All is not lost, the unconquerable will ...
And courage never to submit or yield.
But when that strange bundle of greatness and littleness which makes up man attempts to oppose with such weapons the Almighty, how is he to provide for those states in which the will is no longer the governing force in his nature; for the sickness, in which the mind may have to share the feebleness of the body, or for the daily suspension of will in sleep? Richard can to the last preserve his will from faltering. But, like all the rest of mankind, he must some time sleep: that which is the refuge of the honest man, when he may relax the tension of daily care, sleep, is to Richard his point of weakness, when the safeguard of invincible will can protect him no longer. It is, then, this weak moment which a mocking fate chooses for hurling upon Richard the whole avalanche of his doom; as he starts into the frenzy of his half-waking soliloquy we see him, as it were, tearing off layer after layer of artificial reasonings with which the will-struggles of a lifetime have covered his soul against the touch of natural remorse. With full waking his will is as strong as ever: but meanwhile his physical nature has been shattered to its depths, and it is only the wreck of Richard that goes to meet his death on Bosworth Field.
Remaining stages of the fall.
There is no need to dwell on the further stages of the fall: to the last the tantalising mockery continues. v. iii. 303.Richard's spirits rise with the ordering of the battle, and there comes the mysterious scroll to tell him he is bought and sold. v. iii. 342.His spirits rise again as the fight commences, and news comes of Stanley's long feared desertion. v. iv. 11.Five times in the battle he has slain his foe, and five times it proves a false Richmond. Thus slowly the cup is drained to its last dregs and Richard dies. i. i, from 1.The play opened with the picture of peace, the peace which led Richard's turbid soul, no longer finding scope in physical warfare, to turn to the moral war of villainy; from that point through all the crowded incidents has raged the tumultuous battle between Will and Nemesis; with Richard's death it ceases, and the play may return to its keynote:
v. v. 40.
Now civil wounds are stopp'd, peace lives again.
[VI.]
How Nemesis and Destiny are interwoven in Macbeth.