Macbeth

IN Shakespeare, “all is indiscriminately stamped with grandeur,”as Fuseli said of Michelangelo — the beating of these greater hearts, the pulse of this vaster humanity, seems energised by the rhythms, which are like the active principles of which Newton wrote.

At moments, in the very sound of the verse or prose, is heard the tread of Doom; the beating of Macbeth’s heart changes, suddenly, to the knock of Fate’s hand upon the door, in the passage where the Porter hears the Damned knocking at the gate of Hell.

The events in the life of a character, as well as the personality, even the appearance of Shakespeare’s men and women, are suggested by the texture, the movement of the lines. In Macbeth we fmd, over and over again, schemes of tuneless dropping dissonances: —

FIRST WITCH

SECOND WITCH

THIRD WITCH

FIRST WITCH

SECOND WITCH

THIRD WITCH

“Done” is a dropping dissonance to “raine,”“heath” to the second syllable of “Macbeth, and these untuned, dropping dissonances, falling from the mouths of the three Fates degraded into the shapes of filthy hags, have a prophetic and terrible significance. — So do Macbeth and Lady Macbeth, slow step by step, descend into Hell.

Has not Macbeth himself brought the hags into being? . . . The first speech of these three Fates ends thus: —

The first words spoken by Macbeth are, as Bradley has pointed out, nearly an echo of this: —

But that great critic omitted to call attention to the fact that sometimes the Apparitions’ voices sound with the very tone of Lady Macbeth’s voice: —

Might this not have come from the lips of Macbeth’s loving Furv.’ And does not Lady Macbeth, hetself, apostrophising her absent husband, say.—

Here, as is usual with Shakespeare, a phrase does not bear its obvious meaning alone.

Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch has said “the whole play, as it were a dark corridor of Inverness Castle, resounds with . . . echoes.”

These echoes fall because Time, as has been pointed out by the two distinguished poets and critics Mr. Stephen Spender and Mr. Mark Van Doren, working independently and from quite different points of view, “has become inoperative,” no longer means anything. Mr. Spender says: —

“In the minds of Macbeth and Lady Macbeth there are, after the prophetic meeting with the weird sisters, three kinds of time: the time before the murder of Macbeth, the time of the murder of Duncan, and the enjoyable time afterwards, when they reap the fruits of the murder. Their problem is to keep these times separate, and not to allow them to affect each other.”

Quoting Macbeth’s soliloquy before the murder,

Mr. Spender remarks: “Macbeth certainly has good reason to fear even-handed justice. . . .

“The real fear is far more terrible. It is a fear of the extension into infinity of the instant in which he commits the murder. The bank and shoal of time is time that has stood still; beyond it lies the abyss of a timeless moment.”

Later, Mr. Spender refers to Lady Macbeth’s

In this, I see that Time and Place have become active principles, — a part of Destiny.

This illuminated criticism explains, of course, both Lady Macbeth’s insistence on the hour in the sleepwalking scene, and the repetition in a speech of Macbeth’s — the perpetual return to

Shall sleepe no more.

The words of Banquo to the witches: —

“plant early in the play,” says Mr. Van Doren, “a conception of time as something which fulfils itself by growing — and which, the season being wrong, can swell to monstrous shape. . . . Duncan welcomes Macbeth to Forres with the words

“But Macbeth, like Time itself, will burgeon beyond all bounds.”

I think it means this—but has, also, another meaning. We plant our death in the man who will be the means of it. Not only his deformity, but the looks and taunts of his fellow men planted evil in the nature of Richard the Third. As for Edmund — such speeches as that made by his father to Kent were responsible for his nature.

Perhaps the good Duncan had planted ambition — which was to be the cause of his own death — in Macbeth.

2

IN THIS vast world torn from the universe of night, there are three tragic themes. The first theme is that of the actual guilt, and the separation in damnation of the two characters — the man who, in spite of his guilt, walks the road of the spirit, and who loves the light that has forsaken him — and the woman who, after her invocation to the “Spirits who tend on mortall thoughts,” walks in the material world, and who does not know that light exists, until she is nearing her end and must seek the comfort of one small taper to illumine all the murkiness of Hell.

The second tragic theme of the play is the man’s love for the woman whose damnation is of the earth, who is unable, until death is near, to conceive of the damnation of the spirit, and who in her blindness therefore strays away from him, leaving him for ever in his lonely hell.

The third tragic theme is the woman’s despairing love for the man whose vision she cannot see, and whom she has helped to drive into damnation.

The very voices of these two damned souls have therefore a different sound. His voice is like that of some gigantic being in torment — of a lion with a human soul. In her speech invoking darkness, the actual sound is so murky and thick that the lines seem impervious to light, and, at times, rusty, as though they had lain in the blood that had been spilt, or in some hell-born dew. There is no escape from what we have done. The past will return to confront us. And that is even shown in the verse. In that invocation, there are perpetual echoes, sometimes far removed from each other, sometimes placed close together.

For instance, in the line

And fill me from the Crowne to the Toe, top-full

“full” is a darkened dissonance to “fill” — and these dissonances, put at opposite ends of the line, — together with the particular placing of the alliterative f’s of “fill” and “full” and the alliterative t’s, and the rocking up and down of the dissonantal o’s (“Crowne,” “Toe,” “top”) show us a mind reeling on the brink of madness, about to topple down into those depths, yet striving to retain its balance.

Let us examine the passage for a moment. The manner in which the stressed assonances are placed is largely responsible for the movement, and the texture is extremely variable—murky always, excepting for those few flares from the fires of Hell, but varying in the thickness of that murk.

Throughout the whole of this speech, an untuned and terrible effect is produced by these discordant, dissonantal o’s, used oulwardly and in the lines “hoarse” echoed by “croakes (I am assuming, from the evidence of other words, that the oci of “croakes” was then pronounced as an assonance to the “oar” of “hoarse”) — these thickening to “come,” darkening again to “mortall thoughts and then — supreme example — making the line rock up and down, and finally topple over, in

“Blood,” “Stop,” “Remorse,” “Come,” — each of these dissonantal o’s has a different height or depth, a different length or choked shortness. There is a fabric, too, of dull and rusty vowels, thickened m’s, and unshaping s’s — these latter are unshaping because they are placed close together, and so deprive the line of form, to some extent, as in

or

Throughout the passage, the consonants are for ever thickening and then thinning again — perhaps as the will hardens and then, momentarily, dissolves. In the lines

“Come” is a thickened, darkened assonance (almost a dissonance) to the “Dun of Duncane and of the first syllable of “Under. And in the line

the first syllable of “compunctious” is a kind of darkened thickened reverberation of the word “Come” (darkened or thickened because what follows throws a shade backward); the second syllable is a thickened echo of the first syllable of “Duncane.”

As the giant shuttles of Fate weave, closing and opening, so do the lines of this speech seem to close and open, and to change their length. But this change is in appearance only, and not real. By this I mean that there are no extra syllables to the line. The apparent change is due to the lightening and lengthening of the vowel sounds. For though, as I have said already, the words are frequently dull and rusty in this passage, at times they stretch out into a harsh shriek, which sometimes is sustained, sometimes broken, — as with the broken echoes “Raven,” “fatall.”

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SOMETIMES the particular placing of the assonances produces a sound like that of a fevered, uneven pulse, — an example is the effect brought about by 1 he drumming of the dull un . . . om sounds in

This terrible drumming sound is heard over and oxer again, throughout the passage, and is due not only to the placing of the assonances, but also to the particular placing of double-syllabled and—(this has a still stronger effect) — treble-syllabled words and quick-moving unaccented one-syllabled words.

This march towards Hell is slow, and has a thunderous darkened pomp. It is slow, and yet it has but few pauses (for that march is of her own will, she is driven by that will as by a Fury) and these pauses are not long, but deep, like fissures opening down into Hell. There is, however, a stretching pause after the word “Gall.”

In the Second Scene of Act Two, while the sleeping King is being sent to his death, Lady Macbeth s voice has a different tone: —

Here we actually feel the silence of the night, broken by that long flame of a voice, like a torch held by a Fury before the destruction of a world is begun. That voice, pausing, as it seems, for ever on the long sound of “Peace” (a word that has the high doom-haunted tone of the owl’s shriek), echoes, in a straight line, down all the corridors of the Dead.

The dark and terrible voice of Macbeth is not covered by a blood-dewed rust, is not like a black and impentrable smoke from Hell, or the torch of a Fury — as is the voice of the woman who, to him, is Fate. It is hollow like the depths into which he has fallen, it returns ever (though it, too, has discordances) to one note, dark as the Hell through which he walks with that sleepless soul. The sound is ever “No more.”

As with Lady Macbeth’s speech quoted above, the magnificence is largely brought about and controlled by the particular places in which the alliterations and assonances are placed (though in the two speeches they are used completely differently, and have an entirely different effect).

MACBETH

LADY MACBETH

MACBETH

Twice, a word shudders in that dark voice. The first time, it is the word “innocent” — that word which must henceforth fly in terror from the voice that uttered it,— but that will yet sound again from those guilty lips, bringing with it a renewed agony of soul.

Sometimes an awe-inspiring, drum-beating sound is heard. Once it is slow, and is caused by placing alliterative b’s, with near-assonantal vowel-sounds —“Bath,” “Balme” — (these being pronounced at that time “Bawth,” “Baulme”)—at the end of one line and t he beginning of t he next. (There is a strong pause between these words.) ’These dark a’s are not an exact assonance, because of the difference in thickness between the th and the lme. Then, for a second time, two a sounds are placed together, “Great Nature’s,” and here the beat is less emphatic; there is no pause between the sounds.

But above all, the quickened beat of a terrorstricken heart is heard, in “therefore Cawdor” — “fore” being a darkened dissonance to “there,” and the two other syllables being as nearly as possible assonances to “fore,” to “Balme” and to “Bath,” though all have different degrees of darkness.

This is followed by the long, stately, and inexorable march of Doom: —

It is in this scene that we first become aware of the different paths of damnation, — the path of the spirit that sees not all great Neptune’s ocean will wash his hand clear of blood, — and that of the earth-bound Fate who, until she is near her end, dreams that

and who, when the voice cries

hears only the small voice of the cricket — or a dark, but yet human voice: —

MACBETH

LADY MACBETH

I heard the Owle screame, and the Crickets cry. Did you not speake?

MACBETH

When?

LADY MACBETH

Now,

MACBETH

As I descended?

LADY MACBETH

Aye.

MACBETH

Hearke!
Who lyes i’ the second chamber?

LADY MACBETH

Donalbaine.

“Did you not speake? . . .” Often, in this drama, Fate takes to herself, and uses, the voice of one of the protagonists. . . . And, as Macbeth must hear the voices of the three Sisters and the Apparitions speaking through the lips of his wife, and her voice through theirs — (“Be bloody, bold, and resolute.” Who spoke those words: “who was it thus that cry’d?” as Lady Macbeth asked) —so, here, in the words “As I descended?” it may well be that the descent was into Hell, and that his doom spoke through his unknowing lips.

Doom and he were one.

4

FROM now onward, only blood, and the road that he must tread, exist for Macbeth in the tangible world.

. . . Who must be the next to fall under his bloodstained hands, upon that road? . . . But to Lady Macbeth, he is speaking, not of a grave that must be dug, and of a man about to die, but of one sleeping in his bed — Donalbain.

Here, then, in these few lines, the two guiltstricken souls say farewell, for ever. The immense pause after Lady Macbeth’s “Aye” is a gap in time, like the immense gap between ihe Ice Age and the Stone Age, wherein, as Science tells us, “the previously existing inhabitants of the earth were almost wholly destroyed, and a different class of inhabitants created.” — On the other side of that gap in time, Macbeth rises as the new inhabitant of a changed world — and alone in the universe of eternal night, although the voice of Lady Macbeth, his Fate, his loving Fury, still drives him onward.

Here we have one stupendous use of the pause. After the words that follow Lady Macbeth’s “Donalbaine,” Macbeth looks at his hands.

MACUETH

The four beats falling upon the silence before Lady Macbeth speaks again, seem like the sound of blood dropping, slowly, from those hands: —

Those hands are the hands of Murder. They are no longer the hands of the living man who was once Macbeth — hands made to caress with, hands made to open windows on to the sun and air, hands made to lift the life-giving food to the mouth. Those hands have now given him darkness for ever—a darkness surrounded by a terrible and all-seeing light, that mars every action, and that yet has no part in him. And yet these beings, and those who surround them, speak ever of the light.

Though those souls are separated for ever, yet sometimes the appalling necessities arising from their crime leash them together for a moment . . . as in the scene (Act III, Scene 1) where, with a sort of crouching, horror-inspiring quietness, like that of a t iger about to lap blood, Macbeth says:

And, stretching beyond him, straining even
more eagerly towards the doomed Banquo, Lady
Macbeth continues:—

— the sound of the word “forgotten being like that of a beast lapping.

Macbeth then says: —

(Here, as always, drawing down his own doom upon himself.)

Banquo murmurs: —

. . . That tie is the shedding of his own blood. From the moment of his death he is indeed knit to Macbeth, — he is a part of his Hell.

So did Iago say to Othello: —

But here, the victim is speaking to the slayer.

When we come to the scene where the ghost of Banquo keeps his tryst, we shall hear again the terror-maddened drum-beat of Macbeth’s heart:

MACBETH

LADY MACBETH

MACBETH

What man dare, I dare:
Approach thou like the rugged Russian Beare,
The arm’d Rhinoceros, or the Hircan Tiger,
Take any shape but that, and my firm Nerves
Shall never tremble. Or be alive againe,
And dare me to the Desart with thy Sword,
—If trembling I inhabit then, protest me
The Baby of a Girle. Hence, horrible shadow,
Unreall mockery, hence!
Why so, being gone
I am a man againe. Pray you, sit still.

In these lines, the terror-stricken heart-beat is produced, us before, by the varying use of alliteration of assonances and near-assonances placed close together within the lines: “firm,”Nerves, never tremble,” “rugged Russian,’ “Jake any shape. The feeling of unendurably tautened, sharpened nerves is produced by the particular use of vowels that are tuned just above the pitch of almost identical vowels in the preceding word: “Hircan Tiger, for instance. The change from “firm Nerves to the higher discordances of “Hircan Tiger is another example. “Sight" is a rising dissonance to “quit,” — rising as terror rises. “Hide” is an assonance to “sight ” but is longer because of the d. Further on in the passage, there are the dissonances “Girle,” “ Unreall” — (the latter being, as it were, a crumbling shadow of the sound of “Girle”) — and the rising dissonances “gone,” “againe.” All these general discordances add to the impression of a nature alternately sharpened and untuned by fear.

In the last line: —

the doom-haunted man has lost even the sound of his own heart-beat. There is no pulse to be heard. There is practically no shape in that line, excepting that given by the caesura, which in this case is a chasm dividing the line. . . .

For it seems as if all the blood had fled from the heart of Macbeth, to join the blood that had been shed. Blood will haunt his spirit for ever, but will leave the veins like that “most ghastly thing in Nature,” the bed of the ocean from which the ocean has fled.

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AFTER this scene, the gulf separating the two beings is impassable. Not only the change of the world in which they live, but the whole depth of the soul, separates them. They are divided in all but love. . . . She will love him for ever: but he has gone beyond love.

He asks her: —

and she replies:—

Here, I think, Macbeth is asking if the night is blacker for this fresh crime. But Lady Macbeth is speaking of the physical universe.

Macbeth then utters these words: —

He is speaking to the invisible beings who now, with the past and future victims of his guilt, alone inhabit his world. His wife, surprised by the question, replies: —

And Macbeth, from his polar solitude, answers this being of another universe, who is separated from him by the whole darkness of her spiritual blindness : —

From that moment, I think that the appearance of Macbeth must have inspired terror, as if he were no longer a mortal man, but one of those giant comets whom Pliny named Crinatae, “shaggy with bloody locks . . . having the appearance of a fleece surmounted with a kind of crown, — or one that prognosticates high winds and great heat . . .

1 hey are also visible in the winter months, and about the South Pole, but they have no rays proceeding from them.”

And Lady Macbeth — how changed is she, in that pitiful scene when she who had cried to “thicke Night” to envelop the world and her soul, she who had rejected light, seeks the comfort of one little taper, — the small candle-flame of her soul, to light all the murkiness of Hell. Yet still, in the lonely muttarings of one who must walk through Hell alone, save for the phantom of Macbeth, we hear that indomitable will that pushed him to his doom, rising once more in the vain hope that she may shield and guide him.

There is, in these two beings, the faithfulness of the Lion and his mate. It is not their fault that never more can she be his companion.

Again, there will come one of those reminiscent whispers the words of Macbeth when he hears of her death. . . .

Out, out, brief candle. . . .

And we see again that lonely being, wandering through Hell with the help of one small light. But to Macbeth, the weak light of the candle was not to be treasured, as a hope in the midst of the increasing darkness.

Macbeth,, like that lonely sleep-walker, had changed. That change began when he, alone, heard the voice that cried “Macbeth hath murthered Sleepe, and knew that he was alone for ever. He, who, in the midst of the darkness in that universe his soul, could yet love the light, is about to turn from it, for he must undergo the Mesozoic Age, the Age of Stone: —

The words

in their very quietness, their slowness, seem tears shed in the soul by those lidless eyes, an oblation, the wasting of a rock or glacier by water-dropping, by melting.

Those two beings have passed even from the darkness of a world in which it was possible to ask: —

a darkness of which they have become so much natives that night and day are one: —

MACBETH

What of the night?

LADY MACBETH

Almost at oddes with morning, which is which —

but that yet is illumined by the vision of a lost heaven—a heaven that lives yet in spite of their fall: —