Interest of Passion.

HUMAN Interest includes not only varieties of human nature, or Character, but also items of human experience, or Passion. Passion is the second great topic of Dramatic Criticism. It is concerned with the life that is lived through the scenes of the story, as distinguished from the personages who live it; not treating this with the abstract treatment that belongs to Plot, but reviewing it in the light of its human interest; it embraces conduct still alive with the motives which have actuated it—fate in the process of forging. The word 'passion' signifies primarily what is suffered of good or bad; secondarily the emotions generated by suffering, whether in the sufferer or in bystanders. Its use as a dramatic term thus suggests how in Drama an experience can be grasped by us through our emotional nature, through our sympathy, our antagonism, and all the varieties of emotional interest that lie between. To this Passion we have to apply the threefold division of unity, complexity, and movement.

When unity is applied to Passion we get a series of details bound together into a singleness of impression as an Incident, a Situation, or an Effect. The distinction of the three rests largely on their different degrees of fragmentariness. Incident.Incidents are groups of continuous details forming a complete interest in themselves as ministering to our sense of story. The suit of Shylock against Antonio in the course of which fate swings right round; the murder of Clarence with its long-drawn agony; Richard and Buckingham with the Lord Mayor and Citizens exhibiting a picture of political manipulation in the fifteenth century; the startling sight of a Lady Anne wooed beside the bier of her murdered husband's murdered father, by a murderer who rests his suit on the murders themselves; Banquo's Ghost appearing at the feast at which Banquo's presence had been so vehemently called for; Lear's faithful Gloucester so brutally blinded and so instantly avenged:—all these are complete stories presented in a single view, and suggest how Shakespeare's dramas are constructed out of materials which are themselves dramas in miniature. Situation.Situation, on the other hand, a series of details cohere into a single impression without losing the sense of incompleteness. The two central personages of The Merchant of Venice, around whom brightness and gloom have been revolving in such contrast, at last brought to face one another from the judgment-seat and the dock; Lorenzo and Jessica wrapped in moonlight and music, with the rest of the universe for the hour blotted out into a background for their love; Margaret like an apparition of the sleeping Nemesis of Lancaster flashed into the midst of the Yorkist courtiers while they are bickering through very wantonness of victory; Shylock pitted against Tubal, Jew against Jew, the nature not too narrow to mix affection with avarice, mocked from passion to passion by the nature only wide enough to take in greed; Richard waking on Bosworth morning, and miserably piecing together the wreck of his invincible will which a sleeping vision has shattered; Macbeth's moment of rapture in following the airy dagger, while the very night holds its breath, to break out again presently into voices of doom; the panic mist of universal suspicion amidst which Malcolm blasts his own character to feel after the fidelity of Macduff; Edgar from his ambush of outcast idiocy watching the sad marvel of his father's love restored to him:—all these brilliant Situations are fragments of dramatic continuity in which the fragmentariness is a part of the interest. Just as the sense of sculpture might seek to arrest and perpetuate a casual moment in the evolutions of a dance, so in Dramatic Situation the mind is conscious of isolating something from what precedes and what follows so as to extract out of it an additional impression; the morsel has its purpose in ministering to a complete process of digestion, but it gets a sensation of its own by momentary delay in contact with the palate.

Of a still more fragmentary nature is Dramatic Effect—Effect strictly so called, and as distinguished from the looser use of the term for dramatic impressions in general. Such Effect seems to attach itself to single momentary details, though in reality these details owe their impressiveness to their connection with others: the final detail has completed an electric circle and a shock is given. No element of the Drama is of so miscellaneous a character and so defies analysis: all that can be done here is to notice three special Dramatic Effects. Irony as an Effect.Dramatic Irony is a sudden appearance of double-dealing in surrounding events: a dramatic situation accidentally starts up and produces a shock by its bearing upon conflicting states of affairs, both known to the audience, but one of them hidden from some of the parties to the scene. This is the special contribution to dramatic effect of Greek tragedy. The ancient stage was tied down in its subject-matter to stories perfectly familiar to the audience as sacred legends, and so almost excluding the effect of surprise: in Irony it found some compensation. The ancient tragedies harp upon human blindness to the future, and delight to exhibit a hero speculating about, or struggling with, or perhaps in careless talk stumbling upon, the final issue of events which the audience know so well—Œdipus, for example, through great part of a play moving heaven and earth to pierce the mystery of the judgment that has come upon his city, while according to the familiar sacred story the offender can be none other than himself. Shakespeare has used to almost as great an extent as the Greek dramatists this effect of Irony. His most characteristic handling of it belongs to the lighter plays; yet in the group of dramas dealt with in this work it is prominent amongst his effects. It has been pointed out how Macbeth and Richard III are saturated with it. There are casual illustrations in Julius CÆsar, as when the dictator bids his intended murderer

or in Lear, when Edmund, intriguing guiltily with Goneril, in a chance expression of tenderness unconsciously paints the final issue of that intrigue:

A comic variety of Irony occurs in the Trial Scene of The Merchant of Venice, iv. i. 282.when Bassanio and Gratiano in their distracted grief are willing to sacrifice their new wives if this could save their friend—little thinking these wives are so near to record the vow. The doubleness of Irony is one which attaches to a situation as a whole: iii. ii. 60-73.the effect however is especially keen when a scene is so impregnated with it that the very language is true in a double sense.

Nemesis, though usually extending to the general movement of a drama, and so considered below, may sometimes be only an effect of detail—a sign connecting very closely retribution with sin or reaction with triumph. v. iii. 45.Such a Nemesis may be seen where Cassius in the act of falling on his sword recognises the weapon as the same with which he stabbed CÆsar. Dramatic Foreshadowing.Another special variety of effect is Dramatic Foreshadowing—mysterious details pointing to an explanation in the sequel, a realisation in action of the saying that coming events cast their shadows before them. i. i. 1.The unaccountable 'sadness' of Antonio at the opening of The Merchant of Venice is a typical illustration. iii. i. 68.Others will readily suggest themselves—i. i. 39.the Prince's shuddering aversion to the Tower in Richard III, v. i. 77-90.the letter G that of Edward's heirs the murderer should be, the crows substituted for Cassius's eagles on the morning of the final battle. A more elaborate example is seen in Julius CÆsar, i. ii. 18.where the soothsayer's vague warning 'Beware the Ides of March'—a solitary voice that could yet arrest the hero through the shouting of the crowd—is later on found, not to have become dissipated, but to have gathered definiteness as the moment comes nearer:

These three leading Effects may be sufficient to illustrate a branch of dramatic analysis in which the variety is endless.

We are next to consider the application of complexity to Passion, and the contrasts of passion that so arise. Here care is necessary to avoid confusion with a complexity of passion that hardly comes within the sphere of dramatic criticism. iii. i.In the scene in which Shylock is being teased by Tubal it is easy to note the conflict between the passions of greed and paternal affection: such analysis is outside dramatic criticism and belongs to psychology. In its dramatic sense Passion applies to experience, not decomposed into its emotional elements, but grasped as a whole by our emotional nature: there is still room for complexity of such passion in the appeal made to different sides of our emotional nature, the serious and the gay. Passion-Tone.In dealing with this element of dramatic effect a convenient technical term is Tone. The deep insight of metaphorical word-coining has given universal sanction to the expression of emotional differences by analogies of music: our emotional nature is exalted with mirth and depressed with sorrow, we speak of a chord of sympathy, a strain of triumph, a note of despair; we are in a serious mood, or pitch our appeal in a higher key. These expressions are clearly musical, and there is probably a half association of music in many others, such as a theme of sorrow, acute anguish and profound despair, response of gratitude, or even the working of our feelings. Most exactly to the purpose is a phrase of frequent occurrence, the 'gamut of the passions,' which brings out with emphasis how our emotional nature in its capacity for different kinds of impressions suggests a scale of passion-contrasts, Scale of Passion-Tones.not to be sharply defined but shading off into one another like the tones of a musical scale—Tragic, Heroic, Serious, Elevated, Light, Comic, Farcical. It is with such complexity of tones that Dramatic Passion is concerned.

Now the mere Mixture of Tones is an effect in itself. For the present I am not referring to the combination of one tone with another in the same incident (which will be treated as a distinct variety): I apply it more widely to the inclusion of different tones in the field of the same play. Such mixture is best illustrated by music, which gives us an adagio and an allegro, a fantastic scherzo and a pompous march, within the same symphony or sonata, though in separate movements. In The Merchant of Venice, as often in plays of Shakespeare, every tone in the scale is represented. iv. i.When Antonio is enduring through the long suspense, and triumphant malignity is gaining point after point against helpless friendship, we have travelled far into the Tragic; iv. i. 184.the woman-nature of Portia calling Venetian justice from judicial murder to the divine prerogative of mercy throws in a touch of the Heroic; a great part of what centres around Shylock, ii. v; iii. i, &c.when he is crushing the brightness out of Jessica or defying the Christian world, is pitched in the Serious strain; ii. i, vii; ii. ix.the incidents of the unsuccessful suitors, the warm exuberance of Oriental courtesy and the less grateful loftiness of Spanish family pride, might be a model for the Elevated drama of the English Restoration; i. i, &c.the infinite nothings of Gratiano, prince of diners-out, i. ii.the more piquant small talk of Portia and Nerissa when they criticise the man-world from the secrecy of a maiden-bower—these throw a tone of Lightness over their sections of the drama; ii. ii, iii; iii. v, &c.Launcelot is an incarnation of the conventional Comic serving-man, ii. ii, from 34.and his Comedy becomes broad Farce where he teases the sand-blind Gobbo and draws him on to bless his astonishing beard. a distinction of the modern Drama.How distinct an effect is this mere Mixture of Tones within the same play may be seen in the fact that the Classical Drama found it impossible. The exclusive and uncompromising spirit of antiquity carried caste into art itself, and their Tragedy and Comedy were kept rigidly separate, and indeed were connected with different rituals. The spirit of modern life is marked by its comprehensiveness and reconciliation of opposites; and nothing is more important in dramatic history than the way in which Shakespeare and his contemporaries created a new departure in art, by seizing upon the rude jumble of sport and earnest which the mob loved, and converting it into a source of stirring passion-effects. For a new faculty of mental grasp is generated by this harmony of tones in the English Drama. If the artist introduces every tone into the story he thereby gets hold of every tone in the spectators' emotional nature; the world of the play is presented from every point of view as it works upon the various passions, and the difference this makes is the difference between simply looking down upon a surface and viewing a solid from all round:—the mixture of tones, so to speak, makes passion of three dimensions. Moreover it brings the world of fiction nearer to the world of nature, which has never yet evolved an experience in which brightness was dissevered from gloom: half the pleasure of the world is wrung out of others' pain; the two jostle in the street, house together under every roof, share every stage of life, and refuse to be sundered even in the mysteries of death.

Quite a distinct class of effects is produced when the contrasting tones are not only included in the same drama but are further brought into immediate contact and made to react upon each other. Tone-Play.Tone-Play is made by simple variety and alternation of light and serious passions. It has been pointed out in a previous chapter what a striking example of this is The Merchant of Venice, in which scene by scene two stories of youthful love and of deadly feud alternate with one another as they progress to their climaxes, iii. ii. 221.until from the rapture of Portia united to Bassanio we drop to the full realisation of Antonio in the grasp of Shylock; and again the cruel anxiety of the trial iv. i. 408.and its breathless shock of deliverance are balanced by the mad fun of the ring trick v. i.and the joy of the moonlight scene which Jessica feels is too deep for merriment. Tone-Relief.A slight variation of this is Tone-Relief: in an action which is cast in a uniform tone the continuity is broken by a brief spell of a contrary passion, the contrast at once relieving and intensifying the prevailing tone. One of the best examples (notwithstanding its coarseness) is the introduction in Macbeth of the jolly Porter, ii. iii. 1.who keeps the impatient nobles outside in the storm till his jest is comfortably finished, making each furious knock fit in to his elaborate conceit of Hell-gate. This tone of broad farce, with nothing else like it in the whole play, comes as a single ray of common daylight to separate the agony of the dark night's murder from the agony of the struggle for concealment. Tone-Clash.The mixture of tones goes a stage further when opposing tones of passion clash in the same incident and are fused together. These terms are, I think, scarcely metaphorical: as a physiological fact we see our physical susceptibility to pleasurable and painful emotions drawn into conflict with one another in the phenomena of hysteria; and their mental analogues must be capable of much closer union. As examples of these effects resting upon an appeal to opposite sides of our emotional nature at the same time may be instanced the flash of comic irony, iv. i. 288, &c.already referred to more than once, that starts up in the most pathetic moment of Antonio's trial by his friend's allusion to his newly wedded wife. Of the same double nature are the strokes of pathetic humour in this play; iii. iii. 32.as where Antonio describes himself so worn with grief that he will hardly spare a pound of flesh to his bloody creditor; or again his pun,

Shakespeare is very true to nature in thus borrowing the language of word-play to express suffering so exquisite as to leave sober language far behind. Tone-Storm.Finally Tone-Clash rises into Tone-Storm in such rare climaxes as the centrepiece of Lear, in such rare against a tempest of nature as a fitting background iii. i-vi.we have the conflict of three madnesses, passion, idiocy, and folly, bidding against one another, and inflaming each other's wildness into an inextricable whirl of frenzy.

The idea of movement has next to be applied to Passion. Passion is experience as grasped by our emotional nature: this will be sensitive not only to isolated fragments of experience, but equally to the succession of incidents. The movement of events will produce a corresponding movement in our emotional nature as this is variously affected by them; and as the succession of incidents seems to take direction so the play of our sympathies will seem to take form. Again, events cannot succeed one another without suggesting causes at work and controlling forces: when such causes and forces are of a nature to work upon our sympathy another element of Passion will appear. Motive Form and Motive Force.Under Passion-Movement then are comprehended two things—Motive Form and Motive Force. The first of these is a thing in which two of the great elements of Drama, Passion, and Plot, overlap, and it will be best considered page 278.in connection with Plot which takes in dramatic form as a whole. Here we have to consider the Motive Forces of dramatic passion. The dramatist is, as it were, a God in his universe, and disposes the ultimate issues of human experience at his pleasure: what then are the principles which are found to have governed his ordering of events? to personages in a drama what are the great determinants of fate?

The first of the great determinants of fate in the Drama is Poetic Justice. What exactly is the meaning of this term? It is often understood to mean the correction of justice, as if justice in poetry were more just than the justice of real life. But this is not supported by the facts of dramatic story. An English judge and jury would revolt against measuring out to Shylock the justice that is meted to him by the court of Venice, though the same persons beholding the scene in a theatre might feel their sense of Poetic Justice satisfied; unless, indeed, which might easily happen, the confusion of ideas suggested by this term operated to check their acquiescence in the issue of the play. A better notion of Poetic Justice is to understand it as the modification of justice by considerations of art. This holds good even where justice and retribution do determine the fate of individuals in the Drama; in these cases our dramatic satisfaction still rests, not on the high degree of justice exhibited, but on the artistic mode in which it works. A policeman catching a thief with his hand in a neighbour's pocket and bringing him to summary punishment affords an example of complete justice, yet its very success robs it of all poetic qualities; the same thief defeating all the natural machinery of the law, yet overtaken after all by a questionable ruse would be to the poetic sense far more interesting.

Treating Poetic Justice, then, as the application of art to morals, its most important phase will be Nemesis, which we have already seen involves an artistic link between sin and retribution. The artistic connection may be of the most varied description. Varieties of Nemesis.There is a Nemesis of perfect equality, Shylock reaping measure for measure as he has sown. When Nemesis overtook the Roman conspirators it was partly its suddenness that made it impressive: compare iii. i. 118 and 165.within fifty lines of their appeal to all time they have fallen into an attitude of deprecation. For Richard, on the contrary, retribution was delayed to the last moment: to have escaped to the eleventh hour is shown to be no security.

Nemesis may be emphasised by repetition and multiplication; in the world in which Richard is plunged there appears to be no event which is not a nemesis. Or the point may be the unlooked-for source from which the nemesis comes; as when upon the murder of CÆsar a colossus of energy and resource starts up in the time-serving and frivolous Antony, ii. i. 165.whom the conspirators had spared for his insignificance. Or again, retribution may be made bitter to the sinner by his tracing in it his own act and deed: from Lear himself, and from no other source, Goneril and Regan have received the power they use to crush his spirit. Nay, the very prize for which the sinner has sinned turns out in some cases the nemesis fate has provided for him; as when Goneril and Regan use their ill-gotten power for the state intrigues which work their death. And most keenly pointed of all comes the nemesis that is combined with mockery: iii. i. 49.Macbeth, if he had not essayed the murder of Banquo as an extra precaution, might have enjoyed his stolen crown in safety; iv. iii. 219.his expedition against Macduff's castle slays all except the fate-appointed avenger; iv. ii. 46.Richard disposes of his enemies with flawless success until the last, Dorset, escapes to his rival.

Such is Nemesis, and such are some of the modes in which the connection between sin and retribution may be made artistically impressive. Poetic Justice, however, is a wider term than Nemesis. The latter implies some offence, as an occasion for the operation of judicial machinery. Poetic Justice other than Nemesis.But, apart from sin, fate may be out of accord with character, and the correction of this ill distribution will satisfy the dramatic sense. But here again the practice of dramatic providence appears regulated, not with a view to abstract justice, but to justice modified by dramatic sympathy: Poetic Justice extends to the exhibition of fate moving in the interests of those with whom we sympathise and to the confusion of those with whom we are in antagonism. iv. i. 346-363.Viewed as a piece of equity the sentence on Shylock—a plaintiff who has lost his suit by an accident of statute-law—seems highly questionable. On the other hand, this sentence brings a fortune to a girl who has won our sympathies in spite of her faults; it makes provision for those for whom there is a dramatic necessity of providing; above all it is in accord with our secret liking that good fortune should go with the bright and happy, and sever itself from the mean and sordid. Whether this last is justice, I will not discuss: it is enough that it is one of the instincts of the imagination, and in creative literature justice must pay tribute to art.

But however widely the term be stretched, justice is only one of the determinants of fate in the Drama: confusion on this point has led to many errors of criticism. The case of Cordelia is in point. Because she is involved in the ruin of Lear it is felt by some commentators that a consideration of justice must be sought to explain her death: they find it perhaps in her original resistance to her father; or the ingenious suggestion has been made that Cordelia, in her measures to save her father, invades England, and this breach of patriotism needs atonement. But this is surely twisting the story to an explanation, not extracting an explanation from the details of the story. It would be a violation of all dramatic proportion, needing the strongest evidence from the details of the play, if Cordelia's 'most small fault' betrayed her to dramatic execution. iv. iv. 27.And as to the sin against patriotism, the whole notion of it is foreign to the play itself, ii. ii. 170-177[4]; iii. i, v. in which the truest patriots, such as Kent and Gloucester, are secretly confederate with Cordelia and look upon her as the hope of their unhappy country; iv. ii. 2-10 (compare 55, 95); v. i. 21-27.while even Albany himself, however necessary he finds it to repel the invader, yet distinctly feels that justice is on the other side. The fact is that in Cordelia's case, as in countless other cases, motives determine fate which have in them no relation to justice; fiction being in this matter in harmony with real life, where in only a minority of instances can we recognise any element of justice or injustice as entering into the fates of individuals. When in real life a little child dies, what consideration of justice is there that bears on such an experience? Nevertheless there is an irresistible sense of beauty in the idea of the fleeting child-life arrested while yet in its completeness, before the rude hand of time has begun to trace lines of passion or hardness; the parent indeed may not feel this in the case of his own child, but in art, where there is no mist of individual feeling to blind, the sense of beauty comes out stronger than the sense of loss. It is the mission of the Drama thus to interpret the beauty of fate: it seeks, as Aristotle puts it, to purify our emotions by healthy exercise. The Drama does with human experience what Painting does with external nature. There are landscapes whose beauty is obvious to all; but it is one of the privileges of the artist to reveal the charm that lies in the most ordinary scenery, until the ideal can be recognised everywhere, and nature itself becomes art. Similarly there are striking points in life, such as the vindication of justice, which all can catch: but it is for the dramatist, as the artist in life, to arrange the experience he depicts so as to bring out the hidden beauties of fate, until the trained eye sees a meaning in all that happens;—until indeed the word 'suffering' itself has only to be translated into its Greek equivalent, and pathos is recognised as a form of beauty. Accumulation of Pathos then must be added to Poetic Justice as a determinant of fate in the Drama. And our sensitiveness to this form of beauty is nowhere more signally satisfied than when we see Cordelia dead in the arms of Lear: fate having mysteriously seconded her self-devotion, and nothing, not even her life, being left out to make her sacrifice complete.

There remains a third great determinant of fate in the Drama—the Supernatural. I have in a former chapter pointed out how in relation to this topic the modern Drama stands in a different position from that of ancient Tragedy. In the Drama of antiquity the leading motive forces were supernatural, either the secret force of Destiny, or the interposition of supernatural beings who directly interfered with human events. We are separated from this view of life by a revolution of thought which has substituted Providence for Destiny as the controller of the universe, and absorbed the supernatural within the domain of Law. The Supernatural rationalised in modern Drama.Yet elements that had once entered so deeply into the Drama would not be easily lost to the machinery of Passion-Movement; supernatural agency has a degree of recognition in modern thought, and even Destiny may still be utilised if it can be stripped of antagonism to the idea of a benevolent Providence. To begin with the latter: the problem for a modern dramatist is to reconcile Destiny with Law. The characteristics which made the ancient conception of fate dramatically impressive—its irresistibility, its unintelligibility, and its suggestion of personal hostility—he may still insinuate into the working of events: only the destiny must be rationalised, that is, the course of events must at the same time be explicable by natural causes.

First: Shakespeare gives us Destiny acting objectively, as an external force, in the form of Irony, already discussed in connection with the standard illustration of it in Macbeth. In the movement of this play Destiny appears in the most pronounced form of mockery: every difficulty and check being in the issue converted into an instrument for furthering the course of events. Yet this mockery is wholly without any suggestion of malignity in the governing power of the universe; its effect being rather to measure the irresistibility of righteous retribution. This Irony makes just the difference between the ordinary operations of Law or Providence and the suggestion of Destiny: yet each step in the action is sufficiently explained by rational considerations. i. iv. 37.What more natural than that Duncan should proclaim his son heir-apparent to check any hopes that too successful service might excite? i. iv. 48.Yet what more natural than that this loss of Macbeth's remote chance of the crown should be the occasion of his resolve no longer to be content with chances? ii. iii. 141.What more natural than that the sons of the murdered king should take flight upon the revelation of a treason useless to its perpetrator as long as they were living? Yet what again more natural than that the momentary reaction consequent upon this flight should, ii. iv. 21-41.in the general fog of suspicion and terror, give opportunity to the object of universal dread himself to take the reins of government? The Irony is throughout no more than a garb worn by rational history.

Or, again, Destiny may be exhibited as a subjective force in Infatuation, or Judicial Blindness: 'whom the gods would destroy they first blind.' This was a conception specially impressive to ancient ethics; the lesson it gathered from almost every great fall was that of a spiritual darkening which hid from the sinner his own danger, obvious to every other eye, till he had been tempted beyond the possibility of retreat.

Such Infatuation is very far from being inconsistent with the idea of Law; indeed, it appears repeatedly in the strong figures of Scriptural speech, by which the ripening of sin to its own destruction—a merciful law of a righteously-ordered universe—is suggested as the direct act of Him who is the founder of the universe and its laws. By such figures God is represented as hardening Pharaoh's heart; or, again, an almost technical description of Infatuation is put by the fervour of prophecy into the mouth of God:

In the case of Macbeth the judicial blindness is maintained to the last moment, and he pauses in the final combat to taunt Macduff with certain destruction. Yet, while we thus get the full dramatic effect of Infatuation, it is so far rationalised that we are allowed to see the machinery by which the Infatuation has been brought about: iii. v. 16.we have heard the Witches arrange to deceive Macbeth with false oracles. A very dramatic, but wholly natural, example of Infatuation appears at the turning-point of Richard's career, where, when he has just discovered that Richmond is the point from which the storm of Nemesis threatens to break upon him, iv. ii. 98, &c.prophecies throng upon his memory which might have all his life warned him of this issue, had he not been blind to them till this moment. i. iii. 131.Again, Antonio's challenge to Shylock to do his worst is, as I have already pointed out, an outburst of hybris, the insolence of Infatuation: but this is no more than a natural outcome of a conflict between two implacable temperaments. In Infatuation, then, as in all its other forms, Destiny is exhibited by Shakespeare as harmonised with natural law.

Besides Destiny the Shakespearean Drama admits direct supernatural agencies—witches, ghosts, apparitions, as well as portents and violations of natural law. It appears to me idle to contend that these in Shakespeare are not really supernatural, but must be interpreted as delusions of their victims. There may be single cases, such as the appearance of Banquo to Macbeth, where, as no eye sees it but his own, the apparition may be resolved into an hallucination. But to determine Shakespeare's general practice it is enough to point to the Ghost in Hamlet, which, as seen by three persons at once and on separate occasions, is indisputably objective: and a single instance is sufficient to establish the assumption in the Shakespearean Drama of supernatural beings with a real existence. Zeal for Shakespeare's rationality is a main source of the opposite view; but for the assumption of such supernatural existences the responsibility lies not with Shakespeare, but with the opinion of the age he is pourtraying. A more important question is how far Shakespeare uses such supernatural agency as a motive force in his plays; how far does he allow it to enter into the working of events, for the interpretation of which he is responsible? On this point Shakespeare's usage is clear and subtle: he uses the agency of the supernatural to intensify and to illuminate human action, not to determine it.

Supernatural agency intensifying human action is illustrated in Macbeth. No one can seriously doubt the objective existence of the Witches in this play, or that they are endowed with superhuman sources of knowledge. But the question is, do they in reality turn Macbeth to crime? In one of the chapters devoted to this play I have dwelt on the importance of the point that Macbeth has been already meditating treason in his heart when he meets the Witches on the heath. His secret thoughts—which he betrays in his guilty start—i. iii. 51.have been an invitation to the powers of evil, and they have obeyed the summons: Macbeth has already ventured a descent, and they add an impulse downward. To bring this out the more clearly, Shakespeare keeps Banquo side by side with Macbeth through the critical stages of the temptation: Banquo has made no overtures to temptation, and to him the tempters have no mission. It is noticeable that where the two warriors meet the Witches on the heath it is Banquo who begins the conversation.

No answer. The silence attracts his attention to those he is addressing.

Still no answer.

They signify in dumb show that they may not answer.

Still he can draw no answer. At last Macbeth chimes in: