The reference was to the following, which takes place in the play in the minutes after Macbeth’s murder of King Duncan:

How is’t with me when every noise appalls me?
What hands are here! Ha, they pluck out mine eyes.
Will all great Neptune’s ocean wash this blood
Clean from my hand? No, this my hand will rather
The multitudinous seas incarnadine,
Making the green one red. (II.ii)

This seems to be a comment interesting to Literature students alone, but it is also illuminating to English Language A Level students because of the work we have recently done on etymology, language change, and indeed the derivation of English words.

The sense in which the word incarnadine is used here as a verb is archaic, but it is also incredibly effective. It means to make red; to ‘pinken’. It can be read as an adjective too, meaning having the pinkish colour of flesh. As ever, the etymology of a word can reveal much about the way in which a writer has decided to deploy language. Incarnadine came into English from French (also incarnadine) in the 16th century and was probably in greater usage at the point of time when Shakespeare writes Macbeth (c. 1606). Further back, it comes from late Latin incarnātus (“made flesh”), in turn from the Latin roots carō and carnis – ‘flesh’. ‘Incarnate’ also appeared in 16th century English in descriptions of the devil, who was seen in popular culture as an active force capable of manifesting himself and influencing human beings to behave badly. Thus, the idiom ‘the devil incarnate’ was the clear antithesis or opposite of the King James Bible’s (1611) ‘Word incarnate’ and ‘God incarnate.’ This may indeed make us think not just about Macbeth’s hands - and the state of his soul - but also about his theological opposite, Christ incarnate. The witches, of course, are incarnated too - from the air.

Shakespeare places incarnadine closely by ‘multitudinous seas’. Meaning ‘to consist of a great number’ and again from Latin, multitudin is the stem of multitude. This word enters the language at the time Shakespeare was using it, so it will have sounded new, different, and perhaps exotic, even then. His first audience would have associated these Latin terms with the higher register a king might use. Yet our fallen hero’s language gives him away and shows how, in a very short time, his status has ‘fallen’ from high to low. ‘No, this my hand will rather / The multitudinous seas incarnadine, / Making the green one red.’ The final line here is conspicuously different from the first two. The Anglo-Saxon words ‘green’ (groene) and ‘red’ (rēad) show his fall from noble to murderer, and thus his language falls from that of a high-born to that of a commoner. In other words, Shakespeare momentarily ennobles Macbeth’s moral turpitude in high-blown Latinate terms only then to effect bathos (to lower the tone) and to show his fall from grace. More than this, Macbeth has taken a title to become the Thane of Cawdor, but only by inheriting it from a traitor; what the witches prophesy as just an idea becomes incarnate in the form of another traitor – Macbeth himself.

Is this use of language just coincidental? No: Shakespeare does this often. Richard II (1595) depicts a divinely appointed king whose word is as singular, commanding and literal as God’s, but Richard ‘falls’ into a state where his language is as plural, contingent and as uncertain as is his new identity(s).

John Milton plays with this high-register Latinate language in the greatest narrative Epic in English. Who the hero of Paradise Lost (1666) is, to some, difficult to determine. The big debate has always been: if its genre is that of Epic who is its hero? The answer, from the writer’s point of view, must be Christ, though there is no character development of that ‘character’ in that poem. Rather, as the Romantic poets found, it is Satan who not only appears to be the central character but is the emotional superman whose fall comes with strong feelings – of rejection, amongst other things – on an epic scale.

Satan’s language is oppositional always. Having fallen from Heaven after the quarrel with God, he sets about effecting the second fall, the fall of man. His battle is a ‘hateful siege of contraries’ (Book IX) where everything is seen in binary oppositions. Satan has left Hell to carry out his dastardly deed, but finds that hell is not just a place but something he carries within him – a state of being in which all good things that he sees and internalises are instantly turned to bad:

Me miserable! which way shall I flie

Infinite wrauth, and infinite despaire?

Which way I flie is Hell; my self am Hell; [ Book IV: 75 ]
 

This is constantly reiterated, as here in Book IX:

… the more I see
Pleasures about me, so much more I feel
Torment within me, as from the hateful siege
Of contraries; all good to me becomes
Bane, and in Heaven much worse would be my state. (Book IX, 119)

Overwhelmed by the beauty of Eden and its inhabitants, his internal suffering becomes amplified. External paradise contrasts with his fallenness, his internal hell, and all of the malice, pride and despair which that includes. He is under siege because he cannot escape his own self, his mind, and the challenge of the good. He is being attacked from the opposing forces outside of him, and within him.

I want to conclude by looking at just one word. It reveals the English language in its moments of formation and reveals the genius of Milton’s use of it. That word is Imparadis’t (imparadised). Satan is at once moved by and yet horrified by Eden, Adam, and Eve. When he sees them embrace eachother, his horror is complete. Satan’s hell is internalised, and with that experience he understands that for Eve and Adam, so is paradise:

Sight hateful, sight tormenting! thus these two
Imparadis't in one anothers arms
The happier Eden, shall enjoy thir fill
Of bliss on bliss, while I to Hell am thrust,
Where neither joy nor love, but fierce desire,
Among our other torments not the least (Book IV 505)

For those in the English Language set: look at the derivational morphology of that word 'imparadised'! It is gorgeous. It takes the noun ‘Paradise’ and affixates it with a prefixial ‘im’ (to put in) and a suffixial ‘ed’ which places it in the past tense – a sense of completion. The noun is converted first to a verb, then to an adjective.

The English of the 1660s in the hands of Milton seems more flexible than ours. It gives an extraordinary level of expression to emotions. Perhaps another way, obliquely but nicely, to answer the question of 'Who is the hero?' is this: the hero of Paradise Lost is Milton’s grasp of the English Language.

Dr Moses, Assistant Head (6th Form)