This is no mere acting. The language here has none of the false rhetoric of his merely hypocritical speeches. It is meant to deceive, but it utters at the same time his profoundest feeling. And this he can henceforth never hide from himself for long. However he may try to drown it in further enormities, he hears it murmuring,
After life’s fitful fever he sleeps well:
or,
or,
and it speaks its last words on the last day of his life:
Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour ⟨upon⟩, the stage
And then is heard no more: it is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.
How strange that this judgment on life, the despair of a man who had knowingly made mortal war on his own soul, should be frequently quoted as Shakespeare’s own judgment, and should even be adduced, in serious criticism, as a proof of his pessimism!
It remains to look a little more fully at the history of Macbeth after the murder of Duncan. Unlike his first struggle this history excites little suspense or anxiety on his account: we have now no hope for him. But it is an engrossing spectacle, and psychologically it is perhaps the most remarkable exhibition of the development of a character to be found in Shakespeare’s tragedies.
That heart-sickness which comes from Macbeth’s perception of the futility of his crime, and which never leaves him for long, is not, however, his habitual state. It could not be so, for two reasons. In the first place the consciousness of guilt is
