The Shakespeare book club meets on October 19th to discuss Macbeth. Everyone is welcome, no paid subscription needed. Paid subs are now only for the archive, so please cancel if you no longer need archive access. An email will go out over the weekend of 19th. We will meet at 7p.m. UK time.
Shakespeare’s England was almost obsessively concerned with time—the commercial pressure of time, the mutability of life. His characters are often alarmed at the sudden passing of time (“the clock upbraids me”, “I wasted time and now doth time waste me”, “the time is out of joint”, “Golden lads and girls all must,/ As chimney-sweepers, come to dust”) or they feel the compulsion to battle time (“let myself and fortune/ Tug for the time to come”), or they are philosophical about the forces of time (“one man in his time plays many parts”, “Time travels in divers paces with divers persons”, “O gentlemen, the time of life is short”, “The end crowns all,/ And that old common arbitrator, Time,/ Will one day end it”).
Macbeth is the Shakespeare play most concerned with time. It is a short, dark, bloody play, that is so compressed because it is time that makes everything so dark. (It is said this is the shortest Shakespeare play, which is not right. Comedy of Errors and The Tempest are shorter. But it is the most compressed, the most rapid.) To begin quoting the play on this topic would involve starting with the opening line — “When shall we three meet again” — and would only stop at the end of the play, when Malcolm says,
what needful else
That calls upon us, by the grace of Grace,
We will perform in measure, time and place
Like Hamlet, Macbeth is about the disordering of time, the unravelling of the expected course of events. “To beguile the time,” Lady Macbeth tells her husband, “Look like the time.”
To beguile the time means to their deeds are done in the dark. The weird sisters, at the opening, agree to meet “ere the set of sun.” The sun is tracked, setting just as Banquo is killed. The doomed Banquo had said, after meeting the weird sisters, “The instruments of darkness tell us truths.” Milton surely was inspired by this line when he wrote of the elements in the “wild Abyss,/ The womb of Nature, and perhaps her grave” that the elements
must ever fight,
Unless th’ Almighty Maker them ordain
His dark materials to create more worlds—
It is Satan looking out over that aspect in Paradise Lost, and there is something demonic about Macbeth’s affinity to the weird sister’s predictions, as if he is the real witch at the heart of the play, unaware of what his embrace of their predictions will turn him into, what dark materials he has within.
If only they had known how dark their times would become, would the Macbeths have continued with their plan? Macbeth famously says,
if the assassination
Could trammel up the consequence, and catch
With his surcease success; that but this blow
Might be the be-all and the end-all here,
But here, upon this bank and shoal of time,
We’d jump the life to come.
An admission of the sort that murderers often make. We know that “Brave Macbeth” was “Disdaining fortune” on the battlefield to put down the rebellion against Duncan. So, with that arrogance, he thought that he could put himself above the flow of time. We are told after we see him hear the prophecy that he was “Disdaining fortune”, but Shakespeare is careful in that early scene to show us that Macbeth is already absorbed by his dark ambitions. When they see the sisters, Banquo speaks eight lines describing them, and Macbeth tells them to speak. It is after they begin their prophecy that Macbeth becomes so self-absorbed, Banquo is alarmed.
Good sir, why do you start; and seem to fear
Things that do sound so fair? I’ the name of truth,
Are ye fantastical, or that indeed
Which outwardly ye show? My noble partner
You greet with present grace and great prediction
Of noble having and of royal hope,
That he seems rapt withal
The word “rapt” comes back. Macbeth is constantly slipping into this distracted state, putting himself outside time. At one point, he begins soliloquising and then breaks off, realising there are men standing there, waiting to be dismissed. Banquo calls him “rapt” again, and Macbeth, still talking to himself, mutters: “Come what come may,/ Time and the hour runs through the roughest day.” This is a contortion of the Gospel phrase, “sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof.”
Macbeth’s tragedy is not just that he refuses to be Duncan’s subject, but that he thinks he can disdain fortune, ignore the implications of the prophecy—he thinks he does not have to be Time’s subject either.
The play has a slippery handling of time. We are told of Macbeth disdaining fortune out of sequence, and there are other moments when time goes awry, such as when Macbeth is told Macduff has fled for England—even though he was told that news a few scenes earlier. Macbeth’s experience of time is distorted, and we are often experiencing this play with something like his interior distortions. Soliloquies and asides are Shakespeare’s method of drawing us into Macbeth’s rapt experience. This is a high and sophisticated development of the conspiratorial methods he began using in Richard III.
Slowly, as he removes himself from the flow of time, as he tries to “jump the life to come” Macbeth goes mad. Madness is a total lack of any sense of time, a loss of the continuous nature of life and experience. It is the phenomenology of timelessness, the unravelling, as Lady Macbeth has it, of the ebb and flow of the day.
Methought I heard a voice cry ‘Sleep no more!
Macbeth does murder sleep’, the innocent sleep,
Sleep that knits up the ravell’d sleeve of care,
The death of each day’s life, sore labour’s bath,
Balm of hurt minds, great nature’s second course,
Chief nourisher in life’s feast,—
This is why, as Bradley says, when we recall any scene from Macbeth, we recall it happening at night. Night was a time of spirits and dangers, crimes and hauntings, a time when the good and the Christian needed to be abed, or guided by a protecting light. Macbeth’s world slowly darkens, until the madness takes hold and he never sees the light again.
To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day
To the last syllable of recorded time,
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!
Remember, too, the darkness of Lady Macbeth’s madness: “she has light by her continually; ‘tis her command.” Macbeth’s hubris about his dominion over time creates a sharp pivot at the beginning of Act III. Up to now, Macbeth has seemed an ambitious, unstable man who killed for power. Now we realise he has lost his grip, and we realise he doesn’t know he has lost his grip. After sending Banquo on his ride, pre-meditating the coming murder, he tells the rest of the lords,
Let every man be master of his time
Till seven at night: to make society
The sweeter welcome, we will keep ourself
Till supper-time alone: while then, God be with you!
It seems like a simple instruction, merely to allow everyone free time till supper. But obviously it means more than that. Macbeth believes he has that sort of free will to be “master of his time”, in the biggest sense as a tyrant and as one who can disdain fortune. Alas, the very next thing he says summons the men who will kill Banquo. From there on the play runs swiftly. As soon as Macbeth proclaims that men must be master of their times, he gives the orders that unleashes time against him.
This is the centre of his tragedy. It is never made clear whether the weird sisters cause the events of the play, or merely predict them. They are the dance of time, not the creators of events. Macbeth’s fault is not within his times, but within himself. He reacts to their prophecy with ambition . He arrives having already coveted what they tell him will happen. He “starts” (both in the sense of jumping with alarm, and of beginning his murderous plan: he starts his time) because he is alarmed that they know what he really desires. He never realises, until it is too late, that “Time, thou anticipatest my dread exploits.” In this confession of his problem, we hear the echo of poor mad Lady Macbeth—, “What’s done cannot be undone.—To bed, to bed, to bed!”
