Give Me A Ticket For An Aeroplane
I Ain’t Got Time To Take No Fast Train
Oh ,The Lonely Days Are Gone
I’m coming Home
My Baby She Wrote Me A Letter
( Lady Macbeth is reading a lettter from her husband Macbeth at the the opening of scene in which he informs her of the witches’ prophecy)
Glamis thou art, and Cawdor; and shalt be
What thou art promised: yet do I fear thy nature;
It is too full o’ the milk of human kindness
To catch the nearest way: thou wouldst be great;
Art not without ambition, but without
The illness should attend it: what thou wouldst highly,
That wouldst thou holily; wouldst not play false,
And yet wouldst wrongly win: thou’ldst have, great Glamis,
That which cries ‘Thus thou must do, if thou have it;
And that which rather thou dost fear to do
Than wishest should be undone.’ Hie thee hither,
That I may pour my spirits in thine ear;
And chastise with the valour of my tongue
All that impedes thee from the golden round,
Which fate and metaphysical aid doth seem
To have thee crown’d withal.
Enter a Messenger
What is your tidings?
Messenger
The king comes here to-night.
LADY MACBETH
Thou’rt mad to say it:
Is not thy master with him? who, were’t so,
Would have inform’d for preparation.
Messenger
So please you, it is true: our thane is coming:
One of my fellows had the speed of him,
Who, almost dead for breath, had scarcely more
Than would make up his message.
LADY MACBETH
Give him tending;
He brings great news.
Exit Messenger
The raven himself is hoarse
That croaks the fatal entrance of Duncan
Under my battlements. Come, you spirits
That tend on mortal thoughts, unsex me here,
And fill me from the crown to the toe top-full
Of direst cruelty! make thick my blood;
Stop up the access and passage to remorse,
That no compunctious visitings of nature
Shake my fell purpose, nor keep peace between
The effect and it! Come to my woman’s breasts,
And take my milk for gall, you murdering ministers,
Wherever in your sightless substances
You wait on nature’s mischief! Come, thick night,
And pall thee in the dunnest smoke of hell,
That my keen knife see not the wound it makes,
Nor heaven peep through the blanket of the dark,
To cry ‘Hold, hold!’
I have always been fascinated by the intense intimacy of the Macbeths. Their marriage is passionate and sexually alive.Their love is probably one of the most believable in literature, and raises lots of questions about dependency, summation and sex. Not to mention the question I always come back to in Macbeth: where are the lost babies of their marriage? Is it the childlessness of the couple that makes them so very dangerous, in that their violent murder of Duncan is a perverse form of ‘birth’ for the couple ?
But ironically this frenzied consummation in blood also destroys their intimacy forever. it is a degraded off -spring of their relationship and like a malevolent succubus corrodes away at all they previously had?
This scene reveals Macbeth’s need to share his experience of the witches even before he arrives home. So we see Lady Macbeth’s reaction to the prophecy unfold before our very eyes and this unfolding reveals both her precipitate and markedly homicidal nature!
It is also highly signficant that macbeth writes to his wife before he arrives home, so that she is primed to persuade him to kill. If their marriage is an intimate one, then it is highly likely that Macbeth wants to be persuaded to kill. He needs his wife’s energetic manipulation to get the deed done. If he is ‘innocent’ of such a need then that would suggest their marriage is less close and real?
We alll play games in relationships. This could be a case of a very extreme and dangerous one. Macbeth is known by his wife. He is too fiull of ‘kindness” therefore he writes to his wife whom he knows is not so brimming with good will and lo and behold; Duncan is dead.
Tlady Macbeth is a danger to herself too. Her lack of considered reflection anticipates the her ‘madness’ in the play. For Lady Macbeth lacks imagination: she has no insight into connotation and this lack costs her both her marriage and her life. I hesitate to talk of sanity as the frenzied way in which Lady Macbeth embraces thoughts of murder so quickly, worries me! This contrasts directly with the gradual ( relatively for this is a Shakespearean Tragedy so everything is relative to ‘real’ life chronology!) escalation of Macbeth’s reflection about killing King Duncan. the husband is torn with conscience before the act, the wife not at all.
And it is Macbeth of course who has killed before. His warrior status that is celebrated in the early stages of the play is an ironic marker to the bloody world of Scotland. Duncan’s first words refer to a ‘bloody man’..an ironic encapsulation of his government and the world of the play.
Remember he has ‘unseamed’ other warriors. He is the means by which Duncan has clung to power and he knows what it is to murder…’legitimately.’ He has exteranl outlest for his internal nightmares.
By contrast Lady Macbeth is gulity of not knowing herself! She has no idea about her own repressions. She believes her thoughts are without affect on the thinker. She fails to recognise the relationship between cause and affect. She is left at home after the murde
r to ponder the inescapable truth, that she has ‘killed’ the child of their passionate union and in doing so has kiled herself and him.