9/23/2023 0 Comments Good night owl summaryMacbeth thinks that the dead ought to stay where they belong if the graves are going to send the bodies back, the kites, with their maws full of human flesh, are going to be the only real graves. An ancient fear was that a person who was not properly buried would have his bones picked clean by birds. "Kites" are hawks, and their "maws" are their entire eating apparatuses - beaks, gullets, and stomachs. "Monuments," like "charnel-houses" and "graves," are the places where the dead belong. "Night's black agents" are all things that hunt and kill in the dark, including birds of prey.Īfter the first appearance of the Ghost of Banquo, Macbeth says "If charnel-houses and our graves must send / Those that we bury back, our monuments / Shall be the maws of kites" (3.4.70-72). The deed is to be done at nightfall, and Macbeth imagines the night coming on: Light thickens and the crow / Makes wing to the rooky wood: / Good things of day begin to droop and drowse / While night's black agents to their preys do rouse" (3.2.53). If things in nature stands for things in human life, King Duncan was the falcon, and Macbeth the owl.Īfter he has arranged for the murder of Banquo, Macbeth boasts to his wife that a terrible deed will be done which will solve their problems. Also, a falcon is a day creature, and a royal companion, while the owl is an untamable bird of night and death. And the owl, which usually catches mice on the ground, went up The falcon's "pride of place" is the highest point One of them is described by the Old Man: On Tuesday last / A falcon, towering in her pride of place, / Was by a mousing owl hawk'd at and kill'd" (2.4.11-13). The morning after the murder of King Duncan, Ross and an Old Man are discussing the other unnatural things that have been happening. Just after Lennox finishes this speech, Macduff comes rushing in with the news that King Duncan has been murdered. Perhaps that owl was the same one that Lady Macbeth heard when Macbeth was killing King Duncan. The owl is the "obscure bird," because it flies in the night and can't be seen. Chimneys were blown down, lamentings and screams were heard in the air, and "the obscure bird / Clamour'd the livelong night" (2.3.60-61). Lady Macbeth is glad to hear the cry of the screech owl, because it means that Macbeth is murdering King Duncan.Īs Macduff is going in to say good morning to King Duncan, Lennox tells Macbeth about the rough night. The cry of a screech owl was thought to announce a death, and a "fatal bellman" was a night watchman who rang a bell to call a prisoner to his hanging. In the following passage, she hears something, then tells herself to be quiet and decides that she heard a screech owl: "Hark! Peace! / It was the owl that shriek'd, the fatal bellman, / Which gives the stern'st good-night. While Macbeth goes to murder King Duncan, Lady Macbeth waits and listens very carefully. Instead, as the King looks up to those battlements, he sees swallows gliding to and fro on the breath of heaven. ("Haunting" doesn't have any ghostly connotations.) When Lady Macbeth heard that King Duncan was coming for the night, she imagined a raven under her battlements, foretelling the death of the King. (1.6.3-8)Ī "martlet" is a kind of swallow, who is "temple-haunting" because it likes to build its nests high on the walls of tall buildings. Hath made his pendant bed and procreant cradle. The temple-haunting martlet, does approve,īy his loved mansionry, that the heaven's breathīuttress, nor coign of vantage, but this bird When King Duncan comes to Macbeth's castle, he remarks how sweet the air is. The raven is a bird of ill omen, and Lady Macbeth means that the raven is hoarse from saying again and again that King Duncan must die. After the messenger has left, the first thing Lady Macbeth says is, "The raven himself is hoarse / That croaks the fatal entrance of Duncan / Under my battlements" (1.5.38-40). Immediately after Lady Macbeth reads her husband's letter about the witches' prophecies, a messenger come with the news that King Duncan is coming to spend the night at her castle. The Sergeant, making a tough-guy joke, says "Yes / As sparrows eagles, or the hare the lion" (1.2.34-35). King Duncan asks if this new attack dismayed Macbeth and Banquo. The Sergeant tells King Duncan how, just at the moment when Macbeth's forces defeated Macdonwald's rebels, the Norwegian king attacked the Scots.
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