To the simpler eyes of less learned Thebans than these—­Thebes, by the way, was Dryden’s irreverent name for Cambridge, the nursing mother of “his green unknowing youth,” when that “renegade” was recreant enough to compliment Oxford at her expense as the chosen Athens of “his riper age”—­the likelihood is only too evident that the sole text we possess of Macbeth has not been interpolated but mutilated.  In their version of Othello, remarkably enough, the “player-editors,” contrary to their wont, have added to the treasure-house of their text one of the most precious jewels that ever the prodigal afterthought of a great poet bestowed upon the rapture of his readers.  Some of these, by way of thanksgiving, have complained with a touch of petulance that it was out of place and superfluous in the setting:  nay, that it was incongruous with all the circumstances—­out of tone and out of harmony and out of keeping with character and tune and time.  In other lips indeed than Othello’s, at the crowning minute of culminant agony, the rush of imaginative reminiscence which brings back upon his eyes and ears the lightning foam and tideless thunder of the Pontic sea might seem a thing less natural than sublime.  But Othello has the passion of a poet closed in as it were and shut up behind the passion of a hero.  For all his practical readiness of martial eye and ruling hand in action, he is also in his season “of imagination all compact.”  Therefore it is that in the face and teeth of all devils akin to Iago that hell could send forth to hiss at her election, we feel and recognise the spotless exaltation, the sublime and sun-bright purity, of Desdemona’s inevitable and invulnerable love.  When once we likewise have seen Othello’s visage in his mind, we see too how much more of greatness is in this mind than in another hero’s.  For such an one, even a boy may well think how thankfully and joyfully he would lay down his life.  Other friends we have of Shakespeare’s giving whom we love deeply and well, if hardly with such love as could weep for him all the tears of the body and all the blood of the heart:  but there is none we love like Othello.

I must part from his presence again for a season, and return to my topic in the text of Macbeth.  That it is piteously rent and ragged and clipped and garbled in some of its earlier scenes, the rough construction and the poltfoot metre, lame sense and limping verse, each maimed and mangled subject of players’ and printers’ most treasonable tyranny, contending as it were to seem harsher than the other, combine in this contention to bear indisputable and intolerable witness.  Only where the witches are, and one more potent and more terrible than all witches and all devils at their beck, can we be sure that such traitors have not robbed us of one touch from Shakespeare’s hand.  The second scene of the play at least bears marks of such handling as the brutal Shakespearean Hector’s of the