BANQUO Worthy Macbeth, we stay upon your leisure.
MACBETH Give me your favour. My dull brain was wrought
With things forgotten. Kind gentlemen, your pains
Are registered where every day I turn
The leaf to read them. Let us toward the King.
[To Banquo] Think upon what hath chanced, and at more time,
The interim having weighed it, let us speak
Our free hearts each to other.
BANQUO Very gladly.
MACBETH Till then, enough.—Come, friends.
Exeunt (1.3.144-153)
A tentative approach, a throat-clearing from Banquo: worthy Macbeth, we stay upon your leisure. We’re waiting for you to say the word, so that we can go. Give me your favour: sorry, forgive me; indulge an old soldier. I was distracted, going over all the things I have to do; my dull brain, wrought with things forgotten. (Things not forgotten at all, but rather being obsessed over; the brain being wrought, troubled and agitated, but also perhaps worked on, indeed.) Kind gentlemen, I won’t forget the trouble you’ve taken to bring me this news: your pains are registered where every day I turn the leaf to read them. It’s an oddly intense conceit: it sounds courtly and flattering, but the idea is of a book of record—a book of life, in which names can be written or struck out?—and the suggestion that it will be returned to every day, going back every day to the same page, is obsessive and weirdly static. Let us toward the King. Yes, onwards to see the King—but it’s impossible not to hear the suggestion (even though he’s denied it) of us, Macbeth, him, moving, aspiring in that direction, that status, in a more literal sense. And the final aside to Banquo (which needn’t even be aside, as it’s cryptic and innocuous enough that Ross and Angus won’t pick up anything amiss)—it makes clear that he’s thinking only about what the witches have said. The King’s favour, his new title—those are sideshows, happy prologues indeed. You have a think about—all this—he says to Banquo and, when we have the opportunity, and when we’ve both had the chance to mull it over, let’s have a good talk, speak our free hearts each to other. It’s a promise, or at least a performance, of equality, mutuality; no secrets between mates. But of course, replies Banquo, very gladly. Until we can have that chat, let’s keep quiet; till then, enough. (What happens on the heath, stays on the heath.) Come, friends. And that’s the end of this extraordinary scene, which began with witches and ended with everything being utterly, catastrophically transformed.
