MACBETH
The poet's eye in a fine frenzy rolling
Doth glance from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven;
And as imagination bodies forth
The forms of things unknown, the poet's pen
Turns them to shape, and gives to airy nothing
A local habitation and a name.
MACBETH and Lear, Othello and Hamlet, are usually reckoned
Shakespeare's four principal tragedies. Lear stands first for the
profound intensity of the passion; Macbeth for the wildness of the
imagination and the rapidity of the action; Othello for the
progressive interest and powerful alternations of feeling; Hamlet
for the refined development of thought and sentiment. If the force
of genius shown in each of these works is astonishing, their variety
is not less so. They are like different creations of the same mind,
not one of which has the slightest reference to the rest. This
distinctness and originality is indeed the necessary consequence of
truth and nature. Shakespeare's genius alone appeared to possess the
resources of nature. He is 'your only tragedy-maker'. His plays have
the force of things upon the mind. What he represents is brought
home to the bosom as a part of our experience, implanted in the
memory as if we had known the places, persons, and things of which
he treats. Macbeth is like a record of a preternatural and tragical
event.
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