Note 152:1 — Chapter VII · Mad Folk in Comedy and Tragedy—(iv.) Delusions, Hallucinations and other Abnormal States.

With Macbeth might be compared two other remorse-stricken murderers in little known plays. Glapthorne’s “Albertus Wallenstein” is the story of a man who causes his son and his son’s betrothed to be killed and is then haunted by his crimes. His soul “is shaken with a nipping frost”; he mistakes his son’s page for a ghost and murders him; after this false visions of spirits are ever before him. Only when mortally wounded by conspirators is his mind at rest. In Denham’s “Sophy” (which is in spirit outside our period, though it was acted in 1641), Abbas, King of Persia, is likewise tormented by the ghosts of those whom he has murdered. Abbas, unlike Macbeth and Wallenstein, is quite a maniac, and does not recover his senses before his death.