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: