Shakespeare on Toast: Getting a Taste for the Bard (26 page)

If the previous lines are performed to follow the metre,
and the intensity is there, then Lady Macbeth’s ‘I’ followed by the silence as they listen, followed by Macbeth’s call of ‘Hearke!’ (
shut up and listen
) might get a laugh from the audience. It
is
kinda silly. Them both standing there quietly, carefully listening, and then he says
Shush!
Master dramatist that he is, Shakespeare often places moments of comedy in moments of great tragedy, and vice versa. Make your audience laugh, and you’ll make them cry even harder.

So they listen for another 4½. Then something makes him think: Who’s sleeping next door to Duncan? Could that be what we think we can hear? Did someone sleeping next door hear the murder and wake up? Lady Macbeth finishes the line of metre, answering immediately:

Why does she answer immediately? Why isn’t there a pause after
Chamber
? The metre demands that Lady comes in on cue, and, bearing in mind that this is her house (well, castle), and they’ve planned to murder the king, of course she’s going to know who’s sleeping where.

He replies to her answer of ‘Donalbaine’ with a very sad line, ‘This is a sorry sight’. We know he isn’t showing her that he’s brought the daggers back with him, because she doesn’t seem to see them until the rather straightforward line of ten a bit later on: ‘Why did you bring these daggers from the place?’

Perhaps they’re still far away from each other onstage. It’s very likely to be quite dark – why would the torches still be lit so late at night when everyone should be in bed? Perhaps he’s staring at his bloody hands, thinking of Donalbaine (Duncan’s son) now sleeping next door to his dead father. Perhaps he’s talking about the two of them, terrified of being caught, condemned to an eternity in hell even if they do survive long enough to rule as king and queen for a few years. Whatever action is taking place, after he says ‘This is a sorry sight’, there’s a pause of two beats before she responds with another line of ten syllables.

That’s a stupid thing to say
, she says, after a moment’s pause. Perhaps she’s getting control of her nerves more quickly than he is. If he were to reply in likewise fashion, in a line of ten, we might think he was calming down too. But he doesn’t.

He goes from one extreme to another, a line of six syllables (and so a pause of four) then a line of twelve. Then an eleven, followed by an eight. He’s metrically all over the place, so the actor should take that as the cue for Macbeth’s mental state too; he’s having trouble recounting the story to her.

There’s a short pause, again, before Lady Macbeth says something rather odd:

If you think about it, that really is quite an odd thing to say. Macbeth has been talking about the guards, so although Lady’s comment (if she’s referring to the guards) isn’t entirely out of context, it’s the kind of thing you’d expect your grandmother to say after one too many glasses of port.
Perhaps she means the ‘two lodg’d together’ (
two sleeping in the same room
) are the noise she heard earlier. Perhaps it’s simply an affirmation of what her husband said. But she waits a beat to say it, and then there’s another pause before he speaks. For some reason, her comment seems listless.

Then there’s yet another pause before Macbeth says something else – he talks about the guards. So it seems they
are
both talking about the guards, but there’s something not quite right about what they’re saying.

Then it hits you. They’re not really listening to each other:

They’re both talking, and you assume (as there isn’t anyone else there to talk to, other than the audience) that they’re talking to each other. But, rather sadly, they seem trapped in their own thoughts and fears.

The next part is heartbreaking. Macbeth, when he approached Duncan’s room, heard the guards’ call
God bless us
, and the normal response
Amen
, but wasn’t able to join in. Which is probably just as well, as he wouldn’t have wanted to wake them. Waking them doesn’t seem as important to him as the blessing, though, and you can almost hear his desperation in the alliterative
H
angmans
h
ands
:

After a line of seven, he stops, cannot continue speaking. Lady sees him struggle, and says
Don’t think so much about it
. Then there’s a pause before, out of the depths of himself, Macbeth asks her again.

He asks her in two careful lines of ten, but it has taken him that pause beforehand to summon up the energy to spit it out. (Note that the important word
Blessing
has a capital
B
in the Folio spelling.)

He doesn’t finish, perhaps can’t finish his third line of metre, and Lady jumps in, finishing the line of ten and adding another. Her two lines of ten could be seen as her taking control, but how right she is.
Don’t think about what you’ve done in this way, or it will drive us mad
…

And, as you may know, so it does …

This is what separated Shakespeare off from his contemporaries. They all knew about
stichomythia
, the Greek term for rapid fire dialogue, but nobody took it down to the level of words and breaths, with his accuracy and ostentation. He wrote speech, not speeches
.

Dominic Dromgoole, Artistic Director of Shakespeare’s Globe, from his book
Will and Me
, 2006