"I am so light At any mischief, there's no villainy But is a tune methinks."
That lightness of heart is Middleton's. It is stray pollen from the garden of Shakspeare. But nothing is fructified: there is no tune in the villainous stuff which precedes and follows.
The wounded sergeant easily justifies his mangled metre and ragged pomposity of style. We should suspect a more polished messenger of shamming faintness from loss of blood. He talks exactly as a common soldier should who is fresh from the great fight, puffed up with "valor's minion," and steadying himself upon reeking lines to deliver his message of victory. Middleton could not have so caught the color of the moment.
It is also supposed that Middleton wrote the scene, because when Ross enters he tells the King that
"Norway himself, with terrible numbers, Assisted by that most disloyal traitor The thane of Cawdor, 'gan a dismal conflict."
A discrepancy is charged between this and the report of Angus, in Scene 3 (acknowledged to be Shakspeare's), who enters with Ross, and says, concerning the thane of Cawdor,--
"Whether he was combin'd With those of Norway; or did line the rebel With hidden help and vantage; or that with both He labour'd in his country's wreck, I know not."
Perhaps Ross did not either. But he knew that Cawdor "assisted." He did not say that he was personally engaged in the fight.
The opening chant of the witches is denied to Shakspeare by one critic, because it seems to occupy the opening scene merely to inform us that they are to meet somewhere again; and by another it is attributed to Middleton because it does not flow in the usual trochaic manner of Shakspeare, and contains imperfect lines. Middleton may have Paddock and Graymalkin for his share in the attempt to spoil this grand chant, whose accent ought to have sung Shakspeare's feeling into the critic's ear; for so the foot of Fate would fall in order to pitch the key of the tragedy, and lead its crime into our presence. Its measured step seems to issue out of some foreboding by Macbeth of his ambition's purpose. The weird sisters are not merely enjoying a thunderstorm, and wondering when they shall meet again in similar favorable weather. Their lips put a stress of destiny upon every syllable. The poet's pen unconsciously follows in their traces.