TEXT:
MACBETH (continued)
To ROSS and ANGUS
Thanks for your pains.
To BANQUO
Do you not hope your children shall be kings,
When those that gave the thane of Cawdor to me
Promised no less to them?
BANQUO
That trusted home
Might yet enkindle you unto the crown,
Besides the thane of Cawdor. But 'tis strange:
And oftentimes, to win us to our harm,
The instruments of darkness tell us truths,
Win us with honest trifles, to betray us
In deepest consequence.
Cousins, a word, I pray you.
MACBETH (Aside)
Two truths are told,
As happy prologues to the swelling act
Of the imperial theme. I thank you, gentlemen.
This supernatural soliciting
Cannot be ill, cannot be good: if ill,
Why hath it given me earnest of success,
Commencing in a truth? I am thane of Cawdor.
If good, why do I yield to that suggestion
Whose horrid image doth unfix my hair
And make my seated heart knock at my ribs,
Against the use of nature? Present fears
Are less than horrible imaginings:
My thought, whose murder yet is but fantastical,
Shakes so my single state of man that function
Is smothered in surmise, and nothing is
But what is not.
BANQUO
Look, how our partner's rapt.
MACBETH
If chance will have me king, why, chance may crown me,
Without my stir.
BANQUO
New honours come upon him,
Like our strange garments, cleave not to their mould
But with the aid of use.
MACBETH
Come what come may,
Time and the hour runs through the roughest day.
BANQUO
Worthy Macbeth, we stay upon your leisure.
MACBETH
Give me your favour - my dull brain was wrought
With things forgotten. Kind gentlemen, your pains
Are registered where every day I turn
The leaf to read them. Let us toward the king.
Think upon what hath chanced, and, at more time,
The interim having weighed it, let us speak
Our free hearts each to other.
BANQUO
Very gladly.
MACBETH
Till then, enough. Come, friends.
Exeunt