Shakespearean Tragedy Part 50

Here lurks no treason, here no envy swells, Here grow no d.a.m.ned 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 b.l.o.o.d.y thoughts, but not in blood,' with _Macbeth_ II. iii. 146, 'the near in blood, the nearer b.l.o.o.d.y'; _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 _t.i.tus_ 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 a.s.serting 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).