A Dish of Orts; Chiefly Papers on the Imagination, and on Shakespeare (Paperback)

Excerpt: ... had concealed, keeping the far-off likewise in sweet observance with the whole: the rest pointed that way.-In a manner something like this are we conducted to a right understanding of the character of Lady Macbeth. First put together these her utterances: "You do unbend your noble strength, to think So brainsickly of things." "Get some water, And wash this filthy witness from your hands." "The sleeping and the dead Are but as pictures." "A little water clears us of this deed." "When all's done, You look but on a stool." "You lack the season of all natures, sleep."- Had these passages stood in the play unmodified by others, we might have judged from them that Shakspere intended to represent Lady Macbeth as an utter materialist, believing in nothing beyond the immediate communications of the senses. But when we find them associated with such passages as these- "Memory, the warder of the brain, Shall be a fume, and the receipt of reason A limbeck only;" "Had he not resembled My father as he slept, I had done't; "These deeds must not be thought After these ways; so, it will make us mad;"- then we find that our former theory will not do, for here are deeper and broader foundations to build upon. We discover that Lady Macbeth was an unbeliever morally, and so found it necessary to keep down all imagination, which is the upheaving of that inward world whose very being she would have annihilated. Yet out of this world arose at last the phantom of her slain self, and possessing her sleeping frame, sent it out to wander in the night, and rub its distressed and blood-stained hands in vain. For, as in this same "Rape of...