III.
v. 10 f.:

all you have done
Hath been but for a wayward son,
Spiteful and wrathful, who, as others do,
Loves for his own ends, not for you;

and IV. i. 41, 2:

And now about the cauldron sing,
Like elves and fairies in a ring.

The idea of sexual relation in the first passage, and the trivial
daintiness of the second (with which cf. III. v. 34,

Hark! I am call'd; my little spirit, see,
Sits in a foggy cloud, and stays for me)

suit Middleton's Witches quite well, but Shakespeare's not at all; and
it is difficult to believe that, if Shakespeare had meant to introduce a
personage supreme over the Witches, he would have made her so
unimpressive as this Hecate. (It may be added that the original
stage-direction at IV. i. 39, 'Enter Hecat and the other three Witches,'
is suspicious.)

I doubt if the second and third of these arguments, taken alone, would
justify a very serious suspicion of interpolation; but the fact,
mentioned under (1), that the play has here been meddled with, trebles
their weight. And it gives some weight to the further fact that these
passages resemble one another, and differ from the bulk of the other
Witch passages, in being iambic in rhythm. (It must, however, be
remembered that, supposing Shakespeare _did_ mean to introduce Hecate,
he might naturally use a special rhythm for the parts where she
appeared.)

The same rhythm appears in a third passage which has been doubted: IV.
i. 125-132. But this is not _quite_ on a level with the other two; for
(1), though it is possible to suppose the Witches, as well as the
Apparitions, to vanish at 124, and Macbeth's speech to run straight on
to 133, the cut is not so clean as in the other cases; (2) it is not at
all clear that Hecate (the most suspicious element) is supposed to be
present. The original stage-direction at 133 is merely 'The Witches
Dance, and vanish'; and even if Hecate had been present before, she
might have vanished at 43, as Dyce makes her do.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 280: _E.g._ Mr. Chambers's excellent little edition in the
Warwick series.]

NOTE AA.

HAS _MACBETH_ BEEN ABRIDGED?

_Macbeth_ is a very short play, the shortest of all Shakespeare's except
the _Comedy of Errors_. It contains only 1993 lines, while _King Lear_
contains 3298, _Othello_ 3324, and _Hamlet_ 3924. The next shortest of
the tragedies is _Julius Caesar_, which has 2440 lines. (The