confession:
"Within this bosom never enter'd yet
The dreadful motion of a murderous thought."
The murders take place and the silly scenes in England between Malcolm
and Macduff follow, and then come Lady Macbeth's illness, and the
characteristic end. The servant tells Macbeth of the approach of the
English force, and he begins the wonderful monologue:
"my May of life
Is fall'n into the sear, the yellow leaf;
And that which should accompany old age,
As honour, love, obedience, troops of friends,
I must not look to have; but in their stead
Curses, not loud, but deep, mouth-honour, breath
Which the poor heart would fain deny, and dare not."
Truly this is a strange murderer who longs for "troops of friends," and
who at the last push of fate can find in himself kindness enough towards
others to sympathize with the "poor heart." All this is pure Hamlet; one
might better say, pure Shakespeare.
We are next led into the field with Malcolm and Macduff, and immediately
back to the castle again. While the women break into cries, Macbeth
soliloquizes in the very spirit of bookish Hamlet:
"I have almost forgot the taste of fears.
The time has been, my senses would have cooled
To hear a night-shriek; and my fell of hair
Would at a dismal treatise rouse and stir
As life were in 't."
The whole passage, and especially the "dismal treatise," recalls the
Wittenberg student with a magic of representment.
The death of the Queen is announced, and wrings from Macbeth a speech
full of despairing pessimism, a bitterer mood than ever Hamlet knew; a
speech, moreover, that shows the student as well as the incomparable
lyric poet:
"She should have died hereafter:
There would have been a time for such a word.--
To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,
To the last syllable of recorded time;
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!
Life's but a walking shadow; a poor player,
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