Ube Eli3abetban Sbafespere VOLUME I THE TRAGEDIE OF MACBETH Gbe J6li3abetban Sbafcspere THE TRAGEDIE OF MACBETH A NEW EDITION OF SHAKSPERE'S WORKS WITH CRITICAL TEXT IN ELIZABETHAN ENGLISH AND BRIEF NOTES ILLUSTRATIVE OF ELIZABETHAN LIFE THOUGHT AND IDIOM BY MARK HARVEY LIDDELL NEW YORK DOUBLEDAY, PAGE & CO. M CM III 0- Copyright, 1903, by DOUBLEDAY, PAGE & CO. TO ARTHUR S. NAPIER MERTON PROFESSOR OF ENGLISH LANGUAGE AND LITERATURE IN THE UNIVERSITY OF OXFORD THIS EDITION OF SHAKSPERE IS RESPECTFULLY AND AFFECTIONATELY DEDICATED MH00959 GENERAL PREFACE THE aim of this new edition of Shakspere is twofold: to give the modern reader an accurate critical text of Shakspere* s works in the language of Shakspere* s time, and to interpret this in the light of Elizabethan conditions of life and thought and idiom. ZJUhen Nicholas ^owe in I70J published the first modern edition of Shakspere* s plays ; he printed the text in the English of the eigh- teenth century and explained its divergencies from the idiom then cur- rent as being due to the obsolete words of the 'old print* and to the 'corruptions' of the early printers. Where the text was to him un- intelligible he amended it to suit his notions of what Shakspere should have written. The apparent unintelligibilities ; confusions, and imperfections of Shakspere* s writings when read as eighteenth-century English and weighed by the exact and formal mind of Pope, Shakspere* s next editor (1725), were even more frankly acknowledged than they had been by T^owe. Pope, however, assigned them to the peculiar defects of Shakspere* s genius : "It must be owned that with all these great excellencies he has almost as great defects; and that as he has cer- tainly written better, so he has perhaps written worse than any other.** Guided by this belief, 'Pope made numerous changes and "improve- ments** in Shakspere* s text. Theobald, in his edition, I733 y took much the same attitude to Shakspere* s supposed imperfections that Pope did, and wrote: "As in great piles of building some parts are often finished up to hit the taste of the connoisseur, others more negligently put together to strike the fancy of a common and unlearned beholder, . . so in Shakspere.** GENERAL PREFACE 11 Nullum sine venia placuit ingenium, says Seneca. The genius that gives us the greatest pleasure sometime stands in need of our indulgence." Theobald, therefore (to use his own words), set himself the task of emend- ing the corrupt passages, of explaining the obscure and difficult ones, and of inquiring into the beauties and defects of composition. His guiding principles were admirable: u Wherever the author's sense is clear and discoverable (tho f ', perchance, low and trivial), I have not by any in- novation tamper 7 d with his text out of an ostentation of endeavouring to make him speak better than the old copies have done. Where, thro 7 all the former editions, a passage has labour 7 d under flat nonsense and invincible darkness, if, by the addition or alteration of a letter or two, or a transposition in the pointing, I have restored to him both sense and sentiment, such corrections, I am persuaded, will need no indulgence. And whenever I have taken a greater latitude and liberty in amending, I have constantly endeavoured to support my corrections and conjectures by parallel passages and authorities from himself, the surest means of expounding any author whatever. Cette voie d'interpreter un autbeur par lui-meme est plus sure que tous les commentaires, says a very learned French critick. 77 While these principles and this practice were far in advance of the scholarship of Theobald 7 s day, Theobald 7 s edition laboured under the same disadvantages as did that of 'Pope, — namely, the assumption that whatever was unintelligible in Shakspere when read as eighteenth-cen- tury English must likewise have been unintelligible to Shakspere 7 s audi- ence. He says there are very few pages in Shakspere upon which u some suspicions of depravity do not frequently arise. 77 Again, u as to his style and diction, we may much more justly apply to Shakespeare, what a celebrated writer has said of Milton : Our language sunk under him, and was unequal to that greatness of soul which furnish 7 d him with such glorious conceptions. He therefore frequently uses old words to give his diction an air of solemnity, as he coins others to express the novelty and variety of his ideas 77 — modern appreciations are often quite as ill founded as is this one of Theobald 7 s. GENERAL PREFACE These two eighteenth-century editors of Shakspere, Pope and Theo- bald, though such bitter rivals, both recognized a certain amount of obscurity in Shakspere* s language as they understood it, and each in his own way endeavoured to alleviate it or palliate it for contemporary readers. In the one we have the prototype of the literary, in the other the prototype of the critical editor ofShakspere. ZVarburton (1747) and Johnson (1765) followed more or less closely in the footsteps of Pope; Capell (1768), Steevens (1773), and Malone (1790, 182 1), followed in the footsteps of Theobald. TSut they all printed Shakspere* s text in the current idiom of their day, and explained its divergencies as being due to obsolete words, depravity of text, and the general inade- quacy of language to the task Shakspere imposed upon it. The nineteenth-century editors largely occupied themselves with adding to the explanatory material already collected by their predecessors and emending the text in a growing spirit of conservatism . <&yce ( / 85 7) enriched the work of Steevens and Malone. The first edition to show the impulse of the critical method which, during the middle of the last century, did so much to purify our texts of Greek and Latin classics was that of < Delius (1854) f which is in some respects superior to the work of the Cambridge editors. < Delius > s edition, too, contained evidence of that careful and scholarly judgement which bore such rich fruit in Ger- many during the latter part of the last century. The Cambridge edition, begun in 1863, finished in 1866, and revised in 1887, carried this criti- cal scholarship a long step in advance, furnishing a conservative text with, for its time, a minimum of emendation, and supplying a more or less complete apparatus for textual study. This text has usually been reprinted with slight variations in recent editions of Shakspere. In 1 87 1 was begun a New Variorum by Horace Howard Furness, collecting in convenient form a vast number of notes and emendations of previous editors. 'But in the nineteenth century, as well as in the eighteenth, Shak- spere has invariably, save in the case of Dr. Furness' s Variorum, which copies the First Folio punctuatim et literatim, been modernized and transliterated into the current idiom. GENERAL PREFACE Thus in two centuries of editing, Shakspere' s works have usually been printed as if the differences between Elizabethan and current idiom were largely a matter of obsolete words, and this modernized text has usually been interpreted from the standpoint of modern idiom. The consequent obscurities and confusions have been set down with more or less insistence to the two causes stated by Theobald, viz. the depravity of the text and the inadequacy of the English language to express Shak- spere' s great thought. Through the labours of successive generations of Shakspere scholars the number of the 'depravities' has been greatly reduced, and the l obscurities ' illustrated and more or less clarified. But Shakspere is still given to us in modern English dress and interpreted to us as current idiom, and a large number of apparent depravities of text and obscurities of diction still remain to puzzle the modern reader. For a full half-century it has been known that the development of a living language such as our English consists not merely in an aban- donment of a certain part of its vocabulary, but in successive alterations of its entire structure. Its sounds, the stresses of its syllables, its in- flectional modes, its syntactical habits of collocating words, its pro- sodic forms, the delicate shadings of meaning and connotation which are conveyed by its words and idioms, — all these undergo a continuous process of transformation, sometimes rapid, sometimes slow, the net result of which is that the idiom of one period fails to express for a suc- ceeding generation its original content and meaning. No single work of actual scholarship has contributed so much to the explanation and elucidation of this scientific principle as has the Oxford Dictionary. The resources which this one book places at the disposal of the Shakspere scholar of the present century put him in possession of a means of understanding apparent depravities and inadequacies which Shakspere' s earlier editors did not dream of. (But not only this : the stimulus of new scientific methods has set to work the English scholars of America, England, and Germany at re- casting and rearranging the whole subject of English in the light of the facts of its historical development. The fresh knowledge that has re- GENERAL PREFACE suited gives a new interest to 'text depravity,' and invests the apparent quaintnesses and abnormalities of the ' old spelling' with a new mean- ing. Words and idioms which were thought to be ' corrupt' in Shak- spere's text turn out to be normal forms of expression in normal forms of representation. For instance, in "VOe have scorch' d the snake, not kill' d it" Macbeth III. 2. 13, the " scorch' d " of Shakspere' s text, which has been changed by a ' happy emendation ' of Theobald's to the* scotched' of all modern editions, is a normal Middle English word-form still in use in Elizabethan literature and employed in Beaumont and Fletcher' s Knight of the burning 'Pestle; though here, as in Shakspere, it has been assumed that the " scorch' d" of the half-dozen independent edi- tions of Beaumont and Fletcher's text is a misprint in each case for 4 scotched.' And, notwithstanding that the r looks like such an obvious ' depravity ' of an original t, u scorch' d" meaning ' scored' or 'hacked' was the word Shakspere used. And so in Errors V. 1. 183, where this same word describes the scratching of one's face ; though here some editors explain it as meaning 'singe' and others emend to 'scotch.' Likewise, the obscurity of diction so readily laid to Shakspere' s charge vanishes away when we confront it with a modern historical knowledge of Elizabethan idiom. For instance, in such a phrase as "Let not my jealousies be your dishonors, 'But mine owne safeties," Macbeth IV.3.29, we do not have a vague expression of the thought, 'I am jealous for my honour: but this jealousy implies no dishonour to you; think of it merely as proceeding from my care for my own safety,' but a sharp, clear, and idiomatically expressed notion, 'Let not my sus- picions be a cause of shame to you, but a safeguard to myself,' — a no- tion that has more clearness and definiteness in its Elizabethan form than it is possible to give it in a modern translation. 'Depravity of text undoubtedly is to be reckoned with in Shakspere. Incorrect punctuation, misprinted words, bad line divisions, and occa- sional dislocations of the sense were undoubtedly frequently overlooked by the proof-readers in early editions of the text. 'But these depravities are normal and human, and are not much worse than those that occur GENERAL PREFACE in the other printed books of Shakspere' s time. They are to a large extent such mistakes as we should expect to find in the work of any author whose writing was not revised and corrected by the author himself. ^But the compositor 1 s capacity for error has its limitations : he does not make "pi" of his own language. If the reader will consider the hundreds of \emendations that have been proposed for the text of Macbeth, traditionally regarded as one of the worst printed of Shakspere' s plays, and subse- quently been shown to be due to editorial unfamiliarity with Elizabethan English, he will see that this invocation of the deus ex machina of cor- ruptness to solve the text problems of Shakspere has been appealed to needlessly in nine cases out of ten. As to the inadequacy of English speech to convey the greatness of any one 7 s thought, our language has never failed to rise to any emer- gency that English thinkers, small and great, have created for it. Indeed, in the very nature of language such an inadequacy can never exist, be- cause language is thought itself, and the possession of the power of creating great thought carries with it ipso facto the capacity of putting that thought into form. Shakspere is never superior to his idiom : indeed, no thinker of English ever demonstrated more clearly the capacity of our language for clear, direct, and forthright expression. ZJUe should be as careful, therefore, in invoking this explanation of 'obscurity of dic- tion 1 to help us over a difficult passage as we should be in resorting to assumptions of corruptness, lest in charging Shakspere with ob- scurity we convict ourselves of ignorance. It is the purpose, therefore, of this new edition of Shakspere 1 s works to bring this new learning to bear on the elucidation of Shakspere 1 s text, and to give new point to the illustrative material collected by the editors of the last two centuries, with the single aim of making the sense of Shak- spere^ English clear and inevitable to the modern reader. find while we may not succeed to the full in clearing from all its obscurities the text of Shakspere, or in illustrating to the complete satis- faction of the modern reader the implication of Shakspere 1 s thought and idiom, yet we hope to be able to push the great work of interpreting GENERAL V^EF/ICE Shakspere a step or two along its course, and to point the way to a fuller comprehension of the greatest and mightiest piece of literature, save one, that the human mind has produced. The text of this edition is a critical one newly compiled from the various Quarto and Folio sources in the light of their known relations to one another, and not selected from them with the purpose of obtaining the most literary and, from the modern standpoint, the most easily intelligible form in which the plays might have been written. /Is the basis of the form of the text the Folio of 1623 has been chosen because it presents the uniformity of a collected edition, and its English is essentially that of Shakspere 7 s time. This text is printed in the forms of Elizabethan English, not from any desire to preserve the u quaintness" of the original, nor yet from any philological pedantry, but simply because the scholar- ship of the last quarter-century has made evident the importance of read- ing Elizabethan literature in the language in which it was written, and not in modern transliterations or translations of it. (But while the spelling of Shakspere 7 s English is an essential ele- ment of its structure indicating essential distinctions of sound, the typo- graphical peculiarities of the Folio, such as the capitalization of important words and the printing of the letters f, i r and u for s, j, and v, are dis- tinctions which have only formal and not essential significance. The punctuation system, too, of Elizabethan English is a formal method of pointing thought that is different from our modern one, but does not in- dicate thought divisions essentially different from those of modern Eng- lish. It is therefore unnecessary to preserve these formal peculiarities of printing, and the editor has followed the system adopted by the Oxford (Dictionary for quoting Elizabethan literature, with the sole distinction of substituting modern capitalization for Elizabethan. 1 Significant variant readings, where there is more than one indepen- dent source of the text, are given in their original form. Mere variations in spelling and readings of Quartos or Folios which are not independent 1 The capitalization of important words is not peculiar to the Folio, but was a common practice of Elizabethan printing-offices. GENERAL P^EF/ICE sources of the text are omitted. These latter are of no more weight in determining the text than are modern guesses. Conjectural emendations are not noticed unless they supply in the place of a word obviously un- intelligible as Elizabethan English another word-form which makes apt sense in Shakspere' s time 7 and can be assumed as the basis of a more or less evident printer's error. In short, it is the aim of the text and of the critical notes to present the work of Shakspere simply and clearly in a form which Shakspere himself would understand, and one as nearly like the form he may be supposed to have given his writing as a conservative application of the principles of evidence can attain to. The aim of the explanatory notes is to bring together in brief space and compact form such material as is necessary to the clear understand- ing of Shakspere' s text. Those which have to do with glossarial ex- planations aim to give as accurately as possible the exact shade of mean- ing which Shakspere' s words had at the time they were written. Many Elizabethan locutions, while not entirely obsolete in modern English, nevertheless suggest a range of associated ideas that is quite different from those they now suggest. In the misunderstanding of these Eliza- bethan connotations lies the ground of the charge of obscurity which is so frequently brought against Shakspere' s thinking : an intimate understand- ing, therefore, of these word meanings is necessary not only to an in- telligent comprehension of Shakspere' s text, but is also necessary to an appreciation of the literary quality of his writing. Left to himself, the modern reader can only guess at these connotations, and his guess, as is evident from the explanations of almost any edition of Shakspere, does not always hit the mark. 'Very frequently a delicate implication or a fine reference is missed in this process of guessing. The editor, therefore, has preferred to incur the criticism of tl insulting the reader's intelligence" (as it is called) by glossing these obsolete connotations, rather than that any should miss the full meaning of Shakspere' s words by not being familiar with Elizabethan idiom. The glossarial notes are not intended to set down inferences more or less obvious from the con- text, but are designed as far as possible to give a definite authority for GENERAL (PREFACE such an inference. And in all cases either a reference to the Oxford (Dictionary is cited in justification of the meaning given, or a reference from contemporary literature is appended to show that the reader's in- ference {if he would naturally make it) is authorized by contemporary usage. The same plan has been followed in respect to the grammatical idiom of Elizabethan English. These illustrative references are given as far as possible in the language of Shakspere' s time; their sources indicated; and where they have been made use of in earlier editions due credit has been given to the editor who first pointed them out. In some cases it has been necessary to cite them in modernized forms because the original quotation has not been accessible to the editor. Such citations are dis- tinguished from the others by being printed within single quotation-marks. ^Brief notes of a literary character, or illustrating the dramatic action, have been added where it has seemed to the editor that these helped to a clearer appreciation of the text; and summaries of the dramatic action have been appended to the several acts to keep before the reader's mind the unity which the play would have when represented upon the stage. The numeration of the Globe Text, which has come to be the classic one and is now used in standard Shakspere dictionaries and grammars, has been followed in this edition. Where the editor has seen fit to de- part from the verse division of the Globe Text, or from the act and scene division, the departure has been carefully indicated, and Globe refer- ences appended in small type at the side of the text. The form in which the note matter is arranged about the text, re- viving a fifteenth-century method of note-composition, with some slight modifications to suit modern conditions of printing, has been adopted to secure ease of reading and beauty of typography. It only remains to say that the editor is not insensible of the deep obligation which he owes to the Shakspere scholarship of the past, as well as to that of the present. The labours of Steevens and Malone (whose wide reading in Elizabethan literature furnished rich material for the modern editor to draw upon ), the careful work of the editors of the Cam- GENERAL INTRODUCTION TO MACBETH MACBETH belongs to that group of great dramas, Hamlet, Othello, and Lear, which marks the culmination of Shakspere 7 s literary develop- ment* These plays were all produced in the first decade of the sev- enteenth century, probably between 1602 and 1606} The date of Macbeth is now usually set down as 1606, The earliest certain mention of the play 2 is a note in Forman 7 s T)iary roughly de- scribing the tragedy as he saw it acted at the Globe Theatre on the 20th April, 1610 [April 30th N, S.). 3 I * oUtilNti 11 14 — 20 tion is the correct one, as in Cor. II. 2. 82: "Your multi- And Fortune on his damned quarry smiling ply in g spawne how can he Shev/d like a rebell's whore. But all 's too atter - weake; SF 14 quarry is usually al- For brave Macbeth — well hee deserves that te J ed to "w*™*" by modern editors ; but there is no good name reason for the change, despite Disdaynim* Fortune, with his brandisht Holinshed's "rebellious quar- f 1 rel" in his description of Sieeie > Macdowald's rebellion. That Which smoak'd with bloody execution, quarrel, 'crossbow bolt,' is oc- Like Valour's minion carv'd out his passage carnally spelled 'quarry' in 1 ill hee lac d the Slave: and that quarrel, 'small square window pane,' is often simi- larly spelled, is not surprising: for both these words had in EL. E. doublet forms in -y. But quarrel, MN. E. 'quarrel,' had not. QUARRY in the sense of 'heaps of slain' is also found in Cor. 1. 1.202, " I 'de make a quarrie With thousands of these quarter'd slaves": properly the word describes a heap of slaughtered game, and the association is not so entirely inapposite here as to lead to the inference that it is a misprint for "quarrel." A somewhat similar expression is found in Drayton's Barrons Warres, 1605,11.57: "O ill did Fate these noble armes bestow Which as a quarry on the soilde earth lay, Seized on by conquest as a glorious pray." DAMN in the sense of 'to doom,' 'ruin,' 'destroy' without the connotation 'doom to everlasting perdition' is sufficiently common in EL.E. to make no difficulty; cp. Oth. I. 3. 359? Iago to Roderigo, "If thou wilt needs 7 THE TRAGEDIE OF MACBETH damne thy selfe, do it a more delicate [i. e. pleasant] way then drowning." *IFl5 SHEW'D (i, e. 'appeared/ 'looked/ cp. I. 3- 54) in the preterite tense is awkward with the IS preceding it. But in M.E. and EL. E. the historical present and past tenses are frequently used together in the same narrative. Here, too, SHEW'D seems to point to the first stage of the battle, now past. ALL'S TOO WEAKE presents a similar inconsequence of tenses if ALL ? S is to be taken for 'All is.' It may possibly, however, be the contracted form of 'All was/ like "There's" for 'There was' in II. 2. 23- Such forms were not uncommon in EL. E., cp. Jonson, ' Sejanus/ 1640, p. 338, u Agr. Dying? Ner. That 's strange ! Agr. Yo' were with him yesternight," where no contraction is possible but 'you're.' *ff 18 SMOAK'D is here used in its well-nigh obsolete sense of 'steamed' (though we still say "smoking hot") ; cp. "Thy murd'rous faulchion smoaking in his blood" Rich.3 1.2.94. EXECUTION: in EL. E. the suffixes -sion, -Hon, -tience can be either dissyllabic as in M. E. or monosyllabic as in MN.E. The word refers to the wielding of any weapon or instrument; cp. " In fellest manner execute [i. e. 'wield/ N. E. D. 'execute' lb] your armes" Tro.&Cr. V. 7. 6, where to make MN.E. sense many editors change "armes" to the weak "aims"! *ff 20 In TILL HE FAC'D THE SLAVE we seem to have a verse beginning with a doubled unstressed impulse ; such verses are not common in Macbeth; there is one in 1.2.46, and another in III. 4. 133- Lines of less than the five normal waves occur frequently in EL. blank verse, and this one is well adapted to a wounded soldier's narrative. But perhaps LIKE VALOUR'S MINION (three syllables), v. 19, was an after Ap'T T 9PPMP TT 0T 0A insertion which broke in two AL> l l SOU IN C 1 1 2 1-24 a verse originally beginning with carv'd and ending Which nev rshooke hands nor bad tarwellto him with slave. Till he unseam'd him from thenave to th'chops <1F2I which refers to Mac- And fix ' d his bead u P on our battlements. beth, being an instance of the KTNC common EL. usage of the r\ i i relative pronoun as a con- ^ valiant cousin ! worthy gentleman ! nective, 'and he'; cp. 1,5. 37, and III. 1.85 where "which" stands for 'and this.' SHOOKE HANDS seems to refer to the formal preliminaries of a fight, as in Sidney's Arcadia, 1590, p. 267: " After the terrible salutation of warlike noyse, the shaking of handes was with sharpe weapons," with NOR in its common sense of ' and not.' " Shook hands " in the sense of ' took leave of ' is usually found in EL. E. in connection with abstract notions, e. g. "shake hands with chastitie" ' Euphues/ Arber, p. 75 (quoted in CI. Pr.), "with folly" Middleton's Witch (quoted by Manly), "with earth," z. e. with earthly things, Quarles, 'Emblems' (quoted by Cent. Diet.), "with virtue" Cooper, 'Thesaurus' s.v. nuntius. ^22 NAVE, 'navel/ seems to be the right word here, though this anomalous form has not yet been found in EL. E. That the two words "navel," M.E. "navele," and "nave," M.E. "nave," 'the centre of a wheel/ were confused in EL. E. is shown by Massinger's use of "navel" for "nave" in "Circle him round with death and if he stir His body be the navel to the wheel In which your rapiers like so many spokes Shall meet and fix themselves" ' Pari, of Love' II. 3 (Cent. Diet.). That the expression was more or less familiar to EL. ears is shown by Nash's, 1594, "Then from the navel to the throat at once He ript old Priam" (quoted from Steevens's note). In Holinshed Macbeth finds Macdowald already dead on taking his castle. CHOPS, an EL. form of MN.E. "chaps," 'jaws/ was used of persons as well as of animals in Shakspere's time. SF 24 As to Macbeth's cousinship with Dun- can, cp. Hoi., p. 168 : "After Malcolme succeeded his nephue Duncane [the Duncan of the play] the sonne of his daughter Beatrice : for Malcome had two daughters, the one, which was this Beatrice, being given in manage unto one Abbanath Crinen . . bare of that mariage 8 THE TRAGEDIE OF MACBETH ACT I SCENE II 25-35 the foresaid Duncane. The other called Doada, was mar- ied unto Sinell [cp. I. 3- 71] the thane of Glammis, by whom she had issue one Mac- beth, a valiant gentleman." CAPTAINB As whence the sunne 'gins his reflection Shipwracking stormes and direfull thunders, So from that spring whence comfort seem'd The figure in <1F 25 ff. is a refer- ence to storms rising out of the east and not to the storms of the vernal equinox, a curious interpretation tortured out of the Latin meaning of re- and flectio, ' turning back.' RE- to come Discomfort swells. Marke, King of Scot land, marke: No sooner justice had, with valour arm'd, CompelFd these skipping kernes to trust 'flection in el. e. is used of their heeles, directshining,cp.'' May never _ xt 11 • j glorious sunne reflex his But the Norweyan lord, surveying vantage, beames Upon the countrey Withfurbushtarmesandnewsupplyesof men where you make abode" Began a fresh assault. KING Dismay'd not this Our capitaines, Macbeth and Banquoh? CAPTAINE Yes— As sparrowes eagles, or the hare the lyon. I Hen.6V.4.87 ; "Mostradiant and refulgent Lampe of light . . from thee Reflect [i. e. shine] those rayes that have en- lightnedmee"Quarles,'Sion's Sonets,' 1630, V. The same metaphor is found in 2Hen.4 IV. 4. 34, 35, "As humorous as winter and as sudden As flawes congealed in the spring of day," which also shows the EL. use of SPRING, v. 27, in the sense of * sunrise' : inthe'dayspringfrom on high' of Luke 1. 78 this meaning is still pre- served. That Shakspere intends us to think of Sweno as coming to the aid of the Scots and then turning on them is evident from the WHENCE COMFORT SEEM'D TO COME, i. e. whence help was to have come, for SEEM in EL. E. often connotes an immediate or near futurity, 'was on the point of,' as here and in v. 47 below. SF 26 After THUNDERS mod- ern editors, following Pope, supply 'break'; but 'storms break' and 'thunders break' are neither of them Shaksperian locutions. The word which Shakspere generally uses in connection with thunder is " bursts," cp. Lear III. 2. 46, "such bursts of horrid thunder," and this would also aptly describe the coming of a sudden flaw. The verse, however, does not really need a patch either to make sense, for with ideas of motion the verb is often omitted in M.E. and EL. E. where it can be supplied from the context, or to make metre, for four-wave verses are common in Macbeth: in III. I. 103 and 1.4. 14 are two instances ; in the latter the verse ends with a falling impulse as here. *ff 27 COMFORT, still used in the sense of ' aid/ ' support ' in our phrase ' give comfort to the enemy,' was common in EL. E. with this signification : cp. IV. 3- 193 ; SF 28 DISCOMFORT, likewise, connoted the negative of this idea and corresponds to MN. E. ' undoing,' ' disaster ' : cp. " Should I stay longer, It would be my disgrace and your discomfort" IV. 2. 29. *TF 29 NO SOONER— BUT is EL. E. idiom for ' no sooner— than,' cp. N. E. D. ' but ' 1 6 ; but in MN. E. the verb usually precedes the subject ; the same word order occurs in 1.2. 63, " No more that Thane of Cawdor shall deceive," etc. SF 31 SURVEYING VANTAGE seems to mean 'seeing his opportunity,' cp. N. E. D. 'advantage' 4 and Cym. 1.3-24; but SURVEY in the sense 'dis- cern ' is not elsewhere found in EL. E. In Rich. 3 V. 3. 15, " Let us survey the vantage of 9 THE TRAGEDIE OF MACBETH the field," "vantage" refers to opportunity of place rather than to opportunity of time, and " survey " has its usual sense of ' view.' *1F 33 There are two forms of the word cap- tain in EL. E. as in M. E., one " captain " and the other CAPITAINE ; both forms continue to be written through the 1 7th century, and the latter, the trisyllabic, is of constant occurrence in books of Shakspere's time, e. g. Halle's Chronicle, Henry VIII, 292 b, Cooper's Thesaurus, etc. ; cp., too, Marston as quoted in Warton-Hazlitt IV, p. 417, " with farewell, capitaine, kind heart, ACT I SCENE II adew ! " There can be but little doubt that here and in 3Hen.6lV.7.30 Shakspere used the CAPITAINE form, though the printer of the Folio has set the dissyllabic word. SF37 CRACKS seems here to mean 'shots,' but this pas- sageisas yet theonlyevidence that has been cited for such a meaning in EL. E. : its usual sense is 'crash.' This double charging of pieces is jokingly referred to by Falstaff when he hears the good news of Prince Hal's accession: "Pistol," he says, u I will double charge thee with dignities" 2Hen.4 V. 3.130. SF38 SO THEY, which makes the verse one of six waves with the caesura after THEY, is here printed as in FO. I ; some editors append it to v. 37, others make a sepa- rate line of it. But such ex- pedients help little. There are many six-wave verses in Shakspere and the EL. poets; whether they were due to carelessness or were a permissible variation of the blank-verse structure has not yet been made out. Such expressions as DOUBLY REDOUBLED — this one occurs in Rich. 2 I.3.8O— are frequent in EL. E., but now give offence by their tautology. SF 39 The captain's know- ledge of the battle seems to end at this point : but his closing words are not so abruptly broken off as they seem to be in MN.E., for I CANNOT TELL is 1 6th century idiom for 'I do not know what to say,' cp. Spenser's Faerie Queene I. 8. 34, and would be so under- stood by an EL. audience. EXCEPT is used in its EL. sense of ' unless,' cp. N.E.D., and MEMORIZE is 'make memorable,' cp. Hen. 8 III. 2. 52. We have precisely the same sort of sentence in Tarn, of Shr. IV. 4. 91 ' "I cannot tell, except they are busied about a counterfeit assurance," where the punctuation of FO. I — and it is the only authority for the passage — shows that its "expect" is a misprint for "except," noticed and corrected by FO.2, though modern editions strangely return to "expect." Thissentence istherefore printedhere asit stands in FO. I, without the dash after "tell." ^43 SO — AS is a regular M.E. and EL. E. idiom corresponding to MN. E. 'as — as.' The stage direction of the Folio, ENTER ROSSE AND ANGUS, which follows the captain's exit, is altered to " Enter RoSs" by modern editors and placed after WHO COMES HERE? But Rosse and Angus in I. 3. 88 together bring news of Macbeth's promotion. That Angus does not speak is no evidence for his not 10 36-45 If I say sooth, I must report they were As cannons over-charg'd with double cracks, So they doubly redoubled stroakes upon the foe: Except they meant to bathe in reeking wounds, Or memorize another Golgotha, I cannot tell. But I am faint; my gashes cry for helpe. KING So well thy words become thee as thy wounds ; They smack of honor both. Goe get him surgeons. EXIT CAPTAINE ATTENDED ENTER ROSSE AND ANGUS Who comes here? MALCOLME The worthy Thane of Rosse! THE TRAGEDIE OF MACBETH being in the scene : Donalbaine (see scene direction) does not speak at all, and Lenox only once. It is likely, therefore, that Shakspere intended them both to enter here as the Folio records, Rosse somewhat in advance and alone taking part in the dialogue. In EL. stage directions "Enter" means 'begins to take part in the action' and not necessarily in the dialogue. There is, therefore, no occasion for changing either the form or the position of the stage direction. SF 45 Malcolm's words seem to be rather an exclamation than an an- swer to Duncan's question ; ACT I SCENE II 46-53 So king! the Folio has a period after Rosse, but its printer rarely uses the exclamation-point, e.g. GOD SAVE THE KING, v. 47, is followed by a period. EL.E.WORTHYhaspartofthe connotation of MN.E.' brave,' 'valiant,' as it had in M. E. SF46 Either WHAT A HASTE or "what haste" is idiomatic EL. E. ; but two unstressed syllables at the beginning of a verse are of comparatively rare occurrence ; and it was prob- ably for this reason that the editor of FO. 2 dropped out the article. SF47 SEEMES is here used, like "seem'd" in v. 27 above and " seeme" in I. 5. 30 below, todenotesomethingim- mediately imminent, and cor- responds to MN.E. 'is going to,' 'is about to,' 'is on the point of.' Sidney, 'Arcadia,' p. 291, uses much the same words as those Shakspere puts into the mouth of Lenox : "the messenger came in with letters in his hand and hast in his countenence" ; cp. also, "And that [i.e. if] our drift [i.e. intention] looke through our bad performance" Ham. IV. 7. 152, and "The businesse of this man lookes out of him" Ant.&Cl. V. 1. 50 (cited by CI. Pr.). SF48 In M.E. and early New English (e. N.E.) the imperfect tense often expresses action which in MN.E. is represented by the perfect, as CAM'ST, here ; the illustrations given by Koch, ' Engl. Gram.,' p. 40, could be greatly multiplied, reaching back to Chaucer and for- ward through the 1 7th century. SF 49 To an Englishman of Shakspere's time the mere un- furling of foreign banners on English soil was an insult to heaven : in John V. 1. 69 ff., speak- ing of "arms invasive," the Bastard says, "Shall a beardlesse boy . . flesh his spirit [i.e. courage] in a warre-like soyle, Mocking the ayre with colours idlely [i.e. foolishly, rashly] spread?" An alliance of a foreign power with discontented elements in Ireland and Scotland was much more than a dramatic situation to Shakspere's audience, and the blood of more than one of them had already run " cold " at the thought of it. Rosse, of course, represents the appalling situation in present time, just as does the wounded captain in v. 1 3. SF 50 For FANNE OUR PEOPLE COLD cp. "Let . . your enemies with nodding of their plumes fan you into despaire" Cor. III. 3- 126. *1F5I TERRIBLE belongs toa large class of EL. words in which an unstressed syllable — usually one containing a liquid or nasal — preceded by a full stressed syllable and followed by one of secondary stress, was lost, and the following II LENOX What a haste lookes through his eyes! should he looke That seemes to speake things strange. ROSSE God save the KING Whence cam'st thou, worthy thane ? ROSSE From Fiffe, great king, Where the Norweyan banners flowt the skie, And fanne our people cold. Norway himselfe, with terrible numbers, Assisted by that most disloyall traytor The Thane of Cawdor, began a dismall conflict, THE TRAGEDIE OF MACBETH secondarily stressed syllable reduced to an unstressed syllable. These words occur in the best literary idiom of the EL. period; many printers indicate the loss of this syllable both in prose and poetry by an apostrophe, showing that it was not mere poetic license. Some of these syncopated words are still heard, like "med'cine," "parlous," ('perilous,' with the further change of e to a), "nat'ral," but are recognized as vulgar; others, like "fev'rish" and "tott'ring," are in constant unquestioned use ; while innumerable others, like "visited" and " enemy," have entirely lost their syncopated forms. *ff 52 ASSI STED does not mean neces- sarily that the Thane of Cawdor stood fighting by the side of the King of Norway : he merely furthers the designs of the invaders, as the Host "assists" Fenton u in his purpose" in Merry W. IV. 6. 3 ; the details are left to the imagination. The only interest that the fact has for the tragedy of Macbeth lies in the confirmation which it gives to the first part of the witches' prophecy, and Shakspere would have been the less Shakspere had he stopped to describe the treachery to the satisfaction of the historical student. SF53 In the DIS- MALL CONFLICT, as in the "dismall fight" which the messenger describes to the Bishop of Winchester in I Hen. 6 I. I. I05 r "dismal" is used in its obsolete sense of 'disastrous.' The word was originally a ACT I SCENE II 54-67 phrase meaning 'an unlucky day, 'and in Shakspere's time still retained a part of this M.E. connotation of misfortune. SF 54 THAT is a strengthen- ing particle with M.E. and EL. E. conjunctive adverbs like "till," "when," "if," etc., still familiar to us in Bible English. Rosse calls Mac- beth BELLONA'S BRIDE- GROOM E, as the wounded soldier describes him as " Val- our's darling," picturing him as one who had newly taken the goddess of war for his bride. The classical incon- sistency of making Bellona, the maid of war, even momen- tarily a bride — that Shak- spere did not do it out of ig- norance is fortunately evident fromlHen.4IV.I.II2ff. — has not escaped the criticism of Shakspere scholars, who offer various mitigating explana- tions. LAPTIN PROOFE car- ries out the picture of this new god of war, another " mailed Mars"(cp. lHen.4IV. I.II6) with his "armours forg'd for proofeeterne"(cp. Ham. II. 2. 512). SF55 In Shakspere's time COMPARISON had the connotation of ' rivalry/ a shade of meaning which is Till that Bellona's bridegroome, lapt in proofe r Confronted him with selfe-comparisons, Point against point, rebellious arme 'gainst arme Curbing his lavish spirit; and, to conclude, The victorie fell on us, — KING Great happinesse! — ROSSE that now Sweno, The Norwayes king, craves composition; Nor would we deigne him buriall of his men Till he disbursed at Saint Colmes ynch Ten thousand dollars to our generall use. KING No more that Thane of Cawdor shall deceive Our bosome interest : goe pronounce his present death, And with his former title greet Macbeth. ROSSE I 'le see it done. KING hath lost, noble Macbeth hath What he wonne. EXEUNT 12 THE TRAGEDIE OF MACBETH prominent here, and SELFE in EL. E. was frequently used as the first element of a compound word whose connotation was a property of the subject of the thought ; cp. "selfe-bounty" Oth. III. 3- 200, "selfe-danger" Cym. III. 4. 149, and Jonson's "thou art not covetous of least selfe-fame" 'Epigrammes' II, ed. 1640. *ff56 That POINT is a metonymy for 'sword' is evident from "Turne face to face and bloody point to point" John II. I. 390, and " How often he had met you sword to sword" Cor. III. 1. 13- The text follows the punctuation of the Folio, which makes good sense, and the comma is not put after REBELLIOUS as in many modern editions. (FO. I has a comma also after ARME, which has been removed, for in FO. I a descriptive participial clause, as is usual in EL. printing, is almost invariably pointed off from its noun: e.g. "And the late dignities, Heap'd up to them" I. 6. 19, and "we shall have cause of state, Craving us jointly" III. I. 34, and "His silver skinne, lac'd with his golden blood" II. 3- 118.) As HIS is the EL. E. equivalent of MN.E. 'its/ and SPIRIT a psychological term for the physical energy supposed to reside in the members of the body, HIS probably refers to REBEL- LIOUS ARME ; i. e. 'the arm of the King of Norway, now fighting for the rebels, against the arm of Macbeth, curbing its unbridled strength.' SF57 LAVISH in MN.E. is usually limited to unrestrained expenditure or prodigal giving ; in EL. E. it had a far more general application, e.g. " his lavish tongue" lHen.6 II. 5.47, "lavish manners" 2Hen.4 IV. 4. 64. 458 GREAT HAPPINESSE means 'what good fortune!' cp. Oth. III. 4. 108, where Cassius's meeting with Desdemona provokes Iago to exclaim, " Loe, the happinesse ! " The line is interjectory and the interrupted verse is continued in THAT NOW, etc. THAT in EL.E. often expresses result, 'so that,' as here. SF59 NORWAYES is EL. E. for ' Norwegians 'and not a mistake for ' Norway' ; cp. "English, Scots, Danes, Norwayes, they Foure mighty people" Slatyer, ' Paleealbion,' 1 6 1 9 t p. 219- COMPOSITION means 'terms of surrender,' cp. "Thus we are agreed; I crave our composition may be written And seal'd betweene us," Ant.&Cl. II. 6.58; the word has five syllables, cp. v. 18. SF6I SAINT COLMES YNCH ("inch" is a Gaelic word for a small island) is now Inchcolm in the Firth of Forth opposite Leith. SF 62 Minsheu, 1617, says the DOLLAR was a " Dutch coine worth about foure shillings." Shakspere may have had in mind, however, the "rigs dollar" of the northern countries, which the visit of Christian IV to the court of King James in 1606 had recently made familiar to Londoners. TO OUR GENERALL USE is EL.E. for 'to defray our state expenses,' cp. "Whose ransomes did the generall coffers fill" Caes. III. 2. 94, and "Hath here distrayn'd the tower to his use" lHen.6 1,3.61. *ff 64 In EL.E. BOSOME was used as an adjective meaning 'close,' 'intimate,' and hints at an intimate relation between the treacherous thane and Duncan (OUR, of course, is the majesty plural). PRESENT DEATH is 'immediate death,' cp. " Martius is worthy of pres- ent death" Cor. III. I. 211. The scene closes with a couplet, a common practice with Elizabethan dramatists. INTRODUCTORY NOTE TO SCENE III Scene III resumes the falling lyric rhythm of Scene I ; now running lightly along with no secondarily stressed syllables, now swirling back on itself in short intervals of rising rhythm, as in vv. II, 12, 13, 17, and 18, now poised for a moment, as in " Looke what I have," v. 26, then madly rushing on again to be caught back in vv. 30 and 31- Then the final rush of the chorus, "about, about," ending with the three verses whose rhythm is "Peace! the charme's wound up," a wonderfully fitting cadence to the series. The witchery of such rhythm is paralleled only by that of Puck's charm in Midsummer Night's Dream III. 2. 148 ff. And yet, with the strange obliquity of judgement which sometimes besets Shakspere scholarship, these verses have been thought unShaksperian. 13 THE TRAGEDIE OF MACBETH SCENE III : A HEATH: THUNDER: ENTER THE THREE WITCHES *ff I Jonson, in a note to his 'Masque of Queenes,' 1 609, tells us: "This is also sol- emne [i. e. part of the ritual] in their witchcraft, to be ex- amined, either by the Divill, or their Dame, at their meetings, of what mischief they have done and what they can con- fer ['contribute'] to a future hurt,"subjoiningreferencesto the classical literature of de- monology. Shakspere makes his witches interrogate one another, omitting the dame features altogether (see note on III. 5« 2). Jonson makes them "sisters," but Shak- sperealway s keeps in the back- ground their norn character : to him they are the "weyard sisters," the Three Sisters of FIRST WITCH HERE hast thou beene, sister? SECOND WITCH. Killing swine. THIRD WITCH. Sister, where thou ? FIRST WITCH A savior's wife had chestnuts in her lappe, And mouncht and mouncht and mouncht: 'Give me/ quoth I. 'Aroynt thee, witch!' the rumpe-fed ronyon cryes. Her husband's to Aleppo gone, Master o' th f Tiger ; But in a syve I 'le thither sayle, And, like a rat without a tayle, I *le doe, I f le doe, and I f le doe. Destiny. SF 2 Gifford in his Dialogue concerning Witches, 1 603, tells us that their powers are " when they are offended with any . . to hurt them in their bodies, yea, to kill them, and to kill their cattell." SF 5 The form MOUNCH/ to chew with closed lips,' is not uncommon in EL.E., cp. " Mounch-present," Awdley, 'The XXV orders of Knaves,' E. E. T. S., p. 14. GIVE ME is EL.E. for 'give it to me': Juliet asks the Friar for the vial with "Give me, give me, O tell me not of feare" in Rom.&Jul. IV. 1. 121. SF 6 AROYNTTHEEis evidently an adjuration to a witch, meaning ' begone ' ; the word is used also in the same sense in Lear 1 1 1. 4. 129, "aroynt thee, witch, aroynt thee!" But the locution has not yet been found elsewhere in EL.E., cp. N. E. D.s.v. RUMPE-FED seems to be the equiva- lent of Cotgrave's " hanchu, bumme-growne, great hipt"; with FED in its EL. sense of 'fatted': "fed calfe " in Coverdale's version corresponds to the "fatted calf" of Luke XV. 27, cp. N. E. D. 'fed' b. It may, however, mean 'fed on rumps,' cp. " beane fed" Mids. II. I. 45, and " Had he [i. e. my father] set me to grammer schole . . instead of treading corontoes and making fidlers fat with rumps of capon I had by this time read homilyes" Dekker, ' Knights Conjuring/ Percy Soc, p. 3L The abusive RONYON origi- nally meant 'scurvy person.' In Merry W. IV. 2.193, Ford, who takes the disguised Falstaff for a witch, cries "Out of my doore you witch . . you poulcat, you runnion." *ff7 HER . . GONE, MASTER . . TIGER seem to be intended for two verses, though printed as one in the Folio. In O' TH' appears a common EL. contraction for ' of the ' that counts as but one verse impulse ; the definite article is enclitic, as is shown by the EL. printing " ithe," a similar contraction for 'in the,' and " tothe," a similar contraction for 'to the.' These contract forms are not peculiar to poetry as in MN.E., but are found in EL. prose as well. Collier cites an account of a voyage to ALEPPO in a ship called the TIGER of London in 1583 as given by Hakluyt II, pp. 247, 251, which seems to be more than a mere coincidence, though Tiger is a common ship-name in the 1 6th and 1 7th 14 THE TRAGEDIE OF MACBETH centuries. SF 8 That witches went to sea in sieves was a popular belief in the 1 6th cen- tury. The form "sive," " syve," is common in EL.E. ; it is our modern spelling that is anomalous. *ff9 Steevens, 1793, states that it was a belief of the times that though a witch could assume the form of any animal she pleased, the tail would be wanting ; but unfortunately he gives no evidence of this popular superstition. SF 10 DOE seems to be used vaguely here for ' work ACT I SCENE III 11-26 mischief/ like the MN. E. " I '11 do him ! " The thrice repeated threat has a peculiar solem- nity, imitating \hz fiat, fiat, fiat of an excommunication writ. *ff 1 1 Her witch sisters prom- ise her winds, which they were popularly supposed to con- trol, cp. "The witches raise tempests, "etc. ,Gifford,'Dial.' p. 74. Burton in his 'Anat. of Mel.' says that u nothing is so familiar as for witches and sorcerers in Scandinavia to sell winds to mariners and cause tempests." WINDE in EL.E. rhymed with KINDE. \r more than a hundred miles lhat man may question.' You seeme to from Kingcorne and Inch- understand me colm, near which the battle 17 THE TRAGEDIE OF MACBETH took place. Holinshcd intro- duces the incident of Mac- beth's meeting the witches as occurring "shortly after" the battle: Shakspere seems to consider it as happening im- mediately after. WHAT is the M.E. and EL. E. inter- rogative relative correspond- ing to the Latin qualis, 'what sort of persons/ cp. "what were these" Temp. III. 3.20. *ff 40 WILDE means 'strange,' 'fantastic': Holins- hed mentions their "strange and wild apparell." Sr43The word QUESTION had a wider range of meaning in EL. E. than it has now, and meant 'converse with,' 'talk to'; hence the YOU SEEME TO UNDERSTAND ME that fol- lows. The verse is a good illustration of the extra rhythmical syllable before the cassural pause.