# Shakespearean Tragedy/Note BB

Layout 2
London: Macmillan, pages 470–480
NOTE BB.
THE DATE OF MACBETH. METRICAL TESTS.
Dr. Forman saw Macbeth performed at the Globe in 1610. The question is how much earlier its composition or first appearance is to be put.
It is agreed that the date is not earlier than that of the accession of James I. in 1603. The style and versification would make an earlier date almost impossible. And we have the allusions to ‘two-fold balls and treble sceptres’ and to the descent of Scottish kings from Banquo; the undramatic description of touching for the King’s Evil (James performed this ceremony); and the dramatic use of witchcraft, a matter on which James considered himself an authority.
Some of these references would have their fullest effect early in James’s reign. And on this ground, and on account both of resemblances in the characters of Hamlet and Macbeth, and of the use of the supernatural in the two plays, it has been held that Macbeth was the tragedy that came next after Hamlet, or, at any rate, next after Othello.
These arguments seem to me to have no force when set against those that point to a later date (about 1606) and place Macbeth after King Lear. And, as I have already observed, the probability is that it also comes after Shakespeare’s part of Timon, and immediately before Antony and Cleopatra and Coriolanus.
I will first refer briefly to some of the older arguments in favour of this later date, and then more at length to those based on versification.
(1) In II. ii. 4–5, ‘Here’s a farmer that hang’d himself on the expectation of plenty,’ Malone found a reference to the exceptionally low price of wheat in 1606.
(2) In the reference in the same speech to the equivocator who could swear in both scales and committed treason enough for God’s sake, he found an allusion to the trial of the Jesuit Garnet, in the spring of 1606, for complicity in the Gunpowder ​Treason and Plot. Garnet protested on his soul and salvation that he had not held a certain conversation, then was obliged to confess that he had, and thereupon ‘fell into a large discourse defending equivocation.’ This argument, which I have barely sketched, seems to me much weightier than the first; and its weight is increased by the further references to perjury and treason pointed out on p. 397.
(3) Halliwell observed what appears to be an allusion to Macbeth in the comedy of the Puritan, 4to, 1607: ‘we’ll ha’ the ghost i’ th’ white sheet sit at upper end o’ th’ table’; and Malone had referred to a less striking parallel in Caesar and Pompey, also pub. 1607:
He also found a significance in the references in Macbeth to the genius of Mark Antony being rebuked by Caesar, and to the insane root that takes the reason prisoner, as showing that Shakespeare, while writing Macbeth, was reading Plutarch’s Lives, with a view to his next play Antony and Cleopatra (S.R. 1608).
(4) To these last arguments, which by themselves would be of little weight, I may add another, of which the same may be said. Marston’s reminiscences of Shakespeare are only too obvious. In his Dutch Courtezan, 1605, I have noticed passages which recall Othello and King Lear, but nothing that even faintly recalls Macbeth. But in reading Sophonisba, 1606, I was several times reminded of Macbeth (as well as, more decidedly, of Othello). I note the parallels for what they are worth.
With Sophonisba, Act I. Sc. ii:
cf. Macbeth I. ii. 49:
Cf. Sophonisba, a page later: ‘yet doubtful stood the fight,’ with Macbeth, I. ii. 7, ‘Doubtful it stood’ [‘Doubtful long it ​stood’?] In the same scene of Macbeth the hero in fight is compared to an eagle, and his foes to sparrows; and in Soph. III. ii. Massinissa in fight is compared to a falcon, and his foes to fowls and lesser birds. I should not note this were it not that all these reminiscences (if they are such) recall one and the same scene. In Sophonisba also there is a tremendous description of the witch Erictho (IV. i.), who says to the person consulting her, ‘I know thy thoughts,’ as the Witch says to Macbeth, of the Armed Head, ‘He knows thy thought.’
(5) The resemblances between Othello and King Lear pointed out on pp. 244–5 and in Note R. form, when taken in conjunction with other indications, an argument of some strength in favour of the idea that King Lear followed directly on Othello.
(6) There remains the evidence of style and especially of metre. I will not add to what has been said in the text concerning the former; but I wish to refer more fully to the latter, in so far as it can be represented by the application of metrical tests. It is impossible to argue here the whole question of these tests. I will only say that, while I am aware, and quite admit the force, of what can be said against the independent, rash, or incompetent use of them, I am fully convinced of their value when they are properly used.
Of these tests, that of rhyme and that of feminine endings, discreetly employed, are of use in broadly distinguishing Shakespeare’s plays into two groups, earlier and later, and also in marking out the very latest dramas; and the feminine-ending test is of service in distinguishing Shakespeare’s part in Henry VIII. and the Two Noble Kinsmen. But neither of these tests has any power to separate plays composed within a few years of one another. There is significance in the fact that the Winter’s Tale, the Tempest, Henry VIII., contain hardly any rhymed five-foot lines; but none, probably, in the fact that Macbeth shows a higher percentage of such lines than King Lear, Othello, or Hamlet. The percentages of feminine endings, again, in the four tragedies, are almost conclusive against their being early plays, and would tend to show that they were not among the latest; but the differences in their respective percentages, which would place them in the chronological order Hamlet, Macbeth, Othello, King Lear (König), or Macbeth, Hamlet, Othello, King Lear (Hertzberg), are ​of scarcely any account. Nearly all scholars, I think, would accept these statements.
The really useful tests, in regard to plays which admittedly are not widely separated, are three which concern the endings of speeches and lines. It is practically certain that Shakespeare made his verse progressively less formal, by making the speeches end more and more often within a line and not at the close of it; by making the sense overflow more and more often from one line into another; and, at last, by sometimes placing at the end of a line a word on which scarcely any stress can be laid. The corresponding tests may be called the Speech-ending test, the Overflow test, and the Light and Weak Ending test.
I. The Speech-ending test has been used by König, and I will first give some of his results. But I regret to say that I am unable to discover certainly the rule he has gone by. He omits speeches which are rhymed throughout, or which end with a rhymed couplet. And he counts only speeches which are ‘mehrzeilig.’ I suppose this means that he counts any speech consisting of two lines or more, but omits not only one-line speeches, but speeches containing more than one line but less than two; but I am not sure.
In the plays admitted by everyone to be early the percentage of speeches ending with an incomplete line is quite small. In the Comedy of Errors, for example, it is only 0.6. It advances to 12.1 in King John, 18.3 in Henry V., and 21.6 in As You Like It. It rises quickly soon after, and in no play written (according to general belief) after about 1600 or 1601 is it less than 30. In the admittedly latest plays it rises much higher, the figures being as follows:—Antony 77.5, Cor. 79, Temp. 84.5, Cym. 85, Win. Tale 87.6, Henry VIII. (parts assigned to Shakespeare by Spedding) 89. Going back, now, to the four tragedies, we find the following figures: Othello 41.4, Hamlet 51.6, Lear 60.9, Macbeth 77.2. These figures place Macbeth decidedly last, with a percentage practically equal to that of Antony, the first of the final group.
I will now give my own figures for these tragedies, as they differ somewhat from König’s, probably because my method differs. ​(1) I have included speeches rhymed or ending with rhymes, mainly because I find that Shakespeare will sometimes (in later plays) end a speech which is partly rhymed with an incomplete line (e.g. Ham. III. ii. 187, and the last words of the play: or Macb. V. i. 87, V. ii. 31). And if such speeches are reckoned, as they surely must be (for they may be, and are, highly significant), those speeches which end with complete rhymed lines must also be reckoned. (2) I have counted any speech exceeding a line in length, however little the excess may be; e.g.
considering that the incomplete line here may be just as significant as an incomplete line ending a longer speech. If a speech begins within a line and ends brokenly, of course I have not counted it when it is equivalent to a five-foot line; e.g.
but I do count such a speech (they are very rare) as
for the same reason that I count
Of the speeches thus counted, those which end somewhere within the line I find to be in Othello about 54 per cent.; in Hamlet about 57; in King Lear about 69; in Macbeth about 75. The order is the same as König’s, but the figures differ a good deal. I presume in the last three cases this comes from the difference in method; but I think König’s figures for Othello cannot be right, for I have tried several methods and find that the result is in no case far from the result of my own, and I am almost inclined to conjecture that König’s 41.4 is really the percentage of speeches ending with the close of a line, which would give 58.6 for the percentage of the broken-ended speeches.
​We shall find that other tests also would put Othello before Hamlet, though close to it. This may be due to ‘accident’—i.e. a cause or causes unknown to us; but I have sometimes wondered whether the last revision of Hamlet may not have succeeded the composition of Othello. In this connection the following fact may be worth notice. It is well known that the differences of the Second Quarto of Hamlet from the First are much greater in the last three Acts than in the first two—so much so that the editors of the Cambridge Shakespeare suggested that Q1 represents an old play, of which Shakespeare’s rehandling had not then proceeded much beyond the Second Act, while Q2 represents his later completed rehandling. If that were so, the composition of the last three Acts would be a good deal later than that of the first two (though of course the first two would be revised at the time of the composition of the last three). Now I find that the percentage of speeches ending with a broken line is about 50 for the first two Acts, but about 62 for the last three. It is lowest in the first Act, and in the first two scenes of it is less than 32. The percentage for the last two Acts is about 65.
II. The Enjambement or Overflow test is also known as the End-stopped and Run-on line test. A line may be called ‘end-stopped’ when the sense, as well as the metre, would naturally make one pause at its close; ‘run-on’ when the mere sense would lead one to pass to the next line without any pause. This distinction is in a great majority of cases quite easy to draw: in others it is difficult. The reader cannot judge by rules of grammar, or by marks of punctuation (for there is a distinct pause at the end of many a line where most editors print no stop): he must trust his ear. And readers will differ, one making a distinct pause where another does not. This, however, does not matter greatly, so long as the reader is consistent; for the important point is not the precise number of run-on lines ​in a play, but the difference in this matter between one play and another. Thus one may disagree with König in his estimate of many instances, but one can see that he is consistent,
In Shakespeare’s early plays, ‘overflows’ are rare. In the Comedy of Errors, for example, their percentage is 12.9 according to König (who excludes rhymed lines and some others). In the generally admitted last plays they are comparatively frequent. Thus, according to König, the percentage in the Winter’s Tale is 37.5, in the Tempest 41.5, in Antony 43.3, in Coriolanus 45.9, in Cymbeline 46, in the parts of Henry VIII. assigned by Spedding to Shakespeare 53.18. König’s results for the four tragedies are as follows: Othello, 19.5; Hamlet, 23.1; King Lear, 29.3; Macbeth, 36.6; (Timon, the whole play, 32.5). Macbeth here again, therefore, stands decidedly last: indeed it stands near the first of the latest plays.
And no one who has ever attended to the versification of Macbeth will be surprised at these figures. It is almost obvious, I should say, that Shakespeare is passing from one system to another. Some passages show little change, but in others the change is almost complete. If the reader will compare two somewhat similar soliloquies, ‘To be or not-to be’ and ‘If it were done when ’tis done,’ he will recognise this at once. Or let him search the previous plays, even King Lear, for twelve consecutive lines like these:
Or let him try to parallel the following (III. vi. 37 f.):
or this (IV. ii. 118 f.):
I pass to another point. In the last illustration the reader will observe not only that ‘overflows’ abound, but that they follow one another in an unbroken series of nine lines. So long a series could not, probably, be found outside Macbeth and the last plays. A series of two or three is not uncommon; but a series of more than three is rare in the early plays, and far from common in the plays of the second period (König).
I thought it might be useful for our present purpose, to count the series of four and upwards in the four tragedies, in the parts of Timon attributed by Mr. Fleay to Shakespeare, and in Coriolanus, a play of the last period. I have not excluded rhymed lines in the two places where they occur, and perhaps I may say that my idea of an ‘overflow’ is more exacting than König’s. The reader will understand the following table at once if I say that, according to it, Othello contains three passages where a series of four successive overflowing ​lines occurs, and two passages where a series of five such lines occurs:
| | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | No. of Lines (Fleay). |
| Othello, | 3 | 2 | — | — | — | — | — | 2,758 |
| Hamlet, | 7 | — | — | — | — | — | — | 2,571 |
| Lear, | 6 | 2 | — | — | — | — | — | 2,312 |
| Timon, | 7 | 2 | 1 | 1 | — | — | — | 1,031 (?) |
| Macbeth, | 7 | 5 | 1 | 1 | 1 | — | — | 1,706 |
| Coriolanus, | 16 | 14 | 7 | 1 | 2 | — | 1 | 2,563 |
(The figures for Macbeth and Timon in the last column must be borne in mind. I observed nothing in the non-Shakespeare part of Timon that would come into the table, but I did not make a careful search. I felt some doubt as to two of the four series in Othello and again in Hamlet, and also whether the ten-series in Coriolanus should not be put in column 7).
III. The light and weak ending test.
We have just seen that in some cases a doubt is felt whether there is an ‘overflow’ or not. The fact is that the ‘overflow’ has many degrees of intensity. If we take, for example, the passage last quoted, and if with König we consider the line
to be run-on (as I do not), we shall at least consider the overflow to be much less distinct than those in the lines
And of these four lines the third runs on into its successor at much the greatest speed.
‘Above,’ ‘now,’ ‘abjure,’ are not light or weak endings: ‘and’ is a weak ending. Prof. Ingram gave the name weak ending to certain words on which it is scarcely possible to dwell at all, and which, therefore, precipitate the line which they close into the following. Light endings are certain words which have the same effect in a slighter degree. For example, and, from, in, of, are weak endings; am, are, I, he, are light endings.
The test founded on this distinction is, within its limits, the most satisfactory of all, partly because the work of its author ​can be absolutely trusted. The result of its application is briefly as follows. Until quite a late date light and weak endings occur in Shakespeare’s works in such small numbers as hardly to be worth consideration. But in the well-defined group of last plays the numbers both of light and of weak endings increase greatly, and, on the whole, the increase apparently is progressive (I say apparently, because the order in which the last plays are generally placed depends to some extent on the test itself). I give Prof. Ingram’s table of these plays, premising that in Pericles, Two Noble Kinsmen, and Henry VIII. he uses only those parts of the plays which are attributed by certain authorities to Shakespeare (New Shakspere Soc. Trans., 1874).
| | Light endings. | Weak. | Percentage of light in verse lines. | Percentage of weak in verse lines. | Percentage of both. |
| Antony and Cleopatra, | 71 | 28 | 2.53 | 1. | 3.53 |
| Coriolanus, | 60 | 44 | 2.34 | 1.71 | 4.05 |
| Pericles, | 20 | 10 | 2.78 | 1.39 | 4.17 |
| Tempest, | 42 | 25 | 2.88 | 1.71 | 4.59 |
| Cymbeline, | 78 | 52 | 2.90 | 1.93 | 4.83 |
| Winter’s Tale, | 57 | 43 | 3.12 | 2.36 | 5.48 |
| Two Noble Kinsmen, | 50 | 34 | 3.63 | 2.47 | 6.10 |
| Henry VIII., | 45 | 37 | 3.93 | 3.23 | 7.16 |
Now, let us turn to our four tragedies (with Timon). Here again we have one doubtful play, and I give the figures for the whole of Timon, and again for the parts of Timon assigned to Shakespeare by Mr. Fleay, both as they appear in his amended text and as they appear in the Globe (perhaps the better text).
| | Light. | Weak. |
| Hamlet, | 8 | 0 |
| Othello, | 2 | 0 |
| Lear, | 5 | 1 |
| Timon (whole), | 16 | 5 |
| Timon (Sh. in Fleay), | 14 | 7 |
| Timon (Sh. in Globe), | 21 | 2 |
| Macbeth, | 21 | 2 |
Now here the figures for the first three plays tell us practically. nothing. The tendency to a freer use of these endings is not ​visible. As to Timon, the number of weak endings, I think, tells us little, for probably only two or three are Shakespeare’s; but the rise in the number of light endings is so marked as to be significant. And most significant is this rise in the case of Macbeth, which, like Shakespeare’s part of Timon, is much shorter than the preceding plays. It strongly confirms the impression that in Macbeth we have the transition to Shakespeare’s last style, and that the play is the latest of the five tragedies.
* ↑ The fact that King Lear was performed at Court on December 26, 1606, is of course very far from showing that it had never been performed before.
* ↑ I have not tried to discover the source of the difference between these two reckonings.
* ↑ Der Vers in Shakspere’s Dramen, 1888.
* ↑ In the parts of Timon (Globe text) assigned by Mr. Fleay to Shakespeare, I find the percentage to be about 74.5. König gives 62.8 as the percentage in the whole of the play.
* ↑ I have noted also what must be a mistake in the case of Pericles. König gives 17.1 as the percentage of the speeches with broken ends. I was astounded to see the figure, considering the style in the undoubtedly Shakespearean parts; and I find that, on my method, in Acts III., IV., V. the percentage is about 71, in the first two Acts (which show very slight, if any, traces of Shakespeare’s hand) about 19. I cannot imagine the origin of the mistake here.
* ↑ I put the matter thus, instead of saying that, with a run-on line, one does pass to the next line without any pause, because, in common with many others, I should not in any case whatever wholly ignore the fact that one line ends and another begins.
* ↑ These overflows are what König calls ‘schroffe Enjambements,’ which he considers to correspond with Furnivall’s ‘run-on lines.’
* ↑ The number of light endings, however, in Julius Caesar (10) and All’s Well (12) is worth notice.
* ↑ The Editors of the Cambridge Shakespeare might appeal in support of their view, that parts of Act V. are not Shakespeare’s, to the fact that the last of the light endings occurs at IV. iii. 165.
Footnotes