• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

I.vi.7 (426,5) coigne of 'vantage] Convenient corner.

I.vi.13 (426,7) How you should bid god-yield as for your pains] I believe yield, or, as it is in the folio of 1623, eyld, is a corrupted contraction of shield. The wish implores not reward but protection.

I.vii.1 (428,1) If it were done] A man of learning recommends another punctuation:

If it were done, when 'tis done, then 'twere well.

It were done quickly, if, &c.

I.vii.2 (428,2) If the assassination/Could tramel up the consequence] Of this soliloquy the meaning is not very clear; I have never found the readers of Shakespeare agreeing about it. I understand it thus,

"If that which I am about to do, when it is once done and executed, were done and ended without any following effects, it would then be best to do it quickly; if the murder could terminate in itself, and restrain the regular course of consequences, if its success could secure its surcease, if being once done successfully, without detection, it could fix a period to all vengeance and enquiry, so that this blow might be all that I have to do, and this anxiety all that I have to suffer; if this could be my condition, even here in this world, in this contracted period of temporal existence, on this narrow bank in the ocean of eternity, I would jump the life to come, I would venture upon the deed without care of any future state. But this is one of these cases in which judgment is pronounced and vengeance inflicted upon as here in our present life. We teach others to do as we have done, and are punished by our own example." (1773)

I.vii.4 (428,3) With his surcease, success] I think the reasoning requires that we should read,

With its success surcease.

I.vii.6 (429,4) shoal of time] This is Theobald's emendation, undoubtedly right. The old edition has school, and Dr. Warburton shelve.

I.vii.22 (429,7) or heavens cherubin, hors'd/Upon the sightless couriers of the air] [W: couriers] Courier is only runner. Couriers of air are winds, air in motion. Sightless is invisible.

I.vii.25 (430,8) That tears shall drown the wind] Alluding to the remission of the wind in a shower.

I.vii.28 (430,9) Enter Lady] The arguments by which lady Macbeth persuades her husband to commit the murder, afford a proof of Shakespeare's knowledge of human nature. She urges the excellence and dignity of courage, a glittering idea which has dazzled mankind from age to age, and animated sometimes the house-breaker, and sometimes the conqueror; but this sophism Macbeth has for ever destroyed, by distinguishing true from false fortitude, in a line and a half; of which it may almost be said, that they ought to bestow immortality on the author, though all his other productions had been lost:

I dare do all that become a man,

Who dares do more, is none.

This topic, which has been always employed with too much success, is used in this scene with peculiar propriety, to a soldier by a woman. Courage is the distinguishing virtue of a soldier, and the reproach of cowardice cannot be borne by any man from a woman, without great impatience.

She then urges the oaths by which he had bound himself to murder Duncan, another art of sophistry by which men have sometimes deluded their consciences, and persuaded themselves that what would be criminal in others is virtuous in them; this argument Shakespeare, whose plan obliged him to make Macbeth yield, has not confuted, though he might easily have shewn that a former obligation could not be vacated by a latter: that obligations laid on us by a higher power, could not be over-ruled by obligations which we lay upon ourselves.

I.vii.41 (431,1)

—Whouldst thou have that,

Which then esteem'st the ornament of life,

And live a coward in thine own esteem?]

In this there seems to be no reasoning. I should read,

Or live a coward in thine own esteem?

Unless we choose rather,

—Wouldst thou leave that.

I.vii.45 (431,2) Like the poor cat i' the adage?] The adage alluded to is, The cat loves fish, but dares not wet her feet,