Page:Macbeth (1918) Yale.djvu/117



Macbeth was probably written in 1606; but any precise dating must be recognized as conjectural. The references to King James's 'treble sceptre' could not have been made earlier than 1604; and the porter's jests about equivocation seem to have owed their point to events of the spring of 1606. There are other apparent references to the same events in IV. ii. 46–49, and V. v. 43. A certain Dr. Simon Forman recorded in his notebook that he saw a performance of Macbeth on the twentieth of April, 1610. There is no documentary proof of the existence of the play before this date; but allusions to it are suspected in plays written as early as 1606 and 1607. For example, we find this sentence in The Puritan (published in 1607): 'Instead of a jester, we'll have the ghost in the white sheet sit at the upper end of the table.' But the allusion here to Macbeth is at best no more than highly probable. The evidence of style and versification supports the inference that the play was written in 1606. Shakespeare's style and versification changed progressively as he grew older; and it seems clear that Macbeth was written before Cymbeline, The Winter's Tale, or The Tempest; before Antony and Cleopatra or Coriolanus; before so many of the latest plays, in fact, that we are driven to give it as early a date as the allusions to 'equivocation' will permit. Macbeth, however, seems to have been the last of the four great tragedies. It was later than Hamlet or Othello, and it was probably later than King Lear.

Macbeth appears to have been one of Shakespeare's popular successes, but not one of the greatest of them.