Mojo, The Bard, & Me

It is the bloody business which informs

Thus to mine eyes.

-Macbeth           

Macbeth                                              Act II, Scene i, Line 48

This here is a line from Macbeth’s famous ‘Is this a dagger…’ soliloquy. If you’re not familiar with it, well all you have to Google is ‘is this a d’ and Macbeth’s line is the first thing that comes up. In fact, type in ‘it is the bl’ and you’ll get all of today’s Totally Random line. So, yeah, it’s a well known speech, and we’ve actually picked a famous line for once. But I’ll lay it out for you anyway.

You don’t really need to know all the backstory (though it wouldn’t hurt); just know that Macbeth is on his way to murder the sleeping king (with a dagger). He’s in the hallway of the castle on the way to the sleeping king when he starts hallucinating about seeing a dagger. The 'Thus' in the line is the dagger that he's seeing and the 'bloody business' is the murder he's about to commit. Here’s the whole speech.

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 I see thee still.
Art thou not, fatal vision, sensible
To feeling as to sight? or art thou but
A dagger of the mind, a false creation,
Proceeding from the heat-oppressed brain?
I see thee yet, in form as palpable
As this which now I draw.
Thou marshall'st me the way that I was going;
And such an instrument I was to use.
Mine eyes are made the fools o' the other senses,
Or else worth all the rest; I see thee still, And on thy blade and dudgeon gouts of blood,
Which was not so before. There's no such thing:
It is the bloody business which informs
Thus to mine eyes. Now o'er the one halfworld
Nature seems dead, and wicked dreams abuse
The curtain'd sleep; witchcraft celebrates
Pale Hecate's offerings, and wither'd murder,
Alarum'd by his sentinel, the wolf,
Whose howl's his watch, thus with his stealthy pace,
With Tarquin's ravishing strides, towards his design
Moves like a ghost. Thou sure and firm-set earth,
Hear not my steps, which way they walk, for fear
Thy very stones prate of my whereabout,
And take the present horror from the time,
Which now suits with it. Whiles I threat, he lives:
Words to the heat of deeds too cold breath gives.

You really should read this a few times. It won’t hurt you. But, wow, there’s a tough sentence in here. Check it out, it’s the sentence right after today’s Totally Random line, and it starts ‘Now o’er the one halfworld’ and ends with ‘moves like a ghost.’ The section before this sentence is all about the knife, and the sentence after is about sneaking up and killing the king. But what’s this middle sentence about? It’s a half mile long. The first part is about it being nighttime.

Now there’s quite a bit on this whole passage, and these lines in particular, in Prof. Garber’s Shakespeare After All. You could read that too. But she gets into some pretty, um what’s the word I’m looking for, some pretty in-depth stuff. And in-depth’s not really the word I’m looking for. But anyway, she talks about this being only the second time Macbeth has used the word ‘murder’ and how there’s significance that Will has made murder an entity rather than Macbeth’s act, and that there’s three or four lines between ‘murder’ and what murder does. Pretty esoteric, but of course it’s Shakespeare so you know there’s more there than meets the eye. And though I’m not always crazy about diving quite this deep on Will, I am always pleased to point out this quality of Will. This quality being that you can appreciate Will on whatever level you want, and if you want to appreciate him on the level that Prof Garber is working on, well go at it. It’s there.

Here's my dagger. Not much of a dagger really, but I do carry it with me most of the time. I carry it more for the bottle opener, scissor, and corkscrew than for the blade, and no, I’ve never had any hallucinations about my swiss army knife. None that I can remember.