Had I but died an hour before this chance, / I had liv’d a blessed time; for, from this instant / There’s nothing serious in mortality. / All is but toys: renown and grace is dead; / The wine of life is drawn, and the mere lees / Is left this vault to brag of.
Act II, Scene 3 · Macbeth
Context
Macbeth, standing in the room where Duncan's body has just been discovered, claims he wishes he had died before this moment, because now life has lost all meaning and value.
Analysis
The extended metaphor of life as wine—now 'drawn,' leaving only 'lees' (dregs)—sounds beautifully composed, which is the problem: Macbeth has had time to craft this. Where Macduff's language broke apart, Macbeth's flows smoothly, suggesting rehearsal or at least a mind still capable of aesthetic control. The claim that 'all is but toys' rings false because Macbeth is the one who made it so, yet he speaks as if he's a passive mourner. The eloquence itself becomes evidence of guilt, positioning us to distrust anyone who can perform grief this skillfully.
Essay Tip
Support a thesis that Shakespeare uses the quality of a character's rhetoric as a lie detector—Macbeth's polished metaphors and balanced syntax here reveal him as false precisely because real shock, as we've just seen in Macduff, destroys eloquence rather than producing it.