Macbeth 1: 'If it were done'
The first in a series of essay on Macbeth. The first is on the crucial soliloquy ‘If it were done’, the third is on ‘Malcolm the hero.’
What is the most important moment in Macbeth? In plot terms, Duncan’s murder has to come top of the list, but for me the turning-point of the tragedy is shortly before this, the moment when Macbeth’s life could have gone in a very different direction - the road not taken. It is important not because something crucial happens, but precisely because nothing happens. It is difficult to conceive of an answer on the play which doesn’t address this speech and scene.
It is the start of Act I scene vii, Macbeth’s second soliloquy:
If it were done when 'tis done, then 'twere well
It were done quickly: if the assassination
Could trammel up the consequence, and catch
With his surcease success; that but this blow
Might be the be-all and the end-all here,
But here, upon this bank and shoal of time,
We'ld jump the life to come. But in these cases
We still have judgment here; that we but teach
Bloody instructions, which, being taught, return
To plague the inventor: this even-handed justice
Commends the ingredients of our poison'd chalice
To our own lips. He's here in double trust;
First, as I am his kinsman and his subject,
Strong both against the deed; then, as his host,
Who should against his murderer shut the door,
Not bear the knife myself. Besides, this Duncan
Hath borne his faculties so meek, hath been
So clear in his great office, that his virtues
Will plead like angels, trumpet-tongued, against
The deep damnation of his taking-off;
And pity, like a naked new-born babe,
Striding the blast, or heaven's cherubim, horsed
Upon the sightless couriers of the air,
Shall blow the horrid deed in every eye,
That tears shall drown the wind. I have no spur
To prick the sides of my intent, but only
Vaulting ambition, which o'erleaps itself
And falls on the other -
The beginning is at first confusing, a tangle of words that almost seems to be a kind of tongue-twister around the dental sounds ‘t’ and ‘d’. But in the end it becomes one of the most memorable speeches in literature about moral clarity, about seeing and understanding clearly. It is this clarity which in the end forms the basis of the true tragedy of Macbeth, as we watch a man of great imaginative gifts and profound insights do just what he understands to be the worst thing he could do.
If it were done when 'tis done, then 'twere well
It were done quickly: if the assassination
Could trammel up the consequence, and catch
With his surcease success; that but this blow
Might be the be-all and the end-all here,
But here, upon this bank and shoal of time,
We'ld jump the life to come.
The key words are, literally, little ones. The first is the most important word of all, the one which begins the initial two sentences. Everything is governed by that conditional word ‘if’ – ‘If it were done …’ , ‘If th’assassination could trammel up the consequence …’, and we know that another little word is coming up, lethally, just around the corner. It duly arrives in line 7 – ‘But in these cases we still have judgement here.’ This is an ‘if only’ speech – ‘If only I could have what I want’ – how often do you think that? But you know you can’t, you shouldn’t.
We now hear a man so horrified by what he might do (a key word in this speech and in a play in which nothing is ever truly ‘done’), by what he so desperately desires, that putting this into words, even in the privacy of his own mind, is explosive.
When you speak the first sentence out loud, you have to pick yourself through it carefully to avoid tripping up. Why? It’s Macbeth’s mind doing the same, carefully tip-toeing around the true subject by repeatedly using another little word, ‘it’. There are four ‘it’s in the opening line and a half, some disguised in elisions. But this is nothing compared to the extraordinary second sentence, a mishmash of clauses and consonants during which Macbeth tries to square the circle, to imagine the impossible. He ends this with another significant little word, when he says that if only he could do this thing without any consequences, then he (or, rather, the distancing pronoun ‘we’) would ‘jump’ the life to come. This idea of jumping, or leaping, or ‘vaulting’ or in the second last line of the speech ‘o’erleaping’ consequences is crucial. Macbeth knows you can’t do this. It’s like jumping over your own shadow. But still he really wants to do it. His actions in the second half of the play (the murders of Banquo and the Macduffs in particular) are an increasingly doomed and futile series of attempts to jump over the inevitable.
That But on line 7 brings everything up short : the knowledge that ‘we’ (again, not ‘I’) always have judgement – in other words, rationality, conscience, moral awareness, and the further knowledge that there are consequences to every deed (bloody instructions return to plague the inventor). One of the most significant statements in the play is the Doctor’s in Lady Macbeth’s sleepwalking scene – Unnatural deeds do breed unnatural troubles. Yes they do, inescapably, and Macbeth knows this all too well.
Then he lays out the reasons for not killing Duncan: as kinsman, subject and host there could not be a worse crime. By line 16, intellectual clarity has given away to appalled imagination, as the ten line sentence beginning Besides, this Duncan hath born his faculties so meet … (now he names him as he becomes drawn into the nightmarish vision) takes off into a horrified enactment of the inevitable consequences of the murder:
his virtues
Will plead like angels, trumpet-tongued, against
The deep damnation of his taking-off;
And pity, like a naked new-born babe,
Striding the blast, or heaven's cherubim, horsed
Upon the sightless couriers of the air,
Shall blow the horrid deed in every eye,
That tears shall drown the wind.
There is the key phrase of the speech : the deep damnation of his taking-off. The result? Tears drowning the wind. And so he comes to the conclusion,
I have no spur
To prick the sides of my intent, but only
Vaulting ambition, which o'erleaps itself
And falls on the other -
In the soliloquy’s last (interrupted, incomplete) sentence, as a result of the thought-process of the speech and the inescapable power of his moral imagination, clarity arrives: I have no spur he says, using ‘I’ openly and firmly at last, except vaulting ambition. The pointed entrance of Lady Macbeth at this moment highlights the other spur he has, his own wife.
In Shakespeare our Contemporary (1964), the Polish director Jan Kott writes about this play :
There is no tragedy without awareness … Macbeth is aware of the nightmare … the thought of murder that has to be committed, murder one cannot escape from, is even worse than murder itself … the act of killing changes the person who has performed it; from then on he is a different man living in a different world.
It is just this horrified awareness that Macbeth expresses in this speech, especially in the second part of it.
30 lines after the soliloquy he has changed his mind – or at least he seems to have changed his mind. In this speech, Macbeth decides – apparently definitively – not to do something, and yet by his weak question If we should fail? on line 59, starting with another If, Macbeth has given in. The common too-quick answer to this puzzle is that Lady Macbeth persuades him, by questioning his manhood. If so, he is a truly feeble character, and scarcely worthy of a tragedy. A more convincing answer is that she is just pushing an open door. The rational clarity of this speech should be familiar to all of us: in life, we all come across moments when we know we should not do something and just why not. Then we go ahead and do it. All we need is a little voice inside us to say ‘Oh go on’. It’s the voice inside us that says ‘If only …’ Lady Macbeth echoes this little voice, and her husband is lost for ever.
Shakespeare is constructing a tragedy about a bad man, a man who in real life we would run a mile from, and yet somehow a man who in the theatre fascinates and attracts us. He does this primarily by the privileged access we have into his mind, a mind that is, at the start of the play, vibrant, alert, imaginative, intelligent. The tragedy is that Macbeth wastes all this, and destroys his own life, a tragedy heightened by his own awareness in Act I scene vii that he risks just this. He knows exactly what will happen if he kills Duncan. And then he kills him. And it happens. The tragedy follows from this awareness.
The bookend of this speech is in Act V scene x, starting Tomorrow and tomorrow (subject of a future essay). That is the speech in which the full implications of just what he knows in Act I scene vii come home to roost – that, just as he predicted, bloody instructions will return to plague th’ inventor. Life indeed has come to mean ‘nothing.’
He knew it all along.
END
[Adapted from a podcast]