TEXT:
BANQUO (continued)
And when we have our naked frailties hid,
That suffer in exposure, let us meet,
And question this most bloody piece of work,
To know it further. Fears and scruples shake us:
In the great hand of God I stand; and thence
Against the undivulged pretence I fight
Of treasonous malice.
MACDUFF
And so do I.
ALL
So all.
MACBETH
Let's briefly put on manly readiness,
And meet i' the hall together.
ALL
Well contented.
Exeunt all but Malcolm and Donalbain.
MALCOLM
What will you do? Let's not consort with them:
To show an unfelt sorrow is an office
Which the false man does easy. I'll to England.
DONALBAIN
To Ireland, I; our separated fortune
Shall keep us both the safer: where we are,
There's daggers in men's smiles: the near in blood,
The nearer bloody.
MALCOLM
This murderous shaft that's shot
Hath not yet lighted, and our safest way
Is to avoid the aim. Therefore, to horse;
And let us not be dainty of leave-taking,
But shift away: there's warrant in that theft
Which steals itself, when there's no mercy left.
Exeunt
NOTES:
Bloody
The word bloody has a rather confusing history. In many of Shakespeare’s plays we encounter the word “sblood” - a minced oath. One could not actually say “God’s blood” or “Christ’s blood” because this was a sin and a profanity, and so the shortened version was acceptable for dramatic purposes. By the 1670s or so, bloody - barely connected to the minced oath - had come into fairly common use as an intensifier. “Bloody good job” and so on. It lasted for the guts of a century, but by the 1750s it became terribly taboo, and was ranked among the foulest possible language in English. It stayed that way for nearly two centuries - so, for instance, when Eliza Doolittle uses it in Shaw’s original play Pygmalion, it was considered truly scandalous (and extremely funny). The tamed down version in the stage musical My Fair Lady isn’t nearly as shocking. By the 1920s, that period of Anything Goes, anything went. And bloody came back to a more moderate place - intense, but no longer outrageous. Macbeth’s reputation as a dark and appalling play could only have been compounded by the number of times the word bloody appears in it, even though, in this instance, it’s invariably a adjective describing actual blood! But I think we can all agree - it’s a bloody good play regardless.
Ireland
If Macbeth had been an Elizabethan rather than a Jacobean play, Donalbain’s departure for Ireland would have been a far more significant moment, laden with a very different contemporary resonance. Throughout Elizabeth’s reign, Ireland had been a thorn in her side, and various rebellions and disasters plagued her political and personal life. However, by the time of Macbeth in 1606, Ireland was less of a political hot topic, and so it’s only a footnote - and an accurate piece of history - that Donalbain went into hiding in Ireland after Duncan’s death.
Donalbain
I’ve always had a soft spot for Donalbain, or Donald III, or Domhnall Bán (literally Daniel the Fair, or Daniel the White) in Gaelic. He really did go to Ireland, for about seventeen years - but what we get NO sense of in the play is that he actually became King of Scots himself! The lineage of the period is rather difficult to follow, thanks to an improbable number of men all called Duncan or Malcolm, but during the 1090s Donalbain became king not once but twice.