"Whither should I fly?
I have done no harm. But I remember now
I am in this earthly world, where, to do harm,
Is often laudable; to do good, sometime,
Accounted dangerous folly: why then, alas!
Do I put up that womanly defence,
To say I have done no harm?"
Equally despairing is Macduff's ejaculation when he learns of the slaughter in his home: "Did heaven look on, and would not take their part?" The beginning of this lengthy scene (iv. 3), with its endless dialogue between Malcolm and Macduff, which Shakespeare has transcribed literally from his Holinshed, is weak and flagging. It presents hardly any point of interest except the far-fetched account of King Edward the Confessor's power of curing the king's evil, evidently dragged in for the sake of paying King James a compliment which the poet knew he would value, in the lines—
"'Tis spoken,
To the succeeding royalty he leaves
The healing benediction."
But the close of the scene is admirable, when Rosse breaks the news to Macduff of the attack on his castle and the massacre of his family:—
"Macd. My children too?
Rosse. Wife, children, servants, all
That could be found.
Macd. And I must be from thence!
My wife kill'd too?
Rosse I have said.
Mal. Be comforted:
Let's make us medicines of our great revenge,
To cure this deadly grief.
Macd. He has no children.—All my pretty ones?
Did you say, all?—O hell-kite!—All?
What, all my pretty chickens, and their dam,
At one fell swoop?
Mai. Dispute it like a man.
Macd. I shall do so;
But I must also feel it as a man:
I cannot but remember such things were,
That were most precious to me.—Did Heaven look on,
And would not take their part?"
The voice of revolt makes itself heard in these words, the same voice that sounds later through the despairing philosophy of King Lear: "As flies to wanton boys, are we to the gods: They kill us for their sport." But immediately afterwards Macduff falls back on the traditional sentiment:—
"Sinful Macduff!
They are all struck for thee. Naught that I am,
Not for their own demerits, but for mine,
Fell slaughter on their souls."
Among these horror-stricken speeches there is one in particular that gives matter for reflection—Macduff's cry, "He has no children." At the close of the third part of Henry VI. there is a similar exclamation of quite different import. There, when King Edward, Gloucester, and Clarence have stabbed Margaret of Anjou's son before her eyes, she says:—
"You have no children, butchers! if you had,
The thought of them would have stirr'd up remorse."
Many interpreters have attributed the same sense to Macduff's cry of agony; but their mistake is plain; for the context undeniably shows that the one thought of the now childless father is the impossibility of an adequate revenge.