“To Meet with Macbeth,” given by tutor Louis ... - St. John's College

To Meet With Macbeth
Louis Petrich
Act I Scene 1
Thunder and Lightning. Enter Three Witches.
1. When shall we three meet again?
In thunder, lightning, or in rain?
2. When the hurly-burly’s done,
When the battle’s lost and won.
3. That will be ere the set of sun.
1. Where the place?
2. Upon the heath.
3. There to meet with Macbeth.
1. I come, Graymalkin.
2. Paddock calls.
3. Anon!
All. Fair is foul, and foul is fair,
Hover through the fog and filthy air.
Exit.
(I.i.1-11)
Thus begins Macbeth, Shakespeare’s Scottish play. 1 Both King Lear and Antony and Cleopatra,
written just before and after Macbeth respectively, also begin with dramatic prologues that situate us to
see how their worlds go. But this beginning is unforgettable. The first mysterious sources of action
burst into awareness upon that first explosion of thunder--“the excessive noise that makes all things
tremble.” 2
Fear is the first and the prevailing affect of the play. Startled with fear, we reflexively incline
towards those hurried whispers or defensive gestures that will reverberate on stage for the next two
hours: “What are you?” (I.iii.47; II.iii.16), “Give me your hand” (I.vi.28; V.i.170), “Who’s there?” (II.i.10,
ii.8, iii.3, 7, 12; III.i.72), “Give me my sword” (II.i.9), “What is that noise?” (II.ii.14; IV.i.106; V.v.8),
“Whence is that knocking?” (II.ii.56), “What are these faces?” (IV.ii.77), “Run away, I pray you” (IV.ii.83),
“God, God forgive us all” (V.i.79), “Put mine armor on” (V.iii.33, 36, 48). The thunder that initiates this
progress of fear is not Lear’s thunder, which we hear approach as weather does from a distance and as
1 Parts of this essay were delivered as a public lecture at St. John’s College in Annapolis, April 20, 2012.
2 Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters To A Young Poet.
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counterpoint to rising internal storms. The thunder of this Scottish world comes suddenly, proof that
our exquisite senses that we rely upon to prepare us to meet the world are inadequate informers of
what comes to inhabit our world. There is no way to close the gates of hearing to this thunder, as we
can close or turn away our eyes from ugliness, and no shields will serve as defense. Its loudness is an
unavoidable blow that upsets our confident repose in civilization, and its lightning is no sign of a link to
heaven that we would like to believe holds us in its hands.
Three strange forms are summoned into our presence three times in this play, not by human
action or voice, which serve as cues to summon the other characters, but by the thunder. Thus they are
not under the causation of the human mind— there are no human minds yet on this stage; whatever
they are, they are already out there. They call themselves “Weird Sisters,” as do Macbeth and Banquo,
the only characters to meet them. This word “Weird” can be mono- or disyllabic as in “weyard” (similar
to our “wayward”). This word occurs nowhere else in Shakespeare’s plays, and thus the ambiguity of
their identities and purposes is authoritative. We may be tempted to call them “witches,” as does the
sailor’s wife, who has chestnuts in her lap:
1. And mounched, and mounched, and mounched.
”Give me,” quoth [the first Sister].
“Aroint thee, witch!” the rump-fed ronyon cries.
Her husband’s to Aleppo gone, master o’ th’ Tiger:
But in a sieve I’ll thither sail,
And, like a rat without a tail
I’ll do, I’ll do, and I’ll do.
(I.iii.4-10)
The big-butted, scabby sailor’s wife names what she does not know, while denying the outstretched
hand of the first Sister. (This is the signature gesture of the play, as we shall see.) The chestnuts that
she guards in her lap (and “mounches” greedily) are her seeds of future potential that she keeps secure
in her most personal place by pronouncing an easy moral judgment on the owner of the hand: “witch.”
Let us not make her mistake by keeping safely to our sedentary reading laps our seeds of becoming in a
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world not yet formed. Rather, let us give ourselves to the outstretched hand of desire that invites us
into the secret, fantastical places of the playwright’s soul to challenge the comfortable domains of
present time and place. Thus the other affect of this fearful prologue is the desire for more meetings
with what we fear so that we might know all the possibilities of our becoming. (That is why we attend
tragedies.) The word “more” is a ritual word in Macbeth, spoken frequently to further the action of the
ubiquitous “d” words: “do,” “dare,” “deed,” “done,” “dagger,” “death,” and “double.” “Double” is a
certain kind of “more” that we shall meet with the most.
The three alternating voices of the Sisters form three sections of three or five lines each, mostly
rhymed, each section addressing a nervous question we have: “when is this?” “where are we?” and
“what are the names of note?” They also speak a final rhymed couplet. Despite several obvious
deviations, Shakespeare’s sonnet form is discernible. The discipline of the sonnet helped to teach
Shakespeare the playwright how to present a complete world in the afternoon form of a five act play.
The distortions from regularity in the prologue make us wonder if this play will fulfill our expectations of
resolution according to form. The final couplet epitomizes this wonder: “Fair is foul and foul is fair.”
When opposites serve to name each other, thought and speech are confounded, noble splendor is
forbidden by the fog, and filth loses its repugnance—“so, it will make us mad” (II.ii.33). The play thus
addresses in the concrete form of human action the greatest of all questions: the difference between
good and bad as they appear to the senses and feelings as fair and foul. Will the playwright clear away
the fog and the filth of this Scottish air to let the fair and the foul things distinctly appear and be known?
We shall see.
The Sisters’ next meeting is “ere the set of sun” “on the heath,” an uncultivated land that could
yet be planted in the last of the light. Macbeth calls the place a “blasted heath” (I.iii.77). “Blasted”
indicates something pernicious that keeps the heath blighted so that not even a king could garden it.
This blasted heath has inward dimensions. It is the soul of a childless, deeply introspective warrior,
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married to a fiercely ambitious Lady, whom he loves. The time is late in the day, a day that should be
his, because he won it in that battle “lost and won.” Yet the day is not his. It is King Duncan’s. The
“hurly-burly” that is pronounced “done” by the Sisters is the attempt at political innovation by the
rebels and foreign invaders who are defeated by Macbeth’s “personal venture” on the battlefield
(I.iii.91). These political activities do not get honored with a name. But from among all humanity that
toils and troubles in the hurly-burly, the Sisters name one man, “Macbeth,” whom they will meet and
greet with the angel’s salutation of “hail.” But this heralded man is full--not of grace--but of the
common human misery of wanting what he does not have. “Give me” is the common cry of the
outstretched hand, which denied, becomes the cry, “I’ll do, I’ll do, and I’ll do.” Saint James puts this
common condition most succinctly in his epistle: “You want something and do not have it, so you
commit murder” (4.2). It is not only Hamlet’s vengefulness, Othello’s jealousy, or Lear’s anger that
Shakespeare presents as our common tragic potential, but also Macbeth’s “black and deep desires” and
bloodlust (I.iv.51). Shakespeare is not much interested in this play in the Machiavellian strategies of
acquiring and maintaining dominion over others, but in what if feels like as a man or woman to want, to
do, and to get as a criminal. It is hard to know Macbeth because we do not want to feel the criminal
part of ourselves. Let us be brave and treat desire profoundly. It is most important to understand at the
start that Macbeth becomes a tyrant by daring to treat his desires as promises that are made to him by
profound sources that compel belief and assist action. What he desires is what man ultimately desires:
to be at unity with himself and the world; to harmonize thought, speech, and action; to attain his
source--which is his perfection--“whole as the marble, founded as the rock,/As broad and general as the
casing air;” to wear “the golden round” as “the ornament of life” adorning the name, Macbeth, which
means, “Son of life” (I.v.29; vii.42; III.iv.23-24). We call to desires that are promises to be kept by our
sources with the word “Come,” as in: “Thy Kingdom come.” Likewise, we respond to the call of desire
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from our sources with this same word of promise of ourselves, as in: “I come, Graymalkin. Paddock
calls.”
Anon, let us meet with Macbeth. That is all I propose to do in this essay—to meet him with risk
in his world by letting him take us over somewhat in ours. As Lincoln said, who was himself taken by the
pleasures of its temptations, “the play is unsurpassed.” The lecture thus seeks to illuminate and compel
by means not restricted to objective argument. In Act I we shall meet Macbeth five times: (i) “the
unseamer” of the battlefield; (ii) “the seer” on the heath; (iii) “the servant” of the King; (iv) “the
transporter” of the Lady; and (v) “more the man” at the feast. In Act II we meet the murderer; in Act III
the tyrant; and in Act IV the knower and doer of nameless things. We shall end by meeting the nihilist of
Act V who still bears the name of note, “Macbeth,” to be pitied and feared.
Act I. First Meeting. The Unseamer.
The battlefield reports of Macbeth’s deeds in suppressing the opening rebellion and foreign
invasion, though they come as “thick as tale,” still cannot keep pace with their incredible performance
(I.iii.97). He fights against the “kerns and gallowglasses” in the west and the King of Norway five
hundred miles to the east by “carv[ing] out his passage” through the bodies of human foes as
masterfully as the mind and hand would measure these amplitudes of space and time with instruments
of art (I.ii.13, 19). The first image we get of him comes from the Captain who witnesses his combat in
the west against “the merciless MacDonwald”:
Captain.
For brave Macbeth--well he deserves that name--
Disdaining Fortune, with his brandished steel,
Which smoked with bloody execution,
Like valor’s minion carved out his passage
Till he faced the slave;
Which ne’er shook hands, nor bade farewell to him,
Till he unseamed him from the nave to th’ chops,
And fixed his head upon our battlements.
Duncan.
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O valiant cousin, worthy gentleman!
(I.ii. 16-24)
Think about that terrific image. In the pause after “faced the slave” we have a half-line to feel the
absence of any Homeric or chivalric interludes of respect in the unstoppable, uniquely purposeful killing
by Macbeth. He attacks his opponents along the assailable seam of human identity that marks man as
bilateral, symmetrical, or in the outstanding word of the play, “double.” Let us articulate, by anticipating
what is to come, the modes of doubleness that make this human form Macbeth’s enemy: one hand
clutches for more and more, the other holds its own; one foot struts boldly forward, the other creeps
behind; one ear hears sounds or voices that speak to hope or despair, while the other ear hears no
meanings in them; one eye sees the outside world, the other sees the world inside; the soul aspires
“highly,” yet “holily”; would “wrongly win,” yet “not play false”; ambitious, yet kind; “nothing afeard” of
its own “strange images of death,” yet for safety this soul keeps a “servant fee’d” in every house; prone
to doubt, deliberation, suspicion, indecision, broken promises-- the “genius [of man] is [thus] rebuked,
as it is said/Mark Antony’s was by Caesar”--with every personal deed belonging to someone else in the
course of history: to Duncan, to Banquo and Fleance, and to the boy Malcolm (I.ii.96,97; I.v.21-23;
III.i.61-62; III.iv.133). And so Macbeth rips them open--those who bear this double form--“from the nave
to the chops.” The nave is the mark of man’s birth from woman, the memorialized first portal of his
food from woman--the begetting wife and the nurturing mother, man’s original partner, his feminine
double (more toil and trouble). What kind of man calls his wife, and what kind of wife wishes to be
called, “My dearest partner of greatness”? We shall see their kind emerge as adversaries of the humble
navel. The chops, at the other end of the seam, is of course the mouth, the double portal of eating and
speaking, of animal and human. Macbeth and his Lady give two feasts in Acts I and III of the play that
serve as occasions to facilitate the murders of their chief guests, Duncan and Banquo. It is not by eating
and speaking among friends that they sustain their bodies and souls over time; rather, as Macbeth says,
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y “cancel[ling] and tear[ing] to pieces” the “great [human] bond” that the mouth and navel sustain and
memorialize (III.ii.49).
Let us also notice the political predicament of Duncan evident in his perfect double response to
this image of Macbeth: “O valiant cousin, worthy gentleman!” How is Duncan going to honor the
superlative warrior who does not shake hands, but unseams human opponents, so that this warrior will
become a serviceable gentleman again? Duncan will dispense multiple honors not only to Macbeth, but
conspicuously to Lady Macbeth, thinking that the wife is the way to civilize and pacify the homecoming
warrior. Duncan does not know the Lady.
Macbeth, the unseamer of double man, is also reported to “bathe in reeking wounds” (I.ii.39).
Killing thus seems like a sacrament to unify and purify his manhood; its sign is the immersion of the
outside skin in the inside blood. One more image of Macbeth completes the first meeting: he kills as if
“to memorize another Golgotha,” the place of crucifixion of the man-God, Jesus Christ (I.ii.40). It looks
as if he immerses himself in war’s cauldron of dismemberment to touch what is “serious in mortality”
and to know whether the human form is an image of the high and holy One and therefore worth
remembering as was the case at Golgotha--or is not of that kind at all, being but the form of a
particularly ravenous beast (II.iii.95). When the Weird Sisters meet again and ask each other where they
have been, the second Sister says, “Killing swine” (I.iii.2). This answer provides the final image, from
another point of view, of what Macbeth makes happen to the human form on that battlefield. 3
Act I. Second Meeting. The Seer.
The Weird Sisters do not participate in the form of the double. They are a threesome. Their
form is the circle, in which they move in harmony, chanting and dancing hand in hand. Theirs is another
3 At this point one might wonder what would happened if the unseamer of men, who fights front to front east to
west and never turns his back, were to face a foe who has no seam—no nave, no chops. Macbeth will face such a
man. But first he has to assist in making that man into his only suitable vanquisher.
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way for the many to be one in this world. They meet Macbeth on the heath late in the day in the
direction of his home. After the meeting, that direction home will contain the promise of elevation
towards a way of being one:
1. Look what I have.
2. Show me. Show me.
1. Here I have a pilot’s thumb,
Wracked as homeward he did come.
Drum within.
3. A drum, a drum!
Macbeth doth come.
All. The Weird Sisters, hand in hand,
Posters of the sea and land,
Thus do go about, about,
Thrice to thine, and thrice to mine
And thrice again, to make up nine.
Peace, the charm’s wound up.
Enter Macbeth and Banquo
Macbeth.
So foul and fair a day I have not seen.
Banquo.
How far is’t called to Forres?
(I.iii.26-39)
He enters to the name “Macbeth,” preceded by the sound of a drum and the display of a wracked pilot’s
thumb. His safe steerage home after war depends on the kind of clutching that a human hand performs.
In his very hands is the safekeeping of his name. The first spoken words of Macbeth and Banquo tell us
much. A switch to trochee by Macbeth after the mid-line caesura allows his “I” distinction. He is the
seer of the present newness of the time, as if a primordial landscape were to be contemplated before
the forms of things have separated. Banquo does not see the day, for he is concerned about the future:
how much further until we get there? This tension between the character of Macbeth to stop time on
the heath to contemplate newly emerging, indistinct forms and that of Banquo to hasten towards a
familiar destination makes the Weird Sisters emerge out of the fog and filth to both men, though the
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Sisters had foreseen a meeting with Macbeth only. Banquo is present as Macbeth’s double: he is the
future that never leaves the present time alone, the “not yet” principle of human action that will
torment Macbeth and be assailed by him.
Let us listen further to the meeting on the heath:
Macbeth.
Speak if you can. What are you?
1. All hail, Macbeth! Hail to thee, Thane of Glamis!
2. All hail, Macbeth! Hail to thee, Thane of Cawdor!
3. All hail, Macbeth, that shalt be king hereafter!
(I.iii.47-50)
The three “alls” and the five “hails” unite past, present, and future time through the named honors
(Glamis, Cawdor, king) of those times. Thus kingship means not only ultimacy of title, but the merging
of past and future into present time—if that missing sixth “hail” (the perfect number of “hails”) can be
supplied. (Lady Macbeth will supply it shortly.) Banquo, like a younger sibling demanding “me-too,”
gets the Sisters to speak to him, though they appear reluctant:
1. Hail!
2. Hail!
3. Hail!
1. Lesser than Macbeth and greater.
2. Not so happy, yet much happier.
3. Thou shalt get kings, though thou be none.
So all hail, Macbeth and Banquo!
1. Banquo and Macbeth, all hail!
(I.iii.62-69)
The triple “hails” and prophecies to Banquo accentuate the fair and foul that Macbeth sees mixed.
Perfection of knowledge requires more speaking, and perfection of Macbeth’s being (as King) first
requires non-being on the part of Cawdor:
Macbeth.
Stay, you imperfect speakers. Tell me more.
By Sinel’s death I know I am Thane of Glamis.
But how of Cawdor? The Thane of Cawdor lives,
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A prosperous gentleman; and to be king
Stands not within the prospect of belief,
No more than to be Cawdor.
(I.iii.70-75)
But we know from what Duncan says in the previous battlefield scene that Cawdor will be executed as a
traitor:
Duncan.
No more that Thane of Cawdor shall deceive
Our bosom interest. Go, pronounce his present death,
And with his former title greet Macbeth.
(I.ii.63-65)
The repetitions of “more” and “no more” in these two speeches have ominous implications. Let us hear
these speeches again, reduced to their essences, in the proper order, first Duncan, then Macbeth (follow
the bold words): “No more Cawdor--death--Macbeth; me more, Cawdor? Cawdor--king--no more . . .
Cawdor.” In life, Cawdor is the obstacle to Macbeth’s belief that ultimate desires that lie in the
hereafter can be consummated in the present time. In death, that obstacle is “no more.” The rhymes
point the way to the achievement of desire. Recall St. James’s admonition to sinful man, altered
apropos of the action: “You want more and you do not have it, so let there be committed upon the
obstacle to your having the deed of no more.” In fact the greater difficulty for Macbeth to overcome (as
we shall see) is not the aversion to murdering the first man, but the lack of moderation of bloodlust
once he has begun to kill men.
Let me pause to say that it would not be worth a man’s time merely to trace the web of
ominously sounding words, as if Shakespeare were a spider-poet, like Poe, producing pretty patterns of
verbal filament to catch our attention and hold our admiration. It is worth our time, however, to hear
the insistent rhymes and patterns of Macbeth because, as in any ritual form of poetry, one senses
spiritual presences in the aural qualities of the words. Or to put this differently: the tightly interwoven
sounds of this play are themselves articulations of unspeakable things. When the Sisters vanish into the
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air, Macbeth says, “What seemed corporal melted,/As breath into the wind. Would they had stayed!”
(I.iii.84-85). This infinite longing for answers to his deepest questions, coupled with the doubt that
corporal things are more than air, is the condition of soul of the playwright and of those of his creations,
like Macbeth, who are nearest to him in feeling that longing and doubt while hearing certain measures
of possible meaning in the music of things born in the air.
Remember what we hear as Macbeth enters the heath: “thumb,” “drum,” “come.” He exits
hearing his heart “knock” at his interlocking ribs and feeling his “single state of man” (the indivisible
wholeness of being--his ultimate desire) shaken by the inner thunder, the fear of “horrid images” of
murder that overcome him with shocking ease (I.iii.135, 136, 140). To achieve singleness he must learn
not to feel afraid of images of murder that come so readily with desire. 4
Thus Macbeth is no Oedipus
who turns in the opposite direction from what he fears he may do. “Let us toward the King,” he says,
always moving forward, face to face with fears and hopes. (I.iii.152). He finds the right words to
maintain for the present an open hand to the hereafter: “Come what come may,/Time and the hour
runs through the roughest day” (I.iii.146-147).
Act I. Third Meeting.
The Servant.
Our third meeting with Macbeth begins with a King still not informed of the action of life and
death that he is supposed to be directing:
King.
Is execution done on Cawdor? Are not
Those in commission yet returned?
Malcolm.
My liege,
They are not yet come back. But I have spoke
With one that saw him die, who did report
That very frankly he confessed his treasons,
4 Macbeth enters the cauldron scene of Act IV in a condition opposite to that undergone during this scene’s exit.
He “knocks,” the “locks” of the doors open, and “something wicked,” “without a name,” by means of his coming
“prick*s+ *the+ thumbs” of fate sufficiently to make them speak answers to his deepest questions (IV.i.44-47, 49).
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Implored your Highness’ pardon and set forth
A deep repentance: nothing in his life
Became him like the leaving it. He died
As one that had been studied in his death,
To throw away the dearest thing he owed
As ‘twere a careless trifle.
King.
There’s no art
To find the mind’s construction in the face:
He was a gentleman on whom I built
An absolute trust.
Enter Macbeth, Banquo, Ross, and Angus
O worthiest cousin!
(I.iv.1-14)
Duncan now announces three times, for all to hear, that he cannot equal what he owes to Macbeth, and
then he pronounces a fourth estimation of his new relation to his “worthiest cousin”: “More is thy due
than more than all can pay” (I.iv.21). Imagine the luster of this warrior at the zenith of distinction
outshining the beauty of the King and deserving beyond the bounty of the King. There are only two
ways to escape the present dilemma: designate Macbeth as King “hereafter” (the sixth “hail”), or (as
Duncan chooses) let Macbeth acknowledge, for all to hear, that he is a dutiful and loyal subject whose
deeds belong to his Highness, who therefore owes him nothing. Before we hear Macbeth respond, let
us consider the image of Cawdor’s death. First, notice the structure and motion of this fourteen-line
exchange. The question of Cawdor’s end, which immediately becomes a question of witness and
reporting, leads to Duncan’s assertion of a radical disjunction between mind and face beyond any art to
overcome, which cues the entrance of Macbeth. The exchange is divided in half at the word
“repentance,” which faces--across a mid-line pause--the word “nothing.” It would be nice to say that
Shakespeare’s art here separates fair from foul so that we clearly see the beautiful idea of a ruined man,
deeply repentant, with no more cares for worldly trifles, becoming at the last more truly one with
himself than ever. But Shakespeare does not let us see the execution of Cawdor or hear of it directly
and disinterestedly. We hear Malcolm’s fine words and believe them because they speak to our deepest
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yearnings, as Macbeth believes what he hears from the Sisters. Yet Macbeth can see and touch
something to confirm his belief: he has become the Thane of Cawdor. What do we know to make us
believe in good ends? Duncan does not seem impressed by the secondhand report of Cawdor’s stages
of repentance followed by his most “becoming” end. (Nor has he seemed to learn the lesson he
articulates about trust, as his overflowing greeting of Macbeth on the cue of that very word makes us
suspect.) One reason that this tragedy is so difficult to penetrate is that we do not insist on seeing with
our own eyes what our will towards the good supplies too readily on their behalf. At Macbeth’s end we
will require seeing the mind in the face, by Shakespeare’s art if we can, by no art if we must.
Let us now listen to Macbeth respond to the political dilemma:
Macbeth.
The service and the loyalty I owe,
In doing it, pays itself.
(I.iv.23-24)
Macbeth could have stopped here and let Duncan finish his line, as Banquo will do momentarily, but his
troubled soul will not be still. Haltingly, repetitively, with more syllables than would sound from
sincerity, he continues:
Your Highness’ part
Is to receive our duties: and our duties
Are to your throne and state children and servants;
Which do but what they should, by doing every thing
Safe toward your love and honor.
Duncan.
Welcome hither.
I have begun to plant thee, and will labor
To make thee full of growing. Noble Banquo,
. . . .
let me enfold thee
And hold thee to my heart.
Banquo.
There if I grow,
The harvest is your own.
(I.iv.24-33)
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Duncan embraces Banquo with warmth and familiarity, and Banquo responds with simple pleasure to
the gesture and the image of growth with one line only. Macbeth is not the sort of man to be hugged.
He has become the noblest of the Thanes and the worthiest of the warriors by far, but since he is not
the King, he is still a servant. His deeds are duties, his duties are “children,” and they, too, are servants
to the king. Banquo does not mind this feudal condition of noble servitude. He is willing to grow tall in
the garden of the King until harvest. Banquo has a child. Most people are like Banquo.
Lady Macbeth, as she welcomes Duncan “under my battlements” in a later scene, will feel
equally stung by that word “servant” and the felt lack of anything she can call her own—all is chattel
(I.v.41). She, however, will do better than Macbeth at appearing to mean what she says--and says
doubly--to Duncan:
Lady Macbeth.
All our service
In every point twice done, and then done double,
Were poor and single business to contend
Against those honors deep and broad wherewith
Your Majesty loads our house.
(I.vi.14-18)
Your servants ever
Have theirs, themselves, and what is theirs, in compt,
To make their audit at your Highness’ pleasure,
Still to return your own.
(I.vi.25-28)
Duncan trusts that his “fair and noble hostess,” possessed of a woman’s love of house and ornament,
upon receiving the conspicuous and abundant honors that his abrupt visit brings her, will teach her
husband, noticeably absent from the scene of royal arrival, to profess his planted servitude more as
Banquo does, within the prescribed hopes of growth (I.vi.24). Such are the implications of his exit lines
to Lady Macbeth as they enter her castle, hand in hand:
Duncan.
Give me your hand.
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Conduct me to mine host: we love him highly,
And shall continue our graces towards him.
By your leave, Hostess.
Exit.
(I.vi.28-31)
To return now to the present royal scene: everyone in Duncan’s court hears Macbeth proclaim
his servitude. The great dilemma has apparently been met. Duncan can now publically proclaim his son
Malcolm, who has done nothing to distinguish himself, as the next king. Unrewarded according to his
magnitudinous desert, Macbeth borrows a servant’s word from Duncan (“labor,” I.iv.29) to make his
quick exit towards his wife:
Macbeth.
The rest is labor which is not used for you.
I’ll be myself the harbinger, and make joyful
The hearing of my wife with your approach;
So, humbly take my leave.
(I.iv.44-47)
Macbeth’s deserved rest from martial labor is turned at once into a labor of preparation for Duncan’s
visit. It is also to be a labor of birth performed by the Lady who longs for Macbeth to give her the “dues
of rejoicing” (I.v.13). For most couples this would mean children.
Act I. Fourth Meeting. The Transporter.
One way for a man who is away at war to rejoice his woman at home is to write her a letter that
will make her give her body and soul to his most potent (“black and deep”) desires at a distance (I.iv.51).
Of course you have to be a very skilled writer to do this to a woman, and she has to be the sort of
woman who knows how to read such a letter, alone with the audience. (Shakespeare’s tragic women
are almost never left alone on stage.)
Enter Macbeth’s wife, alone, with a letter.
Lady Macbeth. [Reads]
They met me in the day of success; and I have learned by the perfect’st
15

eport they have more in them than mortal knowledge. When I burned in
desire to question them further, they made themselves air, into which they
vanished. Whiles I stood rapt in the wonder of it, came missives from the King,
who all-hailed me “Thane of Cawdor”; by which title, before, these weird sisters
saluted me, and referred me to the coming on of time, with “Hail, King that shalt
be!” This have I thought good to deliver thee, my dearest partner of greatness, that
thou mightst not lose the dues of rejoicing, by being ignorant of what greatness is
promised thee. Lay it to thy heart, and farewell.
(I.v.1-16)
A messenger soon arrives to announce the coming of “the King” that very night (I.v.32). For one ecstatic
moment she thinks the greatness is already accomplished—or the messenger is mad to report news to
this effect. We have to wonder what kind of a boy actor Shakespeare had in his company in 1606,
capable of making an audience believe what comes next. She calls on the spirits “That tend on mortal
thoughts”: “Come….unsex me here/And fill me…top-full/Of direst cruelty!” She calls on the “murd’ring
ministers” of nature’s “sightless substances” that tend on mischievous action: “Come to my woman’s
breasts,/And take my milk for gall”; and she calls on the protection of darkness: “Come, thick night,/And
pall thee in the dunnest smoke of hell” (I.v.41-55). Three times she summons the sources of thought,
action, and perception with the word “come” to assist her to fulfill the felt promise of desire. Not even
the knife must witness her giving violent birth to what she has conceived by the potent “hails” of the
letter and now wishes to nurture. The physical act of lovemaking, no longer necessary for her to
function as a fertile woman, will be postponed by her in favor of the murder, as we shall now see.
Macbeth, the transporter of his Lady in body and soul to a state of ecstasy, enters her presence
precisely on the words that heaven, were it to witness her triple labors of birth under the “blanket of
dark,” would cry out: “Hold, hold!” 5
Enter Macbeth
Lady Macbeth.
Great Glamis! Worthy Cawdor!
5 Macbeth’s last words similarly reject from future utterance the cry of “Hold, enough!” to the hand that kills
(V.viii.34).
16

Greater than both, by the all-hail hereafter!
Thy letters have transported me beyond
This ignorant present, and I feel now
The future in the instant.
Macbeth.
My dearest love,
Duncan comes here tonight.
(I.v.54-60)
With longing towards a wife he has not held for many nights, Macbeth greets her tenderly as his
“dearest love,” not his promised Queen. He names their guest “Duncan,” not using the fated and
metaphysically-linked title, “King.” He takes over her incantatory word “come,” but couples it with
“here tonight,” the present time and place, not the transported ones. He enfolds her in his arms and
pauses in mid-line for her to grow conformable to his embrace. She senses his desire, but she does not
quite like his choice of words, their matter-of-fact contrast to her own transcendent state. She allows
herself to remain enfolded while he responds to one simple question of time:
Lady Macbeth.
And when goes hence?
Macbeth.
Tomorrow, as he purposes.
Lady Macbeth.
O, never
Shall sun that morrow see!
(I.v.51-62)
Macbeth’s double-minded answer triggers in her a prophetic vision that she expresses first with an
exhalation into his face--“O”--of the spirits that have possessed her unsexed form with a capacity to
breathe beyond all limited political or sexual “purposes.” Her vision is of cosmic darkness, in which she
nonetheless sees without light a never-ending night of “dearest love” for them and unwaking death for
Duncan. 6
Macbeth looks strangely at her. What does she mean? The sun-measured cycles of growth
and decay are to stop this night? No more circular rhythms, only the line of action measured by their
own hands and feet stretching out to a tomorrow that never comes?
6 Among her last words is that cry “Oh,” three times sighed forth from her depths, before she goes off to bed alone
with the candle that she has with her always, for “Hell is murky” (V.i.39,55).
17

Lady Macbeth, seeing her husband’s strange expression at her prophetic words, pulls back from
his figure to read him:
Lady Macbeth.
Your face, my Thane, is as a book where men
May read strange matters.
She closes that book with a caress of his face from eye to mouth and an opening of his hand from its
close holding of her:
To beguile the time
Look like the time; bear welcome in your eye,
Your hand, your tongue: look like th’ innocent flower
But be the serpent under’t.
(I.v.63-67)
She wants to hear him confirm the double image of serpent and flower, which will lead them to
paradise. He remains silent, but draws her towards him to taste the flower from her lips. She pulls
away abruptly. She will not be made love to now—too busy for that—but later, when both halves of
time, the nights of desire and the days of success, are given their promised unity:
He that’s coming
Must be provided for: and you shall put
This night’s great business into my dispatch;
Which shall to all our nights and days to come
Give solely sovereign sway and masterdom.
(I.v.67-71)
She intends this strong rhyme as an exit line for both of them, towards not merely sovereign authority
or the crown. These are not sufficient names or symbols for the great object of their desires. The word
she finally finds sufficient is “masterdom.” We hear more longing in these words—“solely sovereign
sway and masterdom”--than the kings and dictators of the English history and Roman plays ever make
us feel in theirs.
18

Macbeth, his immediate desires postponed, tries not to let the Lady have the last word. But she
will end this scene her way:
Macbeth.
We will speak further.
Lady Macbeth.
Only look up clear.
To alter favor ever is to fear.
Leave all the rest to me.
Exit.
(I.v.72-74)
Macbeth alters his expression as he looks down into his desires and sees the mix of fair and foul that
warrants later conversation. Lady Macbeth would not have him exit unclear, with fear to take what he
desires, namely her as his “dearest partner of greatness.” Thus she supplies a final line of promise that
ends on the word “me”—unrhymed, single, for the birth of their self-belonging is to be her labor.
The actual murder of Duncan will be Macbeth’s to perform, but the deeper truth about this
labor is now apparent. By means of his far-seeing, all-hailing letter, Macbeth prepares his Lady with
promises of greatness to prepare herself for the King’s coming by unsexing herself in order to prepare
Macbeth, her homecoming lover, to prepare himself as the serpent in the flower to provide for Duncan
a sunless tomorrow. Only then will he take his desire as the husband of her bed. Who inseminates
whom? Whose labor is this birth of murder? It is impossible to separate the two of them. Their union
could even be mistaken as the Biblical ideal of man and woman becoming one flesh in marriage. How
shocking to our sensibilities to recognize in them our own practiced ways of moving our spouses to
move ourselves to enact our desires. 7
Their mutual motions reach deeper levels in the next meeting.
7 Macbeth and Lady Macbeth never engage in mutual blame or recrimination after the deed. It would be pleasing
to say that we are like them in that respect, but blaming someone else is as original and common as sin. This is
what the first man and woman do when God catches them transgressing His one command. Yet this common
human practice is not Macbeth or his Lady’s way of sin.
19

Act I. Fifth Meeting.
More The Man.
The “most kind hostess” conducts “this night’s great business” well (II.i.16). She treats Duncan
to an evening of “unusual pleasure” that will send him to bed “soundly invite[d],” “shut up/In
measureless content” (I.vii.63; II.i.13, 17). Macbeth, however, having business still to conduct with
himself, leaves the music, dancing, and feasting to debate the assassination. He makes powerful
arguments and sees haunting images against the deed, while only weak conditionals speak in its favor.
“Vaulting ambition,” the only “spur” left after introspection “to prick the sides of [his] intent” is not
enough (I.vii.25- 27). At this point, having fallen off from his high purpose to the unnamed other side of
the hereafter:
Enter LadyMacbeth
Macbeth.
How now! What news?
Lady Macbeth.
He has almost supped. Why have you left the chamber?
Macbeth.
Hath he asked for me?
Lady Macbeth.
Know you not he has?
(I.vii.28-30)
Macbeth pretends that Duncan’s favors to the Lady and her attentions to him will make his absence
from the table appear unremarkable. She implies harshly what he must know--that Duncan’s visit is for
the sake of keeping Macbeth at the table, eating and drinking, talking, receiving gifts, and then going to
bed pleased and honored, like most serviceable gentlemen. So Macbeth simply tells her what she must
suspect from his character:
Macbeth.
We will proceed no further in this business:
(I.vii.31)
20

He pauses: she says nothing but looks dreadfully at him. How will he appease her? He does not tell her
of his tremendous vision from a moment ago: “pity, like a naked newborn babe,/Striding the blast, or
heaven’s cherubin horsed/Upon the sightless couriers of the air,” “blow[ing] the horrid deed in every
eye” (I.vii.21-24). Instead, he resorts to reasoning with her about their recently acquired goods:
He hath honored me of late, and I have bought
Golden opinions from all sorts of people,
Which would be worn now in their newest gloss,
Not cast aside so soon.
(I.vii.32-35)
“Golden opinions” are not the “golden round” of unitary perfection that their hopes have dared; and “all
sorts of people” are not near in estimation to “fate and metaphysical aid” that exist beyond the evershifting
verbal terrain of human opinion that judges fair and foul like items of clothing (I.v.29, 30). She
ridicules him with his own sartorial image as a man whose courage to take to bed and perform the
future upon the body of the woman he professes to love comes all from drink and the morning after
turns to sickness and fear:
Lady Macbeth.
Was the hope drunk
Wherein you dressed yourself? Hath it slept since?
And wakes it now, to look so green and pale
At what it did so freely? From this time
Such I account thy love.
(I.vii.35-39)
Is he prepared to be thrown out of her bed and live without hope of return forever? She presses the
point twice more, at a volume that risks their privacy, with emphasis on being unified in act and desire:
Art thou afeard
To be the same in thine own act and valor
As thou art in desire? Wouldst thou have that
Which thou esteem’st the ornament of life,
And live a coward in thine own esteem,
Letting “I dare not” wait upon “I would”
Like the poor cat i’ th’ adage?
21

Macbeth.
Prithee, peace!
(I.vii.39-45)
Her contemptuous image of the cat (that wants to take the fish but dares not to wet its paws) wounds
Macbeth in his lion’s pride. He tries to answer her imputations of shame with a statement of creed that
includes in two lines the words that matter most in his life:
I dare do all that may become a man;
Who dares do more is none.
(I.vii.46-47)
His words “all” and “none” would close the door on “this business.” But she takes his word “more” and
doubles it, and she substitutes the word “be” for his “become” and doubles that. More doing--here and
now--leads to being “more the man”:
Lady Macbeth.
What beast was’t then
That made you break this enterprise to me?
When you durst do it, then you were a man;
And to be more than what you were, you would
Be so much more the man. Nor time nor place
Did then adhere, and yet you would make both.
They have made themselves, and that their fitness now
Does unmake you.
(I.vii.47-54)
A woman dares to administer to the greatest warrior a lesson on manhood. This is the place to stop
her--here and now forever as a man to say “no” to her making him “more the man.” But this is not a
play of “no” or “not” or “never.” Such words of negation, spoken especially in connection with love,
belong to King Lear’s world, where nearly everyone says “no” to each other in one form or another. In
Macbeth’s world everyone says “yes” to desire, for this is Shakespeare’s “yes” tragedy—everyone, that
is, except Macduff. He is the only man who says “No” absolutely: “No” to attending Macbeth’s
coronation at Scone; “No” to Macbeth’s two feasts; “No” to indulging in much speech; “No” (implicitly)
22

to his own wife and babes who cry out to him from home as the tyrant “batter[s] at their peace”
(IV.iii.178). Macduff cries out explicitly in reply, “I must be from thence!” (IV.iii.212).
Saying “no,” though costly, is therefore possible, but before Macbeth can stop the Lady’s
harping mouth with this word, she sacrifices her child before their astonished eyes to demonstrate what
it means to be sworn to do more than womanhood does:
Lady Macbeth.
I have given suck, and know
How tender ‘tis to love the babe that milks me:
I would, while it was smiling in my face,
Have plucked my nipple from his boneless gums,
And dashed the brains out, had I so sworn as you
Have done to this.
(I.vii.54-59)
Let us appreciate how much it costs Lady Macbeth to say these words--how much she dares to make
them remember the broken pieces of their life’s history. If there be any doubt as to her having given
suck, the word “boneless” should take care of that. And if there be any doubt as to the present force of
the image, witness its immediate and postponed effects. She inserts between two past facts--her having
nursed and his having promised--a past perfect conditional that is felt not hypothetically, but as present
fact because its immediate effect on Macbeth is to dash out his own deep thinking and to leave him with
only one drastically simple concern, the possibility of failure, which sounds out of tune and slack to her
ears. She prescribes the immediate remedy to tighten and harmonize his cords of speech and action:
Macbeth.
If we should fail?
Lady Macbeth.
We fail?
But screw your courage to the sticking-place,
And we’ll not fail.
(I.vii.59-61)
We hear three “fails” here just as we heard three “hails” from the Sisters on the heath. Remember
Macbeth’s longing for the Sisters to stay corporal and tell him more, rather than melt “as breath into the
23

wind” (I.iii.82). Lady Macbeth is the answer to that longing: her unsexed body is the corporal stickingplace
that melts not, pities not her own babe, but stays “undaunted” according to the word of promise
and tells him more—how to succeed. Editors tell us that the “sticking-place” is where one screws the
peg of a stringed instrument or tightens the cord of a crossbow, to make the one ready for harmonious
sound and the other for deadly hitting of the mark. She is the crossbow and the body of the musical
instrument, and he is the deadly flight and harmony of sound. We shall hear his beautiful, deadly sound
as Macbeth marks the way to Duncan’s bedchamber. 8
Lady Macbeth reveals a simple but effective plan to blame the murder on the sleeping grooms,
whose drinks she will drug. Macbeth looks at her in awe. He speaks directly to her image of herself as
tender mother but promise-keeping wife as he enlists himself in the cause of both:
Macbeth.
Bring forth men-children only;
For thy undaunted mettle should compose
Nothing but males.
. . . .
I am settled, and bend up
Each corporal agent to this terrible feat.
(I.vii.72-74, 79-80)
He resolves in mind and bends his body to the deed, while she is to compose sons from material that
does not let slip the screw. That is the hope and promise between them as they return hungry to the
feast.
We witness the postponed effect of Lady Macbeth’s willingness to dash out the brains of her
baby when Shakespeare forces us to see the murder of Macduff’s little boy in front of his mother. Lady
Macduff exits screaming to her other babes, who will be so savagely slaughtered that Ross, who reports
the news to Macduff in England, dares not say how. You may consult your own imaginations, shaped
8 “Fail” is not only the opposite of “succeed.” When the Lady dies, that is, when she fails, Macbeth plays for her, on
the vocal instrument that she has tuned, during an interlude in the tightening of his giant corporal agencies for
war, an ode to the failure of all the syllables ever spoke and of all the bodies ever made tight for action.
24

and colored by the poet’s design, for the details of how. Perhaps you would prefer not to see childkilling
on the stage or to imagine unstageable images of it taking place just over there, behind the
curtain. But unless we enlist ourselves in the cause of massacred children with face-to-face sympathy, I
do not think Shakespeare would find it artistically possible to put Macbeth to the sword. Some tyrants
cannot be killed by good people without their deeds having been seen and heard at the worst.
Act II. The Murderer.
Now, in the moonless, starless night, with no clocks striking to measure the time, Banquo enters
with his son, Fleance, who lights the way by torch and tells his father the hour is later than he thinks.
Banquo hands his son his sword and dagger and prays to the “merciful powers” to restrain in him “the
cursed thoughts that nature/Gives way to in repose” (II.i.8-10). (For Banquo has been “hailed” with
tempting promises of greatness, too.) His words of prayer are the cue for Macbeth to enter with a
servant who carries a torch. Banquo, not recognizing him, says with alarm, “Give me my sword!” which
Fleance promptly returns. Macbeth then identifies himself as “a friend” (II.i.9, 11). This double entry
has profound meaning. Banquo has a son to light his way, to hold his sword, and to hand it back upon
need; Macbeth has only a servant whom he will send away to bid the Lady strike upon the bell “when
my drink is ready” (II.i.31). The drink, in its effects on the grooms, is their strategy for success in the
murder and thus their ground for hope in the future. The double entry of Banquo and Macbeth, with
and without a son, makes one wonder how much evil that broods in the mind of man is restrained from
performance, as if in answer to prayer, by the witness of one’s children, in whose honor fathers keep
their “bosom franchised” and “allegiance clear” and for whose defense they carry the sword and teach
its proper use (II.i.28). Children first appear on this stage as nature’s check on ambition. 9
9 Lady Macbeth must know that a woman’s breast properly signifies kindness overruling appetite. Thus she has to
turn her generative capacities into their opposites in order not to be held back by them. Even after her unsexing,
Lady Macbeth feels restrained from stabbing Duncan because he resembles her father as he sleeps. She thus
watches herself with the eyes of the child she once was and that is enough to stay her hand. Macbeth does not
serve ambition in the light carried by a child. His avail to mark time passing in this black night is drink.
25

Banquo and Fleance go to bed and the servant undertakes his task, leaving Macbeth alone with
thoughts and corporal agents bent on murder. But to resolve to do is not yet to perform the deed.
Macbeth has to get to Duncan’s bedchamber, stab Duncan quietly to death, plant the evidence with the
grooms, and get back undetected. Plenty of things can happen along the way to confound the murder.
Macbeth’s greatest speech, the dagger soliloquy, begins with a hand gesture (we have seen
before) that embodies the whole action of the play. The speech draws to an end with a single, light
strike upon a bell. To reach that point of singleness Macbeth must overcome all confounding by inner
and outer multiplicities and so make himself the perfect actor. His thirty-two line soliloquy is a double:
each sixteen-line half is a threesome of five to seven-line sections. The three parts of the first half each
begin with “I see.” We have met Macbeth as the seer of the fair and foul. His double vision is now
corrected with the help of his two hands:
Macbeth. [1 st part of 1 st Half]
Is this a dagger which I see before me,
The handle toward my hand? Come, let me clutch thee.
I have thee not, and yet I see thee still.
Art thou not, fatal vision, sensible
To feeling as to sight, or art thou but
A dagger of the mind, a false creation,
Proceeding from the heat-oppressed brain?
(II.i.33-39)
Macbeth sees the instrument of his desire offer itself within reach of his hand, and he says, longingly,
clutching for it, “Come,” but his hand remains empty. A second time, on the word “feeling,” he
clutches, but again his hand is empty. Macbeth’s gesture performs what it means to be human--to see
something that sets up motion in the realm of action, to clutch for it, to have it not and see it still, and to
persist in motion towards that good thing, ever making the necessary corrections to get it. How can a
man not keep grasping, having glimpsed the efficacious tool of desire so close at hand? Do not think it
strange to call the dagger “good.” In a moment we shall consider Macbeth as he stands above his
bleeding victim, the bloody dagger in hand, trying to say “Amen” to bless himself in the act. His
26

amazement that he cannot pronounce this two-syllable word is founded on the idea that his clutching
for the dagger is a motion toward the good. The question Macbeth asks about whether the dagger is
tangible or merely a projection of the overheated brain has to be answered presently with the help of
his remaining hand:
[2 nd Part of 1 st Half]
I see thee yet, in form as palpable
As this which now I draw.
Thou marshal’st me the way that I was going;
And such an instrument I was to use.
Mine eyes are made the fools o’ th’ other senses,
Or else worth all the rest.
(II.i.40-45)
The status of the “fatal vision” alters now that he holds a solid dagger in his other hand. The dagger in
the air pointing the way has become an extension of his arm and empty hand, an outer focus and guide
to a distant goal. The space to be traversed to the bedchamber is thus first encompassed by the arms
and eyes in unison—provided that the eyes can keep their dagger of the air clean:
[3 rd Part of 1 st Half]
I see thee still;
And on thy blade and dudgeon gouts of blood,
Which was not so before. There’s no such thing.
It is the bloody business which informs
Thus to mine eyes.
(II.ii.45-49)
The epistemological question raised by the opposing presentations of the “air-drawn dagger” is now
answered: touch is the master of sight (III.iv63). There is no bloody dagger levitating out there to
confound the purpose of the clean dagger in hand. The bloody dagger is to be left with the sleeping
grooms, who shall “bear the guilt/Of our great quell” among people who take their guidance from sights
and sounds (I.vii.71-72). Macbeth has mastered his wayward powers of vision for the first time. The
upper half of his person—mind, eyes, hands—is one.
But what about Macbeth’s lower half? He still has to get to the bedchamber by his two legs in
proper time. Once before, relying on “vaulting ambition,” he overleapt himself and retreated from his
27

high purpose. Or what if he turns at a sound to ask who is there, and by the time he turns back his
direction is askew or it is too late? How, then, can his legs measure one direction in perfect time? The
wayward quality of locomotion he masters by tuning his lower body to the nocturnal rhythms of nature.
When does the life of the body meet on good terms with death? --At night, in sleep, where fantastic
desires achieve their ends in dreams, the witchcraft of the soul. How do the legs of a man make one
consistent rhythm out of discordant elements?—By soliciting the earth, whose firmness gives possibility
to motion and whose deaf silence under the strides that ravish it implies consent to nature’s own design
to let loose the predators, withered with hunger, who listen for the warning howl while conducting their
ghostly steps towards fullness:
[1 st Part of 2 nd Half]
Now o’er the one half-world
Nature seems dead, and wicked dreams abuse
The curtained sleep; witchcraft celebrates
Pale Hecate’s offerings; and withered murder,
Alarumed by his sentinel, the wolf,
Whose howl’s his watch, thus with his stealthy pace,
With Tarquin’s ravishing strides, towards his design
Moves like a ghost.
[2 nd Part of 2 nd Half]
Thou sure and firm-set earth
Hear not my steps, which way they walk, for fear
Thy very stones prate of my whereabout,
And take the present horror from the time,
Which now suits with it.
(II.i.49-59)
Now Macbeth is one with the benighted earth, provided that the earth, unlike Lucrece, keeps still in
“curtained sleep” while his rapacious legs carry him undetected through the manifold of space to the
single point of his design. Macbeth transports himself with these words as he transported his Lady--
ravished her--with the letter. These words are his drink, his fire to the bold act of murder, whose
offstage performance we will feel by means of the Lady’s onstage longing for the deed done. Macbeth
has now mastered his human form in space and time: head to foot, left hand to right hand, eyes, ears,
28

and tongue are one seamless suit of murderous manhood, bestriding the dark world in conformity with
the time’s own horror of itself.
Macbeth’s mastery of himself exhibits what all actors do. They rehearse the action in order to
convert imaginary things from their inner world into corporal things of their outer world—which is of
course what all men and women do, but with confusion rather than mastery. Every impulse of thought,
perception, and bodily motion is trained by the actor to move uniformly and designedly for the
appreciation of an audience that would like to witness the meaning of its own ordinarily confounded
motions. Stage fright afflicts human action, but by rehearsal it is possible for thoughts and words to
move without the hindrance of fear across an invisible boundary to manifest themselves as coherent
facts of existence. The fact in this case is murder. Sleeping Duncan is an image of the dead Duncan into
which he will be turned by the actor who turns images into their things.
into things:
The third part of the second half of the dagger soliloquy completes the smooth motion of words
[3 rd Part of 2 nd Half]
Whiles I threat, he lives:
Words to the heat of deeds too cold breath gives.
A bell rings.
I go, and it is done: the bell invites me.
Hear it not, Duncan, for it is a knell
That summons thee to heaven, or to hell.
Exit.
(II.i.59-64)
Macbeth here recognizes the essential quality of this speech as cold rehearsal matter for the hot deed.
The quiet ring of the bell signals the cumulative transformation of particular motions (“I go”) into the
enacting by all characters of the unified motion that we call “plot” or “tale” (“it is done”). Thus do
beginnings become their ends in one continuous action. The middle of the tale, however, which
Macbeth does not anticipate, will assert itself in the very act of murder and expand thereafter into Acts
29

III and IV. We should expect the middle to intervene (such is the form of tragedy) because this delicate
bell is not the kind of bell to summon souls to their final ends.
We will hear the ringing of other bells as loud as thunder on two later occasions. Macduff rings
“the alarum bell” the morning after the murder to wake “the sleepers of the house” to see “the great
doom’s image” (II.iii.76, 80, 84). And Macbeth rings “the alarum bell” to call his forces to arms against
the moving wood of Birnam, while he wishes that the fixed “estate of the world” were as “undone” as
those woods are from the ground (V.v.50, 51). These two bells, loud and repeated in their ringing, have
common apocalyptic meanings. Shakespeare knew better than to rely on words only when the ultimate
end calls to souls.
As Macbeth exits on the word “hell,” Lady Macbeth boldly enters, on fire with desire. “Hark!
Peace!” (II.ii.2). She hears something. Her confidence in what is real depends on that little sound. She
is not of sufficient strength to lose her hold on reality and still meet with it. Thus she decides “It was the
owl that shrieked, the fatal bellman,” her accomplice in ringing speech into prepared action (II.ii.3).
Listening, she dares to hear more: “He is about it”—being “more the man.” “The doors are open”--the
drugged grooms snore heavily between life and death (II.ii.4, 5). A voice is heard twice from within:
“Who’s there? What, ho?” (II.ii.8). These questions surround her like thunder. She prepared everything
for him—what could have gone wrong? At last he enters and for the first time she calls him, “My
husband!” (II.ii.13). “I have done the deed,” he declares (II.ii.14). Now should be the time to embrace
his wife and to release all the tension of desire that has been building since the prologue. But that
tension continues to mount until it becomes almost unbearable:
Macbeth.
Didst thou not hear a noise?
Lady Macbeth.
I heard the owl scream and the crickets cry.
Did not you speak?
Macbeth.
When?
30

Lady Macbeth.
Macbeth.
Now.
Lady Macbeth.
Ay.
Macbeth.
Hark!
Who lies i’ th’ second chamber?
Lady Macbeth.
As I descended?
Donalbain.
(II.ii.14-19)
The noises and voices of the night come from things they strain to master by naming or placing. But
what kind of a world sounds like this?
Macbeth.
There’s one did laugh in ’s sleep, and one cried “Murder!”
That they did wake each other. I stood and heard them.
But they did say their prayers, and addressed them
Again to sleep.
Lady Macbeth.
There are two lodged together.
(II.ii.22-25)
Something intervenes in the bedchamber when two opposing voices of laughter and of cries issue from
someplace before they converge in prayer:
Macbeth.
One cried “God bless us!” and “Amen” the other,
As they had seen me with these hangman’s hands:
List’ning their fear, I could not say “Amen,”
When they did say “God bless us!”
Lady Macbeth.
Consider it not so deeply.
Macbeth.
But wherefore could not I pronounce “Amen”?
I had most need of blessing, and “Amen”
Stuck in my throat.
Lady Macbeth.
These deeds must not be thought
After these ways; so, it will make us mad.
(II.ii.26-34).
31

What went wrong up there? Imagine the scene: Macbeth, bent over his victim like a hangman drawing
or quartering a criminal, stands suddenly at the sound of laughter (that’s good) and then the cry of
murder (that’s not good), of equal power to wake sleepers. Hearing these opposing noises is like seeing
a bloody dagger (not good), but holding a clean one (good). Can Macbeth admit only the laughter as an
actual sound to accompany his murder, as he admitted only the clean dagger into his rehearsal? That is
the decisive question of the murder at its very moment of performance. Does he have the power of
mind to master the deeds that comprise the tale of his life? Macbeth tries to join the two speakers in
saying “Amen,” a word that functions like the bell to certify the previous words--“God bless us”--as done
to him, too. But the word “Amen” sticks in his throat and he chokes on it, as on food too big to
swallow. In time he will learn to seize upon his victims capaciously, as the “hell-kite” that takes “all [the]
pretty chickens and their dam/At one fell swoop” (IV.iii.217-219). But at the start of his criminal career
the word “Amen” sticks because it does not come from within Macbeth as an object of his sole creation
and mastery. The word comes like food from the outside world. The meaning of “murder” is also not
mastered as before by the words “it,” “deed,” or “business.” Macbeth hears a third voice that cries out
the new definition of murder:
Macbeth.
Methought I heard a voice cry “Sleep no more!
Macbeth does murder sleep”—the innocent sleep,
Sleep that knits up the raveled sleave of care,
The death of each day’s life, sore labor’s bath,
Balm of hurt minds, great nature’s second course,
Chief nourisher in life’s feast—
Lady Macbeth.
What do you mean?
Recall that Macbeth tries to commit murder musically by keeping time with conducting nocturnal nature
and a wife who pegs the cords of his courage to her prepossessed body. But she hears from him now
32

not the voice she tuned, so she questions its source. His answer is to report more of the voice that
defines the meaning of murder in a familiar rhythm and rhyme of three:
Macbeth.
Still it cried “Sleep no more!” to all the house:
“Glamis hath murdered sleep, and therefore Cawdor
Shall sleep no more: Macbeth shall sleep no more.”
(II.ii.34-42)
The restorative rhythm of day and night, waking and sleeping, which gives a double form to time,
making it livable, is no more to be felt by Glamis, Cawdor, Macbeth--the trio of names co-defined with
the murder of living time. Macbeth is caught in the act by the meaning of the act: doors open to more
chambers where innocent sleep wakes itself, then returns to itself with a blessing born of fear. No
blessing and no return of sleep to those who would be sole masters of all the nights and days to come.
Masters of the night must stay awake in every chamber of every house, more like watchful servants
than kings and queens.
Lady Macbeth tries a fourth time (double double) to correct her husband’s thinking by clearing
the filthy blood that has somehow gotten from his hand into his brain and ears:
Lady Macbeth.
Who was it that thus cried? Why, worthy Thane,
You do unbend your noble strength, to think
So brainsickly of things. Go get some water,
And wash this filthy witness from your hand.
Why did you bring these daggers from the place?
(II.ii.43-47)
The Lady, as usual, asks just the right question. Macbeth does not answer it, but we can. He brings the
daggers “from the place” because the place of murder (“the sticking place”) is not confined to one
chamber; the time for murder is ongoing. The deed that he pronounced “done” is not done. His refusal
to carry the daggers back and smear the sleeping grooms with blood is his one and only failure of
courage in the play and his one absolute “no” to the Lady. She must play the man now:
33

Lady Macbeth.
Infirm of purpose!
Give me the daggers. The sleeping and the dead
Are but as pictures. ‘Tis the eye of childhood
That fears a painted devil. If he do bleed,
I’ll gild the faces of the grooms withal,
For it must seem their guilt.
Exit. Knock within.
(II.ii.51-56)
She takes the bloody daggers in hand—performing the iconic gesture of the play--and carries them to a
carved man, his blood the ornamental paint of the sculpture she must complete. Her lines are a highly
condensed attempt to do what Macbeth did in his dagger soliloquy, to put the outer world in
accordance with her inner world of imagination. The knocking as she exits is the thunder of the outer
world, from where sounds and voices come to appall the mind with things unaccounted for that feel
more real than the mind itself. The Lady returns with bloody hands on Macbeth’s cue of the
“multitudinous seas” becoming “one red” in color (II.ii.61, 62). The knocking continues, and the Lady
takes Macbeth by the hand and pulls him to their bedchamber to wash their hands and put on
nightgowns as if they were sleepers. He resists the motion to bed that she had postponed earlier, and
which should be their natural nightly rhythm, but will never be so again.
This exit will become Lady Macbeth’s nightly ritual. In the last third of the play Macbeth sees no
more sights and hears no more voices; his brain and senses become firm and regular. Lady Macbeth,
however, becomes a sleepwalker. Her sense of time and place are enslaved to this exit. Every night her
bloody hand clutches for her husband’s “starting” hand to drag him unwillingly to bed:
Lady Macbeth.
To bed, to bed! There’s knocking at the gate. Come, come, come, come,
give me your hand! What’s done cannot be undone. To bed, to bed, to bed!
Exit Lady. (V.i.48, 69-72)
And that is the last we see of Lady Macbeth.
Let us review the action of the dagger. Macbeth sees a clean dagger in the air that he twice
cannot clutch; it becomes a bloody dagger that he does not consent to see as real. The clean dagger
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that he sees and holds in his other hand as he exits in a state of singleness becomes the bloody daggers
that he does not see but brings back from the place of murder as if bound to them as manual
extensions. Lady Macbeth takes these daggers in her clean hand to use like a brush to dip into Duncan
and to paint the faces of the grooms; she returns to take his hand, one in color with hers, to a washing
that will not clean and then to a bed in which they will never enjoy conjugal sleep again. This action of
the dagger is one of the greatest actions that Shakespeare ever conceived for the stage.
If blood is what it takes to make actors the master painters of the soul’s motions, as we are
thrilled to witness in Act II of this play, then let there be more of that drink before we inquire into
undoing its effects. The “more” that immediately follows is the discovery of the murder. Macduff
returns from Duncan’s chamber as one who experiences the limit of logos:
Enter Macduff
Macduff.
O horror, horror, horror! Tongue nor heart
Cannot conceive nor name thee.
……………………………..
Do not bid me speak;
See, and then speak yourselves. Awake, awake!
Ring the alarum bell.
(II.iii.66-67, 74-76)
Macduff thus enters the action to wake people up to look upon triple horror—“most sacrilegious
murder,” “a new Gorgon,” “the great doom’s image”—the words he tries are unequal to the sight he
sees (II.iii.69, 74, 80). So his voice, operating at the top of his capacity and our toleration for volume,
turns into the alarum bell and out rush the half-naked sleepers, some to stand shaking in the “great
hand of God” invoked by Banquo, and others (Duncan’s sons) to steal themselves away “when there’s
no mercy left” (II.iii. 132, 148). Let it be noted that Macduff (who does not attend the feast for Duncan)
knocks for entrance after drink has done its work; he cannot speak the horror that he sees in Macbeth’s
house. He is the only character in the play to be called “good” convincingly and more than once (II.iv.20,
IV.ii.16, IV.iii.117). He does not attend Macbeth’s crowning at Scone; instead, he returns home to his
35

family at Fife. He does not attend the second feast; but in its aftermath he flies to England to mount an
invasion to destroy the tyrant. These are the actions of a good man who sees how the world goes.
Every man in this play has to make a choice--yes or no--to the crowning of Macbeth. Ross,
Lennox, Angus, Menteith, Caithness--they all say “yes,” as does Banquo, who “borrow[s] from the night”
on his afternoon ride, arriving late to the royal banquet with “twenty mortal murders on *his+ crown”
(III.iv.82). He chooses to keep quiet about what he knows, and thus his ghost is not permitted to say a
word. These men all choose to “borrow from the night” in hope to benefit by day from the new
sovereigns. They will arrive late, like Banquo, to the knowledge of their choice. There will be much to
pay to even their score.
Act III. The Tyrant.
Banquo’s figurative wearing of murder on his crown points to a unique feature of the staged
action of this play. Unlike any other of Shakespeare’s plays about kingship, Macbeth contains no scene
in which the crown instigates and focuses the main action. There is in Macbeth nothing like Richard II’s,
“Here, cousin, seize the crown” (Richard II, IV.i.181); or Henry IV’s sleeping beside the crown on his
pillow, for Prince Hal to take away prematurely; or Richard III’s precise soliloquizing on the actual worn
item:
How sweet a thing it is to wear a crown;
Within whose circuit is Elysium
And all that poets feign of bliss and joy.
(Henry VI, Part 3, I.ii.29-31)
He loses that crown to Richmond, who is visibly given it to “wear,” “enjoy,” and “make much of” as King
Henry VII (Richard III, V.v. 7). There is no comparable action of the crown in Macbeth. Instead, there is
the action of the dagger. The Scottish crown need not be worn by Duncan, since there are no
references to it. He is pointed out as King upon his first entrance by Malcolm’s words to the Captain
(I.ii.6). The crown should appear only once, I think, on Macbeth’s head, when he enters for the first time
36

“as King” in III.i. But the nothingness of a crown without security, the fruitlessness of a crown without
lineage, prompts him to remove the crown from his head as he greets two men who enter his presence
as he calls on fate to come “into the list/And champion me to th’ utterance!” (III.i.72). These men are to
become his double instruments--of fate and against fate—for they are to impale of the heads of Banquo
and Fleance with the crown of murder:
Macbeth.
Who’s there?
. . . .
Was it not yesterday we spoke together?
Murderers.
It was, so please your Highness.
Macbeth.
Well then,
--here he takes off the crown to persuade them man-to-man, not command them Highness to subject--
now
--bare-headed and ready to “make love” to their manly “assistance,” he proceeds–
Have you considered of my speeches?
(III.i.71-76, 124)
The action thus interpreted is clear: Macbeth uncrowns himself and puts on murder as his source of
security and power over the question of “issue.” He uses the murderers as fate uses him, telling them
the precise time and place for an act predetermined by him, but intended by him to defeat the
predetermination of fate. If he succeeds, Macbeth would become stronger than fate. The ceremony of
kingship (which Henry V complains is not worth a good night’s sleep) is given up by Macbeth (along with
sleep) in favor of exercising the “bloody and invisible hand” of nature at night (III.ii.48). This exercise will
relieve his “filed mind” by removing the “rubs” and “botches” “who keep *Banquo+ company,” namely
Fleance and his prophetically crowned progeny (III.i.134, 135). He frees the “scorpions” that engender
in his mind by willing the “firstlings of *his+ heart” to be “the firstlings of *his+ hand” (III.ii.36; IV.i. 147,
148). Thus he “crowns” the “strange things” in his head with acts unmediated by scanning of them
37

(III.iv.140, 141; IV.i. 149). Such spontaneous action imitates nature’s own way of performing her
purposes without deliberation. Macbeth’s enemies are “assailable” precisely because “nature’s copy’s
not eterne” (III.ii.38, 39). No place is reserved at the banquet of life. No monuments to the past escape
eating by time. Thus we do not see much of the Scottish crown in this play. The head is what matters in
its vulnerability. We see heads everywhere as nature sees them in her capacity as fate, the cutter of life
lines. Macbeth, who engages to be the uttermost champion of time, likes to see the heads of his
enemies “trenched” with “gashes,” crowns of impalement (III.iv.28). At the end of the play we will see
Macbeth’s head brought on stage instead of a crown to proclaim Malcolm the new king. It will be called
“th’ usurper’s cursed head” (V.viii.55). 10
This fits the action of a play without the royal crown as a chief
prop.
How does Macbeth, once lauded with “hails,” become cursed as the usurping tyrant? By means
of a dinner party made disastrous with visits by a murderer and a corpse-like ghost. The murderer (and
his fellow) we have briefly met as substitutes for the crown. Let us know them better. Lady Macbeth’s
persuasion of Macbeth to commit murder in I.vii is given its double in III.i. Macbeth sends the Lady
away in order to persuade these two unnamed men to undertake--as manly men--the “business” of
“fate” in store for their oppressor, Banquo, and his son, Fleance (III.i.124-125, 137). Their murders
promise to restore the “perfect” quality of “health” to sickly Macbeth and these downtrodden men
(III.i.107-108). Macbeth tries to maintain the high and fair perspective on murder that he and the Lady
had taken towards Duncan’s murder, but the men do not need persuasion at all. They confess their
reckless and desperate dispositions towards the whole world, not Banquo in particular. They will risk
anything rather than continue to live miserably. The incongruence of high and low purposes is so
manifest that we have to remind ourselves not to laugh in ridicule of the giant Macbeth making love to
these dwarfs.
10 Macbeth is also called “the dead butcher” at the end. Formerly, he was wondered at as “the unseamer.”
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This sense of incongruence is even more pronounced when Macbeth greets one of these men at
the solemn banquet meant to celebrate the new royal couple. The movement from this bright,
ornamented occasion, so high in hope and jovial in welcome, to the quick, dark words whispered at the
door is an extremely uncomfortable juxtaposition of courtesy with viciousness:
Macbeth.
Here I’ll sit i’ th’ midst:
Be large in mirth; anon we’ll drink a measure
The table round. [Goes to Murderer at door] There’s blood
upon thy face.
Murderer.
‘Tis Banquo’s then.
Macbeth.
‘Tis better thee without than he within.
Is he dispatched?
Murderer.
My lord, his throat is cut; that I did for him.
Macbeth.
Thou art the best o’ th’ cutthroats.
Yet he’s good that did the like for Fleance;
If thou didst it, thou art the nonpareil.
(III.iv. 11-20)
Recall the words of the Lady: “And to be more than what you were, you would/Be so much more the
man” (I.vii.50-51). Her words of longing for an elevation of their beings turn brutal, callous, and
disgusting in these whisperings between crownless Macbeth and the lowlife Murderer. These two kinds
of persuasion and hospitality, so differently felt and spoke, though of one continuous action, come from
the cauldron of the soul, into which are poured all hopes and fears. Fair words are the promises to hope
from voices of religion, philosophy, poetry, and love that men and women keep to their ears. These fair
words break like bubbles from the surface of speaking and hearing into bodily action. The foul words
come from similar voices that take account of the breakings.
39

Typically, it is the genius of comedy to ask the question, “What is the lower meaning?” of
anything human beings elevate highly. 11
Shakespeare’s comic genius for seeing the presence of low
truth in high aspirations is fully and darkly at work throughout the banquet scene. Macbeth alone sees
the gory ghost of Banquo, which appears twice. In extremity of passion he successfully challenges the
ghost, making it exit twice, while the Lady frantically tries to keep her distinguished guests seated as
they look around as if lost in a maze and feel for their own throats in fear. Shakespeare makes us feel in
this scene what it is like to be subject to a tyrant. (It is after this banquet that everyone begins to call
Macbeth by that title.) Imagine that you are a guest at that banquet: Macbeth salutes you with a full
cup, “Come, love and health to all!” You proclaim your duties and return the pledge—and as your neck
lifts up for the wine to go down you hear the thunder: “Avaunt! And quit my sight!” (III.iv.88, 94). You
stand up and move out of Macbeth’s line of vision--harm’s way--but the Lady, “sweet remembrancer,”
pats you on the shoulder with soothing words of warning (III.iv.38):
Lady Macbeth.
Pray you, keep seat.
The fit is momentary; upon a thought
He will again be well. If much you note him,
You shall offend him and extend his passion.
Feed, and regard him not.
(III.iv.55-59)
So you sit back down, feeding, drinking, remembering to laugh, whispering, pretending not to notice the
fits of power and images of blood, obeying the custom and pleasures of survival, until someone finally
asks what the sights are that are not to be noted. Then you are abruptly dismissed to your own houses
without respect of rank, and you push out the door as quickly as space permits for so many bodies at
once. You will interpret Macbeth’s feast at the table of every meal and in the bed of every trial of sleep.
11 Thus “The Miller’s Tale” has to come after “The Knight’s Tale” in Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales, to pull love
down to earth and break its high hopes of heaven.
40

Banquo’s ghost, seated and moving among the guests, brings into the open the two sides of
Macbeth’s tyranny. People are as unreal as ghosts to this tyrant: his power learns how to make them
disappear like shadows and mockeries; and ghosts are as real as people to this tyrant: his power learns
how to order the dead (the monuments of history) to become food for kites. The fear felt by the people
for their disappearing lives and families spreads across the land because the fear felt by Macbeth of his
dead historical rival—twice driven away—and of his living accomplices makes him stalk the land for
more fears to eat. Macbeth thus grows bigger, stronger, and more determined. “For mine own
good/All causes shall give way” (III.v.136-137). “Mine own good” includes in its meaning no more
difference between living people and dead people. Both are assailable to Macbeth’s appetite for blood.
So he moves forward, across the deepening river of blood to the land of promise—there to be free from
bondage to “saucy doubts and fears” (III.iv.26).
Act IV. The Knower and Doer of Nameless Things.
The next cause to give way in Macbeth’s pursuit of his own good is respect for the separate
parts and kinds of things in nature. In order to know deeper things without names, the Weird Sisters,
doing what they call “a deed without a name,” deposit dismembered bodily forms into their cauldron,
where souls come to inquire into things beyond mortal intelligence (IV.i.49). “More shall they speak
[says Macbeth], for now I am bent to know/By the worst means the worst” (III.iv.135-136). Knowing the
worst is good for us, too. Is this not why we attend tragedies—to learn the worst things to fear and to
pity from the master playwrights who already know our abiding questions? “Open, locks,/Whoever
knocks!” (IV.i.46-47). Macbeth first learns from the armed head that rises with thunder from the
cauldron to fear Macduff. He next learns from a bloody child that rises with thunder from the cauldron
to “laugh to scorn” the power of any man born of woman (IV.i.79). There is no pity in that laughter,
which he heard at the time of Duncan’s murder, though he did not know then how to appropriate it
from among the other voices and sounds of the night. Now, that laughter is his charm against tragedy.
41

Macbeth brings two further questions to the cauldron. First, another question not named in words:
does nature have causes that give way to man’s desires? Macbeth learns from a crowned child with a
tree in his hand that rises with thunder from the cauldron that he will not be vanquished until Birnam
Wood comes to high Dunsinane Hill against him. Since trees do not give way to command and move, he
concludes that nature will not take sides in the war against him. He will live “the lease of nature” and
die of old age (IV.i.99). Finally, he insists on asking a question about Banquo’s issue—will they
“ever/Reign in this kingdom?” (IV.i.101-102) The deeper question not named in words is this: does
history have causes that give way to man’s desires? The answer he receives is not favorable to his
hopes. He is shown a line of eight kings and images of many more, all crowned and resembling Banquo.
How will he have the time, even in one long life, to kill all those future kings not of his line? Macbeth
thus determines to make war on the principle of history: orderly generation by families. The first victim
is the family of Macduff. The details of their slaughter will not be asked or spoken.
Macbeth’s inquiries to the cauldron omit the primary question about the nameless One. Does
God live? How can we know anything about what to fear and pity, the boundaries of laughter, and the
susceptibilities of nature and history to man’s control without first knowing about God? This question
gets carried into the action by the Macduffs.
Lady Macduff and her young son address the question about God indirectly, but unmistakably,
prior to their murders. Lady Macduff feels abandoned and unloved by her husband, who does not even
leave her a letter to explain his flight from a fearful place in which he leaves wife and babes defenseless.
Ross tries to comfort her with the idea of Macduff’s hidden wisdom. She sees rather cowardice,
rashness, or treason. Ross blesses the boy and leaves them alone before his tears of pity make a fool of
him—or (as some suspect) before his foolhardy remaining to comfort or defend them makes a pity of
him (slain too). The son answers with good humor and tough-mindedness the questionable assertion of
his father’s death as the sacred dialogue with his mother begins:
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Lady Macduff.
Sirrah, your father’s dead:
And what will you do now? How will you live?
Son.
As birds do, mother.
Lady Macduff.
What, with worms and flies?
Son.
With what I get, I mean; and so do they.
(IV.ii.30-33)
Their sacred dialogue lasts only thirty-two lines, enough for Shakespeare to make us care about this boy
and his mother as they try to interpret their condition of abandonment through questions and answers
that reach from earth to heaven. Can a living father give his children something better than what nature
offers (“worms and flies”) to the getting hand of the fatherless? Is there living truth that defines the
liars and honest men? Which of these men is the stronger? The boy takes heart that his mother is not
weeping, and she takes comfort in his precocious talk. That is the cue for the messenger, another
cowardly pronouncer of blessings:
Enter a Messenger
Messenger.
Bless you fair dame!
. . . .
I doubt some danger does approach you nearly;
. . . .
Be not found here; hence, with your little ones.
. . . .
Heaven preserve you!
I dare abide no longer.
Exit Messenger (IV.ii.63, 65, 67, 70-71)
Then an extraordinary turn is taken by Lady Macduff’s distressed mind. Perhaps one of the spirits that
tend on mortal thoughts visits her to supply exactly the reflection she needs to keep hold on herself, her
husband, and their family as harm swiftly comes upon her and the children without the least hindrance:
Lady Macduff.
Whither should I fly?
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I have done no harm. But I remember now
I am in this earthly world, where to do harm
Is often laudable, to do good sometime
Accounted dangerous folly. Why then, alas,
Do I put up that womanly defense,
To say I have done no harm?—What are these faces?
Enter Murderers
Murderer.
Where is your husband?
Lady Macduff.
I hope, in no place so unsanctified
Where such as thou mayst find him.
Murderer.
He’s a traitor.
Son.
Thou liest, thou shag-eared villain!
Murderer.
What, you egg!
[Stabbing him.]
Young fry of treachery!
Son.
He has killed me, mother:
Run away, I pray you!
Exit [Lady Macduff], crying “Murder!” (IV.ii.71-83)
Two things are most important in the staging of this scene. First, the murderers must clearly look ugly,
fit to inhabit those places where God has not groomed His creation, or rather, where God does not live.
Second, the boy has to be killed in the designated manner, as one cracks open an egg for frying and
eating. The metal dagger cuts into his side and is held there just long enough for him to see clearly that
the big words that a boy used to hear and play with at home are about real things. He reports with
amazement a simple fact: “He has killed me, mother.” Then as the dagger is pulled out his life spills out
on the stage, and the son of Macduff tells his mother to run away as he dies before her eyes. She runs
off one end of the stage crying “Murder!” as her husband enters on that cue from the other end, far way
in England, telling the weepy, shade-sitting Malcolm:
Macduff.
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Let us rather
Hold fast the mortal sword, and like good men
Bestride our down-fall’n birthdom.
(IV.iii.2-4)
It is Scotland that Macduff bestrides as protector while his family is cut down unprotected. The
coordinated exits and entrances make this double action painfully clear.
Thus we see for ourselves that to meet with Macbeth--having done no harm--is to invite an end
like that one. What name should we give to that deed, than which there is none worse on
Shakespeare’s stage? Let us look at this from another perspective. We see for ourselves what is
required to make a man able to kill Macbeth. This is a hard saying. We know from the cauldron that
being not of woman born is a necessary condition to harm Macbeth. But it is not sufficient. Macduff is
made into Macbeth’s worthy opponent once his goodness is seen to match Macbeth’s evil in its capacity
to make all causes (“Those precious motives, those strong knots of love,” IV.iii.27) give way to one great
thing—Scotland, his country, his “down-fall’n birthdom.” This is a terrible goodness, dreadful as sin to
Macduff who alone possesses it, and more than natural. One more thing let us try to say. This painful
exhibition of child-murder shows us the foul clearly, but not the fair. Although the boy shows wit,
loyalty, and an instinct for courage, his death is not fair to look upon. The filthy air is not yet clear for
the fair to appear, and the will of heaven is still to be questioned.
Macduff questions heaven when he hears words that Ross would prefer to “howl out in the
desert air”: “Wife, children, servants, all/That could be found,” “savagely slaughtered” (IV.iii.194, 205,
211-212). It takes some time for the magnitude of the loss to sink into Macduff’s soul. Five times he
questions the word “all.” This is one of Macbeth’s words of transport with which Macduff must now
become intimate as a man. Feeling the power of that word “all” to leave him utterly bereft and amazed,
he, too, is visited by a recollection of the two worlds, earthly and heavenly, and like his wife he finds his
place again in the earthly world of sin:
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Macduff.
I cannot but remember such things were,
That were most precious to me. Did heaven look on,
And would not take their part? Sinful Macduff,
They were all struck for thee! Naught that I am,
Not for their own demerits but for mine
Fell slaughter on their souls. Heaven rest them now!
(IV.iii.222-227)
He answers his most apt question about the will of heaven by taking upon himself the sin and blood of
having left them all alone as food for the tyrant. He knew what he was doing—he now knows that he
knew. Heaven remains justified in Macduff’s eyes. He is not the sort of man to live in doubt about
ultimate things. No such man is fit to kill Macbeth, who is also not the sort of man to live in doubt.
Macduff (as we shall learn) is not born of woman, but “untimely ripped” from his mother (which
certainly kills her); he does not much like to speak and he does not feast (no “nave to the chops” seam
of identity); and he is as unavoidable as heaven’s thunder when we first meet him as the early morning
knocker at the gate. This bloody man Macduff is now fit to meet bloody Macbeth at sword’s length. “If
he ‘scape,/Heaven forgive him too!” he proclaims (IV.iii.234-235). “Too” should take the stress along
with “him,” for the two of them are now each other’s double.
Act V. The Nihilist Still Named Macbeth
The question of forgiveness that links Macduff and Macbeth is a question about the ends of
action. This question must now be answered altogether dramatically. The drums and colors of
impending war increase as both armies prepare to meet: “Hang out our banners on the outward
walls [Macbeth shouts]./The cry is still ‘They come!’” (V.v.1-2). “Come” was Lady Macbeth’s triply
spoken word to the spirits to stop in her the “passage to remorse,” and it is her ritual word as she goes
off to bed night after night alone (I.v.45). How does Lady Macbeth end? Malcolm says that people
think that by “self and violent hands” she “took off her life” (V.viii.70-71). Thus speak the moralistic
desires. We have heard them speak before, also through Malcolm’s secondhand reporting (of Cawdor’s
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end). What can we say about how she ends? Five lines after Macbeth shouts “The cry is still ‘They
come!’” we hear a cry of women from within the castle. Seyton discovers that the cry is over the death
of Lady Macbeth. We know that the doctor has removed from her “the means of all annoyance” and
that she is continually watched (V.i.80). We know that death comes to her while the cry “They come!” is
being heard all around the castle. We know that “thick-coming fancies” keep her from rest, while thickmarching
soldiers occupy Macbeth, whose hand we have not seen in hers for a long time. The action
indicates that somehow or other that word “Come” kills her from within. It stops in her any further
passages and leaves her hands empty of any doing or undoing. That is all that we can say about how she
ends her life.
How does Macbeth react to the news of her death? Becomingly and enigmatically, as if death
were merely the speaking of a word at the end of a career of fantastically spoken words that no longer
stick deep: “She should have died hereafter;/There would have been a time for such a word.” Thus he
“throw*s+ away” his “dearest love” “as ‘twere a careless trifle,” 12 and then he continues, as if he had
been “studied in *her+ death” (I.iv.9-11; I.v.59):
Macbeth.
Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,
To the last syllable of recorded time;
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death.
Note the inner meaning carried by the stresses of the first line: “more and more and more.” Without
the season of sleep, time moves monotonously, and “all” our “yes” days, recorded in history, shed
12 When Macbeth hears the offstage cry of women he is pleased to note that his body no longer responds with fear
to night shrieks. His familiarity with “slaughter,” “direness,” and “horror” (on which he has fully “supped”) has
made him immune to starts (V.v.9-15). When Seyton reports the cause of the cry (the Queen’s death), Macbeth
discovers that he does not feel the pangs of grief. When a man has been trained not to care at all about the cries
of women, he has also learned not to love them. Much more depends on how one hears and responds to the
screams of the night than one might think.
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“light” only upon “dusty death.” The banality of the double “d” ending, “dusty death,” is perfect after
hearing so many active “d” words. In the second half of this double speech Macbeth moves us into the
darkness of life:
Out, out, brief candle!
Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
And then is heard no more. It is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury
Signifying nothing.
(V.v.19-28)
Consider how morally challenging this beautiful speech is. Macbeth does not care about repentance
because there is nothing morally to undo when nothing of significance is done in life. The things
Macbeth has done for his own good have with him the standing of a player who moves on stage for a
while and then disappears.
How do you think Shakespeare (as tale-teller) ought to answer the scorn that issues from a
creature of his poetic hand? He answers no differently from how he presents any other idea,
dramatically. Seyton reports the death of the Queen, a woman Macbeth once dearly loved and who he
hoped would bring forth sons. Now, being “of woman born” is a condition he scorns. Macbeth made
her feel the “future in the instant;” now he feels no time to acknowledge her death. That is the
dramatic situation in which Macbeth describes life (in Seyton’s presence) as so formless a thing that he
cannot judge whether it creeps or struts, shouts furious speeches or whispers fading syllables, burns like
a candle or eclipses itself in shadows; whether it is a series of tomorrows or of yesterdays; is scripted by
an idiot or improvised by fools. Seyton is one of Shakespeare’s many minor characters who
nevertheless make a strong impression. It is sometimes claimed that Shakespeare acted such minor
parts, not being himself a distinguished player, but drawn irresistibly to the presence of great acting as
some people feel compelled to the dangerous service of power. Such a person is Seyton, and I think
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that Shakespeare should have played the part. Seyton speaks with coolness of nerve to Macbeth, while
others shake in his presence. He watches the action, interprets the sounds, and helps his lord timely to
arm. He has but five lines to speak. Each line corresponds in order to each of the five acts of the play.
Seyton’s first line: “What is your gracious pleasure?” (V.iii.30). This is the question of Act I:
what pleasures in life do this warrior and his wife most deeply desire to enact, but graciously so, by
struggle or beguilement, so as to remain fair and free? Seyton’s second line: “All is confirmed, my lord,
which was reported” (V.iii. 31). This is Act II: Macbeth is confirmed as king, as was reported by the
Weird Sisters and by Lady Macbeth, who taught him how to be one in act and desire and to get away
with murder. Seyton’s third line, in response to Macbeth’s, “Give me my armor”: “’Tis not needed yet.”
“I’ll put in on,” Macbeth insists (V.iii.33-34). This is Act III: the murder of Banquo, who represents to
Macbeth the “not yet” doubleness of action, that is, action for the sake of the present actor and for
someone not yet present. The armor Macbeth puts on in the present to fight the “not yet” makes him
known in Act III as a tyrant. Also in Act III we learn that Macduff flies to England, a double action that
turns out in one sense not to be needed, since the forces of invasion are well provided and ready by the
time he arrives there; but in another sense the deadly consequences of his untimely flight make him the
one who can kill the tyrant. Seyton’s fourth line: “It is the cry of women, my good lord” (V.v.8). This is
Act IV: the chanting of the Weird Sisters around the cauldron raised to fever pitch—“Double, double, toil
and trouble;/Fire burn and cauldron bubble” (IV.i.10-11, 20-21, 35-36); the exit of Lady Macduff (and
other wives and mothers), crying “Murder!”; and the news of their slaughter brought to Macduff in
England, his goodness terrible, uncrying, not a woman’s kind of goodness. Seyton’s fifth line: “The
Queen, my lord, is dead” (V.v.16). This is Act V: Lady Macbeth, here called “Queen” for the first time,
dies offstage--we do not know how--nor does Macbeth have the time or interest to inquire. The
question of Act V is that of time itself: what is its interest and meaning as measured in the sounds and
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gestures of mortal human life? And of course there remains to Act V the question of Macbeth’s end. No
one calls him “King” anymore. How will he die? Under what name? To what end?
Thus does Shakespeare answer, through Seyton, Macbeth’s charge that his tale is told by an
idiot. The five acts that Seyton speaks in five lines have a ring structure. The Queen’s death in Act V is
present in the Lady’s murderous desire in Act I, as the word “come,” which invokes her death and
Duncan’s, signifies. The death cries of the women in Act IV are heard in Act II as the cry of “murder”
from the second chamber, as the cry “Macbeth doth murder sleep,” and as Macduff’s wake-up cry of
“Murder and treason!” Act III is the center of the ring. The banquet is the futile attempt by Macbeth
and his Lady to civilize their appetites: to keep their places reserved at the table while leaving the table
to kill the “not yet” guest and to return from his spilled blood to fill cups with wine and drink the health
of all—as if such behavior were suitable civility. To know how to suit action to the time and place seems
like an ordinary thing to know. But when power feels safe from any call to account, it wears what
conduct it wills.
Macbeth’s ambition to master time and place by acting seamlessly, without intermission or
boundaries, may deserve to be called “idiotic.” An idiot, after all, is someone who does not know how
to respect the differences between the inner and outer worlds. . Moliere’s Alceste (for example) is a
real comic idiot of honesty. Macbeth may be calling himself, as the consummate actor of murder, of
which the audiences of tomorrow never tire, a “real bloody idiot.” But “idiot” is the wrong name for
Macbeth, as it is for tale-teller Shakespeare. It beckons too much towards the laughter in which
Macbeth puts his hope (“Laugh to scorn/The power of man, for none of woman born/Shall harm
Macbeth”), and moreover it does not take account of the perfection of form of this tragedy, which one
can appreciate even on first encounter. The Queen is dead. That news is enough to inform the
theatrically-minded Macbeth that he is in Act V. How will his tale end?
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First, Birnam Wood comes to Dunsinane in the cut boughs carried by the soldiers. Macbeth,
hearing the report, begins “To doubt th’ equivocation of the fiend” (V.v.43). The words of promise on
which the highest hopes of mankind are founded are essentially double: equivocal if the fiend “lies like
truth” (44), or poetic if the prophet, poet, or philosopher tells truth like a lie. The wood of Birnam
moves to signify that words do not stay still in one fixed meaning, though they are grounded in
something not of woman born, for words are not of human origin and manipulation only. Seyton speaks
doubly to Macbeth, telling him the form of his own tale (the five act structure of the stage play) and the
truth of its content (the meaning of each act). You have to live at peace with doubleness to hear Seyton
properly and more so the Weird Sisters. Macbeth does not live at peace that way. Shakespeare revels
in the double quality of dramatic speech as partaking of both art and nature. The drums, owls, crickets,
bells, and thunder remind us continually that words are both signs and sounds, and sounds speak
powerfully without logos to embodied souls that move, breathe, and have (even when old) “so much
blood in them” (V.i.43).
Next, the soldiers throw down their “leafy screens” and show their separate faces (V.vi.1).
Macbeth, like a bear tied to the stake, prepares to kill every last one of them that comes within his
reach. The succession of “tomorrows” is time enough for that. Enter within reach the young Siward,
son of an old professional soldier of whom “Christendom” affords none better (IV.iii.192). We hear from
Young Siward something we have heard before:
Young Siward.
What is thy name?
Macbeth.
Thou’lt be afraid to hear it.
Young Siward.
No; though thou call’st thyself a hotter name
Than any is in hell.
Macbeth.
My name’s Macbeth.
Young Siward.
The devil himself could not pronounce a title
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More hateful to mine ear.
Macbeth.
No, nor more fearful.
Young Siward.
Thou liest, abhorred tyrant; with my sword
I’ll prove the lie thou speak’st.
Fight, and Young Siward slain.
Macbeth.
Thou wast born of woman.
(V.vii.4-11)
Recall the words: “Thou liest, thou shag-eared villain!” (IV.ii.81). Young Siward speaks from his father’s
book of chivalry, and he may take some brave hurts on the front before he falls, but like the Macduff
boy he is not meet for such a killer. Macbeth exits, laughing with scorn at all such men and weapons as
these. Bravery and warrior prowess are not enough to kill this “abhorred tyrant.” He asserts the right to
his name, Macbeth, still belonging to the warrior of singular interest who was alone worthy to meet and
be named from among all the actors in the hurly-burly world of war and politics.
Shakespeare shows us the fight with Young Siward not only to recall the famous and dreadful
warrior. He also wants us to see Old Siward hearing the news of his son’s death. This is an
unforgettable little scene of mismatch between the true soldier and the omnipresent reporter of news,
Ross, always trying to reflect the glow of manly action from the surface of his safe-keeping character,
which does nothing himself but add moral tints to the deeds of others:
Ross.
Your son, my lord, has paid a soldier’s debt:
He only lived but till he was a man;
The which no sooner had his prowess confirmed
In the unshrinking station where he fought,
But like a man he died.
Siward.
Then is he dead?
Ross.
Ay, and brought off the field. Your cause of sorrow
Must not be measured by his worth, for then
It hath no end.
Siward.
Had he his hurts before?
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Ross.
Ay, on the front.
Siward.
Why then, God’s soldier be he!
Had I as many sons as I have hairs,
I would not wish them to a fairer death:
And so his knell is knolled.
Now the politic young Malcolm, also not a fighter, but the chief beneficiary of the sacrifices of this war,
tries to appropriate the action emotionally:
Malcolm.
He’s worth more sorrow,
And that I’ll spend for him.
Siward.
He’s worth no more:
They say he parted well and paid his score:
And so God be with him!
(V.viii.39-53)
Does Young Siward die a fair death? To those who do not witness it, perhaps. What is beautiful to me is
how the father receives the news his way in this unmilitary company of uneasy survivors. However, I
have seen productions that cut those of his lines that the director and company found morally
repugnant. We must all make our decisions about what “more” or “no more” we would tolerate of
certain things in this play, for we are not given to see if God has soldiers, or what He requires of man to
“pay the score.” Yet we have our moral business still to conduct unseeingly .
Macduff’s meeting with Macbeth is the greatest of the fights in Shakespeare to watch and
ponder. An honest and decent audience must find it troubling. Imagine that Macbeth enters stage left,
having gashed open a few more foes, and he strides towards the opposite stage right exit; Macduff now
enters stage left, sees Macbeth about to slip away, and in that apocalyptic voice that we heard raising
the sleepers to face the image of doomsday, he booms out four distinct syllables: “Turn, hell-hound,
turn!” (V.viii.3). They must sound like the thunder, completely arresting, like the voice of God
demanding that the great sinner turn and face his deeds to see how vile he is become. Macbeth
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ecognizes the voice, stops, and says half to himself: “Of all men else I have avoided thee” (4). Then he
turns. He doubles: front becomes back and left becomes right, past becomes present, and a line of
meaningless tomorrows curves in a semi-circle to meet its end at a distance. He tries to match the
thunder with four striding syllables: “But get thee back!” (5). Macduff stands his ground. Macbeth
offers a reason, as he did when he tried to say “no” to his wife. It is just as weak and impertinent: “My
soul is too much charged/With blood of thine already” (5-6). He has “supped full” of Macduff’s blood
and has no appetite to pay for more of it (V.v.13). Macduff rejects the paltry-reasoned warning and all
recourse to speech in four knocking syllables: “I have no words” (6). Though he does allow Macbeth’s
image of blood-glut: “My voice is in my sword, thou bloodier villain/Than terms can give thee out!” (7-
8). Macduff is hardly alone in sounding artificial when trying to find the right words to describe
Macbeth. But at least he knows it and defers to the sword.
The fight, which has two parts, now begins. Macduff rushes on Macbeth, delivering furious
sword strikes without remission. The voice of the sword sounds familiar and reassuring to Macbeth,
who parries every thrust until Macduff grows out of breath. Then Macbeth pauses to manifest in
speech the apparent truth of the prophecy. He is never content to let promises remain quietly inside
him, contemptuous of the inner life of private things as being of woman born:
Macbeth.
Thou losest labor:
As easy mayst thou the intrenchant air
With thy keen sword impress as make me bleed:
Let fall thy blade on vulnerable crests;
I bear a charmed life, which must not yield
To one of woman born.
(V.viii.8-13)
Macduff’s spent strength flashes into new breath as he recollects his terrible birth:
Macduff.
Despair thy charm,
And let the angel whom thou still hast served
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Tell thee, Macduff was from his mother’s womb
Untimely ripped.
(V.viii.13-16)
This news breaks the last hope Macbeth has in words of promise, while to Macduff it gives new meaning
to the ripping of his mother and slaughter of his family. Now Macduff fights not for personal revenge
merely, but for the cause for which he was born—the terrible goodness of his zeal for life (leading to his
mother’s demise) and later for country (at the cost of his family). Few can be trusted to choose to
sacrifice what Macduff does sacrifice because of who he is by birth. He frees the time to pass from old
to new, letting what is not yet be more precious than what is.
Macbeth’s courage falters with his broken hopes and he declines to fight further with Macduff.
The alternative to fighting him Macduff vividly portrays:
Macduff.
Then yield thee, coward,
And live to be the show and gaze o’ th’ time:
We’ll have thee, as our rarer monsters are,
Painted upon a pole, and underwrit,
“Here may you see the tyrant.”
(V.viii.23-27)
The title “tyrant” reminds Macbeth of his name that he asserted to Young Siward before killing him at a
similar moment of double naming. This time, however, Macbeth goes much further in defining himself
than by stating his name; he defines the conditions of his own eternity as damned or not damned on the
basis of no outside hopes or inner acts of repentance, only his own endurance against the odds as a
warrior:
Macbeth.
I will not yield,
To kiss the ground before young Malcolm’s feet,
And to be baited with the rabble’s curse.
Though Birnam Wood be come to Dunsinane,
And thou opposed, being of no woman born,
Yet I will try the last. Before my body
I throw my warlike shield. Lay on Macduff;
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And damned be him that first cries, “Hold, enough!”
(V.viii.28-34)
Exit, fighting. Alarums. Enter fighting, and
Macbeth slain. Retreat and flourish.
Macbeth throws down his shield to act with all limbs on offense, no defense, his purpose not to die
bravely, though he does die bravely, but to “try the last” singly. What is lasting in life? Not body, not
family, not Malcolm’s line, for Banquo’s will take over, not Scotland, for England will take over. Macbeth
fights to see what--if anything--there is to see at the end. Is there anything to fear? Why keep a shield
when the body is one with the mind and the mind does not yield?
Part two of the fight now begins. This time Macduff must parry the fury of Macbeth’s assaults,
as both men hear in the clash of swords the threat of damnation to the first who cries out for his life.
They exit fighting, and for a short while the stage is bare and we hear only the “alarums” of war. What
are we thinking as we wait for the action to resume onstage? Do we want to hear Macbeth cry “Hold,
enough!”? Or are we like Lady Macbeth (at the beginning of II.ii), waiting for her man to return from the
kill and afraid that something is going wrong offstage. When they re-enter still fighting, is it not terribly
wonderful? Macbeth is not slain. Of course the tyrant must be slain: history requires it; the tragic form
requires it; moral decency requires it. But is it not terrible to admit that we do not want Macbeth to cry
“Hold, enough!” and be damned? We like seeing him this way, even at risk of his winning. But he
cannot win. If Macbeth wins, life becomes as Macbeth describes in his “tomorrow” speech, meaningless
and idiotic. Shakespeare has a good deal more to say about the meaning of life after this play.
Macbeth’s are not the poet’s last words. 13
Why is Macduff able to kill Macbeth? If we cannot answer this question, we have not
understood the play. The two warriors, childless and wifeless, know the doom of flesh. Each has one
cause left: Macbeth fights to live “the lease of nature” and not be damned by living cowardly (IV.i.99);
13 Some people find that Prospero, who does have the last words, offers a gentle and comic version of Macbeth’s
terrible nihilism.
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Macduff fights to free the time. His cause is greater. Macduff waits for his time to strike. Macbeth
finally exposes his trunk after an upper thrust of his sword fails to unseam the man who has no seams.
Macduff lunges in quickly and withdraws his sword to see its effect on the uncharmed, unyielding life of
the “one of greatest note” (V.vii.21). Macbeth staggers and bends, but his sword sticks in the ground of
Scotland, which he will not kiss. The earth still lies silently “sure and firm-set” beneath unsteady legs, as
doubled over in unspeaking pain, upheld by the sword, he looks up clear to see what comes next to the
soldier who dares the ultimate victory—and then Macduff cuts off his head.
Let the curtain close on those two. We are the keepers of Macbeth’s end, for Macduff knows
better than to tell his countrymen how beautiful it was. The foul is fair still. I hasten to add that
Shakespeare knows better than to tell in speeches or prescribe in stage directions what cannot be so
dictated. At the decisive moment of the play there is no art but what we find in our capacities to coconstruct
the face of action in order to see the end, inside and out, of the nihilist and the tyrant named
“Macbeth.”
Malcolm, Ross, Siward, and other thanes and soldiers enter with drums and colors to survey the
results of the war. Siward’s son is reported dead, as we know, and then Macduff enters with Macbeth’s
head on his outstretched sword, as if hovering in the air. “Hail, King!” he shouts--no one echoes him--
“for so thou art,” he adds to the unbelievers (V.viii. 54). All stare at the head, its eyes still open, its
mouth closed; the oppressive seat of thought forever severed from the bloody hands of action. Is it safe
to meet him now? Macduff is the new preeminent warrior. He has three things quickly to do: name the
head; name the time; and direct the assembled voices to name the new king, for they must be turned
from their fascination with that head--and from him who holds it in lieu of a crown-- to Malcolm:
Macduff.
Behold, where stands
Th’ usurper’s cursed head. The time is free.
I see thee compassed with thy kingdom’s pearl,
That speak my salutation in their minds,
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Whose voices I desire aloud with mine:
Hail, King of Scotland!
This time they respond on cue with the expected third hail:
All.
Hail, King of Scotland!
(V.viii.54-59)
It is important that the head be seen as Macbeth’s head. Let the squeamish shut their eyes if they must,
while the rest ponder their last meeting with Macbeth. 14
Malcolm closes the action with a sixteen-line oration consisting of three interwoven sections
and two final rhymed couplets that clearly recalls the form and matter of the opening prologue. He
promises (i) to “reckon” and “make even” “your several loves” in short time; (ii) to plant “newly with the
time” by “calling home our exiled friends” from abroad and (iii) “producing forth” at home the “cruel
ministers” of “this dead butcher and his fiendlike queen”; and (first couplet) by “the grace of Grace” to
perform “what needful else” “in measure, time, and place” (V.viii.60-73). That much, which is fourteen
lines, should have been the final and fair-sounding words in a form we recognize, for the time is indeed
free when Grace comes to the King without call but by grace. But what if God’s grace does not come?
Macbeth’s head stands there still, and so Malcolm adds an extra couplet to supply something else that is
missing from the action of this play—the actual crown:
“So thanks to all at once and to each one,
Whom we invite to see us crowned at Scone.
Flourish. Exit all.
(V.viii.74-75)
The “all at once” and the “oneness of each” that Macbeth and his Lady tried so hard to clutch for
themselves become for Malcolm mere spectators, told where to meet next and what to see—him,
14 To the cauldron of once living parts, the published versions of Shakespeare’s stage plays, we all may go safely to
ask our questions and take our answers. But it would also be good, if not better, to witness the living plays at the
playhouse, though this is not so safe a mode of meeting Macbeth. The spirits of this play come to live inside those
who hear and call them as if for real.
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crowned. We are among the spectators. Now that we know the consequences of the preference of the
three Weird Sisters to meet with Macbeth on the heath, between the times of night and day and in a
double state of lost and won, maybe we can accept a less profound invitation (still distorted in form) to
meet Malcolm at Scone to see a gold crown placed on the outside of his young head. Will that crown
suffice to keep in his desires? Shall we go see Malcolm crowned, or turn our backs on the hurly-burly of
politics and its mix of fair and foul towards something of higher, purer, perfect promise?
I come, Graymalkin. Paddock calls. Anon.
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