Enter Lady

LADY              That which hath made them drunk hath made me bold.

What hath quenched them hath given me fire. Hark! Peace!

It was the owl that shrieked, the fatal bellman

Which gives the stern’st good-night. He is about it.

The doors are open, and the surfeited grooms

Do mock their charge with snores. I have drugged their possets,

That death and nature do contend about them

Whether they live or die.                  (2.2.1-8)

To say that Lady Macbeth is overwrought at the top of this scene is an understatement. There’s no mention of a torch; this scene could be imagined as taking place in the dark? She’s been drinking with the king’s servants, it seems, and for long enough to get them drunk. Bold suggests fearlessness and daring, but also (especially for a woman) it might connote shamelessness, immodesty, which might be reinforced by Lady Macbeth’s next observation, that what hath quenched them hath given me fire. It’s certainly possible in performance to suggest that she’s been flirting with the servants, or that she’s aroused by the danger, by the transgressive thrill of what she’s been doing, and by the knowledge of what Macbeth will do, as much as by the drink. But she’s wound up to breaking point, jumping at the slightest noise: Hark! What was that? Peace! (she calms herself) it was just (just!) the owl that shrieked (is it eerier if one is heard here, or not?) And she terms the owl the fatal bellman: owls were birds of ill-omen (like the croaking ravens she’s already invoked), but here the owl could more specifically be a night watchman, shrieking a stern, terrible good-night (very much not a nightingale). It’s after midnight, and all is very much not well. There’s also a more topical possibility, more usually suggested in connection with Webster’s Duchess of Malfi: in 1605, a London Merchant Taylor named Robert Dove left money for the payment of a fee to a bellman and the purchase of a bell to be rung outside the condemned cell at Newgate the night before executions; the bellman was also to make a speech, and the ritual was to be repeated in the morning, as the condemned men left the prison, the stern’st goodnight indeed. This was an act of charity, to encourage the prisoners to repent. (The owl is sinister enough as the fatal bellman, without this additional piece of horrific local colour!)

Then another swerve, as Lady Macbeth refocuses. He is about it. (About as euphemistic as she could be, in a play full of euphemisms: he, it. My husband is killing the king, she doesn’t say.) She left the doors open, and the surfeited grooms, the insensible, sodden servants, overcome with an excess of drink, do mock their charge with snores. Their charge here isn’t Duncan himself, but rather the job that they should be doing, that they’ve been charged with. (Lady Macbeth continues to be contemptuous of the servants, collateral damage, merely to be exploited.) And they’re not just drunk, but drugged; she’s spiked the drinks, drugged their possets, and so effectively that they might well die, they’re so deeply unconscious, she adds quite casually. (An early modern audience would assume poppy, or perhaps mandragora, mandrake, a sedative, much more sinister and witchy, believed to shriek as its root was pulled from the ground. The slippery relationship between death and sleep recurs in this play) Very much not what the good hostess should be doing, a violation akin to what Macbeth, the host, is even now inflicting upon his helpless guest.