âTo Meet with Macbeth,â given by tutor Louis ... - St. John's College

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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. 58
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. 59
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To Meet With Macbeth Louis Petrich
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world not yet formed. Rather, let u
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from our sources with this same wor
Page 7 and 8: y “cancel[ling] and tear[ing] to
Page 9 and 10: Sisters had foreseen a meeting with
Page 11 and 12: air, Macbeth says, “What seemed c
Page 13 and 14: yearnings, as Macbeth believes what
Page 15 and 16: Conduct me to mine host: we love hi
Page 17 and 18: Greater than both, by the all-hail
Page 19 and 20: Macbeth, his immediate desires post
Page 21 and 22: He pauses: she says nothing but loo
Page 23 and 24: to his own wife and babes who cry o
Page 25 and 26: and colored by the poet’s design,
Page 27 and 28: amazement that he cannot pronounce
Page 29 and 30: and tongue are one seamless suit of
Page 31 and 32: Lady Macbeth. Macbeth. Now. Lady Ma
Page 33 and 34: not the voice she tuned, so she que
Page 35 and 36: that he sees and holds in his other
Page 37 and 38: “as King” in III.i. But the not
Page 39 and 40: This sense of incongruence is even
Page 41 and 42: Banquo’s ghost, seated and moving
Page 43 and 44: Lady Macduff. Sirrah, your father
Page 45 and 46: Let us rather Hold fast the mortal
Page 47 and 48: end). What can we say about how she
Page 49 and 50: that Shakespeare should have played
Page 51 and 52: First, Birnam Wood comes to Dunsina
Page 53 and 54: Ross. Ay, on the front. Siward. Why
Page 55 and 56: Tell thee, Macduff was from his mot
Page 57: Macduff fights to free the time. Hi
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âTo Meet with Macbeth,â given by tutor Louis ... - St. John's College