Acquaint you with the perfect spy o' the time17, 2 Mur. SCENE II. The same. Another Room. Enter LADY MACBETH, and a Servant. Lady M. Is Banquo gone from court? leisure Where our desire is got without content: Enter МАСВЕТН. How now, my lord? why do you keep alone, 1 i. e. the exact time when you may look out or lie in wait for him. 18 always thought That I require a clearness.' 'Always remembering that I must stand clear of suspicion.' Sorriest, most melancholy. す With them they think on? Things without remedy, Both the worlds suffer, Ere we will eat our meal in fear, and sleep In the affliction of these terrible dreams That shake us nightly: Better be with the dead, reace Whom we, to gain our place 2, have sent to peace, Than on the torture of the mind to lie In restless ecstasy3. Duncan is in his grave; Can touch him further! Lady M. Come on; gentle my lord, Sleek o'er your rugged looks; be bright and jovial Macb. So shall 1, love; And so, I pray, be you: let your remembrance4 Apply to Banquo: present him eminence5, both You must leave this. Macb. O, full of scorpions is my mind, dear wife! Thou know'st, that Banquo, and his Fleance, lives. 2 The first folio reads peace. The second folio place. 3 Ecstasy in its general sense signifies any violent emotion or alienation of the mind. The old dictionaries render it a trance, a dampe, a crampe. Vide note on The Tempest, Act iii. Sc. 3, p. 64. 4 Remembrance is here employed as a quadrisyllable. 5 Present him eminence, do him the highest honour. 6 The sense of this passage (though clouded by metaphor, and perhaps by omission) appears to be as follows:-It is a sign that our royalty is unsafe, when it must descend to flattery, and stoop to dissimulation.' The present arrangement of the text is by Malone. Lady. M. But in them nature's copy's not eterne'. Macb. There's comfort yet; they are assailable; Then be thou jocund; Ere the bat hath flown His cloister'd flight; ere, to black Hecate's summons, The shard-borne beetles, with his drowsy hums, Hath rung night's yawning peal, there shall be done A deed of dreadful note. Lady M. What's to be done? Macb. Be innocent of the knowledge, dearest chuck, Till thou applaud the deed. Come, seeling9 night, Skarf up the tender eye of pitiful day; And, with thy bloody and invisible hand, crow Ritson has justly observed that 'Nature's copy' alludes to copyhold tenure; in which the tenant holds an estate for life, having nothing but the copy of the rolls of his lord's court to show for it. A life-hold tenure may well be said to be not eternal. The subsequent speech of Macbeth, in which he says, Cancel and tear to pieces that great bond,' confirms this explanation. Many of Shakspeare's allusions are to legal customs. 8 That is the beetle borne along the air by its shards or scaly wings. Steevens had the merit of first showing that shard or sherd was the ancient word for a scale or outward covering, a case or sheath: as appears from the following passage cited by him, from Gower's Confessio Amantis, b. vi. fol. 138: 'She sigh, her thought a dragon tho, And again in book v. speaking of a serpent:- It held all edge tool without.* In Cymbeline Shakspeare applies this epithet again to the beetle : --we find The sharded beetle in a safer hold Than is the full-winged eagle.' A similar description of the beetle occurs in Chapman's Eugenia, 1614: the beetle -there did raise With his Irate wings his most unweildie paise; And with his knollike humming gave the dor Of death to men.' i. e. blinding; to seel up the eyes of a hawk was to close them by sewing the eyelids together. 10 So in Cymbeline : Vol. IV. 'Cancel his bond of life, dear God, I pray.` 11 * here Makes wing to the rooky wood11: Good things of day begin to droop and drowse; SCENE III. The same. Coll: if Park, with a lead A Park or Lawn, with a Gate leading to the Palace. [A Enter three Murderers. 1 Mur. But who did bid thee join with us? Macbeth. 2 Mur. He needs not our mistrust; since he de livers Our offices, and what we have to do, To the direction just. 1 Mur. Then stand with us. The west yet glimmers with some streaks of day: To gain the timely inn; and near approaches 3 Mur. Hark! I hear horses. Then it is he; the rest Ban. [Within.] Give us a light there, ho! 2 Mur. 11 By the expression, light thickens, Shakspeare means that it is growing dark. Thus in Fletcher's Faithful Shepherdess : 'Fold your flocks up, for the air Spenser in the Shepherd's Calendar has: the welkin thicks apace.' : Notwithstanding Mr. Steevens's ingenious attempts to explain the -E pastu decedens agmine magno 12 See note on King Richard III. Act iv. Sc. 1. That are within the note of expectation1, 1 Mur. His horses go about. Enter BANQUO and FLEANCE, a Servant with a Ban. O, treachery! Fly, good Fleance, fly, fly, fly; Thou may'st revenge. O slave! [Dies. Fleance and Servant escape2, escapis 3 Mur. Who did strike out the light? 1 Mur. SCENE IV. A Room of State in the Palace. Enter MACBETH, LADY MACBETH, ROSSE, LENOX, Macb. You know your own degrees, sit down: And last, the hearty welcome. i. e. they who are set down in the list of guests, and expected to supper. 2 Fleance, after the assassination of his father, fled into Wales, where, by the daughter of the prince of that country, he had a son named Walter, who afterwards became Lord High Steward of Scotland, and from thence assumed the name of Sir Walter Steward. From him, in a direct line, King James I. was descended; in compliment to whom Shakspeare has chosen to describe Banquo, who was equally concerned with Macbeth in the murder of Duncan, as innocent of that crime. 1 'At first and last." Johnson with great plausibility proposes to read To first and last.' |