So thick the blinding cloud
That o'er him floats; and Rumour widely spread
With many a sigh repeats the dreary doom,
A mist that o'er the house
In gathering darkness broods.
Such Infatuation is very far from being inconsistent with the idea of Law; indeed, it appears repeatedly in the strong figures of Scriptural speech, by which the ripening of sin to its own destruction—a merciful law of a righteously-ordered universe—is suggested as the direct act of Him who is the founder of the universe and its laws. By such figures God is represented as hardening Pharaoh's heart; or, again, an almost technical description of Infatuation is put by the fervour of prophecy into the mouth of God:
Make the heart of this people fat, and make their ears heavy, and shut their eyes; lest they see with their eyes, and hear with their ears, and understand with their heart, and convert, and be healed.
v. viii. 13.
In the case of Macbeth the judicial blindness is maintained to the last moment, and he pauses in the final combat to taunt Macduff with certain destruction. Yet, while we thus get the full dramatic effect of Infatuation, it is so far rationalised that we are allowed to see the machinery by which the Infatuation has been brought about: iii. v. 16.we have heard the Witches arrange to deceive Macbeth with false oracles. A very dramatic, but wholly natural, example of Infatuation appears at the turning-point of Richard's career, where, when he has just discovered that Richmond is the point from which the storm of Nemesis threatens to break upon him, iv. ii. 98, &c.prophecies throng upon his memory which might have all his life warned him of this issue, had he not been blind to them till this moment. i. iii. 131.Again, Antonio's challenge to Shylock to do his worst is, as I have already pointed out, an outburst of hybris, the insolence of Infatuation: but this is no more than a natural outcome of a conflict between two implacable temperaments. In Infatuation, then, as in all its other forms, Destiny is exhibited by Shakespeare as harmonised with natural law.
Supernatural agencies.