Act V: Scene 5
Summary
Now fully
armed, Macbeth confidently turns all his scorn on the advancing armies, only to
find his brave rhetoric interrupted by an offstage shriek. The queen is dead —
whether by her own hand is not made clear — and Macbeth is left to contemplate
a lonely future of endless tomorrows "signifying nothing." Yet
another blow comes with the announcement that Birnam Wood appears to have
uprooted itself and is even now advancing towards Dunsinane. Again Macbeth
recalls the prophecies of Act IV, sure of, but still wishing to deny, their
powerful truth.
Analysis
This scene,
like Scene 3, starts with a bold imperative: "Hang out our banners on the
outward walls." Macbeth's speech is warlike and defiant, his strength
mirrored in that of the castle and men who surround him; his curse on the enemy
vivid and graphic in its use of metaphor: "Here let them lie / Till famine
and the ague (disease) eat them up . . . " (3-5). But the curse is empty
rhetoric: In his play Troilus and Cressida, written two or three years earlier,
Shakespeare had written that man's ambitious appetite for power, once it has
preyed on everything in its path, can eat up only itself. Power-seeking tyrants
tend toward self-destruction; if this curse falls on anyone, it's likely to be
the curser.
At this
point, Macbeth hears a heart-stopping scream. While a servant is dispatched to
find the cause, Macbeth confesses in a brief soliloquy that such noises no
longer have the power to frighten him. The audience recalls other noises: the
owl-shriek that Lady Macbeth heard during Duncan's murder; the voice that
Macbeth heard crying "Macbeth shall sleep no more!" and the fateful
knocking at the door, all in Act II, Scene 2. But in a phrase that calls to
mind the banquet scene (Act III, Scene 4), Macbeth admits that he has
"supp'd full with horrors" and that his familiarity with slaughter
means that such sounds can no longer amaze him.
The report of
Lady Macbeth's death perhaps comes as no surprise, either to Macbeth or to
Shakespeare's audience. The word "hereafter" recalls the
"hereafter" of the Witches' first prophecy; their
"hereafter" was the future that Macbeth was to inherit as king. But
the word also refers, ironically, to the heavenly "hereafter," which
Macbeth seems intent on denying for himself. In the hands of a sensitive actor
or director, this exact word is what triggers the poetic outpouring on the
nature of Time, which follows it.
The famous
lines "Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow" have a resigned, almost
wistful tone to them, occasioned not only by the death of his wife but also by
Macbeth's entire loss of purpose. Although there is perhaps an underlying
bitterness at lost opportunity in the words "petty,"
"fools," "frets" and "idiot," for a man who has
received such desperate news, this is not a desperate speech. In fact, compared
with some of Macbeth's earlier "set pieces," its rhetoric is
controlled, its metaphors precise: Time is like a path to "dusty
death," and our lives are as "brief" as a candle. We are like shadows,
or actors, on the stage of life. Again, the question occurs, as it did in Act
I, Scene 7: How can a man who is capable of such poetic thought act as he does?
Macbeth's
musings on this topic are cut dead by still another message, which reports what
the audience already knows, the fulfillment of the second prophecy, the
movement of the woods. Once again, Macbeth's response is both angry and
reflective: "I . . . begin to doubt th'equivocation of the fiend — / That
lies like truth . . . " (42-44).
To the
servant, he must hotly deny the truth he has been told — to keep his public
appearance and satisfy his own doubt — but he must also secretly accept the
truth of the prophecy, even if logic persuades him that a moving wood is a lie.
It is an understandably human reaction to such a paradoxical problem that
Macbeth admits that he is literally stuck — "There is no flying hence, nor
tarrying here" (48) — or, in his words from Act III, Scene 4,
"Returning were as tedious as go o'er." On a psychological as well as
a military level, Macbeth can neither move forward nor backward, neither
advance nor retreat.
In this case,
and with his gaze firmly fixed on the universe as a whole, Macbeth can only
call, like King Lear, on the elements themselves: "Come wind, blow
wrack!" he cries. It is the bold cry of a hopeless man.
Glossary
ague (4)
disease
forc'd (5)
reinforced
fell of hair
(11) the hair on my flesh
treatise (12)
tale
sooth (40)
truthfully
estate of
things (40) the physical frame of the universe
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