THREE WITCHES on a heath:
“When shall thee meet again?
In thunder, lightning, or in rain?
…When the hurlyburly’s done.
ALL:
…Fair is foul and foul is fair….”
(MacBeth: Act 1, Scene 1)
If only our President had encountered Lady Macbeth. Or at least heard the Lady on stage speak her lines. He would have understood at once any attempt to pardon away the mayhem of January 6, 2021 is futile. Futile for himself. Futile for the mob he had summoned. The stain of the bloodshed they unleashed together that cold January day against the Capitol police; also, the memory of the panic for the Congressmen and the Vice President of the United States forced to flee their Capitol—all to stop a vote for a democratic transfer of power. Those visions could only follow them for the rest of their natural lives. Indeed, follow them on into infamy for as long as the history of this Republic is told.
You see, Shakespeare takes us behind scenes of crime to the haunting mysteries of unavoidable consequences and tragedy. The Bard relates Lady Macbeth believed she could help her husband wrest the power of the throne of Scotland from his elder brother, King Duncan. It would take a little persuasion on her part; her husband would do the necessary. It would take a conspiracy, yes, but then all the power of the Throne of Scone would be theirs. She would be a Queen. Macbeth would just have to carry through with it; she would insist. Still, she said of her husband: “Yet I do fear thy nature; It is too full o’th’ milk of human kindness…To catch the nearest way.” Of herself: “And fill me…top-full. Of direst cruelty! Make thick my blood.” Christian mercy?! No lady Bishop was she.
The Macbeths invited King Duncan for a night’s stay at their castle. In the dark there could be no resisting an inside job. She said: “Come thick night… That my keen knife see not the wound it makes.” And of the King: “O, never…Shall sun that morrow see!” For she knew she alone could fix it. She told Macbeth: “To alter favor is to fear. Leave all the rest up to me.”
Macbeth hesitated. She chided: “Be so much more the man.” She told him she would ply the King’s chamberlains “with wine and wassail” until soundly they slept. Macbeth could then take “and use’d their very daggers.” She assured him others would perceive: “That they have done’t” to the King.
So, Macbeth went to the unguarded King’s chambers holding the chamberlains’ daggers. He returned to Lady Macbeth: “I have done the deed.”
Later, after the power of the throne had become fully theirs, deaths mounted. The Macbeths ruthlessly purged even imagined threats. However, forces greater than even the Lady’s steely resolve would soon appear. Her doctor is our witness as she walks the castle asleep.
DOCTOR: “You see, her eyes are open. GENTLEWOMAN: “Ay, but their sense is shut.” DOCTOR: “What is it she does now? Look how she rubs her hands.”
LADY MACBETH: “Yet here’s a spot. …Out, damned spot! Out, I say! One, two, When then ‘tis time to do’t. …What need we fear who knows it, when none can call our power to account? Yet who would have thought the old man to have had so much blood in him?”
“…the Thane of Fife had a wife. Where is she now? --What, will these hands ne’er be clean?”
DOCTOR to assistant: “Go to, go to. You have known what you should not.”
GENTLEWOMAN: “She has spoken what she should not, I am sure of that: heaven knows what she has known.”
LADY MACBETH: “Here’s the smell of blood still: all the perfumes of Arabia will not sweeten this little hand. Oh, oh, oh!”
DOCTOR: “This disease is beyond my practice….”
LADY MACBETH: “What’s done cannot be undone.”
What was done January 6, 2021 cannot be undone. Not even by the pardons; for the “hurlyburly’s done.” Capitol Officer Sicknick: dead the following day of stroke; Officer Fanoe: beaten with a flag pole, suffering traumatic brain injuries; Officer Daniel Hodges shown no mercy while squeezed between Capitol doors; and then the officer suicides that followed closely after they were all cruelly overwhelmed. In the upside-down world it was: “Fair is foul and foul is fair.” Yet, we know from past middle of the night tweets sleep may be difficult. At the very least, surrender of control to sleep for this occupant of the residence seems a thing to be resisted.
Robert P. Wise is a Northsider.
