that we are never to glance into that abyss, but
are perpetually to construct our novels out of
the amenities of respectable, easy-going men
and women. If the objectors would content
themselves with protesting against coarse
excesses, they would do good service; but, when
they denounce all recourse to the more terrific
elements of our life, we may not unreasonably
inquire how they would have received such a
play as Macbeth. Our neighbours over the
water discuss "the Divine Williams." Let us,
for a few moments, discuss "The Sensational
Williams." Let us suppose Macbeth just
published for the first time by a living author;
probably this is the way in which the Sensational
Williams would be "reviewed" by anti-
sensational critics:

Macbeth. A Tragedy. By William Shakespeare.
—Mr. Shakespeare is really becoming an
intolerable nuisance, which it behoves all critics
who have at heart the dignity, or even the
decency, of letters, to abate by the exercise of a
wholesome severity. He has no idea of tragedy
apart from the merest horrors of melodrama.
In his Othello, a blackamoor smothers his wife
on the stage, under a preposterous delusion of
jealousy, encouraged by a gentlemanly
Mephistophiles of his acquaintance; and then stabs
himself with a hectoring speech when he finds
out his mistake. In King Lear, the accumulation
of frightful and revolting atrocities is
something almost beyond belief. Lear is
supposed to have occupied the throne of Britain in
some remote epoch beyond the dawn of authentic
history. On account of a very natural and
becoming answer made him by one of his
daughters, he disowns her, and afterwards, for
some insufficient reason, pronounces a curse
upon another daughter, expressed in such
frightful language that we must forbear from
making any further allusion to the subject.
Then he goes out on to a heath in a storm, and
curses things in general, his Bedlamite ravings
being varied (such are Mr. Shakespeare's notions
of good taste) by the ribald jokes of a court
fool, whose inanities are evidently addressed to
the gallery auditors. Another character assumes
to be an idiot, and with hideous jibberings
makes up a pretty trio. Finally, the old king
finds out that his disowned daughter is a very
good girl after all, and, when she has met her
death by some unlucky circumstance (as
improbable and horrific as the other incidents
of the play), he brings the corpse on to the
stage in his arms, "howls" over it, like a
mourner at an Irish wake—literally "howls,"
in good downright fashion—and presently gives
up the ghost, to the great relief of the reader.
Besides these agreeable incidents, there is a
good deal of slaughtering, and one nobleman
tears out another nobleman's eyes (at the
instigation of two princesses), and "sets his foot"
on one of them! Hamlet—which a toadying
clique whom Mr. Shakespeare has gathered about
him affect to regard as a work of profound
philosophy and superhuman wisdom—is equally
full of absurd and shocking incidents. We have
the ghost of a murdered king; his murderous
brother who succeeds him on the throne; a
queen who marries her brother-in-law; a crack-
brained young prince (whose state of mind
would make him a fitting subject for a
commission de lunatico inquirendo); a maundering
old gentleman whom Hamlet stabs as he listens
behind the arras (one of the few reasonable
things he does in the whole five acts); and a
young lady who goes mad, and, after doddering
about with straw in her hair, singing songs that
are not over-delicate, drowns herself by
accident in a horse-pond. In the last scene of this
hideous burlesque of nature and probability, the
queen (Hamlet's mother) dies by a poisoned
cup of wine; the king is stabbed, and Hamlet
and an enemy of his kill each other with a
poisoned foil while they are fencing. As only
one of the foils is poisoned, and it is
necessary to the climax that both should die at
once, the two combatants contrive, by some
sleight-of-hand which is quite beyond our
comprehension, to exchange the weapon without
meaning it! But a writer who for ever aims at
startling effects must of necessity pile up the
agonies in his concluding scene; and this
agglomeration of fantastic crimes will the less
astonish the reader when he learns that in one
scene Hamlet reviles his own mother in the
most dreadful manner, and in another utters
profane jokes in a churchyard while his
sweetheart's grave is being dug, and tosses skulls
about the stage! So fond is Mr. Shakespeare
of death in its most revolting forms, that even
his love-story of Romeo and Juliet is full of
slaughtering and poisoning; while his very
comedies have generally some smack of the
gallows in them.

We do not wish to be unfair on Mr. Shakespeare.
He is not devoid of a certain ability,
which might be turned to very reputable
account if he only understood his own powers
better. He has a good deal of native humour
—exaggerated, indeed, to the pitch of burlesque,
but undoubtedly amusing; and he possesses
some knowledge of the superficial parts of
character, though, being evidently no scholar, he is
often ridiculously vulgar in his would-be
representations of gentlemen. He would do very
well as a writer of farces and of show pieces;
but his injudicious friends have flattered him
into the belief that he is a great tragic poet;
and hence the gory nonsense of this new drama,
Macbeth, of which we now proceed to give some
account.

The scene is laid in Scotland, during the
reign of one Duncan, of whom English readers
know little and care less. The play opens, in
good melodramatic (or, rather, pantomimic)
fashion, with a dark scene; thunder rolling and
lightning flashing, and three witches talking
gibberish in rhyme. Were this last monstrosity
of Mr. Shakespeare's fancy ever to be played at
any theatre (which, however, is quite impossible),
we can easily imagine the low tremulous
murmuring of fiddles to which the curtain would