TEXT:
Enter LADY MACBETH
LADY MACBETH
What’s the business,
That such a hideous trumpet calls to parley
The sleepers of the house? Speak, speak!
MACDUFF
O gentle lady,
'Tis not for you to hear what I can speak:
The repetition, in a woman's ear,
Would murder as it fell.
Enter BANQUO
O Banquo, Banquo,
Our royal master’s murdered.
LADY MACBETH
Woe, alas!
What, in our house?
BANQUO
Too cruel any where.
Dear Duff, I prithee, contradict thyself,
And say it is not so.
Re-enter MACBETH and LENNOX, with ROSS
MACBETH
Had I but died an hour before this chance,
I had lived a blessed time; for, from this instant,
There’s nothing serious in mortality:
All is but toys: renown and grace is dead;
The wine of life is drawn, and the mere lees
Is left this vault to brag of.
Enter MALCOLM and DONALBAIN
DONALBAIN
What is amiss?
MACBETH
You are, and do not know't:
The spring, the head, the fountain of your blood
Is stopped; the very source of it is stopped.
MACDUFF
Your royal father’s murdered.
MALCOLM
O, by whom?
LENNOX
Those of his chamber, as it seemed, had done’t:
Their hands and faces were an badged with blood;
So were their daggers, which unwiped we found
Upon their pillows:
They stared, and were distracted; no man’s life
Was to be trusted with them.
MACBETH
O, yet I do repent me of my fury,
That I did kill them.
NOTES:
Euphemism
Shakespeare uses various forms of euphemism in the play - there aren’t many jokes in Macbeth but one big laugh relies on it. Here, we see Lady Macbeth in particular using calculated language to describe her murderous plan. She never describes it plainly, but instead it becomes their “great business”. Their plan is that King Duncan be “provided for” - it’s all euphemism.
Apocalypse
One of the signs of the apocalypse, according to various biblical accounts, will be the sounding of a great - or hideous - trumpet. Lady Macbeth is using it as a hyperbole here, to hide her own knowledge of what is going on.
Parley
A parley is a kind of formal meeting between opposing sides in a conflict - usually military. A formal delegation from each side would meet to talk - hence “parley”, from the French parler, to speak - before battle was engaged. Again, Lady Macbeth is exaggerating, to heighten her surprise at this ungodly noise waking up all her houseguests.
Lees
The lees are the dregs left at the bottom of a bottle - or barrel - of wine. Ironically, after the Porter has conjured up a whole vision of hell here in the vaults of Castle Macbeth, the lord himself reduces the image to a wine-cellar, left empty now that all that is precious (King Duncan) has been put to waste.
Sir Thomas More - Utopia
It was the commentator Braunmuller who spotted the nod to More’s Utopia in this passage. “From the monarch, as from a never-failing spring, flows a stream of all that is good or evil over the whole nation”. Macbeth’s language is of abundance and of nourishment - wine and water both - all associated with Duncan, now dried up and barren with his death. Shakespeare himself knew the works of More enough to have contributed to a play about him. We don’t know an awful lot about who wrote which specific parts of Sir Thomas More, but what’s very interesting is that we have an apparent piece of text in Shakespeare’s own handwriting. “Hand D” in the manuscript is widely believed to be Shakespeare’s own. For more details of this, click here.
Succession
In Scotland’s distant past, kings were named by acclamation rather than by automatic succession. It was very common for a king’s son to take the throne on the death of his father, but it wasn’t absolutely guaranteed. Thus we have it that Malcolm is not automatically crowned king here: in fact this is the most tense moment of the play, because Malcolm seems to intuit that he’ll be suspected of his father’s murder. For the Macbeths, this will be an enormously helpful turn of events.