Page:Wit, humor, and Shakspeare. Twelve essays (IA cu31924013161223).pdf/380

 reproduction, so quick and palpable, of the deed just described to him by the hired murderer who, by doing that, put those "twenty trenched gashes" into his mind, whence they dripped over the chair of state. His talent for this spectral extemporizing has been indulged too often to overtake him with a special wonder. This unexpected Banquo may be dared, and even threatened:—

"Thou canst not say I did it: never shake Thy gory locks at me."

His wife blames his "flaws and starts" at such a moment of festivity when ceremony ought to be the sauce to meat; but they are not the ague-fits of a man who is dropping to pieces at a dreadful sight. The image of his guilt absorbs and diverts his behavior from the guests in a way that suggests to them a sudden flightiness:—

"Prythee, see there! behold! look! lo! how say you? Why, what care I? If thou canst nod, speak too."

This is not bravado trying to steady itself in a breeze of horror.

In order to break Macbeth down, and fully identify him with the deed of which Banquo was the horrible shadow, his temperament required that the ghost should vanish and reappear at the moment when he recovers composure. Shakspeare has marked, by Macbeth's sudden change of demeanor, that he was usually familiar with these coinages of his brain. To whatever ecstasy his feeling rose, with or without his wife's complicity, Shakspeare would have us understand that Macbeth was