Macbeth (The Annotated Shakespeare) - Dream2Movie

1 Macbeth William ShakespeareFully Annotated , with an Introduction, by Burton RaffelWith an essay by Harold Bloomthe Annotated shakespeareBurton Raffel, General EditorYale University Press New Haven and LondonCopyright 2005by Burton rights book may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, including illustrations,in any form (beyond that copying permitted by Sections 107and108of the Copyright Law and except by reviewers for the public press),without written permission from the publishers. Macbeth , from shakespeare : The Invention of the Human,by Harold Bloom,copyright 1998 by Harold Bloom. Used by permission of Riverhead Books,an imprint of Penguin Group (USA) by Rebecca in Bembo type by The Composing Room of Michigan, in the United States of America by R. R. Donnelley & of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication DataShakespeare,William,1564 / William shakespeare ; fully Annotated , with an introduction,by Burton Raffel ; with an essay by Harold (The Annotated Shakespeare) Includes bibliographical (pbk.)

2 1. Macbeth , King of Scotland,11th cent. Regicides Scotland Drama. I. Raffel, Burton. II. Bloom, Harold. III. 3 dc222004024959A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Evander Lomkecontents About This Book ixIntroduction xixSome Essentials of the Shakespearean Stage xxxixMacbeth1An Essay by Harold Bloom169 Further Reading205 Finding List209about this book ixIn act 3, scene 1, Macbeth , alone, speaks of his fears about Banquo:To be thus is nothing, but to be safely fears in Banquo stick deep,And in his royalty of nature reigns that Which would be feared. Tis much he dares,And, to that dauntless temper of his mind,He hath a wisdom that doth guide his valorTo act in safety. There is none but heWhose being I do fear and, under him,My genius is rebuked, as it is saidMark Antony s was by Caesar.(lines48 57)This was perfectly understandable, we must assume, to the mostlyvery average persons who paid to watch Elizabethan plays.

3 Butwho today can make much sense of it? In this very fully annotatededition, I therefore present this passage, not in the bare form quotedabove, but thoroughly supported by bottom-of-the-page notes:To be thus1is nothing, but to be2safely fears in4 Banquo stick5deep,And in his royalty of nature6reigns7thatWhich would8be feared. Tis much he dares,And, to9that dauntless temper10of his mind,He hath a wisdom that doth guide his valorTo act in safety. There is none but heWhose being11I do fear and, under12him,My genius is rebuked,13as it is saidMark Antony s was by modern reader or listener may well understand many aspectsof this malicious introspection. But without full explanation ofwords that have over the years shifted in meaning, and usages thathave been altered, neither the modern reader nor the modern lis-tener is likely to be equipped for anything like the full compre-hension that shakespeare intended and all readers or listeners believe annotations of this sort create the necessary bridgesfrom shakespeare s four-centuries-old English across to this bookx1( , the king) 2but to be = without being3to be THUS is NOThing BUT to be SAFEly THUS4of5stab, thrust6royalty of nature = majestic character7predominates8should9in addition to10dauntless temper = bold/fearless quality of balance/calm11existence12in13genius is rebuked = spirit/nature is repressed/put to shameSome readers, to be sure, will be able to comprehend unusual, his-torically different meanings without glosses.

4 Those not familiarwith the modern meaning of particular words will easily findclear, simple definitions in any modern dictionary. But most read-ers are not likely to understand shakespeare s intended meaning,absent such glosses as I here annotation practices have followed the same principlesused in The Annotated Milton,published in 1999, and in my anno-tated editions of Hamlet,published (as the initial volume in thisseries) in 2003, and Romeo and Juliet (published in 2004). Class-room experience has validated these editions. Classes of mixedupper-level undergraduates and graduate students have morequickly and thoroughly transcended language barriers than everbefore. This allows the teacher, or a general reader without ateacher, to move more promptly and confidently to the non-lin-guistic matters that have made shakespeare and Milton great andimportant is the inevitable forces of linguistic change, operant in all liv-ing tongues, which have inevitably created such wide degrees ofobstacles to ready comprehension not only sharply differentmeanings, but subtle, partial shifts in meaning that allow us tothink we understand when, alas, we do not.

5 Speakers of relatedlanguages like Dutch and German also experience this shifting ofthe linguistic ground. Like early modern English ( ) andthe modern English now current, those languages are too closefor those who know only one language, and not the other, to bereadily able always to recognize what they correctly understandand what they do not. When, for example, a speaker of Dutchsays, Men kofer is kapot, a speaker of German will know thatsomething belonging to the Dutchman is broken (kapot ka-about this bookxiputt in German, and men mein ). But without more linguis-tic awareness than the average person is apt to have, the Germanspeaker will not identify kofer ( trunk in Dutch) with K r-per a modern German word meaning physique, build, body. The closest word to kofer in modern German, indeed, is Scrankkoffer, which is too large a leap for ready comprehen-sion.

6 Speakers of different Romance languages (such as French,Spanish, or Italian), and all other related but not identical tongues,all experience these difficulties, as well as the difficulty of under-standing a text written in their own language five, or six, or sevenhundred years earlier. shakespeare s English is not yet so old thatit requires, like many historical texts in French and German, orlike Old English texts for example,Beowulf a modern transla-tion. Much poetry evaporates in translation: language is im-mensely particular. The sheer sound of Dante in thirteenth-cen-tury Italian is profoundly worth preserving. So too is the sound have Annotated prosody (metrics) only when it seemed trulynecessary or particularly helpful. Except in the few instanceswhere modern usage syllabifies the e, whenever an e inShakespeare is notsilent, it is marked.

7 The notation used forprosody, which is also used in the explanation of Elizabethan pro-nunciation, follows the extremely simple form of my From Stressto Stress: An Autobiography of English Prosody(see Further Read-ing, near the end of this book). Syllables with metrical stress arecapitalized; all other syllables are in lowercase letters. I have man-aged to employ normalized Elizabethan spellings, in most indica-tions of pronunciation, but I have sometimes been obliged to de-viate, in the higher interest of being this bookxiiI have Annotated , as well, a limited number of such other mat-ters, sometimes of interpretation, sometimes of general or histor-ical relevance, as have seemed to me seriously worthy of inclu-sion. These annotations have been most carefully restricted: this isnot intended to be a book of literary commentary. It is for thatreason that the glossing of metaphors has been severely is almost literally no end to discussion and/or analysis ofmetaphor, especially in shakespeare .

8 To yield to temptation mightwell be to double or triple the size of this book and would alsochange it from a historically oriented language guide to a work ofan unsteadily mixed nature. In the process, I believe, neither lan-guage nor literature would be well or clearly it seemed useful, and not obstructive of important tex-tual matters, I have modernized spelling, including have frequently repunctuated. Since the original printed texts (there not being, as there never are for shakespeare , survivingmanuscripts) are frequently careless as well as self-contradictory, Ihave been relatively free with the wording of stage directions and in some cases have added small directions, to indicate who isspeaking to whom. I have made no emendations; I have necessar-ily been obliged to make choices. Textual decisions have been an-notated when the differences between or among the originalprinted texts seem either marked or of unusual spelling is not on the whole a basic issue, punctua-tion and lineation must be given high respect.

9 The Folio uses fewexclamation marks or semicolons, which is to be sure a matter ofthe conventions of a very different era. Still, our modern prefer-ences cannot be lightly substituted for what is, after a fashion, theclosest thing to a shakespeare manuscript we are likely ever toabout this bookxiiihave. We do not know whether these particular seventeenth-century printers, like most of that time, were responsible for ques-tion marks, commas, periods, and, especially, all-purpose in spite of these equivocations and uncertainties, it remainstrue that, to a very considerable extent, punctuation tends to re-sult from just how the mind responsible for that punctuating hearsthe text. And twenty-first-century minds have no business, in suchmatters, overruling seventeenth-century the com-positors were, they were more or less shakespeare s contempo-raries, and we are , when the original printed text uses a comma, weare being signaled that they(whoever they were) heard the text,not coming to a syntactic stop, but continuing to some later stop-ping point.

10 To replace Folio commas with editorial periods isthus risky and on the whole an undesirable practice. The dra-matic action of a tragedy, to be sure, may require us, for twenty-first-century readers, to highlight what four-hundred-year-oldpunctuation standards may not make clear and may even, attimes, the Folio text has a colon, what we are being signaled isthattheyheard a syntactic stop though not necessarily or evenusually the particular kind of syntactic stop we associate, today,with the colon. It is therefore inappropriate to substitute editorialcommas for Folio colons. It is also inappropriate to employ edito-rial colons when theirsyntactic usage of colons does not matchours. In general, the closest thing to theirsyntactic sense of thecolon is our (and their) Folio s interrogation (question) marks, too, merit ex-tremely respectful handling.