I question if _Macbeth_ can ever, in the hands of _any_ tragedian, make the same mark as _Hamlet_. _Hamlet_, as far as the opportunities for the display of the one actor are concerned, might almost have been written by an actor’s playwright of our day, bent on securing prominence for the ‘star.’ Macbeth claims little of our sympathy. Most of us wonder more at his wife, and care more for Macduff. But it is a point in Henry Irving’s art, as displayed in this play, that he brings into such high relief all that Macbeth had of noble, or of the remains of noble: reverence and awe; indignation at crimes that seemed to him baser, because they were done for pettier ends, than his own; admiration of courage in another, and of character more resolute than his; hesitation, having gone so far, to go yet further in the taking of innocent blood. Macbeth’s attitude before the prayer of the grooms; his righteous satire--‘your spirits shine through you’--on the hired murderers; his invocation to his wife; his almost tender and pitying warning to Macduff-- ‘But get thee back: my soul is too much charged With blood of thine already’-- all these things show one or other of the qualities that are good in him. But other things, of course, showing the quite other qualities that have given _Macbeth_ a name, are more conspicuous and abundant: at all events are more upon the surface; and the art is great that knows how to dwell on the sympathetic and worthy, and that in doing so does much to modify the popular conception. It may be true, of course, that the main thought of Irving in _Macbeth_ is to show the deterioration of character through one crime that brings another; but such deterioration is, after all, generally a gradual process, and there is time, while it is proceeding, to show something of the higher nature with which the character began. I think I note also, in Irving’s Macbeth, an added emphasis, not only on his belief in the supernatural, but in the power of the supernatural over him. The prophecy of the weird voices is more than ever a destiny. His crimes are done under a spell. He is moved to them from without, by a something not himself, making for Evil. And the hold that this force from without, this supernatural power, this sense of destiny, this something not himself, making for Evil, has upon him, divides Macbeth until the very end of the action of the play, from such as his own hired murderers. Not that these, indeed, are set before us, by Shakespeare, as quite voluntary cut-throats, rejoicing in their profession; but as men rendered desperate: the one ‘Whom the vile blows and buffets of the world Have so incensed, that I am reckless what I do to spite the world’: the other, less revengeful, yet more weary, ‘So weary with disasters, tugg’d with fortune, That I would set my life on any chance, To mend it or be rid on ’t.’