--Johnson's remark that the events are so great that they
overpower the persons and prevent nice discrimination of character
is partly true.
Coleridge notices that Lady Macbeth was a person of high rank,
living much alone. A darkly meditative mind left in solitude can
conceive without being startled the most awful designs. The same
imagination in Lady Macbeth which brooded over the plot against
Duncan's life drove her to delirium and suicide.
Shakespeare transfers the most perilous stuff in him to Macbeth.
The function smothered in surmise; the reflection on the emptiness
of life--tale told by an idiot--Shakespeare empties it into this
murderous traitor. He makes him the PREY of that which is mixed in
the composition of the best.
The witches do not strike us as miraculous. They are not
supernatural, but extensions of the natural.
It is an apology for emendation that one of the most celebrated
passages in the play is based on conjecture (confirmed by what
follows) and on analogy.
'I dare do all that may become a man;
Who dares NO [Folio] more is none.
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