William Shakespeare’s Macbeth and the traditional ballad Sir Patrick Spence, two very different literary works in terms of format, story, and style, have common threads in their usage of story time to create suspense and narrative desire. Each piece provides the reader with am idea of what’s to come in the rest of the plot, but doesn’t give away enough to cause the reader’s curiosity to be fulfilled. By the middle of each text, we are given what seems to be the end, and yet some how we still want to read on to see for ourselves. The two texts rely on their seemingly immediate action and desire for hindsight to drive their stories forward.
Both texts place a huge emphasis on the present tense. Traditional ballads, by nature, push the language as much in to the present as possible, even if it is something that has already happened. For instance, in Sir Patrick Spence, the line to describe how the king wrote a letter goes “The king has written a letter”. In normal language today we would say “the king wrote a letter” but the traditional ballad keeps as much as possible in the here and now.
By keeping the events of the story so immediate, the traditional ballad brings it’s audience in to the action. It is not a story that happened and is being looked back upon, but a story that is happening as they speak it (since they would have originally been passed along orally). The present tense format also allowed storytellers and bards to put in small enactments of the actions being described so that the audience would visually see the characters’ actions. Since the audience was in a loose sense watching the action as well as listening to it, present tense was more suitable.
Ballads also used scene (dialogue) as much as possible to describe the events, which kept things in real time as much as possible. When dialogue wasn’t present, a summary would occur to fill the audience in and then progress to the next scene. As dialogue in a story is the closest you can get in the written world to actual time, dialogue keeps the story in the present, giving the audience or the reader the feeling that the story is unfolding right as it is read or performed.
The lack of the exposition also emphasizes the seeming present tense of the story. There is no introduction or back ground information of past events with the king, or with Sir Patrick Spence and his journeys to explain why he is the best sailor. In the first two lines of the poem we are informed the king is sitting and drinking in “Dumferling toune”, and immediately after he speaks.
Traditional ballads also tend to focus on a small amount of time. Unlike epic ballads such as The Odyssey in which Homer covers arguably the entirety of Odysseus’ life, Sir Patrick Spence only covers one specific moment in time. The small amount of time covered leaves little time for digression and the story is kept hurtling forward to its, and Sir Patrick Spence’s, untimely end.
Macbeth does of course dwell mainly in the present as well as it is in play format and therefore all of the action is revealed through scene. Macbeth has no ordained narrator as some plays do, so all information presented to the audience is done so through conversation or by monologues and soliloquies.
However, Macbeth is pushed into the future many times, since much of the action either depends or is at least catalyzed by the Witches’ predictions of what the future holds for Macbeth. We are greeted in a sense with the future in the first scene, since the witches seem to be our window into it. The Witches, or Weird Sisters, speak mainly in riddles of the future. Their representation as three woman is symbolic of their dealings with time as well. In Shakespeare’s time, references to “weird sisters” were not indicating stereotypical hocus-pocus witch craft, but referring to Greek mythology and the three fates. Each sister of the Fates represented or ruled over one of the three domains of time: past present and future. Later, however, they became more of a symbol of future knowledge. Humans know what happened in the past, and they are already experiencing the present, so the sisters were called upon to reveal the future. In mythology they rarely did so, as revealing a man’s coming fortune was supposed to bring on disaster. In Macbeth’s case, perhaps this is an accurate conclusion.
The play begins with the Weird Sisters. It does not open with the battle that is later describe to the audience, or with Macbeth himself, even though he is the title role of the story. In stead we are greeted with three women who speak of the future. We see this of course in present tense, as it is very hard to present a play in any other tense, but they speak in terms of what will, not what is. Shakespeare even starts off the sisters’ dialogue with a question about future time, "When shall we three meet again?". Our desire as either audience members or readers of this play is sparked already, since by human nature we are always thinking ahead and waiting for the future to become the present. The sisters’ frequent use of future tense verbs and forecasts of what’s to come pulls that to the forefront of our minds.
Within three scenes we know that Macbeth will be king of Scotland. Some would argue that giving away key events of the plot wrecks the suspense of the story as it takes away the necessary resistance in order to create narrative desire, but I would argue that it adds more suspense, as you do not know the means by which each event comes to pass. It is not like a friend telling you the end to a movie you are about to see. In the case of the movies, you would know the end whilst the characters wouldn’t. In the case of Macbeth, you are no smarter than Macbeth himself. The audience may have ideas as to the true meaning of each of the witches’ riddles, but so may Macbeth, although he does he doesn’t seem to acknowledge them if he does.
Sir Patrick, on the other hand, does seem to know of his coming doom. “O quha is this has don this deid, this ill deid don to me?” he asks, wondering why he should be sent out to see by the king at a bad time of the year. If he is worried, the best sailor that sails upon the sea, than the audience will probably become concerned as well, keeping their attention and their wonder as to what is next. Soon after, one of his sailors announces a storm. This foreshadowing of impending fate keeps up the desire to see what happens.
In Macbeth, foreshadowing is one of the key dramatic devices that is used to ignite suspense, but not only in the prolepsis in the Witches’ speeches to Macbeth. They state at the very end of their first appearance, the first scene of the play, “Fair is foul and foul is fair”. That line sets the tone for the entire play. Every single foretelling is true and yet false. The Weird Sisters’ themselves are often presented on stage as foreboding and even hideous creatures, creating even more of a sense of evil doings a foot.
The revealing early on of Macbeth’s destined royalty early in the show fuels into the narrative seduction of the plot. Whether it is because you do not have faith that they prediction will be fulfilled or if you are intensely curious as to how and what it causes, or both, The reader is pulled into the story by Macbeth’s providence, and needs an explanation or elaboration. The wish to know the entire story, and not just the apparent end (Macbeth is king of Scotland and dies before producing an heir) keeps the reader’s attention. You could say that the narrative seduction leads into the narrative desire. You are seduced in by Macbeth’s seeming good fortune, and the desire to see the fortune occur propels the story.
Phyllis Rackin views Macbeth's reign at king as a pause in time, at which moment the sun ceases to rise and darkness engulfs Scotland. It is an interesting dynamic to grasp when you factor in the fact that most readers are in great anticipation of what will happen by the end. To think of the majority of the story as a pause of time pushes against all the desire to see the end through. This creates part of the necessary resistance that goes part and parcel with narrative desire. If there is no resistance, tension and suspense cannot build up. Interestingly enough, Macbeth actually creates more resistance by trying to remove his. The more he killed to remove anyone and anything that stood in his way, the more people tried to stop him. The delay of final destiny, the resistance, makes the final ending more tragic; delay is not just a condition of narrative, but also a condition of meaning. At the death of Macbeth and the end of his sovereignty, Macduff actually pronounces, "time is free". The resistance is released and the show is over.
The desire to see the first prediction fulfilled is cut short, since the murder of Duncan occurs quite early in the play. However, Macbeth and Lady Macbeth are hosting other quests, and the next object of desire within the plot is to know whether accusations of treason and murder are heard from the guests. Soon after that, Macbeth visits the Weird Sisters again, and they give us the final end to the show. It is the same system as the first prediction, and much of the rest of the play is fuelled by the desire to know whether or not the Witches’ prophecies are true. The first one is, so why not the second? Why not just close the book right there and assume you know Macbeth gets away with everything since the weird sisters got it right the first time. The second prediction doesn’t seem to make sense however (Macbeth can not be killed by any man of woman born) and so there is reason to read on and see what the sisters might mean.
The wonder cause by these prophecies is what Peter Brooks calls "the motor forces that drive the text forward, of the desires that connect narrative ends and beginnings, and make of the textual middle a highly charged field of force. Because narrative desire is ultimately desire for the end, reading practices have often looked to closure for narrative meaning. In investigating the inevitable relationship between the sense of a beginning and the sense of an ending, Brooks finds in the primacy given to endings an "apparent paradox".
In contrast to the generous gifts of foretelling and foreshadowing in both stories, there are also abundant summaries and ellipsis’s. In both pieces, many crucial events in the plot are not actually shown or at least not shown through scene but summary. Duncan’s death is not staged in Macbeth, but Macbeth does describe the deed to Lady Macbeth. In both cases the focus for the reader or audience becomes not the event of murder or tragedy that is the point of the story, but rather the consequences and after math. The lack of bloodshed shown onstage in Macbeth also aids in the build up or tragedy. Though the action of the story is no less bloody in the beginning than the end, it is only shown progressively towards the end. The first bloodshed shown on stage isn’t until Banquo is killed, and the play is increasingly bloody after giving a greater sense to the mounting disaster.
Sir Patrick Spence also uses a lack of fully disclosed information to bring tragedy to the forefront. It takes one line to say indirectly that the ship sunk, “Thair hats they swam aboone”, but spends three stanzas afterward describing the scene of aftermath. We do not know if the ship is struck by lightning from the “deadlie storme” of if they were bashed on they rocks or any other possible untimely end. We do know, however of the ladies of the lords are described, waiting for the ship to return with gold combs in their hair. The ship’s position fifty fathoms under the surface of the coast is disclosed, but the actual scene of the ship sinking is completely left out.
It’s very cinematic, as you can almost imagine those described events as camera shots; hats floating on the water, ladies waiting by the window perhaps looking out to sea, and then a shot of the coast, and perhaps then down under the water’s surface down to the ship wreck. The rapid flashes of images and scenes occur throughout the poem, such as the jump from the king and his court to Sir Patrick walking along the sand.
Considering traditional ballads are characteristically economic in language and discourse, there must be a reason for the disproportion of the climax and the consequences, or for the “leaping and lingering” as it is now referred to in literary terms.
One reason for the summary of many key events in ballads is to add to the mystery, a common theme found in traditional ballads. In The Carpenter’s wife, as in Sir Patrick Spence, the exact cause of the final tragedy is left unknown. “He’s tane her by the milk-white hand and he’s thrown her in the main; and full five and twenty hundred shifts Perished on the coast of Spain”. How exactly did all those ships meet their end? As a storyteller myself, I believe those details were (and still are) often left a mystery so that the audience would leave full of wonder. If all the loose ends were tied up, there is not as much reason to keeping thinking about the story afterward. That still does not explain the extra lingering found in Sir Patrick Spence. The intent to create mystery justifies the leap, but not the linger.
Leaping through what can be considered the climax of the poem and lingering on the repercussions of the event causes the audience to see more of the tragedy in what the event triggered. The consequences of any tragedy are what make the event of story tragic and giving more discourse time to those consequential events puts that in the forefront of the reader’s mind. Tragedies are mainly about the chain reaction of events that is caused by one awful incident. The lingering is where the true tragedy comes to light.
In Macbeth, not as much time is given to the aftermath of Macbeth’s end as in Sir Patrick Spence. But I would argue that the leaping of the plot occurs in Act scene when Macbeth announces to his wife he has murdered Duncan. They play, especially by Shakespeare’s standards, has barely begun and already the King is dead. The rest of the play deals with the spiralling results of that one deed. It is of course not the same cinematic concept as the leaping and lingering displayed in Sir Patrick Spence, but merely a similar pattern.
Although neither stories really touch on hindsight within the context of the plot, hindsight is still a highly significant concept within these suspenseful narratives. It is our desire as audience members and readers to be able to look back and understand the story as a whole that keeps us going. Our “anticipation of retrospection” as Peter Brooks puts it is the momentum behind the two stories.
In Macbeth, we wish to see what the Sisters’ prophecies mean, like how no “man of woman born” can kill Macbeth. As it does not makes sense to us when it is first disclosed, our need to arrive at the end of the story and look back at everything when all the pieces can fall into place is more apparent. In Sir Patrick Spence we are wondering what it means when Sir Patrick laughs at the kings letter, and whether or not the best sailor around can withstand going to sea during the stormiest season of the year, but in Sir Patrick Spence our desire to understand what exactly is going is not fulfilled, which is often the case. The story in a sense is left in perpetual linger since each time you read it you will still be left with a mystery that leaves you wondering.
The manipulation of the story and time passage within the story provides the resistance necessary for a story to create suspense, the resistance that is necessary also to give us a sense at the end that the narrative has reached a proper closure—that feeling of "ah yes, of course!". The simple chronological progression of our lives, by contrast, rarely affords us the same feeling of proper fullness or correctness, which may be one reason we feel compelled to keep telling stories that re-order events in more satisfying narrative ways. "The sense of a beginning, then, must in some important way be determined by the sense of an ending. We might say that we are able to read present moments—in literature and, by extension, in life—as endowed with narrative meaning only because we read them in anticipation of the structuring power of those endings that will retrospectively give them the order and significance of plot".
Macbeth and Sir Patrick Spence are both manipulations of story time by prolepsis and ellipsis so that we know what is going to happen and yet since certain seemingly pedantic details are left out we race through the story in desire to understand it as a whole. Their strong hold in present tense brings out that extra desire to move forward that is constantly present in our own everyday lives, but is not so urgent. Their climaxes and conclusions come abruptly, and immediately cause the audience to look back to begin their process of understand, a natural human reaction in both the world of literature and the world of real life.
