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The last passage of the play, that after line 34, when Macbeth and Macduff go off fighting, and Macbeth is killed, are probably, as the Cambridge editors suggest, by another hand than Shakespeare's. Their tameness and their constrained rhythm are not Shakespearian work, particularly at this period of his life, and in the writing of such a scene.
The early English settlers of "the Dorchester back woods" brought with them many a quaint proverb and local saying. Some of these you can trace back to Shakespeare's day, and beyond. One of these proverbs that is probably as old as weather wisdom says: "Long foretold, long last; Short notice, soon past."
Perhaps that was where his talent was not genius. It blistered him, but it made no steam. Shakespeare had known enough to leave Stratford. He had had to hold horses outside the theatre, and even then he had organized a little business group of horse holders called "Shakespeare's boys." He had the business sense, and he forced his way into the theatre and became a stockholder.
Yes, surely the true way of contemplating these undistinguished masses of humanity, this 'h'-dropping, garlic-eating, child-begetting bourgeois, is Shakespeare's, Dickens', Whitman's way through the eye of a gentle sympathetic beholder one who understands Nature's trick of hiding her most precious things beneath rough husks and in rank and bearded envelopes and not through the eye-glass of the new critic.
We visited the State Theatre, where Wagnerian opera still holds the patient ear, and there we heard, not Wagner, but Shakespeare's "Lear," done in a jog-trot, uninspired, later-Victorian style. One felt as if the theatre had slept for thirty years and then, awakening, had resumed in the same style as before.
Much of the work of their contemporary dramatists is marred by such blemishes. Unpleasant as are numbers of these plays, they are less insidious than many which have appeared on the stage in modern times. Love of Surprises. The dramatists racked their inventive powers to introduce surprises to interest the audience. Here was a marked departure from Shakespeare's later method.
It is of course the merest commonplace to say as much, and would be no less a waste of speech to add the half comfortable reflection that it is in any case no shame to fall by such a hand. But this subtlest and strangest work of Shakespeare's admits and requires some closer than common scrutiny.
Even then the grant was criticised in many quarters, but William Shakespeare's eminence tended to render all criticism nugatory; nor was he the first eminent actor to enjoy a coat of arms. It is quite easy to understand the significance of the application if we turn to regard the poet as a purchaser of real estate.
Portia is a woman who deeply loves and deeply rejoices and exults in her love, and she is never ashamed of her passion or of her exultation in it; and she says the finest things about love that are said by any of Shakespeare's women; the finest because, while supremely passionate, the feeling in them is perfectly sane.
I have never forgot your people felt their Mary stepped down to wed a Shakespeare. I have applied to the Herald's College for a grant of arms. The Shakespeares are as good as any who fought to place the crown on Henry VII's head. But it shall be stopped. The land and the timber on it is Mistress Mary Shakespeare's, not mine."
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