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Shakespearean Tragedy

Note 241 — LECTURE X

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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.

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