Task: (a) fully explicate the language of that soliloquy and (b) discuss the importance of that soliloquy in the context of the entire pl
Task: (a) fully explicate the language of that soliloquy and (b) discuss the importance of that soliloquy in the context of the entire play (which means you will have to discuss other parts of the play). DO NOT USE “I” OR “YOU”. NO OUTSIDE SOURCES.
Textual Analysis: Make sure that you analyze the text. Do not skip any of the language of the soliloquy. You must, as you explain what the language signifies, also talk about how what the character considers, says, and realizes relates to the rest of the play. Make sure you explain and discuss any and all metaphors, similes, personification and allusions.
Structure: begin with a formal introduction that (a) establishes the nature of the play, (b) briefly introduces the nature of the soliloquy, and (c) provides a thesis that specifically asserts the importance of the soliloquy in the play. Your body paragraphs must be both (a) an explication of all the language of the poem and (b) how it fits into the themes and events of the overall play. Your conclusion must be a conclusion that comes from the explication of the poem and your discussion of how it relates to themes and events of the play and then specifically concludes what the importances of the soliloquy are.
Macbeth �
William Shakespeare
Fully annotated, with an Introduction, by Burton Raffel
With an essay by Harold Bloom
t h e a n n o t at e d s h a k e s p e a r e
Burton Raffel, General Editor
Yale University Press • New Haven and London
Copyright © 2005 by Burton Raffel. All rights reserved.
This book may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, including illustrations, in any form (beyond that copying permitted by Sections 107 and 108
of the U.S. Copyright Law and except by reviewers for the public press), without written permission from the publishers.
“Macbeth,” from Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human, by Harold Bloom, copyright © 1998 by Harold Bloom. Used by permission of Riverhead Books,
an imprint of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.
Designed by Rebecca Gibb. Set in Bembo type by The Composing Room of Michigan, Inc.
Printed in the United States of America by R. R. Donnelley & Sons.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Shakespeare,William, 1564 –1616.
Macbeth / William Shakespeare ; fully annotated, with an introduction, by Burton Raffel ; with an essay by Harold Bloom.
p. cm. — (The annotated Shakespeare) Includes bibliographical references.
ISBN 0-300-10654-8 (pbk.) 1. Macbeth, King of Scotland, 11th cent.—Drama. 2. Regicides—Drama. 3. Scotland—Drama. I. Raffel, Burton. II. Bloom, Harold. III. Title.
PR2823.A2R34 2005 822.3�3—dc22 2004024959
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
For Evander Lomke
c o n t e n t s
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About This Book ix
Introduction xix
Some Essentials of the Shakespearean Stage xxxix
Macbeth 1
An Essay by Harold Bloom 169
Further Reading 205
Finding List 209
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I n act 3, scene 1, Macbeth, alone, speaks of his fears about Banquo:
To be thus is nothing, but to be safely thus. Our fears in Banquo stick deep, And in his royalty of nature reigns that Which would be feared. ’Tis much he dares, And, to that dauntless temper of his mind, He hath a wisdom that doth guide his valor To act in safety. There is none but he Whose being I do fear and, under him, My genius is rebuked, as it is said Mark Antony’s was by Caesar. (lines 48 – 57)
This was perfectly understandable, we must assume, to the mostly very average persons who paid to watch Elizabethan plays. But who today can make much sense of it? In this very fully annotated edition,I therefore present this passage,not in the bare form quoted above, but thoroughly supported by bottom-of-the-page notes:
To be thus1 is nothing, but to be2 safely thus.3
Our fears in4 Banquo stick5 deep, And in his royalty of nature6 reigns7 that Which would8 be feared. ’Tis much he dares, And, to9 that dauntless temper10 of his mind, He hath a wisdom that doth guide his valor To act in safety. There is none but he Whose being11 I do fear and, under12 him, My genius is rebuked,13 as it is said Mark Antony’s was by Caesar.
The modern reader or listener may well understand many aspects of this malicious introspection. But without full explanation of words that have over the years shifted in meaning, and usages that have been altered, neither the modern reader nor the modern lis- tener is likely to be equipped for anything like the full compre- hension that Shakespeare intended and all readers or listeners de- serve.
I believe annotations of this sort create the necessary bridges from Shakespeare’s four-centuries-old English across to ours.
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1 (i.e., the king) 2 but to be = without being 3 to be THUS is NOThing BUT to be SAFEly THUS 4 of 5 stab, thrust 6 royalty of nature = majestic character 7 predominates 8 should 9 in addition to
10 dauntless temper = bold/fearless quality of balance/calm 11 existence 12 in 13 genius is rebuked = spirit/nature is repressed/put to shame
Some readers, to be sure, will be able to comprehend unusual, his- torically different meanings without glosses. Those not familiar with the modern meaning of particular words will easily find clear, simple definitions in any modern dictionary. But most read- ers are not likely to understand Shakespeare’s intended meaning, absent such glosses as I here offer.
My annotation practices have followed the same principles used in The Annotated Milton, published in 1999, and in my anno- tated editions of Hamlet, published (as the initial volume in this series) in 2003, and Romeo and Juliet (published in 2004). Class- room experience has validated these editions. Classes of mixed upper-level undergraduates and graduate students have more quickly and thoroughly transcended language barriers than ever before. This allows the teacher, or a general reader without a teacher, to move more promptly and confidently to the non-lin- guistic matters that have made Shakespeare and Milton great and important poets.
It is the inevitable forces of linguistic change, operant in all liv- ing tongues, which have inevitably created such wide degrees of obstacles to ready comprehension—not only sharply different meanings, but subtle, partial shifts in meaning that allow us to think we understand when, alas, we do not. Speakers of related languages like Dutch and German also experience this shifting of the linguistic ground. Like early Modern English (ca. 1600) and the Modern English now current, those languages are too close for those who know only one language, and not the other, to be readily able always to recognize what they correctly understand and what they do not. When, for example, a speaker of Dutch says, “Men kofer is kapot,” a speaker of German will know that something belonging to the Dutchman is broken (kapot � “ka-
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putt” in German, and men �“mein”). But without more linguis- tic awareness than the average person is apt to have, the German speaker will not identify “kofer” (“trunk” in Dutch) with “Kör- per”—a modern German word meaning “physique, build, body.” The closest word to “kofer” in modern German, indeed, is “Scrankkoffer,” which is too large a leap for ready comprehen- sion. Speakers of different Romance languages (such as French, Spanish, or Italian), and all other related but not identical tongues, all experience these difficulties, as well as the difficulty of under- standing a text written in their own language five, or six, or seven hundred years earlier. Shakespeare’s English is not yet so old that it requires, like many historical texts in French and German, or like Old English texts—for example, Beowulf —a modern transla- tion. Much poetry evaporates in translation: language is im- mensely particular. The sheer sound of Dante in thirteenth-cen- tury Italian is profoundly worth preserving. So too is the sound of Shakespeare.
I have annotated prosody (metrics) only when it seemed truly necessary or particularly helpful. Except in the few instances where modern usage syllabifies the “e,” whenever an “e” in Shakespeare is not silent, it is marked “è”. The notation used for prosody, which is also used in the explanation of Elizabethan pro- nunciation, follows the extremely simple form of my From Stress to Stress: An Autobiography of English Prosody (see “Further Read- ing,” near the end of this book). Syllables with metrical stress are capitalized; all other syllables are in lowercase letters. I have man- aged to employ normalized Elizabethan spellings, in most indica- tions of pronunciation, but I have sometimes been obliged to de- viate, in the higher interest of being understood.
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I have annotated, as well, a limited number of such other mat- ters, sometimes of interpretation, sometimes of general or histor- ical relevance, as have seemed to me seriously worthy of inclu- sion. These annotations have been most carefully restricted: this is not intended to be a book of literary commentary. It is for that reason that the glossing of metaphors has been severely restricted. There is almost literally no end to discussion and/or analysis of metaphor, especially in Shakespeare. To yield to temptation might well be to double or triple the size of this book—and would also change it from a historically oriented language guide to a work of an unsteadily mixed nature. In the process, I believe, neither lan- guage nor literature would be well or clearly served.
Where it seemed useful, and not obstructive of important tex- tual matters, I have modernized spelling, including capitalization. I have frequently repunctuated. Since the original printed texts (there not being, as there never are for Shakespeare, surviving manuscripts) are frequently careless as well as self-contradictory, I have been relatively free with the wording of stage directions— and in some cases have added small directions, to indicate who is speaking to whom. I have made no emendations; I have necessar- ily been obliged to make choices. Textual decisions have been an- notated when the differences between or among the original printed texts seem either marked or of unusual interest.
Although spelling is not on the whole a basic issue, punctua- tion and lineation must be given high respect. The Folio uses few exclamation marks or semicolons, which is to be sure a matter of the conventions of a very different era. Still, our modern prefer- ences cannot be lightly substituted for what is, after a fashion, the closest thing to a Shakespeare manuscript we are likely ever to
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have. We do not know whether these particular seventeenth- century printers, like most of that time, were responsible for ques- tion marks, commas, periods, and, especially, all-purpose colons. But in spite of these equivocations and uncertainties, it remains true that, to a very considerable extent, punctuation tends to re- sult from just how the mind responsible for that punctuating hears the text. And twenty-first-century minds have no business,in such matters, overruling seventeenth-century ones.Whoever the com- positors were, they were more or less Shakespeare’s contempo- raries, and we are not.
Accordingly, when the original printed text uses a comma, we are being signaled that they (whoever “they” were) heard the text, not coming to a syntactic stop, but continuing to some later stop- ping point. To replace Folio commas with editorial periods is thus risky and on the whole an undesirable practice. The dra- matic action of a tragedy, to be sure, may require us, for twenty- first-century readers, to highlight what four-hundred-year-old punctuation standards may not make clear—and may even, at times, misrepresent.
When the Folio text has a colon, what we are being signaled is that they heard a syntactic stop—though not necessarily or even usually the particular kind of syntactic stop we associate, today, with the colon. It is therefore inappropriate to substitute editorial commas for Folio colons. It is also inappropriate to employ edito- rial colons when their syntactic usage of colons does not match ours. In general, the closest thing to their syntactic sense of the colon is our (and their) period.
The Folio’s interrogation (question) marks, too, merit ex- tremely respectful handling. In particular, editorial exclamation
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marks should very rarely be substituted for the Folio’s interroga- tion marks.
It follows from these considerations that the movement and sometimes the meaning of what we must take to be Shakespeare’s Macbeth will at times be different, depending on whose punctua- tion we follow, theirs or our own. I have tried, here, to use the printed seventeenth-century text as a guide to both hearing and understanding what Shakespeare wrote.
In the interests of compactness and brevity, I have employed in my annotations (as consistently as I am able) a number of stylistic and typographical devices:
• The annotation of a single word does not repeat that word
• The annotation of more than one word repeats the words being annotated, which are followed by an equals sign and then by the annotation; the footnote number in the text is placed after the last of the words being annotated
• In annotations of a single word, alternate meanings are usually separated by commas; if there are distinctly different ranges of meaning, the annotations are separated by arabic numerals inside parentheses—(1), (2), and so on; in more complexly worded annotations, alternative meanings expressed by a single word are linked by a forward slash, or solidus: /
• Explanations of textual meaning are not in parentheses; comments about textual meaning are
• Except for proper nouns, the word at the beginning of all annotations is in lower case
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• Uncertainties are followed by a question mark, set in parentheses: (?)
• When particularly relevant,“translations” into twenty-first- century English have been added, in parentheses
• Annotations of repeated words are not repeated. Explanations of the first instance of such common words are followed by the sign*. Readers may easily track down the first annotation, using the brief Finding List at the back of the book.Words with entirely separate meanings are annotated only for meanings no longer current in Modern English.
The most important typographical device here employed is the sign * placed after the first (and only) annotation of words and phrases occurring more than once. There is an alphabetically arranged listing of such words and phrases in the Finding List at the back of the book. The Finding List contains no annotations but simply gives the words or phrases themselves and the numbers of the relevant act, the scene within that act, and the foot- note number within that scene for the word’s first occurrence.
Textual Note
Macbeth has only one authoritative contemporary text, the 1623 Folio. Inevitably, there are typographical (and perhaps other errors) in the Folio; these are for the most part noted, here, and sometimes discussed in the annotations to particular words and passages.We do not know whether these particular seventeenth- century typesetters tried to follow their handwritten sources. Nor do we know if those sources, or what part thereof, might have been in Shakespeare’s own hand, or even whether those sources were accurate representations of what Shakespeare wrote,
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either in the probably first version of the play, in 1606, or in the later, revised versions that appear to have been produced. There can be (and has been) no end to speculation.
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L ike Hamlet, Macbeth is centered on its title character: Ham- let is onstage approximately 66 percent of the time, Mac- beth 60 percent. Yet just as Macbeth himself is a traitor—
to his king, his friends, his country, and to God—so, too, is the play steeped in both evil and betrayal. The villain of Othello, Iago, is arguably even more unmitigatedly evil, yet his is evil of an inex- plicable, deeply individual nature. We have no idea what moti- vates Iago to be what he is.We see no causative connection be- tween the world he lives in and his incredibly warped actions. He speaks, he acts, he is what he is; there is a total absence of rational- ity, a complete predominance of wildly irrational will. Everyone else is obliged to deal with Iago, as best they can, in terms of the inexplicably potent menace he simply is.
And yet, Macbeth is a character quite as “rational” as, say, the Satan presented to us in Milton’s Paradise Lost. But though, like Milton’s Satan, Macbeth is tormented by the evil he does, he is— also like Satan—fundamentally unable to resist. The prime im- portance of the witches, in this play, is in no way extrinsic: Mac- beth is drawn to them, and they appear to him, because the evil aspects of his nature far outweigh the good ones. His path, from
the beginning, is headed toward evil. Not only is he guided by a witches’ brew, but in a very real sense he has invoked (as he soon will perform) just such profound immorality. It is apparent that evil in Macbeth’s world has social and theological roots. Iago is utterly alone, but Macbeth has a great many connections, both causative and traceable, and he also has hordes of bad company.
From the first moments of the play, when the three witches take the stage—commanding it, for they have it completely to themselves—Shakespeare’s audience was fully aware that the dra- matic force of these three presences originated from a fiercely dangerous, socially subversive evil that everyone knew and feared. They understood perfectly the power of the demonic force en- gendering and supporting witches and witchcraft, which was of course Satan and his hellish underlings. And in 1606, everyone in England also knew vivid, horrific details of the deadly evil known as the Gunpowder Plot, literally meant to blow up the king and, with him, virtually every important political figure in the king- dom. Catholic dissidents were the known and indisputable insti- gators of this barely foiled attempt, as they were also its betrayers. (The event is commemorated on Guy Fawkes’ Day, still cele- brated in England every November Fifth, though now with non- lethal fireworks.)
Kings have become largely figureheads, in our time; they were still, in Shakespeare’s age, the acknowledged fulcrum on which society depended and by means of whom it functioned and sur- vived. England had been through almost a century of religious conflict, internally and externally (especially in confrontation with the major Catholic kings of Europe). Queen Elizabeth had been the target of many assassination plots; so too had James VI of Scotland, who in 1603 ascended to the English throne as James I
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and thus became, on the international stage, both a more visible and politically an even more important monarch.
What are now the historically more dimmed, virtually forgot- ten, aspects of Macbeth’s social and religious background require explication. But it must also be made very clear that, for a writer like Shakespeare, theme can and sometimes must become treat- ment, style, approach. Betrayal, in particular, runs like a vital bloodline through both the story and the language of Macbeth. It has often been noted that the movement of language, in the po- etry of the play (and little of it is not in verse), is almost bewilder- ingly aberrant. Macbeth’s irregular, rough, and lurching prosody (verse movement) is not, however, the result of a text faultily transmitted but integral to the nature of a text that embodies (like Macbeth himself ) deeply unnatural speech and behavior. Betrayal of earthly and heavenly kings, and of many earthly dwellers, be- comes in this play a kind of infection of language itself. At times, indeed, it almost seems as if Shakespeare is so at one with his sub- ject that he finds it hard to say virtually anything of importance in straight, unequivocal terms. Equivocation—which was then seen, in England, as the brand and trademark of evil and threaten- ing Jesuitical language—can thus appear to us, in the early twenty-first century, every bit as bedeviling as the words of equivocators seemed to the men and women of the early seven- teenth century.We are not as shocked (or as betrayed) as England then felt itself. But we can often be considerably confused.
Let me begin, as Shakespeare does in Macbeth, with witches and witchcraft. A witch, in Keith Thomas’s useful definition,“was a person of either sex (but more often female) who could myste- riously injure other people.”1 There are two basic components, here: (1) the supernatural (“mysterious, unnatural”) nature of
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what witches do, and (2) the doing of harm. Maleficium, meaning “mischief, evil,” may not have been what all witches, without ex- ception, were intending to accomplish. Yet the “white,” or “good,” witch can more usefully be termed a magic worker of a wholly different sort—a sorcerer or perhaps a magician. The great majority of witches clearly intended to do harm, whether they in fact succeeded or did not. A massive and widely relied upon compilation of witch lore, Malleus Maleficarum (The ham- mer of witches), published in Germany in 1486, indicates by its very title how basic an ingredient of witchery maleficium was con- sidered to be. Often reprinted, the book was meant and did in- deed serve as a major handbook for later witch hunters. In En- gland, in 1689, the licensing of midwives still required an oath “that you shall not in any wise use or exercise any manner of witchcraft, charm or sorcery.”2
Those who believed in the power of witchery of course feared it; its ability to make the supernatural world impinge on the nat- ural one created, in their minds, immensely practical and often terrible dangers. The groundwork for witchery, in that world- view, has been vividly evoked by Thomas: “Instead of being re- garded as an inanimate mass, the Earth itself was deemed to be alive. The universe was peopled by a hierarchy of spirits, and thought to manifest all kinds of occult influences and sympathies. The cosmos was an organic unity in which every part bore a sym- pathetic relationship to the rest. Even colours, letters and num- bers were endowed with magical properties. . . . In this general intellectual climate it was easy for many magical activities to gain a plausibility which they no longer possess today.”3 The beliefs and operational procedures of religion often operate according to this same view of the world. The essential difference, plainly, is
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that religion does not aim at the creation of evil; rather, it aims to promote good and to combat evil.
But especially in “a witch-ridden society,” such profoundly emotional matters are never clearly separable and self-contained.4
“The early medieval Christian Church [was] alerted to the bene- fits of the emotional charge certain sorts of magic offered and tried hard to nourish and encourage this form of energy.”5 That is,“If the old heathen beliefs died so hard, it was precisely because they coincided at so many points with popular orthodoxy, and especially with a demonology which practically turned Chris- tianity into a dualistic religion.”6 Extremes of poverty among the mass of people, with inevitably accompanying short and disease- racked life spans, helped create many of the elusive but pervasive bridges leading back and forth between magic and religion. Fonts of holy water, for example, had to be kept under lock and key, to keep evil practitioners from making use of the consecrated liq- uid’s universally credited magical powers. In this and in many other ways, witches frequently exactly mirrored, in their own fashion, many of the rites and ceremonies of the Church. “The problem posed . . . by magic was one of truly gargantuan dimen- sions. [For the Church] it was a matter of setting aside these multifarious and vigorous competing persons [witches, etc.] . . . without dispelling the emotions and expectations which had sus- tained them . . . The old demons persisted into the Middle Ages . . . and occupied a prominent place . . . , partly because there was a cosmological structure and a scriptural basis ready to support them, but largely because they were a useful means of isolating persons and practices the Christian world in particular wished to proscribe—or protect.”7
The nexus of these often violently entangled matters, for Mac-
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beth, is the Gunpowder Plot of 1606.8 It had been almost two years in the planning. The cellar beneath the Parliament building was packed with barrel after barrel of gunpowder. Francis Tre- sham, a nobleman’s son, had earlier participated in the Earl of Essex’s abortive rebellion (1601), and been involved in assorted other antigovernment activities conducted by recusants (Catho- lics who refused to attend the Church of England’s Protestant services). Tresham was a leader of this new conspiracy but in the end could not accept that it would result in the death of many of his relatives. He wrote warningly to his Protestant brother-in- law, Baron Monteagle; the letter was intercepted, and the king was alerted. On November fourth, a sometime soldier and deter- mined Catholic rebel, Guy Fawkes, was stationed underneath Parliament, waiting to light the explosives on the fifth, when the king was to open Parliament’s session, with its members and many of the higher gentry and nobility in attendance. The king had or- dered the basement of the building searched; Fawkes was found, arrested, and executed. Under torture, he betrayed many of the other conspirators.
Jesuits were among those most prominently implicated. The order had long been an active enemy of the Protestant church in England, as they were enemies of the monarchs who by law were at that church’s head. The Jesuit priest Henry Garnett, notably, attempted to evade responsibility by “Jesuitical” equivocations, thereby heaping theological fuel on an already raging fire. Shake- speare’s fellow playwright Thomas Dekker put Jesuitical equivo- cation in a fiercely apt nutshell:“He’s brown, he’s grey, he’s black, he’s white—/He’s anything! A Jesuite! [ JESuITE].”9 A leading Protestant theologian, Lancelot Andrewes, preached bitterly: “This shrining [enshrining] it, such an abomination, setting it in
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the holy place, so ugly and odious, making such a treason as this a religious missal [priest’s prayerbook for Mass], sacramental trea- son, hallowing it with orison [ prayer], oath and eucharist—this passeth all the rest.”10 Sir Francis Knollys had predicted as much, in a letter dated September 29, 1581:“But the Papists’ secret prac- tices by these Jesuits, in going from house to house to withdraw men from the obedience of her Majesty [Queen Elizabeth] unto the false Catholic Church of Rome, hath and will endanger her Majesty’s person and [the] state, more than all the sects of the world, if no execution shall follow upon the traitorous prac- ticers.”11
King James had a longstanding and profound, even profes- sional, interest in witches and witchery. In 1597, while still King of Scotland, he had composed an earnest treatise on the subject, Daemonologie. His government launched a long, extensive cam- paign to brand the Gunpowder Plot and the Jesuits as witchlike evil. Both these negatives and a strongly, even a glowing, portrayal of King James were “spread energetically through all the me- dia.”12 In 1608 the Protestant divine,William Perkins, preached a sermon that nicely expresses one of the major thrusts of this cam- paign.“It were a thousand times better for the land, if all witches . . . might suffer death.”13
And so to the play that Shakespeare wrote. Perhaps the most effective way of indicating at least some of the complexity and taut dramatic structure of Macbeth is an analysis of the seven scenes of act 1. (“In my end,” ran Mary Queen of Scots’s motto,“is my beginning.”) “I’ll do, I’ll do, and I’ll do,” intones Witch 1 (1.3.9), and her extremely simple words vibrate with fearful, un- spoken evil. The effect is all the greater because, in scene 2, the
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rhetorical pitch has been flagrantly elevated—ratcheted up so re- markably high, indeed, that many commentators have convinced themselves Shakespeare could not have written such stuff. Yet this second scene itself is similarly, and most carefully, made contrastive to scene 1, in which the witches begin the play with equally plain-seeming words, once again fraught with unex- pressed and perhaps inexpressible significance: “When shall we three meet again /In thunder, lightning, or in rain?” (1.1.1–2). The sergeant’s language in scene 2 splashes like dramatic pastels, immensely colorful. But its true significance is the portrayal of (a) the gaping, credulous king, and (b) the high, bright light in which the figure of Macbeth, not yet onstage, is presented. “O valiant cousin, worthy gentleman!” exclaims Duncan (1.2.24). The ex- alted bravery of “our captains, Macbeth and Banquo” (1.2.34), soars rhetorically to almost fairy-tale heights, complete with ref- erences to sparrows, eagles, hares, and lions, the animal figures of fable and legend. The badly wounded sergeant finally goes off, but immediately Ross comes on, looking as one “should . . . look / That seems to speak things strange” (1.2.46 – 47). Ross’s account of battling the King of Norway maintains both Macbeth’s glori- ous military standing and the scene’s lofty rhetoric at high levels.
Let us step back, for a moment, to the intentionally very differ- ent language of scene 1 and the first portion of scene 3. How re- create, for a modern audience, what was for the men and women of Shakespeare’s time the tremulously awful juxtaposition of (1) witches and (2) the natural signs and symbols of their ghastly power? Shakespeare’s audience not only had a greater sense for spoken stylistic tonalities,14 but it also had an immediate appreci- ation, for example, for the magical significance of the number three—“we three,” and the thrice-iterated “I’ll do.” They re-
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sponded very differently to night (“’ere the set of sun”), as well as to darkness in daytime (“fog and filthy air”). Night was a thor- oughly and notoriously unreliable, savagely dangerous period, full of active and overwhelmingly evil spirits of all kinds (it was for good reason known as the “witching” time), and darkness in day- time was precisely the kind of unnatural inversion these witches proclaim in the final line of scene 1,“Fair is foul, and foul is fair” (1.1.12). There was nothing casual, nor anything merely pict
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