Abstract
Grammatical strategies in Macbeth comprise one of the play's most fascinating yet unexplored poetic and political devices. Constructions of tense, aspect, and mood inform Macbeth's attempts to articulate the pressures of time and mutability, stretching the grammatical categories allowed by the English language. These irregular extensions of past, present, and future linguistically correlate with the political crises and ruptures in the play. Following an examination of the influential Lily's Grammar, I show how the semantic matrix of tense, aspect, and mood expresses the warped sense of time constituting Macbeth's psychology as well as dissolution of moral order.
In spite of their other violations, Aristotelian and Christian, the Macbeths are as scrupulous grammarians as they are murderers. Thane Macbeth does not convey that oratorical excellence of Brutus or Marc Antony, of such classical proportion and degree that words from his mouth were fain spoken as had been carved from the lips of some Greek figure. Nor do words flourish from his instrument with the floridity, exaggeration, and colour of Iago's baroque imaginings. Nevertheless, this article is concerned with the way Macbeth speaks and, particularly, with his grammar. The play's articulations of the pressures of time and mutability through stretched grammatical categories – showing both common time references as well as the irregular extensions of past, present, and future that dominate the play – are ultimately a manifestation of the desynchronised natural order realised by Macbeth's political illegitimacy. 1
Because of the philosophical nature of tragedy, plays such as Macbeth have often received theoretical treatment. Modern scholarship justly reflects on broad thematic and philosophical concerns in plays such as Macbeth and often enough even offers readings of rhetorical strategy, the latter having reached its apex with Jean Fuzier's systematic treatment of the rhetorical figures and devices in the forum scene of Julius Caesar. 2 Lynne Magnusson notes that Shakespearean criticism has said ‘a great deal about the rhetorical construction of the passions – how the classical theory of rhetoric was translated into a poetics for the Elizabethan theatre, how figures of pathos could become building blocks of passionate dramatic speech’, but she argues that ‘we have heard little or nothing about the grammatical construction of passionate speech. In this omission, we underestimate the scope and influence of grammar in early modern culture’. 3 In examining the connection between grammar and time in Macbeth, I intend to pursue Magnusson's suggestion but also develop the observations of scholars like Donald Foster and Brian Richardson. Foster argues that ‘if the passage of time in Macbeth fails to bring truth to perfection, the language of time may at least serve as a vantage from which to gain a new perspective: for time, in Macbeth, is the mother of many words’. 4 Richardson contends that ‘time is not merely a part of the setting or frame, but is also the raw material that Shakespeare re-forms to embody his themes. Like image patterns or rhetorical devices, the deployment of chronology is an integral aspect of Shakespeare's narrative technique’. 5 In Macbeth, subtle grammatical strategies form a linguistic network that establishes how the very language of the play is chronologically corrupted by Macbeth's political corruption of natural heredity and law.
Figurae grammaticae
The unique instances of grammatical construction in Macbeth almost always suggest either confusion or insidious repression. The use of pronouns in the play is exemplary in this regard. The most famous obfuscatory use of pronouns is upon Macbeth's determination that Duncan after all must be killed. Howsoever his virtues and resolve may differ from Brutus, Macbeth shares with the Roman tyrannicide a tendency to abstract verbally the deed of murder from the physical conditions of actually having to kill someone. Macbeth scruples to admit, ‘If it were done, when ’tis done, then ’twere well / It were done quickly’ (1.7.1–2). The first four noun phrases here refer to the murder of Duncan confusingly by the undescriptive pronoun ‘it’ in various forms, twice eliding the vowel of the pronoun with the following word, modelling the great celerity of the thought. The identification of the pronoun with the noun to which it refers is offered at the end of the second line when Macbeth refers to ‘th’assassination’ (2), but until then the proper antecedent for ‘it’ is as far back as Lady Macbeth's invocation to ‘This night's great business’ at 1.5.68, at which point the noun is a euphemism for murder, again deflecting acknowledgment of the horrific act to which they have pledged themselves. This grammatical quirk in overusing pronouns abstracted from referents is always indicative of the Macbeths’ anxieties related to their having committed themselves to a brutal murder, and the frequency of the use of these pronouns is a gauge for that anxiety.
In 1.5, commenting on Macbeth's letter to her regarding his meeting with the sisters and his newly won title, Lady Macbeth similarly complicates the discernment of the object to which she is referring, again the commitment to murder Duncan, by exploiting the pronoun ‘that’ to the point of confusion so that it functions either implicitly or explicitly as a relative pronoun, as in ‘Thou wouldst be great, / Art not without Ambition, but without / The illness [that] should attend it’. (1.5.18–20), as well as simultaneously in some cases as a demonstrative pronoun without any more clarity, as in ‘What thou wouldst highly, / That wouldst thou holily’ (20–1). Throughout this passage, pronouns replace nouns while vague imperatives and potentialities expressed by the modals ‘shouldst’ and ‘wouldst’ substitute verbs clearly describing actions. There is then a correlation between grammatical confusion in respect to their reluctance to articulate the murder and the sense of apprehension meant to be communicated by the characters. The relationship between the topic of murder and grammar is most perverse when Macbeth laments the dread anticipation of the future, that ‘Present fears / are less than horrible imaginings’, when he is shaken by ‘My thought, whose murder yet is but fantastical’ (1.3.139–41). Some psychological denial syntactically displaces ‘murder’ from its proper place as the grammatical subject of the sentence so that ‘thought’ becomes the grammatical subject and ‘murder’ its possession, demonstrating the double edge of the sword Macbeth plunges into Duncan's breast, literally killing his king and at the same time his own sanity. In one of the many analogies between the two tragedies, Macbeth is in a sense, like Hamlet, ‘Hoist with his own petard’. 6
The scholarly neglect of figurae grammaticae in Macbeth is particularly unfortunate as they express the larger thematic concerns with guilt, as we have seen, and, as I will show, time, producing the near unintelligibility in articulation of Macbeth's agony over such temporal issues as prophecy, anticipation, and mutability. In particular, the morphologies of tense, aspect, and mood in grammatically expressing time comprise one of the play's most fascinating poetic devices. Macbeth attempts to bend his agents to ‘mock the time with fairest show’, referencing the false face he presents to his doomed guest but also his contest against time (1.7.83–4). Time denies the Macbeths the prophesied future they desire ‘in the instant’, whilst the ‘ignorant present’ beyond which the prophecy had momentarily transported them plagues them with remembrances of their deeds from the past (1.5.57–8). The grammatical confusion of time referents in the play shows the collapse in time by the collapse in tense.
Time out of joint
Time is the ruling principle of the play, manifest in the characters’ preoccupations, the plot, the dominant motifs, the rapidity of the play, and the grammar. 7 The attention to speed in the play has been a major component of the character criticism of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, William Hazlitt, and A. C. Bradley, who all suggest something urgent or rushed about Macbeth. 8 Barbara L. Parker writes, ‘Time is represented in the play by two diametrically opposed devices: the imagery of planting and harvesting, symbolic of the natural projection of time, and the element of prophecy, symbolic of the unnatural projection of time’. 9 King Duncan is associated with the natural order of time and consequently with images of vital natural growth and fruition, growth being that process whereby the future flowers as a natural and beautiful effect out of the budding of the present that contains its prospects and, further back, the seeds of the past from which it germinates. Hence, expressing his civic obligations to Macbeth, Duncan says to him, ‘I have begun to plant thee, and will labour / To make thee full of growing’ (1.4.28–9), as those titles and gifts he will receive in time are ‘german’; in the archaic sense of the word, developments from his past deeds. 10 Conversely, prophecy untimely rips the future into the present instant, and this violence to time is reiterated by Macbeth repeatedly, as when he kills Duncan and the royal past, so as to imminently realise his own future as king, and when he kills Banquo, the royal future, so as to secure his ‘fruitless crown’ and ‘barren sceptre’ and cut off the prophesied ‘root and father / Of many kings’ (3.1.61–2, 65–6). Like Agamemnon according to the chorus in Aeschylus's play, Macbeth would have been wise to await the natural growth of his providence and not shed blood upon some sibyllic mutterings.
To violate time is to disturb the categories by which time is understood and communicated, here recognisably threefold as the past, present, and future. The references to the threefold division of time are ancient and assume personification in Indo-European mythologies as the sister-deities known as the three Fates, Moirai, Parcae, or Weird Sisters. These three daughters of either Necessity or Night are often pictured sitting with the spindle of fate resting on their knees. Clotho, singing of the present, spins the thread of life; Lachesis, singing of the past, allots it; and Atropos, singing of the future, cuts the thread. Their voices singing varyingly of the past, present, and future are figured in Macbeth as speaking prophetically without clear time reference. The three such figures of fate in the play, listed in the dramatis personae of various editions as either the Weird Sisters or Witches, speak gnomically, conflating the categories of time. 11 The first two Witches’ successive hails to the thane of Glamis and Cawdor do not discriminate in tense or effect that the one thanage is received and the other about to be given and has been decided upon in the breast of Duncan though unbeknownst to Macbeth. The third Witch's greeting is decidedly in future or what is sometimes called prophetic tense, that Macbeth ‘shalt be king hereafter’, upon which words Macbeth starts in anxiety while Banquo begs the hags to tell him whether truly they ‘can look into the seeds of time, / And say which grain will grow and which will not’ (1.3.48–50, 58–9). 12 The future can be prophesied by the Witches but, though Macbeth's actions suggest that what ‘shalt’ ostensibly yet needs to be willed into effect, Banquo's enquiry reminds us that such projection is unnatural. There are stronger cases elsewhere for the problems with articulating time, but I begin with the Witches to establish that Macbeth assumes their confusion of time reference as much as he assimilates their diction, as some critics have argued; for example, echoing their words ‘foul’ and ‘fair’. 13 The wildly shifting tenses expose linguistically the psychological agony of attempting to realise timeless prophecy in a mortal world filled with past guilt, present horrors, and future worries.
Time, tense, and mood in Lily and Macbeth
The grammatical category of tense produces representations of time. As with time, so with verbs, there are three absolute tenses: the past, the present, and the future. 14 The past tense can refer to past events. The present tense can refer to present events as well as past events for the sake of bringing historical events to immediacy, as in ‘Napoleon sails to Egypt’, and to timeless truths, as in Heraclitus's adage ‘all things flow’. The future tense can refer to future events and also to timeless truths, as in ‘As you sow so shall you reap’. Even without consideration of grammatical mood and aspect, tense has a complex relationship with time because the temporal location of the action or event, of sailing or flowing, is not identical to the category of time suggested by the absolute tense, meaning for example that when reading the phrase ‘Napoleon sails to Egypt’ we should understand that the statement is in present tense but the action itself took place in the past. While tense would seem to be a weft woven seamlessly into the silk tapestry of time, the relationship between the two is knotted with interpretive possibilities, for while tense is a grammatical feature that extends to actions, time is incongruously an imaginative comprehension of change and continuity in the world that we have trouble distinguishing into discrete categories of identification, eluding quantum physicists, philosophers, and tyrants alike.
The relationship between time and tense is particularly fraught in modern English, a language reliant on function words and word order whose philologists and rhetoricians have traditionally expressed tense comparatively using the terms of Latin, a synthetic language in which the morphology of verbs and nouns contains and expresses tense, mood, aspect, and number. The most famous and enduring example is William Lily's Rudimenta grammatices, the earliest recorded edition of which was printed in 1534, and the 1540 revised edition of which was proclaimed by Henry VIII as the only grammar authorised to be used by schoolmasters and teachers. Though ‘Lily's Grammar’ was actually a Latin grammar in the English language, with the first properly English grammar not arriving until 1586 with William Bullokar's Pamphlet for Grammar, Lily's edition was the grammar par excellence for students and teachers and would have been studied by Shakespeare during his formal education. Among other peculiarities, Lily's Grammar uses tense, a feature of grammar, and time, a feature of consciousness, interchangeably. He writes, There be .v. Tenses or tymes. The presente tense, the preterimperfect tense, the preterperfect, the preterplusperfect, and the future tense. The present tense speaketh of the tyme that now is as Amo, I loue. The preterimperfecte tense speaketh of the tyme not perfectly paste, as Amabam, I loued or dyd loue. The preterperfect tense speketh of the time perfectly past, with this signe haue, as Amaui, I haue loved. The preterplusperfecte tense speketh of the tyme more than perfectely paste, with this sygne hadde, as Amaueram, I had loued. The future tense speketh of the tyme to come with this signe, shall or wyll, as Amabo, I shall or wyl loue.
15
Past, present, and future might be synchronous to the Witches and their gnomic utterances, but Macbeth struggles to articulate the temporality of prophesied acts and images as much as he struggles to attempt them. When clocks fail to sound the time but Lady Macbeth rings the bell to mark night, Macbeth is entreated to the image of a dagger. He speaks to the dagger, ‘Thou marshall'st me the way that I was going, / And such an instrument I was to use … / I go, and it is done’. (2.1.42–62). Wylie Sypher writes that in such moments ‘the tenses stand side by side in a kind of montage of inflection. This montage reveals how Macbeth cannot distinguish the actual from the imagined, the present from the past, the past from the future’. 17 Specifically, here the retrospective future is assimilated into the present tense and Macbeth desperately conflates what must and is to be done with what is already done, as if both could be synchronous. This attempt at synchronising times appears in the passage examined above, when Macbeth wishes, ‘If it were done, when ’tis done, then ’twere well / It were done quickly’. This is a statement of condition so if we remove its original verse structure it can be broken into two prosaic clauses following the logic of if p, then q, which may help clarify the grammatically confused expression of time: ‘If it were done when ’tis done, then ’twere well it were done quickly’. The past subjunctive ‘were’ in the first clause of the reordered phrase expresses an event (murder) having hypothetically already been completed, and if that condition is presently (‘when ’tis’) fulfilled (‘done’) then once again subjunctively it would be well (‘’twere well’) that it was done in the immediate present so as to seem to have already been done (‘were done quickly’). This last use of ‘were’ blurs its mood-based use as a subjunctive suggesting the unreality of the event being projected back into future possibility with its tense-based use as a determiner of the temporal location of the event. 18 Also, the subjunctive is the category which most closely approximates the sense of the future in the present in the English language. Macbeth's grammatical strategies evince violations of time that mirror the central concerns of the play, as the variations of tense, intent on an impossible synchronicity, distort time along with unreal grammatical moods, like the subjunctive and its projected imaginings.
‘Perfectest report’: Grammatical aspect and time
The function of aspect in expressing some anxiety about time is integral to Macbeth's eulogy of his wife's death and besides informs his expressions of anticipation. As stated above, aspect expresses whether an action has been completed or, better yet, how that action extends over time, normally understood as being either perfect, that is, completed; or imperfect, that is, incomplete. However, in Germanic languages like English but also in Latin the concept of aspect is combined with the concept of tense so that relative tenses – those tenses not defined absolutely as simply past, present, or future – express both temporal and aspectual information, meaning both information about the time of an event and its continuity or closure. Lily's list above, following the traditional pedagogical practice in Latin of conjugating the verb amo, ‘to love’, defines both absolute tenses and indefinite ones for which aspectual characteristics inform the tense, as in for example the ‘preterplusperfecte’ or what we would in English simply call the past perfect or pluperfect, whereby an event takes place in the past, anterior to another past action. It must be remembered that Lily's vocabulary is necessarily Latinate, in which language the familiar distinction between the perfect and imperfect is distinguished within the past tense itself into the imperfect and preterite, whereas later eighteenth-century grammarians of the English language like James Harris and the Bishop Robert Lowth utilise more familiar categories. While the subjunctive mood and conditionals in considering hypothetical experiences project onto expressions of time the past into the future, the perfect, in determining temporal and aspectual closure, projects the future into the past or present. This is in some distinction to absolute tenses, which do not express any temporal repercussions outside of their respective timeframes. So, while the subjunctive and other conditionals are prospective, the perfect tense is retrospective.
We see in Macbeth something akin to what Lowth, also a theologian as well as Oxford Professor of Poetry in his day, observed as the ambiguity of tenses in prophetic discourse in the Bible. In his remarks on sublimity in his Praelectiones Academicae de Sacra Poesi Hebraeorum [On the Sacred Poetry of the Hebrews], Lowth notes that Hebrew verbs ‘express future events by the past tense, or rather by the perfect present, as if they had actually taken place; and, on the contrary, past events by the future, as if immediately or speedily to happen, and only proceeding towards their completion’. 19 The impulse toward immediate fulfilment is resonant in such phrases pronounced by Macbeth as, ‘I go, and it is done’, and the paradox in his theatrical metaphor, ‘Strange things I have in head, that will to hand, / Which must be acted, ere they may be scanned’ (3.4.137–8). But though time ‘anticipat'st’ his ‘dread exploits’ and ‘the be-all and the end-all’ constantly escapes him, the ‘consequence’ of his actions not ‘trammel[ed] up’ but aggravated by further crimes until sleep itself is killed and Macbeth's life becomes an endless night haunted by guilt and trauma (4.2.143; 1.7.2–3), the perfect tense allows Macbeth in his most pitiful moment a grammatical closure that experience denies to him.
Like William Faulkner's Quentin in The Sound and the Fury, Macbeth cannot bear the thought of mutability and, should some god have wrought him so heavy an instrument, would have flattened time instead of being ‘worn away by a minute clicking of little wheel’.
20
The play's thematic interests in time and dramatic force both reach a climax upon Lady Macbeth's death, when Macbeth delivers his famous elegiac soliloquy contemplating the passing of time. The explicit references to time in the play intensify in approach of this moment.
Again, the famous first line deceptively resembles the future perfect in structure, in marking the time to come in relation to the past, as in ‘She will have died’. But Macbeth's lament in the ‘subjunctive perfect’ is most appropriate for a haunted man whose fleeting sense of the present is suffused with the feverish anticipation of the prophesied future as well as the guilt of the past. This is manifest most evocatively in the form of Banquo's ghost, a timeless rupture of the present by the past, whose present occasions Macbeth to admit of its chronological violation, ‘The times have been / That when the brains were out, the man would die, / And there an end. But now they rise again’ (3.4.78). The prospective subjunctive is the nearest approximation in English of transporting the past into the future, as well as a fitting indicator of the unrealities contemplated by Macbeth in prophecies and nightmares, while the oppositely functioning retrospective perfect aspect semantically expresses a future in the past and thus finally allows closure in death. These temporal staggerings attempt to satisfy the inadequacies that Macbeth feels hither – ‘Then comes my fit again: I had else been perfect’ (3.4.19). Upon this point, the ‘perfectest report’ received by Lady Macbeth, Lord Macbeth's initial interpretation of his prophecy as already having been fulfilled and simply in need of instantiation, can be juxtaposed to the gnomic and incomplete utterances of the Witches, whom Macbeth later calls ‘imperfect speakers’, perpetually open and wanting in closure and fulfilment (1.5.2, 1.3.70).
The vital conceit of the theatrum mundi of wanting to act so immediately as to have performed a scene before having read the lines, expressed by Macbeth in earlier anticipation of the future, is now exhausted into what G. F. Whaller observes as an instance of contemptus mundi, a perception of all mortal experience as but living death for which the future is a miserable and empty prospect. 23 Macbeth's weary pronouncement of ‘Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow’ thus syntactically enunciates the meaninglessness of the march of days, of the impotence of the future, by way of a weak and repetitive conjunction, ‘and’, that by a vicious polysyndeton communicates no logical or emotional connection between the succeeding days that lead to nothing but death. The repetition artistically functions like some leitmotifs in Wagner's operas or like the excessively repeated arabesques in a dream sequence in the Russian ballet La Bayadère, whereby the repetition suggests succession without progression or development, creating a kind of kingdom of death where time is suspended, in which Macbeth reigns until Macduff takes vengeance and announces over Macbeth's slain body that ‘time is free’ and Malcolm resolves that moral, political, and temporal order will be established in ‘measure, time, and place’ (5.9.21, 39). 24
Conclusion
Though it lacks a macabre supplication to a skull found in a graveyard, Macbeth is replete with symbols of vanitas, like a mirror, the language of rot, and objects of time, including the candle in the above soliloquy signifying the frailty and brevity of life. But one of the play's strongest yet hitherto unexplored poetic devices is its grammatical strategy. The semantic matrix of tense, aspect, and mood as it exercised to express warped senses of time in a few instances in Macbeth constitutes especially the interrelationship between Lord Macbeth's deranged structure of thought and the chronological devastation it has wreaked upon the natural order of political cosmos. These grammatical elements also offer concrete formal evidence for the many insightful comments that have been made of the chronological violations in Macbeth, such as Howard Marchitello's statement that ‘temporality is the play's proper subject’ or David Scott Kastan's remark that ‘we are meant to understand Macbeth's evil progress in its relationship to an objective temporal order’. 25 Shakespeare's grammar lessons from Lily would have informed his recognition of the complexities, ambiguities, and therefore the poetic possibilities of tense, mood, and aspect in representing time references, which manifest a linguistic correlative to Macbeth's violation against providence, nature, and the order of the political state upon the commission of regicide, a ‘Most sacrilegious murder’ (2.3.60), and consequent political crime against God's anointed lieutenant on earth. 26 Shakespeare's deliberate employment of those complexities and ambiguities fashions a tragic hero whose demonic senses of awaiting, succession, and remembrance are wrought by grammatical expressions of time that structurally disclose the strange temporalities politically signified in the play.
Footnotes
Declaration of conflicting interests
The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
