MACBETH’S LAST WINTER. SYNOPSIS FOR ANOTHER VERSION OF THE TRAGEDY
It’s not true that I killed Duncan for his throne. The murder I'm accused of is a typical case of an act the law condones as being committed in self-defence.
Unfortunately people have got the story all wrong. I don’t deny that those (if there still are any) who think Duncan was killed by his own guards are completely mistaken. Bet anyone who thinks I myself killed the king because I was greedy for power are even farther from the mark.
Fifteen years have gone by since it happened. And rumour about Duncan’s death has grown more and more rife all the time, until this winter it has reached epidemic proportions.
I myself am responsible for the confusion. It would probably have been better if I'd explained at the outset exactly how it happened, instead of kidding myself I could conceal at least half of the truth. No doubt I should have said from the very beginning that Duncan dug his own grave (tyrants often do), and I merely toppled him in.
As a matter of fact, having known the ins and outs of the horrible business all along, I was sure I was telling the truth when I said Duncan had been killed by himself - in other words, by his own servants.
But my own certainty wasn’t enough to exonerate me. Not that common talk and gossip in streets and taverns were to blame for that, still less the ham actor, Billy Hampston, who wrote a play based on such rumours (and had his manuscript confiscated by my secret police for his pains).
No, it was someone else’s fault, and that someone was, surprising as it may seem, none other than Duncan himself.
This is how it happened.
For a long time he had looked on me with suspicion. This was the result of the mania which most rulers suffer from, and which makes them doubt anyone on the basis of mere slander or calumny. Or perhaps he cultivated the suspicion himself, in order to justify his hatred of me and the hostile schemes that followed from it. It’s not unusual for people to hide from themselves, as too shameful, their real reason for disliking-someone, and to try to justify their aversion by explanations even they themselves don’t really believe in.
I had observed some time before how jealous Duncan was of me, though in fact it was my wife who had noticed it first. To begin with she’d detected it not in him but in his wife. “I can see something malevolent in her eye,” she would say, as we were coming home from some court reception. I used to contradict her: “I don’t get that impression at all! The queen seems very friendly to both of us…” But she persisted, and in the end she convinced me. This didn’t in the least affect my esteem for Duncan himself. Too bad if the queen’s like that, I thought. What matters is what he thinks himself.
But my wife, my beautiful and intelligent lady, would listen angrily and say, “If a wife is jealous, sooner or later the husband will be jealous too.”
And that’s what happened. Duncan’s looks grew cold, and thee grew colder. Gradually other people began to notice it. For my wife and me, this was the beginning of days of anxiety. I did all I could, regardless of expense, to win over some member of the king’s entourage, so as not to be taken unawares.
When Duncan told me he was coming to stay for three days as a guest in my castle, most of the people who had detected a coolness between us thought this visit would bring it to an end. Needless to say, my enemies were appalled and my friends were delighted.
“Why do you both look so gloomy?” the latter asked us. “Aren’t you glad that difficult situation will soon be a thing of the past?”
We pretended to cheer up at this, but our hearts were still heavy. For we knew what all the rest did not: namely, that Duncan was coming not to end our falling-out but to bring about my destruction.
His plan (which I learned of through my spy) was both diabolical and extremely simple: during the third night of his visit there was to be a noisy incident outside his bedroom door which would wake him up. Then he and his suite would rush from the castle, and before the sun had risen the rumour would have spread everywhere that Macbeth had tried to murder his guest, the king, in his sleep.
For my wife and me the days and nights leading up to the visit were agonizing. We kept asking ourselves what misfortune it really was that was hanging over us. And then again, if Duncan had decided to destroy me, why had he chosen this way of doing it? There were many other questions, but what they all came down to was, what were we going to do?
It wasn’t too difficult to find the reason for the king’s deviousness. His position had become somewhat uncertain lately, and I had a lot of influence over the country noblemen, especially those whose seats were on the borders, A direct and unprepared attack on me might have been very dangerous for him. So it seemed to him — rightly, alas - that it would be best to damage my reputation before attacking me. It wasn’t the first time he had used this method. He had done the same thing, details of implementation apart, to the thanes of Cawdor and Garnis.
But our main preoccupation was what to do. Every hour that went by made the question more urgent. How were we to meet the approaching calamity? Just give in and resign ourselves to our fate? Hope the tyrant might change his mind? Run away?
As time went by our mood changed from agitation to apathy, i often found my wife scanning the horizon anxiously from the part of the terrace that overlooked the road. I could tell she too was hoping to see a messenger coming to cancel the king’s visit.
That messenger never came. On the contrary, four days before the fateful date, part of the king’s bodyguard appeared, riding towards the castle. Were they the ones who were supposed to provoke the incident?
My wife was the first to see them. She called me.
“Come and look!”
We stood together on the terrace and watched them approach. It was cold. My wife’s face was white as chalk. My earlier hesitations came back to me: should we yield to fate, try to escape, or hope for clemency?
No, none of those. I was going to choose another way; I myself would adopt Duncan’s wicked scheme. He had planned to put on a charade in my castle. Then he should die there himself, also as in a play.
Even before the approaching horsemen had ridden through the first gate, i had told my wife of my decision.
She didn’t answer. Only went paler still Her shoulders started to shake convulsively. “I’m wicked,” she kept repeating. “I’m a sinner…”
“Neither of us has the soul of a murderer,” I told her. “But if that’s what’s worrying you, I thought of it first.”
“No,” she answered faintly. “I did!”
I insisted that, even if I hadn’t spoken of it straight away, ! had been brooding over the idea for days. It was quite true.
But instead of consoling her, this only made her smile sadly.
“You have been thinking of it for days. I’ve been thinking of it for weeks. Ever since…”
I hastily interrupted to assure her that the thought of murdering the tyrant had occurred to me thee too, and even before that.
But it was no good, and we vied with one another in a macabre attempt to go further and further back in time to claim the honour of being the first to conceive the crime.
It was at the banquet given by Lady K…The reception held by the Scandinavian ambassadors…The day it first snowed…
We propelled ourselves blindly backward, not noticing how close we were getting to the limiting point — the day when I was told about Duncan’s plan to destroy me. If we went back any further we’d be unable to plead self-defence. On the contrary, we’d reveal ourselves as having always harboured the idea of killing him. My wife realized the danger just in time.
“Stop!” she cried. “If we go on like this we’ll go mad!”
I leaned my head on her shoulder,
“You’re right,” I said. “We’re not murderers. It’s he who started this terrible thing. This murderous fever began in his brain, and he infected us …But enough of all that. As you say, if we go on talking about it we really shall go crazy. Let’s t
urn our minds to something else - to preparing for the ‘incident’.”
Until the deed was done, and even afterwards, we always referred to it as the “incident”. I suppose it was a way of trying to convince our consciences that we were only carrying out something that had been initiated by someone else. We were actors in a play written by another. Only, on our stage, the bloodshed, the wounds, the groans and death itself would be real
This parallel so stuck in my mind that I actually suspected some of the king’s escort of being not guards but actors hired for the occasion. I could have sworn they had even rehearsed their scene before they came; perhaps Duncan himself had taken part in the rehearsal
1 was so taken up with preparations for the royal visit that I had no time to be nervous, and by the time Duncan arrived I was perfectly composed.
As usual he wore the humble and penitent expression that, more than his army, his prisons, his money and his secret police, had helped him confound his enemies. It was this appearance of his that always divided conspirators, or made them hesitate and weaken at the critical moment. It was the most difficult thing imaginable to attack so crafty a tyrant.
“Are there any ghosts in this castle?” he asked, laughing, as he mounted the stairs into the great hall
Fortunately, my wife was talking to the queen, and didn’t hear Duncan’s question. It raised some general hilarity, and when this died down she asked, and was told, what the king had said. But hearing It like that was less of a shock than hearing it directly. I myself was able to go on guffawing like the rest without batting an eyelid, but I did wonder what Duncan was driving at. Was his question premeditated, the sort of things rulers say in such circumstances to Impress people? Had he had a sudden premonition? Or was It an omen, one of those messages from on high which men usually fall to read correctly?
“What was all that talk about ghosts?” my wife asked late that night, when we were In bed.
“Just nonsense.”
“It made me think of…”
“Go to sleep.”
But I doubted if I myself would be able to sleep. I lay there turning the details of my plan over and over in my head. There were still a few points I hadn’t settled. The chief of these was when to act. Should I stick to Duncan’s scenario and wait till the third night? Or would it be better to take the initiative and go into action sooner, before he took it into his head to make some change in his plan that might undo my own?
Then there was the question of the guards. Did they already know of the part they were supposed to play, or would they be incited to it at the last minute by force, or guile, or wine and wassail? And, most important of all, what was to become of them afterwards? Did Duncan mean them to be slain there and then outside his door, or spared to give evidence against me?
Duncan must have pondered over their fate just as deeply as I myself was pondering now. I couldn’t make up my mind. Should I have them slain outside my guest’s door as irrefutable proof of their guilt, or let them live and get them to say what ! told them to say when the matter came to trial?
What would I not have given to know what Duncan had decided to do! ! was fascinated by his plan, and if I'd had it in my hand I would have followed it to the letter. The most idiotic ideas occur to you when you’re under great strain: I found myself wondering whether to get up in the middle of the night, go and knock on Duncan’s door, and say: “Your Majesty, just let me have a look at your plan and you’ll see how good I am at carrying it out… The only difference will be that you’re the victim!”
Dawn duly broke, and the second day took its course towards evening. I was still a prey to various uncertainties. Of these the chief was the one that had tormented me from the start: should I act tonight, or wait until the third night? I was ready to bet that Duncan too was tempted to change his timetable. Then there was the question of the guards, the intended provocateurs. What did thanking mean to do with them after the “incident”? What was I going to do with them? Moreover, I had to decide how to deal with my own servants, those who were going to help me do the deed. Should I reward them, as I had promised? H’mm… Keep them in reserve in case there was some sort of trial? Or just kill them outright?
Duncan had probably chosen the last option for his accomplices — murderers always talk in the end. So there was no point in my going out of my way to be original. In any case, I couldn’t have departed from his plan even if I’d wanted to. I was hypnotized by it. Sometimes I even felt his mind giving me orders, as it had done all my life.
During dinner on that second evening he invited me to visit him at his castle a couple of months later. This took me aback. Had he changed his mind, abandoned his plan, decided it would be easier to slaughter me like a lamb under his own roof ? Or was his invitation just a trick designed to lull my suspicions?
My mind reeled. Try as ! might, I couldn’t cope with the swirling images his suggestion had suddenly conjured up. Myself, at night, in Duncan’s castle, as his guest Duncan performing my role. What would he do with the murderers…?
“Perhaps he’s decided not to commit the crime?” my wife said that night in bed.
“Don’t you believe it!”
She sighed.
“Well…If you’re going to act, do it tonight. Something tells me tomorrow will be too late.”
And so the deed was done. On the stroke of two in the morning,in accordance with Duncan’s (and my) plan. The only difference was that at the last moment, when I saw his body covered with blood (who would have thought the old man to have had so much blood in him?). I felt faint, and ordered one of my men to remove the corpse from the castle.
“Where to?” he asked.
I remembered a swift-flowing irrigation canal with peat-lined banks, a few miles away.
In the small hours it took some of the weight off my mind to think the body was out of the castle, with the blood being washed off it by the current.
Then something happened which gave rise to a lot of chat in the taverns, and which that fool of a Billy Hampston stuck in his play. In the morning, even though the corpse wasn’t there, the news of the murder spread like wildfire. (Strange that the lack of a body didn’t suggest to anyone that the king might still be alive, skulking in some corner.) Everyone hung round the bloodstained sheets, gaping in horror. It struck me that a missing body terrified people even more than a murdered corpse…
The finding of the body in the canal late that afternoon didn’t change anything. And there had Ï been, pinning such hopes to my disposal of the remains! Fifteen years have gone by since then, but I can still remember every hour, every minute of what happened: the arrival of the cart carrying the king’s body, dripping with water and mud; the shrieks of the guards under torture; the candies cast. ing shadows on the walls.
Î kept out of the way, gnawing my fingers with anxiety. I’d been right to send the body away, but ! should have sent it further. hundred, a thousand, two thousand miles… But how? There wasn’t a desert in Scotland, curse it.
My lady and I still hoped the moving of the body by night would help to conceal the truth. But we didn’t breathe a word about it.
Later on, we often talked about what happened, she and I, on cold afternoons, sitting by a fire that warmed us less and less. And now she is no more I go over it all on my own, scarcely bothering whether or not the servants hear me.
Ever since my wife passed on my life has been very lonely, and this last year I have missed her worse than ever: my beautiful, intelligent lady, whom that ne’er-do-well Billy Hampston put in a play, depicting her as chief instigator of the murder. Is there no limit to the lies of these vile poetasters?
But now I wish I hadn’t, in my rage, torn the wretched play to pieces with my own hands. I’d have liked to read it again, especially for some of the strangest passages… And I oughtn’t to have had the author of it executed. If I’d been satisfied with putting him in prison I could have gone down one night to his cell and told him to re-write his horrible play.
Some parts of it really were strange, but I can’t remember them very clearly. Partly because it’s so many years since the manuscript was confiscated; partly because I read it at one go, without a pause, almost blind with fury,
I remember one scene in which the ghost of Banquo appeared to me. It’s true that at two or three official banquets I did suffer from hallucinations of that kind - but ! never told anyone about them,not even my wife. How could that charlatan Billy Hampston have got to know about something which I virtually concealed from myself ?
“You shouldn’t judge him so harshly,” my wife said sometimes. She was always noble and generous. She might easily have hated the man for defaming her so. “You shouldn’t speak ill of him — his play is quite sympathetic to you, throughout.”
“Do you think so?”
“I’m sure of it. That was my main reason for telling you not to tear up the manuscript much less have its author’s head cut off. But you were so furious when you’d read it you wouldn’t listen to reason,”
And so on through all those long autumn afternoons. More and more often we would find ourselves — she more than I — discussing passages from the no longer existent tragedy. One of the scenes that astonished us most was that which depicts the witches. Billy Hampston must have been out of his mind to entertain such visions. We had never seen anything so terrifying in any theatre. How could he have imagined such a nightmare, and what did it mean? I conjured them up in my memory oee by one, time after time, but could never decide whether their sinister predictions lessened the weight on my conscience or added to it.
One day we were talking about it when I suddenly struck myself on the forehead.
“Of course!” I cried. “There we were racking our brains, and all the time it’s quite plain, Those witches in rags and tatters…Didn’t John Tendier, my spy at Duncan’s court, send me a messenger disguised as a beggar woman two or three times?”
“Did he? You never told me…”
“It was of no importance…And the news he brought me was so worrying I paid no attention to anything else …”
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