[In the following essay, Wills explains obscure passages and words in Macbeth—such as the specific placement of stage directions, textual cues for clothing and props, and alternative emendations for proscribed editorial revisions—and examines the ways in which the play might have been more clearly perceived by a Jacobean audience than by a modern one.]

Lady Macbeth asks of her evil spirits that they make her insensitive (stopping up the passages of remorse, 1.5.44), and she is relieved to see that wine contributes to that useful deadening (2.2.1). Macbeth wants his own psychic mechanism to be short-circuited. At first he simply observes that “function / Is smother'd” when his surmise leaps toward new possibilities (1.3.140-41). But he soon desires that the eye not know what the hand is up to (1.4.52), that events swallow up consequences (1.7.1-4). He marvels that acts could go forward without the spur of thought or decision (1.7.25-28). Once launched into action, he cannot look back (3.4.135-37), and he will not look any farther ahead than to the instant task, too horrible to contemplate, but not too horrible to do without contemplating it. He tells his wife to be innocent of such knowledge (3.2.45) and so far as possible keeps himself innocent of it. Bad must be treated homeopathically with further bad (3.2.55). Such cures “must be acted ere they may be scanned” (3.4.139). The first conception of the heart must leap to the hand, no sooner thought than acted (4.1.146-49).

He wants to leap into action automatically, to preclude fear, hesitation, or conscience—and he succeeds so well that the short-circuited parts of him atrophy, like an unused limb: “I have almost forgot the taste of fears” (5.5.9). He has tried to skip past time at will, out-tricking it. “Time, thou anticipat'st my dread exploits,” he lamented at one point (4.1.144). By speeding past time, he has eliminated it. It is no longer articulated with any meaning but mere iteration, mere empty succession (5.5.19-28).

Macbeth engages in a self-refashioning that amounts to sabotage committed upon himself. He systematically disconnects the systems of reflection. He even has a short-circuited phrase to describe what he has done to himself: “my strange and-self-abuse” (3.4.141). It is telling that he explains his actions this way even when he is lying. Asked why he killed the grooms in their sleep, he answers (2.3.110-11):

Th' expedition of my violent love
Outrun the pauser, reason.

The jiggering with his own psychic mechanism makes Macbeth's mind move in a blur of images, as if he were on “speed.” That makes his speeches hallucinatory, even when he is not seeing the dagger or Banquo's ghost. The words get tangled in their rush from him, in their plunge past obstacles into action. That is why the soliloquies present so many textual problems—far more than cluster in other sections of the play. We must doubt whether the text is sound in some place—unusual language is more apt to be jumbled in transmission. The “packed” quality of the speeches has led to misinterpretation as well as futile revisions.

A good example is the first speech where Macbeth discusses the jump-sequences he would like to introduce into time's flow. If the assassination could be an act out of sequence, with no antecedent or consequence, a be-all and end-all in itself, a means to the goal and the goal, so that one is contained in the other (a success by mere surcease)—then—what? Then, according to 1.7.5-7 (in the Folio),

                                                                                                                        here,
But here, upon this bank and school of time,
We'd jump the life to come.

How does one jump from a bank and school? Almost all editors adopt Theobald's famous emendation of school to shoal—disastrously, I believe.

Shoal means shallow water, as in “sounded all the depths and shoals of honor” (Henry VIII 3.2.436). How does one jump from the bank and the water? Theobald tried to make shoal mean “passage through shallow water,” or ford: “this shallow, this narrow ford, of human life.” So one jumps from the bank to the ford to what? One should arrive at the opposite shore, not avoid it, yet “jump” mean “skip over” or “cancel” here, not jump to or achieve. The picture is too jumbled to bear thought.¹

What can be made of school if that is retained? Heath (see Variorum) wanted “bank-and-school” to mean “bench-in-school,” which goes nicely with the later “teach bloody instructions” but not so well with “jump the life to come.” What help is the physical furniture of a schoolroom to that process (whatever it is)? No one I know of has suspected that the corruption may be in bank, not school. F's “Banke,” with capital B, could well be a setter's misunderstanding of “Ranke.” We read at Lear 2.4.258 that not being vicious “Stands in some rank [kind or category] of praise.” It is the usage that survives in “rank and file.” A rank of time would be some category of time. School, then, would not be the physical building (with benches in it) but a body of interpretation, like “school of night” at Love's Labour's 4.3.251. “This rank-and-school of time” would be the kind-and-view of time suggested by what immediately precedes. “This” is a resumptive reference back, not a physical marker.

What was “this” interpretation of time? That it ended each act with the act, rather than leading on to consequences. If one could believe that, then (upon this view of time) one could skip or cancel succeeding time. It would be canceled by the surcease of the self-contained act. For jump as skip or cancel, see Cymbeline 5.4.179-82: “You must either be directed … or jump the after-inquiry on your peril” (another passage having to do with instruction).

But then Macbeth reflects that it is not so simple. He wants an exempt time, sealed off from the flow of time, in which to commit a consequence-less murder—like the exempt space marked out by the conjurer's circle, one that seals its ambit off from God's providential order all around the circle. But time flows on into consequential acts: murder calls for retaliation. The interpretation of time as making a single act “the be-all and the end-all here, but here” is not tenable. That “school of time” comes up against the fact that “We still have judgment here” [not surcease “here but here”]. We give others “bloody instruction”—to kill in return, just as Campion's “bloody questions” called for a self-killing response. The passage should be emphasized this way:

If it were done when 'tis done, then 'twere well
It were done quickly. If th' 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 rank and school of time
We'd jump the life to come. But …

This is just the first of three difficult passages in this soliloquy. The second one is the famous “new-born babe” sequence, much discussed and argued over. Cleanth Brooks gave the passage an exhaustive “new criticism” analysis, connecting the babe with every other reference to children or male adulthood in Macbeth.² Helen Gardner responded that Brooks had made the passage more, not less, obscure.³ Kenneth Muir tried to reconcile the work of his fellow critics.⁴ And the battles go on.

The passage is difficult. No phrase in it but has caused problems.

And pity like a naked new-born babe
Striding the blast, or heaven's cherubim horsed
Upon the sightless couriers of the air,
Shall blow the horrid deed in every eye,
That tears shall drown the wind.

It may help to take minor points first, since they can give clues to harder matters.

1. How do “tears drown the wind”? Most editors take “drown” to mean “kill by immersion,” and conclude that, in Johnson's words, there is “remission of the wind in a shower.”⁵ That does not seem to be a meteorological fact, and it fits ill the context: passions should be raised, not allayed, by revelation of the regicide. Actually, “drown” can mean simply “drench” or “flood,” as in a passage with strong similarities to this one, Hamlet 2.2.562ff., where Hamlet says that a real (not a feigned) murder

                                        would drown the stage with tears,
And cleave the general ear with horrid speech. …

There is no question of killing the stage by immersion. So, in our passage, tears will drench the wind, be swirled along in them. Hamlet's actor splits ears with horrid speech; Macbeth's angels blow the horrid deed in every—eye, not ear. In both cases, horrifying testimony to a crime is delivered.

2. Why are the winds “sightless”? Muir, in his edition, glossed the word as invisible—which is clearly what it means at 1.5.49 (demons' “sightless substance”). But he changed his mind when editing King Lear, where winds snatch at Lear's hair “with eyeless rage” (3.1.8). Winds, which make people close their eyes, may be thought of as sightless—putti in the corners of old pictures, representing the four winds, sometimes close their eyes while puffing out their checks to blow.

3. How do angels blow a deed into eyes? Portents and apparitions mark the death of kings. The angels can either cause these portents, or be these portents. If the latter is the case, then the coursers cannot be sightless in the sense of invisible. We are dealing with visual evidence, not acoustic. I mentioned earlier that “blowing” was a charged word in the Gunpowder Plot days, related to the imagined portent of royal limbs flying through the air. The Plot was foiled, and that evidence had to be imagined; but Macbeth is supposing that Duncan's death does occur, and he fears what portents will follow. Some portents do, in fact, occur when the murder has been committed—an owl brings down a falcon, and horses go wild (2.4.11-18). The heavens protest what has been done on earth (lines 5-6):

Thou seest the heavens, as troubled with man's act,
Threatens his bloody stage.

Macbeth is imagining some such revelation of the crime from above.

4. What is the division of labor between the babe and the cherubim? None, says Gardner—they are both symbols of innocence. She mocks Brooks's treatment of the babe as Pity and the cherubim as Vengeance. But cherubs can be judges—Hamlet threatens Claudius with the cryptic remark that he (Hamlet) sees a cherub who reads his (Claudius's) mind (4.3.48). Brooks rightly contrasts the babe, whose powerlessness is emphasized (it is not only new-born but naked), with powerful coursers guided by angels. The messengers seem fitted to give different testimony, raising pity and fear, just as Hamlet's imagined actor, with his “horrid speech,” can “make mad the guilty, and appall the free [from guilt].” Pity is paired by contrast with threats at Comedy of Errors 1.1.10 and Coriolanus 1.6.36.

5. What is a “naked new-born babe” doing out in a cruel blast of air? The babe stands on the blast, bestrides it in that sense. (The moon bestrides a cloud at Romeo 2.2.31 and Margaret says at III Henry VI 5.4.31: “Bestride the rock, the tide will wash you off”). The cherubim guide their coursers. The babe just stands helpless in the storm. This is a powerful image, and it was given powerful expression in a poem printed four years before Macbeth was performed. Robert Southwell's “The Burning Babe” has these features in common with Shakespeare's image. The babe is “newly born.” It “did in the air appear”—cf. “striding the blast.” It sheds “floods of tears”—cf. “drown with tears.” It makes “mercy blow the coals”—cf. “blow the deed.” The babe seems to be naked in the cold—it displays its “faultless breast.” Southwell's poem hangs the Christ child in the air over a wintry Christmas scene to have its heat of love melt the viewer's cold heart. Justice lights fires of vengeance which the babe's melting love puts out—as Shakespeare's babe offers compassion alongside the cherubim's justice. The blood that melts into the fire and puts it out fuses the image of the babe in the air and Christ hung on the cross—another meeting of mercy and justice.

I do not think that Shakespeare is imitating Southwell, but the extraordinary conjunction of similar elements suggests that Shakespeare may have been nudged by Southwell's poem toward this particular symbol of mercy and pity. Shakespeare's babe is not the Christ child. It is Pity in a personified form. But the iconography is the same.⁶

As I in hoary winter's night
                              Stood shivering in the snow,
Surpris'd I was with sudden heat
                              Which made my heart to glow.
And lifting up a fearful eye
                              To view what fire was near,
A pretty Babe all burning bright
                              Did in the air appear.
Who, scorched with excessive heat,
                              Such floods of tears did shed.
As though his floods should quench his flames
                              Which with his tears were fed.
“Alas,” quoth he, “but newly born,
                              In fiery heats I fry;
Yet none approach to warm their hearts,
                              Or feel my fire, but I.
My faultless breast the furnace is,
                              The fuel wounding thorns.
Love is the fire, and sighs the smoke.
                              The ashes, shame and scorns.
The fuel Justice layeth on,
                              And Mercy blows the coals.
The metal, in the furnace wrought,
                              Are men's defiled souls—
For which, as now on fire I am
                              To work them to this good,
So will I melt into a bath
                              To wash them in my blood.
With this he vanish'd out of sight,
                              And swiftly shrunk away.
And straight I called unto mind
                              That it was Christmas day.(7)

The difficulties in Macbeth's Act One, Scene Seven soliloquy continue to the very end, in these possibly corrupt lines (1.7.25-28):

                                        I have no spur
To prick the sides of my intent, but only
Vaulting ambition which o'erleaps, itself,
And falls on th' other.

By contrast with the racing cherubim on their couriers, Macbeth is stalled. He cannot prod on his intent. The natural thing is to take itself as the object of o'erleaps, though a thing that can jump over itself belongs in the poems of Edward Lear not of William Shakespeare. Ambition needs no spurs—it leaps of itself, unprompted. What is the other that ambition falls on? Most people, trying to make sense of a jump over itself, have ambition fall down on some other—a horse on its rider, or a rider on the other side of the horse, etc. These are not convincing pictures. It is better to take “fall on” as “attack”—

The bold young men that, when he bids 'em charge,
Fall on like fire.(8)

Macbeth says he has no spur to guide a rational intent. All he has—and he is at the moment too wise to accept it—is a berserk ambition that spontaneously goes too far (o'erleaps) and attacks anything in its way (any “other”). That is not entirely convincing, and that last line should perhaps be athetized in a critical edition. But earlier interpretations seem even less tenable.

The nervous telegraphic style of Macbeth's speech deserves fuller study; but enough has been looked at to indicate the blowing of his linguistic fuses as he forces himself on into dreadful action, doing violence to “the pauser, reason.”

In the last act, some of Macbeth's words are obscure. But his actions also seem mysterious in the Folio text and directions. In Act Five, Scene Three he asks for his armor, and Seyton says, “'Tis not needed yet,” but Macbeth will put it on anyway. Fourteen lines later he says, “Come, put my armor on; give me my staff.” Six lines after that: “Pull't off [his armor?], I say.” Four lines on: “Bring it [the armor?] after me.” He exits, presumably still unarmed. Not till the end of Scene Five does he say, “Arm! Arm! And out!” Then, six lines later, he says: “At least we'll die with harness on our back.” Most directors have Macbeth arm between scenes, but that seems to destroy the point (whatever it is) of his alternating resolution and reluctance in arming.⁹ What stage business do these various starts and stops indicate?

Ever since Caroline Spurgeon's 1935 book Shakespeare's Imagery drew attention to the language about Macbeth's clothes—too alien, too large, too strange to fit him—directors have tried various ways of suggesting that their actor wears “borrowed robes” (1.3.109). Olivier came out in a large robe in the discovery scene after the murder and tried to “lose” his recently bloodied hands in it.¹⁰ Welles wore a crown that looked too large for his head. Trevor Nunn gave Duncan a huge priest-like cope which is carried or stationed near Macbeth when he is not wearing it, a shining symbol of the kingship he never quite makes his own.

The elaborate business with the armor, the circling of the language back to images of clothing, the general importance of emblematic costume on Shakespeare's stage—and especially of a king's emblematic dress—indicate that Macbeth's robing is important. We see him go from soldier to courtier to king to conjurer and back to soldier.

It is instructive to look at other scenes where there is important business having to do with costume. In The Tempest, Prospero's cloak is an important prop. He must take it off to speak as a man and father (“Pluck my magic garment from me,” 1.2.24) and resume it to compel the spirits. Faustus's cloak was important in Philip Henslowe's inventory (see Frontispiece).¹¹ The actor Richard Alleyn first appeared as Faustus in clerical garb, a surplice with a cross on his breast.¹² But after his contract with the devil is signed, the evil spirits bring him “rich apparel” and clothe him in it (Doctor Faustus A2.1.82-84).

But the most spectacular use of raiment is evident in the other play in the Shakespeare troupe's repertory of 1607, Barnes's The Devil's Charter. The play opens with Alexander being robed in the panoply of a pope. That the robe is an evil conjurer's is shown by the fact that the devils put it on him and then give him a magic book (like the book Mephistopheles brings to Faustus). As the chorus of the play put it (lines 70-71):

Satan, transfigur'd like a protonotary,
To him makes offer of the triple crown.

Later, when Alexander conjures, he resumes the robe and takes up the book, while telling an acolyte to put on his vestments (lines 1851-72). At the end of the play, we see Alexander sitting “unbraced” in his study, trying ineffectually to repent. Then he rises, goes to the curtain over the inner chamber, and pulls it aside—to reveal the devil throned and wearing Alexander's pontificals (lines 3339-42). It is a splendid coup de théâtre. Alexander knows he has lost all his power, now that the devil has reclaimed his proper garb (lines 3545-47).

My robes! My robes! He robs me of my robes!
Bring me my robes or take away my life!
My robes, my life, my soul and all, is gone.

Barnes's play is full of references to clothes, to things like Alexander's “cloaking” of his vices.¹³ And Caesar, his son, throws off his own clerical robes to show he is wearing armor underneath. The other Gunpowder play of 1606, Dekker's The Whore of Babylon, also used papal robes for the Whore's pompous court. Both Dekker and Barnes show the conjunction of papal and witch-like powers in the wizard's cloak.¹⁴ Another attribute of the wizard is his wand, or staff, or rod—the wand we see Faustus wield in the illustration to the 1616 Quarto, the staff Mephistopheles wields at B3.2.16; the staff Prospero must break when he abjures his magic (Tempest 5.1.54), the rod that Merlin uses to quell his enemies in The Birth of Merlin.

Given the expectations of a context where conjuring and witchcraft have been so important, it astonishes me that no one has suggested that the staff Macbeth calls for at 5.3.48 is a magic staff. Editors call it “either a weapon or a staff of office” (Brooke). How does one identify it as either from its appearance? There would be no problem identifying a magic staff from its association with a wizard's cloak—and that is just what Beerbohm Tree (in 1911) had Hecate's spirits put on Macbeth at the end of the necromancy scene, where the spirits come to restore his confidence.¹⁵ We have seen the precedent for this. Faustus, too, after his commerce with the devil, feels weak and regretful—so the devils dance for him and give him rich apparel, the wizard's garb that replaces his clerical garb. I suggest that Hecate's spirits do the same for Macbeth. The stage direction was lost at the same time Hecate's expanded song was added to the play (to be cued in short form by the Folio).

When Macbeth comes to the necromancy, he asks the witches to conjure for him in his own witch-speech. But he is, at this stage, still an initiate brought to his first conjuring—like the Duchess of Gloucester in II Henry VI. After his participation, he is both privileged and damned, given powers that will self-destruct. Just before his next appearance, before the only two scenes where he can wear the mantle, we hear Angus compare his title to “a giant's robe / Upon a dwarfed thief” (5.2.21-22).

The robe would look like a king's robe. Monarchs had emblems on their apparel—like the zodiacal signs and mystical symbols on Elizabeth's garment in the Rainbow Portrait, painted circa 1603, or the wondrous cloak of mirrors put on Edward III.¹⁶ The Titania (Elizabeth) whose court is contrasted with Rome's in Dekker's Whore has a “faery” court where symbols of “good” magic and providential order are contrasted with the trappings of the Beast's kingdom.

The magic cloak of Macbeth the conjurer may even help clear up a textual dispute. At 5.3.21, the Folio has Macbeth say, “This push / Will cheere me ever, or dis-eate me now.” Editors regularly alter “cheere” to “chair,” so it will match “dis-seat.” But the push is Macbeth's, not a challenger's—as it should be if a push, by failing, lets him keep his chair. He is not taking it. If we keep the text, with his garment in mind, it would remind us of the reason he was given it by Hecate (4.1.127):

Come, sisters, cheer we up his sprites!

What becomes, then, of the emphatically syllabified “dis-eate,” a non-word? Many since Rowe have accepted the Second Folio's “dis-ease.” Compare Chapman's “dis-ease” when he had Mercury take away the ease of sleep:

Then up his rod went, with which he declin'd
The eyes of any waker when he pleas'd,
And any sleeper, when he wish'd, dis-eased.(17)

Macbeth's loss will take away the cheering ease the witches brought him.

The long business with the armor reflects Macbeth's reluctance to surrender his robe and staff. He asks for armor, then says instead, “Give me my staff.” There are two possibilities in what follows. Either he says “Pull't off, I say” of his cloak—like Prospero's “Pluck my magic garment from me”—and then says “bring it after me” of the cloak. Or he begins to arm, stops, and says, “Bring the armor after me.”

I prefer the second choice. It takes Macbeth into a third scene wearing his cloak. He disrobes in the gathering doubts that follow on reports of his wife's death—perhaps during the “Tomorrow and tomorrow” speech. He becomes only a man again, like Prospero without his wand, like Faustus and Alexander trying to repent. Then he calls up his manic courage and arms with a desperate glee (5.5.51): “At least we'll die with harness on our back.”

The “Tomorrow and tomorrow” speech (5.5.19-28) is a confession that Macbeth has been all too successful in canceling time. He has turned it into a meaningless succession of sameness. If conjuring is an attempt to master time and space by stepping outside both, to exert a power over the universe, this is a speech of supreme powerlessness.¹⁸ Its weary cadence seems to be an inversion of the message of Psalm 19 (verses 2 and 4):

Day unto day uttreth the same
                    And night unto night teacheth knowledge. …
Their line is gone forth through all the earth,
                    And their words unto the ends of the world.(19)

Yet Macbeth still clings to belief in his own preternatural immunities. He has a pledge on the future, what he called “a bond of fate” (4.1.84). Two impossibilities protect him—no man born of woman can kill him, and Birnam Wood must walk. But the fated end of contracting with the devil is to see that the contract was a trick. The assurance turns into a trap. As the Gunpowder Plotters saw their own scheme recoil upon them (those who dug the pit falling into it), so Macbeth finds that there was a meaning to the pledges that he did not grasp.

In both cases, it is a meaning traditional to witchcraft. Making woods move is a part of the witches' regular impossibilities (adynata). Even Macbeth hinted at this in his conjuring speech. Classical witches regularly boast Et silvas moveo. Macbeth should have suspected such portents, however contrived. He had said himself, “Stones have been known to move and trees to speak” (3.4.122).

The other portent is also traditional with witches. They especially prize unbaptized infants for creating spells. They steal them from cribs or ditches where they die. They even rip them from pregnant corpses, as Lucan said in the passage used by Marston for the necromancy scene in Sophonisba.

Volnere sic ventris, non qua natura vocabat,
Extrahitur partus, calidis ponendus in aris.(20)
By a stab to the womb, in a way nature never indicated,
The child is torn out to be offered on the flaming altar.

This is a passage Ben Jonson cited in his notes to The Masque of Queens.²¹

The witches formed their riddles in ways that could turn backwards on their victim. When the portents come true, however, it is not by some preternatural intrusion into the order of nature. The walking wood and man not born are fake miracles, as it were—natural events masquerading in odd language. The witches are equivocators in the most thoroughgoing way. Like the Jesuits, they use words that are true at some level but not in the way that their victim could understand. They “keep the word of promise to our ear / And break it to our hope” (5.8.21-22). It is what Banquo had predicted on the heath (1.3.123-26):

And oftentimes, to win us to our harm,
The instruments of Darkness tell us truths,
Win us with honest trifles, to betray's
In deepest consequence.

The unnatural thing is not Birnam Wood's moving or Macduff's non-birth birth, but the unnatural (Jesuitical) language of the witches, the destruction of reality in words misused. No wonder Macbeth says, when the wood moves, “I pale in resolution, and begin / To doubt th' equivocation of the fiend” (5.5.41-42).²²

But Macbeth fights on, relying on the other portent, which is harder to fulfill in any conceivable natural sense. He can still boast to Macduff, “I bear a charmed life.” The charm is the magic spell woven around him by the witches in the necromancy scene. The marking off of “charmed” ground has occurred many times in the play—on the heath as the witches circled Macbeth, in “hell” as the Porter circled his imagined Jesuit, in the necromancy scene, in the fake spell cast by Malcolm on Macduff. The actual geometry of magic figures on the ground is important to scenes like those of Faustus's and Pope Alexander's conjuring or in the marked arena of Faustus's witchcraft illustrated in the 1620 Quarto (see Frontispiece). We should suppose that the charmed circle is a spot still definite on the stage as Macbeth, stripped of followers, retreats to his last redoubt of magic. Imagine him taking up that position as he prepares to kill Siward. His circle has become the ambit of a bear staked for baiting (5.7.1-2):

They have tied me to a stake. I cannot fly
But bearlike I must fight the course.

The bear is circumscribed, and his circle can contract if the chain winds around the pole as he turns and backs away from baiting dogs; but Macbeth still sees it as a circle of power, and he kills young Siward with fiendish energy. The charges of diabolic power are made both by Siward and, especially, by Macduff: “Turn, hellhound!” (5.8.3). The bravery of young Siward and of Macduff cannot properly be gauged unless we take seriously the hellish aspect of Macbeth's power. These men are in the position of desperate pursuers who must “take on” a vampire in Dracula movies. Macduff acts like an exorcist (5.8.13-15):

                                                            Despair thy charm!
And let the Angel whom thou still hast serv'd
Tell thee …

Macduff forces Macbeth out of his charmed circle—which explains the odd Folio direction: Exeunt fighting. Alarums. Enter fighting, and Macbeth slain. This breaks Poel's Rule against actors' exiting and immediately re-entering. It has been plausibly suggested that Macbeth is forced out on the lower stage and reappears on the upper level, where the business of beheading him after he falls can more easily be feigned. The retreat to higher inner levels of a castle was a familiar concept to the audience—as if the bear's ambit were narrowing and narrowing around his stake—and the head could be brandished from the balcony as from battlements (Welles filmed it that way). The spell is broken, the circle shattered. “The time is free.”

Notes

1. Defenses of “shoal” get desperate. Brooke writes “reference to the sea [!] springs from the fishing sense of ‘trammel.’” But “trammel” was used more of netting animals on land than of netting fish.

2. Cleanth Brooks, The Well Wrought Urn (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1947), 22-49.

3. Helen Gardner, The Business of Criticism (Oxford University Press, 1959), 53-61.

4. Kenneth Muir, Aspects of “Macbeth” (Cambridge University Press, 1977), 66-68.

5. Johnson on Shakespeare, edited by Arthur Sherbo (Yale University Press, 1968), Vol. 2, p. 767. Cf. Gardner, op.cit., 59, on “the wind dropping as the rain begins.”

6. It is interesting that all the critics refer to the babe as “he,” though the virtues were normally female when personified. Blake, too, made the babe male in his large color print illustrating the passage. For a discussion of Blake's “Pity,” see Jonathan Bate, Shakespeare and the English Romantic Imagination (Clarendon Press, 1989), 125-27.

7. The Poems of Robert Southwell, S.J., edited by James H. McDonald and Nancy Pollard Brown (Clarendon Press, 1967), 15-16. For date of the poem's publication, see pp. lxv and 124. The text available to Shakespeare in 1602 mistakenly printed “bred” for “fed” at the end of the third stanza. Christopher Devlin argued, on no very good evidence, that Southwell and Shakespeare were friends (The Life of Robert Southwell, 1956). But it is likely that Shakespeare knew the Jesuit's poems—there was a vogue for them just after the 1595 execution. It was the eighth edition of his poems in which “The Burning Babe” appeared (in 1602). See McDonald and Brown, op.cit., lv-lxvi.

8. Two Noble Kinsmen 2.2.249-50.

9. I suspect that the troupe had at the time a fine costume of armor that fit Burbage, since there is an elaborate arming scene in the contemporary Antony 4.4.1-18.

10. Dennis Bartholomeusz, Macbeth and the Players (Cambridge University Press, 1969), 260.

11. See David Bevington and Eric Rasmussen, Doctor Faustus, A and B Texts, 1604, 1616 (Manchester University Press, 1993), 92.

12. Ibid., 49.

13. Line 1134: “Those robes pontifical which thou profaned.” Lines 1822-23: “crimes / Lurk underneath the robes of holiness.” Line 2077: “Your sins more heinous, yet your robes conceal them.” Line 2132: “To cloak my vices I will pardon yours.” Lines 2430-31: “your reverend purple robes / Which should protect. …”

14. It would have been theatrically effective to have the Whore (who was also the Pope) played by a man—to emphasize his unnatural aspect (the effect Shakespeare achieves with his witches played by men).

15. Rosenberg, 510.

16. Janet Arnold, Queen Elizabeth's Wardrobe Unlock'd (W. S. Maney & Son, 1988), 81-84, 92; and The Raigne of King Edward the Third, edited by Fred Lapides (Garland Publishing, 1980), lines 707-15. For Shakespeare's possible role in the composition of Edward III, see Chapter 4, note 20.

17. George Chapman, Homer's “Odysses” 5.66-68. Cf. the similar use of “mis-ease” at 13.139. For the hyphen in dis-ease, see F's “dis-heartens” at Macbeth 2.3.33.

18. The two lines preceding make no sense as normally delivered:

                        She should have died hereafter,
    There would have been a time for such a word.

    Editors take this to mean, “I am too distracted to mourn now. If she died later, I could take in the meaning of that event.” But (1) he does not know there will be a later occasion, (2) “There would have been a time” seems to look to the past, not the future, and (3) Macbeth goes on to say there will be no special time to be marked in the future (made up of featureless tomorrows) or the past (yesterdays lighting fools). If the future and past are ruled out, only the present is left as a “time for such a word.” But he is saying that no time is a right time any more, distinguishable from other times. No kairos will exist for him, ever again. Then why does he say, “There would have been a time”? The first two lines must be questions, to which the rest of the speech gives a despairing answer:

    She should have died hereafter [in the future]?
    There would have been time for such a word [in the past]?
    [“No” understood]. Tomorrow, and. …

19. The Geneva translation of 1560. The Psalms are the part of the Bible most echoed in Shakespeare. Richmond Noble wrote that “there is not a play in the Folio entirely free from a suggestion of a use of the Psalms” (Shakespeare's Biblical Knowledge (Octagon Books reprint, 1970), 47).

20. Lucan, Pharsalia 6.557-58.

21. Stephen Orgel, editor, Ben Jonson: The Complete Masques (Yale University Press, 1969), 535.

22. “I pull in resolution” of F calls for a metrically clumsy emphasis on in to get either of the two suggested and contrary meanings (“I inhale new resolution,” or “I limit my former resolution”). Johnson suggested pall, but pale is as easy a setter's slip, and paling has been a regular theme in the play: “look so green and pale” (1.7.37); “wear a heart so white” (2.2.64); “bond which keeps me pale” (3.2.50); “look not so pale” (5.1.63); “cream-fac'd” (5.3.11); “linen cheeks” (5.3.16); “whey-face” (5.3.17).