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La-li-lu-le-lo
Classic Gin
Tuesday, 2005-04-12 | La-Li-Lu-Le-Lo
A connect-the-dots puzzle about 'this dead butcher and his fiend-like queen.' There are three solutions to the puzzle, the first of those three follows the puzzle. The puzzle with 'dots' bolded thus:
Dun. There's no art
To find the mind's construction in the face.
MacB. Away, and mock the time with fairest show;
False face must hide what the false heart doth know.
MacB. Unsafe the while, that we
Must lave our honours in these flattering streams,
And make our faces vizards to our hearts,
Disguising what they are.
LadyM. Yet I do fear thy nature
It is too full o' the milk of human kindness
To catch the nearest way
[...]
Come to my woman's breasts
And take my milk for gall, you murd'ring ministers,
Wherever in your sightless substances
You wait on nature's mischief!
Mal. Nay, had I the power, I should
Pour the sweet milk of concord into hell,
Uproar the universal peace, confound all unity on earth.
LadyM. To beguile the time,
Look like the time; bear welcome in your eye,
Your hand, your tongue; look like the innocent flower,
But be the serpent under't.
Len. Lamentings hear i' the air; strange screams of death,
And prophesying with accents terrible
Of dire combustion and confus'd events
New hatch'd to the woeful time.
MacD. You may
Convey your pleasures in a spacious plenty,
And yet seem cold; the time you may so hoodwink.
In 1.4 Duncan declares, quite prophetically, that <91>There<92>s no art / To find the mind<92>s construction in the face.<92> A bit later, on the night of Duncan<92>s murder, just prior to the deed in 1.7, Macbeth commands <91>Away, and mock the time with fairest show; / False face must hide what the false heart doth know.<92> After Duncan<92>s murder (and others) have been committed, Macbeth<92>s tune hardly changes. In 3.2 he comments on the necessity of his hypocrisy and dissembling thus: <91>we / Must lave our honours in these flattering streams, / And make our faces vizards to our hearts, Disguising what they are.<92>
The face, generally taken as a more reliable and less dangerous organ of expression than the tongue (which we have seen bitten off, cut out and verbally abused all semester), is marked by Duncan as an unreliable and therefore dangerous apparatus. Macbeth seems to agree. He even goes a step further and, in a line so fraught that it defies even the most careful attempts to gloss it, declares that though the face may be false the heart cannot and that the falsity of the former must be used to conceal the falsity of the latter. He clarifies this later in 3.2.
So we have a fairly obvious synecdochal use of the heart and the face (heart for intentions and emotions, face for affectations and speeches) that, over the course of the play, appears to be a conceit that passes from king to king. Whereas Duncan opposes affect and intention to make sense of the apparently treacherous Cawdor, Macbeth uses the same conceit to explain his own inner tumult.
Given this conceit that makes the opposition of affect and intention physical and how it is used by Duncan and then Macbeth, I think we<92>re supposed to be very uncomfortable when Lady Macbeth exhorts Macbeth to this kind of behavior. In 1.5 she advises Macbeth thus: <91>To beguile the time, / Look like the time; bear welcome in your eye, / Your hand, your tongue; look like the innocent flower, / But be the serpent under<92>t.<92> She seems to be carrying the conceit from Duncan (soon to be murdered) to Macbeth (soon to murder him) and thus appears to be the cause and the means of Macbeth<92>s descent into madness; she puts him up to the deed and then gives him the words with which to agonize over it.
Can you solve the other two? (Hint: they concern 'the times' and 'milk.')
