ROSS It cannot
Be called our mother, but our grave; where nothing
But who knows nothing is once seen to smile;
Where sighs and groans and shrieks that rend the air
Are made, not marked; where violent sorrow seems
A modern ecstasy. The dead man’s knell
Is there scarce asked ‘For who?’, and good men’s lives
Expire before the flowers in their caps,
Dying or ere they sicken.
MACDUFF O relation
Too nice, and yet too true! (4.3.166-175)
Ross is speaking in abstractions, resonant ones which are ironically prescient (the combination of mother and grave; he can’t help himself) but he’s shying away from the personal for the moment: Scotland can no long be called our mother but our grave; it’s become a place of death, not life, where the land buries the dead, rather than nurturing them. (A womb has become a tomb; the rhyme’s not needed to make the point.) Nothing but who knows nothing is once seem to smile: only the ignorant, the stupid, the innocent (perhaps including children, implicitly? if so, then it’s another reminder of the horror of the previous scene, that lively, pert little boy). If you know what’s going on, if you understand, there’s no way you can be anything but downcast, depressed, horrified, afraid. But people are becoming numb, inured to terror, just keeping their heads down and hoping that the worst won’t happen to them; sighs and groans and shrieks that rend the air are made, not marked. No one comments on the sigh of sorrow or resignation, the groan of pain, or the shriek of anguish, torture, death. They barely even notice any more. A community that’s not only cowed but fractured, a loss of care and humanity. Violent sorrow seems a modern ecstasy; it’s just the state everyone’s in, beside themselves, grief-stricken, but isolated and alone in their agony. The dead man’s knell is there scarce asked ‘for who?’; when the passing bell tolls to mark a death, it’s now such an everyday occurrence that it’s unremarkable, no one asks anymore who’s died. It’s as if they don’t care (and, implicitly that they don’t stop and pray either). (John Donne’s expression of the same sentiment, but reworked as a profound statement of Christian solidarity and shared humanity, is better known: ‘Any Mans death diminishes me, because I am inuolued in Mankinde; And therefore neuer send to know for whom the bell tolls; It tolls for thee’, from his Devotions upon emergent occasions, 1624.) People are dying all the time, good men; their lives expire before the flowers in their caps, dying or ere they sicken. They die before they even seem to be unwell. (It’s hard not to picture the modern totalitarian state, ordinary people just ‘disappeared’.) The gallant, fragile flowers pinned to the caps, outliving their wearers.
Because of what’s about to happen in this scene, and the news that Ross has yet to reveal, this little speech might easily be overlooked. But it’s an amazing evocation of a country in crisis. Ross doesn’t make clear how people are dying—is it wholesale slaughter, assassinations, a breakdown of order under the tyrant Macbeth? Perhaps; probably, even. He makes it sound like a sickness too, though, like the plague, terms and scenarios that would be horribly familiar to an audience in 1606, the apparently healthy dead within a day. Tyranny as a national malaise, a whole land and people sick and dying. And Ross’s description of the loss of community, the fracture of human relationships, the impoverishment of fellow feeling, and the terrible isolation of fear, and exhaustion, and mental pain: he’s just described Macbeth too. Macbeth may be the cause of all this suffering, but—on the evidence of his most recent appearances—he’s experiencing it too, especially the paranoia and isolation. O relation too nice, and yet too true!says Macduff. You’ve made it sound too elegant, too neat, your account is all too precise, but at the same time, we all know that it’s true. (Another contrast’s being set up, between this studied eloquence and the stark terms in which Ross will soon have to deliver his news to Macduff.)
