ACT III
SCENE i
Modern editors have removed the anachronistic Lady Lennox from the First Folio’s stage direction list of people who enter (Whalen 68), since the lines assigned to “La” seem better for Lady Macbeth. In fact, although the Thane of Lennox and Rosse as Thane of Angus are both anachronistic (Asimov 159), de Vere was friends with the contemporaneous Lennoxes. Margaret, Countess of Lennox, was the mother of Lord Darnley, and her family owned the source of Macbeth, a manuscript not printed before the mid-19th century, William Stewart’s Buik of Croniclis of Scotland, the source Shakespeare favors over Holingshed (Anderson 72).
Banquo privately comments on the fact that Macbeth has now attained all that the weïrd sisters suggested: “Thou hast it now: King, Cawdor, Glamis, all, / As the weird women promised, and I fear / Thou play’dst most foully for ‘t” (III.i.1-3). But then so too are the prophecies about his line likely to come true; so although Banquo is often seen as the model of honor, moderately gleeful avarice is not entirely out of the question here. He takes the road Macbeth did not: passivity in the face of predictions.
Macbeth is planning a party and casually (but we know pointedly) says that he hopes Banquo will be coming, but Banquo’s taking a day trip, so Macbeth settles for a meeting tomorrow (III.i.22). He asks if Banquo’s son Fleance will accompany him. “Ay, my good lord. Our time does call upon ‘s” (III.i.36).
Macbeth provides the classic murder mystery set-up: “Let every man be master of his time / Till seven at night” (III.i.40-41). And he will spend this time “alone” (III.i.43).
Macbeth privately compares his problem with Banquo to Mark Antony’s with Octavius Caesar (III.i.55-56). He secretly rankles at the thought that Banquo’s “unlineal” hand (III.i.62) will snatch the throne he killed for: he’s achieved only a “fruitless crown” (III.i.60). “Did Elizabeth ever hear these words of Macbeth’s and, if so, what thoughts passed through her head?” (Beauclerk 382). Additionally, Macbeth’s “manliness” is occasionally called into question by his wife, so this is disappointingly standard male idiocy about breeding. Shakespeare has
manufactured [a] legend of Banquo, and it doesn’t really fit. Even Shakespeare can’t make it fit. Why should Macbeth be so upset over the possibility that Banquo’s posterity will succeed to the throne? Macbeth has no children of his own and therefore there is none of his posterity to be cheated. (Asimov 180)
Macbeth meets with two down-and-out men commissioned to murder Banquo and Banquo’s son Fleance. Apparently he already met them yesterday (III.i.73), and he now fans the fires of their blame on Banquo for making their lives a misery (no doubt similar to Claudius’ inciting of Laertes against Hamlet, and Trump about immigrants). Macbeth uses the trick he learned from Lady Macbeth: questioning their manhood (III.i.90ff). The emphasis on dogs in this scene (and others) may relate to Henry III’s great love for them (Clark 821), but Macbeth indicates debased sub-humanity by his sneering references. He refers to crummy dogs such as “mongrels” and “curs” and “demi-wolves” (III.i.92-93), the last a cross-breed specific to Scotland (Whalen, Macbeth 106).
With another blur of sex and violence, enlisting these murderers is even called “mak[ing] love” (III.i.123). In a bout of micromanaging, Macbeth mentions three or four times that he will presently acquaint these two with their ideal locations — “I will advise you where to plant yourselves” (III.i.128) — and that he’ll call upon them soon (III.i.138, 139).
SCENE ii
Historical Macbeth had many years of peaceful reign (Asimov 177); but in the play, “stress is hardening Macbeth” (Asimov 181). Lady Macbeth, worried that her husband is spending so much time alone brooding, tries to reassure him with a perpetually banal adage: “Things without all remedy / Should be without regard: what’s done, is done” (III.ii.11-12); “Neither then nor now is the psychology of this advice very sophisticated” (Macrone 181). Macbeth indicates that there is more to be done: “We have scorched the snake, not killed it” (III.ii.14). [Or “scotched” the snake, meaning slashed or notched.] Macbeth indicates he is tormented sleeplessness or by bad dreams (III.ii.21ff) — as was Oxford after returning from Scotland. But he is obviously keeping Lady Macbeth out of the loop on his latest treachery, and he will impress her later with his accomplishment. Another tender Macbeth term of affection emerges when he alludes to this next murder / love token: “Be innocent of the knowledge, dearest chuck, / Till thou applaud the deed” (III.ii.45-46). Macbeth gives a splendid apostrophe to the dusk:
Come, seeling night,
Scarf up the tender eye of pitiful day,
And with thy bloody and invisible hand
Cancel and tear to pieces that great bond
Which keeps me pale! Light thickens, and the crow
Makes wing to th’ rooky wood;
Good things of day begin to droop and drowse,
While night’s black agents to their preys do rouse.
Thou marvel’st at my words, but hold thee still;
Things bad begun make strong themselves by ill.
(III.ii.46-55).
SCENE iii
Surprisingly, a third murderer shows up, presumably since Macbeth didn’t trust just the two. But some interesting details come into play. (See Goddard, II 124-125.)
This third guy’s first word is “Macbeth.”
He hears horses before the others (and Macbeth seemed to have keen hearing recently).
He knows Banquo’s habits (III.iii.12), then catches himself and backpedals: “So all men do” (III.iii.13).
He recognizes Banquo before the others (III.iii.14) and asks, “Who did strike out the light?” (III.iii.19) — reminiscent of Claudius in Hamlet at a moment of guilt, and of Othello.
The third murderer is the one to be concerned, or worse, at Fleance’s escape (III.iii.20).
So, although most productions fill this role with one of Macbeth’s henchmen such as Rosse, is this Macbeth himself, micromanaging further?
SCENE iv
As the banquet commences, the first murderer privately reports the murder of Banquo to Macbeth, who shifts into the mode of dramatic poeticism over the escape of Fleance, which seems to be news to him (but it’s the kind of yammering that led to Lady Macbeth fainting in the previous act, perhaps to shut him up from protesting too much). And another problematic plot point: why should Fleance have fled instead of eventually making it back to daddy’s good friend Macbeth to have him track down the murderers (Asimov 182)?
Macbeth greets his guests and soon sees the Ghost of Banquo, “an embodied conscience, not to be stilled even by death” (Wells 288), at a feast among the lords. Lady Macbeth tries to smooth things over, implying that her husband has had fits of irrational ranting for most of his life: “my lord is often thus, / And hath been from his youth” (III.iv.52-53). She privately asks Macbeth, “Are you a man?” (III.iv.57) and accuses him of being “unmann’d in folly” (III.iv.72), dismissing his hallucination as another instance like his vision of “the air-drawn dagger” (III.iv.61). (When did he ever tell her about that? Another missing moment.)
But the horrors persist, leading to Macbeth’s nostalgic lament for the good old days: “The time has been / That when the brains were out, the man would die, / And there an end” (III.iv.77-79). Lady Macbeth tries to keep the party going, but Macbeth continues to rant insanely, challenging the Ghost: “If trembling I inhabit then, protest me / The baby of a girl” (III.iv.103-104) — reasserting the miserable definitions of masculinity and its opposite. He momentarily pulls it together: “I am a man again” (III.iv.107). But he continues to rant insanely until Lady Macbeth, realizing that “He grows worse and worse” (III.iv.116), must demand that the lords leave hastily (before Macbeth says too much). “Stand not upon the order of your going, / But go at once” (III.iv.118-119).
[In a production of the play at San Francisco’s Point Fort, intermission with snacks such as pita bread turned out not to be intermission but the banquet scene, and we the audience were all at the long table witnessing Macbeth’s mental deterioration. Most amusingly, the experience revealed an aspect of the drama that goes unexpressed: people forced to leave a banquet may at the last minute pocket a few treats.]
“It will have blood, they say; blood will have blood” (III.iv.121). When the guests are gone, Macbeth asks about the time. Lady Macbeth says that the night is “Almost at odds with the morning, which is which” (III.iv.125) — another equivocal inability to read and determine.
Macbeth brings up the issue of the absence of Macduff with Lady Macbeth. He’s got “an imagination so impatient with time’s workings that it always overprepares every event” (Bloom 528). Macbeth acknowledging about the lords that, like Burghley in “Shake-speare’s” time, “There’s not a one of them but in his house / I keep a servant fee’d” (III.iv.130-131). Macbeth recognizes that “I am in blood / Stepp’d in so far, that should I wade no more, / Returning were as tedious as go o’er” (III.iv.135-137). So he might as well go after Macduff — the source of his next paranoid suspicions.
Strange things I have in head, that will to hand,
Which must be acted ere they may be scann’d.
(III.iv.138-139)
Goddard (110) points out the similar lines from Hamlet:
And now I’ll do ‘t. And so he goes to heaven;
And so I am reveng’d. That would be scann’d.
(III.iii.74-75)
“The murderer of Duncan inherits Hamlet’s sensibility, his nervous irritability, his hysterical passion, his extraordinary gifts of visualization and imaginative expression” (Goddard, II 111). This is why Macbeth is the tragic figure here and the play. But Macbeth ends this scene saying to his wife, “We are yet but young in deed” (III.iv.143). Oh dear God!
SCENE v
This scene most feel is not by Shakespeare due to the tetrameter and the superfluity of Hecate, of the scene itself, and the inclusion of a song from a Thomas Middleton play. Hecate feels that she was professionally slighted by the other witches.
SCENE vi
Lennox and another lord report suspicions about Fleance, since he has fled, similar to suspicions about Duncan’s sons, the older of whom has made appeals to “the most pious Edward” the Confessor of England (III.vi.27). They seem to be exchanging the party line about all these matters, and they seem to know more than they feel safe saying openly in this national conspiracy of silence.
Lennox himself appears in none of the chronicles but here “behaves with the same fearful caution that the real Lennox was obliged to practice” after the murder of his son, Lord Darnley (Ogburn and Ogburn 786).
Macbeth, Act by Act
Macbeth Act III