not follow that he knew he was repeating them; or that, if he did, he remembered the sense they had previously borne; or that, if he did remember it, he might not use them now in another sense.
NOTE FF.
THE GHOST OF BANQUO.
I do not think the suggestions that the Ghost on its first appearance is Banquo’s, and on its second Duncan’s, or vice versâ, are worth discussion. But the question whether Shakespeare meant the Ghost to be real or a mere hallucination, has some interest, and I have not seen it fully examined.
The following reasons may be given for the hallucination view:
(1) We remember that Macbeth has already seen one hallucination, that of the dagger; and if we failed to remember it Lady Macbeth would remind us of it here:
This is the air-drawn dagger which, you said,
Led you to Duncan.
(2) The Ghost seems to be created by Macbeth’s imagination; for his words,
With twenty mortal murders on their crowns,
with Macbeth, III. ii. 22 f.:
After life’s fitful fever he sleeps well;
Treason has done his worst: nor steel, nor poison,
Malice domestic, foreign levy, nothing,
Can touch him further.
In writing IV. i. Shakespeare can hardly have failed to remember the conjuring of the Spirit, and the ambiguous oracles, in 2 Henry VI. I. iv. The ‘Hyrcan tiger’ of Macbeth III. iv. 101, which is also alluded to in Hamlet, appears first in 3 Henry VI. I. iv. 155. Cf. Richard III. I. i. 92, ‘Nearer in bloody thoughts, but not in blood,’ with Macbeth II. iii. 146, ‘the near in blood, the nearer bloody’; Richard III. IV. ii. 64, ‘But I am in So far in blood that sin will pluck on sin,’ with Macbeth III. iv. 136, ‘I am in blood stepp’d in so far,’ etc. These are but a few instances. (It makes no difference whether Shakespeare was author or reviser of Titus and Henry VI.).
