Outside the castle — the unnatural night

Outside the castle the next morning. An old man — seventy years deep in memory — speaks with Ross. He cannot remember a night like the one just past. The sun has not risen; "is't night's predominance, or the day's shame, that darkness does the face of earth entomb when living light should kiss it?" Ross adds detail. A falcon, "tow'ring in her pride of place," was caught and killed by a mousing owl. And, most strangely, Duncan's horses — "the minions of their race" — broke their stalls and ran out wild; "'tis said they eat each other."

Structurally, the scene registers the murder at the level of nature. Shakespeare's audience would have understood the disordered animals as a sign that the moral order has been ruptured by the killing of a legitimate king by his host in his sleep. The dark sun, the upset hierarchy of birds, the horses turned cannibal — they are the cosmos's response to the deed inside the castle. They are not metaphor; they are reportage.

Macduff arrives. The political news has caught up with the unnatural. The grooms killed by Macbeth are being blamed; Malcolm and Donalbain have fled and are now suspected of having paid them; Macbeth has been named king and is on his way to Scone for the coronation. Ross asks whether Macduff will go. Macduff, terse, says he will not — "no, cousin, I'll to Fife." The old man blesses both of them in a closing line: "God's benison go with you, and with those that would make good of bad and friends of foes." The wish is small, and the scene has just announced, in three different registers, that good has not been made of bad.