mands the doctor to "cure her of that." Nothing but utter insensibility to her individual sufferings could permit him, at such a moment, to indulge in one of his selfish poetical abstractions:—

Canst thou not minister to a mind diseas'd;
Pluck from the memory a rooted sorrow;
Raze out the written troubles of the brain;
And, with some sweet oblivious antidote,
Cleanse the stuff'd bosom of that perilous stuff
Which weighs upon the heart?

In like manner, his rejoinder to the physician's assurance, "Therein the patient must minister to himself," is purely self-regarding :

Throw physic to the dogs-I'll none of it. And, in the same spirit, he continues:Doctor, the thanes fly from me.

If thou couldst, doctor, cast

The water of my land, find her disease,
And purge it to a sound and pristine health,

I would applaud thee to the very echo,

That should applaud again!

What rhubarb, senna, or what purgative drug,
Would scour these English hence?

When the queen's women are heard lamenting within the castle, the same self-absorption of her husband seems to prevent him from at all divining the cause. He is occupied exclusively with ruminating upon his own sensations:

I have almost forgot the taste of fears:

The time has been, my senses would have cool'd
To hear a night-shriek; and my fell of hair
Would at a dismal treatise rouse, and stir

As life were in't: I have supp'd full with horrors;
Direness, familiar to my slaughterous thoughts,

Cannot once start me!Wherefore was that cry?

When he is told, "The queen, my lord, is dead," his exclamation is one of anything but compassion-he seems to think she has used him very ill by dying just then:

She should have died hereafter

There would have been a time for such a word.

He requites her, however, by forgetting her utterly and finally in another of his grand self-regarding ruminations:

To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,
To the last syllable of recorded time;
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!
Life's but a walking shadow; a poor player,
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,
And then is heard no more: it is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing!

We might here have closed our present notice of this great Shakespearian tragedy, leaving this full examination into the developement of its two leading characters to make its unassisted impression upon the reader's mind. But the established theatrical treatment of the piece will by no means permit us to do So. Of all the great works of its author, this, we believe, is the one which, upon the whole, is most frequently exhibited on the stage; yet, of all others, it is the one which, by injurious omissions, by more injurious insertions, and by erroneous acting, is the most thoroughly falsified to the apprehension of the auditor. So that, although the view which we have presented of the mutual relation between those two characters, so different from the prevailing one, is drawn from the most severely attentive consideration of Shakespeare's text; yet we can scarcely anticipate a fair reception of it by the public at large, unless it be supported by a distinct exposure of the distortion and perversion which are still almost nightly inflicted upon this masterpiece of the greatest of dramatists, by that corrupted mode of representing it, which prescription would seem to have almost irrevocably sanctioned.

5.-STAGE CORRUPTIONS OF THIS PLAY, BY OMISSION OR

INSERTION.

FIRST, as to omissions; in this, perhaps the most closely and rigidly coherent of all its author's compositions, and, consequently, that in which any curtailment most necessarily implies mutilation.

*

Passing over mere suppressions of detail, let us come to the comic scene of the porter, which immediately follows the murder scene between Macbeth and his lady, and respecting which we entirely dissent from the opinion so positively expressed by Coleridge, that it was "written for the mob by some other hand." Coleridge himself, in the very next paragraph of these notes, alluding to a subsequent passage of this play, indicates the true spirit and bearing of this comic introduction. Shakespeare, he observes, never introduces the comic "but when it may react on the tragedy by harmonious contrast." Precisely so. The horror of this midnight assassination is thrown into the boldest possible relief by the fact of its being perpetrated under the mask of grateful, plenteous, jovial, and even riotous hospitality. As the murder scene receives its last heightening of effect from that wherein the guests are seen retiring to rest, and Banquo tells Macbeth

The king's a-bed:

He hath been in unusual pleasure, and
Sent forth great largess to your offices:
This diamond he greets your wife withal,

By the name of most kind hostess; and shut up
In measureless content ;-

so, in this same disputed passage of the drunken porter, wherein we are presented, as it were, with the last heavy, expiring fumes of the nocturnal entertainment, the touch of humorous colloquy between this drolly-moralizing domestic and the gentlemen who

'Literary Remains,' vol. ii. p. 246.

are up thus early to awaken the king for his intended journey, and are quite unsuspecting of mischief,— gives the more overpowering force to the burst of indignant horror produced by their discovery of the sanguinary fact.

The introduction of this comic passage having, for this reason, we believe, been deliberately determined on by the dramatist, what more natural than that it should be made to issue chiefly from the mouth of the half-sobered porter? It is a most essential part of the dramatic incident, that the criminal pair should be startled in the very moment of completing their sanguinary deed, by those loyal followers who are come to awaken the sovereign whom their host and hostess have put to sleep for ever. They must be admitted, and the porter, of course, must make his appearance, the fittest representative, too, of the latest portion of the night's carousing, and the fittest, therefore, to give the dialogue a gravely comic turn. Another dramatic purpose, too, is served by the interposing of this interval in the chain of tragic circumstance—the allowing of time for Macbeth, after retiring from the scene, lost," as his lady tells him, "so poorly in his thoughts," to wash his hands, put on his night-dress, and assume that perfect selfpossession, in speech at least, wherewith he comes forth to meet the early risers, Macduff and Lenox. The omission of the whole passage in acting, except a very few words, by bringing Macbeth forward again, cool and collected, so immediately after he has withdrawn in such confusion, destroys, in this important place, the coherence and probability of the incident. Modern decorum, no doubt, demands the omission of the greater part of the porter's share in the dialogue; but there seems no such reason for suppressing the "devil-porter" soliloquy, wherein he "had thought to have let in some of all professions, that go the primrose way to the everlasting bonfire," amongst whom he tells us of "an equivocator, who committed treason enough for God's sake, yet could not equivocate to heaven."

66

The second theatrical mutilation that we have to notice, is the total omission of Lady Macbeth's appearance in the discovery scene. We hardly need point out the doubly gross improbability involved herein. On the one hand, the lady's clear understanding of the part it behoves her to act, and her perfect selfpossession, must of themselves bring her forward, as the mistress of the mansion, to enquireWhat's the business,

That such a hideous trumpet calls to parley
The sleepers of the house? Speak, speak.

On the other hand, her solicitude to see how her nervous lord conducts himself under this new trial of his self-possession, so vital to them both, must force her upon the scene. Strange, therefore, does it seem, that we should miss her altogether, as we do in the present mode of performance, from this critical passage of the incident. How much deep illustration of character, too, as we have shown in a preceding page, is lost by this one brief suppression,-besides that it strikes out one complete link in the main dramatic interest.

A minor injury, but still injurious, is the omission, in the following scene, of the "old man," and of the dialogue which passes between him and Rosse outside the castle. It was plainly one deliberate aim of the great artist, to keep the association and affinity which he chose to establish between spiritual and material storm and darkness continually before us:-

Old Man. Threescore and ten I can remember well;
Within the volume of which time I have seen
Hours dreadful and things strange; but this sore night
Hath trifled former knowings.

Ah, good father,

Rosse.
Thou seest, the heavens, as troubled with man's act,
Threaten his bloody stage: by the clock 'tis day,
And yet dark night strangles the travelling lamp:
Is it night's predominance, or the day's shame,
That darkness does the face of earth intomb,
When living light should kiss it?

Old M.
Even like the deed that's done, &c.

"Tis unnatural,