Ø Along with 3.3, the scene of the murder of Banquo, 4.2 is the play’s most physically violent moment. But here the violence has intensified to a sickening degree. Fleance escaped; Macduff’s son and wife do not. And this is a murder done on an unprotected woman and child, committed, as it were, by remote control and out of sheer vengeful anger. (Indeed, we later learn, in 4.3.206-214, that “Wife, children, servants, all | That could be found” have been “Savagely slaughtered.”) By the witches’ prophecy Banquo and Fleance stood directly in Macbeth’s line of greatness; the slaughter of the Macduffs seems almost casual, and the fact that these efficient murderers are entirely anonymous makes them all the more chilling, callous, and robotic. And yet Roman Polanski, with a 20th-century sense of savagery and betrayal that goes beyond Shakespeare, manages to take this evil one step further in his film version: after having Ross, Lady Macduff’s cousin, solicitously urge her to be patient at her husband’s defection (as in Shakespeare, 14-26), he then shows his Ross putting on a black leather hood to return as her pitiless slayer! This and Polanski’s treatment of Donaldbain at very end of his film version may provide an index to the differing intensities of Renaissance and contemporary irony and treachery. The most telling imagery in the scene is drawn from the world of birds, and, indeed, this scene is the culmination of an avian imagery system that runs throughout the play. Here both Lady Macduff and her son use the imagery to convey their sense of helplessness and abandonment – and their courage. Lady Macduff compares herself to “the poor wren, | The most diminutive of birds,” who “will fight . . . against the owl,” the nasty scavenger who represents greedy Macbeth. Her husband’s fleeing seems to defy this biological imperative of parental nature and female nurturing: ”All is the fear and nothing is the love”; Macduff’s abandonment “runs against all reason” (6-14). After Ross’s emotion-charged (and seemingly genuine) leave-taking, Lady Macduff tells her son that “your father’s dead” (29); and at least metaphorically she is right, since in his puzzling absence he offers no adult male protection. To her mournful, despairing question “How will you live?” (30) her son answers with both naïve braveness and religious trust: “As birds do, mother” (31), that is, providentially from Nature’s bounty. But his mother, full of the sad experience of Macbeth’s denatured, desecrated Scotland and her womanly vulnerability, knows that this man-made world is a place of traps and snares (33-34). Now (38-61) they banter about manliness and about lying and swearing (equivocation) in terms that are subtly relevant to the issues of the play and in a mood that directly cast their mutual tenderness and unprotectedness into poignant relief. In Shakespeare’s tense rhythms, only Lady Macduff’s six lines of self-questioning separate the Messenger's blunt warning of danger (62-70) from the entrance of the murderers (at 77). But in those lines she moves rapidly from a position that protests her innocence (and therefore her suffering) to one that acknowledges the power of pernicious malice “in this earthly world” (72) and that detaches suffering from deserving to suffer. Her rejection of the relevance of a “womanly defense . . . [that] I have done no harm” (75-76) is part of the discourse of sexual roles that is carried on within the play. Here in her final moment, she rejects the comfortable illusions of worldly (and therefore male) justness; Lady Macbeth, on the other hand, had hateful “womanly” notions of powerlessness, but she confirmed her “feminine illusions” in sexual blackmail and in her failure to imagine moral consequence. Lady Macduff ends with a spirited defense of her departed husband (78-79); and her son, in an act of proper manliness that connects him to the admirable Banquo protecting Fleance, begs his mother to “Run away, I pray you!” (82), even as he is killed.
