Page images
PDF
EPUB

Give to our tables meat, sleep to our nights;
Free from our feasts and banquets bloody knives;
Do faithful homage, and receive free honours3,
All which we pine for now: And this report
Hath so exasperate the king, that he
Prepares for some attempt of war.

Len.

Sent he to Macduff? Lord. He did: and with an absolute, Sir, not I, The cloudy messenger turns me his back,

And hums; as who should say, You'll rue the time That clogs me with this answer.

Len. And that well might Advise him to a caution, to hold what distance His wisdom can provide. Some holy angel Fly to the court of England, and unfold

His message ere he come; that a swift blessing May soon return to this our suffering country Under a hand accurs'd5!

Lord. I'll send my prayers with him!

[Exeunt.

1 Free from our feasts and banquets bloody knives. The construction is:- 'Free our feasts and banquets from bloody knives."

Johnson says, 'Free may be either honours freely bestowed, not purchased by crimes; or honours without slavery, without dread of a tyrant. I have shown in a note on Twelfth Night, Act ii. Sc. 4, p. 311, that free meant pure, chaste, consequently unspotted, which may be its meaning here. Free also meant noble. See note on the Second Part of King Henry VI. Act iii. Sc. 1. 4 Exasperate, for exasperated.

[graphic]

-to this our suffering country

Under a hand accursed.'

The construction is 'to this our country, suffering ander a hand accursed.

ACT IV.

SCENE I.

A dark Cave. In the middle, a Cauldron boiling. Thunder. Enter the three Witches1.

1 Witch. Thrice the brinded cat hath mew'd. 2 Witch. Thrice; and once the hedge-pig whin'd2. 3 Witch. Harper cries:-Tis time, 'tis time. 1 Witch. Round about the cauldron go; In the poison'd entrails throw. Toad, that under coldest3 stone, Days and nights hast thirty-one Swelter'd4 venom, sleeping got, Boil thou first i' the charmed pot! All. Double, double toil and trouble; Fire, burn; and, cauldron, bubble. 2 Witch. Fillet of a fenny snake, In the cauldron boil and bake: Eye of newt, and toe of frog, Wool of bat, and tongue of dog,

Adder's fork, and blind-worm's5 sting,

1 'Enter the three Witches. Dr. Johnson has called the reader's attention to the 'judgment with which Shakspeare has selected all the circumstances of his infernal ceremonies, and how exactly he has conformed to common opinions and traditions."

2 Thrice; and once the hedge-pig whin'd.' The urchin or hedgehog, like the toad, for its solitariness, the ugliness of its appearance, and from a popular belief that it sucked or poisoned the udders of cows, was adopted into the demonologic system; and its shape was sometimes supposed to be assumed by mischievous elves. . Hence it was one of the plagues of Caliban in the Tempest.

3 Coldest stone: The old copy reads " 'cold stone; the emendation is Steevens's. Mr. Boswell thinks that the alteration was unnecessary. See his Essay on Shakspeare's Versification.

Sweltered. This word is employed to signify that the animal was moistened with its own cold exudations. So in the twenty-second song of Drayton's Polyolbion:

'And all the knights there dubb'd the morning but before, The evening sun beheld there sweltered in their gore.'

5 The blind-worm is the slow-worm. Thus in Drayton's Noah's Flood:

"The small eyed slow-worm held of many blind.

Lizard's leg, and owlet's wing,
For a charm of powerful trouble,
Like a hell-broth boil and bubble.
All. Double, double toil and trouble;
Fire, burn; and, cauldron, bubble.

3 Witch. Scale of dragon, tooth of wolf; t Witch's mummy; maw and gulfe

Of the ravin'd salt-sea shark;

Root of hemlock, digg'd i' the dark;
Liver of blaspheming Jew;

Galls of goat; and slips of yew,q}!
Sliver'ds in the moon's eclipse;
Nose of Turk, and Tartar's lips;
Finger of birth-strangled babe,
Ditch-deliver'd by a drab, que
Make the gruel thick and slab:
Add thereto a tiger's chaudron,
For the ingredients of our cauldron.
All. Double, double toil and trouble;
Fire, burn; and, cauldron, bubble.
2 Witch. Cool it with a baboon's blood,
Then the charm is firm and good.

Enter

CATE, and the other three Witches. Hec. O, well done! I commend your pains; And every one shall share i' the gains.

And now about the cauldron

[graphic]

sing,

[ocr errors]

Like elves and fairies in a r ring,
Enchanting all that you put in. Provide

6 Gulf, the throat.

[ocr errors]

To ravin according to Minshew is to devour, to eat greedily? Ravin'd, therefore, may be glutted with prey. Unless, with Malone, we suppose that Shakspeare used ravin'd for ravenous, the passive participle for the adjective. In Horman's Vulgaria, 1519, occurs Thou art a ravenar of delycatis.'

8 Sliver is a common word in the north, where it means to cut a piece or slice. Again in King Lear :

She who herself will sliver and disbranch.

9 i. e e. entrails; a word formerly in common use in books of cookery, in one of which, printed in 1597, is a receipt to make a pudding of a calf's chaldron.

[blocks in formation]

2 Witch. By the pricking of my thumbs11, Something wicked this way comes:Open, locks, whoever knocks.

wal Enter MACBETH.

Macb. How now, you secret, black, and midnight hags?

What is't you do?

All.

A deed without a name. Macb. I conjure you, by that which you profess (Howe'er you come to know it), answer me: Though you untie the winds, and let them fight Against the churches; though the yesty12 waves Confound and swallow navigation up;

Though bladed corn be lodg'd13, and trees blown down;

Though castles topple14 on their warders' heads;
Though palaces, and pyramids, do slope

Their heads to their foundations; though the treasure
Of nature's germins15 tumble all together,
Even till destruction sicken, answer me
To what I ask you.

1 Witch.

Speak.

10. Black spirits and white. The original edition of this play only contains the two first words of this song; the entire stanza is found in The Witch, by Middleton, and is there called 'A charme Song about a Vessel."

11 By the pricking of my thumbs. It is a very ancient superstition, that all sudden pains of the body, and other sensations which could not naturally be accounted for, were presages of somewhat that was shortly to happen.

12 i. e. foaming, frothy.

13 i. e. laid flat by wind or 1

14 Topple, tumble.

ain.

15 Germins, seeds which have begun to sprout or germinate.

Vol. IV.

12

2 Witch.

3 Witch.

0540 Demand.

We'll answer.

1 Witch. Say, if thou'dst rather hear it from our

mouths,

Or from our masters'?

2

Macb.

Call them, let me see them.

1 Witch. Pour in sow's blood, that hath eaten.
s blood, sweaten
Her nine farrow16; grease, that's sweaten
From the murderer's gibbet, throw
Into the flame.

All.

Come, high, or low:

17

Thyself, and office, deftly show.

Thunder. An Apparition of an armed Head rises18.

Macb. Tell me, thou unknown power,-

1 Witch.
He knows thy thought;
Hear his speech, but say thou nought19. oli
App. Macbeth! Macbeth!, Macbeth! beware
Macduff;

Beware the thane of Fife.-Dismiss me:-Enough20, ghel od men [Descends.

[graphic]

16 Pour in sow's blood, that hath eaten Her nine farrow'

Shakspeare probably caught this idea from the laws of Kenneth II. king of Scotland: If a sow eate hir pigges, let hyr be stoned to death and buried, that no man eate of hyr flesh.-Holinshed's History of Scotland, ed. 1577, p. 181,

17 Deftly is adroitly, dexterously,

18 The armed head represents symbolically Macbeth's head cut off and brought to Malcolm by Macduff. The bloody child is Macduff, untimely ripped from his mother's womb. The child, with a crown on his head and a bough in his hand, is the royal Malcolm, who ordered his soldiers to hew them down a bough, and bear it before them to Dunsinane.

19 Silence was necessary during all incantations. Faustus:

"Your grace demand no questions,

But in dumb silence let them come and go."

And in The Tempest:

be mute, or else our spell is marr'd.'

20 Spirits thus evoked were supposed to be impatient of being questioned. The spirit in the Second Part of King Henry the VIth, Act iv, Sc. 1, says :

Ask what thou wilt-That I had said and done."

« PreviousContinue »