How to Teach Your Children Shakespeare (23 page)

Creeps in this petty pace from day to day
,

To the last syllable of recorded time
.

For Macbeth at this point, life is a meaningless succession of tomorrows. For how long will those tomorrows creep forward? Forever. To the very
last syllable of recorded time
.

And all our yesterdays have lighted fools

The way to dusty death
.

Deliberate Ambiguity

What does this mean—
all our yesterdays?
And how can
yesterdays
light the way for fools to follow? This raises an interesting aspect of
Macbeth
that is not necessarily evident on a first reading: The language of the play, in addition to being powerful, is also frequently ambiguous. Shakespeare does this deliberately, and he does it to add a sense of mystery, murkiness, and danger to the story. This technique is explained by Shakespeare scholars Barbara Mowat and Paul Werstine:

Each of Shakespeare’s plays has its own characteristic language. In
Macbeth
, one notices particularly the deliberate imprecision of some of the play’s words. Macbeth’s lines “If it were done when ’tis done, then ’twere well / It were done quickly” not only play with the imprecise verb “done” but also refer to some unnamed “it.”…We hear it again and again in Lady Macbeth’s [speeches]. The sense is clear, but the language seems deliberately vague, deliberately flowery, as if designed to cover over the serpent under it. In reading
Macbeth
, one must sometimes be content to get the gist of the characters’ language, since in such lines as “the powers above / Put on their instruments” no precise “translation” exists.

So if at times your children find the language of
Macbeth
to be slightly confusing, don’t let that trouble them. What I often say to my children, particularly when we’re going to see a performance of Shakespeare, is that they shouldn’t worry if they don’t understand every word, or even every full speech. They should let the language roll over them, the way waves roll over you in the ocean. There will always be time to analyze later.

The Rest of the Speech

Out, out, brief candle!

Life’s but a walking shadow;

Shakespeare often compares life to a lighted candle. And a
walking shadow
is a kind of ghost, isn’t it? The way Banquo became a ghost in the play.

a poor player
,

That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
,

And then is heard no more:

A
poor player
means an actor. As we’ll discuss in a later chapter, Shakespeare frequently uses actors and the theater as metaphors in his work.
Struts
is also a good word. It suggests that Life is an actor who gets to strut around the stage thinking well of himself. This is reminiscent of another speech, in Shakespeare’s
Richard II
, where a king is about to die and he compares death to a tiny actor in the brain:

For God’s sake, let us sit upon the ground

And tell sad stories of the death of kings…

For within the hollow crown

That rounds the mortal temples of a king

Keeps Death his court, and there the antic
[jester]
sits
,

Scoffing
[at]
his state and grinning at his pomp
,

Allowing him
[the king]
a breath, a little scene
,

To monarchize, be feared, and kill with looks
,

Infusing him with self and vain conceit
,

As if this flesh which walls about our life

Were brass impregnable
.

Similarly, for Macbeth, life is

a tale

Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury
,

Signifying nothing
.

Could Shakespeare have written anything more bleak, more filled with despair and hopelessness? I don’t believe so. It is reminiscent of the twentieth-century works of Samuel Beckett, plays like
Krapp’s Last Tape
and the ironically titled
Happy Days
, that view man’s lot as one of absurd nothingness.

Passage 14
Lady Macbeth and the Imagery of Evil

The raven himself is hoarse

That croaks the fatal entrance of Duncan

Under my battlements. Come, you spirits

That tend on mortal thoughts, unsex me here
,

And fill me from the crown to the toe top-full

Of direst cruelty
.

(
Macbeth
, Act I, Scene 5, lines 45–50)

O
ne of the most distinctive features of
Macbeth
is the power of its recurring imagery. Shakespeare uses four key sets of images, all of them troubling. He introduces each one early, then uses them so frequently that we can’t escape them. They involve

1. darkness and the absence of light,

2. blood,

3. nature and the dislocation of nature, and

4. animals in some form of distortion, especially birds.

These recurring images give the play a feeling of evil, of otherworldly forces closing in on a fast, tight-knit world filled with ambition and
violence. The play has a sense of relentless speed, like a runaway train, and Shakespeare achieves this effect by various means. Many of the scenes are short and shocking. Some open in midstream, one in the middle of a letter, others in the middle of conversations. The play itself is the third shortest in the whole canon (though the length varies depending on the edition being used).

Imagery is one of the most effective ways to get your children involved in Shakespeare’s language. An image is a word or phrase that suggests a mental picture that we associate with one of our senses. So when Shakespeare refers to
blood
, we’re meant to see its redness and feel its stickiness—and then we associate the word with violence and pain. The words
darkness
and
dark
and
blackness
create a whole different set of responses relating to fear and danger.

Spot the Image

Shakespeare’s language is filled with images, and one of the games we played in our house was called Spot the Image. The possibilities are endless. Who can spot the most images? How many images can you find in a single exchange or a single scene? What images can you find, and why do you think Shakespeare used them? Images are concrete, visual, and easy to identify, and believe me, this is a very helpful way to keep your children interested in Shakespeare.

Let’s apply the game to
Macbeth
and identify some of the images in the four clusters we’ve mentioned.

1. Darkness

Act I, Scene 1 opens with three witches chanting to each other in a void, and the effect is terrifying. This scene is dark in two senses. First, metaphorically, these creatures have bubbled up from the darkest level of existence. They chant, they prognosticate, they call to invisible spirits with troubling names, and they immediately plunge us into a world of evil. Second, they refer specifically to darkness in their haunting lines:

When shall we three meet again?

In thunder, lightning, or in rain?…

Fair is foul and foul is fair
,

Hover through the fog and filthy air
.

Fog is dark, and so is filthy air. We are in murky darkness from the moment the play opens—and from this point on, something remarkable happens: Almost every single scene of
Macbeth
takes place at night. In one scene, when it is day and therefore should be light, a character remarks

By the clock ’tis day
,

And yet dark night strangles the traveling lamp.…

Darkness does the face of earth entomb
.

Here,
dark night
is given human qualities. It can strangle a lamp and entomb the earth.

Night
by Michelangelo
(photo credit 23.1)

In the history of Western art, another towering genius, Michelangelo, created the same personification, anthropomorphizing night and day in two of his most famous sculptures. In the Medici tomb in Florence, Italy, the two spectacular statues
Night
and
Day
catch the same brooding, troubling aspects that Shakespeare evokes in
Macbeth
. In the illustration on
this page
, notice the owl under Night’s leg. Shakespeare refers to owls several times (
the owls scream
) in the course of the play.

When your children read
Macbeth
, they should visualize it in shadows and fog and recognize that these images help make the action feel dangerous.

2. Blood

In the first line of Act I, Scene 2—only the fifteenth line of the entire play—King Duncan refers to blood. He meets a
bloody man
who reports on the rebellion, telling the king that Macbeth fought bravely,
with his brandished steel, / Which smoked with bloody execution
. The word
blood
is then used again and again, more than forty times throughout the play. When Macbeth sees the apparition of the dagger in front of him, it is covered with
gouts of blood
. When Macbeth sees Banquo’s ghost, it is shaking its
gory locks
. Lady Macbeth can’t manage to wash Duncan’s blood off her hands during the sleepwalking scene, and she remarks with harrowing simplicity,

Yet who would have thought the old man to have had so much blood in him
.

The most remarkable use of blood as an image occurs just after Macbeth staggers in holding the bloody daggers he has used to stab Duncan to death. He looks down at his hands, sees the blood, and exclaims: