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Bradley, A. C. Shakespearean Tragedy: Lectures on Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth.
2nd ed. London: Macmillan, 1905.
PAGE 389
MACBETH

And was he wrong? He has certainly avoided the overloading which distresses us in King Lear, and has produced a tragedy utterly unlike it, not much less great as a dramatic poem, and as a drama superior.

     I would add, though without much confidence, another suggestion. The simplicity of Macbeth is one of the reasons why many readers feel that, in spite of its being intensely 'romantic,' it is less unlike a classical tragedy than Hamlet or Othello or King Lear. And it is possible that this effect is, in a sense, the result of design. I do not mean that Shakespeare intended to imitate a classical tragedy; I mean only that he may have seen in the bloody story of Macbeth a subject suitable for treatment in a manner somewhat nearer to that of Seneca, or of the English Senecan plays familiar to him in his youth, than was the manner of his own mature tragedies. The Witches doubtless are 'romantic,' but so is the witchcraft in Seneca's Medea and Hercules Oetueus; indeed it is difficult to read the account of Medea's preparations (670-739) without being reminded of the incantations in Macbeth. Banquo's Ghost again is 'romantic,' but so are Seneca's ghosts. For the swelling of the style in some of the great passages -- however immeasurably superior these may be to anything in Seneca -- and certainly for the turgid bombast which occasionally appears in Macbeth, and which seems to have horrified Jonson, Shakespeare might easily have found a model in Seneca. Did he not think that this was the high Roman manner? Does not the Sergeant's speech, as Coleridge observed, recall the style of the 'passionate speech' of the Player in Hamlet -- a speech, be it observed, on a Roman subject?1 And is it entirely an accident

   1Cf. Note F. There are also in Macbeth several shorter passages which recall the Player's speech. Cf. 'Fortune . . . showed like a rebel's whore' (I. ii. 14) with 'Out! out! thou strumpet Fortune!' The form 'eterne' occurs in Shakespeare only in Macbeth, III. ii. 38, and in the 'proof eterne' of the Player's speech. Cf 'So, as a painted tyrant, Pyrrhus stood,' with Macbeth, V. viii. 26; 'the rugged Pyrrhus, like the Hyrcanian beast', with 'the rugged Russian bear . . . or the Hyrcan tiger' (Macbeth, III. iv. l00); 'like a neutral to his will and matter' with Macbeth, I. v. 47. The words 'Till he unseam'd him from the nave to the chaps,' in the Serjeant's speech, recall the words 'Then from the navel to the throat at once He ript old Priam,' in Dido Queen of Carthage, where these words follow those others, about Priam falling with the mere wind of Pyrrhus's sword, which seem to have suggested 'the whiff and wind of his fell sword' in the Player's speech.

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