MYPNA_TE_G12_U3_web.pdf

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NOTES

reflect the development of the play. For example, Banquo says to the

Weird Sisters, early in the play:

If you can look into the seeds of time,

And say which grain will grow and which will not,

Speak then to me....

A little later, on welcoming Macbeth, Duncan says to him:

I have begun to plant thee, and will labor

To make thee full of growing.

After the murder of Duncan, Macbeth falls into the same metaphor

when he comes to resolve on Banquo’s death. The Weird Sisters, he

reflects, had hailed Banquo as

... father to a line of kings.
Upon my head they placed a fruitless crown,
And put a barren scepter in my gripe....

Late in the play, Macbeth sees himself as the winter-stricken tree:

I have liv’d long enough: my way of life

Is fall’n into the sear, the yellow leaf....

The plant symbolism, then, supplements the child symbolism. At

points it merges with it, as when Macbeth ponders bitterly that he has

damned himself

To make them kings, the seed of Banquo kings!

And, in at least one brilliant example, the plant symbolism unites

with the clothes symbolism. It is a crowning irony that one of the

Weird Sisters’ prophecies on which Macbeth has staked his hopes

is fulfilled when Birnam Wood comes to Dunsinane. For, in a sense,

Macbeth is here hoist on his own petard. Macbeth, who has invoked

night to “Scarf up the tender eye of pitiful day,” and who has, again

and again, used the “false face” to “hide what the false heart doth

know,” here has the trick turned against him. But the garment which

cloaks the avengers is the living green of nature itself, and nature

seems, to the startled eyes of his sentinels, to be rising up against him.

But it is the babe, the child, that dominates the symbolism. Most

fittingly, the last of the prophecies in which Macbeth has placed his

confidence, concerns the child: and Macbeth comes to know the

final worst when Macduff declares to him that he was not “born of

woman” but was from his “mother’s womb / Untimely ripp’d.”

The babe here has defied even the thing which one feels may

reasonably be predicted of him—his time of birth. With Macduff’s

pronouncement, the unpredictable has broken through the last shred

of the net of calculation. The future cannot be trammeled up.^4 The

naked babe confronts Macbeth to pronounce his doom.

4. trammeled up restrained.

8

9

388 UNIT 3 • FACING THE FUTURE, CONFRONTING THE PAST

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FACILITATING

DIGITAL PERSPECTIVES

Illuminating the Text Discuss paragraph 8 with

students. Encourage students to close read

Brooks’s phrase “hoist on his own petard,” a

phrase he borrows from Shakespeare’s Hamlet

(Act III, Scene iv, line 207). Have students find

photographs or drawings of petards, small

bombs used to blowing up gates and walls when

breaching forts, dating from sixteenth century

France. They typically contained five pounds or so

of gunpowder with slow-burning cord or twine

for a fuse. The idiom means, therefore, “to be

hurt or destroyed by one’s own plot or device

intended for another,” or “to be blown up by

one’s own bomb.” Ask: Why is this an apt turn of

phrase to use in this paragraph which interprets

Birnam Wood coming to Dunsinane?

Additional English Language Support

is available in the Interactive Teacher’s

Edition.

388 UNIT 3 • FACING THE FUTURE, CONFRONTING THE PAST

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