Macbeth Language Macbeth

Language features in Macbeth: #

There is only one reason why Shakespeare’s plays are still alive and read 400 years after they were written; his mastery of clear, powerful visual language. As we have seen most of his plots are not original, but it is ability to revitalise old stories and histories, shape them into compelling dramas with syncopated plots and revitalise them with resonant forceful language that still appeals to us today.

Most transformations or adaptations to contemporary productions, directors may update everything except Shakespeare’s Language. Al Pacino admits that it is the appeal of Shakespeare’s language that convinced him to attempt to attract more people to his plays.

Some outstanding features of Shakespeare’s Language:

  1. His powerful imagery which allows us to visualise his scenes without props or concrete backdrops.

  2. The use of nuances, the power of suggestion, implied meanings.

  3. His varied vocabulary, including the fact that he coined many new words and hundreds of new sayings that have become part of our argot.

  4. The lyricism of his verse and sometimes even his prose has a lightness and resonance or lingering effect on us.

  5. The wide range of his allusions to classical, religious and historical icons, stories and people.

  6. The play on words; he likes to use puns, oxymorons, s-xual innuendo, assonance, alliteration, ambiguity and any other tactics to engage and entertain his audiences.

Ambiguity and Ambivalence in Macbeth #

The echoing of phrases has a haunting effect throughout the play. Here are some examples:

The Witches: #

The witches in Macbeth had magical powers of foretelling events much as clairvoyants, tarot cards or horoscopes claim today. I feel they are integral to the main thrust.

The play is rife with fallacies and they reinforce this.

They are referred to by a number of names, the most common is “weird sisters” others include; “imperfect speakers” , “instruments of darkness”, “secret, black and midnight hags”, beldams , later “filthy hags” and finally “juggling fiends who palter with us in a double sense."

The witches’ first utterance: “fair is foul and foul is fair” is soon echoed by Macbeth’s first speech: “So fair and foul a day have I not seen”.

This ambivalence is followed by others such as: “nothing is but what is not”, “things can not be ill, can not be good”.

Their powers were limited in that they could not kill people. Here a witch threatens the husband of a woman who refused her some chestnuts:

“I’ll drain him dry as hay:
Sleep sh all neither night nor day
Hang upon his pent-house lid; …
Though his bark cannot be lost,
Yet it shall be tempest-toss’d. Act 1, sc. 3 19 – 26

This is what King James claims happened to him and foreshadows what they do to Macbeth and Lady Macbeth. They could not actually kill someone, but harry them and deprive them of sleep.

This is Banquo’s description of them:

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
By each at once her choppy finger laying
Upon her skinny lips. You should be women,
And yet your beards forbid me to interpret
That you are so. Act I Sc. 3 40 48.

BANQUO utters a cautionary note about the prophesy of the witches. We should not be too gullible.

“Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me.” Zachery Rolfe

But ’tis strange:
And oftentimes, to win us to our harm,
The instruments of darkness tell us truths,
Win us with honest trifles, to betray’s
In deepest consequence. I. 3.

HECATE is angry with the three witches for acting on their own in trifling with Macbeth. There is evidence that Hecate is a later inauthentic addition to the play.

*Have I not reason, beldams as you are,
Saucy and overbold? How did you dare
To trade and traffic with Macbeth
In riddles and affairs of death;
And I, the mistress of your charms,
The close contriver of all harms,
Was never call’d to bear my part,
Or show the glory of our art?
And, which is worse, all you have done
Hath been but for a wayward son,
Spiteful and wrathful, who, as others do,
Loves for his own ends, not for you.
But make amends now: get you gone,
And at the pit of Acheron
Meet me i’ the morning: thither he
Will come to know his destiny:
Your vessels and your spells provide,
Your charms and every thing beside.
I am for the air; this night I’ll spend
Unto a dismal and a fatal end:
Great business must be wrought ere noon:
Upon the corner of the moon
There hangs a vaporous drop profound;
I’ll catch it ere it come to ground:
And that distill’d by magic sleights
Shall raise such artificial sprites
As by the strength of their illusion
Shall draw him on to his confusion:
He shall spurn fate, scorn death, and bear
He hopes ‘bove wisdom, grace and fear:
And you all know, security
Is mortals’ chiefest enemy. III. 5. 3 - 33

Macbeth, finally realising that he has been conned by the witch’s evasive and duplicitous assurances:

And be these juggling fiends no more believed,
That palter with us in a double sense,
That keep the word of promise to our ear,
And break it to our hope. V. vii.

double #

The word double in Macbeth is used in several senses, mainly as an intensifier:

Captain

As cannons overcharged with double cracks,

So they doubly redoubled strokes upon the foe.

Lady Macbeth’sdisingenuous welcome:

All our service,
In every point twice done and then done double,

Macbeth’s reservations, hesitancies and qualms about murdering Duncan:

He’s here in double trust:

All Witches

Double, double toil and trouble,
Fire burn, and cauldron bubble.

Macbethin his paranoid state decides not to leave anything to chance:

Then live, Macduff; what need I fear of thee?
But yet I’ll make assurance double sure
And take a bond of fate.

Macbeth, finally realising that he has been conned by the witch’s evasive and duplicitous assurances:

And be these juggling fiends no more believed,
That palter with us in a double sense,
That keep the word of promise to our ear,
And break it to our hope.

The double sense ties in with the Porter’s use of equivocation:

Faith, here’s an equivocator that could swear in both the scales against either scale, who committed treason enough for God’s sake, yet could not equivocate to heaven. O come in, equivocator. II. 3. 9 - 11

This is likely an allusion to Father Henry Garnet, a Jesuit, complicit in the Gunpowder Plot, defending his right to confessional confidence. It can also apply to all legal chicanery.

Nature #

Is nature a malign or beneficial force? Natural justice tends to favour might over right.

Macdonwald–
The multiplying villanies of nature
Do swarm upon him. I.2.

MACBETH on hearing he is annointed thane of Cawdor:

Whose horrid image doth unfix my hair
And make my seated heart knock at my ribs,
Against the use of nature?

LADY MACBETH on receiving Macbeth’s letter predicting his kingship:

yet do I fear thy nature;
It is too full o’ the milk of human kindness
To catch the nearest way:

LADY MACBETH resolve to be bold:

That no compunctious visitings of nature
Shake my fell purpose, nor keep peace between
The effect and it! Come to my woman’s breasts,
And take my milk for gall, you murdering ministers,
Wherever in your sightless substances
You wait on nature’s mischief!

BANQUO just before the murder of DUNCAN

Restrain in me the cursed thoughts that nature
Gives way to in repose!

MACBETH’s soliloquy wrestling over killing DUNCAN.

Is this a dagger which I see before me,

Now o’er the one halfworld
Nature seems dead, and wicked dreams abuse
The curtain’d sleep;

Later:

Sleep that knits up the ravell’d sleeve of care,

Balm of hurt minds, great nature’s second course,

After killing DUNCAN:

Here lay Duncan,
His silver skin laced with his golden blood;
And his gash’d stabs look’d like a breach in nature

ROSS on hearing Malcolm and Donalbain, the king’s two sons,/Are stol’n away and fled; which puts upon them/Suspicion of the deed.

‘Gainst nature still!

MACBETH on BANQUO:

Our fears in Banquo
Stick deep; and in his royalty of nature

MACBETH to the hatchet men hired to kill BANQUO:

Do you find
Your patience so predominant in your nature
That you can let this go?

MACBETH on haaring that FLEANCE has fled but BANQUO is dead:

There the grown serpent lies; the worm that’s fled
Hath nature that in time will venom breed,

LADY MACBETH

You lack the season of all natures, sleep.

MACBETH demanding the Witches predict his future:

I conjure you, by that which you profess,
Howe’er you come to know it, answer me:

though the treasure
Of nature’s germens tumble all together,
Even till destruction sicken; answer me

MACBETH assured that he is safe as long as:

Rebellion’s head, rise never till the wood
Of Birnam rise, and our high-placed Macbeth
Shall live the lease of nature, pay his breath
To time and mortal custom.

MACDUFF and MALCOLM trying to test each other’s integrity:

I am not treacherous.

MALCOLM

But Macbeth is.
A good and virtuous nature may recoil
In an imperial charge.

Later MALCOLM pretends to be full of lechery, to judge MACDUFF’s response:

MALCOLM

but there’s no bottom, none,
In my voluptuousness: your wives, your daughters,
Your matrons and your maids, could not fill up
The cistern of my lust, and my desire
All continent impediments would o’erbear
That did oppose my will: better Macbeth
Than such an one to reign.

MACDUFF

Boundless intemperance
In nature is a tyranny;

MALCOLM after testing Macduff reveals his true self:

Macduff, this noble passion,
Child of integrity, hath from my soul
Wiped the black scruples,

I put myself to thy direction, and
Unspeak mine own detraction, here abjure
The taints and blames I laid upon myself,
For strangers to my nature. I am yet
Unknown to woman, never was forsworn,
Scarcely have coveted what was mine own,
At no time broke my faith, …

Doctor commenting on Lady Macbeth’s sleep walking:

A great perturbation in nature, to receive at once
the benefit of sleep, and do the effects of watching!

Thrice in Macbeth: #

  • Three kings and three murders,
  • The witches “thrice this and thrice that”
  • The three “Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow”.

Archaic language in Macbeth: #

Macbeth: The labour we delight in physics pain. (heals) but later:

Macbeth Throw physic to the dogs

The term “battlements” refers to our guarded space and is used twice, once in its real sense and then by Lady Macbeth figuratively to refer to her house not only as a place of refuge, comfort and shelter but where she rules: Note the singular “my”.

Till he unseamed him from the nave to th’ chops,
And fixed his head upon our battlements.

Lady Macbeth

The raven himself is hoarse
That croaks the fatal entrance of Duncan
Under my battlements.

Lady Macbeth uses an interesting double entendre when referring to Duncan she says:

“He must be provided for”

It’s almost as scary as hearing an underworld figure suggesting:

“He’s got to be taken care of.”