26 L. A. Sherman 



plot. The Witch-masters trump up an apparition of the muti- 

 lated victim, install it in the royal seat, and so horrify Macbeth 

 that he forgets to guard his murderous secret. Lady Macbeth pre- 

 cipitously orders out the guests, supperless, from fear lest Mac- 

 beth pronounce before them the very name of the form he sees. 

 These thanes were called together to ensure committal to Mac- 

 beth's cause. As each canters forth, with his grooms, in the dead 

 of night, towards his castle, he feels himself absolved from the 

 expected obligation, and not wholly disinclined to a future com- 

 mittal of quite a different sort.^^ Thus has Shakespeare inspired 

 the leaders of the people, against the eventual overthrow of 

 the usurper, with a personal as well as a political animus or 

 motivation. 



This imaginative anticipation of the outcome is the construc- 

 tive center of the play. There is ' descending action ' from the 

 moment of the unsuccessful banquet till the end of the history. 

 We are convinced that Macbeth is doomed, and we visualize the 

 defeat and punishment with which his career will end. Because 

 of the vision in which the conviction comes to us, we may call this 

 crowning part of the construction the Subjective Climax. We 

 create for ourselves a conclusion without waiting for enabling 

 or compelling facts. The Objective Climax is reached at the vital 

 moment when the anticipated issue becomes actual. All the 



IS To those who have not regarded the presence of Banquo's ghost as 

 counterfeited, a summary of the suggestions in the text may be of interest. 

 The figures that make up the 'show of eight kings,' in the first scene of 

 the Fourth Act, are incontestably creations of the Witch-masters, or of 

 diabolism. Macbeth recognizes the ' blood-boltered Banquo ' as the same 

 apparition that urmerved him at the banquet, the night before, except that 

 it now smiles on him in triumph. Evidently again this is not, in Shake- 

 speare's thought, a veritable disembodied spirit, since such, by the notions 

 of the age, were permitted to visit the earth only, like the ghost of the 

 elder Hamlet, by high authority, and not by petition of evil powers, and 

 not in the day time. Macbeth, we remember, proposed to seek the Weird 

 Sisters (III. iv. 132, 133) 'betimes,' 'to-morrow.' This understanding 

 of Macbeth's purpose is confirmed by the author — whoever he was — of 

 Hecate's censure {cf. 11. 14-17) of the Witches in the next scene. Also 

 messengers follow Macbeth to the Witches' cavern, to report Macduflf's 

 flight, as in regular course of the day's activities. 



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