Yet do I fear thy nature;
It is too full o’ the milk of human kindness,
To catch the nearest way. Thou would’st be great;
Art not without ambition; but without
The illness should attend it. What thou would’st highly,
That thou would’st holily; would’st not play false,
And yet would’st wrongly win.
And that we may be in no doubt as to the original source from which this diabolical plot proceeded, Shakespeare makes the truth doubly plain to us in a subsequent passage. When the hesitation, which she had feared, threatens to wreck their cherished scheme of crime, she reminds him that in its inception the idea was his, not hers:
What beast was’t, then,
That made you break this enterprise to me?