Macbeth : King of Scotland (1040-57)
... old man" in Shakespeare, though Lear mad seems to have been inspired, and, when sober, just puerile. But even in Bottomley's best play, Gruach, which is conceived as a prelude to Macbeth, showing what kind of girl Lady Macbeth must have been when she first met her husband, and is admirable for its dramatic structure, live characterisation, thrilled atmosphere of forces seen and unseen — even Gruach is... in his best passages must have laid line after mighty line without needing to halt anywhere or amend anything: has he not the reputation of having never blotted a single word? If he really wrote Macbeth in this fashion, that play is surely the most amazing miracle of the human mind, for excepting perhaps a couple of short scenes at the very start, it is one unbroken rush of imaginative grandeur. Lear... in its sweep of occult elemental vision, but the progress of its poetry is not so consistently high as here: if not valleys, it has marked lesser and greater eminences, while the mountain that is Macbeth uplifts, gigantically, an almost straight sky-line. But even Shakespeare is now and then liable to slips which make us wish he had done a little "blotting". Take the lines (from Hamlet): ...
... instance is when Macbeth hears a voice after he has killed the sleeping king Duncan: "Sleep no more! Macbeth does murder sleep," and he tells of the lovely nature of "innocent sleep" at some length. When Lady Macbeth asks him what he meant he answers: Still, it cried, "Sleep no more!" to all the house: "Glamis hath murdered sleep, and therefore Cawdor Shall sleep no more, Macbeth shall sleep... good influences, Macbeth much more than Lady Macbeth; that is why Lady Macbeth who goes to the limit of wickedness with hardly a care in the world is the greater sufferer because we must remember how the forces which are occult are also retributive forces; they can avenge an evil action which has been caused by an intervention of evil occult forces, and it is they who rob Macbeth of his sleep and it... A BACK-LOOK AT MACBETH I was not given a theme in advance. Nirod has just now said, "Talk about Macbeth — or, if you like, about the Sonnets. After all, it doesn't matter because it's the same genius who wrote the play and those poems." Perhaps he should have added, "It's the same non-genius who is going to talk." Well, as he has mentioned Macbeth first, I take it that his ...
... thinking and feeling: his poetry pulses with metaphor upon metaphor and he can rarely stop his Logopoeia from passing into Phanopoeia. However, in a certain passage in Macbeth he keeps the true logopoeic level for several lines. There Macbeth is debating the murder of King Duncan who is a guest for the night at Macbeth's castle: If it were done when 'tis done, then 'twere well It were done quickly:... finished thing when it is carried out completely then the best course is to commit it soon. This sense is elaborated in the next phrase. "Trammel up" means "arrest, bind up, entangle". Macbeth wishes that the murder would have no sequel, run no risk of later discovery and ultimate punishment: the fatal blow which would lead to the cessation of Duncan's life—his surcease—should be in the... itself the whole history of the crime—the full being and the entire ending of the dark deed here upon the earth. If there were no after-effects, no possible results dangerous to the criminal, then Macbeth would consider the success sufficiently tempting for him to ignore the next life and risk whatever might be the consequences after his own death, whatever punishment doled out by God in the other world ...
... of their importance and significance. Shakespeare himself records, in two other of his major dramas, the mystery of two such stages preceding the one he deals with in Hamlet: one in Macbeth and the other in King Lear. Indeed these three mighty creations form a triology with the Karma of the human soul at different crises as its theme. King Lear represents human consciousness... primitive texture. It is a world ruled by the mode of tamas. * ---------- *The angelic Cordelia is a ray that has strayed down from some higher region, page – 185 In Macbeth we move up one step farther; human consciousness attains here a higher level. Something of the mental being enters into the purely vital creature: instead of the Eater, the man with the mere stomach... self-aggrandising ‘vaulting ambition’. He does not seek to possess things for their own sake, not so much to enjoy them as to hold them as symbols of his royalty, of his personal worth and majesty. In Macbeth we have the world of the Asura-a creation of the mode of rajas. Hamlet is the third stage; it is a vision of sattva-guna and a creation attempted by that vision. The human ...
... experience. In this category the most marvellous lines are those in which Macbeth conveys the terror of the voice he heard reverberating around him after Duncan had been stabbed while asleep: Still it cried, 'Sleep no more!' to all the house: 'Glamis hath murdered sleep, and therefore Cawdor Shall sleep no more, Macbeth shall sleep no more!' Shakespeare has found for the original... pain To tell my story. Page 92 It is impossible to read that line without difficulty and strain in the breath, especially as it follows one which is most musically smooth. Macbeth is, perhaps, fullest with this alert or rather instinctive skill in the use of words and their sounds. I can never forget, for instance, the impression of perfect artistry given by Macbeth's famous... multitudinous seas incarnadine, Making the green one red. The point which rivets the attention is the word "incarna-dine" — a strongly beautiful effect on the ear, but not that alone. Macbeth has invoked a daring comparison, blood-stained hands pitted against "all Neptune's ocean"; and to support it he must somehow bring out the enormity of his crime, all the more when he applies a thi ...
... One in that other passage on insomnia, where Macbeth, after killing Duncan during sleep, reports the hearing of a dreadful voice addressing him by all Page 194 the three names by which he is known: Still it cried, 'Sleep no more!' to all the house: 'Glamis hath murdered sleep, and therefore Cawdor Shall sleep no more, Macbeth shall sleep no more!' Also, it would be... vitalistic being or the thoughts that spring out in the life-mind under the pressure of sensation, passion, emotion. No transcendental view of things is involved, though a touch of the occult comes in the Macbeth-lines. Virgil's verse has also no such view, even if it does rise to a universal level out of a passage related to particular objects and incidents. The phrase of Leopardi, a wild indignant pessimism ...
... any of his son's creations but not at all like his son. He could be like Hamlet or Macbeth or Falstaff or Romeo — at least some sort of Romeo he must have been if Shakespeare was at all to get born — but we do not imagine that Shakespeare's father was like Shakespeare who was the literary father of Hamlet and Macbeth and Falstaff and Romeo. So when Chaucer is described as the Father of English Poetry... but the quiver of the nerves of sensation is absent. And this quiver will be realised by us all the more if, beside Chaucer's lines on the emptiness and transience of the world, we set the famous Macbeth-passage, on a part of which we have already commented elsewhere and which again triumphantly employs a repetition, a triple one this time at the very start: Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow ...
... close this narration by describing the medico-poetic thrill that a doctor friend felt when he, being a Page 122 Shakespearean scholar, first read the following lines in the Poet's Macbeth. Macbeth is appealing to his physician on behalf of his wife: Canst thou not minister to a mind disease'd; Pluck from the memory a rooted sorrow; Raze out the written troubles of the brain;... Which weighs upon the heart? Our said doctor was enraptured on hearing an appeal like this. He thought that he would feel like a god if asked to do such things in such a sublime language. Macbeth is speaking of plucking a rooted sorrow, razing out brain-troubles and cleansing the stuffed bosom - procedures that appear to call for deep-going surgical operations! So, our friend thrilled and wondered ...
... intention to commit a crime? And if intentions are to be counted, I feel that I am a criminal. I am a student of Shakespeare and his four tragedies have influenced me greatly: Macbeth, Hamlet, Othello and King Lear. Macbeth was a noble man but degenerated through selfish ambition into an unfaithful murderer; Hamlet was also a noble man, but besieged by dualities, indecisions and doubts, he ruined his... pretences. But now, as compared to Vijay, I suddenly found myself covered with dirty linens without even realizing how dirty they were! And as I began to look at myself, I too found within myself the same Macbeth, the same Hamlet, the same Othello and the same King Lear. I realised that there were standards nobler and profounder than those described in the books of Law in the light of which I stood guilty and ...
... the outer eye and ear. An excellent example of the latter purpose is in Shakespeare's Macbeth, in the scene where Macbeth's wife has left him with an injunction to remove the filthy evidence of his misdeed, the blood-stains on his hand after the Page 76 murder of the sleeping King Duncan. Macbeth soliloquises: Will all great Neptune's ocean wash this blood Clean from my hand... centre-piece here. It signifies: "to dye flesh-coloured or crimson." It has a strongly melodious effect on the ear and creates a vivid impression on the eye. But its purpose goes far beyond all this. Macbeth has let his imagination soar. He has put, in rivalry with the bloodiness of his human hand, the power of "all great Neptune's ocean", and he has increased the audacity of his counterpoise by throwing... throwing into relief the greatness of the ocean with the help of the thirteen-lettered epithet "multitudinous": the challenge, as it were, of Neptune's washing vastness has been openly accepted by Macbeth in order to suggest the enormity of his own crime, an enormity against which the combined cleansing powers of the Atlantic, the Pacific and the Indian Oceans would not avail. But the suggestion would remain ...
... bidding adieu to our dentist but not to the poet. We have said that Shakespeare is constantly passing over from Logopoeia to Phanopoeia. But in a certain passage in Macbeth he keeps the true logopoeic level for several lines. There Macbeth is debating the murder of King Duncan who is a guest for the night at Macbeth's castle: If it were done when 'tis done, then 'twere well It were done quickly:... perfectly finished thing when it is carried out completely, then the best course is to commit it soon. This sense is elaborated in the next phrase. "Trammel up" means "arrest, bind up, entangle". Macbeth wishes that the murder should have no sequel, run no risk of later discovery and ultimate punishment: the fatal blow which would lead to the cessation of Duncan's life — his "surcease" — should be... itself the whole history of the crime — the full being and the entire ending of the dark deed here upon the earth. If there were no after-effects, no possible results dangerous to the criminal, then Macbeth would consider the success sufficiently tempting for him to ignore the next life and risk whatever might be the consequences after his own death, whatever the punishment meted out by God in the ...
... limpidity that deeply moves us without directly shaking up our sensations as Shakespeare does and tearing like him at our emotional roots. The typical Shakespearian seizure of our vital being in the Macbeth-passage can be gauged also by comparing it to Gray's eighteenth-century "gem": The boast of heraldry, the pomp of power, And all that beauty, all that wealth e'er gave, Awaits alike... secretly penned the plays and used Shakespeare as a convenient facade. Unfortunately for these scholars Bacon has left us some verse under his own name and we have just to hear it together with the Macbeth-lines in order to realise not only that Bacon was a mediocre poet but also that he functioned from a poetic plane quite unlike the Shakespearian. Here is how his Life starts: The World's a bubble... the Hellespont, Even so my bloody thoughts with violent pace Shall ne'er look back, ne'er ebb to humble love, Till that a capable and wide revenge Swallow them up - or Lady Macbeth providing a more weird and Romantically quivering analogue to the Classical Clytemnestra of Aeschy-lus: Come, come, you spirits That tend on mortal thoughts, unsex me here; And fill ...
... aesthetic Page 121 values out of Dogberry and Malvolio, and he is as thorough a creative artist in his treatment of them as in his handling of Macbeth or Lear. But if we had only Dogberry or Malvolio to testify to Shakespeare's genius, no Macbeth, no Lear, would he be so great a dramatic artist and creator as he now is? It is in the varying possibilities of one subject or another that there lies ...
... emphasis which could not be bettered. I may quote an instance in which the word "tale" rather than "story" is the inevitable expression. In Macbeth Shakespeare has some lines etching out a desperate pessimism. Towards the close of the passage Macbeth says about life: it is a tale Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury Signifying nothing. "Story" would have been quite in the ...
... not really a product of the thinking mind at work in its own right: it is really a throw-forth from the passionate being. Sri Aurobindo has instanced that "thought" which we have already cited from Macbeth. He picks out its most pronounced ideative phrases: Life's but a walking shadow;... ...it is a tale Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, Signifying nothing. Then he sets... feel it even in our nerves of mental sensation, the other is the thought-mind itself uttering in a moved, inspired and illuminative language an idea of the pure intelligence." You may say that Macbeth is a character of storm and stress and is not meant by Shakespeare to be philosophic. Well, let us turn to Hamlet. Here surely Shakespeare tries to mirror the intellect. Hamlet is his closest vision... . I'll write the whole list on the blackboard with the important letters standing out from the rest. Read off all that falls in vertical line with the big letter of the first title: KING LEAR MACBETH MEASURE FOR MEASURE MUCH ADO ABOUT NOTHING HAMLET TWELFTH NIGHT Isn't the result a bit of an eye-opener? So cryptograms can prove anything. And to this over-ingenious sample, even more ...
... greatest villain has such moments. You remember Lady Macbeth ― known as the cruellest woman; well, she said about Duncan, "I would have killed him myself but he looked like my father" ¹ ― well, that is the feeling even she had. So let us not despair, even the ¹ Shakespeare: Macbeth, Act II, Scene 2. Lady Macbeth: ... Had he not resembled ...
... is not satisfied. 3rd: One revolts and sinks into falsehood. 25 Again, how are we to grapple with such adverse forces, and throw them out? Evil suggestions come to Macbeth from the Witches, then from Lady Macbeth, and finally in the form of a dagger: Is this a dagger which I see before me, The handle toward my hand? Come, let me clutch thee. I have thee not, and yet... There is, however, the danger of mistaking false gods for the true, of misinterpreting the dreams and the visions, and of hugging false security (as, for example, literature's tragic heroes - a Macbeth, a Captain Ahab - do), and coming to grief. But of course the few minutes of "dreamless sleep" during the night are much more restful and refreshing than hours of so-called sleep, for those ...
... beaten and shuddering. To the Hindu it would have seemed a savage and inhuman spirit that could take any aesthetic pleasure in the sufferings of an Oedipus or a Duchess of Malfi or in the tragedy of a Macbeth or an Othello. Partly this arose from the divine tenderness of the Hindu nature, always noble, forbearing & gentle and at that time saturated with the sweet & gracious pity & purity which flowed from... Beautiful White Devil or a Jew of Malta from the Hindu dramatist, we Page 192 shall be disappointed; he deals not in these splendid or horrible masks. If we come to him for a Lear or a Macbeth, we shall go away discontented; for these also are sublimities which belong to cruder civilisations and more barbarous national types; in worst crimes & deepest suffering as well as in happiness & ...
... ending the troubles — he uses "them" and not "it". We can gauge the wrong-headedness of Johnsonian criticism by referring to Johnson's own balancing against one of the most admired passages in Macbeth three couplets from Dryden's drama, The Indian Emperor. Dryden gives the stage-direction: "Enter Cortez alone in a night-gown" — and then the speech of the night-gowned hero: All things are... Dr. Gupta would feel like a god if asked to do such things in such language. Perhaps even our Dr. Sanyal and Dr. Satyabrata Sen, though they are more sur-geons than physicians, would thrill; for, Macbeth speaks of pluck-ing a rooted sorrow, razing out brain-troubles and cleansing the stuffed bosom — procedures that appear to call for deep-going operations, the surgeon's job. But possibly Dr. Sanyal ...
... was the one poet who never condescended to a copy, a photograph or a shadow. The reader who sees in Falstaff, Macbeth, Lear or Hamlet imitations of Nature, has either no inner eye of the soul or has been hypnotised by a formula. 149) Where in material Nature wilt thou find Falstaff, Macbeth or Lear? Shadows & hints of them she possesses but they themselves tower above her. 150) There are two for ...
... was the one poet who never condescended to a copy, a photograph or a shadow. The reader who sees in Falstaff, Macbeth, Lear or Hamlet imitations of Nature, has either no inner eye of the soul or has been hypnotised by a formula. 149—Where in material Nature wilt thou find Falstaff, Macbeth or Lear? Shadows and hints of them she possesses, but they themselves tower over her. Page 249 150—There ...
... and therefore aesthetic values out of Dogberry and Malvolio and he is as thorough a creative artist in his treatment of them as in his handling of Macbeth or Lear. But if we had only Dogberry or Malvolio to testify to Shake speare's genius, no Macbeth, no Lear, would he be so great a dramatic artist and creator as he now is ? It is in the varying possibilities of one subject or another that there ...
... Karataka, 77 Katyayani, 54 Kirkup, James, 46n. –New Directions, 46n. Krishna , 38, 68, 112, 149 Kukkiripada, 256,270 Kutsa, Rishi, 129 LADY MACBETH, 38 London , 82n. Luy(pada) 255,277,279 MADRAS , 40 Mahinda, 268 Maitra, Debiprasad, 177 Maitreyee, 54 Mara, 200, 203-4, 206, 212, 233, 271... 281-2 Sarama, 271 Saraswati, 138 Satyavan, 26-30 Savitri, 27-31, 112 Shabara,288 Shakespeare, 38n., 58, 59n. –Hamlet, 22 –Macbeth, 38n. –Ruhard the Third, 59n. Shankara, 195 Shanti, 274-5 Shantipada, 267 Shastri, Pandit Haraprasad, 254 Shiva, 13, 41, 150-5 Shobhanaka ...
... not only depicts but carries you and puts you face to face with the living reality. I will give you three examples to show how Shakespeare wields his Prosperian wand. First I take the lines from Macbeth, that present before you the castle of Duncan, almost physically – perhaps even a little more than physically – with its characteristic setting and atmosphere: Dun. This castle hath a pleasant... Methinks y'are better spoken. Edg. Come on, sir; here's the place. Stand still. How fearful And dizzy 'tis to cast one's eyes so low! The crows and choughs that wing the midway air ¹ Macbeth, Act I, Sc. 6. Page 171 Show scarce so gross as beetles. Half-way down Hangs one that gathers samphire-dreadful trade! Methinks he seems-no bigger than his head. The fishermen ...
... dramatic and therefore aesthetic values out of Dogberry and Malvolio and he is as thorough a creative artist in his treatment of them as in his handling of Macbeth or Lear. But if we had only Dogberry or Malvolio to testify to Shakespeare's genius, no Macbeth, no Lear, would he be so great a dramatic artist and creator as he now is? It is in the varying possibilities of one subject or another that there lies ...
... for a definite artistic purpose, but the thousands that never found verbal Page 390 expression, many of them with as splendid potentialities as those which did materialize in Hamlet and Macbeth seem to have risen & perished without any useful purpose. The same wastefulness is shown by Nature in her works; how many millions of lives does she not shower forth that a few may be selected for ...
... himself becomes impersonal, yet allowing the stream of some impetuous energy to flow through him. We do not get the joy, rasa, of the same detachment in, say, Duncan's murder in Macbeth's castle. Lady Macbeth wants to be unsexed and filled with direst cruelty, that with the help of murdering ministers, she would let a hell loose in her design of ghastly ambition. And the poet is true to the occasion, that ...
... soul. You have raised the question: "What is life?" Arthur Symons, with a dignified Stoic pessimism, says: Life is a long preparedness for death. Shakespeare, in the role of a disgruntled Macbeth, cries out, as everybody knows; Life's but a poor player Who struts and frets his hour upon the stage And then is heard no more... Page 18 Shelley, idealistic visionary ...
... the nasty sty... Would you say that "sensational potency" is absent in these outbursts which hardly celebrate the earth as a bed of roses or appreciate the pleasures of the marriage-bed? Macbeth too is surely not lacking in "sensational potency" with such words as: I have lived long enough: my way of life Is fall'n into the sere, the yellow leaf: And that which should accompany ...
... to have been striving to do this, but all that he does see then is the action of certain tremendous life-forces, which he either sets in a living symbol or indicates behind the human action, as in Macbeth , or embodies, as in King Lear , in a tragically uncontrollable possession of his human characters. Nevertheless, his is not a drama of mere externalised action, for it lives from within and more ...
... classifications and is unanalysable. Instances would include the most different kinds of style—Keats' "magic casements", Wordsworth's [ lines on ] Newton and his "fields of sleep", Shakespeare's "Macbeth has murdered sleep", Homer's descent of Apollo from Olympus, Virgil's "Sunt lachrimae rerum" and his "O passi graviora". 16 September 1934 You write, in regard to a poem of mine, "it is difficult ...
... which He guides and governs. He is then Isha, the Lord or Ruler. To use a human parallel, Shakespeare pouring himself out in a hundred names and forms, Desdemona, Othello, Iago, Viola, Rosalind, Macbeth, Hamlet, Lear, Cymbeline is using his power of Avidya to become the lord and ruler of a wonderful imaginary world. Shakespeare putting aside his works and returning to his own single & sufficient existence ...
... suggestions,—for this manner is peculiarly his own and others can only occasionally come near to it. Such passages recur to the mind as those in the soliloquy on sleep or the well-known lines in Macbeth , Pluck from the memory a rooted sorrow, Raze out the written troubles of the brain, And with some sweet oblivious antidote Cleanse the stuffed bosom of that perilous stuff Which weighs upon ...
... suggestions, - for this manner is peculiarly his own and others can only occasionally come near to it. Such passages recur to the mind as those in the soliloquy on sleep or the well-known lines in Macbeth , Page 9 Pluck from the memory a rooted sorrow, Raze out the written troubles of the brain, And with some sweet oblivious antidote Cleanse the stuffed bosom of that ...
... Nations, 78, 80, 85 Leibnitz, 327 Lenin, 125 Leo X, 207 Leonardo da Vinci, 120 Lewis, Cecil Day, 195 Louis XIV, 207 Lucifer, 267 MACBETH, 186 Madhusudan Dutt, 120, 197 Mahabharata, the, 188,217,222 Mahalakshmi, 275 Mahasaraswati,271 Mahashakti, 327 Maheshwari, 275 Maitreyi ...
... memory a rooted sorrow ...?" 215 etc. Or I feel like sending an 213Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, 11:1: 704. 214A well-known joke from Amrita-da, 215William Shakespeare, The Tragedy of Macbeth, Act V, Scene III, lines 40-41. Page 145 SOS to my Guru as I had done once in rhyme: OGuru, O Guru, My head, my head and the damned fever - Iam half-dead ...
... Errant Life", 74n Shakespeare, 6, 52, 57, 71, 83, 85, 93, 168, 170, 176, 178, 233-4, 266 -A Midsummer Night's Dream, 57n -Hamlet, 163, 173, 175n., 185n -King Lear, 171, 173n -Macbeth, 170, 171n -Romeo & .Juliet, 176n -Sonnets, 178-9 -The Winter's Tale, 233n Shankara, 246, 277, 282 Shelley, 68, 71, 98, 235 Shita1a, 180 Siddhacharyas, 164, 221-2, 225 ...
... somewhat different? Sri Krishna urges Arjuna to be in the very thick of a deadly fight, not a theoretical or abstract combat, but take a hand in the direst man-slaughter, to "do the deed" (even like Macbeth) but yogically. Yes, The Gita's position seems to be that – to accept all life integrally, to undertake all necessary work ( kartavyam karma ) and turn them Godward. The Gita seeks to do it in its ...
... the savour of earthly pleasure, the embrace of physical bodies with each other, as it were. But Valmiki deals with experiences and realities that exceed the bounds of ordinary earthly life. Hamlet, Macbeth and King Lear are the highlights of Shakespearae's creation. Valmiki's heroes and heroine are Rama, Ravana and Sita. The characters depicted by Shakespeare are men as men are or would be. But even ...
... 101, 105, 112, 116, 161,317 Kurukshetra, 66, 109, 116 LAo- TSE, 134 Laplace, 370 Lazarus, 200 Lenin, 142 Louis XIV, 209, 320, 418 Lucifer, 46, 81 MADAGASCAR, 323-4 Macbeth, 93 McDougall, 57 Mahakali, 44, 160, 207-10, 225, 382 Mahalakshmi, 44, 207, 209-10, 225 Mahasaraswati, 44, 207-10, 225 Mahashakti, 67, 198 Mahavira, 44, 207 Maheshwari, 44, 207 ...
... the "Irrémédiable". He says, ¹ Inferno, Canto III , 11. 1-9. Page 51 when Satan does a thing, if he means it, he does it well. One remembers the frightful picture of Lady Macbeth trying to rub out the damned spot on her hand: she found it impossible and "all the perfumes of Arabia" would not sweeten the hand that bore it; the spot corrodes, eats into the being carrying with ...
... is yearned for. Then there is the matchless Virgilian rhythm helped out Page 147 by the freedom an inflected language allows of word-arrangement. Another favourite of mine is from Macbeth: Duncan is in his grave. After life's fitful fever he sleeps well. A whole life-vision is caught here with both poignancy and resignation in a sound-pattern perfect in subtle communication ...
... associate the object with any gleam in our gaze, any stir of our pulse, any thrill in our brain, any figurative view of it as in the Porter's Page 360 expression in Shakespeare's Macbeth: . . . go the primrose way to the everlasting bonfire" or else as in Ophelia's speech to her - : brother Laertes in Hamlet: Do not, as some ungracious pastors do, Show me the steep and ...
... full of sound and fury, Signifying nothing. On the thought in this, Murry comments: "It is one which the well-tuned man would rather not believe to be true; and yet, when he has listened to Macbeth, something is changed. There are undreamed-of riches, it seems, even in ultimate despair; a glory is shed over the road to dusty death. This despair is not despairing, because it is complete. The act ...
... difficult to say what else can be so regarded. Occasionally he lets himself refer to Elizabethan poetry as Romantic, as when he writes about Schiller adapting in Classical mood "the Romantic pages of Macbeth " 28 or when he tells us that the Romantic. pursues violent feelings and that, "like an Elizabethan dramatist, he may find them in the crudities of reality as well as in .the fantasies of dreams" ...
... be expressed also with poetic perfection in the course of the play. You don't suppose Shakespeare was a murderer or even in sympathy with murdering: still, the speech he puts into the mouth of Lady Macbeth invoking the powers of evil to aid her in killing Duncan is one of the peaks of the Shakespearean Parnassus. And it has not one false note, it is absolutely sincere, a potential murderess seems actually ...
... out of all classification and is unanalysable. Instances would include the most different kinds of style—Keats' 'magic casements', Wordsworth's Newton and his 'fields of sleep', Shakespeare's 'Macbeth has murdered sleep', Homer's descent of Apollo from Olympus, Virgil's 'Sunt lacrimae rerum' and his 'O passi graviora'. "Homer's passage translated into English would be perfectly ordinary ...
... (SAOS, pp. 14-15) of such a quality in Macbeth's lines Still it cried 'Sleep no more!' to all the house: 'Glamis hath murdered sleep, and therefore Cawdor Shall sleep no more: Macbeth shall sleep no more!' (2.2.4345) is an example of his keenness and subtlety of response and lucid formulation, as also are the analyses of pas-sages elsewhere like, SAOS, pp. 39-41. The ...
... devotionalism Page 251 and sudden-turn-ism. Humbug ! You have to send your blessings by wire to his brother who (for ought we know) maybe of the type described by Shakespeare in Macbeth, "Nothing became them in life so much as their leaving it." (I quote the idea from memory.) Even the Kasmandas didn't dare so much, what ? P.S. Whatever you may say. Guru, I respond still ...
... render it adjectival. I have marked only two earlier employments of the word in English poetry and, according to me, Sri Aurobindo's is in accord with them. The first occasion is in Shakespeare's Macbeth: Will all great Neptune's ocean wash this blood Page 3 Clean from my hand? No, this my hand will rather The multitudinous seas incarnadine, Making the green one red ...
... becomes impersonal, yet allowing the stream of some impetuous energy to flow through him. We do not get the joy, rasa, of the same detachment in, say, Duncan's murder in Macbeth's castle. Lady Macbeth wants to be unsexed and Page 572 filled with direst cruelty, that with the help of murdering ministers, she would let a hell loose in her design of ghastly ambition. And the poet ...
... and is unanalysable. Instances would include the most different kinds of style —Keats' 'magic casements', Wordsworth's Newton and his Page 100 'fields of sleep', Shakespeare's 'Macbeth has murdered sleep', Homer's descent of Apollo from Olympus, Virgil's 'Sunt lacrimae rerum' and his 'O passi graviora'. "Homer's passage translated into English would be perfectly ordinary ...
... have become brittle and veils of decency are being lifted away rapidly. Ambitions are mounting, and even noble men of yesterday are found yielding themselves to the temptations that had corrupted Macbeth. And what about jealousy? Jealousy in professional life; jealousy in domestic life. Increasing number of lagos are found wandering about in their blind hunt for victims of suspicion and doubt. I shudder ...
... The beautiful, the luminous, the noble things that appear to you, in your consciousness, from time to time, all come from your soul." Even the greatest villain has such moments. You remember Lady Macbeth — known as the cruellest woman, well, she said about Duncan, "I would have killed him myself but he looked like my father" — well, that is the feeling even she had. So let us not despair, even the ...
... King Lear 20 King Zeus 34 Krishna 31, 78 Kronos 4 Kumbhodara 17 Kutsa 8 L Lalan the Fakir 84 Laocoon 18 London 10 Lombards 50 M Macbeth 19 Madhuchchanda 8 Madhyama 13 Mahabharata 103, 104 Mamata 9 Manmohan Ghose, Prof. 92,102 Mantra 25 Manu 5 Marcellus 23, 24 Matthew Arnold 102 Medhatithi ...
... Ariel was handsome, hence beautiful. Caliban was high-serious, vibrant with an essential sap of Truth. Sakuntala appeals to our heart, for she was an embodiment of beauty. We can appreciate Lady Macbeth for the intensity of her sombre soul. Kalidasa has excelled in depicting the beauties of form. Shakespeare sought not beauty but the wide surge of vital truths. Petrarch abounds in the beauty of ...
... not only depicts but carries you and puts you face to face with the living reality. I will give you three examples to show how Shakespeare wields his Prosperian wand. First I take the lines from Macbeth, that present before you the castle of Duncan, almost physically —perhaps even a little more than physically—with its characteristic setting and atmosphere: Dun. This castle hath a pleasant ...
... somewhat different ? Sri Krishna urges Arjuna to be in the very thick of a deadly fight, not a theoretical or abstract combat, but take a hand in the direst manslaughter, to "do the deed" (even like Macbeth) but Yogically. Yes, Gita's position seems to be that—to accept all life integrally, to undertake all necessary work (kartavyam karma) and turn them Godward. Gita seeks to do it in its own way ...
... 26:393 17. 12 Years :138 18. Bull Feb-76:24,26;cf SA 26:393 19. 12 Years :128 20. 12 Years : 127 21. MI Jun-68:351;cf Jauhar :75 22. MI Jun-67:331 23. Macbeth I.vii.21ff 24. MI Feb-54:17-18 25. Champaklal :45-46 26. cf L&L :50 27. SA 26:445 30. The Mother's War 1. MO 5:418 2. MO 15:179 3. MO 15:179 4 ...
... utter or even sympathising with all their feelings. If AE's dictum is correct, a dramatist like Shakespeare should never have penned quite a number of celebrated speeches such as Iago's or Lady Macbeth's, for he could never have answered satisfactorily to AE's "posers". We have to recognise that a poet's function essentially is not to transcribe his own convictions and experiences but to put himself ...
... full of sound and fury, Signifying nothing. That is a 'thought', a judgment on life, so would naturally be assigned to the intellect, but as a matter of fact it is a throw-up from Macbeth's vital, an emotional or sensational, not an intellectual judgment and its whole turn and rhythm are vital. "About the first quotation, Shakespeare's ...the prophetic soul Of the wide ...
... Talks on Poetry TALK TEN Last time we caught hold of true Poetic Diction with the help of Macbeth's seas-incarnadining hand and had also an appreciative look at genuine Poetic Diction through Keats's magic casements. Today we shall make a few more quotations. No, I shall not start commenting on them in detail — banish that wrinkle of anxiety from your brows ...
... or even of the near future. The soul can grow against or even by a material destiny that is adverse. Finally, even if all is determined, why say that Life is, in Shakespeare's phrase or rather Macbeth's, "a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing"? Life would rather be that if it were all chance and random incertitude. But if it is something foreseen, planned in every detail ...
... have been anticipated by Shakespeare in its suggestion of a satisfied slow-goingness and a happy postponing tendency, though his line in its proper context has hardly the same mood. Detached from Macbeth's mouth, it is most apt with its emphatic Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow... Benjamin Franklin with his adage - "Never put off till tomorrow what you can do today" - would have ...
... 1 Alongside the lines themselves Sri Aurobindo wrote: "Tremendously vital." (K.D.S.) Page 83 assigned to the intellect, but as a matter of fact it is a throw-up from Macbeth's vital, an emotional or sensational, not an intellectual judgment and its whole turn and rhythm are vital. "About the first quotation, Shakespeare's ... the prophetic soul Of ...
... full of sound and fury, Signifying nothing. Here is a "thought", a judgment on life, and its origin would naturally be assigned to the intellect, but as a matter of fact it is a throw-up from Macbeth's vital being, an emotional or sensational, not an intellectual judgment and its whole turn and rhythm are strongly vital in their vibration and texture. But yet in this passage there is a greater power ...
... The soul can grow against or even by a material destiny that is adverse. Finally, even if all is determined, why say that Life is, in Page 240 Shakespeare's phrase or rather Macbeth's, "a tale told by an idiot full of sound and fury, signifying nothing" ? Life would rather be that if it were all chance and random incertitude. But if it is something foreseen, planned in every detail ...
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