husband lay in seductive attractions deliberately exercised.
Shakespeare was not unskilled or squeamish in indicating such ideas.]

[Footnote 233: That it is Macbeth who feels the harmony between the
desolation of the heath and the figures who appear on it is a
characteristic touch.]

[Footnote 234: So, in Holinshed, 'Banquho jested with him and sayde, now
Makbeth thou haste obtayned those things which the twoo former sisters
prophesied, there remayneth onely for thee to purchase that which the
third sayd should come to passe.']

[Footnote 235: =doubts.]

[Footnote 236: =design.]

[Footnote 237:

'tis much he dares,
And, to that dauntless temper of his mind,
He hath a wisdom that doth guide his valour
To act in safety.]

[Footnote 238: So when he hears that Fleance has escaped he is not much
troubled (III. iv. 29):

the worm that's fled
Hath nature that in time will venom breed,
No teeth for the present.

I have repeated above what I have said before, because the meaning of
Macbeth's soliloquy is frequently misconceived.]

[Footnote 239: Virgilia in _Coriolanus_ is a famous example. She speaks
about thirty-five lines.]

[Footnote 240: The percentage of prose is, roughly, in _Hamlet_ 30-2/3,
in _Othello_ 16-1/3, in _King Lear_ 27-1/2, in _Macbeth_ 8-1/2.]

[Footnote 241: Cf. Note F. There are also in _Macbeth_ several shorter
passages which recall the Player's speech. Cf. 'Fortune ... showed like
a rebel's whore' (I. ii. 14) with 'Out! out! thou strumpet Fortune!' The
form 'eterne' occurs in Shakespeare only in _Macbeth_, III. ii. 38, and
in the 'proof eterne' of the Player's speech. Cf. 'So, as a painted
tyrant, Pyrrhus stood,' with _Macbeth_, V. viii. 26; 'the rugged
Pyrrhus, like the Hyrcanian beast,' with 'the rugged Russian bear ... or
the Hyrcan tiger' (_Macbeth_, III. iv. 100); 'like a neutral to his will
and matter' with _Macbeth_, I. v. 47. The words 'Till he unseam'd him
from the nave to the chaps,' in the Serjeant's speech, recall the words
'Then from the navel to the throat at once He ript old Priam,' in _Dido
Queen of Carthage_, where these words follow those others, about Priam
falling with the mere wind of Pyrrhus' sword, which seem to have
suggested 'the whiff and wind of his fell sword' in the Player's
speech.]

[Footnote 242: See Cunliffe, _The Influence of Seneca on Elizabethan
Tragedy_. The most famous of t