TEXT:
ACT I - SCENE V. Inverness. Macbeth's castle.
Enter LADY MACBETH, reading a letter
LADY MACBETH
'They met me in the day of success: and I have
learned by the perfectest report, they have more in
them than mortal knowledge. When I burned in desire
to question them further, they made themselves air,
into which they vanished. Whiles I stood rapt in
the wonder of it, came missives from the king, who
all-hailed me 'Thane of Cawdor;' by which title,
before, these weird sisters saluted me, and referred
me to the coming on of time, with 'Hail, king that shalt
be!' This have I thought good to deliver thee,
my dearest partner of greatness, that thou
mightst not lose the dues of rejoicing, by being
ignorant of what greatness is promised thee. Lay it
to thy heart, and farewell.'
Glamis thou art, and Cawdor; and shalt be
What thou art promised: yet do I fear thy nature;
It is too full o' the milk of human kindness
To catch the nearest way: thou wouldst be great;
Art not without ambition, but without
The illness should attend it: what thou wouldst highly,
That wouldst thou holily; wouldst not play false,
And yet wouldst wrongly win: thou'ldst have, great Glamis,
That which cries 'Thus thou must do, if thou have it;
And that which rather thou dost fear to do
Than wishest should be undone.' Hie thee hither,
That I may pour my spirits in thine ear;
And chastise with the valour of my tongue
All that impedes thee from the golden round,
Which fate and metaphysical aid doth seem
To have thee crowned withal.
NOTES:
Holinshed’s Chronicle
As early as the 1540s, a London printer called Reginald Wolfe wanted to publish a comprehensive history of the world. This would obviously be a massive undertaking, and indeed poor Wolfe died before he got anywhere close to completing it. The project morphed into a chronicle of the British Isles, and it is named instead after Raphael Holinshed, a writer employed by Wolfe to help out. Holinshed and a consortium of fellow writers completed the first edition in 1577, but thanks to censorship a complete version would not see print for a few hundred years. The Chronicles were used as source material for several famous works of the period - first among them Shakespeare’s histories, King Lear, Cymbeline and of course Macbeth.
Lady Macbeth
The historical Lady Macbeth - that is, the wife of the historical figure Macbeth - was called Gruoch. We know maddeningly little about her; we have no dates of birth or death, no useful information at all. Shakespeare seems to have invented this titan of a character from a very small reference in Holinshed’s chronicle: “The words of the three Weird Sisters also (of whom before ye have heard) greatly encouraged him hereunto; but specially his wife lay sore upon him to attempt the thing, as she was very ambitious, burning with an unquenchable desire to bear the name of a queen.”
The Humours
Although milk is certainly not one of them, the four humours date back at least to medicine in the time of Hippocrates. Ancient Greek medicine identified four humours - black bile (whose name in Greek gives us the word melancholy), yellow bile, phlegm and blood. Galen suggested that an excess of any of these led to one of four personality types as mentioned in the episode - melancholic, choleric, phlegmatic and sanguine. Although rejected by most of modern medicine, in this breakdown we do have the seeds that grew into personality indicators like the Meyers-Briggs test and its many off-shoots.
Francis Bacon
Francis Bacon, First Viscount St. Alban (1561-1626), an almost exact contemporary of Shakespeare, was a statesman and philosopher. The Advancement of Learning, mentioned in this episode, is among his more notable works, but he produced a great quantity of material. As with many of the sophisticated courtiers of Elizabethan England, a great many juicy rumours abound about his private life and even his dealings with the supernatural. He’s also a frequent candidate nominated by theorists desperate to find an alternative author for Shakespeare’s plays.