Download Macbeth Notes – Act II

Macbeth Notes – Act II
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Scene i
Summary – Banquo and his son Fleance prepare to retire for the night when they meet Macbeth. Banquo mentions the prophecy of the witches coming
true about Macbeth becoming the Thane of Cawdor; Macbeth denies thinking about them, but asks Banquo, indirectly, to support him in the future.
After they leave, Macbeth suddenly sees a hallucination of a bloody dagger which he believes was sent to lead him to Duncan's room for murder. He
leaves to do the deed when he hears a bell Lady Macbeth rings as a signal that Duncan's bodyguards have been drugged.
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[Lines 1-32] This short scene, between two emotional highpoints, serves a couple of purposes. First, it establishes that
Banquo does have a son, Fleance, through whom Banquo's line will be preserved to eventually become the Stuart kings of
Scotland. Secondly, Shakespeare wants to give us a moment of calm before he begins to build the suspense again.
Thirdly, he wants to establish the contrast between the moral choices of Banquo and Macbeth. As you read this scene
notice how Banquo reacts when Macbeth enters and what Duncan has given Lady Macbeth. Finally notice how Macbeth
and Banquo dance around the prophecy of the witches.
This short scene provides a momentary calm. It establishes a contrast between Macbeth and Banquo: Banquo is tired and
will sleep soundly, especially after he offers a little prayer to the "merciful powers" at lines 8 -- 10; Macbeth, psyched up
by the confrontation with his wife, roams the halls of the palace. We get very different views of children: Lady Macbeth
"dashing the brains out," and Macbeth hoping for "men-children" contrast with Banquo and his son, who seem perfectly
natural. Dad even lets his boy carry the big sword for him. Banquo fears "the cursed thoughts that nature/ Gives way to
in repose" [lines 9 -- 10]. These are the same thoughts that Macbeth and his wife had tried to raise in their powerful
evocations of the night in contemplating evil.
When Macbeth comes in, Banquo instinctively calls for his sword as if something dangerous is approaching. Of course,
Banquo doesn't realize how right he is to suspect Macbeth. King Duncan has been generous to everyone at the castle,
even giving Lady Macbeth a diamond. It's just a reminder that Macbeth can't claim ingratitude drives him to the murder.
Duncan's generosity and his pleasure in visiting the Macbeths make his murder all the more horrible.
At line 20 Banquo first brings up the witches: "I dreamt last night of the three weird sisters./ To you they have showed
some truth." Macbeth denies that he has thought of them at all, but then asks Banquo if they can meet privately, perhaps
do lunch, so they can talk about what happened. Banquo agrees. Perhaps then Macbeth realizes that he won't be able to
sound Banquo out more fully before he commits the murder in just a few minutes. Perhaps he suddenly wonders how
Banquo will react? In any event, he blurts out this strange request at line 25: "If you shall cleave to my consent, when
'tis,/ It shall make honor for you." This is strange because it doesn't refer to anything specific; it's as if Macbeth is saying,
"Something's about to happen, and if you side with me ['cleave to my consent'], it will bring you honor." No more details
than that. It's almost as if Macbeth panics and really wants to test Banquo's allegiances here. Banquo's answer is not
negative, but he makes it clear that whatever Macbeth is asking, Banquo will be careful not to do anything which
compromises his honor or violates his oath of allegiance to Duncan. So much for the forlorn hope Macbeth had that
Banquo, the kind of Everyman in this play, would support him. I think the close friendship between Macbeth and Banquo
ceases at that moment. Clearly Macbeth cannot trust him. In this exchange Macbeth has acted toward Banquo as his wife
had acted toward him in the previous scene in trying to manipulate him to act. Obviously he is not as skilled in this
endeavor as his wife is. He sends the messenger out to tell his wife to strike upon the bell when "my drink is ready,"
which is, of course, the signal for when she has drugged the bodyguards.
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Now at line 49 Macbeth goes into another one of those evocations of the night. It is as if Macbeth is saying, "If the sun's
not shining, I don't need to worry about morality. If it's too dark to see what my hand is doing, I'm safe." The word
"abuse" here is revealing. Your notes tell you it means "deceive," but more importantly it was a technical term used to
describe a witch's spell. So here the "wicked dreams" put a spell on sleep that thinks it's safe behind a curtain. "Hecate"
is the goddess of witches for the ancient Greeks; she'll appear in the flesh later in the play. So Shakespeare, in addition
to using details from English and Scottish witchcraft, goes back and borrows from the Greeks as well. At line 52
Shakespeare personifies "murder," creating a character who represents the crime. Murder has a watchdog or "sentinel,"
which is a wolf, an animal which still evoked fright even though there were no wolves left in England at that time. The
howl of the wolf is likened to the regular call of the watchman who cried out on the hour throughout the night. At line 55
Shakespeare now compares murder, sneaking through the dark, with the Roman despot Tarquin who stalked and raped
the Roman matron Lucrece. (Shakespeare had written a long poem about Lucrece whose only recourse after she was
attacked was to kill herself.) So in these eight lines Shakespeare packs a lot of information.
So, without having solved the question of the imaginary dagger, which might warn him of consequences, but after evoking
the power of the night, Macbeth at line 56 sets out to commit the ultimate crime. Macbeth is ready to act; he has
psyched himself up, and because it is night, the consequences will not be great. But even the environment conspires
against him, the stones warning of his approach. He ends up with that same imperative of the soldier we had seen earlier
-- just do it! You thought about it enough, now act!
The bell rings on cue, and he sets out at line 62 to act. "I go, and it is done: the bell invites me." Notice how we get the
euphemism "it" once again to refer to the murder. The last two lines of the scene, "Hear it not, Duncan, for it is a knell/
That summons thee to heaven, or to hell" is a rhymed couplet used to signal the audience that the next scene will be in a
different location. It is also a Snively Whiplash reminder so that even the slowest member of the audience, who has not
followed all of Macbeth's pretending to be good and moral ponderings on the event, will now know he is about to commit
evil. The rhyme words emphasize the message: "knell," the bell rung for the dead; and "hell."
Scene ii
Summary – Having drugged the bodyguards, Lady Macbeth, manic with excitement, waits downstairs for her husband to do the murder. Suddenly
someone cries out, and Lady Macbeth fears that the murder attempt has been discovered. Macbeth returns with bloody hands, but he is so distracted
he makes little sense, telling his wife of strange voices that cried out, condemning him and promising that he would never again sleep peacefully. When
she discovers he has brought the knives downstairs rather than leaving them next to the body, he refuses to look upon what he had done. She carries
the knives upstairs while he envisions himself unable to wash the guilty blood from off his hands with all the water in the sea. A knock at the gate
startles them, and they go out to wash their hands and change their clothes. Macbeth wishes the knocking could awaken Duncan.
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This is the murder of Duncan, one of the triumphs of Shakespeare's imagination. It presents the horror of the murder in
an unusual way, one that will heighten what is done. The scene will also reveal some profound psychological differences
between husband and wife, fault lines in their relationship. As you look over the scene, as yourself why have we moved
all the way from Lady Macbeth's "Leave all the rest to me" to "what cannot you and I perform" now to "He is about it"?
Why is Lady Macbeth not upstairs sticking the knife into Duncan's flesh? Then ask yourself what to make of Macbeth's
reaction to committing the murder.
This scene is justifiably famous for the creation of suspense. We never see the murder, only a kind of parallel action,
which actually has the effect of making the horror greater. Early in his career Shakespeare had written a series of action
dramas in which Shakespeare was careful to show every act of death and mutilation on stage. A young playwright,
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Shakespeare had exercised no restraint at all. Now we see the mature playwright at work: no blood or body, but
Shakespeare showing us the psychological effects of the action.
In the opening 13 lines Lady Macbeth isn't upstairs in the action, but she is psyched. She has been hitting the booze, and
she is supersensitive to sounds. She hears the owl at line 3, another animal associated with witchcraft. She calls it the
"fatal bellman,/ That gives the sternest goodnight." This refers to a rather quaint custom in London. When a person was
about to be executed the authorities had a special person walk up and down outside the prison the night before, ringing a
bell and crying out to remind the poor wretch inside that he needed to make his peace with his god. Lots of people in the
audience had undoubtedly heard the bellman. At line 4 she tells us, "He is about it." Again the euphemism of "it." It also
reinforces the idea of off-stage action, drawing our attention to somewhere else in our imagination. We saw something
like this in Romeo & Juliet where while the kids spend their night of love, downstairs Juliet's dad was arranging for her
marriage. At line 5 following Lady Macbeth, like a good wife, worries that her husband has screwed up. At line 8, when
she hears him cry out, her anxiety increases. As she tells us if he bungles the murder and is caught, they will both lose
their heads. If they can bring off the killing, then they should be able to lay the blame on someone else: "Th' attempt and
not the deed/ Confounds us" [lines 10 -- 11]. She did all the preparation; he "Could not have missed 'em." Then she
reveals a very important psychological key to how she works and what probably happened to those pronouns: "Had he not
resembled/ My father as he slept, I had done it" [lines 12 -- 13].
When Macbeth returns from upstairs, he and his wife have a heated, almost frantic exchange between lines13 -- 22. Here
Shakespeare is using the very brevity and terseness of the language to emphasize the fact that both of these people are
very agitated and their emotions are raw. The exchange takes the form of a series of questions and answers. Notice how
sometimes Macbeth doesn't even answer the question his wife asks, suggesting that he is very distracted. What begins to
emerge is that they have very different reactions to the event -- she's excited by the success, he's devastated by what he's
done. Notice how at line 18 she answers his question, and he jumps to a whole new topic. People under extreme stress
will act like this, unable to move logically from one point to another.
At line 22 Macbeth finally begins to tell her what happened, not in terms of the principal action of plunging the knife into
Duncan's flesh repeatedly, but in terms of what happened, supposedly, on the way up and back down from Duncan's room.
It is as if by not mentioning the actual killing Macbeth heightens the horror. Now in the exchange between Macbeth and
his wife, which runs between line 22 and about 45. It is as if we had two different worlds trying to communicate. He has
this powerful imagination that builds on the event, making it ever more complex and shocking. We saw what his
imagination could generate with his sense of sight and the air-borne dagger before; His sense of hearing proves to be
even more fertile. She has no imagination, at least none that she shares with him; she will seek to treat the event in the
most mundane and literal fashion possible. He tells her that someone laughed in his sleep and another one cried
"Murder!" At line 23 he explains: "[So] That they did wake each other. I stood and heard them./ But they did say their
prayers, and addressed them/ Again to sleep." Lady Macbeth, who knows the sleeping arrangements upstairs, confirms
that two men are sharing a room. So far, so good. But now Macbeth begins to expand this exchange at line 26.
They say more to each other, asking for God's blessing as if they has seen Macbeth with his "hangman's hands." The
hangman in these times did much more than just put the noose over the condemned man's neck. In executions for serious
crimes against the state, the hangman often stopped the victim from dying, revived him so that he could watch while the
hangman cut him open and pulled out his intestines. When the victim finally died of shock and loss of blood, his body was
often cut up into quarters and sent to be displayed in various parts of the city as a warning to others. This is where we
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get the phrase: "Hang, drawn [cut open] and quartered." Macbeth identifies with these unnamed men's sudden fear in the
middle of the night, but he cannot say "Amen."
Lady Macbeth's solution to her husband's dilemma is simple: "don't think about it!" at line 29. But he cannot let it go. At
line 30 he ponders its significance: "But wherefore could I not pronounce 'Amen'?/ I had most need of blessing, and
"Amen"/ Stuck in my throat." Lady Macbeth, at line 33, is even more insistent about her earlier solution: "These deeds
must not be thought/ After these ways; so it will make use mad." Now this is really revealing. Her message throughout
the play up to now has been, "Come on, be a man! The dead can't hurt you." But here she warns that his over-blown
response "will make us mad." We're back to those revealing pronouns. She fears for both of them. Underneath her mask
of being tough and not bothered by the events, she really is. In the end she will be the one who does go mad.
Macbeth’s auditory hallucination continues. Now besides the two guys who woke up we get a detail at line 34. Don't you
hate walking through a house in the night and having lengthy expositions coming at you from the dark? Of course,
Macbeth does murder sleep in the sense that we never see or hear of him sleeping through the rest of the play, but we do
get a number of references from him and his wife about the trouble he will have getting a good night's sleep. Banquo had
prayed that he be protected from the wicked dreams that come in the night; it's too late for Macbeth.
Lady Macbeth was willing to cut her husband some slack before; after all, he had done what she wanted. But this is too
much: "What do you mean?" she demands at line 39. And he's just getting started with what all he heard: "Still it cried
'Sleep no more' to all the house:/ 'Glamis hath murdered sleep, and therefore Cawdor/ Shall sleep no more: Macbeth shall
sleep no more!'" This is a whole lot to have heard just coming down the stairs. Of course, we can see how Macbeth in
stabbing Duncan in his sleep would think that he had murdered sleep. Once he had done it to another, how could he ever
sleep peacefully himself? Lady Macbeth blows up, as she tries to deal with what he says in a literal sense at line 43: "Who
was it that thus cried?" She'll find out who said what and what room they're in. She'll get to the bottom of the mystery.
Then at line 43 she lashes out at him in the same way she had before the murder: "Why worthy Thane/ You do unbend
your noble strength, to think/ So brainsickly of things." It's that same suggestion she used before that he's not living up to
his macho image. All he has to do is wash his hands to get rid of "this filthy witness" from his hands. Then she realizes
that he still has the bloody daggers in his hand. He has screwed up, as she feared. He was supposed to have left them
upstairs and to have smeared the sleepy grooms with blood. She orders him to go back and finish the job.
Macbeth refuses at line 49: "I'll go no more./ I am afraid to think what I have done;/ Look on it again I dare not." This
takes us back to those evocations of the night. As long as Macbeth did not have to see the wound he made in the dark, he
was all right. Now he is terrified of thinking about the consequences of his action. He cannot bear to look at it again. So
gutsy Lady Macbeth finally gets her chance to jump in at line 51. She gives her husband a couple of shots, attacking his
manhood once again. She declares that "The sleeping and the dead/ Are but as pictures" but remember when she looked
on the sleeping Duncan back at line 12 of this scene, what did she think? We know that Macbeth is terrified, but what
does it take for Lady Macbeth to go upstairs and finish the job? We even get a serious pun in the last two lines here -- the
play on "gild" and "guilt."
At this point we get an intrusion, a knocking at the door. It's a simple device, but psychologically what an impact! The
Macbeths have been behaving as if they were the only people in the world; they are in the midst of a terrible, bloody act.
The knocking is a sudden, dramatic device to remind both of them that they are accountable to the outside world, which
is at the door and wants in now. Macbeth freaks out at line 56. When Macbeth looks at his hands and wonders about
cleaning them, he thinks in terms of using the ocean. However, even that would not be enough to cleanse the guilt from
him. The blood will turn the green sea to red in that wonderful word "incarnadine." Everything about his crime and
subsequent guilt makes Macbeth think in terms of superlatives.
Lady Macbeth returns and gives her husband one more shot at line 62: "My hands are of your color, but I shame/ To wear
a heart so white." When she hears the knocking at the door, she urges that they retire to their room, wash up and change
to their night clothes: "A little water clears us of this deed." It won't be that simple, as she'll find out. She sees Macbeth's
suffering at line 70 as simply being "lost/ So poorly in your thoughts." He sees it differently: "To know my deed , 'twere
best not know myself." His regret is palpable. He had warned himself before the murder that committing the crime was
like drinking the same poison you use to kill someone. His final words in the scene also express regret as he says to
whoever is knocking at the door: "Wake Duncan with thy knocking! I would thou couldst!"
Scene iii
Summary – A drunken porter goes to answer the door and pretends to be the doorman of hell, letting in some of the popular sinners of the day. The
persons at the door are Macduff and Lennox, who have arrived to awaken the king. Macduff jokes with the porter about the drunken revelry the night
before. Macbeth enters and shows Macduff the way to the king's chamber. Lennox tells Macbeth of the terrible storm of the night and the strange
omens that bodes some catastrophic event. Macduff returns with news of the murder of Duncan and awakens the castle while Macbeth and others rush
upstairs. They soon return, Macbeth having killed the apparently guilty servants. Confusion reigns, and Duncan's sons Malcolm and Donalbain secretly
decide to flee the country separately.
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[Lines 1-22] Scene 2, you'll notice, doesn't end with that rhymed couplet that I told you signals the conclusion of most
scenes. That's because Shakespeare did not consider this as a separate scene but as a continuation. The Porter is the
doorman for the castle, and we see him, hung over, playing a little game of being the Porter at the gates of Hell. Read
his short scene in the first 22 lines of the scene and notice anything unusual about who he lets in.
This scene shows how far Shakespeare had come in the development of his art. You recall in Romeo & Juliet there was a
short scene of comic relief involving a group of musicians who show up for Juliet's wedding to Paris, only to discover she
has died and have to change their musical selections to fit the new circumstances. I pointed out that this wasn't very
effective and is almost always cut. By contrast, the Porter's scene is one of the very best comic relief scenes that
Shakespeare wrote. The emotional intensity of the previous scene is very high, with the Macbeths scurrying around to
hide their guilt and the insistent knocking at the gate, threatening discovery. Now, Shakespeare uses the Porter to create
a different view of the same issues. The Macbeths stated that is they could operate in the dark they could escape
detection. The Porter shows that there are many others who make the same mistake, and they all pay the same price by
going "the primrose way to the ever-lasting bonfire" [line 20] of Hell. There are so many sinners, the Porter says, he
would be opening the door all the time. One of the sinners he lets in at line 4 is a farmer who tried to get rich by
hoarding his crop, hoping for high prices, only to learn that there's a bumper crop and his goods are worthless. He hangs
himself, and suicide is a mortal sin, so he will sweat in Hell and need lots of napkins. Another sinner is a comic English
tailor at line 13 who stole, another mortal sin, by copying the fashion of France, something the English were notorious
for. The tailor will be where it is hot enough to heat his "goose" or pressing iron. The really interesting sinner is the
equivocator at line 8. You know all about the equivocator, the Jesuit Garnett, who lied about the Gunpowder Plot and
was executed in a particularly horrible manner. In this one reference Shakespeare brings the current events of England
into this play supposedly set in medieval Scotland. At the end of this sequence as he finishes his routine, the Porter
reminds us to remember him, at line 22, as a character looking for a tip from whoever he lets in the door. The line is also
a reminder to the audience to remember his message that no one escapes from the consequences of their actions, no
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matter how dark it is. Now this passage has had humor, and in that sense it is "comic relief," but it has not let us forget
the significance of what the Macbeths have done and how they will have to pay.
[Lines 23-44] In the lines that follow when Macduff and Lennox come in, we do get some genuine comic relief. The
Porter explains that everyone had too much to drink, which is why it took so long for him to get to the door. He launches
into another comic routine that too much drink provokes nose painting, sleep and urine. Drink does promote lechery,
sexual desire, but it takes away the ability to perform, so that too much drink could be said to be an "equivocator with
lechery; it makes him and it mars him….makes him stand to and not stand to" [lines 34 -- 37]. We get that theme of
equivocation sounded again, complete with the phallic reference, with more comic effect than the earlier reference.
The rest of the exchange between Macduff and the Porter, all in prose of course, is pretty low humor.
In the next sequence we will watch as Macduff goes upstairs to awaken Duncan. Notice Macbeth's reactions as he awaits
the bloody discovery. How has he changed from what he was before? Notice everyone else's reactions to the news of
Duncan's death. What's unusual about them?
In lines 45 -- 65 Macbeth seems very subdued. There are a series of mundane questions and answers, as Macbeth escorts
Macduff to the door leading up to the King's bedroom. Once Macduff enters we wait, along with Macbeth, for the shoe to
drop. In a sense everything that Macbeth says here has a double meaning, which only we share. So when Lennox at line
54 asks if the king is leaving today, Macbeth says he is, then quickly adds the qualifier, "he did appoint so" as a reminder
to us that plans can change suddenly. Lennox describes a terrible storm that happened the night before, a storm which
would signal to Shakespeare's audience supernatural connections with the death of a ruler. Some of the things Lennox
mentions are your typical storm damage, like chimneys blown down. Some suggest supernatural forces, such as the
"obscure bird" or owl, hooting throughout the night and the earthquake at line 63, something very unusual for the British
Isles. Some have a special meaning for Shakespeare's time, as at line 60 where strange voices prophesy "dire combustion
and confused events/ New hatched to the woeful time" quite probably referring again to the Gunpowder Plot with its
special "combustion and confused events." Lennox is highly emotional in his account, to which Macbeth responds at line
63: "'Twas a rough night." That short line resonates with us because we have been through it with Macbeth.
What's unusual about the way Macduff and others describe the death of Duncan from lines 66 to 82? "O horror! horror!
horror! Tongue nor heart/ Cannot conceive nor name thee," he says as he first comes down at line 66. Granted that
Shakespeare's language is often more formal than that we use, this wording is fancy in the extreme. On NYPD Blue in
over eight seasons, no one, finding the hacked body of a business associate, has ever said something like this. The
language conveying the emotions here is very formal. Notice at line 68: ‘Confusion now hath made his masterpiece. /
Most sacrilegious murder hath broke ope’ / The Lord's anointed temple, and stole thence / The life of the building.”
Nowhere else in literature, to my knowledge, does an author compare taking a man's life to the act of desecrating a holy
building, (holy because the king is consecrated by God in the act of coronation). The concept here of murder of a
monarch being a form of "confusion" is very abstract and intellectually correct. But none of this rings true emotionally;
this language doesn't sound like real people in a state of shock but rather like people going through the motions of grief.
And that's the point. Shakespeare doesn't want us to empathize too closely with Macduff or the king's sons discovering
what we have already gone through, so he uses language to keep us from any genuine feeling. He doesn't want us to use
up all our emotional energy when he has more for us to feel, and so he removes us from the event by the language.
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Macduff orders the bell rung, a reminder of the bell Lady Macbeth rang just before the murder. At line 78 he tells
Malcolm and Donalbain, Duncan's sons, to "Shake off downy sleep, death's counterfeit,/ And look on death itself!" This
reminds us of Lady Macbeth's lines that the sleeping and the dead are but as pictures. Lady Macbeth gets up and demands
to know what's happening. Macduff says he cannot tell her because, as a woman, the words would murder her. But he
turns right around and tells Banquo, "Our royal master's murdered," to which Lady Macbeth cries out, "What, in our
house?" at line 90. (You can hear her thinking, "Not in the room with the white carpeting!")
Macbeth had run upstairs to see the body with Lennox and Ross. He comes down now and says, at line 93:
Had I but died an hour before this chance,
I had lived a blessed time; for from this instant
There's nothing serious in mortality:
[mortal life]
All is but toys. Renown and grace is dead,
[trifles]
The wine of life is drawn, and the mere lees [sludge in the bottom of a wine vat]
Is left this vault to brag of.
What's Macbeth motivation here for this speech? At the obvious level he is mirroring the grief that others are feeling. At
another level this is a profound feeling of his despair for what he has done. In a very real sense he wishes he had died
just an hour before, so he would not have killed Duncan.
Malcolm and Donalbain come in and are told that their father has been murdered, that "The spring, the head, the
fountain of your blood/ Is stopped" at line 100 as if the king were a water source from which their blessings flow. When
they ask who did it, Lennox says that the guards in his chambers apparently were guilty. He describes the blood on them
and their daggers, their distracted behavior, and concludes, "No man's life was to be trusted with them" [line 107]. Now
Macbeth expressed regret for having killed them, blaming his fury. Surprise! Was this in the original plot that the
Macbeths hatched? No, that only went as far as the murder of Duncan. So apparently Macbeth is starting to ad lib, to act
without getting his wife's permission. Macbeth has set out on a journey of his own into further evil.
Macbeth's actions immediately prompt suspicion. Macduff demands to know why he killed them; later Banquo will
express his doubts. Macbeth thought it would cover up his guilt, but it just multiplies the doubts. We saw the same thing
in our history when Jack Ruby, in an act he said was to clear the name of Dallas, killed Lee Harvey Oswald and generated
decades of doubts, suspicions and grotesque movies by Oliver Stone about the unresolved murder of Jack Kennedy.
Macbeth attempts to justify his actions, saying that he was driven temporarily insane by the sight of Duncan's body and
the obvious culprits covered with his blood. He concludes at line 118: "Who could refrain,/ That had a heart to love, and
in that heart/ Courage to make his love known?" So the murder of the grooms was an act of love and loyalty to Duncan.
In this instant the dynamics of the scene have changed. No one is sure whom to believe. Suspicion has begun to point
toward Macbeth when Lady Macbeth suddenly begins to faint, or at least gives that impression at line 120. Why does Lady
Macbeth faint? Here are three possibilities. First, she realizes that people are beginning to suspect her husband, and she
pretends to faint to divert attention, the good wife helping hubby. A second possibility is that she really does start to
faint. The vivid description of the bloody crime scene that her husband just gave was too much for this woman who had
to pretend that it didn't bother her to go upstairs and finish the job. We'll see the real toll that action took on her later
in the sleepwalking scene. Finally she faints because in an instant she fears that her husband may no longer need her to
psyche him up and provide direction. Killing the grooms was an act of his independence and the old relationship is dead.
While everyone else rushes to catch Lady Macbeth, Malcolm and Donalbain have an aside where they share with us that
they trust no one and fear for their own lives. Banquo now takes control of the situation at line 128, and while Lady
Macbeth is carried out he declares: “And when we have our naked frailties hid, / That suffer in exposure, let us meet /
And question this most bloody piece of work, / To know it further. Fear and scruples shake us. / In the great hand of God
I stand, and thence / Against undivulged pretense I fight / Of treasonous malice.”
After saying that they all have suspicions, Banquo takes his stand against plots and hidden motives of treason. At this
point you have to wonder if Banquo suspects Macbeth's complicity. One thing to look for in any production is where
Banquo first indicates his suspicions of Macbeth. The thanes go out to dress and then meet to discuss the crime. Malcolm
and Donalbain decide to flee: "This murderous shaft that's shot/ Hath not yet lighted, and our safest way/ Is to avoid the
shaft". They both realize they are the next targets and must flee to avoid the weapon aimed at them. Malcolm goes to
England and Donalbain to Ireland.
Scene iv
Summary – Near Macbeth's castle people discuss the continuing supernatural events, which suggest terrible events to follow. The murder of Duncan has
been blamed on the princes, who have fled. Macduff arrives with news that Macbeth has been selected as the new king and has gone to the sacred
coronation spot at Scone. The others set out for Scone, but Macduff returns home.
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This scene takes us away from Macbeth's castle and the scene of the murder to show us the reactions of a commoner.
Ross talks with an old man in his seventies who says he has never seen anything like the storm that accompanied Duncan's
murder. Ross describes how the day is as dark as night and asks, "Is it night's predominance or day's shame?" The old man
adds a strange detail at line 12: a falcon, a mighty bird, was attacked by an owl (there's that supernatural touch again)
and killed. Ross then describes Duncan's horses going wild, breaking out of their stalls and then trying to eat each other,
more strange, supernatural happenings. This particular detail Shakespeare found in Holinshed's description of the murder
of King Duff by Macdonwald, which he used as the model for the death of Duncan.
Macduff enters and announces that Macbeth will be the new king. Now Macduff is politically correct in what he says. The
murderers were apparently bribed by Duncan's sons, and the fact that they have fled makes them suspect. At line 28 Ross
calls their actions "unnatural." Macbeth is on his way to the holy coronation site at Scone to become king while Duncan's
body has been taken home for burial. Now Macduff is clearly one of the most important figures in the kingdom. He was
so trusted by the previous king that he gave him permission to enter the royal bedroom and wake him. Where should such
a key political person be when the new king is crowned? Macduff is asked if he will go to Scone at line 35 and he says,
"No, cousin, I'll to Fife," his home. It may not seem a big deal to us, but believe me, it is a conscious insult and reinforces
the idea that Macduff has serious suspicions about Macbeth. Ross covers himself and says he'll go to Scone. Macduff says
at line 37, "Well, may you see things well done there. Adieu!/ Lest our old robes sit easier than our new." We get that old
clothes/new clothes motif used again to describe the tensions between what Macbeth has been and what he has become.
The old man, a kind of representative for ordinary folks, hopes that Ross will find a change in conditions in Scotland, that
the people in charge will now "make good of bad, and friends of foes!"