MACBETH If we should fail.
LADY We fail!
But screw your courage to the sticking place,
And we’ll not fail. When Duncan is asleep,
Whereto the rather shall his day’s hard journey
Soundly invite him, his two chamberlains
Will I with wine and wassail so convince
That memory, the warder of the brain,
Shall be a fume, and the recept of reason
A limbeck only. When in swinish sleep
Their drenchèd natures lies as in a death,
What cannot you and I perform upon
Th’unguarded Duncan? What not put upon
His spongy officers, who shall bear the guilt
Of our great quell? (1.7.59-72)
These first short lines are some of the most contested in the whole play, as there are so many ways of playing them, and hence punctuating them. Some editions give Macbeth’s first line a question mark; he’s asking explicitly, then, what happens if we fail? And in the Folio, Lady Macbeth’s reply also has a question mark: We fail? A modern reader or actor will interpret that as a scornful rhetorical question, we, fail? The two of us? (Me, in particular?) But question marks were very often used as what would now be called exclamation marks in this period, so it can as well be interpreted—and often is—as, we fail then, and so what? At least we’ll have tried. But as she exhorts him, if you only screw your courage to the sticking place, we’ll not fail. This is one of my favourite lines in the play, because it’s all about tension, literally winding it up. The sticking place is the point at which the cord on a crossbow is fully wound up, ready to release its bolt, or when the peg of a string instrument is fully tightened in its hole, and as the peg tightens, the string is under more and more tension, its pitch increasing with every turn of the screw. (I can’t read this line without hearing Psycho violins.) There’s also a continuation of the fraught sexual undercurrent of the earlier part of the scene, the promise of release, although screw in a specifically sexual sense isn’t yet current (and in fact screw as a verb in any sense is quite new at this date).
So. This is the plan. Duncan’s exhausted from his journey (she sees this as something to be exploited, rather than any cause of sympathy or care), so he’ll be deeply asleep. And I’ll nobble his servants. (They’re not guards, although it can be inferred that they’re armed at least with daggers; they’re his closest attendants, his chamberlains, responsible for undressing him, putting him to bed. That there’s no mention of guards suggests how safe Duncan feels, and should feel, in Macbeth’s house.) I’ll get them drunk, she says, show them a good time: wassail is revelry, and the suggestion is, perhaps, that she’s prepared to flirt, or more. They’ll be befuddled with drink, unable to remember anything, let alone how they should be responding, or act rationally. Her metaphor is alchemical, as if the chamberlains have become merely vessels for alcohol which will be distilled into fumes (another example of the play’s interest in fog and foul air), and incapable of reason, of holding a rational thought. Lady Macbeth is contemptuous even in anticipation of their weakness and credulousness; they’ll be overcome with swinish sleep, like pigs (and perhaps the pigs here make her a Circe figure, one of the witches of the Odyssey, transforming men to beasts), their human natures drenched, drowned, overcome so that they are as incapable as animals—it’ll be as if they’re dead. And then we can do whatever we want. (Only a few lines earlier, Lady Macbeth was taunting her husband that he was no more than a beast; now she’s reclaimed him as a superman, superior, powerful, in comparison with these sodden servants.) What cannot you and I perform upon the unguarded Duncan? This is all about taking advantage of a helpless and unprotected old man. And then we’ll make it seem as if his attendants—those spongy officers, drunk and insensible—did it. (Spongy is also an implicit contrast to the hard, taut, phallic agency which his wife is now flatteringly attributing to Macbeth.) They shall bear the guilt of our great quell, our murder.
