Shakespeare & the Beats of Silence
It is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.
“It is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.” — Macbeth, Act V, Scene 5, Lines 29-31.
There are many different ways to analyze Shakespeare plays (and a sure-fire way to start an argument among academics is to argue which one is the “right” way). There are the words explicitly on the page. There are allusions to historic events. One could compare the works to their source material (gasp, Shakespeare — like every other writer ever— didn’t make his plots up his out of whole cloth. He begged, borrowed and stole from other sources). And, for our purposes today, you can look at the way he played with rhyme and meter.
Plays in the early modern period were structured and governed by convention (i.e. comedies end in weddings and tragedies in deaths), and Shakespeare played with those rules to express meaning. For instance, the play of Macbeth offers examples of how he played with meter to affect tone and performance.
Meter is the rhythm of the lines determined by the pattern of stressed and unstressed syllables. Shakespeare wrote in iambic pentameter … mostly.1 Iambic pentameter is comprised of a line of ten syllables alternating between the unstressed and stressed, giving it a sing-songy ba-DUM, ba-DUM, ba-DUM, ba-DUM, ba-DUM quality. However, the plays also includes shortened lines and lengthened lines and consecutive lines that can be read together to complete the meter. And a completely different meter all together, referred to as “magic meter.”2
The Shakespeare Sitch
In some ways, Macbeth is a natural follow-up to the discussion of fate in Julius Caesar. In fact, I’d considered opening that door last week, but couldn’t do so efficiently. That’s because much ink has been spilled over the centuries debating whether Macbeth would have killed Duncan (the king) without the prophecy of the Weird Sisters (the witches). But, much like the man himself, I’m getting ahead of myself.
Macbeth— known to your local superstitious thespian as “The Scottish Play”3— was written around 1606. It is Shakespeare’s shortest play, and likely written to please the new king, King James I, who ascended to the throne in 1603. He was fascinated with (terrified by?) witchcraft (women?) and demonology, and even wrote a book about it titled Daemonologie in 1597. The play also features the character of Banquo, from whom James I claimed descent, and has potential references to the Gunpowder Plot of 1605.
The play itself is the age old story: Boy meets witches; witches tell boy he could be king; boy kills king to make prophecy come true. Oh, and he kills some kids, his wife goes mad, and his foe kills him because a c-section doesn’t count as giving birth (yeah right…).
The importance of meter is apparent from the start. Three witches creep upon our stage as thunder and lightning rage. But they don’t speak in iambic pentameter. No, they speak in “magic meter”4 or catelectic trochaic tetrameter. Trochaic meter is the reverse of iambic, going from stressed to unstressed, i.e. BAH-dum, BAH-dum, BAH-dum, BAH. Tetrameter is in four feet (each foot containing a stressed and unstressed syllable) instead of the five of pentameter. And “catelectic” means the last unstressed syllable is missing.
Meaning, the moment these beings speak, the audience knows that there’s something rotten in the state of Denmark… wait, no. Wrong play. Sorry. We’ll get there eventually.
But even their unnatural rhythm is broken at the first mention of “Macbeth”. Macbeth is iambic instead of trochaic. Some scholars argue this break in the meter represents Macbeth disrupting the natural order through regicide. Because, you see, in Scene 3, the witches tell Macbeth that he will be king. And, instead of waiting to see if this prophecy will come true without action on his part (as their other prophecy did), he rushes home to plot the murder of the current king with his wife.5
And murder him they do. So the Macbeths rise to power and civil war breaks out. Macbeth does some horrific things to consolidate that power (having his best friend killed and slaughtering this other guy’s entire household). By Act V, Lady Macbeth goes mad and throws herself out of a window at the same time as the rival army closes in on their castle.
Macbeth, upon being told this dreadful news, reflects on the meaninglessness of existence. And ultimately, he concludes —
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.
There are beats missing in that final line. It’s short by four syllables (we know this because the next line is complete). Those missing beats suggest a pause the actor playing Macbeth, echoing the idea of nothing with silence.
Ultimately, Macbeth is defeated and the royal line resumes with the original king’s son. And the audience — especially the post-Elizabethan England recovering from decades of succession insecurity— is assured that the proper order (or meter?) of things has resumed.
Speak the Speech, I Pray You
Bring Shakespeare’s words into your own life by:
Confronting your uncle with the problematic political views over Thanksgiving dinner (but please, don’t do this);
Assuring that jerk in traffic that he is full of sound and fury and his honking signifies nothing;
And… doing battle with your overly-sensitive smoke detector.
Additional Resources
Find a copy of the entire play here.
Check out the various resources in the footnotes below.
Engage in some Olsen nostalgia with Double, Double Toil and Trouble — Yes, that’s a line from Shakespeare.
There is a huge asterisk on this entire discussion. Shakespeare is a trickster who played with language like a cat with a mouse, so any “rule” we attempt to impose on his works will immediately be broken. This discussion is a generalization because this is a newsletter intended to be enjoyed by the everyman.
See the Macbeth: Arden Performance Edition (2019) at 38.
For the uninitiated, Macbeth is considered to be a cursed play because of the witches. There’s a theory that a coven of witches was offended by Shakespeare using real incantations, and cursed the play. Read an article from the RSC here. For that reason, it is bad luck to say the name of the play in a theater (unless speaking the dialogue in character), and so many monikers have been created as placeholders. Personally, I’m a believer. When I was a kid, a local community theater did the play and one of the actors stepped off the edge of the stage and broke his leg… But I’ll let you decide if it’s worth the risk.
The fairies in A Midsummer Night’s Dream also use this verse, hence it’s association with “magic”.
The blame-shifting between Macbeth and Lady Macbeth is an incredibly nuanced and complicated question, which I will eventually delve into. For now, let’s talk scansion and leave couples counseling for another day.
Another great article. Remember though that Macbeth struggles with the thought of killing Duncan, and is opposed to it, until his wife emasculated him. She even declares that if he fails, she will be there with him the entire way. Yet at the end he is completely alone, and his Tomorrow speech is so nihilistic because he's lost the only thing that truly mattered to him. I would argue the Scottish Play is a much better love story than anything that Romeo and Juliet could have ever produced, and Macbeth's only real flaw was listening to bad career advice.