... function
Is smothered in surmise and nothing is
But what is not,----"

When Banquo draws attention to him as "rapt," Macbeth still goes on
talking to himself, for at length he has found arguments against action:

"If chance will have me King, why chance may crown me,
Without my stir,"--
all in the true Hamlet vein. At the end of the act, Macbeth when
excusing himself to his companions becomes the student of Wittenberg in
proper person. The courteous kindliness of the words is almost as
characteristic as the bookish illustration:

"Kind gentlemen, your pains
Are registered where every day I turn
The leaf to read them."

If this is not Hamlet's very tone, manner and phrase, then individuality
of nature has no peculiar voice.

I have laid such stress upon this, the first scene in which Macbeth
appears, because the first appearance is by far the most important for
the purpose of establishing the main outlines of a character; first
impressions in a drama being exceedingly difficult to modify and almost
impossible to change.

Macbeth, however, acts Hamlet from one end of the play to the other; and
Lady Macbeth's first appearance (a personage almost as important to the
drama as Macbeth himself) is used by Shakespeare to confirm this view of