MACDUFF      I have lost my hopes.

MALCOLM      Perchance even there where I did find my doubts.

Why in that rawness left you wife and child,

Those precious motives, those strong knots of love,

Without leave-taking? I pray you,

Let not my jealousies be your dishonours,

But mine own safeties. You may be rightly just,

Whatever I shall think.         (4.3.25-32)

Macduff’s despairing: this isn’t the welcome or the conversation he thought he’d be having with Malcolm. Rather than warmth, trust, confidence, comradeship, leading to a shared plan of action, he’s been greeted with suspicion. I have lost my hopes, he says. I came to you because I thought we’d work together to liberate Scotland, and not only do you not seem to want to, you’re suggesting that you distrust my motivations, you cast aspersions on my character. If that’s the case, I don’t know what to do anymore. (Macduff’s hopes, in another proleptic irony, can also suggest his children.) Malcolm’s not finished, though. He’s still concerned that Macduff’s motivations might be suspect; he doubts him, and he still thinks that he might have cause, good grounds for suspicion, in the situation that Macduff’s apparently left behind in Scotland. Why in that rawness left you wife and child, those precious motives, those strong knots of love, without leave-taking? Why on earth would you do that? Why leave them raw, vulnerable and unprotected? They’re the focus of your life, the precious motives of all that you do; you’re bound to them by strong knots of love, a family. This, of course, is both horribly ironic, and can also be carefully established if Macduff’s family has been present in earlier scenes, perhaps even interacting with Malcolm—maybe playing with the children—a contrast both to the Macbeths’ obsessive, exclusive coupledom and the two princes, Malcolm and Donalbain, with their elderly father Duncan. Macduff’s family can be the play’s clearest vision of familial love. (They might even be thought of as a version of the royal family of James VI and I and Anna of Denmark, Henry, Elizabeth, and Charles, aged between 11 and 4 at the time of the Gunpowder Plot, and baby Mary.) Why did you apparently abandon them so abruptly, without saying goodbye? Some editors point out that there’s a missing foot in the line before I pray you, perhaps cuing Macduff to respond with a gesture of anger or wretched despair in a loaded, felt pause. At any rate, Malcolm retreats a little: let not my jealousies be your dishonours, but mine own safeties. I’m not deliberately intending to insult you, to dishonour you, but rather my mean-spirited, suspicious comments are my own attempts to stay safe, to protect myself. No one else can look out for me; I can’t trust anyone too readily. But—he concedes—you may be rightly just, whatever I shall think. You may be telling the truth, be virtuous, have acted in the only way you could, a man of the utmost honesty—I’m just not wholly convinced, yet. I can’t be.