From The Library of Literary Criticism of English and American Authors, ed. Charles Wells Moulton, 8 vols. (London: Moulton Publishing, 1901), 1: 514-19.
MACBETH
1605-6
January 7. -- To the Duke's house, and saw "Macbeth," which, though I saw it lately, yet appears a most excellent play in all respects, but especially in divertisement, though it be a deep tragedy; which is a strange perfection in a tragedy, it being most proper here, and suitable. -- PEPYS, SAMUEL, 1666-7, Diary and Correspondence.
This play is deservedly celebrated for the propriety of its fictions, and solemnity, grandeur, and variety of its action, but it has no nice discriminations of character, the events are too great to admit the influence of particular dispositions, and the course of the action necessarily determines the conduct of the agents. The danger of ambition is well described; and I know not whether it may not be said, in defence of some parts which now seem improbable, that, in Shakspeare's time it was necessary to warn credulity against vain and illusive predictions. -- JOHNSON, SAMUEL, 1768, General Observations on Shakspeare's Plays.
Macbeth wants no disguise of his natural disposition, for it is not bad, he does not affect more piety than he has: on the contrary, a part of his distress arises from a real sense of religion: which makes him regret that he could not join the chamberlains in prayer for God's blessing' and bewail that he has "given his eternal jewel to the common enemy of man." He continually reproaches himself for his deeds; no use can harden him: confidence cannot silence, and even despair cannot stifle, the cries of his conscience. By the first murder he put "rancours in the vessel of his peace," and of the last he owns to Macduff, "My soul is too much charg'd with blood of thine already." -- WHATELY, THOMAS, 1785-1839, Remarks on Some Characters of Shakespere, p. 89.
Who could exhaust the praise of this sublime work? Since "The Furies" of AEschylus, nothing so grand and terrible has ever been composed. The Witches are not, it is true, divine Eumenides, and are not intended to be so: they are ignoble and vulgar instruments of hell. A German poet therefore very ill understood their meaning, when he transformed them into mongrel beings a mixture of fates, furies, and enchantresses, and clothed them with tragical dignity. Let no man lay hand on Shakspeare's works to change anything essential in them, he will be sure to punish himself. -- SCHLEGEL, AUGUSTUS WILLIAM, 1809, Dramatic Art and Literature, tr. Black, Lecture XII.
Macbeth is said to have been the last King of Scotland here buried; sixty preceded him, all doubtless as powerful in their day, but now unknown -- carent quia vate sacro. A few weeks' labour of Shakspeare, an obscure player, has done more for the memory of Macbeth than all the gifts, wealth, and monuments of this cemetery of princes have been able to secure to the rest of its inhabitants. -- SCOTT, SIR WALTER, 1814, Iona, Diary, 28th August.
"Macbeth" (generally speaking) is done upon a stronger and more systematic principle of contrast than any other of Shakespeare's plays. It moves upon the verge of an abyss, and is a constant struggle between life and death. The action is desperate and the reaction is dreadful. It is a huddling together of fierce extremes, a war of opposite natures which of them shall destroy the other. There is nothing but what has a violent end or violent beginnings. The lights and shades are laid on with a determined hand; the transitions from triumph to despair, from the height of terror to the repose of death, are sudden and startling; every passion brings in its fellow-contrary, and the thoughts pitch and jostle against each other as in the dark. The whole play is an unruly chaos of strange and forbidden things, where the ground rocks under our feet. Shakespeare's genius here took its full swing, and trod upon the farthest bounds of nature and passion. This circumstance will account for the abruptness and violent antitheses of the style, the throes and labour which run through the expression, and from defects will turn them into beauties. -- HAZLITT, WILLIAM, 1817-69, Characters of Shakespear's Plays, p 17.
How admirably Macduff's grief is in harmony with the whole play! It rends, not dissolves, the heart. "The tune of it goes manly." Thus is Shakspere always master of himself and of his subject, -- a genuine Proteus: -- we see all things in him, as images in a calm lake, most distinct, most accurate -- only more splendid, more glorified. This is correctness in the only philosophical sense. But he requires your sympathy and your submission, you must have that recipiency of moral impression without which the purposes and ends of the drama would be frustrated and the absence of which demonstrates an utter want of all imagination, a deadness to that necessary pleasure of being innocently -- shall I say, deluded? -- or rather drawn away from ourselves to the music of noblest thought in harmonious sounds. Happy he, who not only in the public theatre, but in the labours of a profession, and round the light of his own hearth, still carries a heart so pleasure-fraught! -- COLERIDGE, SAMUEL TAYLOR, 1818, Lectures and Notes on Shakspere, ed. Ashe.
From my boyish days I had always felt a great point of perplexity on one point in "Macbeth." It was this: -- The knocking at the gate which succeeds to the murder of Duncan produced to my feelings an effect for which I never could account. The effect was that it reflected back upon the murder a peculiar awfulness and a depth of solemnity; yet, however obstinately I endeavored with my understanding to comprehend this, for many years I never could see why it should produce such an effect. . . . At length I solved it to my own satisfaction; and my solution is this: -- Murder, in ordinary cases, where the sympathy is wholly directed to the case of the murdered person, is an incident of coarse and vulgar horror; and for this reason, -- that it flings the interest exclusively upon the natural but ignoble instinct by which we cleave to life: an instinct which, as being indispensable to the primal law of self-preservation, is the same in kind (though different in degree) amongst all living creatures. This instinct, therefore, because it annihilates all distinctions, and degrades the greatest of men to the level of the "poor beetle that we tread on," exhibits human nature in its most abject and humiliating attitude. Such an attitude would little suit the purposes of the poet. What then must he do? He must throw the interest on the murderer. Our sympathy must be with him (of course I mean a sympathy of comprehension, a sympathy by which we enter into his feelings, and are made to understand them, -- not a sympathy of pity or approbation). In the murdered person, all strife of thought, all flux and reflex of passion and of purpose, are crushed by one overwhelming panic, the fear of instant death smites him "with its petrific mace." But in the murderer, such a murderer as a poet will condescend to, there must be raging some great storm of passion, -- jealousy ambition, vengeance, hatred, -- which will create a hell within him, and into this hell we are to look. -- DE QUINCEY, THOMAS, 1893-60, On the Knocking at the Gate in Macbeth, Collected Writings, ed. Masson, vol. x, pp. 385, 391.
"'Macbeth,' said Goethe, "is Shakespeare's best acting play, the one in which he shows most understanding with respect to the stage. ECKERMANN, JOHN PETER, 1825, Conversations of Goethe, Oct. 15.
It was my custom to study my characters at night, when all the domestic cares and business of the day were over. On the night preceding that in which I was to appear in this part for the first time, I shut myself up, as usual, when all the family were retired, and commenced my study of Lady Macbeth. As the character is very short, I thought I should soon accomplish it. Being then only twenty years of age, I believed, as many others do believe, that little more was necessary than to get the words into my head; for the necessity of discrimination, and the development of character, at that time of my life, had scarcely entered into my imagination. But to proceed. I went on with tolerable composure, in the silence of the night (a night I can never forget), till I came to the assassination scene, when the horrors of the scene rose to a degree that made it impossible for me to get farther. I snatched up my candle, and hurried out of the room, in a paroxysm of terror. My dress was of silk, and the rustling of it, as I ascended the stairs to go to bed, seemed to my panic-struck fancy like the movement of a spectre pursuing me. At last I reached my chamber, where I found my husband fast asleep. I clapped my candlestick down upon the table without the potter@@ of putting the candle out; and threw myself on my bed, without daring to stay even to take off my clothes. At peep of day I rose to resume my task, but so little did I know of my part when I appeared in it at night, that my shame and confusion cured me of procrastinating my business for the remainder of my life. -- SIDDONS, SARAH, 1831? Remarks on the Character of Lady Macbeth. Life of Mrs. Siddons by Campbell, vol. II, p. 35.
In the mind of Lady Macbeth, ambition is represented as the ruling motive, an intense overmastering passion, which is gratified at the expense of every just and generous principle, and every feminine feeling. In the pursuit of her object, she is cruel, treacherous, and daring. She is doubly, trebly dyed in guilt and blood; for the murder she instigates is rendered more frightful by disloyalty and ingratitude, and by the violation of all the most sacred claiins of kindred and hospitality. When her husband's more kindly nature shrinks from the perpetration of the deed of horror, she, like an evil genius, whispers him on to his damnation. The full measure of her wickedness is never disguised, the magnitude and atrocity of her crime is never extenuated, forgotten, or forgiven, in the whole course of the play. . . . Lady Macbeth's amazing power of intellect, her inexorable determination of purpose, her superhuman strength of nerve, render her as fearful in herself as her deeds are hateful; yet she is not a mere monster of depravity, with whom we have nothing in common, nor a meteor whose destroying path we watch in ignorant affright and amaze. She is a terrible impersonation of evil passions and mighty powers, never so far removed from our nature as to be cast beyond the pale of our sympathies; for the woman herself remains a woman to the last -- still linked with her sex and with humanity. -- JAMESON, ANNA BROWNELL, 1832, Characteristics of Women.
I regard the tragedy of "Macbeth," upon the whole, as the greatest treasure of our dramatic literature. We may look, as Britons, at Greek sculpture and at Italian paintings, with a humble consciousness that our native art has never reached their perfection; but in the drama, we can confront AEschylus himself with Shakespeare; and of all modern theatres, ours alone can compete with the Greek in the unborrowed nativeness and sublimity of its superstition. In the grandeur of tragedy, "Macbeth" has no parallel, till we go back to the "Prometheus and the Furies" of the Attic stage. I could even produce, if it were not digressing too far from my subject, innumerable instances of striking similarity between the metaphorical mintage of Shakespeare's and of AEschylus's style, -- a similarity, both in beauty and the fault of excess, that, unless the contrary had been proved, would lead me to suspect our great dramatist to have been a studious Greek scholar. But their resemblance arose only from the consanguinity of nature. -- CAMPBELL, THOMAS, 1834, Life Mrs. Siddons, vol. II, p. 6.
Kemble styles this the noblest of tragedies, and it is natural that he should prefer it to all others of Shakspeare, because, assuredly of the historical plays, and perhaps of all the plays, Othello alone excepted, it is the finest in representation. To read, I own that it is, in my opinion, inferior to some others, from the absence of the splendid and stately speeches which I have noticed in former plays. -- COURTENAY, THOMAS PEREGRINE, 1840, Commetaries on the Historical Plays of Shakspeare, vol. ii, p. 208.
This play has more the air of being a draft, if not unfinished, yet requiring to be retouched and written more in full by its author, than any other of his greater works. Full of incident as it is, it is still one of the shortest of the plays. Like "The Tempest" in this respect, we feel that it would be better if it were longer. We want more of the subdued and calm. There are also more passages than in other plays which seem to be carried beyond the just limits which part the true sublime from the inflated or the obscure, -- passages which we may suppose to have been in the mind of [Ben] Johnson when he said of the soaring genius of Shakespeare, "sufflimandus est." What might not "Macbeth" have been had the Poet been induced to sit down with the play, as it now is, before him, and to direct upon it the full force of his judgment and fine taste, removing here and there a too luxuriant expression, and giving us here and there a breadth of verdure on which the mind might find a momentary repose, and refresh itself amidst the multitude of exciting incidents which come in too rapid a succession upon us! -- HUNTER, JOSEPH, 1845, New Illustrations of the Life, Studies and Writings of Shakespeare, vol. II, p. 158.
"Macbeth" seems inspired by the very genius of the tempest. This drama shows us the gathering, the discharge, and the dispelling of a domestic and political storm, which takes its peculiar hue from the individual character of the hero. It is not in the spirit of mischief that animates the "weird sisters," nor in the passionate and strong-willed ambition of Lady Macbeth, that we find the mainspring of this tragedy, but in the disproportioned though poetically tempered soul of Macbeth himself. A character like this, of extreme selfishness, with a most irritable fancy, must produce, even in ordinary circumstances, an excess of morbid apprehensiveness; which, however, as we see in him, is not inconsistent with the greatest physical courage, but generates of necessity the most entire moral cowardice. When, therefore, a man like this, ill enough qualified even for the honest and straight-forward transactions of life, had brought himself to snatch at an ambitious object by the commission of one great sanguinary crime, the new and false position in which he finds himself by his very success will but startle and exasperate him to escape, as Macbeth says, from "horrible imaginings" by the perpetration of greater and greater actual horrors, till inevitable destruction comes upon us amidst universal execration. -- FLETCHER, GEORGE, 1847, Studies of Shakespeare, p. 109.
"Macbeth," the most awful creation of the poetic mind, is a study every way worthy of those to whom the storms of passion present the frequent cause of mental disease. -- BUCKNILL, JOHN CHARLES, M. D., 1859-67, The Mad Folk of Shakespeare, p. 1.
It is, in fact, a powerful psychological study. Shakespeare depicts a state of mind not only novel, but highly dramatic. He has given us hardened villains, before, in his other pieces. But here he unveils the process by which the thought of crime penetrates a virtuous soul, the destruction it causes as soon as it gains lodgement there, and to what extremites it drags him who has not had strength enough to repel on its first appearance. Macbeth is not wicked like Iago, or Edmund in "Lear." He even begins well. He has defended his country and his king most zealously, and covered himself with glory on two battle-fields. His comrades in arms accord him ungrudging praise, and Duncan knows not how to recompense his deserts. But this brave soldier bears within him the germ of ambition; and, without as yet knowing the height of his aspirations, without even defining to himself his vague desires, he awakes to a simultaneous consciousness of his own power and the temptation to make trial of it. -- MÉZIÈRES, A., 1860, Shakespeare, ses OEuvres et ses Critiques.
As regards wealth of thought, "Macbeth" ranks far below "Hamlet," it lacks the wide, free, historic perfection which in "Julius Caesar" raises us above the horror of his tragic fall. It cannot be compared with "Othello" for completeness, depth of plot, or full, rich illustration of character. But, in our opinion, it excels all that Shakspeare, or any other, poet, has created, in the simple force of the harmonious, majestic current of its action, in the transparency of its plan, in the nervous power and bold sweep of its language, and in its prodigal wealth of poetical coloring. --KREYSSIG, F., 1862, Vorlesungen über Shakspeare, vol. II, p. 346.
It is the prospective and retrospective representation of Macbeth's remorse that constitutes the element of horror in the play. Almost as much pity is felt for the murderer as for his victim. The true title of the tragedy might be, crime, remorse, and expiation. Lady Macbeth alone appears to stand outside of the pale of morality, but her life ends before the expiatory death of her husband, whose daring villainy, incapable of plotting or of enduring the crime, is unable to submit to its punishment. All the great crimes in Shakespeare are inspired by wicked women; men may execute, but cannot conceive them. The creature of sentiment is more depraved than the man of crime. The imagination of woman dallies more easily with crime than the hand of man is raised against his victim. We feel that in committing the murder Macbeth succumbed to a strength of depravity superior to his own. This strength of depravity is the ardent imagination of his wife. . . . Such is "Macbeth!" It is Crime! It is Remorse! It is the weakness of a strong man opposed to the seductions of a perverted and passionate woman! Above all, it is the immediate expiation of crime by the secret vengeance of God! Herein lies the invincible morality of Shakespeare. The Poet is in harmony with God. -- LAMARTINE, ALPHONSE MARIE LOUIS DE, 1865, Shakespeare et son OEouvre.
The popular misunderstanding of the character of Macbeth is due, probably, to the description his wife gives of him in the first interview we have with her. "Yet do I fear thy nature," etc. But it is obvious that so far as we see Macbeth in the play, nothing could be wider of the mark than this estimate of him. For nothing can be farther from the truth than the popular view of Lady Macbeth. That wonderful characteristic of genius, which enables it to put on the character it conceives, reaches its highest manifestation in this marvellous portrait. . . . But all the truth and force of the delineation are lost when Lady Macbeth is regarded as a mere tempter and fiend. She is, in reality, nothing of the kind. Her part is simply that of a woman and a wife who shares her husband's ambition and supports him in it. So far from suggesting his crimes, she distinctly declares that he broke the enterprise to her. . . . We have seen that, before he saw his wife, Macbeth had made up his mind to this first step in his career of crime. All that she does is to back him in the execution of his own design. -- CLAYDEN, P. W., 1867, Macbeth and Lady Macbeth, Fortnightly Review, vol. 8, pp. 163, 164.
The history of Macbeth is the story of a moral poisoning. Frank, sociable, and generous, though tainted from the first by base and ambitious thoughts, he is urged on to his ruin by the prophetic warnings of the witches, by golden opportunity, and the instigations of his wife. He has physical but lacks moral courage. The suggestion of a possible crown haunts him. He struggles, but he is a lion in the toils. He feels the resistless traction of fate, sees himself on the verge of an abyss, and his brain is filled with phantoms. -- WELSH, ALFRED H., 1882, Development of English Literature and Language, vol. I, p. 384.
Macbeth is not, as is too often represented, a noisy swash-buckler; he is a full-furnished, ambitious man. In the scene with Duncan, the excess of courtesy adds a touch to the tragedy. It is like Clytemnestra's profusion to Agamemnon; who, by the way, always strikes me as uncommonly cold and haughty to his wife whom he had not seen for years. -- TENNYSON, ALFRED, LORD, 1883, Some Criticisms on Poets, Memoir by His Son, vol. II, p. 292.
She would never have been the Lady Macbeth we see in Shakespeare's play if she had not been led to it by love for her husband, by her ambition in his interest. Her crime is not innate cruelty, but hardness of heart and unwomanly energy, though the former is even not strong enough to withhold her from tender feelings, and with a different husband she would have been a different wife. -- LEO, F. A., 1885, Shakespeare-Notes, p. 68.
Stands alone by its grand simplicity of conception and the originality of its execution, giving us in a few bold strokes a consummate picture of the strange workings of a human soul. -- TEN BRINK, BERNHARD, 1892-95, Five Lectures on Shakespeare, tr. Franklin, p. 87.
I confess that this play seems to me one of Shakespeare's less interesting efforts; not from the artistic, but from the purely human point of view. It is a rich, highly moral melodrama; but only at occasional points in it do I feel the beating of Shakespeare's heart. My comparative coolness of feeling towards "Macbeth" may possibly be due in a considerable degree to the shamefully mutilated form in which this tragedy has been handed down to us. Who knows what it may have been when it came from Shakespeare's own hand! The text we possess,which was not printed till long after the poet's death, is clipped, pruned, and compressed for acting purposes. We can feel distinctly where the gaps occur, but that is of no avail.... Shakespeare has employed in the treatment of this subject a style that suits it -- vehement to violence, compressed to congestion -- figures treading upon each other's heels. -- BRANDES, GEORGE, 1898, William Shakespeare, A Critical Study, vol.II, pp. 99, 101.
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