I cannot read. The character I’ll take with wax.
Our captain hath in every figure skill,
An aged interpreter, though young in days.
Before proud Athens he’s set down by this,
Whose fall the mark of his ambition is. Exit
5.5 Trumpets sound. Enter Alcibiades with his powers, before Athens
ALCIBIADES
Sound to this coward and lascivious town
Our terrible approach.
A parley sounds. The Senators appear upon the walls
Till now you have gone on and filled the time
With all licentious measure, making your wills
The scope of justice. Till now myself and such
As slept within the shadow of your power
Have wandered with our traversed arms, and breathed
Our sufferance vainly. Now the time is flush
When crouching marrow, in the bearer strong,
Cries of itself ‘No more’; now breathless wrong
Shall sit and pant in your great chairs of ease,
And pursy insolence shall break his wind
With fear and horrid flight.
FIRST SENATOR
Noble and young,
When thy first griefs were but a mere conceit,
Ere thou hadst power or we had cause of fear,
We sent to thee to give thy rages balm,
To wipe out our ingratitude with loves
Above their quantity.
SECOND SENATOR
So did we woo
Transformed Timon to our city’s love
By humble message and by promised means.
We were not all unkind, nor all deserve
The common stroke of war.
FIRST SENATOR
These walls of ours
Were not erected by their hands from whom
You have received your grief; nor are they such
That these great tow’rs, trophies, and schools should fall
For private faults in them.
SECOND SENATOR
Nor are they living
Who were the motives that you first went out.
Shame that they wanted cunning, in excess,
Hath broke their hearts. March, noble lord,
Into our city with thy banners spread.
By decimation and a tithed death,
If thy revenges hunger for that food
Which nature loathes, take thou the destined tenth,
And by the hazard of the spotted die
Let die the spotted.
FIRST SENATOR
All have not offended.
For those that were, it is not square to take,
On those that are, revenges. Crimes like lands
Are not inherited. Then, dear countryman,
Bring in thy ranks, but leave without thy rage.
Spare thy Athenian cradle and those kin
Which, in the bluster of thy wrath, must fall
With those that have offended. Like a shepherd
Approach the fold and cull th’infected forth,
But kill not all together.
SECOND SENATOR
What thou wilt,
Thou rather shalt enforce it with thy smile
Than hew to’t with thy sword.
FIRST SENATOR
Set but thy foot
Against our rampired gates and they shall ope,
So thou wilt send thy gentle heart before
To say thou’lt enter friendly.
SECOND SENATOR
Throw thy glove,
Or any token of thine honour else,
That thou wilt use the wars as thy redress,
And not as our confusion. All thy powers
Shall make their harbour in our town till we
Have sealed thy full desire.
ALCIBIADES ⌈throwing up a glove⌉
Then there’s my glove.
Descend, and open your uncharged ports.
Those enemies of Timon’s and mine own
Whom you yourselves shall set out for reproof
Fall, and no more; and to atone your fears
With my more noble meaning, not a man
Shall pass his quarter or offend the stream
Of regular justice in your city’s bounds
But shall be remedied to your public laws
At heaviest answer.
BOTH SENATORS ’Tis most nobly spoken.
ALCIBIADES Descend, and keep your words.
⌈Trumpets sound. Exeunt Senators from the walls.⌉
Enter Soldier, with a tablet of wax
SOLDIER
My noble general, Timon is dead,
Entombed upon the very hem o’th’ sea;
And on his gravestone this insculpture, which
With wax I brought away, whose soft impression
Interprets for my poor ignorance.
Alcibiades reads the epitaph
ALCIBIADES
‘Here lies a wretched corpse,
Of wretched soul bereft.
Seek not my name. A plague consume
You wicked caitiffs left!
Here lie I, Timon, who alive
All living men did hate.
Pass by and curse thy fill, but pass
And stay not here thy gait.’
These well express in thee thy latter spirits.
Though thou abhorred‘st in us our human griefs,
Scorned’st our brains’ flow and those our droplets which
From niggard nature fall, yet rich conceit
Taught thee to make vast Neptune weep for aye
On thy low grave, on faults forgiven. Dead
Is noble Timon, of whose memory
Hereafter more.
⌈Enter Senators through the gates⌉
Bring me into your city,
And I will use the olive with my sword,
Make war breed peace, make peace stint war, make each
Prescribe to other as each other’s leech.
Let our drums strike.
⌈Drums.⌉ Exeunt ⌈through the gates⌉
MACBETH
BY WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE (ADAPTED BY THOMAS MIDDLETON)
SHORTLY after James VI of Scotland succeeded to the English throne, in 1603, he gave his patronage to Shakespeare’s company; the Lord Chamberlain’s Men became the King’s Men, entering into a special relationship with their sovereign. Macbeth is the play of Shakespeare’s that most clearly reflects this relationship. James regarded the virtuous and noble Banquo, Macbeth’s comrade at the start of the action, as his direct ancestor; eight Stuart kings were said to have preceded James, just as, in the play, Banquo points to ‘a show of eight kings’ as his descendants (4.1.127.1-140); and in the play the English king (historically Edward the Confessor) is praised for the capacity, on which James also prided himself, to cure ’the king’s evil’ (scrofula). Macbeth is obviously a Jacobean play, composed probably in 1606.
But the first printed text, in the 1623 Folio, shows signs of having been adapted at a later date. It is exceptionally short by comparison with Shakespeare’s other tragedies; and it includes episodes which there is good reason to believe are not by Shakespeare. Most conspicuous are Act 3, Scene 5 and parts of Act 4, Scene I: 38.I-60 and 141-8.1. These episodes feature Hecate, who does not appear elsewhere in the play; they are composed largely in octosyllabic couplets in a style conspicuously different from the rest of the play; and they call for the performance of two songs that are found in The Witch, a play of uncertain date by Thomas Middleton. Probably Middleton himself adapted Shakespeare’s play some years after its first performance, adding these and more localized details, and cutting the play elsewhere. We do not attempt to excise passages most clearly written by Middleton, because the adapter’s hand almost certainly affected the text at other, less determinable points. The Folio text of Macbeth cites only the opening words of the songs; drawing on The Witch, we attempt a reconstruction of their staging in Macbeth.
Shakespeare took materials for his story from the account in Raphael Holinshed’s Chronicle of the reigns of Duncan and Macbeth (AD 1034-57). Occasionally (especially in the English episodes of Act 4, Scene 2) he closely followed Holinshed’s wording, but essentially the play’s structure is his own. He invented the framework of the three witches who tempted both Macbeth and Banquo with prophecies of greatness. His Macbeth is both more introspective and more intensely evil than the competent warrior-king portrayed by Holinshed; conversely, Shakespeare made Duncan, the king whom Macbeth murders, far more venerable and saintly. Some of the play’s features, notably the character of Lady Macbeth, originate in Holinshed’s account of the murder of an earlier Scottish king, Duff; he was killed in his castle at Forres by Donwald, who had been ‘set on’ by his wife.
Macbeth is an exciting story of witchcraft, murder, and retribution that can also be seen as a study in the philosophy and psychology of evil. The witches are not easily made credible in modern performances, and Shakespeare seems deliberately to have drained colour away from some parts of his composition in order to concentrate attention on Macbeth and his Lady. It is Macbeth’s neurotic self-absorption, his fear, his anger, and his despair, along with his wife’s steely determination, her invoking of the powers of evil, and her eventual revelation in sleep of her repressed humanity, that have given the play its long-proven power to fascinate readers and to challenge performers.
THE PERSONS OF THE PLAY
KING DUNCAN of Scotland
A CAPTAIN in Duncan’s army
MACBETH, Thane of Glamis, later Thane of Cawdor, then King of
Scotland
A PORTER at Macbeth’s castle
Three MURDERERS attending on Macbeth
SEYTON, servant of Macbeth
LADY MACBETH, Macbeth’s wife
BANQUO, a Scottish thane
FLEANCE, his son
MACDUFF, Thane of Fife
LADY MACDUFF, his wife
MACDUFF’S SON
SIWARD, Earl of Northumberland
YOUNG SIWARD, his son
An English DOCTOR
HECATE, Queen of the Witches
Six WITCHES
Three APPARITIONS, one an armed head, one a bloody child, one
a child crowned
A SPIRIT LIKE A CAT
Other SPIRITS
An OLD MAN
A MESSENGER
MURDERERS
SERVANTS
A show of eight kings; Lords and Thanes, attendants, soldiers, drummers
The Tragedy of Macbeth
1.1 Thunder and lightning. Enter three Witches
FIRST WITCH
When shall we three meet again?
In thunder, lightning, or in rain?
SECOND WITCH
When the hurly-burly’s done,
When the battle’s lost and won.
THIRD WITCH
That will be ere the set of sun.
FIRST WITCH
Where the place?
SECOND WITCH
Upon the heath.
THIRD WITCH
There to meet with Macbeth.
FIRST WITCH
I come, Grimalkin.
SECOND WITCH
Paddock calls.
THIRD WITCH
Anon.
ALL
Fair is foul, and foul is fair,
Hover through the fog and filthy air. Exeunt
1.2 Alarum within. Enter king Duncan, Malcolm, Donalbain, Lennox, with attendants, meeting a bleeding Captain
KING DUNCAN
What bloody man is that? He can report,
As seemeth by his plight, of the revolt
The newest state.
MALCOLM
This is the sergeant
Who like a good and hardy soldier fought
’Gainst my captivity. Hail, brave friend.
Say to the King the knowledge of the broil
As thou didst leave it.
CAPTAIN
Doubtful it stood,
As two spent swimmers that do cling together
And choke their art. The merciless Macdonald—
Worthy to be a rebel, for to that
The multiplying villainies of nature
Do swarm upon him—from the Western Isles
Of kerns and galloglasses is supplied,
And fortune on his damned quarry smiling
Showed like a rebel’s whore. But all’s too weak,
For brave Macbeth—well he deserves that name!—
Disdaining fortune, with his brandished steel
Which smoked with bloody execution,
Like valour’s minion
Carved out his passage till he faced the slave,
Which ne’er shook hands nor bade farewell to him
Till he unseamed him from the nave to th’ chops,
And fixed his head upon our battlements.
KING DUNCAN
O valiant cousin, worthy gentleman!
CAPTAIN
As whence the sun ’gins his reflection
Shipwrecking storms and direful thunders break,
So from that spring whence comfort seemed to come
Discomfort swells. Mark, King of Scotland, mark.
No sooner justice had, with valour armed,
Compelled these skipping kerns to trust their heels
But the Norwegian lord, surveying vantage,
With furbished arms and new supplies of men
Began a fresh assault.
KING DUNCAN
Dismayed not this our captains, Macbeth and
Banquo?
CAPTAIN
Yes, as sparrows eagles, or the hare the lion!
If I say sooth I must report they were
As cannons overcharged with double cracks,
So they doubly redoubled strokes upon the foe.
Except they meant to bathe in reeking wounds
Or memorize another Golgotha,
I cannot tell—
But I am faint. My gashes cry for help.
KING DUNCAN
So well thy words become thee as thy wounds:
They smack of honour both.—Go get him surgeons.
Exit Captain with attendants
Enter Ross and Angus
Who comes here?
MALCOLM
The worthy Thane of Ross.
LENNOX
What haste looks through his eyes! So should he look
That seems to speak things strange.
Ross
God save the King.
KING DUNCAN
Whence cam’st thou, worthy thane?
Ross
From Fife, great King,
Where the Norwegian banners flout the sky
And fan our people cold.
Norway himself, with terrible numbers,
Assisted by that most disloyal traitor
The Thane of Cawdor, began a dismal conflict,
Till that Bellona’s bridegroom, lapped in proof,
Confronted him with self-comparisons,
Point against point, rebellious arm ’gainst arm,
Curbing his lavish spirit; and to conclude,
The victory fell on us—
KING DUNCAN
Great happiness.
Ross
That now
Sweno, the Norways’ king, craves composition;
Nor would we deign him burial of his men
Till he disbursed at Saint Colum’s inch
Ten thousand dollars to our general use.
KING DUNCAN
No more that Thane of Cawdor shall deceive
Our bosom interest. Go pronounce his present death,
And with his former title greet Macbeth.
Ross I’ll see it done.
KING DUNCAN
What he hath lost, noble Macbeth hath won.
Exeunt severally
1.3 Thunder. Enter the three Witches
FIRST WITCH
Where
hast thou been, sister?
SECOND WITCH
Killing swine.
THIRD WITCH
Sister, where thou?
FIRST WITCH
A sailor’s wife had chestnuts in her lap,
And munched, and munched, and munched. ‘Give
me,’ quoth I.
‘Aroint thee, witch,’ the rump-fed runnion cries.
Her husband’s to Aleppo gone, master o’th’ Tiger.
But in a sieve I’ll thither sail,
And like a rat without a tail
I’ll do, I’ll do, and I’ll do.
SECOND WITCH
I’ll give thee a wind.
FIRST WITCH
Thou’rt kind.
THIRD WITCH
And I another.
FIRST WITCH
I myself have all the other,
And the very ports they blow,
All the quarters that they know
I’th’ shipman’s card.
I’ll drain him dry as hay.
Sleep shall neither night nor day
Hang upon his penthouse lid.
He shall live a man forbid.
Weary sennights nine times nine
Shall he dwindle, peak, and pine.
Though his barque cannot be lost,
Yet it shall be tempest-tossed.
Look what I have.
SECOND WITCH
Show me, show me.
FIRST WITCH
Here I have a pilot’s thumb,
Wrecked as homeward he did come.
Drum within
THIRD WITCH
A drum, a drum—
Macbeth doth come.
ALL (dancing in a ring)
The weird sisters hand in hand,
Posters of the sea and land,
Thus do go about, about,
Thrice to thine, and thrice to mine,
And thrice again to make up nine.
Peace! The charm’s wound up.
Enter Macbeth and Banquo
MACBETH
So foul and fair a day I have not seen.
BANQUO
How far is’t called to Forres?—What are these,
So withered, and so wild in their attire,
That look not like th‘inhabitants o’th’ earth
And yet are on’t?—Live you, or are you aught
That man may question? You seem to understand me
The Oxford Shakespeare: The Complete Works Page 312
