R. Is thy name Tirrel ? T. James Tirrel, and your most obedient subject. 1. Prove me, my gracious lord. R. Dar'st thou resolve to kill a friend of mine? T. Please you, I had rather kill two enemies. R. Why then thou hast it; two deep enemies, Foes to my rest and my sweet sleep's disturbers, Are they that I would have thee deal upon : Tirrel, I mean those bastards in the Tower. If the reader calls to mind by what circumspect and slow degrees King John opens himself to Hubert under a similar situation with this of Richard, he will be convinced that Shakspeare considered preservation of character too important to sacrifice on any occasion to the vanity of fine writing; for the scene he has given to John, a timorous and wary prince, would ill suit the character of Richard. A close observance of nature is the first excellence of a dramatic poet, and the peculiar property of him we are reviewing. In these two stages of our comparison, Macbeth appears with far more dramatic effect than Richard, whose first scenes presents us with little else than traits of perfidiousness, one striking incident of successful hypocrisy practised on the Lady Anne, and an open unreserved display of remorseless cruelty. Impatient of any pause or interruption in his measures, a dangerous friend and a determined foe : Effera torquebant avidæ præcordia curæ Crescebat scelerata sitis; prædæque recentis CLAUDIAN. The sole remorse his greedy heart can feel That, which should quench, inflames his craving thirst, Shameless by force or fraud to work his way, And no less prompt to flatter than betray: This hour makes friendships which he breaks the next, Basely to cancel all concessions past, If in a thousand you deny the last. Macbeth has now touched the goal of his ambition Thou hast it now; King, Cawdor, Glamis, all The auguries of the witches, to which no reference had been made in the heat of the main action, are now called to mind with many circumstances of galling aggravation, not only as to the prophecy, which gave the crown to the posterity of Banquo, but also of his own safety from the gallant and noble nature of that general Our fears in Banquo Assassins are provided to murder Banquo and his son, but this is not decided upon without much previous meditation, and he seems prompted to the act more by desperation and dread than by any settled resolution or natural cruelty. He convenes the assassins, and in a conference of some length works round to his point, by insinuations calculated to persuade them to despatch Banquo for injuries done to them, rather than from motives which respect himself; in which scene we dicover a remarkable preservation of character in Macbeth, who by this artifice strives to blind his own conscience and throw the guilt upon theirs: in this, as in the former action, there is nothing kingly in his cruelty; in one he acted under the controlling spirit of his wife, here he plays the sycophant with hired assassins, and confesses himself under awe of the superior genius of Banquo -Under him My genius is rebuked, as it is said There is not a circumstance ever so minute in the conduct of this character, which does not point out to a diligent observer, how closely the poet has adhered to nature in every part of his delineation; accordingly we observe a peculiarity in the language of Macbeth, which is highly characteristic; I mean the figurative turn of his expressions, whenever his imagination strikes upon any gloomy subject Oh! full of scorpions is my mind, dear wife! And in this state of self torment every object of solemnity, though ever so familiar, becomes an object of terror! night, for instance, is not mentioned by him without an accompaniment of every melancholy attribute which a frighted fancy can annex Ere the bat hath flown His cloister'd flight, ere to black Hecate's summons It is the darkness of his soul that makes the night so dreadful, the scorpions in his mind convoke these images-but he has not yet done with it Come, sealing Night! Skarf up the tender eye of pitiful day; Good things of day begin to droop and drowse, Whilst night's black agents to their prey do rouse. The critic of language will observe that here is a redundancy and crowd of metaphors, but the critic of nature will acknowledge that it is the very truth of character, and join me in the remark which points it out. In a tragedy so replete with murder, and in the display of a character so tortured by the scorpions of the mind as this of Macbeth, it is naturally to be expected that a genius like Shakspeare's will call in the dead for their share in the horror of the scene. This he has done in two several ways; first, by the apparition of Banquo, which is invisible to all but Macbeth; secondly, by the spells and incantations of the witches, who raise spirits, which in certain enigmatical predictions shadow out his fate; and these are followed by a train of unborn revelations, drawn by the power of magic from the womb of futurity before their time. It appears that Lady Macbeth was not a party in the assassination of Banquo, and the ghost, though twice visible to the murderer, is not seen by her. This is another incident highly worthy a particular remark; for by keeping her free from any participation in the horror of the sight, the poet is enabled to make a scene aside, between Macbeth and her, which contains some of the finest speakings in the play. The ghost in Hamlet, and the ghost of Darius in Æschylus, are introduced by preparation and prelude; this of Banquo is an object of surprise as well as terror, and there is scarce an incident to be named of more striking and dramatic effect: it is one, amongst various proofs, that must convince every man who looks critically into Shakspeare, that he was as great a master in art as in nature: how it strikes me in this point of view, I shall take the liberty of explaining more at length. The murder of Duncan is the main incident of this tragedy; that of Banquo is subordinate: Duncan's blood was not only the first so shed by Macbeth, but the dignity of the person murdered, and the aggravating circumstaces attending it, constitute a crime of the very first magnitude: for these reasons it might be expected, that the spectre most likely to haunt his imagination would be that of Duncan; and the rather because his terror and compunction were so much more strongly excited by this first murder, perpetrated with his own hands, than by the subsequent one of Banquo, palliated by evasion, and committed to others. But when we recollect that Lady Macbeth was not only his accomplice, but in fact the first mover in the murder of the king, we see good reason why Duncan's ghost could not be called up, unless she who so deeply partook of the guilt had also shared in the horror of the appearance; and as visitations of a peculiar sort were reserved for her in a later period of the drama, it was a point of consummate art and judgment to exclude her from the affair of Banquo's murder, and make the more susceptible conscience of Macbeth figure this apparition in his mind's eye, without any other witness to the vision. I persuade myself these will appear very natural reasons why the poet did not raise the ghost of the king in preference, though it is reasonable to think it would have been a much more noble incident in his hands than this of Banquo. It now remains to examine, whether this is more fully justified by the peculiar situation reserved for Lady Macbeth, to which I have before adverted. The intrepidity of her character is so marked that we may well suppose no waking terrors could shake it, and in this light it must be acknowledged a very natural expedient to make her vent the agonies of her conscience in sleep. Dreams have been a |