"Canst thou not minister to a mind diseas'd, Pluck from the memory a rooted sorrow, Raze out the written troubles of the brain, And with some sweet oblivious antidote Cleanse the stuff'd bosom of that perilous stuff, Which weighs upon the heart?"
If he had married a female butcher of the strongest-minded type, there would have been no fees to pay for doctor's attendance, and the bloom of regret would have been rubbed from Macbeth's language. Such a wife's muscle would have been perilous to any stuff that conscience might venture to suggest. A virago who could dash out the brains of her smiling babe as easily as nurse it,--more easily, forsooth, for how could Nature have endowed her person with the founts of maternity?--was not the kind of woman Shakspeare selected for the ruin of Macbeth.
If the poet had intended Lady Macbeth to be a fury, a person of abnormal wildness and cruelty, who had exhausted love and craved the fire-water of ambition, he would have prepared us to throw such a conception over her, by hinting some motive or circumstance for this divergence from the normal feminine nature. On the contrary, he purposely neglected the opportunity which the old story furnished toward the warping and poisoning of a woman's mind. The historical Lady Macbeth was the grand-daughter of Kenneth IV., who fell in the fight against Malcolm II., Duncan's father. Shakspeare has carefully suppressed any allusion which might recall the bitter family feud to unsex her and make revenge an element of her ambition.
Her shape, complexion, tone of voice, and style of feeling cannot be constructed for us out of the brawn of those lines which she throws out from the shoulder to hit Macbeth's irresolution. They do not provide us with the essence of her material. If we build a woman out of that literal clay, she would be square-shouldered, big-limbed, stout-bodied, sharp-boned, and pachydermatous, with a skin of bronzed leather tightened over knobs of cheek-bones, hairs woven in a wire-mill, and eyebrows like two heavy dashes from the circus charcoal. Prometheus would connive with Billingsgate to o'er-inform that clay. We confess that such a female lingers among the traditional properties of theatres; but she is too shop-worn to dare again the blaze of footlights. We would not so defame a Jason, and blast his life by constructing the mother of his children out of the language which the jealous, frenzied moment drove by heart-spasms from her lips. Still less can we subject Macbeth to the matrimonial luck of such a ferocious contrast. How truculently married would numerous husbands be if their wives' temper corresponded to the abandoned use of language which domestic virtue sometimes will employ, when every hair upon the head, both native and naturalized, seems twisted into the coils of a fell purpose to turn a thing of beauty into a fury for ever! The gust passes, the familiar features of the landscape reappear, and the lips transpire with mellower salutes; as when Lady Macbeth, who has been regretting that her husband should stay so much apart, greets him with the blandishing rhythm of those two lines:--