The following was an assignment that I at first hated but then came to have a great deal of fun with. This is what would happen if I invited Falstaff from Henry IV Part 1 and MacBeth from (guess what) MacBeth, to dinner to discuss philosophy. For reference, "ancient worm" refers to a dragon, to "kill" a woman or for a woman to "die," is Shakespeare slang for them to reach a pleasurable climax (ahem...real Shakespeare dirty puns here people), and a "stale" is a prostitute.
Flourish within. Enter MACBETH, FALSTAFF, and ABIGAIL.
ABIGAIL: Welcome, gentlemen, to my humble abode.
FALSTAFF: A thousand thanks! [Aside] Humble, indeed. ‘Twould be better a least to have the same advantages of a stale’s keep, if it insist on being so humble.
MACBETH: ‘Twas a decent gesture to give us respite here. Weariness drags at my bones, and my spirit ‘tis as sunken in my chest as—
FALSTAFF: Aha! What, ho! Do I spy good food and spirits?
ABIGAIL: You do! It’s not much, but I hoped it would suffice.
FALSTAFF: My gut seems to welcome the sight of it. [Aside] Though the company could bear revision. This fellow here wears a countenance so drawn and colorless that a spirit long dead would pity him.
ABIGAIL: Well, have a seat and help yourselves, sirs.
MACBETH: Thanks, Lady.
FALSTAFF: The table will find itself barren before I’ve left it, or my name is not John Falstaff.
ABIGAIL: Now that we’re all seated, I confess that I bore design in inviting you here tonight. Soft, MacBeth—I intend neither of you any harm. I just hoped to pose an idea and hear your thoughts on’t.
MACBETH: I will hear it, then.
FALSTAFF: Aye. Let us take measure of this idea and beat it ‘till it surrenders.
ABIGAIL: It should ring familiar with you, MacBeth, because you once said it. The idea, in short description, is that life “is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing” (MacBeth 5.5.25-27). What thinks you on’t now?
MACBETH: ‘Tis as true now as when I said it first. “Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow creeps in this petty pace from day to day to the last syllable of recorded time,” and all men’s savage efforts amount only to death in the end, nothing more (MacBeth 5.5.18-20).
ABIGAIL: And what thinks you, Falstaff?
FALSTAFF: [Aside] The man ‘tis as miserable a soul as first I thought. [To ABIGAIL] Surely it means as he says, for his lips are those that said it. But mayhaps the truth behind it is not so sound.
ABIGAIL: Why do you believe life means nothing, MacBeth?
MACBETH: All men do is in vain. Life is all strife and struggle to gain, to survive, to be remembered, but it all ends in the same wretched vein: with death. With dust. With nothing. Men seek to stop it or control it, but fate is fate.
ABIGAIL: Some would argue that just the act of living is worthwhile. Are you saying then, that it doesn’t matter what action you take in life because fate has already been determined? Does not every action you choose determine your fate?
MACBETH: We only think as if we steer ourselves. ‘Tis the others, gods, spirits, dark hags likened to the Wyrd Sisters, that know our fates already and laugh at the folly that we suffer to control it. The hags prophesied things I though impossible. But they were true, all true. True and wretched in being true.
FALSTAFF: [Aside] The poor soul is a bit unhinged from reality, methinks.
MACBETH: All we accomplish through life is to move closer to death. We bluster and fret and worry over each choice, when in sooth, it means nothing. Every man and beast will die, and it matters not how he gets there.
ABIGAIL: Not to offend, but doesn’t it matter? Would not your life have been more worthwhile had you stayed your hand and had you not been tempted by the hags? Would not you have been happier now?
MACBETH: But the prophesy was destined to happen, was it not? Verily, was I to blame? They granted me truth before turning the blessing to a curse. It was still truth, was it not? I was destined to be King. I was not creating destiny but fulfilling it.
ABIGAIL: But what if you had never heard the prophesy nor fulfilled it by your own hand? Would it still have come to pass?
MACBETH: I was destiny’s pawn. I had no power. That is what I speak. Men have no power, even as they think they do. They fret and wring their hands and walk life’s stage trying to achieve the perfect performance when, as much as they try, their actions will lead only to the fate already set out for them. Fate somehow spoke through the bearded, unnatural lips of the Wyrd Sisters but not altered by their words any more than our own actions can hope to alter it.
FALSTAFF: [Aside] Methinks the wine is stronger than previously imagined. I will have to partake of more of it.
ABIGAIL: Yet to me, just the act of living has meaning in the way in which we do it. At least, it has more meaning than to not live at all.
MACBETH: ‘Tis an illusion! “Life’s but a walking shadow,” an act, a badly written play performed before a heartless and uncaring audience. And after all that strife and effort, the play comes to a close and the actors are “heard no more” (MacBeth 5.5.23-25). There can be neither pleasure nor success in a thing that will ultimately end in dust. It accomplishes nothing!
FALSTAFF: But what of the worth of comrades? What of drink and killing fresh women? What of living? Have you no friends? Take you pleasure in nothing?
MACBETH: What pleasures can I take? I have cursed myself—or if not that, I have been cursed. I cannot close my eyes to my fate, my damnation, which I will suffer in life, and worse, in death. I have bloodied my hands with King, with kin, with comrades. I have sinned ultimately already for a pleasure that, in sooth, revealed itself to be no pleasure at all. I have nothing remaining to me that would sweeten the poison that I have drunk, offered by spirits of strange faces and evil designs. I was a good man, but I shall die a tyrant. That is all.
FALSTAFF: Well, be you a tyrant, I say, enjoy it. If ‘tis all that is left for you, then kill every woman worth killing, and kill their men to silence objections. Drink ‘till there is no drink left, excepting that which needs be in stock for myself, of course, and collect treasures like some ancient worm, taking pleasure from your hoard. Therein lies your meaning in life.
MACBETH: Even my sinner’s ears recoil from that. I have not sunk so low, you lascivious—
ABIGAIL: Gentlemen! Perhaps we should digress.
FALSTAFF: The man names himself a tyrant, yet he objects to the definition.
ABIGAIL: Soft, both of you, please. So, to be clear: Falstaff, you believe that life has meaning in pleasure.
FALSTAFF: Just so. I don’t consider myself a philosophical sort of fool, and life, in sooth, may mean nothing. But then what are we here for then but to find pleasure? Be drunk, be loud, sink in revelry and make friends of both sexes.
ABIGAIL: And MacBeth, you believe that life signifies nothing, because it is a vain attempt at controlling something that is uncontrollable, and that the actions in one’s life are meaningless and petty because all they accomplish is to move you closer to death. You also claim there can be no pleasure found in life.
MACBETH: None, any more.
ABIGAIL: So, MacBeth, if your actions, as you say, mean nothing, and you had no control over them, then why did you choose to charge at the battle of Dunsinane? You must have known you were charging to death.
MACBETH: The hags had prophesied as such, and they had not yet been wrong. Death means more to others’ eyes than life. My life meant nothing to those traitors, yet my death might yet move them.
FALSTAFF: Ha! Honor, then! Again, honor. If you seek honor, you seek death. “Who hath it? He that died o’Wednesday. Doth he feel it? No. Doth he hear it? No.…Therefore I’ll none of it. Honour is a mere scutcheon,” a due paid to those too permanently still to appreciate it, and it will rot just as valiantly as the corpse (1 Henry IV 5.1.134-138). Why recall a man’s death if your thoughts are too sluggish to remember his life? You will be forgotten just the same had you expired elsewise, and even if remembered fondly, will not be present to enjoy the praise. Yet, if you turn tail, you live. In living, you continue to take pleasure. And verily, those living are impossible to forget, because they are in constant sight. Therefore, why rush to death? Once dead, regrettably, there is nothing for it. Let Death glower at me from afar. I have no words to bandy with him.
ABIGAIL: So, MacBeth, you find more significance in death than in life, and Falstaff, you find more significance in life than in death.
MACBETH: Verily.
FALSTAFF: I say, mock Death, as “I would be loath to pay him before his day” (1 Henry IV 5.1.127-128). Let him chase me to the ends of this world, and forbid he ever catch me. Leastways, whilst there is still drink to drink, money to be won—or, in sooth, to be lost—and women inclined to die.
MACBETH: So speaks a cheap carouser.
FALSTAFF: Myself? No, sir; I am but a good and honest gent. But you, one who professes no love nor pleasure in any flesh nor possession obtainable, are a bit of a fool. Thy life is meaningless because it is yours, and you have butchered it. That is the work of thy hand, not these hags of which you speak. So says Macbeth that all life signifies nothing. So says I that MacBeth’s life signifies nothing. A transfers to all that which belongs alone to himself.
ABIGAIL: No offense intended, MacBeth, but having heard both arguments, I have to say that I favor Falstaff’s. I believe that your actions bring about your own fate, and even if they don’t, life is still worthwhile. After all, life is all we have. We may not always be able to control what happens to us, and yes, we will all die in the end and probably be forgotten. But it is what we choose to do with our time here that creates meaning for us. It is what we do when we do have control that matters. It is through the people who we touch and love in our lives that our memory lives on and is not lost to dust. It is through living with honor, not just dying with honor, that we endure and find happiness in even the bitterest of times. We must all act as poets to fashion each of our lives into something personally meaningful. For the “poet’s pen turns [the form of things unknown] to shapes, and gives to airy nothing a local habitation and a name” (A Midsummer Night’s Dream 4.2.15-17). We can never know for sure, but why don’t we live for something? It is mad to give up on life before you absolutely must; our time here is too short already.
MACBETH: I perceive now. I perceive your ‘design’ in inviting me here tonight. ‘Twas out of no generosity but to mock MacBeth’s isolated damnation. I pity the both of you, for the time when you at last reach the pinnacle of your life, only to realize that the “mad” MacBeth was in the right all the while! [Exeunt]
ABIGAIL: Wait, MacBeth! I didn’t mean it like that! I don’t agree with “that villainous, abominable misleader of youth, Falstaff,” either (1 Henry IV 2.5.421-422)! O, drat; he’s already gone!
FALSTAFF: I know not what I have done to deserve such a stained and repugnant reputation. I have always done my utmost to—
ABIGAIL: Oh, hush, Falstaff, and drink your blasted wine.
Exeunt all [severally]. End scene.
Flourish within. Enter MACBETH, FALSTAFF, and ABIGAIL.
ABIGAIL: Welcome, gentlemen, to my humble abode.
FALSTAFF: A thousand thanks! [Aside] Humble, indeed. ‘Twould be better a least to have the same advantages of a stale’s keep, if it insist on being so humble.
MACBETH: ‘Twas a decent gesture to give us respite here. Weariness drags at my bones, and my spirit ‘tis as sunken in my chest as—
FALSTAFF: Aha! What, ho! Do I spy good food and spirits?
ABIGAIL: You do! It’s not much, but I hoped it would suffice.
FALSTAFF: My gut seems to welcome the sight of it. [Aside] Though the company could bear revision. This fellow here wears a countenance so drawn and colorless that a spirit long dead would pity him.
ABIGAIL: Well, have a seat and help yourselves, sirs.
MACBETH: Thanks, Lady.
FALSTAFF: The table will find itself barren before I’ve left it, or my name is not John Falstaff.
ABIGAIL: Now that we’re all seated, I confess that I bore design in inviting you here tonight. Soft, MacBeth—I intend neither of you any harm. I just hoped to pose an idea and hear your thoughts on’t.
MACBETH: I will hear it, then.
FALSTAFF: Aye. Let us take measure of this idea and beat it ‘till it surrenders.
ABIGAIL: It should ring familiar with you, MacBeth, because you once said it. The idea, in short description, is that life “is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing” (MacBeth 5.5.25-27). What thinks you on’t now?
MACBETH: ‘Tis as true now as when I said it first. “Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow creeps in this petty pace from day to day to the last syllable of recorded time,” and all men’s savage efforts amount only to death in the end, nothing more (MacBeth 5.5.18-20).
ABIGAIL: And what thinks you, Falstaff?
FALSTAFF: [Aside] The man ‘tis as miserable a soul as first I thought. [To ABIGAIL] Surely it means as he says, for his lips are those that said it. But mayhaps the truth behind it is not so sound.
ABIGAIL: Why do you believe life means nothing, MacBeth?
MACBETH: All men do is in vain. Life is all strife and struggle to gain, to survive, to be remembered, but it all ends in the same wretched vein: with death. With dust. With nothing. Men seek to stop it or control it, but fate is fate.
ABIGAIL: Some would argue that just the act of living is worthwhile. Are you saying then, that it doesn’t matter what action you take in life because fate has already been determined? Does not every action you choose determine your fate?
MACBETH: We only think as if we steer ourselves. ‘Tis the others, gods, spirits, dark hags likened to the Wyrd Sisters, that know our fates already and laugh at the folly that we suffer to control it. The hags prophesied things I though impossible. But they were true, all true. True and wretched in being true.
FALSTAFF: [Aside] The poor soul is a bit unhinged from reality, methinks.
MACBETH: All we accomplish through life is to move closer to death. We bluster and fret and worry over each choice, when in sooth, it means nothing. Every man and beast will die, and it matters not how he gets there.
ABIGAIL: Not to offend, but doesn’t it matter? Would not your life have been more worthwhile had you stayed your hand and had you not been tempted by the hags? Would not you have been happier now?
MACBETH: But the prophesy was destined to happen, was it not? Verily, was I to blame? They granted me truth before turning the blessing to a curse. It was still truth, was it not? I was destined to be King. I was not creating destiny but fulfilling it.
ABIGAIL: But what if you had never heard the prophesy nor fulfilled it by your own hand? Would it still have come to pass?
MACBETH: I was destiny’s pawn. I had no power. That is what I speak. Men have no power, even as they think they do. They fret and wring their hands and walk life’s stage trying to achieve the perfect performance when, as much as they try, their actions will lead only to the fate already set out for them. Fate somehow spoke through the bearded, unnatural lips of the Wyrd Sisters but not altered by their words any more than our own actions can hope to alter it.
FALSTAFF: [Aside] Methinks the wine is stronger than previously imagined. I will have to partake of more of it.
ABIGAIL: Yet to me, just the act of living has meaning in the way in which we do it. At least, it has more meaning than to not live at all.
MACBETH: ‘Tis an illusion! “Life’s but a walking shadow,” an act, a badly written play performed before a heartless and uncaring audience. And after all that strife and effort, the play comes to a close and the actors are “heard no more” (MacBeth 5.5.23-25). There can be neither pleasure nor success in a thing that will ultimately end in dust. It accomplishes nothing!
FALSTAFF: But what of the worth of comrades? What of drink and killing fresh women? What of living? Have you no friends? Take you pleasure in nothing?
MACBETH: What pleasures can I take? I have cursed myself—or if not that, I have been cursed. I cannot close my eyes to my fate, my damnation, which I will suffer in life, and worse, in death. I have bloodied my hands with King, with kin, with comrades. I have sinned ultimately already for a pleasure that, in sooth, revealed itself to be no pleasure at all. I have nothing remaining to me that would sweeten the poison that I have drunk, offered by spirits of strange faces and evil designs. I was a good man, but I shall die a tyrant. That is all.
FALSTAFF: Well, be you a tyrant, I say, enjoy it. If ‘tis all that is left for you, then kill every woman worth killing, and kill their men to silence objections. Drink ‘till there is no drink left, excepting that which needs be in stock for myself, of course, and collect treasures like some ancient worm, taking pleasure from your hoard. Therein lies your meaning in life.
MACBETH: Even my sinner’s ears recoil from that. I have not sunk so low, you lascivious—
ABIGAIL: Gentlemen! Perhaps we should digress.
FALSTAFF: The man names himself a tyrant, yet he objects to the definition.
ABIGAIL: Soft, both of you, please. So, to be clear: Falstaff, you believe that life has meaning in pleasure.
FALSTAFF: Just so. I don’t consider myself a philosophical sort of fool, and life, in sooth, may mean nothing. But then what are we here for then but to find pleasure? Be drunk, be loud, sink in revelry and make friends of both sexes.
ABIGAIL: And MacBeth, you believe that life signifies nothing, because it is a vain attempt at controlling something that is uncontrollable, and that the actions in one’s life are meaningless and petty because all they accomplish is to move you closer to death. You also claim there can be no pleasure found in life.
MACBETH: None, any more.
ABIGAIL: So, MacBeth, if your actions, as you say, mean nothing, and you had no control over them, then why did you choose to charge at the battle of Dunsinane? You must have known you were charging to death.
MACBETH: The hags had prophesied as such, and they had not yet been wrong. Death means more to others’ eyes than life. My life meant nothing to those traitors, yet my death might yet move them.
FALSTAFF: Ha! Honor, then! Again, honor. If you seek honor, you seek death. “Who hath it? He that died o’Wednesday. Doth he feel it? No. Doth he hear it? No.…Therefore I’ll none of it. Honour is a mere scutcheon,” a due paid to those too permanently still to appreciate it, and it will rot just as valiantly as the corpse (1 Henry IV 5.1.134-138). Why recall a man’s death if your thoughts are too sluggish to remember his life? You will be forgotten just the same had you expired elsewise, and even if remembered fondly, will not be present to enjoy the praise. Yet, if you turn tail, you live. In living, you continue to take pleasure. And verily, those living are impossible to forget, because they are in constant sight. Therefore, why rush to death? Once dead, regrettably, there is nothing for it. Let Death glower at me from afar. I have no words to bandy with him.
ABIGAIL: So, MacBeth, you find more significance in death than in life, and Falstaff, you find more significance in life than in death.
MACBETH: Verily.
FALSTAFF: I say, mock Death, as “I would be loath to pay him before his day” (1 Henry IV 5.1.127-128). Let him chase me to the ends of this world, and forbid he ever catch me. Leastways, whilst there is still drink to drink, money to be won—or, in sooth, to be lost—and women inclined to die.
MACBETH: So speaks a cheap carouser.
FALSTAFF: Myself? No, sir; I am but a good and honest gent. But you, one who professes no love nor pleasure in any flesh nor possession obtainable, are a bit of a fool. Thy life is meaningless because it is yours, and you have butchered it. That is the work of thy hand, not these hags of which you speak. So says Macbeth that all life signifies nothing. So says I that MacBeth’s life signifies nothing. A transfers to all that which belongs alone to himself.
ABIGAIL: No offense intended, MacBeth, but having heard both arguments, I have to say that I favor Falstaff’s. I believe that your actions bring about your own fate, and even if they don’t, life is still worthwhile. After all, life is all we have. We may not always be able to control what happens to us, and yes, we will all die in the end and probably be forgotten. But it is what we choose to do with our time here that creates meaning for us. It is what we do when we do have control that matters. It is through the people who we touch and love in our lives that our memory lives on and is not lost to dust. It is through living with honor, not just dying with honor, that we endure and find happiness in even the bitterest of times. We must all act as poets to fashion each of our lives into something personally meaningful. For the “poet’s pen turns [the form of things unknown] to shapes, and gives to airy nothing a local habitation and a name” (A Midsummer Night’s Dream 4.2.15-17). We can never know for sure, but why don’t we live for something? It is mad to give up on life before you absolutely must; our time here is too short already.
MACBETH: I perceive now. I perceive your ‘design’ in inviting me here tonight. ‘Twas out of no generosity but to mock MacBeth’s isolated damnation. I pity the both of you, for the time when you at last reach the pinnacle of your life, only to realize that the “mad” MacBeth was in the right all the while! [Exeunt]
ABIGAIL: Wait, MacBeth! I didn’t mean it like that! I don’t agree with “that villainous, abominable misleader of youth, Falstaff,” either (1 Henry IV 2.5.421-422)! O, drat; he’s already gone!
FALSTAFF: I know not what I have done to deserve such a stained and repugnant reputation. I have always done my utmost to—
ABIGAIL: Oh, hush, Falstaff, and drink your blasted wine.
Exeunt all [severally]. End scene.
