III
Passages possibly obscure from the thought may for the most part be left for the later study of the play in detail. A few of them it is well to take up for the simple purpose of training the student in poetic language, and some need to be understood for the sake of the first general effect. In the first act of "Macbeth" the passages which it is actually necessary to examine are few, but the list may be made long or short at the pleasure of the teacher. The following may serve as examples:
The merciless Macdonwald—
Worthy to be a rebel, for to that
The multiplying villainies of nature
Do swarm upon him.—ii, 9-12.
As whence the sun 'gins his reflection
Shipwrecking storms and direful thunders break,
So from that spring whence comfort seem'd to come
Discomfort swells.—ii, 25-28.
But thither in a sieve I'll sail,
And like a rat without a tail,
I'll do, I'll do and I'll do.—iii, 8-10.
This passage is a good example of what may be passed over in the first reading, yet which if understood adds greatly to the force of the effect. If the scholar knows that according to the old superstition a witch could take the form of an animal but could be identified by the fact that the tail was wanting, the idea of the hag's flying through the air on the wind to the tempest-tossed vessel bound for Aleppo, and on it taking the form of a
tailless rat to gnaw, and gnaw, and gnaw till the ship springs a leak, is sure to appeal to the youthful imagination.
My thought, whose murder yet is but fantastical,
Shakes so my single state of man that function
Is smothered in surmise, and nothing is
But what is not.—iii, 139-142.
This is one of those passages which is sure to puzzle the ordinary school-boy, although a little help will enable him to understand it, and to see how natural under the circumstances is the state of mind which it paints. The murder is as yet only imagined (fantastical), and yet the thought of it so shakes Macbeth's individual (single) consciousness (state of man) that the ordinary functions of the mind are lost in confused surmises of what may come as the consequences of the deed; until to his excited fancy nothing seems real (is) but what the dreadful surmise paints, although that does not yet exist.
Your servants ever
Have theirs, themselves, and what is theirs, in compt
To make their audit to your highness' pleasure,
Still to return your own.—vi, 25-28.
His two chamberlains
Will I with wine and wassail so convince,
That memory, the warder of the brain,
Shall be a fume, and the receipt of reason
A limbec only.—vii, 63-67.
The whole of Macbeth's soliloquy at the beginning of scene vii is a case in point. It may be taken up here, but to my thinking is better treated
after the class is familiar with the circumstances under which it is spoken.