Part 33 (1/2)
[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 _Coriola.n.u.s_ is a famous example. She speaks about thirty-five lines.]
[Footnote 240: The percentage of prose is, roughly, in _Hamlet_ 30-2/3, in _Oth.e.l.lo_ 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 pa.s.sages which recall the Player's speech. Cf. 'Fortune ... showed like a rebel's wh.o.r.e' (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 pa.s.sages:
Quis eluet me Tanais? aut quae barbaris Maeotis undis Pontico inc.u.mbens 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 ma.n.u.s, Haerebit altum facinus. (_Herc. Furens_, 1323.)
(The reader will remember Oth.e.l.lo'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 pa.s.sage 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 _t.i.t. 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 pa.s.sage 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 partic.i.p.ation 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 G.o.d'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.