LADY What’s to be done?
MACBETH Be innocent of the knowledge, dearest chuck,
Till thou applaud the deed.— Come, seeling night,
Scarf up the tender eye of pitiful day,
And with thy bloody and invisible hand
Cancel and tear to pieces that great bond
Which keeps me pale. (3.2.45-51)
What’s to be done? A simple request for information—what are you planning, what is this dreadful deed that’s going to be done?—but it can also be read, ironically, as a statement of helpless frustration. What’s to be done? What can be done? And, implicitly, nothing can be done. (What’s done cannot be undone.) I’m not going to tell you, says Macbeth, initially framing it almost as a safety measure, it’s for your own good: be innocent of the knowledge. But whose safety? Does he not want her to know anything, so that she has deniability, if she’s questioned, if it all goes wrong, for her own safety? Or does he no longer trust her? Dearest chuck is more affectionate, perhaps, than dear wife, chuck as chick or chook, a colloquial endearment. But this is not a play in which chicks or chickens or other nice birds prosper; rather, they are natural prey. She’ll know what’s been done when it’s time to applaud the deed, congratulate him. Room for irony: how genuinely does he still want, need her approval? It can be played bitterly, or pleadingly.
At this point, if she has any sense, Lady Macbeth should start feeling really, properly scared. Not only is he shutting her out, not trusting her, perhaps, but he’s calling on seriously dark things in seriously dark ways. It’s an invocation of night, but night here suggests a darkness that goes beyond a simple time of day. It’s one of the passages in the play where there is, I think, a proper sense of evil. Night is seeling because it obscures and blinds; a young falcon’s eyes are seeled, sewn up, as part of its taming and training. It’s a forced blindness, an act of complete control (and the implicit falcon is opposed to the chuck, the chick, the innocent in the previous line). Scarf up suggests a less interventionist blindfold, but the effect is the same: blindness, the inability to see, to be seen, like the blanket of the dark that Lady Macbeth herself called on in 1.5 (this speech recapitulates her own perverse epithalamium). That the eye is tender and day is pitiful suggests that day might be a child, caught in a game of blindman’s buff, being hoodwinked, weaker far, and more vulnerable than the heavy, irresistible hand of night, the weight of darkness. (Macbeth is partly thinking about Fleance.)
Night’s hand is both bloody and invisible (creepy, and also prescient, blood that’s there, just not able to be seen) and here it is not simply to cancel, render void by striking through (a textual, legal metaphor) but tear to pieces a bond, a contract. Utter rejection and destruction. And what’s the nature of that bond, that Macbeth suggests is keeping him pale? it is, perhaps, his friendship for Banquo, the relationship that they have forged on the battlefield, as loyal thanes; it’s the reciprocal bond that they have, in this instance, as king and subject (but Macbeth violated that, with Duncan) and as host and guest (Macbeth broke that one too). It could also be Macbeth’s own humanity, the shreds of compassion and compunction that are preventing him from acting entirely ruthlessly, that is, without pity, especially in his intention to have a child murdered. (Pity, like a naked newborn babe.) That bond—and here its fleeting, imagined paperiness, whiteness is important—is what keeps him pale, because it’s making him waver, think too much; it’s what Hamlet calls the ‘pale cast of thought’, pallor, weakness, as opposed to the bloody ‘native hue of resolution’, the ability to act decisively, courageously. The colour play here is extraordinary, black, white, and red, none of them named, all of them suggested, a chromatic assault on the mind’s eye of the audience.
