"Macbeth" offers a marked contrast to "Lear" in its brevity and rapidity. In spite of a few probable interpolations, the text is so short that it may likely represent a condensation of the original version. In none of the tragedies is the story told with more breathless directness, or with more effective presentation of the externals of the action. The play is more dependent on the chronicle than "Lear," and pays more attention to the representation of history. In "Lear" the political and national importance of the events is forgotten, but in "Macbeth" the convulsion of the kingdom is kept in mind, and the battles, political intrigue, and the prophecies of future dynasties recall the early chronicle plays. The story in Holinshed's chronicle, however, conforms to the current ideas of tragedy, so closely indeed that one wonders that some writer had not earlier attempted its dramatization.[20] Apparently it awaited a Scottish king and a general interest in Scottish affairs. The story is one of crime and retribution with a rather striking likeness to some of the classical dramas. It coincides with the Senecan plan of a crime committed and then revenged through the accompaniment of supernatural agencies. It is the story, familiar to both humanistic and popular tragedy, of a usurper who becomes a bloody tyrant and is overthrown after a reign of increasing crime. Macbeth's inordinate and fatal ambition also offers an obvious chance for a development akin to that of Marlowe's protagonists. Again, as in most English tragedies from "Cambyses" to "Sejanus," the story presents the punishment of evil rather than the suffering of the good, and, except for the absence of lust as a motive, might have found favor with any contemporary dramatist. All these possibilities in the story were seized upon by Shakespeare and adapted to his purpose. "Macbeth" might be studied as the complement of "Lear" in the reflection and summarizing of all preceding essays at tragedy.