* * * * * _Macbeth_.—Johnson’s remark that the events are so great that they overpower the persons and prevent nice discrimination of character is partly true. Coleridge notices that Lady Macbeth was a person of high rank, living much alone. A darkly meditative mind left in solitude can conceive without being startled the most awful designs. The same imagination in Lady Macbeth which brooded over the plot against Duncan’s life drove her to delirium and suicide. Shakespeare transfers the most perilous stuff in him to Macbeth. The function smothered in surmise; the reflection on the emptiness of life—tale told by an idiot—Shakespeare empties it into this murderous traitor. He makes him the _prey_ of that which is mixed in the composition of the best. The witches do not strike us as miraculous. They are not supernatural, but extensions of the natural. It is an apology for emendation that one of the most celebrated passages in the play is based on conjecture (confirmed by what follows) and on analogy. ‘I dare do all that may become a man; Who dares _no_ [Folio] more is none.’ ‘No’—corrected by Rowe to ‘do.’ In _Measure for Measure_ we have ‘Be that you are, That is, a woman; if you be more, you’re none.’ Note the terrible, gasping brevity of the dialogue between Lady Macbeth and her husband after the murder: _Lady M._ ‘Did not you speak? _M._ When? _Lady M._ Now. _M._ As I descended? _Lady M._ Ay.’ Macbeth’s speech beginning just before he hears of Lady Macbeth’s death, and ending after he hears of it, should be interpreted and spoken as follows. He had just said he ‘will laugh a siege to scorn.’ Then a cry of women within. ‘What is that noise? _Seyton_. It is the cry of women, my good lord. [_Exit_. _Macbeth_ (musing). I have almost forgot the taste of fears. The time has been, my senses would have cool’d To hear a night-shriek; and my fell of hair Would at a dismal treatise rouse and stir As life were in ’t: I have supp’d full with horrors; Direness, familiar to my slaughterous thoughts, Cannot once start me. _Re-enter Seyton_. Wherefore was that cry? _Seyton_. The queen, my lord, is dead. _Macbeth_ (with a touch of impatience). She should have died hereafter: There would have been a time for such a word.’ He makes no inquiry about his wife, but goes on with his reverie, which does not specially refer to her.