£ Lady Macbeth’s rhyming couplets near the scene’s beginning give an almost hypnotic version of the Macbeths’ dilemma at the middle of the play:
Nought’s had, all’s spent
Where our desire is got without content.
’Tis safer to be that which we destroy
Than by destruction dwell in doubtful joy. (4-7)
The rhyme words of spent/content and destroy/joy literally fight each other to a standstill, with the “good words” of content and joy being destroyed by their negative modifyers without and doubtful, thereby leaving behind a message of waste and destruction. The heavy use of alliteration (repetition of initial vowels, in this case d) and of assonance (repetition of interior vowels, in this instance t) give a stuttering and dulling movement:
Nought’s had, all’s spent
Where our desire is got without content.
’Tis safer to be that which we destroy
Than by destruction dwell in doubtful joy.
Stylistically, these lines prefigure the language and action of Lady Macbeth’s narcoleptic sleepwalking (in 5.1); Shakespeare employs some of these same poetic techniques in Macbeth’s agonized but emotionally dulled and repetitive response to her death (in 5.5.16-27).
In the profoundly interconnected worlds of Shakespeare’s art and morality, evil begets a deadness of soul and of language, however exhilarating its initial manifestations in heart and tongue. One of Shakespeare’s dramatic problems, then, is poetic: how to keep the languages of the Macbeths at once interestingly rich and expansive and at the same time use shifts downward in language to record and calibrate their deterioration. Indeed, the ultimate Shakespeare villain – Iago in Othello – completes his treachery by refusing to recant or explain:
Demand me nothing. What you know, you know.
From this time forth I never will speak word.
(5.2.302-303)
But this willful silence only recognizes that Iago’s ability to speak compellingly has been deteriorating since the middle of the play. Likewise, one might notice that for all his hectic courage – and a soul far less ignoble than Iago’s – Macbeth ends the play (5.8) in bluster, speaking a harsh and old-fashioned language far from the fresh, expansive vocabulary, rhythms, and introspection of his beginnings.
Shakespeare compensates for this loss of language and ethical evaluation by bringing other voices strongly into play. In Othello, Othello recovers his grand language and Desdemona comes back even from death to speak eloquently on behalf of her beloved lord. Late in Macbeth, the language and actions of Malcolm and Macduff compensate for the loss of verbal richness from the Macbeths. But in this middle act and scene of the Scottish play, Shakespeare still loads King Macbeth’s language with a kind of hallucinatory and fearsome grandeur. Here, Macbeth’s intensive imagery conveys his restlessness and murderous fantasies: he imagines a snake slashed but not killed (13-15) and a whole universe “disjoint”; his “torture[d]” mind is frenzied in “restless ecstasy” (22), while Duncan in his grave “sleeps well,” now out of treason’s way. Though Lady Macbeth still claims that “what’s done is done” and warns that “You must leave this,” Macbeth knows full well that “O, full of scorpions is my mind, dear wife!” (36). To her frantic question, “What’s to be done?” – this from the woman who so insistently urged and planned the first murder – Macbeth, excluding her now from his own schemes, replies with a vast, satanic invocation to the spirits of wickedness:
Come, seeling night,
Scarf up the tender eye of pitiful day
And with thy bloody and invisible hand
Cancel and tear to pieces that great bond
Which keeps me pale. Light thickens,
And the crow makes wing to th’rooky wood;
Good things of day begin to droop and drowse,
Whiles night’s black agents to their preys do rouse.
(46-53)
Repeating the demon-invoking language of his wife – “make thick my blood” – and calling on night and the birds already established in the play as harbingers of other, more degraded worlds, Macbeth (like the witches with their “fog and filthy air”) thickens and darkens the play, the language, and the stage in ritual preparation for his second murder. è Voyager ëPalex ë ñVoyager ñ ∞Palex ∞ ≤Voyager ≤ €Palex € ›Voyager ›Palex Voyager 0Palex 01Voyager 1KPalex KPPalex PQPalex QXPalex X]Palex ]dPalex dePalex ehPalex hÆPalex ƵPalex µ∫Palex ∫ΩPalex ΩÍPalex ÍÒPalex ÒˆPalex ˆ˛Palex ˛ÖPalex ÖÜPalex Ü Palex ÀPalex À˜Palex ˜˚Voyager ˚ Palex Palex Palex Palex Palex Palex Palex Voyager !Palex !"Palex "-Palex -.Palex .1Palex 12Palex 25Palex 56Palex 6:Palex :;Palex ;=Palex =>Palex >@Palex @BVoyager BCPalex CDPalex DSPalex STPalex TVPalex VWPalex WaPalex abPalex bdPalex dePalex eiPalex ikVoyager ksPalex stPalex tvPalex vwPalex wzPalex z{Palex {Palex ÄPalex ÄàPalex àâPalex âåPalex åçPalex çóPalex óòVoyager ò¶Palex ¶ßVoyager ßPalex Palex `Palex `aPalex aiPalex ijPalex juPalex uvPalex v}Palex }~Palex ~Palex ÄPalex ÄÑPalex ÑÖPalex ÖáPalex áàPalex àèPalex èÕPalex ÕœVoyager œ˚Palex ˚˝Voyager ˝,Palex ,<Voyager <Palex Palex @Palex Palex @ Palex Palex @ #Palex #$Palex @$+Palex +,Palex @,0Palex 01Palex @1ÊPalex ÊÁVoyager Á `Palex ` gPalex g ÒPalex Ò ¯Palex ¯
