Punch (96.1889)

January 12, 1889.]

PUNCH, OR THE LONDON CHARIVARI.

15

SHAKSPEARE IN TOWN.

character is defined in his wife’s taunt, 1 infirm of
purpose.” She knew him ; and all that he lacked she possessed, and
much more besides. Mr. Irving’s Macbeth is, as it seems to me,
admirable. There is only one point where I am sure he is wrong-,
and that is at the very outset of his stage career—I mean, when he
first enters. Instead of marching on as the victorious Chieftain, to
whom any achievement vi et armis is possible, he comes on as though
he were brooding over a defeat.

His first few words should be delivered in a cheery tone to Banquo,
“ So foul and fair a' day I ne’er have met.” This is the grim
pleasantry of a Scotchman on the state of the weather, which is more
than usually “ soft,” even for Scotland. His wife has told him he
ought to be this, he ought to be that, and so forth, and he has begun
to think that prowess such as his could achieve anything. But to
murder Duncan—to knock the King on his head for the sake of his
crown—this has never crossed his brain until the three “Witches—out
for a lark, mind you, and
disobeying Hecate's orders—
suggest it to him. But Mac
beth has a great personal

regard for Duncan, and, if it hadn’t been for his wife, he would not have hurt a hair of the old King’s
head, though he might have managed to pick a quarrel with Malcolm and Donaldbain, and have
settled the pair of them in fair and open combat; and, indeed, to settle the Prince of Cumberland is
the first step that occurs to muddle-headed Macbeth at this early stage of his “ criminal procedure.”

A propos of the Witches, why is Hecate's scene in the Third Act omitted ?

In this the Queen of the Witches gives Macbeth's character as “ a wayward
son, spiteful and wrathful,” and then she foreshadows what by pre-
arrangement the answers of the Spirits in the Cauldron Scene are to be,
and how they are to urge this “wayward son,” this man “infirm of
purpose,” to be “bloody, bold and resolute ; ” to assure him beyond doubt
of his bearing a charmed life, and so to make him “ spurn fate ” and “ scorn
death.” If he were “bloody, bold and resolute” by nature, to what end
do the Witches take all this trouble to make him so ? No: Macbeth is just
what Mr. Irving shows him to be, what his deuce of a wife and Hecate know
him to be, and, in my humble opinion, what Shakspeare meant him to be.

Miss Ellen Terry’s reasoning about her impersonation of Lady Macbeth
seems to me to have been this:—“The grim gaunt female, the awful
Tragedy Queen with whom we have been accustomed to associate Lady
Macbeth, could never have been the woman to whom Macbeth was so
devoted that he writes to her whenever he has a moment’s leisure, a letter,
not of commonplaces, but revealing the innermost thoughts of his heart, and
whom in his most playful moments, when trying to resemble her in masking
his murderous design under a gay aspect, he styles ‘ dearest chuck.’ Surely

an interiorly fixed, firm, and deadly purpose is compatible with a fascinating Is this the Wicked Uncle dragging- away one of the Babes, to be
exterior; if not, what becomes of our historic traitresses and murderesses, killed? No, it is only Macbeth bringing on Sir Arthur Sullivan to
our Delllahs, Lucrezias, our Marchioness de Brinvilliers, and many receive the congratulations of the Audience.