Without my stir.
i. vii.
On the eve of his great crime the suspense of the few hours that must intervene before the banquet can be despatched and Duncan can retire becomes intolerable to Macbeth, and he is for abandoning the treason. In the next stage it is the suspense of a single moment that impels him to stab the grooms. From this point suspense no longer comes by fits and starts, but is a settled disease: iii. ii. 13, 36, &c.his mind is as scorpions; it is tortured in restless ecstasy. Suspense has undermined his judgment and brought on him the gambler's fever—the haunting thought that just one more venture will make him safe; in spite of the opposition of his reason—iii. ii. 45.which his unwillingness to confide the murder of Banquo to his wife betrays—he is carried on to work the additional crime which unmasks the rest. And finally suspense intensifies to a panic, and he himself feels that his deeds—
iii. iv. 140.
must be acted ere they may be scann'd.
The third feature in Macbeth is the quickening of his sensitiveness to the supernatural side by side with the deadening of his conscience. Imagination becomes, as it were, a pictorial conscience for one to whom its more rational channels have been closed: the man who 'would jump the world to come' accepts implicitly every word that falls from a witch. Now this imagination is at first a restraining force in Macbeth: i. iii. 134.the thought whose image unfixes his hair leads him to abandon the treason. When later he has, under pressure, delivered himself again to the temptation, there are still signs that imagination is a force on the other side that has to be overcome:
i. iv. 50.
Stars, hide your fires;
Let not light see my black and deep desires:
The eye wink at the hand.