KING —Noble Banquo,
That hast no less deserved, nor must be known
No less to have done so, let me enfold thee
And hold thee to my heart.
BANQUO There if I grow,
The harvest is your own.
KING My plenteous joys,
Wanton in fullness, seek to hide themselves
In drops of sorrow. (1.4.29-35)
A carefully calibrated little exchange here. Duncan the King explicitly says that Banquo has no less deserved than Macbeth (which is probably a bit of an exaggeration; all the reports of the battlefield have put Macbeth first)—and the praises are less fulsome, or at least less reiterated and developed than for Macbeth—but the point is, they’re being set up more or less as equals. And therefore Banquo is a kind of control, in terms of responses. Both he and Macbeth have been made promises by the witches, and now the two of them are being praised and rewarded by their sovereign. Are they going to react in the same way? Are they going to make similar decisions, follow similar courses of action? Let me enfold thee and hold thee to my heart. (Is there an implication here that Duncan has also embraced Macbeth? Or does Banquo get the hug while Macbeth gets the extravagant praises and promises of reward?) The metaphor of growth and vegetation is revisited, and Banquo shows himself as adept at rhetorical display as Macbeth: there if I grow—in your heart, in your embrace—the harvest is your own. You’ll reap the benefits, the fruits of such closeness, such loyalty, patronage, and service. And Duncan is moved to tears by all this, filled with emotion—another sign, perhaps, of his age and infirmity: my plenteous joys, wanton in fullness, seek to hide themselves in drops of sorrow. It’s all too much; I’m over-full with emotion, it’s all got to spill over, come out somehow. It’s an image of plenitude, generosity; he is the bringer of fertility, the waterer (as it were) of this garden, these burgeoning fields of plenty. But it’s also, potentially, an image of vulnerability, in its most literal sense of wound-ability. Duncan’s tears are straightforwardly weak, childlike—womanish, if you like—but also make his body leaky, permeable, fluid, uncontained, unstable. There’s a telling juxtaposition of joy and sorrow; these are tears of joy, but they are indistinguishable from those of sorrow. (The body is almost always the body politic, the body of the state.)
