ACT V - SCENE VIII. Another part of the field.
Enter MACBETH
MACBETH
Why should I play the Roman fool, and die
On mine own sword? whiles I see lives, the gashes
Do better upon them.
Enter MACDUFF
MACDUFF
Turn, hell-hound, turn!
MACBETH
Of all men else I have avoided thee:
But get thee back; my soul is too much charged
With blood of thine already.
MACDUFF
I have no words:
My voice is in my sword: thou bloodier villain
Than terms can give thee out!
They fight
MACBETH
Thou losest labour:
As easy mayst thou the intrenchant air
With thy keen sword impress as make me bleed:
Let fall thy blade on vulnerable crests;
I bear a charmed life, which must not yield,
To one of woman born.
MACDUFF
Despair thy charm;
And let the angel whom thou still hast served
Tell thee, Macduff was from his mother's womb
Untimely ripped.
MACBETH
Accursed be that tongue that tells me so,
For it hath cowed my better part of man!
And be these juggling fiends no more believed,
That palter with us in a double sense;
That keep the word of promise to our ear,
And break it to our hope. I'll not fight with thee.
MACDUFF
Then yield thee, coward,
And live to be the show and gaze o' the time:
We'll have thee, as our rarer monsters are,
Painted on a pole, and underwrit,
“Here may you see the tyrant.”
MACBETH
I will not yield,
To kiss the ground before young Malcolm's feet,
And to be baited with the rabble's curse.
Though Birnam wood be come to Dunsinane,
And thou opposed, being of no woman born,
Yet I will try the last. Before my body
I throw my warlike shield. Lay on, Macduff,
And damn'd be him that first cries, “Hold, enough!”
Exeunt, fighting. Alarums
NOTES:
Suicide
In Ancient Rome, suicide was considered an honourable death in certain circumstances. By Shakespeare’s time, the teachings of the Church were so severely against suicide (and the degrading treatment visited upon the bodies of those who died this way were so awful) that it was all but unthinkable. As a result, the very idea that the Romans had found any honour in this was fascinating to Shakespeare’s England, and this is why so many of his characters discuss suicide via the euphemism of behaving like an antique Roman, or a Roman fool.
Richard Burbage
For a bonus episode about Richard Burbage, Shakespeare’s leading man, click here.
Hell-hound
Nearly every country in Europe has a myth of some kind of hellish, awful black dog with blazing eyes that stormed up from the great beyond and occasionally terrified the populace. One of the most famous of these was Cerberus, the three-headed dog that guarded the entrance to the underworld.
Killing onstage
As mentioned in the episode, there was a notorious incident when a performance of Richard II was almost at the centre of a plot to overthrow Elizabeth I. The night before Essex’ rebellion in early 1601, Essex and his co-conspirators paid Shakespeare’s company a huge amount of money to put on Richard II, which they hadn’t performed for a very long time. They wanted it staged because it is a play in which an out-of-touch monarch is deposed and martyred, and they wanted this storyline to be on people’s minds as they attempted to send Queen Elizabeth to a similar fate. Many months later, Elizabeth famously quipped “I am Richard II, know ye not that?”