while he, brainsick, rehearses past fears and shows himself the sensitive poet-dreamer inclined to piety: here is the incredible scene:
“Lady M. There are two lodged together.
Macb. One cried, 'God bless us!' and 'Amen' the other,
As they had seen me with these hangman's hands.
Listening their fear, I could not say 'Amen,'
When they did say 'God bless us.'
Lady M. Consider it not so deeply.
Macb. But wherefore could not I pronounce 'Amen'?
I had most need of blessing, and 'Amen'
Stuck in my throat.”
This religious tinge colouring the weakness of self-pity is to be found again and again in “Hamlet”; Hamlet, too, is religious-minded; he begs Ophelia to remember his sins in her orisons. When he first sees his father's ghost he cries:
“Angels and ministers of grace defend us,”
and when the ghost leaves him his word is, “I'll go pray.” This new trait, most intimate and distinctive, is therefore the most conclusive proof of the identity of the two characters. The whole passage in the mouth of a murderer is utterly unexpected and out of place; no wonder Lady Macbeth exclaims:
“These deeds must not be thought
After these ways: so, it will make us mad.”
But nothing can restrain Macbeth; he gives rein to his poetic imagination, and breaks out in an exquisite lyric, a lyric which has hardly any closer relation to the circumstances than its truth to Shakespeare's nature:
“Methought I heard a voice cry, 'Sleep no more!
Macbeth does murder sleep,'—the innocent sleep:
Sleep, that knits up the ravelled sleave of care,”
and so forth—the poet in love with his own imaginings.
Again Lady Macbeth tries to bring him back to a sense of reality; tells him his thinking unbends his strength, and finally urges him to take the daggers back and