Macbeth 5: the end

This is the fifth in a series of essay on Macbeth for pupils studying the play. The first is on the crucial soliloquy ‘If it were done’, the second is on ‘The real Lady Macbeth’, the third on Malcolm the hero?; the fourth on the supernatural.

In the words of Frank Sinatra, And now, the end is near, And so I face the final curtain. This essay for pupils studying the play is about how Macbeth faces his end, and the impact on us as we watch the conclusion of the tragedy. The end of any tragedy is the moment which defines it as a tragedy (see how close Romeo and Juliet is to being a comedy, and how close King Lear is to working out to our satisfaction). I will start by looking at the key speech in Act V, and then broaden out my discussion of the end.  

The relevant speech is prompted by Macbeth asking Seyton (Satan?) what the cry of women offstage meant. Macbeth says before Seyton returns:

I have almost forgot the taste of fears;

The time has been, my senses would have cool'd

To hear a night-shriek; and my fell of hair

Would at a dismal treatise rouse and stir

As life were in't: I have supp'd full with horrors;

Direness, familiar to my slaughterous thoughts

Cannot once start me.

Wherefore was that cry?

These words of weariness, from a man who has travelled a long and tiring way from the start of the story, and is now utterly numbed by his experiences, lead us on the crucial speech. Seyton says The Queen my Lord is dead and then we hear Macbeth’s response:

 She should have died hereafter;

There would have been a time for such a word.

To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow,

Creeps in this petty pace from day to day

To the last syllable of recorded time,

And all our yesterdays have lighted fools

The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!

Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player

That struts and frets his hour upon the stage

And then is heard no more: it is a tale

Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,

Signifying nothing.

The first line is famously ambiguous. She would have died anyway? She picked the wrong time to die? In any case, what we can state for certain is that Macbeth does not do what we would expect most people in this situation to do. There is no breakdown, no wailing, no grief on show. In the second essay I traced his relationship with his wife, and so will not go over this again now. But, broadly speaking, despite living together they have become two wholly discrete individuals, living in two different universes, a long long away from being dearest partners.

The speech really begins with that haunting rhythmical line, tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow, a line weighed down with tiredness and big heavy vowels (yet another of the threes within the play: three witches, three apparitions, three Scottish kings). This was a man who once looked forward to tomorrows, to the bright future. Now that he has got there he can only see a meaningless succession of days stretching off into eternity. Now he sees that that promise was all just an illusion, just like one of the most memorable images in play, when he reaches out for the dagger in Act II scene i. And of course the play is full of things which turn out not to be what they seem.

Time itself has become treacle-slow. This man who once tried to o’erleap consequences, who was so excited about becoming king that he sent a letter to his wife even though he was already on his way to see her anyway and arrived mere minutes after it was delivered, now sees time as creeping in petty pace (little steps, no great o’erleaping there).  

In Act III scene iv he had said that I am in blood /   Stepp'd in so far that, should I wade no more, /  Returning were as tedious as go o'er. He has gone from wading to creeping: to day to day to - we expect day to complete the phrase echoing the three earlier tomorrows, but it actually turns with finality into the last syllable of recorded time. His past (as well as his future) now looks pointless too: All our yesterdays have lighted fools / The way to dusty death.

This presumably means he is a fool too, as he foresaw in the soliloquy in Act I scene vii that I looked at in the first essay. He knew he would be damned if he murdered the King.

Lady Macbeth’s life has been extinguished. She is woman who carries light by her continually, tis her command according to the doctor in the sleepwalking scene. But the brief candle to which Macbeth now refers seems to mean life itself.  The critic Stephen Booth calls this

a speech of which her death was the occasion but of which she no longer seems to be the subject.

Then comes a metaphor that Shakespeare uses more than once in his plays and poetry – the most obvious one for him to choose, the most personal of all – life as a drama in which we are actors, as Shakespeare himself was:

Life’s but a walking shadow a poor player

That struts and frets his hour upon the stage

And then is heard no more.

It turns out not to have meaning, purpose or shape: it is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.

In s sense this is Macbeth’s final speech. Of course he says more afterwards, but this is his wrapping up, the culmination of the thoughts of this most intensely thoughtful savage murderer. He does not have a death speech as such, like Othello or Hamlet or King Lear. In Act V scene viii he says little of interest before Macduff kills him.

Tony Nuttall in his book Shakespeare the Thinker writes of this passage that

This is almost an inverse mystical experience. While the great mystics speak of a world suddenly enhanced, blazing with fresh significance, Macbeth describes the draining away of all meaning from the universe … What is technically interesting about Macbeth’s speech on hearing of his wife’s death is that an intuition of universal meaninglessness should be at the same time an explosion of lyric power. 

This is the fascination, from a man who has both fascinated and appalled us from the start. Out of the exhaustion of the endgame, he drags a profoundly poetic response to his wife’s death, his own doomed future and the very nature of existence.  Just to show you how lyrically powerful Shakespeare’s lines are, here in contrast is what the famous actor David Garrick did with Macbeth’s end in 1744. He thought it wasn’t dramatic or eloquent enough, so he wrote himself a speech in the seconds before Macbeth was killed by Macduff, and here are those 8 lines: -

 Tis done! The scene of life will quickly close.

Ambition’s vain delusive dreams are fled,

And now I wake to darkness, guilt and horror.

I cannot bear it! Let me shake it off –

It will not be; my soul is clogged with blood –

I cannot rise! I dare not ask for mercy –

It is too late; hell drags me down; I sink,

I sink – my soul is fled for ever! O – O – (dies)

It would have been difficult not to giggle at that death. 

So what is our reaction to his death?  Shakespeare is trying to do an extraordinarily difficult thing in this play, to create a tragedy out of the story of a man who in real life we would be terrified by and would steer well clear of. In real life we would cheer his demise in the way that all of Scotland does. But instead there is a sense of loss. Macbeth could have been so much more. He was a kind of poet himself, as this speech shows, and as does much more of what he said, particularly in the first half of the play when we became intimate with him through his soliloquies.

In the 9 and a half lines of this speech Macbeth has more imaginative insight and linguistic brilliance than Malcolm, Macduff, Banquo and Duncan could gather all together in their lifetimes.  As we leave the theatre, we are not high-fiving each other with delight that at last that nice man Malcolm is rightfully on the throne (see Essay 3). Instead our heads are full of the images and words of someone who had great gifts, but who ended his life a mere walking shadow.