ir
tameness and their constrained rhythm are not Shakespearian work,
particularly at this period of his life, and in the writing of such a
scene. "Nor would he," as the Cambridge editors say, "have drawn away
the veil which with his fine tact he had dropped over her [Lady
Macbeth's] fate by telling us that she had taken off her life 'by self,
and violent hands.'"

The person who wrote these un-Shakespearian passages was probably
Middleton. Shakespeare, writing the tragedy in haste for an occasion,
received a little help, according to the fashion of the time, from
another playwright; and the latter having imitated the supernatural
poets of this play in one of his own, the players or managers afterward
introduced from that play songs by him--"Music and a song, Come away,
come away," Act III., Sc. 5, and "Music and a song, Black spirits,"
etc., Act IV., Sc. 1. This was done to please the inferior part of the
audience. These songs and all this sort of operatic incantation are
entirely foreign to the supernatural motive of the tragedy as
Shakespeare conceived it. And I will here remark that the usual
performance of "Macbeth" with "a chorus" and "all Locke's music" is a
revolting absurdity.

My next paper will close this series with an examination of some of
Shakespeare's least known dramas.

RICHARD GRANT WHITE.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote G: Since 1854.]

[Footnote H: For the convenience of readers to whom my edition is not
accessible I quote the following passage:

"I am more inclined to this opinion from the indications which the
play itself affords that it was produced upon an emergency. It
exhibits throughout the hasty execution of a grand and clearly
conceived design. But the haste is that of a master of his art,
who, with conscious command of its resources, and in the frenzy of
a grand inspiration, works out his conception to its minutest
detail of essential form, leaving the work of surface finish for
the occupation of cooler leisure. What the Sistine Madonna was to
Raphael, it seems that 'Macbeth' was to Shakespeare--a magnificent
impromptu; that kind of impromptu which results from the
application of well-disciplined powers and rich stores of thought
to a subject suggested by occasion. I am inclined to regard
'Macbeth' as, for the most part, a specimen of Shakespeare's
unelaborated, if not unfinished,