Act 5, Scene 4

Country nearDunsinane: a Wood in view.

[Enter, with drum and colours, Malcolm, old Siward and his Son, Macduff, Menteith, Caithness, Angus, Lennox, Ross, and Soldiers, marching.]
Malcolm
2134 Cousins, I hope the days are near at hand
2135 That chambers will be safe.
Menteith
2136 We doubt it nothing.
Siward
2137 What wood is this before us?
Menteith
2138 The wood of Birnam.
Malcolm
2139 Let every soldier hew him down a bough,
2140 And bear't before him; thereby shall we shadow
2141 The numbers of our host, and make discovery
2142 Err in report of us.
Soldiers
2143 It shall be done.
Siward
2144 We learn no other but the confident tyrant
2145 Keeps still in Dunsinane, and will endure
2146 Our setting down before't.
Malcolm
2147 'Tis his main hope:
2148 For where there is advantage to be given,
2149 Both more and less have given him the revolt;
2150 And none serve with him but constrained things,
2151 Whose hearts are absent too.
Macduff
2152 Let our just censures
2153 Attend the true event, and put we on
2154 Industrious soldiership.
Siward
2155 The time approaches,
2156 That will with due decision make us know
2157 What we shall say we have, and what we owe.
2158 Thoughts speculative their unsure hopes relate;
2159 But certain issue strokes must arbitrate:
2160 Towards which advance the war.
[Exeunt, marching.]

Reading mode

Word definitions on hover

Notes

TLN 2139historical topical
“hew him down a bough, And bear't before him”
Malcolm orders each soldier to cut a bough from Birnam Wood and carry it as camouflage, so that scouts will miscount the army. The order unwittingly begins to fulfill the Third Apparition's promise that Macbeth 'shall never vanquish'd be until / Great Birnam wood to high Dunsinane hill / shall come against him' (4.1). The prophecy seemed to guarantee safety because a forest cannot move; it is undone by a battlefield ruse that Macbeth never imagined.
historical Holinshed's Chronicleshistorical Equivocation and the Gunpowder Plot
TLN 2149archaic vocab
“Both more and less have given him the revolt”
'More and less' is an Elizabethan idiom for 'greater and lesser' -- that is, noblemen and commoners alike. Malcolm is saying that Macbeth's support has collapsed at every rank of society: both the great lords and the ordinary soldiers have defected from him.
TLN 2152archaic vocab
“Let our just censures Attend the true event”
'Censures' here means 'judgments' or 'assessments,' not blame. Macduff is urging the leaders to hold back their evaluations of the situation until the battle has actually told them what is true. The caution is pointed: the last three scenes have been full of intelligence reports about Macbeth's position, none of them fully reliable.
TLN 2158rhetorical device
“Thoughts speculative their unsure hopes relate; But certain issue strokes must arbitrate”
Siward closes the scene with a sententia -- a compressed, aphoristic maxim of the kind common in Senecan drama and rhetoric: speculation can only report uncertain hopes, but the real outcome will be decided by blows. 'Arbitrate' means 'decide' or 'settle' (as an arbitrator settles a dispute). The couplet is a soldier's blunt dismissal of all the political talk above it: words and guesses have their limit; the fighting will tell.