That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,
And then is heard no more: it is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing."
Macbeth's philosophy, like Hamlet's, ends in utter doubt, in a passion
of contempt for life, deeper than anything in Dante. The word "syllable"
in this lyric outburst is as characteristic as the "dismal treatise" in
the previous one, and more characteristic still of Hamlet is the
likening of life to "a poor player."
The messenger tells Macbeth that Birnam Wood has begun to move, and he
sees that the witches have cheated him. He can only say, as Hamlet might
have said:
"I 'gin to be aweary of the sun,
And wish the estate o' the world were now undone.--
Ring the alarum bell! Blow wind! Come, wrack!
At least we'll die with harness on our back."
And later he cries:
"They have tied me to a stake; I cannot fly,
But bear-like I must fight the course."
This seems to me intensely characteristic of Hamlet; the brutal side of
action was never more contemptuously described, and Macbeth's next
soliloquy makes the identity apparent to every one; it is in the true
thinker-sceptic vein:
"Why should I play the Roman[1] fool and die
On mine own sword?"
[Footnote 1: About the year 1600 Shakespeare seems to have steeped
himself in Plutarch. For the next five or six years, whenever he thinks
of suicide, the Roman way of looking at it occurs to him. Having made up
his mind to kill himself, Laertes cries:
"I am more an antique Roman than a Dane,"
and, in like case, Cleopatra talks of dying "after the high Roman
fashion."]
Macbeth then meets Macduff, and there follows the confession of pity and
remorse, which must be compared to the gentle-kindness with which Hamlet
treats Laertes and Romeo treats Paris. Macbeth says to Macduff:
"Of all men else I have avoided thee:
But get thee back, my soul is too much charged
With blood of thine already."
Then comes the "something desperate" in him that Hamlet boasted of--and
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