Macbeth 6: ten key quotations
This is the final part of a series of revision posts on Macbeth, originally from podcasts.
In this case there were 10 key quotations: listeners could pause the audio after hearing them and then write notes about why these quotations were important and useful. In the written version, you can just jot down the relevant quotation, look away and write your own notes before returning to the statement. The quotations are not in chronological order.
1. All is the fear, and nothing is the love ; / As little is the wisdom, where the flight / So runs against all reason.
Lady Macduff in Act IV scene ii.
This is her response to Ross, who suggests that they don’t know whether it was wisdom or fear that made Macduff to leave his family and go to England. Lady Macduff snaps back: he loves us not; He wants (lacks) the natural touch. Lady Macduff only features in this scene, but her sole appearance gives us something distinctive and memorable: the clear, honest, terrified voice of a real woman and a real mother. After the Messenger warns her that savagery is on its way, she says sarcastically I remember now I am in this earthly world, where to do harm sometime / Is often laudable, to do good sometime / Accounted dangerous folly. A few lines later she, and the rest of her family, are slaughtered.
The word fear/s appears 43 times in this short play, compared to 22 times in the longer tragedy Othello. By this stage in the story, fear has spread everywhere, and this short brutal scene shows us in the most powerful way the effects of Macbeth’s tyrannical rule.
2) Yet who would have thought the old man to have had so much blood in him?
Lady Macbeth in Act V scene i (the sleepwalking scene).
The play is soaked in blood. The word blood, or its variants, appears 38 times in the text. Compare this to 16 times in another play in which blood features prominently, The Merchant of Venice. And this is the culmination of what Macbeth said in horror in Act II scene iii (speaking from the heart, but only omitting his own responsibility):- Here lay Duncan, His silver skin laced with his golden blood, And his gashed stabs looked like a breach in nature / For ruin’s wasteful entrance. It was this breach which let all that blood flow out. Lady Macbeth’s words also hark back to one of the most memorable images in the play, when in the murder scene, Act II scene ii, her husband looks at his hands and asks Will all great Neptune’s ocean wash this blood / Clean from my hand? He answers this himself at once: No, this my hand will rather The multitudinous seas incarnadine, Making the green one red. He understands this immediately, whereas Lady Macbeth quickly dismisses his concerns with A little water clears us of this deed. By III iv he admits I am in blood / Stepp'd in so far that, should I wade no more, / Returning were as tedious as go o'er. What Lady Macbeth admits (only in her dream) is that the murder did indeed open Pandora’s Box. You can’t ever close it again.
3) Unnatural deeds / Do breed unnatural troubles.
The doctor in the sleepwalking scene, Act V scene i.
You could make a case for this being the key statement of the play. It is like a mathematical formula – unnatural deeds equal unnatural troubles. They do breed them – there is no escaping or hiding from this. This quotation takes us back to what I considered the key speech in the play in Essay 1, the soliloquy beginning Act I scene vii, If it were done. He was right in that speech – the murder of Duncan would inevitably result in deep damnation, and the destruction of the natural order. Everything that has followed since has confirmed this. Trouble is another key word and idea in the play, famously picked out in the witches’ Double double toil and trouble, and this provides a link to quotation four, which focusses on how troubles created by unnatural deeds can become embedded in an individual’s psyche.
4) Canst thou not minister to a mind diseased, / Pluck from the memory a rooted sorrow, / Raze out the written troubles of the brain …
Macbeth to the Doctor in Act V scene iii.
The Doctor tells tells him that Lady Macbeth is troubled with thick-coming fancies, / That keep her from her rest [more troubling]. When Macbeth responds, he seems to be talking about his wife: Cure her of that. 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 stuff'd bosom of that perilous stuff / Which weighs upon the heart? But these lines are so intense, so fraught with insight, that he seems really to be talking about himself. We know what his rooted sorrow is : after he murdered the King, he said when he heard the knocking Wake Duncan with thy knocking! I would thou coulds’t, and ever since he has been trying to run away from and stop thinking about that sorrow and the loss of his soul. He knows exactly what a mind diseased feels like, and the Doctor seems to pick up on this in his use then of the male pronoun : Therein the patient / Must minister to himself.
5) But now I am cabin'd, cribb'd, confined, bound in / To saucy doubts and fears.
Macbeth, when he hears from the murderers that they have let Fleance escape in Act III scene iv.
Those three bitterly alliterated words (K, K, K) emphasise his full realisation that his life has not turned out as he expected. He believed that by becoming King he would achieve everything he wanted – happiness, fulfilment, freedom. Instead, that deed has done the opposite for him, and now he is trapped. What now seems ages ago he made a free choice, a choice made with completely open eyes, as we learnt in the If it were done speech. Now he is trying the impossible, to stamp out all the consequences. After these words he says :- Then comes my fit again: I had else been perfect, / Whole as the marble, founded as the rock, / As broad and general as the casing air. He is deluding himself. He wouldn’t ever have been perfect; every step he takes now leads him further into the darkness.
The critic Charles Moseley says that Macbeth is a being making an initial and entirely wrong free choice, and gradually being rendered less and less free by the consequences of that choice, to the point where he is unable to escape the prison of his own self. What is striking about Macbeth is the self-awareness he shows in his own destruction. He knows exactly what he is doing and is at all stages aware of his own progress.
6) Oftentimes, to win us to our harm, / The instruments of darkness tell us truths.
Banquo, in Act I scene iii, after the first meeting with the witches.
Wise words, indeed, and Banquo serves a crucial function in the play as a foil to Macbeth. As Charles Moseley puts it The moral sense and caution shown by Banquo are constantly emphasised by Shakespeare to highlight the freedom of choice both men enjoy ... Having one character who did not give way enormously heightens our perception of the one who did.
As Banquo says in Act II scene i : Merciful powers, / Restrain in me the cursed thoughts that nature / Gives way to in repose! Here is a man who is indeed tempted, but who is able to restrain himself, and he does so by exercising his morality and conscience, or as Macbeth himself puts it, the pauser, reason. Banquo is a very inconvenient figure for Macbeth, not just because he was there when the witches made their initial prophecies, but because of his character. His fears in Banquo stick deep, and in his royalty of nature reigns that which would be feared. So he determines to rid himself of this discomfiting reminder.
7) 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.
No, it’s not Macbeth, but you’d be forgiven for thinking so, but rather the first murderer in Act III scene i.
But it certainly could be Macbeth: a man who becomes weary of life (as he repeatedly says in Act V, he’s lost all enthusiasm for life – it has come to signify nothing), and who recklessly is ready to gamble anything now, who has stopped calculating and even thinking. The second murderer, in trying to persuade his master that he can be trusted, has just said that he is one Whom the vile blows and buffets of the world / Have so incensed that I am reckless what / I do to spite the world. Remind you of anyone again?
What does this little scene with the murderers show us? A man reduced to their level. Earlier he commented on how they were hardly like men. But he himself made the definitive statement on being a man, a human, earlier to his wife : I dare do all that may become a man; who dares do more is none. In other words, everything that is appropriate for a man – if you go further, you have dehumanised yourself. Exactly.
8) ’Tis safer to be that which we destroy, / Than by destruction dwell in doubtful joy.
Lady Macbeth in Act III scene ii, a short but powerful and significant scene, in which she desperately, and often tenderly, tries to get through to her husband, tries to get close again to him.
This scene is discussed in more depth in the second essay, the Real Lady Macbeth. It shows a woman scared by how things have spiralled out of control, by how she has lost contact with her husband (at the start she has to ask a servant to get permission to see him). At the end of this scene, no doubt to her bewilderment, her husband says Be innocent of the knowledge, dearest chuck, / Till thou applaud the deed and talks about darkness taking over the universe. From now on their relationship disintegrates, not because of any emotional trouble between them, but because Macbeth is a universe of his own where she can’t reach him. The only members of this club are people who know what it is like to kill others, and who fully realise the awful and inevitable consequences of doing so.
9) Boundless intemperance / In nature is a tyranny ; it hath been / Th’untimely emptying of the happy throne.
Macduff in Act IV scene iii (set in England) replying to Malcolm’s persistent testing.
Macduff hits here on one of the central ideas of the play, that we must keep everything in order, that bounds should not be broken, that intemperance in the will results in disaster, especially in a King. And this of course is exactly what Macbeth, a man who cannot control himself, has done. The natural order has been disrupted, and everywhere we see images of this. In Act II scene iv Ross says that Duncan's horses--a thing most strange and certain--/ Beauteous and swift, the minions of their race, / Turn'd wild in nature, broke their stalls, flung out, / Contending 'gainst obedience, as they would make / War with mankind. These most beautiful horses have broken out from their stalls, from their place. As Lady Macbeth says to Macbeth at the end of the banquet scene, with more truth than she herself recognises, You have displaced the mirth, broke the good meeting, / With most admired disorder. Again that word broke. Earlier Macduff had announced Duncan’s death by saying Confusion now hath made his masterpiece! Most sacrilegious murder hath broke ope / The Lord's anointed temple, and stole thence / The life o' the building!
10) Even now, to crown my thoughts with acts, be it thought and done.
Macbeth in Act IV scene i, when he hears from Lennox that Macduff has fled to England before he could be assassinated.
He is determined from now on to act on impulse. He has just said that from this moment the very firstlings of my heart shall be the firstlings of my hand. I end with the words of Tony Tanner in his superb Everyman edition introduction to the play :
He wants to bypass conscience and reflection entirely and translate impulse immediately into deed … Language itself is of course the prime ‘pauser’ or instrument of pausing. While you are talking (or writing) about it, you are not doing it. Words defer … He seeks increasingly to live and move entirely in the realm of ‘deeds’ and lose himself in a life of unreflective action. Be it thoughtanddone – instantaneously, no gaps or pauses.