"Macbeth" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... and Manuscripts at Kelmscott House. The text of the Shakespeare was to have been prepared by Dr. Furnivall. The original intention, as first set out in the list of May 20, 1893, was to print it in three vols. folio. A trial page from Lady Macbeth, printed at this time, is in existence. The same information is repeated until the list of July 2, 1895, in which the book is announced as to be a 'small 4to (special size),' i. e., the size afterwards adopted for The Earthly Paradise. It was not, ...
— The Art and Craft of Printing • William Morris
... is the greatest of Byron's works will probably not be disputed. It has more than the fatal mysticism of Macbeth, with the satanic grandeur of the Paradise Lost, and the hero is placed in circumstances, and amid scenes, which accord with the stupendous features of his preternatural character. How then, it may be asked, does this moral ...
— The Life of Lord Byron • John Galt
... the ugly, crabbed creature that Casorans had described; but had she been as frightful as the witches in Macbeth I was determined to make her conquest. So I began playing with unusual attention. I was her partner, and I knew from experience the profound horror which the loss of money inspires in old women. Thank heaven, we won! ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... the troops, who, on seeing him approach them, rushed towards him and overpowered him. However, he unfortunately succeeded in seriously wounding one of the best and bravest soldiers in the command, Private Richard G. Macbeth, of Co. "F" 27th U. S. Infantry, whose bravery in time of danger had made him an unanimous favorite among his comrades. Another victim of this savage Sultan was Pvt. James Nolan, Jr., of Co. "G" 27th U. S. Infantry, who, having been detailed ...
— The Battle of Bayan and Other Battles • James Edgar Allen
... at the manoeuvres that were going on in the middle of the road. Her age Charteris put down at a venture at twelve—a correct guess. Her state of mind he also conjectured. She was letting 'I dare not' wait upon 'I would', like the late Macbeth, the cat i' the adage, and numerous other celebrities. She evidently had plenty of remarks to make on the subject in hand, but ...
— Tales of St. Austin's • P. G. Wodehouse
... flung the bundle of stalks on which she had been seated at the head of her assailant, kicked up a tornado of loose husks with her trim foot, and stood brandishing her red ear furiously, as if it had been a dagger in the hand of Lady Macbeth, rather than inoffensive food ...
— The Old Homestead • Ann S. Stephens
... Nature must of necessity be very brief and general; in which even the external form of man is so indifferent a consideration that it will vary with each actor who performs the part? A Hamlet may be fair or dark. A Macbeth may be short or tall. The merit of dramatic poetry consists in the substituting for what is commonly called Nature (namely, external and material Nature) creatures intellectual, emotional, but so purely immaterial that they may be ...
— Kenelm Chillingly, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... on to its stately close, and just as the solemn procession of flunkeys, long as the shadowy line of the kings in 'Macbeth,' filed off with the empty ice-dishes, Lady Maulevrier said something which was as if a shell had exploded in the ...
— Phantom Fortune, A Novel • M. E. Braddon
... depicted remorse with that terrible truthfulness which carries home to our minds the horror of crime. Lady Macbeth passes before us haunted by a vision, and ceaselessly washing her blood-stained hands. During all his life, even in his exile, Napoleon vainly sought to wash off the innocent and illustrious blood which he caused to flow in the fosse of Vincennes on the 20th of March, 1804. The men whom he ...
— Worlds Best Histories - France Vol 7 • M. Guizot and Madame Guizot De Witt
... support to gain a chance for a sudden dash at him before he could elude him. At the same time he did not forget the dozen horsemen that had stolen out so cautiously from the rear, and he knew that "if it were done, then 'twere well it were done quickly," as Macbeth so aptly puts it. ...
— In the Pecos Country • Edward Sylvester Ellis (AKA Lieutenant R.H. Jayne)
... Laura travelled alone to Boston to hear Modjeska in "Marie Stuart" and "Macbeth," and upon returning full of enthusiasm, allowed it to be understood that she had a half-formed desire of emulating such an example. A group of lady-deaconesses, headed by the Presbyterian minister, called upon her, with some intention of ...
— The Pit • Frank Norris
... friend," said he, good-humouredly. "It is a pleasure we lose as we grow older,—that of being sleepy. However, 'to bed,' as Lady Macbeth says. Faith, I don't wonder the poor devil of a thane was slow in going to bed with such a tigress. Good-night ...
— Alice, or The Mysteries, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... company never included an actor named Martin. Fletcher repeated the visit in October 1601. {41b} There is nothing to indicate that any of his companions belonged to Shakespeare's company. In like manner, Shakespeare's accurate reference in 'Macbeth' to the 'nimble' but 'sweet' climate of Inverness, {41c} and the vivid impression he conveys of the aspects of wild Highland heaths, have been judged to be the certain fruits of a personal experience; but the passages in question, ...
— A Life of William Shakespeare - with portraits and facsimiles • Sidney Lee
... that from the lyric to the dramatic poets. Historians appear in the second period, chroniclers and critics in the third. The characters of the ode are colossi—Adam, Cain, Noah; those of the epic are giants—Achilles, Atreus, Orestes; those of the drama are men—Hamlet, Macbeth, Othello. The ode lives upon the ideal, the epic upon the grandiose, the drama upon the real. Lastly, this threefold poetry flows from three ...
— Prefaces and Prologues to Famous Books - with Introductions, Notes and Illustrations • Charles W. Eliot
... Robinson were publishers. Lamb took the idea for his chorus from Davenant's version of "Macbeth" which he described in The Spectator in 1828 (see Vol. I. of the present edition). It is there ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb (Vol. 6) - Letters 1821-1842 • Charles and Mary Lamb
... contains, becoming a separate entity with an individual flavour of its own. To attempt to create this atmosphere in an artificial language is not only futile, but would introduce just the difficulties, redundancies, and complications which it is its chief object to avoid. Take a single instance, Macbeth's— ...
— International Language - Past, Present and Future: With Specimens of Esperanto and Grammar • Walter J. Clark
... realized the full immensity of Clithering's fatuousness until he uttered that mangled quotation from Macbeth in the tone of an old-fashioned tragedian. I believe the man actually revelled in harrowing emotion. It would not have surprised me to hear him assure me that the "multitudinous seas" would not wash out the blood-stains from his hands. He might very ...
— The Red Hand of Ulster • George A. Birmingham
... indifferently performed; some who had "atmosphere" and "chiaro-oscuro" so fully developed that copies of even the "Madonna di San Sisto" were only daubs offensive to the eye; others who, having seen Macready in Macbeth, find the tragedy stale in others' hands. Now I don't believe this ensues where the love of the art itself is genuine; and I rejoice to say that having once listened to an oratorio at the Handel Festival with four thousand selected ...
— Round the World • Andrew Carnegie
... scenic reinforcement; when I was struck with the fact that no actor so little graced by nature probably ever went so far toward repairing it by a kind of cold rage of endeavour. Were he and his wife really not coercively interesting on that Boston night of Macbeth in particular, hadn't their art a distinction that triumphed over battered age and sorry harshness, or was I but too easily beguiled by the old association? I have enjoyed and forgotten numberless rich hours of spectatorship, but ...
— A Small Boy and Others • Henry James
... panegyrists as unfitting him for characters of dignity or heroism, even to his exclusion from Faulconbridge, Hotspur, &c. and if we find that the greatest admirers of Barry considered the harmony and softness of his features, as reducing his Macbeth, Pierre, &c. to poor lukewarm efforts, how can it be expected that a boy, just started from childhood, should present a true picture of a warrior or a philosopher? We premise this for the purpose of having it understood that what we are to say of Master ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor - Vol I, No. 2, February 1810 • Samuel James Arnold
... characters was a very modest one for a beginner. It embraced only Richelieu, Bertram, Brutus, Lear, Richard, Shylock, Sir Giles Overreach, Hamlet, Othello, and Macbeth. My principal literary recreation for several years had been in studying these parts; and as I knew them by heart, I did not doubt that a few rehearsals would put me in possession of the requisite stage-business. And yet my familiarity ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 09, No. 51, January, 1862 • Various
... to whom should the sceptre and the crown be given? Lord Bacon had a kingly soul, capacious great thoughts, and high designs, but no one who has read his metrical translation of the Psalms of David will be troubled again with doubts whether he was the writer also of "Macbeth," "Othello," and "Lear." Compared with these sterile, bald, and mechanical quatrains, the sacred hymns of Isaac Watts are howling and bacchanalian anacreontics, to be hiccoughed by drunkards in their most ...
— Great Men and Famous Women, Vol. 7 of 8 • Charles F. (Charles Francis) Horne
... impunity, become at one stroke both sovereign and executioner. In vain does he work himself up against the condemned and heap insults on them to augment his fury;[31101] I he is dimly conscious of committing a great crime, and his soul, like that of Macbeth, "is full of scorpions." Through a terrible tightening up, he hardens himself against the inborn, hereditary impulses of humanity; these resist while he becomes exasperated, and, to stifle them, there is no other way but to "gorge ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 3 (of 6) - The French Revolution, Volume 2 (of 3) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... an immediate adjournment to the theatre. What should be the entertainment? Dances of almehs, songs of gypsies, or Chinese jugglers? One of the Ivans brought a programme. It was not difficult to decipher the word "[Russian: MACBETH]," and to recognize, further, in the name of "Ira Aldridge" a distinguished mulatto tragedian, to whom Maryland has given birth (if I am rightly informed) and Europe fame. We had often heard of him, yea, seen his portrait in Germany, decorated with the orders conferred by half a ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 87, January, 1865 • Various
... either of these? The hush of the moment, the atmosphere of suspense that seemed to envelop him, it was just what had always for his imagination had such strange charm in the stories of fated men. He turned again to Macbeth, or to Richard II, or to Hamlet. Shakespeare, too, understood ...
— Lincoln • Nathaniel Wright Stephenson
... in those years that followed the close of the war. The prairies were boundless, and the constant line of movers' wagons reaching out endlessly on the old trail, with fathers and mothers and children, children, children, like the ghosts of Banquo's lineal issue to King Macbeth, seemed numerous enough to people the world and put to the plough every foot of the virgin soil of the beautiful Plains. With the downfall of slavery the strife for commercial supremacy began in earnest here, and there are no idle ...
— The Price of the Prairie - A Story of Kansas • Margaret Hill McCarter
... long time, making frantic efforts to catch the empty air, panting like a human steam-engine, and nearly knocking out what small amount of brains she might possess against the gray branches, outstretched like the lean arms of Macbeth's weird women across her path. Finally Polly Sims succeeded in catching Bobby Jones, whom she clutched with the tenacity of an octopus; and then came the reign of Bobby Jones, who was an expert at the game, and who kept ...
— Vixen, Volume I. • M. E. Braddon
... shops there was still a shuttered blankness, but here and there a durwan[8] yawned and stretched himself before an open door, and a sweeper made a cloud of dust beneath a commercial verandah. The first boarding in a side street announced the appearance of Miss Hilda Howe for one night only as Lady Macbeth, under the kind patronage of His Excellency the Viceroy, with Jimmy Finnigan in the close proximity of professional jealousy, advertising five complete novelties for the same evening. It made a cheerful note which appealed to them both; ...
— Hilda - A Story of Calcutta • Sara Jeannette Duncan
... 'Lear, Macbeth, Mercutio—they live on their own, as it were. The newspapers are full of them, if we were only the Shakespeares to see it. Have you ever been in a Police Court? Have you ever WATCHED tradesmen behind their counters? My soul, the secrets ...
— The Return • Walter de la Mare
... disappear at left. Fearful pow-wow behind the scenes. Five minutes elapse. Enter goats at right as before, followed by Obanjo and company as before, and so on da capo. It was more like a fight I once saw between the armies of Macbeth and Macduff than anything I have seen before or since; only our Rembwe play was better put on, more supers, and noise, and all that sort of thing, you know. It was a spirited performance I assure you and I and the inhabitants of the village, not personally ...
— Travels in West Africa • Mary H. Kingsley
... observation; and it was plain that the provost's inclinations towards him, which he believed to be sincere and good, were not firm enough to withstand the influence of this league between his wife and friend. The provost's adieus, like Macbeth's amen, had stuck in his throat, and seemed to intimate that he apprehended more than he dared give ...
— Redgauntlet • Sir Walter Scott
... work engaged, were continually accompanying themselves with effervescent noises; and where the most domestic and confidential garments of coachmen and their wives and families, usually hung, like Macbeth's banners, ...
— Dombey and Son • Charles Dickens
... To the Duke's house to see "Macbeth," a pretty good play, but admirably acted. Thence home; the coach being forced to go round by London Wall home, because of the bonfires; the day being mightily observed ...
— The Diary of Samuel Pepys • Samuel Pepys
... thus shoved back to the amazing affair he had in hand. "All your 'Red Crawls' and your 'Sacred Sons' and your 'Nine-fingered Skeletons' are fools to it for wonder and mystery. Talk about witchcraft! Talk about wizards and giants and enchanters and the things that witches did in the days of Macbeth! God bless my soul, they're nothing to it. Those were the days of magic, anyhow, so you can take it or leave it, as you like; but this—— Look here, Cleek, you've heard of a good many queer things and run foul of a good many mysteries, I'll admit, but did you ever in this twentieth century, when ...
— Cleek, the Master Detective • Thomas W. Hanshew
... careful preparation. During the presidential period Lincoln gave evidence of critical ability that is little short of marvellous in a man whose schooling amounted to less than a year. In a letter to the actor Hackett and in several conversations he analyzed passages from "Hamlet," "Macbeth," and other plays with an insight and sympathy that have rarely been surpassed even by eminent ...
— Lincoln's Inaugurals, Addresses and Letters (Selections) • Abraham Lincoln
... Manager his wife and ourselves, but there were fewer to pay and the only inconvenience attending it was the Scarcity of Plays which for want of People to fill the Characters, we could perform. We did not mind trifles however—. One of our most admired Performances was MACBETH, in which we were truly great. The Manager always played BANQUO himself, his Wife my LADY MACBETH. I did the THREE WITCHES and Philander acted ALL THE REST. To say the truth this tragedy was not only the Best, but the only Play that we ever performed; and after having acted ...
— Persuasion • Jane Austen
... he spent in looking for a room, which he soon found, and in familiarising himself with liberty. In the evening I took him to the Olympic, where Robson was then acting in a burlesque on Macbeth, Mrs Keeley, if I remember rightly, taking the part of Lady Macbeth. In the scene before the murder, Macbeth had said he could not kill Duncan when he saw his boots upon the landing. Lady Macbeth put a stop to her husband's hesitation by whipping ...
— The Way of All Flesh • Samuel Butler
... emotions that lie between the extremes of joy and sorrow; it was creative in that, from any given emotion or motive, it could form a human character who should be completely governed by that motive. Ambition in Macbeth, pride in Coriolanus, wit in Mercutio, broad humor in Falstaff, indecision in Hamlet, pure fancy in Ariel, brutality in Richard, a passionate love in Juliet, a merry love in Rosalind, an ideal love in Perdita,—such characters reveal Shakespeare's power to create living men and women ...
— Outlines of English and American Literature • William J. Long
... former self, and contemplating the sports of his youth with a sort of melancholy pleasure, yet under the influence of the strong fatality which hurried him to his end. It is by mixing somewhat of this feeling in the character of Macbeth, that Shakspeare has excited a momentary interest even for a murderer and usurper, who perceives "his life fallen into the sere and yellow leaf," and pauses for a moment in melancholy reflection as he rushes to "die with harness ...
— Itinerary of Provence and the Rhone - Made During the Year 1819 • John Hughes
... within him a certain Christian conscience-stricken feeling of remorse on this head. It might be that he had wronged her by his tardiness. He had, however, at the present moment imbibed too much of Mr. Thorne's champagne to have any inward misgivings. He was right in repeating the boast of Lady Macbeth: he was not drunk, but he was bold enough for anything. It was a pity that in such a state he could ...
— Barchester Towers • Anthony Trollope
... passion. Hence the name 'tragedy of thought,' which Schlegel gave to Hamlet, may be given also, as in effect it has been by Professor Dowden, to Julius Caesar. The later heroes, on the other hand, Othello, Lear, Timon, Macbeth, Antony, Coriolanus, have, one and all, passionate natures, and, speaking roughly, we may attribute the tragic failure in each of these cases to passion. Partly for this reason, the later plays are wilder and stormier than the ...
— Shakespearean Tragedy - Lectures on Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth • A. C. Bradley
... hermetically sealed, and came forward accordingly. Leaning over the edge of the ebony caldron, he found that it contained nothing more dreadful than water, for he labored under a vague and unpleasant idea that, like the witches' caldron in Macbeth, it might be filled with serpents' blood and children's' brains. La Masque opened her golden casket, and took from it a portion of red powder, with which it was filled. Casting it into the caldron, she murmured an invocation in Sanscrit, or Coptic, or some other unknown tongue, and slowly ...
— The Midnight Queen • May Agnes Fleming
... Monitor, sir, would hug themselves with pleasure. But libel, Mr. Brent, libel! Do you know, sir, that ever since I occupied the editorial chair of state I have always felt that the wet blanket of the law of libel sat at my banquet like the ghost in Macbeth, letting its sword hang by a thread an inch from my cranium! Bit mixed in my metaphors, sir, but you know what I mean. Mustn't involve my respected proprietor in a libel suit, Mr. Brent, so stick to abstract principles, sir, and eschew those saucy ...
— In the Mayor's Parlour • J. S. (Joseph Smith) Fletcher
... years of each other; and Algar's sons, Edwin and Morkar, were as yet young and timid. Old Earl Siward Biorn fought his last battle when he assisted Malcolm Canmore in overthrowing the murderous usurper, Macbeth, in Scotland. In the battle, Siward's eldest-son, of the same name as himself, was killed. The father only asked if his death-wound was in front, and when he heard it was, "I heartily rejoice," said he; "no other death is ...
— Cameos from English History, from Rollo to Edward II • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... inappropriate by others, according to different interpretations of the sentence. Take as an example, "Early in the morning the nobles and gentlemen who attended on the king assembled in the great hall of the castle; and here they began to talk of what a dreadful storm it had been the night before. But Macbeth could scarcely understand what they said, for he was thinking of something worse." The last sentence has been amended by Professor Bain into "What they said, Macbeth could scarcely understand." But there appears to be an antithesis between ...
— How to Write Clearly - Rules and Exercises on English Composition • Edwin A. Abbott
... left Slains Castle next morning, and, driving by Banff and Elgin, where the noble ruins of the cathedral were examined by Dr. Johnson with a patient attention, reached Forres on the night of August 26. That afternoon we drove over the very heath where Macbeth met the witches, according to tradition. Dr. ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Volume 19 - Travel and Adventure • Various
... Pandit Vedantavagish, was now our tutor at home. When he found he could not secure my attention for the school course, he gave up the attempt as hopeless and went on a different tack. He took me through Kalidas's "Birth of the War-god," translating it to me as we went on. He also read Macbeth to me, first explaining the text in Bengali, and then confining me to the school room till I had rendered the day's reading into Bengali verse. In this way he got me to translate the whole play. I was fortunate enough to lose this translation and ...
— My Reminiscences • Rabindranath Tagore
... the will of man: for these we require the intervention of a God, or some other equally irresistible, infinite force. Wagner, therefore, in "Tristram and Iseult," makes use of the philtre, as Shakespeare of the witches in "Macbeth," Racine of the oracle of Calchas in "Iphigenia" and of Venus' hatred in "Phedre." We have travelled in a circle, and find ourselves back once more at the very heart of the craving of former days. This ...
— The Buried Temple • Maurice Maeterlinck
... searcheth all things,—which severs one by one the ties of passion, of interest, of self-pride, that bind the soul to earth,—whose implacable edge may divide a man from family, from friends, from whatever is nearest and dearest,—and which hovers before him like the air-drawn dagger of Macbeth, beckoning him, not to crime, but to the legitimate royalties of self-denial and self-sacrifice, to the freedom which is won only by surrender of the will. Christianity has never been concession, never ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Number 9, July, 1858 • Various
... "Like Macbeth, he has done his murder and is on his way to be crowned at Scone. He has not a wife, but he has a daughter ambitious as himself. She has a son. He sees his line secured. He has suborned other murderers and made traitors of honest men—and our Laputa philosopher at Washington ...
— Lewis Rand • Mary Johnston
... enjoy Labitzki and his water-cure orchestra, Aldridge, the black Roscius, who plays beautifully Othello, Macbeth, and Fiesco; also spurious Arabs and genuine Chinese, who howl and tinkle ...
— Correspondence of Wagner and Liszt, Volume 1 • Francis Hueffer (translator)
... announced that a new work is in preparation, in any way connected with the events of the American Revolution, poor Mr. William B. Reed "gets the fidgets." He throws business, as Macbeth did physic,—to the dogs; he can hardly delay for the introduction of a supply of clean linen into his carpet-bag; but, jumping into the next steamboat or railroad car, he travels post-haste till he has reached the ...
— Nuts for Future Historians to Crack • Various
... circumstances under which they were spoken, they are enough to stamp the speaker as a remarkable woman. She has got as much from age and lost as little from youth as woman can well do. Nevertheless, to look at, she is like one of the witches in Macbeth. ...
— The Note-Books of Samuel Butler • Samuel Butler
... It was just such proud, dark, purposeful souls that Byron delighted to draw; but the only one in literature to whom I can fully liken her is the wife of Macbeth. There was the same ambition—the same ruthless will—the same disregard of everything that stood in her way. And, like Cawdor's wife, she weakened in ...
— Ashton-Kirk, Investigator • John T. McIntyre
... or three-legged pot, of the size and shape of the cauldron usually introduced in the witch scene in Macbeth." ...
— A Dictionary of Austral English • Edward Morris
... Banquo was an uncivilized spectre, or—strong as was the provocation—it would have confronted Macbeth in any other place sooner than the banqueting-hall. The worst deed in the life of a cruel, false king was the setting on of the black bull's head before the doomed Douglases; and perhaps Pope Alexander, though singularly exempt from all vulgar prejudice, found it hard to ...
— Sword and Gown - A Novel • George A. Lawrence
... on the Tragedy of Macbeth, with remarks on Sir T.H.'s (Sir Thomas Hanmer's) Edition of Shakspeare, and proposals for a new Edition of ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 1 • Boswell
... guilty imagination? Ought an enlightened audience to tolerate the mischievous impressions produced on the minds of ignorance or youth by the gross exhibitions which now disgrace our stage in Hamlet, Richard, and Macbeth? We all know that fever of the brain produces successions of spectres or images, the result of diseased organs; but no one ever conceived that such melancholy effects of disease could be seen by healthy by-standers, till our stage-managers availed ...
— A Morning's Walk from London to Kew • Richard Phillips
... this latter qualification, it was also true that he was equally skilled in getting people into it. If he ultimately doubled their joys and halved their sorrows he inevitably first doubled their sorrows and halved their savings. Like the witch in Macbeth: "Double, double toil and trouble." His aims were childishly simple: First, to find out how much money his victim had, and then ...
— By Advice of Counsel • Arthur Train
... in Scotland during his reign an ambitious nobleman named Macbeth, who invited Duncan, the King of Scotland, to his castle and murdered him. He tried to make it appear that the murder had been committed by Duncan's attendants and he caused the king's son and heir, Prince Malcolm, to flee from the land. He then ...
— Famous Men of The Middle Ages • John H. Haaren, LL.D. and A. B. Poland, Ph.D.
... actor as well as a dramatist. He was "leading man" when I first saw him in the stock company of the Adelphi Theatre, Liverpool, and used to play the whole round of Shakespearean characters, his favourite parts being the popular ones of Macbeth, Hamlet, and Richard the Third. He was a dark-complexioned man of average height, somewhat spare in form and features. Though his performances were intellectual creations, we boys used to make somewhat unfavourable comparisons between him and Barry Sullivan, another of our fellow-countrymen. Barry ...
— The Life Story of an Old Rebel • John Denvir
... Abigail's bedroom opened hastily, and that pink of maidenly propriety stepped out into the hail in her night-gown—the only indecorous thing I ever knew her to do. She held a lighted candle in her hand and looked like a very aged Lady Macbeth. ...
— The Story of a Bad Boy • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... interested in the victim. Duncan, in Macbeth, is a generous gentleman; Caesar, in this play, is a touchy man of affairs whose head is turned. Shakespeare's imagination broods on the fact that the killers were deluded into murder, Macbeth by an envious wife and the belief that Fate meant him to be king, Brutus by an envious friend and the belief that he was saving Rome. In both cases the killers show base personal ingratitude and treachery. In ...
— William Shakespeare • John Masefield
... the best. She is a character which exhibits considerable development, and she is also Lyly's only attempt to embody the evil principle in woman—a hint for the construction of that marvellous portrait of another Scottish queen, the Lady Macbeth, which Lyly just before his death in 1606 may have seen ...
— John Lyly • John Dover Wilson
... that great and wise Canute, the friend of the famous Godiva, and Leofric, Godiva's husband, and Siward Biorn, the conqueror of Macbeth; trying to expiate by justice and mercy the dark deeds of his bloodstained youth; trying (and not in vain) to blend the two races over which he ruled; rebuilding the churches and monasteries which his father had destroyed; ...
— Hereward, The Last of the English • Charles Kingsley
... object of this notice,—that this island is one of the few spots in the vicinity of Edinburgh that has been rendered classical by the pen of Shakspeare. In the second scene of the opening act of the tragedy of Macbeth, the Thane of Ross comes as a hurried messenger from the field of battle to King Duncan, and reports that Duncan's own rebellious subjects and the invading Scandinavians had both been so completely defeated ...
— Archaeological Essays, Vol. 1 • James Y. Simpson
... indefinitely. Hamlet wars against his hesitating nature. Macbeth struggles with his conscience that reincarnates the murdered Banquo. Sentimental Tommy fights his own play-actor character. Tito Melema goes down beneath the weight of his accumulated insincerities. Sometimes light shines ...
— Writing the Photoplay • J. Berg Esenwein and Arthur Leeds
... praise. Improvement is the appropriate race of man. We cannot stand still. If we do not go forward, we shall inevitably recede. Shakespear, when he wrote his Hamlet, did not know that he could produce Macbeth and Othello. ...
— Thoughts on Man - His Nature, Productions and Discoveries, Interspersed with - Some Particulars Respecting the Author • William Godwin
... exactly at stage centre, in the latter play? In what dulcet tones, love-laden, the future Hamlet and Macbeth murmured to his lady fair! Even the sword duel in the last act, all over the chamber, across the great bed ripping down the curtains, back and forth with flash of steel and rattle of blade, was not so thrilling ...
— Penguin Persons & Peppermints • Walter Prichard Eaton
... somnambulism, hallucinations. And deeds issuing from these are certainly not what we called deeds in the fullest sense, deeds expressive of character. No; but these abnormal conditions are never introduced as the origin of deeds of any dramatic moment. Lady Macbeth's sleep-walking has no influence whatever on the events that follow it. Macbeth did not murder Duncan because he saw a dagger in the air: he saw the dagger because he was about to murder Duncan. Lear's insanity is not the cause of a tragic conflict any more than Ophelia's; ...
— Shakespearean Tragedy - Lectures on Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth • A. C. Bradley
... with the general bearing of the American character. The levity of wit and the pleasantry of humor appear at first purposeless; they are immaterial, and, even when most palpably present, seem, like Macbeth's encountering witches, to make of themselves air, into which they vanish. But sarcasm, and the direct application of ridicule, effect something at once; their course may be swift and cloudy, like that of the bullet, but it has a definite end ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 58, August, 1862 • Various
... of his art victorious like some flag waved over a conquered citadel! I seem to remember having been told, that a bad sweep was once left in a stack with his brush, to indicate which way the wind blew. It was an awful spectacle certainly; not much unlike the old stage direction in Macbeth, where the "Apparition of a child crowned with a tree in his ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Volume 2 • Charles Lamb
... He arrived at the latter's house with a sum of eight thousand livres, which he placed in Derues' hands, asking him for assistance in finding a business. The sight of gold was enough to rouse the instinct of crime in Derues, and the witches who hailed Macbeth with the promise of royalty did not rouse the latter's ambitious desires to a greater height than the chance of wealth did the greed of the assassin; whose hands, once closed over the eight thousand livres, were never again relaxed. ...
— Celebrated Crimes, Complete • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... first name. He wrote something in the ship's log, and I saw his signature. His name is Fleance, like in "Macbeth." He prefers to be called Jones. Pat uses his first name as a ...
— The Dope on Mars • John Michael Sharkey
... to explain away so as not to affront the Doctor, whose suspicions were all alive. "And have a care, sir," said he, just as I came in, "the Old Lion will not bear to be tickled." The other was pale with rage, the lady wept at the confusion she had caused, and I could only say with Lady Macbeth— ...
— Anecdotes of the late Samuel Johnson, LL.D. - during the last twenty years of his life • Hester Lynch Piozzi
... crusades, when all Europe was marching to the East, and engaging in battle with the Moslems. Scotland had been an independent country for many years, but some of her princes were too weak for those troublous times. The witches that deceived Macbeth seem to have cast a spell upon the prosperity of the country. Clan was at enmity with clan, and one great chieftain waged relentless war with another. The fierce nobles paid little heed to the king, and showed no regard for the rights of the people. It seemed that peace and liberty ...
— Ten Great Events in History • James Johonnot
... Vixere fortes, &c., which, as it avers that there were a great number of stout fellows before Agamemnon, may not unreasonably induce us to conclude that similar heroes were to succeed him. Shakspeare made a better man when his imagination moulded the mighty figure of Macbeth. And if you will measure Satan by Prometheus, the blind old Puritan's work by that of the fiery Grecian poet, does not Milton's angel surpass AEschylus's—surpass ...
— The Paris Sketch Book Of Mr. M. A. Titmarsh • William Makepeace Thackeray
... enlivened by a concert of fiddles. There appear to be two legitimate modes of interweaving tragedy with something like comedy. The first and most easy, which has often been resorted to, is to make the lower or less marked characters of the drama, like the porter in "Macbeth," or the fool in "King Lear," speak the language appropriated to their station, even in the midst of the distresses of the piece; nay, they may be permitted to have some slight under-intrigue of their own. This, ...
— The Dramatic Works of John Dryden Vol. I. - With a Life of the Author • Sir Walter Scott
... virtues, dark with crimes, rich in tenderness, humor, loveliness, awe, yet almost unaffected by any consideration of the supernatural world. On Hamlet's brooding there breaks no ray from Christian revelation. No hope of a hereafter soothes Lear as he bends over dead Cordelia. Macbeth, hesitating on the verge of crime, throws out of the scale any dread of future retribution,—assure him ...
— The Chief End of Man • George S. Merriam
... rest of their adventures. The first time Jack carries the Duchess into the Highlands, I am persuaded that some of his second-sighted subjects will see him in a winding-sheet, with a train of kings behind him as long as those in Macbeth. ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole, Volume 2 • Horace Walpole
... Ah, believe me, ye Gracchi, ye Acephali, ye Levelers, it is something worth seeing, be sure; whether beheld at Babylon the Tremendous, when Nebuchadnezzar was crowned; at old Scone in the days of Macbeth; at Rheims, among Oriflammes, at the coronation of Louis le Grand; at Westminster Abbey, when the gentlemanly George doffed his beaver for a diadem; or under the soft shade of palm trees on ...
— Mardi: and A Voyage Thither, Vol. I (of 2) • Herman Melville
... he promised in return to furnish them with a play every year, if his health would permit. Two years passed, however, before he produced the Mourning Bride, a play which, paltry as it is when compared, we do not say, with Lear or Macbeth, but with the best dramas of Massinger and Ford, stands very high among the tragedies of the age in which it was written. To find anything so good we must go twelve years back to Venice Preserved, or six years forward to the Fair Penitent. The noble ...
— Critical and Historical Essays, Volume III (of 3) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... boy who had sat in the stocks! And the words uttered by the squire came back on his soul, like the voice of conscience in the ears of some doomed Macbeth: "A sad disgrace, Lenny,—you'll never be in such a quandary." "Quandary"—the word was unfamiliar to him; it must mean something awfully discreditable. The poor boy could have prayed for ...
— My Novel, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... Macbeth and Sancho have been equally eloquent in the praise of sleep. 'Sleep that knits up the ravelled sleave of care!' But sleep will knit up effectually no broken stitches unless it be enjoyed in bed. 'Blessings on him who invented sleep,' said Sancho. But the great inventor was he who discovered ...
— John Caldigate • Anthony Trollope
... letters with which I had aimed at giving it an air of distinction had already been compared by one of my teachers to Persian hieroglyphics. In this composition I had constructed a drama in which I had drawn largely upon Shakespeare's Hamlet, King Lear, and Macbeth, and Goethe's Gotz van Berlichingen. The plot was really based on a modification of Hamlet, the difference consisting in the fact that my hero is so completely carried away by the appearance of the ghost of his father, who has been murdered under similar circumstances, and demands ...
— My Life, Volume I • Richard Wagner
... advised that a brigade should make a wide circuit by the left, and, if possible, catch this line in flank. The movement was completely successful, the first line of the enemy was swept away, and we captured the larger part of Rhett's brigade, two hundred and seventeen men, including Captain Macbeth's battery of three guns, and buried one hundred and ...
— Memoirs of Three Civil War Generals, Complete • U. S. Grant, W. T. Sherman, P. H. Sheridan
... David Macbeth Moir was born at Musselburgh on the 5th January 1798. His elementary education was conducted at a private seminary and the Grammar-school of that town. He subsequently attended the medical classes in the University of Edinburgh, and in his eighteenth ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volumes I-VI. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... sat helpless a while at a table, was ignominiously withdrawn. Twice was this ghostly Jack-in-the-box obtruded on the stage before his time; twice removed again; and yet he showed so little hurry when he was really wanted, that, after an awkward pause, Macbeth had to begin his apostrophe to empty air. The arrival of the belated spectre in the middle, with a jerk that made him nod all over, was the last accident in the chapter, and worthily topped the whole. It may be imagined how lamely ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. XXII (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... which of his twenty-four ribs was taken for the nucleus. If you depend entirely upon yourself in the selection of a wife, there are twenty-three possibilities to one that you will select the wrong rib. By the fate of Ahab, whose wife induced him to steal; by the fate of Macbeth, whose wife pushed him into massacre; by the fate of James Ferguson, the philosopher, whose wife entered the room while he was lecturing and willfully upset his astronomical apparatus, so that he turned to the audience and said: "Ladies and gentlemen, ...
— The Wedding Ring - A Series of Discourses for Husbands and Wives and Those - Contemplating Matrimony • T. De Witt Talmage
... bed.' This broke up the agreeable party. Mr George Sampson shortly afterwards took his leave, accompanied by Miss Lavinia with a candle as far as the hall, and without a candle as far as the garden gate; Mrs Wilfer, washing her hands of the Boffins, went to bed after the manner of Lady Macbeth; and R. W. was left alone among the dilapidations of the supper ...
— Our Mutual Friend • Charles Dickens
... did not even escape the shafts of ridicule. A writer in the Dublin Nation, imitating the Witches' scene in Macbeth, thus attacked him:— ...
— The History of the Great Irish Famine of 1847 (3rd ed.) (1902) - With Notices Of Earlier Irish Famines • John O'Rourke
... critical moment, and is not, and cannot in her nature be, a guide to him when he needs her most, that all the bitter catastrophe follows. Finally, though there are three wicked women among the principal figures—Lady Macbeth, Regan, and Goneril- -they are felt at once to be frightful exceptions to the ordinary laws of life; fatal in their influence also, in proportion to the power for good ...
— Sesame and Lilies • John Ruskin
... a mimic and singer. First visits to the theatre. Plays Lady Macbeth, her first part. To a young actress. To a young mother. Early griefs. Art her only spouse. Farewell to ...
— [19th Century Actor] Autobiographies • George Iles
... manners and costume; it dressed the groups around the Crucifixion in the garb of Florentine gentlefolk or Flemish burghers. In the last century it was the custom for distinguished actors to present Macbeth in a powdered wig and ruffles. How far we are ourselves in this age from such conviction of the poetry of our own life and manners may easily be conceived by anyone who chooses to imagine a picture of Alfred the Great toasting the ...
— The Defendant • G.K. Chesterton
... vended both to brewers and publicans for adulterating beer, but that the ingredients mixed up in the brewer's enchanting cauldron are placed above all competition, even with the potent charms of Macbeth's witches: ...
— A Treatise on Adulterations of Food, and Culinary Poisons • Fredrick Accum
... year 1034, and the chamber in which he expired is still shown. Two obelisks, one near the Manse, and the other in a neighbouring field, denote the places where he was attacked. In this castle also, according to some historians, Macbeth murdered Duncan. We notice, however, that Sir Walter Scott, in his recently-published version of the story of Macbeth, states the murder to have been committed at "a great castle near Inverness," in which he is corroborated by Baethius, who says, the castle stood upon an eminence south-east ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 14, Issue 393, October 10, 1829 • Various
... an art, a literature, a political philosophy, which are all alike valued for their immediate effect upon the taste, not for what they promise of the destiny of the spirit. Their statuettes and sonnets are rounded and perfect, while 'Macbeth' is in comparison a fragment, and the Moses of Michael Angelo a hint. Their campaigns and battles are always called triumphant, while Caesar and Cromwell wept for many humiliations. And the end of it all is the hell of no resistance, ...
— Twelve Types • G.K. Chesterton
... behind him. When I think on one, with his confederates, I remember the danger of Coriolanus, who was afraid that "girls with spits, and boys with stones, should slay him in puny battle;" when the other crosses my imagination, I remember the prodigy in "Macbeth", ...
— Preface to Shakespeare • Samuel Johnson
... whiteness could never, never be restored! He would always be the boy who had sat in the stocks! And the words uttered by the Squire came back on his soul, like the voice of conscience in the ears of some doomed Macbeth. "A sad disgrace, Lenny—you'll never be in such a quandary." "Quandary," the word was unfamiliar to him; it must mean something awfully discreditable. The poor boy could have prayed for the earth to ...
— The International Magazine, Volume 2, No. 3, February, 1851 • Various
... both Morris and Morrison are sometimes to be referred to Mary. Similarly Margaret, popularly Mar-get, became Mag, Meg, Mog, whence Meggitt, Moxon, etc. The rarity of Maggot is easily understood, but Poll Maggot was one of Jack Sheppard's accomplices and Shakespeare uses maggot-pie for magpie (Macbeth, iii, 4). Meg was rimed into Peg, whence Peggs, Mog into Pog, whence Pogson, and Madge into Padge, whence Padgett, when this is not for Patchett (Chapter IX), or for the Fr. Paget, usually explained as Smallpage. The royal name Matilda appears ...
— The Romance of Names • Ernest Weekley
... this strange behaviour on the part of certain skulls is that their owners met with a violent death, and that the avenging spirit in this manner annoys the living, reminding us of Macbeth's words: ...
— Strange Pages from Family Papers • T. F. Thiselton Dyer
... also the author of the music of the Indian Queen, Arthur and Emmeline, and a variety of other pieces. It may be observed that these names are not clustering, but solitary, appearing at long intervals. Locke, the producer of the music in the incantation scene in Macbeth, as now sung and played, was the contemporary of Purcell. Dr. Arne next appears, the famous composer of Artaxerxes. Bishop, who has identified himself with almost every thing valuable in modern composition, is well known, as are also his ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. XVII. No. 473., Saturday, January 29, 1831 • Various
... and Norway, landed an army on the Scottish coast. Duncan was unable to take the field against the invaders in person, and his sons were too young for such a trust. He had a kinsman, who had proved himself a brave soldier, named Macbeth. He placed this kinsman at the head of his troops; and certain writers, long, long after the event, discovered that this kinsman appointed a relation of his own, named Banquo, to assist him. Macbeth and Banquo defeated the Danes in a hard-fought battle, and then ...
— ZigZag Journeys in Northern Lands; - The Rhine to the Arctic • Hezekiah Butterworth
... started forward with an inarticulate cry, and at the same instant there came a loud knocking at the door behind him. The sound reverberated through the empty house, filling the place with awful echoes,—like those knocks at the gate of Macbeth's castle the night of Duncan's murder. Richard stood petrified for a second; then he hastily turned the key in the lock, and Mr. ...
— The Stillwater Tragedy • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... a woman. Whose face it is hard to say. Not the Furies, not Lady Macbeth, not Catherine de Medici, not Phillip the Second, not Nero, not any face you have ever seen, but a gathering up from all the faces you have seen—the greatness, the splendor, the savagery, the greed, the pride, the hate, ...
— The Story of the Innumerable Company, and Other Sketches • David Starr Jordan
... Coming home I felt like the witches in 'Macbeth.' 'By the pricking of my thumbs, something wicked this way comes.' It was Senator Tom-tit, the little fat Mayor of Rome. His great ambition is to wear the green ribbon of St. Maurice and Lazarus, as none know better than myself. Wanting money on my fountain, ...
— The Eternal City • Hall Caine
... be more constitutional, less absolute than it had been. The public were no longer to be confined to Drury Lane and Covent Garden in the winter, and the Haymarket in the summer. Actors were enabled, managers and public consenting, to personate Hamlet or Macbeth, or other heroes of the poetic stage, at Lambeth, Clerkenwell, or Shoreditch, anywhere indeed, without risk of committal to gaol. It was no longer necessary to call a play a "burletta," or to touch a note upon ...
— A Book of the Play - Studies and Illustrations of Histrionic Story, Life, and Character • Dutton Cook
... King of Scotland, there lived a great thane, or lord, called Macbeth. This Macbeth was a near kinsman to the king, and in great esteem at court for his valour and conduct in the wars; an example of which he had lately given, in defeating a rebel army assisted by the troops of ...
— Tales from Shakespeare • Charles Lamb and Mary Lamb
... specimens of translation from Jean Paul Richter and Lessing; with a criticism on the former, quite equal to that more famous one of Carlyle's; with historical chapters, such as those in "Blackwood" on the Caesars, worthy of Gibbon; with searching criticisms, such as one on the knocking in Macbeth, and two series on Landor and Schlosser; with the elephantine humor of his lectures on "Murder, considered as one of the fine arts;" and with the deep theological insight of his papers on Christianity, considered as a means of social progress, and on the Essenes. In fact, ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 2, July, 1850. • Various
... Lyn. I'm not worried about Ann as you and Con are. Her Lady Macbeth pose is just plain girl; but she has depths we have never sounded. Sometimes I think she hides them to prove her gratitude and affection, and because she is so helpless. She was nearly five when she ...
— The Man Thou Gavest • Harriet T. Comstock
... striven nobly and failed deserve sympathy. Sometimes they deserve also praise unreserved, in that they have refused to do something ignoble which would have led to what the world calls success. They have lived the idea which Macbeth merely proclaimed: ...
— It Can Be Done - Poems of Inspiration • Joseph Morris
... and soldiers had assembled to gratify their curiosity; and new detachments of captives came in hourly, encircled by sabremen, the Southerners being disarmed and on foot. The scene within the area was ludicrously moving. It reminded me of the witch-scene in Macbeth, or pictures of brigands or Bohemian gypsies at rendezvous, not less than five hundred men, in motley, ragged costumes, with long hair, and lean, wild, haggard faces, were gathered in groups or in pairs, around some fagot fires. In the growing darkness their ...
— Campaigns of a Non-Combatant, - and His Romaunt Abroad During the War • George Alfred Townsend
... Bodmer and Breitenger, were professors. Here he became the bosom companion of that amiable enthusiast, Lavater, studied English, and conceived such a love for the works of Shakspeare, that he translated Macbeth into German. The writings of Wieland and Klopstock influenced his youthful fancy, and from Shakspeare he extended his affection to the chief masters in English literature. His love of poetry was natural, not affected—he practiced at an early age the art which he admired ...
— Anecdotes of Painters, Engravers, Sculptors and Architects, and Curiosities of Art, (Vol. 2 of 3) • Shearjashub Spooner
... their histories may greatly incline us to doubt whether a king named Duffus ever reigned in Scotland, and, still more, whether he died by the agency of a gang of witches, who inflicted torments upon an image made in his name, for the sake of compassing his death. In the tale of Macbeth, which is another early instance of Demonology in Scottish history, the weird-sisters, who were the original prophetesses, appeared to the usurper in a dream, and are described as volae, or sibyls, rather than as witches, ...
— Letters On Demonology And Witchcraft • Sir Walter Scott
... I tire even of Hamlet and Macbeth! When overlong the season runs, I find Those master-scenes of passion, blood, and death, After a time ...
— Poems of Passion • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... say, "my poor mamma was going to a banquet, like the Capulet one, or Macbeth's. Oh, no! 'cause that would have been horrid, with ghosts and daggers and things. S'pose it was the Capulets! Then she would put on this pink silk. Isn't it pretty, and soft, and creamy? Just like ...
— Captain January • Laura E. Richards
... can wish for him, and all of us, for this day is, that he should remain quiet during the ceremony," said his mother, who was not so elated as Lady Macbeth at the ...
— Marriage • Susan Edmonstone Ferrier
... comfortingly, and tried to cheer Lucien. The poet spent an hour with his friends, then he went, but his conscience treated him hardly, crying to him, "You will be a journalist—a journalist!" as the witch cried to Macbeth that he ...
— Lost Illusions • Honore De Balzac
... regent, annually elected, nominally at its head. Against the regency bill he burst into a paroxysm of rage. He exclaimed, "It is a mere mummery, a piece of masquerade buffoonery, formed to burlesque every species of government. A hideous spectre, to which, with Macbeth, we ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... was probably well advanced in his sixty-seventh year, but grief and travel had made him look much older. He was still vigorous, however, and the effusion from his body was so extraordinary, that many of the spectators shared the wonder of Lady Macbeth, that the old man had so much blood in him. The head was shown to the spectators, on both sides of the scaffold, and was then dropped into a red bag. The body was wrapt in the velvet night-gown, and both were carried to Lady Raleigh. By this time, perhaps, she had heard from ...
— Raleigh • Edmund Gosse
... 'Macbeth' to you, trying to indicate by changes in my voice which character is speaking." I opened ...
— Eliza • Barry Pain
... in their sleep (of which our inimitable Shakespear has, in his tragedy of MACBETH, drawn out a fine scene) are said to have their eyes open; though they are not, the more for that, conscious of any thing, but the dream which has got possession of their imagination. I never saw one of those persons, therefore cannot describe their manner from nature; ...
— The Young Gentleman and Lady's Monitor, and English Teacher's Assistant • John Hamilton Moore
... the sin of stuffing, in 'All's Well that Ends Well,' where he speaks of the man that 'dies with feeding his own stomach.' In 'Timon of Athens' there's a chap who 'greases his pure mind,' probably with fried sausages, gravy, and such like trash. The fellow in 'Macbeth' who has 'eaten of the insane root' was meant, I calculate, as a hard rap on tobacco-chewers (and smokers too); he called it root, instead of leaf, just to cover up his tracks. What a splendid thought that is in ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 85, November, 1864 • Various
... it. "Why, it ought actually to have begun with one!" was the natural exclamation of the person he was addressing, who added instantly, with affected indignation, "Not one? Why, next they'll be playing Macbeth without the Witches!" The joyous laugh with which this ludicrous conceit was greeted by the Humorist, still rings freshly and musically in our remembrance. And the recollection of it is doubtless all the more ...
— Charles Dickens as a Reader • Charles Kent
... in the hearts of the worst of us: even Lady Macbeth could not herself slay King Duncan, "he looked so like her father," and the one weak point in the armour of proof—of selfishness, we should say—which encrusted Hugo de Malville, was ...
— The Rival Heirs being the Third and Last Chronicle of Aescendune • A. D. Crake
... broken-hearted to my grave, you must give up this mad idea, Frank,"—and now all Lady Arabella's energy came out. "Frank there is but one course left open to you. You MUST marry money." And then Lady Arabella stood up before her son as Lady Macbeth might have stood, had Lady Macbeth lived to have a son ...
— Doctor Thorne • Anthony Trollope
... "toddle." Pen sprang up with very bright eyes, and a flushed face; and they moved off towards the theatre, where they paid their money to the wheezy old lady slumbering in the money-taker's box. "Mrs. Dropsicum, Bingley's mother-in-law, great in Lady Macbeth," Foker said to his companion. Foker ...
— The History of Pendennis • William Makepeace Thackeray
... are my eye. Ugliness is only the prose of horror. It is when you are not able to write MACBETH that you write THERESE RAQUIN. Fashions are external: the essence of art only varies in so far as fashion widens the field of its application; art is a mill whose thirlage, in different ages, widens and contracts; but, ...
— The Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson - Volume 1 • Robert Louis Stevenson
... abstract and dispassionate way whether the ghost of all his misdeeds were continually to rise before him. "Really," he said to himself with a smile that curled his lips "in that case I shall become a perfect Macbeth." And at that instant the ghost most dreadful of all rose at the feast like that of ...
— The Philistines • Arlo Bates
... effect, pauses to light a pipe at the very climax of his story. Suspense is the key-note of the romance. The characters are still subordinate to incident, but La Motte and his wife claim our interest because they are exhibited in varying moods. La Motte has his struggles and, like Macbeth, is haunted by compunctious visitings of nature. Unlike the thorough-paced villain, who glories in his misdeeds, he is worried and harassed, and takes no pleasure in his crimes. Madame La Motte is not a jealous woman ...
— The Tale of Terror • Edith Birkhead
... the Plays,—Shakespeare's Verse,—The Latin and Anglo-Saxon Elements of Shakespeare's English. The larger portion of the book is devoted to commentaries and critical chapters upon Romeo and Juliet, King John, Much Ado about Nothing, Hamlet, Macbeth, and Anthony and Cleopatra. These aim to present the points of view demanded for a proper appreciation of Shakespeare's general attitude toward things, and his resultant dramatic art, rather than the textual study ...
— The Writing of the Short Story • Lewis Worthington Smith
... tapestry hangings, huge Japanese vases, and elaborately carved furniture helped me to woo sweet slumber any more successfully than the simple equipments of an English village inn. Indeed, they rather suggested insomnia, just as the ominous name of "Macbeth," affixed to one of the bedrooms in the Shakespeare Hotel at Stratford-on-Avon, immediately suggested the ...
— The Land of Contrasts - A Briton's View of His American Kin • James Fullarton Muirhead
... a perverse manner, the actor with the character which he represents. It is difficult for a frequent playgoer to disembarrass the idea of Hamlet from the person and voice of Mr. K. We speak of Lady Macbeth, while we are in reality thinking of Mrs. S. Nor is this confusion incidental alone to unlettered persons, who, not possessing the advantage of reading, are necessarily dependent upon the stage-player for all the pleasure which ...
— English Critical Essays - Nineteenth Century • Various
... arrived I found the whole of my wild, forgotten forest-world absolutely changed and transformed into one great camp. But the empty wood was moving like a living thing, like the menacing 'Birnam wood' before the eyes of Macbeth. It was full of an army, with each of their handsome big horses tied to a pine in the forest. Farther off across the roots could be seen small grey tents stretched on logs. Most of the exhausted blackened men were lying all over the ground and sleeping among the quiet beasts. ...
— Selected Polish Tales • Various
... referred to at the close of the last chapter is the same as that which those who rarely go to a theatre have to get over before they can appreciate an actor. They go to "Macbeth" or "Othello," expecting to find players speaking and acting on the stage much as they would in actual life; and not finding this, are apt to think the acting coarse and unnatural. They forget that the physical conditions of the stage involve compliance with conventions from ...
— Ex Voto • Samuel Butler
... the time of the great French war, and how once, when hard pressed, a party of smugglers, taking a short cut in the moonlight midnight across the Homestead gardens, had encountered an escaped Guinea-pig, and no doubt taking it for the very rat without a tail, in whose person Macbeth's witch was to do, and to do, and to do, had been nearly scared ...
— The Clever Woman of the Family • Charlotte M. Yonge
... Garrick's time, yet the attention of his audience, the critics tell us, was never known to stray when he produced a great play by Shakespeare. In Shakespeare's day boys or men took the part of women, and how characters like Lady Macbeth and Desdemona were adequately rendered by youths beggars belief. But renderings in such conditions proved popular and satisfactory. Such a fact seems convincing testimony, not to the ability of Elizabethan ...
— Shakespeare and the Modern Stage - with Other Essays • Sir Sidney Lee
... vanities once properly mortified) he threw himself into the business of collecting signatures. It was his part, on the ground of his Italian, to see and arrange with the actor; it was mine to write in the ACADEMY a notice of the first performance of MACBETH. Fleeming opened the paper, read so far, and flung it on the floor. 'No,' he cried, 'that won't do. You were thinking of yourself, not of Salvini!' The criticism was shrewd as usual, but it was unfair through ignorance; it was not of myself ...
— Memoir of Fleeming Jenkin • Robert Louis Stevenson
... undoubtedly owed his marvelous insight into the human soul, to his profound sympathy with man. He might have conned whole libraries on the philosophy of the passions, he might have coldly observed facts for years, and never have conceived of jealousy like Othello's,—the remorse of Macbeth, or love like that ...
— Choice Specimens of American Literature, And Literary Reader - Being Selections from the Chief American Writers • Benj. N. Martin
... past six on a summer morning, but we both sat down to rest as if the activities of the day were over. Mrs. Todd rocked gently for a time, and seemed to be lost, though not poorly, like Macbeth, in her thoughts. At last she resumed relations with her actual surroundings. "I shall now put my lobsters on. They'll make us a good supper," she announced. "Then I can let the fire out for all day; give it a holiday, same's ...
— The Queen's Twin and Other Stories • Sarah Orne Jewett
... text, each completely colored, completely consistent with itself. Every actor in whom the artistic life is strong must often feel the challenge to do that. I should never think, for instance, of contesting an actress's right to represent Lady Macbeth as a charming, insinuating woman, if she really sees the figure that way. I may be surprised at such a vision; but so far from being scandalized, I am positively thankful for the extension of knowledge, of pleasure, that she is able to ...
— Picture and Text - 1893 • Henry James
... after a hurried knock and a moment's interval, Mr. Swift came into the hall, ran up stairs to the room we were dining in, and entered it with a perturbed face. St. John, excited with drink, was making some wild quotation out of Macbeth, but ...
— The History of Henry Esmond, Esq. • W. M. Thackeray
... seemed to be enough water. I want to try a bath with plenty of water. But I am afraid it may be with me as it would have been with Macbeth or Lady Macbeth. Those red hands of murder could not be washed white by the ocean, they could only "the multitudinous seas incarnadine, making the green one red." What if I cannot be decolorized by any sea? What if my flesh only pollutes the sea, when I plunge, and makes ...
— Cinderella in the South - Twenty-Five South African Tales • Arthur Shearly Cripps
... Caliban, and all the leading statesmen and sovereigns are represented in Shakespearian character appropriate to the circumstances; the "Standard" and "Morning Herald," two of Punch's pet aversions and journalistic butts, bringing up the rear as the Witches in "Macbeth," Mesdames Gamp and Harris. The illustrators of this exceptionally happy number were—besides Sir John Tenniel—Charles Keene, Mr. ...
— The History of "Punch" • M. H. Spielmann
... Coriolanus. Titus Andronicus. Romeo and Juliet. Timon of Athens. The Life and death of Julius Caesar. The Tragedy of Macbeth. The Tragedy of Hamlet. King Lear. Othello, the Moore of Venice. Anthony and Cleopater. Cymbeline ...
— The First Folio [35 Plays] • William Shakespeare
... Eighteen Hundred Fifty. His life now turns into what may be called the Second Verdi Period. After this we shall see no more such curious exhibitions of bad taste as a ballet of forty witches in "Macbeth," capering nimbly to a syncopated melody, with "Lady Macbeth" in a needlessly abbreviated skirt singing a drinking-song to an absent lover. In strenuous efforts to avoid coarseness Verdi may occasionally give us soft sentimentality, but the ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great - Volume 14 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Musicians • Elbert Hubbard
... representations, the depth of the reflections, whether he be writing the two worst plays in which he took part (for portions only seem to have been supplied by him), Pericles and Titus Andronicus, or his two best, conceived so massively and executed in such a masterly manner, Macbeth and Othello. In the Two Noble Kinsmen, which he wrote with Fletcher, any body familiar with his acknowledged dramas, can trace him as easily as a traveller follows with his finger the course of the Rhone while that ...
— Tacitus and Bracciolini - The Annals Forged in the XVth Century • John Wilson Ross
... Shade from certain grounds which he knew. A peculiar symptom in those poisoned by Belladonna berries is the complete loss of voice, together with frequent bending forward of the trunk, and continual movements of the hands and fingers. The Scotch under Macbeth sent bread and wine treacherously impregnated with this poison to the ...
— Herbal Simples Approved for Modern Uses of Cure • William Thomas Fernie
... an owl sits on the house-top, the occupants dare scarcely lie down to sleep, for they know that the devil is walking the rooms and marking someone for death. Lady Macbeth, when about the murder of Duncan, ...
— Concerning Animals and Other Matters • E.H. Aitken, (AKA Edward Hamilton)
... was again associated with Ryder, who was the Banquo when I was Fleance, and I remember that after we had been dismissed by Macbeth: "Good repose the while," we had to go off up a flight of steps. I always stayed at the top until the end of the scene, but Mr. Ryder used to go down the other side rather heavily, and Mr. Kean, who wanted perfect ...
— The Story of My Life - Recollections and Reflections • Ellen Terry
... robbed me of my repose for ever: I am like Macbeth, after the death of good king Duncan; methinks a voice says to me,—Sleep no more; Tricksy ...
— The Works of John Dryden, Vol. 6 (of 18) - Limberham; Oedipus; Troilus and Cressida; The Spanish Friar • John Dryden
... ever read the "Life of Mansie Wauch, Tailor in Dalkeith," by that pleasing poet and most amiable man, the late David Macbeth Moir? I have been looking into it lately; and I have regretted much that the Lowland Scotch dialect is so imperfectly understood in England, and that even where so far understood its raciness is so little felt; for great ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 7, No. 43, May, 1861 • Various
... Red, she's some swell dame, that Egyptian skirt, take it from me! She's got Macbeth's frau of the fairy tale faded to ...
— The Short Cut • Jackson Gregory
... appeared, rising like Banquo's spirit at Macbeth's feast. This was too much for the plump girl's self-control. She opened her mouth, and her half-strangled shriek, the partially masticated cap-strings all but choking her, aroused Ruth and ...
— Ruth Fielding Down East - Or, The Hermit of Beach Plum Point • Alice B. Emerson
... they have never seen before, though they have had dealings with uncivilised beings in many lands. Two score ugly old women, wrinkled and blear-eyed, and with tangled hair hanging over their faces, every one a match for Macbeth's witches, and with them a number of old men stoop-shouldered, and of wizard aspect, each a very Caliban. Even the boys and girls have an impish, unearthly look, like the dwarfs that figure on the stage in a Christmas pantomime. ...
— The Land of Fire - A Tale of Adventure • Mayne Reid |
