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

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.
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