Enter MacDuff
MACDUFF O horror, horror, horror!
Tongue nor heart cannot conceive nor name thee.
MACBETH AND LENNOX What’s the matter?
MACDUFF Confusion now hath made his masterpiece.
Most sacrilegious murder hath broke ope
The Lord’s anointed temple, and stole thence
The life o’th’ building.
MACBETH What is’t you say, the life?
LENNOX Mean you his majesty?
MACDUFF Approach the chamber, and destroy your sight
With a new Gorgon. Do not bid me speak.
See, and then speak yourselves. Awake, awake!
Exeunt Macbeth and Lennox (2.3.55-66)
Does Macduff re-enter at a run, or slowly, stunned? I think the latter. He has to convey what he’s seen, but instead, deeply traumatised, he first says that he can’t describe it or, even more, that the horror of what he’s just seen is so extreme that he can’t process it, let alone put it into words. Tongue nor heart cannot conceive nor name thee. This does not compute. (The thrice-repeated horror adds emphasis but is also a reminder that, in this play, lots of things come in threes. It’s a witch signature.) Macbeth can just join in with Lennox, cover his own confusion, drown out the pounding of his own heart, with a shocked, What’s the matter? Confusion now hath made his masterpiece. What I’ve just seen is the ultimate in destruction, chaos, catastrophe, disorder. One circumlocution, meaning still unclear, although the magnitude is clearly great. He tries again but still can’t give the bare facts: most sacrilegious murder hath broke ope the Lord’s anointed temple, and stole thence the life o’th’ building. A violation that’s a kind of blasphemy, expressed in terms of breaking and entering; a violation of house, home, sanctuary, the desecration of a church—and not just kids being silly, a graffiti scribble, chairs overturned, collection box forced, but wholesale destruction of all that’s sacred, with no possibility of restoration or redress. Macduff’s language, while still circumlocutory, indicates the play’s high view of kingship, flattering to James VI and I, that the monarch was indeed divinely appointed and anointed. That’s what Macbeth has destroyed, sacrilege indeed. Macbeth seizes on his idiom, because he can’t keep up this pretence of not knowing anything much longer: what is’t you say, the life? (a death, then? He can’t bring himself to ask that, quite.) And Lennox picks it up, fortunately, and starts to speak this horror into reality: Mean you his Majesty? Is the King—?! But Macduff still can’t articulate it. All he can do is tell them, in terrible, ominous terms, to go and see for themselves. Approach the chamber, and destroy your sight with a new Gorgon. The sight of the terrible snake-haired Gorgon turned those who looked on her to stone. Do not bid me speak. See, and then speak yourselves. (If you can. For I cannot.) It’s brilliant writing, not just dramatizing the difference between showing and telling, but between telling and not telling, not being able to tell. It’s not just that the imagination supplies the horrors more graphically, and in more personalised form, than any description could—it’s also that Macduff is giving another version of trauma to go with Macbeth’s (the compulsion to repeat, the flashbulb memory of the servants’ prayers), reinforcing even more the horror of what Macbeth has done. Two fighting men, shocked to the core and beside themselves. But Macduff at least can rally himself just enough to raise the house: Awake, awake!And Macbeth must face another test, confronting the horror of what he’s done, going back into that room after all, without betraying himself.
