To cry “Hold, Hold!”
Through this realm of darkness, that knows no dawn till that last hour when by the hand of Macduff “the time is free,” Shakespeare conducts his characters with no uncertain step. Lit as by the light of the under-world, the fell purpose of the guilty pair stands plainly revealed to us on the very threshold of the drama: the seeds of murder had been sown long ere the weird sisters have shrieked their fatal preface to the action; and before we meet with either Macbeth or his wife, the souls of both are already deeply dyed in blood. Nothing, indeed, could be more absurd than to suggest that the murder of Duncan is the fruit of sudden impulse on his part or hers; nor could anything be more destructive of the whole scheme of the poet’s work than the assumption that Macbeth’s enfeebled virtue was overborne by the satanic strength of her will. We cannot too often remind ourselves that there is no question of virtue here: it could not live in the air they had learned to breathe: it has passed beyond the ken of minds that have long brooded over crime. And it may be pointed out that Shakespeare himself has been at particular pains to make this clear to us; for he doubtless felt, and felt rightly, that unless the starting-point were clearly kept in view, the subsequent development of the action, with the contrast of character it is designed to illustrate, would lose all significance. Therefore at the first entrance of Macbeth, when the eulogy of others has but just pictured him to us as a soldier of dauntless courage fighting loyally for his sovereign, we are allowed to see that the thought of Duncan’s death has already found a lodging in his heart. As the weird sisters lift the veil of the future and point the dark way to the throne, the vision that presents itself to his eyes is but the mirrored image of the bloody picture seated in his own brain; and in foretelling the end, they wring from his lips a confession of the means which he has already devised for its fulfilment:
Why do I yield to that suggestion
Whose horrid image doth unfix my hair,
And make my seated heart knock at my ribs,
Against the use of nature? Present fears
Are less than horrible imaginings:
My thought, whose murder yet is but fantastical,
Shakes so my single state of man, that function
Is smothered in surmise; and nothing is