from beginning to end, and which offers very little relief by means of humorous or pathetic scenes, ought to be short, and would be unbearable if it lasted so long as Hamlet or even King Lear.  And in fact I do not think that, in reading, we feel Macbeth to be short:  certainly we are astonished when we hear that it is about half as long as Hamlet.  Perhaps in the Shakespearean theatre too it appeared to occupy a longer time than the clock recorded.

FOOTNOTES: 

[Footnote 281:  These two considerations should also be borne in mind in regard to the exceptional shortness of the Midsummer Night’s Dream and the Tempest.  Both contain scenes which, even on the Elizabethan stage, would take an unusual time to perform.  And it has been supposed of each that it was composed to grace some wedding.]

NOTE BB.

THE DATE OF MACBETH.  METRICAL TESTS.

Dr. Forman saw Macbeth performed at the Globe in 1610.  The question is how much earlier its composition or first appearance is to be put.

It is agreed that the date is not earlier than that of the accession of James I. in 1603.  The style and versification would make an earlier date almost impossible.  And we have the allusions to ’two-fold balls and treble sceptres’ and to the descent of Scottish kings from Banquo; the undramatic description of touching for the King’s Evil (James performed this ceremony); and the dramatic use of witchcraft, a matter on which James considered himself an authority.

Some of these references would have their fullest effect early in James’s reign.  And on this ground, and on account both of resemblances in the characters of Hamlet and Macbeth, and of the use of the supernatural in the two plays, it has been held that Macbeth was the tragedy that came next after Hamlet, or, at any rate, next after Othello.

These arguments seem to me to have no force when set against those that point to a later date (about 1606) and place Macbeth after King Lear.[282] And, as I have already observed, the probability is that it also comes after Shakespeare’s part of Timon, and immediately before Antony and Cleopatra and Coriolanus.

I will first refer briefly to some of the older arguments in favour of this later date, and then more at length to those based on versification.

(1) In II. iii. 4-5, ’Here’s a farmer that hang’d himself on the expectation of plenty,’ Malone found a reference to the exceptionally low price of wheat in 1606.

(2) In the reference in the same speech to the equivocator who could swear in both scales and committed treason enough for God’s sake, he found an allusion to the trial of the Jesuit Garnet, in the spring of 1606, for complicity in the Gunpowder Treason and Plot.  Garnet protested on his soul and salvation that he had not held a certain conversation, then was obliged to confess that he had, and thereupon ’fell into a large discourse defending equivocation.’  This argument, which I have barely sketched, seems to me much weightier than the first; and its weight is increased by the further references to perjury and treason pointed out on p. 397.