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Lecture 6. SHAKESPEARE'S
Macbeth)
TRAGEDIES (Hamlet and
1. Tragedy as a Dramatic Genre:
dramatic representations of serious and important actions which
turn out disastrously for the chief character
- Lydgate: The Fall of Princes (1430-1440) loose transl. of
Boccaccio
- Mirror for Magistrates
WITH with eMPHASIS
a Tudor collection of verese biographies of tragic figures in
English history; 1st ed. 1559 (19 lives)
2nd ed. 1563 by James Baldwin (+8 lives)
several expanded editions
in the Middle Ages: no "dramatic" but "narrative tragedies"
Aristotle in Poetics: ”the imitation of an action that is serious and
complete in itself performed in the medium of poetic language, the
events arousing pity and fear, and thus accomplishing the catharsis
of the emotion”
4. Renaissance: revival of Seneca: Gorboduc; Thomas Kyd’s
Spanish Tragedy (ghost, revenge etc); „Ur-hamlet”
Shakespearean tragedy: Senecan, romantic, “great”, Roman
introduces comic relief: gravediggers in Hamlet
(A’s definition: descriptive – based on Aeschylus, Sophocles,
Euripides)
tragic hero:hamartia (error of judgement) hybris (pride); role of
periperetia (reversal) anagnorisis (recognition)
Types of tragedy:
1.Greek (classical)
2. Roman - Senecan revenge tragedies (nemesis), 5 acts, 3 unities,
tragedies of blood, psychologising, welter of bloodshed
3. Medieval -Historical Antecedents of Sh.-and Tragedy
(See: W.Farnham: Medieval Heritage of Elizabethan Tragedy;
Helen Cooper: Shakespeare and the Medieval World)
- Boccaccio: De Casibus Virorum Illustrium (1367)
- Chaucer: Monk's Tale
"Tragedy means a certain kind of story,
As old books tell, of those who fell in glory,
People that stood in great prosperity
And were cast down out of their high degree
Into calamity, and so they died" (Coghill's Tr.)
5. The Complementarity of Shakespearean Tragedy and
Comedy
Not only classical but medieval, i.e. Christian roots
Two halves of the same cycle (N. Frye: tragedy: fall, winter;
comedy: spring).
Peculiarity of the Comic vision as Opposed to the Tragic
Tragic Vision:
tragedy, realism, irony; concerned with "serious", „reality”
aim: "to hold up mirror to nature"
its movement: downward fall, fortune
from spring/prosperity; into winter/misery
plot: based on history; Sh: The Tragedy of Richard III
characters: from historical narrative
Comic Vision:
Seeks its own instead of holding mirror up to nature;
its movement: upward: from winter to spring,
from misery to renewal; tendency to include rather than
1
exclude, plot: fictitious, characters: „stock-figures
Act IV. denouncement: death of Ophelia, return of Laertes
Act V. Castrophe: all main characters killed on stage
6. Shakespeare’s Tragedies
2. Theme (dianoia ) Suggestions for the themes of Hamlet
3. Characters (ethos)
The Prince a Hesitating Hero (What is the cause of his Delay?)
Please find „Doubles”!
The role of women? (Is Hamlet a Misogynist?
4. Music (melos) Poetry versus prose?
5.Diction (lexis) POETIC DRAMA: Play, Prince or the Poem?
a) Images, imagery: rottenness, disease
b) Speeches, soliloquies
c) Word-plays (puns) – Find them in English and in Hungarian
translations
d) Hendiadys: „the figure of twins” (=to say one by two) „to keep
you … /out of the shot and danger of desire” (=out of dangerous
shots)
6. Spectacle opsis (spectacle)
The role of the play within the play.
A) Early Tragedies:
Titus Andronicus 1594, Senecan Revenge Tragedy
Romeo and Juliet 1599 Romantic Tragedy Q2 is good
Tragedy of accident rather than character
B) Roman Tragedies
Julius Caesar, 1599 Source: Plutarch (tr.1579)
Antony and Cleopatra, 1608
C) The "Four Great Tragedies" (See A.C. Bradley’s book, 1904)
Why great? Tragedy inevitable, rooted in human nature.
Hamlet 1601, 1603 Q1 (bad), 1604 Q2 (good) F1 including 85 lines
not in Q2
The „Revenge Tragedy” Convention (Seneca, Kyd etc.)
Sources: Ur-Hamlet, Saxo Grammaticus» Historia Dania c.1200,
Belleforest; Intellectual sources. Montaigne, Demonology
Characters, Imagery, Soliloquies, Doublets
Negative critiques: Voltaire, Tolstoy, Eliot
Critical approaches: 1) character-oriented, 2) New Critical, 3)
Structuralist, 4) Psychoanalytical, 5) Myth-critical, 6) Marxist (New
historicist), 7) Feminist, 8) Postmodern
1. Plot and structure mythos
Hamlet’s Pyramidal Structure:
Act I. exposition: (main plot-subplot) –The Ghost’s „revelation” to
Act II.Hamlet conflicts: Hamlet plays the madman
Act III.climax: mouse-trap scene (play within the play)
Texts:
KING CLAUDIUS
Though yet of Hamlet our dear brother's death
The memory be green, and that it us befitted
To bear our hearts in grief and our whole kingdom
To be contracted in one brow of woe,
Yet so far hath discretion fought with nature
That we with wisest sorrow think on him,
Together with remembrance of ourselves.
Therefore our sometime sister, now our queen,
2
The imperial jointress to this warlike state,
Have we, as 'twere with a defeated joy,-With an auspicious and a dropping eye,
With mirth in funeral and with dirge in marriage,
In equal scale weighing delight and dole,-Taken to wife: …………..
KING CLAUDIUS
But now, my cousin Hamlet, and my son,-HAMLET
[Aside] A little more than kin, and less than kind.
KING CLAUDIUS
How is it that the clouds still hang on you?
HAMLET
Not so, my lord; I am too much i' the sun.
QUEEN GERTRUDE
Good Hamlet, cast thy nighted colour off,
And let thine eye look like a friend on Denmark.
Do not for ever with thy vailed lids
Seek for thy noble father in the dust:
Thou know'st 'tis common; all that lives must die,
Passing through nature to eternity.
----HAMLET
Seems, madam! nay it is; I know not 'seems.'
'Tis not alone my inky cloak, good mother,
Nor customary suits of solemn black,
Nor windy suspiration of forced breath,
No, nor the fruitful river in the eye,
Nor the dejected 'havior of the visage,
Together with all forms, moods, shapes of grief,
That can denote me truly: these indeed seem,
For they are actions that a man might play:
But I have that within which passeth show;
These but the trappings and the suits of woe.
HAMLET
O, that this too too solid flesh would melt
Thaw and resolve itself into a dew!
Or that the Everlasting had not fix'd
His canon 'gainst self-slaughter! O God! God!
How weary, stale, flat and unprofitable,
Seem to me all the uses of this world!
Fie on't! ah fie! 'tis an unweeded garden,
That grows to seed; things rank and gross in nature
Possess it merely. That it should come to this!
But two months dead: nay, not so much, not two:
So excellent a king; that was, to this,
Hyperion to a satyr; so loving to my mother
That he might not beteem the winds of heaven
Visit her face too roughly. Heaven and earth!
Must I remember? why, she would hang on him,
As if increase of appetite had grown
By what it fed on: and yet, within a month-Let me not think on't--Frailty, thy name is woman!-A little month, or ere those shoes were old
With which she follow'd my poor father's body,
Like Niobe, all tears:--why she, even she-O, God! a beast, that wants discourse of reason,
Would have mourn'd longer--married with my uncle,
My father's brother, but no more like my father
Than I to Hercules: within a month:
Ere yet the salt of most unrighteous tears
Had left the flushing in her galled eyes,
3
She married. O, most wicked speed, to post
With such dexterity to incestuous sheets!
It is not nor it cannot come to good:
But break, my heart; for I must hold my tongue.
me: no, nor woman neither, though by your smiling
you seem to say so.
ACT III
……………………
Scene V
O cursed spite,
That ever I was born to set it right!
Nay, come, let's go together.
ACT II
HAMLET
I have of late--but
wherefore I know not--lost all my mirth, forgone all
custom of exercises; and indeed it goes so heavily
with my disposition that this goodly frame, the
earth, seems to me a sterile promontory, this most
excellent canopy, the air, look you, this brave
o'erhanging firmament, this majestical roof fretted
with golden fire, why, it appears no other thing to
me than a foul and pestilent congregation of vapours.
What a piece of work is a man! how noble in reason!
how infinite in faculty! in form and moving how
express and admirable! in action how like an angel!
in apprehension how like a god! the beauty of the
world! the paragon of animals! And yet, to me,
what is this quintessence of dust? man delights not
HAMLET
To be, or not to be: that is the question:
Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,
Or to take arms against a sea of troubles,
And by opposing end them? To die: to sleep;
No more; and by a sleep to say we end
The heart-ache and the thousand natural shocks
That flesh is heir to, 'tis a consummation
Devoutly to be wish'd. To die, to sleep;
To sleep: perchance to dream: ay, there's the rub;
For in that sleep of death what dreams may come
When we have shuffled off this mortal coil,
Must give us pause: there's the respect
That makes calamity of so long life;
For who would bear the whips and scorns of time,
The oppressor's wrong, the proud man's contumely,
The pangs of despised love, the law's delay,
The insolence of office and the spurns
That patient merit of the unworthy takes,
When he himself might his quietus make
With a bare bodkin? who would fardels bear,
To grunt and sweat under a weary life,
But that the dread of something after death,
The undiscover'd country from whose bourn
No traveller returns, puzzles the will
And makes us rather bear those ills we have
4
Than fly to others that we know not of?
Thus conscience does make cowards of us all;
And thus the native hue of resolution
Is sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought,
And enterprises of great pith and moment
With this regard their currents turn awry,
And lose the name of action.--Soft you now!
The fair Ophelia! Nymph, in thy orisons
Be all my sins remember'd.
OPHELIA
O, what a noble mind is here o'erthrown!
The courtier's, soldier's, scholar's, eye, tongue, sword;
The expectancy and rose of the fair state,
The glass of fashion and the mould of form,
The observed of all observers, quite, quite down!
And I, of ladies most deject and wretched,
That suck'd the honey of his music vows,
Now see that noble and most sovereign reason,
Like sweet bells jangled, out of tune and harsh;
That unmatch'd form and feature of blown youth
Blasted with ecstasy: O, woe is me,
To have seen what I have seen, see what I see!
ACT III. Scene I
HAMLET
Be not too tame neither, but let your own discretion
be your tutor: suit the action to the word, the
word to the action; with this special o'erstep not
the modesty of nature: for any thing so overdone is
from the purpose of playing, whose end, both at the
first and now, was and is, to hold, as 'twere, the
mirror up to nature; to show virtue her own feature,
scorn her own image, and the very age and body of
the time his form and pressure. Now this overdone,
or come tardy off, though it make the unskilful
laugh, cannot but make the judicious grieve; the
censure of the which one must in your allowance
o'erweigh a whole theatre of others. O, there be
players that I have seen play, and heard others
praise, and that highly, not to speak it profanely,
that, neither having the accent of Christians nor
the gait of Christian, pagan, nor man, have so
strutted and bellowed that I have thought some of
nature's journeymen had made men and not made them
well, they imitated humanity so abominably.
Scene II
HAMLET
Soft! now to my mother.
O heart, lose not thy nature; let not ever
The soul of Nero enter this firm bosom:
Let me be cruel, not unnatural:
I will speak daggers to her, but use none;
My tongue and soul in this be hypocrites;
How in my words soever she be shent,
To give them seals never, my soul, consent!
Exit
KING CLAUDIUS
O, my offence is rank it smells to heaven;
It hath the primal eldest curse upon't,
A brother's murder. Pray can I not,
5
Though inclination be as sharp as will:
-………………….
[Rising] My words fly up, my thoughts remain below:
Words without thoughts never to heaven go.
QUEEN GERTRUDE
O, speak to me no more;
These words, like daggers, enter in mine ears;
No more, sweet Hamlet!
……..
QUEEN GERTRUDE
O Hamlet, thou hast cleft my heart in twain.
HAMLET
O, throw away the worser part of it,
And live the purer with the other half.
Good night: but go not to mine uncle's bed;
Assume a virtue, if you have it not.
That monster, custom, who all sense doth eat,
Of habits devil, is angel yet in this,
That to the use of actions fair and good
He likewise gives a frock or livery,
That aptly is put on. Refrain to-night,
And that shall lend a kind of easiness
To the next abstinence: the next more easy;
ACT IV
SCENE II. Another room in the castle.
KING CLAUDIUS
Now, Hamlet, where's Polonius?
HAMLET
At supper.
KING CLAUDIUS
At supper! where?
HAMLET
Not where he eats, but where he is eaten: a certain
convocation of politic worms are e'en at him. Your
worm is your only emperor for diet: we fat all
creatures else to fat us, and we fat ourselves for
maggots: your fat king and your lean beggar is but
variable service, two dishes, but to one table:
that's the end.
KING CLAUDIUS
Alas, alas!
HAMLET
A man may fish with the worm that hath eat of a
king, and cat of the fish that hath fed of that worm.
KING CLAUDIUS
What dost you mean by this?
HAMLET
Nothing but to show you how a king may go a
progress through the guts of a beggar.
KING CLAUDIUS
Where is Polonius?
HAMLET
In heaven; send hither to see: if your messenger
find him not there, seek him i' the other place
yourself. But indeed, if you find him not within
this month, you shall nose him as you go up the
stairs into the lobby.
ACT V.
6
HAMLET
Give me your pardon, sir: I've done you wrong;
But pardon't, as you are a gentleman.
This presence knows,
And you must needs have heard, how I am punish'd
With sore distraction. What I have done,
That might your nature, honour and exception
Roughly awake, I here proclaim was madness.
Was't Hamlet wrong'd Laertes? Never Hamlet:
If Hamlet from himself be ta'en away,
And when he's not himself does wrong Laertes,
Then Hamlet does it not, Hamlet denies it.
Who does it, then? His madness: if't be so,
Hamlet is of the faction that is wrong'd;
His madness is poor Hamlet's enemy.
Sir, in this audience,
Let my disclaiming from a purposed evil
Free me so far in your most generous thoughts,
That I have shot mine arrow o'er the house,
And hurt my brother.
LAERTES
I am satisfied in nature,
Whose motive, in this case, should stir me most
To my revenge: but in my terms of honour
I stand aloof; and will no reconcilement,
Till by some elder masters, of known honour,
I have a voice and precedent of peace,
To keep my name ungored. But till that time,
I do receive your offer'd love like love,
And will not wrong it.
…..
HAMLET
O, I die, Horatio;
The potent poison quite o'er-crows my spirit:
I cannot live to hear the news from England;
But I do prophesy the election lights
On Fortinbras: he has my dying voice;
So tell him, with the occurrents, more and less,
Which have solicited. The rest is silence.
Othello 1604
King Lear 1605 , Q2 300 lines not F1
Macbeth 1608 only F1
Last of the great tragedies; Macbeth: Poetic Tragedy (Tragedy of the
Imagination)
TEXT:
-shortest: 2107 lines (cf. Othello's 3924lines)
-only F (based probably on prompt-book)
-III/V (Hecate-scene) probably later interpolation
- 2nd half weaker (perhaps Thomas Middleton's The Witch)
DATE:
-court performance when Christian, the Danish king visited James I.
- written definitely after 5 November 1606 (Guy Fawkes's
restauration)
7
(Father Garnet's appeal to equivocation)
SOURCES:
-Holinshed chronicle about historical Macbeth (ruled: 1040-1057)
-Holinshed story of Donwald (black magic, killed King Duff)
-Scottish historians: Boece, Stewart, Leslie, Buchanan
-contemporary pageant: James hailed 3 times by Sybils ("Hail...)
-intellectual sources: Reinald Scot: Discovery of Witchcraft, James's
Daemonology
STRUCTURE:
-no double plot Sh. concentrates on the individual's psychology
PLOT and MOVEMENT of the Play
1.WITCHES in I/1 and I/III
hurly-burly, foul is fair, charm's wound up
2.MACBETH's IMAGE before the encountering with the witches
Bellona's bridegroom
3.INTERSECTION OF NATURAL AND SUPERNATIORAL
WORLD
witches’ contamination (enigmatic prophecies)
Difference between Banquo's and Macbeth's reactions
The idea of murder conceived immediately in M's soul
4.LADY MACBETH-MACBETH
-reading the letter ("greatness")
-commenting on the letter
-having learned Duncan is coming ("unsex me")
-after M's arrival (teacher, sexuality)
-Macbeth's dagger monologue (murder: sacrilege, stain not to
be washed off)
-after the murder LM: practical
the function of the porter's scene (comic relief, porter of hell,
harrowing of hell)
-discovery of the murder: both improvise
"Confusion hath made its masterpiece"
5.SECOND CYCLE OF EVIL: the murdering of Banquo
"Light thickens and the crow/ Makes wing to the rooky wood
Good things of day begin to droop and drowse.."
-the Banquet scene LM's last great role-playing
6.THIRD CYCLE OF EVIL (LM disappeared)
-Macbeth goes to the witches: 3 ambiguous messages
-Macduff's Castle, Lady Macduff and son (Macbeth as
Herod)
7.ENGLAND and the HOLY KING (Edward the Confessor)
sacred world opposed to the demonic world of Scotland
Malcolm's role-playing with Macduff
8.LADY MACBETH SLEEPWALKING SCENE
"Out, out, damned spot" (5,1)
Lady Macbeth's suicide
Macbeth's
"Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow
Creeps in this perrty pace from day to day
To the last syllable of recorded time
And all our yestrdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle,
Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
And is heard no more. It is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury
8
Signifying nothing. (5,5,17-26).
9.MACBETH VILLAIN AND Hero
"bear-like" cf.
10."TIME IS FREE"
cycle is evil is over
Shakespeare vs. Polanski (or Kott) everything starts from the
beginning
Texts:
MACBETH
[Aside] Two truths are told,
As happy prologues to the swelling act
Of the imperial theme.--I thank you, gentlemen. …
-Aside This supernatural soliciting
Cannot be ill, cannot be good: if ill,
Why hath it given me earnest of success,
Commencing in a truth? I am thane of Cawdor:
If good, why do I yield to that suggestion
Whose horrid image doth unfix my hair
And make my seated heart knock at my ribs,
Against the use of nature? Present fears
Are less than horrible imaginings:
My thought, whose murder yet is but fantastical,
Shakes so my single state of man that function
Is smother'd in surmise, and nothing is
But what is not.
LADY MACBETH
'They met me in the day of success: and I have
learned by the perfectest report, they have more in
them than mortal knowledge. When I burned in desire
to question them further, they made themselves air,
into which they vanished. Whiles I stood rapt in
the wonder of it, came missives from the king, who
all-hailed me 'Thane of Cawdor;' by which title,
before, these weird sisters saluted me, and referred
me to the coming on of time, with 'Hail, king that
shalt be!' This have I thought good to deliver
thee, my dearest partner of greatness, that thou
mightst not lose the dues of rejoicing, by being
ignorant of what greatness is promised thee. Lay it
to thy heart, and farewell.'
Glamis thou art, and Cawdor; and shalt be
What thou art promised: yet do I fear thy nature;
It is too full o' the milk of human kindness
To catch the nearest way: thou wouldst be great;
Art not without ambition, but without
The illness should attend it: what thou wouldst highly,
That wouldst thou holily; wouldst not play false,
And yet wouldst wrongly win: thou'ldst have, great Glamis,
That which cries 'Thus thou must do, if thou have it;
And that which rather thou dost fear to do
Than wishest should be undone.' Hie thee hither,
That I may pour my spirits in thine ear;
And chastise with the valour of my tongue
All that impedes thee from the golden round,
Which fate and metaphysical aid doth seem
To have thee crown'd withal.
The raven himself is hoarse
That croaks the fatal entrance of Duncan
Under my battlements. Come, you spirits
That tend on mortal thoughts, unsex me here,
And fill me from the crown to the toe top-full
Of direst cruelty! make thick my blood;
Stop up the access and passage to remorse,
9
That no compunctious visitings of nature
Shake my fell purpose, nor keep peace between
The effect and it! Come to my woman's breasts,
And take my milk for gall, you murdering ministers,
Wherever in your sightless substances
You wait on nature's mischief! Come, thick night,
And pall thee in the dunnest smoke of hell,
That my keen knife see not the wound it makes,
Nor heaven peep through the blanket of the dark,
To cry 'Hold, hold!'
Enter MACBETH
MACBETH
If it were done when 'tis done, then 'twere well
It were done quickly: if the assassination
Could trammel up the consequence, and catch
With his surcease success; that but this blow
Might be the be-all and the end-all here,
But here, upon this bank and shoal of time,
We'ld jump the life to come. But in these cases
We still have judgment here; that we but teach
Bloody instructions, which, being taught, return
To plague the inventor: this even-handed justice
Commends the ingredients of our poison'd chalice
To our own lips. He's here in double trust;
First, as I am his kinsman and his subject,
Strong both against the deed; then, as his host,
Who should against his murderer shut the door,
Not bear the knife myself. Besides, this Duncan
Hath borne his faculties so meek, hath been
So clear in his great office, that his virtues
Will plead like angels, trumpet-tongued, against
The deep damnation of his taking-off;
And pity, like a naked new-born babe,
Striding the blast, or heaven's cherubim, horsed
Upon the sightless couriers of the air,
Shall blow the horrid deed in every eye,
That tears shall drown the wind. I have no spur
To prick the sides of my intent, but only
Vaulting ambition, which o'erleaps itself
And falls on the other.
Is this a dagger which I see before me,
The handle toward my hand? Come, let me clutch thee.
I have thee not, and yet I see thee still.
Art thou not, fatal vision, sensible
To feeling as to sight? or art thou but
A dagger of the mind, a false creation,
Proceeding from the heat-oppressed brain?
I see thee yet, in form as palpable
As this which now I draw.
Thou marshall'st me the way that I was going;
And such an instrument I was to use.
Mine eyes are made the fools o' the other senses,
Or else worth all the rest; I see thee still,
And on thy blade and dudgeon gouts of blood,
Which was not so before. There's no such thing:
It is the bloody business which informs
Thus to mine eyes. Now o'er the one halfworld
Nature seems dead, and wicked dreams abuse
The curtain'd sleep; witchcraft celebrates
Pale Hecate's offerings, and wither'd murder,
Alarum'd by his sentinel, the wolf,
Whose howl's his watch, thus with his stealthy pace.
With Tarquin's ravishing strides, towards his design
Moves like a ghost. Thou sure and firm-set earth,
Hear not my steps, which way they walk, for fear
Thy very stones prate of my whereabout,
And take the present horror from the time,
10
Which now suits with it. Whiles I threat, he lives:
Words to the heat of deeds too cold breath gives.
A bell rings
I go, and it is done; the bell invites me.
Hear it not, Duncan; for it is a knell
That summons thee to heaven or to hell.
MACBETH
Whence is that knocking?
How is't with me, when every noise appals me?
What hands are here? ha! they pluck out mine eyes.
Will all great Neptune's ocean wash this blood
Clean from my hand? No, this my hand will rather
The multitudinous seas in incarnadine,
Making the green one red.
……
MACBETH
We have scotch'd the snake, not kill'd it:
She'll close and be herself, whilst our poor malice
Remains in danger of her former tooth.
But let the frame of things disjoint, both the
worlds suffer,
Ere we will eat our meal in fear and sleep
In the affliction of these terrible dreams
That shake us nightly: better be with the dead,
Whom we, to gain our peace, have sent to peace,
Than on the torture of the mind to lie
In restless ecstasy. Duncan is in his grave;
After life's fitful fever he sleeps well;
Treason has done his worst: nor steel, nor poison,
Malice domestic, foreign levy, nothing,
Can touch him further.
…
LADY MACBETH
What's to be done?
MACBETH
Be innocent of the knowledge, dearest chuck,
Till thou applaud the deed. Come, seeling night,
Scarf up the tender eye of pitiful day;
And with thy bloody and invisible hand
Cancel and tear to pieces that great bond
Which keeps me pale! Light thickens; and the crow
Makes wing to the rooky wood:
Good things of day begin to droop and drowse;
While night's black agents to their preys do rouse.
Thou marvell'st at my words: but hold thee still;
Things bad begun make strong themselves by ill.
So, prithee, go with me.
Exeunt
Enter LADY MACBETH, with a taper
Lo you, here she comes! This is her very guise;
and, upon my life, fast asleep. Observe her; stand close.
Doctor
How came she by that light?
Gentlewoman
Why, it stood by her: she has light by her
continually; 'tis her command.
Doctor
You see, her eyes are open.
Gentlewoman
Ay, but their sense is shut.
Doctor
What is it she does now? Look, how she rubs her hands.
Gentlewoman
11
It is an accustomed action with her, to seem thus
washing her hands: I have known her continue in
this a quarter of an hour.
LADY MACBETH
Yet here's a spot.
Doctor
Hark! she speaks: I will set down what comes from
her, to satisfy my remembrance the more strongly.
LADY MACBETH
Out, damned spot! out, I say!--One: two: why,
then, 'tis time to do't.--Hell is murky!--Fie, my
lord, fie! a soldier, and afeard? What need we
fear who knows it, when none can call our power to
account?--Yet who would have thought the old man
to have had so much blood in him.
Doctor
Do you mark that?
Wherefore was that cry?
SEYTON
The queen, my lord, is dead. ..
MACBETH
She should have died hereafter;
There would have been a time for such a word.
To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day
To the last syllable of recorded time,
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!
Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
And then is heard no more: it is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.
Enter a Messenger
MACDUFF
Despair thy charm;
And let the angel whom thou still hast served
Tell thee, Macduff was from his mother's womb
Untimely ripp'd.
MACBETH
Accursed be that tongue that tells me so,
For it hath cow'd my better part of man!
And be these juggling fiends no more believed,
That palter with us in a double sense;
That keep the word of promise to our ear,
And break it to our hope. I'll not fight with thee.
…
I will not yield,
To kiss the ground before young Malcolm's feet,
And to be baited with the rabble's curse.
Though Birnam wood be come to Dunsinane,
And thou opposed, being of no woman born,
Yet I will try the last. Before my body
I throw my warlike shield. Lay on, Macduff,
And damn'd be him that first cries, 'Hold, enough!'
MALCOLM
We shall not spend a large expense of time
Before we reckon with your several loves,
And make us even with you. My thanes and kinsmen,
Henceforth be earls, the first that ever Scotland
In such an honour named. What's more to do,
Which would be planted newly with the time,
As calling home our exiled friends abroad
That fled the snares of watchful tyranny;
Producing forth the cruel ministers
Of this dead butcher and his fiend-like queen,
Who, as 'tis thought, by self and violent hands
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Took off her life; this, and what needful else
That calls upon us, by the grace of Grace,
We will perform in measure, time and place:
So, thanks to all at once and to each one,
Whom we invite to see us crown'd at Scone.
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