As it is, when Coleridge asks "which do we pity the most" at
the fall of the curtain, we can surely answer, Othello. Noble as are the
"most blessed conditions" of "the gentle Desdemona," he is yet the nobler
of the two; and has suffered more in one single pang than she could
suffer in life or in death.
But if _Othello_ be the most pathetic, _King Lear_ the most terrible,
_Hamlet_ the subtlest and deepest work of Shakespeare, the highest in
abrupt and steep simplicity of epic tragedy is _Macbeth_. There needs no
ghost come from the grave, any reader may too probably remark, to tell us
this. But in the present generation such novelties have been unearthed
regarding Shakespeare that the reassertion of an old truth may seem to
have upon it some glittering reflection from the brazen brightness of a
brand-new lie. Have not certain wise men of the east of
England--Cantabrigian Magi, led by the star of their goddess Mathesis
("mad Mathesis," as a daring poet was once ill-advised enough to dub her
doubtful deity in defiance of scansion rather than of truth)--have they
not detected in the very heart of this tragedy the "paddling palms and
pinching fingers" of Thomas Middleton?
To the simpler eyes of less learned Thebans than these--Thebes, by the
way, was Dryden's irreverent name for Cambridge, the nursing mother of
"his green unknowing youth," when that "renegade" was recreant enough to
compliment Oxford at her expense as the chosen Athens of "his riper
age"--the likelihood is only too evident that the sole text we possess of
_Macbeth_ has not been interpolated but mutilated.
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