RALPH: Lady Macbeth’s speech is short, but packed with figurative language that demands a closer look. 

DAVINA: When Macbeth tells her that Duncan plans to leave tomorrow, she says “O never shall sun that morrow see.”

RALPH:   It’s a strange sentence because it makes it sound like the sun won’t see tomorrow, but it’s pretty clear what she means by it –  Duncan won’t see tomorrow because he’ll be killed tonight.

DAVINA:  Although that makes me think, Ralph: there’s a history of the sun being a symbol for kingship, so maybe the sun in the sentence is a clever way of referring to Duncan.

RALPH: That’s a good point.  But we should also notice that the wording suggests a third, metaphorical meaning, one that Lady Macbeth wouldn’t have intended:  that the actual sun won’t see another tomorrow because the traitorous slaughter of a king will throw Scotland into a state of perpetual darkness.

DAVINA:  So much meaning packed into one sentence!

RALPH:  Lady Macbeth then warns her husband that his face can be read like a book; she advises him, “to beguile the time, look like the time.” What’s that about, Davina?

DAVINA: “The time” refers to what’s about to happen: welcoming the king to their castle. To “beguile the time” means to deceive the people who make up the court society, to hide from them the Macbeths’ murderous intentions. In order to do that, Macbeth needs to “look like the time”; he needs to look like somebody who is happy to welcome his king to his castle and not give any sign of their evil intentions.

RALPH:  Or, as she rephrases it, “Look like the innocent flower, but be the serpent under it.”

DAVINA: Finally, she uses the language of the court when she tells Macbeth to “put the night’s great business in her dispatch”. “Dispatch” means taking care of official business, so she’s telling Macbeth to let her handle things.

RALPH: But she’s also making a pun on dispatch, which has a second meaning: to kill someone.

DAVINA: Lady Macbeth finishes her advice to her husband with this rhyming couplet. 

    We will speak further; only look up clear, 

    To alter favour ever is to fear.

RALPH:  To get this to rhyme, Shakespeare had to put “fear” at the end of the second line, so we just need to do a little rearranging to get the sense of it. She’s really telling Macbeth, “Make yourself seem carefree, because fear always changes someone’s appearance.” In other words, if Macbeth pretends to be carefree, he won’t look any different from someone who really is carefree, and no one will notice that anything strange is happening. 

DAVINA:  Or to use the language of the witches from the first scene, make foul look fair.

RALPH:  Exactly.

DAVINA: I see what you mean about this short speech containing so much, Ralph. It’s only 11 lines long, but the language touches on many of the themes and motifs we’ve seen at work in the play so far: the difference between appearance and reality, the motif of darkness, and the strange nature of time.