Hautboys [within]. Torches. Enter a sewer and divers servants with dishes and service over the stage [and exeunt]. Then enter Macbeth

MACBETH      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 bank and shoal of time,

We’d jump the life to come.             (1.7.1-7)

Your writer exhales. This is one of those astonishing 0-60 in no seconds moments in Shakespeare—perhaps the greatest of them?—where one is tempted simply to shake one’s head and wonder how on earth writers do it, let alone actors. One does, however, have to have a go. So. Here’s one answer as to what Macbeth’s been doing, why he wasn’t in the previous scene, welcoming Duncan to the castle. Fretting, going over and over it, agonising about what he’s going to do. Now of course he hasn’t been—he’s been at the feast, doing the host thing—but the impression’s still there, and it’s a useful one. This is an ongoing tussle, now (perhaps) reaching crisis point. There’s the bustle of a banquet, the sound of normal life carrying on unawares, elsewhere, close by: the sound of music offstage, torches(reminding us that it’s night), a team of servants led by a sewer, a butler, perhaps even in a formal procession, carrying elaborate dishes. This banquet is a big deal, all the stops pulled out—and then suddenly there’s Macbeth, leaving the feast, full of agitation, apparently unable to bear being around people (perhaps Duncan especially) a moment longer. Time for a breath of fresh air (and whatever Duncan wants to believe, there’s not a lot of that around in this play); in modern dress, a quick nip from a hip flask, fag break, trembling hands?*

He’s been going over and over this and now he’s saying it out loud. If it were done when ’tis done, then ’twere well it were done quickly. It—well, he’s still not going to articulate it quite, although we know what he means. If killing Duncan (there, I said it), if it were concluded, utterly finished in the moment of its doing, if the actual performance of the deed were the end of it, then there’s no reason to delay—just get on with it. Do it, do it quickly; it’s all for the best. (Doing and done, like it, resound through this play, the usually invisible mortar of language rendered terrifyingly visible and fraught.) If the assassination, the actual doing, as well as the murder itself (this is probably the first appearance of the word in English, to mean this kind of targeted murder of a high-ranking figure) could trammel up the consequence, prevent any repercussions (trammel means to entangle, as if in a net, or a hobbled horse; it’s an image allied to smothering, but of movement, not breath), and if it caught (as in a net) success with his surcease, the end of his life, if all the chains of causation were clear and swift—it’d be—alright? If but this blow, if only it were to be the be-all and the end-all, if it were to be a conclusion, a full stop—that’d be OK? If that were the case, then here, upon this bank and shoal of time, we’d jump the life to come. This moment, this event, this deed would be the end of it, the place where we’d run aground in the shallows, end the journey—and we’d jump the life to come, leap over the question of eternity, and what it might hold. The sense of being all at sea, adrift, both wanting and not wanting to reach a destination, or perhaps simply to be there without having ever to voyage and arrive.

So much has been written about this speech, and I could say much more, but there’s so much more to come…

*It’s both trivial and vulgar but also pleasing to imagine Macbeth saying to his guests, scuse me, must have a slash; OED tells me that the much later idiom derives from the Scots, current in the C17, of slash as drink, or large splash of liquid. But I digress.