William Shakespeare Part 15

Macduff persuades Duncan's son, Malcolm, to attempt the recovery of the Scottish crown.

Malcolm and Macduff make the attempt. They attack Macbeth and kill him.

Macbeth is one of the seven supreme Shakespearean plays. In the order of composition it is either the fourth or the fifth of the seven. In point of merit it is neither greater nor less than the other six. It is different from them, in that it belongs more wholly to the kingdom of vision.

Like most Shakespearean tragedy, Macbeth is the tragedy of a man betrayed by an obsession. Caesar is betrayed by an obsession of the desire of glory, Antony by pa.s.sion, Tarquin by l.u.s.t, Wolsey by worldly greed, Coriola.n.u.s and Timon by their n.o.bleness, Angelo by his righteousness, Hamlet by his wisdom. All fail through having some hunger or quality in excess. Macbeth fails because he interprets with his worldly mind things spiritually suggested to him. G.o.d sends on many men "strong delusion, that they shall believe a lie." Oth.e.l.lo is one such.

Many things betray men. One strong means of delusion is the half-true, half-wise, half-spiritual thing, so much harder to kill than the lie direct. The sentimental treacherous things, like women who betray by arousing pity, are the dangerous things because their attack is made in the guise of great things. Tears look like grief, sentiment looks like love; love feels like n.o.bility; spiritualism seems like revelation.

Among these things few are stronger than the words spoken in unworldly states, in trance, in ecstasy, by oracles and diviners, by soothsayers, by the wholly excited people who are also half sane, by whoever obtains a half knowledge of the spirit by destruction of intellectual process.

"to win us to our harm, The instruments of darkness tell us truths, Win us with honest trifles, to betray's In deepest consequence."

Coming weary and excited from battle, on a day so strange that it adds to the strangeness of his mood, Macbeth hears the hags hail him with prophecy. The promise rankles in him. The seed scattered in us by the beings outside life comes to good or evil according to the sun in us.

Macbeth, looking on the letter of the prophecy, thinks only of the letter of its fulfilment, till it becomes an obsession with him.

Partial fulfilment of the prophecy convinces him that all will be fulfilled. The belief that the veil over the future has been lifted for him gives him the recklessness of one bound in the knots of fate. So often, the thought that the soul is in a trap, playing out something planned of old, makes man take the frantic way, when the smallest belief in life would lead to peace. This thought pa.s.ses through his mind. Then fear that it is all a contriving of the devils makes him put it manfully from his mind. The talk about the Cawdor whose place he holds is a thrust to him. That Cawdor was a traitor who has been put to death for treachery. The king had an "absolute trust" in him; but there is no judging by appearances. This glimpse of the ugliness of treachery makes Macbeth for an instant free of all temptation to it. Then a word stabs him again to the knowledge that if he take no step the king's young son will be king after Duncan. Why should the boy rule? From this point he goes forward, full of all the devils of indecision, but inclining towards righteousness, till his wife, girding and railing at him with definite aim while all his powers are in mutiny, drives him to the act of murder.

The story of the double treachery of the killing of a king, who is also a guest, is so written that we do not feel horror so much as an unbearable pity for Macbeth's mind. The horror is felt later, when it is made plain that the treachery does not end with that old man on the bed, but proceeds in a spreading growth of murder till the man who fought so knightly at Fife is the haunted awful figure who goes ghastly, killing men, women and little children, till Scotland is like a grave. At the end, the "worthy gentleman," "n.o.ble Macbeth," having fallen from depth to depth of degradation, is old, hag-haunted, sick at heart, and weary.

He has no friends. He knows himself silently cursed by every one in his kingdom. His queen is haunted. There is a curse upon the pair of them.

The birds of murder have come to roost. All that supports him is his trust in his reading of the words of the hags. He knows himself secure.

"And you all know security Is mortal's chiefest enemy,"

He has supped full with horrors. His b.l.o.o.d.y base mind is all a blur with gore. But he is resolute in evil still. At the end he sees too late that he has been tricked by--

"the equivocation of the fiend That lies like truth."

His queen has killed herself. All the welter of murder has been useless.

All that he has done is to d.a.m.n his soul through the centuries during which the line of Banquo will reign. He dies with a courage that is half fury against the fate that has tricked him.

No play contains greater poetry. There is nothing more intense. The mind of the man was in the kingdom of vision, hearing a new speech and seeing what worldly beings do not see, the rush of the powers, and the fury of elemental pa.s.sions. No play is so full of an unspeakable splendour of vision--

"his virtues Will plead like angels trumpet-tongued."

"And pity, like a naked new-born babe, Striding the blast, or heaven's cherubin, horsed Upon the sightless couriers of the air."

"Our chimneys were blown down, and, as they say, Lamentings heard i' the air, strange screams of death, And prophesying with accents terrible."

"In the great hand of G.o.d I stand."

"A falcon towering in her pride of place Was by a mousing owl hawk'd at and killed.

And Duncan's horses--a thing most strange and certain-- Beauteous and swift, the minions of their race, Turn'd wild in nature, broke their stalls, flung out, Contending 'gainst obedience, as they would make War with mankind.

'Tis said they eat each other."

"the time has been That, when the brains were out, the man would die."

All the splendours and powers of this great play have been praised and re-praised. n.o.ble inventions, like the knocking on the door and the mutterings of the hags, have thrilled thousands. One, not less n.o.ble, is less noticed. It is in Act IV, sc. i, Macbeth has just questioned the hags for the last time. He calls in Lennox, with the words--

"I did hear The galloping of horse: who was't came by?"

It was the galloping of messengers with the news that Macduff, who is to be the cause of his ruin, has fled to England. An echo of the galloping stays in the brain, as though the hoofs of some horse rode the night, carrying away Macbeth's luck for ever.

_Antony and Cleopatra._

_Written._ 1607-8 (?)

_Published_, in the folio, 1623.

_Source of the Plot._ The life of Antonius in Sir Thomas North's translation of Plutarch's _Lives_.

_The Fable._ Antony, entangled by the wiles of Cleopatra, shakes himself free so that he may attend to the conduct of the world. He makes a pact with the young Caesar, by marrying Caesar's sister Octavia. Soon afterwards, being tempted from his wife by Cleopatra, he falls into wars with Caesar. Being unhappy in his fortune and deserted by his friends, he kills himself. Cleopatra having lost her lover, and fearing to be led in triumph by Caesar, also kills herself.

In this most n.o.ble play, Shakespeare applies to a great subject his constant idea, that tragedy springs from the treachery caused by some obsession.

"Strange it is That nature must compel us to lament Our most persisted deeds."

It cannot be said that the play is greater than the other plays of this period. It can be said that it is on a greater scale than any other play. The scene is the Roman world. The men engaged are struggling for the control of all the power of the world. The private action is played out before a grand public setting. The wisdom and the beauty of the poetry answer the greatness of the subject.

Shakespeare's later tragedies, _King Lear_, _Coriola.n.u.s_, _Oth.e.l.lo_, and this play differ from some of the early tragedies in that the subject is not the man of intellect, hounded down by the man of affairs, as in _Richard II_, _Richard III_, and _Henry IV_, but the man of large and generous nature hounded down by the man of intellect. In all four plays the destruction of the princ.i.p.al character is brought about partly by a blindness in a n.o.ble nature, but very largely by a cool, resolute, astute soul who can and does take advantage of the blindness. Edmund, the tribunes, Iago, and (in this play) Octavius Caesar are such souls.

All of them profit by the soul they help to destroy. They leave upon the mind the impression that they have a tact for the gaining of profit from human frailty. All of them show the basest ingrat.i.tude under a colourable cloak of human excuse.

The obsession of l.u.s.t is ill.u.s.trated in half-a-dozen of Shakespeare's plays; but in none of them so fully as here. The results of that obsession in treachery and tragedy brim the great play. Antony is drunken to destruction with a woman like a raging thirst. A fine stroke in the creation of the play sweeps him clear of her and offers him a way of life. He uses the moment to get so far from her that his return to her is a deed of triple treachery to his wife, to Caesar, and to his country. His intoxication with the woman degrades him to the condition of blindness in which the woman-drunken staggers. It is a part of all drunkenness that the drunkard thinks himself a king, though he looks and is a sot. Shakespeare's marvellous ill.u.s.tration of this blindness (in the third act) is seldom praised as it should be. Antony, crushingly defeated, owing to the treachery of all debauched natures, calls upon Octavius to meet him in single combat.

"men's judgments are A parcel of their fortunes, and things outward Do draw the inward quality after them, To suffer all alike."

"when we in our viciousness grow hard, O misery on't--the wise G.o.ds seel our eyes; In our own filth drop our clear judgments; make us Adore our errors; laugh at's while we strut To our confusion."

The cruel bungling suicide which leaves him lingering in dishonour is one of the saddest things in the plays. This was Antony who ruled once, this mutterer dying, whom no one loves enough to kill. Once before, in Shakespeare's vision, he came near death, in the proud scene in the senate house, before Caesar's murderers. He was very great and n.o.ble then. Now

"The star is fall'n And time is at his period."

"The G.o.d Hercules, whom Antony loved,"

has moved away with his hautboys and all comes to dust again.

The minds of most writers would have been exhausted after the creation of four such acts. The splendour of Shakespeare's intellectual energy makes the last act as bright a torch of beauty as the others. The cry--

"We'll bury him; and then, what's brave, what's n.o.ble, Let's do it after the high Roman fashion, And make Death proud to take us ...

.... we have no friend But resolution and the briefest end,"

begins a song of the welcoming of death, unlike anything in the plays.

Shakespeare seldom allows a woman a great, tragical scene. Cleopatra is the only Shakespearean woman who dies heroically upon the stage. Her death scene is not the greatest, nor the most terrible, but it is the most beautiful scene in all the tragedies. The words--

"Finish, good lady; the bright day is done, And we are for the dark,"

and those most marvellous words, written at one golden time, in a gush of the spirit, when the man must have been trembling--

"O eastern star!

Peace, peace!