Making the green one red.
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is mysterious brooding has scarcely a parallel elsewhere even mShakespeare’s work. Increasingly, as the play advances, its antitheticalsubjects are cruelty and his own suffering; hand in hand these move,until the universe seems to consist of nothing else. There is nothing inMacbeth so intolerable as the last act of Othello, but no other Shake-spearean tragedy is so desolate, and this desolation is conveyed to usthrough the fantastic imagination of its hero. The course of action adopted by Macbeth, however, changes hisnature, as we saw earlier, and the celebrated description of lifeas meaningless (at v. 5. 19 if.)— which has been so often and foolishlytaken for Shakespeare’s own conviction— is that of a man who issickening to his end, who has ceased to be a man, who has actedhimself— so to speak— out of his beliefs. Duncan’s character is fundamental also to Macbeth’s fate. Hismark is generosity, trust— even to foolishness, as is made plain atonce, when he says of Cawdor the traitor-
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