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appearance of it which tragedy cannot dissolve without dissolving itself, is illusive. And its tendency towards this idea is traceable in King Lear, in the shape of the notion that this 'great world' is transitory, or 'will wear out to nought' like the little world called 'man' (iv. vi. 137), or that humanity will destroy itself.1 In later days, in the drama that was probably Shakespeare's last complete work, the Tempest, this notion of the transitoriness of things appears, side by side with the simpler feeling that man's life is an illusion or dream, in some of the most famous lines he ever wrote:

Our revels now are ended. These our actors,

As I foretold you, were all spirits and

Are melted into air, into thin air:

And, like the baseless fabric of this vision,
The cloud-capp'd towers, the gorgeous palaces,
The solemn temples, the great globe itself,
Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve
And, like this insubstantial pageant faded,
Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff
As dreams are made on, and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep.

These lines, detached from their context, are
familiar to everyone; but, in the Tempest, they
are dramatic as well as poetical. The sudden
emergence of the thought expressed in them has
a specific and most significant cause; and as I
have not seen it remarked I will point it out.

Prospero, by means of his spirits, has been exhibiting to Ferdinand and Miranda a masque

1 Biblical ideas seem to have been floating in Shakespeare's mind. Cf. the words of Kent, when Lear enters with Cordelia's body, 'Is this the promised end?' and Edgar's answer, 'Or image of that horror?' The 'promised end' is certainly the end of the world (cf. with 'image' 'the great doom's image,' Macbeth, ii. iii. 83); and the next words, Albany's 'Fall and cease,' may be addressed to the heavens or stars, not to Lear. It seems probable that in writing Gloster's speech about the predicted horrors to follow 'these late eclipses Shakespeare had a vague recollection of the passage in Matthew xxiv., or of that in Mark xiii., about the tribulations which were to be the sign of 'the end of the world.' (I do not mean, of course, that the 'prediction' of i. ii. 119 is the prediction to be found in one of these passages.)

in which goddesses appear, and which is so majestic and harmonious that to the young man, standing beside such a father and such a wife, the place seems Paradise, -as perhaps the world once seemed to Shakespeare. Then, at the bidding of Iris, there begins a dance of Nymphs with Reapers, sunburnt, weary of their August labour, but now in their holiday garb. But, as this is nearing its end, Prospero 'starts suddenly, and speaks'; and the visions vanish. And what he 'speaks' is shown in these lines, which introduce the famous passage just quoted:

Pros. [Aside] I had forgot that foul conspiracy

Of the beast Caliban and his confederates

Against my life: the minute of their plot

Is almost come. [To the Spirits.] Well done! avoid; no

more.

Fer. This is strange; your father's in some passion
That works him strongly.

Mir.

Never till this day

Saw I him touch'd with anger so distemper'd.

Pros. You do look, my son, in a moved sort,
As if you were dismay'd: be cheerful, sir.
Our revels.

And then, after the famous lines, follow these:

Sir, I am vex'd:

Bear with my weakness; my old brain is troubled ;

Be not disturb'd with my infirmity;

If you be pleased, retire into my cell

And there repose: a turn or two I'll walk,

To still my beating mind.

We seem to see here the whole mind of Shakespeare in his last years. That which provokes in Prospero first a 'passion' of anger, and, a moment later, that melancholy and mystical thought that the great world must perish utterly and that man is but a dream, is the sudden recollection of gross and apparently incurable evil in the 'monster' whom he had tried in vain to raise and soften, and in the monster's human confederates. It is this, which is but the repetition of his earlier experience

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of treachery and ingratitude, that troubles his old
brain, makes his mind 'beat,' and forces on
him the sense of unreality and evanescence in the
world and the life that are haunted by such evil.
Nor, though Prospero can spare and forgive, is
there any sign to the end that he believes the evil
curable either in the monster, the 'born devil,' or
in the more monstrous villains, the 'worse than
devils,' whom he so sternly dismisses. But he has
learned patience, has come to regard his anger and
loathing as a weakness or infirmity, and would not
have it disturb the young and innocent.
And so,
in the days of King Lear, it was chiefly the power
of 'monstrous' and apparently cureless evil in the
'great world' that filled Shakespeare's soul with
horror, and perhaps forced him sometimes to yield
to the infirmity of misanthropy and despair, to cry
'No, no, no life,' and to take refuge in the thought
that this fitful fever is a dream that must
soon fade into a dreamless sleep; until, to free
himself from the perilous stuff that weighed upon
his heart, he summoned to his aid his 'so potent
art,' and wrought this stuff into the stormy music
of his greatest poem, which seems to cry,

You heavens, give me that patience, patience I need,
and, like the Tempest, seems to preach to us from
end to end, Thou must be patient,' 'Bear free
and patient thoughts."

1 Cf. Hamlet, iii. i. 181:

This something-settled matter in his heart,

Whereon his brains still beating puts him thus

From fashion of himself.

I believe the criticism of King Lear which has influenced me most is that in Prof. Dowden's Shakspere, his Mind and Art (though, when I wrote my lectures, I had not read that criticism for many years); and I am glad that this acknowledgment gives me the opportunity of repeating in print an opinion which I have often expressed to students, that anyone entering on the study of Shakespeare, and unable or unwilling to read much criticism, would do best to take Prof. Dowden for his guide.

LECTURE IX

MACBETH

Macbeth, it is probable, was the last-written of the four great tragedies, and immediately preceded Antony and Cleopatra. In that play Shakespeare's final style appears for the first time completely formed, and the transition to this style is much more decidedly visible in Macbeth than in King Lear. Yet in certain respects Macbeth recalls Hamlet rather than Othello or King Lear. In the heroes of both plays the passage from thought to a critical resolution and action is difficult, and excites the keenest interest. In neither play, as in Othello and King Lear, is painful pathos one of the main effects. Evil, again, though it shows in Macbeth a prodigious energy, is not the icy or stony inhumanity of Iago or Goneril; and, as in Hamlet, it is pursued by remorse. Finally, Shakespeare no longer restricts the action to purely human agencies, as in the two preceding tragedies; portents once more fill the heavens, ghosts rise from their graves, an unearthly light flickers about the head of the doomed man. The special popu

larity of Hamlet and Macbeth is due in part to some of these common characteristics, notably to the fascination of the supernatural, the absence of the spectacle of extreme undeserved suffering, the

1 See note BB.

absence of characters which horrify and repel and yet are destitute of grandeur. The reader who looks unwillingly at Iago gazes at Lady Macbeth in awe, because though she is dreadful she is also sublime. The whole tragedy is sublime.

In this, however, and in other respects, Macbeth makes an impression quite different from that of Hamlet. The dimensions of the principal characters, the rate of movement in the action, the supernatural effect, the style, the versification, are all changed; and they are all changed in much the same manner. In many parts of Macbeth there is in the language a peculiar compression, pregnancy, energy, even violence; the harmonious grace and even flow, often conspicuous in Hamlet, have almost disappeared. The chief characters, built on a scale at least as large as that of Othello, seem to attain at times an almost superhuman stature. The diction has in places a huge and rugged grandeur, which degenerates here and there into tumidity. The solemn majesty of the royal Ghost in Hamlet, appearing in armour and standing silent in the moonlight, is exchanged for shapes of horror, dimly seen in the murky air or revealed by the glare of the caldron fire in a dark cavern, or for the ghastly face of Banquo badged with blood and staring with blank eyes. The other three tragedies all open with conversations which lead into the action: here the action bursts into wild life amidst the sounds of a thunderstorm and the echoes of a distant battle. It hurries through seven very brief scenes of mounting suspense to a terrible crisis, which is reached, in the murder of Duncan, at the beginning of the Second Act. Pausing a moment and changing its shape, it hastes again with scarcely diminished speed to fresh horrors. And even when the speed of the outward action is slackened, the same effect is continued in another form: we are shown a soul

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