EDGAR: What, in ill thoughts again? Men must endure
Their going hence even as their coming hither.
Ripeness is all. Come on.
GLOC: And that’s true too. 10
Exit Edgar guiding Gloucester
Edgar’s farewell in line 3 means that he will do or die. The blind Gloucester’s prayers,
if any, are not answered; Edgar brings him no comfort. Gloucester wishes to stay, not
caring whether he is captured. But Edgar will not let his father despair; he reminds
him that men must be ready to die, not choose the moment of their death. The brunt
of the scene is given in lines 6 and 10. But the tree adds much: the tree, linked with
the words ‘rot’ and ‘ripeness’, raises the kindness of lines 1–4 and the wisdom of lines
8–10 to something consciously Christian. The tree helps Edgar remind us that men,
like fruit, do not choose to enter the world; and that men must not choose to fall and
rot, but be ready for the death God sends. With a tree and some simple words – and
with no mention of trees in Eden or on Calvary – much can be done in ten lines.
Shakespeare went no deeper in tragedy than King Lear.Macbeth,Antony and
Coriolanus are later, not darker. Although Macbeth’s vivid soliloquies take us so
intensely into his mind, his evil is far graver than Lear’s arrogance, and the poetic
justice refused at the end ofLear is inevitable in Macbeth.Macbe th
Macbeth(1605–6), the shortest of the tragedies, is addressed in part to the new King,
James,who was Shakespeare’ s patron since he was now one of the King’s Men. When
James was one year old,Queen Elizabeth had executed his mother, Mary Queen of
Scots,whose claim to the throne was as good as Elizabeth’s. Regicide and succession
were inter esting topics in 1601; in 1603, when James succeeded; at the time of the
play’s composition in 1605, with the Gunpowder Plot; and 1606, with its trials and
executions. ‘Assassination’ is a word first recorded in Macbeth, but the thing was not
new. J ames’s father, Darnley, had been blown up, then smothered; and his mother’s
supposed lover, David Rizzio, had been taken from the presence of his mother, then
pregnant with him, and murdered in the next room.
James had encouraged English Catholics to expect better treatment than they had
experienced in Elizabeth’s later years; but after he had made peace with Spain, he
went back on his promises. James had escaped assassination in Scotland, and
escaped it again on 5 November 1605, along with his eldest son, the House of Lords,
and many judges,who were to have been blown up by Guy Fawkes and his desper-
ate associates. But the plot had been penetrated and was prevented.
Before the murder, Macbeth acknowledges that his lord and guest is not a tyrant.
The sacredness of the king’s person is emphasized by the man who discovers and
reports the murder, Macduff:
Most sacrilegious murder hath broke ope
The Lord’s anointed temple, and stole thence
The life of the building.
The image is that of a desecrated temple. Like all English monarchs since Edgar,
James had been anointed at his coronation, following the precedents of Saul and
David, kings of Israel. The king’s body is the Lord’s anointed temple, and the life
which has been stolen from it is sacred. The act of regicide is invested with the
horror felt by some Christians on seeing a tabernacle desecrated on an altar.132 4 · SHAKESPEARE AND THE DRAMA