MACBETH
Whiles I threat, he lives: Words to the heat of deeds too cold breath gives.
A bell rings
I go, and it is done; the bell invites me. Hear it not, Duncan; for it is a knell That summons thee to heaven or to hell. Exit
Macbeth draws his soliloquy to a close with the tension between words and action. He chides himself for spending time talking, realising that his “threat” does not equal action. He equates “deeds” with “heat” and words (or “breath”) with cold, an opposition to which he will return (“this deed I’ll do before this purpose cool” in 4.1). It captures the tension between passion (hot-headed, brave, impulsive) and logic (measured, cold, calculated). By setting them up as opposites, Macbeth weighs up his options as a strict, ordered either/or scenario: either he acts now and becomes king or he does not act and does not become king. The lines are grammatically balanced, half and half; though the soliloquy has been building towards resolve, it is still not fully there. The rhyming couplet (“lives” and “gives”) signals the close of the soliloquy without any clear resolution, but it is interrupted by the off-stage bell ringing, a prearranged signal and the impetus of Lady Macbeth. The bell jolts both Macbeth and the audience, ramping up the tension. It reminds us that the act is already underway and that (off stage, whilst we have been agonising with Macbeth) Lady Macbeth has left Duncan “unguarded”. For Macbeth, the bell seems to remove any decision or agency from him: “I go, and it is done”. The present tense infinitive “I go” is at once definite and incomplete: it is absolute and it is overly simplified, forcing us to extend its implications ourselves. This is no longer a future act but a present one. Indeed, our hold on time is muddled by “it is done”, which brings the act forward, with a time gap between the actions of “is” and “done”; “is” gestures towards a moment to come, after the murder is “done”. The present and future have been merged (like the “future in the instant” in 1.5), and the action seems oddly predetermined, “done” before he does it. Despite his attempt to separate words and deeds, Macbeth almost seems to call the murder into being by his speech. His use of the passive voice in both “it is done” and “the bell invites me” helps him to absolve himself of responsibility and to avoid considering the consequences – at this point, he is content to believe that “what’s done is done”. The bell switches from a signal for him to a “knell” for Duncan, a mournful bell ringing to signal death. Macbeth creates an image of a God-like “summons” for the last judgement (“to heaven or to hell”, in contrast to his confidence in a heavenly Duncan in 1.7); he is playing God by taking life, all the more troubling because that life is the divinely chosen king. The scene closes with the stress on “hell”, made weightier by the triple rhyme (“bell”, “knell”, “hell”); the castle of Macbeth, for all its earlier “delicate air”, is transformed into a hellish place, from which there is no escape for Duncan or Macbeth. With his “exit”, the deed is done, off-stage, without ceremony.
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