Macbeth, however, acts Hamlet from one end of the play to the other; and Lady Macbeth's first appearance (a personage almost as important to the drama as Macbeth himself) is used by Shakespeare to confirm this view of Macbeth's character. After reading her husband's letter almost her first words are:
“Yet do I fear thy nature.
It is too full o' the milk of human kindness
To catch the nearest way.”
What is this but a more perfect expression of Hamlet's nature than Hamlet himself gives? Hamlet declares bitterly that he is “pigeon livered,” and lacks “gall to make oppression bitter”; he says to Laertes, “I loved you ever,” and to his mother:
“I must be cruel only to be kind,”
and she tells the King that he wept for Polonius' death. But the best phrase for his gentle-heartedness is what Lady Macbeth gives here: he is “too full o' the milk of human kindness.” The words are as true of the Scottish chieftain as of the Wittenberg student; in heart they are one and the same person.
Though excited to action by his wife, Macbeth's last words in this scene are to postpone decision. “We will speak further,” he says, whereupon the woman takes the lead, warns him to dissemble, and adds, “leave all the rest to me.” Macbeth's doubting, irresolution, and dislike of action could hardly be more forcibly portrayed.
The seventh scene of the first act begins with another long soliloquy by Macbeth, and this soliloquy shows us not only Hamlet's irresolution and untimely love of meditation, but also the peculiar pendulum-swing of Hamlet's thought:
“If it were done when 'tis done, then 'twere well
It were done quickly: if the assassination
Could trammel up the consequence, and catch
With his surcease success: that but this blow
Might be the be-all and the end-all; here,
But here upon this bank and shoal of time
We'd jump the life to come. . . . .”
Is not this the same soul which also in a soliloquy questions fate?—“Whether 'tis better in the mind....”
Macbeth, too, has Hamlet's peculiar and exquisite intellectual fairness—a quality, be it remarked in passing, seldom found in a ruthless murderer. He sees even the King's good points: