© Pearson Education, Inc., or its affiliates. All rights reserved.NOTESBanquo answers with questions to Macbeth: why does he fear what
seems so fair? Then he addresses the Sisters: “Are ye fantastical, or that
indeed / Which outwardly ye show?” (53–54). Are you what you appear
to be, or mere apparitions? Why do you speak to him and not to me?
If you can look into the seeds of time,
And say which grain will grow, and which will not,
Speak then to me, who neither beg nor fear
Your favors nor your hate.
(58–61)Here the rhythms reinforce the return to the original question: What
can be known of the future in the present? Him/me, grow/not grow,
beg/fear, favors/hate, even when they are not, as it were, necessary,
part of the substance, the oppositions and alternatives sound on
continually. “Lesser than Macbeth, and greater. / Not so happy, yet
much happier. / Thou shalt get kings, though thou be none” (65–67).
Macbeth calls the Sisters “imperfect speakers” (70), meaning that what
they say is not complete enough to be understood or to satisfy him.
But they vanish, leaving their imperfect speeches to be completed
according to taste: “Your children shall be kings. You shall be king”
(86). The “self-same tune” is now repetitively in our ears.
When Ross confirms Macbeth’s appointment as Thane of Cawdor,
Banquo’s reaction is to ask, “What, can the devil speak true?” (107).
And Macbeth begins the famous sequence of allusions to borrowed
or ill-fitting garments: “why do you dress me / In borrowed robes?”
(108–109). Banquo repeats the figure almost immediately (144–146).
Here these robes, if borrowed, must be on loan from the future, and
they confirm a devil’s prophecy, although the fiend as a rule “lies like
truth” (V.v.43). Banquo fears that this truth has been told to do harm:
“The instruments of darkness tell us truths, / Win us with honest
trifles, to betray ‘s / In deepest consequence” (I.iii.l24–126). And
Macbeth, contemplating a future in which he may have to murder in
order to fulfil the prophecy of kingship, speaks a long aside which
now completely establishes the rhythm of the interim:
This supernatural soliciting
Cannot be ill; cannot be good. If ill,
Why hath it given me earnest of success,
Commencing in a truth? I am Thane of Cawdor.
If good, why do I yield to that suggestion
Whose horrid image doth unfix my hair
And make my seated heart knock at my ribs,
Against the use of nature? Present fears
Are less than horrible imaginings:
My thought, whose murther yet is but fantastical,
Shakes so my single state of man that function
Is smother’d in surmise, and nothing is
But what is not.
(130–42)56392 UNIT 3 • FACING THE FUTURE, CONFRONTING THE PASTLIT17_SE12_U03_B2_SG.indd 392 11/18/15 2:48 PMFACILITATING
PERSONALIZE FOR LEARNING
Strategic Support
Proportion of Quotations to Essay Review
paragraph 6. Guide students to notice the
proportion of quoted material to the writer’s
own sentences on this page, and the way that
Kermode integrates the quotations into his own
ideas. This page is the heart of his essay, and
he relies heavily on Shakespeare’s own words to
make and support his points. This is characteristicof New Criticism, which seeks meaning in the
close reading of the text, as opposed to reliance
on outside factors such as historical context,
reader response, or cultural influences. Encourage
students to analyze other paragraphs within
this essay or in Brooks’s essay as a comparison.
Ask: Do you think the writers rely too heavily on
Shakespeare’s text? Why or why not?392 UNIT 3 • FACING THE FUTURE, CONFRONTING THE PAST
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