Glamis thou art, and Cawdor; and shalt be
What thou art promised. - Yet do I fear thy nature;
It is too full o' the milk of human kindness
To catch the nearest way. Thou wouldst be great;
Art not without ambition, but without
The illness should attend it: what thou wouldst highly,
That wouldst thou holily; wouldst not play false,
And yet wouldst wrongly win: thou'ldst have, great Glamis,
That which cries 'Thus thou must do', if thou have it;
And that which rather thou dost fear to do
Than wishest should be undone.
Lady Macbeth's first words of her own are to reiterate the prophecies of the witches, where "shalt be" echoes their words, suggesting the reverberations of the supernatural into even Macbeth's domestic setting. Her immediate worry is that Macbeth (contrary to our impression of him) is "too full o' the milk of human kindness / To catch the nearest way", that he will not act to make the prophecy become true. She is, it seems, correct in this assertion: Macbeth has attempted to suppress his "black and deep desires". Lady Macbeth's metaphor creates a tender, childlike image of Macbeth, one which is maternal and nourishing (in contrast to much of the later suspicion and violence expressed towards children). She acknowledges the coexistence of "kindness" and cruelty, a tension which Macbeth will struggle to keep in check throughout the remainder of Act 1. Her tone needs interpretation: the line can be read either as scorn and contempt for his perceived cowardice, or concern and consideration for his naïve loyalty to duty. Like Macbeth, the prophecies have turned her thoughts straight to murder, but she expresses it in euphemism - "the nearest way", suggesting she can view the idea with distance. The physical reality of the crime (and as such its ethical consequences) is not real to her, whereas Macbeth's battlefield exploits make him viscerally aware of what he is considering. Indeed, Lady Macbeth's lines continue hypothetically with the repetition of the conditional modal verb "wouldst" (six times in one sentence). It variously suggests conjecture and hope ("wouldst be great") and desire ("what thou wouldst highly") and consent ("wouldst wrongly win"), whilst being tinged with regret at a course already gaining momentum, a course strengthened by the stronger "must". The line is long, syntactically twisting between clauses, and hard to unpick. The words suggest a balanced rationality (we see things in pairs - "ambition" and "illness", "highly" and "holily", "false" and "win"), but the layered clauses suggest a struggle to contain any logical balance. Indeed, by the time we reach the end of the sentence, we are less certain what Lady Macbeth intends; the murder is referred to as "that" and the object of the murder, the crown, as "it". The determiners are vague - like the euphemisms, we must fill the gaps ourselves - and in doing so we become almost complicit in the thoughts of murder. Lady Macbeth is aware that Macbeth's strongest emotion is "fear", a word she has used to describe both herself and him. Their fears are different: Lady Macbeth's is distrust or worry, whereas Macbeth's is horror, alarm and agitation. Fear is set up as Macbeth's highest motivator, something we have witnessed already in the way he is horrified by his own thoughts, torn apart by the gap between desire and action. He does not want to act himself, but would not see it "undone", a passive reversal of chronology in contrast to the finality of the act itself ("what's done is done" in 3.2 and "what's done cannot be undone" in 5.1). Whether Lady Macbeth's words are intended as harsh criticism or fond (yet patronising) frustration, her commentary on Macbeth here sets him up as a humanised villain, fully aware of the difference between morality and desire.