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

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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