Macbeth's tragic end: 7.

Hello, this is a podcast from SCCEnglish, the English Department of Syncolumbus College Dublin in Ireland. It's our blog at SCCEnglish.io Welcome to the SCCEnglish podcast number 11. This is Julian Goedem from Syncolumbus College in Dublin, with her seventh and final revision podcast on Macbeth. I hope these podcasts have stimulated your brain, kept your mind fresh about the play. A little reminder of what I said at the end of last week, a really good way of preparing for the exam now is by simply listening to the play on an audio. As Frank Sinatra used to sing, and now the end is near, and so I face the final curtain. And you're facing the end of your studying, and this is our final revision podcast. It'll be about how Macbeth faces his end, and the impact on us as we watch the end of the tragedy. I'd like to start by looking at the key speech in Act 5, and then broaden out my discussion about the end. The end of any tragedy is the defining moment of it. The crucial speech here is prompted by Macbeth asking "Seaton," or "Satan," if you like, what the cry of women offstage meant. Macbeth says before "Seaton returns." I have almost forgot the taste of fears. The time has been my senses would have cooled to hear a night shriek, and my fell of hair would, at a dismal treatise, rouse and stir as life were in it. I have supped full with horrors, dyrness familiar to my slaughterless thoughts, cannot once start me. Wherefore was that cry? These words of weariness of a man who has travelled a long and tiring way from the start of the play, and is now numbed by his experiences, leaders on to the lines I'm going to analyse. "Seaton says, 'The Queen, my Lord, is dead, and then we hear this.' She should have died hereafter. There would have been a time for such a word. Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow creeps in this petty pace from day to day to the last syllable of recorded time, and all our yesterday's have lighted fools the way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle. Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player that struts and frets his hour upon the stage, and then is heard no more. It is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing." Now, the first line there is famously ambiguous. She would have died anyway, she picked the wrong time to die. In any case, what we can state for certain is that Macbeth does not do what we'd expect most people in this situation to do. There's no breakdown, no wailing, no grief. In the second podcast, I traced his relationship with his wife, and so won't go over this again now. But broadly speaking, they have become two wholly separate individuals living in two different universes, along, long way away from being dearest partners. This speech really begins with that haunting rhythmical line, tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow. A line weighed down with tiredness and big heavy vowels. By the way, yet another of the threes within the play, three witches, three apparitions, three Scottish kings. This was a man who once looked forward to tomorrow, to the bright future. And now that he's got there, he just sees a meaningless succession of days stretching into eternity. Now that he's got there, he sees that that promise was all just an illusion, just like one of the most memorable images in the play. When he reaches out for that dagger in act two, scene one, and there's nothing there. And of course, the play is full of things which turn out not to be what they seem. Time itself for him is now treacle slow. This is a man who once tried to owe a leap consequences, who was so excited about becoming king that he sent a letter to his wife, even though he was on his way to see her anyway. Now he sees time creeping in petty pace, little steps, no great or leaping. In act three, scene four, he had said that I am in blood stepped in so far that should I weighed no more returning where as tedious as go or. He's gone from waiting to creeping. Today, today, we expect day echoing the three tomorrow's, but it's actually two, the last syllable of recorded time. And his past now looks pointless too. All our yesterday's have lighted fools the way to dusty death, which presumably means he's a fool too. As in the soliloquy in act one, scene seven, which is the subject of podcast one, he knew he would be if he murdered the king. Lady Macbeth's life has been extinguished, that woman who carried a light by her continuity, tis her command according to the doctor in the sleepwalking scene. But the brief candle to which Macbeth now refers seems not to refer to that to her life so much as to life itself. The critic Stephen Booth calls this quote, "a speech of which her death was the occasion, but of which she no longer seems to be the subject." And then comes a metaphor that Shakespeare uses more than once in his plays and poetry, the most obvious one for him to choose, the most personal of all, life as a drama in which we're actors, as Shakespeare himself was. Life is a walking shadow, a poor player, or bad actor, that struts and frets his hour upon the stage and then is heard no more. It turns out not to have meaning, purpose, or shape, it's a tale told by an idiot full of sound and fury, signifying nothing. In some sense this is Macbeth's final speech, of course he says plenty more, but this is his wrapping up, the culmination of the thoughts of this most intensely thoughtful brutal murderer. He doesn't really have a death speech as such, like a fellow or hamlet or kinglier. In act 5, scene 8 he says little of real interest before Macbeth kills him. Tony Nuttle, in his book Shakespeare the Thinker, writes of this passage that quote, "This is almost an inverse mystical experience. While the great mystic speak of a world suddenly enhanced, blazing with fresh significance, Macbeth describes the draining away of all meaning from the universe, what is technically interesting about Macbeth's speech on hearing of his wife's death, is that an intuition of universal meaninglessness should be at the same time an explosion of lyric power." Now this is the fascination, from a man who has both fascinated and appalled us from the start. Out of the exhaustion of the end game, he drags a profoundly poetic and memorable response to his wife's death, his own doomed future and the very nature of existence. So just to show you how lyrically powerful these lines are, thought you might like to hear in contrast, what the famous actor David Garrick did with Macbeth's end in 1744, he thought Macbeth's end wasn't dramatic or eloquent enough, he didn't after all have a death speech. So he himself wrote a speech in the seconds before Macbeth was killed by Macduff, and here are those eight lines. "It is done. The scene of life will quickly close. Ambitions veined elusive dreams are fled, and now I wait to darkness, guilt and horror. I cannot bear it. Let me shake it off. It will not be. My soul is clogged with blood. I cannot rise. I dare not ask for mercy. It is too late. Hell drags me down. I sink. I sink. My soul is fled forever." He dies. "Good, eh? Would it be difficult not to giggle at that death?" So what is our reaction to Macbeth's death? Shakespeare is trying to do an extraordinarily tricky thing in this play, to create a tragedy out of the story of a man who in real life we'd be terrified by, and would steer clear of. In real life we'd cheer his demise in the way that all of Scotland does, but instead there's a sense of loss. This man's life could have been so much more he had such gifts. He was a kind of poet himself as this speech shows, and so much more of what he said as well, particularly in the first half of the play. We could become intimate with him through his silo-liquise, in particular. And as he faces his death now, in the mere nine-and-a-half lines of this speech he has more imaginative insight and linguistic brilliance than Malcolm, Macduff, Banco and Duncan could gather altogether in their lifetimes. So as we leave the theatre, we're not high-fiving each other with delight that that nice man Malcolm is at last rightfully on the throne, but instead our heads are full of the images and words of a man who became. a walking shadow himself, but could have been so much more. That's it. Good luck in your exams. Know the text, of course, but above all trust your instincts and be honest about this play, its characters and themes. It's one of the very greatest works of literature ever created.