Your face, my thane, is as a book, where men
May read strange matters; To beguile the time,
Look like the time; bear welcome in your eye,
Your hand, your tongue; look like the innocent flower,
But be the serpent under it.
In the next scene she practices that dissimulation which she has reproached Macbeth for wanting. Her reception of Duncan is full of ceremony and professions of duty.
The 7th Scene opens with the great soliloquy of Macbeth, “If it were done, when ’tis done,” etc. He dwells on the incongruity of his killing Duncan, who is there in double trust; “First as I am his kinsman and his subject; then as his host.” Duncan, too, “has borne his faculties so meek;” has been “so clear in his great office;” “he has honored me of late;” and “I have bought golden opinions from all sorts of people.” He resolves at last that he will proceed no further in the business. Lady Macbeth now enters to “chastise him with the valor of her tongue.” In the course of the argument that ensues, Macbeth shows his regard for appearances by saying:
I dare do all that may become a man,
Who dares do more is none.
whilst she shows her respect for the strictness of the letter by declaring that had she so sworn as he has done to this, she would, whilst her babe was smiling in her face, have “plucked her nipple from his boneless gums,” and dashed his brains out. She then proposes to drench the attendants with wine, and smear them with Duncan’s blood, so that suspicion may fall on them; also, “we will make our griefs and clamor roar upon his death.” And here the first act ends with these words: