Page:Wit, humor, and Shakspeare. Twelve essays (IA cu31924013161223).pdf/396

 If the poet had intended Lady Macbeth to be a fury, a person of abnormal wildness and cruelty, who had exhausted love and craved the fire-water of ambition, he would have prepared us to throw such a conception over her, by hinting some motive or circumstance for this divergence from the normal feminine nature. On the contrary, he purposely neglected the opportunity which the old story furnished toward the warping and poisoning of a woman's mind. The historical Lady Macbeth was the grand-daughter of Kenneth IV., who fell in the fight against Malcolm II., Duncan's father. Shakspeare has carefully suppressed any allusion which might recall the bitter family feud to unsex her and make revenge an element of her ambition.

Her shape, complexion, tone of voice, and style of feeling cannot be constructed for us out of the brawn of those lines which she throws out from the shoulder to hit Macbeth's irresolution. They do not provide us with the essence of her material. If we build a woman out of that literal clay, she would be square-shouldered, big-limbed, stout-bodied, sharp-boned, and pachydermatous, with a skin of bronzed leather tightened over knobs of cheek-bones, hairs woven in a wire-mill, and eyebrows like two heavy dashes from the circus charcoal. Prometheus would connive with Billingsgate to o'er-inform that clay. We confess that such a female lingers among the traditional properties of theatres; but she is too shop-worn to dare again the blaze of footlights. We would not so defame a Jason, and blast his life by constructing the mother of his children out of