Macbeth

Third lecture

Banquo’s dreams• II.1: Banquo wants to sleep, but is afraid to dream. Why?• Stage image: he hands over his sword – and dagger? • He has dreamt of the “weird sisters.”• Does he want to? • Acceptance or rejection of a “dream.”• What’s acceptable and unacceptable to “dream of”?• And his response to Macbeth’s invitation to talk over

“that business.” • And by contrast Macbeth’s “dream”: “Is this a dagger I

see before me?”• “a dagger of the mind”: with a double meaning?• And then the dream-state dagger becomes covered with

blood.• What does one do with a nightmare or a vision of horror?

Thinking brainsickly• Lady M accuses Macbeth of unbending his noble

strength “to think so brainsickly of things” (II.2.48-49).• His anxiety over not being able to pronounce “Amen” to

the guards’ “God bless us.”• “Consider it not so deeply.” • But why couldn’t he respond?• And because he imagines that in killing a sleeping man,

he has killed sleep.• “Innocent sleep”! And six wonderful metaphors for sleep.• Sleep equals helplessness, innocence?• And he imagines his hands “will rather/ The

multitudinous seas incarnadine/ Making the green one red” instead of washing off the blood?

• While she insists, “A little water clears us of the deed.”• The vast gulf between them?

Changing places• By Act V, Macbeth and Lady M appear to have changed places in

regard to their imaginative apprehension.• V.1 (sleepwalking scene): The murder of sleep now affects Lady M. • She brainsickly imagines blood.• “Yet who would have thought the old man to have had so much

blood in him.”• “What, will these hands ne’er be clean?”• “All the perfumes of Arabia will not sweeten this little hand.” • The doc’s diagnosis: “infected minds.”• And Macbeth (V.3): “I have almost forgot the taste of fears.”• He has “supped full with horrors.”• Lady M, his “dearest chuck,” is dead (V.5)? Oh well . . . • “She should have died hereafter:/ There would have been a time for

such a word.” • And his sense of life in the lines following. • Life is nothing but a dumb actor, “a poor player/ That struts and frets

his hour upon the stage/ And then is heard no more.” • Theater itself is emptied out – life and theater become mutually

insignificant.

Banquo’s ghost• The scene of Macbeth’s feast is at the very center of the

play: III.4.• All the verbal images of food and of nature in the play

concentrated in the visual image of the feast: stage direction.

• Lady M’s welcome – and the stage direction. • “Feeding” vs. feasting: the sauce to meat . . . • Macbeth’s toast: “Good digestion wait on appetite,/ And

health on both.”• When does the ghost enter? • Macbeth’s “conjuration”? • He tries the toast again (l. 89-90). • But again “conjures” the ghost. • The excuse is that Macbeth is brainsick. • And his sickness destroys the feast. • As the sickness will destroy the kingdom

Macbeth’s castle• At I.6 Duncan’s “construction” of the castle’s nature: the air.• Banquo’s noting of the “temple-haunting martlet”: “no jutty,

frieze,/ Buttress, nor coign of vantage, but this bird/ Hath made his pendent beg and procreant cradle.”

• An image of a sort of paradisal nature . . .• . . . turning to “knock, knock, knock” in the porter’s comic

turn. • He’s playing the “porter of hell gate.” • Which had been an actual role in the biblical mystery plays. • Porter pretends to be a character that Shakespeare had

seen in the Coventry Corpus Christi play, the devil who is guarding the gate of hell when Christ comes to deliver the souls of the just.

• Coventry play is lost, but we know of the role from a reference in an early 16th century play.

• The role had been comic, just as the porter is comic. • And what does the play-acting make of Macbeth’s castle?

Macbeth and Herod• One of the most powerful scenes in the biblical

plays had been the killing of the innocent children by Herod.

• Herod orders the killing of all babies in Bethlehem.

• His soldiers carry this out in a particularly gruesome scene in the biblical play. Lots of stage blood.

• This scene evoked in the scene of killing the son of Lady Macduff and Lady Macduff herself.

• Macbeth thereby becomes Herod, the most potent image of evil kingship in Sh’s world.

• Which is contrasted, in the scene in the English court, to the saintly kingship of Edward the Confessor.

Sickness and kingship• At the end of the play (V.3), the disease of Lady

Macbeth’s mind reflects the disease of Scotland.• Macbeth orders the doctor to cure her of the “thick-

coming fancies/ That keep her from rest.”• “Canst thou not minister to a mind diseased?”• “Therein the patient/ Must minister to himself.”• Macbeth: “If thou couldst, doctor, cast/ The water of my

land, find her disease . . .”• But meanwhile “Seyton” is helping Macbeth put his

armor on.• The word, spoken, seems indistinguishable from “Satan.”• Who has, through the witches, tricked Macbeth with the

two equivocal prophecies?• The coalescence of the evil accomplished by Macbeth

with kingship has diseased, sickened the entire kingdom. • Only a purgative, can cure the kingdom.• Which must be accomplished by Macbeth’s expulsion.

“Enter Macduff with Macbeth’s head”

• Why this ending?• We’ve already seen Macbeth slain – and understand the fulfillment

of the two prophecies.• It certainly produces a striking stage image.• But beheading was the punishment for treason – for nobility. • The striking off of Macbeth’s head means he was a traitor – as well

as a usurper.• The beheading of the traitor/usurper appears to accomplish the

purging that Macbeth had asked the doctor for. • To us, beheading may look barbaric, evil in itself. • But could it signal the severing of the seat of the evil we see created

in the play, the mind/brain/face, from the instruments of that evil, the hands and bodily sinews?

• Is it somehow “necessary” for the purging of the evil the play has shown created?

• I have to admit that it has always seemed oddly satisfying in productions of the play I’ve seen.