MACBETH      Accursèd be that tongue that tells me so,

For it hath cowed my better part of man;

And be these juggling fiends no more believed,

That palter with us in a double sense,

That keep the word of promise to our ear,

And break it to our hope. I’ll not fight with thee.

MACDUFF                   Then yield thee, coward,

And live to be the show and gaze o’th’ time.

We’ll have thee, as our rarer monsters are,

Painted upon a pole, and underwrit,

‘Here may you see the tyrant.’        (5.10.18-28)

Temporarily at least, all the stuffing goes out of Macbeth, and he falters in the fight, and turns his ire on the witches, the apparitions, the spirits whose prophecies he trusted utterly, and which have, one by one, been shown to be so false. Accursed be the tongue that tells me so, Macduff that is, who was (technically at least) not of woman born, untimely ripped from his mother’s womb. But, cursing aside, that news has cowed Macbeth’s better part of man, his courage, unmanned him, he would say. I’m not going to believe these juggling fiends any longer, these trickster devils, who cheat and lie, palter with us in a double sense, deceive with their equivocations. Unsurprisingly, he takes the deception personally; he’s been let down by voices and words that he trusted. They keep the word of promise to our ear, kept telling me everything would turn out well, that I was untouchable, invulnerable—and then break their word to our hope. They’ve destroyed me through their deceptions; I believed them and it’s all come crashing down. I’ll not fight with thee, he says to Macduff. I can’t. Everything’s fallen apart.

Then yield thee, coward, says Macduff, uncompromising, turning the knife with coward. Surrender, give yourself up. And live to be the show and gaze of the time, to be paraded in front of all the troops, ours and those few who’ve remained on your side. (Again it’s a nod forward to Antony and Cleopatra: that public humiliation in a Roman triumph is what Cleopatra dreads and refuses.) You’ll be blinking in the glare of the flashbulbs, unflattering angles on the television news, unkempt and shambling. People will point at you, and laugh, and mock; you’ll be the prime exhibit in a freak-show, like one of the rarer monsters, a two-headed calf, a mermaid—you’ll be the headline attraction, on the posters, painted upon a pole, letting everyone know, ‘here may you see the tyrant’. Not the hero, the warrior, the king, but the tyrant—again—the monster, the freak.