Treason and Plot. Garnet protested on his soul and salvation that he had not held a certain conversation, then was obliged to confess that he had, and thereupon ‘fell into a large discourse defending equivocation.’ This argument, which I have barely sketched, seems to me much weightier than the first; and its weight is increased by the further references to perjury and treason pointed out on p. 397.
(3) Halliwell observed what appears to be an allusion to Macbeth in the comedy of the Puritan, 4to, 1607: ‘we’ll ha’ the ghost i’ th’ white sheet sit at upper end o’ th’ table’; and Malone had referred to a less striking parallel in Caesar and Pompey, also pub. 1607:
That pricketh Caesar to these high attempts?
He also found a significance in the references in Macbeth to the genius of Mark Antony being rebuked by Caesar, and to the insane root that takes the reason prisoner, as showing that Shakespeare, while writing Macbeth, was reading Plutarch’s Lives, with a view to his next play Antony and Cleopatra (S.R. 1608).
(4) To these last arguments, which by themselves would be of little weight, I may add another, of which the same may be said. Marston’s reminiscences of Shakespeare are only too obvious. In his Dutch Courtezan, 1605, I have noticed passages which recall Othello and King Lear, but nothing that even faintly recalls Macbeth. But in reading Sophonisba, 1606, I was several times reminded of Macbeth (as well as, more decidedly, of Othello). I note the parallels for what they are worth.
With Sophonisba, Act I. Sc. ii:
Their large spread wings, which fann’d the evening aire
To us cold breath,
cf. Macbeth I. ii. 49:
And fan our people cold.
Cf. Sophonisba, a page later: ‘yet doubtful stood the fight,’ with Macbeth, I. ii. 7, ‘Doubtful it stood’ [‘Doubtful long it
