TEXT:
MACBETH (continued)
Sirrah, a word with you: attend those men
Our pleasure?
ATTENDANT
They are, my lord, without the palace gate.
MACBETH
Bring them before us.
Exit Attendant
To be thus is nothing;
But to be safely thus. Our fears in Banquo
Stick deep; and in his royalty of nature
Reigns that which would be feared: 'tis much he dares;
And, to that dauntless temper of his mind,
He hath a wisdom that doth guide his valour
To act in safety. There is none but he
Whose being I do fear: and, under him,
My Genius is rebuked; as, it is said,
Mark Antony's was by Caesar. He chid the sisters
When first they put the name of king upon me,
And bade them speak to him: then prophet-like
They hailed him father to a line of kings:
Upon my head they placed a fruitless crown,
And put a barren sceptre in my gripe,
Thence to be wrenched with an unlineal hand,
No son of mine succeeding. If 't be so,
For Banquo's issue have I filed my mind;
For them the gracious Duncan have I murdered;
Put rancours in the vessel of my peace
Only for them; and mine eternal jewel
Given to the common enemy of man,
To make them kings, the seed of Banquo kings!
Rather than so, come fate into the list.
And champion me to the utterance! Who's there!
Re-enter Attendant, with two Murderers
Now go to the door, and stay there till we call.
Exit Attendant
NOTES:
Sirrah
Sirrah is an address for a man or a boy, usually said by a social superior. So, Macbeth speaking to his attendant here. Or Orsino speaking to Viola in Twelfth Night. It isn’t always contemptuous, but it invariably reminds us of a difference in status between two characters.
Without
The word comes to us from the Old English wiðutan "outside of, from outside," literally "against the outside”. It is the opposite of “within”.
Antony and Cleopatra
This extraordinary play was written during the same year that Shakespeare wrote Macbeth AND King Lear. All three plays navigate very turbulent political currents - for a rollicking read about the context in which Shakespeare wrote them, I cannot recommend highly enough James Shapiro’s book 1606 - The Year of Lear. Utterly remarkable reading.
Caesar
In this. context, Caesar refers to Octavian, who would eventually become the emperor Caesar Augustus.
Genius
In this context genius is something like an “animating spirit” - not quite as defined as, say, in His Dark Materials wherein it is expressed as an actual animal. But one’s daemon, or genius, or better angel… that kind of thing. The sense of one’s soul and one’s genius being almost physical entities - and therefore in need of care and protection - looms very large over the play.
Gripe
There’s a terrific etymological lineage for this word, meaning something like grasp, or clutch. In Old English it was grīpan, which became grijpen (Dutch), greifen (German) and then in English we wind up with grip and grope. And somewhere in the past we also had gripe.
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 Malcolm is not automatically crowned king; after the murder and the flight of the princes, Macbeth is chosen instead.
Chalice
A chalice is a goblet, a kind of footed cup. Invariably ceremonial, they are most often associated with the sacrament of communion in the Christian church, in which the wine is converted into Christ’s blood. We also associate it with the idea of a “poisoned chalice” - which is a gift or reward that may seem good but turns out to have a negative effect. The phrase is first used here in Macbeth!
Satan
Here Macbeth refers to “the common enemy of man”: he means Satan, who is the enemy of all mankind and therefore their “common enemy”. Macbeth believes he has sold his soul to Satan by killing Duncan.
Lulach
Poor Lulach, Macbeth’s stepson, has a series of rather miserable epithets. In Gaelic he’s nicknamed Tairbith, “the unfortunate”, and elsewhere as Lulach the Fatuus (or foolish). He reigned Scotland between August 1057 and March 1058. Not a reign for the ages, but Lulach mac Gille Coemgáin deserves to be remembered despite his absence from Holinshed and, indeed, from Shakespeare.
Trial by Combat
At the beginning of Richard II, Thomas Mowbray and Henry Bolingbroke (who will be Henry IV by the end of the play) are at each other’s throats and so King Richard decrees that they should settle their grievances via a trial by combat. Macbeth here is seeming to call on Fate for a comparable match.
Randle Cotgrave
We don’t know a great deal about Randle - or Randal - Cotgrave. Most likely from Cheshire, he was educated at Cambridge and was a secretary to William Cecil, Lord Burghley. His great work - dedicated to Lord Burghley - was his Dictionarie of the French and English Tongues in 1611. Conveniently this includes a definition of outrance, as described in the episode.
Murderers
What does a murderer’s costume look like? You tell me…