Macbeth Read Online Free

social status:
    New honours come upon him,
Like our strange garments, cleave not to their mould
But with the aid of use.
    And:
    … now does he feel his title
Hang loose about him, like a giant’s robe
Upon a dwarfish thief.
    Metaphors are usually most powerful when they link things from very different frames of reference; for instance, the amplitude of “life” itself and the confinement of “a poor player / That struts and frets his hour upon the stage / And then is heard no more.” Within this metaphor there are further configurations of multiple meaning: “poor” simultaneously suggests “mere,” “ill-paid,” and “unskillful,” while “frets” suggests “wears out,” “worries his way through,” and “rants.” But when Macbeth begins to doubt the “equivocationof the fiend”—at this point he is with his last remaining follower, who rejoices in the name of “Seyton” (a dark pun: the name may be pronounced “Satan”)—he comes up with a simile that links things from the
same
frame of reference: “That lies like truth.” To lie and to tell the truth at one and the same time: that is true equivocation, literally the vocation—the voicing—of things that are equal but opposite.
    The play does it all the time, from the first appearance of the weyard sisters (“When the battle’s lost and won,” “Fair is foul, and foul is fair”) through Macbeth’s first entrance (“So foul and fair a day I have not seen”) to Ross’s moving tribute to old Siward’s battle-slain son (“He only lived but till he was a man.…But like a man he died”). In this world, even the ornithology palters with us in a double sense: “Light thickens, / And the crow makes wing to the rooky wood.” Simultaneously like and unlike: the crow is a large black bird that feeds upon the carcasses of beasts and that lives in pairs (fittingly, in that Macbeth is at this point speaking to Lady Macbeth), while rooks, though closely related to crows, are sociable birds that live in vast colonies. Crow and rook are both similar and different, as Macbeth is both similar to and different from the other thanes. Rooks live in rookeries, but the adjective “rooky” is a Shakespearean coinage that plays brilliantly on an old dialect word “rawky” or “roky”: as one dictionary has it, “We say it is a rooky day, when the air is thick and the light of consequence feeble.”
    Language in
Macbeth
is thickened to a viscous texture. Like that of clotted blood. Another form of what might be called poetic equivocation is the restatement of the same idea in two different idioms:
    Will all great Neptune’s ocean wash this blood
Clean from my hand? No, this my hand will rather
The multitudinous seas incarnadine,
Making the green one red.
    The two latter lines say the same thing twice, first in erudite Latinate polysyllables, then in plain monosyllabic Anglo-Saxon colors. Shakespeare holds together the complex linguistic inheritance of English at the time of his mother tongue’s richest expansion. He speaks in oneline to his educated and elevated courtly audience, then in the next to the ordinary people, the penny-paying groundlings.
Macbeth
is a play steeped in stage blood, but perhaps its greatest achievement is to incarnate—to incarnadine—the hot blood of life into the evanescent breath of the poetic word.

ABOUT THE TEXT
    Shakespeare endures through history. He illuminates later times as well as his own. He helps us to understand the human condition. But he cannot do this without a good text of the plays. Without editions there would be no Shakespeare. That is why every twenty years or so throughout the last three centuries there has been a major new edition of his complete works. One aspect of editing is the process of keeping the texts up to date—modernizing the spelling, punctuation, and typography (though not, of course, the actual words), providing explanatory notes in the light of changing educational practices (a