[Footnote 231:  The words about Lady Macduff are of course significant of natural human feeling, and may have been introduced expressly to mark it, but they do not, I think, show any fundamental change in Lady Macbeth, for at no time would she have suggested or approved a purposeless atrocity.  It is perhaps characteristic that this human feeling should show itself most clearly in reference to an act for which she was not directly responsible, and in regard to which therefore she does not feel the instinct of self-assertion.]

[Footnote 232:  The tendency to sentimentalise Lady Macbeth is partly due to Mrs. Siddons’s fancy that she was a small, fair, blue-eyed woman, ‘perhaps even fragile.’  Dr. Bucknill, who was unaquainted with this fancy, independently determined that she was ‘beautiful and delicate,’ ‘unoppressed by weight of flesh,’ ‘probably small,’ but ’a tawny or brown blonde,’ with grey eyes:  and Brandes affirms that she was lean, slight, and hard.  They know much more than Shakespeare, who tells us absolutely nothing on these subjects.  That Lady Macbeth, after taking part in a murder, was so exhausted as to faint, will hardly demonstrate her fragility.  That she must have been blue-eyed, fair, or red-haired, because she was a Celt, is a bold inference, and it is an idle dream that Shakespeare had any idea of making her or her husband characteristically Celtic.  The only evidence ever offered to prove that she was small is the sentence, ’All the perfumes of Arabia will not sweeten this little hand’; and Goliath might have called his hand ‘little’ in contrast with all the perfumes of Arabia.  One might as well propose to prove that Othello was a small man by quoting,

                            I have seen the day,
     That, with this little arm and this good sword,
     I have made my way through more impediments
     Than twenty times your stop.

The reader is at liberty to imagine Lady Macbeth’s person in the way that pleases him best, or to leave it, as Shakespeare very likely did, unimagined.

Perhaps it may be well to add that there is not the faintest trace in the play of the idea occasionally met with, and to some extent embodied in Madame Bernhardt’s impersonation of Lady Macbeth, that her hold upon her husband lay in seductive attractions deliberately exercised.  Shakespeare was not unskilled or squeamish in indicating such ideas.]

[Footnote 233:  That it is Macbeth who feels the harmony between the desolation of the heath and the figures who appear on it is a characteristic touch.]

[Footnote 234:  So, in Holinshed, ’Banquho jested with him and sayde, now Makbeth thou haste obtayned those things which the twoo former sisters prophesied, there remayneth onely for thee to purchase that which the third sayd should come to passe.’]

[Footnote 235:  =doubts.]

[Footnote 236:  =design.]

[Footnote 237: