“There is none but he
Whose being I do fear”:...
This proves, as nothing else could prove, the all-pervading, attaching kindness of Shakespeare's nature. Again and again Lady Macbeth saves the situation and tries to shame her husband into stern resolve, but in vain; he's “quite unmann'd in folly.”
Had Macbeth been made ambitious, as the commentators assume, there would have been a sufficient motive for his later actions. But ambition is foreign to the Shakespeare-Hamlet nature, so the poet does not employ it. Again and again he returns to the explanation that the timid grow dangerous when “frighted out of fear.” Macbeth says:
“But let the frame of things disjoint, both the worlds suffer
Ere we will eat our meal in fear, and sleep
In the affliction of these terrible dreams
That shake us nightly.”
In passing I may remark that Hamlet, too, complains of “bad dreams.”
In deep Hamlet melancholy, Macbeth now begins to contrast his state with Duncan's:
“After life's fitful fever he sleeps well.
Treason has done his worst: nor steel nor poison,
Malice domestic, foreign levy, nothing,
Can touch him further.”
Lady Macbeth begs him to sleek o'er his rugged looks, be bright and jovial. He promises obedience; but soon falls into the dark mood again and predicts “a deed of dreadful note.” Naturally his wife questions him, and he replies:
“Be innocent of the knowledge, dearest chuck,
Till thou applaud the deed. Come, seeling night,
Scarf up the tender eye of pityful day,
And with thy bloody and invisible hand
Cancel and tear to pieces that great bond
Which keeps me pale.”
No other motive for murder is possible to Shakespeare-Macbeth but fear.