TEXT:
MACDUFF
What concern they?
The general cause? Or is it a fee-grief
Due to some single breast?
ROSS
No mind that's honest
But in it shares some woe; though the main part
Pertains to you alone.
MACDUFF
If it be mine,
Keep it not from me, quickly let me have it.
ROSS
Let not your ears despise my tongue for ever,
Which shall possess them with the heaviest sound
That ever yet they heard.
MACDUFF
Hum! I guess at it.
ROSS
Your castle is surprised; your wife and babes
Savagely slaughtered. To relate the manner,
Were, on the quarry of these murdered deer,
To add the death of you.
MALCOLM
Merciful heaven!
What, man! ne'er pull your hat upon your brows;
Give sorrow words: the grief that does not speak
Whispers the o'er-fraught heart and bids it break.
MACDUFF
My children too?
ROSS
Wife, children, servants, all
That could be found.
MACDUFF
And I must be from thence!
My wife killed too?
ROSS
I have said.
NOTES:
Surprise
The word is used only twice in the play - when Macbeth tells us that he will surprise Macduff’s castle, and now, as Ross tells us that it has happened. To us it seems like a fun word, but at its root is an element of taking, of seizing and of capturing. It’s an awful moment, and no accident that Shakespeare is so careful in his choice of words.
Seneca
As promised within the episode, here is the popular quote from Seneca’s Hippolytus: “Curae leves loquuntur, ingentes stupent.” Small problems speak, but great ones stay silent.
Montaigne
Michel de Montaigne (1533-1592) was a very influential French Renaissance philosopher. His Essays were widely available in English translation, and it has been maintained since at least the 1780s that Shakespeare could have read them. There are passages in The Tempest, for example, that seem like almost direct echoes of John Florio’s translation of the Essays, first published in 1603. It’s possible that - if Shakespeare didn’t know the aforementioned Seneca line from the Latin - there’s an echo of Florio’s version of it here.