The night has been unruly: where we lay, / Our chimneys were blown down and, as they say, / Lamentings heard i’ th’ air, strange screams of death, / And prophesying, with accents terrible, / Of dire combustion and confus’d events, / New hatch’d to the woeful time.
Act II, Scene 3 · Lennox
Context
Lennox describes the violent storm that raged the previous night, including strange cries, prophecies of disaster, and unnatural disturbances in the air and earth.
Analysis
Lennox reports the night's chaos in language that refuses to settle: 'dire combustion and confus'd events' piles up near-synonyms without clarifying what actually happened, as if the disorder in nature has infected his syntax. The phrase 'new hatch'd to the woeful time' makes the storm sound like it was born from the present moment, as though Duncan's murder has broken something in the natural order and the world is responding in kind. This positions readers to see Macbeth's crime not as a private act but as a rupture that the entire universe registers.
Essay Tip
Use this to argue that Shakespeare constructs a cosmology in which political murder is a cosmic event—Lennox's confused, overstuffed syntax enacts the breakdown of natural order, showing that once a king is killed, language and nature both lose their structure.