Macbeth Act 2 Notes

Banquo’s knowledge of the witches’ prophecy makes him both a potential ally and a potential threat to Macbeth’s plotting. For now, Macbeth seems distrustful of Banquo and pretends to have hardly thought of the witches, but Macbeth’s desire to discuss the prophecies at some future time suggests that he may have some sort of conspiratorial plans in mind. The appearance of Fleance, Banquo’s son, serves as a reminder of the witches’ prediction that Banquo’s children will sit on the throne of Scotland. We realize that if Macbeth succeeds in the murder of Duncan, he will be driven to still more violence before his crown is secure, and Fleance will be in immediate and mortal danger. Act 2 is singularly concerned with the murder of Duncan. But Shakespeare here relies on a technique that he uses throughout Macbeth to help sustain the play’s incredibly rapid tempo of development: elision. We see the scenes leading up to the murder and the scenes immediately following it, but the deed itself does not appear onstage. Duncan’s bedchamber becomes a sort of hidden sanctum into which the characters disappear and from which they emerge powerfully changed. This technique of not allowing us to see the actual murder, which persists throughout Macbeth, may have been borrowed from the classical Greek tragedies of Aeschylus and Sophocles. In these plays, violent acts abound but are kept offstage, made to seem more terrible by the power of suggestion. The effect on Lady Macbeth of her trip into Duncan’s bedroom is particularly striking. She claims that she would have killed Duncan herself except that he resembled her father sleeping. This is the first time Lady Macbeth shows herself to be at all vulnerable. Her comparison of Duncan to her father suggests that despite her desire for power and her harsh chastisement of Macbeth, she sees her king as an authority figure to whom she must be loyal. After the bloody imagery and dark tone of the previous two scenes, the porter’s comedy comes as a jarring change of tone. His good-natured joking with Macduff breaks up the mounting tension of the play and also comments obliquely on its themes. Unlike all the characters of noble birth, who speak in iambic verse, the porter speaks in prose. His relaxed language seems to signal that his words and his role are less important than those of the other characters, but in his merry banter the porter hits on many truths. His description of the confusion and lust provoked by alcohol caricatures Macbeth’s moral confusion and lust for power. Moreover, his remarks about the ineffective lechery inspired by drink eerily echo Lady Macbeth’s sexual taunting of Macbeth about his ability to carry out his resolutions. The porter’s joke that the door of Inverness is like hell’s gate is ironic, given the cruel and bloody events that are taking place within the castle. When he cries, “Who’s there, i’ th’ name of Beelzebub [the devil]?” the analogy between hell and Inverness becomes even stronger (2.3.3). Instead of receiving a welcome and a blessing when they step into Macbeth’s castle, guests are warned that they are putting themselves in the hands of the devil. Now that Lady Macbeth’s machinations have wrought their result, Lady Macbeth begins to recede from center stage and Macbeth takes her place as the most compelling character in the play. The clipped, halting sentences with which Macbeth speaks to Macduff and Lennox indicate his troubled mind and trepidation about the impending discovery of Duncan’s body. For example, while Lennox offers a lengthy speech about the wild weather of the previous night, Macbeth’s only response is a terse “ ’Twas a rough night”. And when Lennox asks Macbeth, “Goes the King hence today?” Macbeth almost gives away his knowledge that Duncan is dead. “He does,” answers Macbeth, before he realizes that his answer is incriminating and changes it to: “[H]e did appoint so”.