’tis much he dares,
     And, to that dauntless temper of his mind,
     He hath a wisdom that doth guide his valour
     To act in safety.]

[Footnote 238:  So when he hears that Fleance has escaped he is not much troubled (III. iv. 29): 

the worm that’s fled
Hath nature that in time will venom breed,
No teeth for the present.

I have repeated above what I have said before, because the meaning of Macbeth’s soliloquy is frequently misconceived.]

[Footnote 239:  Virgilia in Coriolanus is a famous example.  She speaks about thirty-five lines.]

[Footnote 240:  The percentage of prose is, roughly, in Hamlet 30-2/3, in Othello 16-1/3, in King Lear 27-1/2, in Macbeth 8-1/2.]

[Footnote 241:  Cf.  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. 100); ’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’ sword, which seem to have suggested ‘the whiff and wind of his fell sword’ in the Player’s speech.]

[Footnote 242:  See Cunliffe, The Influence of Seneca on Elizabethan Tragedy.  The most famous of these parallels is that between ’Will all great Neptune’s Ocean,’ etc., and the following passages: 

     Quis eluet me Tanais? aut quae barbaris
     Maeotis undis Pontico incumbens mari? 
     Non ipse toto magnus Oceano pater
     Tantum expiarit sceleris. (Hipp. 715.)

     Quis Tanais, aut quis Nilus, aut quis Persica
     Violentus unda Tigris, aut Rhenus ferox,
     Tagusve Ibera turbidus gaza fluens,
     Abluere dextram poterit?  Arctoum licet
     Maeotis in me gelida transfundat mare,
     Et tota Tethys per meas currat manus,
     Haerebit altum facinus. (Herc.  Furens, 1323.)

(The reader will remember Othello’s ‘Pontic sea’ with its ’violent pace.’) Medea’s incantation in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, vii. 197 ff., which certainly suggested Prospero’s speech, Tempest, V. i. 33 ff., should be compared with Seneca, Herc.  Oet., 452 ff., ’Artibus magicis,’ etc.  It is of course highly probable that Shakespeare read some Seneca at school.  I may add that in the Hippolytus, beside the passage quoted above, there are others which might have furnished him with suggestions.  Cf. for instance Hipp., 30 ff., with the lines about the Spartan hounds in Mids.  Night’s Dream, IV. i. 117 ff., and Hippolytus’ speech, beginning 483, with the Duke’s speech in As You Like It, II. i.]