Than on the torture of the mind to lie
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is strangeness, then, and his suffering, and also the fact that he is notprofiting from his crimes, help to explain the fact that he does notalienate us. Notice that the feast of Act I has moved onstage to become thebanquet of Act III, so that we now see the atrocious linkage made byMacbeth between hospitality and murder. The fact also that it isBanquo murdered, who was declaring, “In the great hand of God Istand,” is striking. God seems altogether remote here in the centralact— a place of the witches, the tyrant, the murderers, the Ghost,Act IV is much lower in key than any of the first three acts, as isusual in Shakespearean tragedy. Such tension cannot and ought not tobe sustained. First there is the witches’ spectacle, hard only on thenerves of Macbeth, an ironic or sycophantic pleasure to its first audi-ence; then the short pathetic scene of the killings at Fife; then thelong— very long— scene in England of the tempting of Macduff,Clearly there is nothing high here. But the scenes are not unrelated:the first ruins Macbeth’s dynastic hopes, the second completes theruin of his moral claims, the third looks to the ruin of his security. 62
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