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Updated: June 19, 2025
that annoyed Harry Hotspur so terribly; and neither in this allusion, which was suggested by a passage in Holinshed, nor in "Macbeth," where he makes the three witches conjure up their familiars in the shapes of an armed head, a bloody child, and a child crowned, has Shakspere gone beyond the fantastic conceptions of the time.
At first the absolute cruelty, which with Holinshed was the chief trait of his character, is wanting in Macbeth, and therefore ambition is mentioned first. Macbeth becomes the tyrant wading in blood first after the murder of Duncan and then more from a necessity to defend himself.
Or, if he had been in the possession of a proper bath of fusible metal, he would have attained the necessary certainty in his process, and need not have immured himself in a subterranean apartment. PARKES' Essays, 1841, p. 495. HOLINSHED, History of England.
You do not blame Holinshed or Froissart for believing and repeating the things they had read or been told, though you cannot always believe these things yourself. But when Cellini tells you that he saw this or did that, and you find it impossible to believe him, you lose patience with him, and are disposed to doubt everything in his autobiography.
Nothing can well be more dry and commonplace than the historical literature of this period, which recalls the early efforts of the Greeks in this department, and exhibits a decided inferiority to the compositions of Stowe and Holinshed.
The only one of the evangelists who professes to give first-hand evidence as an eyewitness naturally takes care to say so; and the fact that Matthew makes no such pretension, and writes throughout as a chronicler, makes it clear that he is telling the story of Jesus as Holinshed told the story of Macbeth, except that, for a reason to be given later on, he must have collected his material and completed his book within the lifetime of persons contemporary with Jesus.
Certainly the history itself, as he found it in Hall, Holinshed, and Stowe, those somewhat picturesque old chroniclers who had themselves an eye for the dramatic "effects" of human life, has much of this sentiment already about it.
Shakespeare has represented the rest fairly truly according to Holinshed, only that in actuality this lasted for seven years, until Macbeth fell at the hands of Macduff. It is also worthy of note what Holinshed has made the ground of the murder of Duncan.
In Harrison's introduction to Holinshed we have an account of the state of our working population in the "golden days," as Mr. Southey calls them, "of good Queen Bess."
All hail, Macbeth! hail to thee, thane of Cawdor! 3rd Witch. All hail, Macbeth! thou shall be king hereafter. This is so accurate a dramatization of the parallel passage in Holinshed, and so entire in itself, that there is some temptation to ask whether it was not so written at first, and the interpolated lines subsequently inserted by the author.
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