The assassin now asks himself whether the ocean is enough to wash Duncan’s
blood from his hand, and answers ‘No, this my hand will rather / The multitudi-
nous seas incarnadine / Making the green one red.’ The blood on his hand will
discolour the ocean: lavish polysyllables shrink to simple monosyllables: incarna-
dine to red. Macbeth eventually sinks to the level of the killer he sends to Fife, who
says ‘What, you egg!’ to MacDuff ’s little son before crushing this frail young life.
Toward the end, a man who was once a noble general abuses a servant as a ‘cream-
faced loon’.
It is a very bloody play. ‘Who would have thought the old man had so much blood
in him?’ asks Lady Macbeth. Macduff is from his mother’s womb ‘untimely ripped’.
This language is, as the Weird Sisters say, ‘thick and slab’. ‘Slab’ rhymes with ‘Bab’ and
‘Ditch-delivered by a drab’: the finger cut off a baby strangled at birth, an image as
horrible as Lady Macbeth’s volunteering that she would have dashed out the brains
of a baby at her breast rather than break a promise to murder a King.
Banquo’s speech about the blessed microclimate of Macbeth’s castle near
Inverness shows Shakespeare using dramatic language to do several things at once.
The guest of summer
The temple-haunting martlet, does approve,
By his loved mansionry, that the Heaven’s breath
Smells wooingly here; no jutty, frieze,
Buttress, nor coign of vantage, but this bird
Hath made his pendant bed and procreant cradle;
Where they most breed and haunt, I have observed
The air is delicate.There is delicacy in the language of this description of early summer after the breed-
ing season. We have heard the castle’s hostess rejoice that ‘The raven himself is
hoarse / That croaks the fatal entrance of Duncan / Under my battlements.’
Editors quote Psalm 84: ‘Yea, the sparowe hath founde her an house, and the swal-
lowe a nest for her, where she maie lay her yong: even by thine altars, o Lord of
hostes, my King, and my God.’ With his usual economy, Shakespeare gives us infor-
mation, reveals Banquo’s character, creates dramatic irony, and develops the theme
of innocence and cruelty. House-martins procreate, their nestlings shelter in the
cradles they build below the battlements under which Duncan enters. In the house
of the Macbeths he is killed for a kingdom which no son of the Macbeths will
inherit. There is no cradle, no procreation in his house, no future for it. This tender
natural imagery re-enters with the later exchange between Lady Macduff and her
son, her egg. Breeding birds and birds of prey again appear in the most painful lines
of the play, in Macduff ’s reaction to the news that his entire family has been killed.
He has no children. All my pretty ones?
Did you say all? O hell-kite! All?
What, all my pretty chickens and their dam
At one fell swoop?Macbethis a play about murder as a crime against nature and as a sacrilege.
Late Romances
Shakespeare ended his career with romance and tragicomedy. His plays do not state
his views, but his choice of subject indicates changing interests. In his last plays, he
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE 133