_,
And keep the natural ruby of your cheeks,
When mine is blanch'd with fear.]

[Footnote 225: 'Luxurious' and 'luxury' are used by Shakespeare only in
this older sense. It must be remembered that these lines are spoken by
Malcolm, but it seems likely that they are meant to be taken as true
throughout.]

[Footnote 226: I do not at all suggest that his love for his wife
remains what it was when he greeted her with the words 'My dearest love,
Duncan comes here to-night.' He has greatly changed; she has ceased to
help him, sunk in her own despair; and there is no intensity of anxiety
in the questions he puts to the doctor about her. But his love for her
was probably never unselfish, never the love of Brutus, who, in somewhat
similar circumstances, uses, on the death of Cassius, words which remind
us of Macbeth's:

I shall find time, Cassius, I shall find time.

For the opposite strain of feeling cf. Sonnet 90:

Then hate me if thou wilt; if ever, now,
Now while the world is bent my deeds to cross.]

LECTURE X

MACBETH

1

To regard _Macbeth_ as a play, like the love-tragedies _Romeo and
Juliet_ and _Antony and Cleopatra_, in which there are two central
characters of equal importance, is certainly a mistake. But Shakespeare
himself is in a measure responsible for it, because the first half of
_Macbeth_ is greater than the second, and in the first half Lady Macbeth
not only appears more than in the second but exerts the ultimate
deciding influence on the action. And, in the opening Act at least, Lady
Macbeth is the most commanding and perhaps the most awe-inspiring figure
that Shakespeare drew. Sharing, as we have seen, certain traits with her
husband, she is at once clearly distinguished from him by an
inflexibility of will, which appears to hold imagination, feeling, and
conscience completely in check. To her the prophecy of things that will
be becomes instantaneously the determination that they shall be:

Glamis thou art, and Cawdor, and shalt be
That thou art promised.

She knows her husband's weakness, how he scruples 'to catch the nearest
way' to the object he desires; and she sets herself without a trace of
doubt or conflict to counteract this weakness. To her there is no
separation between will and deed; and, as the deed falls in part to her,
she is sure it will be done:

The raven himself is hoarse
That croaks the fatal entrance of