himself, have been imagined intensely, and therefore they do not produce that sense of unique personality which Shakespeare could convey in a much smaller number of lines than he gives to most of them.[239] And this is of course even more the case with persons like Ross, Angus, and Lennox, though each of these has distinguishable features.  I doubt if any other great play of Shakespeare’s contains so many speeches which a student of the play, if they were quoted to him, would be puzzled to assign to the speakers.  Let the reader turn, for instance, to the second scene of the Fifth Act, and ask himself why the names of the persons should not be interchanged in all the ways mathematically possible.  Can he find, again, any signs of character by which to distinguish the speeches of Ross and Angus in Act I. scenes ii. and iii., or to determine that Malcolm must have spoken I. iv. 2-11?  Most of this writing, we may almost say, is simply Shakespeare’s writing, not that of Shakespeare become another person.  And can anything like the same proportion of such writing be found in Hamlet, Othello, or King Lear?

Is it possible to guess the reason of this characteristic of Macbeth?  I cannot believe it is due to the presence of a second hand.  The writing, mangled by the printer and perhaps by ‘the players,’ seems to be sometimes obviously Shakespeare’s, sometimes sufficiently Shakespearean to repel any attack not based on external evidence.  It may be, as the shortness of the play has suggested to some, that Shakespeare was hurried, and, throwing all his weight on the principal characters, did not exert himself in dealing with the rest.  But there is another possibility which may be worth considering. Macbeth is distinguished by its simplicity,—­by grandeur in simplicity, no doubt, but still by simplicity.  The two great figures indeed can hardly be called simple, except in comparison with such characters as Hamlet and Iago; but in almost every other respect the tragedy has this quality.  Its plot is quite plain.  It has very little intermixture of humour.  It has little pathos except of the sternest kind.  The style, for Shakespeare, has not much variety, being generally kept at a higher pitch than in the other three tragedies; and there is much less than usual of the interchange of verse and prose.[240] All this makes for simplicity of effect.  And, this being so, is it not possible that Shakespeare instinctively felt, or consciously feared, that to give much individuality or attraction to the subordinate figures would diminish this effect, and so, like a good artist, sacrificed a part to the whole?  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.