Unit 4: The Tragedy of Macbeth, Act 1

From Fife, great King,
Where the Norweyan banners flout the sky
And fan our people cold.

And oftentimes, to win us to our harm,
The instruments of darkness tell us truths,
Win us with honest trifles, to betray ’s
In deepest consequence.

Present fears
Are less than horrible imaginings:
My thought, whose murther yet is but fantastical,
Shakes so my single state of man that function
Is smother’d in surmise, and nothing is
But what is not.

Thou art so far before,
That swiftest wing of recompense is slow
To overtake thee. Would thou hadst less deserv’d,
That the proportion both of thanks and payment
Might have been mine!

My plenteous joys,
Wanton in fullness, seek to hide themselves
In drops of sorrow.

Hie thee hither,
That I may pour my spirits in thine ear,
And chastise with the valor of my tongue
All that impedes thee from the golden round,
Which fate and metaphysical aid doth seem
To have thee crown’d withal.

Make thick my blood,
Stop up th’ access and passage to remorse

Come, thick night,
And pall thee in the dunnest smoke of hell,
That my keen knife see not the wound it makes

We cours’d him at the heels, and had a purpose
To be his purveyor

For thy undaunted mettle should compose
Nothing but males.