As for the supposed obligations of Shakespeare to Middleton or Middleton
to Shakespeare, the imaginary relations of "The Witch" to "Macbeth" or
"Macbeth" to "The Witch," I can only say that the investigation of this
subject seems to me as profitable as a research into the natural
history of snakes in Iceland. That the editors to whom we owe the
miserably defaced and villanously garbled text which is all that has
reached us of "Macbeth," not content with the mutilation of the greater
poet, had recourse to the interpolation of a few superfluous and
incongruous lines or fragments from the lyric portions of the lesser
poet's work--that the players who mangled Shakespeare were the pilferers
who plundered Middleton--must be obvious to all but those (if any such
yet exist anywhere) who are capable of believing the unspeakably
impudent assertion of those mendacious malefactors that they have left
us a pure and perfect edition of Shakespeare. These passages are all
thoroughly in keeping with the general tone of the lesser work: it would
be tautology to add that they are no less utterly out of keeping with
the general tone of the other. But in their own way nothing can be
finer: they have a tragic liveliness in ghastliness, a grotesque
animation of horror, which no other poet has ever conceived or conveyed
to us.
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