the wood of birnam. let every soldier hew him down a bough and bear it before him thereby shall we shadow the numbers of our host. the confident tyrant keeps still in dunsinane. 'tis his main hope. and none serve with him but constrained things whose hearts are absent too. advance the war. our castle's strength will laugh a siege to scorn. wherefore was that cry? the queen, my lord, is dead. she should have died hereafter. there would have been a time for such a word. tomorrow, and tomorrow and tomorrow. creeps in this petty pace from day to day to the last syllable of recorded time. and all our yesterdays have lighted fools the way to dusty death. out, out, brief candle. life's but a walking shadow, a poor player that struts and frets his hour upon the stage and then is heard no more. it is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury signifying nothing. thou comest to use thy tongue thy story quickly. as i did stand my watch upon the hill, i looked toward birnam and anon, methought, the wood began t

finally, comes the moment when birnam wood is seen to move. and when macduff reveals he was torn untimely from his mother's womb, now, knowing the worst, macbeth recovers some of his former virtue and manfully fights his last fight. one word more: in listening to the voice of macbeth, one should be aware that one is listening to a poet, not simply to poetic lines put into the mouth of a character by the playwright but to words and metaphors of beauty that spring from an imagination naturally endowed with poetic vision. think of macbeth, if you will, not only as a noble nature fallen into evil, but as a poet lost as well. to see him thus is to see him in a dimension one might otherwise only dimly sense. such insight can make this swift-paced drama a dazzling interplay of poetic beauty and moral ugliness, most of which have their single source in a corrupted but essentially noble heart. well, after that briefing, you should be all set for what is to follow. shall we then look at the play? when shall we three meet again, in thunder, lightning or