Page:Macbeth (1918) Yale.djvu/119

Macbeth he introduced much spectacular business and still more music and dancing, so that a contemporary described his play as 'in the nature of an opera.' The witches were not hags, but ladies with beautiful voices. The diarist Pepys, who saw Macbeth many times, described it in 1664 merely as 'a pretty good play, but admirably acted'; but in 1667 it was 'a most excellent play in all respects, but especially in divertisement, though it be a deep tragedy; which is a strange perfection in a tragedy, it being most proper here, and suitable.' Perhaps the first of these entries refers to Shakespeare's Macbeth, and the second to Davenant's.

After this period, and for three-quarters of a century, the public saw only Davenant's version. Many illustrious critics and editors (Rowe, Pope, Theobald, Hanmer) never saw Shakespeare's play; and in eighteenth-century criticism the two versions are sometimes curiously confused. Thus Richard Steele, in his essay on the great tragic actor Betterton, quotes the following as part of a speech of Macbeth's:

In 1744 Garrick effected a partial restoration of Shakespeare's play; but the witches kept their operatic character till 1847, when Samuel Phelps had the courage to present them in their proper guise. In Davenant's play, or in Shakespeare's, or in intermediate compromises between the two, all the greatest English-speaking actors of the last two and a half centuries have achieved distinction, from Betterton to Booth; and the part of Lady Macbeth was one of the notable triumphs of the great Mrs. Siddons.