TEXT:
MACBETH
Prithee, see there! Behold! Look! Lo! How say you?
Why, what care I? If thou canst nod, speak too.
If charnel-houses and our graves must send
Those that we bury back, our monuments
Shall be the maws of kites.
GHOST OF BANQUO vanishes
LADY MACBETH
What, quite unmanned in folly?
MACBETH
If I stand here, I saw him.
LADY MACBETH
Fie, for shame!
MACBETH
Blood hath been shed ere now, i' the olden time,
Ere human statute purged the gentle weal;
Ay, and since too, murders have been performed
Too terrible for the ear: the times have been,
That, when the brains were out, the man would die,
And there an end; but now they rise again,
With twenty mortal murders on their crowns,
And push us from our stools: this is more strange
Than such a murder is.
LADY MACBETH
My worthy lord,
Your noble friends do lack you.
MACBETH
I do forget.
Do not muse at me, my most worthy friends,
I have a strange infirmity, which is nothing
To those that know me. Come, love and health to all;
Then I'll sit down. Give me some wine; fill full.
I drink to the general joy o' the whole table,
And to our dear friend Banquo, whom we miss;
Would he were here! To all, and him, we thirst,
And all to all.
Lords
Our duties, and the pledge.
NOTES:
Charnel Houses
The charnel house, where decomposing human remains were storied, was a rather grim aspect of life in Shakespeare’s time. He was certainly haunted by his memories of the charnel house in Stratford, and his intense but memorable meditation on the transience of life in Hamlet takes place amid disinterred human remains.
Kites
Macbeth is a play full of birds - here Macbeth mentions kites, birds of prey with a grim reputation for feasting on corpses. His point is that if graves and charnel houses will no longer contain the dead, we will all wind up buried in the stomachs of carrion birds.