Page:The Psychology of Shakespeare.pdf/26

Rh of his great crime, before the suggestion of it arising from the devil's interview on Fores heath. That he yields to it is only too evident from the passage beginning “Stars hide your fires.” That his wife should form the same guilty pur pose, upon the mere recital in his letter of the supernatural information he had obtained of that which was in the “coming on of time,” proves not that he had suggested it to her, but that she is prone to entertain it on slighter grounds, and that there is between them that unity of thought and desire which is common between man and wife who are much wrapt up in each other. The struggle with which Macbeth yields to the suggestion is so fierce that horror and pain are forthwith stamped upon his features.

His wife exclaims, when he meets her :

“Your face, my thane, is like a book, where men May read strange matters.” For herself, she hath no faltering ; she hath no need of supernatural appearances to “prick the sides of her intent.” Ambition and the desire “of sovereign sway and masterdom,” are to her undaunted metal the all-sufficient motives of the

terrible deed which she plotted and instigated, and would have perpetrated, had not a touch of filial piety withheld her hand. Strange inconsistency of humanity which leaves not the darkest moments of the lost soul without stray gleams of light. “Had he not resembled

My father as he slept, I had done't.” It is one of the “compunctious visitings of nature,” against which she invokes the murdering ministers whose sightless substances wait on nature's mischief, in that expression of sublimated

wickedness in

which

she welcomes

the fatal

entrance of Duncan under her battlements.


 * The wavering of Macbeth, expressed in his first soliloquy,

appears to us very different from the “prudential reasonings”