In the intervals between orgies of televised basketball viewing I've been perusing Macbeth, which my 10th-grader is reading for English class. I thought maybe we'd discuss it like adults, but she mainly has complaints:
What the hell does this mean?
And this?
And this?
What are they talking about? I thought this was English class.
Here's a passage she hasn't mentioned, from Act I, Scene iv:
KING
Is execution done on Cawdor? Are not
Those in commission yet returned?
MALCOLM
My liege,
They are not yet come back. But I have spoke
With one that saw him die, who did report
That very frankly he confessed his treasons,
Implored your Highness' pardon and set forth
A deep repentance: nothing in his life
Became him like the leaving it. He died
As one that had been studied in his death,
To throw away the dearest thing he owed
As 'twere a careless trifle.
KING
There's no art
To find the mind's construction in the face:
He was a gentleman on whom I built
An absolute trust.
Enter Macbeth . . . .
O worthiest cousin!
And for several lines the king fawns on Macbeth, who in the next act will murder him. Enter another gentleman on whom the king had built an absolute trust! I don't know how many times my eyes had passed over these words without communicating to my brain the force of that stage direction.
The effect is to link the new Thane of Cawdor with the one who made a good death. Nothing in the first traitor's life became him like the leaving it; here is Macbeth contemplating his imminent death in the fifth act:
I have lived long enough. My way of life
Is fall'n into the sear, the yellow leaf,
And that which should accompany old age,
As honor, love, obedience, troops of friends,
I must not look to have; but, in their stead,
Curses not loud but deep, mouth-honor, breath,
Which the poor heart would fain deny, and dare not.
My daughter's teacher has evidently stressed this idea of the tragic hero, the great man who falls on account of a "tragic flaw," in this case ambition, but Macbeth at the end, pitifully placing his confidence in the witches' equivocating prophecies, seems to me too pathetic to inspire anything like awe or the philosopher's "catharsis." His entrance for his first interview with the witches is announced by
A drum, a drum!
Macbeth doth come!
which, in the second interview, is reduced to
By the pricking of my thumbs,
Something wicked this way comes.
In Macbeth, more than I've ever noticed in any other of Shakespeare's tragedies, lines from near the conclusion are intended to put us in mind of a previous speech, in a way that highlights a lie or error. Bucking up her husband in the immediate aftermath of the horrible crime, Lady Macbeth says of a potentially incriminating blood spattering, "A little water clears us of this deed." Later, having gone to pieces, she unconsciously mutters to herself while sleepwalking, "Who would have thought the old man to have had so much blood in him?"
ADDENDUM
I didn't mention maybe my favorite example of this design, one that sounds like a 420-year-old commentary on the current topic of "toxic masculinity." In the scene (I.vii) in which Lady Macbeth persuades her husband to murder the king, she really has nothing more than "a real man wouldn't be afraid of taking an action needed to attain his goal." Macbeth memorably refutes her:
Prithee peace!
I dare do all that may become a man;
Who dares do more is none.
She succeeds even though her method is just to repeat herself: "When you durst do it, then you were a man," she avers in the speech immediately following the one in which Macbeth says he would dare to do anything that could properly be understood as manly. I think we're meant to recall this conversation much later when Macduff, on his mission to Malcolm hiding out in England (IV.iii), receives the news that his entire family has been slaughtered in their home back in Scotland. Malcolm advises him to assuage his grief and anger by resolving to take revenge and is then slightingly rebuffed by the grieving family man:
MACDUFF
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?
MALCOLM
Dispute it like a man.
MACDUFF
I shall do so;
But I must also feel it as a man.
Lady Macbeth presses upon her husband hellish advice, is reproved, repeats herself, and carries the day. When Malcolm is reproved, he also repeats himself—and is reproved again.