the divine grace only on legitimate monarchs) was this therapeutic power, with which, of course, he held himself to be endued. To this we owe that irrelevant passage, which Shakespeare drags in by the scruff of the neck, exhibiting Edward the Confessor as exercising the holy virtue transmitted to his illustrious seventeenth-century representative:— Malcolm: Well; more anon. pray you? - Comes the King forth, I IV iii 139 ff. Doctor: Ay, sir; there are a crew of wretched souls Macduff: What's the disease he means? Malcolm: A most miraculous work in this good king; It is interesting to note that for this touch of loyal As hath beene thought, he was inspired with the gift of prophesie, and also to haue had the gift of healing infirmities and diseases. He vsed to helpe those that were vexed with the disease, commonlie called the kings euill, and left that vertue as it were a portion of inheritance vnto his successors the kings of this realme. Holinshed's Historie of (edition of 1587), p. 195. England The ana The events connected with the usurpation of Macchronism, as beth and his subsequent defeat covered a period of before well shaken before taken. The Porter's soliloquy a résumé of XVII-century occurrences. II iii 1 ff. some seventeen years in the eleventh century. But Shakespeare (who, as we have seen on many occasions, was entirely aware of the difference between poetry and history) really dated them in the year 1606, when he wrote the tragedy. Hence to quote all the minor anachronisms he has perpetrated would practically necessitate reprinting the play, since they occur in almost every line. In the third scene of the first act we read of "cannons" and "dollars"; in the first of Act II, and elsewhere, we hear of a striking clock. But these are trifles. In every line we get the mentality, the standard of moral judgment, and the social tone and general civilization of Shakespeare's own day; and in this consists the peculiarity which may be called either anachronism or creative licence as you like it. It comes quite congenially to Shakespeare to make his soliloquizing Porter, in a Scottish castle in the eleventh century, discourse on affairs that happened in London in the seventeenth century. The first of the imaginary knockers at the gate whom that startling humorist enumerates is "a farmer, that hang'd himself on the expectation of plenty"-an allusion, so the wise tell us, to the abnormally abundant harvest of 1606. The second is "an equivocator, that could swear in both the scales against either scale; who committed treason enough for God's sake, yet could not equivocate to heaven." The original of this description was a Jesuit, by name Henry Garnet, who was executed early in 1606 for participation in the Gunpowder Plot, and who created a sensation by making a fearless defence of equivocation at his trial. Such wilful violations of historic or even legendary consistency are indefensible; and yet is there not something the matter with a mind that could feel them to need defence? Shakespeare's use whitewash ing of Apart from these characteristic and habitual defiances of place and time, Shakespeare in this play has followed his authority with more closeness than source: usual; though it need scarcely be added that he finds in Holinshed only the barest scaffolding of the majestic edifice he has reared for us. And even this framework he has not hesitated to alter freely, in accordance with his own sense of poetic propriety and dramatic convincingness. For example, to (1) The deepen the heinousness of Macbeth's crime, he has made of Duncan something little short of a saint; Duncan; whereas, according to the chronicler, that monarch was a vicious and incapable person, of whom his people were by no means displeased to be rid. Mac (2) The beth, despite the crime by which he usurped the crown, was, for more than ten of the seventeen years of his reign, an unusually satisfactory sovereign, who originated many righteous laws, and was a particularly good friend to the poor and to the Church. In the chronicle the murder of Duncan is 1 "Makbeth [was] a valiant gentleman, & one that if he had not beene somewhat cruell of nature, might haue beene thought most woorthie the gouernement of a realme. On the other part, Duncane was so soft & gentle of nature, that the people wished the inclinations and maners of these two cousins to haue beene so tempered and interchangeablie bestowed betwixt them, that where the one had too much of clemencie, & the other of crueltie, the meane vertue betwixt these two extremities might haue reigned by indifferent partition in them both; so should Duncane haue proued a woorthie king, & Makbeth an excellent capteine."- Holinshed, Historie of Scotland, ed. 1587, p. 168. "Mackbeth shewing himselfe thus a most diligent punisher of all iniuries and wrongs attempted by anie disordered persons within his realme, was accounted the sure defense and blackwash ing of Macbeth; (3) The tion of the murder episode; (4) The syn- Lady barely alluded to; and so Shakespeare has calmly transplanta- annexed the description of the assassination of another king by another man, and made it the basis of his elaborate picture of the nocturnal crime. Lady Macbeth, too, is in Holinshed nothing but a name,nay, she is not even that; yet because the other murderer's wife is represented not only as exerting great influence over her husband, but as initiating his plots and ensuring their efficient carrying out, Shakespeare in his own fashion has transferred her attributes to the wife of his villainous hero. He loves to follow his authority only so far as it is convenient to do so. As soon as it seems otherwise, he becomes a law to himself;-a law which we may perhaps venture to formulate in some such terms as these: “If thine authority offend thee, pluck him out and cast him from thee; for it is better for thee to enter into dramatic success having no authority, than having an authority to be hissed into the hell of failure." Text and editions. With the exception of The Comedy of Errors, Macbeth is the shortest of Shakespeare's plays. Hamlet is almost twice as long. No quarto editions have been preserved, and it is virtually certain that none ever existed. Hence our only authority is the buckler of innocent people; and hereto he also applied his whole indeuor, to cause yoong men to exercise themselues in vertuous maners, and men of the church to attend their diuine seruice according to their vocations. . . . “To be briefe, such were the woorthie dooings and princelie acts of this Mackbeth in the administration of the realme, that if he had atteined therevnto by rightfull means, and continued in vprightnesse of iustice as he began, till the end of his reigne, he might well haue beene numbred amongest the most noble princes that anie where had reigned. He made manie holesome laws and statutes for the publike weale of his subiects. . . .”—Ibid., p. 171. text of the Folio, and there are various indications that what we find there is a version abbreviated for stage purposes. It has been maintained by some critics that the second scene of Act I, describing King Duncan's interview with the wounded Sergeant, is so inferior to the rest of the play that it cannot be from Shakespeare's hand. Others have alleged that the fifth scene of Act III, consisting almost entirely of the speech of Hecate, is also from another hand. Such decisions of the higher intuition may be saluted with respect, but they are too inscrutable for less inspired minds to endorse. I am quite unable to detect the alleged inferiority, still less to accept Mr. White's jaunty ascription of the Hecate scene to Middleton. While the latter is perfectly possible, yet it is a mere guess. And when one speaks of inferiority, it must be remembered that the comparison is not with Shakespeare's best work, but with the poorest that he is admitted to have done at this period. The intuitional method of criticism finds its reductio ad absurdum in that wonderful contention of Coleridge, that the Porter's soliloquy is ungenuine except only the single great sentence, "I'll devilporter it no further: I had thought to have let in some of all professions that go the primrose way to the everlasting bonfire." This is too good to be given away; and so Shakespeare, forsooth, must be credited with having thrust it into the margin of a colleague's page! 2 2"... the disgusting passage of the Porter (Act II, sc. 3), which I dare pledge myself to demonstrate to be an interpolation of the actors. "This low soliloquy of the Porter and his few speeches afterwards, I believe to have been written for the mob by some other hand, perhaps with Shakespeare's consent; and that find Alleged interpolations: I ii and III v. |