mforted:
Let's makes us medicines of our great revenge,
To cure this deadly grief.

_Macd._ He has no children. All my pretty ones?
Did you say all? O hell-kite! All?
What, all my pretty chickens and their dam
At one fell swoop?

_Mal_. Dispute it like a man.

_Macd._ I shall do so;
But I must also feel it as a man:
I cannot but remember such things were,
That were most precious to me.--

Three interpretations have been offered of the words 'He has no
children.'

(_a_) They refer to Malcolm, who, if he had children of his own, would
not at such a moment suggest revenge, or talk of curing such a grief.
Cf. _King John_, III. iv. 91, where Pandulph says to Constance,

You hold too heinous a respect of grief,

and Constance answers,

He talks to me that never had a son.

(_b_) They refer to Macbeth, who has no children, and on whom therefore
Macduff cannot take an adequate revenge.

(_c_) They refer to Macbeth, who, if he himself had children, could
never have ordered the slaughter of children. Cf. _3 Henry VI._ V. v.
63, where Margaret says to the murderers of Prince Edward,

You have no children, butchers! if you had,
The thought of them would have stirred up remorse.

I cannot think interpretation (_b_) the most natural. The whole idea of
the passage is that Macduff must feel _grief_ first and before he can
feel anything else, _e.g._ the desire for vengeance. As he says directly
after, he cannot at once 'dispute' it like a man, but must 'feel' it as
a man; and it is not till ten lines later that he is able to pass to the
thought of revenge. Macduff is not the man to conceive at any time the
idea of killing children in retaliation; and that he contemplates it
_here_, even as a suggestion, I find it hard to believe.

For the same main reason interpretation (_a_) seems to me far more
probable than (_c_). What could be more consonant with the natural
course of the thought, as developed in the lines which follow, than that
Macduff, being told to think of revenge, not grief, should answer, 'No
one who was himself a father would ask that of me in the very first
moment of loss'? But the thought supposed by interpretation (_c_) has
not this natural connection.

It has been objected to interpretation (_a_) that, according to it,
Macduff would natural