TEXT:
Enter SEYTON
SEYTON
What is your gracious pleasure?
MACBETH
What news more?
SEYTON
All is confirm'd, my lord, which was reported.
MACBETH
I'll fight till from my bones my flesh be hacked.
Give me my armour.
SEYTON
'Tis not needed yet.
MACBETH
I'll put it on.
Send out more horses; skirr the country round;
Hang those that talk of fear. Give me mine armour.
How does your patient, doctor?
Doctor
Not so sick, my lord,
As she is troubled with thick coming fancies,
That keep her from her rest.
MACBETH
Cure her of that.
Canst thou not minister to a mind diseased,
Pluck from the memory a rooted sorrow,
Raze out the written troubles of the brain
And with some sweet oblivious antidote
Cleanse the stuffed bosom of that perilous stuff
Which weighs upon the heart?
Doctor
Therein the patient
Must minister to himself.
MACBETH
Throw physic to the dogs; I'll none of it.
Come, put mine armour on; give me my staff.
Seyton, send out. Doctor, the thanes fly from me.
Come, sir, dispatch. If thou couldst, doctor, cast
The water of my land, find her disease,
And purge it to a sound and pristine health,
I would applaud thee to the very echo,
That should applaud again. - Pull't off, I say. -
What rhubarb, cyme, or what purgative drug,
Would scour these English hence? Hear'st thou of them?
Doctor
Ay, my good lord; your royal preparation
Makes us hear something.
MACBETH
Bring it after me.
I will not be afraid of death and bane,
Till Birnam forest come to Dunsinane.
Doctor [Aside]
Were I from Dunsinane away and clear,
Profit again should hardly draw me here.
Exeunt
NOTES:
Skirr
This obscure means something like ‘to ride quickly or pass through’. Shakespeare uses it here and in only one other text, Henry V:
Take a trumpet, herald;
Ride thou unto the horsemen on yon hill:
If they will fight with us, bid them come down,
Or void the field; they do offend our sight:
If they'll do neither, we will come to them,
And make them skirr away, as swift as stones
Enforced from the old Assyrian slings:
Besides, we'll cut the throats of those we have,
And not a man of them that we shall take
Shall taste our mercy. Go and tell them so.
Cast the water
This is a slight inside into Jacobean medicine. It was believed that extensive medical insights could be achieved by the analysis of urine. Macbeth wonders if the Doctor could do this for his land, Scotland.