Transcript Third Macbeth Lecture

Macbeth
Third lecture
Banquo’s dreams
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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 “thickcoming 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.