Enter MACBETH Great Glamis! worthy Cawdor! Greater than both, by the all-hail hereafter! Thy letters have transported me beyond This ignorant present, and I feel now The future in the instant.
MACBETH
My dearest love, Duncan comes here to-night.
LADY MACBETH
And when goes hence?
MACBETH
To-morrow, as he purposes.
LADY MACBETH
O, never Shall sun that morrow see!
For the first time, we have both Macbeth and Lady Macbeth on stage together, and they are effusive in their greetings. Lady Macbeth greets him with his titles: "Great Glamis! Worthy Cawdor! Greater than both, by the all-hail hereafter". Her words echo words already spoken through the play – Duncan has used the same phrase of "worthy Cawdor!" in 1.4 to praise Macbeth. Taken together, though, the triple greeting and "all-hail hereafter" is affiliated with the supernatural forces, as she repeats the exact phrase spoken by the witches when they deliver the prophecy in 1.3. What is most interesting in this section is the references to time. The echo of the prophecies has in some ways "transported" the audience backwards, or rather projects the recent past of the play into its present – the witches remain a looming presence even with their absence. Indeed, Lady Macbeth's triple greeting functions as past, present and future, like she is intentionally manipulating time, an idea reinforced by the idea that she feels "now the future in the instant". This desire to accelerate time extends from her attempts to distort of natural order in her soliloquy and exert her own control over the progression of events (in contrast to Macbeth in 1.3 who settles to wait "come what come may"). The effect of this acceleration is disorientating. We know that this is a tragedy, that Macbeth's downfall has already been set in motion, that we are moving relentlessly towards his death, and yet Lady Macbeth's confidence in her imaginative view of the future inspires a vivid alternative. Whereas Macbeth's vision of the future, his "horrible imaginings", haunts his present and needs to be quelled, Lady Macbeth's invigorate her. The greetings give way to dialogue, where the stichomythia suggests Lady Macbeth's closeness with her husband and their status as equals within the home. The rapid exchanges are still concerned with time - "tonight", "when", "tomorrow" - but also now place - "here", "hence". We are moved from the fantasy of the future to its immediacy. Lady Macbeth's concern is clearly a practical one: this is a convergence of time and place which allows opportunity, and the danger is that it will not recur. The exchange is, again, reminiscent of the witches in 1.1 - "when", "where", "ere the set of sun" - and just as Duncan is caught in the wrong place, at the wrong time, there is a sense that Macbeth too is the victim of a convergence of fate. Lady Macbeth picks up the witches' "ere the set of sun" and recapitulates the literal time marker as a metaphorical one: "never shall sun that morrow see". Duncan is described with the celestial imagery of the "sun", the rightful king to the throne (Duncan, too, uses this imagery when he describes nobility as "like stars"). The contrast between the light of Duncan as the "sun" and Macbeth's darkness, his "black and deep desires", emphasises the horror of their potential crime and foreshadows the future tyranny, as the subjects are stripped of the warmth of the sun.
- Ruiyun