Macb. Thou know'st that Banquo, and his Fleance, lives.
Lady M. But in them nature's copy's not eterne.
To Macbeth the one thing impossible is to wait; and once more his powerlessness to control suspense is his ruin.
The first Shock of Nemesis.
We have reviewed the contrasted characters under Temptation, in the Deed of sin itself, and in the struggle for Concealment: iii. iv.it remains to watch them face to face with their Nemesis. In the present play Shakespeare has combined the nemesis which takes the form of a sudden shock with the yet severer nemesis of a hopeless resistance through the stages of a protracted fall. The first Shock of Nemesis comes in the Banquet Scene. Macbeth has surrendered himself to the supernatural, and from the supernatural his retribution comes. This is not the place to draw out the terrible force of this famous scene; for its bearing on the contrast of character under delineation it is to be remarked that Macbeth faces his ghostly visitation with unflinching courage, yet without a shadow of doubt as to the reality of what nevertheless no one sees but himself. Lady Macbeth is equally true to her character, and fights on to the last in the now hopeless contest—her double task of keeping up appearances for herself and for her husband. Her keen tact in dealing with Macbeth is to be noted. At first she rallies him angrily, and seeks to shame him into self-command; a moment shows that he is too far gone to be reached by such motives. Instantly she changes her tactics, and, employing a device so often effective with patients of disordered brain, she endeavours to recall him to his senses by assuming an ordinary tone of voice; hitherto she has whispered, now, in the hearing of all, she makes the practical remark:
iii. iv. 83.
My worthy lord,
Your noble friends do lack you.
The device proves successful, his nerves respond to the tone of everyday life, and recovering himself he uses all his skill of deportment to efface the strangeness of the episode, until the reappearance of his victim plunges the scene in confusion past recovery. In the moment of crisis Lady Macbeth had used roughness to rouse her husband; iii. iv, from 122.when the courtiers are gone she is all tenderness. She utters not a word of reproach: perhaps she is herself exhausted by the strain she has gone through; more probably the womanly solicitude for the physical sufferer thinks only how to procure for her husband 'the season of all natures, sleep.'
The full Nemesis.