So plot. Umm. K it's in Scotland and Macbeth is the Thane of Glamis, which is a high title, like Duke. He was a hero in a recent war and you see that the King Duncan likes him and respects him, as he's a good ol' likeable, respectable, cool tough soldier guy. When you first see Macbeth, he's with Banquo, his best friend, and they run into the three witches, and they say that Macbeth will be Thane of Cawdor, that he'll be king, and that Banquos won't be king but his descendents will be. They're both pretty spooked and grow more so when they find out that Duncan actually assigned him thane of Cawdor. So Macbeth pretty quickly starts contemplating killing Duncan, and tells his wife, Lady Macbeth, about the witches. She's a pretty ferocious person and pushes good-but-tempted Macbeth to go through with the patricide. Banquo grows suspicious and when Duncan comes to Macbeth's house, and he falls asleep, Macbeth kills him and Lady Macbeth frames it on two guards by getting them drunk asleep and putting bloody knives in their hands. Macbeth feels super guilty but Lady Macbeth keeps him clean and they buy it, but Macbeth ends up killing the two guards when they awake. He becomes king and Banquo, super-suspicious, goes into the woods with his kid, Fleance. Macbeth sends three murderers to kill them, but Fleance escapes. At the supper for Banquo later on, Macbeth sees Banquo's ghost and gets very paranoid. Meanwhile, Malcolm and Donalbain, Duncan's sons, had fled to England and Ireland after Duncan's death, since they didn't want to seem like usurpers, and so everyone, naturally, believes that they killed Duncan. Then there's a random supposedly-added scene with Hecate, goddess of withes, saying they've got a plan. Then from messengers, you find out that Macbeth sent Macduff to find Malcolm, whom King Edward, the very good and just king of England, likes and is housing. Edward is prepared to help Malcolm in a war to dethrone the now tyrannous Macbeth. The witches then show up again, as Macbeth seeks them out. They tell him that he doesn't have anything to fear until the Great Birnam woods meet the high Dunsinan hill, and no one born of a woman can hurt him. They also show him that Banquo's descendents will still be king, which annoys him. Macbeth at this point decides that Macduff is not a threat, since everyone is born of a woman, but decides to kill him and his family anyways, sending murders. Macduffs wife and kids are murdered. That's the last of Macbeth you see for a while, as you focus on other people. Malcolm explains that he'd make a terrible king since he's a bad person, and Macduff finds out about his family and they prepare for war. Then you find out that Lady Macbeth has been having sleepwalking nightmares about what she and Macbeth have done, and seems very remorseful, I think. The English are marching now, and Macbeth's still not that fussed because of the forest thing. He hears a woman cry and ignores it but then fins out that it was Lady Macbeth committing suicide. Right after that, he's told that the Birnam woods are moving. He gets armed and goes out to fight, fearless of anyone born of a woman. He kills young Siwar, the kid of an English war-head-guy and then is killed by Macduff who was cut out of his mother through C section, so wasn't born. An iffy explanation, I think. Macduff carries his head out and everyone hails the king sarcastically.
Alright. This is my second shakespeare blog. Other was King Lear. Then I just decided to do one speech by Lear. I think I'll just do that again. Or hm.........Lady Macbeth.
Alright I have a plan. I'm going to very very relatively briefly sketch out the character, as characters are the most important aspect of a book, of Lady Macbeth concerning guilt in comparison to Macbeth. I know it seems like a huge topic, and it definitely is, but briefly sketch! I have so many quotations for Macbeth that this may just be more of a quotation blog with groups and one-sentence connectors. Let's see how it goes.
So my friends had been pushing me to read this for a while and they all described Lady Macbeth as a terrible person, which led me to assume that Macbeth was better. I don't really agree. Sure Macbeth's early speeches, the one about killing her baby and the unsex me speech make her seem super scary, and sure Macbeth probably wouldn't have gone through with murder if it weren't for her, and sure she kept her head beer than him, but I guess I have a way of seeing how things turn out rather than start, and in that sense, Lady Macbeth seems more remorseful, and Macbeth more brutal.
This is their attitudes at the beginning.
Macbeth: 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. (I, iv)
So there Macbeth is trying to look away from his act because he is disgusted by it. He wants Duncan dead but he doesn't want to kill.
Macbeth: Is this a dagger I see before me,
The handle toward my hand? (II,i)
Macbeth starts hallucinating a bit too here, haunted by the idea of killing. He's really scared. On the other side...
Lady Macbeth: Give me the daggers: the sleeping and the dead
Are but as pictures: 'tis the eye of childhood
That fears a painted devil. (II,ii)
Lady M's not scared at all. She thinks the lifeless are harmless, and the physical connects directly to the psychological. However, they end up switching. Macbeth, after the first kill, gets rather paranoid and has Banquo killed, Macduff's family, and a bunch of other people, until he is desensitised towards it.
Macbeth: Who wear our health but sickly in his life,
Which in his death were perfect. (III,i)
He says this of Banquo. That he can't rest until Banquo is dead. Now B was his best friend and he moral anchor of the play, so it's rather terrible killing him. M, in seeing B's ghost after he murder, is haunted and still shaky, but as the massacre continues, his opinion on death becomes less and less, as seen in the Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow speech. Life becomes worthless to him. This called to my mind the bit about the murderers Macbeth hires to kill Banquo.
Murderer 2:I am one, my liege,
Whom the vile blows and buffets of the world
Have so incensed that I am reckless what
I do to spite the world.
Murderer 1:And I another
So weary with disasters, tugged with fortune,
That I would set my life on any chance,
To mend it or be rid on ’t.
M becomes like them. He too is so thrown about that he becomes cruel to the world, and careless towards his own well-being. Strange huh. It's a bit like the Hamlet killing Polonius carelessly. Or Romeo killing Paris, which is often excluded in interpretations of the play because it paints Romeo as too much a killer. Macbeth becomes a killer. Hence the tragedy. However, instead, LM becomes less cruel but very remorseful.
Lady Macbeth: Naught’s had, all’s spent,
Where our desire is got without content.
'Tis safer to be that which we destroy
Than by destruction dwell in doubtful joy. (III,ii)
Here she says she tried all but in the end, all spent, is still unhappy. Thus it really is better to be the dead than the so discontented killer. She'd take it back. This haunts her dreams and she is seen as always waning to clean herself, particularly her dirty, bloody hands.
Lady Macbeth: Out, damned spot! out, I say! (V,i)
Lady Macbeth: What, will these hands ne'er be clean? (V,i)
This idea of washing your hands clean is very classical, isn't it? You have Pontius Pilate, for one, after condemning Jesus to crucifiction, asking for water to wash his hands of it. Then it also is seen in Hamlet, of course, with the Queen saying 'Thou turn’st mine eyes into my very soul,/And there I see such black and grainèd spots/As will not leave their tinct.' to Hamlet. She's dirtied. And you have others, like Blanche in The Streetcar Named Desire, who is constantly bathing so as to cleanse herself after her vivacious past. So this obsession is very useful since it carries so much already, and you see people using this over and over.
Interesting thing here is, remember how I said that LM separates physical from mental? Well, here they're reversing, aren't they? She is mentally affected, and connects it to physical, as opposed to finding physical effects to be translatable to mental. Right?
So Macbeth obsesses over cleansing near the beginning too, and they switch.
Macbeth: Whence is that knocking?
How is't with me, when every noise appals me?
What hands are here? ha! they pluck out mine eyes!
With all great Neptune's ocean wash this blood
clean from me hand? No; this my hand will rather
The multitudinous seas incarnadine,
Making the green - one red. (II,ii)
So he's jumpy, and, unlike LM, instead of trying to cleanse himself, he rather quickly assumes that he'll never be clean again. He expresses the idea of hiding things too, early on, like...
Macbeth: False face must hide what the false heart doth know. (I,vii)
So there's the connection of how bloody hands and a bloody conscience is not only harmful for you personally and your self-respect, but for your image, and he separates here the physical and mental, thinking of at least preserving the physical.
In the beginning, LM is convinced, however, that it could wash off easily:
Lady Macbeth: Go get some water,
And wash this filthy witness from your hand.(II,ii)
But then there, she's talking of actual blood on Macbeth's actual hands. Her hands are also physically red, but she m=mentally is only later afflicted:
Lady Macbeth: My hands are of your colour; but I shame
To wear a heart so white. (II,ii)
She is not capable of feeling remorse at that point. She instead takes on her physical bloodiness as something that was necessary and so not worth fussing over:
Lady Macbeth: Things without all remedy
Should be without regard: what's done, is done. (III,ii)
This seems somewhat healthy in context, killing Duncan, but later on, she says something similar.
Lady Macbeth: what's done, cannot be undone: to bed, to bed, to bed. (V,i)
This again is about killing Duncan, but also, about killing all those other people, and contributing greatly towards making a tyrant out of Macbeth. Then she wishes for undoing, can't, but can't live with it either. Hence suicide. Now Macbeth's idea of suicide is a bit different.
Macbeth: Why should I play the Roman fool and die
On mine own sword? Whiles I see lives, the gashes
Do better upon them.
He thinks it's ridiculous to kill yourself, when you could still kill others, which is infinite;y more noble and productive and meaningful, according to him, because he'll die with his harness on, as he argues. But that just shows again the gruesomeness of his adopted logic. Now, he does not imagine daggers, because he has a dagger, and his hands are ever bloody bu he worries not of them. Instead, people say for him:
Angus: Now does he feel
His secret murders sticking on his hands (V,ii)
There Shakespeare likens Macbeth's situation to LM's, both with bloody, dirty hands. The difference is though, that only one is trying still to cleanse themselves. Macbeth seems no longer to understand the grasp of remorse and the foreverness of remorse as he had known. Instead, he asks the doctor to help LM in her nightmares, expecting a solution where once he may have known there wouldn't be one.
Macbeth: Canst thou not minister to a mind diseased,
Pluck from the memory a rooted sorrow,
Raze out the written troubles of the brain
And with some sweet oblivious antidote
Cleanse the stuffed bosom of that perilous stuff
Which weighs upon the heart? (V,iii)
So conscious reverses and I feel sorry for LM. If it had ended with LM still cruel an M still remorseful, it wouldn't be a very fun play, but I'd sympathise for M as opposed to LM. Instead, as it is, I always support the remorseful. That was a weird way of blogging. Alright there. Here are a ridiculous amount of quotations.
Read, folks, read.
Witches: Fair is foul, and foul is fair:
Hover through the fog and filthy air. (I,i)
Macbeth: So foul and fair a day I have not seen, (I,iii)
Macbeth: Come what come may,
Time and the hour runs through the roughest day. (I,iii)
Macbeth: Prithee, peace:
I dare do all that may become a man;
Who dares do more, is none. (I,vii)
Macbeth: Whiles I threat, he lives:
Words to the heat of deeds too cold breath gives. (II,i)
Lady Macbeth: A little water cleans us of this deed (II,ii)
Macbeth: To know my deed 'twere best not know myself.
Wake Duncan with thy knocking! I would thou couldst! (II,ii)
Macbeth: 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:
All is but toys: renown and grace is dead;
The wine of life is drawn, and the mere lees
Is left this vault to brag of. (II,iii)
Donalbain: where we are
There's daggers in men's smiles (II,iii)
Old Man: God's benison go with you; and with those
That would make good of bad, and friends of foes! (II,iv)
Macbeth: After life's fitful fever he sleeps well (III,ii)
Macbeth: And make our faces vizards to our hearts, Disguising what they are. (III,ii)
Macbeth: O, full of scorpions is my mind, dear wife! (III,ii)
Macbeth: Things bad begun make strong themselves by ill (III,ii)
Witches: Double, double toils and trouble;
Fire burn and cauldron bubble. (IV, i)
Witch 2: By the pricking of my thumbs,
Something wicked this way come (IV, i)
Lady Macduff: He wants the natural touch: for the poor wren,
The most diminutive of birds, will fight,
Her young ones in her nest, against the owl.(IV, ii)
Son: Then the liars and swearers are fools,
for there are liars and swearers enow to beat
the honest men and hang up them. (IV, ii)
Macduff: each new morn
New widows howl, new orphans cry, new sorrows (IV, iii)
Malcolm: I think our country sinks beneath the yoke;
It weeps, it bleeds; and each new day a gash
Is added to her wounds
Macduff: Not in the legions
Of horrid hell can come a devil more damn'd
In evils to top Macbeth.
Malcolm:Nay, had I power, I should
Pour the sweet milk of concord into hell,
Uproar the universal peace, confound
All unity on earth.
Macduff: O Scotland, Scotland!
Macduff: O my breast,
Thy hope ends here!
Malcolm: Macduff, this noble passion,
Child of integrity, hath from my soul
Wiped the black scruples, reconciled my thoughts
To thy good truth and honour.
Ross: Alas, poor country!
Almost afraid to know itself. It cannot
Be called our mother, but our grave, where nothing,
But who knows nothing, is once seen to smile;
Where sighs and groans and shrieks that rend the air
Are made, not marked; where violent sorrow seems
A modern ecstasy. The dead man’s knell
Is there scarce asked for who, and good men’s lives
Expire before the flowers in their caps,
Dying or ere they sicken.
Ross: Would I could answer
This comfort with the like. But I have words
That would be howled out in the desert air,
Where hearing should not latch them.
Malcolm: Give sorrow words. The grief that does not speak
Whispers the o'erfraught heart and bids it break.
Malcolm: let grief
Convert to anger; blunt not the heart, enrage it.
Malcolm: Receive what cheer you may;
The night is long that never finds the day. (IV, iii)
Macbeth: I have lived long enough. My way of life
Is fall'n into the sere, the yellow leaf,
And that which should accompany old age,
As honor, love, obedience, troops of friends,
I must not look to have, but, in their stead,
Curses, not loud but deep, mouth-honor, breath
Which the poor heart would fain deny and dare not. (V,iii)
Macbeth: I will not be afraid of death and bane
Till Birnam forest come to Dunsinane. (V,iii)
Macbeth:I have almost forgot the taste of fears.
The time has been, my senses would have cooled
To hear a night-shriek, and my fell of hair
Would at a dismal treatise rouse and stir
As life were in ’t. I have supped full with horrors.
Direness, familiar to my slaughterous thoughts
Cannot once start me. (V,v)
Macbeth: She should have died hereafter.
There would have been a time for such a word.
Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day
To the last syllable of recorded time,
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!
Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
And then is heard no more. It is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing. (V,v)
Macbeth: There is nor flying hence nor tarrying here.
I 'gin to be aweary of the sun,
And wish th' estate o' th' world were now undone.—
Ring the alarum-bell!—Blow, wind! Come, wrack!
At least we’ll die with harness on our back. (V,v)
Siward: Let us be beaten, if we cannot fight.
Macduff: Make all our trumpets speak; give them all breath,
Those clamorous harbingers of blood and death. (V,vi)
Macbeth: I bear a charmèd life, which must not yield
To one of woman born. (V,viii)
Macduff:Then yield thee, coward,
And live to be the show and gaze o' th' time.
We’ll have thee, as our rarer monsters are,
Painted on a pole, and underwrit,
'Here may you see the tyrant.' (V,viii)
Macbeth: Though Birnam Wood be come to Dunsinane,
And thou opposed, being of no woman born,
Yet I will try the last. Before my body
I throw my warlike shield. Lay on, Macduff,
And damned be him that first cries, 'Hold, enough!' (V,viii)
Ross: But like a man he died. (V,ix)
Siward: Why then, God's soldier be he! (V,ix)
All: Hail, king of Scotland!(V,ix)
Malcolm: Of this dead butcher and his fiend-like queen (V,ix)