And she seems to lack
+that independence and strength of spirit which Cordelia and Imogen
+possess, and which in a manner raises them above suffering. She appears
+passive and defenceless, and can oppose to wrong nothing but the
+infinite endurance and forgiveness of a love that knows not how to
+resist or resent. She thus becomes at once the most beautiful example of
+this love, and the most pathetic heroine in Shakespeare's world. If her
+part were acted by an artist equal to Salvini, and with a Salvini for
+Othello, I doubt if the spectacle of the last two Acts would not be
+pronounced intolerable.
+
+Of course this later impression of Desdemona is perfectly right, but it
+must be carried back and united with the earlier before we can see what
+Shakespeare imagined. Evidently, we are to understand, innocence,
+gentleness, sweetness, lovingness were the salient and, in a sense, the
+principal traits in Desdemona's character. She was, as her father
+supposed her to be,
+
+                         a maiden never bold,
+     Of spirit so still and quiet that her motion
+     Blushed at herself.
+
+But suddenly there appeared something quite different--something which
+could never have appeared, for example, in Ophelia--a love not only full
+of romance but showing a strange freedom and energy of spirit, and
+leading to a most unusual boldness of action; and this action was
+carried through with a confidence and decision worthy of Juliet or
+Cordelia. Desdemona does not shrink before the Senate; and her language
+to her father, though deeply respectful, is firm enough to stir in us
+some sympathy with the old man who could not survive his daughter's
+loss. This then, we must understand, was the emergence in Desdemona, as
+she passed from girlhood to womanhood, of an individuality and strength
+which, if she had lived, would have been gradually fused with her more
+obvious qualities and have issued in a thousand actions, sweet and good,
+but surprising to her conventional or timid neighbours. And, indeed, we
+have already a slight example in her overflowing kindness, her boldness
+and her ill-fated persistence in pleading Cassio's cause. But the full
+ripening of her lovely and noble nature was not to be. In her brief
+wedded life she appeared again chiefly as the sweet and submissive being
+of her girlhood; and the strength of her soul, first evoked by love,
+found scope to show itself only in a love which, when harshly repulsed,
+blamed only its own pain; when bruised, only gave forth a more exquisite
+fragrance; and, when rewarded with death, summoned its last labouring
+breath to save its murderer.
+
+Many traits in Desdemona's character have been described with
+sympathetic insight by Mrs. Jameson, and I will pass them by and add but
+a few words on the connection between this character and the catastrophe
+of _Othello_. Desdemona, as Mrs. Jameson remarks, shows less quickness
+of intellect and less tendency to reflection than most of Shakespeare's
+heroines; but I question whether the critic is right in adding that she
+shows much of the 'unconscious address common in women.' She seems to me
+deficient in this address, having in its place a frank childlike
+boldness and persistency, which are full of charm but are unhappily
+united with a certain want of perception. And these graces and this
+deficiency appear to be inextricably intertwined, and in the
+circumstances conspire tragically against her. They, with her innocence,
+hinder her from understanding Othello's state of mind, and lead her to
+the most unlucky acts and words; and unkindness or anger subdues her so
+completely that she becomes passive and seems to drift helplessly
+towards the cataract in front.
+
+In Desdemona's incapacity to resist there is also, in addition to her
+perfect love, something which is very characteristic. She is, in a
+sense, a child of nature. That deep inward division which leads to clear
+and conscious oppositions of right and wrong, duty and inclination,
+justice and injustice, is alien to her beautiful soul. She is not good,
+kind and true in spite of a temptation to be otherwise, any more than
+she is charming in spite of a temptation to be otherwise. She seems to
+know evil only by name, and, her inclinations being good, she acts on
+inclination. This trait, with its results, may be seen if we compare
+her, at the crises of the story, with Cordelia. In Desdemona's place,
+Cordelia, however frightened at Othello's anger about the lost
+handkerchief, would not have denied its loss. Painful experience had
+produced in her a conscious principle of rectitude and a proud hatred of
+falseness, which would have made a lie, even one wholly innocent in
+spirit, impossible to her; and the clear sense of justice and right
+would have led her, instead, to require an explanation of Othello's
+agitation which would have broken Iago's plot to pieces. In the same
+way, at the final crisis, no instinctive terror of death would have
+compelled Cordelia suddenly to relinquish her demand for justice and to
+plead for life. But these moments are fatal to Desdemona, who acts
+precisely as if she were guilty; and they are fatal because they ask for
+something which, it seems to us, could hardly be united with the
+peculiar beauty of her nature.
+
+This beauty is all her own. Something as beautiful may be found in
+Cordelia, but not the same beauty. Desdemona, confronted with Lear's
+foolish but pathetic demand for a profession of love, could have done, I
+think, what Cordelia could not do--could have refused to compete with
+her sisters, and yet have made her father feel that she loved him well.
+And I doubt if Cordelia, 'falsely murdered,' would have been capable of
+those last words of Desdemona--her answer to Emilia's 'O, who hath done
+this deed?'
+
+               Nobody: I myself. Farewell.
+     Commend me to my kind lord. O, farewell!
+
+Were we intended to remember, as we hear this last 'falsehood,' that
+other falsehood, 'It is not lost,' and to feel that, alike in the
+momentary child's fear and the deathless woman's love, Desdemona is
+herself and herself alone?[106]
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[Footnote 85: One instance is worth pointing out, because the passage in
+_Othello_ has, oddly enough, given trouble. Desdemona says of the maid
+Barbara: 'She was in love, and he she loved proved mad And did forsake
+her.' Theobald changed 'mad' to 'bad.' Warburton read 'and he she loved
+forsook her, And she proved mad'! Johnson said 'mad' meant only 'wild,
+frantic, uncertain.' But what Desdemona says of Barbara is just what
+Ophelia might have said of herself.]
+
+[Footnote 86: The whole force of the passages referred to can be felt
+only by a reader. The Othello of our stage can never be Shakespeare's
+Othello, any more than the Cleopatra of our stage can be his Cleopatra.]
+
+[Footnote 87: See p. 9.]
+
+[Footnote 88: Even here, however, there is a great difference; for
+although the idea of such a power is not suggested by _King Lear_ as it
+is by _Hamlet_ and _Macbeth_, it is repeatedly expressed by persons _in_
+the drama. Of such references there are very few in _Othello_. But for
+somewhat frequent allusions to hell and the devil the view of the
+characters is almost strictly secular. Desdemona's sweetness and
+forgivingness are not based on religion, and her only way of accounting
+for her undeserved suffering is by an appeal to Fortune: 'It is my
+wretched fortune' (IV. ii. 128). In like manner Othello can only appeal
+to Fate (V. ii. 264):
+
+           but, oh vain boast!
+     Who can control his fate?]
+
+[Footnote 89: Ulrici has good remarks, though he exaggerates, on this
+point and the element of intrigue.]
+
+[Footnote 90: And neither she nor Othello observes what handkerchief it
+is. Else she would have remembered how she came to lose it, and would
+have told Othello; and Othello, too, would at once have detected Iago's
+lie (III. iii. 438) that he had seen Cassio wipe his beard with the
+handkerchief 'to-day.' For in fact the handkerchief had been lost _not
+an hour_ before Iago told that lie (line 288 of the _same scene_), and
+it was at that moment in his pocket. He lied therefore most rashly, but
+with his usual luck.]
+
+[Footnote 91: For those who know the end of the story there is a
+terrible irony in the enthusiasm with which Cassio greets the arrival of
+Desdemona in Cyprus. Her ship (which is also Iago's) sets out from
+Venice a week later than the others, but reaches Cyprus on the same day
+with them:
+
+     Tempests themselves, high seas and howling winds,
+     The gutter'd rocks and congregated sands--
+     Traitors ensteep'd to clog the guiltless keel--
+     As having sense of beauty, do omit
+     Their mortal natures, letting go safely by
+     The divine Desdemona.
+
+So swiftly does Fate conduct her to her doom.]
+
+[Footnote 92: The dead bodies are not carried out at the end, as they
+must have been if the bed had been on the main stage (for this had no
+front curtain). The curtains within which the bed stood were drawn
+together at the words, 'Let it be hid' (V. ii. 365).]
+
+[Footnote 93: Against which may be set the scene of the blinding of
+Gloster in _King Lear_.]
+
+[Footnote 94: The reader who is tempted by it should, however, first ask
+himself whether Othello does act like a barbarian, or like a man who,
+though wrought almost to madness, does 'all in honour.']
+
+[Footnote 95: For the actor, then, to represent him as violently angry
+when he cashiers Cassio is an utter mistake.]
+
+[Footnote 96: I cannot deal fully with this point in the lecture. See
+Note L.]
+
+[Footnote 97: It is important to observe that, in his attempt to arrive
+at the facts about Cassio's drunken misdemeanour, Othello had just had
+an example of Iago's unwillingness to tell the whole truth where it must
+injure a friend. No wonder he feels in the Temptation-scene that 'this
+honest creature doubtless Sees and knows more, much more, than he
+unfolds.']
+
+[Footnote 98: To represent that Venetian women do not regard adultery so
+seriously as Othello does, and again that Othello would be wise to
+accept the situation like an Italian husband, is one of Iago's most
+artful and most maddening devices.]
+
+[Footnote 99: If the reader has ever chanced to see an African violently
+excited, he may have been startled to observe how completely at a loss
+he was to interpret those bodily expressions of passion which in a
+fellow-countryman he understands at once, and in a European foreigner
+with somewhat less certainty. The effect of difference in blood in
+increasing Othello's bewilderment regarding his wife is not sufficiently
+realised. The same effect has to be remembered in regard to Desdemona's
+mistakes in dealing with Othello in his anger.]
+
+[Footnote 100: See Note M.]
+
+[Footnote 101: Cf. _Winter's Tale_, I. ii. 137 ff.:
+
+              Can thy dam?--may't be?--
+     Affection! thy intention stabs the centre:
+     Thou dost make possible things not so held,
+     Communicatest with dreams;--how can this be?
+     With what's unreal thou coactive art,
+     And fellow'st nothing: then 'tis very credent
+     Thou may'st cojoin with something; and thou dost,
+     And that beyond commission, and I find it,
+     And that to the infection of my brains
+     And hardening of my brows.]
+
+[Footnote 102: See Note O.]
+
+[Footnote 103: New Illustrations, ii. 281.]
+
+[Footnote 104: _Lectures on Shakespeare_, ed. Ashe, p. 386.]
+
+[Footnote 105: I will not discuss the further question whether, granted
+that to Shakespeare Othello was a black, he should be represented as a
+black in our theatres now. I dare say not. We do not like the real
+Shakespeare. We like to have his language pruned and his conceptions
+flattened into something that suits our mouths and minds. And even if we
+were prepared to make an effort, still, as Lamb observes, to imagine is
+one thing and to see is another. Perhaps if we saw Othello coal-black
+with the bodily eye, the aversion of our blood, an aversion which comes
+as near to being merely physical as anything human can, would overpower
+our imagination and sink us below not Shakespeare only but the audiences
+of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
+
+As I have mentioned Lamb, I may observe that he differed from Coleridge
+as to Othello's colour, but, I am sorry to add, thought Desdemona to
+stand in need of excuse. 'This noble lady, with a singularity rather to
+be wondered at than imitated, had chosen for the object of her
+affections a Moor, a black.... Neither is Desdemona to be altogether
+condemned for the unsuitableness of the person whom she selected for her
+lover' (_Tales from Shakespeare_). Others, of course, have gone much
+further and have treated all the calamities of the tragedy as a sort of
+judgment on Desdemona's rashness, wilfulness and undutifulness. There is
+no arguing with opinions like this; but I cannot believe that even Lamb
+is true to Shakespeare in implying that Desdemona is in some degree to
+be condemned. What is there in the play to show that Shakespeare
+regarded her marriage differently from Imogen's?]
+
+[Footnote 106: When Desdemona spoke her last words, perhaps that line of
+the ballad which she sang an hour before her death was still busy in her
+brain,
+
+     Let nobody blame him: his scorn I approve.
+
+Nature plays such strange tricks, and Shakespeare almost alone among
+poets seems to create in somewhat the same manner as Nature. In the same
+way, as Malone pointed out, Othello's exclamation, 'Goats and monkeys!'
+(IV. i. 274) is an unconscious reminiscence of Iago's words at III. iii.
+403.]
+
+
+
+
+LECTURE VI
+
+OTHELLO
+
+
+1
+
+Evil has nowhere else been portrayed with such mastery as in the
+character of Iago. Richard III., for example, beside being less subtly
+conceived, is a far greater figure and a less repellent. His physical
+deformity, separating him from other men, seems to offer some excuse for
+his egoism. In spite of his egoism, too, he appears to us more than a
+mere individual: he is the representative of his family, the Fury of the
+House of York. Nor is he so negative as Iago: he has strong passions, he
+has admirations, and his conscience disturbs him. There is the glory of
+power about him. Though an excellent actor, he prefers force to fraud,
+and in his world there is no general illusion as to his true nature.
+Again, to compare Iago with the Satan of _Paradise Lost_ seems almost
+absurd, so immensely does Shakespeare's man exceed Milton's Fiend in
+evil. That mighty Spirit, whose
+
+                   form had yet not lost
+     All her original brightness, nor appeared
+     Less than archangel ruined and the excess
+     Of glory obscured;
+
+who knew loyalty to comrades and pity for victims; who
+
+               felt how awful goodness is, and saw
+     Virtue in her shape how lovely; saw, and pined
+     His loss;
+
+who could still weep--how much further distant is he than Iago from
+spiritual death, even when, in procuring the fall of Man, he completes
+his own fall! It is only in Goethe's Mephistopheles that a fit companion
+for Iago can be found. Here there is something of the same deadly
+coldness, the same gaiety in destruction. But then Mephistopheles, like
+so many scores of literary villains, has Iago for his father. And
+Mephistopheles, besides, is not, in the strict sense, a character. He is
+half person, half symbol. A metaphysical idea speaks through him. He is
+earthy, but could never live upon the earth.
+
+Of Shakespeare's characters Falstaff, Hamlet, Iago, and Cleopatra (I
+name them in the order of their births) are probably the most wonderful.
+Of these, again, Hamlet and Iago, whose births come nearest together,
+are perhaps the most subtle. And if Iago had been a person as attractive
+as Hamlet, as many thousands of pages might have been written about him,
+containing as much criticism good and bad. As it is, the majority of
+interpretations of his character are inadequate not only to
+Shakespeare's conception, but, I believe, to the impressions of most
+readers of taste who are unbewildered by analysis. These false
+interpretations, if we set aside the usual lunacies,[107] fall into two
+groups. The first contains views which reduce Shakespeare to
+commonplace. In different ways and degrees they convert his Iago into
+an ordinary villain. Their Iago is simply a man who has been slighted
+and revenges himself; or a husband who believes he has been wronged, and
+will make his enemy suffer a jealousy worse than his own; or an
+ambitious man determined to ruin his successful rival--one of these, or
+a combination of these, endowed with unusual ability and cruelty. These
+are the more popular views. The second group of false interpretations is
+much smaller, but it contains much weightier matter than the first. Here
+Iago is a being who hates good simply because it is good, and loves evil
+purely for itself. His action is not prompted by any plain motive like
+revenge, jealousy or ambition. It springs from a 'motiveless malignity,'
+or a disinterested delight in the pain of others; and Othello, Cassio
+and Desdemona are scarcely more than the material requisite for the full
+attainment of this delight. This second Iago, evidently, is no
+conventional villain, and he is much nearer to Shakespeare's Iago than
+the first. Only he is, if not a psychological impossibility, at any rate
+not a _human_ being. He might be in place, therefore, in a symbolical
+poem like _Faust_, but in a purely human drama like _Othello_ he would
+be a ruinous blunder. Moreover, he is not in _Othello_: he is a product
+of imperfect observation and analysis.
+
+Coleridge, the author of that misleading phrase 'motiveless malignity,'
+has some fine remarks on Iago; and the essence of the character has been
+described, first in some of the best lines Hazlitt ever wrote, and then
+rather more fully by Mr. Swinburne,--so admirably described that I am
+tempted merely to read and illustrate these two criticisms. This plan,
+however, would make it difficult to introduce all that I wish to say. I
+propose, therefore, to approach the subject directly, and, first, to
+consider how Iago appeared to those who knew him, and what inferences
+may be drawn from their illusions; and then to ask what, if we judge
+from the play, his character really was. And I will indicate the points
+where I am directly indebted to the criticisms just mentioned.
+
+But two warnings are first required. One of these concerns Iago's
+nationality. It has been held that he is a study of that peculiarly
+Italian form of villainy which is considered both too clever and too
+diabolical for an Englishman. I doubt if there is much more to be said
+for this idea than for the notion that Othello is a study of Moorish
+character. No doubt the belief in that Italian villainy was prevalent in
+Shakespeare's time, and it may perhaps have influenced him in some
+slight degree both here and in drawing the character of Iachimo in
+_Cymbeline_. But even this slight influence seems to me doubtful. If Don
+John in _Much Ado_ had been an Englishman, critics would have admired
+Shakespeare's discernment in making his English villain sulky and
+stupid. If Edmund's father had been Duke of Ferrara instead of Earl of
+Gloster, they would have said that Edmund could have been nothing but an
+Italian. Change the name and country of Richard III., and he would be
+called a typical despot of the Italian Renaissance. Change those of
+Juliet, and we should find her wholesome English nature contrasted with
+the southern dreaminess of Romeo. But this way of interpreting
+Shakespeare is not Shakespearean. With him the differences of period,
+race, nationality and locality have little bearing on the inward
+character, though they sometimes have a good deal on the total
+imaginative effect, of his figures. When he does lay stress on such
+differences his intention is at once obvious, as in characters like
+Fluellen or Sir Hugh Evans, or in the talk of the French princes before
+the battle of Agincourt. I may add that Iago certainly cannot be taken
+to exemplify the popular Elizabethan idea of a disciple of Macchiavelli.
+There is no sign that he is in theory an atheist or even an unbeliever
+in the received religion. On the contrary, he uses its language, and
+says nothing resembling the words of the prologue to the _Jew of Malta_:
+
+     I count religion but a childish toy,
+     And hold there is no sin but ignorance.
+
+Aaron in _Titus Andronicus_ might have said this (and is not more likely
+to be Shakespeare's creation on that account), but not Iago.
+
+I come to a second warning. One must constantly remember not to believe
+a syllable that Iago utters on any subject, including himself, until one
+has tested his statement by comparing it with known facts and with other
+statements of his own or of other people, and by considering whether he
+had in the particular circumstances any reason for telling a lie or for
+telling the truth. The implicit confidence which his acquaintances
+placed in his integrity has descended to most of his critics; and this,
+reinforcing the comical habit of quoting as Shakespeare's own statement
+everything said by his characters, has been a fruitful source of
+misinterpretation. I will take as an instance the very first assertions
+made by Iago. In the opening scene he tells his dupe Roderigo that three
+great men of Venice went to Othello and begged him to make Iago his
+lieutenant; that Othello, out of pride and obstinacy, refused; that in
+refusing he talked a deal of military rigmarole, and ended by declaring
+(falsely, we are to understand) that he had already filled up the
+vacancy; that Cassio, whom he chose, had absolutely no practical
+knowledge of war, nothing but bookish theoric, mere prattle, arithmetic,
+whereas Iago himself had often fought by Othello's side, and by 'old
+gradation' too ought to have been preferred. Most or all of this is
+repeated by some critics as though it were information given by
+Shakespeare, and the conclusion is quite naturally drawn that Iago had
+some reason to feel aggrieved. But if we ask ourselves how much of all
+this is true we shall answer, I believe, as follows. It is absolutely
+certain that Othello appointed Cassio his lieutenant, and _nothing_ else
+is absolutely certain. But there is no reason to doubt the statement
+that Iago had seen service with him, nor is there anything inherently
+improbable in the statement that he was solicited by three great
+personages on Iago's behalf. On the other hand, the suggestions that he
+refused out of pride and obstinacy, and that he lied in saying he had
+already chosen his officer, have no verisimilitude; and if there is any
+fact at all (as there probably is) behind Iago's account of the
+conversation, it doubtless is the fact that Iago himself was ignorant of
+military science, while Cassio was an expert, and that Othello explained
+this to the great personages. That Cassio, again, was an interloper and
+a mere closet-student without experience of war is incredible,
+considering first that Othello chose him for lieutenant, and secondly
+that the senate appointed him to succeed Othello in command at Cyprus;
+and we have direct evidence that part of Iago's statement is a lie, for
+Desdemona happens to mention that Cassio was a man who 'all his time had
+founded his good fortunes' on Othello's love and had 'shared dangers'
+with him (III. iv. 93). There remains only the implied assertion that,
+if promotion had gone by old gradation, Iago, as the senior, would have
+been preferred. It may be true: Othello was not the man to hesitate to
+promote a junior for good reasons. But it is just as likely to be a pure
+invention; and, though Cassio was young, there is nothing to show that
+he was younger, in years or in service, than Iago. Iago, for instance,
+never calls him 'young,' as he does Roderigo; and a mere youth would not
+have been made Governor of Cyprus. What is certain, finally, in the
+whole business is that Othello's mind was perfectly at ease about the
+appointment, and that he never dreamed of Iago's being discontented at
+it, not even when the intrigue was disclosed and he asked himself how he
+had offended Iago.
+
+
+2
+
+It is necessary to examine in this manner every statement made by Iago.
+But it is not necessary to do so in public, and I proceed to the
+question what impression he made on his friends and acquaintances. In
+the main there is here no room for doubt. Nothing could be less like
+Iago than the melodramatic villain so often substituted for him on the
+stage, a person whom everyone in the theatre knows for a scoundrel at
+the first glance. Iago, we gather, was a Venetian[108] soldier,
+eight-and-twenty years of age, who had seen a good deal of service and
+had a high reputation for courage. Of his origin we are ignorant, but,
+unless I am mistaken, he was not of gentle birth or breeding.[109] He
+does not strike one as a degraded man of culture: for all his great
+powers, he is vulgar, and his probable want of military science may well
+be significant. He was married to a wife who evidently lacked
+refinement, and who appears in the drama almost in the relation of a
+servant to Desdemona. His manner was that of a blunt, bluff soldier, who
+spoke his mind freely and plainly. He was often hearty, and could be
+thoroughly jovial; but he was not seldom rather rough and caustic of
+speech, and he was given to making remarks somewhat disparaging to human
+nature. He was aware of this trait in himself, and frankly admitted that
+he was nothing if not critical, and that it was his nature to spy into
+abuses. In these admissions he characteristically exaggerated his fault,
+as plain-dealers are apt to do; and he was liked none the less for it,
+seeing that his satire was humorous, that on serious matters he did not
+speak lightly (III. iii. 119), and that the one thing perfectly obvious
+about him was his honesty. 'Honest' is the word that springs to the lips
+of everyone who speaks of him. It is applied to him some fifteen times
+in the play, not to mention some half-dozen where he employs it, in
+derision, of himself. In fact he was one of those sterling men who, in
+disgust at gush, say cynical things which they do not believe, and then,
+the moment you are in trouble, put in practice the very sentiment they
+had laughed at. On such occasions he showed the kindliest sympathy and
+the most eager desire to help. When Cassio misbehaved so dreadfully and
+was found fighting with Montano, did not Othello see that 'honest Iago
+looked dead with grieving'? With what difficulty was he induced, nay,
+compelled, to speak the truth against the lieutenant! Another man might
+have felt a touch of satisfaction at the thought that the post he had
+coveted was now vacant; but Iago not only comforted Cassio, talking to
+him cynically about reputation, just to help him over his shame, but he
+set his wits to work and at once perceived that the right plan for
+Cassio to get his post again was to ask Desdemona to intercede. So
+troubled was he at his friend's disgrace that his own wife was sure 'it
+grieved her husband as if the case was his.' What wonder that anyone in
+sore trouble, like Desdemona, should send at once for Iago (IV. ii.
+106)? If this rough diamond had any flaw, it was that Iago's warm loyal
+heart incited him to too impulsive action. If he merely heard a friend
+like Othello calumniated, his hand flew to his sword; and though he
+restrained himself he almost regretted his own virtue (I. ii. 1-10).
+
+Such seemed Iago to the people about him, even to those who, like
+Othello, had known him for some time. And it is a fact too little
+noticed but most remarkable, that he presented an appearance not very
+different to his wife. There is no sign either that Emilia's marriage
+was downright unhappy, or that she suspected the true nature of her
+husband.[110] No doubt she knew rather more of him than others. Thus we
+gather that he was given to chiding and sometimes spoke shortly and
+sharply to her (III. iii. 300 f.); and it is quite likely that she gave
+him a good deal of her tongue in exchange (II. i. 101 f.). He was also
+unreasonably jealous; for his own statement that he was jealous of
+Othello is confirmed by Emilia herself, and must therefore be believed
+(IV. ii. 145).[111] But it seems clear that these defects of his had not
+seriously impaired Emilia's confidence in her husband or her affection
+for him. She knew in addition that he was not quite so honest as he
+seemed, for he had often begged her to steal Desdemona's handkerchief.
+But Emilia's nature was not very delicate or scrupulous about trifles.
+She thought her husband odd and 'wayward,' and looked on his fancy for
+the handkerchief as an instance of this (III. iii. 292); but she never
+dreamed he was a villain, and there is no reason to doubt the sincerity
+of her belief that he was heartily sorry for Cassio's disgrace. Her
+failure, on seeing Othello's agitation about the handkerchief, to form
+any suspicion of an intrigue, shows how little she doubted her husband.
+Even when, later, the idea strikes her that some scoundrel has poisoned
+Othello's mind, the tone of all her speeches, and her mention of the
+rogue who (she believes) had stirred up Iago's jealousy of her, prove
+beyond doubt that the thought of Iago's being the scoundrel has not
+crossed her mind (IV. ii. 115-147). And if any hesitation on the subject
+could remain, surely it must be dispelled by the thrice-repeated cry of
+astonishment and horror, 'My husband!', which follows Othello's words,
+'Thy husband knew it all'; and by the choking indignation and desperate
+hope which we hear in her appeal when Iago comes in:
+
+     Disprove this villain if thou be'st a man:
+     He says thou told'st him that his wife was false:
+     I know thou did'st not, thou'rt not such a villain:
+     Speak, for my heart is full.
+
+Even if Iago _had_ betrayed much more of his true self to his wife than
+to others, it would make no difference to the contrast between his true
+self and the self he presented to the world in general. But he never did
+so. Only the feeble eyes of the poor gull Roderigo were allowed a
+glimpse into that pit.
+
+The bearing of this contrast upon the apparently excessive credulity of
+Othello has been already pointed out. What further conclusions can be
+drawn from it? Obviously, to begin with, the inference, which is
+accompanied by a thrill of admiration, that Iago's powers of
+dissimulation and of self-control must have been prodigious: for he was
+not a youth, like Edmund, but had worn this mask for years, and he had
+apparently never enjoyed, like Richard, occasional explosions of the
+reality within him. In fact so prodigious does his self-control appear
+that a reader might be excused for feeling a doubt of its possibility.
+But there are certain observations and further inferences which, apart
+from confidence in Shakespeare, would remove this doubt. It is to be
+observed, first, that Iago was able to find a certain relief from the
+discomfort of hypocrisy in those caustic or cynical speeches which,
+being misinterpreted, only heightened confidence in his honesty. They
+acted as a safety-valve, very much as Hamlet's pretended insanity did.
+Next, I would infer from the entire success of his hypocrisy--what may
+also be inferred on other grounds, and is of great importance--that he
+was by no means a man of strong feelings and passions, like Richard, but
+decidedly cold by temperament. Even so, his self-control was wonderful,
+but there never was in him any violent storm to be controlled. Thirdly,
+I would suggest that Iago, though thoroughly selfish and unfeeling, was
+not by nature malignant, nor even morose, but that, on the contrary, he
+had a superficial good-nature, the kind of good-nature that wins
+popularity and is often taken as the sign, not of a good digestion, but
+of a good heart. And lastly, it may be inferred that, before the giant
+crime which we witness, Iago had never been detected in any serious
+offence and may even never have been guilty of one, but had pursued a
+selfish but outwardly decent life, enjoying the excitement of war and of
+casual pleasures, but never yet meeting with any sufficient temptation
+to risk his position and advancement by a dangerous crime. So that, in
+fact, the tragedy of _Othello_ is in a sense his tragedy too. It shows
+us not a violent man, like Richard, who spends his life in murder, but a
+thoroughly bad, _cold_ man, who is at last tempted to let loose the
+forces within him, and is at once destroyed.
+
+
+3
+
+In order to see how this tragedy arises let us now look more closely
+into Iago's inner man. We find here, in the first place, as has been
+implied in part, very remarkable powers both of intellect and of will.
+Iago's insight, within certain limits, into human nature; his ingenuity
+and address in working upon it; his quickness and versatility in dealing
+with sudden difficulties and unforeseen opportunities, have probably no
+parallel among dramatic characters. Equally remarkable is his strength
+of will. Not Socrates himself, not the ideal sage of the Stoics, was
+more lord of himself than Iago appears to be. It is not merely that he
+never betrays his true nature; he seems to be master of _all_ the
+motions that might affect his will. In the most dangerous moments of his
+plot, when the least slip or accident would be fatal, he never shows a
+trace of nervousness. When Othello takes him by the throat he merely
+shifts his part with his usual instantaneous adroitness. When he is
+attacked and wounded at the end he is perfectly unmoved. As Mr.
+Swinburne says, you cannot believe for a moment that the pain of torture
+will ever open Iago's lips. He is equally unassailable by the
+temptations of indolence or of sensuality. It is difficult to imagine
+him inactive; and though he has an obscene mind, and doubtless took his
+pleasures when and how he chose, he certainly took them by choice and
+not from weakness, and if pleasure interfered with his purposes the
+holiest of ascetics would not put it more resolutely by. 'What should I
+do?' Roderigo whimpers to him; 'I confess it is my shame to be so fond;
+but it is not in my virtue to amend it.' He answers: 'Virtue! a fig!
+'tis in ourselves that we are thus and thus. It all depends on our will.
+Love is merely a lust of the blood and a permission of the will. Come,
+be a man.... Ere I would say I would drown myself for the love of a
+guinea-hen, I would change my humanity with a baboon.' Forget for a
+moment that love is for Iago the appetite of a baboon; forget that he is
+as little assailable by pity as by fear or pleasure; and you will
+acknowledge that this lordship of the will, which is his practice as
+well as his doctrine, is great, almost sublime. Indeed, in intellect
+(always within certain limits) and in will (considered as a mere power,
+and without regard to its objects) Iago _is_ great.
+
+To what end does he use these great powers? His creed--for he is no
+sceptic, he has a definite creed--is that absolute egoism is the only
+rational and proper attitude, and that conscience or honour or any kind
+of regard for others is an absurdity. He does not deny that this
+absurdity exists. He does not suppose that most people secretly share
+his creed, while pretending to hold and practise another. On the
+contrary, he regards most people as honest fools. He declares that he
+has never yet met a man who knew how to love himself; and his one
+expression of admiration in the play is for servants
+
+     Who, trimmed in forms and visages of duty,
+     Keep yet their hearts attending on themselves.
+
+'These fellows,' he says, 'have some soul.' He professes to stand, and
+he, attempts to stand, wholly outside the world of morality.
+
+The existence of Iago's creed and of his corresponding practice is
+evidently connected with a characteristic in which he surpasses nearly
+all the other inhabitants of Shakespeare's world. Whatever he may once
+have been, he appears, when we meet him, to be almost destitute of
+humanity, of sympathetic or social feeling. He shows no trace of
+affection, and in presence of the most terrible suffering he shows
+either pleasure or an indifference which, if not complete, is nearly so.
+Here, however, we must be careful. It is important to realise, and few
+readers are in danger of ignoring, this extraordinary deadness of
+feeling, but it is also important not to confuse it with a general
+positive ill-will. When Iago has no dislike or hostility to a person he
+does _not_ show pleasure in the suffering of that person: he shows at
+most the absence of pain. There is, for instance, not the least sign of
+his enjoying the distress of Desdemona. But his sympathetic feelings are
+so abnormally feeble and cold that, when his dislike is roused, or when
+an indifferent person comes in the way of his purpose, there is scarcely
+anything within him to prevent his applying the torture.
+
+What is it that provokes his dislike or hostility? Here again we must
+look closely. Iago has been represented as an incarnation of envy, as a
+man who, being determined to get on in the world, regards everyone else
+with enmity as his rival. But this idea, though containing truth, seems
+much exaggerated. Certainly he is devoted to himself; but if he were an
+eagerly ambitious man, surely we should see much more positive signs of
+this ambition; and surely too, with his great powers, he would already
+have risen high, instead of being a mere ensign, short of money, and
+playing Captain Rook to Roderigo's Mr. Pigeon. Taking all the facts, one
+must conclude that his desires were comparatively moderate and his
+ambition weak; that he probably enjoyed war keenly, but, if he had money
+enough, did not exert himself greatly to acquire reputation or position;
+and, therefore, that he was not habitually burning with envy and
+actively hostile to other men as possible competitors.
+
+But what is clear is that Iago is keenly sensitive to anything that
+touches his pride or self-esteem. It would be most unjust to call him
+vain, but he has a high opinion of himself and a great contempt for
+others. He is quite aware of his superiority to them in certain
+respects; and he either disbelieves in or despises the qualities in
+which they are superior to him. Whatever disturbs or wounds his sense of
+superiority irritates him at once; and in _that_ sense he is highly
+competitive. This is why the appointment of Cassio provokes him. This is
+why Cassio's scientific attainments provoke him. This is the reason of
+his jealousy of Emilia. He does not care for his wife; but the fear of
+another man's getting the better of him, and exposing him to pity or
+derision as an unfortunate husband, is wormwood to him; and as he is
+sure that no woman is virtuous at heart, this fear is ever with him. For
+much the same reason he has a spite against goodness in men (for it is
+characteristic that he is less blind to its existence in men, the
+stronger, than in women, the weaker). He has a spite against it, not
+from any love of evil for evil's sake, but partly because it annoys his
+intellect as a stupidity; partly (though he hardly knows this) because
+it weakens his satisfaction with himself, and disturbs his faith that
+egoism is the right and proper thing; partly because, the world being
+such a fool, goodness is popular and prospers. But he, a man ten times
+as able as Cassio or even Othello, does not greatly prosper. Somehow,
+for all the stupidity of these open and generous people, they get on
+better than the 'fellow of some soul' And this, though he is not
+particularly eager to get on, wounds his pride. Goodness therefore
+annoys him. He is always ready to scoff at it, and would like to strike
+at it. In ordinary circumstances these feelings of irritation are not
+vivid in Iago--_no_ feeling is so--but they are constantly present.
+
+
+4
+
+Our task of analysis is not finished; but we are now in a position to
+consider the rise of Iago's tragedy. Why did he act as we see him acting
+in the play? What is the answer to that appeal of Othello's:
+
+     Will you, I pray, demand that demi-devil
+     Why he hath thus ensnared my soul and body?
+
+This question Why? is _the_ question about Iago, just as the question
+Why did Hamlet delay? is _the_ question about Hamlet. Iago refused to
+answer it; but I will venture to say that he _could_ not have answered
+it, any more than Hamlet could tell why he delayed. But Shakespeare knew
+the answer, and if these characters are great creations and not blunders
+we ought to be able to find it too.
+
+Is it possible to elicit it from Iago himself against his will? He makes
+various statements to Roderigo, and he has several soliloquies. From
+these sources, and especially from the latter, we should learn
+something. For with Shakespeare soliloquy generally gives information
+regarding the secret springs as well as the outward course of the plot;
+and, moreover, it is a curious point of technique with him that the
+soliloquies of his villains sometimes read almost like explanations
+offered to the audience.[112] Now, Iago repeatedly offers explanations
+either to Roderigo or to himself. In the first place, he says more than
+once that he 'hates' Othello. He gives two reasons for his hatred.
+Othello has made Cassio lieutenant; and he suspects, and has heard it
+reported, that Othello has an intrigue with Emilia. Next there is
+Cassio. He never says he hates Cassio, but he finds in him three causes
+of offence: Cassio has been preferred to him; he suspects _him_ too of
+an intrigue with Emilia; and, lastly, Cassio has a daily beauty in his
+life which makes Iago ugly. In addition to these annoyances he wants
+Cassio's place. As for Roderigo, he calls him a snipe, and who can hate
+a snipe? But Roderigo knows too much; and he is becoming a nuisance,
+getting angry, and asking for the gold and jewels he handed to Iago to
+give to Desdemona. So Iago kills Roderigo. Then for Desdemona: a
+fig's-end for her virtue! but he has no ill-will to her. In fact he
+'loves' her, though he is good enough to explain, varying the word, that
+his 'lust' is mixed with a desire to pay Othello in his own coin. To be
+sure she must die, and so must Emilia, and so would Bianca if only the
+authorities saw things in their true light; but he did not set out with
+any hostile design against these persons.
+
+Is the account which Iago gives of the causes of his action the true
+account? The answer of the most popular view will be, 'Yes. Iago was, as
+he says, chiefly incited by two things, the desire of advancement, and a
+hatred of Othello due principally to the affair of the lieutenancy.
+These are perfectly intelligible causes; we have only to add to them
+unusual ability and cruelty, and all is explained. Why should Coleridge
+and Hazlitt and Swinburne go further afield?' To which last question I
+will at once oppose these: If your view is correct, why should Iago be
+considered an extraordinary creation; and is it not odd that the people
+who reject it are the people who elsewhere show an exceptional
+understanding of Shakespeare?
+
+The difficulty about this popular view is, in the first place, that it
+attributes to Iago what cannot be found in the Iago of the play. Its
+Iago is impelled by _passions_, a passion of ambition and a passion of
+hatred; for no ambition or hatred short of passion could drive a man who
+is evidently so clear-sighted, and who must hitherto have been so
+prudent, into a plot so extremely hazardous. Why, then, in the Iago of
+the play do we find no sign of these passions or of anything approaching
+to them? Why, if Shakespeare meant that Iago was impelled by them, does
+he suppress the signs of them? Surely not from want of ability to
+display them. The poet who painted Macbeth and Shylock understood his
+business. Who ever doubted Macbeth's ambition or Shylock's hate? And
+what resemblance is there between these passions and any feeling that we
+can trace in Iago? The resemblance between a volcano in eruption and a
+flameless fire of coke; the resemblance between a consuming desire to
+hack and hew your enemy's flesh, and the resentful wish, only too
+familiar in common life, to inflict pain in return for a slight.
+Passion, in Shakespeare's plays, is perfectly easy to recognise. What
+vestige of it, of passion unsatisfied or of passion gratified, is
+visible in Iago? None: that is the very horror of him. He has _less_
+passion than an ordinary man, and yet he does these frightful things.
+The only ground for attributing to him, I do not say a passionate
+hatred, but anything deserving the name of hatred at all, is his own
+statement, 'I hate Othello'; and we know what his statements are worth.
+
+But the popular view, beside attributing to Iago what he does not show,
+ignores what he does show. It selects from his own account of his
+motives one or two, and drops the rest; and so it makes everything
+natural. But it fails to perceive how unnatural, how strange and
+suspicious, his own account is. Certainly he assigns motives enough; the
+difficulty is that he assigns so many. A man moved by simple passions
+due to simple causes does not stand fingering his feelings,
+industriously enumerating their sources, and groping about for new ones.
+But this is what Iago does. And this is not all. These motives appear
+and disappear in the most extraordinary manner. Resentment at Cassio's
+appointment is expressed in the first conversation with Roderigo, and
+from that moment is never once mentioned again in the whole play. Hatred
+of Othello is expressed in the First Act alone. Desire to get Cassio's
+place scarcely appears after the first soliloquy, and when it is
+gratified Iago does not refer to it by a single word. The suspicion of
+Cassio's intrigue with Emilia emerges suddenly, as an after-thought, not
+in the first soliloquy but the second, and then disappears for
+ever.[113] Iago's 'love' of Desdemona is alluded to in the second
+soliloquy; there is not the faintest trace of it in word or deed either
+before or after. The mention of jealousy of Othello is followed by
+declarations that Othello is infatuated about Desdemona and is of a
+constant nature, and during Othello's sufferings Iago never shows a sign
+of the idea that he is now paying his rival in his own coin. In the
+second soliloquy he declares that he quite believes Cassio to be in love
+with Desdemona; it is obvious that he believes no such thing, for he
+never alludes to the idea again, and within a few hours describes Cassio
+in soliloquy as an honest fool. His final reason for ill-will to Cassio
+never appears till the Fifth Act.
+
+What is the meaning of all this? Unless Shakespeare was out of his mind,
+it must have a meaning. And certainly this meaning is not contained in
+any of the popular accounts of Iago.
+
+Is it contained then in Coleridge's word 'motive-hunting'? Yes,
+'motive-hunting' exactly answers to the impression that Iago's
+soliloquies produce. He is pondering his design, and unconsciously
+trying to justify it to himself. He speaks of one or two real feelings,
+such as resentment against Othello, and he mentions one or two real
+causes of these feelings. But these are not enough for him. Along with
+them, or alone, there come into his head, only to leave it again, ideas
+and suspicions, the creations of his own baseness or uneasiness, some
+old, some new, caressed for a moment to feed his purpose and give it a
+reasonable look, but never really believed in, and never the main forces
+which are determining his action. In fact, I would venture to describe
+Iago in these soliloquies as a man setting out on a project which
+strongly attracts his desire, but at the same time conscious of a
+resistance to the desire, and unconsciously trying to argue the
+resistance away by assigning reasons for the project. He is the
+counterpart of Hamlet, who tries to find reasons for his delay in
+pursuing a design which excites his aversion. And most of Iago's reasons
+for action are no more the real ones than Hamlet's reasons for delay
+were the real ones. Each is moved by forces which he does not
+understand; and it is probably no accident that these two studies of
+states psychologically so similar were produced at about the same
+period.
+
+What then were the real moving forces of Iago's action? Are we to fall
+back on the idea of a 'motiveless malignity;'[114] that is to say, a
+disinterested love of evil, or a delight in the pain of others as simple
+and direct as the delight in one's own pleasure? Surely not. I will not
+insist that this thing or these things are inconceivable, mere phrases,
+not ideas; for, even so, it would remain possible that Shakespeare had
+tried to represent an inconceivability. But there is not the slightest
+reason to suppose that he did so. Iago's action is intelligible; and
+indeed the popular view contains enough truth to refute this desperate
+theory. It greatly exaggerates his desire for advancement, and the
+ill-will caused by his disappointment, and it ignores other forces more
+important than these; but it is right in insisting on the presence of
+this desire and this ill-will, and their presence is enough to destroy
+Iago's claims to be more than a demi-devil. For love of the evil that
+advances my interest and hurts a person I dislike, is a very different
+thing from love of evil simply as evil; and pleasure in the pain of a
+person disliked or regarded as a competitor is quite distinct from
+pleasure in the pain of others simply as others. The first is
+intelligible, and we find it in Iago. The second, even if it were
+intelligible, we do not find in Iago.
+
+Still, desire of advancement and resentment about the lieutenancy,
+though factors and indispensable factors in the cause of Iago's action,
+are neither the principal nor the most characteristic factors. To find
+these, let us return to our half-completed analysis of the character.
+Let us remember especially the keen sense of superiority, the contempt
+of others, the sensitiveness to everything which wounds these feelings,
+the spite against goodness in men as a thing not only stupid but, both
+in its nature and by its success, contrary to Iago's nature and
+irritating to his pride. Let us remember in addition the annoyance of
+having always to play a part, the consciousness of exceptional but
+unused ingenuity and address, the enjoyment of action, and the absence
+of fear. And let us ask what would be the greatest pleasure of such a
+man, and what the situation which might tempt him to abandon his
+habitual prudence and pursue this pleasure. Hazlitt and Mr. Swinburne do
+not put this question, but the answer I proceed to give to it is in
+principle theirs.[115]
+
+The most delightful thing to such a man would be something that gave an
+extreme satisfaction to his sense of power and superiority; and if it
+involved, secondly, the triumphant exertion of his abilities, and,
+thirdly, the excitement of danger, his delight would be consummated. And
+the moment most dangerous to such a man would be one when his sense of
+superiority had met with an affront, so that its habitual craving was
+reinforced by resentment, while at the same time he saw an opportunity
+of satisfying it by subjecting to his will the very persons who had
+affronted it. Now, this is the temptation that comes to Iago. Othello's
+eminence, Othello's goodness, and his own dependence on Othello, must
+have been a perpetual annoyance to him. At _any_ time he would have
+enjoyed befooling and tormenting Othello. Under ordinary circumstances
+he was restrained, chiefly by self-interest, in some slight degree
+perhaps by the faint pulsations of conscience or humanity. But
+disappointment at the loss of the lieutenancy supplied the touch of
+lively resentment that was required to overcome these obstacles; and the
+prospect of satisfying the sense of power by mastering Othello through
+an intricate and hazardous intrigue now became irresistible. Iago did
+not clearly understand what was moving his desire; though he tried to
+give himself reasons for his action, even those that had some reality
+made but a small part of the motive force; one may almost say they were
+no more than the turning of the handle which admits the driving power
+into the machine. Only once does he appear to see something of the
+truth. It is when he uses the phrase '_to plume up my will_ in double
+knavery.'
+
+To 'plume up the will,' to heighten the sense of power or
+superiority--this seems to be the unconscious motive of many acts of
+cruelty which evidently do not spring chiefly from ill-will, and which
+therefore puzzle and sometimes horrify us most. It is often this that
+makes a man bully the wife or children of whom he is fond. The boy who
+torments another boy, as we say, 'for no reason,' or who without any
+hatred for frogs tortures a frog, is pleased with his victim's pain, not
+from any disinterested love of evil or pleasure in pain, but mainly
+because this pain is the unmistakable proof of his own power over his
+victim. So it is with Iago. His thwarted sense of superiority wants
+satisfaction. What fuller satisfaction could it find than the
+consciousness that he is the master of the General who has undervalued
+him and of the rival who has been preferred to him; that these worthy
+people, who are so successful and popular and stupid, are mere puppets
+in his hands, but living puppets, who at the motion of his finger must
+contort themselves in agony, while all the time they believe that he is
+their one true friend and comforter? It must have been an ecstasy of
+bliss to him. And this, granted a most abnormal deadness of human
+feeling, is, however horrible, perfectly intelligible. There is no
+mystery in the psychology of Iago; the mystery lies in a further
+question, which the drama has not to answer, the question why such a
+being should exist.
+
+Iago's longing to satisfy the sense of power is, I think, the strongest
+of the forces that drive him on. But there are two others to be noticed.
+One is the pleasure in an action very difficult and perilous and,
+therefore, intensely exciting. This action sets all his powers on the
+strain. He feels the delight of one who executes successfully a feat
+thoroughly congenial to his special aptitude, and only just within his
+compass; and, as he is fearless by nature, the fact that a single slip
+will cost him his life only increases his pleasure. His exhilaration
+breaks out in the ghastly words with which he greets the sunrise after
+the night of the drunken tumult which has led to Cassio's disgrace: 'By
+the mass, 'tis morning. Pleasure and action make the hours seem short.'
+Here, however, the joy in exciting action is quickened by other
+feelings. It appears more simply elsewhere in such a way as to suggest
+that nothing but such actions gave him happiness, and that his happiness
+was greater if the action was destructive as well as exciting. We find
+it, for instance, in his gleeful cry to Roderigo, who proposes to shout
+to Brabantio in order to wake him and tell him of his daughter's flight:
+
+     Do, with like timorous[116] accent and dire yell
+     As when, by night and negligence, the fire
+     Is spied in populous cities.
+
+All through that scene; again, in the scene where Cassio is attacked and
+Roderigo murdered; everywhere where Iago is in physical action, we catch
+this sound of almost feverish enjoyment. His blood, usually so cold and
+slow, is racing through his veins.
+
+But Iago, finally, is not simply a man of action; he is an artist. His
+action is a plot, the intricate plot of a drama, and in the conception
+and execution of it he experiences the tension and the joy of artistic
+creation. 'He is,' says Hazlitt, 'an amateur of tragedy in real life;
+and, instead of employing his invention on imaginary characters or
+long-forgotten incidents, he takes the bolder and more dangerous course
+of getting up his plot at home, casts the principal parts among his
+newest friends and connections, and rehearses it in downright earnest,
+with steady nerves and unabated resolution.' Mr. Swinburne lays even
+greater stress on this aspect of Iago's character, and even declares
+that 'the very subtlest and strongest component of his complex nature'
+is 'the instinct of what Mr. Carlyle would call an inarticulate poet.'
+And those to whom this idea is unfamiliar, and who may suspect it at
+first sight of being fanciful, will find, if they examine the play in
+the light of Mr. Swinburne's exposition, that it rests on a true and
+deep perception, will stand scrutiny, and might easily be illustrated.
+They may observe, to take only one point, the curious analogy between
+the early stages of dramatic composition and those soliloquies in which
+Iago broods over his plot, drawing at first only an outline, puzzled how
+to fix more than the main idea, and gradually seeing it develop and
+clarify as he works upon it or lets it work. Here at any rate
+Shakespeare put a good deal of himself into Iago. But the tragedian in
+real life was not the equal of the tragic poet. His psychology, as we
+shall see, was at fault at a critical point, as Shakespeare's never was.
+And so his catastrophe came out wrong, and his piece was ruined.
+
+Such, then, seem to be the chief ingredients of the force which,
+liberated by his resentment at Cassio's promotion, drives Iago from
+inactivity into action, and sustains him through it. And, to pass to a
+new point, this force completely possesses him; it is his fate. It is
+like the passion with which a tragic hero wholly identifies himself, and
+which bears him on to his doom. It is true that, once embarked on his
+course, Iago _could_ not turn back, even if this passion did abate; and
+it is also true that he is compelled, by his success in convincing
+Othello, to advance to conclusions of which at the outset he did not
+dream. He is thus caught in his own web, and could not liberate himself
+if he would. But, in fact, he never shows a trace of wishing to do so,
+not a trace of hesitation, of looking back, or of fear, any more than of
+remorse; there is no ebb in the tide. As the crisis approaches there
+passes through his mind a fleeting doubt whether the deaths of Cassio
+and Roderigo are indispensable; but that uncertainty, which does not
+concern the main issue, is dismissed, and he goes forward with
+undiminished zest. Not even in his sleep--as in Richard's before his
+final battle--does any rebellion of outraged conscience or pity, or any
+foreboding of despair, force itself into clear consciousness. His
+fate--which is himself--has completely mastered him: so that, in the
+later scenes, where the improbability of the entire success of a design
+built on so many different falsehoods forces itself on the reader, Iago
+appears for moments not as a consummate schemer, but as a man absolutely
+infatuated and delivered over to certain destruction.
+
+
+5
+
+Iago stands supreme among Shakespeare's evil characters because the
+greatest intensity and subtlety of imagination have gone to his making,
+and because he illustrates in the most perfect combination the two facts
+concerning evil which seem to have impressed Shakespeare most. The first
+of these is the fact that perfectly sane people exist in whom
+fellow-feeling of any kind is so weak that an almost absolute egoism
+becomes possible to them, and with it those hard vices--such as
+ingratitude and cruelty--which to Shakespeare were far the worst. The
+second is that such evil is compatible, and even appears to ally itself
+easily, with exceptional powers of will and intellect. In the latter
+respect Iago is nearly or quite the equal of Richard, in egoism he is
+the superior, and his inferiority in passion and massive force only
+makes him more repulsive. How is it then that we can bear to contemplate
+him; nay, that, if we really imagine him, we feel admiration and some
+kind of sympathy? Henry the Fifth tells us:
+
+     There is some soul of goodness in things evil,
+     Would men observingly distil it out;
+
+but here, it may be said, we are shown a thing absolutely evil,
+and--what is more dreadful still--this absolute evil is united with
+supreme intellectual power. Why is the representation tolerable, and why
+do we not accuse its author either of untruth or of a desperate
+pessimism?
+
+To these questions it might at once be replied: Iago does not stand
+alone; he is a factor in a whole; and we perceive him there and not in
+isolation, acted upon as well as acting, destroyed as well as
+destroying.[117] But, although this is true and important, I pass it by
+and, continuing to regard him by himself, I would make three remarks in
+answer to the questions.
+
+In the first place, Iago is not merely negative or evil--far from it.
+Those very forces that moved him and made his fate--sense of power,
+delight in performing a difficult and dangerous action, delight in the
+exercise of artistic skill--are not at all evil things. We sympathise
+with one or other of them almost every day of our lives. And,
+accordingly, though in Iago they are combined with something detestable
+and so contribute to evil, our perception of them is accompanied with
+sympathy. In the same way, Iago's insight, dexterity, quickness,
+address, and the like, are in themselves admirable things; the perfect
+man would possess them. And certainly he would possess also Iago's
+courage and self-control, and, like Iago, would stand above the impulses
+of mere feeling, lord of his inner world. All this goes to evil ends in
+Iago, but in itself it has a great worth; and, although in reading, of
+course, we do not sift it out and regard it separately, it inevitably
+affects us and mingles admiration with our hatred or horror.
+
+All this, however, might apparently co-exist with absolute egoism and
+total want of humanity. But, in the second place, it is not true that in
+Iago this egoism and this want are absolute, and that in this sense he
+is a thing of mere evil. They are frightful, but if they were absolute
+Iago would be a monster, not a man. The fact is, he _tries_ to make them
+absolute and cannot succeed; and the traces of conscience, shame and
+humanity, though faint, are discernible. If his egoism were absolute he
+would be perfectly indifferent to the opinion of others; and he clearly
+is not so. His very irritation at goodness, again, is a sign that his
+faith in his creed is not entirely firm; and it is not entirely firm
+because he himself has a perception, however dim, of the goodness of
+goodness. What is the meaning of the last reason he gives himself for
+killing Cassio:
+
+     He hath a daily beauty in his life
+     That makes me ugly?
+
+Does he mean that he is ugly to others? Then he is not an absolute
+egoist. Does he mean that he is ugly to himself? Then he makes an open
+confession of moral sense. And, once more, if he really possessed no
+moral sense, we should never have heard those soliloquies which so
+clearly betray his uneasiness and his unconscious desire to persuade
+himself that he has some excuse for the villainy he contemplates. These
+seem to be indubitable proofs that, against his will, Iago is a little
+better than his creed, and has failed to withdraw himself wholly from
+the human atmosphere about him. And to these proofs I would add, though
+with less confidence, two others. Iago's momentary doubt towards the end
+whether Roderigo and Cassio must be killed has always surprised me. As a
+mere matter of calculation it is perfectly obvious that they must; and I
+believe his hesitation is not merely intellectual, it is another symptom
+of the obscure working of conscience or humanity. Lastly, is it not
+significant that, when once his plot has begun to develop, Iago never
+seeks the presence of Desdemona; that he seems to leave her as quickly
+as he can (III. iv. 138); and that, when he is fetched by
+Emilia to see her in her distress (IV. ii. 110 ff.), we fail to
+catch in his words any sign of the pleasure he shows in Othello's
+misery, and seem rather to perceive a certain discomfort, and, if one
+dare say it, a faint touch of shame or remorse? This interpretation of
+the passage, I admit, is not inevitable, but to my mind (quite apart
+from any theorising about Iago) it seems the natural one.[118] And if it
+is right, Iago's discomfort is easily understood; for Desdemona is the
+one person concerned against whom it is impossible for him even to
+imagine a ground of resentment, and so an excuse for cruelty.[119]
+
+There remains, thirdly, the idea that Iago is a man of supreme
+intellect who is at the same time supremely wicked. That he is supremely
+wicked nobody will doubt; and I have claimed for him nothing that will
+interfere with his right to that title. But to say that his intellectual
+power is supreme is to make a great mistake. Within certain limits he
+has indeed extraordinary penetration, quickness, inventiveness,
+adaptiveness; but the limits are defined with the hardest of lines, and
+they are narrow limits. It would scarcely be unjust to call him simply
+astonishingly clever, or simply a consummate master of intrigue. But
+compare him with one who may perhaps be roughly called a bad man of
+supreme intellectual power, Napoleon, and you see how small and negative
+Iago's mind is, incapable of Napoleon's military achievements, and much
+more incapable of his political constructions. Or, to keep within the
+Shakespearean world, compare him with Hamlet, and you perceive how
+miserably close is his intellectual horizon; that such a thing as a
+thought beyond the reaches of his soul has never come near him; that he
+is prosaic through and through, deaf and blind to all but a tiny
+fragment of the meaning of things. Is it not quite absurd, then, to call
+him a man of supreme intellect?
+
+And observe, lastly, that his failure in perception is closely connected
+with his badness. He was destroyed by the power that he attacked, the
+power of love; and he was destroyed by it because he could not
+understand it; and he could not understand it because it was not in him.
+Iago never meant his plot to be so dangerous to himself. He knew that
+jealousy is painful, but the jealousy of a love like Othello's he could
+not imagine, and he found himself involved in murders which were no part
+of his original design. That difficulty he surmounted, and his changed
+plot still seemed to prosper. Roderigo and Cassio and Desdemona once
+dead, all will be well. Nay, when he fails to kill Cassio, all may still
+be well. He will avow that he told Othello of the adultery, and persist
+that he told the truth, and Cassio will deny it in vain. And then, in a
+moment, his plot is shattered by a blow from a quarter where he never
+dreamt of danger. He knows his wife, he thinks. She is not
+over-scrupulous, she will do anything to please him, and she has learnt
+obedience. But one thing in her he does not know--that she _loves_ her
+mistress and would face a hundred deaths sooner than see her fair fame
+darkened. There is genuine astonishment in his outburst 'What! Are you
+mad?' as it dawns upon him that she means to speak the truth about the
+handkerchief. But he might well have applied to himself the words she
+flings at Othello,
+
+                          O gull! O dolt!
+     As ignorant as dirt!
+
+The foulness of his own soul made him so ignorant that he built into the
+marvellous structure of his plot a piece of crass stupidity.
+
+To the thinking mind the divorce of unusual intellect from goodness is a
+thing to startle; and Shakespeare clearly felt it so. The combination of
+unusual intellect with extreme evil is more than startling, it is
+frightful. It is rare, but it exists; and Shakespeare represented it in
+Iago. But the alliance of evil like Iago's with _supreme_ intellect is
+an impossible fiction; and Shakespeare's fictions were truth.
+
+
+6
+
+The characters of Cassio and Emilia hardly require analysis, and I will
+touch on them only from a single point of view. In their combination of
+excellences and defects they are good examples of that truth to nature
+which in dramatic art is the one unfailing source of moral instruction.
+
+Cassio is a handsome, light-hearted, good-natured young fellow, who
+takes life gaily, and is evidently very attractive and popular. Othello,
+who calls him by his Christian name, is fond of him; Desdemona likes him
+much; Emilia at once interests herself on his behalf. He has warm
+generous feelings, an enthusiastic admiration for the General, and a
+chivalrous adoration for his peerless wife. But he is too easy-going. He
+finds it hard to say No; and accordingly, although he is aware that he
+has a very weak head, and that the occasion is one on which he is bound
+to run no risk, he gets drunk--not disgustingly so, but ludicrously
+so.[120] And, besides, he amuses himself without any scruple by
+frequenting the company of a woman of more than doubtful reputation, who
+has fallen in love with his good looks. Moralising critics point out
+that he pays for the first offence by losing his post, and for the
+second by nearly losing his life. They are quite entitled to do so,
+though the careful reader will not forget Iago's part in these
+transactions. But they ought also to point out that Cassio's looseness
+does not in the least disturb our confidence in him in his relations
+with Desdemona and Othello. He is loose, and we are sorry for it; but we
+never doubt that there was 'a daily beauty in his life,' or that his
+rapturous admiration of Desdemona was as wholly beautiful a thing as it
+appears, or that Othello was perfectly safe when in his courtship he
+employed Cassio to 'go between' Desdemona and himself. It is fortunately
+a fact in human nature that these aspects of Cassio's character are
+quite compatible. Shakespeare simply sets it down; and it is just
+because he is truthful in these smaller things that in greater things we
+trust him absolutely never to pervert the truth for the sake of some
+doctrine or purpose of his own.
+
+There is something very lovable about Cassio, with his fresh eager
+feelings; his distress at his disgrace and still more at having lost
+Othello's trust; his hero-worship; and at the end his sorrow and pity,
+which are at first too acute for words. He is carried in, wounded, on a
+chair. He looks at Othello and cannot speak. His first words come later
+when, to Lodovico's question, 'Did you and he consent in Cassio's
+death?' Othello answers 'Ay.' Then he falters out, 'Dear General, I
+never gave you cause.' One is sure he had never used that adjective
+before. The love in it makes it beautiful, but there is something else
+in it, unknown to Cassio, which goes to one's heart. It tells us that
+his hero is no longer unapproachably above him.
+
+Few of Shakespeare's minor characters are more distinct than Emilia, and
+towards few do our feelings change so much within the course of a play.
+Till close to the end she frequently sets one's teeth on edge; and at
+the end one is ready to worship her. She nowhere shows any sign of
+having a bad heart; but she is common, sometimes vulgar, in minor
+matters far from scrupulous, blunt in perception and feeling, and quite
+destitute of imagination. She let Iago take the handkerchief though she
+knew how much its loss would distress Desdemona; and she said nothing
+about it though she saw that Othello was jealous. We rightly resent her
+unkindness in permitting the theft, but--it is an important point--we
+are apt to misconstrue her subsequent silence, because we know that
+Othello's jealousy was intimately connected with the loss of the
+handkerchief. Emilia, however, certainly failed to perceive this; for
+otherwise, when Othello's anger showed itself violently and she was
+really distressed for her mistress, she could not have failed to think
+of the handkerchief, and would, I believe, undoubtedly have told the
+truth about it. But, in fact, she never thought of it, although she
+guessed that Othello was being deceived by some scoundrel. Even after
+Desdemona's death, nay, even when she knew that Iago had brought it
+about, she still did not remember the handkerchief; and when Othello at
+last mentions, as a proof of his wife's guilt, that he had seen the
+handkerchief in Cassio's hand, the truth falls on Emilia like a
+thunder-bolt. 'O God!' she bursts out, 'O heavenly God!'[121] Her
+stupidity in this matter is gross, but it is stupidity and nothing
+worse.
+
+But along with it goes a certain coarseness of nature. The contrast
+between Emilia and Desdemona in their conversation about the infidelity
+of wives (IV. iii.) is too famous to need a word,--unless it be a word
+of warning against critics who take her light talk too seriously. But
+the contrast in the preceding scene is hardly less remarkable. Othello,
+affecting to treat Emilia as the keeper of a brothel, sends her away,
+bidding her shut the door behind her; and then he proceeds to torture
+himself as well as Desdemona by accusations of adultery. But, as a
+critic has pointed out, Emilia listens at the door, for we find, as soon
+as Othello is gone and Iago has been summoned, that she knows what
+Othello has said to Desdemona. And what could better illustrate those
+defects of hers which make one wince, than her repeating again and again
+in Desdemona's presence the word Desdemona could not repeat; than her
+talking before Desdemona of Iago's suspicions regarding Othello and
+herself; than her speaking to Desdemona of husbands who strike their
+wives; than the expression of her honest indignation in the words,
+
+     Has she forsook so many noble matches,
+     Her father and her country and her friends,
+     To be called whore?
+
+If one were capable of laughing or even of smiling when this point in
+the play is reached, the difference between Desdemona's anguish at the
+loss of Othello's love, and Emilia's recollection of the noble matches
+she might have secured, would be irresistibly ludicrous.
+
+And yet how all this, and all her defects, vanish into nothingness when
+we see her face to face with that which she can understand and feel!
+From the moment of her appearance after the murder to the moment of her
+death she is transfigured; and yet she remains perfectly true to
+herself, and we would not have her one atom less herself. She is the
+only person who utters for us the violent common emotions which we feel,
+together with those more tragic emotions which she does not comprehend.
+She has done this once already, to our great comfort. When she suggests
+that some villain has poisoned Othello's mind, and Iago answers,
+
+     Fie, there is no such man; it is impossible;
+
+and Desdemona answers,
+
+     If any such there be, Heaven pardon him;
+
+Emilia's retort,
+
+     A halter pardon him, and Hell gnaw his bones,
+
+says what we long to say, and helps us. And who has not felt in the last
+scene how her glorious carelessness of her own life, and her outbursts
+against Othello--even that most characteristic one,
+
+     She was too fond of her most filthy bargain--
+
+lift the overwhelming weight of calamity that oppresses us, and bring us
+an extraordinary lightening of the heart? Terror and pity are here too
+much to bear; we long to be allowed to feel also indignation, if not
+rage; and Emilia lets us feel them and gives them words. She brings us
+too the relief of joy and admiration,--a joy that is not lessened by her
+death. Why should she live? If she lived for ever she never could soar a
+higher pitch, and nothing in her life became her like the losing
+it.[122]
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[Footnote 107: It has been held, for example, that Othello treated Iago
+abominably in preferring Cassio to him; that he _did_ seduce Emilia;
+that he and Desdemona were too familiar before marriage; and that in any
+case his fate was a moral judgment on his sins, and Iago a righteous, if
+sharp, instrument of Providence.]
+
+[Footnote 108: See III. iii. 201, V. i. 89 f. The statements are his
+own, but he has no particular reason for lying. One reason of his
+disgust at Cassio's appointment was that Cassio was a Florentine (I. i.
+20). When Cassio says (III. i. 42) 'I never knew a Florentine more kind
+and honest,' of course he means, not that Iago is a Florentine, but that
+he could not be kinder and honester if he were one.]
+
+[Footnote 109: I am here merely recording a general impression. There is
+no specific evidence, unless we take Cassio's language in his drink (II.
+ii. 105 f.) to imply that Iago was not a 'man of quality' like himself.
+I do not know if it has been observed that Iago uses more nautical
+phrases and metaphors than is at all usual with Shakespeare's
+characters. This might naturally be explained by his roving military
+life, but it is curious that almost all the examples occur in the
+earlier scenes (see _e.g._ I. i. 30, 153, 157; I. ii. 17, 50; I. iii.
+343; II. iii. 65), so that the use of these phrases and metaphors may
+not be characteristic of Iago but symptomatic of a particular state of
+Shakespeare's mind.]
+
+[Footnote 110: See further Note P.]
+
+[Footnote 111: But it by no means follows that we are to believe his
+statement that there was a report abroad about an intrigue between his
+wife and Othello (I. iii. 393), or his statement (which may be divined
+from IV. ii. 145) that someone had spoken to him on the subject.]
+
+[Footnote 112: See, for instance, Aaron in _Titus Andronicus_, II. iii.;
+Richard in _3 Henry VI._, III. ii. and V. vi., and in _Richard III._, I.
+i. (twice), I. ii.; Edmund in _King Lear_, I. ii. (twice), III. iii. and
+v., V. i.]
+
+[Footnote 113: See, further, Note Q.]
+
+[Footnote 114: On the meaning which this phrase had for its author,
+Coleridge, see note on p. 228.][Transcriber's note: Reference is to
+Footnote 115.]
+
+[Footnote 115: Coleridge's view is not materially different, though less
+complete. When he speaks of 'the motive-hunting of a motiveless
+malignity,' he does not mean by the last two words that 'disinterested
+love of evil' or 'love of evil for evil's sake' of which I spoke just
+now, and which other critics attribute to Iago. He means really that
+Iago's malignity does not spring from the causes to which Iago himself
+refers it, nor from any 'motive' in the sense of an idea present to
+consciousness. But unfortunately his phrase suggests the theory which
+has been criticised above. On the question whether there is such a thing
+as this supposed pure malignity, the reader may refer to a discussion
+between Professor Bain and F.H. Bradley in _Mind_, vol. viii.]
+
+[Footnote 116: _I.e._ terrifying.]
+
+[Footnote 117: Cf. note at end of lecture.][Transcriber's note: Refers
+to Footnote 122.]
+
+[Footnote 118: It was suggested to me by a Glasgow student.]
+
+[Footnote 119: A curious proof of Iago's inability to hold by his creed
+that absolute egoism is the only proper attitude, and that loyalty and
+affection are mere stupidity or want of spirit, may be found in his one
+moment of real passion, where he rushes at Emilia with the cry,
+'Villainous whore!' (V. ii. 229). There is more than fury in his cry,
+there is indignation. She has been false to him, she has betrayed him.
+Well, but why should she not, if his creed is true? And what a
+melancholy exhibition of human inconsistency it is that he should use as
+terms of reproach words which, according to him, should be quite
+neutral, if not complimentary!]
+
+[Footnote 120: Cassio's invective against drink may be compared with
+Hamlet's expressions of disgust at his uncle's drunkenness. Possibly the
+subject may for some reason have been prominent in Shakespeare's mind
+about this time.]
+
+[Footnote 121: So the Quarto, and certainly rightly, though modern
+editors reprint the feeble alteration of the Folio, due to fear of the
+Censor, 'O heaven! O heavenly Powers!']
+
+[Footnote 122: The feelings evoked by Emilia are one of the causes which
+mitigate the excess of tragic pain at the conclusion. Others are the
+downfall of Iago, and the fact, already alluded to, that both Desdemona
+and Othello show themselves at their noblest just before death.]
+
+
+
+
+LECTURE VII
+
+KING LEAR
+
+
+_King Lear_ has again and again been described as Shakespeare's greatest
+work, the best of his plays, the tragedy in which he exhibits most fully
+his multitudinous powers; and if we were doomed to lose all his dramas
+except one, probably the majority of those who know and appreciate him
+best would pronounce for keeping _King Lear_.
+
+Yet this tragedy is certainly the least popular of the famous four. The
+'general reader' reads it less often than the others, and, though he
+acknowledges its greatness, he will sometimes speak of it with a certain
+distaste. It is also the least often presented on the stage, and the
+least successful there. And when we look back on its history we find a
+curious fact. Some twenty years after the Restoration, Nahum Tate
+altered _King Lear_ for the stage, giving it a happy ending, and putting
+Edgar in the place of the King of France as Cordelia's lover. From that
+time Shakespeare's tragedy in its original form was never seen on the
+stage for a century and a half. Betterton acted Tate's version; Garrick
+acted it and Dr. Johnson approved it. Kemble acted it, Kean acted it. In
+1823 Kean, 'stimulated by Hazlitt's remonstrances and Charles Lamb's
+essays,' restored the original tragic ending. At last, in 1838, Macready
+returned to Shakespeare's text throughout.
+
+What is the meaning of these opposite sets of facts? Are the lovers of
+Shakespeare wholly in the right; and is the general reader and
+play-goer, were even Tate and Dr. Johnson, altogether in the wrong? I
+venture to doubt it. When I read _King Lear_ two impressions are left on
+my mind, which seem to answer roughly to the two sets of facts. _King
+Lear_ seems to me Shakespeare's greatest achievement, but it seems to me
+_not_ his best play. And I find that I tend to consider it from two
+rather different points of view. When I regard it strictly as a drama,
+it appears to me, though in certain parts overwhelming, decidedly
+inferior as a whole to _Hamlet_, _Othello_ and _Macbeth_. When I am
+feeling that it is greater than any of these, and the fullest revelation
+of Shakespeare's power, I find I am not regarding it simply as a drama,
+but am grouping it in my mind with works like the _Prometheus Vinctus_
+and the _Divine Comedy_, and even with the greatest symphonies of
+Beethoven and the statues in the Medici Chapel.
+
+This two-fold character of the play is to some extent illustrated by the
+affinities and the probable chronological position of _King Lear_. It is
+allied with two tragedies, _Othello_ and _Timon of Athens_; and these
+two tragedies are utterly unlike.[123] _Othello_ was probably composed
+about 1604, and _King Lear_ about 1605; and though there is a somewhat
+marked change in style and versification, there are obvious resemblances
+between the two. The most important have been touched on already: these
+are the most painful and the most pathetic of the four tragedies, those
+in which evil appears in its coldest and most inhuman forms, and those
+which exclude the supernatural from the action. But there is also in
+_King Lear_ a good deal which sounds like an echo of _Othello_,--a fact
+which should not surprise us, since there are other instances where the
+matter of a play seems to go on working in Shakespeare's mind and
+re-appears, generally in a weaker form, in his next play. So, in _King
+Lear_, the conception of Edmund is not so fresh as that of Goneril.
+Goneril has no predecessor; but Edmund, though of course essentially
+distinguished from Iago, often reminds us of him, and the soliloquy,
+'This is the excellent foppery of the world,' is in the very tone of
+Iago's discourse on the sovereignty of the will. The gulling of Gloster,
+again, recalls the gulling of Othello. Even Edmund's idea (not carried
+out) of making his father witness, without over-hearing, his
+conversation with Edgar, reproduces the idea of the passage where
+Othello watches Iago and Cassio talking about Bianca; and the conclusion
+of the temptation, where Gloster says to Edmund:
+
+                              and of my land,
+     Loyal and natural boy, I'll work the means
+     To make thee capable,
+
+reminds us of Othello's last words in the scene of temptation, 'Now art
+thou my lieutenant.' This list might be extended; and the appearance of
+certain unusual words and phrases in both the plays increases the
+likelihood that the composition of the one followed at no great distance
+on that of the other.[124]
+
+When we turn from _Othello_ to _Timon of Athens_ we find a play of quite
+another kind. _Othello_ is dramatically the most perfect of the
+tragedies. _Timon_, on the contrary, is weak, ill-constructed and
+confused; and, though care might have made it clear, no mere care could
+make it really dramatic. Yet it is undoubtedly Shakespearean in part,
+probably in great part; and it immediately reminds us of _King Lear_.
+Both plays deal with the tragic effects of ingratitude. In both the
+victim is exceptionally unsuspicious, soft-hearted and vehement. In both
+he is completely overwhelmed, passing through fury to madness in the one
+case, to suicide in the other. Famous passages in both plays are curses.
+The misanthropy of Timon pours itself out in a torrent of maledictions
+on the whole race of man; and these at once recall, alike by their form
+and their substance, the most powerful speeches uttered by Lear in his
+madness. In both plays occur repeated comparisons between man and the
+beasts; the idea that 'the strain of man's bred out into baboon,' wolf,
+tiger, fox; the idea that this bestial degradation will end in a furious
+struggle of all with all, in which the race will perish. The
+'pessimistic' strain in _Timon_ suggests to many readers, even more
+imperatively than _King Lear_, the notion that Shakespeare was giving
+vent to some personal feeling, whether present or past; for the signs of
+his hand appear most unmistakably when the hero begins to pour the vials
+of his wrath upon mankind. _Timon_, lastly, in some of the
+unquestionably Shakespearean parts, bears (as it appears to me) so
+strong a resemblance to _King Lear_ in style and in versification that
+it is hard to understand how competent judges can suppose that it
+belongs to a time at all near that of the final romances, or even that
+it was written so late as the last Roman plays. It is more likely to
+have been composed immediately after _King Lear_ and before
+_Macbeth_.[125]
+
+Drawing these comparisons together, we may say that, while as a work of
+art and in tragic power _King Lear_ is infinitely nearer to _Othello_
+than to _Timon_, in its spirit and substance its affinity with _Timon_
+is a good deal the stronger. And, returning to the point from which
+these comparisons began, I would now add that there is in _King Lear_ a
+reflection or anticipation, however faint, of the structural weakness of
+_Timon_. This weakness in _King Lear_ is not due, however, to anything
+intrinsically undramatic in the story, but to characteristics which were
+necessary to an effect not wholly dramatic. The stage is the test of
+strictly dramatic quality, and _King Lear_ is too huge for the stage. Of
+course, I am not denying that it is a great stage-play. It has scenes
+immensely effective in the theatre; three of them--the two between Lear
+and Goneril and between Lear, Goneril and Regan, and the ineffably
+beautiful scene in the Fourth Act between Lear and Cordelia--lose in the
+theatre very little of the spell they have for imagination; and the
+gradual interweaving of the two plots is almost as masterly as in _Much
+Ado_. But (not to speak of defects due to mere carelessness) that which
+makes the _peculiar_ greatness of King Lear,--the immense scope of the
+work; the mass and variety of intense experience which it contains; the
+interpenetration of sublime imagination, piercing pathos, and humour
+almost as moving as the pathos; the vastness of the convulsion both of
+nature and of human passion; the vagueness of the scene where the action
+takes place, and of the movements of the figures which cross this scene;
+the strange atmosphere, cold and dark, which strikes on us as we enter
+this scene, enfolding these figures and magnifying their dim outlines
+like a winter mist; the half-realised suggestions of vast universal
+powers working in the world of individual fates and passions,--all this
+interferes with dramatic clearness even when the play is read, and in
+the theatre not only refuses to reveal itself fully through the senses
+but seems to be almost in contradiction with their reports. This is not
+so with the other great tragedies. No doubt, as Lamb declared,
+theatrical representation gives only a part of what we imagine when we
+read them; but there is no _conflict_ between the representation and the
+imagination, because these tragedies are, in essentials, perfectly
+dramatic. But _King Lear_, as a whole, is imperfectly dramatic, and
+there is something in its very essence which is at war with the senses,
+and demands a purely imaginative realisation. It is therefore
+Shakespeare's greatest work, but it is not what Hazlitt called it, the
+best of his plays; and its comparative unpopularity is due, not merely
+to the extreme painfulness of the catastrophe, but in part to its
+dramatic defects, and in part to a failure in many readers to catch the
+peculiar effects to which I have referred,--a failure which is natural
+because the appeal is made not so much to dramatic perception as to a
+rarer and more strictly poetic kind of imagination. For this reason,
+too, even the best attempts at exposition of _King Lear_ are
+disappointing; they remind us of attempts to reduce to prose the
+impalpable spirit of the _Tempest_.
+
+I propose to develop some of these ideas by considering, first, the
+dramatic defects of the play, and then some of the causes of its
+extraordinary imaginative effect.
+
+
+1
+
+We may begin, however, by referring to two passages which have often
+been criticised with injustice. The first is that where the blinded
+Gloster, believing that he is going to leap down Dover cliff, does in
+fact fall flat on the ground at his feet, and then is persuaded that he
+_has_ leaped down Dover cliff but has been miraculously preserved.
+Imagine this incident transferred to _Othello_, and you realise how
+completely the two tragedies differ in dramatic atmosphere. In _Othello_
+it would be a shocking or a ludicrous dissonance, but it is in harmony
+with the spirit of _King Lear_. And not only is this so, but, contrary
+to expectation, it is not, if properly acted, in the least absurd on the
+stage. The imagination and the feelings have been worked upon with such
+effect by the description of the cliff, and by the portrayal of the old
+man's despair and his son's courageous and loving wisdom, that we are
+unconscious of the grotesqueness of the incident for common sense.
+
+The second passage is more important, for it deals with the origin of
+the whole conflict. The oft-repeated judgment that the first scene of
+_King Lear_ is absurdly improbable, and that no sane man would think of
+dividing his kingdom among his daughters in proportion to the strength
+of their several protestations of love, is much too harsh and is based
+upon a strange misunderstanding. This scene acts effectively, and to
+imagination the story is not at all incredible. It is merely strange,
+like so many of the stories on which our romantic dramas are based.
+Shakespeare, besides, has done a good deal to soften the improbability
+of the legend, and he has done much more than the casual reader
+perceives. The very first words of the drama, as Coleridge pointed out,
+tell us that the division of the kingdom is already settled in all its
+details, so that only the public announcement of it remains.[126] Later
+we find that the lines of division have already been drawn on the map of
+Britain (l. 38), and again that Cordelia's share, which is her dowry, is
+perfectly well known to Burgundy, if not to France (ll. 197, 245). That
+then which is censured as absurd, the dependence of the division on the
+speeches of the daughters, was in Lear's intention a mere form, devised
+as a childish scheme to gratify his love of absolute power and his
+hunger for assurances of devotion. And this scheme is perfectly in
+character. We may even say that the main cause of its failure was not
+that Goneril and Regan were exceptionally hypocritical, but that
+Cordelia was exceptionally sincere and unbending. And it is essential to
+observe that its failure, and the consequent necessity of publicly
+reversing his whole well-known intention, is one source of Lear's
+extreme anger. He loved Cordelia most and knew that she loved him best,
+and the supreme moment to which he looked forward was that in which she
+should outdo her sisters in expressions of affection, and should be
+rewarded by that 'third' of the kingdom which was the most 'opulent.'
+And then--so it naturally seemed to him--she put him to open shame.
+
+There is a further point, which seems to have escaped the attention of
+Coleridge and others. Part of the absurdity of Lear's plan is taken to
+be his idea of living with his three daughters in turn. But he never
+meant to do this. He meant to live with Cordelia, and with her
+alone.[127] The scheme of his alternate monthly stay with Goneril and
+Regan is forced on him at the moment by what he thinks the undutifulness
+of his favourite child. In fact his whole original plan, though foolish
+and rash, was not a 'hideous rashness'[128] or incredible folly. If
+carried out it would have had no such consequences as followed its
+alteration. It would probably have led quickly to war,[129] but not to
+the agony which culminated in the storm upon the heath. The first scene,
+therefore, is not absurd, though it must be pronounced dramatically
+faulty in so far as it discloses the true position of affairs only to an
+attention more alert than can be expected in a theatrical audience or
+has been found in many critics of the play.
+
+Let us turn next to two passages of another kind, the two which are
+mainly responsible for the accusation of excessive painfulness, and so
+for the distaste of many readers and the long theatrical eclipse of
+_King Lear_. The first of these is much the less important; it is the
+scene of the blinding of Gloster. The blinding of Gloster on the stage
+has been condemned almost universally; and surely with justice, because
+the mere physical horror of such a spectacle would in the theatre be a
+sensation so violent as to overpower the purely tragic emotions, and
+therefore the spectacle would seem revolting or shocking. But it is
+otherwise in reading. For mere imagination the physical horror, though
+not lost, is so far deadened that it can do its duty as a stimulus to
+pity, and to that appalled dismay at the extremity of human cruelty
+which it is of the essence of the tragedy to excite. Thus the blinding
+of Gloster belongs rightly to _King Lear_ in its proper world of
+imagination; it is a blot upon _King Lear_ as a stage-play.
+
+But what are we to say of the second and far more important passage, the
+conclusion of the tragedy, the 'unhappy ending,' as it is called, though
+the word 'unhappy' sounds almost ironical in its weakness? Is this too a
+blot upon _King Lear_ as a stage-play? The question is not so easily
+answered as might appear. Doubtless we are right when we turn with
+disgust from Tate's sentimental alterations, from his marriage of Edgar
+and Cordelia, and from that cheap moral which every one of Shakespeare's
+tragedies contradicts, 'that Truth and Virtue shall at last succeed.'
+But are we so sure that we are right when we unreservedly condemn the
+feeling which prompted these alterations, or at all events the feeling
+which beyond question comes naturally to many readers of _King Lear_ who
+would like Tate as little as we? What they wish, though they have not
+always the courage to confess it even to themselves, is that the deaths
+of Edmund, Goneril, Regan and Gloster should be followed by the escape
+of Lear and Cordelia from death, and that we should be allowed to
+imagine the poor old King passing quietly in the home of his beloved
+child to the end which cannot be far off. Now, I do not dream of saying
+that we ought to wish this, so long as we regard _King Lear_ simply as a
+work of poetic imagination. But if _King Lear_ is to be considered
+strictly as a drama, or simply as we consider _Othello_, it is not so
+clear that the wish is unjustified. In fact I will take my courage in
+both hands and say boldly that I share it, and also that I believe
+Shakespeare would have ended his play thus had he taken the subject in
+hand a few years later, in the days of _Cymbeline_ and the _Winter's
+Tale_. If I read _King Lear_ simply as a drama, I find that my feelings
+call for this 'happy ending.' I do not mean the human, the
+philanthropic, feelings, but the dramatic sense. The former wish Hamlet
+and Othello to escape their doom; the latter does not; but it does wish
+Lear and Cordelia to be saved. Surely, it says, the tragic emotions have
+been sufficiently stirred already. Surely the tragic outcome of Lear's
+error and his daughters' ingratitude has been made clear enough and
+moving enough. And, still more surely, such a tragic catastrophe as this
+should seem _inevitable_. But this catastrophe, unlike those of all the
+other mature tragedies, does not seem at all inevitable. It is not even
+satisfactorily motived.[130] In fact it seems expressly designed to fall
+suddenly like a bolt from a sky cleared by the vanished storm. And
+although from a wider point of view one may fully recognise the value of
+this effect, and may even reject with horror the wish for a 'happy
+ending,' this wider point of view, I must maintain, is not strictly
+dramatic or tragic.
+
+Of course this is a heresy and all the best authority is against it. But
+then the best authority, it seems to me, is either influenced
+unconsciously by disgust at Tate's sentimentalism or unconsciously takes
+that wider point of view. When Lamb--there is no higher
+authority--writes, 'A happy ending!--as if the living martyrdom that
+Lear had gone through, the flaying of his feelings alive, did not make a
+fair dismissal from the stage of life the only decorous thing for him,'
+I answer, first, that it is precisely this _fair_ dismissal which we
+desire for him instead of renewed anguish; and, secondly, that what we
+desire for him during the brief remainder of his days is not 'the
+childish pleasure of getting his gilt robes and sceptre again,' not what
+Tate gives him, but what Shakespeare himself might have given him--peace
+and happiness by Cordelia's fireside. And if I am told that he has
+suffered too much for this, how can I possibly believe it with these
+words ringing in my ears:
+
+                      Come, let's away to prison:
+     We two alone will sing like birds i' the cage.
+     When thou dost ask me blessing, I'll kneel down,
+     And ask of thee forgiveness: so we'll live,
+     And pray, and sing, and tell old tales, and laugh
+     At gilded butterflies?
+
+And again when Schlegel declares that, if Lear were saved, 'the whole'
+would 'lose its significance,' because it would no longer show us that
+the belief in Providence 'requires a wider range than the dark
+pilgrimage on earth to be established in its whole extent,' I answer
+that, if the drama does show us that, it takes us beyond the strictly
+tragic point of view.[131]
+
+A dramatic mistake in regard to the catastrophe, however, even supposing
+it to exist, would not seriously affect the whole play. The principal
+structural weakness of _King Lear_ lies elsewhere. It is felt to some
+extent in the earlier Acts, but still more (as from our study of
+Shakespeare's technique we have learnt to expect) in the Fourth and the
+first part of the Fifth. And it arises chiefly from the double action,
+which is a peculiarity of _King Lear_ among the tragedies. By the side
+of Lear, his daughters, Kent, and the Fool, who are the principal
+figures in the main plot, stand Gloster and his two sons, the chief
+persons of the secondary plot. Now by means of this double action
+Shakespeare secured certain results highly advantageous even from the
+strictly dramatic point of view, and easy to perceive. But the
+disadvantages were dramatically greater. The number of essential
+characters is so large, their actions and movements are so complicated,
+and events towards the close crowd on one another so thickly, that the
+reader's attention,[132] rapidly transferred from one centre of interest
+to another, is overstrained. He becomes, if not intellectually confused,
+at least emotionally fatigued. The battle, on which everything turns,
+scarcely affects him. The deaths of Edmund, Goneril, Regan and Gloster
+seem 'but trifles here'; and anything short of the incomparable pathos
+of the close would leave him cold. There is something almost ludicrous
+in the insignificance of this battle, when it is compared with the
+corresponding battles in _Julius Caesar_ and _Macbeth_; and though there
+may have been further reasons for its insignificance, the main one is
+simply that there was no room to give it its due effect among such a
+host of competing interests.[133]
+
+A comparison of the last two Acts of _Othello_ with the last two Acts of
+_King Lear_ would show how unfavourable to dramatic clearness is a
+multiplicity of figures. But that this multiplicity is not in itself a
+fatal obstacle is evident from the last two Acts of _Hamlet_, and
+especially from the final scene. This is in all respects one of
+Shakespeare's triumphs, yet the stage is crowded with characters. Only
+they are not _leading_ characters. The plot is single; Hamlet and the
+King are the 'mighty opposites'; and Ophelia, the only other person in
+whom we are obliged to take a vivid interest, has already disappeared.
+It is therefore natural and right that the deaths of Laertes and the
+Queen should affect us comparatively little. But in _King Lear_, because
+the plot is double, we have present in the last scene no less than five
+persons who are technically of the first importance--Lear, his three
+daughters and Edmund; not to speak of Kent and Edgar, of whom the latter
+at any rate is technically quite as important as Laertes. And again,
+owing to the pressure of persons and events, and owing to the
+concentration of our anxiety on Lear and Cordelia, the combat of Edgar
+and Edmund, which occupies so considerable a space, fails to excite a
+tithe of the interest of the fencing-match in _Hamlet_. The truth is
+that all through these Acts Shakespeare has too vast a material to use
+with complete dramatic effectiveness, however essential this very
+vastness was for effects of another kind.
+
+Added to these defects there are others, which suggest that in _King
+Lear_ Shakespeare was less concerned than usual with dramatic fitness:
+improbabilities, inconsistencies, sayings and doings which suggest
+questions only to be answered by conjecture. The improbabilities in
+_King Lear_ surely far surpass those of the other great tragedies in
+number and in grossness. And they are particularly noticeable in the
+secondary plot. For example, no sort of reason is given why Edgar, who
+lives in the same house with Edmund, should write a letter to him
+instead of speaking; and this is a letter absolutely damning to his
+character. Gloster was very foolish, but surely not so foolish as to
+pass unnoticed this improbability; or, if so foolish, what need for
+Edmund to forge a letter rather than a conversation, especially as
+Gloster appears to be unacquainted with his son's handwriting?[134] Is
+it in character that Edgar should be persuaded without the slightest
+demur to avoid his father instead of confronting him and asking him the
+cause of his anger? Why in the world should Gloster, when expelled from
+his castle, wander painfully all the way to Dover simply in order to
+destroy himself (IV. i. 80)? And is it not extraordinary that, after
+Gloster's attempted suicide, Edgar should first talk to him in the
+language of a gentleman, then to Oswald in his presence in broad peasant
+dialect, then again to Gloster in gentle language, and yet that Gloster
+should not manifest the least surprise?
+
+Again, to take three instances of another kind; (_a_) only a fortnight
+seems to have elapsed between the first scene and the breach with
+Goneril; yet already there are rumours not only of war between Goneril
+and Regan but of the coming of a French army; and this, Kent says, is
+perhaps connected with the harshness of _both_ the sisters to their
+father, although Regan has apparently had no opportunity of showing any
+harshness till the day before. (_b_) In the quarrel with Goneril Lear
+speaks of his having to dismiss fifty of his followers at a clap, yet
+she has neither mentioned any number nor had any opportunity of
+mentioning it off the stage. (_c_) Lear and Goneril, intending to hurry
+to Regan, both send off messengers to her, and both tell the messengers
+to bring back an answer. But it does not appear either how the
+messengers _could_ return or what answer could be required, as their
+superiors are following them with the greatest speed.
+
+Once more, (_a_) why does Edgar not reveal himself to his blind father,
+as he truly says he ought to have done? The answer is left to mere
+conjecture. (_b_) Why does Kent so carefully preserve his incognito till
+the last scene? He says he does it for an important purpose, but what
+the purpose is we have to guess. (_c_) Why Burgundy rather than France
+should have first choice of Cordelia's hand is a question we cannot help
+asking, but there is no hint of any answer.[135] (_d_) I have referred
+already to the strange obscurity regarding Edmund's delay in trying to
+save his victims, and I will not extend this list of examples. No one of
+such defects is surprising when considered by itself, but their number
+is surely significant. Taken in conjunction with other symptoms it means
+that Shakespeare, set upon the dramatic effect of the great scenes and
+upon certain effects not wholly dramatic, was exceptionally careless of
+probability, clearness and consistency in smaller matters, introducing
+what was convenient or striking for a momentary purpose without
+troubling himself about anything more than the moment. In presence of
+these signs it seems doubtful whether his failure to give information
+about the fate of the Fool was due to anything more than carelessness or
+an impatient desire to reduce his overloaded material.[136]
+
+Before I turn to the other side of the subject I will refer to one more
+characteristic of this play which is dramatically disadvantageous. In
+Shakespeare's dramas, owing to the absence of scenery from the
+Elizabethan stage, the question, so vexatious to editors, of the exact
+locality of a particular scene is usually unimportant and often
+unanswerable; but, as a rule, we know, broadly speaking, where the
+persons live and what their journeys are. The text makes this plain, for
+example, almost throughout _Hamlet_, _Othello_ and _Macbeth_; and the
+imagination is therefore untroubled. But in _King Lear_ the indications
+are so scanty that the reader's mind is left not seldom both vague and
+bewildered. Nothing enables us to imagine whereabouts in Britain Lear's
+palace lies, or where the Duke of Albany lives. In referring to the
+dividing-lines on the map, Lear tells us of shadowy forests and
+plenteous rivers, but, unlike Hotspur and his companions, he studiously
+avoids proper names. The Duke of Cornwall, we presume in the absence of
+information, is likely to live in Cornwall; but we suddenly find, from
+the introduction of a place-name which all readers take at first for a
+surname, that he lives at Gloster (I. v. 1).[137] This seems likely to
+be also the home of the Earl of Gloster, to whom Cornwall is patron. But
+no: it is a night's journey from Cornwall's 'house' to Gloster's, and
+Gloster's is in the middle of an uninhabited heath.[138] Here, for the
+purpose of the crisis, nearly all the persons assemble, but they do so
+in a manner which no casual spectator or reader could follow. Afterwards
+they all drift towards Dover for the purpose of the catastrophe; but
+again the localities and movements are unusually indefinite. And this
+indefiniteness is found in smaller matters. One cannot help asking, for
+example, and yet one feels one had better not ask, where that 'lodging'
+of Edmund's can be, in which he hides Edgar from his father, and whether
+Edgar is mad that he should return from his hollow tree (in a district
+where 'for many miles about there's scarce a bush') to his father's
+castle in order to soliloquise (II. iii.):--for the favourite
+stage-direction, 'a wood' (which is more than 'a bush'), however
+convenient to imagination, is scarcely compatible with the presence of
+Kent asleep in the stocks.[139] Something of the confusion which
+bewilders the reader's mind in _King Lear_ recurs in _Antony and
+Cleopatra_, the most faultily constructed of all the tragedies; but
+there it is due not so much to the absence or vagueness of the
+indications as to the necessity of taking frequent and fatiguing
+journeys over thousands of miles. Shakespeare could not help himself in
+the Roman play: in _King Lear_ he did not choose to help himself,
+perhaps deliberately chose to be vague.
+
+From these defects, or from some of them, follows one result which must
+be familiar to many readers of _King Lear_. It is far more difficult to
+retrace in memory the steps of the action in this tragedy than in
+_Hamlet_, _Othello_, or _Macbeth_. The outline is of course quite clear;
+anyone could write an 'argument' of the play. But when an attempt is
+made to fill in the detail, it issues sooner or later in confusion even
+with readers whose dramatic memory is unusually strong.[140]
+
+
+2
+
+How is it, now, that this defective drama so overpowers us that we are
+either unconscious of its blemishes or regard them as almost irrelevant?
+As soon as we turn to this question we recognise, not merely that _King
+Lear_ possesses purely dramatic qualities which far outweigh its
+defects, but that its greatness consists partly in imaginative effects
+of a wider kind. And, looking for the sources of these effects, we find
+among them some of those very things which appeared to us dramatically
+faulty or injurious. Thus, to take at once two of the simplest examples
+of this, that very vagueness in the sense of locality which we have just
+considered, and again that excess in the bulk of the material and the
+number of figures, events and movements, while they interfere with the
+clearness of vision, have at the same time a positive value for
+imagination. They give the feeling of vastness, the feeling not of a
+scene or particular place, but of a world; or, to speak more accurately,
+of a particular place which is also a world. This world is dim to us,
+partly from its immensity, and partly because it is filled with gloom;
+and in the gloom shapes approach and recede, whose half-seen faces and
+motions touch us with dread, horror, or the most painful
+pity,--sympathies and antipathies which we seem to be feeling not only
+for them but for the whole race. This world, we are told, is called
+Britain; but we should no more look for it in an atlas than for the
+place, called Caucasus, where Prometheus was chained by Strength and
+Force and comforted by the daughters of Ocean, or the place where
+Farinata stands erect in his glowing tomb, 'Come avesse lo Inferno in
+gran dispitto.'
+
+Consider next the double action. It has certain strictly dramatic
+advantages, and may well have had its origin in purely dramatic
+considerations. To go no further, the secondary plot fills out a story
+which would by itself have been somewhat thin, and it provides a most
+effective contrast between its personages and those of the main plot,
+the tragic strength and stature of the latter being heightened by
+comparison with the slighter build of the former. But its chief value
+lies elsewhere, and is not merely dramatic. It lies in the fact--in
+Shakespeare without a parallel--that the sub-plot simply repeats the
+theme of the main story. Here, as there, we see an old man 'with a white
+beard.' He, like Lear, is affectionate, unsuspicious, foolish, and
+self-willed. He, too, wrongs deeply a child who loves him not less for
+the wrong. He, too, meets with monstrous ingratitude from the child whom
+he favours, and is tortured and driven to death. This repetition does
+not simply double the pain with which the tragedy is witnessed: it
+startles and terrifies by suggesting that the folly of Lear and the
+ingratitude of his daughters are no accidents or merely individual
+aberrations, but that in that dark cold world some fateful malignant
+influence is abroad, turning the hearts of the fathers against their
+children and of the children against their fathers, smiting the earth
+with a curse, so that the brother gives the brother to death and the
+father the son, blinding the eyes, maddening the brain, freezing the
+springs of pity, numbing all powers except the nerves of anguish and the
+dull lust of life.[141]
+
+Hence too, as well as from other sources, comes that feeling which
+haunts us in _King Lear_, as though we were witnessing something
+universal,--a conflict not so much of particular persons as of the
+powers of good and evil in the world. And the treatment of many of the
+characters confirms this feeling. Considered simply as psychological
+studies few of them, surely, are of the highest interest. Fine and
+subtle touches could not be absent from a work of Shakespeare's
+maturity; but, with the possible exception of Lear himself, no one of
+the characters strikes us as psychologically a _wonderful_ creation,
+like Hamlet or Iago or even Macbeth; one or two seem even to be somewhat
+faint and thin. And, what is more significant, it is not quite natural
+to us to regard them from this point of view at all. Rather we observe a
+most unusual circumstance. If Lear, Gloster and Albany are set apart,
+the rest fall into two distinct groups, which are strongly, even
+violently, contrasted: Cordelia, Kent, Edgar, the Fool on one side,
+Goneril, Regan, Edmund, Cornwall, Oswald on the other. These characters
+are in various degrees individualised, most of them completely so; but
+still in each group there is a quality common to all the members, or one
+spirit breathing through them all. Here we have unselfish and devoted
+love, there hard self-seeking. On both sides, further, the common
+quality takes an extreme form; the love is incapable of being chilled by
+injury, the selfishness of being softened by pity; and, it may be added,
+this tendency to extremes is found again in the characters of Lear and
+Gloster, and is the main source of the accusations of improbability
+directed against their conduct at certain points. Hence the members of
+each group tend to appear, at least in part, as varieties of one
+species; the radical differences of the two species are emphasized in
+broad hard strokes; and the two are set in conflict, almost as if
+Shakespeare, like Empedocles, were regarding Love and Hate as the two
+ultimate forces of the universe.
+
+The presence in _King Lear_ of so large a number of characters in whom
+love or self-seeking is so extreme, has another effect. They do not
+merely inspire in us emotions of unusual strength, but they also stir
+the intellect to wonder and speculation. How can there be such men and
+women? we ask ourselves. How comes it that humanity can take such
+absolutely opposite forms? And, in particular, to what omission of
+elements which should be present in human nature, or, if there is no
+omission, to what distortion of these elements is it due that such
+beings as some of these come to exist? This is a question which Iago
+(and perhaps no previous creation of Shakespeare's) forces us to ask,
+but in _King Lear_ it is provoked again and again. And more, it seems to
+us that the author himself is asking this question. 'Then let them
+anatomise Regan, see what breeds about her heart. Is there any cause in
+nature that makes these hard hearts?'--the strain of thought which
+appears here seems to be present in some degree throughout the play. We
+seem to trace the tendency which, a few years later, produced Ariel and
+Caliban, the tendency of imagination to analyse and abstract, to
+decompose human nature into its constituent factors, and then to
+construct beings in whom one or more of these factors is absent or
+atrophied or only incipient. This, of course, is a tendency which
+produces symbols, allegories, personifications of qualities and abstract
+ideas; and we are accustomed to think it quite foreign to Shakespeare's
+genius, which was in the highest degree concrete. No doubt in the main
+we are right here; but it is hazardous to set limits to that genius. The
+Sonnets, if nothing else, may show us how easy it was to Shakespeare's
+mind to move in a world of 'Platonic' ideas;[142] and, while it would be
+going too far to suggest that he was employing conscious symbolism or
+allegory in _King Lear_, it does appear to disclose a mode of
+imagination not so very far removed from the mode with which, we must
+remember, Shakespeare was perfectly familiar in Morality plays and in
+the _Fairy Queen_.
+
+This same tendency shows itself in _King Lear_ in other forms. To it is
+due the idea of monstrosity--of beings, actions, states of mind, which
+appear not only abnormal but absolutely contrary to nature; an idea,
+which, of course, is common enough in Shakespeare, but appears with
+unusual frequency in _King Lear_, for instance in the lines:
+
+     Ingratitude, thou marble-hearted fiend,
+     More hideous when thou show'st thee in a child
+     Than the sea-monster!
+
+or in the exclamation,
+
+                               Filial ingratitude!
+     Is it not as this mouth should tear this hand
+     For lifting food to't?
+
+It appears in another shape in that most vivid passage where Albany, as
+he looks at the face which had bewitched him, now distorted with
+dreadful passions, suddenly sees it in a new light and exclaims in
+horror:
+
+     Thou changed and self-cover'd thing, for shame.
+     Be-monster not thy feature. Were't my fitness
+     To let these hands obey my blood,
+     They are apt enough to dislocate and tear
+     Thy flesh and bones: howe'er thou art a fiend,
+     A woman's shape doth shield thee.[143]
+
+It appears once more in that exclamation of Kent's, as he listens to
+the description of Cordelia's grief:
+
+                             It is the stars,
+     The stars above us, govern our conditions;
+     Else one self mate and mate could not beget
+     Such different issues.
+
+(This is not the only sign that Shakespeare had been musing over
+heredity, and wondering how it comes about that the composition of two
+strains of blood or two parent souls can produce such astonishingly
+different products.)
+
+This mode of thought is responsible, lastly, for a very striking
+characteristic of _King Lear_--one in which it has no parallel except
+_Timon_--the incessant references to the lower animals[144] and man's
+likeness to them. These references are scattered broadcast through the
+whole play, as though Shakespeare's mind were so busy with the subject
+that he could hardly write a page without some allusion to it. The dog,
+the horse, the cow, the sheep, the hog, the lion, the bear, the wolf,
+the fox, the monkey, the pole-cat, the civet-cat, the pelican, the owl,
+the crow, the chough, the wren, the fly, the butterfly, the rat, the
+mouse, the frog, the tadpole, the wall-newt, the water-newt, the worm--I
+am sure I cannot have completed the list, and some of them are mentioned
+again and again. Often, of course, and especially in the talk of Edgar
+as the Bedlam, they have no symbolical meaning; but not seldom, even in
+his talk, they are expressly referred to for their typical
+qualities--'hog in sloth, fox in stealth, wolf in greediness, dog in
+madness, lion in prey,' 'The fitchew nor the soiled horse goes to't With
+a more riotous appetite.' Sometimes a person in the drama is compared,
+openly or implicitly, with one of them. Goneril is a kite: her
+ingratitude has a serpent's tooth: she has struck her father most
+serpent-like upon the very heart: her visage is wolvish: she has tied
+sharp-toothed unkindness like a vulture on her father's breast: for her
+husband she is a gilded serpent: to Gloster her cruelty seems to have
+the fangs of a boar. She and Regan are dog-hearted: they are tigers, not
+daughters: each is an adder to the other: the flesh of each is covered
+with the fell of a beast. Oswald is a mongrel, and the son and heir of a
+mongrel: ducking to everyone in power, he is a wag-tail: white with
+fear, he is a goose. Gloster, for Regan, is an ingrateful fox: Albany,
+for his wife, has a cowish spirit and is milk-liver'd: when Edgar as the
+Bedlam first appeared to Lear he made him think a man a worm. As we
+read, the souls of all the beasts in turn seem to us to have entered the
+bodies of these mortals; horrible in their venom, savagery, lust,
+deceitfulness, sloth, cruelty, filthiness; miserable in their
+feebleness, nakedness, defencelessness, blindness; and man, 'consider
+him well,' is even what they are. Shakespeare, to whom the idea of the
+transmigration of souls was familiar and had once been material for
+jest,[145] seems to have been brooding on humanity in the light of it.
+It is remarkable, and somewhat sad, that he seems to find none of man's
+better qualities in the world of the brutes (though he might well have
+found the prototype of the self-less love of Kent and Cordelia in the
+dog whom he so habitually maligns);[146] but he seems to have been
+asking himself whether that which he loathes in man may not be due to
+some strange wrenching of this frame of things, through which the lower
+animal souls have found a lodgment in human forms, and there found--to
+the horror and confusion of the thinking mind--brains to forge, tongues
+to speak, and hands to act, enormities which no mere brute can conceive
+or execute. He shows us in _King Lear_ these terrible forces bursting
+into monstrous life and flinging themselves upon those human beings who
+are weak and defenceless, partly from old age, but partly because they
+_are_ human and lack the dreadful undivided energy of the beast. And the
+only comfort he might seem to hold out to us is the prospect that at
+least this bestial race, strong only where it is vile, cannot endure:
+though stars and gods are powerless, or careless, or empty dreams, yet
+there must be an end of this horrible world:
+
+     It will come;
+     Humanity must perforce prey on itself
+     Like monsters of the deep.[147]
+
+The influence of all this on imagination as we read _King Lear_ is very
+great; and it combines with other influences to convey to us, not in the
+form of distinct ideas but in the manner proper to poetry, the wider or
+universal significance of the spectacle presented to the inward eye. But
+the effect of theatrical exhibition is precisely the reverse. There the
+poetic atmosphere is dissipated; the meaning of the very words which
+create it passes half-realised; in obedience to the tyranny of the eye
+we conceive the characters as mere particular men and women; and all
+that mass of vague suggestion, if it enters the mind at all, appears in
+the shape of an allegory which we immediately reject. A similar conflict
+between imagination and sense will be found if we consider the dramatic
+centre of the whole tragedy, the Storm-scenes. The temptation of Othello
+and the scene of Duncan's murder may lose upon the stage, but they do
+not lose their essence, and they gain as well as lose. The Storm-scenes
+in _King Lear_ gain nothing and their very essence is destroyed. It is
+comparatively a small thing that the theatrical storm, not to drown the
+dialogue, must be silent whenever a human being wishes to speak, and is
+wretchedly inferior to many a storm we have witnessed. Nor is it simply
+that, as Lamb observed, the corporal presence of Lear, 'an old man
+tottering about the stage with a walking-stick,' disturbs and depresses
+that sense of the greatness of his mind which fills the imagination.
+There is a further reason, which is not expressed, but still emerges, in
+these words of Lamb's: 'the explosions of his passion are terrible as a
+volcano: they are storms turning up and disclosing to the bottom that
+sea, his mind, with all its vast riches.' Yes, 'they are _storms_.' For
+imagination, that is to say, the explosions of Lear's passion, and the
+bursts of rain and thunder, are not, what for the senses they must be,
+two things, but manifestations of one thing. It is the powers of the
+tormented soul that we hear and see in the 'groans of roaring wind and
+rain' and the 'sheets of fire'; and they that, at intervals almost more
+overwhelming, sink back into darkness and silence. Nor yet is even this
+all; but, as those incessant references to wolf and tiger made us see
+humanity 'reeling back into the beast' and ravening against itself, so
+in the storm we seem to see Nature herself convulsed by the same
+horrible passions; the 'common mother,'
+
+     Whose womb immeasurable and infinite breast
+     Teems and feeds all,
+
+turning on her children, to complete the ruin they have wrought upon
+themselves. Surely something not less, but much more, than these
+helpless words convey, is what comes to us in these astounding scenes;
+and if, translated thus into the language of prose, it becomes confused
+and inconsistent, the reason is simply that it itself is poetry, and
+such poetry as cannot be transferred to the space behind the
+foot-lights, but has its being only in imagination. Here then is
+Shakespeare at his very greatest, but not the mere dramatist
+Shakespeare.[148]
+
+And now we may say this also of the catastrophe, which we found
+questionable from the strictly dramatic point of view. Its purpose is
+not merely dramatic. This sudden blow out of the darkness, which seems
+so far from inevitable, and which strikes down our reviving hopes for
+the victims of so much cruelty, seems now only what we might have
+expected in a world so wild and monstrous. It is as if Shakespeare said
+to us: 'Did you think weakness and innocence have any chance here? Were
+you beginning to dream that? I will show you it is not so.'
+
+I come to a last point. As we contemplate this world, the question
+presses on us, What can be the ultimate power that moves it, that
+excites this gigantic war and waste, or, perhaps, that suffers them and
+overrules them? And in _King Lear_ this question is not left to us to
+ask, it is raised by the characters themselves. References to religious
+or irreligious beliefs and feelings are more frequent than is usual in
+Shakespeare's tragedies, as frequent perhaps as in his final plays. He
+introduces characteristic differences in the language of the different
+persons about fortune or the stars or the gods, and shows how the
+question What rules the world? is forced upon their minds. They answer
+it in their turn: Kent, for instance:
+
+                           It is the stars,
+     The stars above us, govern our condition:
+
+Edmund:
+
+     Thou, nature, art my goddess; to thy law
+     My services are bound:
+
+and again,
+
+     This is the excellent foppery of the world, that, when we are
+     sick in fortune--often the surfeit of our own behaviour--we
+     make guilty of our disasters the sun, the moon and the stars;
+     as if we were villains by necessity, fools by heavenly
+     compulsion, ... and all that we are evil in by a divine
+     thrusting on:
+
+Gloster:
+
+     As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods;
+     They kill us for their sport;
+
+Edgar:
+
+     Think that the clearest gods, who make them honours
+     Of men's impossibilities, have preserved thee.
+
+Here we have four distinct theories of the nature of the ruling power.
+And besides this, in such of the characters as have any belief in gods
+who love good and hate evil, the spectacle of triumphant injustice or
+cruelty provokes questionings like those of Job, or else the thought,
+often repeated, of divine retribution. To Lear at one moment the storm
+seems the messenger of heaven:
+
+                         Let the great gods,
+     That keep this dreadful pother o'er our heads,
+     Find out their enemies now. Tremble, thou wretch,
+     That hast within thee undivulged crimes....
+
+At another moment those habitual miseries of the poor, of which he has
+taken too little account, seem to him to accuse the gods of injustice:
+
+                Take physic, pomp;
+     Expose thyself to feel what wretches feel,
+     That thou mayst shake the superflux to them
+     And show the heavens more just;
+
+and Gloster has almost the same thought (IV. i. 67 ff.). Gloster again,
+thinking of the cruelty of Lear's daughters, breaks out,
+
+                       but I shall see
+     The winged vengeance overtake such children.
+
+The servants who have witnessed the blinding of Gloster by Cornwall and
+Regan, cannot believe that cruelty so atrocious will pass unpunished.
+One cries,
+
+     I'll never care what wickedness I do,
+     If this man come to good;
+
+and another,
+
+                       if she live long,
+     And in the end meet the old course of death,
+     Women will all turn monsters.
+
+Albany greets the news of Cornwall's death with the exclamation,
+
+              This shows you are above,
+     You justicers, that these our nether crimes
+     So speedily can venge;
+
+and the news of the deaths of the sisters with the words,
+
+     This judgment[149] of the heavens, that makes us tremble,
+     Touches us not with pity.
+
+Edgar, speaking to Edmund of their father, declares
+
+     The gods are just, and of our pleasant vices
+     Make instruments to plague us,
+
+and Edmund himself assents. Almost throughout the latter half of the
+drama we note in most of the better characters a pre-occupation with the
+question of the ultimate power, and a passionate need to explain by
+reference to it what otherwise would drive them to despair. And the
+influence of this pre-occupation and need joins with other influences in
+affecting the imagination, and in causing it to receive from _King Lear_
+an impression which is at least as near of kin to the _Divine Comedy_ as
+to _Othello_.
+
+
+3
+
+For Dante that which is recorded in the _Divine Comedy_ was the justice
+and love of God. What did _King Lear_ record for Shakespeare? Something,
+it would seem, very different. This is certainly the most terrible
+picture that Shakespeare painted of the world. In no other of his
+tragedies does humanity appear more pitiably infirm or more hopelessly
+bad. What is Iago's malignity against an envied stranger compared with
+the cruelty of the son of Gloster and the daughters of Lear? What are
+the sufferings of a strong man like Othello to those of helpless age?
+Much too that we have already observed--the repetition of the main theme
+in that of the under-plot, the comparisons of man with the most wretched
+and the most horrible of the beasts, the impression of Nature's
+hostility to him, the irony of the unexpected catastrophe--these, with
+much else, seem even to indicate an intention to show things at their
+worst, and to return the sternest of replies to that question of the
+ultimate power and those appeals for retribution. Is it an accident, for
+example, that Lear's first appeal to something beyond the earth,
+
+                      O heavens,
+     If you do love old men, if your sweet sway
+     Allow[150] obedience, if yourselves are old,
+     Make it your cause:
+
+is immediately answered by the iron voices of his daughters, raising by
+turns the conditions on which they will give him a humiliating
+harbourage; or that his second appeal, heart-rending in its piteousness,
+
+     You see me here, you gods, a poor old man,
+     As full of grief as age; wretched in both:
+
+is immediately answered from the heavens by the sounds of the breaking
+storm?[151] Albany and Edgar may moralise on the divine justice as they
+will, but how, in face of all that we see, shall we believe that they
+speak Shakespeare's mind? Is not his mind rather expressed in the bitter
+contrast between their faith and the events we witness, or in the
+scornful rebuke of those who take upon them the mystery of things as if
+they were God's spies?[152] Is it not Shakespeare's judgment on his kind
+that we hear in Lear's appeal,
+
+                   And thou, all-shaking thunder,
+     Smite flat the thick rotundity o' the world!
+     Crack nature's moulds, all germens spill at once,
+     That make ingrateful man!
+
+and Shakespeare's judgment on the worth of existence that we hear in
+Lear's agonised cry, 'No, no, no life!'?
+
+Beyond doubt, I think, some such feelings as these possess us, and, if
+we follow Shakespeare, ought to possess us, from time to time as we read
+_King Lear_. And some readers will go further and maintain that this is
+also the ultimate and total impression left by the tragedy. _King Lear_
+has been held to be profoundly 'pessimistic' in the full meaning of that
+word,--the record of a time when contempt and loathing for his kind had
+overmastered the poet's soul, and in despair he pronounced man's life to
+be simply hateful and hideous. And if we exclude the biographical part
+of this view,[153] the rest may claim some support even from the
+greatest of Shakespearean critics since the days of Coleridge, Hazlitt
+and Lamb. Mr. Swinburne, after observing that _King Lear_ is 'by far the
+most Aeschylean' of Shakespeare's works, proceeds thus:
+
+'But in one main point it differs radically from the work and the spirit
+of Aeschylus. Its fatalism is of a darker and harder nature. To
+Prometheus the fetters of the lord and enemy of mankind were bitter;
+upon Orestes the hand of heaven was laid too heavily to bear; yet in the
+not utterly infinite or everlasting distance we see beyond them the
+promise of the morning on which mystery and justice shall be made one;
+when righteousness and omnipotence at last shall kiss each other. But on
+the horizon of Shakespeare's tragic fatalism we see no such twilight of
+atonement, such pledge of reconciliation as this. Requital, redemption,
+amends, equity, explanation, pity and mercy, are words without a meaning
+here.
+
+     As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods;
+     They kill us for their sport.
+
+Here is no need of the Eumenides, children of Night everlasting; for
+here is very Night herself.
+
+'The words just cited are not casual or episodical; they strike the
+keynote of the whole poem, lay the keystone of the whole arch of
+thought. There is no contest of conflicting forces, no judgment so much
+as by casting of lots: far less is there any light of heavenly harmony
+or of heavenly wisdom, of Apollo or Athene from above. We have heard
+much and often from theologians of the light of revelation: and some
+such thing indeed we find in Aeschylus; but the darkness of revelation
+is here.'[154]
+
+It is hard to refuse assent to these eloquent words, for they express in
+the language of a poet what we feel at times in reading _King Lear_ but
+cannot express. But do they represent the total and final impression
+produced by the play? If they do, this impression, so far as the
+substance of the drama is concerned (and nothing else is in question
+here), must, it would seem, be one composed almost wholly of painful
+feelings,--utter depression, or indignant rebellion, or appalled
+despair. And that would surely be strange. For _King Lear_ is admittedly
+one of the world's greatest poems, and yet there is surely no other of
+these poems which produces on the whole this effect, and we regard it as
+a very serious flaw in any considerable work of art that this should be
+its ultimate effect.[155] So that Mr. Swinburne's description, if taken
+as final, and any description of King Lear as 'pessimistic' in the
+proper sense of that word, would imply a criticism which is not
+intended, and which would make it difficult to leave the work in the
+position almost universally assigned to it.
+
+But in fact these descriptions, like most of the remarks made on _King
+Lear_ in the present lecture, emphasise only certain aspects of the play
+and certain elements in the total impression; and in that impression the
+effect of these aspects, though far from being lost, is modified by that
+of others. I do not mean that the final effect resembles that of the
+_Divine Comedy_ or the _Oresteia_: how should it, when the first of
+these can be called by its author a 'Comedy,' and when the second,
+ending (as doubtless the _Prometheus_ trilogy also ended) with a
+solution, is not in the Shakespearean sense a tragedy at all?[156] Nor
+do I mean that _King Lear_ contains a revelation of righteous
+omnipotence or heavenly harmony, or even a promise of the reconciliation
+of mystery and justice. But then, as we saw, neither do Shakespeare's
+other tragedies contain these things. Any theological interpretation of
+the world on the author's part is excluded from them, and their effect
+would be disordered or destroyed equally by the ideas of righteous or of
+unrighteous omnipotence. Nor, in reading them, do we think of 'justice'
+or 'equity' in the sense of a strict requital or such an adjustment of
+merit and prosperity as our moral sense is said to demand; and there
+never was vainer labour than that of critics who try to make out that
+the persons in these dramas meet with 'justice' or their 'deserts.'[157]
+But, on the other hand, man is not represented in these tragedies as the
+mere plaything of a blind or capricious power, suffering woes which have
+no relation to his character and actions; nor is the world represented
+as given over to darkness. And in these respects _King Lear_, though the
+most terrible of these works, does not differ in essence from the rest.
+Its keynote is surely to be heard neither in the words wrung from
+Gloster in his anguish, nor in Edgar's words 'the gods are just.' Its
+final and total result is one in which pity and terror, carried perhaps
+to the extreme limits of art, are so blended with a sense of law and
+beauty that we feel at last, not depression and much less despair, but a
+consciousness of greatness in pain, and of solemnity in the mystery we
+cannot fathom.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[Footnote 123: I leave undiscussed the position of _King Lear_ in
+relation to the 'comedies' of _Measure for Measure_, _Troilus and
+Cressida_ and _All's Well_.]
+
+[Footnote 124: See Note R.]
+
+[Footnote 125: On some of the points mentioned in this paragraph see
+Note S.]
+
+[Footnote 126:
+
+     '_Kent._ I thought the king had more affected the Duke of
+                Albany than Cornwall.
+
+      _Glos._ It did always seem so to us: but now, in the division
+                of the kingdom, it appears not which of the dukes
+                he values most.'
+
+For (Gloster goes on to say) their shares are exactly equal in value.
+And if the shares of the two elder daughters are fixed, obviously that
+of the third is so too.]
+
+[Footnote 127:
+
+     I loved her most, and thought to set my rest
+     On her kind nursery.]
+
+[Footnote 128: It is to Lear's altered plan that Kent applies these
+words.]
+
+[Footnote 129: There is talk of a war between Goneril and Regan within a
+fortnight of the division of the kingdom (II. i. 11 f.).]
+
+[Footnote 130: I mean that no sufficiently clear reason is supplied for
+Edmund's delay in attempting to save Cordelia and Lear. The matter
+stands thus. Edmund, after the defeat of the opposing army, sends Lear
+and Cordelia to prison. Then, in accordance with a plan agreed on
+between himself and Goneril, he despatches a captain with secret orders
+to put them both to death _instantly_ (V. iii. 26-37, 244, 252). He then
+has to fight with the disguised Edgar. He is mortally wounded, and, as
+he lies dying, he says to Edgar (at line 162, _more than a hundred
+lines_ after he gave that commission to the captain):
+
+     What you have charged me with, that have I done;
+     And more, much more; the time will bring it out;
+     'Tis past, and so am I.
+
+In 'more, much more' he seems to be thinking of the order for the deaths
+of Lear and Cordelia (what else remained undisclosed?); yet he says
+nothing about it. A few lines later he recognises the justice of his
+fate, yet still says nothing. Then he hears the story of his father's
+death, says it has moved him and 'shall perchance do good' (What good
+except saving his victims?); yet he still says nothing. Even when he
+hears that Goneril is dead and Regan poisoned, he _still_ says nothing.
+It is only when directly questioned about Lear and Cordelia that he
+tries to save the victims who were to be killed 'instantly' (242). How
+can we explain his delay? Perhaps, thinking the deaths of Lear and
+Cordelia would be of use to Goneril and Regan, he will not speak till he
+is sure that both the sisters are dead. Or perhaps, though he can
+recognise the justice of his fate and can be touched by the account of
+his father's death, he is still too self-absorbed to rise to the active
+effort to 'do some good, despite of his own nature.' But, while either
+of these conjectures is possible, it is surely far from satisfactory
+that we should be left to mere conjecture as to the cause of the delay
+which permits the catastrophe to take place. The _real_ cause lies
+outside the dramatic _nexus_. It is Shakespeare's wish to deliver a
+sudden and crushing blow to the hopes which he has excited.]
+
+[Footnote 131: Everything in these paragraphs must, of course, be taken
+in connection with later remarks.]
+
+[Footnote 132: I say 'the reader's,' because on the stage, whenever I
+have seen _King Lear_, the 'cuts' necessitated by modern scenery would
+have made this part of the play absolutely unintelligible to me if I had
+not been familiar with it. It is significant that Lamb in his _Tale of
+King Lear_ almost omits the sub-plot.]
+
+[Footnote 133: Even if Cordelia had won the battle, Shakespeare would
+probably have hesitated to concentrate interest on it, for her victory
+would have been a British defeat. On Spedding's view, that he did mean
+to make the battle more interesting, and that his purpose has been
+defeated by our wrong division of Acts IV. and V., see Note X.]
+
+[Footnote 134: It is vain to suggest that Edmund has only just come
+home, and that the letter is supposed to have been sent to him when he
+was 'out' See I. ii. 38-40, 65 f.]
+
+[Footnote 135: The idea in scene i., perhaps, is that Cordelia's
+marriage, like the division of the kingdom, has really been
+pre-arranged, and that the ceremony of choosing between France and
+Burgundy (I. i. 46 f.) is a mere fiction. Burgundy is to be her husband,
+and that is why, when Lear has cast her off, he offers her to Burgundy
+first (l. 192 ff.). It might seem from 211 ff. that Lear's reason for
+doing so is that he prefers France, or thinks him the greater man, and
+therefore will not offer him first what is worthless: but the language
+of France (240 ff.) seems to show that he recognises a prior right in
+Burgundy.]
+
+[Footnote 136: See Note T. and p. 315.]
+
+[Footnote 137: See Note U.]
+
+[Footnote 138: The word 'heath' in the stage-directions of the
+storm-scenes is, I may remark, Rowe's, not Shakespeare's, who never used
+the word till he wrote _Macbeth_.]
+
+[Footnote 139: It is pointed out in Note V. that what modern editors
+call Scenes ii., iii., iv. of Act II. are really one scene, for Kent is
+on the stage through them all.]
+
+[Footnote 140: [On the locality of Act I., Sc. ii., see _Modern Language
+Review_ for Oct., 1908, and Jan., 1909.]]
+
+[Footnote 141: This effect of the double action seems to have been
+pointed out first by Schlegel.]
+
+[Footnote 142: How prevalent these are is not recognised by readers
+familiar only with English poetry. See Simpson's _Introduction to the
+Philosophy of Shakespeare's Sonnets_ (1868) and Mr. Wyndham's edition of
+Shakespeare's Poems. Perhaps both writers overstate, and Simpson's
+interpretations are often forced or arbitrary, but his book is valuable
+and ought not to remain out of print.]
+
+[Footnote 143: The monstrosity here is a being with a woman's body and a
+fiend's soul. For the interpretation of the lines see Note Y.]
+
+[Footnote 144: Since this paragraph was written I have found that the
+abundance of these references has been pointed out and commented on by
+J. Kirkman, _New Shaks. Soc. Trans._, 1877.]
+
+[Footnote 145: _E.g._ in _As You Like It_, III. ii. 187, 'I was never so
+berhymed since Pythagoras' time, that I was an Irish rat, which I can
+hardly remember'; _Twelfth Night_, IV. ii. 55, '_Clown._ What is the
+opinion of Pythagoras concerning wild fowl? _Mal._ That the soul of our
+grandam might haply inhabit a bird. _Clown._ What thinkest thou of his
+opinion? _Mal._ I think nobly of the soul, and no way approve his
+opinion,' etc. But earlier comes a passage which reminds us of _King
+Lear_, _Merchant of Venice_, IV. i. 128:
+
+     O be thou damn'd, inexecrable dog!
+     And for thy life let justice be accused.
+     Thou almost makest me waver in my faith
+     To hold opinion with Pythagoras,
+     That souls of animals infuse themselves
+     Into the trunks of men: thy currish spirit
+     Govern'd a wolf, who, hang'd for human slaughter,
+     Even from the gallows did his fell soul fleet,
+     And, whilst thou lay'st in thy unhallow'd dam,
+     Infused itself in thee; for thy desires
+     Are wolvish, bloody, starved and ravenous.]
+
+[Footnote 146: I fear it is not possible, however, to refute, on the
+whole, one charge,--that the dog is a snob, in the sense that he
+respects power and prosperity, and objects to the poor and despised. It
+is curious that Shakespeare refers to this trait three times in _King
+Lear_, as if he were feeling a peculiar disgust at it. See III. vi. 65,
+'The little dogs and all,' etc.: IV. vi. 159, 'Thou hast seen a farmer's
+dog bark at a beggar ... and the creature run from the cur? There thou
+mightst behold the great image of authority': V. iii. 186, 'taught me to
+shift Into a madman's rags; to assume a semblance That very dogs
+disdain'd.' Cf. _Oxford Lectures_, p. 341.]
+
+[Footnote 147: With this compare the following lines in the great speech
+on 'degree' in _Troilus and Cressida_, I. iii.:
+
+     Take but degree away, untune that string,
+     And, hark, what discord follows! Each thing meets
+     In mere oppugnancy: the bounded waters
+     Should lift their bosoms higher than the shores
+     And make a sop of all this solid globe:
+     Strength should be lord of imbecility,
+     And the rude son should strike his father dead:
+     Force should be right; or, rather, right and wrong,
+     Between whose endless jar justice resides,
+     Should lose their names, and so should justice too.
+     Then everything includes itself in power,
+     Power into will, will into appetite;
+     And appetite, an universal wolf,
+     So doubly seconded with will and power,
+     Must make perforce an universal prey,
+     And last eat up himself.]
+
+[Footnote 148: Nor is it believable that Shakespeare, whose means of
+imitating a storm were so greatly inferior even to ours, had the
+stage-performance only or chiefly in view in composing these scenes. He
+may not have thought of readers (or he may), but he must in any case
+have written to satisfy his own imagination. I have taken no notice of
+the part played in these scenes by anyone except Lear. The matter is too
+huge, and too strictly poetic, for analysis. I may observe that in our
+present theatres, owing to the use of elaborate scenery, the three
+Storm-scenes are usually combined, with disastrous effect. Shakespeare,
+as we saw (p. 49), interposed between them short scenes of much lower
+tone.]
+
+[Footnote 149: 'justice,' Qq.]
+
+[Footnote 150: =approve.]
+
+[Footnote 151: The direction 'Storm and tempest' at the end of this
+speech is not modern, it is in the Folio.]
+
+[Footnote 152: The gods are mentioned many times in _King Lear_, but
+'God' only here (V. ii. 16).]
+
+[Footnote 153: The whole question how far Shakespeare's works represent
+his personal feelings and attitude, and the changes in them, would carry
+us so far beyond the bounds of the four tragedies, is so needless for
+the understanding of them, and is so little capable of decision, that I
+have excluded it from these lectures; and I will add here a note on it
+only as it concerns the 'tragic period.'
+
+There are here two distinct sets of facts, equally important, (1) On the
+one side there is the fact that, so far as we can make out, after
+_Twelfth Night_ Shakespeare wrote, for seven or eight years, no play
+which, like many of his earlier works, can be called happy, much less
+merry or sunny. He wrote tragedies; and if the chronological order
+_Hamlet_, _Othello_, _King Lear_, _Timon_, _Macbeth_, is correct, these
+tragedies show for some time a deepening darkness, and _King Lear_ and
+_Timon_ lie at the nadir. He wrote also in these years (probably in the
+earlier of them) certain 'comedies,' _Measure for Measure_ and _Troilus
+and Cressida_, and perhaps _All's Well_. But about these comedies there
+is a peculiar air of coldness; there is humour, of course, but little
+mirth; in _Measure for Measure_ perhaps, certainly in _Troilus and
+Cressida_, a spirit of bitterness and contempt seems to pervade an
+intellectual atmosphere of an intense but hard clearness. With _Macbeth_
+perhaps, and more decidedly in the two Roman tragedies which followed,
+the gloom seems to lift; and the final romances show a mellow serenity
+which sometimes warms into radiant sympathy, and even into a mirth
+almost as light-hearted as that of younger days. When we consider these
+facts, not as barely stated thus but as they affect us in reading the
+plays, it is, to my mind, very hard to believe that their origin was
+simply and solely a change in dramatic methods or choice of subjects, or
+even merely such inward changes as may be expected to accompany the
+arrival and progress of middle age.
+
+(2) On the other side, and over against these facts, we have to set the
+multitudinousness of Shakespeare's genius, and his almost unlimited
+power of conceiving and expressing human experience of all kinds. And we
+have to set more. Apparently during this period of years he never ceased
+to write busily, or to exhibit in his writings the greatest mental
+activity. He wrote also either nothing or very little (_Troilus and
+Cressida_ and his part of _Timon_ are the possible exceptions) in which
+there is any appearance of personal feeling overcoming or seriously
+endangering the self-control or 'objectivity' of the artist. And finally
+it is not possible to make out any continuously deepening _personal_
+note: for although _Othello_ is darker than _Hamlet_ it surely strikes
+one as about as impersonal as a play can be; and, on grounds of style
+and versification, it appears (to me, at least) impossible to bring
+_Troilus and Cressida_ chronologically close to _King Lear_ and _Timon_;
+even if parts of it are later than others, the late parts must be
+decidedly earlier than those plays.
+
+The conclusion we may very tentatively draw from these sets of facts
+would seem to be as follows. Shakespeare during these years was probably
+not a happy man, and it is quite likely that he felt at times even an
+intense melancholy, bitterness, contempt, anger, possibly even loathing
+and despair. It is quite likely too that he used these experiences of
+his in writing such plays as _Hamlet_, _Troilus and Cressida_, _King
+Lear_, _Timon_. But it is evident that he cannot have been for any
+considerable time, if, ever, overwhelmed by such feelings, and there is
+no appearance of their having issued in any settled 'pessimistic'
+conviction which coloured his whole imagination and expressed itself in
+his works. The choice of the subject of ingratitude, for instance, in
+_King Lear_ and _Timon_, and the method of handling it, may have been
+due in part to personal feeling; but it does not follow that this
+feeling was particularly acute at this particular time, and, even if it
+was, it certainly was not so absorbing as to hinder Shakespeare from
+representing in the most sympathetic manner aspects of life the very
+reverse of pessimistic. Whether the total impression of _King Lear_ can
+be called pessimistic is a further question, which is considered in the
+text.]
+
+[Footnote 154: _A Study of Shakespeare_, pp. 171, 172.]
+
+[Footnote 155: A flaw, I mean, in a work of art considered not as a
+moral or theological document but as a work of art,--an aesthetic flaw.
+I add the word 'considerable' because we do not regard the effect in
+question as a flaw in a work like a lyric or a short piece of music,
+which may naturally be taken as expressions merely of a mood or a
+subordinate aspect of things.]
+
+[Footnote 156: Caution is very necessary in making comparisons between
+Shakespeare and the Greek dramatists. A tragedy like the _Antigone_
+stands, in spite of differences, on the same ground as a Shakespearean
+tragedy; it is a self-contained whole with a catastrophe. A drama like
+the _Philoctetes_ is a self-contained whole, but, ending with a
+solution, it corresponds not with a Shakespearean tragedy but with a
+play like _Cymbeline_. A drama like the _Agamemnon_ or the _Prometheus
+Vinctus_ answers to no Shakespearean form of play. It is not a
+self-contained whole, but a part of a trilogy. If the trilogy is
+considered as a unit, it answers not to _Hamlet_ but to _Cymbeline_. If
+the part is considered as a whole, it answers to _Hamlet_, but may then
+be open to serious criticism. Shakespeare never made a tragedy end with
+the complete triumph of the worse side: the _Agamemnon_ and
+_Prometheus_, if wrongly taken as wholes, would do this, and would so
+far, I must think, be bad tragedies. [It can scarcely be necessary to
+remind the reader that, in point of 'self-containedness,' there is a
+difference of degree between the pure tragedies of Shakespeare and some
+of the historical.]]
+
+[Footnote 157: I leave it to better authorities to say how far these
+remarks apply also to Greek Tragedy, however much the language of
+'justice' may be used there.]
+
+
+
+
+LECTURE VIII
+
+KING LEAR
+
+
+We have now to look at the characters in _King Lear_; and I propose to
+consider them to some extent from the point of view indicated at the
+close of the last lecture, partly because we have so far been regarding
+the tragedy mainly from an opposite point of view, and partly because
+these characters are so numerous that it would not be possible within
+our limits to examine them fully.
+
+
+1
+
+The position of the hero in this tragedy is in one important respect
+peculiar. The reader of _Hamlet_, _Othello_, or _Macbeth_, is in no
+danger of forgetting, when the catastrophe is reached, the part played
+by the hero in bringing it on. His fatal weakness, error, wrong-doing,
+continues almost to the end. It is otherwise with _King Lear_. When the
+conclusion arrives, the old King has for a long while been passive. We
+have long regarded him not only as 'a man more sinned against than
+sinning,' but almost wholly as a sufferer, hardly at all as an agent.
+His sufferings too have been so cruel, and our indignation against those
+who inflicted them has been so intense, that recollection of the wrong
+he did to Cordelia, to Kent, and to his realm, has been well-nigh
+effaced. Lastly, for nearly four Acts he has inspired in us, together
+with this pity, much admiration and affection. The force of his passion
+has made us feel that his nature was great; and his frankness and
+generosity, his heroic efforts to be patient, the depth of his shame and
+repentance, and the ecstasy of his re-union with Cordelia, have melted
+our very hearts. Naturally, therefore, at the close we are in some
+danger of forgetting that the storm which has overwhelmed him was
+liberated by his own deed.
+
+Yet it is essential that Lear's contribution to the action of the drama
+should be remembered; not at all in order that we may feel that he
+'deserved' what he suffered, but because otherwise his fate would appear
+to us at best pathetic, at worst shocking, but certainly not tragic. And
+when we were reading the earlier scenes of the play we recognised this
+contribution clearly enough. At the very beginning, it is true, we are
+inclined to feel merely pity and misgivings. The first lines tell us
+that Lear's mind is beginning to fail with age.[158] Formerly he had
+perceived how different were the characters of Albany and Cornwall, but
+now he seems either to have lost this perception or to be unwisely
+ignoring it. The rashness of his division of the kingdom troubles us,
+and we cannot but see with concern that its motive is mainly selfish.
+The absurdity of the pretence of making the division depend on
+protestations of love from his daughters, his complete blindness to the
+hypocrisy which is patent to us at a glance, his piteous delight in
+these protestations, the openness of his expressions of preference for
+his youngest daughter--all make us smile, but all pain us. But pity
+begins to give way to another feeling when we witness the precipitance,
+the despotism, the uncontrolled anger of his injustice to Cordelia and
+Kent, and the 'hideous rashness' of his persistence in dividing the
+kingdom after the rejection of his one dutiful child. We feel now the
+presence of force, as well as weakness, but we feel also the presence of
+the tragic [Greek: hubris]. Lear, we see, is generous and unsuspicious,
+of an open and free nature, like Hamlet and Othello and indeed most of
+Shakespeare's heroes, who in this, according to Ben Jonson, resemble the
+poet who made them. Lear, we see, is also choleric by temperament--the
+first of Shakespeare's heroes who is so. And a long life of absolute
+power, in which he has been flattered to the top of his bent, has
+produced in him that blindness to human limitations, and that
+presumptuous self-will, which in Greek tragedy we have so often seen
+stumbling against the altar of Nemesis. Our consciousness that the decay
+of old age contributes to this condition deepens our pity and our sense
+of human infirmity, but certainly does not lead us to regard the old
+King as irresponsible, and so to sever the tragic _nexus_ which binds
+together his error and his calamities.
+
+The magnitude of this first error is generally fully recognised by the
+reader owing to his sympathy with Cordelia, though, as we have seen, he
+often loses the memory of it as the play advances. But this is not so, I
+think, with the repetition of this error, in the quarrel with Goneril.
+Here the daughter excites so much detestation, and the father so much
+sympathy, that we often fail to receive the due impression of his
+violence. There is not here, of course, the _injustice_ of his rejection
+of Cordelia, but there is precisely the same [Greek: hubris]. This had
+been shown most strikingly in the first scene when, _immediately_ upon
+the apparently cold words of Cordelia, 'So young, my lord, and true,'
+there comes this dreadful answer:
+
+     Let it be so; thy truth then be thy dower.
+     For, by the sacred radiance of the sun,
+     The mysteries of Hecate and the night;
+     By all the operation of the orbs
+     From whom we do exist and cease to be;
+     Here I disclaim all my paternal care,
+     Propinquity and property of blood,
+     And as a stranger to my heart and me
+     Hold thee from this for ever. The barbarous Scythian,
+     Or he that makes his generation messes
+     To gorge his appetite, shall to my bosom
+     Be as well neighbour'd, pitied and relieved,
+     As thou my sometime daughter.
+
+Now the dramatic effect of this passage is exactly, and doubtless
+intentionally, repeated in the curse pronounced against Goneril. This
+does not come after the daughters have openly and wholly turned against
+their father. Up to the moment of its utterance Goneril has done no more
+than to require him 'a little to disquantity' and reform his train of
+knights. Certainly her manner and spirit in making this demand are
+hateful, and probably her accusations against the knights are false; and
+we should expect from any father in Lear's position passionate distress
+and indignation. But surely the famous words which form Lear's immediate
+reply were meant to be nothing short of frightful:
+
+     Hear, nature, hear; dear goddess, hear!
+     Suspend thy purpose, if thou didst intend
+     To make this creature fruitful!
+     Into her womb convey sterility!
+     Dry up in her the organs of increase;
+     And from her derogate body never spring
+     A babe to honour her! If she must teem,
+     Create her child of spleen; that it may live,
+     And be a thwart disnatured torment to her!
+     Let it stamp wrinkles in her brow of youth;
+     With cadent tears fret channels in her cheeks;
+     Turn all her mother's pains and benefits
+     To laughter and contempt; that she may feel
+     How sharper than a serpent's tooth it is
+     To have a thankless child!
+
+The question is not whether Goneril deserves these appalling
+imprecations, but what they tell us about Lear. They show that, although
+he has already recognised his injustice towards Cordelia, is secretly
+blaming himself, and is endeavouring to do better, the disposition from
+which his first error sprang is still unchanged. And it is precisely the
+disposition to give rise, in evil surroundings, to calamities dreadful
+but at the same time tragic, because due in some measure to the person
+who endures them.
+
+The perception of this connection, if it is not lost as the play
+advances, does not at all diminish our pity for Lear, but it makes it
+impossible for us permanently to regard the world displayed in this
+tragedy as subject to a mere arbitrary or malicious power. It makes us
+feel that this world is so far at least a rational and a moral order,
+that there holds in it the law, not of proportionate requital, but of
+strict connection between act and consequence. It is, so far, the world
+of all Shakespeare's tragedies.
+
+But there is another aspect of Lear's story, the influence of which
+modifies, in a way quite different and more peculiar to this tragedy,
+the impressions called pessimistic and even this impression of law.
+There is nothing more noble and beautiful in literature than
+Shakespeare's exposition of the effect of suffering in reviving the
+greatness and eliciting the sweetness of Lear's nature. The occasional
+recurrence, during his madness, of autocratic impatience or of desire
+for revenge serves only to heighten this effect, and the moments when
+his insanity becomes merely infinitely piteous do not weaken it. The old
+King who in pleading with his daughters feels so intensely his own
+humiliation and their horrible ingratitude, and who yet, at fourscore
+and upward, constrains himself to practise a self-control and patience
+so many years disused; who out of old affection for his Fool, and in
+repentance for his injustice to the Fool's beloved mistress, tolerates
+incessant and cutting reminders of his own folly and wrong; in whom the
+rage of the storm awakes a power and a poetic grandeur surpassing even
+that of Othello's anguish; who comes in his affliction to think of
+others first, and to seek, in tender solicitude for his poor boy, the
+shelter he scorns for his own bare head; who learns to feel and to pray
+for the miserable and houseless poor, to discern the falseness of
+flattery and the brutality of authority, and to pierce below the
+differences of rank and raiment to the common humanity beneath; whose
+sight is so purged by scalding tears that it sees at last how power and
+place and all things in the world are vanity except love; who tastes in
+his last hours the extremes both of love's rapture and of its agony, but
+could never, if he lived on or lived again, care a jot for aught
+beside--there is no figure, surely, in the world of poetry at once so
+grand, so pathetic, and so beautiful as his. Well, but Lear owes the
+whole of this to those sufferings which made us doubt whether life were
+not simply evil, and men like the flies which wanton boys torture for
+their sport. Should we not be at least as near the truth if we called
+this poem _The Redemption of King Lear_, and declared that the business
+of 'the gods' with him was neither to torment him, nor to teach him a
+'noble anger,' but to lead him to attain through apparently hopeless
+failure the very end and aim of life? One can believe that Shakespeare
+had been tempted at times to feel misanthropy and despair, but it is
+quite impossible that he can have been mastered by such feelings at the
+time when he produced this conception.
+
+To dwell on the stages of this process of purification (the word is
+Professor Dowden's) is impossible here; and there are scenes, such as
+that of the meeting of Lear and Cordelia, which it seems almost a
+profanity to touch.[159] But I will refer to two scenes which may remind
+us more in detail of some of the points just mentioned. The third and
+fourth scenes of Act III. present one of those contrasts which speak as
+eloquently even as Shakespeare's words, and which were made possible in
+his theatre by the absence of scenery and the consequent absence of
+intervals between the scenes. First, in a scene of twenty-three lines,
+mostly in prose, Gloster is shown, telling his son Edmund how Goneril
+and Regan have forbidden him on pain of death to succour the houseless
+King; how a secret letter has reached him, announcing the arrival of a
+French force; and how, whatever the consequences may be, he is
+determined to relieve his old master. Edmund, left alone, soliloquises
+in words which seem to freeze one's blood:
+
+     This courtesy, forbid thee, shall the duke
+     Instantly know; and of that letter too:
+     This seems a fair deserving, and must draw me
+     That which my father loses; no less than all:
+     The younger rises when the old doth fall.
+
+He goes out; and the next moment, as the fourth scene opens, we find
+ourselves in the icy storm with Lear, Kent and the Fool, and yet in the
+inmost shrine of love. I am not speaking of the devotion of the others
+to Lear, but of Lear himself. He had consented, merely for the Fool's
+sake, to seek shelter in the hovel:
+
+                               Come, your hovel.
+     Poor fool and knave, I have one part in my heart
+     That's sorry yet for thee.
+
+But on the way he has broken down and has been weeping (III. iv. 17),
+and now he resists Kent's efforts to persuade him to enter. He does not
+feel the storm:
+
+                               when the mind's free
+     The body's delicate: the tempest in my mind
+     Doth from my senses take all feeling else
+     Save what beats there:
+
+and the thoughts that will drive him mad are burning in his brain:
+
+                               Filial ingratitude!
+     Is it not as this mouth should tear this hand
+     For lifting food to't? But I will punish home.
+     No, I will weep no more. In such a night
+     To shut me out! Pour on; I will endure.
+     In such a night as this! O Regan, Goneril!
+     Your old kind father, whose frank heart gave all,--
+     O, that way madness lies; let me shun that;
+     No more of that.
+
+And then suddenly, as he controls himself, the blessed spirit of
+kindness breathes on him 'like a meadow gale of spring,' and he turns
+gently to Kent:
+
+     Prithee, go in thyself; seek thine own ease:
+     This tempest will not give me leave to ponder
+     On things would hurt me more. But I'll go in.
+     In, boy; go first. You houseless poverty--
+     Nay, get thee in. I'll pray, and then I'll sleep.
+
+But his prayer is not for himself.
+
+     Poor naked wretches, wheresoe'er you are,
+
+it begins, and I need not quote more. This is one of those passages
+which make one worship Shakespeare.[160]
+
+Much has been written on the representation of insanity in _King Lear_,
+and I will confine myself to one or two points which may have escaped
+notice. The most obvious symptom of Lear's insanity, especially in its
+first stages, is of course the domination of a fixed idea. Whatever
+presents itself to his senses, is seized on by this idea and compelled
+to express it; as for example in those words, already quoted, which
+first show that his mind has actually given way:
+
+                            Hast thou given all
+     To thy two daughters? And art thou come to this?[161]
+
+But it is remarkable that what we have here is only, in an exaggerated
+and perverted form, the very same action of imagination that, just
+before the breakdown of reason, produced those sublime appeals:
+
+                         O heavens,
+     If you do love old men, if your sweet sway
+     Allow obedience, if yourselves are old,
+     Make it your cause;
+
+and:
+
+     Rumble thy bellyful! Spit, fire! spout, rain!
+     Nor rain, wind, thunder, fire, are my daughters:
+     I tax not you, you elements, with unkindness;
+     I never gave you kingdom, call'd you children,
+     You owe me no subscription: then let fall
+     Your horrible pleasure; here I stand, your slave,
+     A poor, infirm, weak, and despised old man:
+     But yet I call you servile ministers,
+     That have with two pernicious daughters join'd
+     Your high engender'd battles 'gainst a head
+     So old and white as this. O! O! 'tis foul!
+
+Shakespeare, long before this, in the _Midsummer Night's Dream_, had
+noticed the resemblance between the lunatic, the lover, and the poet;
+and the partial truth that genius is allied to insanity was quite
+familiar to him. But he presents here the supplementary half-truth that
+insanity is allied to genius.
+
+He does not, however, put into the mouth of the insane Lear any such
+sublime passages as those just quoted. Lear's insanity, which destroys
+the coherence, also reduces the poetry of his imagination. What it
+stimulates is that power of moral perception and reflection which had
+already been quickened by his sufferings. This, however partial and
+however disconnectedly used, first appears, quite soon after the
+insanity has declared itself, in the idea that the naked beggar
+represents truth and reality, in contrast with those conventions,
+flatteries, and corruptions of the great world, by which Lear has so
+long been deceived and will never be deceived again:
+
+     Is man no more than this? Consider him well. Thou owest the
+     worm no silk, the beast no hide, the sheep no wool, the cat no
+     perfume. Ha! here's three on's are sophisticated: thou art the
+     thing itself.
+
+Lear regards the beggar therefore with reverence and delight, as a
+person who is in the secret of things, and he longs to question him
+about their causes. It is this same strain of thought which much later
+(IV. vi.), gaining far greater force, though the insanity has otherwise
+advanced, issues in those famous Timon-like speeches which make us
+realise the original strength of the old King's mind. And when this
+strain, on his recovery, unites with the streams of repentance and love,
+it produces that serene renunciation of the world, with its power and
+glory and resentments and revenges, which is expressed in the speech (V.
+iii.):
+
+     No, no, no, no! Come, let's away to prison:
+     We two alone will sing like birds i' the cage:
+     When thou dost ask me blessing, I'll kneel down,
+     And ask of thee forgiveness: so we'll live,
+     And pray, and sing, and tell old tales, and laugh
+     At gilded butterflies, and hear poor rogues
+     Talk of court news; and we'll talk with them too,
+     Who loses, and who wins; who's in, who's out;
+     And take upon's the mystery of things,
+     As if we were God's spies: and we'll wear out,
+     In a wall'd prison, packs and sets of great ones,
+     That ebb and flow by the moon.
+
+This is that renunciation which is at the same time a sacrifice offered
+to the gods, and on which the gods themselves throw incense; and, it may
+be, it would never have been offered but for the knowledge that came to
+Lear in his madness.
+
+I spoke of Lear's 'recovery,' but the word is too strong. The Lear of
+the Fifth Act is not indeed insane, but his mind is greatly enfeebled.
+The speech just quoted is followed by a sudden flash of the old
+passionate nature, reminding us most pathetically of Lear's efforts,
+just before his madness, to restrain his tears:
+
+                           Wipe thine eyes:
+     The good-years shall devour them, flesh and fell,
+     Ere they shall make us weep: we'll see 'em starve first.
+
+And this weakness is still more pathetically shown in the blindness of
+the old King to his position now that he and Cordelia are made
+prisoners. It is evident that Cordelia knows well what mercy her father
+is likely to receive from her sisters; that is the reason of her
+weeping. But he does not understand her tears; it never crosses his mind
+that they have anything more than imprisonment to fear. And what is that
+to them? They have made that sacrifice, and all is well:
+
+                          Have I caught thee?
+     He that parts us shall bring a brand from heaven,
+     And fire us hence like foxes.
+
+This blindness is most affecting to us, who know in what manner they
+will be parted; but it is also comforting. And we find the same mingling
+of effects in the overwhelming conclusion of the story. If to the
+reader, as to the bystanders, that scene brings one unbroken pain, it is
+not so with Lear himself. His shattered mind passes from the first
+transports of hope and despair, as he bends over Cordelia's body and
+holds the feather to her lips, into an absolute forgetfulness of the
+cause of these transports. This continues so long as he can converse
+with Kent; becomes an almost complete vacancy; and is disturbed only to
+yield, as his eyes suddenly fall again on his child's corpse, to an
+agony which at once breaks his heart. And, finally, though he is killed
+by an agony of pain, the agony in which he actually dies is one not of
+pain but of ecstasy. Suddenly, with a cry represented in the oldest text
+by a four-times repeated 'O,' he exclaims:
+
+     Do you see this? Look on her, look, her lips,
+     Look there, look there!
+
+These are the last words of Lear. He is sure, at last, that she _lives_:
+and what had he said when he was still in doubt?
+
+                     She lives! if it be so,
+     It is a chance which does redeem all sorrows
+     That ever I have felt!
+
+To us, perhaps, the knowledge that he is deceived may bring a
+culmination of pain: but, if it brings _only_ that, I believe we are
+false to Shakespeare, and it seems almost beyond question that any actor
+is false to the text who does not attempt to express, in Lear's last
+accents and gestures and look, an unbearable _joy_.[162]
+
+To dwell on the pathos of Lear's last speech would be an impertinence,
+but I may add a remark on the speech from the literary point of view. In
+the simplicity of its language, which consists almost wholly of
+monosyllables of native origin, composed in very brief sentences of the
+plainest structure, it presents an extraordinary contrast to the dying
+speech of Hamlet and the last words of Othello to the by-standers. The
+fact that Lear speaks in passion is one cause of the difference, but not
+the sole cause. The language is more than simple, it is familiar. And
+this familiarity is characteristic of Lear (except at certain moments,
+already referred to) from the time of his madness onwards, and is the
+source of the peculiarly poignant effect of some of his sentences (such
+as 'The little dogs and all....'). We feel in them the loss of power to
+sustain his royal dignity; we feel also that everything external has
+become nothingness to him, and that what remains is 'the thing itself,'
+the soul in its bare greatness. Hence also it is that two lines in this
+last speech show, better perhaps than any other passage of poetry, one
+of the qualities we have in mind when we distinguish poetry as
+'romantic.' Nothing like Hamlet's mysterious sigh 'The rest is silence,'
+nothing like Othello's memories of his life of marvel and achievement,
+was possible to Lear. Those last thoughts are romantic in their
+strangeness: Lear's five-times repeated 'Never,' in which the simplest
+and most unanswerable cry of anguish rises note by note till the heart
+breaks, is romantic in its naturalism; and to make a verse out of this
+one word required the boldness as well as the inspiration which came
+infallibly to Shakespeare at the greatest moments. But the familiarity,
+boldness and inspiration are surpassed (if that can be) by the next
+line, which shows the bodily oppression asking for bodily relief. The
+imagination that produced Lear's curse or his defiance of the storm may
+be paralleled in its kind, but where else are we to seek the imagination
+that could venture to follow that cry of 'Never' with such a phrase as
+'undo this button,' and yet could leave us on the topmost peaks of
+poetry?[163]
+
+
+2
+
+Gloster and Albany are the two neutral characters of the tragedy. The
+parallel between Lear and Gloster, already noticed, is, up to a certain
+point, so marked that it cannot possibly be accidental. Both are old
+white-haired men (III. vii. 37); both, it would seem, widowers, with
+children comparatively young. Like Lear, Gloster is tormented, and his
+life is sought, by the child whom he favours; he is tended and healed by
+the child whom he has wronged. His sufferings, like Lear's, are partly
+traceable to his own extreme folly and injustice, and, it may be added,
+to a selfish pursuit of his own pleasure.[164] His sufferings, again,
+like Lear's, purify and enlighten him: he dies a better and wiser man
+than he showed himself at first. They even learn the same lesson, and
+Gloster's repetition (noticed and blamed by Johnson) of the thought in a
+famous speech of Lear's is surely intentional.[165] And, finally,
+Gloster dies almost as Lear dies. Edgar reveals himself to him and asks
+his blessing (as Cordelia asks Lear's):
+
+                       but his flaw'd heart--
+     Alack, too weak the conflict to support--
+     'Twixt two extremes of passion, joy and grief,
+     Burst smilingly.
+
+So far, the resemblance of the two stories, and also of the ways in
+which their painful effect is modified, is curiously close. And in
+character too Gloster is, like his master, affectionate,[166] credulous
+and hasty. But otherwise he is sharply contrasted with the tragic Lear,
+who is a towering figure, every inch a king,[167] while Gloster is built
+on a much smaller scale, and has infinitely less force and fire. He is,
+indeed, a decidedly weak though good-hearted man; and, failing wholly to
+support Kent in resisting Lear's original folly and injustice,[168] he
+only gradually takes the better part. Nor is his character either very
+interesting or very distinct. He often gives one the impression of being
+wanted mainly to fill a place in the scheme of the play; and, though it
+would be easy to give a long list of his characteristics, they scarcely,
+it seems to me, compose an individual, a person whom we are sure we
+should recognise at once. If this is so, the fact is curious,
+considering how much we see and hear of him.
+
+I will add a single note. Gloster is the superstitious character of the
+drama,--the only one. He thinks much of 'these late eclipses in the sun
+and moon.' His two sons, from opposite points of view, make nothing of
+them. His easy acceptance of the calumny against Edgar is partly due to
+this weakness, and Edmund builds upon it, for an evil purpose, when he
+describes Edgar thus:
+
+     Here stood he in the dark, his sharp sword out,
+     Mumbling of wicked charms, conjuring the moon,
+     To prove's auspicious mistress.
+
+Edgar in turn builds upon it, for a good purpose, when he persuades his
+blind father that he was led to jump down Dover cliff by the temptation
+of a fiend in the form of a beggar, and was saved by a miracle:
+
+     As I stood here below, methought his eyes
+     Were two full moons; he had a thousand noses,
+     Horns whelk'd and waved like the enridged sea:
+     It was some fiend; therefore, thou happy father,
+     Think that the clearest gods, who make them honours
+     Of men's impossibilities, have preserved thee.
+
+This passage is odd in its collocation of the thousand noses and the
+clearest gods, of grotesque absurdity and extreme seriousness. Edgar
+knew that the 'fiend' was really Gloster's 'worser spirit,' and that
+'the gods' were himself. Doubtless, however--for he is the most
+religious person in the play--he thought that it _was_ the gods who,
+through him, had preserved his father; but he knew that the truth could
+only enter this superstitious mind in a superstitious form.
+
+The combination of parallelism and contrast that we observe in Lear and
+Gloster, and again in the attitude of the two brothers to their father's
+superstition, is one of many indications that in _King Lear_ Shakespeare
+was working more than usual on a basis of conscious and reflective
+ideas. Perhaps it is not by accident, then, that he makes Edgar and Lear
+preach to Gloster in precisely the same strain. Lear says to him:
+
+     If thou wilt weep my fortunes, take my eyes.
+     I know thee well enough; thy name is Gloster:
+     Thou must be patient; we came crying hither:
+     Thou know'st, the first time that we smell the air,
+     We wawl and cry. I will preach to thee: mark.
+
+Edgar's last words to him are:
+
+     What, in ill thoughts again? Men must endure
+     Their going hence, even as their coming hither:
+     Ripeness is all.
+
+Albany is merely sketched, and he is so generally neglected that a few
+words about him may be in place. He too ends a better and wiser man than
+he began. When the play opens he is, of course, only just married to
+Goneril; and the idea is, I think, that he has been bewitched by her
+fiery beauty not less than by her dowry. He is an inoffensive
+peace-loving man, and is overborne at first by his 'great love' for his
+wife and by her imperious will. He is not free from responsibility for
+the treatment which the King receives in his house; the Knight says to
+Lear, 'there's a great abatement of kindness appears as well in the
+general dependants as in _the duke himself also_ and your daughter.' But
+he takes no part in the quarrel, and doubtless speaks truly when he
+protests that he is as guiltless as ignorant of the cause of Lear's
+violent passion. When the King departs, he begins to remonstrate with
+Goneril, but shrinks in a cowardly manner, which is a trifle comical,
+from contest with her. She leaves him behind when she goes to join
+Regan, and he is not further responsible for what follows. When he hears
+of it, he is struck with horror: the scales drop from his eyes, Goneril
+becomes hateful to him, he determines to revenge Gloster's eyes. His
+position is however very difficult, as he is willing to fight against
+Cordelia in so far as her army is French, and unwilling in so far as she
+represents her father. This difficulty, and his natural inferiority to
+Edmund in force and ability, pushes him into the background; the battle
+is not won by him but by Edmund; and but for Edgar he would certainly
+have fallen a victim to the murderous plot against him. When it is
+discovered, however, he is fearless and resolute enough, beside being
+full of kind feeling towards Kent and Edgar, and of sympathetic distress
+at Gloster's death. And one would be sure that he is meant to retain
+this strength till the end, but for his last words. He has announced his
+intention of resigning, during Lear's life, the 'absolute power' which
+has come to him; and that may be right. But after Lear's death he says
+to Kent and Edgar:
+
+                         Friends of my soul, you twain
+     Rule in this realm, and the gored state sustain.
+
+If this means that he wishes to hand over his absolute power to them,
+Shakespeare's intention is certainly to mark the feebleness of a
+well-meaning but weak man. But possibly he means by 'this realm' only
+that half of Britain which had belonged to Cornwall and Regan.
+
+
+3
+
+I turn now to those two strongly contrasted groups of good and evil
+beings; and to the evil first. The members of this group are by no means
+on a level. Far the most contemptible of them is Oswald, and Kent has
+fortunately expressed our feelings towards him. Yet twice we are able to
+feel sympathy with him. Regan cannot tempt him to let her open Goneril's
+letter to Edmund; and his last thought as he dies is given to the
+fulfilment of his trust. It is to a monster that he is faithful, and he
+is faithful to her in a monstrous design. Still faithfulness is
+faithfulness, and he is not wholly worthless. Dr. Johnson says: 'I know
+not well why Shakespeare gives to Oswald, who is a mere factor of
+wickedness, so much fidelity'; but in any other tragedy this touch, so
+true to human nature, is only what we should expect. If it surprises us
+in _King Lear_, the reason is that Shakespeare, in dealing with the
+other members of the group, seems to have been less concerned than usual
+with such mingling of light with darkness, and intent rather on making
+the shadows as utterly black as a regard for truth would permit.
+
+Cornwall seems to have been a fit mate for Regan; and what worse can be
+said of him? It is a great satisfaction to think that he endured what to
+him must have seemed the dreadful disgrace of being killed by a servant.
+He shows, I believe, no redeeming trait, and he is a coward, as may be
+seen from the sudden rise in his courage when Goneril arrives at the
+castle and supports him and Regan against Lear (II. iv. 202). But as his
+cruelties are not aimed at a blood-relation, he is not, in this sense, a
+'monster,' like the remaining three.
+
+Which of these three is the least and which the most detestable there
+can surely be no question. For Edmund, not to mention other
+alleviations, is at any rate not a woman. And the differences between
+the sisters, which are distinctly marked and need not be exhibited once
+more in full, are all in favour of 'the elder and more terrible.' That
+Regan did not commit adultery, did not murder her sister or plot to
+murder her husband, did not join her name with Edmund's on the order for
+the deaths of Cordelia and Lear, and in other respects failed to take
+quite so active a part as Goneril in atrocious wickedness, is quite true
+but not in the least to her credit. It only means that she had much less
+force, courage and initiative than her sister, and for that reason is
+less formidable and more loathsome. Edmund judged right when, caring for
+neither sister but aiming at the crown, he preferred Goneril, for he
+could trust her to remove the living impediments to her desires. The
+scornful and fearless exclamation, 'An interlude!' with which she greets
+the exposure of her design, was quite beyond Regan. Her unhesitating
+suicide was perhaps no less so. She would not have condescended to the
+lie which Regan so needlessly tells to Oswald:
+
+     It was great ignorance, Gloster's eyes being out,
+     To let him live: where he arrives he moves
+     All hearts against us: Edmund, I think, is gone,
+     _In pity of his misery_, to dispatch
+     His nighted life.
+
+Her father's curse is nothing to her. She scorns even to mention the
+gods.[169] Horrible as she is, she is almost awful. But, to set against
+Regan's inferiority in power, there is nothing: she is superior only in
+a venomous meanness which is almost as hateful as her cruelty. She is
+the most hideous human being (if she is one) that Shakespeare ever drew.
+
+I have already noticed the resemblance between Edmund and Iago in one
+point; and Edmund recalls his greater forerunner also in courage,
+strength of will, address, egoism, an abnormal want of feeling, and the
+possession of a sense of humour. But here the likeness ends. Indeed a
+decided difference is observable even in the humour. Edmund is
+apparently a good deal younger than Iago. He has a lighter and more
+superficial nature, and there is a certain genuine gaiety in him which
+makes one smile not unsympathetically as one listens to his first
+soliloquy, with its cheery conclusion, so unlike Iago's references to
+the powers of darkness,
+
+     Now, gods, stand up for bastards!
+
+Even after we have witnessed his dreadful deeds, a touch of this
+sympathy is felt again when we hear his nonchalant reflections before
+the battle:
+
+     To both these sisters have I sworn my love:
+     Each jealous of the other, as the stung
+     Are of the adder. Which of them shall I take?
+     Both? one? or neither?
+
+Besides, there is nothing in Edmund of Iago's motive-hunting, and very
+little of any of the secret forces which impelled Iago. He is
+comparatively a straightforward character, as straightforward as the
+Iago of some critics. He moves wonder and horror merely because the fact
+that a man so young can have a nature so bad is a dark mystery.
+
+Edmund is an adventurer pure and simple. He acts in pursuance of a
+purpose, and, if he has any affections or dislikes, ignores them. He is
+determined to make his way, first to his brother's lands, then--as the
+prospect widens--to the crown; and he regards men and women, with their
+virtues and vices, together with the bonds of kinship, friendship, or
+allegiance, merely as hindrances or helps to his end. They are for him
+divested of all quality except their relation to this end; as
+indifferent as mathematical quantities or mere physical agents.
+
+     A credulous father and a brother noble,
+      ... I see the business,
+
+he says, as if he were talking of _x_ and _y_.
+
+     This seems a fair deserving, and must draw me
+     That which my father loses; no less than all:
+     The younger rises when the old doth fall:
+
+he meditates, as if he were considering a problem in mechanics. He
+preserves this attitude with perfect consistency until the possibility
+of attaining his end is snatched from him by death.
+
+Like the deformity of Richard, Edmund's illegitimacy furnishes, of
+course, no excuse for his villainy, but it somewhat influences our
+feelings. It is no fault of his, and yet it separates him from other
+men. He is the product of Nature--of a natural appetite asserting itself
+against the social order; and he has no recognised place within this
+order. So he devotes himself to Nature, whose law is that of the
+stronger, and who does not recognise those moral obligations which exist
+only by convention,--by 'custom' or 'the curiosity of nations.'[170]
+Practically, his attitude is that of a professional criminal. 'You tell
+me I do not belong to you,' he seems to say to society: 'very well: I
+will make my way into your treasure-house if I can. And if I have to
+take life in doing so, that is your affair.' How far he is serious in
+this attitude, and really indignant at the brand of bastardy, how far
+his indignation is a half-conscious self-excuse for his meditated
+villainy, it is hard to say; but the end shows that he is not entirely
+in earnest.
+
+As he is an adventurer, with no more ill-will to anyone than good-will,
+it is natural that, when he has lost the game, he should accept his
+failure without showing personal animosity. But he does more. He admits
+the truth of Edgar's words about the justice of the gods, and applies
+them to his own case (though the fact that he himself refers to
+fortune's wheel rather than to the gods may be significant). He shows
+too that he is not destitute of feeling; for he is touched by the story
+of his father's death, and at last 'pants for life' in the effort to do
+'some good' by saving Lear and Cordelia. There is something pathetic
+here which tempts one to dream that, if Edmund had been whole brother to
+Edgar, and had been at home during those 'nine years' when he was 'out,'
+he might have been a very different man. But perhaps his words,
+
+                   Some good I mean to do,
+     _Despite of mine own nature_,
+
+suggest rather that Shakespeare is emphasising the mysterious fact,
+commented on by Kent in the case of the three daughters of Lear, of an
+immense original difference between children of one father. Stranger
+than this emergence of better feelings, and curiously pathetic, is the
+pleasure of the dying man in the thought that he was loved by both the
+women whose corpses are almost the last sight he is to see. Perhaps, as
+we conjectured, the cause of his delay in saving Lear and Cordelia even
+after he hears of the deaths of the sisters is that he is sunk in dreamy
+reflections on his past. When he murmurs, 'Yet Edmund was beloved,' one
+is almost in danger of forgetting that he had done much more than reject
+the love of his father and half-brother. The passage is one of several
+in Shakespeare's plays where it strikes us that he is recording some
+fact about human nature with which he had actually met, and which had
+seemed to him peculiarly strange.
+
+What are we to say of the world which contains these five beings,
+Goneril, Regan, Edmund, Cornwall, Oswald? I have tried to answer this
+question in our first lecture; for in its representation of evil _King
+Lear_ differs from the other tragedies only in degree and manner. It is
+the tragedy in which evil is shown in the greatest abundance; and the
+evil characters are peculiarly repellent from their hard savagery, and
+because so little good is mingled with their evil. The effect is
+therefore more startling than elsewhere; it is even appalling. But in
+substance it is the same as elsewhere; and accordingly, although it may
+be useful to recall here our previous discussion, I will do so only by
+the briefest statement.
+
+On the one hand we see a world which generates terrible evil in
+profusion. Further, the beings in whom this evil appears at its
+strongest are able, to a certain extent, to thrive. They are not
+unhappy, and they have power to spread misery and destruction around
+them. All this is undeniable fact.
+
+On the other hand this evil is _merely_ destructive: it founds nothing,
+and seems capable of existing only on foundations laid by its opposite.
+It is also self-destructive: it sets these beings at enmity; they can
+scarcely unite against a common and pressing danger; if it were averted
+they would be at each other's throats in a moment; the sisters do not
+even wait till it is past. Finally, these beings, all five of them, are
+dead a few weeks after we see them first; three at least die young; the
+outburst of their evil is fatal to them. These also are undeniable
+facts; and, in face of them, it seems odd to describe _King Lear_ as 'a
+play in which the wicked prosper' (Johnson).
+
+Thus the world in which evil appears seems to be at heart unfriendly to
+it. And this impression is confirmed by the fact that the convulsion of
+this world is due to evil, mainly in the worst forms here considered,
+partly in the milder forms which we call the errors or defects of the
+better characters. Good, in the widest sense, seems thus to be the
+principle of life and health in the world; evil, at least in these worst
+forms, to be a poison. The world reacts against it violently, and, in
+the struggle to expel it, is driven to devastate itself.
+
+If we ask why the world should generate that which convulses and wastes
+it, the tragedy gives no answer, and we are trying to go beyond tragedy
+in seeking one. But the world, in this tragic picture, is convulsed by
+evil, and rejects it.
+
+
+4
+
+And if here there is 'very Night herself,' she comes 'with stars in her
+raiment.' Cordelia, Kent, Edgar, the Fool--these form a group not less
+remarkable than that which we have just left. There is in the world of
+_King Lear_ the same abundance of extreme good as of extreme evil. It
+generates in profusion self-less devotion and unconquerable love. And
+the strange thing is that neither Shakespeare nor we are surprised. We
+approve these characters, admire them, love them; but we feel no
+mystery. We do not ask in bewilderment, Is there any cause in nature
+that makes these kind hearts? Such hardened optimists are we, and
+Shakespeare,--and those who find the darkness of revelation in a tragedy
+which reveals Cordelia. Yet surely, if we condemn the universe for
+Cordelia's death, we ought also to remember that it gave her birth. The
+fact that Socrates was executed does not remove the fact that he lived,
+and the inference thence to be drawn about the world that produced him.
+
+Of these four characters Edgar excites the least enthusiasm, but he is
+the one whose development is the most marked. His behaviour in the early
+part of the play, granted that it is not too improbable, is so foolish
+as to provoke one. But he learns by experience, and becomes the most
+capable person in the story, without losing any of his purity and
+nobility of mind. There remain in him, however, touches which a little
+chill one's feeling for him.
+
+     The gods are just, and of our pleasant vices
+     Make instruments to plague us:
+     The dark and vicious place where thee he got
+     Cost him his eyes:
+
+--one wishes he had not said to his dying brother those words about
+their dead father. 'The gods are just' would have been enough.[171] It
+may be suggested that Shakespeare merely wished to introduce this moral
+somehow, and did not mean the speech to be characteristic of the
+speaker. But I doubt this: he might well have delivered it through
+Albany, if he was determined to deliver it. This trait in Edgar _is_
+characteristic. It seems to be connected with his pronounced and
+conscious religiousness. He interprets everything religiously, and is
+speaking here from an intense conviction which overrides personal
+feelings. With this religiousness, on the other side, is connected his
+cheerful and confident endurance, and his practical helpfulness and
+resource. He never thinks of despairing; in the worst circumstances he
+is sure there is something to be done to make things better. And he is
+sure of this, not only from temperament, but from faith in 'the clearest
+gods.' He is the man on whom we are to rely at the end for the recovery
+and welfare of the state: and we do rely on him.
+
+I spoke of his temperament. There is in Edgar, with much else that is
+fine, something of that buoyancy of spirit which charms us in Imogen.
+Nothing can subdue in him the feeling that life is sweet and must be
+cherished. At his worst, misconstrued, contemned, exiled, under sentence
+of death, 'the lowest and most dejected thing of fortune,' he keeps his
+head erect. The inextinguishable spirit of youth and delight is in him;
+he _embraces_ the unsubstantial air which has blown him to the worst;
+for him 'the worst returns to laughter.'[172] 'Bear free and patient
+thoughts,' he says to his father. His own thoughts are more than
+patient, they are 'free,' even joyous, in spite of the tender sympathies
+which strive in vain to overwhelm him. This ability to feel and offer
+great sympathy with distress, without losing through the sympathy any
+elasticity or strength, is a noble quality, sometimes found in souls
+like Edgar's, naturally buoyant and also religious. It may even be
+characteristic of him that, when Lear is sinking down in death, he tries
+to rouse him and bring him back to life. 'Look up, my lord!' he cries.
+It is Kent who feels that
+
+                       he hates him,
+     That would upon the rack of this tough world
+     Stretch him out longer.
+
+Kent is one of the best-loved characters in Shakespeare. He is beloved
+for his own sake, and also for the sake of Cordelia and of Lear. We are
+grateful to him because he stands up for Cordelia, and because, when she
+is out of sight, he constantly keeps her in our minds. And how well
+these two love each other we see when they meet. Yet it is not Cordelia
+who is dearest to Kent. His love for Lear is the passion of his life: it
+_is_ his life. At the beginning he braves Lear's wrath even more for
+Lear's sake than Cordelia's.[173] At the end he seems to realise
+Cordelia's death only as it is reflected in Lear's agony. Nor does he
+merely love his master passionately, as Cordelia loves her father. That
+word 'master,' and Kent's appeal to the 'authority' he saw in the old
+King's face, are significant. He belongs to Lear, body and soul, as a
+dog does to his master and god. The King is not to him old, wayward,
+unreasonable, piteous: he is still terrible, grand, the king of men.
+Through his eyes we see the Lear of Lear's prime, whom Cordelia never
+saw. Kent never forgets this Lear. In the Storm-scenes, even after the
+King becomes insane, Kent never addresses him without the old terms of
+respect, 'your grace,' 'my lord,' 'sir.' How characteristic it is that
+in the scene of Lear's recovery Kent speaks to him but once: it is when
+the King asks 'Am I in France?' and he answers 'In your own kingdom,
+sir.'
+
+In acting the part of a blunt and eccentric serving-man Kent retains
+much of his natural character. The eccentricity seems to be put on, but
+the plainness which gets him set in the stocks is but an exaggeration of
+his plainness in the opening scene, and Shakespeare certainly meant him
+for one of those characters whom we love none the less for their
+defects. He is hot and rash; noble but far from skilful in his
+resistance to the King; he might well have chosen wiser words to gain
+his point. But, as he himself says, he has more man than wit about him.
+He shows this again when he rejoins Lear as a servant, for he at once
+brings the quarrel with Goneril to a head; and, later, by falling upon
+Oswald, whom he so detests that he cannot keep his hands off him, he
+provides Regan and Cornwall with a pretext for their inhospitality. One
+has not the heart to wish him different, but he illustrates the truth
+that to run one's head unselfishly against a wall is not the best way to
+help one's friends.
+
+One fact about Kent is often overlooked. He is an old man. He tells Lear
+that he is eight and forty, but it is clear that he is much older; not
+so old as his master, who was 'four-score and upward' and whom he 'loved
+as his father,' but, one may suppose, three-score and upward. From the
+first scene we get this impression, and in the scene with Oswald it is
+repeatedly confirmed. His beard is grey. 'Ancient ruffian,' 'old
+fellow,' 'you stubborn ancient knave, you reverent braggart'--these are
+some of the expressions applied to him. 'Sir,' he says to Cornwall, 'I
+am too old to learn.' If his age is not remembered, we fail to realise
+the full beauty of his thoughtlessness of himself, his incessant care of
+the King, his light-hearted indifference to fortune or fate.[174] We
+lose also some of the naturalness and pathos of his feeling that his
+task is nearly done. Even at the end of the Fourth Act we find him
+saying,
+
+     My point and period will be throughly wrought
+     Or well or ill, as this day's battle's fought.
+
+His heart is ready to break when he falls with his strong arms about
+Edgar's neck; bellows out as he'd burst heaven (how like him!);
+
+                     threw him on my father,
+     Told the most piteous tale of Lear and him
+     That ever ear received; which in recounting
+     His grief grew puissant, and the strings of life
+     Began to crack. Twice then the trumpet sounded,
+     And there I left him tranced;
+
+and a little after, when he enters, we hear the sound of death in his
+voice:
+
+                         I am come
+     To bid my king and master aye goodnight.
+
+This desire possesses him wholly. When the bodies of Goneril and Regan
+are brought in he asks merely, 'Alack, why thus?' How can he care? He is
+waiting for one thing alone. He cannot but yearn for recognition, cannot
+but beg for it even when Lear is bending over the body of Cordelia; and
+even in that scene of unmatched pathos we feel a sharp pang at his
+failure to receive it. It is of himself he is speaking, perhaps, when he
+murmurs, as his master dies, 'Break, heart, I prithee, break!' He puts
+aside Albany's invitation to take part in the government; his task is
+over:
+
+     I have a journey, sir, shortly to go:
+     My master calls me; I must not say no.
+
+Kent in his devotion, his self-effacement, his cheerful stoicism, his
+desire to follow his dead lord, has been well likened to Horatio. But
+Horatio is not old; nor is he hot-headed; and though he is stoical he is
+also religious. Kent, as compared with him and with Edgar, is not so. He
+has not Edgar's ever-present faith in the 'clearest gods.' He refers to
+them, in fact, less often than to fortune or the stars. He lives mainly
+by the love in his own heart.[175]
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The theatrical fool or clown (we need not distinguish them here) was a
+sore trial to the cultured poet and spectator in Shakespeare's day. He
+came down from the Morality plays, and was beloved of the groundlings.
+His antics, his songs, his dances, his jests, too often unclean,
+delighted them, and did something to make the drama, what the vulgar,
+poor or rich, like it to be, a variety entertainment. Even if he
+confined himself to what was set down for him, he often disturbed the
+dramatic unity of the piece; and the temptation to 'gag' was too strong
+for him to resist. Shakespeare makes Hamlet object to it in emphatic
+terms. The more learned critics and poets went further and would have
+abolished the fool altogether. His part declines as the drama advances,
+diminishing markedly at the end of the sixteenth century. Jonson and
+Massinger exclude him. Shakespeare used him--we know to what effect--as
+he used all the other popular elements of the drama; but he abstained
+from introducing him into the Roman plays,[176] and there is no fool in
+the last of the pure tragedies, _Macbeth_.
+
+But the Fool is one of Shakespeare's triumphs in _King Lear_. Imagine
+the tragedy without him, and you hardly know it. To remove him would
+spoil its harmony, as the harmony of a picture would be spoiled if one
+of the colours were extracted. One can almost imagine that Shakespeare,
+going home from an evening at the Mermaid, where he had listened to
+Jonson fulminating against fools in general and perhaps criticising the
+Clown in _Twelfth Night_ in particular, had said to himself: 'Come, my
+friends, I will show you once for all that the mischief is in you, and
+not in the fool or the audience. I will have a fool in the most tragic
+of my tragedies. He shall not play a little part. He shall keep from
+first to last the company in which you most object to see him, the
+company of a king. Instead of amusing the king's idle hours, he shall
+stand by him in the very tempest and whirlwind of passion. Before I have
+done you shall confess, between laughter and tears, that he is of the
+very essence of life, that you have known him all your days though you
+never recognised him till now, and that you would as soon go without
+Hamlet as miss him.'
+
+The Fool in _King Lear_ has been so favourite a subject with good
+critics that I will confine myself to one or two points on which a
+difference of opinion is possible. To suppose that the Fool is, like
+many a domestic fool at that time, a perfectly sane man pretending to be
+half-witted, is surely a most prosaic blunder. There is no difficulty in
+imagining that, being slightly touched in the brain, and holding the
+office of fool, he performs the duties of his office intentionally as
+well as involuntarily: it is evident that he does so. But unless we
+suppose that he _is_ touched in the brain we lose half the effect of
+his appearance in the Storm-scenes. The effect of those scenes (to state
+the matter as plainly as possible) depends largely on the presence of
+three characters, and on the affinities and contrasts between them; on
+our perception that the differences of station in King, Fool, and
+beggar-noble, are levelled by one blast of calamity; but also on our
+perception of the differences between these three in one respect,--viz.
+in regard to the peculiar affliction of insanity. The insanity of the
+King differs widely in its nature from that of the Fool, and that of the
+Fool from that of the beggar. But the insanity of the King differs from
+that of the beggar not only in its nature, but also in the fact that one
+is real and the other simply a pretence. Are we to suppose then that the
+insanity of the third character, the Fool, is, in this respect, a mere
+repetition of that of the second, the beggar,--that it too is _mere_
+pretence? To suppose this is not only to impoverish miserably the
+impression made by the trio as a whole, it is also to diminish the
+heroic and pathetic effect of the character of the Fool. For his heroism
+consists largely in this, that his efforts to outjest his master's
+injuries are the efforts of a being to whom a responsible and consistent
+course of action, nay even a responsible use of language, is at the best
+of times difficult, and from whom it is never at the best of times
+expected. It is a heroism something like that of Lear himself in his
+endeavour to learn patience at the age of eighty. But arguments against
+the idea that the Fool is wholly sane are either needless or futile; for
+in the end they are appeals to the perception that this idea almost
+destroys the poetry of the character.
+
+This is not the case with another question, the question whether the
+Fool is a man or a boy. Here the evidence and the grounds for discussion
+are more tangible. He is frequently addressed as 'boy.' This is not
+decisive; but Lear's first words to him, 'How now, my pretty knave, how
+dost thou?' are difficult to reconcile with the idea of his being a man,
+and the use of this phrase on his first entrance may show Shakespeare's
+desire to prevent any mistake on the point. As a boy, too, he would be
+more strongly contrasted in the Storm-scenes with Edgar as well as with
+Lear; his faithfulness and courage would be even more heroic and
+touching; his devotion to Cordelia, and the consequent bitterness of
+some of his speeches to Lear, would be even more natural. Nor does he
+seem to show a knowledge of the world impossible to a quick-witted
+though not whole-witted lad who had lived at Court. The only serious
+obstacle to this view, I think, is the fact that he is not known to have
+been represented as a boy or youth till Macready produced _King
+Lear_.[177]
+
+But even if this obstacle were serious and the Fool were imagined as a
+grown man, we may still insist that he must also be imagined as a timid,
+delicate and frail being, who on that account and from the expression of
+his face has a boyish look.[178] He pines away when Cordelia goes to
+France. Though he takes great liberties with his master he is frightened
+by Goneril, and becomes quite silent when the quarrel rises high. In the
+terrible scene between Lear and his two daughters and Cornwall
+(II. iv. 129-289), he says not a word; we have almost forgotten
+his presence when, at the topmost pitch of passion, Lear suddenly turns
+to him from the hateful faces that encompass him:
+
+                        You think I'll weep;
+     No, I'll not weep:
+     I have full cause of weeping; but this heart
+     Shall break into a hundred thousand flaws
+     Or ere I'll weep. O fool, I shall go mad.
+
+From the beginning of the Storm-scenes, though he thinks of his master
+alone, we perceive from his words that the cold and rain are almost more
+than he can bear. His childishness comes home to us when he runs out of
+the hovel, terrified by the madman and crying out to the King 'Help me,
+help me,' and the good Kent takes him by the hand and draws him to his
+side. A little later he exclaims, 'This cold night will turn us all to
+fools and madmen'; and almost from that point he leaves the King to
+Edgar, speaking only once again in the remaining hundred lines of the
+scene. In the shelter of the 'farm-house' (III. vi.) he revives, and
+resumes his office of love; but I think that critic is right who
+considers his last words significant. 'We'll go to supper i' the
+morning,' says Lear; and the Fool answers 'And I'll go to bed at noon,'
+as though he felt he had taken his death. When, a little later, the King
+is being carried away on a litter, the Fool sits idle. He is so benumbed
+and worn out that he scarcely notices what is going on. Kent has to
+rouse him with the words,
+
+              Come, help to bear thy master,
+     Thou must not stay behind.
+
+We know no more. For the famous exclamation 'And my poor fool is hanged'
+unquestionably refers to Cordelia; and even if it is intended to show a
+confused association in Lear's mind between his child and the Fool who
+so loved her (as a very old man may confuse two of his children), still
+it tells us nothing of the Fool's fate. It seems strange indeed that
+Shakespeare should have left us thus in ignorance. But we have seen that
+there are many marks of haste and carelessness in _King Lear_; and it
+may also be observed that, if the poet imagined the Fool dying on the
+way to Dover of the effects of that night upon the heath, he could
+perhaps convey this idea to the audience by instructing the actor who
+took the part to show, as he left the stage for the last time, the
+recognised tokens of approaching death.[179]
+
+Something has now been said of the four characters, Lear, Edgar, Kent
+and the Fool, who are together in the storm upon the heath. I have made
+no attempt to analyse the whole effect of these scenes, but one remark
+may be added. These scenes, as we observed, suggest the idea of a
+convulsion in which Nature herself joins with the forces of evil in man
+to overpower the weak; and they are thus one of the main sources of the
+more terrible impressions produced by _King Lear_. But they have at the
+same time an effect of a totally different kind, because in them are
+exhibited also the strength and the beauty of Lear's nature, and, in
+Kent and the Fool and Edgar, the ideal of faithful devoted love. Hence
+from the beginning to the end of these scenes we have, mingled with pain
+and awe and a sense of man's infirmity, an equally strong feeling of his
+greatness; and this becomes at times even an exulting sense of the
+powerlessness of outward calamity or the malice of others against his
+soul. And this is one reason why imagination and emotion are never here
+pressed painfully inward, as in the scenes between Lear and his
+daughters, but are liberated and dilated.
+
+
+5
+
+The character of Cordelia is not a masterpiece of invention or subtlety
+like that of Cleopatra; yet in its own way it is a creation as
+wonderful. Cordelia appears in only four of the twenty-six scenes of
+_King Lear_; she speaks--it is hard to believe it--scarcely more than a
+hundred lines; and yet no character in Shakespeare is more absolutely
+individual or more ineffaceably stamped on the memory of his readers.
+There is a harmony, strange but perhaps the result of intention, between
+the character itself and this reserved or parsimonious method of
+depicting it. An expressiveness almost inexhaustible gained through
+paucity of expression; the suggestion of infinite wealth and beauty
+conveyed by the very refusal to reveal this beauty in expansive
+speech--this is at once the nature of Cordelia herself and the chief
+characteristic of Shakespeare's art in representing it. Perhaps it is
+not fanciful to find a parallel in his drawing of a person very
+different, Hamlet. It was natural to Hamlet to examine himself minutely,
+to discuss himself at large, and yet to remain a mystery to himself; and
+Shakespeare's method of drawing the character answers to it; it is
+extremely detailed and searching, and yet its effect is to enhance the
+sense of mystery. The results in the two cases differ correspondingly.
+No one hesitates to enlarge upon Hamlet, who speaks of himself so much;
+but to use many words about Cordelia seems to be a kind of impiety.
+
+I am obliged to speak of her chiefly because the devotion she inspires
+almost inevitably obscures her part in the tragedy. This devotion is
+composed, so to speak, of two contrary elements, reverence and pity. The
+first, because Cordelia's is a higher nature than that of most even of
+Shakespeare's heroines. With the tenderness of Viola or Desdemona she
+unites something of the resolution, power, and dignity of Hermione, and
+reminds us sometimes of Helena, sometimes of Isabella, though she has
+none of the traits which prevent Isabella from winning our hearts. Her
+assertion of truth and right, her allegiance to them, even the touch of
+severity that accompanies it, instead of compelling mere respect or
+admiration, become adorable in a nature so loving as Cordelia's. She is
+a thing enskyed and sainted, and yet we feel no incongruity in the love
+of the King of France for her, as we do in the love of the Duke for
+Isabella.
+
+But with this reverence or worship is combined in the reader's mind a
+passion of championship, of pity, even of protecting pity. She is so
+deeply wronged, and she appears, for all her strength, so defenceless.
+We think of her as unable to speak for herself. We think of her as quite
+young, and as slight and small.[180] 'Her voice was ever soft, gentle,
+and low'; ever so, whether the tone was that of resolution, or rebuke,
+or love.[181] Of all Shakespeare's heroines she knew least of joy. She
+grew up with Goneril and Regan for sisters. Even her love for her father
+must have been mingled with pain and anxiety. She must early have
+learned to school and repress emotion. She never knew the bliss of young
+love: there is no trace of such love for the King of France. She had
+knowingly to wound most deeply the being dearest to her. He cast her
+off; and, after suffering an agony for him, and before she could see him
+safe in death, she was brutally murdered. We have to thank the poet for
+passing lightly over the circumstances of her death. We do not think of
+them. Her image comes before us calm and bright and still.
+
+The memory of Cordelia thus becomes detached in a manner from the action
+of the drama. The reader refuses to admit into it any idea of
+imperfection, and is outraged when any share in her father's sufferings
+is attributed to the part she plays in the opening scene. Because she
+was deeply wronged he is ready to insist that she was wholly right. He
+refuses, that is, to take the tragic point of view, and, when it is
+taken, he imagines that Cordelia is being attacked, or is being declared
+to have 'deserved' all that befell her. But Shakespeare's was the tragic
+point of view. He exhibits in the opening scene a situation tragic for
+Cordelia as well as for Lear. At a moment where terrible issues join,
+Fate makes on her the one demand which she is unable to meet. As I have
+already remarked in speaking of Desdemona, it was a demand which other
+heroines of Shakespeare could have met. Without loss of self-respect,
+and refusing even to appear to compete for a reward, they could have
+made the unreasonable old King feel that he was fondly loved. Cordelia
+cannot, because she is Cordelia. And so she is not merely rejected and
+banished, but her father is left to the mercies of her sisters. And the
+cause of her failure--a failure a thousand-fold redeemed--is a compound
+in which imperfection appears so intimately mingled with the noblest
+qualities that--if we are true to Shakespeare--we do not think either of
+justifying her or of blaming her: we feel simply the tragic emotions of
+fear and pity.
+
+In this failure a large part is played by that obvious characteristic to
+which I have already referred. Cordelia is not, indeed, always
+tongue-tied, as several passages in the drama, and even in this scene,
+clearly show. But tender emotion, and especially a tender love for the
+person to whom she has to speak, makes her dumb. Her love, as she says,
+is more ponderous than her tongue:[182]
+
+                   Unhappy that I am, I cannot heave
+     My heart into my mouth.
+
+This expressive word 'heave' is repeated in the passage which describes
+her reception of Kent's letter:
+
+     Faith, once or twice she heaved the name of 'Father'
+     Pantingly forth, as if it press'd her heart:
+
+two or three broken ejaculations escape her lips, and she 'starts' away
+'to deal with grief alone.' The same trait reappears with an ineffable
+beauty in the stifled repetitions with which she attempts to answer her
+father in the moment of his restoration:
+
+     _Lear._                 Do not laugh at me;
+              For, as I am a man, I think this lady
+              To be my child Cordelia.
+
+     _Cor._                             And so I am, I am.
+
+     _Lear._  Be your tears wet? yes, faith. I pray, weep not;
+              If you have poison for me, I will drink it.
+              I know you do not love me; for your sisters
+              Have, as I do remember, done me wrong:
+              You have some cause, they have not.
+
+     _Cor._                             No cause, no cause.
+
+We see this trait for the last time, marked by Shakespeare with a
+decision clearly intentional, in her inability to answer one syllable to
+the last words we hear her father speak to her:
+
+     No, no, no, no! Come, let's away to prison:
+     We two alone will sing like birds i' the cage:
+     When thou dost ask me blessing, I'll kneel down,
+     And ask of thee forgiveness: so we'll live,
+     And pray, and sing, and tell old tales, and laugh
+     At gilded butterflies....
+
+She stands and weeps, and goes out with him silent. And we see her alive
+no more.
+
+But (I am forced to dwell on the point, because I am sure to slur it
+over is to be false to Shakespeare) this dumbness of love was not the
+sole source of misunderstanding. If this had been all, even Lear could
+have seen the love in Cordelia's eyes when, to his question 'What can
+you say to draw a third more opulent than your sisters?' she answered
+'Nothing.' But it did not shine there. She is not merely silent, nor
+does she merely answer 'Nothing.' She tells him that she loves him
+'according to her bond, nor more nor less'; and his answer,
+
+     How now, Cordelia! mend your speech a little,
+     Lest it may mar your fortunes,
+
+so intensifies her horror at the hypocrisy of her sisters that she
+replies,
+
+                             Good my Lord,
+     You have begot me, bred me, loved me: I
+     Return those duties back as are right fit,
+     Obey you, love you, and most honour you.
+     Why have my sisters husbands, if they say
+     They love you all? Haply, when I shall wed,
+     That lord whose hand must take my plight shall carry
+     Half my love with him, half my care and duty:
+     Sure, I shall never marry like my sisters,
+     To love my father all.
+
+What words for the ear of an old father, unreasonable, despotic, but
+fondly loving, indecent in his own expressions of preference, and blind
+to the indecency of his appeal for protestations of fondness! Blank
+astonishment, anger, wounded love, contend within him; but for the
+moment he restrains himself and asks,
+
+     But goes thy heart with this?
+
+Imagine Imogen's reply! But Cordelia answers,
+
+                       Ay, good my lord.
+
+     _Lear._  So young, and so untender?
+
+     _Cor._   So young, my lord, and true.
+
+Yes, 'heavenly true.' But truth is not the only good in the world, nor
+is the obligation to tell truth the only obligation. The matter here was
+to keep it inviolate, but also to preserve a father. And even if truth
+_were_ the one and only obligation, to tell much less than truth is not
+to tell it. And Cordelia's speech not only tells much less than truth
+about her love, it actually perverts the truth when it implies that to
+give love to a husband is to take it from a father. There surely never
+was a more unhappy speech.
+
+When Isabella goes to plead with Angelo for her brother's life, her
+horror of her brother's sin is so intense, and her perception of the
+justice of Angelo's reasons for refusing her is so clear and keen, that
+she is ready to abandon her appeal before it is well begun; she would
+actually do so but that the warm-hearted profligate Lucio reproaches her
+for her coldness and urges her on. Cordelia's hatred of hypocrisy and of
+the faintest appearance of mercenary professions reminds us of
+Isabella's hatred of impurity; but Cordelia's position is infinitely
+more difficult, and on the other hand there is mingled with her hatred a
+touch of personal antagonism and of pride. Lear's words,
+
+     Let pride, which she calls plainness, marry her![183]
+
+are monstrously unjust, but they contain one grain of truth; and indeed
+it was scarcely possible that a nature so strong as Cordelia's, and with
+so keen a sense of dignity, should feel here nothing whatever of pride
+and resentment. This side of her character is emphatically shown in her
+language to her sisters in the first scene--language perfectly just, but
+little adapted to soften their hearts towards their father--and again in
+the very last words we hear her speak. She and her father are brought
+in, prisoners, to the enemy's camp; but she sees only Edmund, not those
+'greater' ones on whose pleasure hangs her father's fate and her own.
+For her own she is little concerned; she knows how to meet adversity:
+
+     For thee, oppressed king, am I cast down;
+     Myself could else out-frown false fortune's frown.
+
+Yes, that is how she would meet fortune, frowning it down, even as
+Goneril would have met it; nor, if her father had been already dead,
+would there have been any great improbability in the false story that
+was to be told of her death, that, like Goneril, she 'fordid herself.'
+Then, after those austere words about fortune, she suddenly asks,
+
+     Shall we not see these daughters and these sisters?
+
+Strange last words for us to hear from a being so worshipped and
+beloved; but how characteristic! Their tone is unmistakable. I doubt if
+she could have brought herself to plead with her sisters for her
+father's life; and if she had attempted the task, she would have
+performed it but ill. Nor is our feeling towards her altered one whit by
+that. But what is true of Kent and the Fool[184] is, in its measure,
+true of her. Any one of them would gladly have died a hundred deaths to
+help King Lear; and they do help his soul; but they harm his cause. They
+are all involved in tragedy.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Why does Cordelia die? I suppose no reader ever failed to ask that
+question, and to ask it with something more than pain,--to ask it, if
+only for a moment, in bewilderment or dismay, and even perhaps in tones
+of protest. These feelings are probably evoked more strongly here than
+at the death of any other notable character in Shakespeare; and it may
+sound a wilful paradox to assert that the slightest element of
+reconciliation is mingled with them or succeeds them. Yet it seems to me
+indubitable that such an element is present, though difficult to make
+out with certainty what it is or whence it proceeds. And I will try to
+make this out, and to state it methodically.
+
+(_a_) It is not due in any perceptible degree to the fact, which we have
+just been examining, that Cordelia through her tragic imperfection
+contributes something to the conflict and catastrophe; and I drew
+attention to that imperfection without any view to our present problem.
+The critics who emphasise it at this point in the drama are surely
+untrue to Shakespeare's mind; and still more completely astray are those
+who lay stress on the idea that Cordelia, in bringing a foreign army to
+help her father, was guilty of treason to her country. When she dies we
+regard her, practically speaking, simply as we regard Ophelia or
+Desdemona, as an innocent victim swept away in the convulsion caused by
+the error or guilt of others.
+
+(_b_) Now this destruction of the good through the evil of others is one
+of the tragic facts of life, and no one can object to the use of it,
+within certain limits, in tragic art. And, further, those who because of
+it declaim against the nature of things, declaim without thinking. It is
+obviously the other side of the fact that the effects of good spread far
+and wide beyond the doer of good; and we should ask ourselves whether we
+really could wish (supposing it conceivable) to see this double-sided
+fact abolished. Nevertheless the touch of reconciliation that we feel in
+contemplating the death of Cordelia is not due, or is due only in some
+slight degree, to a perception that the event is true to life,
+admissible in tragedy, and a case of a law which we cannot seriously
+desire to see abrogated.
+
+(_c_) What then is this feeling, and whence does it come? I believe we
+shall find that it is a feeling not confined to _King Lear_, but present
+at the close of other tragedies; and that the reason why it has an
+exceptional tone or force at the close of _King Lear_, lies in that very
+peculiarity of the close which also--at least for the moment--excites
+bewilderment, dismay, or protest. The feeling I mean is the impression
+that the heroic being, though in one sense and outwardly he has failed,
+is yet in another sense superior to the world in which he appears; is,
+in some way which we do not seek to define, untouched by the doom that
+overtakes him; and is rather set free from life than deprived of it.
+Some such feeling as this--some feeling which, from this description of
+it, may be recognised as their own even by those who would dissent from
+the description--we surely have in various degrees at the deaths of
+Hamlet and Othello and Lear, and of Antony and Cleopatra and
+Coriolanus.[185] It accompanies the more prominent tragic impressions,
+and, regarded alone, could hardly be called tragic. For it seems to
+imply (though we are probably quite unconscious of the implication) an
+idea which, if developed, would transform the tragic view of things. It
+implies that the tragic world, if taken as it is presented, with all its
+error, guilt, failure, woe and waste, is no final reality, but only a
+part of reality taken for the whole, and, when so taken, illusive; and
+that if we could see the whole, and the tragic facts in their true place
+in it, we should find them, not abolished, of course, but so transmuted
+that they had ceased to be strictly tragic,--find, perhaps, the
+suffering and death counting for little or nothing, the greatness of the
+soul for much or all, and the heroic spirit, in spite of failure, nearer
+to the heart of things than the smaller, more circumspect, and perhaps
+even 'better' beings who survived the catastrophe. The feeling which I
+have tried to describe, as accompanying the more obvious tragic emotions
+at the deaths of heroes, corresponds with some such idea as this.[186]
+
+Now this feeling is evoked with a quite exceptional strength by the
+death of Cordelia.[187] It is not due to the perception that she, like
+Lear, has attained through suffering; we know that she had suffered and
+attained in his days of prosperity. It is simply the feeling that what
+happens to such a being does not matter; all that matters is what she
+is. How this can be when, for anything the tragedy tells us, she has
+ceased to exist, we do not ask; but the tragedy itself makes us feel
+that somehow it is so. And the force with which this impression is
+conveyed depends largely on the very fact which excites our bewilderment
+and protest, that her death, following on the deaths of all the evil
+characters, and brought about by an unexplained delay in Edmund's effort
+to save her, comes on us, not as an inevitable conclusion to the
+sequence of events, but as the sudden stroke of mere fate or chance. The
+force of the impression, that is to say, depends on the very violence of
+the contrast between the outward and the inward, Cordelia's death and
+Cordelia's soul. The more unmotived, unmerited, senseless, monstrous,
+her fate, the more do we feel that it does not concern her. The
+extremity of the disproportion between prosperity and goodness first
+shocks us, and then flashes on us the conviction that our whole attitude
+in asking or expecting that goodness should be prosperous is wrong;
+that, if only we could see things as they are, we should see that the
+outward is nothing and the inward is all.
+
+And some such thought as this (which, to bring it clearly out, I have
+stated, and still state, in a form both exaggerated and much too
+explicit) is really present through the whole play. Whether Shakespeare
+knew it or not, it is present. I might almost say that the 'moral' of
+_King Lear_ is presented in the irony of this collocation:
+
+           _Albany._ The gods defend her!
+     _Enter Lear with Cordelia dead in his arms._
+
+The 'gods,' it seems, do _not_ show their approval by 'defending' their
+own from adversity or death, or by giving them power and prosperity.
+These, on the contrary, are worthless, or worse; it is not on them, but
+on the renunciation of them, that the gods throw incense. They breed
+lust, pride, hardness of heart, the insolence of office, cruelty, scorn,
+hypocrisy, contention, war, murder, self-destruction. The whole story
+beats this indictment of prosperity into the brain. Lear's great
+speeches in his madness proclaim it like the curses of Timon on life and
+man. But here, as in _Timon_, the poor and humble are, almost without
+exception, sound and sweet at heart, faithful and pitiful.[188] And here
+adversity, to the blessed in spirit, is blessed. It wins fragrance from
+the crushed flower. It melts in aged hearts sympathies which prosperity
+had frozen. It purges the soul's sight by blinding that of the
+eyes.[189] Throughout that stupendous Third Act the good are seen
+growing better through suffering, and the bad worse through success. The
+warm castle is a room in hell, the storm-swept heath a sanctuary. The
+judgment of this world is a lie; its goods, which we covet, corrupt us;
+its ills, which break our bodies, set our souls free;
+
+     Our means secure us,[190] and our mere defects
+     Prove our commodities.
+
+Let us renounce the world, hate it, and lose it gladly. The only real
+thing in it is the soul, with its courage, patience, devotion. And
+nothing outward can touch that.
+
+This, if we like to use the word, is Shakespeare's 'pessimism' in _King
+Lear_. As we have seen, it is not by any means the whole spirit of the
+tragedy, which presents the world as a place where heavenly good grows
+side by side with evil, where extreme evil cannot long endure, and where
+all that survives the storm is good, if not great. But still this strain
+of thought, to which the world appears as the kingdom of evil and
+therefore worthless, is in the tragedy, and may well be the record of
+many hours of exasperated feeling and troubled brooding. Pursued further
+and allowed to dominate, it would destroy the tragedy; for it is
+necessary to tragedy that we should feel that suffering and death do
+matter greatly, and that happiness and life are not to be renounced as
+worthless. Pursued further, again, it leads to the idea that the world,
+in that obvious appearance of it which tragedy cannot dissolve without
+dissolving itself, is illusive. And its tendency towards this idea is
+traceable in _King Lear_, in the shape of the notion that this 'great
+world' is transitory, or 'will wear out to nought' like the little world
+called 'man' (IV. vi. 137), or that humanity will destroy itself.[191]
+In later days, in the drama that was probably Shakespeare's last
+complete work, the _Tempest_, this notion of the transitoriness of
+things appears, side by side with the simpler feeling that man's life is
+an illusion or dream, in some of the most famous lines he ever wrote:
+
+     Our revels now are ended. These our actors,
+     As I foretold you, were all spirits and
+     Are melted into air, into thin air:
+     And, like the baseless fabric of this vision,
+     The cloud-capp'd towers, the gorgeous palaces,
+     The solemn temples, the great globe itself,
+     Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve
+     And, like this insubstantial pageant faded,
+     Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff
+     As dreams are made on, and our little life
+     Is rounded with a sleep.
+
+These lines, detached from their context, are familiar to everyone; but,
+in the _Tempest_, they are dramatic as well as poetical. The sudden
+emergence of the thought expressed in them has a specific and most
+significant cause; and as I have not seen it remarked I will point it
+out.
+
+Prospero, by means of his spirits, has been exhibiting to Ferdinand and
+Miranda a masque in which goddesses appear, and which is so majestic and
+harmonious that to the young man, standing beside such a father and such
+a wife, the place seems Paradise,--as perhaps the world once seemed to
+Shakespeare. Then, at the bidding of Iris, there begins a dance of
+Nymphs with Reapers, sunburnt, weary of their August labour, but now in
+their holiday garb. But, as this is nearing its end, Prospero 'starts
+suddenly, and speaks'; and the visions vanish. And what he 'speaks' is
+shown in these lines, which introduce the famous passage just quoted:
+
+     _Pros._ [_Aside_] I had forgot that foul conspiracy
+     Of the beast Caliban and his confederates
+     Against my life: the minute of their plot
+     Is almost come. [_To the Spirits._] Well done! avoid; no more.
+
+     _Fer._ This is strange; your father's in some passion
+     That works him strongly.
+
+     _Mir._                    Never till this day
+     Saw I him touch'd with anger so distemper'd.
+
+     _Pros._ You do look, my son, in a moved sort,
+     As if you were dismay'd: be cheerful, sir.
+     Our revels....
+
+And then, after the famous lines, follow these:
+
+                                Sir, I am vex'd:
+     Bear with my weakness; my old brain is troubled;
+     Be not disturb'd with my infirmity;
+     If you be pleased, retire into my cell
+     And there repose: a turn or two I'll walk,
+     To still my beating mind.
+
+We seem to see here the whole mind of Shakespeare in his last years.
+That which provokes in Prospero first a 'passion' of anger, and, a
+moment later, that melancholy and mystical thought that the great world
+must perish utterly and that man is but a dream, is the sudden
+recollection of gross and apparently incurable evil in the 'monster'
+whom he had tried in vain to raise and soften, and in the monster's
+human confederates. It is this, which is but the repetition of his
+earlier experience of treachery and ingratitude, that troubles his old
+brain, makes his mind 'beat,'[192] and forces on him the sense of
+unreality and evanescence in the world and the life that are haunted by
+such evil. Nor, though Prospero can spare and forgive, is there any sign
+to the end that he believes the evil curable either in the monster, the
+'born devil,' or in the more monstrous villains, the 'worse than
+devils,' whom he so sternly dismisses. But he has learned patience, has
+come to regard his anger and loathing as a weakness or infirmity, and
+would not have it disturb the young and innocent. And so, in the days of
+_King Lear_, it was chiefly the power of 'monstrous' and apparently
+cureless evil in the 'great world' that filled Shakespeare's soul with
+horror, and perhaps forced him sometimes to yield to the infirmity of
+misanthropy and despair, to cry 'No, no, no life,' and to take refuge in
+the thought that this fitful fever is a dream that must soon fade into a
+dreamless sleep; until, to free himself from the perilous stuff that
+weighed upon his heart, he summoned to his aid his 'so potent art,' and
+wrought this stuff into the stormy music of his greatest poem, which
+seems to cry,
+
+     You heavens, give me that patience, patience I need,
+
+and, like the _Tempest_, seems to preach to us from end to end, 'Thou
+must be patient,' 'Bear free and patient thoughts.'[193]
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[Footnote 158: Of course I do not mean that he is beginning to be
+insane, and still less that he _is_ insane (as some medical critics
+suggest).]
+
+[Footnote 159: I must however point out that the modern stage-directions
+are most unfortunate in concealing the fact that here Cordelia sees her
+father again _for the first time_. See Note W.]
+
+[Footnote 160: What immediately follows is as striking an illustration
+of quite another quality, and of the effects which make us think of Lear
+as pursued by a relentless fate. If he could go in and sleep after his
+prayer, as he intends, his mind, one feels, might be saved: so far there
+has been only the menace of madness. But from within the hovel
+Edgar--the last man who would willingly have injured Lear--cries,
+'Fathom and half, fathom and half! Poor Tom!'; the Fool runs out
+terrified; Edgar, summoned by Kent, follows him; and, at sight of Edgar,
+in a moment something gives way in Lear's brain, and he exclaims:
+
+                          Hast thou given all
+     To thy two daughters? And art thou come to this?
+
+Henceforth he is mad. And they remain out in the storm.
+
+I have not seen it noticed that this stroke of fate is repeated--surely
+intentionally--in the sixth scene. Gloster has succeeded in persuading
+Lear to come into the 'house'; he then leaves, and Kent after much
+difficulty induces Lear to lie down and rest upon the cushions. Sleep
+begins to come to him again, and he murmurs,
+
+     'Make no noise, make no noise; draw the curtains; so, so, so.
+     We'll go to supper i' the morning. So, so, so.'
+
+At that moment Gloster enters with the news that he has discovered a
+plot to kill the King; the rest that 'might yet have balm'd his broken
+senses' is again interrupted; and he is hurried away on a litter towards
+Dover. (His recovery, it will be remembered, is due to a long sleep
+artificially induced.)]
+
+[Footnote 161: III. iv. 49. This is printed as prose in the Globe
+edition, but is surely verse. Lear has not yet spoken prose in this
+scene, and his next three speeches are in verse. The next is in prose,
+and, ending, in his tearing off his clothes, shows the advance of
+insanity.]
+
+[Footnote 162: [Lear's death is thus, I am reminded, like _pere_
+Goriot's.] This interpretation may be condemned as fantastic, but the
+text, it appears to me, will bear no other. This is the whole speech (in
+the Globe text):
+
+     And my poor fool is hang'd! No, no, no life!
+     Why should a dog, a horse, a rat, have life,
+     And thou no breath at all? Thou'lt come no more,
+     Never, never, never, never, never!
+     Pray you, undo this button: thank you, sir.
+     Do you see this? Look on her, look, her lips,
+     Look there, look there!
+
+The transition at 'Do you see this?' from despair to something more than
+hope is exactly the same as in the preceding passage at the word 'Ha!':
+
+     A plague upon you, murderers, traitors all!
+     I might have saved her; now she's gone for ever!
+     Cordelia, Cordelia, stay a little.
+     Ha!
+     What is't thou say'st? Her voice was ever soft,
+     Gentle, and low, an excellent thing in woman.
+
+As to my other remarks, I will ask the reader to notice that the passage
+from Lear's entrance with the body of Cordelia to the stage-direction
+_He dies_ (which probably comes a few lines too soon) is 54 lines in
+length, and that 30 of them represent the interval during which he has
+absolutely forgotten Cordelia. (It begins when he looks up at the
+Captain's words, line 275.) To make Lear during this interval turn
+continually in anguish to the corpse, is to act the passage in a manner
+irreconcilable with the text, and insufferable in its effect. I speak
+from experience. I have seen the passage acted thus, and my sympathies
+were so exhausted long before Lear's death that his last speech, the
+most pathetic speech ever written, left me disappointed and weary.]
+
+[Footnote 163: The Quartos give the 'Never' only thrice (surely
+wrongly), and all the actors I have heard have preferred this easier
+task. I ought perhaps to add that the Quartos give the words 'Break,
+heart; I prithee, break!' to Lear, not Kent. They and the Folio are at
+odds throughout the last sixty lines of King Lear, and all good modern
+texts are eclectic.]
+
+[Footnote 164: The connection of these sufferings with the sin of
+earlier days (not, it should be noticed, of youth) is almost thrust upon
+our notice by the levity of Gloster's own reference to the subject in
+the first scene, and by Edgar's often quoted words 'The gods are just,'
+etc. The following collocation, also, may be intentional (III. iv. 116):
+
+     _Fool_. Now a little fire in a wild field were like an old
+     lecher's heart; a small spark, all the rest on's body cold.
+     Look, here comes a walking fire. [_Enter_ GLOSTER with a
+     torch.]
+
+Pope destroyed the collocation by transferring the stage-direction to a
+point some dozen lines later.]
+
+[Footnote 165: The passages are here printed together (III. iv. 28 ff.
+and IV. i. 67 ff.):
+
+     _Lear._ Poor naked wretches, wheresoe'er you are,
+     That bide the pelting of this pitiless storm,
+     How shall your houseless heads and unfed sides,
+     Your loop'd and window'd raggedness, defend you
+     From seasons such as these? O, I have ta'en
+     Too little care of this! Take physic, pomp;
+     Expose thyself to feel what wretches feel,
+     That thou mayst shake the superflux to them,
+     And show the heavens just.
+
+     _Glo._ Here, take this purse, thou whom the heavens' plagues
+     Have humbled to all strokes: that I am wretched
+     Makes thee the happier: heavens, deal so still!
+     Let the superfluous and lust-dieted man,
+     That slaves your ordinance, that will not see
+     Because he doth not feel, feel your power quickly;
+     So distribution should undo excess,
+     And each man have enough.]
+
+[Footnote 166: Schmidt's idea--based partly on the omission from the
+Folios at I. ii. 103 (see Furness' Variorum) of the words 'To his father
+that so tenderly and entirely loves him'--that Gloster loved neither of
+his sons, is surely an entire mistake. See, not to speak of general
+impressions, III. iv. 171 ff.]
+
+[Footnote 167: Imagination demands for Lear, even more than for Othello,
+majesty of stature and mien. Tourgenief felt this and made his 'Lear of
+the Steppes' a _gigantic_ peasant. If Shakespeare's texts give no
+express authority for ideas like these, the reason probably is that he
+wrote primarily for the theatre, where the principal actor might not be
+a large man.]
+
+[Footnote 168: He is not present, of course, till France and Burgundy
+enter; but while he is present he says not a word beyond 'Here's France
+and Burgundy, my noble lord.' For some remarks on the possibility that
+Shakespeare imagined him as having encouraged Lear in his idea of
+dividing the kingdom see Note T. It must be remembered that Cornwall was
+Gloster's 'arch and patron.']
+
+[Footnote 169: In this she stands alone among the more notable
+characters of the play. Doubtless Regan's exclamation 'O the blest gods'
+means nothing, but the fact that it is given to her means something. For
+some further remarks on Goneril see Note T. I may add that touches of
+Goneril reappear in the heroine of the next tragedy, _Macbeth_; and that
+we are sometimes reminded of her again by the character of the Queen in
+_Cymbeline_, who bewitched the feeble King by her beauty, and married
+him for greatness while she abhorred his person (_Cymbeline_, V. v. 62
+f., 31 f.); who tried to poison her step-daughter and intended to poison
+her husband; who died despairing because she could not execute all the
+evil she purposed; and who inspirited her husband to defy the Romans by
+words that still stir the blood (_Cymbeline_, III. i. 14 f. Cf. _King
+Lear_, IV. ii. 50 f.).]
+
+[Footnote 170: I. ii. 1 f. Shakespeare seems to have in mind the idea
+expressed in the speech of Ulysses about the dependence of the world on
+degree, order, system, custom, and about the chaos which would result
+from the free action of appetite, the 'universal wolf' (_Troilus and
+Cr._ I. iii. 83 f.). Cf. the contrast between 'particular will' and 'the
+moral laws of nature and of nations,' II. ii. 53, 185 ('nature' here of
+course is the opposite of the 'nature' of Edmund's speech).]
+
+[Footnote 171: The line last quoted is continued by Edmund in the Folios
+thus: 'Th' hast spoken right; 'tis true,' but in the Quartos thus: 'Thou
+hast spoken truth,' which leaves the line imperfect. This, and the
+imperfect line 'Make instruments to plague us,' suggest that Shakespeare
+wrote at first simply,
+
+                  Make instruments to plague us.
+
+     _Edm._                           Th' hast spoken truth.
+
+The Quartos show other variations which seem to point to the fact that
+the MS. was here difficult to make out.]
+
+[Footnote 172: IV. i. 1-9. I am indebted here to Koppel,
+_Verbesserungsvorschlaege zu den Erlaeuterungen und der Textlesung des
+Lear_ (1899).]
+
+[Footnote 173: See I. i. 142 ff. Kent speaks, not of the _injustice_ of
+Lear's action, but of its 'folly,' its 'hideous rashness.' When the King
+exclaims 'Kent, on thy life, no more,' he answers:
+
+     My life I never held but as a pawn
+     To wage against thy enemies; nor fear to lose it,
+     _Thy safety being the motive_.
+
+(The first Folio omits 'a,' and in the next line reads 'nere' for 'nor.'
+Perhaps the first line should read 'My life I ne'er held but as pawn to
+wage.')]
+
+[Footnote 174: See II. ii. 162 to end. The light-heartedness disappears,
+of course, as Lear's misfortunes thicken.]
+
+[Footnote 175: This difference, however, must not be pressed too far;
+nor must we take Kent's retort,
+
+                Now by Apollo, king,
+     Thou swear'st thy gods in vain,
+
+for a sign of disbelief. He twice speaks of the gods in another manner
+(I. i. 185, III. vi. 5), and he was accustomed to think of Lear in his
+'prayers' (I. i. 144).]
+
+[Footnote 176: The 'clown' in _Antony and Cleopatra_ is merely an old
+peasant. There is a fool in _Timon of Athens_, however, and he appears
+in a scene (II. ii.) generally attributed to Shakespeare. His talk
+sometimes reminds one of Lear's fool; and Kent's remark, 'This is not
+altogether fool, my lord,' is repeated in _Timon_, II. ii. 122, 'Thou
+art not altogether a fool.']
+
+[Footnote 177: [This is no obstacle. There could hardly be a stage
+tradition hostile to his youth, since he does not appear in Tate's
+version, which alone was acted during the century and a half before
+Macready's production. I had forgotten this; and my memory must also
+have been at fault regarding an engraving to which I referred in the
+first edition. Both mistakes were pointed out by Mr. Archer.]]
+
+[Footnote 178: In parts of what follows I am indebted to remarks by
+Cowden Clarke, quoted by Furness on I. iv. 91.]
+
+[Footnote 179: See also Note T.]
+
+[Footnote 180: 'Our last and least' (according to the Folio reading).
+Lear speaks again of 'this little seeming substance.' He can carry her
+dead body in his arms.]
+
+[Footnote 181: Perhaps then the 'low sound' is not merely metaphorical
+in Kent's speech in I. i. 153 f.:
+
+                        answer my life my judgment,
+     Thy youngest daughter does not love thee least;
+     Nor are those empty-hearted whose low sound
+     Reverbs no hollowness.]
+
+[Footnote 182: I. i. 80. 'More ponderous' is the reading of the Folios,
+'more richer' that of the Quartos. The latter is usually preferred, and
+Mr. Aldis Wright says 'more ponderous' has the appearance of being a
+player's correction to avoid a piece of imaginary bad grammar. Does it
+not sound more like the author's improvement of a phrase that he thought
+a little flat? And, apart from that, is it not significant that it
+expresses the same idea of weight that appears in the phrase 'I cannot
+heave my heart into my mouth'?]
+
+[Footnote 183: Cf. Cornwall's satirical remarks on Kent's 'plainness' in
+II. ii. 101 ff.,--a plainness which did no service to Kent's master. (As
+a matter of fact, Cordelia had said nothing about 'plainness.')]
+
+[Footnote 184: Who, like Kent, hastens on the quarrel with Goneril.]
+
+[Footnote 185: I do not wish to complicate the discussion by examining
+the differences, in degree or otherwise, in the various cases, or by
+introducing numerous qualifications; and therefore I do not add the
+names of Macbeth and Lady Macbeth.]
+
+[Footnote 186: It follows from the above that, if this idea were made
+explicit and accompanied our reading of a tragedy throughout, it would
+confuse or even destroy the tragic impression. So would the constant
+presence of Christian beliefs. The reader most attached to these beliefs
+holds them in temporary suspension while he is immersed in a
+Shakespearean tragedy. Such tragedy assumes that the world, as it is
+presented, is the truth, though it also provokes feelings which imply
+that this world is not the whole truth, and therefore not the truth.]
+
+[Footnote 187: Though Cordelia, of course, does not occupy the position
+of the hero.]
+
+[Footnote 188: _E.g._ in _King Lear_ the servants, and the old man who
+succours Gloster and brings to the naked beggar 'the best 'parel that he
+has, come on't what will,' _i.e._ whatever vengeance Regan can inflict.
+Cf. the Steward and the Servants in _Timon_. Cf. there also (V. i. 23),
+'Promising is the very air o' the time ... performance is ever the
+duller for his act; and, _but in the plainer and simpler kind of
+people_, the deed of saying [performance of promises] is quite out of
+use.' Shakespeare's feeling on this subject, though apparently specially
+keen at this time of his life, is much the same throughout (cf. Adam in
+_As You Like It_). He has no respect for the plainer and simpler kind of
+people as politicians, but a great respect and regard for their hearts.]
+
+[Footnote 189: 'I stumbled when I saw,' says Gloster.]
+
+[Footnote 190: Our advantages give us a blind confidence in our
+security. Cf. _Timon_, IV. iii. 76,
+
+     _Alc._ I have heard in some sort of thy miseries.
+
+     _Tim._ Thou saw'st them when I had prosperity.]
+
+[Footnote 191: Biblical ideas seem to have been floating in
+Shakespeare's mind. Cf. the words of Kent, when Lear enters with
+Cordelia's body, 'Is this the promised end?' and Edgar's answer, 'Or
+image of that horror?' The 'promised end' is certainly the end of the
+world (cf. with 'image' 'the great doom's image,' _Macbeth_, II. iii.
+83); and the next words, Albany's 'Fall and cease,' _may_ be addressed
+to the heavens or stars, not to Lear. It seems probable that in writing
+Gloster's speech about the predicted horrors to follow 'these late
+eclipses' Shakespeare had a vague recollection of the passage in
+_Matthew_ xxiv., or of that in _Mark_ xiii., about the tribulations
+which were to be the sign of 'the end of the world.' (I do not mean, of
+course, that the 'prediction' of I. ii. 119 is the prediction to be
+found in one of these passages.)]
+
+[Footnote 192: Cf. _Hamlet_, III. i. 181:
+
+     This something-settled matter in his heart,
+     Whereon his brains still beating puts him thus
+     From fashion of himself.]
+
+[Footnote 193: I believe the criticism of _King Lear_ which has
+influenced me most is that in Prof. Dowden's _Shakspere, his Mind and
+Art_ (though, when I wrote my lectures, I had not read that criticism
+for many years); and I am glad that this acknowledgment gives me the
+opportunity of repeating in print an opinion which I have often
+expressed to students, that anyone entering on the study of Shakespeare,
+and unable or unwilling to read much criticism, would do best to take
+Prof. Dowden for his guide.]
+
+
+
+
+LECTURE IX
+
+MACBETH
+
+
+_Macbeth_, it is probable, was the last-written of the four great
+tragedies, and immediately preceded _Antony and Cleopatra_.[194] In that
+play Shakespeare's final style appears for the first time completely
+formed, and the transition to this style is much more decidedly visible
+in _Macbeth_ than in _King Lear_. Yet in certain respects _Macbeth_
+recalls _Hamlet_ rather than _Othello_ or _King Lear_. In the heroes of
+both plays the passage from thought to a critical resolution and action
+is difficult, and excites the keenest interest. In neither play, as in
+_Othello_ and _King Lear_, is painful pathos one of the main effects.
+Evil, again, though it shows in _Macbeth_ a prodigious energy, is not
+the icy or stony inhumanity of Iago or Goneril; and, as in _Hamlet_, it
+is pursued by remorse. Finally, Shakespeare no longer restricts the
+action to purely human agencies, as in the two preceding tragedies;
+portents once more fill the heavens, ghosts rise from their graves, an
+unearthly light flickers about the head of the doomed man. The special
+popularity of _Hamlet_ and _Macbeth_ is due in part to some of these
+common characteristics, notably to the fascination of the supernatural,
+the absence of the spectacle of extreme undeserved suffering, the
+absence of characters which horrify and repel and yet are destitute of
+grandeur. The reader who looks unwillingly at Iago gazes at Lady Macbeth
+in awe, because though she is dreadful she is also sublime. The whole
+tragedy is sublime.
+
+In this, however, and in other respects, _Macbeth_ makes an impression
+quite different from that of _Hamlet_. The dimensions of the principal
+characters, the rate of movement in the action, the supernatural effect,
+the style, the versification, are all changed; and they are all changed
+in much the same manner. In many parts of _Macbeth_ there is in the
+language a peculiar compression, pregnancy, energy, even violence; the
+harmonious grace and even flow, often conspicuous in _Hamlet_, have
+almost disappeared. The cruel characters, built on a scale at least as
+large as that of _Othello_, seem to attain at times an almost superhuman
+stature. The diction has in places a huge and rugged grandeur, which
+degenerates here and there into tumidity. The solemn majesty of the
+royal Ghost in _Hamlet_, appearing in armour and standing silent in the
+moonlight, is exchanged for shapes of horror, dimly seen in the murky
+air or revealed by the glare of the caldron fire in a dark cavern, or
+for the ghastly face of Banquo badged with blood and staring with blank
+eyes. The other three tragedies all open with conversations which lead
+into the action: here the action bursts into wild life amidst the sounds
+of a thunder-storm and the echoes of a distant battle. It hurries
+through seven very brief scenes of mounting suspense to a terrible
+crisis, which is reached, in the murder of Duncan, at the beginning of
+the Second Act. Pausing a moment and changing its shape, it hastes again
+with scarcely diminished speed to fresh horrors. And even when the speed
+of the outward action is slackened, the same effect is continued in
+another form: we are shown a soul tortured by an agony which admits not
+a moment's repose, and rushing in frenzy towards its doom. _Macbeth_ is
+very much shorter than the other three tragedies, but our experience in
+traversing it is so crowded and intense that it leaves an impression not
+of brevity but of speed. It is the most vehement, the most concentrated,
+perhaps we may say the most tremendous, of the tragedies.
+
+
+1
+
+A Shakespearean tragedy, as a rule, has a special tone or atmosphere of
+its own, quite perceptible, however difficult to describe. The effect of
+this atmosphere is marked with unusual strength in _Macbeth_. It is due
+to a variety of influences which combine with those just noticed, so
+that, acting and reacting, they form a whole; and the desolation of the
+blasted heath, the design of the Witches, the guilt in the hero's soul,
+the darkness of the night, seem to emanate from one and the same source.
+This effect is strengthened by a multitude of small touches, which at
+the moment may be little noticed but still leave their mark on the
+imagination. We may approach the consideration of the characters and the
+action by distinguishing some of the ingredients of this general effect.
+
+Darkness, we may even say blackness, broods over this tragedy. It is
+remarkable that almost all the scenes which at once recur to memory take
+place either at night or in some dark spot. The vision of the dagger,
+the murder of Duncan, the murder of Banquo, the sleep-walking of Lady
+Macbeth, all come in night-scenes. The Witches dance in the thick air of
+a storm, or, 'black and midnight hags,' receive Macbeth in a cavern. The
+blackness of night is to the hero a thing of fear, even of horror; and
+that which he feels becomes the spirit of the play. The faint
+glimmerings of the western sky at twilight are here menacing: it is the
+hour when the traveller hastens to reach safety in his inn, and when
+Banquo rides homeward to meet his assassins; the hour when 'light
+thickens,' when 'night's black agents to their prey do rouse,' when the
+wolf begins to howl, and the owl to scream, and withered murder steals
+forth to his work. Macbeth bids the stars hide their fires that his
+'black' desires may be concealed; Lady Macbeth calls on thick night to
+come, palled in the dunnest smoke of hell. The moon is down and no stars
+shine when Banquo, dreading the dreams of the coming night, goes
+unwillingly to bed, and leaves Macbeth to wait for the summons of the
+little bell. When the next day should dawn, its light is 'strangled,'
+and 'darkness does the face of earth entomb.' In the whole drama the sun
+seems to shine only twice: first, in the beautiful but ironical passage
+where Duncan sees the swallows flitting round the castle of death; and,
+afterwards, when at the close the avenging army gathers to rid the earth
+of its shame. Of the many slighter touches which deepen this effect I
+notice only one. The failure of nature in Lady Macbeth is marked by her
+fear of darkness; 'she has light by her continually.' And in the one
+phrase of fear that escapes her lips even in sleep, it is of the
+darkness of the place of torment that she speaks.[195]
+
+The atmosphere of _Macbeth_, however, is not that of unrelieved
+blackness. On the contrary, as compared with _King Lear_ and its cold
+dim gloom, _Macbeth_ leaves a decided impression of colour; it is really
+the impression of a black night broken by flashes of light and colour,
+sometimes vivid and even glaring. They are the lights and colours of the
+thunder-storm in the first scene; of the dagger hanging before Macbeth's
+eyes and glittering alone in the midnight air; of the torch borne by the
+servant when he and his lord come upon Banquo crossing the castle-court
+to his room; of the torch, again, which Fleance carried to light his
+father to death, and which was dashed out by one of the murderers; of
+the torches that flared in the hall on the face of the Ghost and the
+blanched cheeks of Macbeth; of the flames beneath the boiling caldron
+from which the apparitions in the cavern rose; of the taper which showed
+to the Doctor and Gentlewoman the wasted face and blank eyes of Lady
+Macbeth. And, above all, the colour is the colour of blood. It cannot be
+an accident that the image of blood is forced upon us continually, not
+merely by the events themselves, but by full descriptions, and even by
+reiteration of the word in unlikely parts of the dialogue. The Witches,
+after their first wild appearance, have hardly quitted the stage when
+there staggers onto it a 'bloody man,' gashed with wounds. His tale is
+of a hero whose 'brandished steel smoked with bloody execution,' 'carved
+out a passage' to his enemy, and 'unseam'd him from the nave to the
+chaps.' And then he tells of a second battle so bloody that the
+combatants seemed as if they 'meant to bathe in reeking wounds.' What
+metaphors! What a dreadful image is that with which Lady Macbeth greets
+us almost as she enters, when she prays the spirits of cruelty so to
+thicken her blood that pity cannot flow along her veins! What pictures
+are those of the murderer appearing at the door of the banquet-room with
+Banquo's 'blood upon his face'; of Banquo himself 'with twenty trenched
+gashes on his head,' or 'blood-bolter'd' and smiling in derision at his
+murderer; of Macbeth, gazing at his hand, and watching it dye the whole
+green ocean red; of Lady Macbeth, gazing at hers, and stretching it away
+from her face to escape the smell of blood that all the perfumes of
+Arabia will not subdue! The most horrible lines in the whole tragedy are
+those of her shuddering cry, 'Yet who would have thought the old man to
+have had so much blood in him?' And it is not only at such moments that
+these images occur. Even in the quiet conversation of Malcolm and
+Macduff, Macbeth is imagined as holding a bloody sceptre, and Scotland
+as a country bleeding and receiving every day a new gash added to her
+wounds. It is as if the poet saw the whole story through an ensanguined
+mist, and as if it stained the very blackness of the night. When
+Macbeth, before Banquo's murder, invokes night to scarf up the tender
+eye of pitiful day, and to tear in pieces the great bond that keeps him
+pale, even the invisible hand that is to tear the bond is imagined as
+covered with blood.
+
+Let us observe another point. The vividness, magnitude, and violence of
+the imagery in some of these passages are characteristic of _Macbeth_
+almost throughout; and their influence contributes to form its
+atmosphere. Images like those of the babe torn smiling from the breast
+and dashed to death; of pouring the sweet milk of concord into hell; of
+the earth shaking in fever; of the frame of things disjointed; of
+sorrows striking heaven on the face, so that it resounds and yells out
+like syllables of dolour; of the mind lying in restless ecstasy on a
+rack; of the mind full of scorpions; of the tale told by an idiot, full
+of sound and fury;--all keep the imagination moving on a 'wild and
+violent sea,' while it is scarcely for a moment permitted to dwell on
+thoughts of peace and beauty. In its language, as in its action, the
+drama is full of tumult and storm. Whenever the Witches are present we
+see and hear a thunder-storm: when they are absent we hear of
+ship-wrecking storms and direful thunders; of tempests that blow down
+trees and churches, castles, palaces and pyramids; of the frightful
+hurricane of the night when Duncan was murdered; of the blast on which
+pity rides like a new-born babe, or on which Heaven's cherubim are
+horsed. There is thus something magnificently appropriate in the cry
+'Blow, wind! Come, wrack!' with which Macbeth, turning from the sight of
+the moving wood of Birnam, bursts from his castle. He was borne to his
+throne on a whirlwind, and the fate he goes to meet comes on the wings
+of storm.
+
+Now all these agencies--darkness, the lights and colours that illuminate
+it, the storm that rushes through it, the violent and gigantic
+images--conspire with the appearances of the Witches and the Ghost to
+awaken horror, and in some degree also a supernatural dread. And to this
+effect other influences contribute. The pictures called up by the mere
+words of the Witches stir the same feelings,--those, for example, of the
+spell-bound sailor driven tempest-tost for nine times nine weary weeks,
+and never visited by sleep night or day; of the drop of poisonous foam
+that forms on the moon, and, falling to earth, is collected for
+pernicious ends; of the sweltering venom of the toad, the finger of the
+babe killed at its birth by its own mother, the tricklings from the
+murderer's gibbet. In Nature, again, something is felt to be at work,
+sympathetic with human guilt and supernatural malice. She labours with
+portents.
+
+     Lamentings heard in the air, strange screams of death,
+     And prophesying with accents terrible,
+
+burst from her. The owl clamours all through the night; Duncan's horses
+devour each other in frenzy; the dawn comes, but no light with it.
+Common sights and sounds, the crying of crickets, the croak of the
+raven, the light thickening after sunset, the home-coming of the rooks,
+are all ominous. Then, as if to deepen these impressions, Shakespeare
+has concentrated attention on the obscurer regions of man's being, on
+phenomena which make it seem that he is in the power of secret forces
+lurking below, and independent of his consciousness and will: such as
+the relapse of Macbeth from conversation into a reverie, during which he
+gazes fascinated at the image of murder drawing closer and closer; the
+writing on his face of strange things he never meant to show; the
+pressure of imagination heightening into illusion, like the vision of a
+dagger in the air, at first bright, then suddenly splashed with blood,
+or the sound of a voice that cried 'Sleep no more' and would not be
+silenced.[196] To these are added other, and constant, allusions to
+sleep, man's strange half-conscious life; to the misery of its
+withholding; to the terrible dreams of remorse; to the cursed thoughts
+from which Banquo is free by day, but which tempt him in his sleep: and
+again to abnormal disturbances of sleep; in the two men, of whom one
+during the murder of Duncan laughed in his sleep, and the other raised a
+cry of murder; and in Lady Macbeth, who rises to re-enact in
+somnambulism those scenes the memory of which is pushing her on to
+madness or suicide. All this has one effect, to excite supernatural
+alarm and, even more, a dread of the presence of evil not only in its
+recognised seat but all through and around our mysterious nature.
+Perhaps there is no other work equal to _Macbeth_ in the production of
+this effect.[197]
+
+It is enhanced--to take a last point--by the use of a literary
+expedient. Not even in _Richard III._, which in this, as in other
+respects, has resemblances to _Macbeth_, is there so much of Irony. I do
+not refer to irony in the ordinary sense; to speeches, for example,
+where the speaker is intentionally ironical, like that of Lennox in III.
+vi. I refer to irony on the part of the author himself, to ironical
+juxtapositions of persons and events, and especially to the 'Sophoclean
+irony' by which a speaker is made to use words bearing to the audience,
+in addition to his own meaning, a further and ominous sense, hidden from
+himself and, usually, from the other persons on the stage. The very
+first words uttered by Macbeth,
+
+     So foul and fair a day I have not seen,
+
+are an example to which attention has often been drawn; for they startle
+the reader by recalling the words of the Witches in the first scene,
+
+     Fair is foul, and foul is fair.
+
+When Macbeth, emerging from his murderous reverie, turns to the nobles
+saying, 'Let us toward the King,' his words are innocent, but to the
+reader have a double meaning. Duncan's comment on the treachery of
+Cawdor,
+
+                       There's no art
+     To find the mind's construction in the face:
+     He was a gentleman on whom I built
+     An absolute trust,
+
+is interrupted[198] by the entrance of the traitor Macbeth, who is
+greeted with effusive gratitude and a like 'absolute trust.' I have
+already referred to the ironical effect of the beautiful lines in which
+Duncan and Banquo describe the castle they are about to enter. To the
+reader Lady Macbeth's light words,
+
+     A little water clears us of this deed:
+     How easy is it then,
+
+summon up the picture of the sleep-walking scene. The idea of the
+Porter's speech, in which he imagines himself the keeper of hell-gate,
+shows the same irony. So does the contrast between the obvious and the
+hidden meanings of the apparitions of the armed head, the bloody child,
+and the child with the tree in his hand. It would be easy to add further
+examples. Perhaps the most striking is the answer which Banquo, as he
+rides away, never to return alive, gives to Macbeth's reminder, 'Fail
+not our feast.' 'My lord, I will not,' he replies, and he keeps his
+promise. It cannot be by accident that Shakespeare so frequently in this
+play uses a device which contributes to excite the vague fear of hidden
+forces operating on minds unconscious of their influence.[199]
+
+
+2
+
+But of course he had for this purpose an agency more potent than any yet
+considered. It would be almost an impertinence to attempt to describe
+anew the influence of the Witch-scenes on the imagination of the
+reader.[200] Nor do I believe that among different readers this
+influence differs greatly except in degree. But when critics begin to
+analyse the imaginative effect, and still more when, going behind it,
+they try to determine the truth which lay for Shakespeare or lies for us
+in these creations, they too often offer us results which, either
+through perversion or through inadequacy, fail to correspond with that
+effect. This happens in opposite ways. On the one hand the Witches,
+whose contribution to the 'atmosphere' of Macbeth can hardly be
+exaggerated, are credited with far too great an influence upon the
+action; sometimes they are described as goddesses, or even as fates,
+whom Macbeth is powerless to resist. And this is perversion. On the
+other hand, we are told that, great as is their influence on the action,
+it is so because they are merely symbolic representations of the
+unconscious or half-conscious guilt in Macbeth himself. And this is
+inadequate. The few remarks I have to make may take the form of a
+criticism on these views.
+
+(1) As to the former, Shakespeare took, as material for his purposes,
+the ideas about witch-craft that he found existing in people around him
+and in books like Reginald Scot's _Discovery_ (1584). And he used these
+ideas without changing their substance at all. He selected and improved,
+avoiding the merely ridiculous, dismissing (unlike Middleton) the
+sexually loathsome or stimulating, rehandling and heightening whatever
+could touch the imagination with fear, horror, and mysterious
+attraction. The Witches, that is to say, are not goddesses, or fates,
+or, in any way whatever, supernatural beings. They are old women, poor
+and ragged, skinny and hideous, full of vulgar spite, occupied in
+killing their neighbours' swine or revenging themselves on sailors'
+wives who have refused them chestnuts. If Banquo considers their beards
+a proof that they are not women, that only shows his ignorance: Sir Hugh
+Evans would have known better.[201] There is not a syllable in _Macbeth_
+to imply that they are anything but women. But, again in accordance with
+the popular ideas, they have received from evil spirits certain
+supernatural powers. They can 'raise haile, tempests, and hurtfull
+weather; as lightening, thunder etc.' They can 'passe from place to
+place in the aire invisible.' They can 'keepe divels and spirits in the
+likenesse of todes and cats,' Paddock or Graymalkin. They can
+'transferre corne in the blade from one place to another.' They can
+'manifest unto others things hidden and lost, and foreshew things to
+come, and see them as though they were present.' The reader will apply
+these phrases and sentences at once to passages in _Macbeth_. They are
+all taken from Scot's first chapter, where he is retailing the current
+superstitions of his time; and, in regard to the Witches, Shakespeare
+mentions scarcely anything, if anything, that was not to be found, of
+course in a more prosaic shape, either in Scot or in some other easily
+accessible authority.[202] He read, to be sure, in Holinshed, his main
+source for the story of Macbeth, that, according to the common opinion,
+the 'women' who met Macbeth 'were eyther the weird sisters, that is (as
+ye would say) ye Goddesses of destinee, or els some Nimphes or Feiries.'
+But what does that matter? What he read in his authority was absolutely
+nothing to his audience, and remains nothing to us, unless he _used_
+what he read. And he did not use this idea. He used nothing but the
+phrase 'weird sisters,'[203] which certainly no more suggested to a
+London audience the Parcae of one mythology or the Norns of another than
+it does to-day. His Witches owe all their power to the spirits; they are
+'_instruments_ of darkness'; the spirits are their 'masters' (IV. i.
+63). Fancy the fates having masters! Even if the passages where Hecate
+appears are Shakespeare's,[204] that will not help the Witches; for they
+are subject to Hecate, who is herself a goddess or superior devil, not a
+fate.[205]
+
+Next, while the influence of the Witches' prophecies on Macbeth is very
+great, it is quite clearly shown to be an influence and nothing more.
+There is no sign whatever in the play that Shakespeare meant the actions
+of Macbeth to be forced on him by an external power, whether that of the
+Witches, or of their 'masters,' or of Hecate. It is needless therefore
+to insist that such a conception would be in contradiction with his
+whole tragic practice. The prophecies of the Witches are presented
+simply as dangerous circumstances with which Macbeth has to deal: they
+are dramatically on the same level as the story of the Ghost in
+_Hamlet_, or the falsehoods told by Iago to Othello. Macbeth is, in the
+ordinary sense, perfectly free in regard to them: and if we speak of
+degrees of freedom, he is even more free than Hamlet, who was crippled
+by melancholy when the Ghost appeared to him. That the influence of the
+first prophecies upon him came as much from himself as from them, is
+made abundantly clear by the obviously intentional contrast between him
+and Banquo. Banquo, ambitious but perfectly honest, is scarcely even
+startled by them, and he remains throughout the scene indifferent to
+them. But when Macbeth heard them he was not an innocent man. Precisely
+how far his mind was guilty may be a question; but no innocent man would
+have started, as he did, with a start of _fear_ at the mere prophecy of
+a crown, or have conceived thereupon _immediately_ the thought of
+murder. Either this thought was not new to him,[206] or he had cherished
+at least some vaguer dishonourable dream, the instantaneous recurrence
+of which, at the moment of his hearing the prophecy, revealed to him an
+inward and terrifying guilt. In either case not only was he free to
+accept or resist the temptation, but the temptation was already within
+him. We are admitting too much, therefore, when we compare him with
+Othello, for Othello's mind was perfectly free from suspicion when his
+temptation came to him. And we are admitting, again, too much when we
+use the word 'temptation' in reference to the first prophecies of the
+Witches. Speaking strictly we must affirm that he was tempted only by
+himself. _He_ speaks indeed of their 'supernatural soliciting'; but in
+fact they did not solicit. They merely announced events: they hailed him
+as Thane of Glamis, Thane of Cawdor, and King hereafter. No connection
+of these announcements with any action of his was even hinted by them.
+For all that appears, the natural death of an old man might have
+fulfilled the prophecy any day.[207] In any case, the idea of fulfilling
+it by murder was entirely his own.[208]
+
+When Macbeth sees the Witches again, after the murders of Duncan and
+Banquo, we observe, however, a striking change. They no longer need to
+go and meet him; he seeks them out. He has committed himself to his
+course of evil. Now accordingly they do 'solicit.' They prophesy, but
+they also give advice: they bid him be bloody, bold, and secure. We have
+no hope that he will reject their advice; but so far are they from
+having, even now, any power to compel him to accept it, that they make
+careful preparations to deceive him into doing so. And, almost as though
+to intimate how entirely the responsibility for his deeds still lies
+with Macbeth, Shakespeare makes his first act after this interview one
+for which his tempters gave him not a hint--the slaughter of Macduff's
+wife and children.
+
+To all this we must add that Macbeth himself nowhere betrays a suspicion
+that his action is, or has been, thrust on him by an external power. He
+curses the Witches for deceiving him, but he never attempts to shift to
+them the burden of his guilt. Neither has Shakespeare placed in the
+mouth of any other character in this play such fatalistic expressions as
+may be found in _King Lear_ and occasionally elsewhere. He appears
+actually to have taken pains to make the natural psychological genesis
+of Macbeth's crimes perfectly clear, and it was a most unfortunate
+notion of Schlegel's that the Witches were required because natural
+agencies would have seemed too weak to drive such a man as Macbeth to
+his first murder.
+
+'Still,' it may be said, 'the Witches did foreknow Macbeth's future; and
+what is foreknown is fixed; and how can a man be responsible when his
+future is fixed?' With this question, as a speculative one, we have no
+concern here; but, in so far as it relates to the play, I answer, first,
+that not one of the things foreknown is an action. This is just as true
+of the later prophecies as of the first. That Macbeth will be harmed by
+none of woman born, and will never be vanquished till Birnam Wood shall
+come against him, involves (so far as we are informed) no action of his.
+It may be doubted, indeed, whether Shakespeare would have introduced
+prophecies of Macbeth's deeds, even if it had been convenient to do so;
+he would probably have felt that to do so would interfere with the
+interest of the inward struggle and suffering. And, in the second place,
+_Macbeth_ was not written for students of metaphysics or theology, but
+for people at large; and, however it may be with prophecies of actions,
+prophecies of mere events do not suggest to people at large any sort of
+difficulty about responsibility. Many people, perhaps most, habitually
+think of their 'future' as something fixed, and of themselves as 'free.'
+The Witches nowadays take a room in Bond Street and charge a guinea; and
+when the victim enters they hail him the possessor of L1000 a year, or
+prophesy to him of journeys, wives, and children. But though he is
+struck dumb by their prescience, it does not even cross his mind that he
+is going to lose his glorious 'freedom'--not though journeys and
+marriages imply much more agency on his part than anything foretold to
+Macbeth. This whole difficulty is undramatic; and I may add that
+Shakespeare nowhere shows, like Chaucer, any interest in speculative
+problems concerning foreknowledge, predestination and freedom.
+
+(2) We may deal more briefly with the opposite interpretation. According
+to it the Witches and their prophecies are to be taken merely as
+symbolical representations of thoughts and desires which have slumbered
+in Macbeth's breast and now rise into consciousness and confront him.
+With this idea, which springs from the wish to get rid of a mere
+external supernaturalism, and to find a psychological and spiritual
+meaning in that which the groundlings probably received as hard facts,
+one may feel sympathy. But it is evident that it is rather a
+'philosophy' of the Witches than an immediate dramatic apprehension of
+them; and even so it will be found both incomplete and, in other
+respects, inadequate.
+
+It is incomplete because it cannot possibly be applied to all the facts.
+Let us grant that it will apply to the most important prophecy, that of
+the crown; and that the later warning which Macbeth receives, to beware
+of Macduff, also answers to something in his own breast and 'harps his
+fear aright' But there we have to stop. Macbeth had evidently no
+suspicion of that treachery in Cawdor through which he himself became
+Thane; and who will suggest that he had any idea, however subconscious,
+about Birnam Wood or the man not born of woman? It may be held--and
+rightly, I think--that the prophecies which answer to nothing inward,
+the prophecies which are merely supernatural, produce, now at any rate,
+much less imaginative effect than the others,--even that they are in
+_Macbeth_ an element which was of an age and not for all time; but still
+they are there, and they are essential to the plot.[209] And as the
+theory under consideration will not apply to them at all, it is not
+likely that it gives an adequate account even of those prophecies to
+which it can in some measure be applied.
+
+It is inadequate here chiefly because it is much too narrow. The Witches
+and their prophecies, if they are to be rationalised or taken
+symbolically, must represent not only the evil slumbering in the hero's
+soul, but all those obscurer influences of the evil around him in the
+world which aid his own ambition and the incitements of his wife. Such
+influences, even if we put aside all belief in evil 'spirits,' are as
+certain, momentous, and terrifying facts as the presence of inchoate
+evil in the soul itself; and if we exclude all reference to these facts
+from our idea of the Witches, it will be greatly impoverished and will
+certainly fail to correspond with the imaginative effect. The union of
+the outward and inward here may be compared with something of the same
+kind in Greek poetry.[210] In the first Book of the _Iliad_ we are told
+that, when Agamemnon threatened to take Briseis from Achilles, 'grief
+came upon Peleus' son, and his heart within his shaggy breast was
+divided in counsel, whether to draw his keen blade from his thigh and
+set the company aside and so slay Atreides, or to assuage his anger and
+curb his soul. While yet he doubted thereof in heart and soul, and was
+drawing his great sword from his sheath, Athene came to him from heaven,
+sent forth of the white-armed goddess Hera, whose heart loved both alike
+and had care for them. She stood behind Peleus' son and caught him by
+his golden hair, to him only visible, and of the rest no man beheld
+her.' And at her bidding he mastered his wrath, 'and stayed his heavy
+hand on the silver hilt, and thrust the great sword back into the
+sheath, and was not disobedient to the saying of Athene.'[211] The
+succour of the goddess here only strengthens an inward movement in the
+mind of Achilles, but we should lose something besides a poetic effect
+if for that reason we struck her out of the account. We should lose the
+idea that the inward powers of the soul answer in their essence to
+vaster powers without, which support them and assure the effect of their
+exertion. So it is in _Macbeth_.[212] The words of the Witches are fatal
+to the hero only because there is in him something which leaps into
+light at the sound of them; but they are at the same time the witness of
+forces which never cease to work in the world around him, and, on the
+instant of his surrender to them, entangle him inextricably in the web
+of Fate. If the inward connection is once realised (and Shakespeare has
+left us no excuse for missing it), we need not fear, and indeed shall
+scarcely be able, to exaggerate the effect of the Witch-scenes in
+heightening and deepening the sense of fear, horror, and mystery which
+pervades the atmosphere of the tragedy.
+
+
+3
+
+From this murky background stand out the two great terrible figures, who
+dwarf all the remaining characters of the drama. Both are sublime, and
+both inspire, far more than the other tragic heroes, the feeling of awe.
+They are never detached in imagination from the atmosphere which
+surrounds them and adds to their grandeur and terror. It is, as it were,
+continued into their souls. For within them is all that we felt
+without--the darkness of night, lit with the flame of tempest and the
+hues of blood, and haunted by wild and direful shapes, 'murdering
+ministers,' spirits of remorse, and maddening visions of peace lost and
+judgment to come. The way to be untrue to Shakespeare here, as always,
+is to relax the tension of imagination, to conventionalise, to conceive
+Macbeth, for example, as a half-hearted cowardly criminal, and Lady
+Macbeth as a whole-hearted fiend.
+
+These two characters are fired by one and the same passion of ambition;
+and to a considerable extent they are alike. The disposition of each is
+high, proud, and commanding. They are born to rule, if not to reign.
+They are peremptory or contemptuous to their inferiors. They are not
+children of light, like Brutus and Hamlet; they are of the world. We
+observe in them no love of country, and no interest in the welfare of
+anyone outside their family. Their habitual thoughts and aims are, and,
+we imagine, long have been, all of station and power. And though in both
+there is something, and in one much, of what is higher--honour,
+conscience, humanity--they do not live consciously in the light of these
+things or speak their language. Not that they are egoists, like Iago;
+or, if they are egoists, theirs is an _egoisme a deux_. They have no
+separate ambitions.[213] They support and love one another. They suffer
+together. And if, as time goes on, they drift a little apart, they are
+not vulgar souls, to be alienated and recriminate when they experience
+the fruitlessness of their ambition. They remain to the end tragic, even
+grand.
+
+So far there is much likeness between them. Otherwise they are
+contrasted, and the action is built upon this contrast. Their attitudes
+towards the projected murder of Duncan are quite different; and it
+produces in them equally different effects. In consequence, they appear
+in the earlier part of the play as of equal importance, if indeed Lady
+Macbeth does not overshadow her husband; but afterwards she retires more
+and more into the background, and he becomes unmistakably the leading
+figure. His is indeed far the more complex character: and I will speak
+of it first.
+
+Macbeth, the cousin of a King mild, just, and beloved, but now too old
+to lead his army, is introduced to us as a general of extraordinary
+prowess, who has covered himself with glory in putting down a rebellion
+and repelling the invasion of a foreign army. In these conflicts he
+showed great personal courage, a quality which he continues to display
+throughout the drama in regard to all plain dangers. It is difficult to
+be sure of his customary demeanour, for in the play we see him either in
+what appears to be an exceptional relation to his wife, or else in the
+throes of remorse and desperation; but from his behaviour during his
+journey home after the war, from his _later_ conversations with Lady
+Macbeth, and from his language to the murderers of Banquo and to others,
+we imagine him as a great warrior, somewhat masterful, rough, and
+abrupt, a man to inspire some fear and much admiration. He was thought
+'honest,' or honourable; he was trusted, apparently, by everyone;
+Macduff, a man of the highest integrity, 'loved him well.' And there
+was, in fact, much good in him. We have no warrant, I think, for
+describing him, with many writers, as of a 'noble' nature, like Hamlet
+or Othello;[214] but he had a keen sense both of honour and of the worth
+of a good name. The phrase, again, 'too much of the milk of human
+kindness,' is applied to him in impatience by his wife, who did not
+fully understand him; but certainly he was far from devoid of humanity
+and pity.
+
+At the same time he was exceedingly ambitious. He must have been so by
+temper. The tendency must have been greatly strengthened by his
+marriage. When we see him, it has been further stimulated by his
+remarkable success and by the consciousness of exceptional powers and
+merit. It becomes a passion. The course of action suggested by it is
+extremely perilous: it sets his good name, his position, and even his
+life on the hazard. It is also abhorrent to his better feelings. Their
+defeat in the struggle with ambition leaves him utterly wretched, and
+would have kept him so, however complete had been his outward success
+and security. On the other hand, his passion for power and his instinct
+of self-assertion are so vehement that no inward misery could persuade
+him to relinquish the fruits of crime, or to advance from remorse to
+repentance.
+
+In the character as so far sketched there is nothing very peculiar,
+though the strength of the forces contending in it is unusual. But there
+is in Macbeth one marked peculiarity, the true apprehension of which is
+the key to Shakespeare's conception.[215] This bold ambitious man of
+action has, within certain limits, the imagination of a poet,--an
+imagination on the one hand extremely sensitive to impressions of a
+certain kind, and, on the other, productive of violent disturbance both
+of mind and body. Through it he is kept in contact with supernatural
+impressions and is liable to supernatural fears. And through it,
+especially, come to him the intimations of conscience and honour.
+Macbeth's better nature--to put the matter for clearness' sake too
+broadly--instead of speaking to him in the overt language of moral
+ideas, commands, and prohibitions, incorporates itself in images which
+alarm and horrify. His imagination is thus the best of him, something
+usually deeper and higher than his conscious thoughts; and if he had
+obeyed it he would have been safe. But his wife quite misunderstands it,
+and he himself understands it only in part. The terrifying images which
+deter him from crime and follow its commission, and which are really the
+protest of his deepest self, seem to his wife the creations of mere
+nervous fear, and are sometimes referred by himself to the dread of
+vengeance or the restlessness of insecurity.[216] His conscious or
+reflective mind, that is, moves chiefly among considerations of outward
+success and failure, while his inner being is convulsed by conscience.
+And his inability to understand himself is repeated and exaggerated in
+the interpretations of actors and critics, who represent him as a
+coward, cold-blooded, calculating, and pitiless, who shrinks from crime
+simply because it is dangerous, and suffers afterwards simply because he
+is not safe. In reality his courage is frightful. He strides from crime
+to crime, though his soul never ceases to bar his advance with shapes of
+terror, or to clamour in his ears that he is murdering his peace and
+casting away his 'eternal jewel.'
+
+It is of the first importance to realise the strength, and also (what
+has not been so clearly recognised) the limits, of Macbeth's
+imagination. It is not the universal meditative imagination of Hamlet.
+He came to see in man, as Hamlet sometimes did, the 'quintessence of
+dust'; but he must always have been incapable of Hamlet's reflections on
+man's noble reason and infinite faculty, or of seeing with Hamlet's eyes
+'this brave o'erhanging firmament, this majestical roof fretted with
+golden fire.' Nor could he feel, like Othello, the romance of war or the
+infinity of love. He shows no sign of any unusual sensitiveness to the
+glory or beauty in the world or the soul; and it is partly for this
+reason that we have no inclination to love him, and that we regard him
+with more of awe than of pity. His imagination is excitable and intense,
+but narrow. That which stimulates it is, almost solely, that which
+thrills with sudden, startling, and often supernatural fear.[217] There
+is a famous passage late in the play (V. v. 10) which is here very
+significant, because it refers to a time before his conscience was
+burdened, and so shows his native disposition:
+
+     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 rise and stir
+     As life were in't.
+
+This 'time' must have been in his youth, or at least before we see him.
+And, in the drama, everything which terrifies him is of this character,
+only it has now a deeper and a moral significance. Palpable dangers
+leave him unmoved or fill him with fire. He does himself mere justice
+when he asserts he 'dare do all that may become a man,' or when he
+exclaims to Banquo's ghost,
+
+                        What man dare, I dare:
+     Approach thou like the rugged Russian bear,
+     The arm'd rhinoceros, or the Hyrcan tiger;
+     Take any shape but that, and my firm nerves
+     Shall never tremble.
+
+What appals him is always the image of his own guilty heart or bloody
+deed, or some image which derives from them its terror or gloom. These,
+when they arise, hold him spell-bound and possess him wholly, like a
+hypnotic trance which is at the same time the ecstasy of a poet. As the
+first 'horrid image' of Duncan's murder--of himself murdering
+Duncan--rises from unconsciousness and confronts him, his hair stands on
+end and the outward scene vanishes from his eyes. Why? For fear of
+'consequences'? The idea is ridiculous. Or because the deed is bloody?
+The man who with his 'smoking' steel 'carved out his passage' to the
+rebel leader, and 'unseam'd him from the nave to the chaps,' would
+hardly be frightened by blood. How could fear of consequences make the
+dagger he is to use hang suddenly glittering before him in the air, and
+then as suddenly dash it with gouts of blood? Even when he _talks_ of
+consequences, and declares that if he were safe against them he would
+'jump the life to come,' his imagination bears witness against him, and
+shows us that what really holds him back is the hideous vileness of the
+deed:
+
+                            He's here in double trust;
+     First, as I am his kinsman and his subject,
+     Strong both against the deed; then, as his host,
+     Who should against his murderer shut the door,
+     Not bear the knife myself. Besides, this Duncan
+     Hath borne his faculties so meek, hath been
+     So clear in his great office, that his virtues
+     Will plead like angels, trumpet-tongued, against
+     The deep damnation of his taking-off;
+     And pity, like a naked new-born babe,
+     Striding the blast, or heaven's cherubim, horsed
+     Upon the sightless couriers of the air,
+     Shall blow the horrid deed in every eye,
+     That tears shall drown the wind.
+
+It may be said that he is here thinking of the horror that others will
+feel at the deed--thinking therefore of consequences. Yes, but could he
+realise thus how horrible the deed would look to others if it were not
+equally horrible to himself?
+
+It is the same when the murder is done. He is well-nigh mad with horror,
+but it is not the horror of detection. It is not he who thinks of
+washing his hands or getting his nightgown on. He has brought away the
+daggers he should have left on the pillows of the grooms, but what does
+he care for that? What _he_ thinks of is that, when he heard one of the
+men awaked from sleep say 'God bless us,' he could not say 'Amen'; for
+his imagination presents to him the parching of his throat as an
+immediate judgment from heaven. His wife heard the owl scream and the
+crickets cry; but what _he_ heard was the voice that first cried
+'Macbeth doth murder sleep,' and then, a minute later, with a change of
+tense, denounced on him, as if his three names gave him three
+personalities to suffer in, the doom of sleeplessness:
+
+     Glamis hath murdered sleep, and therefore Cawdor
+     Shall sleep no more, Macbeth shall sleep no more.
+
+There comes a sound of knocking. It should be perfectly familiar to him;
+but he knows not whence, or from what world, it comes. He looks down at
+his hands, and starts violently: 'What hands are here?' For they seem
+alive, they move, they mean to pluck out his eyes. He looks at one of
+them again; it does not move; but the blood upon it is enough to dye the
+whole ocean red. What has all this to do with fear of 'consequences'? It
+is his soul speaking in the only shape in which it can speak freely,
+that of imagination.
+
+So long as Macbeth's imagination is active, we watch him fascinated; we
+feel suspense, horror, awe; in which are latent, also, admiration and
+sympathy. But so soon as it is quiescent these feelings vanish. He is no
+longer 'infirm of purpose': he becomes domineering, even brutal, or he
+becomes a cool pitiless hypocrite. He is generally said to be a very bad
+actor, but this is not wholly true. Whenever his imagination stirs, he
+acts badly. It so possesses him, and is so much stronger than his
+reason, that his face betrays him, and his voice utters the most
+improbable untruths[218] or the most artificial rhetoric[219] But when
+it is asleep he is firm, self-controlled and practical, as in the
+conversation where he skilfully elicits from Banquo that information
+about his movements which is required for the successful arrangement of
+his murder.[220] Here he is hateful; and so he is in the conversation
+with the murderers, who are not professional cut-throats but old
+soldiers, and whom, without a vestige of remorse, he beguiles with
+calumnies against Banquo and with such appeals as his wife had used to
+him.[221] On the other hand, we feel much pity as well as anxiety in the
+scene (I. vii.) where she overcomes his opposition to the murder; and we
+feel it (though his imagination is not specially active) because this
+scene shows us how little he understands himself. This is his great
+misfortune here. Not that he fails to realise in reflection the baseness
+of the deed (the soliloquy with which the scene opens shows that he does
+not). But he has never, to put it pedantically, accepted as the
+principle of his conduct the morality which takes shape in his
+imaginative fears. Had he done so, and said plainly to his wife, 'The
+thing is vile, and, however much I have sworn to do it, I will not,' she
+would have been helpless; for all her arguments proceed on the
+assumption that there is for them no such point of view. Macbeth does
+approach this position once, when, resenting the accusation of
+cowardice, he answers,
+
+     I dare do all that may become a man;
+     Who dares do more is none.
+
+She feels in an instant that everything is at stake, and, ignoring the
+point, overwhelms him with indignant and contemptuous personal reproach.
+But he yields to it because he is himself half-ashamed of that answer of
+his, and because, for want of habit, the simple idea which it expresses
+has no hold on him comparable to the force it acquires when it becomes
+incarnate in visionary fears and warnings.
+
+Yet these were so insistent, and they offered to his ambition a
+resistance so strong, that it is impossible to regard him as falling
+through the blindness or delusion of passion. On the contrary, he
+himself feels with such intensity the enormity of his purpose that, it
+seems clear, neither his ambition nor yet the prophecy of the Witches
+would ever without the aid of Lady Macbeth have overcome this feeling.
+As it is, the deed is done in horror and without the faintest desire or
+sense of glory,--done, one may almost say, as if it were an appalling
+duty; and, the instant it is finished, its futility is revealed to
+Macbeth as clearly as its vileness had been revealed beforehand. As he
+staggers from the scene he mutters in despair,
+
+     Wake Duncan with thy knocking! I would thou could'st.
+
+When, half an hour later, he returns with Lennox from the room of the
+murder, he breaks out:
+
+     Had I but died an hour before this chance,
+     I had lived a blessed time; for from this instant
+     There's nothing serious in mortality:
+     All is but toys: renown and grace is dead;
+     The wine of life is drawn, and the mere lees
+     Is left this vault to brag of.
+
+This is no mere acting. The language here has none of the false
+rhetoric of his merely hypocritical speeches. It is meant to deceive,
+but it utters at the same time his profoundest feeling. And this he can
+henceforth never hide from himself for long. However he may try to drown
+it in further enormities, he hears it murmuring,
+
+                        Duncan is in his grave:
+     After life's fitful fever he sleeps well:
+
+or,
+
+     better be with the dead:
+
+or,
+
+     I have lived long enough:
+
+and it speaks its last words on the last day of his life:
+
+                     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.
+
+How strange that this judgment on life, the despair of a man who had
+knowingly made mortal war on his own soul, should be frequently quoted
+as Shakespeare's own judgment, and should even be adduced, in serious
+criticism, as a proof of his pessimism!
+
+It remains to look a little more fully at the history of Macbeth after
+the murder of Duncan. Unlike his first struggle this history excites
+little suspense or anxiety on his account: we have now no hope for him.
+But it is an engrossing spectacle, and psychologically it is perhaps the
+most remarkable exhibition of the _development_ of a character to be
+found in Shakespeare's tragedies.
+
+That heart-sickness which comes from Macbeth's perception of the
+futility of his crime, and which never leaves him for long, is not,
+however, his habitual state. It could not be so, for two reasons. In the
+first place the consciousness of guilt is stronger in him than the
+consciousness of failure; and it keeps him in a perpetual agony of
+restlessness, and forbids him simply to droop and pine. His mind is
+'full of scorpions.' He cannot sleep. He 'keeps alone,' moody and
+savage. 'All that is within him does condemn itself for being there.'
+There is a fever in his blood which urges him to ceaseless action in the
+search for oblivion. And, in the second place, ambition, the love of
+power, the instinct of self-assertion, are much too potent in Macbeth to
+permit him to resign, even in spirit, the prize for which he has put
+rancours in the vessel of his peace. The 'will to live' is mighty in
+him. The forces which impelled him to aim at the crown re-assert
+themselves. He faces the world, and his own conscience, desperate, but
+never dreaming of acknowledging defeat. He will see 'the frame of things
+disjoint' first. He challenges fate into the lists.
+
+The result is frightful. He speaks no more, as before Duncan's murder,
+of honour or pity. That sleepless torture, he tells himself, is nothing
+but the sense of insecurity and the fear of retaliation. If only he were
+safe, it would vanish. And he looks about for the cause of his fear; and
+his eye falls on Banquo. Banquo, who cannot fail to suspect him, has not
+fled or turned against him: Banquo has become his chief counsellor. Why?
+Because, he answers, the kingdom was promised to Banquo's children.
+Banquo, then, is waiting to attack him, to make a way for them. The
+'bloody instructions' he himself taught when he murdered Duncan, are
+about to return, as he said they would, to plague the inventor. _This_
+then, he tells himself, is the fear that will not let him sleep; and it
+will die with Banquo. There is no hesitation now, and no remorse: he has
+nearly learned his lesson. He hastens feverishly, not to murder Banquo,
+but to procure his murder: some strange idea is in his mind that the
+thought of the dead man will not haunt him, like the memory of Duncan,
+if the deed is done by other hands.[222] The deed is done: but, instead
+of peace descending on him, from the depths of his nature his
+half-murdered conscience rises; his deed confronts him in the apparition
+of Banquo's Ghost, and the horror of the night of his first murder
+returns. But, alas, _it_ has less power, and _he_ has more will.
+Agonised and trembling, he still faces this rebel image, and it yields:
+
+                       Why, so: being gone,
+     I am a man again.
+
+Yes, but his secret is in the hands of the assembled lords. And, worse,
+this deed is as futile as the first. For, though Banquo is dead and even
+his Ghost is conquered, that inner torture is unassuaged. But he will
+not bear it. His guests have hardly left him when he turns roughly to
+his wife:
+
+     How say'st thou, that Macduff denies his person
+     At our great bidding?
+
+Macduff it is that spoils his sleep. He shall perish,--he and aught else
+that bars the road to peace.
+
+                              For mine own good
+     All causes shall give way: I am in blood
+     Stepp'd in so far that, should I wade no more,
+     Returning were as tedious as go o'er:
+     Strange things I have in head that will to hand,
+     Which must be acted ere they may be scann'd.
+
+She answers, sick at heart,
+
+     You lack the season of all natures, sleep.
+
+No doubt: but he has found the way to it now:
+
+     Come, we'll to sleep. My strange and self abuse
+     Is the initiate fear that wants hard use;
+     We are yet but young in deed.
+
+What a change from the man who thought of Duncan's virtues, and of pity
+like a naked new-born babe! What a frightful clearness of
+self-consciousness in this descent to hell, and yet what a furious force
+in the instinct of life and self-assertion that drives him on!
+
+He goes to seek the Witches. He will know, by the worst means, the
+worst. He has no longer any awe of them.
+
+     How now, you secret, black and midnight hags!
+
+--so he greets them, and at once he demands and threatens. They tell him
+he is right to fear Macduff. They tell him to fear nothing, for none of
+woman born can harm him. He feels that the two statements are at
+variance; infatuated, suspects no double meaning; but, that he may
+'sleep in spite of thunder,' determines not to spare Macduff. But his
+heart throbs to know one thing, and he forces from the Witches the
+vision of Banquo's children crowned. The old intolerable thought
+returns, 'for Banquo's issue have I filed my mind'; and with it, for all
+the absolute security apparently promised him, there returns that inward
+fever. Will nothing quiet it? Nothing but destruction. Macduff, one
+comes to tell him, has escaped him; but that does not matter: he can
+still destroy:[223]
+
+                                And even now,
+     To crown my thoughts with acts, be it thought and done:
+     The castle of Macduff I will surprise;
+     Seize upon Fife; give to the edge o' the sword
+     His wife, his babes, and all unfortunate souls
+     That trace him in's line. No boasting like a fool;
+     This deed I'll do before this purpose cool.
+     But no more sights!
+
+No, he need fear no more 'sights.' The Witches have done their work,
+and after this purposeless butchery his own imagination will trouble him
+no more.[224] He has dealt his last blow at the conscience and pity
+which spoke through it.
+
+The whole flood of evil in his nature is now let loose. He becomes an
+open tyrant, dreaded by everyone about him, and a terror to his country.
+She 'sinks beneath the yoke.'
+
+                             Each new morn
+     New widows howl, new orphans cry, new sorrows
+     Strike heaven on the face.
+
+She weeps, she bleeds, 'and each new day a gash is added to her wounds.'
+She is not the mother of her children, but their grave;
+
+                               where nothing,
+     But who knows nothing, is once seen to smile:
+     Where sighs and groans and shrieks that rend the air
+     Are made, not mark'd.
+
+For this wild rage and furious cruelty we are prepared; but vices of
+another kind start up as he plunges on his downward way.
+
+                            I grant him bloody,
+     Luxurious, avaricious, false, deceitful,
+     Sudden, malicious,
+
+says Malcolm; and two of these epithets surprise us. Who would have
+expected avarice or lechery[225] in Macbeth? His ruin seems complete.
+
+Yet it is never complete. To the end he never totally loses our
+sympathy; we never feel towards him as we do to those who appear the
+born children of darkness. There remains something sublime in the
+defiance with which, even when cheated of his last hope, he faces earth
+and hell and heaven. Nor would any soul to whom evil was congenial be
+capable of that heart-sickness which overcomes him when he thinks of the
+'honour, love, obedience, troops of friends' which 'he must not look to
+have' (and which Iago would never have cared to have), and contrasts
+with them
+
+     Curses, not loud but deep, mouth-honour, breath,
+     Which the poor heart would fain deny, and dare not,
+
+(and which Iago would have accepted with indifference). Neither can I
+agree with those who find in his reception of the news of his wife's
+death proof of alienation or utter carelessness. There is no proof of
+these in the words,
+
+                     She should have died hereafter;
+     There would have been a time for such a word,
+
+spoken as they are by a man already in some measure prepared for such
+news, and now transported by the frenzy of his last fight for life. He
+has no time now to feel.[226] Only, as he thinks of the morrow when time
+to feel will come--if anything comes, the vanity of all hopes and
+forward-lookings sinks deep into his soul with an infinite weariness,
+and he murmurs,
+
+     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.
+
+In the very depths a gleam of his native love of goodness, and with it a
+touch of tragic grandeur, rests upon him. The evil he has desperately
+embraced continues to madden or to wither his inmost heart. No
+experience in the world could bring him to glory in it or make his peace
+with it, or to forget what he once was and Iago and Goneril never were.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[Footnote 194: See note BB.]
+
+[Footnote 195: 'Hell is murky' (V. i. 35). This, surely, is not meant
+for a scornful repetition of something said long ago by Macbeth. He
+would hardly in those days have used an argument or expressed a fear
+that could provoke nothing but contempt.]
+
+[Footnote 196: Whether Banquo's ghost is a mere illusion, like the
+dagger, is discussed in Note FF.]
+
+[Footnote 197: In parts of this paragraph I am indebted to Hunter's
+_Illustrations of Shakespeare_.]
+
+[Footnote 198: The line is a foot short.]
+
+[Footnote 199: It should be observed that in some cases the irony would
+escape an audience ignorant of the story and watching the play for the
+first time,--another indication that Shakespeare did not write solely
+for immediate stage purposes.]
+
+[Footnote 200: Their influence on spectators is, I believe, very
+inferior. These scenes, like the Storm-scenes in _King Lear_, belong
+properly to the world of imagination.]
+
+[Footnote 201: 'By yea and no, I think the 'oman is a witch indeed: I
+like not when a 'oman has a great peard' (_Merry Wives_, IV. ii. 202).]
+
+[Footnote 202: Even the metaphor in the lines (II. iii. 127),
+
+     What should be spoken here, where our fate,
+     Hid in an auger-hole, may rush and seize us?
+
+was probably suggested by the words in Scot's first chapter, 'They can
+go in and out at awger-holes.']
+
+[Footnote 203: Once, 'weird women.' Whether Shakespeare knew that
+'weird' signified 'fate' we cannot tell, but it is probable that he did.
+The word occurs six times in _Macbeth_ (it does not occur elsewhere in
+Shakespeare). The first three times it is spelt in the Folio _weyward_,
+the last three _weyard_. This may suggest a miswriting or misprinting of
+_wayward_; but, as that word is always spelt in the Folio either rightly
+or _waiward_, it is more likely that the _weyward_ and _weyard_ of
+_Macbeth_ are the copyist's or printer's misreading of Shakespeare's
+_weird_ or _weyrd_.]
+
+[Footnote 204: The doubt as to these passages (see Note Z) does not
+arise from the mere appearance of this figure. The idea of Hecate's
+connection with witches appears also at II. i. 52, and she is mentioned
+again at III. ii. 41 (cf. _Mid. Night's Dream_, V. i. 391, for her
+connection with fairies). It is part of the common traditional notion of
+the heathen gods being now devils. Scot refers to it several times. See
+the notes in the Clarendon Press edition on III. v. 1, or those in
+Furness's Variorum.
+
+Of course in the popular notion the witch's spirits are devils or
+servants of Satan. If Shakespeare openly introduces this idea only in
+such phrases as 'the instruments of darkness' and 'what! can the devil
+speak true?' the reason is probably his unwillingness to give too much
+prominence to distinctively religious ideas.]
+
+[Footnote 205: If this paragraph is true, some of the statements even of
+Lamb and of Coleridge about the Witches are, taken literally, incorrect.
+What these critics, and notably the former, describe so well is the
+poetic aspect abstracted from the remainder; and in describing this they
+attribute to the Witches themselves what belongs really to the complex
+of Witches, Spirits, and Hecate. For the purposes of imagination, no
+doubt, this inaccuracy is of small consequence; and it is these purposes
+that matter. [I have not attempted to fulfil them.]]
+
+[Footnote 206: See Note CC.]
+
+[Footnote 207: The proclamation of Malcolm as Duncan's successor (I.
+iv.) changes the position, but the design of murder is prior to this.]
+
+[Footnote 208: Schlegel's assertion that the first thought of the murder
+comes from the Witches is thus in flat contradiction with the text. (The
+sentence in which he asserts this is, I may observe, badly mistranslated
+in the English version, which, wherever I have consulted the original,
+shows itself untrustworthy. It ought to be revised, for Schlegel is well
+worth reading.)]
+
+[Footnote 209: It is noticeable that Dr. Forman, who saw the play in
+1610 and wrote a sketch of it in his journal, says nothing about the
+later prophecies. Perhaps he despised them as mere stuff for the
+groundlings. The reader will find, I think, that the great poetic effect
+of Act IV. Sc. i. depends much more on the 'charm' which precedes
+Macbeth's entrance, and on Macbeth himself, than on the predictions.]
+
+[Footnote 210: This comparison was suggested by a passage in Hegel's
+_Aesthetik_, i. 291 ff.]
+
+[Footnote 211: _Il._ i. 188 ff. (Leaf's translation).]
+
+[Footnote 212: The supernaturalism of the modern poet, indeed, is more
+'external' than that of the ancient. We have already had evidence of
+this, and shall find more when we come to the character of Banquo.]
+
+[Footnote 213: The assertion that Lady Macbeth sought a crown for
+herself, or sought anything for herself, apart from her husband, is
+absolutely unjustified by anything in the play. It is based on a
+sentence of Holinshed's which Shakespeare did _not_ use.]
+
+[Footnote 214: The word is used of him (I. ii. 67), but not in a way
+that decides this question or even bears on it.]
+
+[Footnote 215: This view, thus generally stated, is not original, but I
+cannot say who first stated it.]
+
+[Footnote 216: The latter, and more important, point was put quite
+clearly by Coleridge.]
+
+[Footnote 217: It is the consequent insistence on the idea of fear, and
+the frequent repetition of the word, that have principally led to
+misinterpretation.]
+
+[Footnote 218: _E.g._ I. iii. 149, where he excuses his abstraction by
+saying that his 'dull brain was wrought with things forgotten,' when
+nothing could be more natural than that he should be thinking of his new
+honour.]
+
+[Footnote 219: _E.g._ in I. iv. This is so also in II. iii. 114 ff.,
+though here there is some real imaginative excitement mingled with the
+rhetorical antitheses and balanced clauses and forced bombast.]
+
+[Footnote 220: III. i. Lady Macbeth herself could not more naturally
+have introduced at intervals the questions 'Ride you this afternoon?'
+(l. 19), 'Is't far you ride?' (l. 24), 'Goes Fleance with you?' (l.
+36).]
+
+[Footnote 221: We feel here, however, an underlying subdued frenzy which
+awakes some sympathy. There is an almost unendurable impatience
+expressed even in the rhythm of many of the lines; _e.g._:
+
+                                        Well then, now
+     Have you consider'd of my speeches? Know
+     That it was he in the times past which held you
+     So under fortune, which you thought had been
+     Our innocent self: this I made good to you
+     In our last conference, pass'd in probation with you,
+     How you were borne in hand, how cross'd, the instruments,
+     Who wrought with them, and all things else that might
+     To half a soul and to a notion crazed
+     Say, 'Thus did Banquo.'
+
+This effect is heard to the end of the play in Macbeth's less poetic
+speeches, and leaves the same impression of burning energy, though not
+of imaginative exaltation, as his great speeches. In these we find
+either violent, huge, sublime imagery, or a torrent of figurative
+expressions (as in the famous lines about 'the innocent sleep'). Our
+impressions as to the diction of the play are largely derived from these
+speeches of the hero, but not wholly so. The writing almost throughout
+leaves an impression of intense, almost feverish, activity.]
+
+[Footnote 222: See his first words to the Ghost: 'Thou canst not say I
+did it.']
+
+[Footnote 223:
+
+     For only in destroying I find ease
+     To my relentless thoughts.--_Paradise Lost_, ix. 129.
+
+Milton's portrait of Satan's misery here, and at the beginning of Book
+IV., might well have been suggested by _Macbeth_. Coleridge, after
+quoting Duncan's speech, I. iv. 35 ff., says: 'It is a fancy; but I can
+never read this, and the following speeches of Macbeth, without
+involuntarily thinking of the Miltonic Messiah and Satan.' I doubt if it
+was a mere fancy. (It will be remembered that Milton thought at one time
+of writing a tragedy on Macbeth.)]
+
+[Footnote 224: The immediate reference in 'But no more sights' is
+doubtless to the visions called up by the Witches; but one of these, the
+'blood-bolter'd Banquo,' recalls to him the vision of the preceding
+night, of which he had said,
+
+                        You make me strange
+     Even to the disposition that I owe,
+     When now I think you can behold such _sights_,
+     And keep the natural ruby of your cheeks,
+     When mine is blanch'd with fear.]
+
+[Footnote 225: 'Luxurious' and 'luxury' are used by Shakespeare only in
+this older sense. It must be remembered that these lines are spoken by
+Malcolm, but it seems likely that they are meant to be taken as true
+throughout.]
+
+[Footnote 226: I do not at all suggest that his love for his wife
+remains what it was when he greeted her with the words 'My dearest love,
+Duncan comes here to-night.' He has greatly changed; she has ceased to
+help him, sunk in her own despair; and there is no intensity of anxiety
+in the questions he puts to the doctor about her. But his love for her
+was probably never unselfish, never the love of Brutus, who, in somewhat
+similar circumstances, uses, on the death of Cassius, words which remind
+us of Macbeth's:
+
+     I shall find time, Cassius, I shall find time.
+
+For the opposite strain of feeling cf. Sonnet 90:
+
+     Then hate me if thou wilt; if ever, now,
+     Now while the world is bent my deeds to cross.]
+
+
+
+
+LECTURE X
+
+MACBETH
+
+
+1
+
+To regard _Macbeth_ as a play, like the love-tragedies _Romeo and
+Juliet_ and _Antony and Cleopatra_, in which there are two central
+characters of equal importance, is certainly a mistake. But Shakespeare
+himself is in a measure responsible for it, because the first half of
+_Macbeth_ is greater than the second, and in the first half Lady Macbeth
+not only appears more than in the second but exerts the ultimate
+deciding influence on the action. And, in the opening Act at least, Lady
+Macbeth is the most commanding and perhaps the most awe-inspiring figure
+that Shakespeare drew. Sharing, as we have seen, certain traits with her
+husband, she is at once clearly distinguished from him by an
+inflexibility of will, which appears to hold imagination, feeling, and
+conscience completely in check. To her the prophecy of things that will
+be becomes instantaneously the determination that they shall be:
+
+     Glamis thou art, and Cawdor, and shalt be
+     That thou art promised.
+
+She knows her husband's weakness, how he scruples 'to catch the nearest
+way' to the object he desires; and she sets herself without a trace of
+doubt or conflict to counteract this weakness. To her there is no
+separation between will and deed; and, as the deed falls in part to her,
+she is sure it will be done:
+
+                   The raven himself is hoarse
+     That croaks the fatal entrance of Duncan
+     Under my battlements.
+
+On the moment of Macbeth's rejoining her, after braving infinite dangers
+and winning infinite praise, without a syllable on these subjects or a
+word of affection, she goes straight to her purpose and permits him to
+speak of nothing else. She takes the superior position and assumes the
+direction of affairs,--appears to assume it even more than she really
+can, that she may spur him on. She animates him by picturing the deed as
+heroic, 'this night's _great_ business,' or 'our _great_ quell,' while
+she ignores its cruelty and faithlessness. She bears down his faint
+resistance by presenting him with a prepared scheme which may remove
+from him the terror and danger of deliberation. She rouses him with a
+taunt no man can bear, and least of all a soldier,--the word 'coward.'
+She appeals even to his love for her:
+
+                 from this time
+     Such I account thy love;
+
+--such, that is, as the protestations of a drunkard. Her reasonings are
+mere sophisms; they could persuade no man. It is not by them, it is by
+personal appeals, through the admiration she extorts from him, and
+through sheer force of will, that she impels him to the deed. Her eyes
+are fixed upon the crown and the means to it; she does not attend to the
+consequences. Her plan of laying the guilt upon the chamberlains is
+invented on the spur of the moment, and simply to satisfy her husband.
+Her true mind is heard in the ringing cry with which she answers his
+question, 'Will it not be received ... that they have done it?'
+
+     Who _dares_ receive it other?
+
+And this is repeated in the sleep-walking scene: 'What need we fear who
+knows it, when none can call our power to account?' Her passionate
+courage sweeps him off his feet. His decision is taken in a moment of
+enthusiasm:
+
+               Bring forth men-children only;
+     For thy undaunted mettle should compose
+     Nothing but males.
+
+And even when passion has quite died away her will remains supreme. In
+presence of overwhelming horror and danger, in the murder scene and the
+banquet scene, her self-control is perfect. When the truth of what she
+has done dawns on her, no word of complaint, scarcely a word of her own
+suffering, not a single word of her own as apart from his, escapes her
+when others are by. She helps him, but never asks his help. She leans on
+nothing but herself. And from the beginning to the end--though she makes
+once or twice a slip in acting her part--her will never fails her. Its
+grasp upon her nature may destroy her, but it is never relaxed. We are
+sure that she never betrayed her husband or herself by a word or even a
+look, save in sleep. However appalling she may be, she is sublime.
+
+In the earlier scenes of the play this aspect of Lady Macbeth's
+character is far the most prominent. And if she seems invincible she
+seems also inhuman. We find no trace of pity for the kind old king; no
+consciousness of the treachery and baseness of the murder; no sense of
+the value of the lives of the wretched men on whom the guilt is to be
+laid; no shrinking even from the condemnation or hatred of the world.
+Yet if the Lady Macbeth of these scenes were really utterly inhuman, or
+a 'fiend-like queen,' as Malcolm calls her, the Lady Macbeth of the
+sleep-walking scene would be an impossibility. The one woman could never
+become the other. And in fact, if we look below the surface, there is
+evidence enough in the earlier scenes of preparation for the later. I do
+not mean that Lady Macbeth was naturally humane. There is nothing in the
+play to show this, and several passages subsequent to the murder-scene
+supply proof to the contrary. One is that where she exclaims, on being
+informed of Duncan's murder,
+
+                  Woe, alas!
+     What, in our house?
+
+This mistake in acting shows that she does not even know what the
+natural feeling in such circumstances would be; and Banquo's curt
+answer, 'Too cruel anywhere,' is almost a reproof of her insensibility.
+But, admitting this, we have in the first place to remember, in
+imagining the opening scenes, that she is deliberately bent on
+counteracting the 'human kindness' of her husband, and also that she is
+evidently not merely inflexibly determined but in a condition of
+abnormal excitability. That exaltation in the project which is so
+entirely lacking in Macbeth is strongly marked in her. When she tries to
+help him by representing their enterprise as heroic, she is deceiving
+herself as much as him. Their attainment of the crown presents itself to
+her, perhaps has long presented itself, as something so glorious, and
+she has fixed her will upon it so completely, that for the time she sees
+the enterprise in no other light than that of its greatness. When she
+soliloquises,
+
+                               Yet do I fear thy nature:
+     It is too full o' the milk of human kindness
+     To catch the nearest way: thou wouldst be great;
+     Art not without ambition, but without
+     The illness should attend it; what thou wouldst highly,
+     That wouldst thou holily,
+
+one sees that 'ambition' and 'great' and 'highly' and even 'illness' are
+to her simply terms of praise, and 'holily' and 'human kindness' simply
+terms of blame. Moral distinctions do not in this exaltation exist for
+her; or rather they are inverted: 'good' means to her the crown and
+whatever is required to obtain it, 'evil' whatever stands in the way of
+its attainment. This attitude of mind is evident even when she is alone,
+though it becomes still more pronounced when she has to work upon her
+husband. And it persists until her end is attained. But, without being
+exactly forced, it betrays a strain which could not long endure.
+
+Besides this, in these earlier scenes the traces of feminine weakness
+and human feeling, which account for her later failure, are not absent.
+Her will, it is clear, was exerted to overpower not only her husband's
+resistance but some resistance in herself. Imagine Goneril uttering the
+famous words,
+
+                 Had he not resembled
+     My father as he slept, I had done 't.
+
+They are spoken, I think, without any sentiment--impatiently, as though
+she regretted her weakness: but it was there. And in reality, quite
+apart from this recollection of her father, she could never have done
+the murder if her husband had failed. She had to nerve herself with wine
+to give her 'boldness' enough to go through her minor part. That
+appalling invocation to the spirits of evil, to unsex her and fill her
+from the crown to the toe topfull of direst cruelty, tells the same tale
+of determination to crush the inward protest. Goneril had no need of
+such a prayer. In the utterance of the frightful lines,
+
+                I have given suck, and know
+     How tender 'tis to love the babe that milks me:
+     I would, while it was smiling in my face,
+     Have pluck'd my nipple from his boneless gums,
+     And dash'd the brains out, had I so sworn as you
+     Have done to this,
+
+her voice should doubtless rise until it reaches, in 'dash'd the brains
+out,' an almost hysterical scream.[227] These lines show unmistakably
+that strained exaltation which, as soon as the end is reached, vanishes,
+never to return.
+
+The greatness of Lady Macbeth lies almost wholly in courage and force of
+will. It is an error to regard her as remarkable on the intellectual
+side. In acting a part she shows immense self-control, but not much
+skill. Whatever may be thought of the plan of attributing the murder of
+Duncan to the chamberlains, to lay their bloody daggers on their
+pillows, as if they were determined to advertise their guilt, was a
+mistake which can be accounted for only by the excitement of the moment.
+But the limitations of her mind appear most in the point where she is
+most strongly contrasted with Macbeth,--in her comparative dulness of
+imagination. I say 'comparative,' for she sometimes uses highly poetic
+language, as indeed does everyone in Shakespeare who has any greatness
+of soul. Nor is she perhaps less imaginative than the majority of his
+heroines. But as compared with her husband she has little imagination.
+It is not _simply_ that she suppresses what she has. To her, things
+remain at the most terrible moment precisely what they were at the
+calmest, plain facts which stand in a given relation to a certain deed,
+not visions which tremble and flicker in the light of other worlds. The
+probability that the old king will sleep soundly after his long journey
+to Inverness is to her simply a fortunate circumstance; but one can
+fancy the shoot of horror across Macbeth's face as she mentions it. She
+uses familiar and prosaic illustrations, like
+
+     Letting 'I dare not' wait upon 'I would,'
+     Like the poor cat i' the adage,
+
+(the cat who wanted fish but did not like to wet her feet); or,
+
+                                      We fail?
+     But screw your courage to the sticking-place,
+     And we'll not fail;[228]
+
+or,
+
+                           Was the hope drunk
+     Wherein you dress'd yourself? hath it slept since?
+     And wakes it now, to look so green and pale
+     At what it did so freely?
+
+The Witches are practically nothing to her. She feels no sympathy in
+Nature with her guilty purpose, and would never bid the earth not hear
+her steps, which way they walk. The noises before the murder, and during
+it, are heard by her as simple facts, and are referred to their true
+sources. The knocking has no mystery for her: it comes from 'the south
+entry.' She calculates on the drunkenness of the grooms, compares the
+different effects of wine on herself and on them, and listens to their
+snoring. To her the blood upon her husband's hands suggests only the
+taunt,
+
+     My hands are of your colour, but I shame
+     To wear a heart so white;
+
+and the blood to her is merely 'this filthy witness,'--words impossible
+to her husband, to whom it suggested something quite other than sensuous
+disgust or practical danger. The literalism of her mind appears fully in
+two contemptuous speeches where she dismisses his imaginings; in the
+murder scene:
+
+                           Infirm of purpose!
+     Give me the daggers! The sleeping and the dead
+     Are but as pictures: 'tis the eye of childhood
+     That fears a painted devil;
+
+and in the banquet scene:
+
+                         O these flaws and starts,
+     Impostors to true fear, would well become
+     A woman's story at a winter's fire,
+     Authorised by her grandam. Shame itself!
+     Why do you make such faces? When all's done,
+     You look but on a stool.
+
+Even in the awful scene where her imagination breaks loose in sleep she
+uses no such images as Macbeth's. It is the direct appeal of the facts
+to sense that has fastened on her memory. The ghastly realism of 'Yet
+who would have thought the old man to have had so much blood in him?' or
+'Here's the smell of the blood still,' is wholly unlike him. Her most
+poetical words, 'All the perfumes of Arabia will not sweeten this little
+hand,' are equally unlike his words about great Neptune's ocean. Hers,
+like some of her other speeches, are the more moving, from their greater
+simplicity and because they seem to tell of that self-restraint in
+suffering which is so totally lacking in him; but there is in them
+comparatively little of imagination. If we consider most of the passages
+to which I have referred, we shall find that the quality which moves our
+admiration is courage or force of will.
+
+This want of imagination, though it helps to make Lady Macbeth strong
+for immediate action, is fatal to her. If she does not feel beforehand
+the cruelty of Duncan's murder, this is mainly because she hardly
+imagines the act, or at most imagines its outward show, 'the motion of a
+muscle this way or that.' Nor does she in the least foresee those inward
+consequences which reveal themselves immediately in her husband, and
+less quickly in herself. It is often said that she understands him well.
+Had she done so, she never would have urged him on. She knows that he is
+given to strange fancies; but, not realising what they spring from, she
+has no idea either that they may gain such power as to ruin the scheme,
+or that, while they mean present weakness, they mean also perception of
+the future. At one point in the murder scene the force of his
+imagination impresses her, and for a moment she is startled; a light
+threatens to break on her:
+
+                  These deeds must not be thought
+     After these ways: so, it will make us mad,
+
+she says, with a sudden and great seriousness. And when he goes panting
+on, 'Methought I heard a voice cry, "Sleep no more,"' ... she breaks in,
+'What do you mean?' half-doubting whether this was not a real voice that
+he heard. Then, almost directly, she recovers herself, convinced of the
+vanity of his fancy. Nor does she understand herself any better than
+him. She never suspects that these deeds _must_ be thought after these
+ways; that her facile realism,
+
+     A little water clears us of this deed,
+
+will one day be answered by herself, 'Will these hands ne'er be clean?'
+or that the fatal commonplace, 'What's done is done,' will make way for
+her last despairing sentence, 'What's done cannot be undone.'
+
+Hence the development of her character--perhaps it would be more
+strictly accurate to say, the change in her state of mind--is both
+inevitable, and the opposite of the development we traced in Macbeth.
+When the murder has been done, the discovery of its hideousness, first
+reflected in the faces of her guests, comes to Lady Macbeth with the
+shock of a sudden disclosure, and at once her nature begins to sink. The
+first intimation of the change is given when, in the scene of the
+discovery, she faints.[229] When next we see her, Queen of Scotland, the
+glory of her dream has faded. She enters, disillusioned, and weary with
+want of sleep: she has thrown away everything and gained nothing:
+
+               Nought's had, all's spent,
+     Where our desire is got without content:
+     'Tis safer to be that which we destroy
+     Than by destruction dwell in doubtful joy.
+
+Henceforth she has no initiative: the stem of her being seems to be cut
+through. Her husband, physically the stronger, maddened by pangs he had
+foreseen, but still flaming with life, comes into the foreground, and
+she retires. Her will remains, and she does her best to help him; but he
+rarely needs her help. Her chief anxiety appears to be that he should
+not betray his misery. He plans the murder of Banquo without her
+knowledge (not in order to spare her, I think, for he never shows love
+of this quality, but merely because he does not need her now); and even
+when she is told vaguely of his intention she appears but little
+interested. In the sudden emergency of the banquet scene she makes a
+prodigious and magnificent effort; her strength, and with it her
+ascendancy, returns, and she saves her husband at least from an open
+disclosure. But after this she takes no part whatever in the action. We
+only know from her shuddering words in the sleep-walking scene, 'The
+Thane of Fife had a wife: where is she now?' that she has even learned
+of her husband's worst crime; and in all the horrors of his tyranny over
+Scotland she has, so far as we hear, no part. Disillusionment and
+despair prey upon her more and more. That she should seek any relief in
+speech, or should ask for sympathy, would seem to her mere weakness, and
+would be to Macbeth's defiant fury an irritation. Thinking of the change
+in him, we imagine the bond between them slackened, and Lady Macbeth
+left much alone. She sinks slowly downward. She cannot bear darkness,
+and has light by her continually: 'tis her command. At last her nature,
+not her will, gives way. The secrets of the past find vent in a disorder
+of sleep, the beginning perhaps of madness. What the doctor fears is
+clear. He reports to her husband no great physical mischief, but bids
+her attendant to remove from her all means by which she could harm
+herself, and to keep eyes on her constantly. It is in vain. Her death is
+announced by a cry from her women so sudden and direful that it would
+thrill her husband with horror if he were any longer capable of fear. In
+the last words of the play Malcolm tells us it is believed in the
+hostile army that she died by her own hand. And (not to speak of the
+indications just referred to) it is in accordance with her character
+that even in her weakest hour she should cut short by one determined
+stroke the agony of her life.
+
+The sinking of Lady Macbeth's nature, and the marked change in her
+demeanour to her husband, are most strikingly shown in the conclusion of
+the banquet scene; and from this point pathos is mingled with awe. The
+guests are gone. She is completely exhausted, and answers Macbeth in
+listless, submissive words which seem to come with difficulty. How
+strange sounds the reply 'Did you send to him, sir?' to his imperious
+question about Macduff! And when he goes on, 'waxing desperate in
+imagination,' to speak of new deeds of blood, she seems to sicken at the
+thought, and there is a deep pathos in that answer which tells at once
+of her care for him and of the misery she herself has silently endured,
+
+     You lack the season of all natures, sleep.
+
+We begin to think of her now less as the awful instigator of murder than
+as a woman with much that is grand in her, and much that is piteous.
+Strange and almost ludicrous as the statement may sound,[230] she is, up
+to her light, a perfect wife. She gives her husband the best she has;
+and the fact that she never uses to him the terms of affection which, up
+to this point in the play, he employs to her, is certainly no indication
+of want of love. She urges, appeals, reproaches, for a practical end,
+but she never recriminates. The harshness of her taunts is free from
+mere personal feeling, and also from any deep or more than momentary
+contempt. She despises what she thinks the weakness which stands in the
+way of her husband's ambition; but she does not despise _him_. She
+evidently admires him and thinks him a great man, for whom the throne is
+the proper place. Her commanding attitude in the moments of his
+hesitation or fear is probably confined to them. If we consider the
+peculiar circumstances of the earlier scenes and the banquet scene, and
+if we examine the language of the wife and husband at other times, we
+shall come, I think, to the conclusion that their habitual relations are
+better represented by the later scenes than by the earlier, though
+naturally they are not truly represented by either. Her ambition for her
+husband and herself (there was no distinction to her mind) proved fatal
+to him, far more so than the prophecies of the Witches; but even when
+she pushed him into murder she believed she was helping him to do what
+he merely lacked the nerve to attempt; and her part in the crime was so
+much less open-eyed than his, that, if the impossible and undramatic
+task of estimating degrees of culpability were forced on us, we should
+surely have to assign the larger share to Macbeth.
+
+'Lady Macbeth,' says Dr. Johnson, 'is merely detested'; and for a long
+time critics generally spoke of her as though she were Malcolm's
+'fiend-like queen.' In natural reaction we tend to insist, as I have
+been doing, on the other and less obvious side; and in the criticism of
+the last century there is even a tendency to sentimentalise the
+character. But it can hardly be doubted that Shakespeare meant the
+predominant impression to be one of awe, grandeur, and horror, and that
+he never meant this impression to be lost, however it might be modified,
+as Lady Macbeth's activity diminishes and her misery increases. I cannot
+believe that, when she said of Banquo and Fleance,
+
+     But in them nature's copy's not eterne,
+
+she meant only that they would some day die; or that she felt any
+surprise when Macbeth replied,
+
+     There's comfort yet: they are assailable;
+
+though I am sure no light came into her eyes when he added those
+dreadful words, 'Then be thou jocund.' She was listless. She herself
+would not have moved a finger against Banquo. But she thought his death,
+and his son's death, might ease her husband's mind, and she suggested
+the murders indifferently and without remorse. The sleep-walking scene,
+again, inspires pity, but its main effect is one of awe. There is great
+horror in the references to blood, but it cannot be said that there is
+more than horror; and Campbell was surely right when, in alluding to
+Mrs. Jameson's analysis, he insisted that in Lady Macbeth's misery there
+is no trace of contrition.[231] Doubtless she would have given the world
+to undo what she had done; and the thought of it killed her; but,
+regarding her from the tragic point of view, we may truly say she was
+too great to repent.[232]
+
+
+2
+
+The main interest of the character of Banquo arises from the changes
+that take place in him, and from the influence of the Witches upon him.
+And it is curious that Shakespeare's intention here is so frequently
+missed. Banquo being at first strongly contrasted with Macbeth, as an
+innocent man with a guilty, it seems to be supposed that this contrast
+must be continued to his death; while, in reality, though it is never
+removed, it is gradually diminished. Banquo in fact may be described
+much more truly than Macbeth as the victim of the Witches. If we follow
+his story this will be evident.
+
+He bore a part only less distinguished than Macbeth's in the battles
+against Sweno and Macdonwald. He and Macbeth are called 'our captains,'
+and when they meet the Witches they are traversing the 'blasted
+heath'[233] alone together. Banquo accosts the strange shapes without
+the slightest fear. They lay their fingers on their lips, as if to
+signify that they will not, or must not, speak to _him_. To Macbeth's
+brief appeal, 'Speak, if you can: what are you?' they at once reply, not
+by saying what they are, but by hailing him Thane of Glamis, Thane of
+Cawdor, and King hereafter. Banquo is greatly surprised that his partner
+should start as if in fear, and observes that he is at once 'rapt'; and
+he bids the Witches, if they know the future, to prophesy to _him_, who
+neither begs their favour nor fears their hate. Macbeth, looking back at
+a later time, remembers Banquo's daring, and how
+
+                       he chid the sisters,
+     When first they put the name of king upon me,
+     And bade them speak to him.
+
+'Chid' is an exaggeration; but Banquo is evidently a bold man, probably
+an ambitious one, and certainly has no lurking guilt in his ambition. On
+hearing the predictions concerning himself and his descendants he makes
+no answer, and when the Witches are about to vanish he shows none of
+Macbeth's feverish anxiety to know more. On their vanishing he is simply
+amazed, wonders if they were anything but hallucinations, makes no
+reference to the predictions till Macbeth mentions them, and then
+answers lightly.
+
+When Ross and Angus, entering, announce to Macbeth that he has been made
+Thane of Cawdor, Banquo exclaims, aside, to himself or Macbeth, 'What!
+can the devil speak true?' He now believes that the Witches were real
+beings and the 'instruments of darkness.' When Macbeth, turning to him,
+whispers,
+
+     Do you not hope your children shall be kings,
+     When those that gave the Thane of Cawdor to me
+     Promised no less to them?
+
+he draws with the boldness of innocence the inference which is really
+occupying Macbeth, and answers,
+
+                             That, trusted home,
+     Might yet enkindle you unto the crown
+     Besides the thane of Cawdor.
+
+Here he still speaks, I think, in a free, off-hand, even jesting,[234]
+manner ('enkindle' meaning merely 'excite you to _hope_ for'). But then,
+possibly from noticing something in Macbeth's face, he becomes graver,
+and goes on, with a significant 'but,'
+
+                          But 'tis strange:
+     And oftentimes, to win us to our harm,
+     The instruments of darkness tell us truths,
+     Win us with honest trifles, to betray's
+     In deepest consequence.
+
+He afterwards observes for the second time that his partner is 'rapt';
+but he explains his abstraction naturally and sincerely by referring to
+the surprise of his new honours; and at the close of the scene, when
+Macbeth proposes that they shall discuss the predictions together at
+some later time, he answers in the cheerful, rather bluff manner, which
+he has used almost throughout, 'Very gladly.' Nor was there any reason
+why Macbeth's rejoinder, 'Till then, enough,' should excite misgivings
+in him, though it implied a request for silence, and though the whole
+behaviour of his partner during the scene must have looked very
+suspicious to him when the prediction of the crown was made good through
+the murder of Duncan.
+
+In the next scene Macbeth and Banquo join the King, who welcomes them
+both with the kindest expressions of gratitude and with promises of
+favours to come. Macbeth has indeed already received a noble reward.
+Banquo, who is said by the King to have 'no less deserved,' receives as
+yet mere thanks. His brief and frank acknowledgment is contrasted with
+Macbeth's laboured rhetoric; and, as Macbeth goes out, Banquo turns with
+hearty praises of him to the King.
+
+And when next we see him, approaching Macbeth's castle in company with
+Duncan, there is still no sign of change. Indeed he gains on us. It is
+he who speaks the beautiful lines,
+
+                        This guest of summer,
+     The temple-haunting martlet, does approve,
+     By his loved mansionry, that the heaven's breath
+     Smells wooingly here: no jutty, frieze,
+     Buttress, nor coign of vantage, but this bird
+     Hath made his pendent bed and procreant cradle:
+     Where they most breed and haunt, I have observed,
+     The air is delicate;
+
+--lines which tell of that freedom of heart, and that sympathetic sense
+of peace and beauty, which the Macbeth of the tragedy could never feel.
+
+But now Banquo's sky begins to darken. At the opening of the Second Act
+we see him with Fleance crossing the court of the castle on his way to
+bed. The blackness of the moonless, starless night seems to oppress him.
+And he is oppressed by something else.
+
+     A heavy summons lies like lead upon me,
+     And yet I would not sleep: merciful powers,
+     Restrain in me the cursed thoughts that nature
+     Gives way to in repose!
+
+On Macbeth's entrance we know what Banquo means: he says to
+Macbeth--and it is the first time he refers to the subject unprovoked,
+
+     I dreamt last night of the three weird sisters.
+
+His will is still untouched: he would repel the 'cursed thoughts'; and
+they are mere thoughts, not intentions. But still they are 'thoughts,'
+something more, probably, than mere recollections; and they bring with
+them an undefined sense of guilt. The poison has begun to work.
+
+The passage that follows Banquo's words to Macbeth is difficult to
+interpret:
+
+     I dreamt last night of the three weird sisters:
+     To you they have show'd some truth.
+
+     _Macb._                          I think not of them:
+     Yet, when we can entreat an hour to serve,
+     We would spend it in some words upon that business,
+     If you would grant the time.
+
+     _Ban._                       At your kind'st leisure.
+
+     _Macb._ If you shall cleave to my consent, when 'tis,
+     It shall make honour for you.
+
+     _Ban._                         So I lose none
+     In seeking to augment it, but still keep
+     My bosom franchised and allegiance clear,
+     I shall be counsell'd.
+
+     _Macb._                Good repose the while!
+
+     _Ban._ Thanks, sir: the like to you!
+
+Macbeth's first idea is, apparently, simply to free himself from any
+suspicion which the discovery of the murder might suggest, by showing
+himself, just before it, quite indifferent to the predictions, and
+merely looking forward to a conversation about them at some future time.
+But why does he go on, 'If you shall cleave,' etc.? Perhaps he foresees
+that, on the discovery, Banquo cannot fail to suspect him, and thinks it
+safest to prepare the way at once for an understanding with him (in the
+original story he makes Banquo his accomplice _before_ the murder).
+Banquo's answer shows three things,--that he fears a treasonable
+proposal, that he has no idea of accepting it, and that he has no fear
+of Macbeth to restrain him from showing what is in his mind.
+
+Duncan is murdered. In the scene of discovery Banquo of course appears,
+and his behaviour is significant. When he enters, and Macduff cries out
+to him,
+
+                O Banquo, Banquo,
+     Our royal master's murdered,
+
+and Lady Macbeth, who has entered a moment before, exclaims,
+
+                  Woe, alas!
+     What, in our house?
+
+his answer,
+
+     Too cruel anywhere,
+
+shows, as I have pointed out, repulsion, and we may be pretty sure that
+he suspects the truth at once. After a few words to Macduff he remains
+absolutely silent while the scene is continued for nearly forty lines.
+He is watching Macbeth and listening as he tells how he put the
+chamberlains to death in a frenzy of loyal rage. At last Banquo appears
+to have made up his mind. On Lady Macbeth's fainting he proposes that
+they shall all retire, and that they shall afterwards meet,
+
+     And question this most bloody piece of work
+     To know it further. Fears and scruples[235] shake us:
+     In the great hand of God I stand, and thence
+     Against the undivulged pretence[236] I fight
+     Of treasonous malice.
+
+His solemn language here reminds us of his grave words about 'the
+instruments of darkness,' and of his later prayer to the 'merciful
+powers.' He is profoundly shocked, full of indignation, and determined
+to play the part of a brave and honest man.
+
+But he plays no such part. When next we see him, on the last day of his
+life, we find that he has yielded to evil. The Witches and his own
+ambition have conquered him. He alone of the lords knew of the
+prophecies, but he has said nothing of them. He has acquiesced in
+Macbeth's accession, and in the official theory that Duncan's sons had
+suborned the chamberlains to murder him. Doubtless, unlike Macduff, he
+was present at Scone to see the new king invested. He has, not formally
+but in effect, 'cloven to' Macbeth's 'consent'; he is knit to him by 'a
+most indissoluble tie'; his advice in council has been 'most grave and
+prosperous'; he is to be the 'chief guest' at that night's supper. And
+his soliloquy tells us why:
+
+     Thou hast it now: king, Cawdor, Glamis, all,
+     As the weird women promised, and, I fear,
+     Thou play'dst most foully for't: yet it was said
+     It should not stand in thy posterity,
+     But that myself should be the root and father
+     Of many kings. If there come truth from them--
+     As upon thee, Macbeth, their speeches shine--
+     Why, by the verities on thee made good,
+     May they not be my oracles as well,
+     And set me up in hope? But hush! no more.
+
+This 'hush! no more' is not the dismissal of 'cursed thoughts': it only
+means that he hears the trumpets announcing the entrance of the King and
+Queen.
+
+His punishment comes swiftly, much more swiftly than Macbeth's, and
+saves him from any further fall. He is a very fearless man, and still so
+far honourable that he has no thought of acting to bring about the
+fulfilment of the prophecy which has beguiled him. And therefore he has
+no fear of Macbeth. But he little understands him. To Macbeth's
+tormented mind Banquo's conduct appears highly suspicious. _Why_ has
+this bold and circumspect[237] man kept his secret and become his chief
+adviser? In order to make good _his_ part of the predictions after
+Macbeth's own precedent. Banquo, he is sure, will suddenly and secretly
+attack him. It is not the far-off accession of Banquo's descendants that
+he fears; it is (so he tells himself) swift murder; not that the 'barren
+sceptre' will some day droop from his dying hand, but that it will be
+'wrenched' away now (III. i. 62).[238] So he kills Banquo. But the
+Banquo he kills is not the innocent soldier who met the Witches and
+daffed their prophecies aside, nor the man who prayed to be delivered
+from the temptation of his dreams.
+
+_Macbeth_ leaves on most readers a profound impression of the misery of
+a guilty conscience and the retribution of crime. And the strength of
+this impression is one of the reasons why the tragedy is admired by
+readers who shrink from _Othello_ and are made unhappy by _Lear_. But
+what Shakespeare perhaps felt even more deeply, when he wrote this play,
+was the _incalculability_ of evil,--that in meddling with it human
+beings do they know not what. The soul, he seems to feel, is a thing of
+such inconceivable depth, complexity, and delicacy, that when you
+introduce into it, or suffer to develop in it, any change, and
+particularly the change called evil, you can form only the vaguest idea
+of the reaction you will provoke. All you can be sure of is that it will
+not be what you expected, and that you cannot possibly escape it.
+Banquo's story, if truly apprehended, produces this impression quite as
+strongly as the more terrific stories of the chief characters, and
+perhaps even more clearly, inasmuch as he is nearer to average human
+nature, has obviously at first a quiet conscience, and uses with evident
+sincerity the language of religion.
+
+
+3
+
+Apart from his story Banquo's character is not very interesting, nor is
+it, I think, perfectly individual. And this holds good of the rest of
+the minor characters. They are sketched lightly, and are seldom
+developed further than the strict purposes of the action required. From
+this point of view they are inferior to several of the less important
+figures in each of the other three tragedies. The scene in which Lady
+Macduff and her child appear, and the passage where their slaughter is
+reported to Macduff, have much dramatic value, but in neither case is
+the effect due to any great extent to the special characters of the
+persons concerned. Neither they, nor Duncan, nor Malcolm, nor even
+Banquo himself, have been imagined intensely, and therefore they do not
+produce that sense of unique personality which Shakespeare could convey
+in a much smaller number of lines than he gives to most of them.[239]
+And this is of course even more the case with persons like Ross, Angus,
+and Lennox, though each of these has distinguishable features. I doubt
+if any other great play of Shakespeare's contains so many speeches which
+a student of the play, if they were quoted to him, would be puzzled to
+assign to the speakers. Let the reader turn, for instance, to the second
+scene of the Fifth Act, and ask himself why the names of the persons
+should not be interchanged in all the ways mathematically possible. Can
+he find, again, any signs of character by which to distinguish the
+speeches of Ross and Angus in Act I. scenes ii. and iii., or to
+determine that Malcolm must have spoken I. iv. 2-11? Most of this
+writing, we may almost say, is simply Shakespeare's writing, not that of
+Shakespeare become another person. And can anything like the same
+proportion of such writing be found in _Hamlet_, _Othello_, or _King
+Lear_?
+
+Is it possible to guess the reason of this characteristic of _Macbeth_?
+I cannot believe it is due to the presence of a second hand. The
+writing, mangled by the printer and perhaps by 'the players,' seems to
+be sometimes obviously Shakespeare's, sometimes sufficiently
+Shakespearean to repel any attack not based on external evidence. It may
+be, as the shortness of the play has suggested to some, that Shakespeare
+was hurried, and, throwing all his weight on the principal characters,
+did not exert himself in dealing with the rest. But there is another
+possibility which may be worth considering. _Macbeth_ is distinguished
+by its simplicity,--by grandeur in simplicity, no doubt, but still by
+simplicity. The two great figures indeed can hardly be called simple,
+except in comparison with such characters as Hamlet and Iago; but in
+almost every other respect the tragedy has this quality. Its plot is
+quite plain. It has very little intermixture of humour. It has little
+pathos except of the sternest kind. The style, for Shakespeare, has not
+much variety, being generally kept at a higher pitch than in the other
+three tragedies; and there is much less than usual of the interchange of
+verse and prose.[240] All this makes for simplicity of effect. And, this
+being so, is it not possible that Shakespeare instinctively felt, or
+consciously feared, that to give much individuality or attraction to the
+subordinate figures would diminish this effect, and so, like a good
+artist, sacrificed a part to the whole? And was he wrong? He has
+certainly avoided the overloading which distresses us in _King Lear_,
+and has produced a tragedy utterly unlike it, not much less great as a
+dramatic poem, and as a drama superior.
+
+I would add, though without much confidence, another suggestion. The
+simplicity of _Macbeth_ is one of the reasons why many readers feel
+that, in spite of its being intensely 'romantic,' it is less unlike a
+classical tragedy than _Hamlet_ or _Othello_ or _King Lear_. And it is
+possible that this effect is, in a sense, the result of design. I do not
+mean that Shakespeare intended to imitate a classical tragedy; I mean
+only that he may have seen in the bloody story of Macbeth a subject
+suitable for treatment in a manner somewhat nearer to that of Seneca, or
+of the English Senecan plays familiar to him in his youth, than was the
+manner of his own mature tragedies. The Witches doubtless are
+'romantic,' but so is the witch-craft in Seneca's _Medea_ and _Hercules
+Oetaeus_; indeed it is difficult to read the account of Medea's
+preparations (670-739) without being reminded of the incantations in
+_Macbeth_. Banquo's Ghost again is 'romantic,' but so are Seneca's
+ghosts. For the swelling of the style in some of the great
+passages--however immeasurably superior these may be to anything in
+Seneca--and certainly for the turgid bombast which occasionally appears
+in _Macbeth_, and which seems to have horrified Jonson, Shakespeare
+might easily have found a model in Seneca. Did he not think that this
+was the high Roman manner? Does not the Sergeant's speech, as Coleridge
+observed, recall the style of the 'passionate speech' of the Player in
+_Hamlet_,--a speech, be it observed, on a Roman subject?[241] And is it
+entirely an accident that parallels between Seneca and Shakespeare seem
+to be more frequent in _Macbeth_ than in any other of his undoubtedly
+genuine works except perhaps _Richard III._, a tragedy unquestionably
+influenced either by Seneca or by English Senecan plays?[242] If there
+is anything in these suggestions, and if we suppose that Shakespeare
+meant to give to his play a certain classical tinge, he might naturally
+carry out this idea in respect to the characters, as well as in other
+respects, by concentrating almost the whole interest on the important
+figures and leaving the others comparatively shadowy.
+
+
+4
+
+_Macbeth_ being more simple than the other tragedies, and broader and
+more massive in effect, three passages in it are of great importance as
+securing variety in tone, and also as affording relief from the feelings
+excited by the Witch-scenes and the principal characters. They are the
+passage where the Porter appears, the conversation between Lady Macduff
+and her little boy, and the passage where Macduff receives the news of
+the slaughter of his wife and babes. Yet the first of these, we are told
+even by Coleridge, is unworthy of Shakespeare and is not his; and the
+second, with the rest of the scene which contains it, appears to be
+usually omitted in stage representations of _Macbeth_.
+
+I question if either this scene or the exhibition of Macduff's grief is
+required to heighten our abhorrence of Macbeth's cruelty. They have a
+technical value in helping to give the last stage of the action the form
+of a conflict between Macbeth and Macduff. But their chief function is
+of another kind. It is to touch the heart with a sense of beauty and
+pathos, to open the springs of love and of tears. Shakespeare is loved
+for the sweetness of his humanity, and because he makes this kind of
+appeal with such irresistible persuasion; and the reason why _Macbeth_,
+though admired as much as any work of his, is scarcely loved, is that
+the characters who predominate cannot make this kind of appeal, and at
+no point are able to inspire unmingled sympathy. The two passages in
+question supply this want in such measure as Shakespeare thought
+advisable in _Macbeth_, and the play would suffer greatly from their
+excision. The second, on the stage, is extremely moving, and Macbeth's
+reception of the news of his wife's death may be intended to recall it
+by way of contrast. The first brings a relief even greater, because here
+the element of beauty is more marked, and because humour is mingled with
+pathos. In both we escape from the oppression of huge sins and
+sufferings into the presence of the wholesome affections of unambitious
+hearts; and, though both scenes are painful and one dreadful, our
+sympathies can flow unchecked.[243]
+
+Lady Macduff is a simple wife and mother, who has no thought for
+anything beyond her home. Her love for her children shows her at once
+that her husband's flight exposes them to terrible danger. She is in an
+agony of fear for them, and full of indignation against him. It does not
+even occur to her that he has acted from public spirit, or that there is
+such a thing.
+
+     What had he done to make him fly the land?
+
+He must have been mad to do it. He fled for fear. He does not love his
+wife and children. He is a traitor. The poor soul is almost beside
+herself--and with too good reason. But when the murderer bursts in with
+the question 'Where is your husband?' she becomes in a moment the wife,
+and the great noble's wife:
+
+     I hope, in no place so unsanctified
+     Where such as thou may'st find him.
+
+What did Shakespeare mean us to think of Macduff's flight, for which
+Macduff has been much blamed by others beside his wife? Certainly not
+that fear for himself, or want of love for his family, had anything to
+do with it. His love for his country, so strongly marked in the scene
+with Malcolm, is evidently his one motive.
+
+     He is noble, wise, judicious, and best knows
+     The fits o' the season,
+
+says Ross. That his flight was 'noble' is beyond doubt. That it was not
+wise or judicious in the interest of his family is no less clear. But
+that does not show that it was wrong; and, even if it were, to represent
+its consequences as a judgment on him for his want of due consideration
+is equally monstrous and ludicrous.[244] The further question whether he
+did fail in due consideration, or whether for his country's sake he
+deliberately risked a danger which he fully realised, would in
+Shakespeare's theatre have been answered at once by Macduff's expression
+and demeanour on hearing Malcolm's words,
+
+     Why in that rawness left you wife and child,
+     Those precious motives, those strong knots of love,
+     Without leave-taking?
+
+It cannot be decided with certainty from the mere text; but, without
+going into the considerations on each side, I may express the opinion
+that Macduff knew well what he was doing, and that he fled without
+leave-taking for fear his purpose should give way. Perhaps he said to
+himself, with Coriolanus,
+
+     Not of a woman's tenderness to be,
+     Requires nor child nor woman's face to see.
+
+Little Macduff suggests a few words on Shakespeare's boys (there are
+scarcely any little girls). It is somewhat curious that nearly all of
+them appear in tragic or semi-tragic dramas. I remember but two
+exceptions: little William Page, who said his _Hic, haec, hoc_ to Sir
+Hugh Evans; and the page before whom Falstaff walked like a sow that
+hath overwhelmed all her litter but one; and it is to be feared that
+even this page, if he is the Boy of _Henry V._, came to an ill end,
+being killed with the luggage.
+
+     So wise so young, they say, do ne'er live long,
+
+as Richard observed of the little Prince of Wales. Of too many of these
+children (some of the 'boys,' _e.g._ those in _Cymbeline_, are lads, not
+children) the saying comes true. They are pathetic figures, the more so
+because they so often appear in company with their unhappy mothers, and
+can never be thought of apart from them. Perhaps Arthur is even the
+first creation in which Shakespeare's power of pathos showed itself
+mature;[245] and the last of his children, Mamillius, assuredly proves
+that it never decayed. They are almost all of them noble figures,
+too,--affectionate, frank, brave, high-spirited, 'of an open and free
+nature' like Shakespeare's best men. And almost all of them, again, are
+amusing and charming as well as pathetic; comical in their mingled
+acuteness and _naivete_, charming in their confidence in themselves and
+the world, and in the seriousness with which they receive the jocosity
+of their elders, who commonly address them as strong men, great
+warriors, or profound politicians.
+
+Little Macduff exemplifies most of these remarks. There is nothing in
+the scene of a transcendent kind, like the passage about Mamillius'
+never-finished 'Winter's Tale' of the man who dwelt by a churchyard, or
+the passage about his death, or that about little Marcius and the
+butterfly, or the audacity which introduces him, at the supreme moment
+of the tragedy, outdoing the appeals of Volumnia and Virgilia by the
+statement,
+
+                           'A shall not tread on me:
+     I'll run away till I'm bigger, but then I'll fight.
+
+Still one does not easily forget little Macduff's delightful and
+well-justified confidence in his ability to defeat his mother in
+argument; or the deep impression she made on him when she spoke of his
+father as a 'traitor'; or his immediate response when he heard the
+murderer call his father by the same name,--
+
+     Thou liest, thou shag-haired villain.
+
+Nor am I sure that, if the son of Coriolanus had been murdered, his last
+words to his mother would have been, 'Run away, I pray you.'
+
+I may add two remarks. The presence of this child is one of the things
+in which _Macbeth_ reminds us of _Richard III._ And he is perhaps the
+only person in the tragedy who provokes a smile. I say 'perhaps,' for
+though the anxiety of the Doctor to escape from the company of his
+patient's husband makes one smile, I am not sure that it was meant to.
+
+
+5
+
+The Porter does not make me smile: the moment is too terrific. He is
+grotesque; no doubt the contrast he affords is humorous as well as
+ghastly; I dare say the groundlings roared with laughter at his coarsest
+remarks. But they are not comic enough to allow one to forget for a
+moment what has preceded and what must follow. And I am far from
+complaining of this. I believe that it is what Shakespeare intended, and
+that he despised the groundlings if they laughed. Of course he could
+have written without the least difficulty speeches five times as
+humorous; but he knew better. The Grave-diggers make us laugh: the old
+Countryman who brings the asps to Cleopatra makes us smile at least. But
+the Grave-digger scene does not come at a moment of extreme tension; and
+it is long. Our distress for Ophelia is not so absorbing that we refuse
+to be interested in the man who digs her grave, or even continue
+throughout the long conversation to remember always with pain that the
+grave is hers. It is fitting, therefore, that he should be made
+decidedly humorous. The passage in _Antony and Cleopatra_ is much nearer
+to the passage in _Macbeth_, and seems to have been forgotten by those
+who say that there is nothing in Shakespeare resembling that
+passage.[246] The old Countryman comes at a moment of tragic exaltation,
+and the dialogue is appropriately brief. But the moment, though tragic,
+is emphatically one of exaltation. We have not been feeling horror, nor
+are we feeling a dreadful suspense. We are going to see Cleopatra die,
+but she is to die gloriously and to triumph over Octavius. And therefore
+our amusement at the old Countryman and the contrast he affords to these
+high passions, is untroubled, and it was right to make him really comic.
+But the Porter's case is quite different. We cannot forget how the
+knocking that makes him grumble sounded to Macbeth, or that within a few
+minutes of his opening the gate Duncan will be discovered in his blood;
+nor can we help feeling that in pretending to be porter of hell-gate he
+is terribly near the truth. To give him language so humorous that it
+would ask us almost to lose the sense of these things would have been a
+fatal mistake,--the kind of mistake that means want of dramatic
+imagination. And that was not the sort of error into which Shakespeare
+fell.
+
+To doubt the genuineness of the passage, then, on the ground that it is
+not humorous enough for Shakespeare, seems to me to show this want. It
+is to judge the passage as though it were a separate composition,
+instead of conceiving it in the fulness of its relations to its
+surroundings in a stage-play. Taken by itself, I admit, it would bear no
+indubitable mark of Shakespeare's authorship, not even in the phrase
+'the primrose way to the everlasting bonfire,' which Coleridge thought
+Shakespeare might have added to an interpolation of 'the players.' And
+if there were reason (as in my judgment there is not) to suppose that
+Shakespeare thus permitted an interpolation, or that he collaborated
+with another author, I could believe that he left 'the players' or his
+collaborator to write the words of the passage. But that anyone except
+the author of the scene of Duncan's murder _conceived_ the passage, is
+incredible.[247]
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The speeches of the Porter, a low comic character, are in prose. So is
+the letter of Macbeth to his wife. In both these cases Shakespeare
+follows his general rule or custom. The only other prose-speeches occur
+in the sleep-walking scene, and here the use of prose may seem strange.
+For in great tragic scenes we expect the more poetic medium of
+expression, and this is one of the most famous of such scenes. Besides,
+unless I mistake, Lady Macbeth is the only one of Shakespeare's great
+tragic characters who on a last appearance is denied the dignity of
+verse.
+
+Yet in this scene also he adheres to his custom. Somnambulism is an
+abnormal condition, and it is his general rule to assign prose to
+persons whose state of mind is abnormal. Thus, to illustrate from these
+four plays, Hamlet when playing the madman speaks prose, but in
+soliloquy, in talking with Horatio, and in pleading with his mother, he
+speaks verse.[248] Ophelia in her madness either sings snatches of songs
+or speaks prose. Almost all Lear's speeches, after he has become
+definitely insane, are in prose: where he wakes from sleep recovered,
+the verse returns. The prose enters with that speech which closes with
+his trying to tear off his clothes; but he speaks in verse--some of it
+very irregular--in the Timon-like speeches where his intellect suddenly
+in his madness seems to regain the force of his best days (IV. vi.).
+Othello, in IV. i., speaks in verse till the moment when Iago tells him
+that Cassio has confessed. There follow ten lines of prose--exclamations
+and mutterings of bewildered horror--and he falls to the ground
+unconscious.
+
+The idea underlying this custom of Shakespeare's evidently is that the
+regular rhythm of verse would be inappropriate where the mind is
+supposed to have lost its balance and to be at the mercy of chance
+impressions coming from without (as sometimes with Lear), or of ideas
+emerging from its unconscious depths and pursuing one another across its
+passive surface. The somnambulism of Lady Macbeth is such a condition.
+There is no rational connection in the sequence of images and ideas. The
+sight of blood on her hand, the sound of the clock striking the hour for
+Duncan's murder, the hesitation of her husband before that hour came,
+the vision of the old man in his blood, the idea of the murdered wife of
+Macduff, the sight of the hand again, Macbeth's 'flaws and starts' at
+the sight of Banquo's ghost, the smell on her hand, the washing of hands
+after Duncan's murder again, her husband's fear of the buried Banquo,
+the sound of the knocking at the gate--these possess her, one after
+another, in this chance order. It is not much less accidental than the
+order of Ophelia's ideas; the great difference is that with Ophelia
+total insanity has effaced or greatly weakened the emotional force of
+the ideas, whereas to Lady Macbeth each new image or perception comes
+laden with anguish. There is, again, scarcely a sign of the exaltation
+of disordered imagination; we are conscious rather of an intense
+suffering which forces its way into light against resistance, and speaks
+a language for the most part strikingly bare in its diction and simple
+in its construction. This language stands in strong contrast with that
+of Macbeth in the surrounding scenes, full of a feverish and almost
+furious excitement, and seems to express a far more desolating misery.
+
+The effect is extraordinarily impressive. The soaring pride and power of
+Lady Macbeth's first speeches return on our memory, and the change is
+felt with a breathless awe. Any attempt, even by Shakespeare, to draw
+out the moral enfolded in this awe, would but weaken it. For the moment,
+too, all the language of poetry--even of Macbeth's poetry--seems to be
+touched with unreality, and these brief toneless sentences seem the only
+voice of truth.[249]
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[Footnote 227: So Mrs. Siddons is said to have given the passage.]
+
+[Footnote 228: Surely the usual interpretation of 'We fail?' as a
+question of contemptuous astonishment, is right. 'We fail!' gives
+practically the same sense, but alters the punctuation of the first two
+Folios. In either case, 'But,' I think, means 'Only.' On the other hand
+the proposal to read 'We fail.' with a full stop, as expressive of
+sublime acceptance of the possibility, seems to me, however attractive
+at first sight, quite out of harmony with Lady Macbeth's mood throughout
+these scenes.]
+
+[Footnote 229: See Note DD.]
+
+[Footnote 230: It is not new.]
+
+[Footnote 231: The words about Lady Macduff are of course significant of
+natural human feeling, and may have been introduced expressly to mark
+it, but they do not, I think, show any fundamental change in Lady
+Macbeth, for at no time would she have suggested or approved a
+_purposeless_ atrocity. It is perhaps characteristic that this human
+feeling should show itself most clearly in reference to an act for which
+she was not directly responsible, and in regard to which therefore she
+does not feel the instinct of self-assertion.]
+
+[Footnote 232: The tendency to sentimentalise Lady Macbeth is partly due
+to Mrs. Siddons's fancy that she was a small, fair, blue-eyed woman,
+'perhaps even fragile.' Dr. Bucknill, who was unaquainted with this
+fancy, independently determined that she was 'beautiful and delicate,'
+'unoppressed by weight of flesh,' 'probably small,' but 'a tawny or
+brown blonde,' with grey eyes: and Brandes affirms that she was lean,
+slight, and hard. They know much more than Shakespeare, who tells us
+absolutely nothing on these subjects. That Lady Macbeth, after taking
+part in a murder, was so exhausted as to faint, will hardly demonstrate
+her fragility. That she must have been blue-eyed, fair, or red-haired,
+because she was a Celt, is a bold inference, and it is an idle dream
+that Shakespeare had any idea of making her or her husband
+characteristically Celtic. The only evidence ever offered to prove that
+she was small is the sentence, 'All the perfumes of Arabia will not
+sweeten this little hand'; and Goliath might have called his hand
+'little' in contrast with all the perfumes of Arabia. One might as well
+propose to prove that Othello was a small man by quoting,
+
+                            I have seen the day,
+     That, with this little arm and this good sword,
+     I have made my way through more impediments
+     Than twenty times your stop.
+
+The reader is at liberty to imagine Lady Macbeth's person in the way
+that pleases him best, or to leave it, as Shakespeare very likely did,
+unimagined.
+
+Perhaps it may be well to add that there is not the faintest trace in
+the play of the idea occasionally met with, and to some extent embodied
+in Madame Bernhardt's impersonation of Lady Macbeth, that her hold upon
+her husband lay in seductive attractions deliberately exercised.
+Shakespeare was not unskilled or squeamish in indicating such ideas.]
+
+[Footnote 233: That it is Macbeth who feels the harmony between the
+desolation of the heath and the figures who appear on it is a
+characteristic touch.]
+
+[Footnote 234: So, in Holinshed, 'Banquho jested with him and sayde, now
+Makbeth thou haste obtayned those things which the twoo former sisters
+prophesied, there remayneth onely for thee to purchase that which the
+third sayd should come to passe.']
+
+[Footnote 235: =doubts.]
+
+[Footnote 236: =design.]
+
+[Footnote 237:
+
+                           'tis much he dares,
+     And, to that dauntless temper of his mind,
+     He hath a wisdom that doth guide his valour
+     To act in safety.]
+
+[Footnote 238: So when he hears that Fleance has escaped he is not much
+troubled (III. iv. 29):
+
+                         the worm that's fled
+     Hath nature that in time will venom breed,
+     No teeth for the present.
+
+I have repeated above what I have said before, because the meaning of
+Macbeth's soliloquy is frequently misconceived.]
+
+[Footnote 239: Virgilia in _Coriolanus_ is a famous example. She speaks
+about thirty-five lines.]
+
+[Footnote 240: The percentage of prose is, roughly, in _Hamlet_ 30-2/3,
+in _Othello_ 16-1/3, in _King Lear_ 27-1/2, in _Macbeth_ 8-1/2.]
+
+[Footnote 241: Cf. Note F. There are also in _Macbeth_ several shorter
+passages which recall the Player's speech. Cf. 'Fortune ... showed like
+a rebel's whore' (I. ii. 14) with 'Out! out! thou strumpet Fortune!' The
+form 'eterne' occurs in Shakespeare only in _Macbeth_, III. ii. 38, and
+in the 'proof eterne' of the Player's speech. Cf. 'So, as a painted
+tyrant, Pyrrhus stood,' with _Macbeth_, V. viii. 26; 'the rugged
+Pyrrhus, like the Hyrcanian beast,' with 'the rugged Russian bear ... or
+the Hyrcan tiger' (_Macbeth_, III. iv. 100); 'like a neutral to his will
+and matter' with _Macbeth_, I. v. 47. The words 'Till he unseam'd him
+from the nave to the chaps,' in the Serjeant's speech, recall the words
+'Then from the navel to the throat at once He ript old Priam,' in _Dido
+Queen of Carthage_, where these words follow those others, about Priam
+falling with the mere wind of Pyrrhus' sword, which seem to have
+suggested 'the whiff and wind of his fell sword' in the Player's
+speech.]
+
+[Footnote 242: See Cunliffe, _The Influence of Seneca on Elizabethan
+Tragedy_. The most famous of these parallels is that between 'Will all
+great Neptune's Ocean,' etc., and the following passages:
+
+     Quis eluet me Tanais? aut quae barbaris
+     Maeotis undis Pontico incumbens mari?
+     Non ipse toto magnus Oceano pater
+     Tantum expiarit sceleris. (_Hipp._ 715.)
+
+     Quis Tanais, aut quis Nilus, aut quis Persica
+     Violentus unda Tigris, aut Rhenus ferox,
+     Tagusve Ibera turbidus gaza fluens,
+     Abluere dextram poterit? Arctoum licet
+     Maeotis in me gelida transfundat mare,
+     Et tota Tethys per meas currat manus,
+     Haerebit altum facinus. (_Herc. Furens_, 1323.)
+
+(The reader will remember Othello's 'Pontic sea' with its 'violent
+pace.') Medea's incantation in Ovid's _Metamorphoses_, vii. 197 ff.,
+which certainly suggested Prospero's speech, _Tempest_, V. i. 33 ff.,
+should be compared with Seneca, _Herc. Oet._, 452 ff., 'Artibus
+magicis,' etc. It is of course highly probable that Shakespeare read
+some Seneca at school. I may add that in the _Hippolytus_, beside the
+passage quoted above, there are others which might have furnished him
+with suggestions. Cf. for instance _Hipp._, 30 ff., with the lines about
+the Spartan hounds in _Mids. Night's Dream_, IV. i. 117 ff., and
+Hippolytus' speech, beginning 483, with the Duke's speech in _As You
+Like It_, II. i.]
+
+[Footnote 243: Cf. Coleridge's note on the Lady Macduff scene.]
+
+[Footnote 244: It is nothing to the purpose that Macduff himself says,
+
+                                  Sinful Macduff,
+     They were all struck for thee! naught that I am,
+     Not for their own demerits, but for mine,
+     Fell slaughter on their souls.
+
+There is no reason to suppose that the sin and demerit he speaks of is
+that of leaving his home. And even if it were, it is Macduff that
+speaks, not Shakespeare, any more than Shakespeare speaks in the
+preceding sentence,
+
+                                 Did heaven look on,
+     And would not take their part?
+
+And yet Brandes (ii. 104) hears in these words 'the voice of revolt ...
+that sounds later through the despairing philosophy of _King Lear_.' It
+sounds a good deal earlier too; _e.g._ in _Tit. And._, IV. i. 81, and _2
+Henry VI._, II. i. 154. The idea is a commonplace of Elizabethan
+tragedy.]
+
+[Footnote 245: And the idea that it was the death of his son Hamnet,
+aged eleven, that brought this power to maturity is one of the more
+plausible attempts to find in his dramas a reflection of his private
+history. It implies however as late a date as 1596 for _King John_.]
+
+[Footnote 246: Even if this were true, the retort is obvious that
+neither is there anything resembling the murder-scene in _Macbeth_.]
+
+[Footnote 247: I have confined myself to the single aspect of this
+question on which I had what seemed something new to say. Professor
+Hales's defence of the passage on fuller grounds, in the admirable paper
+reprinted in his _Notes and Essays on Shakespeare_, seems to me quite
+conclusive. I may add two notes. (1) The references in the Porter's
+speeches to 'equivocation,' which have naturally, and probably rightly,
+been taken as allusions to the Jesuit Garnet's appeal to the doctrine of
+equivocation in defence of his perjury when, on trial for participation
+in the Gunpowder Plot, do not stand alone in _Macbeth_. The later
+prophecies of the Witches Macbeth calls 'the equivocation of the fiend
+That lies like truth' (V. v. 43); and the Porter's remarks about the
+equivocator who 'could swear in both the scales against either scale,
+who committed treason enough for God's sake, yet could not equivocate to
+heaven,' may be compared with the following dialogue (IV. ii. 45):
+
+     _Son._           What is a traitor?
+
+     _Lady Macduff._  Why, one that swears and lies.
+
+     _Son._           And be all traitors that do so?
+
+     _Lady Macduff._  Everyone that does so is a traitor, and must
+                        be hanged.
+
+Garnet, as a matter of fact, _was_ hanged in May, 1606; and it is to be
+feared that the audience applauded this passage.
+
+(2) The Porter's soliloquy on the different applicants for admittance
+has, in idea and manner, a marked resemblance to Pompey's soliloquy on
+the inhabitants of the prison, in _Measure for Measure_, IV. iii. 1 ff.;
+and the dialogue between him and Abhorson on the 'mystery' of hanging
+(IV. ii. 22 ff.) is of just the same kind as the Porter's dialogue with
+Macduff about drink.]
+
+[Footnote 248: In the last Act, however, he speaks in verse even in the
+quarrel with Laertes at Ophelia's grave. It would be plausible to
+explain this either from his imitating what he thinks the rant of
+Laertes, or by supposing that his 'towering passion' made him forget to
+act the madman. But in the final scene also he speaks in verse in the
+presence of all. This again might be accounted for by saying that he is
+supposed to be in a lucid interval, as indeed his own language at 239
+ff. implies. But the probability is that Shakespeare's real reason for
+breaking his rule here was simply that he did not choose to deprive
+Hamlet of verse on his last appearance. I wonder the disuse of prose in
+these two scenes has not been observed, and used as an argument, by
+those who think that Hamlet, with the commission in his pocket, is now
+resolute.]
+
+[Footnote 249: The verse-speech of the Doctor, which closes this scene,
+lowers the tension towards that of the next scene. His introductory
+conversation with the Gentlewoman is written in prose (sometimes very
+near verse), partly, perhaps, from its familiar character, but chiefly
+because Lady Macbeth is to speak in prose.]
+
+
+
+
+NOTE A.
+
+EVENTS BEFORE THE OPENING OF THE ACTION IN _HAMLET_.
+
+
+In Hamlet's first soliloquy he speaks of his father as being 'but two
+months dead,--nay, not so much, not two.' He goes on to refer to the
+love between his father and mother, and then says (I. ii. 145):
+
+                          and yet, within a month--
+     Let me not think on't--Frailty, thy name is woman!--
+     A little month, or ere those shoes were old
+     With which she follow'd my poor father's body,
+     Like Niobe, all tears, why she, even she--
+     O God! a beast, that wants discourse of reason,
+     Would have mourn'd longer--married with my uncle.
+
+It seems hence to be usually assumed that at this time--the time when
+the action begins--Hamlet's mother has been married a little less than a
+month.
+
+On this assumption difficulties, however, arise, though I have not found
+them referred to. Why has the Ghost waited nearly a month since the
+marriage before showing itself? Why has the King waited nearly a month
+before appearing in public for the first time, as he evidently does in
+this scene? And why has Laertes waited nearly a month since the
+coronation before asking leave to return to France (I. ii. 53)?
+
+To this it might be replied that the marriage and the coronation were
+separated by some weeks; that, while the former occurred nearly a month
+before the time of this scene, the latter has only just taken place; and
+that what the Ghost cannot bear is, not the mere marriage, but the
+accession of an incestuous murderer to the throne. But anyone who will
+read the King's speech at the opening of the scene will certainly
+conclude that the marriage has only just been celebrated, and also that
+it is conceived as involving the accession of Claudius to the throne.
+Gertrude is described as the 'imperial jointress' of the State, and the
+King says that the lords consented to the marriage, but makes no
+separate mention of his election.
+
+The solution of the difficulty is to be found in the lines quoted above.
+The marriage followed, within a month, not the _death_ of Hamlet's
+father, but the _funeral_. And this makes all clear. The death happened
+nearly two months ago. The funeral did not succeed it immediately, but
+(say) in a fortnight or three weeks. And the marriage and coronation,
+coming rather less than a month after the funeral, have just taken
+place. So that the Ghost has not waited at all; nor has the King, nor
+Laertes.
+
+On this hypothesis it follows that Hamlet's agonised soliloquy is not
+uttered nearly a month after the marriage which has so horrified him,
+but quite soon after it (though presumably he would know rather earlier
+what was coming). And from this hypothesis we get also a partial
+explanation of two other difficulties, (_a_) When Horatio, at the end of
+the soliloquy, enters and greets Hamlet, it is evident that he and
+Hamlet have not recently met at Elsinore. Yet Horatio came to Elsinore
+for the funeral (I. ii. 176). Now even if the funeral took place some
+three weeks ago, it seems rather strange that Hamlet, however absorbed
+in grief and however withdrawn from the Court, has not met Horatio; but
+if the funeral took place some seven weeks ago, the difficulty is
+considerably greater. (_b_) We are twice told that Hamlet has '_of
+late_' been seeking the society of Ophelia and protesting his love for
+her (I. iii. 91, 99). It always seemed to me, on the usual view of the
+chronology, rather difficult (though not, of course, impossible) to
+understand this, considering the state of feeling produced in him by his
+mother's marriage, and in particular the shock it appears to have given
+to his faith in woman. But if the marriage has only just been celebrated
+the words 'of late' would naturally refer to a time before it. This time
+presumably would be subsequent to the death of Hamlet's father, but it
+is not so hard to fancy that Hamlet may have sought relief from mere
+_grief_ in his love for Ophelia.
+
+But here another question arises; May not the words 'of late' include,
+or even wholly refer to,[250] a time prior to the death of Hamlet's
+father? And this question would be answered universally, I suppose, in
+the negative, on the ground that Hamlet was not at Court but at
+Wittenberg when his father died. I will deal with this idea in a
+separate note, and will only add here that, though it is quite possible
+that Shakespeare never imagined any of these matters clearly, and so
+produced these unimportant difficulties, we ought not to assume this
+without examination.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[Footnote 250: This is intrinsically not probable, and is the more
+improbable because in Q1 Hamlet's letter to Ophelia (which must have
+been written before the action of the play begins) is signed 'Thine ever
+the most unhappy Prince _Hamlet_.' 'Unhappy' _might_ be meant to
+describe an unsuccessful lover, but it probably shows that the letter
+was written after his father's death.]
+
+
+
+
+NOTE B.
+
+WHERE WAS HAMLET AT THE TIME OF HIS FATHER'S DEATH?
+
+
+The answer will at once be given: 'At the University of Wittenberg. For
+the king says to him (I. ii. 112):
+
+                         For your intent
+     In going back to school in Wittenberg,
+     It is most retrograde to our desire.
+
+The Queen also prays him not to go to Wittenberg: and he consents to
+remain.'
+
+Now I quite agree that the obvious interpretation of this passage is
+that universally accepted, that Hamlet, like Horatio, was at Wittenberg
+when his father died; and I do not say that it is wrong. But it involves
+difficulties, and ought not to be regarded as certain.
+
+(1) One of these difficulties has long been recognised. Hamlet,
+according to the evidence of Act V., Scene i., is thirty years of age;
+and that is a very late age for a university student. One solution is
+found (by those who admit that Hamlet _was_ thirty) in a passage in
+Nash's _Pierce Penniless_: 'For fashion sake some [Danes] will put their
+children to schoole, but they set them not to it till they are fourteene
+years old, so that you shall see a great boy with a beard learne his
+A.B.C. and sit weeping under the rod when he is thirty years old.'
+Another solution, as we saw (p. 105), is found in Hamlet's character. He
+is a philosopher who lingers on at the University from love of his
+studies there.
+
+(2) But there is a more formidable difficulty, which seems to have
+escaped notice. Horatio certainly came from Wittenberg to the funeral.
+And observe how he and Hamlet meet (I. ii. 160).
+
+     _Hor._  Hail to your lordship!
+
+     _Ham._                    I am glad to see you well:
+             Horatio,--or I do forget myself.
+
+     _Hor._  The same, my lord, and your poor servant ever.
+
+     _Ham._  Sir, my good friend; I'll change that name with you:
+             And what make you from Wittenberg, Horatio?
+             Marcellus?
+
+     _Mar._             My good lord--
+
+     _Ham._  I am very glad to see you. Good even, sir.[251]
+             But what, in faith, make you from Wittenberg?
+
+     _Hor._  A truant disposition, good my lord.
+
+     _Ham._  I would not hear your enemy say so,
+             Nor shall you do my ear that violence,
+             To make it truster of your own report
+             Against yourself: I know you are no truant.
+             But what is your affair in Elsinore?
+             We'll teach you to drink deep ere you depart.
+
+     _Hor._  My lord, I came to see your father's funeral.
+
+     _Ham._  I pray thee, do not mock me, fellow-student;
+             I think it was to see my mother's wedding.
+
+Is not this passing strange? Hamlet and Horatio are supposed to be
+fellow-students at Wittenberg, and to have left it for Elsinore less
+than two months ago. Yet Hamlet hardly recognises Horatio at first, and
+speaks as if he himself lived at Elsinore (I refer to his bitter jest,
+'We'll teach you to drink deep ere you depart'). Who would dream that
+Hamlet had himself just come from Wittenberg, if it were not for the
+previous words about his going back there?
+
+How can this be explained on the usual view? Only, I presume, by
+supposing that Hamlet is so sunk in melancholy that he really does
+almost 'forget himself'[252] and forget everything else, so that he
+actually is in doubt who Horatio is. And this, though not impossible, is
+hard to believe.
+
+'Oh no,' it may be answered, 'for he is doubtful about Marcellus too;
+and yet, if he were living at Elsinore, he must have seen Marcellus
+often.' But he is _not_ doubtful about Marcellus. That note of
+interrogation after 'Marcellus' is Capell's conjecture: it is not in any
+Quarto or any Folio. The fact is that he knows perfectly well the man
+who lives at Elsinore, but is confused by the appearance of the friend
+who comes from Wittenberg.
+
+(3) Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are sent for, to wean Hamlet from his
+melancholy and to worm his secret out of him, because he has known them
+from his youth and is fond of them (II. ii. 1 ff.). They come _to_
+Denmark (II. ii. 247 f.): they come therefore _from_ some other country.
+Where do they come from? They are, we hear, Hamlet's 'school-fellows'
+(III. iv. 202). And in the first Quarto we are directly told that they
+were with him at Wittenberg:
+
+     _Ham._  What, Gilderstone, and Rossencraft,
+             Welcome, kind school-fellows, to Elsanore.
+
+     _Gil._  We thank your grace, and would be very glad
+             You were as when we were at Wittenberg.
+
+Now let the reader look at Hamlet's first greeting of them in the
+received text, and let him ask himself whether it is the greeting of a
+man to fellow-students whom he left two months ago: whether it is not
+rather, like his greeting of Horatio, the welcome of an old
+fellow-student who has not seen his visitors for a considerable time
+(II. ii. 226 f.).
+
+(4) Rosencrantz and Guildenstern tell Hamlet of the players who are
+coming. He asks what players they are, and is told, 'Even those you were
+wont to take such delight in, the tragedians of the city.' He asks, 'Do
+they hold the same estimation they did when I was in the city?'
+Evidently he has not been in the city for some time. And this is still
+more evident when the players come in, and he talks of one having grown
+a beard, and another having perhaps cracked his voice, since they last
+met. What then is this city, where he has not been for some time, but
+where (it would appear) Rosencrantz and Guildenstern live? It is not in
+Denmark ('Comest thou to beard me in Denmark?'). It would seem to be
+Wittenberg.[253]
+
+All these passages, it should be observed, are consistent with one
+another. And the conclusion they point to is that Hamlet has left the
+University for some years and has been living at Court. This again is
+consistent with his being thirty years of age, and with his being
+mentioned as a soldier and a courtier as well as a scholar (III. i.
+159). And it is inconsistent, I believe, with nothing in the play,
+unless with the mention of his 'going back to school in Wittenberg.' But
+it is not really inconsistent with that. The idea may quite well be that
+Hamlet, feeling it impossible to continue at Court after his mother's
+marriage and Claudius' accession, thinks of the University where, years
+ago, he was so happy, and contemplates a return to it. If this were
+Shakespeare's meaning he might easily fail to notice that the expression
+'going back to school in Wittenberg' would naturally suggest that Hamlet
+had only just left 'school.'
+
+I do not see how to account for these passages except on this
+hypothesis. But it in its turn involves a certain difficulty. Horatio,
+Rosencrantz and Guildenstern seem to be of about the same age as Hamlet.
+How then do _they_ come to be at Wittenberg? I had thought that this
+question might be answered in the following way. If 'the city' is
+Wittenberg, Shakespeare would regard it as a place like London, and we
+might suppose that Horatio, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern were living
+there, though they had ceased to be students. But this can hardly be
+true of Horatio, who, when he (to spare Hamlet's feelings) talks of
+being 'a truant,' must mean a truant from his University. The only
+solution I can suggest is that, in the story or play which Shakespeare
+used, Hamlet and the others were all at the time of the murder young
+students at Wittenberg, and that when he determined to make them older
+men (or to make Hamlet, at any rate, older), he did not take trouble
+enough to carry this idea through all the necessary detail, and so left
+some inconsistencies. But in any case the difficulty in the view which I
+suggest seems to me not nearly so great as those which the usual view
+has to meet.[254]
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[Footnote 251: These three words are evidently addressed to Bernardo.]
+
+[Footnote 252: Cf. Antonio in his melancholy (_Merchant of Venice_, I.
+i. 6),
+
+     And such a want-wit sadness makes of me
+     That I have much ado to know myself.]
+
+[Footnote 253: In _Der Bestrafte Brudermord_ it _is_ Wittenberg. Hamlet
+says to the actors: 'Were you not, a few years ago, at the University of
+Wittenberg? I think I saw you act there': Furness's _Variorum_, ii. 129.
+But it is very doubtful whether this play is anything but an adaptation
+and enlargement of _Hamlet_ as it existed in the stage represented by
+Q1.]
+
+[Footnote 254: It is perhaps worth while to note that in _Der Bestrafte
+Brudermord_ Hamlet is said to have been 'in Germany' at the time of his
+father's murder.]
+
+
+
+
+NOTE C.
+
+HAMLET'S AGE.
+
+
+The chief arguments on this question may be found in Furness's _Variorum
+Hamlet_, vol. i., pp. 391 ff. I will merely explain my position briefly.
+
+Even if the general impression I received from the play were that Hamlet
+was a youth of eighteen or twenty, I should feel quite unable to set it
+against the evidence of the statements in V. i. which show him to be
+exactly thirty, unless these statements seemed to be casual. But they
+have to my mind, on the contrary, the appearance of being expressly
+inserted in order to fix Hamlet's age; and the fact that they differ
+decidedly from the statements in Q1 confirms that idea. So does the fact
+that the Player King speaks of having been married thirty years (III.
+ii. 165), where again the number differs from that in Q1.
+
+If V. i. did not contain those decisive statements, I believe my
+impression as to Hamlet's age would be uncertain. His being several
+times called 'young' would not influence me much (nor at all when he is
+called 'young' simply to distinguish him from his father, _as he is in
+the very passage which shows him to be thirty_). But I think we
+naturally take him to be about as old as Laertes, Rosencrantz and
+Guildenstern, and take them to be less than thirty. Further, the
+language used by Laertes and Polonius to Ophelia in I. iii. would
+certainly, by itself, lead one to imagine Hamlet as a good deal less
+than thirty; and the impression it makes is not, to me, altogether
+effaced by the fact that Henry V. at his accession is said to be in 'the
+very May-morn of his youth,'--an expression which corresponds closely
+with those used by Laertes to Ophelia. In some passages, again, there is
+an air of boyish petulance. On the other side, however, we should have
+to set (1) the maturity of Hamlet's thought; (2) his manner, on the
+whole, to other men and to his mother, which, I think, is far from
+suggesting the idea of a mere youth; (3) such a passage as his words to
+Horatio at III. ii. 59 ff., which imply that both he and Horatio have
+seen a good deal of life (this passage has in Q1 nothing corresponding
+to the most significant lines). I have shown in Note B that it is very
+unsafe to argue to Hamlet's youth from the words about his going back to
+Wittenberg.
+
+On the whole I agree with Prof. Dowden that, apart from the statements
+in V. i., one would naturally take Hamlet to be a man of about five and
+twenty.
+
+It has been suggested that in the old play Hamlet was a mere lad; that
+Shakespeare, when he began to work on it,[255] had not determined to
+make Hamlet older; that, as he went on, he did so determine; and that
+this is the reason why the earlier part of the play makes (if it does
+so) a different impression from the later. I see nothing very improbable
+in this idea, but I must point out that it is a mistake to appeal in
+support of it to the passage in V. i. as found in Q1; for that passage
+does not in the least show that the author (if correctly reported)
+imagined Hamlet as a lad. I set out the statements in Q2 and Q1.
+
+Q2 says:
+
+     (1) The grave-digger came to his business on the day when old
+     Hamlet defeated Fortinbras:
+
+     (2) On that day young Hamlet was born:
+
+     (3) The grave-digger has, at the time of speaking, been sexton
+     for thirty years:
+
+     (4) Yorick's skull has been in the earth twenty-three years:
+
+     (5) Yorick used to carry young Hamlet on his back.
+
+This is all explicit and connected, and yields the result that Hamlet is
+now thirty.
+
+Q1 says:
+
+     (1) Yorick's skull has been in the ground a dozen years:
+
+     (2) It has been in the ground ever since old Hamlet overcame
+     Fortinbras:
+
+     (3) Yorick used to carry young Hamlet on his back.
+
+From this nothing whatever follows as to Hamlet's age, except that he is
+more than twelve![256] Evidently the writer (if correctly reported) has
+no intention of telling us how old Hamlet is. That he did not imagine
+him as very young appears from his making him say that he has noted
+'this seven year' (in Q2 'three years') that the toe of the peasant
+comes near the heel of the courtier. The fact that the Player-King in Q1
+speaks of having been married forty years shows that here too the writer
+has not any reference to Hamlet's age in his mind.[257]
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[Footnote 255: Of course we do not know that he did work on it.]
+
+[Footnote 256: I find that I have been anticipated in this remark by H.
+Tuerck (_Jahrbuch_ for 1900, p. 267 ff.)]
+
+[Footnote 257: I do not know if it has been observed that in the opening
+of the Player-King's speech, as given in Q2 and the Folio (it is quite
+different in Q1), there seems to be a reminiscence of Greene's
+_Alphonsus King of Arragon_, Act IV., lines 33 ff. (Dyce's _Greene and
+Peele_, p. 239):
+
+     Thrice ten times Phoebus with his golden beams
+     Hath compassed the circle of the sky,
+     Thrice ten times Ceres hath her workmen hir'd,
+     And fill'd her barns with fruitful crops of corn,
+     Since first in priesthood I did lead my life.]
+
+
+
+
+NOTE D.
+
+'MY TABLES--MEET IT IS I SET IT DOWN.'
+
+
+This passage has occasioned much difficulty, and to many readers seems
+even absurd. And it has been suggested that it, with much that
+immediately follows it, was adopted by Shakespeare, with very little
+change, from the old play.
+
+It is surely in the highest degree improbable that, at such a critical
+point, when he had to show the first effect on Hamlet of the disclosures
+made by the Ghost, Shakespeare would write slackly or be content with
+anything that did not satisfy his own imagination. But it is not
+surprising that we should find some difficulty in following his
+imagination at such a point.
+
+Let us look at the whole speech. The Ghost leaves Hamlet with the words,
+'Adieu, adieu! Hamlet, remember me'; and he breaks out:
+
+     O all you host of heaven! O earth! what else?
+     And shall I couple hell? O, fie! Hold, hold, my heart;
+     And you, my sinews, grow not instant old,
+     But bear me stiffly up. Remember thee!
+     Ay, thou poor ghost, while memory holds a seat
+     In this distracted globe. Remember thee!
+     Yea, from the table of my memory
+     I'll wipe away all trivial fond records,
+     All saws of books, all forms, all pressures past,
+     That youth and observation copied there;
+     And thy commandment all alone shall live
+     Within the book and volume of my brain,
+     Unmix'd with baser matter: yes, by heaven!
+     O most pernicious woman!
+     O villain, villain, smiling, damned villain!
+     My tables--meet it is I set it down,
+     That one may smile, and smile, and be a villain;
+     At least I'm sure it may be so in Denmark:      [_Writing_
+     So, uncle, there you are. Now to my word;
+     It is 'Adieu, adieu! remember me.'
+     I have sworn 't.
+
+The man who speaks thus was, we must remember, already well-nigh
+overwhelmed with sorrow and disgust when the Ghost appeared to him. He
+has now suffered a tremendous shock. He has learned that his mother was
+not merely what he supposed but an adulteress, and that his father was
+murdered by her paramour. This knowledge too has come to him in such a
+way as, quite apart from the _matter_ of the communication, might make
+any human reason totter. And, finally, a terrible charge has been laid
+upon him. Is it strange, then, that he should say what is strange? Why,
+there would be nothing to wonder at if his mind collapsed on the spot.
+
+Now it is just this that he himself fears. In the midst of the first
+tremendous outburst, he checks himself suddenly with the exclamation 'O,
+fie!' (cf. the precisely similar use of this interjection, II. ii. 617).
+He must not let himself feel: he has to live. He must not let his heart
+break in pieces ('hold' means 'hold together'), his muscles turn into
+those of a trembling old man, his brain dissolve--as they threaten in an
+instant to do. For, if they do, how can he--_remember_? He goes on
+reiterating this 'remember' (the 'word' of the Ghost). He is, literally,
+afraid that he will _forget_--that his mind will lose the message
+entrusted to it. Instinctively, then, he feels that, if he _is_ to
+remember, he must wipe from his memory everything it already contains;
+and the image of his past life rises before him, of all his joy in
+thought and observation and the stores they have accumulated in his
+memory. All that is done with for ever: nothing is to remain for him on
+the 'table' but the command, 'remember me.' He swears it; 'yes, by
+heaven!' That done, suddenly the repressed passion breaks out, and, most
+characteristically, he thinks _first_ of his mother; then of his uncle,
+the smooth-spoken scoundrel who has just been smiling on him and calling
+him 'son.' And in bitter desperate irony he snatches his tables from his
+breast (they are suggested to him by the phrases he has just used,
+'table of my memory,' 'book and volume'). After all, he _will_ use them
+once again; and, perhaps with a wild laugh, he writes with trembling
+fingers his last observation: 'One may smile, and smile, and be a
+villain.'
+
+But that, I believe, is not merely a desperate jest. It springs from
+that _fear of forgetting_. A time will come, he feels, when all this
+appalling experience of the last half-hour will be incredible to him,
+will seem a mere nightmare, will even, conceivably, quite vanish from
+his mind. Let him have something in black and white that will bring it
+back and _force_ him to remember and believe. What is there so unnatural
+in this, if you substitute a note-book or diary for the 'tables'?[258]
+
+But why should he write that particular note, and not rather his 'word,'
+'Adieu, adieu! remember me'? I should answer, first, that a grotesque
+jest at such a moment is thoroughly characteristic of Hamlet (see p.
+151), and that the jocose 'So, uncle, there you are!' shows his state of
+mind; and, secondly, that loathing of his uncle is vehement in his
+thought at this moment. Possibly, too, he might remember that 'tables'
+are stealable, and that if the appearance of the Ghost should be
+reported, a mere observation on the smiling of villains could not betray
+anything of his communication with the Ghost. What follows shows that
+the instinct of secrecy is strong in him.
+
+It seems likely, I may add, that Shakespeare here was influenced,
+consciously or unconsciously, by recollection of a place in _Titus
+Andronicus_ (IV. i.). In that horrible play Chiron and Demetrius, after
+outraging Lavinia, cut out her tongue and cut off her hands, in order
+that she may be unable to reveal the outrage. She reveals it, however,
+by taking a staff in her mouth, guiding it with her arms, and writing in
+the sand, 'Stuprum. Chiron. Demetrius.' Titus soon afterwards says:
+
+                    I will go get a leaf of brass,
+     And with a gad of steel will write these words,
+     And lay it by. The angry northern wind
+     Will blow these sands, like Sibyl's leaves, abroad,
+     And where's your lesson then?
+
+Perhaps in the old _Hamlet_, which may have been a play something like
+_Titus Andronicus_, Hamlet at this point did write something of the
+Ghost's message in his tables. In any case Shakespeare, whether he wrote
+_Titus Andronicus_ or only revised an older play on the subject, might
+well recall this incident, as he frequently reproduces other things in
+that drama.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[Footnote 258: The reader will observe that this suggestion of a
+_further_ reason for his making the note may be rejected without the
+rest of the interpretation being affected.]
+
+
+
+
+NOTE E.
+
+THE GHOST IN THE CELLARAGE.
+
+
+     It has been thought that the whole of the last part of I. v.,
+     from the entrance of Horatio and Marcellus, follows the old
+     play closely, and that Shakespeare is condescending to the
+     groundlings.
+
+     Here again, whether or no he took a suggestion from the old
+     play, I see no reason to think that he wrote down to his
+     public. So far as Hamlet's state of mind is concerned, there
+     is not a trace of this. Anyone who has a difficulty in
+     understanding it should read Coleridge's note. What appears
+     grotesque is the part taken by the Ghost, and Hamlet's
+     consequent removal from one part of the stage to another. But,
+     as to the former, should we feel anything grotesque in the
+     four injunctions 'Swear!' if it were not that they come from
+     under the stage--a fact which to an Elizabethan audience,
+     perfectly indifferent to what is absurdly called stage
+     illusion, was probably not in the least grotesque? And as to
+     the latter, if we knew the Ghost-lore of the time better than
+     we do, perhaps we should see nothing odd in Hamlet's insisting
+     on moving away and proposing the oath afresh when the Ghost
+     intervenes.
+
+     But, further, it is to be observed that he does not merely
+     propose the oath afresh. He first makes Horatio and Marcellus
+     swear never to make known what they have _seen_. Then, on
+     shifting his ground, he makes them swear never to speak of
+     what they have _heard_. Then, moving again, he makes them
+     swear that, if he should think fit to play the antic, they
+     will give no sign of knowing aught of him. The oath is now
+     complete; and, when the Ghost commands them to swear the last
+     time, Hamlet suddenly becomes perfectly serious and bids it
+     rest. [In Fletcher's _Woman's Prize_, V. iii., a passage
+     pointed out to me by Mr. C.J. Wilkinson, a man taking an oath
+     shifts his ground.]
+
+
+
+
+     NOTE F.
+
+     THE PLAYER'S SPEECH IN _HAMLET_.
+
+
+     There are two extreme views about this speech. According to
+     one, Shakespeare quoted it from some play, or composed it for
+     the occasion, simply and solely in order to ridicule, through
+     it, the bombastic style of dramatists contemporary with
+     himself or slightly older; just as he ridicules in _2 Henry
+     IV._ Tamburlaine's rant about the kings who draw his chariot,
+     or puts fragments of similar bombast into the mouth of Pistol.
+     According to Coleridge, on the other hand, this idea is 'below
+     criticism.' No sort of ridicule was intended. 'The lines, as
+     epic narrative, are superb.' It is true that the language is
+     'too poetical--the language of lyric vehemence and epic pomp,
+     and not of the drama'; but this is due to the fact that
+     Shakespeare had to distinguish the style of the speech from
+     that of his own dramatic dialogue.
+
+     In essentials I think that what Coleridge says[259] is true.
+     He goes too far, it seems to me, when he describes the
+     language of the speech as merely 'too poetical'; for with much
+     that is fine there is intermingled a good deal that, in epic
+     as in drama, must be called bombast. But I do not believe
+     Shakespeare meant it for bombast.
+
+     I will briefly put the arguments which point to this
+     conclusion. Warburton long ago stated some of them fully and
+     cogently, but he misinterpreted here and there, and some
+     arguments have to be added to his.
+
+     1. If the speech was meant to be ridiculous, it follows either
+     that Hamlet in praising it spoke ironically, or that
+     Shakespeare, in making Hamlet praise it sincerely, himself
+     wrote ironically. And both these consequences are almost
+     incredible.
+
+     Let us see what Hamlet says. He asks the player to recite 'a
+     passionate speech'; and, being requested to choose one, he
+     refers to a speech he once heard the player declaim. This
+     speech, he says, was never 'acted' or was acted only once; for
+     the play pleased not the million. But he, and others whose
+     opinion was of more importance than his, thought it an
+     excellent play, well constructed, and composed with equal
+     skill and temperance. One of these other judges commended it
+     because it contained neither piquant indecencies nor
+     affectations of phrase, but showed 'an honest method, as
+     wholesome as sweet, and by very much more handsome than
+     fine.'[260] In this play Hamlet 'chiefly loved' one speech;
+     and he asks for a part of it.
+
+     Let the reader now refer to the passage I have just
+     summarised; let him consider its tone and manner; and let him
+     ask himself if Hamlet can possibly be speaking ironically. I
+     am sure he will answer No. And then let him observe what
+     follows. The speech is declaimed. Polonius interrupting it
+     with an objection to its length, Hamlet snubs him, bids the
+     player proceed, and adds, 'He's for a jig or a tale of bawdry:
+     or he sleeps.' 'He,' that is, 'shares the taste of the million
+     for sallets in the lines to make the matter savoury, and is
+     wearied by an honest method.'[261] Polonius later interrupts
+     again, for he thinks the emotion of the player too absurd; but
+     Hamlet respects it; and afterwards, when he is alone (and
+     therefore can hardly be ironical), in contrasting this emotion
+     with his own insensibility, he betrays no consciousness that
+     there was anything unfitting in the speech that caused it.
+
+     So far I have chiefly followed Warburton, but there is an
+     important point which seems not to have been observed. All
+     Hamlet's praise of the speech is in the closest agreement with
+     his conduct and words elsewhere. His later advice to the
+     player (III. ii.) is on precisely the same lines. He is to
+     play to the judicious, not to the crowd, whose opinion is
+     worthless. He is to observe, like the author of Aeneas'
+     speech, the 'modesty' of nature. He must not tear a 'passion'
+     to tatters, to split the ears of the incompetent, but in the
+     very tempest of passion is to keep a temperance and
+     smoothness. The million, we gather from the first passage,
+     cares nothing for construction; and so, we learn in the second
+     passage, the barren spectators want to laugh at the clown
+     instead of attending to some necessary question of the play.
+     Hamlet's hatred of exaggeration is marked in both passages.
+     And so (as already pointed out, p. 133) in the play-scene,
+     when his own lines are going to be delivered, he impatiently
+     calls out to the actor to leave his damnable faces and begin;
+     and at the grave of Ophelia he is furious with what he thinks
+     the exaggeration of Laertes, burlesques his language, and
+     breaks off with the words,
+
+                  Nay, an thou'lt mouth,
+     I'll rant as well as thou.
+
+Now if Hamlet's praise of the Aeneas and Dido play and speech is
+ironical, his later advice to the player must surely be ironical too:
+and who will maintain that? And if in the one passage Hamlet is serious
+but Shakespeare ironical, then in the other passage all those famous
+remarks about drama and acting, which have been cherished as
+Shakespeare's by all the world, express the opposite of Shakespeare's
+opinion: and who will maintain that? And if Hamlet and Shakespeare are
+both serious--and nothing else is credible--then, to Hamlet and
+Shakespeare, the speeches of Laertes and Hamlet at Ophelia's grave are
+rant, but the speech of Aeneas to Dido is not rant. Is it not evident
+that he meant it for an exalted narrative speech of 'passion,' in a
+style which, though he may not have adopted it, he still approved and
+despised the million for not approving,--a speech to be delivered with
+temperance or modesty, but not too tamely neither? Is he not aiming here
+to do precisely what Marlowe aimed to do when he proposed to lead the
+audience
+
+     From jigging veins of rhyming mother-wits,
+     And such conceits as clownage keeps in pay,
+
+to 'stately' themes which beget 'high astounding terms'? And is it
+strange that, like Marlowe in _Tamburlaine_, he adopted a style marred
+in places by that which _we_ think bombast, but which the author meant
+to be more 'handsome than fine'?
+
+2. If this is so, we can easily understand how it comes about that the
+speech of Aeneas contains lines which are unquestionably grand and free
+from any suspicion of bombast, and others which, though not free from
+that suspicion, are nevertheless highly poetic. To the first class
+certainly belongs the passage beginning, 'But as we often see.' To the
+second belongs the description of Pyrrhus, covered with blood that was
+
+     Baked and impasted with the parching streets,
+     That lend a tyrannous and damned light
+     To their lord's murder;
+
+and again the picture of Pyrrhus standing like a tyrant in a picture,
+with his uplifted arm arrested in act to strike by the crash of the
+falling towers of Ilium. It is surely impossible to say that these lines
+are _merely_ absurd and not in the least grand; and with them I should
+join the passage about Fortune's wheel, and the concluding lines.
+
+But how can the insertion of these passages possibly be explained on the
+hypothesis that Shakespeare meant the speech to be ridiculous?
+
+3. 'Still,' it may be answered, 'Shakespeare _must_ have been conscious
+of the bombast in some of these passages. How could he help seeing it?
+And, if he saw it, he cannot have meant seriously to praise the speech.'
+But why must he have seen it? Did Marlowe know when he wrote
+bombastically? Or Marston? Or Heywood? Does not Shakespeare elsewhere
+write bombast? The truth is that the two defects of style in the speech
+are the very defects we do find in his writings. When he wished to make
+his style exceptionally high and passionate he always ran some risk of
+bombast. And he was even more prone to the fault which in this speech
+seems to me the more marked, a use of metaphors which sound to our ears
+'conceited' or grotesque. To me at any rate the metaphors in 'now is he
+total gules' and 'mincing with his sword her husband's limbs' are more
+disturbing than any of the bombast. But, as regards this second defect,
+there are many places in Shakespeare worse than the speech of Aeneas;
+and, as regards the first, though in his undoubtedly genuine works there
+is no passage so faulty, there is also no passage of quite the same
+species (for his narrative poems do not aim at epic grandeur), and there
+are many passages where bombast of the same kind, though not of the same
+degree, occurs.
+
+Let the reader ask himself, for instance, how the following lines would
+strike him if he came on them for the first time out of their context:
+
+                     Whip me, ye devils,
+     From the possession of this heavenly sight!
+     Blow me about in winds! Roast me in sulphur!
+     Wash me in steep-down gulfs of liquid fire!
+
+Are Pyrrhus's 'total gules' any worse than Duncan's 'silver skin laced
+with his golden blood,' or so bad as the chamberlains' daggers
+'unmannerly breech'd with gore'?[262] If 'to bathe in reeking wounds,'
+and 'spongy officers,' and even 'alarum'd by his sentinel the wolf,
+Whose howl's his watch,' and other such phrases in _Macbeth_, had
+occurred in the speech of Aeneas, we should certainly have been told
+that they were meant for burlesque. I open _Troilus and Cressida_
+(because, like the speech of Aeneas, it has to do with the story of
+Troy), and I read, in a perfectly serious context (IV. v. 6 f.):
+
+                Thou, trumpet, there's thy purse.
+     Now crack thy lungs, and split thy brazen pipe:
+     Blow, villain, till thy sphered bias cheek
+     Outswell the colic of puff'd Aquilon:
+     Come, stretch thy chest, and let thy eyes spout blood;
+     Thou blow'st for Hector.
+
+'Splendid!' one cries. Yes, but if you are told it is also bombastic,
+can you deny it? I read again (V. v. 7):
+
+                    bastard Margarelon
+     Hath Doreus prisoner,
+     And stands colossus-wise, waving his beam,
+     Upon the pashed corses of the kings.
+
+Or, to turn to earlier but still undoubted works, Shakespeare wrote in
+_Romeo and Juliet_,
+
+                  here will I remain
+     With worms that are thy chamber-maids;
+
+and in _King John_,
+
+     And pick strong matter of revolt and wrath
+     Out of the bloody finger-ends of John;
+
+and in _Lucrece_,
+
+     And, bubbling from her breast, it doth divide
+     In two slow rivers, that the crimson blood
+     Circles her body in on every side,
+     Who, like a late-sack'd island, vastly stood
+     Bare and unpeopled in this fearful flood.
+       Some of her blood still pure and red remain'd,
+       And some look'd black, and that false Tarquin stain'd.
+
+Is it so very unlikely that the poet who wrote thus might, aiming at a
+peculiarly heightened and passionate style, write the speech of Aeneas?
+
+4. But, pursuing this line of argument, we must go further. There is
+really scarcely one idea, and there is but little phraseology, in the
+speech that cannot be paralleled from Shakespeare's own works. He merely
+exaggerates a little here what he has done elsewhere. I will conclude
+this Note by showing that this is so as regards almost all the passages
+most objected to, as well as some others. (1) 'The Hyrcanian beast' is
+Macbeth's 'Hyrcan tiger' (III. iv. 101), who also occurs in _3 Hen. VI._
+I. iv. 155. (2) With 'total gules' Steevens compared _Timon_ IV. iii. 59
+(an undoubtedly Shakespearean passage),
+
+     With man's blood paint the ground, gules, gules.
+
+(3) With 'baked and impasted' cf. _John_ III. iii. 42, 'If that surly
+spirit melancholy Had baked thy blood.' In the questionable _Tit. And._
+V. ii. 201 we have, 'in that paste let their vile heads be baked' (a
+paste made of blood and bones, _ib._ 188), and in the undoubted _Richard
+II._ III. ii. 154 (quoted by Caldecott) Richard refers to the ground
+
+     Which serves as paste and cover to our bones.
+
+(4) 'O'er-sized with coagulate gore' finds an exact parallel in the
+'blood-siz'd field' of the _Two Noble Kinsmen_, I. i. 99, a scene which,
+whether written by Shakespeare (as I fully believe) or by another poet,
+was certainly written in all seriousness. (5) 'With eyes like
+carbuncles' has been much ridiculed, but Milton (_P.L._ ix. 500) gives
+'carbuncle eyes' to Satan turned into a serpent (Steevens), and why are
+they more outrageous than ruby lips and cheeks (_J.C._ III. i. 260,
+_Macb._ III. iv. 115, _Cym._ II. ii. 17)? (6) Priam falling with the
+mere wind of Pyrrhus's sword is paralleled, not only in _Dido Queen of
+Carthage_, but in _Tr. and Cr._ V. iii. 40 (Warburton). (7) With Pyrrhus
+standing like a painted tyrant cf. _Macb._ V. viii. 25 (Delius). (8) The
+forging of Mars's armour occurs again in _Tr. and Cr._ IV. v. 255, where
+Hector swears by the forge that stithied Mars his helm, just as Hamlet
+himself alludes to Vulcan's stithy (III. ii. 89). (9) The idea of
+'strumpet Fortune' is common: _e.g._ _Macb._ I. ii. 15, 'Fortune ...
+show'd like a rebel's whore.' (10) With the 'rant' about her wheel
+Warburton compares _Ant. and Cl._ IV. xv. 43, where Cleopatra would
+
+                                  rail so high
+     That the false huswife Fortune break her wheel.
+
+(11.) Pyrrhus minces with his sword Priam's limbs, and Timon (IV. iii.
+122) bids Alcibiades 'mince' the babe without remorse.'[263]
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[Footnote 259: It is impossible to tell whether Coleridge formed his
+view independently, or adopted it from Schlegel. For there is no record
+of his having expressed his opinion prior to the time of his reading
+Schlegel's _Lectures_; and, whatever he said to the contrary, his
+borrowings from Schlegel are demonstrable.]
+
+[Footnote 260: Clark and Wright well compare Polonius' antithesis of
+'rich, not gaudy': though I doubt if 'handsome' implies richness.]
+
+[Footnote 261: Is it not possible that 'mobled queen,' to which Hamlet
+seems to object, and which Polonius praises, is meant for an example of
+the second fault of affected phraseology, from which the play was said
+to be free, and an instance of which therefore surprises Hamlet?]
+
+[Footnote 262: The extravagance of these phrases is doubtless
+intentional (for Macbeth in using them is trying to act a part), but the
+_absurdity_ of the second can hardly be so.]
+
+[Footnote 263: Steevens observes that Heywood uses the phrase 'guled
+with slaughter,' and I find in his _Iron Age_ various passages
+indicating that he knew the speech of Aeneas (cf. p. 140 for another
+sign that he knew _Hamlet_). The two parts of the _Iron Age_ were
+published in 1632, but are said, in the preface to the Second, to have
+'been long since writ.' I refer to the pages of vol. 3 of Pearson's
+_Heywood_ (1874). (1) p. 329, Troilus 'lyeth imbak'd In his cold blood.'
+(2) p. 341, of Achilles' armour:
+
+     _Vulcan_ that wrought it out of gadds of Steele
+     With his _Ciclopian_ hammers, never made
+     Such noise upon his Anvile forging it,
+     Than these my arm'd fists in _Ulisses_ wracke.
+
+(3) p. 357, 'till _Hecub's_ reverent lockes Be gul'd in slaughter.' (4)
+p. 357, '_Scamander_ plaines Ore-spread with intrailes bak'd in blood
+and dust.' (5) p. 378, 'We'll rost them at the scorching flames of
+_Troy_.' (6) p. 379, 'tragicke slaughter, clad in gules and sables'
+(cf.'sable arms' in the speech in _Hamlet_). (7) p. 384, 'these lockes,
+now knotted all, As bak't in blood.' Of these, all but (1) and (2) are
+in Part II. Part I. has many passages which recall _Troilus and
+Cressida_. Mr. Fleay's speculation as to its date will be found in his
+_Chronicle History of the English Drama_, i. p. 285.
+
+For the same writer's ingenious theory (which is of course incapable of
+proof) regarding the relation of the player's speech in _Hamlet_ to
+Marlowe and Nash's _Dido_, see Furness's Variorum _Hamlet_.]
+
+
+
+
+NOTE G.
+
+HAMLET'S APOLOGY TO LAERTES.
+
+
+Johnson, in commenting on the passage (V. ii. 237-255), says: 'I wish
+Hamlet had made some other defence; it is unsuitable to the character of
+a good or a brave man to shelter himself in falsehood.' And Seymour
+(according to Furness) thought the falsehood so ignoble that he rejected
+lines 239-250 as an interpolation!
+
+I wish first to remark that we are mistaken when we suppose that Hamlet
+is here apologising specially for his behaviour to Laertes at Ophelia's
+grave. We naturally suppose this because he has told Horatio that he is
+sorry he 'forgot himself' on that occasion, and that he will court
+Laertes' favours (V. ii. 75 ff.). But what he says in that very passage
+shows that he is thinking chiefly of the greater wrong he has done
+Laertes by depriving him of his father:
+
+     For, by the image of my cause, I see
+     The portraiture of his.
+
+And it is also evident in the last words of the apology itself that he
+is referring in it to the deaths of Polonius and Ophelia:
+
+     Sir, in this audience,
+     Let my disclaiming from a purposed evil
+     Free me so far in your most generous thoughts,
+     _That I have shot mine arrow o'er the house,
+     And hurt my brother._
+
+But now, as to the falsehood. The charge is not to be set aside lightly;
+and, for my part, I confess that, while rejecting of course Johnson's
+notion that Shakespeare wanted to paint 'a good man,' I have momentarily
+shared Johnson's wish that Hamlet had made 'some other defence' than
+that of madness. But I think the wish proceeds from failure to imagine
+the situation.
+
+In the first place, _what_ other defence can we wish Hamlet to have
+made? I can think of none. He cannot tell the truth. He cannot say to
+Laertes, 'I meant to stab the King, not your father.' He cannot explain
+why he was unkind to Ophelia. Even on the false supposition that he is
+referring simply to his behaviour at the grave, he can hardly say, I
+suppose, 'You ranted so abominably that you put me into a towering
+passion.' _Whatever_ he said, it would have to be more or less untrue.
+
+Next, what moral difference is there between feigning insanity and
+asserting it? If we are to blame Hamlet for the second, why not equally
+for the first?
+
+And, finally, even if he were referring simply to his behaviour at the
+grave, his excuse, besides falling in with his whole plan of feigning
+insanity, would be as near the truth as any he could devise. For we are
+not to take the account he gives to Horatio, that he was put in a
+passion by the bravery of Laertes' grief, as the whole truth. His raving
+over the grave is not _mere_ acting. On the contrary, that passage is
+the best card that the believers in Hamlet's madness have to play. He is
+really almost beside himself with grief as well as anger, half-maddened
+by the impossibility of explaining to Laertes how he has come to do what
+he has done, full of wild rage and then of sick despair at this wretched
+world which drives him to such deeds and such misery. It is the same
+rage and despair that mingle with other feelings in his outbreak to
+Ophelia in the Nunnery-scene. But of all this, even if he were clearly
+conscious of it, he cannot speak to Horatio; for his love to Ophelia is
+a subject on which he has never opened his lips to his friend.
+
+If we realise the situation, then, we shall, I think, repress the wish
+that Hamlet had 'made some other defence' than that of madness. We shall
+feel only tragic sympathy.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+As I have referred to Hamlet's apology, I will add a remark on it from a
+different point of view. It forms another refutation of the theory that
+Hamlet has delayed his vengeance till he could publicly convict the
+King, and that he has come back to Denmark because now, with the
+evidence of the commission in his pocket, he can safely accuse him. If
+that were so, what better opportunity could he possibly find than this
+occasion, where he has to express his sorrow to Laertes for the grievous
+wrongs which he has unintentionally inflicted on him?
+
+
+
+
+NOTE H.
+
+THE EXCHANGE OF RAPIERS.
+
+
+I am not going to discuss the question how this exchange ought to be
+managed. I wish merely to point out that the stage-direction fails to
+show the sequence of speeches and events. The passage is as follows
+(Globe text):
+
+     _Ham._  Come, for the third, Laertes: you but dally;
+             I pray you, pass with your best violence;
+             I am afeard you make a wanton of me.
+
+     _Laer._ Say you so? come on.                 [_They play._
+
+     _Osr._  Nothing, neither way.
+
+     _Laer._ Have at you now!
+
+                [_Laertes wounds Hamlet; then, in scuffling, they
+                   change rapiers, and Hamlet wounds Laertes._[264]
+
+     _King._  Part them; they are incensed.
+
+     _Ham._   Nay, come, again.             _The Queen falls._[265]
+
+     _Osr._                    Look to the Queen there, ho!
+
+     _Hor._   They bleed on both sides. How is it, my lord?
+
+     _Osr._   How is't, Laertes?
+
+The words 'and Hamlet wounds Laertes' in Rowe's stage-direction destroy
+the point of the words given to the King in the text. If Laertes is
+already wounded, why should the King care whether the fencers are parted
+or not? What makes him cry out is that, while he sees his purpose
+effected as regards Hamlet, he also sees Laertes in danger through the
+exchange of foils in the scuffle. Now it is not to be supposed that
+Laertes is particularly dear to him; but he sees instantaneously that,
+if Laertes escapes the poisoned foil, he will certainly hold his tongue
+about the plot against Hamlet, while, if he is wounded, he may confess
+the truth; for it is no doubt quite evident to the King that Laertes has
+fenced tamely because his conscience is greatly troubled by the
+treachery he is about to practise. The King therefore, as soon as he
+sees the exchange of foils, cries out, 'Part them; they are incensed.'
+But Hamlet's blood is up. 'Nay, come, again,' he calls to Laertes, who
+cannot refuse to play, and _now_ is wounded by Hamlet. At the very same
+moment the Queen falls to the ground; and ruin rushes on the King from
+the right hand and the left.
+
+The passage, therefore, should be printed thus:
+
+     _Laer._ Have at you now!
+
+                     [_Laertes wounds Hamlet; then, in scuffling,
+                                            they change rapiers._
+
+     _King._ Part them; they are incensed.
+
+     _Ham._  Nay, come, again.
+
+       [_They play, and Hamlet wounds Laertes. The Queen falls._
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[Footnote 264: So Rowe. The direction in Q1 is negligible, the text
+being different. Q2 etc. have nothing, Ff. simply 'In scuffling they
+change rapiers.']
+
+[Footnote 265: Capell. The Quartos and Folios have no directions.]
+
+
+
+
+NOTE I.
+
+THE DURATION OF THE ACTION IN _OTHELLO_.
+
+
+The quite unusual difficulties regarding this subject have led to much
+discussion, a synopsis of which may be found in Furness's Variorum
+edition, pp. 358-72. Without detailing the facts I will briefly set out
+the main difficulty, which is that, according to one set of indications
+(which I will call A), Desdemona was murdered within a day or two of her
+arrival in Cyprus, while, according to another set (which I will call
+B), some time elapsed between her arrival and the catastrophe. Let us
+take A first, and run through the play.
+
+(A) Act I. opens on the night of Othello's marriage. On that night he is
+despatched to Cyprus, leaving Desdemona to follow him.
+
+In Act II. Sc. i., there arrive at Cyprus, first, in one ship, Cassio;
+then, in another, Desdemona, Iago, and Emilia; then, in another, Othello
+(Othello, Cassio, and Desdemona being in three different ships, it does
+not matter, for our purpose, how long the voyage lasted). On the night
+following these arrivals in Cyprus the marriage is consummated (II. iii.
+9), Cassio is cashiered, and, on Iago's advice, he resolves to ask
+Desdemona's intercession 'betimes in the morning' (II. iii. 335).
+
+In Act III. Sc. iii. (the Temptation scene), he does so: Desdemona does
+intercede: Iago begins to poison Othello's mind: the handkerchief is
+lost, found by Emilia, and given to Iago: he determines to leave it in
+Cassio's room, and, renewing his attack on Othello, asserts that he has
+seen the handkerchief in Cassio's hand: Othello bids him kill Cassio
+within three days, and resolves to kill Desdemona himself. All this
+occurs in one unbroken scene, and evidently on the day after the arrival
+in Cyprus (see III. i. 33).
+
+In the scene (iv.) following the Temptation scene Desdemona sends to bid
+Cassio come, as she has interceded for him: Othello enters, tests her
+about the handkerchief, and departs in anger: Cassio, arriving, is told
+of the change in Othello, and, being left _solus_, is accosted by
+Bianca, whom he requests to copy the work on the handkerchief which he
+has just found in his room (ll. 188 f.). All this is naturally taken to
+happen in the later part of the day on which the events of III. i.-iii.
+took place, _i.e._ the day after the arrival in Cyprus: but I shall
+return to this point.
+
+In IV. i. Iago tells Othello that Cassio has confessed, and, placing
+Othello where he can watch, he proceeds on Cassio's entrance to rally
+him about Bianca; and Othello, not being near enough to hear what is
+said, believes that Cassio is laughing at his conquest of Desdemona.
+Cassio here says that Bianca haunts him and 'was here _even now_'; and
+Bianca herself, coming in, reproaches him about the handkerchief 'you
+gave me _even now_.' There is therefore no appreciable time between III.
+iv. and IV. i. In this same scene Bianca bids Cassio come to supper
+_to-night_; and Lodovico, arriving, is asked to sup with Othello
+_to-night_. In IV. ii. Iago persuades Roderigo to kill Cassio _that
+night_ as he comes from Bianca's. In IV. iii. Lodovico, after supper,
+takes his leave, and Othello bids Desdemona go to bed on the instant and
+dismiss her attendant.
+
+In Act V., _that night_, the attempted assassination of Cassio, and the
+murder of Desdemona, take place.
+
+From all this, then, it seems clear that the time between the arrival in
+Cyprus and the catastrophe is certainly not more than a few days, and
+most probably only about a day and a half: or, to put it otherwise, that
+most probably Othello kills his wife about twenty-four hours after the
+consummation of their marriage!
+
+The only _possible_ place, it will be seen, where time can elapse is
+between III. iii. and III. iv. And here Mr. Fleay would imagine a gap of
+at least a week. The reader will find that this supposition involves the
+following results, (_a_) Desdemona has allowed at least a week to elapse
+without telling Cassio that she has interceded for him. (_b_) Othello,
+after being convinced of her guilt, after resolving to kill her, and
+after ordering Iago to kill Cassio within three days, has allowed at
+least a week to elapse without even questioning her about the
+handkerchief, and has so behaved during all this time that she is
+totally unconscious of any change in his feelings. (_c_) Desdemona, who
+reserves the handkerchief evermore about her to kiss and talk to (III.
+iii. 295), has lost it for at least a week before she is conscious of
+the loss. (_d_) Iago has waited at least a week to leave the
+handkerchief in Cassio's chamber; for Cassio has evidently only just
+found it, and wants the work on it copied before the owner makes
+inquiries for it. These are all gross absurdities. It is certain that
+only a short time, most probable that not even a night, elapses between
+III. iii. and III. iv.
+
+(B) Now this idea that Othello killed his wife, probably within
+twenty-four hours, certainly within a few days, of the consummation of
+his marriage, contradicts the impression produced by the play on all
+uncritical readers and spectators. It is also in flat contradiction with
+a large number of time-indications in the play itself. It is needless to
+mention more than a few. (_a_) Bianca complains that Cassio has kept
+away from her for a week (III. iv. 173). Cassio and the rest have
+therefore been more than a week in Cyprus, and, we should naturally
+infer, considerably more. (_b_) The ground on which Iago builds
+throughout is the probability of Desdemona's having got tired of the
+Moor; she is accused of having repeatedly committed adultery with Cassio
+(_e.g._ V. ii. 210); these facts and a great many others, such as
+Othello's language in III. iii. 338 ff., are utterly absurd on the
+supposition that he murders his wife within a day or two of the night
+when he consummated his marriage. (_c_) Iago's account of Cassio's dream
+implies (and indeed states) that he had been sleeping with Cassio
+'lately,' _i.e._ after arriving at Cyprus: yet, according to A, he had
+only spent one night in Cyprus, and we are expressly told that Cassio
+never went to bed on that night. Iago doubtless was a liar, but Othello
+was not an absolute idiot.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Thus (1) one set of time-indications clearly shows that Othello murdered
+his wife within a few days, probably a day and a half, of his arrival in
+Cyprus and the consummation of his marriage; (2) another set of
+time-indications implies quite as clearly that some little time must
+have elapsed, probably a few weeks; and this last is certainly the
+impression of a reader who has not closely examined the play.
+
+It is impossible to escape this result. The suggestion that the imputed
+intrigue of Cassio and Desdemona took place at Venice before the
+marriage, not at Cyprus after it, is quite futile. There is no positive
+evidence whatever for it; if the reader will merely refer to the
+difficulties mentioned under B above, he will see that it leaves almost
+all of them absolutely untouched; and Iago's accusation is uniformly one
+of adultery.
+
+How then is this extraordinary contradiction to be explained? It can
+hardly be one of the casual inconsistencies, due to forgetfulness, which
+are found in Shakespeare's other tragedies; for the scheme of time
+indicated under A seems deliberate and self-consistent, and the scheme
+indicated under B seems, if less deliberate, equally self-consistent.
+This does not look as if a single scheme had been so vaguely imagined
+that inconsistencies arose in working it out; it points to some other
+source of contradiction.
+
+'Christopher North,' who dealt very fully with the question, elaborated
+a doctrine of Double Time, Short and Long. To do justice to this theory
+in a few words is impossible, but its essence is the notion that
+Shakespeare, consciously or unconsciously, wanted to produce on the
+spectator (for he did not aim at readers) two impressions. He wanted the
+spectator to feel a passionate and vehement haste in the action; but he
+also wanted him to feel that the action was fairly probable. Consciously
+or unconsciously he used Short Time (the scheme of A) for the first
+purpose, and Long Time (the scheme of B) for the second. The spectator
+is affected in the required manner by both, though without distinctly
+noticing the indications of the two schemes.
+
+The notion underlying this theory is probably true, but the theory
+itself can hardly stand. Passing minor matters by, I would ask the
+reader to consider the following remarks. (_a_) If, as seems to be
+maintained, the spectator does not notice the indications of 'Short
+Time' at all, how can they possibly affect him? The passion, vehemence
+and haste of Othello affect him, because he perceives them; but if he
+does not perceive the hints which show the duration of the action from
+the arrival in Cyprus to the murder, these hints have simply no
+existence for him and are perfectly useless. The theory, therefore, does
+not explain the existence of 'Short Time.' (_b_) It is not the case that
+'Short Time' is wanted only to produce an impression of vehemence and
+haste, and 'Long Time' for probability. The 'Short Time' is equally
+wanted for probability: for it is grossly improbable that Iago's
+intrigue should not break down if Othello spends a week or weeks between
+the successful temptation and his execution of justice. (_c_) And this
+brings me to the most important point, which appears to have escaped
+notice. The place where 'Long Time' is wanted is not _within_ Iago's
+intrigue. 'Long Time' is required simply and solely because the intrigue
+and its circumstances presuppose a marriage consummated, and an adultery
+possible, for (let us say) some weeks. But, granted that lapse between
+the marriage and the temptation, there is no reason whatever why more
+than a few days or even one day should elapse between this temptation
+and the murder. The whole trouble arises because the temptation begins
+on the morning after the consummated marriage. Let some three weeks
+elapse between the first night at Cyprus and the temptation; let the
+brawl which ends in the disgrace of Cassio occur not on that night but
+three weeks later; or again let it occur that night, but let three weeks
+elapse before the intercession of Desdemona and the temptation of Iago
+begin. All will then be clear. Cassio has time to make acquaintance with
+Bianca, and to neglect her: the Senate has time to hear of the perdition
+of the Turkish fleet and to recall Othello: the accusations of Iago
+cease to be ridiculous; and the headlong speed of the action after the
+temptation has begun is quite in place. Now, too, there is no reason why
+we should not be affected by the hints of time ('to-day,' 'to-night,'
+'even now'), which we _do_ perceive (though we do not calculate them
+out). And, lastly, this supposition corresponds with our natural
+impression, which is that the temptation and what follows it take place
+some little while after the marriage, but occupy, themselves, a very
+short time.
+
+Now, of course, the supposition just described is no fact. As the play
+stands, it is quite certain that there is no space of three weeks, or
+anything like it, either between the arrival in Cyprus and the brawl, or
+between the brawl and the temptation. And I draw attention to the
+supposition chiefly to show that quite a small change would remove the
+difficulties, and to insist that there is nothing wrong at all in regard
+to the time from the temptation onward. How to account for the existing
+contradictions I do not at all profess to know, and I will merely
+mention two possibilities.
+
+Possibly, as Mr. Daniel observes, the play has been tampered with. We
+have no text earlier than 1622, six years after Shakespeare's death. It
+may be suggested, then, that in the play, as Shakespeare wrote it, there
+was a gap of some weeks between the arrival in Cyprus and Cassio's
+brawl, or (less probably) between the brawl and the temptation. Perhaps
+there was a scene indicating the lapse of time. Perhaps it was dull, or
+the play was a little too long, or devotees of the unity of time made
+sport of a second breach of that unity coming just after the breach
+caused by the voyage. Perhaps accordingly the owners of the play
+altered, or hired a dramatist to alter, the arrangement at this point,
+and this was unwittingly done in such a way as to produce the
+contradictions we are engaged on. There is nothing intrinsically
+unlikely in this idea; and certainly, I think, the amount of such
+corruption of Shakespeare's texts by the players is usually rather
+underrated than otherwise. But I cannot say I see any signs of foreign
+alteration in the text, though it is somewhat odd that Roderigo, who
+makes no complaint on the day of the arrival in Cyprus when he is being
+persuaded to draw Cassio into a quarrel that night, should, directly
+after the quarrel (II. iii. 370), complain that he is making no advance
+in his pursuit of Desdemona, and should speak as though he had been in
+Cyprus long enough to have spent nearly all the money he brought from
+Venice.
+
+Or, possibly, Shakespeare's original plan was to allow some time to
+elapse after the arrival at Cyprus, but when he reached the point he
+found it troublesome to indicate this lapse in an interesting way, and
+convenient to produce Cassio's fall by means of the rejoicings on the
+night of the arrival, and then almost necessary to let the request for
+intercession, and the temptation, follow on the next day. And perhaps he
+said to himself, No one in the theatre will notice that all this makes
+an impossible position: and I can make all safe by using language that
+implies that Othello has after all been married for some time. If so,
+probably he was right. I do not think anyone does notice the
+impossibilities either in the theatre or in a casual reading of the
+play.
+
+Either of these suppositions is possible: neither is, to me, probable.
+The first seems the less unlikely. If the second is true, Shakespeare
+did in _Othello_ what he seems to do in no other play. I can believe
+that he may have done so; but I find it very hard to believe that he
+produced this impossible situation without knowing it. It is one thing
+to read a drama or see it, quite another to construct and compose it,
+and he appears to have imagined the action in _Othello_ with even more
+than his usual intensity.
+
+
+
+
+NOTE J.
+
+THE 'ADDITIONS' TO _OTHELLO_ IN THE FIRST FOLIO. THE PONTIC SEA.
+
+
+The first printed _Othello_ is the first Quarto (Q1), 1622; the second
+is the first Folio (F1), 1623. These two texts are two distinct versions
+of the play. Q1 contains many oaths and expletives where less
+'objectionable' expressions occur in F1. Partly for this reason it is
+believed to represent the _earlier_ text, perhaps the text as it stood
+before the Act of 1605 against profanity on the stage. Its readings are
+frequently superior to those of F1, but it wants many lines that appear
+in F1, which probably represents the acting version in 1623. I give a
+list of the longer passages absent from Q1:
+
+     (_a_) I. i. 122-138. 'If't' ... 'yourself:'
+
+     (_b_) I. ii 72-77. 'Judge' ... 'thee'
+
+     (_c_) I. iii. 24-30. 'For' ... 'profitless.'
+
+     (_d_) III. iii. 383-390. '_Oth._ By' ... 'satisfied! _Iago._'
+
+     (_e_) III. iii. 453-460. 'Iago.' ... 'heaven,'
+
+     (_f_) IV. i. 38-44. 'To confess' ... 'devil!'
+
+     (_g_) IV. ii. 73-76, 'Committed!' ... 'committed!'
+
+     (_h_) IV. ii. 151-164. 'Here' ... 'make me.'
+
+     (_i_) IV. iii. 31-53. 'I have' ... 'not next'
+                and 55-57. '_Des._ [_Singing_]' ... 'men.'
+
+     (_j_) IV. iii. 60-63. 'I have' ... 'question.'
+
+     (_k_) IV. iii. 87-104. 'But I' ... 'us so.'
+
+     (_l_) V. ii. 151-154. 'O mistress' ... 'Iago.'
+
+     (_m_) V. ii. 185-193. 'My mistress' ... 'villany!'
+
+     (_n_) V. ii. 266-272. 'Be not' ... 'wench!'
+
+Were these passages after-thoughts, composed after the version
+represented by Q1 was written? Or were they in the version represented
+by Q1, and only omitted in printing, whether accidentally or because
+they were also omitted in the theatre? Or were some of them
+after-thoughts, and others in the original version?
+
+I will take them in order. (_a_) can hardly be an after-thought. Up to
+that point Roderigo had hardly said anything, for Iago had always
+interposed; and it is very unlikely that Roderigo would now deliver but
+four lines, and speak at once of 'she' instead of 'your daughter.'
+Probably this 'omission' represents a 'cut' in stage performance. (_b_)
+This may also be the case here. In our texts the omission of the passage
+would make nonsense, but in Q1 the 'cut' (if a cut) has been mended,
+awkwardly enough, by the substitution of 'Such' for 'For' in line 78. In
+any case, the lines cannot be an addition. (_c_) cannot be an
+after-thought, for the sentence is unfinished without it; and that it
+was not meant to be interrupted is clear, because in Q1 line 31 begins
+'And,' not 'Nay'; the Duke might say 'Nay' if he were cutting the
+previous speaker short, but not 'And.' (_d_) is surely no addition. If
+the lines are cut out, not only is the metre spoilt, but the obvious
+reason for Iago's words, 'I see, Sir, you are eaten up with passion,'
+disappears, and so does the reference of his word 'satisfied' in 393 to
+Othello's 'satisfied' in 390. (_e_) is the famous passage about the
+Pontic Sea, and I reserve it for the present. (_f_) As Pope observes,
+'no hint of this trash in the first edition,' the 'trash' including the
+words 'Nature would not invest herself in such shadowing passion without
+some instruction. It is not words that shake me thus'! There is nothing
+to prove these lines to be original or an after-thought. The omission of
+(_g_) is clearly a printer's error, due to the fact that lines 72 and 76
+both end with the word 'committed.' No conclusion can be formed as to
+(_h_), nor perhaps (_i_), which includes the whole of Desdemona's song;
+but if (_j_) is removed the reference in 'such a deed' in 64 is
+destroyed. (_k_) is Emilia's long speech about husbands. It cannot well
+be an after-thought, for 105-6 evidently refer to 103-4 (even the word
+'uses' in 105 refers to 'use' in 103). (_l_) is no after-thought, for
+'if he says so' in 155 must point back to 'my husband say that she was
+false!' in 152. (_m_) might be an after-thought, but, if so, in the
+first version the ending 'to speak' occurred twice within three lines,
+and the reason for Iago's sudden alarm in 193 is much less obvious. If
+(_n_) is an addition the original collocation was:
+
+                          but O vain boast!
+     Who can control his fate? 'Tis not so now.
+     Pale as thy smock!
+
+which does not sound probable.
+
+Thus, as it seems to me, in the great majority of cases there is more or
+less reason to think that the passages wanting in Q1 were nevertheless
+parts of the original play, and I cannot in any one case see any
+positive ground for supposing a subsequent addition. I think that most
+of the gaps in Q1 were accidents of printing (like many other smaller
+gaps in Q1), but that probably one or two were 'cuts'--_e.g._ Emilia's
+long speech (_k_). The omission of (_i_) might be due to the state of
+the MS.: the words of the song may have been left out of the dialogue,
+as appearing on a separate page with the musical notes, or may have been
+inserted in such an illegible way as to baffle the printer.
+
+I come now to (_e_), the famous passage about the Pontic Sea. Pope
+supposed that it formed part of the original version, but approved of
+its omission, as he considered it 'an unnatural excursion in this
+place.' Mr. Swinburne thinks it an after-thought, but defends it. 'In
+other lips indeed than Othello's, at the crowning minute of culminant
+agony, the rush of imaginative reminiscence which brings back upon his
+eyes and ears the lightning foam and tideless thunder of the Pontic Sea
+might seem a thing less natural than sublime. But Othello has the
+passion of a poet closed in as it were and shut up behind the passion of
+a hero' (_Study of Shakespeare_, p. 184). I quote these words all the
+more gladly because they will remind the reader of my lectures of my
+debt to Mr. Swinburne here; and I will only add that the reminiscence
+here is of _precisely the same character_ as the reminiscences of the
+Arabian trees and the base Indian in Othello's final speech. But I find
+it almost impossible to believe that Shakespeare _ever_ wrote the
+passage without the words about the Pontic Sea. It seems to me almost an
+imperative demand of imagination that Iago's set speech, if I may use
+the phrase, should be preceded by a speech of somewhat the same
+dimensions, the contrast of which should heighten the horror of its
+hypocrisy; it seems to me that Shakespeare must have felt this; and it
+is difficult to me to think that he ever made the lines,
+
+     In the due reverence of a sacred vow
+     I here engage my words,
+
+follow directly on the one word 'Never' (however impressive that word in
+its isolation might be). And as I can find no _other_ 'omission' in Q1
+which appears to point to a subsequent addition, I conclude that this
+'omission' _was_ an omission, probably accidental, conceivably due to a
+stupid 'cut.' Indeed it is nothing but Mr. Swinburne's opinion that
+prevents my feeling certainty on the point.
+
+Finally, I may draw attention to certain facts which may be mere
+accidents, but may possibly be significant. Passages (_b_) and (_c_)
+consist respectively of six and seven lines; that is, they are almost of
+the same length, and in a MS. might well fill exactly the same amount of
+space. Passage (_d_) is eight lines long; so is passage (_e_). Now,
+taking at random two editions of Shakespeare, the Globe and that of
+Delius, I find that (_b_) and (_c_) are 6-1/4 inches apart in the Globe,
+8 in Delius; and that (_d_) and (_e_) are separated by 7-3/8 inches in
+the Globe, by 8-3/4 in Delius. In other words, there is about the same
+distance in each case between two passages of about equal dimensions.
+
+The idea suggested by these facts is that the MS. from which Q1 was
+printed was mutilated in various places; that (_b_) and (_c_) occupied
+the bottom inches of two successive pages, and that these inches were
+torn away; and that this was also the case with (_d_) and (_e_).
+
+This speculation has amused me and may amuse some reader. I do not know
+enough of Elizabethan manuscripts to judge of its plausibility.
+
+
+
+
+NOTE K.
+
+OTHELLO'S COURTSHIP.
+
+
+It is curious that in the First Act two impressions are produced which
+have afterwards to be corrected.
+
+1. We must not suppose that Othello's account of his courtship in his
+famous speech before the Senate is intended to be exhaustive. He is
+accused of having used drugs or charms in order to win Desdemona; and
+therefore his purpose in his defence is merely to show that his
+witchcraft was the story of his life. It is no part of his business to
+trouble the Senators with the details of his courtship, and he so
+condenses his narrative of it that it almost appears as though there was
+no courtship at all, and as though Desdemona never imagined that he was
+in love with her until she had practically confessed her love for him.
+Hence she has been praised by some for her courage, and blamed by others
+for her forwardness.
+
+But at III. iii. 70 f. matters are presented in quite a new light. There
+we find the following words of hers:
+
+                             What! Michael Cassio,
+     That came a-wooing with you, and so many a time,
+     When I have spoke of you dispraisingly,
+     Hath ta'en your part.
+
+It seems, then, she understood why Othello came so often to her father's
+house, and was perfectly secure of his love before she gave him that
+very broad 'hint to speak.' I may add that those who find fault with her
+forget that it was necessary for her to take the first open step. She
+was the daughter of a Venetian grandee, and Othello was a black soldier
+of fortune.
+
+2. We learn from the lines just quoted that Cassio used to accompany
+Othello in his visits to the house; and from III. iii. 93 f. we learn
+that he knew of Othello's love from first to last and 'went between' the
+lovers 'very oft.' Yet in Act I. it appears that, while Iago on the
+night of the marriage knows about it and knows where to find Othello (I.
+i. 158 f.), Cassio, even if he knows where to find Othello (which is
+doubtful: see I. ii. 44), seems to know nothing about the marriage. See
+I. ii. 49:
+
+     _Cas._   Ancient, what makes he here?
+
+     _Iago._  'Faith, he to-night hath boarded a land carack:
+              If it prove lawful prize, he's made for ever.
+
+     _Cas._   I do not understand.
+
+     _Iago._                   He's married.
+
+     _Cas._                               To who?
+
+It is possible that Cassio does know, and only pretends ignorance
+because he has not been informed by Othello that Iago also knows. And
+this idea is consistent with Iago's apparent ignorance of Cassio's part
+in the courtship (III. iii. 93). And of course, if this were so, a word
+from Shakespeare to the actor who played Cassio would enable him to make
+all clear to the audience. The alternative, and perhaps more probable,
+explanation would be that, in writing Act I., Shakespeare had not yet
+thought of making Cassio Othello's confidant, and that, after writing
+Act III., he neglected to alter the passage in Act I. In that case the
+further information which Act III. gives regarding Othello's courtship
+would probably also be an after-thought.
+
+
+
+
+NOTE L.
+
+OTHELLO IN THE TEMPTATION SCENE.
+
+
+One reason why some readers think Othello 'easily jealous' is that they
+completely misinterpret him in the early part of this scene. They fancy
+that he is alarmed and suspicious the moment he hears Iago mutter 'Ha! I
+like not that,' as he sees Cassio leaving Desdemona (III. iii. 35). But,
+in fact, it takes a long time for Iago to excite surprise, curiosity,
+and then grave concern--by no means yet jealousy--even about Cassio; and
+it is still longer before Othello understands that Iago is suggesting
+doubts about Desdemona too. ('Wronged' in 143 certainly does not refer
+to her, as 154 and 162 show.) Nor, even at 171, is the exclamation 'O
+misery' meant for an expression of Othello's own present feelings; as
+his next speech clearly shows, it expresses an _imagined_ feeling, as
+also the speech which elicits it professes to do (for Iago would not
+have dared here to apply the term 'cuckold' to Othello). In fact it is
+not until Iago hints that Othello, as a foreigner, might easily be
+deceived, that he is seriously disturbed about Desdemona.
+
+Salvini played this passage, as might be expected, with entire
+understanding. Nor have I ever seen it seriously misinterpreted on the
+stage. I gather from the Furness Variorum that Fechter and Edwin Booth
+took the same view as Salvini. Actors have to ask themselves what was
+the precise state of mind expressed by the words they have to repeat.
+But many readers never think of asking such a question.
+
+The lines which probably do most to lead hasty or unimaginative readers
+astray are those at 90, where, on Desdemona's departure, Othello
+exclaims to himself:
+
+     Excellent wretch! Perdition catch my soul
+     But I do love thee! and when I love thee not,
+     Chaos is come again.
+
+He is supposed to mean by the last words that his love is _now_
+suspended by suspicion, whereas in fact, in his bliss, he has so totally
+forgotten Iago's 'Ha! I like not that,' that the tempter has to begin
+all over again. The meaning is, 'If ever I love thee not, Chaos will
+have come again.' The feeling of insecurity is due to the excess of
+_joy_, as in the wonderful words after he rejoins Desdemona at Cyprus
+(II. i. 191):
+
+                     If it were now to die,
+     'Twere now to be most happy: for, I fear
+     My soul hath her content so absolute
+     That not another comfort like to this
+     Succeeds in unknown fate.
+
+If any reader boggles at the use of the present in 'Chaos _is_ come
+again,' let him observe 'succeeds' in the lines just quoted, or let him
+look at the parallel passage in _Venus and Adonis_, 1019:
+
+     For, he being dead, with him is beauty slain;
+     And, beauty dead, black Chaos comes again.
+
+Venus does not know that Adonis is dead when she speaks thus.
+
+
+
+
+NOTE M.
+
+QUESTIONS AS TO _OTHELLO_, ACT IV. SCENE I.
+
+
+(1) The first part of the scene is hard to understand, and the
+commentators give little help. I take the idea to be as follows. Iago
+sees that he must renew his attack on Othello; for, on the one hand,
+Othello, in spite of the resolution he had arrived at to put Desdemona
+to death, has taken the step, without consulting Iago, of testing her in
+the matter of Iago's report about the handkerchief; and, on the other
+hand, he now seems to have fallen into a dazed lethargic state, and must
+be stimulated to action. Iago's plan seems to be to remind Othello of
+everything that would madden him again, but to do so by professing to
+make light of the whole affair, and by urging Othello to put the best
+construction on the facts, or at any rate to acquiesce. So he says, in
+effect: 'After all, if she did kiss Cassio, that might mean little. Nay,
+she might even go much further without meaning any harm.[266] Of course
+there is the handkerchief (10); but then why should she _not_ give it
+away?' Then, affecting to renounce this hopeless attempt to disguise his
+true opinion, he goes on: 'However, _I_ cannot, as your friend, pretend
+that I really regard her as innocent: the fact is, Cassio boasted to me
+in so many words of his conquest. [Here he is interrupted by Othello's
+swoon.] But, after all, why make such a fuss? You share the fate of most
+married men, and you have the advantage of not being deceived in the
+matter.' It must have been a great pleasure to Iago to express his real
+cynicism thus, with the certainty that he would not be taken seriously
+and would advance his plot by it. At 208-210 he recurs to the same plan
+of maddening Othello by suggesting that, if he is so fond of Desdemona,
+he had better let the matter be, for it concerns no one but him. This
+speech follows Othello's exclamation 'O Iago, the pity of it,' and this
+is perhaps the moment when we most of all long to destroy Iago.
+
+(2) At 216 Othello tells Iago to get him some poison, that he may kill
+Desdemona that night. Iago objects: 'Do it not with poison: strangle her
+in her bed, even the bed she hath contaminated?' Why does he object to
+poison? Because through the sale of the poison he himself would be
+involved? Possibly. Perhaps his idea was that, Desdemona being killed by
+Othello, and Cassio killed by Roderigo, he would then admit that he had
+informed Othello of the adultery, and perhaps even that he had
+undertaken Cassio's death; but he would declare that he never meant to
+fulfil his promise as to Cassio, and that he had nothing to do with
+Desdemona's death (he seems to be preparing for this at 285). His buying
+poison might wreck this plan. But it may be that his objection to poison
+springs merely from contempt for Othello's intellect. He can trust him
+to use violence, but thinks he may bungle anything that requires
+adroitness.
+
+(3) When the conversation breaks off here (225) Iago has brought Othello
+back to the position reached at the end of the Temptation scene (III.
+iii.). Cassio and Desdemona are to be killed; and, in addition, the time
+is hastened; it is to be 'to-night,' not 'within three days.'
+
+The constructional idea clearly is that, after the Temptation scene,
+Othello tends to relapse and wait, which is terribly dangerous to Iago,
+who therefore in this scene quickens his purpose. Yet Othello relapses
+again. He has declared that he will not expostulate with her (IV. i.
+217). But he cannot keep his word, and there follows the scene of
+accusation. Its _dramatic_ purposes are obvious, but Othello seems to
+have no purpose in it. He asks no questions, or, rather, none that shows
+the least glimpse of doubt or hope. He is merely torturing himself.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[Footnote 266: The reader who is puzzled by this passage should refer to
+the conversation at the end of the thirtieth tale in the _Heptameron_.]
+
+
+
+
+NOTE N.
+
+TWO PASSAGES IN THE LAST SCENE OF _OTHELLO_.
+
+
+(1) V. ii. 71 f. Desdemona demands that Cassio be sent for to 'confess'
+the truth that she never gave him the handkerchief. Othello answers that
+Cassio _has_ confessed the truth--has confessed the adultery. The
+dialogue goes on:
+
+     _Des._  He will not say so.
+
+     _Oth._                    No, his mouth is stopp'd:
+             Honest Iago hath ta'en order for 't.
+
+     _Des._  O! my fear interprets: what, is he dead?
+
+     _Oth._  Had all his hairs been lives, my great revenge
+             Had stomach for them all.
+
+     _Des._  Alas! he is _betray'd_ and _I_ undone.
+
+It is a ghastly idea, but I believe Shakespeare means that, at the
+mention of Iago's name, Desdemona suddenly sees that _he_ is the villain
+whose existence he had declared to be impossible when, an hour before,
+Emilia had suggested that someone had poisoned Othello's mind. But her
+words rouse Othello to such furious indignation ('Out, strumpet! Weep'st
+thou for him to my face?') that 'it is too late.'
+
+(2) V. ii. 286 f.
+
+     _Oth._  I look down towards his feet; but that's a fable.
+             If that thou be'st a devil, I cannot kill thee.
+                                           [_Wounds Iago._
+
+     _Lod._  Wrench his sword from him.
+
+     _Iago._                      I bleed, sir, but not killed.
+
+Are Iago's strange words meant to show his absorption of interest in
+himself amidst so much anguish? I think rather he is meant to be
+alluding to Othello's words, and saying, with a cold contemptuous smile,
+'You see he is right; I _am_ a devil.'
+
+
+
+
+NOTE O.
+
+OTHELLO ON DESDEMONA'S LAST WORDS.
+
+
+I have said that the last scene of _Othello_, though terribly painful,
+contains almost nothing to diminish the admiration and love which
+heighten our pity for the hero (p. 198). I said 'almost' in view of the
+following passage (V. ii. 123 ff.):
+
+     _Emil._ O, who hath done this deed?
+
+     _Des._  Nobody; I myself. Farewell:
+             Commend  me to my kind lord: O, farewell!    [_Dies._
+
+     _Oth._  Why, how should she be murdered?[267]
+
+     _Emil._                                Alas, who knows?
+
+     _Oth._  You heard her say herself, it was not I.
+
+     _Emil._ She said so: I must needs report the truth.
+
+     _Oth._  She's, like a liar, gone to burning hell:
+             'Twas I that kill'd her.
+
+     _Emil._                         O, the more angel she,
+             And you the blacker devil!
+
+     _Oth._  She turn'd to folly, and she was a whore.
+
+This is a strange passage. What did Shakespeare mean us to feel? One is
+astonished that Othello should not be startled, nay thunder-struck, when
+he hears such dying words coming from the lips of an obdurate
+adulteress. One is shocked by the moral blindness or obliquity which
+takes them only as a further sign of her worthlessness. Here alone, I
+think, in the scene sympathy with Othello quite disappears. Did
+Shakespeare mean us to feel thus, and to realise how completely confused
+and perverted Othello's mind has become? I suppose so: and yet Othello's
+words continue to strike me as very strange, and also as not _like_
+Othello,--especially as at this point he was not in anger, much less
+enraged. It has sometimes occurred to me that there is a touch of
+personal animus in the passage. One remembers the place in _Hamlet_
+(written but a little while before) where Hamlet thinks he is unwilling
+to kill the King at his prayers, for fear they may take him to heaven;
+and one remembers Shakespeare's irony, how he shows that those prayers
+do _not_ go to heaven, and that the soul of this praying murderer is at
+that moment as murderous as ever (see p. 171), just as here the soul of
+the lying Desdemona is angelic _in_ its lie. Is it conceivable that in
+both passages he was intentionally striking at conventional 'religious'
+ideas; and, in particular, that the belief that a man's everlasting fate
+is decided by the occupation of his last moment excited in him
+indignation as well as contempt? I admit that this fancy seems
+un-Shakespearean, and yet it comes back on me whenever I read this
+passage. [The words 'I suppose so' (l. 3 above) gave my conclusion; but
+I wish to withdraw the whole Note]
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[Footnote 267: He alludes to her cry, 'O falsely, falsely murder'd!']
+
+
+
+
+NOTE P.
+
+DID EMILIA SUSPECT IAGO?
+
+
+I have answered No (p. 216), and have no doubt about the matter; but at
+one time I was puzzled, as perhaps others have been, by a single phrase
+of Emilia's. It occurs in the conversation between her and Iago and
+Desdemona (IV. ii. 130 f.):
+
+     I will be hang'd if some eternal villain,
+     Some busy and insinuating rogue,
+     Some cogging, cozening slave, _to get some office_,
+     Have not devised this slander; I'll be hang'd else.
+
+Emilia, it may be said, knew that Cassio was the suspected man, so that
+she must be thinking of _his_ office, and must mean that Iago has
+poisoned Othello's mind in order to prevent his reinstatement and to get
+the lieutenancy for himself. And, it may be said, she speaks
+indefinitely so that Iago alone may understand her (for Desdemona does
+not know that Cassio is the suspected man). Hence too, it may be said,
+when, at V. ii. 190, she exclaims,
+
+                  Villany, villany, villany!
+     I think upon't, I think: I smell't: O villany!
+     _I thought so then:_--I'll kill myself for grief;
+
+she refers in the words italicised to the occasion of the passage in IV.
+ii., and is reproaching herself for not having taken steps on her
+suspicion of Iago.
+
+I have explained in the text why I think it impossible to suppose that
+Emilia suspected her husband; and I do not think anyone who follows her
+speeches in V. ii., and who realises that, if she did suspect him, she
+must have been simply _pretending_ surprise when Othello told her that
+Iago was his informant, will feel any doubt. Her idea in the lines at
+IV. ii. 130 is, I believe, merely that someone is trying to establish a
+ground for asking a favour from Othello in return for information which
+nearly concerns him. It does not follow that, because she knew Cassio
+was suspected, she must have been referring to Cassio's office. She was
+a stupid woman, and, even if she had not been, she would not put two and
+two together so easily as the reader of the play.
+
+In the line,
+
+     I thought so then: I'll kill myself for grief,
+
+I think she certainly refers to IV. ii. 130 f. and also IV. ii. 15
+(Steevens's idea that she is thinking of the time when she let Iago take
+the handkerchief is absurd). If 'I'll kill myself for grief' is to be
+taken in close connection with the preceding words (which is not
+certain), she may mean that she reproaches herself for not having acted
+on her general suspicion, or (less probably) that she reproaches herself
+for not having suspected that Iago was the rogue.
+
+With regard to my view that she failed to think of the handkerchief when
+she saw how angry Othello was, those who believe that she did think of
+it will of course also believe that she suspected Iago. But in addition
+to other difficulties, they will have to suppose that her astonishment,
+when Othello at last mentioned the handkerchief, was mere acting. And
+anyone who can believe this seems to me beyond argument. [I regret that
+I cannot now discuss some suggestions made to me in regard to the
+subjects of Notes O and P.]
+
+
+
+
+NOTE Q.
+
+IAGO'S SUSPICION REGARDING CASSIO AND EMILIA.
+
+
+The one expression of this suspicion appears in a very curious manner.
+Iago, soliloquising, says (II. i. 311):
+
+                          Which thing to do,
+     If this poor trash of Venice, whom I trash
+     For his quick hunting, stand the putting on,
+     I'll have our Michael Cassio on the hip,
+     Abuse him to the Moor in the rank [F. right] garb--
+     For I fear Cassio with my night-cap too--
+     Make the Moor thank me, etc.
+
+Why '_For_ I fear Cassio,' etc.? He can hardly be giving himself an
+additional reason for involving Cassio; the parenthesis must be
+explanatory of the preceding line or some part of it. I think it
+explains 'rank garb' or 'right garb,' and the meaning is, 'For Cassio
+_is_ what I shall accuse him of being, a seducer of wives.' He is
+returning to the thought with which the soliloquy begins, 'That Cassio
+loves her, I do well believe it.' In saying this he is unconsciously
+trying to believe that Cassio would at any rate _like_ to be an
+adulterer, so that it is not so very abominable to say that he _is_ one.
+And the idea 'I suspect him with Emilia' is a second and stronger
+attempt of the same kind. The idea probably was born and died in one
+moment. It is a curious example of Iago's secret subjection to morality.
+
+
+
+
+NOTE R.
+
+REMINISCENCES OF _OTHELLO_ IN _KING LEAR_.
+
+
+The following is a list, made without any special search, and doubtless
+incomplete, of words and phrases in _King Lear_ which recall words and
+phrases in _Othello_, and many of which occur only in these two plays:
+
+     'waterish,' I. i. 261, appears only here and in _O._
+     III. iii. 15.
+
+     'fortune's alms,' I. i. 281, appears only here and in
+     _O._ III. iv. 122.
+
+     'decline' seems to be used of the advance of age only in
+     I. ii. 78 and _O._ III. iii. 265.
+
+     'slack' in 'if when they chanced to slack you,' II.
+     iv. 248, has no exact parallel in Shakespeare, but recalls
+     'they slack their duties,' _O._ IV. iii. 88.
+
+     'allowance' (=authorisation), I. iv. 228, is used
+     thus only in _K.L._, _O._ I. i. 128, and two places
+     in _Hamlet_ and _Hen. VIII._
+
+     'besort,' vb., I. iv. 272, does not occur elsewhere,
+     but 'besort,' sb., occurs in _O._ I. iii. 239 and
+     nowhere else.
+
+     Edmund's 'Look, sir, I bleed,' II. i. 43, sounds like
+     an echo of Iago's 'I bleed, sir, but not killed,' _O._
+     V. ii. 288.
+
+     'potential,' II. i. 78, appears only here, in _O._
+     I. ii. 13, and in the _Lover's Complaint_ (which, I
+     think, is certainly not an early poem).
+
+     'poise' in 'occasions of some poise,' II. i. 122, is
+     exactly like 'poise' in 'full of poise and difficult weight,'
+     _O._ III. iii. 82, and not exactly like 'poise' in
+     the three other places where it occurs.
+
+     'conjunct,' used only in II. ii. 125 (Q), V.
+     i. 12, recalls 'conjunctive,' used only in _H_. IV.
+     vii. 14, _O._ I. iii. 374 (F).
+
+     'grime,' vb., used only in II. iii. 9, recalls
+     'begrime,' used only in _O._ III. iii. 387 and
+     _Lucrece_.
+
+     'unbonneted,' III. i. 14, appears only here and in
+     _O._ I. ii. 23.
+
+     'delicate,' III. iv. 12, IV. iii. 15,
+     IV. vi. 188, is not a rare word with Shakespeare; he
+     uses it about thirty times in his plays. But it is worth
+     notice that it occurs six times in _O._
+
+     'commit,' used intr. for 'commit adultery,' appears only in
+     III. iv. 83, but cf. the famous iteration in _O._
+     IV. ii. 72 f.
+
+     'stand in hard cure,' III. vi. 107, seems to have no
+     parallel except _O._ II. i. 51, 'stand in bold cure.'
+
+     'secure'=make careless, IV. i. 22, appears only here
+     and in _O._ I. iii. 10 and (not quite the same sense)
+     _Tim._ II. ii. 185.
+
+     Albany's 'perforce must wither,' IV. ii. 35, recalls
+     Othello's 'It must needs wither,' V. ii. 15.
+
+     'deficient,' IV. vi. 23, occurs only here and in _O._
+     I. iii. 63.
+
+     'the safer sense,' IV. vi. 81, recalls 'my blood
+     begins my safer guides to rules,' _O._ II. iii. 205.
+
+     'fitchew,' IV. vi. 124, is used only here, in _O._
+     IV. i. 150, and in _T.C._ V. i. 67 (where it
+     has not the same significance).
+
+     Lear's 'I have seen the day, with my good biting falchion I
+     would have made them skip,' V. iii. 276, recalls
+     Othello's 'I have seen the day, That with this little arm and
+     this good sword,' etc., V. ii. 261.
+
+The fact that more than half of the above occur in the first two Acts of
+_King Lear_ may possibly be significant: for the farther removed
+Shakespeare was from the time of the composition of _Othello_, the less
+likely would be the recurrence of ideas or words used in that play.
+
+
+
+
+NOTE S.
+
+_KING LEAR_ AND _TIMON OF ATHENS_.
+
+
+That these two plays are near akin in character, and probably in date,
+is recognised by many critics now; and I will merely add here a few
+references to the points of resemblance mentioned in the text (p. 246),
+and a few notes on other points.
+
+(1) The likeness between Timon's curses and some of the speeches of Lear
+in his madness is, in one respect, curious. It is natural that Timon,
+speaking to Alcibiades and two courtezans, should inveigh in particular
+against sexual vices and corruption, as he does in the terrific passage
+IV. iii. 82-166; but why should Lear refer at length, and with the same
+loathing, to this particular subject (IV. vi. 112-132)? It almost looks
+as if Shakespeare were expressing feelings which oppressed him at this
+period of his life.
+
+The idea may be a mere fancy, but it has seemed to me that this
+pre-occupation, and sometimes this oppression, are traceable in other
+plays of the period from about 1602 to 1605 (_Hamlet_, _Measure for
+Measure_, _Troilus and Cressida_, _All's Well_, _Othello_); while in
+earlier plays the subject is handled less, and without disgust, and in
+later plays (e.g. _Antony and Cleopatra_, _The Winter's Tale_,
+_Cymbeline_) it is also handled, however freely, without this air of
+repulsion (I omit _Pericles_ because the authorship of the
+brothel-scenes is doubtful).
+
+(2) For references to the lower animals, similar to those in _King
+Lear_, see especially _Timon_, I. i. 259; II. ii. 180; III. vi. 103 f.;
+IV. i. 2, 36; IV. iii. 49 f., 177 ff., 325 ff. (surely a passage written
+or, at the least, rewritten by Shakespeare), 392, 426 f. I ignore the
+constant abuse of the dog in the conversations where Apemantus appears.
+
+(3) Further points of resemblance are noted in the text at pp. 246, 247,
+310, 326, 327, and many likenesses in word, phrase and idea might be
+added, of the type of the parallel 'Thine Do comfort and not burn,'
+_Lear_, II. iv. 176, and 'Thou sun, that comfort'st, burn!' _Timon_, V.
+i. 134.
+
+(4) The likeness in style and versification (so far as the purely
+Shakespearean parts of _Timon_ are concerned) is surely unmistakable,
+but some readers may like to see an example. Lear speaks here (IV. vi.
+164 ff.):
+
+     Thou rascal beadle, hold thy bloody hand!
+     Why dost thou lash that whore? Strip thine own back;
+     Thou hotly lust'st to use her in that kind
+     For which thou whipp'st her. The usurer hangs the cozener.
+     Through tatter'd clothes small vices do appear;
+     Robes and furr'd gowns hide all. Plate sin with gold,
+     And the strong lance of justice hurtless breaks;
+     Arm it in rags, a pigmy's straw does pierce it.
+     None does offend, none, I say, none; I'll able 'em:
+     Take that of me, my friend, who have the power
+     To seal the accuser's lips. Get thee glass eyes;
+     And, like a scurvy politician, seem
+     To see the things thou dost not.
+
+And Timon speaks here (IV. iii. 1 ff.):
+
+     O blessed breeding sun, draw from the earth
+     Rotten humidity; below thy sister's orb
+     Infect the air! Twinn'd brothers of one womb,
+     Whose procreation, residence, and birth,
+     Scarce is dividant, touch them with several fortunes,
+     The greater scorns the lesser: not nature,
+     To whom all sores lay siege, can bear great fortune,
+     But by contempt of nature.
+     Raise me this beggar, and deny't that lord:
+     The senator shall bear contempt hereditary,
+     The beggar native honour.
+     It is the pasture lards the rother's sides,
+     The want that makes him lean. Who dares, who dares.
+     In purity of manhood stand upright
+     And say 'This man's a flatterer'? if one be,
+     So are they all: for every grise of fortune
+     Is smooth'd by that below: the learned pate
+     Ducks to the golden fool: all is oblique;
+     There's nothing level in our cursed natures,
+     But direct villany.
+
+The reader may wish to know whether metrical tests throw any light on
+the chronological position of _Timon_; and he will find such information
+as I can give in Note BB. But he will bear in mind that results arrived
+at by applying these tests to the whole play can have little value,
+since it is practically certain that Shakespeare did not write the whole
+play. It seems to consist (1) of parts that are purely Shakespearean
+(the text, however, being here, as elsewhere, very corrupt); (2) of
+parts untouched or very slightly touched by him; (3) of parts where a
+good deal is Shakespeare's but not all (_e.g._, in my opinion, III. v.,
+which I cannot believe, with Mr. Fleay, to be wholly, or almost wholly,
+by another writer). The tests ought to be applied not only to the whole
+play but separately to (1), about which there is little difference of
+opinion. This has not been done: but Dr. Ingram has applied one test,
+and I have applied another, to the parts assigned by Mr. Fleay to
+Shakespeare (see Note BB.).[268] The result is to place _Timon_ between
+_King Lear_ and _Macbeth_ (a result which happens to coincide with that
+of the application of the main tests to the whole play): and this result
+corresponds, I believe, with the general impression which we derive from
+the three dramas in regard to versification.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[Footnote 268: These are I. i.; II. i.; II. ii., except 194-204; in III.
+vi. Timon's verse speech; IV. i.; IV. ii. 1-28; IV. iii., except
+292-362, 399-413, 454-543; V. i., except 1-50; V. ii.; V. iv. I am not
+to be taken as accepting this division throughout.]
+
+
+
+
+NOTE T.
+
+DID SHAKESPEARE SHORTEN _KING LEAR_?
+
+
+I have remarked in the text (pp. 256 ff.) on the unusual number of
+improbabilities, inconsistencies, etc., in _King Lear_. The list of
+examples given might easily be lengthened. Thus (_a_) in IV. iii. Kent
+refers to a letter which he confided to the Gentleman for Cordelia; but
+in III. i. he had given to the Gentleman not a letter but a message.
+(_b_) In III. i. again he says Cordelia will inform the Gentleman who
+the sender of the message was; but from IV. iii. it is evident that she
+has done no such thing, nor does the Gentleman show any curiosity on the
+subject. (_c_) In the same scene (III. i.) Kent and the Gentleman
+arrange that whichever finds the King first shall halloo to the other;
+but when Kent finds the King he does not halloo. These are all examples
+of mere carelessness as to matters which would escape attention in the
+theatre,--matters introduced not because they are essential to the plot,
+but in order to give an air of verisimilitude to the conversation. And
+here is perhaps another instance. When Lear determines to leave Goneril
+and go to Regan he says, 'call my train together' (I. iv. 275). When he
+arrives at Gloster's house Kent asks why he comes with so small a train,
+and the Fool gives a reply which intimates that the rest have deserted
+him (II. iv. 63 ff.). He and his daughters, however, seem unaware of any
+diminution; and, when Lear 'calls to horse' and leaves Gloster's house,
+the doors are shut against him partly on the excuse that he is 'attended
+with a desperate train' (308). Nevertheless in the storm he has no
+knights with him, and in III. vii. 15 ff. we hear that 'some five or six
+and thirty of his knights'[269] are 'hot questrists after him,' as
+though the real reason of his leaving Goneril with so small a train was
+that he had hurried away so quickly that many of his knights were
+unaware of his departure.
+
+This prevalence of vagueness or inconsistency is probably due to
+carelessness; but it may possibly be due to another cause. There are, it
+has sometimes struck me, slight indications that the details of the plot
+were originally more full and more clearly imagined than one would
+suppose from the play as we have it; and some of the defects to which I
+have drawn attention might have arisen if Shakespeare, finding his
+matter too bulky, had (_a_) omitted to write some things originally
+intended, and (_b_), after finishing his play, had reduced it by
+excision, and had not, in these omissions and excisions, taken
+sufficient pains to remove the obscurities and inconsistencies
+occasioned by them.
+
+Thus, to take examples of (_b_), Lear's 'What, fifty of my followers at
+a clap!' (I. iv. 315) is very easily explained if we suppose that in the
+preceding conversation, as originally written, Goneril had mentioned the
+number. Again the curious absence of any indication why Burgundy should
+have the first choice of Cordelia's hand might easily be due to the same
+cause. So might the ignorance in which we are left as to the fate of the
+Fool, and several more of the defects noticed in the text.
+
+To illustrate the other point (_a_), that Shakespeare may have omitted
+to write some things which he had originally intended, the play would
+obviously gain something if it appeared that, at a time shortly before
+that of the action, Gloster had encouraged the King in his idea of
+dividing the kingdom, while Kent had tried to dissuade him. And there
+are one or two passages which suggest that this is what Shakespeare
+imagined. If it were so, there would be additional point in the Fool's
+reference to the lord who counselled Lear to give away his land (I. iv.
+154), and in Gloster's reflection (III. iv. 168),
+
+     His daughters seek his death: ah, that good Kent!
+     He said it would be thus:
+
+('said,' of course, not to the King but to Gloster and perhaps others of
+the council). Thus too the plots would be still more closely joined.
+Then also we should at once understand the opening of the play. To
+Kent's words, 'I thought the King had more affected the Duke of Albany
+than Cornwall,' Gloster answers, 'It did always seem so to us.' Who are
+the 'us' from whom Kent is excluded? I do not know, for there is no sign
+that Kent has been absent. But if Kent, in consequence of his
+opposition, had fallen out of favour and absented himself from the
+council, it would be clear. So, besides, would be the strange suddenness
+with which, after Gloster's answer, Kent changes the subject; he would
+be avoiding, in presence of Gloster's son, any further reference to a
+subject on which he and Gloster had differed. That Kent, I may add, had
+already the strongest opinion about Goneril and Regan is clear from his
+extremely bold words (I. i. 165),
+
+     Kill thy physician, and the fee bestow
+     Upon thy foul disease.
+
+Did Lear remember this phrase when he called Goneril 'a disease that's
+in my flesh' (II. iv. 225)?
+
+Again, the observant reader may have noticed that Goneril is not only
+represented as the fiercer and more determined of the two sisters but
+also strikes one as the more sensual. And with this may be connected one
+or two somewhat curious points: Kent's comparison of Goneril to the
+figure of Vanity in the Morality plays (II. ii. 38); the Fool's
+apparently quite irrelevant remark (though his remarks are scarcely ever
+so), 'For there was never yet fair woman but she made mouths in a glass'
+(III. ii. 35); Kent's reference to Oswald (long before there is any sign
+of Goneril's intrigue with Edmund) as 'one that would be a bawd in way
+of good service' (II. ii. 20); and Edgar's words to the corpse of Oswald
+(IV. vi. 257), also spoken before he knew anything of the intrigue with
+Edmund,
+
+     I know thee well: a serviceable villain;
+     As duteous to the vices of thy mistress
+     As badness would desire.
+
+Perhaps Shakespeare had conceived Goneril as a woman who before her
+marriage had shown signs of sensual vice; but the distinct indications
+of this idea were crowded out of his exposition when he came to write
+it, or, being inserted, were afterwards excised. I will not go on to
+hint that Edgar had Oswald in his mind when (III. iv. 87) he described
+the serving-man who 'served the lust of his mistress' heart, and did the
+act of darkness with her'; and still less that Lear can have had Goneril
+in his mind in the declamation against lechery referred to in Note S.
+
+I do not mean to imply, by writing this note, that I believe in the
+hypotheses suggested in it. On the contrary I think it more probable
+that the defects referred to arose from carelessness and other causes.
+But this is not, to me, certain; and the reader who rejects the
+hypotheses may be glad to have his attention called to the points which
+suggested them.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[Footnote 269: It has been suggested that 'his' means 'Gloster's'; but
+'him' all through the speech evidently means Lear.]
+
+
+
+
+NOTE U.
+
+MOVEMENTS OF THE DRAMATIS PERSONAE IN ACT II. OF _KING LEAR_.
+
+
+I have referred in the text to the obscurity of the play on this
+subject, and I will set out the movements here.
+
+When Lear is ill-treated by Goneril his first thought is to seek refuge
+with Regan (I. iv. 274 f., 327 f.). Goneril, accordingly, who had
+foreseen this, and, even before the quarrel, had determined to write to
+Regan (I. iii. 25), now sends Oswald off to her, telling her not to
+receive Lear and his hundred knights (I. iv. 354 f.). In consequence of
+this letter Regan and Cornwall immediately leave their home and ride by
+night to Gloster's house, sending word on that they are coming (II. i. 1
+ff., 81, 120 ff.). Lear, on his part, just before leaving Goneril's
+house, sends Kent with a letter to Regan, and tells him to be quick, or
+Lear will be there before him. And we find that Kent reaches Regan and
+delivers his letter before Oswald, Goneril's messenger. Both the
+messengers are taken on by Cornwall and Regan to Gloster's house.
+
+In II. iv. Lear arrives at Gloster's house, having, it would seem,
+failed to find Regan at her own home. And, later, Goneril arrives at
+Gloster's house, in accordance with an intimation which she had sent in
+her letter to Regan (II. iv. 186 f.).
+
+Thus all the principal persons except Cordelia and Albany are brought
+together; and the crises of the double action--the expulsion of Lear and
+the blinding and expulsion of Gloster--are reached in Act III. And this
+is what was required.
+
+But it needs the closest attention to follow these movements. And, apart
+from this, difficulties remain.
+
+1. Goneril, in despatching Oswald with the letter to Regan, tells him to
+hasten his return (I. iv. 363). Lear again is surprised to find that
+_his_ messenger has not been sent back (II. iv. 1 f., 36 f.). Yet
+apparently both Goneril and Lear themselves start at once, so that their
+messengers _could_ not return in time. It may be said that they expected
+to meet them coming back, but there is no indication of this in the
+text.
+
+2. Lear, in despatching Kent, says (I. v. 1):
+
+     Go you before to Gloster with these letters. Acquaint my
+     daughter no further with anything you know than comes from her
+     demand out of the letter.
+
+This would seem to imply that Lear knew that Regan and Cornwall were at
+Gloster's house, and meant either to go there (so Koppel) or to summon
+her back to her own home to receive him. Yet this is clearly not so, for
+Kent goes straight to Regan's house (II. i. 124, II. iv. 1, 27 ff., 114
+ff.).
+
+Hence it is generally supposed that by 'Gloster,' in the passage just
+quoted, Lear means not the Earl but the _place_; that Regan's home was
+there; and that Gloster's castle was somewhere not very far off. This is
+to some extent confirmed by the fact that Cornwall is the 'arch' or
+patron of Gloster (II. i. 60 f., 112 ff.). But Gloster's home or house
+must not be imagined quite close to Cornwall's, for it takes a night to
+ride from the one to the other, and Gloster's house is in the middle of
+a solitary heath with scarce a bush for many miles about (II. iv. 304).
+
+The plural 'these letters' in the passage quoted need give no trouble,
+for the plural is often used by Shakespeare for a single letter; and the
+natural conjecture that Lear sent one letter to Regan and another to
+Gloster is not confirmed by anything in the text.
+
+The only difficulty is that, as Koppel points out, 'Gloster' is nowhere
+else used in the play for the place (except in the phrase 'Earl of
+Gloster' or 'my lord of Gloster'); and--what is more important--that it
+would unquestionably be taken by the audience to stand in this passage
+for the Earl, especially as there has been no previous indication that
+Cornwall lived at Gloster. One can only suppose that Shakespeare forgot
+that he had given no such indication, and so wrote what was sure to be
+misunderstood,--unless we suppose that 'Gloster' is a mere slip of the
+pen, or even a misprint, for 'Regan.' But, apart from other
+considerations, Lear would hardly have spoken to a servant of 'Regan,'
+and, if he had, the next words would have run 'Acquaint her,' not
+'Acquaint my daughter.'
+
+
+
+
+NOTE V.
+
+SUSPECTED INTERPOLATIONS IN _KING LEAR_.
+
+
+There are three passages in _King Lear_ which have been held to be
+additions made by 'the players.'
+
+The first consists of the two lines of indecent doggerel spoken by the
+Fool at the end of Act I.; the second, of the Fool's prophecy in rhyme
+at the end of III. ii.; the third, of Edgar's soliloquy at the end of
+III. vi.
+
+It is suspicious (1) that all three passages occur at the ends of
+scenes, the place where an addition is most easily made; and (2) that in
+each case the speaker remains behind alone to utter the words after the
+other persons have gone off.
+
+I postpone discussion of the several passages until I have called
+attention to the fact that, if these passages are genuine, the number of
+scenes which end with a soliloquy is larger in _King Lear_ than in any
+other undoubted tragedy. Thus, taking the tragedies in their probable
+chronological order (and ignoring the very short scenes into which a
+battle is sometimes divided),[270] I find that there are in _Romeo and
+Juliet_ four such scenes, in _Julius Caesar_ two, in _Hamlet_ six, in
+_Othello_ four,[271] in _King Lear_ seven,[272] in _Macbeth_ two,[273]
+in _Antony and Cleopatra_ three, in _Coriolanus_ one. The difference
+between _King Lear_ and the plays that come nearest to it is really much
+greater than it appears from this list, for in _Hamlet_ four of the six
+soliloquies, and in _Othello_ three of the four, are long speeches,
+while most of those in _King Lear_ are quite short.
+
+Of course I do not attach any great importance to the fact just noticed,
+but it should not be left entirely out of account in forming an opinion
+as to the genuineness of the three doubted passages.
+
+(_a_) The first of these, I. v. 54-5, I decidedly believe to be
+spurious. (1) The scene ends quite in Shakespeare's manner without it.
+(2) It does not seem likely that at the _end_ of the scene Shakespeare
+would have introduced anything _violently_ incongruous with the
+immediately preceding words,
+
+     Oh let me not be mad, not mad, sweet heaven!
+     Keep me in temper: I would not be mad!
+
+(3) Even if he had done so, it is very unlikely that the incongruous
+words would have been grossly indecent. (4) Even if they had been,
+surely they would not have been _irrelevantly_ indecent and evidently
+addressed to the audience, two faults which are not in Shakespeare's
+way. (5) The lines are doggerel. Doggerel is not uncommon in the
+earliest plays; there are a few lines even in the _Merchant of Venice_,
+a line and a half, perhaps, in _As You Like It_; but I do not think it
+occurs later, not even where, in an early play, it would certainly have
+been found, _e.g._ in the mouth of the Clown in _All's Well_. The best
+that can be said for these lines is that they appear in the Quartos,
+_i.e._ in reports, however vile, of the play as performed within two or
+three years of its composition.
+
+(_b_) I believe, almost as decidedly, that the second passage, III. ii.
+79 ff., is spurious. (1) The scene ends characteristically without the
+lines. (2) They are addressed directly to the audience. (3) They destroy
+the pathetic and beautiful effect of the immediately preceding words of
+the Fool, and also of Lear's solicitude for him. (4) They involve the
+absurdity that the shivering timid Fool would allow his master and
+protector, Lear and Kent, to go away into the storm and darkness,
+leaving him alone. (5) It is also somewhat against them that they do not
+appear in the Quartos. At the same time I do not think one would
+hesitate to accept them if they occurred at any natural place _within_
+the dialogue.
+
+(_c_) On the other hand I see no sufficient reason for doubting the
+genuineness of Edgar's soliloquy at the end of III. vi. (1) Those who
+doubt it appear not to perceive that _some_ words of soliloquy are
+wanted; for it is evidently intended that, when Kent and Gloster bear
+the King away, they should leave the Bedlam behind. Naturally they do
+so. He is only accidentally connected with the King; he was taken to
+shelter with him merely to gratify his whim, and as the King is now
+asleep there is no occasion to retain the Bedlam; Kent, we know, shrank
+from him, 'shunn'd [his] abhorr'd society' (V. iii. 210). So he is left
+to return to the hovel where he was first found. When the others depart,
+then, he must be left behind, and surely would not go off without a
+word. (2) If his speech is spurious, therefore, it has been substituted
+for some genuine speech; and surely that is a supposition not to be
+entertained except under compulsion. (3) There is no such compulsion in
+the speech. It is not very good, no doubt; but the use of rhymed and
+somewhat antithetic lines in a gnomic passage is quite in Shakespeare's
+manner, _more_ in his manner than, for example, the rhymed passages in
+I. i. 183-190, 257-269, 281-4, which nobody doubts; quite like many
+places in _All's Well_, or the concluding lines of _King Lear_ itself.
+(4) The lines are in spirit of one kind with Edgar's fine lines at the
+beginning of Act IV. (5) Some of them, as Delius observes, emphasize the
+parallelism between the stories of Lear and Gloster. (6) The fact that
+the Folio omits the lines is, of course, nothing against them.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[Footnote 270: I ignore them partly because they are not significant for
+the present purpose, but mainly because it is impossible to accept the
+division of battle-scenes in our modern texts, while to depart from it
+is to introduce intolerable inconvenience in reference. The only proper
+plan in Elizabethan drama is to consider a scene ended as soon as no
+person is left on the stage, and to pay no regard to the question of
+locality,--a question theatrically insignificant and undetermined in
+most scenes of an Elizabethan play, in consequence of the absence of
+movable scenery. In dealing with battles the modern editors seem to have
+gone on the principle (which they could not possibly apply generally)
+that, so long as the place is not changed, you have only one scene.
+Hence in _Macbeth_, Act V., they have included in their Scene vii. three
+distinct scenes; yet in _Antony and Cleopatra_, Act III., following the
+right division for a wrong reason, they have two scenes (viii. and ix.),
+each less than four lines long.]
+
+[Footnote 271: One of these (V. i.) is not marked as such, but it is
+evident that the last line and a half form a soliloquy of one remaining
+character, just as much as some of the soliloquies marked as such in
+other plays.]
+
+[Footnote 272: According to modern editions, eight, Act II., scene ii.,
+being an instance. But it is quite ridiculous to reckon as three scenes
+what are marked as scenes ii., iii., iv. Kent is on the lower stage the
+whole time, Edgar in the so-called scene iii. being on the upper stage
+or balcony. The editors were misled by their ignorance of the stage
+arrangements.]
+
+[Footnote 273: Perhaps three, for V. iii. is perhaps an instance, though
+not so marked.]
+
+
+
+
+NOTE W.
+
+THE STAGING OF THE SCENE OF LEAR'S REUNION WITH CORDELIA.
+
+
+As Koppel has shown, the usual modern stage-directions[274] for this
+scene (IV. vii.) are utterly wrong and do what they can to defeat the
+poet's purpose.
+
+It is evident from the text that the scene shows the _first_ meeting of
+Cordelia and Kent, and _first_ meeting of Cordelia and Lear, since they
+parted in I. i. Kent and Cordelia indeed are doubtless supposed to have
+exchanged a few words before they come on the stage; but Cordelia has
+not seen her father at all until the moment before she begins (line 26),
+'O my dear father!' Hence the tone of the first part of the scene, that
+between Cordelia and Kent, is kept low, in order that the latter part,
+between Cordelia and Lear, may have its full effect.
+
+The modern stage-direction at the beginning of the scene, as found, for
+example, in the Cambridge and Globe editions, is as follows:
+
+     'SCENE vii.--A tent in the French camp. LEAR
+     on a bed asleep, soft music playing; _Gentleman_, and others
+     attending.
+
+     Enter CORDELIA, KENT, and _Doctor_.'
+
+At line 25, where the Doctor says 'Please you, draw near,' Cordelia is
+supposed to approach the bed, which is imagined by some editors visible
+throughout at the back of the stage, by others as behind a curtain at
+the back, this curtain being drawn open at line 25.
+
+Now, to pass by the fact that these arrangements are in flat
+contradiction with the stage-directions of the Quartos and the Folio,
+consider their effect upon the scene. In the first place, the reader at
+once assumes that Cordelia has already seen her father; for otherwise it
+is inconceivable that she would quietly talk with Kent while he was
+within a few yards of her. The edge of the later passage where she
+addresses him is therefore blunted. In the second place, through Lear's
+presence the reader's interest in Lear and his meeting with Cordelia is
+at once excited so strongly that he hardly attends at all to the
+conversation of Cordelia and Kent; and so this effect is blunted too.
+Thirdly, at line 57, where Cordelia says,
+
+                      O, look upon me, sir,
+     And hold your hands in benediction o'er me!
+     No, sir, you must not kneel,
+
+the poor old King must be supposed either to try to get out of bed, or
+actually to do so, or to kneel, or to try to kneel, on the bed.
+Fourthly, consider what happens at line 81.
+
+     _Doctor._ Desire him to _go in_; trouble him no more
+               Till further settling.
+
+     _Cor._                  Will't please your highness _walk?_
+
+     _Lear._   You must bear with me;
+               Pray you now, forget and forgive; I am old and
+                 foolish.    [_Exeunt all but Kent and Gentleman_.
+
+If Lear is in a tent containing his bed, why in the world, when the
+doctor thinks he can bear no more emotion, is he made to walk out of the
+tent? A pretty doctor!
+
+But turn now to the original texts. Of course they say nothing about the
+place. The stage-direction at the beginning runs, in the Quartos, 'Enter
+Cordelia, Kent, and Doctor;' in the Folio, 'Enter Cordelia, Kent, and
+Gentleman.' They differ about the Gentleman and the Doctor, and the
+Folio later wrongly gives to the Gentleman the Doctor's speeches as well
+as his own. This is a minor matter. But they agree in _making no mention
+of Lear_. He is not on the stage at all. Thus Cordelia, and the reader,
+can give their whole attention to Kent.
+
+Her conversation with Kent finished, she turns (line 12) to the Doctor
+and asks 'How does the King?'[275] The Doctor tells her that Lear is
+still asleep, and asks leave to wake him. Cordelia assents and asks if
+he is 'arrayed,' which does not mean whether he has a night-gown on, but
+whether they have taken away his crown of furrow-weeds, and tended him
+duly after his mad wanderings in the fields. The Gentleman says that in
+his sleep 'fresh garments' (not a night-gown) have been put on him. The
+Doctor then asks Cordelia to be present when her father is waked. She
+assents, and the Doctor says, 'Please you, draw near. Louder the music
+there.' The next words are Cordelia's, 'O my dear father!'
+
+What has happened? At the words 'is he arrayed?' according to the Folio,
+'_Enter Lear in a chair carried by Servants._' The moment of this
+entrance, as so often in the original editions, is doubtless too soon.
+It should probably come at the words 'Please you, draw near,' which
+_may_, as Koppel suggests, be addressed to the bearers. But that the
+stage-direction is otherwise right there cannot be a doubt (and that the
+Quartos omit it is no argument against it, seeing that, according to
+their directions, Lear never enters at all).
+
+This arrangement (1) allows Kent his proper place in the scene, (2)
+makes it clear that Cordelia has not seen her father before, (3) makes
+her first sight of him a theatrical crisis in the best sense, (4) makes
+it quite natural that he should kneel, (5) makes it obvious why he
+should leave the stage again when he shows signs of exhaustion, and (6)
+is the only arrangement which has the slightest authority, for 'Lear on
+a bed asleep' was never heard of till Capell proposed it. The ruinous
+change of the staging was probably suggested by the version of that
+unhappy Tate.
+
+Of course the chair arrangement is primitive, but the Elizabethans did
+not care about such things. What they cared for was dramatic effect.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[Footnote 274: There are exceptions: _e.g._, in the editions of Delius
+and Mr. W.J. Craig.]
+
+[Footnote 275: And it is possible that, as Koppel suggests, the Doctor
+should properly enter at this point; for if Kent, as he says, wishes to
+remain unknown, it seems strange that he and Cordelia should talk as
+they do before a third person. This change however is not necessary, for
+the Doctor might naturally stand out of hearing till he was addressed;
+and it is better not to go against the stage-direction without
+necessity.]
+
+
+
+
+NOTE X.
+
+THE BATTLE IN _KING LEAR_.
+
+
+I found my impression of the extraordinary ineffectiveness of this
+battle (p. 255) confirmed by a paper of James Spedding (_New Shakspere
+Society Transactions_, 1877, or Furness's _King Lear_, p. 312 f.); but
+his opinion that this is the one technical defect in _King Lear_ seems
+certainly incorrect, and his view that this defect is not due to
+Shakespeare himself will not, I think, bear scrutiny.
+
+To make Spedding's view quite clear I may remind the reader that in the
+preceding scene the two British armies, that of Edmund and Regan, and
+that of Albany and Goneril, have entered with drum and colours, and have
+departed. Scene ii. is as follows (Globe):
+
+     SCENE II.--_A field between the two camps.
+
+     Alarum within. Enter, with drum and colours_, LEAR, CORDELIA,
+     _and_ Soldiers, _over the stage; and exeunt._ _Enter_ EDGAR
+     _and_ GLOSTER.
+
+     _Edg._  Here, father, take the shadow of this tree
+             For your good host; pray that the right may thrive:
+             If ever I return to you again,
+             I'll bring you comfort.
+
+     _Glo._                        Grace go with you, sir!
+
+                                                    [_Exit_ Edgar
+
+     _Alarum and retreat within._ _Re-enter_ EDGAR.
+
+     _Edg._  Away, old man; give me thy hand; away!
+             King Lear hath lost, he and his daughter ta'en:
+             Give me thy hand; come on.
+
+     _Glo._  No farther, sir; a man may rot even here.
+
+     _Edg._  What, in ill thoughts again? Men must endure
+             Their going hence, even as their coming hither:
+             Ripeness is all: come on.
+
+     _Glo._                        And that's true too. [_Exeunt_.
+
+The battle, it will be seen, is represented only by military music
+within the tiring-house, which formed the back of the stage. 'The
+scene,' says Spedding, 'does not change; but 'alarums' are heard, and
+afterwards a 'retreat,' and on the same field over which that great army
+has this moment passed, fresh and full of hope, re-appears, with tidings
+that all is lost, the same man who last left the stage to follow and
+fight in it.[276] That Shakespeare meant the scene to stand thus, no one
+who has the true faith will believe.'
+
+Spedding's suggestion is that things are here run together which
+Shakespeare meant to keep apart. Shakespeare, he thinks, continued Act
+IV. to the '_exit_ Edgar' after l. 4 of the above passage. Thus, just
+before the close of the Act, the two British armies and the French army
+had passed across the stage, and the interest of the audience in the
+battle about to be fought was raised to a high pitch. Then, after a
+short interval, Act V. opened with the noise of battle in the distance,
+followed by the entrance of Edgar to announce the defeat of Cordelia's
+army. The battle, thus, though not fought on the stage, was shown and
+felt to be an event of the greatest importance.
+
+Apart from the main objection of the entire want of evidence of so great
+a change having been made, there are other objections to this idea and
+to the reasoning on which it is based. (1) The pause at the end of the
+present Fourth Act is far from 'faulty,' as Spedding alleges it to be;
+that Act ends with the most melting scene Shakespeare ever wrote; and a
+pause after it, and before the business of the battle, was perfectly
+right. (2) The Fourth Act is already much longer than the Fifth (about
+fourteen columns of the Globe edition against about eight and a half),
+and Spedding's change would give the Fourth nearly sixteen columns, and
+the Fifth less than seven. (3) Spedding's proposal requires a much
+greater alteration in the existing text than he supposed. It does not
+simply shift the division of the two Acts, it requires the disappearance
+and re-entrance of the blind Gloster. Gloster, as the text stands, is
+alone on the stage while the battle is being fought at a distance, and
+the reference to the tree shows that he was on the main or lower stage.
+The main stage had no front curtain; and therefore, if Act IV. is to end
+where Spedding wished it to end, Gloster must go off unaided at its
+close, and come on again unaided for Act V. And this means that the
+_whole_ arrangement of the present Act V. Sc. ii. must be changed. If
+Spedding had been aware of this it is not likely that he would have
+broached his theory.[277]
+
+It is curious that he does not allude to the one circumstance which
+throws some little suspicion on the existing text. I mean the
+contradiction between Edgar's statement that, if ever he returns to his
+father again, he will bring him comfort, and the fact that immediately
+afterwards he returns to bring him discomfort. It is possible to explain
+this psychologically, of course, but the passage is not one in which we
+should expect psychological subtlety.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[Footnote 276: Where did Spedding find this? I find no trace of it, and
+surely Edgar would not have risked his life in the battle, when he had,
+in case of defeat, to appear and fight Edmund. He does not appear
+'armed,' according to the Folio, till V. iii. 117.]
+
+[Footnote 277: Spedding supposed that there was a front curtain, and
+this idea, coming down from Malone and Collier, is still found in
+English works of authority. But it may be stated without hesitation that
+there is no positive evidence at all for the existence of such a
+curtain, and abundant evidence against it.]
+
+
+
+
+NOTE Y.
+
+SOME DIFFICULT PASSAGES IN _KING LEAR_.
+
+
+The following are notes on some passages where I have not been able to
+accept any of the current interpretations, or on which I wish to express
+an opinion or represent a little-known view.
+
+
+1. _Kent's soliloquy at the end of_ II. ii.
+
+(_a_) In this speech the application of the words 'Nothing, almost sees
+miracles but misery' seems not to have been understood. The 'misery' is
+surely not that of Kent but that of Lear, who has come 'out of heaven's
+benediction to the warm sun,' _i.e._ to misery. This, says Kent, is just
+the situation where something like miraculous help may be looked for;
+and he finds the sign of it in the fact that a letter from Cordelia has
+just reached him; for his course since his banishment has been so
+obscured that it is only by the rarest good fortune (something like a
+miracle) that Cordelia has got intelligence of it. We may suppose that
+this intelligence came from one of Albany's or Cornwall's servants, some
+of whom are, he says (III. i. 23),
+
+             to France the spies and speculations
+     Intelligent of our state.
+
+(_b_) The words 'and shall find time,' etc., have been much discussed.
+Some have thought that they are detached phrases from the letter which
+Kent is reading: but Kent has just implied by his address to the sun
+that he has no light to read the letter by.[278] It has also been
+suggested that the anacoluthon is meant to represent Kent's sleepiness,
+which prevents him from finishing the sentence, and induces him to
+dismiss his thoughts and yield to his drowsiness. But I remember nothing
+like this elsewhere in Shakespeare, and it seems much more probable that
+the passage is corrupt, perhaps from the loss of a line containing words
+like 'to rescue us' before 'From this enormous state' (with 'state' cf.
+'our state' in the lines quoted above).
+
+When we reach III. i. we find that Kent has now read the letter; he
+knows that a force is coming from France and indeed has already 'secret
+feet' in some of the harbours. So he sends the Gentleman to Dover.
+
+
+2. _The Fool's Song in_ II. iv.
+
+At II. iv. 62 Kent asks why the King comes with so small a train. The
+Fool answers, in effect, that most of his followers have deserted him
+because they see that his fortunes are sinking. He proceeds to advise
+Kent ironically to follow their example, though he confesses he does not
+intend to follow it himself. 'Let go thy hold when a great wheel runs
+down a hill, lest it break thy neck with following it: but the great one
+that goes up the hill, let him draw thee after. When a wise man gives
+thee better counsel, give me mine again: I would have none but knaves
+follow it, since a fool gives it.
+
+     That sir which serves and seeks for gain,
+       And follows but for form,
+     Will pack when it begins to rain,
+       And leave thee in the storm.
+     But I will tarry; the fool will stay,
+       And let the wise man fly:
+     The knave turns fool that runs away;
+       The fool no knave, perdy.
+
+The last two lines have caused difficulty. Johnson wanted to read,
+
+     The fool turns knave that runs away,
+       The knave no fool, perdy;
+
+_i.e._ if I ran away, I should prove myself to be a knave and a wise
+man, but, being a fool, I stay, as no knave or wise man would. Those who
+rightly defend the existing reading misunderstand it, I think.
+Shakespeare is not pointing out, in 'The knave turns fool that runs
+away,' that the wise knave who runs away is really a 'fool with a
+circumbendibus,' 'moral miscalculator as well as moral coward.' The Fool
+is referring to his own words, 'I would have none but knaves follow [my
+advice to desert the King], since a fool gives it'; and the last two
+lines of his song mean, 'The knave who runs away follows the advice
+given by a fool; but I, the fool, shall not follow my own advice by
+turning knave.'
+
+For the ideas compare the striking passage in _Timon_, I. i. 64 ff.
+
+
+3. '_Decline your head._'
+
+At IV. ii. 18 Goneril, dismissing Edmund in the presence of Oswald,
+says:
+
+                                  This trusty servant
+     Shall pass between us: ere long you are like to hear,
+     If you dare venture in your own behalf,
+     A mistress's command. Wear this; spare speech;
+     Decline your head: this kiss, if it durst speak,
+     Would stretch thy spirits up into the air.
+
+I copy Furness's note on 'Decline': 'STEEVENS thinks that Goneril bids
+Edmund decline his head that she might, while giving him a kiss, appear
+to Oswald merely to be whispering to him. But this, WRIGHT says, is
+giving Goneril credit for too much delicacy, and Oswald was a
+"serviceable villain." DELIUS suggests that perhaps she wishes to put a
+chain around his neck.'
+
+Surely 'Decline your head' is connected, not with 'Wear this' (whatever
+'this' may be), but with 'this kiss,' etc. Edmund is a good deal taller
+than Goneril, and must stoop to be kissed.
+
+
+4. _Self-cover'd_.
+
+At IV. ii. 59 Albany, horrified at the passions of anger, hate, and
+contempt expressed in his wife's face, breaks out:
+
+                               See thyself, devil!
+             Proper deformity seems not in the fiend
+             So horrid as in woman.
+
+     _Gon._                          O vain fool!
+
+     _Alb._  Thou changed and self-cover'd thing, for shame,
+             Be-monster not thy feature. Were't my fitness
+             To let these hands obey my blood,
+             They are apt enough to dislocate and tear
+             Thy flesh and bones: howe'er thou art a fiend,
+             A woman's shape doth shield thee.
+
+The passage has been much discussed, mainly because of the strange
+expression 'self-cover'd,' for which of course emendations have been
+proposed. The general meaning is clear. Albany tells his wife that she
+is a devil in a woman's shape, and warns her not to cast off that shape
+by be-monstering her feature (appearance), since it is this shape alone
+that protects her from his wrath. Almost all commentators go astray
+because they imagine that, in the words 'thou changed and self-cover'd
+thing,' Albany is speaking to Goneril as a _woman_ who has been changed
+into a fiend. Really he is addressing her as a fiend which has changed
+its own shape and assumed that of a woman; and I suggest that
+'self-cover'd' means either 'which hast covered or concealed thyself,'
+or 'whose self is covered' [so Craig in Arden edition], not (what of
+course it ought to mean) 'which hast been covered _by_ thyself.'
+
+Possibly the last lines of this passage (which does not appear in the
+Folios) should be arranged thus:
+
+             To let these hands obey my blood, they're apt enough
+             To dislocate and tear thy flesh and bones:
+             Howe'er thou art a fiend, a woman's shape
+             Doth shield thee.
+
+     _Gon._                 Marry, your manhood now--
+
+     _Alb._                                          What news?
+
+
+5. _The stage-directions at_ V. i. 37, 39.
+
+In V. i. there first enter Edmund, Regan, and their army or soldiers:
+then, at line 18, Albany, Goneril, and their army or soldiers. Edmund
+and Albany speak very stiffly to one another, and Goneril bids them
+defer their private quarrels and attend to business. Then follows this
+passage (according to the modern texts):
+
+     _Alb._                    Let's then determine
+             With the ancient of war on our proceedings.
+
+     _Edm._  I shall attend you presently at your tent.
+
+     _Reg._  Sister, you'll go with us?
+
+     _Gon._  No.
+
+     _Reg._  'Tis most convenient: pray you, go with us.
+
+     _Gon._  [_Aside_] O, ho, I know the riddle.--I will go.
+
+               _As they are going out, enter_ EDGAR _disguised._
+
+     _Edg._  If e'er your grace had speech with man so poor,
+             Hear me one word.
+
+     _Alb._                   I'll overtake you. Speak.
+
+                              [_Exeunt all but_ ALBANY _and_ EDGAR.
+
+It would appear from this that all the leading persons are to go to a
+Council of War with the ancient (plural) in Albany's tent; and they are
+going out, followed by their armies, when Edgar comes in. Why in the
+world, then, should Goneril propose (as she apparently does) to absent
+herself from the Council; and why, still more, should Regan object to
+her doing so? This is a question which always perplexed me, and I could
+not believe in the only answers I ever found suggested, viz., that Regan
+wanted to keep Edmund and Goneril together in order that she might
+observe them (Moberly, quoted in Furness), or that she could not bear to
+lose sight of Goneril, for fear Goneril should effect a meeting with
+Edmund after the Council (Delius, if I understand him).
+
+But I find in Koppel what seems to be the solution
+(Verbesserungsvorschlaege, p. 127 f.). He points out that the modern
+stage-directions are wrong. For the modern direction 'As they are going
+out, enter Edgar disguised,' the Ff. read, 'Exeunt both the armies.
+Enter Edgar.' For 'Exeunt all but Albany and Edgar' the Ff. have
+nothing, but Q1 has 'exeunt' after 'word.' For the first direction
+Koppel would read, 'Exeunt Regan, Goneril, Gentlemen, and Soldiers': for
+the second he would read, after 'overtake you,' 'Exit Edmund.'
+
+This makes all clear. Albany proposes a Council of War. Edmund assents,
+and says he will come at once to Albany's tent for that purpose. The
+Council will consist of Albany, Edmund, and the ancient of war. Regan,
+accordingly, is going away with her soldiers; but she observes that
+Goneril shows no sign of moving with _her_ soldiers; and she at once
+suspects that Goneril means to attend the Council in order to be with
+Edmund. Full of jealousy, she invites Goneril to go with _her_. Goneril
+refuses, but then, seeing Regan's motive, contemptuously and ironically
+consents (I doubt if 'O ho, I know the riddle' should be 'aside,' as in
+modern editions, following Capell). Accordingly the two sisters go out,
+followed by their soldiers; and Edmund and Albany are just going out, in
+a different direction, to Albany's tent when Edgar enters. His words
+cause Albany to stay; Albany says to Edmund, as Edmund leaves, 'I'll
+overtake you'; and then, turning to Edgar, bids him 'speak.'
+
+
+6. V. iii. 151 ff.
+
+When Edmund falls in combat with the disguised Edgar, Albany produces
+the letter from Goneril to Edmund, which Edgar had found in Oswald's
+pocket and had handed over to Albany. This letter suggested to Edmund
+the murder of Albany. The passage in the Globe edition is as follows:
+
+     _Gon._                  This is practice, Gloucester:
+             By the law of arms thou wast not bound to answer
+             An unknown opposite: thou art not vanquish'd,
+             But cozen'd and beguiled.
+
+     _Alb._                           Shut your mouth, dame,
+             Or with this paper shall I stop it: Hold, sir;
+             Thou worse than any name, read thy own evil:
+             No tearing, lady; I perceive you know it.
+                                   [_Gives the letter to Edmund._
+
+     _Gon._  Say, if I do, the laws are mine, not thine:
+             Who can arraign me for't?
+
+     _Alb._                            Most monstrous! oh!
+             Know'st thou this paper?
+
+     _Gon._                       Ask me not what I know. [_Exit._
+
+     _Alb._  Go after her: she's desperate: govern her.
+
+     _Edm._  What you have charged me with, that have I done;
+             And more, much more; the time will bring it out.
+             'Tis past, and so am I. But what art thou
+             That hast this fortune on me?
+
+The first of the stage-directions is not in the Qq. or Ff.: it was
+inserted by Johnson. The second ('Exit') is both in the Qq. and in the
+Ff., but the latter place it after the words 'arraign me for't.' And
+they give the words 'Ask me not what I know' to Edmund, not to Goneril,
+as in the Qq. (followed by the Globe).
+
+I will not go into the various views of these lines, but will simply say
+what seems to me most probable. It does not matter much where precisely
+Goneril's 'exit' comes; but I believe the Folios are right in giving the
+words 'Ask me not what I know' to Edmund. It has been pointed out by
+Knight that the question 'Know'st thou this paper?' cannot very well be
+addressed to Goneril, for Albany has already said to her, 'I perceive
+you know it.' It is possible to get over this difficulty by saying that
+Albany wants her confession: but there is another fact which seems to
+have passed unnoticed. When Albany is undoubtedly speaking to his wife,
+he uses the plural pronoun, 'Shut _your_ mouth, dame,' 'No tearing,
+lady; I perceive _you_ know it.' When then he asks 'Know'st _thou_ this
+paper?' he is probably _not_ speaking to her.
+
+I should take the passage thus. At 'Hold, sir,' [omitted in Qq.] Albany
+holds the letter out towards Edmund for him to see, or possibly gives it
+to him.[279] The next line, with its 'thou,' is addressed to Edmund,
+whose 'reciprocal vows' are mentioned in the letter. Goneril snatches at
+it to tear it up: and Albany, who does not know whether Edmund ever saw
+the letter or not, says to her 'I perceive _you_ know it,' the 'you'
+being emphatic (her very wish to tear it showed she knew what was in
+it). She practically admits her knowledge, defies him, and goes out to
+kill herself. He exclaims in horror at her, and, turning again to
+Edmund, asks if _he_ knows it. Edmund, who of course does not know it,
+refuses to answer (like Iago), not (like Iago) out of defiance, but from
+chivalry towards Goneril; and, having refused to answer _this_ charge,
+he goes on to admit the charges brought against himself previously by
+Albany (82 f.) and Edgar (130 f.). I should explain the change from
+'you' to 'thou' in his speech by supposing that at first he is speaking
+to Albany and Edgar together.
+
+
+7. V. iii. 278.
+
+Lear, looking at Kent, asks,
+
+                                        Who are you?
+             Mine eyes are not o' the best: I'll tell you straight.
+
+     _Kent._ If fortune brag of two she loved _and_ hated (Qq. _or_),
+             One of them we behold.
+
+Kent is not answering Lear, nor is he speaking of himself. He is
+speaking of Lear. The best interpretation is probably that of Malone,
+according to which Kent means, 'We see the man most hated by Fortune,
+whoever may be the man she has loved best'; and perhaps it is supported
+by the variation of the text in the Qq., though their texts are so bad
+in this scene that their support is worth little. But it occurs to me as
+possible that the meaning is rather: 'Did Fortune ever show the extremes
+_both_ of her love _and_ of her hatred to any other man as she has shown
+them to this man?'
+
+
+8. _The last lines._
+
+     _Alb._  Bear them from hence. Our present business
+             Is general woe. [_To Kent and Edgar_] Friends of my
+               soul, you twain
+             Rule in this realm, and the gored state sustain.
+
+     _Kent._ I have a journey, sir, shortly to go;
+             My master calls me, I must not say no.
+
+     _Alb._  The weight of this sad time we must obey;
+             Speak what we feel, not what we ought to say.
+             The oldest hath borne most: we that are young
+             Shall never see so much, nor live so long.
+
+So the Globe. The stage-direction (right, of course) is Johnson's. The
+last four lines are given by the Ff. to Edgar, by the Qq. to Albany. The
+Qq. read '_have_ borne most.'
+
+To whom ought the last four lines to be given, and what do they mean? It
+is proper that the principal person should speak last, and this is in
+favour of Albany. But in this scene at any rate the Ff., which give the
+speech to Edgar, have the better text (though Ff. 2, 3, 4, make Kent die
+after his two lines!); Kent has answered Albany, but Edgar has not; and
+the lines seem to be rather more appropriate to Edgar. For the 'gentle
+reproof' of Kent's despondency (if this phrase of Halliwell's is right)
+is like Edgar; and, although we have no reason to suppose that Albany
+was not young, there is nothing to prove his youth.
+
+As to the meaning of the last two lines (a poor conclusion to such a
+play) I should suppose that 'the oldest' is not Lear, but 'the oldest of
+us,' viz., Kent, the one survivor of the old generation: and this is the
+more probable if there _is_ a reference to him in the preceding lines.
+The last words seem to mean, 'We that are young shall never see so much
+_and yet_ live so long'; _i.e._ if we suffer so much, we shall not bear
+it as he has. If the Qq. 'have' is right, the reference is to Lear,
+Gloster and Kent.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[Footnote 278: The 'beacon' which he bids approach is not the moon, as
+Pope supposed. The moon was up and shining some time ago (II. ii. 35),
+and lines 1 and 141-2 imply that not much of the night is left.]
+
+[Footnote 279: 'Hold' can mean 'take'; but the word 'this' in line 160
+('Know'st thou this paper?') favours the idea that the paper is still in
+Albany's hand.]
+
+
+
+
+NOTE Z.
+
+SUSPECTED INTERPOLATIONS IN _MACBETH_.
+
+
+I have assumed in the text that almost the whole of _Macbeth_ is
+genuine; and, to avoid the repetition of arguments to be found in other
+books,[280] I shall leave this opinion unsupported. But among the
+passages that have been questioned or rejected there are two which seem
+to me open to serious doubt. They are those in which Hecate appears:
+viz. the whole of III. v.; and IV. i. 39-43.
+
+These passages have been suspected (1) because they contain
+stage-directions for two songs which have been found in Middleton's
+_Witch_; (2) because they can be excised without leaving the least trace
+of their excision; and (3) because they contain lines incongruous with
+the spirit and atmosphere of the rest of the Witch-scenes: _e.g._ III.
+v. 10 f.:
+
+                     all you have done
+     Hath been but for a wayward son,
+     Spiteful and wrathful, who, as others do,
+     Loves for his own ends, not for you;
+
+and IV. i. 41, 2:
+
+     And now about the cauldron sing,
+     Like elves and fairies in a ring.
+
+The idea of sexual relation in the first passage, and the trivial
+daintiness of the second (with which cf. III. v. 34,
+
+     Hark! I am call'd; my little spirit, see,
+     Sits in a foggy cloud, and stays for me)
+
+suit Middleton's Witches quite well, but Shakespeare's not at all; and
+it is difficult to believe that, if Shakespeare had meant to introduce a
+personage supreme over the Witches, he would have made her so
+unimpressive as this Hecate. (It may be added that the original
+stage-direction at IV. i. 39, 'Enter Hecat and the other three Witches,'
+is suspicious.)
+
+I doubt if the second and third of these arguments, taken alone, would
+justify a very serious suspicion of interpolation; but the fact,
+mentioned under (1), that the play has here been meddled with, trebles
+their weight. And it gives some weight to the further fact that these
+passages resemble one another, and differ from the bulk of the other
+Witch passages, in being iambic in rhythm. (It must, however, be
+remembered that, supposing Shakespeare _did_ mean to introduce Hecate,
+he might naturally use a special rhythm for the parts where she
+appeared.)
+
+The same rhythm appears in a third passage which has been doubted: IV.
+i. 125-132. But this is not _quite_ on a level with the other two; for
+(1), though it is possible to suppose the Witches, as well as the
+Apparitions, to vanish at 124, and Macbeth's speech to run straight on
+to 133, the cut is not so clean as in the other cases; (2) it is not at
+all clear that Hecate (the most suspicious element) is supposed to be
+present. The original stage-direction at 133 is merely 'The Witches
+Dance, and vanish'; and even if Hecate had been present before, she
+might have vanished at 43, as Dyce makes her do.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[Footnote 280: _E.g._ Mr. Chambers's excellent little edition in the
+Warwick series.]
+
+
+
+
+NOTE AA.
+
+HAS _MACBETH_ BEEN ABRIDGED?
+
+
+_Macbeth_ is a very short play, the shortest of all Shakespeare's except
+the _Comedy of Errors_. It contains only 1993 lines, while _King Lear_
+contains 3298, _Othello_ 3324, and _Hamlet_ 3924. The next shortest of
+the tragedies is _Julius Caesar_, which has 2440 lines. (The figures are
+Mr. Fleay's. I may remark that for our present purpose we want the
+number of the lines in the first Folio, not those in modern composite
+texts.)
+
+Is there any reason to think that the play has been shortened? I will
+briefly consider this question, so far as it can be considered apart
+from the wider one whether Shakespeare's play was re-handled by
+Middleton or some one else.
+
+That the play, as we have it, is _slightly_ shorter than the play
+Shakespeare wrote seems not improbable. (1) We have no Quarto of
+_Macbeth_; and generally, where we have a Quarto or Quartos of a play,
+we find them longer than the Folio text. (2) There are perhaps a few
+signs of omission in our text (over and above the plentiful signs of
+corruption). I will give one example (I. iv. 33-43). Macbeth and Banquo,
+returning from their victories, enter the presence of Duncan (14), who
+receives them with compliments and thanks, which they acknowledge. He
+then speaks as follows:
+
+                        My plenteous joys,
+     Wanton in fulness, seek to hide themselves
+     In drops of sorrow. Sons, kinsmen, thanes,
+     And you whose places are the nearest, know,
+     We will establish our estate upon
+     Our eldest, Malcolm, whom we name hereafter
+     The Prince of Cumberland; which honour must
+     Not unaccompanied invest him only,
+     But signs of nobleness, like stars, shall shine
+     On all deservers. From hence to Inverness,
+     And bind us further to you.
+
+Here the transition to the naming of Malcolm, for which there has been
+no preparation, is extremely sudden; and the matter, considering its
+importance, is disposed of very briefly. But the abruptness and brevity
+of the sentence in which Duncan invites himself to Macbeth's castle are
+still more striking. For not a word has yet been said on the subject;
+nor is it possible to suppose that Duncan had conveyed his intention by
+message, for in that case Macbeth would of course have informed his wife
+of it in his letter (written in the interval between scenes iii. and
+iv.). It is difficult not to suspect some omission or curtailment here.
+On the other hand Shakespeare may have determined to sacrifice
+everything possible to the effect of rapidity in the First Act; and he
+may also have wished, by the suddenness and brevity of Duncan's
+self-invitation, to startle both Macbeth and the audience, and to make
+the latter feel that Fate is hurrying the King and the murderer to their
+doom.
+
+And that any _extensive_ omissions have been made seems not likely. (1)
+There is no internal evidence of the omission of anything essential to
+the plot. (2) Forman, who saw the play in 1610, mentions nothing which
+we do not find in our play; for his statement that Macbeth was made Duke
+of Northumberland is obviously due to a confused recollection of
+Malcolm's being made Duke of Cumberland. (3) Whereabouts could such
+omissions occur? Only in the first part, for the rest is full enough.
+And surely anyone who wanted to cut the play down would have operated,
+say, on Macbeth's talk with Banquo's murderers, or on III. vi., or on
+the very long dialogue of Malcolm and Macduff, instead of reducing the
+most exciting part of the drama. We might indeed suppose that
+Shakespeare himself originally wrote the first part more at length, and
+made the murder of Duncan come in the Third Act, and then _himself_
+reduced his matter so as to bring the murder back to its present place,
+perceiving in a flash of genius the extraordinary effect that might thus
+be produced. But, even if this idea suited those who believe in a
+rehandling of the play, what probability is there in it?
+
+Thus it seems most likely that the play always was an extremely short
+one. Can we, then, at all account for its shortness? It is possible, in
+the first place, that it was not composed originally for the public
+stage, but for some private, perhaps royal, occasion, when time was
+limited. And the presence of the passage about touching for the evil
+(IV. iii. 140 ff.) supports this idea. We must remember, secondly, that
+some of the scenes would take longer to perform than ordinary scenes of
+mere dialogue and action; _e.g._ the Witch-scenes, and the Battle-scenes
+in the last Act, for a broad-sword combat was an occasion for an
+exhibition of skill.[281] And, lastly, Shakespeare may well have felt
+that a play constructed and written like _Macbeth_, a play in which a
+kind of fever-heat is felt almost from beginning to end, and which
+offers very little relief by means of humorous or pathetic scenes, ought
+to be short, and would be unbearable if it lasted so long as _Hamlet_ or
+even _King Lear_. And in fact I do not think that, in reading, we _feel
+Macbeth_ to be short: certainly we are astonished when we hear that it
+is about half as long as _Hamlet_. Perhaps in the Shakespearean theatre
+too it appeared to occupy a longer time than the clock recorded.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[Footnote 281: These two considerations should also be borne in mind in
+regard to the exceptional shortness of the _Midsummer Night's Dream_ and
+the _Tempest_. Both contain scenes which, even on the Elizabethan stage,
+would take an unusual time to perform. And it has been supposed of each
+that it was composed to grace some wedding.]
+
+
+
+
+NOTE BB.
+
+THE DATE OF _MACBETH_. METRICAL TESTS.
+
+
+Dr. Forman saw _Macbeth_ performed at the Globe in 1610. The question is
+how much earlier its composition or first appearance is to be put.
+
+It is agreed that the date is not earlier than that of the accession of
+James I. in 1603. The style and versification would make an earlier date
+almost impossible. And we have the allusions to 'two-fold balls and
+treble sceptres' and to the descent of Scottish kings from Banquo; the
+undramatic description of touching for the King's Evil (James performed
+this ceremony); and the dramatic use of witchcraft, a matter on which
+James considered himself an authority.
+
+Some of these references would have their fullest effect early in
+James's reign. And on this ground, and on account both of resemblances
+in the characters of Hamlet and Macbeth, and of the use of the
+supernatural in the two plays, it has been held that _Macbeth_ was the
+tragedy that came next after _Hamlet_, or, at any rate, next after
+_Othello_.
+
+These arguments seem to me to have no force when set against those that
+point to a later date (about 1606) and place _Macbeth_ after _King
+Lear_.[282] And, as I have already observed, the probability is that it
+also comes after Shakespeare's part of _Timon_, and immediately before
+_Antony and Cleopatra_ and _Coriolanus_.
+
+I will first refer briefly to some of the older arguments in favour of
+this later date, and then more at length to those based on
+versification.
+
+(1) In II. iii. 4-5, 'Here's a farmer that hang'd himself on the
+expectation of plenty,' Malone found a reference to the exceptionally
+low price of wheat in 1606.
+
+(2) In the reference in the same speech to the equivocator who could
+swear in both scales and committed treason enough for God's sake, he
+found an allusion to the trial of the Jesuit Garnet, in the spring of
+1606, for complicity in the Gunpowder Treason and Plot. Garnet protested
+on his soul and salvation that he had not held a certain conversation,
+then was obliged to confess that he had, and thereupon 'fell into a
+large discourse defending equivocation.' This argument, which I have
+barely sketched, seems to me much weightier than the first; and its
+weight is increased by the further references to perjury and treason
+pointed out on p. 397.
+
+(3) Halliwell observed what appears to be an allusion to _Macbeth_ in
+the comedy of the _Puritan_, 4to, 1607: 'we'll ha' the ghost i' th'
+white sheet sit at upper end o' th' table'; and Malone had referred to a
+less striking parallel in _Caesar and Pompey_, also pub. 1607:
+
+     Why, think you, lords, that 'tis _ambition's spur_
+     That _pricketh_ Caesar to these high attempts?
+
+He also found a significance in the references in _Macbeth_ to the
+genius of Mark Antony being rebuked by Caesar, and to the insane root
+that takes the reason prisoner, as showing that Shakespeare, while
+writing _Macbeth_, was reading Plutarch's _Lives_, with a view to his
+next play _Antony and Cleopatra_ (S.R. 1608).
+
+(4) To these last arguments, which by themselves would be of little
+weight, I may add another, of which the same may be said. Marston's
+reminiscences of Shakespeare are only too obvious. In his _Dutch
+Courtezan_, 1605, I have noticed passages which recall _Othello_ and
+_King Lear_, but nothing that even faintly recalls _Macbeth_. But in
+reading _Sophonisba_, 1606, I was several times reminded of _Macbeth_
+(as well as, more decidedly, of _Othello_). I note the parallels for
+what they are worth.
+
+With _Sophonisba_, Act I. Sc. ii.:
+
+     Upon whose tops the Roman eagles stretch'd
+     Their large spread wings, which fann'd the evening aire
+     To us cold breath,
+
+cf. _Macbeth_ I. ii. 49:
+
+     Where the Norweyan banners flout the sky
+     And fan our people cold.
+
+Cf. _Sophonisba_, a page later: 'yet doubtful stood the fight,' with
+_Macbeth_, I. ii. 7, 'Doubtful it stood' ['Doubtful long it stood'?] In
+the same scene of _Macbeth_ the hero in fight is compared to an eagle,
+and his foes to sparrows; and in _Soph._ III. ii. Massinissa in fight is
+compared to a falcon, and his foes to fowls and lesser birds. I should
+not note this were it not that all these reminiscences (if they are
+such) recall one and the same scene. In _Sophonisba_ also there is a
+tremendous description of the witch Erictho (IV. i.), who says to the
+person consulting her, 'I know thy thoughts,' as the Witch says to
+Macbeth, of the Armed Head, 'He knows thy thought.'
+
+(5) The resemblances between _Othello_ and _King Lear_ pointed out on
+pp. 244-5 and in Note R. form, when taken in conjunction with other
+indications, an argument of some strength in favour of the idea that
+_King Lear_ followed directly on _Othello_.
+
+(6) There remains the evidence of style and especially of metre. I will
+not add to what has been said in the text concerning the former; but I
+wish to refer more fully to the latter, in so far as it can be
+represented by the application of metrical tests. It is impossible to
+argue here the whole question of these tests. I will only say that,
+while I am aware, and quite admit the force, of what can be said against
+the independent, rash, or incompetent use of them, I am fully convinced
+of their value when they are properly used.
+
+Of these tests, that of rhyme and that of feminine endings, discreetly
+employed, are of use in broadly distinguishing Shakespeare's plays into
+two groups, earlier and later, and also in marking out the very latest
+dramas; and the feminine-ending test is of service in distinguishing
+Shakespeare's part in _Henry VIII._ and the _Two Noble Kinsmen_. But
+neither of these tests has any power to separate plays composed within a
+few years of one another. There is significance in the fact that the
+_Winter's Tale_, the _Tempest_, _Henry VIII._, contain hardly any rhymed
+five-foot lines; but none, probably, in the fact that _Macbeth_ shows a
+higher percentage of such lines than _King Lear_, _Othello_, or
+_Hamlet_. The percentages of feminine endings, again, in the four
+tragedies, are almost conclusive against their being early plays, and
+would tend to show that they were not among the latest; but the
+differences in their respective percentages, which would place them in
+the chronological order _Hamlet_, _Macbeth_, _Othello_, _King Lear_
+(Koenig), or _Macbeth_, _Hamlet_, _Othello_, _King Lear_ (Hertzberg), are
+of scarcely any account.[283] Nearly all scholars, I think, would accept
+these statements.
+
+The really useful tests, in regard to plays which admittedly are not
+widely separated, are three which concern the endings of speeches and
+lines. It is practically certain that Shakespeare made his verse
+progressively less formal, by making the speeches end more and more
+often within a line and not at the close of it; by making the sense
+overflow more and more often from one line into another; and, at last,
+by sometimes placing at the end of a line a word on which scarcely any
+stress can be laid. The corresponding tests may be called the
+Speech-ending test, the Overflow test, and the Light and Weak Ending
+test.
+
+I. The Speech-ending test has been used by Koenig,[284] and I will first
+give some of his results. But I regret to say that I am unable to
+discover certainly the rule he has gone by. He omits speeches which are
+rhymed throughout, or which end with a rhymed couplet. And he counts
+only speeches which are 'mehrzeilig.' I suppose this means that he
+counts any speech consisting of two lines or more, but omits not only
+one-line speeches, but speeches containing more than one line but less
+than two; but I am not sure.
+
+In the plays admitted by everyone to be early the percentage of speeches
+ending with an incomplete line is quite small. In the _Comedy of
+Errors_, for example, it is only 0.6. It advances to 12.1 in _King
+John_, 18.3 in _Henry V._, and 21.6 in _As You Like It_. It rises
+quickly soon after, and in no play written (according to general belief)
+after about 1600 or 1601 is it less than 30. In the admittedly latest
+plays it rises much higher, the figures being as follows:--_Antony_
+77.5, _Cor._ 79, _Temp._ 84.5, _Cym._ 85, _Win. Tale_ 87.6, _Henry
+VIII._ (parts assigned to Shakespeare by Spedding) 89. Going back, now,
+to the four tragedies, we find the following figures: _Othello_ 41.4,
+_Hamlet_ 51.6, _Lear_ 60.9, _Macbeth_ 77.2. These figures place
+_Macbeth_ decidedly last, with a percentage practically equal to that of
+_Antony_, the first of the final group.
+
+I will now give my own figures for these tragedies, as they differ
+somewhat from Koenig's, probably because my method differs. (1) I have
+included speeches rhymed or ending with rhymes, mainly because I find
+that Shakespeare will sometimes (in later plays) end a speech which is
+partly rhymed with an incomplete line (_e.g. Ham._ III. ii. 187, and the
+last words of the play: or _Macb._ V. i. 87, V. ii. 31). And if such
+speeches are reckoned, as they surely must be (for they may be, and are,
+highly significant), those speeches which end with complete rhymed lines
+must also be reckoned. (2) I have counted any speech exceeding a line in
+length, however little the excess may be; _e.g._
+
+     I'll fight till from my bones my flesh be hacked.
+     Give me my armour:
+
+considering that the incomplete line here may be just as significant as
+an incomplete line ending a longer speech. If a speech begins within a
+line and ends brokenly, of course I have not counted it when it is
+equivalent to a five-foot line; _e.g._
+
+                       Wife, children, servants, all
+     That could be found:
+
+but I do count such a speech (they are very rare) as
+
+                        My lord, I do not know:
+     But truly I do fear it:
+
+for the same reason that I count
+
+                       You know not
+     Whether it was his wisdom or his fear.
+
+Of the speeches thus counted, those which end somewhere within the line
+I find to be in _Othello_ about 54 per cent.; in _Hamlet_ about 57; in
+_King Lear_ about 69; in _Macbeth_ about 75.[285] The order is the same
+as Koenig's, but the figures differ a good deal. I presume in the last
+three cases this comes from the difference in method; but I think
+Koenig's figures for _Othello_ cannot be right, for I have tried several
+methods and find that the result is in no case far from the result of my
+own, and I am almost inclined to conjecture that Koenig's 41.4 is really
+the percentage of speeches ending with the close of a line, which would
+give 58.6 for the percentage of the broken-ended speeches.[286]
+
+We shall find that other tests also would put _Othello_ before _Hamlet_,
+though close to it. This may be due to 'accident'--_i.e._ a cause or
+causes unknown to us; but I have sometimes wondered whether the last
+revision of _Hamlet_ may not have succeeded the composition of
+_Othello_. In this connection the following fact may be worth notice. It
+is well known that the differences of the Second Quarto of _Hamlet_ from
+the First are much greater in the last three Acts than in the first
+two--so much so that the editors of the Cambridge Shakespeare suggested
+that Q1 represents an old play, of which Shakespeare's rehandling had
+not then proceeded much beyond the Second Act, while Q2 represents his
+later completed rehandling. If that were so, the composition of the last
+three Acts would be a good deal later than that of the first two (though
+of course the first two would be revised at the time of the composition
+of the last three). Now I find that the percentage of speeches ending
+with a broken line is about 50 for the first two Acts, but about 62 for
+the last three. It is lowest in the first Act, and in the first two
+scenes of it is less than 32. The percentage for the last two Acts is
+about 65.
+
+II. The Enjambement or Overflow test is also known as the End-stopped
+and Run-on line test. A line may be called 'end-stopped' when the sense,
+as well as the metre, would naturally make one pause at its close;
+'run-on' when the mere sense would lead one to pass to the next line
+without any pause.[287] This distinction is in a great majority of cases
+quite easy to draw: in others it is difficult. The reader cannot judge
+by rules of grammar, or by marks of punctuation (for there is a distinct
+pause at the end of many a line where most editors print no stop): he
+must trust his ear. And readers will differ, one making a distinct pause
+where another does not. This, however, does not matter greatly, so long
+as the reader is consistent; for the important point is not the precise
+number of run-on lines in a play, but the difference in this matter
+between one play and another. Thus one may disagree with Koenig in his
+estimate of many instances, but one can see that he is consistent.
+
+In Shakespeare's early plays, 'overflows' are rare. In the _Comedy of
+Errors_, for example, their percentage is 12.9 according to Koenig[288]
+(who excludes rhymed lines and some others). In the generally admitted
+last plays they are comparatively frequent. Thus, according to Koenig,
+the percentage in the _Winter's Tale_ is 37.5, in the _Tempest_ 41.5, in
+_Antony_ 43.3, in _Coriolanus_ 45.9, in _Cymbeline_ 46, in the parts of
+_Henry VIII._ assigned by Spedding to Shakespeare 53.18. Koenig's results
+for the four tragedies are as follows: _Othello_, 19.5; _Hamlet_, 23.1;
+_King Lear_, 29.3; _Macbeth_, 36.6; (_Timon_, the whole play, 32.5).
+_Macbeth_ here again, therefore, stands decidedly last: indeed it stands
+near the first of the latest plays.
+
+And no one who has ever attended to the versification of _Macbeth_ will
+be surprised at these figures. It is almost obvious, I should say, that
+Shakespeare is passing from one system to another. Some passages show
+little change, but in others the change is almost complete. If the
+reader will compare two somewhat similar soliloquies, 'To be or not to
+be' and 'If it were done when 'tis done,' he will recognise this at
+once. Or let him search the previous plays, even _King Lear_, for twelve
+consecutive lines like these:
+
+     If it were done when 'tis done, then 'twere well
+     It were done quickly: if the assassination
+     Could trammel up the consequence, and catch
+     With his surcease success; that but this blow
+     Might be the be-all and the end-all here,
+     But here, upon this bank and shoal of time,
+     We 'ld jump the life to come. But in these cases
+     We still have judgement here; that we but teach
+     Bloody instructions, which, being taught, return
+     To plague the inventor: this even-handed justice
+     Commends the ingredients of our poison'd chalice
+     To our own lips.
+
+Or let him try to parallel the following (III. vi. 37 f.):
+
+                                     and this report
+             Hath so exasperate the king that he
+             Prepares for some attempt of war.
+
+     _Len._                      Sent he to Macduff?
+
+     _Lord._ He did: and with an absolute 'Sir, not I,'
+             The cloudy messenger turns me his back
+             And hums, as who should say 'You'll rue the time
+             That clogs me with this answer.'
+
+     _Len._                     And that well might
+             Advise him to a caution, to hold what distance
+             His wisdom can provide. Some holy angel
+             Fly to the court of England, and unfold
+             His message ere he come, that a swift blessing
+             May soon return to this our suffering country
+             Under a hand accurs'd!
+
+or this (IV. iii. 118 f.):
+
+                        Macduff, this noble passion,
+     Child of integrity, hath from my soul
+     Wiped the black scruples, reconciled my thoughts
+     To thy good truth and honour. Devilish Macbeth
+     By many of these trains hath sought to win me
+     Into his power, and modest wisdom plucks me
+     From over-credulous haste: but God above
+     Deal between thee and me! for even now
+     I put myself to thy direction, and
+     Unspeak mine own detraction, here abjure
+     The taints and blames I laid upon myself,
+     For strangers to my nature.
+
+I pass to another point. In the last illustration the reader will
+observe not only that 'overflows' abound, but that they follow one
+another in an unbroken series of nine lines. So long a series could not,
+probably, be found outside _Macbeth_ and the last plays. A series of two
+or three is not uncommon; but a series of more than three is rare in the
+early plays, and far from common in the plays of the second period
+(Koenig).
+
+I thought it might be useful for our present purpose, to count the
+series of four and upwards in the four tragedies, in the parts of
+_Timon_ attributed by Mr. Fleay to Shakespeare, and in _Coriolanus_, a
+play of the last period. I have not excluded rhymed lines in the two
+places where they occur, and perhaps I may say that my idea of an
+'overflow' is more exacting than Koenig's. The reader will understand the
+following table at once if I say that, according to it, _Othello_
+contains three passages where a series of four successive overflowing
+lines occurs, and two passages where a series of five such lines occurs:
+
+-----------------------------------------------------------------
+                 4    5    6    7    8    9   10   No. of Lines
+                                                    (Fleay).
+-----------------------------------------------------------------
+Othello,         3    2   --   --   --   --   --     2,758
+Hamlet,          7   --   --   --   --   --   --     2,571
+Lear,            6    2   --   --   --   --   --     2,312
+Timon,           7    2    1    1   --   --   --     1,031 (?)
+Macbeth,         7    5    1    1   --    1   --     1,706
+Coriolanus,     16   14    7    1    2   --    1     2,563
+-----------------------------------------------------------------
+
+(The figures for _Macbeth_ and _Timon_ in the last column must be borne
+in mind. I observed nothing in the non-Shakespeare part of _Timon_ that
+would come into the table, but I did not make a careful search. I felt
+some doubt as to two of the four series in _Othello_ and again in
+_Hamlet_, and also whether the ten-series in _Coriolanus_ should not be
+put in column 7).
+
+III. _The light and weak ending test._
+
+We have just seen that in some cases a doubt is felt whether there is an
+'overflow' or not. The fact is that the 'overflow' has many degrees of
+intensity. If we take, for example, the passage last quoted, and if with
+Koenig we consider the line
+
+     The taints and blames I laid upon myself
+
+to be run-on (as I do not), we shall at least consider the overflow to
+be much less distinct than those in the lines
+
+                               but God above
+     Deal between thee and me! for even now
+     I put myself to thy direction, and
+     Unspeak my own detraction, here abjure
+
+And of these four lines the third runs on into its successor at much the
+greatest speed.
+
+'Above,' 'now,' 'abjure,' are not light or weak endings: 'and' is a weak
+ending. Prof. Ingram gave the name weak ending to certain words on which
+it is scarcely possible to dwell at all, and which, therefore,
+precipitate the line which they close into the following. Light endings
+are certain words which have the same effect in a slighter degree. For
+example, _and_, _from_, _in_, _of_, are weak endings; _am_, _are_, _I_,
+_he_, are light endings.
+
+The test founded on this distinction is, within its limits, the most
+satisfactory of all, partly because the work of its author can be
+absolutely trusted. The result of its application is briefly as follows.
+Until quite a late date light and weak endings occur in Shakespeare's
+works in such small numbers as hardly to be worth consideration.[289]
+But in the well-defined group of last plays the numbers both of light
+and of weak endings increase greatly, and, on the whole, the increase
+apparently is progressive (I say apparently, because the order in which
+the last plays are generally placed depends to some extent on the test
+itself). I give Prof. Ingram's table of these plays, premising that in
+_Pericles_, _Two Noble Kinsmen_, and _Henry VIII._ he uses only those
+parts of the plays which are attributed by certain authorities to
+Shakespeare (_New Shakspere Soc. Trans._, 1874).
+
+------------------------------------------------------------------------
+               | Light  |      | Percentage  | Percentage  | Percentage
+               |endings.| Weak.| of light in | of weak in  |     of
+               |        |      | verse lines.| verse lines.|    both.
+------------------------------------------------------------------------
+Antony &       |        |      |             |             |
+  Cleopatra,   |   71   |  28  |   2.53      |   1.        |    3.53
+Coriolanus,    |   60   |  44  |   2.34      |   1.71      |    4.05
+Pericles,      |   20   |  10  |   2.78      |   1.39      |    4.17
+Tempest,       |   42   |  25  |   2.88      |   1.71      |    4.59
+Cymbeline,     |   78   |  52  |   2.90      |   1.93      |    4.83
+Winter's Tale, |   57   |  43  |   3.12      |   2.36      |    5.48
+Two Noble      |        |      |             |             |
+  Kinsmen,     |   50   |  34  |   3.63      |   2.47      |    6.10
+Henry VIII.,   |   45   |  37  |   3.93      |   3.23      |    7.16
+------------------------------------------------------------------------
+
+Now, let us turn to our four tragedies (with _Timon_). Here again we
+have one doubtful play, and I give the figures for the whole of _Timon_,
+and again for the parts of _Timon_ assigned to Shakespeare by Mr. Fleay,
+both as they appear in his amended text and as they appear in the Globe
+(perhaps the better text).
+
+-----------------------------------------
+                      |  Light. |  Weak.
+-----------------------------------------
+Hamlet,               |    8    |    0
+Othello,              |    2    |    0
+Lear,                 |    5    |    1
+Timon (whole),        |   16    |    5
+      (Sh. in Fleay), |   14    |    7
+      (Sh. in Globe), |   13    |    2
+Macbeth,              |   21    |    2
+-----------------------------------------
+
+Now here the figures for the first three plays tell us practically
+nothing. The tendency to a freer use of these endings is not visible. As
+to _Timon_, the number of weak endings, I think, tells us little, for
+probably only two or three are Shakespeare's; but the rise in the number
+of light endings is so marked as to be significant. And most significant
+is this rise in the case of _Macbeth_, which, like Shakespeare's part of
+_Timon_, is much shorter than the preceding plays. It strongly confirms
+the impression that in _Macbeth_ we have the transition to Shakespeare's
+last style, and that the play is the latest of the five tragedies.[290]
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[Footnote 282: The fact that _King Lear_ was performed at Court on
+December 26, 1606, is of course very far from showing that it had never
+been performed before.]
+
+[Footnote 283: I have not tried to discover the source of the difference
+between these two reckonings.]
+
+[Footnote 284: _Der Vers in Shakspere's Dramen_, 1888.]
+
+[Footnote 285: In the parts of _Timon_ (Globe text) assigned by Mr.
+Fleay to Shakespeare, I find the percentage to be about 74.5. Koenig
+gives 62.8 as the percentage in the whole of the play.]
+
+[Footnote 286: I have noted also what must be a mistake in the case of
+Pericles. Koenig gives 17.1 as the percentage of the speeches with broken
+ends. I was astounded to see the figure, considering the style in the
+undoubtedly Shakespearean parts; and I find that, on my method, in Acts
+III., IV., V. the percentage is about 71, in the first two Acts (which
+show very slight, if any, traces of Shakespeare's hand) about 19. I
+cannot imagine the origin of the mistake here.]
+
+[Footnote 287: I put the matter thus, instead of saying that, with a
+run-on line, one does pass to the next line without any pause, because,
+in common with many others, I should not in any case whatever _wholly_
+ignore the fact that one line ends and another begins.]
+
+[Footnote 288: These overflows are what Koenig calls 'schroffe
+Enjambements,' which he considers to correspond with Furnivall's 'run-on
+lines.']
+
+[Footnote 289: The number of light endings, however, in _Julius Caesar_
+(10) and _All's Well_ (12) is worth notice.]
+
+[Footnote 290: The Editors of the Cambridge Shakespeare might appeal in
+support of their view, that parts of Act V. are not Shakespeare's, to
+the fact that the last of the light endings occurs at IV. iii. 165.]
+
+
+
+
+NOTE CC.
+
+WHEN WAS THE MURDER OF DUNCAN FIRST PLOTTED?
+
+
+A good many readers probably think that, when Macbeth first met the
+Witches, he was perfectly innocent; but a much larger number would say
+that he had already harboured a vaguely guilty ambition, though he had
+not faced the idea of murder. And I think there can be no doubt that
+this is the obvious and natural interpretation of the scene. Only it is
+almost necessary to go rather further, and to suppose that his guilty
+ambition, whatever its precise form, was known to his wife and shared by
+her. Otherwise, surely, she would not, on reading his letter, so
+instantaneously assume that the King must be murdered in their castle;
+nor would Macbeth, as soon as he meets her, be aware (as he evidently
+is) that this thought is in her mind.
+
+But there is a famous passage in _Macbeth_ which, closely considered,
+seems to require us to go further still, and to suppose that, at some
+time before the action of the play begins, the husband and wife had
+explicitly discussed the idea of murdering Duncan at some favourable
+opportunity, and had agreed to execute this idea. Attention seems to
+have been first drawn to this passage by Koester in vol. I. of the
+_Jahrbuecher d. deutschen Shakespeare-gesellschaft_, and on it is based
+the interpretation of the play in Werder's very able _Vorlesungen ueber
+Macbeth_.
+
+The passage occurs in I. vii., where Lady Macbeth is urging her husband
+to the deed:
+
+     _Macb._                                  Prithee, peace:
+               I dare do all that may become a man;
+               Who dares do more is none.
+
+     _Lady M._                         What beast was't, then,
+               That made you break this enterprise to me?
+               When you durst do it, then you were a man;
+               And, to be more than what you were, you would
+               Be so much more the man. Nor time nor place
+               Did then adhere, and yet you would make both:
+               They have made themselves, and that their fitness now
+               Does unmake you. I have given suck, and know
+               How tender 'tis to love the babe that milks me:
+               I would, while it was smiling in my face,
+               Have pluck'd my nipple from his boneless gums,
+               And dash'd the brains out, had I so sworn as you
+               Have done to this.
+
+Here Lady Macbeth asserts (1) that Macbeth proposed the murder to her:
+(2) that he did so at a time when there was no opportunity to attack
+Duncan, no 'adherence' of 'time' and 'place': (3) that he declared he
+wou'd _make_ an opportunity, and swore to carry out the murder.
+
+Now it is possible that Macbeth's 'swearing' might have occurred in an
+interview off the stage between scenes v. and vi., or scenes vi. and
+vii.; and, if in that interview Lady Macbeth had with difficulty worked
+her husband up to a resolution, her irritation at his relapse, in sc.
+vii., would be very natural. But, as for Macbeth's first proposal of
+murder, it certainly does not occur in our play, nor could it possibly
+occur in any interview off the stage; for when Macbeth and his wife
+first meet, 'time' and 'place' _do_ adhere; 'they have made themselves.'
+The conclusion would seem to be, either that the proposal of the murder,
+and probably the oath, occurred in a scene at the very beginning of the
+play, which scene has been lost or cut out; or else that Macbeth
+proposed, and swore to execute, the murder at some time prior to the
+action of the play.[291] The first of these hypotheses is most
+improbable, and we seem driven to adopt the second, unless we consent to
+burden Shakespeare with a careless mistake in a very critical passage.
+
+And, apart from unwillingness to do this, we can find a good deal to say
+in favour of the idea of a plan formed at a past time. It would explain
+Macbeth's start of fear at the prophecy of the kingdom. It would explain
+why Lady Macbeth, on receiving his letter, immediately resolves on
+action; and why, on their meeting, each knows that murder is in the mind
+of the other. And it is in harmony with her remarks on his probable
+shrinking from the act, to which, _ex hypothesi_, she had already
+thought it necessary to make him pledge himself by an oath.
+
+Yet I find it very difficult to believe in this interpretation. It is
+not merely that the interest of Macbeth's struggle with himself and with
+his wife would be seriously diminished if we felt he had been through
+all this before. I think this would be so; but there are two more
+important objections. In the first place the violent agitation described
+in the words,
+
+     If good, why do I yield to that suggestion
+     Whose horrid image doth unfix my hair
+     And make my seated heart knock at my ribs,
+
+would surely not be natural, even in Macbeth, if the idea of murder were
+already quite familiar to him through conversation with his wife, and if
+he had already done more than 'yield' to it. It is not as if the Witches
+had told him that Duncan was coming to his house. In that case the
+perception that the moment had come to execute a merely general design
+might well appal him. But all that he hears is that he will one day be
+King--a statement which, supposing this general design, would not point
+to any immediate action.[292] And, in the second place, it is hard to
+believe that, if Shakespeare really had imagined the murder planned and
+sworn to before the action of the play, he would have written the first
+six scenes in such a manner that practically all readers imagine quite
+another state of affairs, and _continue to imagine it_ even after they
+have read in scene vii. the passage which is troubling us. Is it likely,
+to put it otherwise, that his idea was one which nobody seems to have
+divined till late in the nineteenth century? And for what possible
+reason could he refrain from making this idea clear to his audience, as
+he might so easily have done in the third scene?[293] It seems very much
+more likely that he himself imagined the matter as nearly all his
+readers do.
+
+But, in that case, what are we to say of this passage? I will answer
+first by explaining the way in which I understood it before I was aware
+that it had caused so much difficulty. I supposed that an interview had
+taken place after scene v., a scene which shows Macbeth shrinking, and
+in which his last words were 'we will speak further.' In this interview,
+I supposed, his wife had so wrought upon him that he had at last yielded
+and pledged himself by oath to do the murder. As for her statement that
+he had 'broken the enterprise' to her, I took it to refer to his letter
+to her,--a letter written when time and place did not adhere, for he did
+not yet know that Duncan was coming to visit him. In the letter he does
+not, of course, openly 'break the enterprise' to her, and it is not
+likely that he would do such a thing in a letter; but if they had had
+ambitious conversations, in which each felt that some half-formed guilty
+idea was floating in the mind of the other, she might naturally take the
+words of the letter as indicating much more than they said; and then in
+her passionate contempt at his hesitation, and her passionate eagerness
+to overcome it, she might easily accuse him, doubtless with
+exaggeration, and probably with conscious exaggeration, of having
+actually proposed the murder. And Macbeth, knowing that when he wrote
+the letter he really had been thinking of murder, and indifferent to
+anything except the question whether murder should be done, would easily
+let her statement pass unchallenged.
+
+This interpretation still seems to me not unnatural. The alternative
+(unless we adopt the idea of an agreement prior to the action of the
+play) is to suppose that Lady Macbeth refers throughout the passage to
+some interview subsequent to her husband's return, and that, in making
+her do so, Shakespeare simply forgot her speeches on welcoming Macbeth
+home, and also forgot that at any such interview 'time' and 'place' did
+'adhere.' It is easy to understand such forgetfulness in a spectator and
+even in a reader; but it is less easy to imagine it in a poet whose
+conception of the two characters throughout these scenes was evidently
+so burningly vivid.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[Footnote 291: The 'swearing' _might_ of course, on this view, occur off
+the stage within the play; but there is no occasion to suppose this if
+we are obliged to put the proposal outside the play.]
+
+[Footnote 292: To this it might be answered that the effect of the
+prediction was to make him feel, 'Then I shall succeed if I carry out
+the plan of murder,' and so make him yield to the idea over again. To
+which I can only reply, anticipating the next argument, 'How is it that
+Shakespeare wrote the speech in such a way that practically everybody
+supposes the idea of murder to be occurring to Macbeth for the first
+time?']
+
+[Footnote 293: It might be answered here again that the actor,
+instructed by Shakespeare, could act the start of fear so as to convey
+quite clearly the idea of definite guilt. And this is true; but we ought
+to do our best to interpret the text before we have recourse to this
+kind of suggestion.]
+
+
+
+
+NOTE DD.
+
+DID LADY MACBETH REALLY FAINT?
+
+
+In the scene of confusion where the murder of Duncan is discovered,
+Macbeth and Lennox return from the royal chamber; Lennox describes the
+grooms who, as it seemed, had done the deed:
+
+             Their hands and faces were all badged with blood;
+             So were their daggers, which unwiped we found
+             Upon their pillows:
+             They stared, and were distracted; no man's life
+             Was to be trusted with them.
+
+     _Macb._ O, yet I do repent me of my fury
+             That I did kill them.
+
+     _Macd._                       Wherefore did you so?
+
+     _Macb._ Who can be wise, amazed, temperate and furious,
+             Loyal and neutral, in a moment? No man:
+             The expedition of my violent love
+             Outrun the pauser, reason. Here lay Duncan,
+             His silver skin laced with his golden blood;
+             And his gash'd stabs look'd like a breach in nature
+             For ruin's wasteful entrance: there, the murderers,
+             Steep'd in the colours of their trade, their daggers
+             Unmannerly breech'd with gore: who could refrain,
+             That had a heart to love, and in that heart
+             Courage to make's love known?
+
+At this point Lady Macbeth exclaims, 'Help me hence, ho!' Her husband
+takes no notice, but Macduff calls out 'Look to the lady.' This, after a
+few words 'aside' between Malcolm and Donalbain, is repeated by Banquo,
+and, very shortly after, all except Duncan's sons _exeunt_. (The
+stage-direction 'Lady Macbeth is carried out,' after Banquo's
+exclamation 'Look to the lady,' is not in the Ff. and was introduced by
+Rowe. If the Ff. are right, she can hardly have fainted _away_. But the
+point has no importance here.)
+
+Does Lady Macbeth really turn faint, or does she pretend? The latter
+seems to have been the general view, and Whately pointed out that
+Macbeth's indifference betrays his consciousness that the faint was not
+real. But to this it may be answered that, if he believed it to be real,
+he would equally show indifference, in order to display his horror at
+the murder. And Miss Helen Faucit and others have held that there was no
+pretence.
+
+In favour of the pretence it may be said (1) that Lady Macbeth, who
+herself took back the daggers, saw the old King in his blood, and
+smeared the grooms, was not the woman to faint at a mere description;
+(2) that she saw her husband over-acting his part, and saw the faces of
+the lords, and wished to end the scene,--which she succeeded in doing.
+
+But to the last argument it may be replied that she would not willingly
+have run the risk of leaving her husband to act his part alone. And for
+other reasons (indicated above, p. 373 f.) I decidedly believe that she
+is meant really to faint. She was no Goneril. She knew that she could
+not kill the King herself; and she never expected to have to carry back
+the daggers, see the bloody corpse, and smear the faces and hands of the
+grooms. But Macbeth's agony greatly alarmed her, and she was driven to
+the scene of horror to complete his task; and what an impression it made
+on her we know from that sentence uttered in her sleep, 'Yet who would
+have thought the old man to have had so much blood in him?' She had now,
+further, gone through the ordeal of the discovery. Is it not quite
+natural that the reaction should come, and that it should come just when
+Macbeth's description recalls the scene which had cost her the greatest
+effort? Is it not likely, besides, that the expression on the faces of
+the lords would force her to realise, what before the murder she had
+refused to consider, the horror and the suspicion it must excite? It is
+noticeable, also, that she is far from carrying out her intention of
+bearing a part in making their 'griefs and clamours roar upon his death'
+(I. vii. 78). She has left it all to her husband, and, after uttering
+but two sentences, the second of which is answered very curtly by
+Banquo, for some time (an interval of 33 lines) she has said nothing. I
+believe Shakespeare means this interval to be occupied in desperate
+efforts on her part to prevent herself from giving way, as she sees for
+the first time something of the truth to which she was formerly so
+blind, and which will destroy her in the end.
+
+It should be observed that at the close of the Banquet scene, where she
+has gone through much less, she is evidently exhausted.
+
+Shakespeare, of course, knew whether he meant the faint to be real: but
+I am not aware if an actor of the part could show the audience whether
+it was real or pretended. If he could, he would doubtless receive
+instructions from the author.
+
+
+
+
+NOTE EE.
+
+DURATION OF THE ACTION IN _MACBETH_. MACBETH'S AGE. 'HE HAS NO
+CHILDREN.'
+
+
+1. The duration of the action cannot well be more than a few months. On
+the day following the murder of Duncan his sons fly and Macbeth goes to
+Scone to be invested (II. iv.). Between this scene and Act III. an
+interval must be supposed, sufficient for news to arrive of Malcolm
+being in England and Donalbain in Ireland, and for Banquo to have shown
+himself a good counsellor. But the interval is evidently not long:
+_e.g._ Banquo's first words are 'Thou hast it now' (III. i. 1). Banquo
+is murdered on the day when he speaks these words. Macbeth's visit to
+the Witches takes place the next day (III. iv. 132). At the end of this
+visit (IV. i.) he hears of Macduff's flight to England, and determines
+to have Macduff's wife and children slaughtered without delay; and this
+is the subject of the next scene (IV. ii.). No great interval, then, can
+be supposed between this scene and the next, where Macduff, arrived at
+the English court, hears what has happened at his castle. At the end of
+that scene (IV. iii. 237) Malcolm says that 'Macbeth is ripe for
+shaking, and the powers above put on their instruments': and the events
+of Act V. evidently follow with little delay, and occupy but a short
+time. Holinshed's Macbeth appears to have reigned seventeen years:
+Shakespeare's may perhaps be allowed as many weeks.
+
+But, naturally, Shakespeare creates some difficulties through wishing to
+produce different impressions in different parts of the play. The main
+effect is that of fiery speed, and it would be impossible to imagine the
+torment of Macbeth's mind lasting through a number of years, even if
+Shakespeare had been willing to allow him years of outward success.
+Hence the brevity of the action. On the other hand time is wanted for
+the degeneration of his character hinted at in IV. iii. 57 f., for the
+development of his tyranny, for his attempts to entrap Malcolm (_ib._
+117 f.), and perhaps for the deepening of his feeling that his life had
+passed into the sere and yellow leaf. Shakespeare, as we have seen,
+scarcely provides time for all this, but at certain points he produces
+an impression that a longer time has elapsed than he has provided for,
+and he puts most of the indications of this longer time into a scene
+(IV. iii.) which by its quietness contrasts strongly with almost all the
+rest of the play.
+
+2. There is no unmistakable indication of the ages of the two principal
+characters; but the question, though of no great importance, has an
+interest. I believe most readers imagine Macbeth as a man between forty
+and fifty, and his wife as younger but not young. In many cases this
+impression is doubtless due to the custom of the theatre (which, if it
+can be shown to go back far, should have much weight), but it is shared
+by readers who have never seen the play performed, and is then
+presumably due to a number of slight influences probably incapable of
+complete analysis. Such readers would say, 'The hero and heroine do not
+speak like young people, nor like old ones'; but, though I think this is
+so, it can hardly be demonstrated. Perhaps however the following small
+indications, mostly of a different kind, tend to the same result.
+
+(1) There is no positive sign of youth. (2) A young man would not be
+likely to lead the army. (3) Macbeth is 'cousin' to an old man.[294] (4)
+Macbeth calls Malcolm 'young,' and speaks of him scornfully as 'the boy
+Malcolm.' He is probably therefore considerably his senior. But Malcolm
+is evidently not really a boy (see I. ii. 3 f. as well as the later
+Acts). (5) One gets the impression (possibly without reason) that
+Macbeth and Banquo are of about the same age; and Banquo's son, the boy
+Fleance, is evidently not a mere child. (On the other hand the children
+of Macduff, who is clearly a good deal older than Malcolm, are all
+young; and I do not think there is any sign that Macbeth is older than
+Macduff.) (6) When Lady Macbeth, in the banquet scene, says,
+
+     Sit, worthy friends: my lord is often thus,
+     And hath been from his youth,
+
+we naturally imagine him some way removed from his youth. (7) Lady
+Macbeth saw a resemblance to her father in the aged king. (8) Macbeth
+says,
+
+     I have lived long enough: my way[295] of life
+     Is fall'n into the sere, the yellow leaf:
+     And that which should accompany old age,
+     As honour, love, obedience, troops of friends,
+     I may not look to have.
+
+It is, surely, of the old age of the soul that he speaks in the second
+line, but still the lines would hardly be spoken under any circumstances
+by a man less than middle-aged.
+
+On the other hand I suppose no one ever imagined Macbeth, or on
+consideration could imagine him, as _more_ than middle-aged when the
+action begins. And in addition the reader may observe, if he finds it
+necessary, that Macbeth looks forward to having children (I. vii. 72),
+and that his terms of endearment ('dearest love,' 'dearest chuck') and
+his language in public ('sweet remembrancer') do not suggest that his
+wife and he are old; they even suggest that she at least is scarcely
+middle-aged. But this discussion tends to grow ludicrous.
+
+For Shakespeare's audience these mysteries were revealed by a glance at
+the actors, like the fact that Duncan was an old man, which the text, I
+think, does not disclose till V. i. 44.
+
+3. Whether Macbeth had children or (as seems usually to be supposed) had
+none, is quite immaterial. But it is material that, if he had none, he
+looked forward to having one; for otherwise there would be no point in
+the following words in his soliloquy about Banquo (III. i. 58 f.):
+
+                        Then prophet-like
+     They hail'd him father to a line of kings:
+     Upon my head they placed a fruitless crown,
+     And put a barren sceptre in my gripe,
+     Thence to be wrench'd with an unlineal hand,
+     No son of mine succeeding. If't be so,
+     For Banquo's issue have I filed my mind.
+
+And he is determined that it shall not 'be so':
+
+     Rather than so, come, fate, into the list
+     And champion me to the utterance!
+
+Obviously he contemplates a son of his succeeding, if only he can get
+rid of Banquo and Fleance. What he fears is that Banquo will kill him;
+in which case, supposing he has a son, that son will not be allowed to
+succeed him, and, supposing he has none, he will be unable to beget one.
+
+I hope this is clear; and nothing else matters. Lady Macbeth's child (I.
+vii. 54) may be alive or may be dead. It may even be, or have been, her
+child by a former husband; though, if Shakespeare had followed history
+in making Macbeth marry a widow (as some writers gravely assume) he
+would probably have told us so. It may be that Macbeth had many children
+or that he had none. We cannot say, and it does not concern the play.
+But the interpretation of a statement on which some critics build, 'He
+has no children,' has an interest of another kind, and I proceed to
+consider it.
+
+These words occur at IV. iii. 216. Malcolm and Macduff are talking at
+the English Court, and Ross, arriving from Scotland, brings news to
+Macduff of Macbeth's revenge on him. It is necessary to quote a good
+many lines:
+
+     _Ross._ Your castle is surprised; your wife and babes
+             Savagely slaughter'd: to relate the manner,
+             Were, on the quarry of these murder'd deer,
+             To add the death of you.
+
+     _Mal._                            Merciful heaven!
+             What, man! ne'er pull your hat upon your brows;
+             Give sorrow words: the grief that does not speak
+             Whispers the o'er-fraught heart and bids it break.
+
+     _Macd._ My children too?
+
+     _Ross._                   Wife, children, servants, all
+             That could be found.
+
+     _Macd._                       And I must be from thence!
+             My wife kill'd too?
+
+     _Ross._                     I have said.
+
+     _Mal._                                   Be comforted:
+             Let's makes us medicines of our great revenge,
+             To cure this deadly grief.
+
+     _Macd._ He has no children. All my pretty ones?
+             Did you say all? O hell-kite! All?
+             What, all my pretty chickens and their dam
+             At one fell swoop?
+
+     _Mal_.  Dispute it like a man.
+
+     _Macd._                         I shall do so;
+             But I must also feel it as a man:
+             I cannot but remember such things were,
+             That were most precious to me.--
+
+Three interpretations have been offered of the words 'He has no
+children.'
+
+(_a_) They refer to Malcolm, who, if he had children of his own, would
+not at such a moment suggest revenge, or talk of curing such a grief.
+Cf. _King John_, III. iv. 91, where Pandulph says to Constance,
+
+     You hold too heinous a respect of grief,
+
+and Constance answers,
+
+     He talks to me that never had a son.
+
+(_b_) They refer to Macbeth, who has no children, and on whom therefore
+Macduff cannot take an adequate revenge.
+
+(_c_) They refer to Macbeth, who, if he himself had children, could
+never have ordered the slaughter of children. Cf. _3 Henry VI._ V. v.
+63, where Margaret says to the murderers of Prince Edward,
+
+     You have no children, butchers! if you had,
+     The thought of them would have stirred up remorse.
+
+I cannot think interpretation (_b_) the most natural. The whole idea of
+the passage is that Macduff must feel _grief_ first and before he can
+feel anything else, _e.g._ the desire for vengeance. As he says directly
+after, he cannot at once 'dispute' it like a man, but must 'feel' it as
+a man; and it is not till ten lines later that he is able to pass to the
+thought of revenge. Macduff is not the man to conceive at any time the
+idea of killing children in retaliation; and that he contemplates it
+_here_, even as a suggestion, I find it hard to believe.
+
+For the same main reason interpretation (_a_) seems to me far more
+probable than (_c_). What could be more consonant with the natural
+course of the thought, as developed in the lines which follow, than that
+Macduff, being told to think of revenge, not grief, should answer, 'No
+one who was himself a father would ask that of me in the very first
+moment of loss'? But the thought supposed by interpretation (_c_) has
+not this natural connection.
+
+It has been objected to interpretation (_a_) that, according to it,
+Macduff would naturally say 'You have no children,' not 'He has no
+children.' But what Macduff does is precisely what Constance does in the
+line quoted from _King John_. And it should be noted that, all through
+the passage down to this point, and indeed in the fifteen lines which
+precede our quotation, Macduff listens only to Ross. His questions 'My
+children too?' 'My wife killed too?' show that he cannot fully realise
+what he is told. When Malcolm interrupts, therefore, he puts aside his
+suggestion with four words spoken to himself, or (less probably) to Ross
+(his relative, who knew his wife and children), and continues his
+agonised questions and exclamations. Surely it is not likely that at
+that moment the idea of (_c_), an idea which there is nothing to
+suggest, would occur to him.
+
+In favour of (_c_) as against (_a_) I see no argument except that the
+words of Macduff almost repeat those of Margaret; and this fact does not
+seem to me to have much weight. It shows only that Shakespeare might
+easily use the words in the sense of (_c_) if that sense were suitable
+to the occasion. It is not unlikely, again, I think, that the words came
+to him here because he had used them many years before;[296] but it does
+not follow that he knew he was repeating them; or that, if he did, he
+remembered the sense they had previously borne; or that, if he did
+remember it, he might not use them now in another sense.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[Footnote 294: So in Holinshed, as well as in the play, where however
+'cousin' need not have its specific meaning.]
+
+[Footnote 295: 'May,' Johnson conjectured, without necessity.]
+
+[Footnote 296: As this point occurs here, I may observe that
+Shakespeare's later tragedies contain many such reminiscences of the
+tragic plays of his young days. For instance, cf. _Titus Andronicus_, I.
+i. 150 f.:
+
+     In peace and honour rest you here, my sons,
+
+            *       *       *       *       *
+
+     Secure from worldly chances and mishaps!
+     Here lurks no treason, here no envy swells,
+     Here grow no damned drugs: here are no storms,
+     No noise, but silence and eternal sleep,
+
+with _Macbeth_, III. ii. 22 f.:
+
+                                Duncan is in his grave;
+     After life's fitful fever he sleeps well;
+     Treason has done his worst: nor steel, nor poison,
+     Malice domestic, foreign levy, nothing,
+     Can touch him further.
+
+In writing IV. i. Shakespeare can hardly have failed to remember the
+conjuring of the Spirit, and the ambiguous oracles, in _2 Henry VI._ I.
+iv. The 'Hyrcan tiger' of _Macbeth_ III. iv. 101, which is also alluded
+to in _Hamlet_, appears first in _3 Henry VI._ I. iv. 155. Cf. _Richard
+III._ II. i. 92, 'Nearer in bloody thoughts, but not in blood,' with
+_Macbeth_ II. iii. 146, 'the near in blood, the nearer bloody'; _Richard
+III._ IV. ii. 64, 'But I am in So far in blood that sin will pluck on
+sin,' with _Macbeth_ III. iv. 136, 'I am in blood stepp'd in so far,'
+etc. These are but a few instances. (It makes no difference whether
+Shakespeare was author or reviser of _Titus_ and _Henry VI._).]
+
+
+
+
+NOTE FF.
+
+THE GHOST OF BANQUO.
+
+
+I do not think the suggestions that the Ghost on its first appearance is
+Banquo's, and on its second Duncan's, or _vice versa_, are worth
+discussion. But the question whether Shakespeare meant the Ghost to be
+real or a mere hallucination, has some interest, and I have not seen it
+fully examined.
+
+The following reasons may be given for the hallucination view:
+
+(1) We remember that Macbeth has already seen one hallucination, that of
+the dagger; and if we failed to remember it Lady Macbeth would remind us
+of it here:
+
+     This is the very painting of your fear;
+     This is the air-drawn dagger which, you said,
+     Led you to Duncan.
+
+(2) The Ghost seems to be created by Macbeth's imagination; for his
+words,
+
+                     now they rise again
+     With twenty mortal murders on their crowns,
+
+describe it, and they echo what the murderer had said to him a little
+before,
+
+                   Safe in a ditch he bides
+     With twenty trenched gashes on his head.
+
+(3) It vanishes the second time on his making a violent effort and
+asserting its unreality:
+
+                     Hence, horrible shadow!
+     Unreal mockery, hence!
+
+This is not quite so the first time, but then too its disappearance
+follows on his defying it:
+
+     Why what care I? If thou canst nod, speak too.
+
+So, apparently, the dagger vanishes when he exclaims, 'There's no such
+thing!'
+
+(4) At the end of the scene Macbeth himself seems to regard it as an
+illusion:
+
+                        My strange and self-abuse
+     Is the initiate fear that wants hard use.
+
+(5) It does not speak, like the Ghost in _Hamlet_ even on its last
+appearance, and like the Ghost in _Julius Caesar_.
+
+(6) It is visible only to Macbeth.
+
+I should attach no weight to (6) taken alone (see p. 140). Of (3) it may
+be remarked that Brutus himself seems to attribute the vanishing of
+Caesar's Ghost to his taking courage: 'now I have taken heart thou
+vanishest:' yet he certainly holds it to be real. It may also be
+remarked on (5) that Caesar's Ghost says nothing that Brutus' own
+forebodings might not have conjured up. And further it may be asked why,
+if the Ghost of Banquo was meant for an illusion, it was represented on
+the stage, as the stage-directions and Forman's account show it to have
+been.
+
+On the whole, and with some doubt, I think that Shakespeare (1) meant
+the judicious to take the Ghost for an hallucination, but (2) knew that
+the bulk of the audience would take it for a reality. And I am more sure
+of (2) than of (1).
+
+
+
+
+INDEX
+
+The titles of plays are in italics. So are the numbers of the pages
+containing the main discussion of a character. The titles of the Notes
+are not repeated in the Index.
+
+
+Aaron, 200, 211.
+
+Abnormal mental conditions, 13, 398.
+
+Accident, in tragedy, 7, 14-16, 26, 28;
+  in _Hamlet_, 143, 173;
+  in _Othello_, 181-2;
+  in _King Lear_, 253, 325.
+
+Act, difficulty in Fourth, 57-8;
+  the five Acts, 49.
+
+Action, tragic, 11, 12, 31;
+  and character, 12, 19;
+  a conflict, 16-19.
+
+Adversity and prosperity in _King Lear_, 326-7.
+
+Albany, _297-8_.
+
+Antonio, 110, 404.
+
+_Antony and Cleopatra_, 3, 7, 45, 80;
+  conflict, 17-8;
+  crisis, 53, 55, 66;
+  humour in catastrophe, 62, 395-6;
+  battle-scenes, 62-3;
+  extended catastrophe, 64;
+  faulty construction, 71, 260;
+  passion in, 82;
+  evil in, 83-4;
+  versification, 87, Note BB.
+
+Antony, 22, 29, 63, 83-4.
+
+_Arden of Feversham_, 9.
+
+Ariel, 264.
+
+Aristotle, 16, 22.
+
+Art, Shakespeare's, conscious, 68-9;
+  defects in, 71-78.
+
+Arthur, 294.
+
+_As You Like It_, 71, 267, 390.
+
+Atmosphere in tragedy, 333.
+
+
+Banquo, 343, _379-86_.
+
+Barbara, the maid, 175.
+
+Battle-scene, 62, 451, 469;
+  in _King Lear_, 255, Note X.
+
+Beast and man, in _King Lear_, 266-8;
+  in _Timon_, 453.
+
+Bernhardt, Mme., 379.
+
+Biblical ideas, in _King Lear_, 328.
+
+Bombast, 73, 75-6, 389, Note F.
+
+Brandes, G., 379, 393.
+
+Brutus, 7, 14, 22, 27, 32, 81-2, 101, 364.
+
+
+Caliban, 264.
+
+Cassio, 211-3, _238-9_, 433-4.
+
+Catastrophe, humour before, 61-2;
+  battle-scenes in, 62;
+  false hope before, 63;
+  extended, 62;
+  in _Antony_ and _Coriolanus_, 83-4.
+  See _Hamlet_, etc.
+
+Character, and plot, 12;
+  is destiny, 13;
+  tragic, 19-23.
+
+Chaucer, 8, 346.
+
+Children, in the plays, 293-5.
+
+Cleopatra, 7, 20, 84, 178, 208.
+
+Coleridge, 104-5, 107, 109, 127, 165, 200, 201, 209, 223, 226, 228, 249,
+  343, 353, 362, 389, 391, 392, 397, 412, 413.
+
+Comedy, 15, 41.
+
+Conflict, tragic, 16-9;
+  originates in evil, 34;
+  oscillating movement in, 50;
+  crisis in, 51-5;
+  descending movement of, 55-62.
+
+Conscience. See Hamlet.
+
+Cordelia, 29, 32, 203-6, 250, 290, 314, _315-26_, Note W.
+
+_Coriolanus_, 3, 9, 43, 394-5;
+  crisis, 53;
+  hero off stage, 57;
+  counter-stroke, 58;
+  humour, 61;
+  passion, 82;
+  catastrophe, 83-4;
+  versification, Note BB.
+
+Coriolanus, 20, 29, 83-4, 196.
+
+Cornwall, 298-9.
+
+Crisis. See Conflict.
+
+Curtain, no front, in Shakespeare's theatre, 185, 458.
+
+_Cymbeline_, 7, 21, 72, 80, Note BB;
+  Queen in, 300.
+
+
+Desdemona, 32, 165, 179, 193, 197, _201-6_, 323, 433, 437-9.
+
+Disillusionment, in tragedies, 175.
+
+Dog, the, Shakespeare and, 268.
+
+Don John, 110, 210.
+
+Double action in _King Lear_, 255-6, 262.
+
+Dowden, E., 82, 105, 330, 408.
+
+Dragging, 57-8, 64.
+
+Drunkenness, invective against, 238.
+
+
+Edgar, _305-7_, 453, 465.
+
+Edmund, 210, 245, 253, _300-3_, Notes P, Q.
+  See Iago.
+
+Emilia, 214-6, 237, _239-42_, Note P.
+
+Emotional tension, variations of, 48-9.
+
+Evil, origin of conflict, 34;
+  negative, 35;
+  in earlier and later tragedies, 82-3;
+  poetic portrayal of, 207-8;
+  aspects of, specially impressive to Shakespeare, 232-3;
+  in _King Lear_, 298, 303-4, 327;
+  in _Tempest_, 328-30;
+  in _Macbeth_, 331, 386.
+
+Exposition, 41-7.
+
+
+Fate, Fatality, 10, 26-30, 45, 59, 177, 181, 287, 340-6.
+
+Fleay, F.G., 419, 424, 445, 467, 479.
+
+Fool in _King Lear_, the, 258, _311-5_, 322, 447, Note V.
+
+Fools, Shakespeare's, 310.
+
+Forman, Dr., 468, 493.
+
+Fortinbras, 90.
+
+Fortune, 9, 10.
+
+Freytag, G., 40, 63.
+
+Furness, H.H., 199, 200.
+
+
+Garnet and equivocation, 397, 470-1.
+
+Ghost, Banquo's, 332, 335, 338, 361, Note FF.
+
+Ghost, Caesar's, Note FF.
+
+Ghost in _Hamlet_, 97, 100, 118, 120, 125, 126, 134, 136, 138-40,
+  _173-4_.
+
+Ghosts, not hallucinations because appearing only to one in a company,
+  140.
+
+Gloster, 272, _293-6_, 447.
+
+Gnomic speeches, 74, 453.
+
+Goethe, 101, 127, 165, 208.
+
+Goneril, 245, _299-300_, 331, 370, 447-8.
+
+Greek tragedy, 7, 16, 30, 33, 182, 276-9, 282.
+
+Greene, 409.
+
+
+Hales, J.W., 397.
+
+_Hamlet_, exposition, 43-7;
+  conflict, 17, 47, 50-1;
+  crisis and counter-stroke, 52, 58-60, 136-7;
+  dragging, 57;
+  humour, and false hope, before catastrophe, 61, 63;
+  obscurities, 73;
+  undramatic passages, 72, 74;
+  place among tragedies, 80-8;
+  position of hero, 89-92;
+  not simply tragedy of thought, 82, 113, 127;
+  in the Romantic Revival, 92, 127-8;
+  lapse of time in, 129, 141;
+  accident, 15, 143, 173;
+  religious ideas, 144-5, 147-8, 172-4;
+  player's speech, 389-90, Note F;
+  grave-digger, 395-6;
+  last scene, 256.
+  See Notes A to H, and BB.
+
+Hamlet, only tragic character in play, 90;
+  contrasted with Laertes and Fortinbras, 90, 106;
+  failure of early criticism of, 91;
+  supposed unintelligible, 93-4;
+  external view, 94-7;
+  'conscience' view, 97-101;
+  sentimental view, 101-4;
+  Schlegel-Coleridge view, 104-8, 116, 123, 126-7;
+  temperament, 109-10;
+  moral idealism, 110-3;
+  reflective genius, 113-5;
+    connection of this with inaction, 115-7;
+  origin of melancholy, 117-20;
+    its nature and effects, 120-7, 103, 158;
+    its diminution, 143-4;
+  his 'insanity,' 121-2, 421;
+  in Act II. 129-31, 155-6;
+  in III. i. 131-3, 157, 421;
+  in play-scene, 133-4;
+  spares King, 134-6, 100, 439;
+  with Queen, 136-8;
+  kills Polonius, 136-7, 104;
+  with Ghost, 138-40;
+  leaving Denmark, 140-1;
+  state after return, 143-5, 421;
+  in grave-yard, 145-6, 153, 158, 421-2;
+  in catastrophe, 102, 146-8, 151, 420-1;
+  and Ophelia, 103, 112, 119, 145-6, 152-9, 402, 420-1;
+  letter to Ophelia, 150, 403;
+  trick of repetition, 148-9;
+  word-play and humour, 149-52, 411;
+  aesthetic feeling, 133, 415;
+  and Iago, 208, 217, 222, 226;
+  other references, 9, 14, 20, 22, 28, 316, 353, Notes A to H.
+
+Hanmer, 91.
+
+Hazlitt, 209, 223, 228, 231, 243, 248.
+
+Hecate, 342, Note Z.
+
+Hegel, 16, 348.
+
+_2 Henry VI._, 492.
+
+_3 Henry VI._, 222, 418, 490, 492.
+
+_Henry VIII._, 80, 472, 479.
+
+Heredity, 30, 266, 303.
+
+Hero, tragic, 7;
+  of 'high degree,' 9-11;
+  contributes to catastrophe, 12;
+  nature of, 19-23, 37;
+  error of, 21, 34;
+  unlucky, 28;
+  place of, in construction, 53-55;
+  absence of, from stage, 57;
+  in earlier and later plays, 81-2, 176;
+  in _King Lear_, 280;
+  feeling at death of, 147-8, 174, 198, 324.
+
+Heywood, 140, 419.
+
+Historical tragedies, 3, 53, 71.
+
+Homer, 348.
+
+Horatio, 99, 112, 310, Notes A, B, C.
+
+Humour, constructional use of, 61;
+  Hamlet's, 149-52;
+  in _Othello_, 177;
+  in _Macbeth_, 395.
+
+Hunter, J., 199, 338.
+
+
+Iachimo, 21, 210.
+
+Iago, and evil, 207, 232-3;
+  false views of, 208-11, 223-7;
+  danger of accepting his own evidence, 211-2, 222-5;
+  how he appeared to others, 213-5;
+    and to Emilia, 215-6, 439-40;
+  inferences hence, 217-8;
+  further analysis, 218-22;
+  source of his action, 222-31;
+  his tragedy, 218, 222, 232;
+  not merely evil, 233-5;
+  nor of supreme intellect, 236;
+  cause of failure, 236-7;
+  and Edmund, 245, 300-1, 464;
+  and Hamlet, 208, 217, 222, 226;
+  other references, 21, 28, 32, 192, 193, 196, 364, Notes L, M, P, Q.
+
+Improbability, not always a defect, 69;
+  in _King Lear_, 249, 256-7.
+
+Inconsistencies, 73;
+  real or supposed, in _Hamlet_, 408;
+  in _Othello_, Note I;
+  in _King Lear_, 256, Note T;
+  in _Macbeth_, Notes CC, EE.
+
+Ingram, Prof., 478.
+
+Insanity in tragedy, 13;
+  Ophelia's, 164-5, 399;
+  Lear's, 288-90.
+
+Intrigue in tragedy, 12, 67, 179.
+
+Irony, 182, 338.
+
+Isabella, 316, 317, 321.
+
+
+Jameson, Mrs., 165, 204, 379.
+
+Jealousy in Othello, 178, 194, Note L.
+
+Job, 11.
+
+Johnson, 31, 91, 294, 298, 304, 377, 420.
+
+Jonson, 69, 282, 389.
+
+Juliet, 7, 204, 210.
+
+_Julius Caesar_, 3, 7, 9, 33, 34, 479;
+  conflict, 17-8;
+  exposition, 43-5;
+  crisis, 52;
+  dragging, 57;
+  counter-stroke, 58;
+  quarrel-scene, 60-1;
+  battle-scenes, 62;
+  and _Hamlet_, 80-2;
+  style, 85-6.
+
+Justice in tragedy, idea of, 31-33, 279, 318.
+
+
+Kean, 99, 243-4.
+
+Kent, _307-10_, 314, 321, 447, Note W.
+
+King Claudius, 28, 102, 133, 137, 142, _168-72_, 402, 422.
+
+_King John_, 394, 490-1.
+
+_King Lear_, exposition, 44, 46-7;
+  conflict, 17, 53-4;
+  scenes of high and low tension, 49;
+  dragging, 57;
+  false hope before catastrophe, 63;
+  battle-scene, 62, 456-8;
+  soliloquy in, 72, 222;
+  place among tragedies, 82, 88, see Tate;
+  Tate's, 243-4;
+  two-fold character, 244-6;
+  not wholly dramatic, 247;
+  opening scene, 71, 249-51, 258, 319-21, 447;
+  blinding of Gloster, 185, 251;
+  catastrophe, 250-4, 271, 290-3, 309, 322-6;
+  structural defects, 254-6;
+  improbabilities, etc., 256-8;
+  vagueness of locality, 259-60;
+  poetic value of defects, 261;
+  double action, 262;
+  characterisation, 263;
+  tendency to symbolism, 264-5;
+  idea of monstrosity, 265-6;
+  beast and man, 266-8;
+  storm-scenes, 269-70, 286-7, 315;
+  question of government of world, in, 271-3;
+  supposed pessimism, 273-9, 284-5, 303-4, 322-30;
+  accident and fatality, 15, 250-4, 287-8;
+  intrigue in, 179;
+  evil in, 298, 303-4;
+  preaching patience, 330;
+  and _Othello_, 176-7, 179, 181, 244-5, 441-3;
+  and _Timon_, 245-7, 310, 326-7, 443-5;
+  other references, 8, 10, 61, 181, Notes R to Y, and BB.
+
+Koenig, G., Note BB.
+
+Koppel, R., 306, 450, 453, 462.
+
+
+Laertes, 90, 111, 142, 422.
+
+Lamb, 202, 243, 248, 253, 255, 269, 343.
+
+Language, Shakespeare's, defects of, 73, 75, 416.
+
+Lear, 13, 14, 20, 28, 29, 32, 249-51, _280-93_, 293-5, Note W.
+
+Leontes, 21, 194.
+
+
+_Macbeth_, exposition, 43, 45-6;
+  conflict, 17-9, 48, 52;
+  crisis, 59, 60;
+  pathos and humour, 61, 391, 395-7;
+  battle-scenes, 62;
+  extended catastrophe, 64;
+  defects in construction, 57, 71;
+  place among tragedies, 82, 87-8, Note BB;
+  religious ideas, 172-4;
+  atmosphere of, 333;
+  effects of darkness, 333-4,
+  colour, 334-6,
+  storm, 336-7,
+  supernatural, etc., 337-8,
+  irony, 338-40;
+  Witches, 340-9, 362, 379-86;
+  imagery, 336, 357;
+  minor characters, 387;
+  simplicity, 388;
+  Senecan effect, 389-90;
+  bombast, 389, 417;
+  prose, 388, 397-400;
+  relief-scenes, 391;
+  sleep-walking scene, 378, 398, 400;
+  references to Gunpowder Plot, 397, 470-1;
+  all genuine? 388, 391, 395-7, Note Z;
+  and _Hamlet_, 331-2;
+  and _Richard III._, 338, 390, 395, 492;
+  other references, 7, 8, 386, and Notes Z to FF.
+
+Macbeth, 13, 14, 20, 22, 28, 32, 63, 172, 343-5, _349-65_, 380, 383,
+  386, Notes CC, EE.
+
+Macbeth, Lady, 13, 28, 32, 349-50, 358, 364, _366-79_, 398-400, Notes
+  CC, DD.
+
+Macduff, 387, 391-2, 490-1.
+
+Macduff, Lady, 61, 387, 391-2.
+
+Macduff, little, 393-5.
+
+Mackenzie, 91.
+
+Marlowe, 211, 415-6.
+
+Marston's possible reminiscences of Shakespeare's plays, 471-2.
+
+_Measure for Measure_, 76, 78, 275, 397.
+
+Mediaeval idea of tragedy, 8, 9.
+
+Melancholy, Shakespeare's representations of, 110, 121.
+  See Hamlet.
+
+Mephistopheles, 208.
+
+_Merchant of Venice_, 21, 200.
+
+Metrical tests, Notes S, BB.
+
+Middleton, 466.
+
+_Midsummer Night's Dream_, 390, 469.
+
+Milton, 207, 362, 418.
+
+Monstrosity, idea of, in _King Lear_, 265-6.
+
+Moral order in tragedy, idea of, 26, 31-9.
+
+Moulton, R.G., 40.
+
+
+Negro? Othello a, 198-202.
+
+
+Opening scene in tragedy, 43-4.
+
+Ophelia, 14, 61, 112, _160-5_, 204, 399.
+  See Hamlet.
+
+Oswald, 298, 448.
+
+_Othello_, exposition, 44-5;
+  conflict, 17, 18, 48;
+  peculiar construction, 54-5, 64-7, 177;
+  inconsistencies, 73;
+  place among tragedies, 82, 83, 88;
+  and _Hamlet_, 175-6;
+  and _King Lear_, 176-7, 179, 181, 244-5, 441-3;
+  distinctive effect, and its causes, 176-80;
+  accident in, 15, 181-2;
+  objections to, considered, 183-5;
+  point of inferiority to other three tragedies, 185-6;
+  elements of reconciliation in catastrophe, 198, 242;
+  other references, 9, 61, Notes I to R, and BB.
+
+Othello, 9, 20, 21, 22, 28, 29, 32, 176, 178, 179, _186-98_, 198-202,
+  211, 212, Notes K to O.
+
+
+Pathos, and tragedy, 14, 103, 160, 203, 281-2;
+  constructional use of, 60-1.
+
+Peele, 200.
+
+_Pericles_, 474.
+
+Period, Shakespeare's tragic, 79-89, 275-6.
+
+Pessimism, supposed, in _King Lear_, 275-9, 327;
+  in _Macbeth_, 359, 393.
+
+Plays, Shakespeare's, list of, in periods, 79.
+
+Plot, 12.
+  See Action, Intrigue.
+
+'Poetic justice,' 31-2.
+
+Poor, goodness of the, in _King Lear_ and _Timon_, 326.
+
+Posthumus, 21.
+
+Problems, probably non-existent for original audience, 73, 157, 159,
+  315, 393, 483, 486, 488.
+
+Prose, in the tragedies, 388, 397-400.
+
+
+Queen Gertrude, 104, 118, 134, 136-8, 161, 164, _166-8_.
+
+
+Reconciliation, feeling of, in tragedy, 31, 36, 84, 147-8, 174, 198,
+  242, 322-6.
+
+Regan, _299-300_.
+
+Religion, in Edgar, 306,
+  Horatio, 310,
+  Banquo, 387.
+
+_Richard II._, 3, 10, 17, 18, 42.
+
+Richard II., 20, 22, 150, 152.
+
+_Richard III._, 3, 18, 42, 62, 82;
+  and _Macbeth_, 338, 390, 395, 492.
+
+Richard III., 14, 20, 22, 32, 63, 152, 207, 210, 217, 218, 233, 301.
+
+_Romeo and Juliet_, 3, 7, 9, 15;
+  conflict, 17, 18, 34;
+  exposition, 41-5;
+  crisis, 52;
+  counter-stroke, 58.
+
+Romeo, 22, 29, 150, 210.
+
+Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, 137, 405-6.
+
+Rules of drama, Shakespeare's supposed ignorance of, 69.
+
+
+Salvini, 434.
+
+Satan, Milton's, 207, 362.
+
+Scenery, no, in Shakespeare's theatre, 49, 71, 451.
+
+Scenes, their number, length, tone, 49;
+  wrong divisions of, 451.
+
+Schlegel, 82, 104, 105, 116, 123, 127, 254, 262, 344, 345, 413.
+
+Scot on Witch-craft, 341.
+
+Seneca, 389-90.
+
+Shakespeare the man, 6, 81, 83, 185-6, 246, 275-6, 282, 285, 327-30,
+  359, 393, 414-5.
+
+Shylock, 21.
+
+Siddons, Mrs., 371, 379.
+
+Soliloquy, 72;
+  of villains, 222;
+  scenes ending with, 451.
+
+Sonnets, Shakespeare's, 264, 364.
+
+Spedding, J., 255, 476, Note X.
+
+Stage-directions, wrong modern, 260, 285, 422, 453-6, 462.
+
+Style in the tragedies, 85-9, 332, 336, 357.
+
+Suffering, tragic, 7, 8, 11.
+
+Supernatural, the, in tragedy, 14, 181, 295-6, 331-2.
+  See Ghost, Witch.
+
+Swinburne, A.C., 80, 179, 191, 209, 218, 223, 228, 231, 276-8, 431.
+
+Symonds, J.A., 10.
+
+
+Tate's version of _King Lear_, 243, 251-3, 313.
+
+Temperament, 110, 282, 306.
+
+_Tempest_, 42, 80, 185, 264, 328-30, 469; Note BB.
+
+Theological ideas in tragedy, 25, 144, 147, 279;
+  in _Hamlet_ and _Macbeth_, 171-4, 439;
+  not in _Othello_, 181, 439;
+  in _King Lear_, 271-3, 296.
+
+Time, short and long, theory of, 426-7.
+
+_Timon of Athens_, 4, 9, 81-3, 88, 245-7, 266, 270, 275, 310, 326-7,
+  443-5, 460; Note BB.
+
+Timon, 9, 82, 112.
+
+_Titus Andronicus_, 4, 200, 211, 411, 491.
+
+Tourgenief, 11, 295.
+
+Toussaint, 198.
+
+Tragedy, Shakespearean; parts, 41, 51;
+  earlier and later, 18, 176;
+  pure and historical, 3, 71.
+  See Accident, Action, Hero, Period, Reconciliation, etc.
+
+Transmigration of souls, 267.
+
+_Troilus and Cressida_, 7, 185-6, 268, 275-6, 302, 417, 419.
+
+_Twelfth Night_, 70, 267.
+
+_Two Noble Kinsmen_, 418, 472, 479.
+
+
+Ultimate power in tragedy, 24-39, 171-4, 271-9.
+  See Fate, Moral Order, Reconciliation, Theological.
+
+Undramatic speeches, 74, 106.
+
+
+Versification. See Style and Metrical tests.
+
+Virgilia, 387.
+
+
+Waste, tragic, 23, 37.
+
+Werder, K., 94, 172, 480.
+
+_Winter's Tale_, 21, Note BB.
+
+Witches, the, and Macbeth, _340-9_, 362;
+  and Banquo, 379-87.
+
+Wittenberg, Hamlet at, 403-6.
+
+Wordsworth, 30, 198.
+
+
+_Yorkshire Tragedy_, 10.
+
+
+GLASGOW: PRINTED AT THE UNIVERSITY PRESS BY ROBERT MACLEHOSE AND CO.
+LTD.
+
+
+
+
+_8vo. 12s. 6d. net._
+
+Oxford Lectures on Poetry
+
+BY
+
+A.C. BRADLEY, LL.D., Litt.D.
+
+_ATHENAEUM._--"A remarkable achievement.... It is probable that this
+volume will attain a permanence for which critical literature generally
+cannot hope. Very many of the things that are said here are finally
+said; they exhaust their subject. Of one thing we are certain--that
+there is no work in English devoted to the interpretation of poetic
+experience which can claim the delicacy and sureness of Mr. Bradley's."
+
+_SPECTATOR._--"In reviewing Professor Bradley's previous book on
+_Shakespearean Tragedy_ we declared our opinion that it was probably the
+best Shakespearean criticism since Coleridge. The new volume shows the
+same complete sanity of judgment, the same subtlety, the same persuasive
+and eloquent exposition."
+
+_TIMES._--"Nothing higher need be said of the present volume than it is
+not unworthy to be the sequel to _Shakespearean Tragedy_."
+
+_DAILY TELEGRAPH._--"This is not a book to be written about in a hasty
+review of a thousand words. It is one to be perused and appreciated at
+leisure--to be returned to again and again, partly because of its
+supreme interest, partly because it provokes, as all good books should
+do, a certain antagonism, partly because it is itself the product of a
+careful, scholarly mind, basing conclusions on a scrupulous perusal of
+documents and authorities.... The whole book is so full of good things
+that it is impossible to make any adequate selection. In an age which is
+not supposed to be very much interested in literary criticism, a book
+like Mr. Bradley's is of no little significance and importance."
+
+_SATURDAY REVIEW._--"The writer of these admirable lectures may claim
+what is rare even in this age of criticism--a note of his own. In type
+he belongs to those critics of the best order, whose view of literature
+is part and parcel of their view of life. His lectures on poetry are
+therefore what they profess to be: not scraps of textual comment, nor
+studies in the craft of verse-making, but broad considerations of poetry
+as a mode of spiritual revelation. An accomplished style and signs of
+careful reading we may justly demand from any professor who sets out to
+lecture in literature. Mr. Bradley has them in full measure. But he has
+also not a little of that priceless quality so seldom found in the
+professional or professorial critic--the capacity of naive vision and
+admiration. Here he is in a line with the really stimulating essayists,
+the artists in criticism."
+
+MACMILLAN AND CO. LTD., LONDON.
+
+
+_Second Edition. Crown 8vo. 5s. 6d. net._
+
+A Commentary on Tennyson's 'In Memoriam'
+
+BY
+
+A.C. BRADLEY, LL.D., Litt.D.
+
+_THE SATURDAY REVIEW._--"Here we find a model of what a commentary on a
+great work should be, every page instinct with thoughtfulness; complete
+sympathy and appreciation; the most reverent care shown in the attempted
+interpretation of passages whose meaning to a large degree evades, and
+will always evade, readers of 'In Memoriam.' It is clear to us that Mr.
+Bradley has devoted long time and thought to his work, and that he has
+published the result of his labours simply to help those who, like
+himself, have been and are in difficulties as to the drift of various
+passages. He is not of course the first who has addressed himself to the
+interpretation of 'In Memoriam'--in this spirit ... but Mr. Bradley's
+commentary is sure to take rank as the most searching and scholarly of
+any."
+
+_THE PILOT._--"In re-studying 'In Memoriam' with Dr. Bradley's aid, we
+have found his interpretation helpful in numerous passages. The notes
+are prefaced by a long introduction dealing with the origin,
+composition, and structure of the poem, the ideas used in it, the metre
+and the debt to other poems. All of these are good, but more interesting
+than any of them is a section entitled, 'The Way of the Soul,' reviewing
+the spiritual experience which 'In Memoriam' records. This is quite
+admirable throughout, and proves conclusively that Dr. Bradley's keen
+desire to fathom the exact meaning of every phrase has only quickened
+his appreciation of the poem as a whole."
+
+MACMILLAN AND CO. LTD., LONDON.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Shakespearean Tragedy, by A. C. Bradley
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