Shakespeare on Toast: Getting a Taste for the Bard (24 page)

Scene 9

The London Underground

W
ell, there are plenty of things you could do with all those gaps and pauses, which is one of the reasons why Shakespeare is performed so much and his plays are open to endless interpretation. What is written below is my interpretation, and by no means do I list all the possible thoughts and feelings that may or may not be running through these two characters’ heads. It’s not a definitive analysis, it’s one of many.

If you’re a playwright and you’re writing in iambic pentameter, and you want your character to sound calm and sane and clear, you might write their speeches using clear and simple words, with thoughts that finish at the end of a line of metre.

Conversely, if you want to express a character’s angst, their stress, their worries and their confusion, yes, you could just have them say, ‘Ooh I’m feeling a little stressed and confused right now’, or you could have them talk about something completely different, but make them say it in a very complicated way. This is what Shakespeare does with Lady Macbeth’s first speech in this scene.

Let’s look at it:

The first two sentences are simple, and essentially say the same thing: what made them (the King’s guards) drunk, made me strong. What has exhausted them, has given me fire.

But wait a second – what kind of person repeats the same thing over and over? ‘To bed, to bed, to bed …’ as she says later in the play (once she’s gone mad). She’s telling us that she’s not nervous, that she’s been calmed by a quick swig of alcohol. And the metre, in two lines of ten, would support that. But she’s repeating herself, so maybe she is a
little
nervous. Then:

Hearke
means
listen. Peace
in this instance means
forget about it, it was nothing
. She hears a noise that makes her jump, completely belying her previous statement of boldness, not two lines before. She’s so nervous that a shrieking owl made her think it was the sound of the king dying. A curious line follows:

11 The fatall Bell-man, which giues the stern’st good-night.

Which is a pretty odd thing to say. After being scared by the owl, she starts talking about it in a melodramatic, poetic way. This is something that Lady seems to do a lot of (in her first meeting with Duncan in Act 1, Scene 6, she gets so nervous she ends her speech with the somewhat peculiar ‘We rest your hermits’). She’s reassuring herself, perhaps making a joke about the fact that it scared her, calling it a
fatal bellman
. An owl
was
said to be a harbinger of doom; hearing its call was considered bad luck. So if she is joking, it’s a very black humour. The ‘joke’ calms her, and in the next two lines of ten she thinks about her husband – has he killed Duncan yet? Is he about to? What about the guards? Will they catch him?

She tells us the guards are sleeping, and with the mid-line ending, excitedly interrupts herself to tell us she put
something in their drinks to make them sleep:

Perhaps she’s nervous, or proud of the part she played – whatever the reason, she remembers the drugs, then imagines Death and Nature fighting over the sleeping guards:

Immediately, her husband calls as he enters – he’s heard someone talking: this is one of Shakespeare’s clues. His two characters (unknowingly, in this instance) share a complete line of metre:

He wants the actors to pick up their cues here – to not let
there be a gap between one character speaking and the other. No pause, in other words, between Lady Macbeth saying
live, or dye
, and Macbeth entering and calling out.

This is indisputable: the scene is written in metre. The rhythm is bouncing along and the audience is tuned into it. If Macbeth doesn’t speak right on cue, it will upset the rhythm of the metre. If he does, the metrical rhythm can continue unbroken.

If Shakespeare had wanted a pause between the lines, he’d have put one in, as we’ll see in a moment. There’s a clearer example coming up, but this is the beginning of Shakespeare orchestrating the dramatic intensity of the scene, through the metre.

A moment ago I said that the two characters unknowingly share a line of metre. It seems clear from what’s said that when Macbeth calls ‘Who’s there? what hoa?’, Lady doesn’t see him, or perhaps doesn’t hear him properly, because she has a further six lines before they start talking to each other; plus the speech ends with her calling out and asking if it’s Macbeth approaching.

This is the first real unspoken stage direction from Shakespeare. He wants Macbeth onstage, perhaps in shock, but visible to the audience; and more to the point, out of sight of Mrs Macbeth.

Whatever it is that she thinks she heard when he called has scared her, and the one thing she didn’t talk about
directly in her previous speech (but seems to have been on her mind) she finally vocalises:

She’s still talking to the audience, and begins by saying
Oh no, the guards have woken, he hasn’t killed Duncan, he’s been caught and we’re going to get busted for trying to kill him, rather than actually killing him
. She carries on fretting to herself/the audience:

Worried that they have been caught in the act, she calls
hearke
again, interrupting her own fretting, thinking she heard a noise (she probably did hear something this time – perhaps her husband returning). Immediately, either reassuring us or herself, she tells us she placed the daggers carefully for Macbeth to find, implying everything should be going well …

A curious way to commit a murder, leaving the intended murder weapons for anybody to find. If she put the daggers in place, why didn’t she do it herself? As we heard in Act 1 of
Macbeth
, it’s at her insistence that they’re doing this at all. We hear her reason straight away: