"Macbeth" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... supposable in the trivial Rezenvelt. To feel teased by such a man, to dislike him, occasionally to present him with your compliments in the shape of a duodecimo kick—well and good, nothing but right. And the plot manifestly tended to a comic issue. But murder!—a Macbeth murder!—not the injury so much as the man himself was incommensurate, was too slight by a thousand degrees for so appalling a catastrophe. It reacts upon De Montford, making him ignoble that could be moved so profoundly ...
— The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey, Vol. 1 (2 vols) • Thomas De Quincey
... tragico-comedy, and none but Shakespere has succeeded. It is wonderful, however, that Schiller, who had studied Shakespere, should not have perceived his divine judgment in the management of his assassins, as in Macbeth. They are fearful and almost pitiable Beings—not loathsome, ludicrous miscreants. (4) The character of Thekla O, the bold Heroine of any novel. Nothing of the Convent, no superstition, nothing of the Daughter of Wallenstein, nothing that her past life is represented by. (5) Wallenstein ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Vol I and II • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... brought to a speedy termination by 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 ...
— The Battle of Bayan and Other Battles • James Edgar Allen
... hearty fellows—were travelling in the same compartment with a communicative Scot, when the train stopped at Forres. "Gentlemen," said the Scot, "this is Forres, and I'm sure you've read about it; quite near Forres is the blasted heath where Macbeth was accosted by the witches." "How shocking," said one of the Englishmen; "how really shocking! Well, you see, we haven't read about that yet: we've been up North for some time, and we have'nt seen the pypers ...
— Literary Tours in The Highlands and Islands of Scotland • Daniel Turner Holmes
... 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 ...
— Cleek, the Master Detective • Thomas W. Hanshew
... moves within certain specific and positive limitations—spiritual, mental, and physical. No actor has proved equal to every kind of character. Salvini, when he acted Hamlet, was unspiritual—giving no effect to the haunted tone of that part or to its weird surroundings; and when he acted Macbeth he was unimaginative, obscure, common, and therefore inadequate. The only Shakespearean character that he excelled in is Othello, and even in that his ideal displayed neither the magnanimity nor the tenderness that are in Shakespeare's conception. The chief attributes of the ...
— Shadows of the Stage • William Winter
... rise to many superstitious fictions. For instance, it was said that they possessed "an evil eye," and that, if they looked on a man before he saw them, he would forthwith lose his voice. Again, we find the Roman witches, like the weird sisters of Macbeth, employing ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 2, No. 12, May, 1851. • Various
... 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 a chorus ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb (Vol. 6) - Letters 1821-1842 • Charles and Mary Lamb
... "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 smiles and says ...
— Lewis Rand • Mary Johnston
... artistry culminated in "The Return of Peter Grimm." The subject was very difficult, and the greatest problem confronting me was to preserve the illusion of a spirit while actually using a living person. The apparition of the ghost in "Hamlet" and in "Macbeth," the spirits who return to haunt Richard III, and other ghosts of the theatre convinced me that green lights and dark stages with spot-lights would not give the illusion necessary to this play. All other spirits have been visible to someone ...
— The Return of Peter Grimm • David Belasco
... a pen in the ink and held it out to William Roper with very much the air of Lady Macbeth presenting ...
— The Loudwater Mystery • Edgar Jepson
... philosophers and classifiers of the sciences and arts who will not permit such poets as Shelley and Tennyson to be put in the category of philosophers, remind one very forcibly of the passage in Macbeth: "The earth has bubbles, as the water has, and ...
— Percy Bysshe Shelley as a Philosopher and Reformer • Charles Sotheran
... 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, ...
— By Advice of Counsel • Arthur Train
... '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 ...
— The Return • Walter de la Mare
... more apparent than in the present narrative. Every aera of Johnson's life is fixed by his writings. In 1744, he published the life of Savage; and then projected a new edition of Shakespeare. As a prelude to that design, he published, in 1745, Miscellaneous Observations on the Tragedy of Macbeth, with remarks on sir Thomas Hanmer's edition; to which were prefixed, Proposals for a new Edition of Shakespeare, with a specimen. Of this pamphlet, Warburton, in the preface to Shakespeare, has given his opinion: "As to all ...
— Dr. Johnson's Works: Life, Poems, and Tales, Volume 1 - The Works Of Samuel Johnson, Ll.D., In Nine Volumes • Samuel Johnson
... mountains; or the low Of herds slow winding down the cottaged vale, Where day's last sunshine linger. Such repose He feels, who, following where his SHAKSPEARE leads, As in a dream, through an enchanted land, Here, with Macbeth, in the dread cavern hails The weird sisters, and the dismal deed Without a name; there sees the charmed isle, The lone domain of Prospero; and, hark! Wild music, such as earth scarce seems to own, 150 And Ariel o'er the slow-subsiding surge Singing her smooth air quaintly! Such repose Steals ...
— The Poetical Works of William Lisle Bowles, Vol. 1 • William Lisle Bowles
... of those painful pauses. Nutty looked at the monkey rather like an elongated Macbeth inspecting the ghost of Banquo. The monkey looked at Nutty. The pause continued. Nutty shut his eyes, counted ten slowly, and ...
— Uneasy Money • P.G. Wodehouse
... 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 ...
— Selected Polish Tales • Various
... heard two whimsical blunders made in the course of a performance of Macbeth, at a poor little country theatre. The Lady Macbeth—who, not unlikely, had been ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction No. 485 - Vol. 17, No. 485, Saturday, April 16, 1831 • Various
... when Macbeth entertained unawares the ghost of gracious Duncan, the bishop's reception broke up in the most admired disorder. It was not Dr Pendle's wish that the entertainment should be cut short on his account, but the rumour—magnified greatly—of his sudden illness so dispirited his ...
— The Bishop's Secret • Fergus Hume
... seated, as Ben expected,—the hoods of their burnouses, drawn over their heads, making them look more like a party of old crones than stalwart Arabs habituated to war and the chase; or I might have taken them for the witches in "Macbeth" discussing their malevolent designs. On one side were the ruined walls of the Roman town, with a tall monument rising above them; in front were the tents, spread beneath a few sparsely scattered palm-trees; while beyond could be ...
— Saved from the Sea - The Loss of the Viper, and her Crew's Saharan Adventures • W.H.G. Kingston
... contained the following, which was purely Shakespearean. An orchestra of thirty pieces played the overture and accompanied the several numbers. The Rialto, Bargain, and Trial scenes from the Merchant of Venice, four glees, a reading, and Locke's music to Macbeth's witches in character. Sergeant-Instructor Smith and his brother conducted the programme. No ladies took part. The characters were all male, John Smith taking the part of Portia, and his brother that of Shylock. Schoolmaster Ward made a good Antonio, Color-Sergeant Pix made a splendid ...
— A Soldier's Life - Being the Personal Reminiscences of Edwin G. Rundle • Edwin G. Rundle
... 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
... the militia, would be absolute master of any situation. He was not the one to throw up the cards because the chances of the game were going against him. His was a fighting spirit, and his impulse was ever, like that of Macbeth, to try to the last. But Tompkins could not fail to observe the party's growing dislike for Clinton, and, much as he wanted military success, he graciously declined Clinton's request, brought to him by Thomas Addis Emmet, to be ...
— A Political History of the State of New York, Volumes 1-3 • DeAlva Stanwood Alexander
... 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
... hideous face, begrimed with dirt and smeared with yellow paint, bleared and leering eyes, and horrid long, flapping breasts—ugh! it was a sight to make one feel sick. A degraded woman is the saddest spectacle on earth. Shakespeare knew what he was doing when he made the witches in Macbeth of the feminine gender. But as you look at them you almost forget that these Piute hags are women—they seem a cross between brute and devil. The unity of the human race is a fact which I accept; but some of our brothers and sisters are far gone from original loveliness. If Eve ...
— California Sketches, Second Series • O. P. Fitzgerald
... to Macbeth," said the Duke—again paced the chamber, and again seated himself, and said, "Be plain, Christian—speak out at once, and manfully, what is it ...
— Peveril of the Peak • Sir Walter Scott
... silent, Miss Eyre, I was arranging a point with my destiny. She stood there, by that beech-trunk—a hag like one of those who appeared to Macbeth on the heath of Forres. 'You like Thornfield?' she said, lifting her finger; and then she wrote in the air a memento, which ran in lurid hieroglyphics all along the house-front, between the upper and lower row of windows, 'Like it if you can! Like ...
— Jane Eyre - an Autobiography • Charlotte Bronte
... commonplace. Popular art in all ages has been interested in contemporary 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 cakes dressed ...
— The Defendant • G.K. Chesterton
... Miss Morris, "my first step into theatrical controversy. 'Macbeth' was being rehearsed, and the star had just exclaimed: 'Hang out our banners on the outward walls!' That was enough—argument was on. It grew animated. Some were for: 'Hang out our banners! On the outward walls ...
— Ten American Girls From History • Kate Dickinson Sweetser
... the moonlight sleeps upon this bank,' when Love solves all differences in the Merchant of Venice! On the other hand, when Macbeth is meditating the murder of Duncan, the wolf howls, the owl hoots, and the cricket cries. And since Shakespeare's characters often act out of part, so that intelligible motive fails, while it is important ...
— The Development of the Feeling for Nature in the Middle Ages and - Modern Times • Alfred Biese
... vista of Mews, where hostlers, at whatever sort of 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, on the ...
— Dombey and Son • Charles Dickens
... The mercilesse Macdonwald (Worthie to be a Rebell, for to that The multiplying Villanies of Nature Doe swarme vpon him) from the Westerne Isles Of Kernes and Gallowgrosses is supply'd, And Fortune on his damned Quarry smiling, Shew'd like a Rebells Whore: but all's too weake: For braue Macbeth (well hee deserues that Name) Disdayning Fortune, with his brandisht Steele, Which smoak'd with bloody execution (Like Valours Minion) caru'd out his passage, Till hee fac'd the Slaue: Which neu'r shooke hands, nor bad farwell to him, Till he vnseam'd him from ...
— The First Folio [35 Plays] • William Shakespeare
... spectre 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 ...
— Ruth Fielding Down East - Or, The Hermit of Beach Plum Point • Alice B. Emerson
... 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 expedient may be more or less legitimate in archaic or legendary ...
— The Buried Temple • Maurice Maeterlinck
... she had called me, in calmer moments, when I was able to discuss our affair objectively. And once she declared that I had no sense of tragedy. We read "Macbeth" together, I remember, one rainy Sunday. The modern world, which was our generation, would seem to be cut off from all that preceded it as with a descending knife. It was precisely from "the sense of tragedy" that we had been emancipated: from the "agonized conscience," I should undoubtedly have ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... and unlovely in life. But night in the goblin-land, where Dick found himself suddenly deserted, with fantastic forms swaying in the lazy wind, would have had terrors for the most constant mind; terrors such as filled the soul of MacBeth, when Birnam wood came marching to Dunsinane. In an instant, as it seemed to Dick's exalted and painfully impressionable sense, every separate leaf, branch, brier, copse, and jungle, was endowed with a voice of its own—hateful, irritating, mocking. Swarms of peering eyes hovered in the air, ...
— The Iron Game - A Tale of the War • Henry Francis Keenan
... Tales, or Edmund Spenser's immortal Faerie Queene, or Shakespeare's tender women, the Juliet we love, the Rosalind who is ever in our hearts, the Beatrice, the Imogen, gentle Ophelia, or kindly but ill-starred Desdemona, or the great heroes of tragedy, Lear, Macbeth, Hamlet or Othello, or I might ask you to hear a word about Ben Jonson, "rare Ben," or poor Philip Massinger who died a stranger, of the Puritan Milton, the great Catholic Dryden, or Swift, or Bunyan, Defoe, Addison, Pope and ...
— Picturesque Quebec • James MacPherson Le Moine
... deny that in the end I dozed at intervals in my empty smoking compartment; but wish to make it clear that I came on the Vision (as I will call it) with eyes open, and that it left me staring, wide-awake as Macbeth. ...
— News from the Duchy • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... productions of which use has been made, give the book a peculiar interest and value. It is also of especial service in its brief but profoundly suggestive study of the psychic background of Shakespeare's creative work as illustrated in the sleep walking of Lady Macbeth. The endeavor in the translation has been to make accessible to our English readers the clear and direct psychoanalysis of the author and the peculiar psychologic and literary ...
— Sleep Walking and Moon Walking - A Medico-Literary Study • Isidor Isaak Sadger
... the township of West Gwillinbury, north of Toronto, near London, and in the Talbot settlement, near St. Thomas—all in Upper Canada—they received their lands. Half a century later, in one of the townships north of Toronto, the writer had pointed out to him a man named MacBeth weighing two hundred and fifty pounds, of whom it was humourously told that he had been carried all the way from Red River. The explanation of course was, that he had been brought as an infant on this famous Hegira of the ...
— The Romantic Settlement of Lord Selkirk's Colonists - The Pioneers of Manitoba • George Bryce
... Key, who wrote the "Star Spangled Banner," is not the author of Hamlet, a tragedy. He wrote the banner business, and assisted in "The Female Pirate," BUT DID NOT WRITE HAMLET. Hamlet was written by a talented but unscrupulous man named Macbeth, afterwards tried and executed ...
— The Complete Works of Artemus Ward, Part 1 • Charles Farrar Browne
... been formed to keep the "lads" out of the public-houses and was doing so well, about the Shakespeare Reading Society and a Mrs. Tempest (who also became a live figure in Maggie's brain), "a born tragedian" and wonderful as Lady Macbeth and Katherine of Aragon. Skeaton slowly revealed itself to Maggie as a sunny sparkling place, with glittering sea, shining sand, and dark cool woods, full of kindliness, too, and friendship and good-humour. Paul and Grace Trenchard seemed to ...
— The Captives • Hugh Walpole
... in the only foreign enterprise undertaken during the reign of Edward. Duncan, King of Scotland, was a prince of a gentle disposition, but possessed not the genius requisite for governing a country so turbulent, and so much infested by the intrigues and animosities of the great Macbeth, a powerful nobleman, and nearly allied to the crown, not content with curbing the king's authority, carried still farther his pestilent ambition; he put his sovereign to death; chased Malcolm Kenmore, his son and heir, into England; and usurped ...
— The History of England, Volume I • David Hume
... office, where all the morning, at noon to the 'Change, and thence home to dinner, and so with my wife to the Duke's house to a play, "Macbeth," a pretty good play, but admirably acted. Thence home; the coach being forced to go round by London Wall home, because of the bonefires; the day being mightily observed in the City. To my office late at business, and then home to ...
— Diary of Samuel Pepys, Complete • Samuel Pepys
... comes the goitre, which, by utterly destroying the symmetry of her form, leaves her, at thirty, little better than a wreck. As to the really old folks, the grandams and maiden aunts of the community, these are, at all moments, in a condition to play with effect the characters of Macbeth's witches; and when, as not unfrequently happens, they judge it expedient to go about bareheaded, the resemblance which they bear to the respectable individuals just alluded to, is complete. Yet in youth, not a few of the girls are extremely pretty; which makes you the ...
— Germany, Bohemia, and Hungary, Visited in 1837. Vol. II • G. R. Gleig
... can borrow from other people. Any thing is better than stagnation; and now, in the interregnum of my autumn and a strange summer adventure, which I don't like to think of, (I don't mean * *'s, however, which is laughable only,) the antithetical state of my lucubrations makes me alive, and Macbeth can 'sleep no more:'—he was lucky in getting rid of the drowsy ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. III - With His Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore
... boyish days I had always felt a great perplexity on one point in Macbeth. It was this: the knocking at the gate, which succeeds to the murder of Duncan, produced to my feelings an effect for which I never could account. The effect was, that it reflected back upon the murder a peculiar awfulness and a depth of solemnity; yet, however ...
— Miscellaneous Essays • Thomas de Quincey
... statement has, as we shall afterwards see, some bearing upon the more immediate 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 by his generals, Macbeth and Banquo, that the Norwegians ...
— Archaeological Essays, Vol. 1 • James Y. Simpson
... it painful for them to listen even to the grandest music if 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 performers, that ...
— Round the World • Andrew Carnegie
... originally set down for Keeley, had not a single "which" in 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 vivid ...
— Charles Dickens as a Reader • Charles Kent
... cloud, isn't there? An inky cloud, if ever there was one! Take care, inhabitants below; growl, growl, there's the thunder; now comes the rain; hail, hail, all hail, like the beginning of Macbeth." ...
— Countess Kate • Charlotte M. Yonge
... and as he matured in his career, through acting every kind of part, from a dandy negro up to Hamlet, he at last made choice of the characters that afford scope for his powers and his aspirations, and so settled upon a definite, restricted repertory. His characters were Hamlet, Macbeth, Lear, Othello, Iago, Richard the Second, Richard the Third, Shylock, Cardinal Wolsey, Benedick, Petruchio, Richelieu, Lucius Brutus, Bertuccio, Ruy Blas, and Don Caesar de Bazan. These he acted in customary usage, and to these he occasionally added Marcus Brutus, Antony, ...
— Shadows of the Stage • William Winter
... plan of operations seems to have been to concentrate in the western Highlands, with Inverness for head-quarters. The town Charles easily got, but Fort-George, a powerful fortress, built upon the site of the castle where Macbeth was said to have murdered Duncan, commanded the Loch. Stapleton and his Irish, captured it, however, as well as the neighbouring Fort-Augustus. Joined by some Highlanders, they next attempted Fort-William, the last fortress of King George ...
— A Popular History of Ireland - From the earliest period to the emancipation of the Catholics • Thomas D'Arcy McGee
... want to be Shylock. I love character parts. I don't see why you have to pick out these little tame scenes when we could have Lear and Edgar and the Fool on the heath, or Dick the Third or Macbeth. I'd play any of those for you. We used to have plays back home just amongst us girls, and I was always the leading heavy. We even tried putting on 'Faust' in the barn when the hay-lofts were empty, but that ...
— Kit of Greenacre Farm • Izola Forrester
... the end, not the means. A woman, set on anything, will walk right through the moral crockery without wincing. She'd be a great deal more unscrupulous in politics than the average man. Did you ever see a female lobbyist? Or a criminal? It is Lady Macbeth who does not falter. Don't raise your hands at me! The sweetest angel or the coolest devil is a woman. I see in some of the modern novels we have been talking of the same unscrupulous daring, a blindness ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... long-legged animals appearing in the distant horizon, they looked like groups of small trees; and I felt agreeably surprised to meet with vegetation in this endless wilderness. But the wood, like that in Shakspere's Macbeth, shortly advanced towards us, and the stems changed into legs and ...
— A Woman's Journey Round the World • Ida Pfeiffer
... the wardrobe. These garments the party proceeded to assume; and we were quickly transformed into as picturesque-looking a crowd as any that ever figured at a masquerade ball. As for myself, I made a very tolerable representation of Falstaff; while Richard, Othello, Macbeth, Hamlet, Shylock, and other gentlemen of Shakespeare's creation, gave variety to the procession. Then there was a clown in full circus costume, accompanied by Harlequin in his glittering shape-dress. We sadly longed for a sprightly ...
— My Life: or the Adventures of Geo. Thompson - Being the Auto-Biography of an Author. Written by Himself. • George Thompson
... his favour arose not from the impulse of compassion, but from some internal, and probably capricious, association of feelings, to which he had no clue. It rested, perhaps, on a fancied likeness, such as Lady Macbeth found to her father in the sleeping monarch. Such were the reflections that passed in rapid succession through Brown's mind as he gazed from his hiding-place upon this extraordinary personage. Meantime the gang did not yet approach, and he was ...
— Guy Mannering, or The Astrologer, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... without success, he should be assisted by the teacher. It is very important that the selection should be suited to the capacity and progress of the pupil. Beginners should take simple pieces, and not be allowed, as is sometimes the case, to murder a passage from Paradise Lost, or Macbeth. Sometimes a fault is committed on the part of the teacher, by permitting a pupil to confine his selections to one favorite class. I have observed in certain schools, that one particular boy would always appear in a comic piece, another ...
— The American Union Speaker • John D. Philbrick
... 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 ...
— The Diary of Samuel Pepys • Samuel Pepys
... measures. Observe, too, that speakers of all orders and characters use all the forms. Hamlet, Othello, Lear, Coriolanus, Lance, use prose; Leontes and his little boy, Lear, Coriolanus, and his domestics—to say nothing of the Steward—Macbeth and his murderlings, use blank verse. Even Falstaff, now and then, a verse. All, high and low, wise, merry, and sad, rhyme. Fools, witches, fairies—we know not who else—use lyrical measures. Upon the whole, the uttermost—that is, the musical ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 57, No. 352, February 1845 • Various
... by painful emotions—suddenly I found myself before Drury Lane Theatre. The play was Macbeth—the first actor of the age was there to exert his powers to drug with irreflection the auditors; such a medicine I yearned for, so I entered. The theatre was tolerably well filled. Shakspeare, whose popularity was established by the approval of four ...
— The Last Man • Mary Shelley
... drowsiness)—Ver. 1102. Generally we hear of a person "being buried in sleep;" but Callidamates considers that a drunkard, when he awakes from his sleep, "buries slumber." It is not unlike the words of Shakspeare, in Macbeth: ...
— The Captiva and The Mostellaria • Plautus
... the romancists 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 great sources—The Bible, ...
— Prefaces and Prologues to Famous Books - with Introductions, Notes and Illustrations • Charles W. Eliot
... hear him chatter, the fossicker bent on recreation rouses the old lady to feats of swearing far beyond the scope of most people. No man has yet been found who could withstand her onslaught. I saw her angry once! She positively alarmed me; the three witches in Macbeth thrown into one would be of no account in comparison. Had she lived a century or two ago she ...
— Spinifex and Sand - Five Years' Pioneering and Exploration in Western Australia • David W Carnegie
... America—without a rag of 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, ...
— A Small Boy and Others • Henry James
... 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; it was a pictorial ...
— Hilda - A Story of Calcutta • Sara Jeannette Duncan
... business is with the diggings and the diggers. We have often wished we could interrogate one of those unquiet spirits in the manner of Macbeth—'What is't ye do?' How do you manage? By what signs do you know a locality that is likely to repay your pains? What are your instruments, your machinery? What do you conceive to be the prospects of your singular trade? And, in fact, our curiosity is at this ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 430 - Volume 17, New Series, March 27, 1852 • Various
... he could conscientiously fulfil, and the quality of his work suffered in consequence. There are some fine scenes in 'I Due Foscari' (1844), but it has little of the vigour of 'Ernani.' 'Giovanna d'Arco' (1845), 'Alzira' (1845), and 'Attila' (1846), were almost total failures. In 'Macbeth' (1847), however, Verdi seems to have been inspired by his subject, and wrote better music than he had yet given to the world. The libretto is a miserable perversion of Shakespeare, and for that reason the opera has never succeeded in England, but in countries which ...
— The Opera - A Sketch of the Development of Opera. With full Descriptions - of all Works in the Modern Repertory • R.A. Streatfeild
... man appears as he is, made up of a crowd of passions, which contend for the mastery over him, and govern him in turn. What is Hamlet's ruling passion? Or Othello's? Or Harry the Fifth's? Or Wolsey's? Or Lear's? Or Shylock's? Or Benedick's? Or Macbeth's? Or that of Cassius? Or that of Falconbridge? But we might go on for ever. Take a single example-Shylock. Is he so eager for money as to be indifferent to revenge? Or so eager for revenge as to be ...
— The Diary and Letters of Madame D'Arblay Volume 1 • Madame D'Arblay
... prematurely, to make room for the 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
... any fables, are, after all, only good jokes in a narrative form, which owe their fame simply to their boundless capacity for application. Sidney Smith's story of Mrs. Partington, who tried to mop out the Atlantic, was a jest, and so too was Lady Macbeth's 'cat i' the adage,' who wanted fish, yet would not wet her paws, and let 'I dare not' wait upon 'I would.' Something of our old enjoyment of a joke for the first time, always lingers around it, and we gladly laugh again—for, 'old love never quite rusts out.' And there are ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 3 No 2, February 1863 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... forty-third year of the century, only to be extinguished for ever by the Norman conquest twenty-three years later. Scotland, during the same years was more than once subject to invasion from the same ancient enemy. Malcolm II., and the brave usurper Macbeth, fought several engagements with the northern leaders, and generally with brilliant success. By a remarkable coincidence, the Scottish chronicles also date the decadence of Danish power on their coasts ...
— A Popular History of Ireland - From the earliest period to the emancipation of the Catholics • Thomas D'Arcy McGee
... suspicions. Among others the persistence with which her ladyship, though in good health, and with no other engagement at hand, resolved and adhered to her resolution to remain at home and miss the rare opportunity of seeing Mr. and Mrs. Dean in their great parts of Macbeth and Lady Macbeth. Suspecting that her ladyship had some unlawful design in thus denying herself an amusement of which I know her to be excessively fond, and preferring to spend the evening at home, of which I know she is excessively tired, I ordered my faithful ...
— Self-Raised • Emma Dorothy Eliza Nevitte Southworth
... 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 her ...
— Raleigh • Edmund Gosse
... done on the 4th, heard his appeals in silence; and the Duke of Vicenza, though repeatedly commanded to give him back the act of abdication, refused to do so. It is generally believed that, during the night which ensued, Napoleon's meditations were, once more, like those of the falling Macbeth:— ...
— The History of Napoleon Buonaparte • John Gibson Lockhart
... September 20th. — The performances announced were the tragedy of "Macbeth" and the afterpiece of "The Quaker." The house was excessively crowded (the pit especially) with persons who had gone for no other purpose than to make a disturbance. They soon discovered another grievance to add to the list. The whole of the lower, and three-fourths of the upper tier ...
— Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions - Vol. I • Charles Mackay
... 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; but ...
— The Young Gentleman and Lady's Monitor, and English Teacher's Assistant • John Hamilton Moore
... 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 ...
— Shakespearean Tragedy - Lectures on Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth • A. C. Bradley
... 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; bringing back in state to Canterbury the body of Archbishop ...
— Hereward, The Last of the English • Charles Kingsley
... sealed forever. Everything about the tiny town is refreshing. A citizen finished up a game of checkers before he went down to consider the case of my trunk. Then it took him some time to wake up his horse, which did a bewildered Lady Macbeth up the street. I was walking beside, and suddenly a roly-poly puppy slipped away from a boy and ran straight under the clumsy hoofs.... You never heard such ki-yi's. You'd think he was being vivisected. There was a shrieking streak of white and he ...
— Jane Journeys On • Ruth Comfort Mitchell
... an argument! It would make Macduff fall into the arms of Macbeth; it would tranquillize the Kilkenny cats themselves! I'll run in and apologize abjectly to my thrice guilty aunt, then I'll reward myself by ...
— Robinetta • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... cause is not to be put down or even passed by with contemptuous silence, vulgar abuse, or conservative scorn. Foote squealed out his angry opposition, in the old stupid slang (of Shakespeare perverted from "Macbeth"), about unsexing woman with the right of suffrage, and endeavored to contrast it with property-claims; as if the revolutionary maxim concerning taxation and representation going together is not a property rule. I suspect, too, that personal rights, secured by the right preservative ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume I • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... the same day to Fores, the town to which Macbeth was travelling, when he met the weird sisters in his way. This to an Englishman is classic ground. Our imaginations were heated, and our thoughts recalled ...
— A Journey to the Western Isles of Scotland • Samuel Johnson
... 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
... various parts of its surface. Its appearance has suggested the name, which Hedges has given, of "Hell-Broth springs;" for, as we gazed upon the infernal mixture and inhaled the pungent sickening vapors, we were impressed with the idea that this was a most perfect realization of Shakespeare's image in Macbeth. It needed but the presence of Hecate and her weird band to realize that horrible creation of poetic fancy, and I fancied the "black and midnight hags" concocting a charm around this horrible cauldron. We ventured near enough to this spring to dip the end of a pine pole into ...
— The Discovery of Yellowstone Park • Nathaniel Pitt Langford
... from behind. He turned round and saw a work-girl in a little black hat with blue ribbons. She was young and pretty enough, but his mind was fixed on the awe-inspiring and superhuman graces of an Electra or a Lady Macbeth. She went on nuzzling against his back till ...
— The Aspirations of Jean Servien • Anatole France
... And e'en as Macbeth, when devising the death Of his King, heard "the very stones prate of his whereabouts;" So this shocking bad wife heard a voice all her life Crying "Murder!" resound from the ...
— The Humourous Poetry of the English Language • James Parton
... 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
... quotation from his school-work. Macbeth, Act II. Another of Shakespeare's phrases from the same work leaped into his mind. "Macbeth hath murdered sleep." Not Macbeth, but Marks. Rick knew he wouldn't sleep well that night, nor for many nights ...
— The Electronic Mind Reader • John Blaine
... 'Macbeth,'" said Arvasita. "Leola's great night at the church fair and bazar, El Paso, in Shakespeare's acknowledged masterpiece. Leola's repetwar likewise includes 'Catherine the Queen before her Judges,' 'Quality of Mercy is not ...
— The Jimmyjohn Boss and Other Stories • Owen Wister
... 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
... Putting Lady Macbeth out of the question, the situation may be traced to a passage in Henry Mackenzie's Julia de Roubigne (1777, ii. 101: "Montauban ...
— The Works Of Lord Byron, Vol. 3 (of 7) • Lord Byron
... mixture.—Ver. 262. This reminds us of the line of Shakespeare in Macbeth, 'Make ...
— The Metamorphoses of Ovid - Vol. I, Books I-VII • Publius Ovidius Naso
... man, duties multiply in his conscience and obstacles and bonds around his life. Instead of those electric brains, prompt to communicate the spark which they have received; instead of those ardent and simple-minded men, whose projects like Macbeth's "will to hand"—the world now presents to the poet minds like Hamlet's, deep in the observation of those inward conflicts which our classical system has derived from a state of society more advanced than that of the time in which Shakespeare lived. So many feelings, interests, ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. VII (of X)—Continental Europe I • Various
... of entertainment I 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)
... was the first of the great English tragic actors, and was the original of the greater number of Shakespeare's heroes—Hamlet, Othello, Lear, Shylock, Macbeth, Richard III., Romeo, Brutus, etc. Dick Tarleton, one of the privileged scapegraces of social life, was regarded by his contemporaries as the most witty of clowns and comedians. The clown was a permitted character in the old theatres, and intruded not ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... Andronicus; Romeo and Juliet; Julius Caesar; Hamlet; King Lear; Macbeth; Timon of ...
— English Literature For Boys And Girls • H.E. Marshall
... sundial, 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
... of God, they recked not where. The boat in which they came was made of two hides and a half; and they took with them provisions for seven nights; and within seven nights they came to land in Cornwall, and soon after went to King Alfred. They were thus named: Dubslane, and Macbeth, and Maelinmun. And Swinney, the best teacher that was among the Scots, departed this life. And the same year after Easter, about the gang-days or before, appeared the star that men in book-Latin call "cometa": some men say that in English it may ...
— The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle • Unknown
... left his home and went north, to Siward, who was engaged in war with Macbeth, and for aught we know he may have helped to bring great Birnam Wood to high Dunsinane Hill. However that may be, he stayed in Scotland with one Gilbert of Ghent, at whose house, among other doughty deeds, single-handed he slew a mighty white bear that escaped from captivity, ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Volume V. • Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton, Eds.
... subject—and is of a truly mythic character. Since visiting Shetland I have thought a great deal about the Picts, but cannot come to any satisfactory conclusion. Were they Celts? were they Laps? Macbeth could hardly have been a Lap, but then the tradition of the country that they were a diminutive race, and their name Pight or Pict, which I almost think is the same as petit—pixolo—puj—pigmy. It is a truly perplexing subject—quite ...
— George Borrow and His Circle - Wherein May Be Found Many Hitherto Unpublished Letters Of - Borrow And His Friends • Clement King Shorter
... 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 expressions ...
— Campaigns of a Non-Combatant, - and His Romaunt Abroad During the War • George Alfred Townsend
... voice cry, "Sleep no more! Macbeth does murder sleep!" the innocent sleep, Sleep that knits up the ravell'd sleave of care, The death of each day's life, sore labour's bath, Balm of hurt minds, great nature's second course, ...
— Familiar Quotations • John Bartlett
... darkness in the distance, and black with the soot of a thousand chimneys. The member apologized politely enough for bringing us to this almost uninhabitable and Heaven-forsaken region; but I begged him not to mind: it was only a more blasted scene than the heath in "Macbeth." ...
— The Reminiscences Of Sir Henry Hawkins (Baron Brampton) • Henry Hawkins Brampton
... of her acquaintance; and she gave me such an account of what they did, that I thought I would have liked to have gotten a keek at them myself. At the same time, I must own this was a sinful curiosity, and I stifled it to the best of my ability. Among other plays that they did, was one called MACBETH AND THE WITCHES, which the Miss Cayennes had seen performed in London, when they were there in the winter time with their father, for three months, seeing the world, after coming from the boarding-school. But it was no more like ...
— The Annals of the Parish • John Galt
... killing," she replied. "Don't you remember the protest in Macbeth, 'Time was, when the brains were out the man would die'?" Then, with a little quick gesture towards the camp, she added, "When you think of to-day, doesn't it seem that the brains are out, and yet that the man still lives? I'm not a soldier, and this awful slaughter ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... though I believe it somewhat of the newest. Now, poor I have no skill in these matters! If I see a pretty fellow, I care not who knows it; I like a jest, a laugh, tempered with all rightful modesty. I do not prim my mouth, tutor my eyes into sobriety, nor say Amen, like old Will's Macbeth, to those who say 'God bless us!' I laugh my laugh, and look my look, and say my say, though I am youngest, and, by God's grace, wildest of his Highness the ...
— The Buccaneer - A Tale • Mrs. S. C. Hall
... Three-Oughts-One. I'll take care of rival inventors. You and Koku keep your eyes peeled for the H. & W. spies. Especially for that Andy O'Malley. I feel that he will again show up. Maybe by 'the pricking of my thumb' as Macbeth's ...
— Tom Swift and his Electric Locomotive - or, Two Miles a Minute on the Rails • Victor Appleton
... containing such lighter, friendlier work, as "Life's Little Ironies," "Under a Greenwood Tree," and "The Trumpet Major"—the second being the period of the great tragedies which assume the place, in his work, of "Hamlet," "Lear," "Macbeth" and "Othello," in the work of Shakespeare—the third, of curious and imaginative interest, expresses in quite a particular way, Mr. Hardy's own peculiar point of view. The Well-Beloved, Jude the Obscure, and the later poems would belong ...
— One Hundred Best Books • John Cowper Powys
... placed his stage wardrobe at their disposal when they were invited to the great Viceregal ball in honour of King George's birthday; and, attired as Lady Macbeth and Juliet respectively, they danced the stately minuet and rollicking country dances with such grace and abandon that lords and ladies stopped in their dances, and mounted on chairs and tables to feast their eyes on so rare and ravishing ...
— Love Romances of the Aristocracy • Thornton Hall
... reminds me of the German commentators who find in the Agamemnon of AEschylus or the OEdipus of Sophocles or the Hamlet of Shakespeare motives and purposes of which the authors could never have dreamed, and give us a metaphysical, beer-and-tobacco, High-Dutch Clytemnestra or Antigone or Lady Macbeth. No, my boy, More was a simple sailor, and had no idea ...
— A Strange Manuscript Found in a Copper Cylinder • James De Mille
... is, like Agamemnon, a warrior-king. But, unlike Agamemnon, he is blameless with regard to Gertrude. Yet Gertrude, like Clytemnestra, is the potential murderer of her husband, as Lady Macbeth is murderess, as the daughters of Lear. The women murder the supreme male, the ideal Self, the King ...
— Twilight in Italy • D.H. Lawrence
... and we know it so well and feel so much with Caesar or with Lear or with Othello or with Macbeth, that we instinctively take it all for true psychology, while it after all covers just the exceptional cases of the ...
— Psychology and Social Sanity • Hugo Muensterberg
... loves. He does nothing by moderation. Calmness does not belong to him. He is tempestuous always; but tempests are magnificent and purifying to the air. Hugo is painting, and painting heroes, and his hero of heroes is Valjean. Jean Valjean is conscience. In Macbeth, conscience is warring and retributive. In Richard III, conscience, stifled in waking, speaks in dreams, and is menace, like a sword swung by a maniac's hands. In Arthur Dimmesdale, conscience is lacerative. In Jean Valjean, conscience is regulative, creative, constructive. Jean ...
— A Hero and Some Other Folks • William A. Quayle
... 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 abandoned ...
— Great Men and Famous Women, Vol. 7 of 8 • Charles F. (Charles Francis) Horne
... twenty minutes 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 William. You can have a little one now, ...
— The Queen's Twin and Other Stories • Sarah Orne Jewett
... sentiment of loyalty was too deeply implanted in his bosom to be wholly eradicated. Though in arms against the measures and ministers of his sovereign, he was not prepared to raise the sword against the sovereign himself. He, doubtless, had conflicting emotion in his bosom; like Macbeth, and many ...
— History Of The Conquest Of Peru • William Hickling Prescott
... children of Lir, have been changed from men or women because of wicked doings, but the most part born of the evil in Nature herself. They do what harm they can to innocent folk; they enter into, support, and direct—like Macbeth's witches—the evil thoughts of men; they rejoice in the battle, in the wounds and pain and death of men; they shriek and scream and laugh around the head of the hero when he goes forth, like Cuchulain, to an unwearied slaughter of ...
— The High Deeds of Finn and other Bardic Romances of Ancient Ireland • T. W. Rolleston
... Wiglaf who was one day to become ruler of Mercia, the heart of present-day England (music, please), is when at the age of seven he was taken by Oswier, his father's murderer, to see Mrs. Siddons play Lady Macbeth. (Every subject of biographical treatment, regardless of the period in which he or she lived, must have been taken at an early age to see Mrs. Siddons play Lady Macbeth. It is part of ...
— Love Conquers All • Robert C. Benchley
... published during his lifetime, of allusions to them in other writings of the time, and other scattering facts of one sort or another, joined with the more important internal evidence of comparative maturity of mind and art which shows 'Macbeth' and 'The Winter's Tale,' for example, vastly superior to 'Love's Labour's Lost'—all this evidence together enables us to arrange the plays in a chronological order which is certainly approximately correct. The first of the four periods thus disclosed ...
— A History of English Literature • Robert Huntington Fletcher
... to foreign sources. It is noteworthy that Shakspere, who borrowed his subjects and his heroes sometimes from authentic English history, sometimes from the legendary history of ancient Britain, Denmark, and Scotland, as in Lear, Hamlet, and Macbeth, ignores the Saxon period altogether. And Spenser, who gives in his second book of the Faerie Queene, a resume of the reigns of fabulous British kings—the supposed ancestors of Queen Elizabeth, ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers
... have, therefore, less hesitation in referring the more ambitious of our artists to this prohibition in Sir Joshua's Discourse. The greater the authority the more injurious the delinquency. We therefore adduce as examples, works of our most inventive and able artist, his "Macbeth" and his "Hamlet"—they are greatly overloaded with the faults of superabundance of ornament, and want unity; yet are they works of great power, and such as none but a painter of high genius could conceive or execute. In a more fanciful subject, and where ornament was more admissible, he ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXVIII. February, 1843. Vol. LIII. • Various
... of hands like that are thought to be a disgrace. They are like the bloody hands of Macbeth. Certain people would look at them and say: 'My God, man, you are guilty of hard work. You have produced food for the hungry and fuel for the cold. You are not an idler. You have refused to waste your time with ...
— In the Days of Poor Richard • Irving Bacheller
... 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 gag. ...
— The Dope on Mars • John Michael Sharkey
... hitherto un-plumbed depths within me and awakened dark things which, unsuspected, lay there sleeping. I never heard "The Black Mass" played by anyone else; indeed, I am not aware that it was ever published. But had it been we should rarely hear it. Like Locke's music to "Macbeth" it bears an unpleasant reputation; to include it in any concert programme would be to court disaster. An idle superstition, perhaps, but there is much ...
— Tales of Chinatown • Sax Rohmer
... beating in the wind of the hysterical passion which is tearing the heart of the poor dying king, what a powerful index of misery it becomes, and its "undoing," as the sign of the end of the tragedy, and the letting forth of the great injured soul, has melted many to tears! When Lady Macbeth exclaims, in ...
— Poetical Works of Pope, Vol. II • Alexander Pope
... thought of Clay seemed to inspire his genius for vituperation; his eye would gleam, his meagre and attenuated form would writhe and contort as if under the enchantment of a demon; his long, bony fingers would be extended, as if pointing at an imaginary Clay, air-drawn as the dagger of Macbeth, as he would writhe the muscles of his beardless, sallow, and wrinkled face, pouring out the gall of his soul upon his hated enemy. It was in one of these hallucinations that he uttered the following morsel of bitterness, in allusion to the story of bargain and corruption: ...
— The Memories of Fifty Years • William H. Sparks
... How like Macbeth he is!—the successful soldier, stirred by supernatural monitions of a greatness which he should achieve, and at ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... branches for us to hold over our shoulders to keep the heat of the afternoon sun off neck and back—Birnam woods a deux, and Nampoung fort instead of Macbeth's castle. ...
— From Edinburgh to India & Burmah • William G. Burn Murdoch
... virago, who might pass as the younger brother of her husband, and about whom nature seemed to have hesitated before determining whether to make her a man or a woman—a kind of debatable land, in fact, between the two sexes, and almost as much one as the other. Helen Macgregor, Lady Macbeth, Catharine de' Medici, Mrs. Manning, and the old-fashioned murderesses in novels, are all of the muscular, black-brigand type, with more or less of regal grace superadded according to circumstances; and it would be thought nothing but a puerile fancy to suppose the contrary of those ...
— Modern Women and What is Said of Them - A Reprint of A Series of Articles in the Saturday Review (1868) • Anonymous
... to feel exactly like Lady Macbeth to-day at algebra. When Miss Campbell turned her back, another girl dared me to put my pen in Miss Campbell's red ink. (This is strictly against the law.) So of course I did. But instead of mopping it straight off like a fool I displayed it with pride. Consequently it fell ...
— Lalage's Lovers - 1911 • George A. Birmingham
... now what men call the highest point of their worldly prosperity, made good my resolve that no human power should defeat me. All that Macbeth had not I have: a quiet throne of my own, children, wife, troops of friends, duties, honours, ease. There have been times when with natural misgiving lest I had wandered too far these many summers on a sea of glory, I have prepared for myself the lament ...
— The Choir Invisible • James Lane Allen |
