Stories from Old English Poetry/Macbeth
MACBETH, KING OF SCOTLAND.
(FROM SHAKESPEARE.)
UPON a naked, blasted heath, where neither tree nor bush could live, so barren was it in its bleakness, three witches, gray, crooked, and misshapen, hovered round a boiling, bubbling caldron. The fire crackled under the huge vessel, from whose blazing depths came forth a vile and sickening odor. The edge was lurid with sulphurous flames, which gleamed upon the horrid faces of the unclean hags who tended it; lighting up in ghastly vividness their skinny arms, their sharp faces, fringed with grizzled, scattering hairs, which looked like beards, and showing more plainly than the light of day their eyes,—staring and blood-colored, yet expressionless as the faces of the dead.
The thunder pealed dully in the sky, and the rain fell in fine drops, each one of which seemed to pierce the clothing to the skin, as if it were a point of steel. Amid the rain and wind these strange beings moved slowly round and round the caldron’s edge, uttering their weird incantations. Their smileless faces wore the blackness of the night; their voices sounded like the cry of vultures, or the shriek of the harpies when they swoop upon their prey.
What was the business of these minions of Hecate on the heath of Forres on such a night? Their meetings never boded good; their only purpose was to foster crime, to hint black deeds to minds still innocent, to poison with venomous suggestion the most wholesome conscience. All day they had watched the distant smoke and dust of battle, and only when the exhausted armies paused at the coming of night, had they begun upon this spot their unearthly orgies.
While they were still muttering and gibbering, two figures were seen riding across the plain on their way to the castle of Forres, from whose distant towers a light was shining here and there through the obscure mist. At sight of them, a sudden gleam of exultation lighted up the expressionless faces of the witches. The tallest horseman, still riding erect and proudly, in spite of the day’s fatigues, was Macbeth, Thane of Glamis, a kinsman of the Scottish king, chief of a royal clan, the handsomest, bravest, and proudest of all King Duncan’s nobles. With him rode Banquo, another cousin of the king, a man of rare virtue; not approved so much for his brave deeds, as for his wisdom in council; shining rather in the quiet of peace than in the storms of war. Such were the two who crossed the heath together. The witches waited impatiently their coming. For them the magic caldron had been set, and to intercept them these secret hags had stretched among the blackened grass an invisible circle which should detain their horses’ feet until they had had speech with the Thane of Glamis.
Macbeth, unappalled in the midst of scenes of bloodiest carnage, started with fear as his horse’s feet stopped suddenly within the enchanted circle. His brave spirit, fearless before all real and tangible dangers, was a slave to superstition, and the sight of these supernatural creatures daunted him more than a host of mailed enemies would have done. But the serene Banquo was moved by no such terrors. In his estimation these apparitions might be illusions of the eye, or creatures of the imagination.
“The earth hath bubbles, as the water has,
And these are of them.”
As they paused thus, the witches crossed their path, and with ghostly waving of her hands, and solemn utterance, the first spoke,—
“All hail, Macbeth! hail to thee, Thane of Glamis.”
The second approached, more horrible than the first, and with the same weird gestures, cried,—
“All hail, Macbeth! hail to thee, Thane of Cawdor.”
Macbeth remained motionless with fear and astonishment. His eager hopes surmise the second title to be a prophecy. If the witches had power to divine rightly that he was Thane of Glamis, would they not also have known that the Thane of Cawdor was still living, and that not to him belonged the honor.
In the next instant the third witch, a hag of more dreadful aspect than either of the others, repeated the strange motions in his path, and, in a whisper so sharp and sibilant, it seemed to pierce the marrow of his brain, hissed in his ear,—
“All hail, Macbeth; THOU SHALT BE KING HEREAFTER!”
Then turning to Banquo, they repeated in the same alternation,—
‘Hail! lesser than Macbeth, and greater.”
“Not so happy, yet much happier.”
“Thou shalt get kings, though thou be none:
So all hail! Macbeth and Banquo!”
Then, as Macbeth, recovering himself a little, would have sought to question them, the witches, the blazing caldron, all the supernatural surroundings, vanished in a twinkling, and the two warriors were left alone in darkness on the vacant heath.
While they consulted with each other on the reality of the vision they had seen, they were met by two messengers from King Duncan, who was already awaiting their coming in the castle of Forres. These were too intent upon delivering their message, to notice the distraught manners of Macbeth and Banquo, but greeted them instantly with congratulations on their brave services that day to the Scottish throne. They told Macbeth that the king had appointed them to signify his value of his knightly deeds by investing him with the titles of the Thane of Cawdor, who had proved disloyal, and was thus stripped of his titles and estates, that they might be conferred upon more deserving shoulders.
Macbeth was astonished almost beyond speech at the sudden fulfillment of the witches’ prophecy. What if they had indeed spoken truth? He should be king hereafter! Might not the powers which had divined his greatness, which had put the crown into his thoughts, help now to place it on his head? His quick-kindled ambition rose higher at the thought, and with a powerful effort he shook off his abstraction, and rode hastily forward to greet his sovereign.
The battle of Forres had been a decisive one in the long civil war, and Duncan’s kingdom now promised to return to peace and security. Macbeth purposed returning to his castle at Inverness, to recruit from his bloody exploits in the field, and the old monarch, loth to part with his loved kinsman and subject, anxious also to show him all possible honor, decided to accompany him to his castle and spend a night there before journeying to the royal palace. Macbeth had hastily dispatched a messenger informing his wife of his new title of Cawdor, and giving the details of his encounter with the witches. As soon as Duncan announced his intention of becoming his guest for a night, he sent another messenger, bidding her make preparations for their arrival. Then the royal train set out for Inverness.
At the head rode Duncan—white-haired and benignant old monarch—whose enemies called him weak and doting, but whose friends knew him honorable and brave, though credulously trustful, and guileless as a child. Beside him rode his two sons, Malcolm and Donalbain, both in the early dawn of manhood, noble and refined in aspect, but inheriting a trifle too much of their father’s gentle spirit to cope well with the rude exigencies of the times. Near them, the grave and reticent Banquo, attended by his young son Fleance, the hope and promise of his age. In the midst of the train was the noble Macduff, one of the most noted thanes of Scotland: temperate in his judgment, enthusiastic in his loves and hates; not the equal of Macbeth in elegance of bearing and in polish of manners, but no whit behind him in absolute bravery; as trustworthy in the council hall as in the battle-field; who breathed in loyalty as the air of his native heath, and whose honor was as inflexible as death. Towering above them all,—conspicuous for his striking figure, his gallant horsemanship,—readiest in wit and in those delicate flatteries which charm the ear of royalty,—dashing, spirited, handsome, and brave, rode Macbeth, the new-made Thane of Cawdor.
Macbeth’s messengers rode well. Scarcely had the first delivered the letter to his mistress, which informed her of her lord’s accession to the titles and estates of Cawdor, and the prediction of the weird sisters, before the mailed heel of the second messenger clanked on the paved hall of the castle, and breathless with the haste of his journey, told her of Duncan’s immediate visit at Inverness.
Lady Macbeth was reputed a worthy match for her noble husband in all the qualities which could become her station. Her beauty was unquestioned, her manners elegant and polished to a remarkable degree in that age of warfare; and though her mind was wonderfully bold and original, she concealed such masculine attributes under a mask of the most womanly softness and delicacy. Not inferior to Macbeth in any of the qualities which won him scores of friends, she far excelled him in strength of intellect and will, and in unshaken purpose. And her ambition was as riotous as his. The witches’ predictions and their partial fulfillment had bred in the mind of Macbeth a thousand half-formed thoughts of villainy. In her mind the conclusion was immediate. The knowledge of the final honor which had been promised her husband, the “Hail, Macbeth; thou shalt be king hereafter!” and the intelligence that Duncan slept that night under her castle’s roof, were sufficient to bring: her to the resolve that the obstacles which lay between the prophecy and its fulfillment, could be removed by murder. The resolve once taken, no doubts, nor fears, nor remorse, could move her from it.
Macbeth spurred on before his guests, and arrived a short time in advance of the party. Their first tender greetings hurriedly exchanged, she laid before him, first in dark hints, and then in open, undisguised words, her plan to make him king of Scotland.
At first Macbeth recoiled in horror from the revolting aspect of his own hidden thought. But though the frank wickedness of his wife startled him at first, there needed but little peruasion to bring him to lend himself to her designs, and before the kingly party entered the gates of Inverness, it was resolved between this guilty pair that the trusting old monarch, their kinsman and their guest, made sacred to them by all the laws of hospitality and loyalty, should never again cross alive the threshold over which he had thus graciously passed, to confer upon it honor and distinction.
Duncan was unwarned of his fate, and he read no presage of it in the faces of his treacherous host and hostess. Macbeth was tremulous and eager. The shallowest observer could have read his agitation in his uncertain voice, in the tremor of his hand, his restless eye; but all believed that the honors heaped on him had disconcerted his usually unruffled spirit. But his wife wore a mask impenetrable to all scrutiny. When she met the royal train, it was in her richest attire, with jewels braided in her yellow hair. Her soft eyes beamed nothing but welcome, and no rebellious flush on her fair cheek told of the murderous passion that stirred in her blood.
That night, when all the reveling had ceased, and Ducan’s attendants, worn out with eating and drinking, slept their soundest sleep, Macbeth and his ambitious wife met in the antechamber to the King’s apartment. The grooms who guarded his couch, had been drugged by her fair hands; she forced upon her wavering spouse the daggers with which to do the bloody deed, and, spurred on by ber scorn and her entreaties, he entered Duncan’s chamber and slew him as he slept. Then, shuddering a their crime, so dreadful in the freshness of its commission that they dared not look into each other’s eyes lest each should read condemnation and horror of the other’s deeds, they retired to their apartment to cleanse themselves of the blood upon their hands and weapons, and await the event of this night's work.
In the early morning the castle was filled with confusion and alarm. Macduff was the first to discover the murder, and frenzied with horror, he roused servants, guests, and kinsmen, from their beds. All was dismay and terror, and in the tumult, Malcolm and Donalbain, fearing treachery for themselves, fled instantly. Too weak to await what fate might bring them, they hastened to England, and drew suspicion on themselves by their flight, that they had been guilty of their father’s murder. Barquo may have suspected his noble friend Macbeth, but he was silent, and made no confidant of their encounter with the witches; and in a short time, by reason of his near kinship with the dead monarch, as well as his popularity with the soldiers and populace, Macbeth easily made himself king. Thus the witches’ prophecy was fulfilled.
But the crown thus gained did not sit easily on the wearer’s head. Beside, those secret midnight hags upon the heath of Forres had declared that Banquo’s children should be kings. And Macbeth, who believed the witches to be unerring when they predicted his greatness, dared to hope that he could thwart their power when it ran counter to his own wishes. He plotted then to take the life of Banquo and his only child, young Fleance, that there might be no possibility of their succession to the crown.
To compass this he made a banquet, and invited Banquo as the noblest and most honored guest. At the time he was expected to ride through the vast grounds which surrounded the royal palace, three murderers, whom Macbeth had hired to do his bloodiest crimes, set upon Banquo and his son. Banquo was instantly dispatched, but Fleance escaped, and fled to England, where he knew he should join his royal cousins, Malcolm and Donalbain.
After the murder was done, and the bloody-handed assassins had received their fee, Macbeth entered his banquet-hall. His mind was much disturbed at the escape of Fleance, but he dissembled his trouble, and when he was seated at the feast with his nobles, he pledged their absent peer in his own royal glass, uttering smooth-tongued regrets that Banquo was not present with them.
Before his words were done, his guilty imagination began to work, and he seemed to see before him, in his own royal chair, the ghost of Banquo, with its gaping wounds and dripping blood.
His reason and self-command gave way at the sight, and while the wondering guests saw only the empty chair, and the wild, distraught looks of their new monarch, Macbeth beheld his victim shake his gory locks at him in solemn threatening, and silently withdraw.
Thrice did the ghost appear, and thrice did Macbeth cower in abject horror at the dreadful sight, until his wife—now at the summit of her wishes, as the Queen of Scotland—bade the company depart, since some strange freak of fancy made her lord unfit for guests and banquets.
Unhappy Macbeth! he had paid too large a price for his greatness. No more wholesome sleep visited the pillow where he laid his weary head. His nights were filled with dreadful visitants, and his days were spent in devising plans by which he might make his power more stable and enduring. Remorse could not bring him penitence. He pictured himself in a sea of blood, whose shores were boundless. It was as easy to go forward on its crimson waves as to turn back. Since he had stained his hands with blood, courage, hope, and pity seemed dead to him.
But the unhappy woman who had shared his crimes—the dearest partner of his greatness—was even more pitiably wretched. In the first enthusiasm of her ambition she was not appalled by any crime. She could scorn her weaker spouse because he feared to look upon the blood his hands had shed. But in her soul the revulsion of feeling had been greater and more terrible. More reticent and heroic than Macbeth, feeding on her remorse in silence lest she should add to the bitter thoughts that poisoned his life, she constrained herself to smile, and flatter, and play the part of royalty, while in her heart she carried an eternal wound, the slow agony of conscience. Nature avenged itself on the mask she wore, and in the dead of night, when she strove to forget her tortures in sleep, remorse became her conqueror. Night after night her wondering attendants watched her rise from her couch, and with a lighted taper in her hand,—fast-locked in sleep, with glazed and open eyes, in which a fixed horror seemed frozen,—she traversed the corridors till she reached a certain antechamber. Then with repeated rubbing of her hands, she sought to cleanse them from some fancied stains of blood. The sighs that heaved her breast were piteous enough to move even the ghost of her murdered victim, and when her frail form was wearied beyond endurance, she went back to her wretched couch, still wrapt in sleep, to wait the waking of another miserable day.
Only one consolation was left the wicked pair. As their love for each other had been strong in innocence, it was still supreme in guilt. Misery only cemented their attachment more firmly, till they seemed to have but one life and one thought. If his wife had been his temptress, Macbeth had no reproach for her; and in his darkest hours her love was ready to shelter and protect and comfort him.
The greatest of Italian poets, Dante, has a story of two guilty lovers, dying in their crimes, whose souls, even in the deepest torment, could never be separated, and who still found consolation in bewailing together their lost happiness. Like them, this unhappy husband and wife were one in love, in guilt, and in remorse.
In the mean time, Macduff, whose loyalty had never despaired in the darkest hour of Scotland’s fortunes, had been in England trying to stimulate the young princes, Malcolm and Donalbain, to return and head an army, which he promised should welcome them as soon as they set foot on their native soil. Macbeth heard of his efforts, and one of the most abhorrent acts of his life is the way he revenged himself upon Macduff. Knowing the wife and children of the latter were left at home in an ungarded castle, he sent thither a band of ruffians, who murdered in cold blood the defenseless wife and her pleading babes.
At length the rumors of Macduff’s success alarmed the monarch. He resolved to have recourse again to the augurs of his present fortunes. He would seek the cave of Hecate, and conjure the witches to unfold another page of the future, to tell him what was to be the end of his vexed and miserable life.
He found the cave—a dismal, subterraneous haunt—where they were wont to hold their midnight revels. The walls dripped with dampness, which felt to Macbeth’s groping fingers, slimy and thick, like human gore. Bats of monstrous size flitted through the noisome air; reptiles, cold and noiseless, glided under foot. In the midst the caldron burned, and about it glided the dimly seen forms of the weird sisters.
In this place Macbeth entreated those evil beings to tell him of his own fate, and who should wear the crown after him. The witches would not answer. They told the monarch he should hear their masters. Straightway the rocky floor opened, and from the gaping fissure rose an armed head.
It cried, “Beware Macduff!” and disappeared.
A moment more, and to the loud roar of thunder, a second head rose up, dripping with gore. It conjured Macbeth to be bold and resolute, since he need not fear till Birnam wood should come to Dunsinane. Again the vision sank, and in answer to his thoughts, he saw a long line of shadowy forms, wearing the Scottish crown, and each bearing the arms of the house of Banquo, glide slowly by. After them folowed the pale ghost of Banquo, who pointed in solemn warning to the dim procession, and vanished into thin air as Macbeth gazed on him.
Disheartened at the sight, Macbeth departed from the cave, despairing of leaving the succession to his own issue. The same voice which had said, “Hail, Macbeth; thou shalt be king hereafter!” had declared that Banquo’s children should be kings. And he no longer dared doubt the power of Hecate and her attendants.
But he had some gleams of comfort. They had declared he should be unconquered till Birnam wood should come to Dunsinane. The forest of Birnam was three miles distant from his royal castle of Dunsinane; and until the trees should tear out from the earth their firm roots, and march upon his castle, he might sleep in safety. At least, he should be unconquered and should die a king. After him, let Banquo’s pale progeny take the crown.
And now the sons of Duncan, and the fiery Macduff, infuriated at the slaughter of his wife and babes, had landed on the shores of Scotland. Their army was gathered. They were marching towards Dunsinane to beleaguer the usurper in his very stronghold. Macbeth heard of their movements, and buckling on his armor, awaited the approach of their forces. His courage rose high at the first scent of battle, and his cheek, paled with the terrors which conscience had inflicted, grew ruddy at the sound of the trumpets. While in the midst of his warlike preparations, a startled messenger came in with fear distorting all his visage. The forest of Birnam, three miles away, was moving towards them. It was already coming across the heath, in the middle of which stood the castle of Dunsinane. The sentinels upon the outer walls had seen the strange spectacle, and, mad with fear, had fled back into the inner court-yards.
Then Macbeth’s heart sank in despair. Had fate so mocked him? He seemed to hear a peal of ghostly laughter from the pit of Hecate, which rang the death-knell to his fortunes. As he thought thus, the cries and moanings of women told him that his wife, the last stay and comfort in his misery, was dead. He heard it with the strong calmness of despair, and gave no time to grief or lamentation.
Now he saw the double meaning of the prophetic warning which had bade him fear only when Birnam wood should move to Dunsinane. The army of Macduff and Malcolm threw down the huge branches of the Birnam forest, with which they had concealed their moving hosts, and from behind their leafy screens stood revealed in immense force.
There was but a brief struggle. Macbeth was brave, but he could not fight against destiny. “Fate is a spaniel; we cannot beat it from us.” Before sunset the head of Macbeth was raised upon a pole above the walls of Dunsinane by the conquering hand of Macduff, and its stony eyes looked down upon the hosts of Malcolm as he passed through the castle gates, the crowned and rightful King of Scotland.
