Macduff: TURN, HELL-HOUND, TURN (5.10-1-8) #DaggerDrawn #SlowShakespeare

Enter Macbeth

MACBETH      Why should I play the Roman fool, and die

On mine own sword? Whiles I see lives, the gashes

Do better upon them.

Enter Macduff

MACDUFF                  Turn, hell-hound, turn.

MACBETH      Of all men else I have avoided thee.

But get thee back; my soul is too much charged

With blood of thine already.

MACDUFF                  I have no words.

My voice is in my sword, thou bloodier villain

Than terms can give thee out.

Fight. Alarum (5.10.1-8)

 

Finally. Macbeth first: he knows it’s going badly, that he’s losing; back against the wall indeed. But he’s still defiant: why should I play the Roman fool, and die on mine own sword? Why should he kill himself, rather than be killed or captured? Shakespeare depicts the suicide of Brutus in Julius Caesar in favourable terms; he might already have been thinking about his next play, Antony and Cleopatra, at the end of which both protagonists kill themselves. Hamlet’s friend Horatio declares himself ‘more an antique Roman than a Dane’, ready to kill himself in order to follow his friend, until Hamlet dissuades him. In a Christian context suicide is more morally ambiguous than in a Roman, stoic setting, where it’s generally admirable, but Macbeth is contemptuous as well as defiant, in his reference to Roman fools. It’s not so much that he thinks that while there’s life there’s hope, or that there’s any hope at all—rather, he’ll just keep fighting, and killing, as long as he can. Whiles I see lives, any other living creatures, the gashes do better upon them than on me. It’s not a noble sentiment.

 

Turn, hell-hound, turn: it’s a brilliant entry line for Macduff, grim, succinct, uncompromising. (It’s hard not to see this encounter as behind the denouement of every Western, Macbeth definitely the one in the black hat.) Not so fast, boy, you’re not going anywhere. And hell, again, Macbeth as devil but also dog, savage and slavering, but also a beast, inhuman, subhuman. Macbeth taken aback, recoils just a bit: it’s Macduff. Of all men else I have avoided thee. We might recall that that was the third prophecy: beware the Thane of Fife. Macbeth’s remembering it too, although he frames it in terms of his guilt over the killing of Macduff’s family: but get thee back; my soul is too much charged with blood of thine already. In fact that can be played tauntingly too, reminding Macduff (as if he needs a reminder) of just what Macbeth’s done to him; I’ve already killed all your family, haven’t you suffered enough? But the language is mostly of the soul charged with blood, not just stained (in a play full of indelible bloodstains) but weighed down, burdened—to modern ears, also the sense of a charge sheet, the list of all the terrible crimes that Macbeth has committed, or that have been done in his name. Macbeth feels the weight of it, now, perhaps can’t in this moment cope with the thought of more.

 

I have no words, says Macduff. I haven’t come to talk and, besides, what you’ve done, to me, to everyone, is beyond words. My voice is in my sword, and you’ll listen to that alright; it speaks for me now, thou bloodier villain, worse even than terms can give thee out, worse than any words can express. The time for words is long gone.

 

View 2 comments on “Macduff: TURN, HELL-HOUND, TURN (5.10-1-8) #DaggerDrawn #SlowShakespeare

  1. Where you have written ‘the third prophecy: Beware the Thane of Fife,’ there is an error, for this is the first prophecy/apparition being referenced.

    1. Ah, well spotted. Here I meant that it’s the third prophecy to be ticked off, as it were, after Dunsinane Wood and none of woman born, rather than the third in the scene in which they first appear?

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