[Footnote 192:  Cf. Hamlet, III. i. 181: 

     This something-settled matter in his heart,
     Whereon his brains still beating puts him thus
     From fashion of himself.]

[Footnote 193:  I believe the criticism of King Lear which has influenced me most is that in Prof.  Dowden’s Shakspere, his Mind and Art (though, when I wrote my lectures, I had not read that criticism for many years); and I am glad that this acknowledgment gives me the opportunity of repeating in print an opinion which I have often expressed to students, that anyone entering on the study of Shakespeare, and unable or unwilling to read much criticism, would do best to take Prof.  Dowden for his guide.]

LECTURE IX

MACBETH

Macbeth, it is probable, was the last-written of the four great tragedies, and immediately preceded Antony and Cleopatra.[194] In that play Shakespeare’s final style appears for the first time completely formed, and the transition to this style is much more decidedly visible in Macbeth than in King Lear.  Yet in certain respects Macbeth recalls Hamlet rather than Othello or King Lear.  In the heroes of both plays the passage from thought to a critical resolution and action is difficult, and excites the keenest interest.  In neither play, as in Othello and King Lear, is painful pathos one of the main effects.  Evil, again, though it shows in Macbeth a prodigious energy, is not the icy or stony inhumanity of Iago or Goneril; and, as in Hamlet, it is pursued by remorse.  Finally, Shakespeare no longer restricts the action to purely human agencies, as in the two preceding tragedies; portents once more fill the heavens, ghosts rise from their graves, an unearthly light flickers about the head of the doomed man.  The special popularity of Hamlet and Macbeth is due in part to some of these common characteristics, notably to the fascination of the supernatural, the absence of the spectacle of extreme undeserved suffering, the absence of characters which horrify and repel and yet are destitute of grandeur.  The reader who looks unwillingly at Iago gazes at Lady Macbeth in awe, because though she is dreadful she is also sublime.  The whole tragedy is sublime.

In this, however, and in other respects, Macbeth makes an impression quite different from that of Hamlet.  The dimensions of the principal characters, the rate of movement in the action, the supernatural effect, the style, the versification, are all changed; and they are all changed in much the same manner.  In many parts of Macbeth there is in the language a peculiar compression, pregnancy, energy, even violence; the harmonious grace and even flow, often conspicuous in Hamlet, have almost disappeared.  The cruel characters, built on a scale at least as large