Macbeth Read Free Page B

proportion of rhyme and a greater regularity in rhythm, the essential pattern being that of iambic pentameter (ten syllables, five stresses, the stress on every second syllable). In the early plays, lines are very frequently end-stopped: punctuation marks a pause at the line ending, meaning that the movement of the syntax (the grammatical construction) falls in with that of the meter (the rhythmical construction). In the later plays, there are far fewer rhyming couplets (sometimes rhyme features only as a marker to indicate that a scene is ending) and the rhythmic movement has far greater variety, freedom, and flow. Mature Shakespearean blank (unrhymed) verse is typically not end-stopped but “run on” (a feature known as “enjambment”): instead of pausing heavily at the line ending, the speaker hurries forward, thesense demanded by the grammar working in creative tension against the holding pattern of the meter. The heavier pauses migrate to the middle of the lines (where they are known as the “caesura” and where their placing varies). Much more often than in the early plays, a single line of verse is shared between two speakers. And the pentameter itself becomes a more subtle instrument: the iambic beat is broken up, there is often an extra (“redundant”) unstressed eleventh syllable at the end of the line (known as a “feminine ending”). There are more modulations between verse and prose. Occasionally the verse is so loose that neither the original typesetters of the plays when they were first printed nor the modern editors of scholarly texts can be entirely certain whether verse or prose is intended. The iambic pentamenter is the ideal medium for dramatic poetry in English because its rhythm and duration seem to fall in naturally with the speech patterns of the language. In its capacity to combine the ordinary variety of speech with the heightened precision of poetry, the supple, mature Shakespearean “loose pentameter” is perhaps the most expressive vocal instrument ever given to the actor.
    Open the text of
Macbeth
at random and you are guaranteed almost immediately to find a strong example of this loose pentameter. In a first test of this claim, the script fell open at the end of Act 5 Scene 5. A messenger brings news of Birnam Wood: “Within this three mile may you see it coming: / I say, a moving grove.” The announcement ends on an abrupt half line, so Macbeth speaks the other half:
    If thou speak’st false,
Upon the next tree shall thou hang alive
Till famine cling thee…
    As if in imitation of what is being said, Shakespeare makes the verse “hang alive” at the line ending: instead of a deadening end-stop, there is the most momentary pause before we tumble headlong into the next line. The heavy pause then comes in the very middle of the line (after the fifth syllable, not the more customary fourth or sixth). When he turns away from the messenger, Macbeth goes into meditative mode. He soliloquizes even though he is not alone:
    I pull in resolution, and begin
To doubt th’equivocation of the fiend
That lies like truth….
    The flow of his thought is enacted in the running on of the lines: “begin / To doubt,” “the fiend / That lies.”
    Always in Shakespeare, metrical innovation goes alongside verbal invention: “cling thee” is what you would expect a lover to do, not starvation. Simile and metaphor are among the key building blocks of his poetry. “Was the hope drunk / Wherein you dressed yourself?” Lady Macbeth chides her husband, “And wakes it now, to look so green and pale?” The waking image is a superbly accurate imagining of a severe hangover. The ingenuity of the comparison comes from the application of something so physical as the bodily symptoms of a hangover to something so psychological as the idea of “hope.” We are eased into the physicality by “dressed.” Clothing is one of the similes through which the play repeatedly embodies abstractions that denote