Shakespeare

Macbeth 421together; Macbeth has been fighting near the east coast, because the Norwegianinvader could throw in fresh troops when the rebel was defeated; he walkswestwards to the King’s headquarters to report; and his wife is in his castle atInverness, a day’s ride to the west again. He has a positive duty to report to theKing before going to her. Surely this kind of point was firm in the Elizabethanmind, however foggy everything else was made. (Even if you are determined tohave him gallop between the two battlefields instead of staying at one of them,he still has an obligation to report before he goes home.) In this scene with hiswife, now lost, says Dover Wilson, he must have sworn he would kill Duncanwhen occasion arose, and she in her turn must have insisted, probably using hernow misplaced invocation to the “spirits that / tend on mortal thoughts”, that shewould do it herself. In our text “I.v”, jammed together from bits of the lostscenes, she is still assuming she will do it herself; and the change of plan by whichMacbeth does it, says Dover Wilson,ought by all dramatic rights to be explained to the audience. This wasoriginally done, I suggest, by means of a further dialogue betweenhusband and wife, preceded perhaps by a scene in which, going intothe bedroom knife in hand, she cannot bring herself to do it.So three whole scenes are to be added before we finish with Duncan. The firstobjection, I think, must be that this painstaking treatment would throw away thewhole impression of “fog” which has been established at the start; theimpression, that is, of a fatal decision made hurriedly in confusion. The play thatDover Wilson is imagining, or rather not imagining, would be like a “debate” byRacine. Also I do not see why, in the first of these lost scenes, Lady Macbethinsisted that she would kill Duncan, if the whole point of the scene was to makehim swear he would do it. Also the arguments keep on being drawn from ourexisting text as though it were the original text, though that is what is beingdenied; if Lady Macbeth didn’t say she would kill Duncan as late as our “I.v”(because her remarks to that effect have been dragged in from an earlier scene)then you can’t require further scenes which presume that she did say it. However,this amount of confusion might be justified. What does seem clear is that the playsupposed by Dover Wilson would not do what Macbeth does. I suspect he wouldhave two jealous hell-hounds, each of them greedy to be first at the kill. In anycase, he would not have an atmosphere of wincing and horrified determination,in which a crucial decision is scrambled through hurriedly and confusedly.Before reaching this bold theory, Dover Wilson recalls various oldersuggestions about why Lady Macbeth says Macbeth had broached the enterprisebefore:(1) on psychological grounds as a bold lie or as an exaggeration,based on his letter to her, and (2) on technical grounds, as an