MACBETH                              He chid the sisters

When first they put the name of king upon me,

And bade them speak to him. Then, prophet-like,

They hailed him father to a line of kings.

Upon my head they placed a fruitless crown,

And put a barren sceptre in my grip

Thence to be wrenched with an unlineal hand,

No son of mine succeeding. (3.1.57-64)

Macbeth’s properly obsessing about Banquo, going over and over it, drawing up a charge sheet, justifying what he’s about to do to himself. He chid the sisters when first they put the name of king upon me, and bade them speak to him: Banquo made it all about him, when it was meant to be all about me! Chid (as the past tense of chide) is interesting here because it’s so emotionally inflected: it means to rebuke or reprove, but can also suggest scold, blame. In fact Banquo did nothing of the sort in 1.3, he said to the witches, in essence, Macbeth’s gone off into his own little world, he’s rapt, so, in the meantime, what about me? Have you got anything for me? But Macbeth’s now remembering it as Banquo taking over almost by force, wresting the witches’ attention on to him, rather than Macbeth, and chid, with its sense of blaming, shaming, speaks for how Macbeth is feeling now, projected backwards, and on to Banquo. This is what Macbeth’s been dwelling on, obsessing over; it all comes tumbling out. Prophet-like, they hailed him father to a line of kings. Father. Macbeth, the childless man. That great vulnerability again, played on by Lady Macbeth as, perhaps, the grief that they share, the mostly unspoken trauma of their life. Upon my head—by contrast—they placed a fruitless crown, futile and pointless (a whisper of the histories and of Lear: the crown as hollow, empty, nothing, nought) and put a barren sceptre in my grip. Bare, withered, and also impotent, gripped as if with a fierce but failing hand, aware of its own redundancy. The fruitless crown and the barren sceptre become like a dead tree, in the wasteland that Macbeth is now creating. Thence to be wrenched with an unlineal hand, to be torn away by a stranger, no one of my own blood, no son of mine succeeding. The end of the line, failure, loss, and grief, a gulping sob, in those four breathless lines, a single sentence of pain and shame and fear, channelled into anger and self-justification. Was it all just for this?