towards the false notion upon which this insertion is grounded, that the weird sisters had directly instigated the murder of Duncan; but how is it possible to forgive the disgusting violation of Shakespeare's own fundamental conception of their nature, which is involved in shewing us these airy beings, whom the poet has imagined incapable of human intercourse or sympathy, actually elbowed by a vulgar human multitude, and sharing in their low gambols and grimaces? And how, we would ask, after such a scene, are we to resume the broken thread of our impressions, so as to follow with adequate interest the ensuing course of incident relating to the murder of Banquo? Again, what a strange substitution for that other omitted passage which we have quoted above, describing the progress of disaffection among Macbeth's adherents after Banquo's murder, is that concert of melodious spirits who are made to attend on Shakespeare's discordant Hecate, and the conversion of the latter from a purely ethereal being of evil, into a mere flesh-and-blood, sensual witch, who talks of anointing herself and says, With new-fall'n dew Oh, what a dainty pleasure's this, To sing, to toy, to dance, and kiss! And finally, what a strange accompaniment are Davenant's rabble to Shakespeare's weird sisters and their mistress, in the incantation scene, the mysterious horror of which most especially demands the preservation of that immaterial, anomalous, and insulated character which their creator has assigned to them. This, we conceive, is the most villanous profanation of all. The sole reason, we believe, that will now-a-days be alleged for retaining these monstrous blots upon so great a work of Shakespeare is, the merit and attraction of the music which accompanies them. These we fully admit. The compositions in question are not only the masterpiece of their author, but one of the most vigorous productions of native English musical genius. Let them be performed and enjoyed anywhere and everywhere but in the representation of the greatest tragedy of the world's great dramatist-for which representation, let every auditor well observe, their author, Lock, did not compose them. For Davenant's abominable travesty were they written, and with that they ought to have been repudiated from the stage. The very restoration of Shakespeare's text in the rest of the performance, has but more glaringly brought out the shocking incongruity of these extraneous passages. We come now to consider the other grand monstrosity which, introduced into this play, like the rest, by the men who had the forming of the stage of the Restoration, has, with them, been ever since retained -the dragging of the murdered Banquo bodily before the eyes of Macbeth and of the audience, in the banquet scene. This was an idea worthy of Davenant and his compeers, and consistent with the gross, incongruous texture of his corrupted play: but here, again, the general restoration of the text brings out this other disfigurement before us in all its atrocious and insulting absurdity. Having already shown, at length, how studiously Shakespeare has wrought Macbeth's liability, under violent excitement, to perfect hallucination of the senses, not only as a chief source of the poetic colouring of this piece, but as a mainspring of the tragic action, we need not here repeat the argument. Indeed, we feel a sort of humiliation in reflecting that the inveterate attachment of managers and auditors to so glaring a perversion should compel us to insist for a single moment upon the fact, that so leading an intention of the dramatist, in this most conspicuous instance of its display, is not merely injured, but is utterly subverted, by placing before the hero's bodily eyes and ours an actual blood-stained figure;-the result of which contrivance is, that so far from marvelling, as Shakespeare meant his audience to do, at the violence of imagination which could force so unreal an apparition upon Macbeth's "heat-oppressed brain," our wonder must be if he, or any man, were not to start and rave at the entrance of so strange a visitor; not to mention the precious outrage to our senses, in the visibility of this unaccountable personage to us, the distant audience, while he is invisible to every one of the guests who crowd the table at which he seats himself in the only vacant chair! But, gross as these disfigurements are, of this grand work of the greatest of artists, even these are not the most essential perversions of its spirit that have descended to us among those traditions from a corrupt and degenerate stage, which, to this very hour, have resisted the growth amongst us of a profounder and more enlightened literary criticism of Shakespeare. The most hurtful of these traditionary notions respecting Macbeth,' are to be found in the radically false conception and representation of its two leading characters, which the actors of them have perpetuated through the whole modern era of our theatrical history. It is the more indispensable, before dismissing our present subject, to consider these histrionic misinterpretations, because, owing to the great frequency of performance which this piece has constantly maintained, this, we are persuaded, is one of the most signal instances of all in which the misconception of the actor has reacted upon the judgment of the critic, forcibly illustrating the importance even to a perfectly intelligent reading of Shakespeare, that the public mind should be disabused of erroneous prepossessions having their source wholly or partly in mere theatrical prescription. 175 6.-FALSE ACTING OF THE TWO PRINCIPAL CHARACTERS. We cannot here examine into the several varieties of expression which, in the representation of the hero, have marked respectively the acting of a Garrick or a Kemble, a Kean or a Macready,-resulting from their personal peculiarities, their particular mannerisms, or their different conceptions as to matters of detail. We have to do at present only with the one grand misconception which has pervaded all these personations,— that of regarding Macbeth as a man originally good, sympathetic, tender-hearted, generous, and grateful, until the ambitious and treacherous purpose of murdering his king is first suggested to him by the weird sisters, and then confirmed in him by the instigations of his wife. This capital error at the outset has betrayed the actors, like the critics, into mistaking the language of his selfish apprehensions for the expressions of compunction and remorse, and his equally selfish bewailings over his own difficulties and downfall, for generous effusions of sympathetic humanity. John Kemble's view of the matter, which we find recorded under his own hand, so fairly represents the constant stage notion upon the subject, that a general indication of it will suffice to shew the still subsisting theatrical creed respecting Macbeth's character. In the year 1785, then, the year in which Mrs. Siddons first acted Lady Macbeth on the London stage, there appeared, in the form of an octavo pamphlet, a posthumous essay, from the pen of Mr. Thomas Whately (uncle of the present Dr. Whately, archbishop of Dublin), known also as the author of Observations on Modern Gardening,'-under the title of Remarks on some of the Characters of Shakespeare.' The piece itself, however, is but a fragment of a larger work which its author had projected-extending only to the completion of a running parallel between the character of Macbeth and that of Richard the Third. This essay, which acquired and has retained a high critical reputation, produced from John Kemble, in the following year, another pamphlet, inscribed to Edmund Malone, and entitled Macbeth Reconsidered; an Essay intended as an Answer to part of the Remarks on some of the Characters of Shakespeare.' Mr. Kemble, however, limits his strictures to a refutation, which we think just and conclusive, of Mr. Whately's denial of personal courage as a quality inherent in Macbeth. To the rest of the essayist's argument he thus emphatically expresses his assent: "The writer of the above pages cannot conclude without saying, he read the Remarks on some of Shakespeare's Characters' with so much general pleasure and conviction, that he wishes his approbation were considerable enough to increase the celebrity which Mr. Wheatley's [Whately's] memory has acquired from a work so usefully intended and so elegantly performed." In Mr. Whately's view of the matter, then (which, indeed, we find still appealed to as an authority), we shall see what was Kemble's "conviction" as to the essential qualities in the character of Macbeth. Having already argued the whole matter so elaborately from the simple evidence of Shakespeare's text, we shall here confine ourselves to citing from Mr. Whately's pages those passages which most strikingly exhibit in his mind that leading view of Macbeth's qualities, the fallacy of which we have demonstrated at length in our foregoing examination. Mr. Whately, then, tells us at the very outset : : "The first thought of succeeding to the throne is suggested, and success in the attempt is promised, to Macbeth by the witches he is therefore represented as a man whose natural temper would have deterred him from such a design, if he had not been immediately tempted and strongly impelled to it. Macbeth appears 66 Agreeably to these ideas," he continues, to be a man not destitute of the feelings of humanity. His lady gives him that character: |