GOETHE VERSUS SHAKESPEARE
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nature-the play is not a philosophic allegory-but through a villain–
ous deception. Nothing less would have offered a sufficient frame–
work for the drama.
In
spite of these dramatic intricacies, however,
what shatters Othello
is
essentially the realization of Desdemona's
limitations, which he immediately associates with the thought that
she must die. "She must die"- that is the point of intersection of the
two levels of meaning (yet this spatial metaphor of intersection is
inadequate insofar as it falsely suggests a complete separation of the
two levels).
Macbeth
presents an analogous case. The hero is ambitious, but
also has another dimension to which the other characters in the play
are blind and which Lady Macbeth takes for mere weakness. Being
extraordinarily ambitious herself, she cannot understand how he
differs from her:
Yet do I fear thy nature:
It is too full
0 '
the milk of human kindness,
To catch the nearest way. Thou wouldst be great;
Art not without ambition but without
The illness should attend it: what thou wouldst highly,
That wouldst thou holily; wouldst not play false,
And yet wouldst wrongly win .
..
That is how Macbeth appears to her- and to many a reader; and
she rightly concludes that he would never murder Duncan unless she
made him do it:
Hie thee hither,
That I may pour my spirits in thine ear,
And chastise with the valour of my tongue
All that impedes thee from the golden round,
Which fat e and metaphysical aid doth seem
To have thee crown'd withal. (I. 5)
What she fails to see is that Macbeth would be great in another way;
that his desire for enhancement is different in kind from her ambi–
tion and not only more choosy as regards the means; and that, once
crowned, Macbeth will find that his "ambition"
is
unstilled, being
of such a nature that no crown could satisfy it. Indeed, Macbeth is
far closer in spirit to Hamlet than to Lady Macbeth. He has a deep
spirituality and an essentially lyrical soul (albeit of titanic dimen-
