Act 3, Scene 2

The same. Another Room in the Palace.

[Enter Lady Macbeth and a Servant.]
Lady Macbeth
1070 Is Banquo gone from court?
Servant
1071 Ay, madam, but returns again to-night.
Lady Macbeth
1072 Say to the king, I would attend his leisure
1073 For a few words.
Servant
1074 Madam, I will.
[Exit.]
Lady Macbeth
1075 Naught's had, all's spent,
1076 Where our desire is got without content:
1077 'Tis safer to be that which we destroy,
1078 Than, by destruction, dwell in doubtful joy.
[Enter Macbeth.]
Lady Macbeth
1079 How now, my lord! why do you keep alone,
1080 Of sorriest fancies your companions making;
1081 Using those thoughts which should indeed have died
1082 With them they think on? Things without all remedy
1083 Should be without regard: what's done is done.
Macbeth
1084 We have scotch'd the snake, not kill'd it;
1085 She'll close, and be herself; whilst our poor malice
1086 Remains in danger of her former tooth.
1087 But let the frame of things disjoint,
1088 Both the worlds suffer,
1089 Ere we will eat our meal in fear, and sleep
1090 In the affliction of these terrible dreams
1091 That shake us nightly: better be with the dead,
1092 Whom we, to gain our peace, have sent to peace,
1093 Than on the torture of the mind to lie
1094 In restless ecstasy. Duncan is in his grave;
1095 After life's fitful fever he sleeps well;
1096 Treason has done his worst: nor steel, nor poison,
1097 Malice domestic, foreign levy, nothing,
1098 Can touch him further.
Lady Macbeth
1099 Come on;
1100 Gently my lord, sleek o'er your rugged looks;
1101 Be bright and jovial 'mong your guests to-night.
Macbeth
1102 So shall I, love; and so, I pray, be you:
1103 Let your remembrance apply to Banquo;
1104 Present him eminence, both with eye and tongue:
1105 Unsafe the while, that we
1106 Must lave our honors in these flattering streams;
1107 And make our faces vizards to our hearts,
1108 Disguising what they are.
Lady Macbeth
1109 You must leave this.
Macbeth
1110 O, full of scorpions is my mind, dear wife!
1111 Thou know'st that Banquo, and his Fleance, lives.
Lady Macbeth
1112 But in them nature's copy's not eterne.
Macbeth
1113 There's comfort yet; they are assailable;
1114 Then be thou jocund: ere the bat hath flown
1115 His cloister'd flight, ere to black Hecate's summons,
1116 The shard-borne beetle, with his drowsy hums,
1117 Hath rung night's yawning peal, there shall be done
1118 A deed of dreadful note.
Lady Macbeth
1119 What's to be done?
Macbeth
1120 Be innocent of the knowledge, dearest chuck,
1121 Till thou applaud the deed. Come, seeling night,
1122 Scarf up the tender eye of pitiful day;
1123 And with thy bloody and invisible hand
1124 Cancel and tear to pieces that great bond
1125 Which keeps me pale!—Light thickens; and the crow
1126 Makes wing to the rooky wood:
1127 Good things of day begin to droop and drowse;
1128 Whiles night's black agents to their preys do rouse.—
1129 Thou marvell'st at my words: but hold thee still;
1130 Things bad begun make strong themselves by ill:
1131 So, pr'ythee, go with me.
[Exeunt.]

Notes

TLN 1075rhetorical device

“Naught's had, all's spent”

Lady Macbeth, alone on stage, admits in a private aside that everything has been sacrificed ('spent') and nothing gained ('naught's had') — the throne was won but the peace it was supposed to bring has not come. The paired contraries (nothing/all; had/spent) are a compressed paradox: total cost, zero return.

TLN 1084archaic vocab

“scotch'd the snake, not kill'd it”

'Scotch'd' means slashed or scored — wounded but not killed. Macbeth is saying that killing Duncan has only injured the threat, like cutting a snake that can still close its wounds ('She'll close') and bite again with its 'former tooth.' The snake is the web of danger surrounding him: Banquo, Fleance, the knowledge of his guilt.

TLN 1087historical topical

“frame of things disjoint, Both the worlds suffer”

Macbeth says he would rather the 'frame of things' — the structure of the universe — fall apart ('disjoint') and 'both worlds' suffer, than go on living in fear and sleepless nightmare. 'Both the worlds' means this world and the next: he is past caring if heaven and earth are destroyed together. The image of a universe breaking at its joints draws on the Elizabethan idea of a divinely ordered cosmos that holds together only while its ranks are observed.

historical The great chain of being (order and degree)

TLN 1093archaic vocab

“torture of the mind to lie In restless ecstasy”

'Ecstasy' here does not mean delight or rapture; it means a state of being driven outside oneself — mental frenzy, derangement. The word comes from Greek 'ekstasis,' a standing outside of oneself. Macbeth is saying that the living endure a kind of mental torture ('the mind on the rack') while Duncan, in his grave, is past all that and 'sleeps well.' 'Fitful fever' in the next line — life as a fever that comes and goes in violent fits — continues the medical metaphor of disease.

TLN 1115classical allusion

“ere to black Hecate's summons, The shard-borne beetle”

Hecate was the classical goddess of witchcraft and the night; her 'summons' here is the coming of full dark that calls night-creatures out. A 'shard-borne' beetle is a dung-beetle or chafer, 'shard-borne' meaning either born in or carried on 'shards' (dung or broken pottery). The beetle's 'drowsy hums' mark the close of day — Macbeth is giving the hour: before bats fly, before the night insects sound, the 'deed of dreadful note' (the murder of Banquo) will be done.

classical Triple Hecate

TLN 1121archaic vocab

“Come, seeling night, Scarf up the tender eye of pitiful day”

'Seeling' is a falconry term: to 'seel' a hawk was to stitch its eyelids shut with thread so it could not see — a standard way of taming a newly caught bird. Macbeth calls on night to 'seel' (blind) the 'tender eye of pitiful day' that might otherwise witness and pity what he is about to do. 'Scarf up' means to blindfold or muffle, and 'pitiful' means both full of pity and capable of being pitied.