“I have no spur To prick the sides of my intent, but only Vaulting ambition, which o’erleaps itself And falls on th’ other.”

Context. These lines are taken from Macheth Written by Shakespeare

Explanation: Shakespearean scholars almost unanimously agree that de berries fully responsible for his actions.

It is certainly his “vaulting ambition” that makes him murder Duncan, and then the fear of insecurity does not let his mind take a rest.

In Christian terms, Macbeth is completely free to choose his course of action. He commands reason which scans the whole situation before he decides to kill Duncan. He himself speaks well of Duncan:

Besides, this Duncan

Hath borne his faculties so meek, hath been

So clear in his great office, that his virtues

Will plead like angels, trumpet-tongud.

I have no spur. To prick the sides of my intent, but only

Vaulting ambition, which o’erleaps itself

And falls on th other.

This frank admission of Duncan’s qualities and of his own evil makes Macheth decide not to murder but after Lady Macbeth’s sweeping persuasion, it is his own decision that settles him to commit regicide. In the same way, before contriving Banquo’s murder, he analyses the situation and reaches a very logical conclusion that to be safely thus” is better than to be thus”. 

However, his frantic “bare-fac d power is used without the force of reasoning in surprising Macduff’s house and killing the innocent Macduff’s.

But, at this stage, he has reached the point of no return; he has “Suppd full with horror;” and he has strange things in his head “which must be acted, ere they may be scanned”.

The witches are not capable of compelling Macbeth to do wrong: they can only persuade by announcing future events.

It is only a responding emotion within Macbeth which makes him interpret the prophecies of the witches after his own wishes.

Bradley says that the words of the witches are fatal to the hero only because there is in him something that leaps into light at the sound of them.

In dramatic terms, the witches cannot be only a dire ambition “slumbering in the hero’s soul” because, in addition to Macbeth’s ambition, Bradley says, they must represent “all those obscurer influences of evil around him.”

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