Birds
The Sergeant tells King Duncan how, just at the moment when Macbeth's
forces defeated Macdonwald's rebels, the Norwegian king attacked the Scots.
King Duncan asks if this new attack dismayed Macbeth and Banquo. The
Sergeant, making a tough-guy joke, says "Yes / As sparrows [dismay] eagles,
or the hare the lion" (1.2.34-35). [Scene Summary]
Immediately after Lady Macbeth reads her husband's letter about the witches'
prophecies, a messenger come with the news that King Duncan is coming to
spend the night at her castle. After the messenger has left, the first thing Lady
Macbeth says is, "The raven himself is hoarse / That croaks the fatal entrance
of Duncan / Under my battlements" (1.5.38-40). The raven is a bird of ill omen,
and Lady Macbeth means that the raven is hoarse from saying again and
again that King Duncan must die. [Scene Summary]
When King Duncan comes to Macbeth's castle, he remarks how sweet the air
is. Banquo agrees, and adds:
This guest of summer,
The temple-haunting martlet, does approve,
By his loved mansionry, that the heaven's breath
Smells wooingly here: no jutty, frieze,
Buttress, nor coign of vantage, but this bird
Hath made his pendant bed and procreant cradle. (1.6.3-8)
A "martlet" is a kind of swallow, who is "temple-haunting" because it likes to
build its nests high on the walls of tall buildings. ("Haunting" doesn't have
any ghostly connotations.) When Lady Macbeth heard that King Duncan was
coming for the night, she imagined a raven under her battlements, foretelling
the death of the King. Instead, as the King looks up to those battlements, he
sees swallows gliding to and fro on the breath of heaven. [Scene Summary]
While Macbeth goes to murder King Duncan, Lady Macbeth waits and listens
very carefully. In the following passage, she hears something, then tells
herself to be quiet and decides that she heard a screech owl: "Hark! Peace! / It
was the owl that shriek'd, the fatal bellman, / Which gives the stern'st goodnight. He is about it" (2.2.2-4). The cry of a screech owl was thought to
announce a death, and a "fatal bellman" was a night watchman who rang a
bell to call a prisoner to his hanging. Lady Macbeth is glad to hear the cry of
the screech owl, because it means that Macbeth is murdering King Duncan.
[Scene Summary]
As Macduff is going in to say good morning to King Duncan, Lennox tells
Macbeth about the rough night. Chimneys were blown down, lamentings and
screams were heard in the air, and "the obscure bird / Clamour'd the livelong
night" (2.3.60-61). The owl is the "obscure bird," because it flies in the night
and can't be seen. Perhaps that owl was the same one that Lady Macbeth
heard when Macbeth was killing King Duncan. Just after Lennox finishes this
speech, Macduff comes rushing in with the news that King Duncan has been
murdered. [Scene Summary]
The morning after the murder of King Duncan, Ross and an Old Man are
discussing the other unnatural things that have been happening. One of them
is described by the Old Man: On Tuesday last / A falcon, towering in her
pride of place, / Was by a mousing owl hawk'd at and kill'd" (2.4.11-13). The
falcon's "pride of place" is the highest point of its flight. And the owl, which
usually catches mice on the ground, went up instead of down, and killed a
falcon. Also, a falcon is a day creature, and a royal companion, while the owl
is an untamable bird of night and death. If things in nature stands for things
in human life, King Duncan was the falcon, and Macbeth the owl. [Scene
Summary]
After he has arranged for the murder of Banquo, Macbeth boasts to his wife
that a terrible deed will be done which will solve their problems. The deed is
to be done at nightfall, and Macbeth imagines the night coming on: 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" (3.2.53). "Night's black agents" are all things that hunt and kill in the
dark, including birds of prey. [Scene Summary]
After the first appearance of the Ghost of Banquo, Macbeth says "If charnelhouses and our graves must send / Those that we bury back, our monuments /
Shall be the maws of kites" (3.4.70-72). "Monuments," like "charnel-houses"
and "graves," are the places where the dead belong. "Kites" are hawks, and
their "maws" are their entire eating apparatuses -- beaks, gullets, and
stomachs. An ancient fear was that a person who was not properly buried
would have his bones picked clean by birds. Macbeth thinks that the dead
ought to stay where they belong; if the graves are going to send the bodies
back, the kites, with their maws full of human flesh, are going to be the only
real graves. [Scene Summary]
Later in the same scene, after Macbeth has finally driven away the Ghost of
Banquo, he reflects that a murder will always be discovered, sometimes in
strange ways: "Stones have been known to move and trees to speak; / Augurs
and understood relations have / By magot-pies and choughs and rooks
brought forth / The secret'st man of blood" (3.4.122-125). Magot-pies
(magpies), choughs (jackdaws), and rooks are all birds that can be taught to
speak a few words. And of course, Macbeth himself is a secret man of blood, a
murderer. [Scene Summary]
In her shock at learning that her husband has fled from Scotland, Lady
Macduff accuses her husband of running away because he is afraid. She
thinks he should have stayed to protect his family, and she says, "He loves us
not; / He wants [lacks] the natural touch: for the poor wren, / The most
diminutive of birds, will fight, / Her young ones in her nest, against the owl"
(4.2.8-11). [Scene Summary]
A little later in the same scene, Lady Macduff tries to make light of the
situation by pretending to believe that things are worse than they really are.
She says to her son, "Sirrah, your father's dead; / And what will you do now?
How will you live?" (4.2.30-31). The boy answers, "As birds do, mother"
(4.2.32), and when she asks if that means he will eat worms and flies, he
replies "With what I get, I mean; and so do they" (4.2.33). What the birds get is
provided by God, as Jesus said: "Behold the fowls of the air; for they sow not,
neither do they reap, nor gather into barns; yet your heavenly Father feedeth
them" (Matt. 6:26). Lady Macduff comments, "Poor bird! thou'ldst never fear
the net nor lime" (4.2.34). "The net" and "lime" (birdlime, a sticky substance)
were the two most common ways of catching birds, but this boy -- his mother
says -- is so innocent or stupid that he wouldn't fear either one. The boy is
unfazed. He take the word "poor" to mean "little," and says that poor birds are
too little to be trapped. [Scene Summary]
When Ross tells Macduff of the slaughter of his wife and children, Macduff
cries out in passionate grief: All my pretty ones? / Did you say all? O hell-kite!
All? / What, all my pretty chickens and their dam / At one fell swoop?"
(4.3.217-220). The "hell-kite" is Macbeth, who has killed all the "pretty
chickens" in one murderous dive ("fell swoop"). [Scene Summary]
Blood
"What bloody man is that?" (1.2.1). In these, the opening words of the play's
second scene, King Duncan asks about a sergeant. The sergeant then tells the
story of Macbeth's heroic victories over Macdonwald and the King of
Norway. The sergeant's telling of the story is in itself heroic, because his loss
of blood has made him weak. Thus his blood and his heroism seem to
enhance the picture of Macbeth as a hero. [Scene Summary]
As Lady Macbeth plans to kill King Duncan, she calls upon the spirits of
murder to "make thick my blood; / Stop up the access and passage to remorse"
(1.5.43-44). Thin blood was considered wholesome, and it was thought that
poison made blood thick. Lady Macbeth wants to poison her own soul, so that
she can kill without remorse. [Scene Summary]
Just before he kills King Duncan, Macbeth is staring at the "dagger of the
mind," and as he does so, thick drops of blood appear on the blade and hilt.
He says to the knife, I see thee still, / And on thy blade and dudgeon gouts of
blood, / Which was not so before" (2.1.45-47). However, he's not so far gone
that he doesn't know what's happening to him: "There's no such thing: / It is
the bloody business which informs / Thus to mine eyes" (2.1.47-49). Of course
the "bloody business" is the murder he's about to commit. [Scene Summary]
"This is a sorry sight" (2.2.18), says Macbeth, looking at his bloody hands
moments after he has murdered King Duncan. His wife thinks that's a foolish
thing to say, and when she notices that he has brought the bloody daggers
from King Duncan's bedchamber, she thinks him even more foolish. She tells
him that he must take the daggers back, place them with the King's sleeping
grooms, and smear the grooms with blood. Macbeth, however, is so shaken
that all he can do is stand and stare at his bloody hands, so Lady Macbeth
takes the daggers from him. When she goes to do the job she thinks he should
do, Macbeth still stands and stares. He asks himself if all the water in the
world can wash away the blood: "Will all great Neptune's ocean wash this
blood / Clean from my hand?" And he answers his own question: "No, this my
hand will rather / The multitudinous seas incarnadine, / Making the green one
red" (2.2.57-60).
In contrast, his wife thinks his obsession with blood shows that he's a coward.
She dips her hands in the dead King's blood, and smears the grooms with that
blood, then tells Macbeth that "My hands are of your colour; but I shame / To
wear a heart so white" (2.2.61-62). She means that now her hands are bloody,
like his, but she would be ashamed to have a "white" -- bloodless and
cowardly -- heart like his. She leads him away to wash his hands, and she
seems quite sure that "A little water clears us of this deed" (2.2.64). Ironically,
when she later goes mad, she sees blood on her hands that she cannot wash
away, no matter how much water she uses. [Scene Summary]
Telling Malcolm and Donalbain of their father's murder, Macbeth says, "The
spring, the head, the fountain of your blood / Is stopp'd; the very source of it
is stopp'd" (2.3.98-99). Here, the primary meaning of "your blood" is "your
family," but Macbeth's metaphors also picture blood as a life-giving essence.
A second later, blood is spoken of as a sign of guilt. Lennox says that it
appears that the King was murdered by his grooms, because "Their hands and
faces were all badged [spotted, marked] with blood" (2.3.102). In another
second, blood appears as the precious clothing of a precious body, when
Macbeth, justifying his killing of the grooms, describes the King's corpse:
"Here lay Duncan, / His silver skin laced with his golden blood" (2.3.112). (It
was common in Shakespeare's time for blood to be spoken of as "golden,"
although it was probably just as red then as it is now.)
In this scene, the last mention of blood comes from Donalbain, who says to his
brother, "the near in blood, / The nearer bloody" (2.3.140-141), meaning that as
the murdered King's sons, they are likely to be murdered themselves. [Scene
Summary]
It's strangely dark on the morning after the night of King Duncan's murder,
and Ross says to an Old Man, "Ah, good father, / Thou seest, the heavens, as
troubled with man's act, / Threaten his bloody stage" (2.4.4-6). The "stage" is
this earth, where we humans play out our lives. Because of Duncan's murder,
the stage is bloody and the heavens are angry.
Moments later, Macduff enters and Ross asks him, "Is't known who did this
more than bloody deed?" (2.4.22). The deed is "more than bloody" because it is
unnatural. King Duncan was a good and kind man whose life naturally
should have been cherished by everyone. [Scene Summary]
In the first scene in which Macbeth appears as King of Scotland, he mentions
to Banquo, in a seemingly casual way, that Malcolm and Donalbain, "our
bloody cousins" (3.1.29), are in England and Ireland, where they are denying
that they killed their father. By referring to them as "bloody," Macbeth wants
to emphasize their guilt. After Banquo leaves, Macbeth arranges for his
murder. [Scene Summary]
Macbeth tells his wife that by nightfall a deed will done which will release
them from their fear of Banquo. Then he calls upon night to come and "with
thy bloody and invisible hand / Cancel and tear to pieces that great bond /
Which keeps me pale!" (3.2.48-50). The "great bond" is Banquo's lease on life.
A man becomes pale with fear or worry because the blood drains away from
his face. Macbeth believes that if Banquo's blood is shed, his own blood will
return, and he won't be pale anymore. [Scene Summary]
After he has become king, Macbeth gives a banquet for his noblemen. The
banquet has barely begun when Macbeth has to go to the door to speak with
First Murderer. "There's blood on thy face" (3.4.13), he says, and the murderer
proudly tells him it's Banquo's blood, and that he left Banquo in a ditch with
"twenty trenched gashes on his head" (3.4.26), all mortal. [Scene Summary]
A bit later in the scene, just as Macbeth is talking about how much he wishes
that Banquo were at the banquet, Banquo's Ghost enters. Macbeth says to the
ghost, "Thou canst not say I did it: never shake / Thy gory locks at me" (3.4.4950). The ghost's "gory locks" are the locks of his hair, covered with clotted
blood. After the ghost has gone, Macbeth tells himself that it's not his fault
that the ghost showed up. He says that men have been killing men for a long
time, since before there were even laws against it: "Blood hath been shed ere
now, i' the olden time, / Ere human statute purged the gentle weal" (3.4.74-75).
It's a natural thing to shed blood; what's not natural is that now the dead "rise
again, / With twenty mortal murders [deadly wounds] on their crowns
[heads], / And push us from our stools" (3.4.81). After saying this, Macbeth
recovers himself, returns to his guests, and proposes a toast in honor of
Banquo. At that, the Ghost of Banquo re-enters. This time, Macbeth tries to
drive it away with words: "Avaunt! and quit my sight! let the earth hide thee!
/ Thy bones are marrowless, thy blood is cold" (3.4.92-94). Macbeth is making
sure that the Ghost knows that it belongs in the grave because it is very, very
dead. Perhaps the ghost actually listens to Macbeth, because it soon leaves
again. Macbeth then wonders why the sight of the ghost hasn't driven the
blood from everyone's face. He asks them how "you can behold such sights, /
And keep the natural ruby of your cheeks, / When mine is blanched with fear"
(3.4.113-115). Apparently he doesn't realize that only he has seen the ghost.
[Scene Summary]
Finally, after all the guests are gone, Macbeth reflects that "they say, blood
will have blood" (3.4.121). The saying means that the blood of a murder victim
will seek out the blood of his killer, and so a murder will always be
discovered. Macbeth knows that stones have moved, trees have spoken, birds
have told secrets. All of these things have "brought forth / The secret'st man of
blood" (3.4.124-125). Macbeth himself is a secret man of blood, and the bloody
Ghost confronted him. His guilt was almost "brought forth" in front of his
guests. None of this makes him feel remorse, or anything but a determination
to see things through to the bitter end, because he is "in blood / Stepp'd in so
far that, should I wade no more, / Returning were as tedious as go o'er"
(3.4.135-137). [Scene Summary]
After he comes to understand that Macbeth is a murderous tyrant, Lennox
learns from another Scottish Lord that Macduff has gone to the English court
to ask for help. Macduff wants to overthrow Macbeth, so that King Duncan's
son, Malcolm, can be King of Scotland. Once that is done, the Scottish Lord
says, Scotland will enjoy the blessing of peace, so that "we may again / Give to
our tables meat, sleep to our nights / Free from our feasts and banquets
bloody knives" (3.6.33-35). [Scene Summary]
As they wait for Macbeth, the witches stir up a sickening stew in a cauldron.
After they have put in all the other ingredients, they "Cool it with a baboon's
blood" (4.1.37).[Scene Summary]
A little later, just before they call up the first apparition, the witches put two
more ingredients in the cauldron -- grease from a murderer's gibbet, and
"sow's blood, that hath eaten / Her nine farrow" (4.1.64-65). When the
apparitions appear, we see blood on two of them. First comes an armed head,
then a bloody child that tells Macbeth to "Be bloody, bold, and resolute; laugh
to scorn / The power of man, for none of woman born / Shall harm Macbeth"
(4.1.79-81). The final apparition is a parade of eight kings, escorted by the
spirit of Banquo. Macbeth cries out, "the blood-bolter'd Banquo smiles upon
me, / And points at them for his" (4.1.123-124). Macbeth refers to Banquo as
"blood-boltered" because Banquo's hair is matted with blood. [Scene
Summary]
The son of Macduff, struggling in the hands of one of Macbeth's hired
assassins, cries out, "He has kill'd me, mother: / Run away, I pray you!"
(4.2.85). Because we don't use the words "mother" and "pray" exactly as they
were used in Shakespeare's time, the boy's cry may sound a bit unrealistic,
and we may miss the full horror of what we're seeing. A child is being
murdered in front of our eyes, and although blood is never mentioned, we
almost certainly see it. [Scene Summary]
When Macduff comes to believe that Malcolm won't support him in a war
against Macbeth, he cries out to his beloved Scotland, "Bleed, bleed, poor
country!" (4.3.30). Malcolm then reassures him that all is not lost, and that he,
too, feels strongly for Scotland: "I think our country sinks beneath the yoke; /
It weeps, it bleeds; and each new day a gash / Is added to her wounds" (4.3.3941).
After this, Malcolm proceeds to test Macduff's honor by telling a big lie about
himself. First, he says of Macbeth, "I grant him bloody, / Luxurious,
avaricious, false, deceitful, / Sudden, malicious, smacking of every sin / That
has a name" (4.3.57-60), but then he goes on to say that he will be an even
worse king. By going on and on about all the horrible things he will do when
he is king, Malcolm drives Macduff to despair. Macduff believes that Scotland
is a "nation miserable, / With an untitled tyrant bloody-scepter'd" (4.3.103104), and with a worse king to come in Malcolm. This is just what Malcolm
was looking for, because it shows that Macduff truly loves Scotland, and
doesn't just want to be on the winning side. [Scene Summary]
As Lady Macbeth's waiting gentlewoman and a doctor observe, the lady
walks and talks in her sleep. She rubs her hands together, as though she is
trying to wash them. As it turns out, it is King Duncan's blood she is trying to
wash away. She continues to "wash" her hands until she is interrupted by the
memory of the bell that she herself rang to summon her husband to the
murder of King Duncan:
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? (5.1.35-40)
Lady Macbeth had thought that once her husband was king, it wouldn't
matter who knew that they murdered King Duncan, because no one would be
able to challenge Macbeth's power as king, to "call our power to account." Yet
the old man had a lot of blood, and she can still see it on her hands, reminding
her of her guilt. His blood is pursuing her in another way, too, although she
may not know it. A man's "blood" is his family, and Malcolm, who is of King
Duncan's blood, is now marching with ten thousand English soldiers to call
Macbeth to account.
As the sleepwalking scene continues, Lady Macbeth twice more complains
that she can't get the blood off of her hands. "What, will these hands ne'er be
clean?" (5.1.44), she asks, and then she is devastated when she realizes that the
blood will never come out: "Here's the smell of the blood still: all the perfumes
of Arabia will not sweeten this little hand. O, O, O!" (5.1.50-52). [Scene
Summary]
Menteith and Caithness are among those in the Scottish forces marching to
join the English army at Birnam wood. Menteith says of Malcolm and
Macduff, "Revenges burn in them; for their dear causes / Would to the
bleeding and the grim alarm / Excite the mortified man" (5.2.3-5). Their "dear
causes" are their motivations -- Macbeth's murder of Malcolm's father and of
Macduff's wife and children. An "alarm" is a battle, a "mortified man" is one
who is half-dead, and "excite" was used the way "incite" is used now.
Menteith is saying even a man who was half-dead would rush into the most
bloody battle if that man had the reasons to fight that Malcolm and Macduff
have.
At the end of the same scene, Caithness pledges "each drop of us" to cure
Scotland's sickness. Lennox replies, "Or so much as it needs, / To dew the
sovereign flower and drown the weeds. / Make we our march towards
Birnam" (5.2.29-31). To "dew the sovereign flower" is to make it grow, and the
sovereign flower is Malcolm. Macbeth and his supporters are the weeds that
will be drowned in the blood of these soldiers. [Scene Summary]
When a frightened servant comes to tell Macbeth of the approach of ten
thousand English soldiers, Macbeth is enraged by the servant's face, which is
pale with fear. He tells the servant, Go prick thy face, and over-red thy fear, /
Thou lily-liver'd boy" (5.3.14-15). Macbeth is mocking the servant; he means
that the only way the boy can even look courageous is by pricking it to make
it bleed. Also, the liver was thought to be the seat of courage, but courage
requires blood, and Macbeth's opinion is that this boy is a coward whose liver
is white as a lily. [Scene Summary]
At the walls of Dunsinane, after the soldiers throw down their concealing
boughs, Macduff calls out the battle-charge: "Make all our trumpets speak;
give them all breath, / Those clamorous harbingers of blood and death" (5.6.910). A "harbinger" is someone or something that foretells what is about to
happen; in this case, the trumpets announce that blood will flow and people
will die. [Scene Summary]
In the last scene of the play, Macbeth knows that he is in an impossible
situation, but he is determined to do as much damage as possible before he
dies. He says, "Whiles I see lives [living men], the gashes / Do better upon
them" (5.8.2-3). In other words, he just likes to see the blood flow.
A moment later, Macduff catches up with Macbeth and challenges him,
calling out, "Turn, hell-hound, turn!" (5.8.3). Macbeth answers, "Of all men
else I have avoided thee: / But get thee back; my soul is too much charged /
With blood of thine" (5.8.5-7). "Charged" means full, overburdened, and the
"blood" to which Macbeth refers is the blood that was shed in the slaughter of
Macduff's wife and children. In short, Macbeth is saying that those murders
are on his conscience, so he doesn't want to shed Macduff's blood. Macduff is
not appeased, and says that he will let his sword do his talking: "My voice is
in my sword, thou bloodier villain / Than terms can give thee out!" (5.8.7-8).
Blood is not mentioned again in the scene, but -- unless the director of the
play is too squeamish -- it is certainly seen, both when Macbeth dies, and
when Macduff carries in his head on a pole. It would be a matter of poetic
justice if Macbeth were killed with a blow to the head, so that the blood
flowed down over his face, as it did over Banquo's face. [Scene Summary]
Macbeth's Clothes
The Thane of Cawdor lives; why do you dress me / In borrow'd robes?
(1.3.108-109), asks Macbeth when Ross tells him that the King has named him
Thane of Cawdor.
Later in the scene we hear another expression of the idea that Macbeth is like
a person wearing unfamiliar clothes. "New honors come upon him, / Like our
strange garments, cleave not to their mould / But with the aid of use" (1.3.144146), says Banquo about Macbeth, trying to explain why he is lost in thought
just after he has been named Thane of Cawdor. Here "strange" means "new,"
and "cleave" means "fit," and "mould" means "shape," and "use" means "habit."
So Banquo is saying that Macbeth is mentally trying on his new "honors," his
title of Thane of Cawdor, but the title doesn't quite fit, and won't, until
Macbeth gets used to it. [Scene Summary]
Shortly before Macbeth is to kill King Duncan, he has serious second
thoughts, and he tells his wife they won't kill the King after all, saying, "He
hath honour'd me of late; and I have bought / Golden opinions from all sorts
of people, / Which would be worn now in their newest gloss, / Not cast aside
so soon" (1.7.32-35). Macbeth imagines his fame to be a kind of glorious new
coat, which he will enjoy wearing. In her sarcastic reply, Lady Macbeth also
uses a clothing metaphor, asking her husband, Was the hope drunk / Wherein
you dress'd yourself?" (1.7.35-36). She means that--to use an American
metaphor--he's the kind of cowboy who's all hat and no horse. [Scene
Summary]
In the scene in which Macduff discovers the bloody body of King Duncan and
awakens everyone in Macbeth's castle, most of the characters appear in their
nightclothes. When Banquo proposes that they all meet to discuss the murder
of the King, he mentions that they all need to put on their clothes, saying that
should meet when they have their "naked frailties hid, / That suffer in
exposure" (2.3.126-127). Macbeth agrees to the meeting by saying, "Let's
briefly put on manly readiness, / And meet i' the hall together" (2.3.133-134).
In short, it appears that Macbeth feels that he is more of a man when he's
wearing his daytime clothes. [Scene Summary]
The morning after the night that King Duncan is murdered, Ross and Macduff
discuss the question of who did the murder. Their guarded words suggests
that they have serious doubts about the idea that the grooms killed King
Duncan and were bribed to do so by Malcolm and Donalbain. Also, Macduff,
unlike Ross, is not going to go to see Macbeth crowned, and his farewell to
Ross is: "Well, may you see things well done there: adieu! / Lest our old robes
sit easier than our new!" (2.4.37-38). The "old robes" were the royal garments
of King Duncan; the new robes will be Macbeth's. The metaphor implies that
Macbeth may not know how to wear his new robes. In addition, they are "our"
robes; everyone in Scotland will be affected by the way in which the new king
handles his powers. [Scene Summary]
After the night in which King Duncan is killed, Macbeth and his wife next
appear this way: "Sennet sounded. Enter MACBETH, as king, LADY MACBETH,
as queen " (3.1.10, s.d.). "As king" and "as queen" must mean that they are
wearing crowns, and it probably means that they are wearing royal robes. If
those robes are very similar to those of the man they murdered, the effect can
be shocking. [Scene Summary]
As the Scottish forces march to join the English army before Macbeth's castle,
various Scotsmen comment on Macbeth's desperate situation. Angus says,
"Those he commands move only in command, / Nothing in love: now does he
feel his title / Hang loose about him, like a giant's robe / Upon a dwarfish
thief" (5.2.19-22). [Scene Summary]
After receiving the news that none of his thanes will fight for him, and that an
English army of ten thousand is approaching, Macbeth is defiant. He says to
an attendant, "I'll fight till from my bones my flesh be hack'd. / Give me my
armour" (5.3.32-33). The attendant tells him that there's no need to don armor
just now, but Macbeth insists. Apparently he wants to feel like the warrior he
used to be. For the rest of the scene -- as he is speaking of the sickness of his
wife and his country -- Macbeth puts on the armor. At the end of the scene he
still doesn't have it all on, but he tells the attendant to follow him with the
rest. [Scene Summary]
When Macbeth comes to realize that his situation is hopeless -- after his wife's
death and after he has learned that Birnam wood is moving toward
Dunsinane -- he determines to fight on, saying, "Blow, wind! come, wrack! /
At least we'll die with harness on our back" (5.5.51-52). In this context,
"harness" means armor. [Scene Summary]
Sight, Light, Darkness, and Blindness
When King Duncan announces that his eldest son Malcolm is heir to the
throne, he says that Malcolm won't be the only one who receives new honors.
The King promises that "signs of nobleness, like stars, shall shine / On all
deservers" (1.4.41-42). Moments later Macbeth also uses starlight as a
metaphor for what is good and noble. As he is thinking of murdering both the
King and Malcolm, he says to himself:
Stars, hide your fires;
Let not light see my black and deep desires:
The eye wink at the hand; yet let that be,
Which the eye fears, when it is done, to see. (1.4.50-53)
In short, his desires are so terrible, that he can't stand to have the stars shine
on them; he doesn't even want to look at them himself. [Scene Summary]
At the end of a soliloquy in which Lady Macbeth talks herself into a
murderous state of mind, she calls upon night to hide her deed from heaven
and from herself: 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!" (1.5.50-54). In both its
ideas and imagery, this passage is remarkably similar to Macbeth's speech in
the previous scene. [Scene Summary]
When Macbeth is thinking about what's going to happen after he has killed
King Duncan, he says that "pity, like a naked new-born babe, / Striding the
blast, or heaven's cherubins, horsed / Upon the sightless couriers of the air, /
Shall blow the horrid deed in every eye, / That tears shall drown the wind"
(1.7.21-25). "Cherubins" are small angels, portrayed as chubby, naked
children; we call them "cherubs." And "the sightless couriers of the air" are the
winds, imagined as invisible ("sightless") horses. This elaborate metaphor
suggests that pity for King Duncan will be like that kind of wind that blows so
hard that it brings tears to your eyes. [Scene Summary]
After the moon has gone down on the night in which Macbeth kills King
Duncan, Banquo says to Fleance, "There's husbandry in heaven; / Their
candles are all out" (2.1.4-5). He means that there's not a star to be seen in the
sky. If we think back, we may remember that this is exactly the kind of night
Macbeth wanted, because he thought it might conceal his own guilt from
himself. (See the first entry on this page.) [Scene Summary]
Later in the same scene, when he is alone and waiting for the bell that will
summon him to kill King Duncan, Macbeth hallucinates, and sees a dagger.
He knows that it is a "dagger of the mind," but he wonders about its
significance. He thinks that either "Mine eyes are made the fools o' the other
senses, / Or else worth all the rest" (2.1.44-45). In other words, either his eyes
are (like fools) tricking him, or they are showing him what he must do, and so
are "worth all the rest" of his senses put together. [Scene Summary]
"I'll go no more: / I am afraid to think what I have done; / Look on't again I
dare not" (2.2.47-49), says Macbeth when his wife tells him that he must take
the bloody daggers and put them with the King's grooms. Before Macbeth
killed his king, he wanted to be able to do it without looking; now the very
idea of looking at what he has done petrifies him.
His wife, on the other hand, thinks Macbeth's fear of looking is childish. She
tells him that "the sleeping and the dead / Are but as pictures: 'tis the eye of
childhood / That fears a painted devil" (2.2.50-52). [Scene Summary]
After Macduff has discovered King Duncan's bloody corpse, he rushes out
and tells Macbeth and Lennox to "Approach the chamber, and destroy your
sight / With a new Gorgon: do not bid me speak; / See, and then speak
yourselves" (2.3.71-73). The most well-known Gorgon is Medusa; just looking
at her would turn a man to stone, so Macduff is saying that the mere sight of
Duncan's body would make a man blind. But then he says that when Macbeth
and Lennox do see the body, they will "speak" -- shout and cry in grief -- as he
is doing. In either case, the effect will be produced not by words, but by
actually seeing. [Scene Summary]
It's strangely dark on the morning after the night of King Duncan's murder,
and Ross says to an Old Man, "by the clock, 'tis day, / And yet dark night
strangles the travelling lamp" (2.4.6-7). The "travelling lamp" is the sun, which
should be lighting the new day. Ross goes on to speculate that the night is
stronger than the day, or that the day is ashamed of itself. In either case, the
cause would be the murder of King Duncan. The night would be strong
because in that night the good King was murdered, and the day would be
ashamed to shed light on the bloody scene of the murder. [Scene Summary]
After he has made all of the other arrangements for the murder of Banquo,
Macbeth tells the murderers that "Fleance his son, that keeps him company, /
Whose absence is no less material to me / Than is his father's, must embrace
the fate / Of that dark hour" (3.1.134-137). The hour will be "dark" both
literally and metaphorically. Literally, Banquo and Fleance will be riding after
dark, and that's when they will be ambushed. Metaphorically, the hour will be
dark because that's when they will meet the final darkness of death. (As it
turns out, Fleance escapes.) [Scene Summary]
After he has arranged for the murder of Banquo, Macbeth tells his wife that
their problems will be solved by a deed to be done at nightfall. He doesn't tell
her exactly what he has planned, but he very much wants night to come, and
he falls into a kind of reverie in which he speaks to the night. In the reverie
Macbeth mentions a "great bond," which is usually explained as Banquo's
lease on life, so Macbeth is asking the night to take away Banquo's life,
because Banquo makes Macbeth "pale" with fear:
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!
(3.2.50)
The passage has two images of blinding. "Seeling" means "blinding" of a
particularly cruel kind. In order to make them tame, falcons were seeled by
sewing their eyelids shut. The second image of blinding is "scarf up," which
means "to blindfold." And it is the day which must be blinded, because the
deed that Macbeth wants done is too cruel to be seen in the light of day.
Also, before and after this passage, Macbeth describes the night as filled with
flying creatures, "night's black agents" -- the bat and the beetle, the rook and
the crow. And in the night stands Hecate, a visitor from the underworld who
is the protector protectress of witches. The night that Macbeth imagines is
mysterious and dangerous, and he wants it that way because it makes him
feel stronger. [Scene Summary]
The murder of Banquo takes place in the dark. First Murderer says that "The
west yet glimmers with some streaks of day" (3.3.5), but when Banquo and
Fleance enter, Fleance is carrying a torch to light the way. [Scene Summary]
After the Ghost of Banquo has ruined Macbeth's banquet, and all the guests
have departed, Macbeth asks his wife "What is the night?" She answers,
"Almost at odds with morning, which is which" (3.4.125-126). Then Macbeth
states his intention to continue his bloody course of action, and says, "Strange
things I have in head, that will to hand; / Which must be acted ere they may
be scann'd" (3.4.138-39). "Scann'd" meant "thought about," and it also meant
"carefully looked at," as it does today. And "ere" means "before." Macbeth is
saying that there are certain things that he needs to do before he thinks about
them or carefully looks at what they really are. [Scene Summary]
In the scene after the scene in which Macbeth says that he will visit the
witches again, Hecate tells the witches that she will prepare illusions that will
make Macbeth "spurn fate, scorn death, and bear / His hopes 'bove wisdom,
grace and fear" (3.5.30-31). What Macbeth thinks he sees will lead him to
destruction. [Scene Summary]
When Macbeth goes to the witches to learn his fate, he greets them as "you
secret, black, and midnight hags!" (4.1.48). An earlier scene suggests that
Macbeth's visit actually occurs in the morning, but Macbeth associates dark
with evil.
Later in the scene, Macbeth demands to know if Banquo's descendants will be
kings. The witches warn him not to ask, but he insists, so they call out, "Show
his eyes, and grieve his heart" (4.1.110). At this, there appears a parade of
eight kings, escorted by Banquo. As soon as Macbeth sees this, he wishes he
that he could stop looking, but he can't. When he sees the first king, he says to
it, "Thy crown does sear mine eye-balls" (4.1.113). Yet he keeps looking. By the
time the fourth one appears, he says, "Start, eyes!" (4.1.116), as though he
could command his own eyes to jump ("start") out of his head and make him
blind. Yet still he looks, though he promises himself that he'll "see no more"
(4.1.118). [Scene Summary]
In Lady Macbeth's sleepwalking scene she enters holding a candle, and the
doctor asks her gentlewoman how the lady happens to have the candle. The
gentlewoman replies, "Why, it stood by her: she has light by her continually;
'tis her command" (5.1.22-23). The doctor then points out, "You see, her eyes
are open" (5.1.24), and the gentlewoman replies, "Ay, but their sense is shut"
(5.1.25). Thus we see that Lady Macbeth, who eagerly awaited the dark hour
of King Duncan's murder, is now afraid of the dark. And though her eyes are
open, she can see only her own memories of murder. As she sleepwalks, Lady
Macbeth imagines she sees a spot of King Duncan's blood on her hand. She
rubs her hands to try to wash it away, but it won't disappear, and then she
hears the bell that she rung to summon her husband to the murder of his king.