Macbeth

"Where we are is hell,

And where hell is, there must we ever be.

Macbeth's tragedy might therefore appear as a second Fall, with Lady Macbeth as a second Eve"

Equivocation:

Had I but died an hour before this chance,

I had liv'd a blessed time; for, from this instant,

There's nothing serious in mortality;

All is but toys: renown, and grace, is dead;

The wine of life is drawn, and the mere lees

Is left this vault to brag of.

The play contains many antithese which are not to be found under such headings as Angel and Devil, good and evil. A contrast between the man and his clothes:

Now does he feel his title

Hang loose about him, like a giant's robe

Upon a dwarfish thief.

A contrast between the picture and the thing depicted:

The sleeping, and the dead,(感觉莎士比亚很喜欢把死和睡连在一起，Homlet也有类似的说法)

Are but as pictures; 'tis the eye of childhood

That fears a painted devil.

This is the very painting of your fear.

Shake off his downy sleep, death's counterfeit,

And look on death itself!—up,up,up and see

The great doom's image!

感觉这里面的三个女巫的预言象征着一种不可更改的命运，这里我有一个疑问，Do the Weird Sisters plant the seeds of evil in Macbeth？读完麦克白，作为莎士比亚的四大悲剧之一，与现在的悲剧有所不同啊，或者说跟我认为的悲剧不大一样，我一直觉得悲剧是将美好的东西毁灭给人看，而麦克白一直都存在人性无法战胜的欲望，一步步走向堕落，成为人人得儿诛之的对象，最后被杀也是理所当然。如果说里面什么人死去最让我觉得悲剧，我觉得是Macduff的妻儿，他们是纯粹无辜之人，卷进这场“政治”风波，被残忍屠杀，实在让人不忍悲哀，他们可以看成一类代表（或者说牺牲品）——作为那些有着争权夺利，永无止境的野心的人的牺牲品。正如Lady Macduff所说“But I remenber now I am in this earthly world; where to do harm is often laudable, to do good sometime accounted dangerous folly”

历史上Banquo和麦克白是一伙的，也参与到了谋杀当中。

"Although Macbeth fears Banquo partly for prudential reasons, he fears him also because of his own sense of guilt. Macbeth is never in doubt of the difference between good and evil; nor is Lady Macbeth, not even in the speech in which she deliberately chooses evil as a means of achieving the 'good' of the crown. Inexorably the action rams home the moral that all the perfumes of Arabia will not sweeten the little hand of the murderess, and that, to those who destroy life, life itself becomes merely 'a tale told by idiot' ."

In a play, between three comparable factors, fate, external evil, and the character of the hero. We cannot divide the world into potential murderers and those who are not. It consists of imperfect human beings, more or less ignorant of their own selves, and not knowing(though they have been told enough)the way to be happy. If they commit evil it is because they hope thereby to avoid another evil, which seems to them for the moment to be worse, or obtain another goid, which seems attractive only because it is not in their possession. The direct cause of sin is the 'adherence to a mutable good, and every sinful act proceeds from an inordinate desire for some temporal good; and thatone desires a temporal good inordinately is due to the fact that he loves himself inordinately. '

"Life is a tale told by an idiot signifying nothing." Macbeth , by his own actions, has robbed life of meaning: Shakespeare restores meaning to life by showing that Macbeth's nihilism results from his crimes.

Scene1

Fair is foul, and foul is fair:

Hover through the fog and filthy air.

2.

So foul and fair a day I have not seen.

And oftentimes, to win us to our harm,

The instruments of darkness tell us truths,

Win us with honest trifles, to betray's

In deepest consequence.

Macbeth:

Present fears

Are less than horrible imaginings:

My thought, whose murder yet is but fantastical,

Shakes so my single state of man that function

Is smother'd in surmise, and nothing is

But what is not.

Come what come may,

Time and the hour runs through the roughest day.

Stars, hide your fires;

Let not light see my black and deep desires:

The eye wink at the hand; yet let that be,

Which the eye fears, when it is done, to see.

The air

Nimbly and sweetly recommends itself

Unto our gentle senses.

Banquo:

New horrors come upon him,

Like our strange garments, cleave not to their mould

But with the aid of use.

描写燕子的—This guest of summer,

The temple-haunting martlet, does approve,

By his loved mansionary, that the heaven's breath

Smells wooingly here: no jutty, frieze,

Buttress, nor coign of vantage, but this bird

Hath made his pendent bed and procreant cradle:

Where they most breed and haunt, I have observed,

The air is delicate.

Scene 7:

Macbeth:

If it were done when 'tis done, then 'twere well

It were done quickly: if the assassination

Could trammel up the consequence, and catch

With his surcease success; that but this blow

Might be the be-all and the end-all here,

But hete, upon this bank and shoal of time,

We'ld jump the life to come. But in these cases

We still have judgment here; that we but teach

Bloody instructions, which, being taught, return

To plague the inventor: this even-handed justice

Commends the ingredients of our poison'd chalice

To our own lips. He's hete in double trust;

First, as I am his kinsman and his subject,

Strong both against the deed; then, as his host,

Who should against his murderer shut the door,

Not bear the knife myself. Besides, this Duncan

Hath borne his faculties so meek, hath been

So clear in his great office, that his virtues

Will plead like angels, trumpet-tongued, against

The deep damnation of his taking-off;

And pity, like a naked new-born babe,

Striding the blast, or heaven's cherubim, horsed

Upon the sightless couriers of the air,

Shall blow the horrid deed in every eye,

That tears shall drown the wind. I haveno spur

To prick the sides of my intent, but only

Vaulting ambition, which o'er-leaps itself

And falls on the other.

Away, and mock the time with fairest show:

False face must hide what the false heart doth know.

Hear it or not, Duncan; for it is a knell

That summons thee to heaven or to hell.

Had I but died an hour before this chance,

I had lived a,blessed time; for, from this instant,

There's nothing serious in mortality:

All is but toys: renown and grace is dead;

The wine of life is drawn, and the mere lees

Is left this vault to brag of.

Lady Macbeth:

Wouldst thou have that

Which thou esteem'st the ornament of life,

And live a coward in thine own esteem,

Letting 'I dare not' wait upon 'I would'

Like the poor cat i' the adage?

(麦克白夫人生错了性别)

Macduff:

国王死后

Awake!

Shake off this downy sleep, death's counterfeit,

And look on death itself! up, up, and see

The great doom's image!

Donalbain:

There's daggers in men's smiles: the near in blood,

The nearer bloody.

Act two

Scene4

Ross: And yet dark night strangles the traveling lamp:

Is't night's predominance, or the day's shame,

That darkness does the face of earth entomb,

When living light should kiss it?

Act five

Scene 5

Lady Macbeth死后

Macbeth: She should have died hereafter:

There would have been a time for such a word--

To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow,

Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,

To the last syllable of recorded time;

And all our yesterdays have lighted fools

The way to dusty death.Out, out, brief candle!

Life's but a walking shadow; a poor player,

That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,

And then is heard no more:it is a tale

Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,

Signifying nothing.

(tomorrow, tomorrow and tomorrow---one infinite sameness, in which yesterdays have only lighted fools the way to dusty death. Life in this time is meaningless---a tale told by an idiot---and death also. For his wife's death to have meaning there needs some total change ---a plunge across some total abyss into a Hereafter.

The living man is a shadow walking between the light and that dusty death to which it is lighting him. Life is only a delusive resemblance to an endurable substance, and the poor player is but the shadow of the substance or reality whose semblance he has assumed.

Order emerging from disorder, truth emerging from deceit.)

关于悲剧，孙老师说那个时代的悲剧和现在不一样，那个时候的人们认为，“悲剧”就是“悲壮”。