2.  There is no unmistakable indication of the ages of the two principal characters; but the question, though of no great importance, has an interest.  I believe most readers imagine Macbeth as a man between forty and fifty, and his wife as younger but not young.  In many cases this impression is doubtless due to the custom of the theatre (which, if it can be shown to go back far, should have much weight), but it is shared by readers who have never seen the play performed, and is then presumably due to a number of slight influences probably incapable of complete analysis.  Such readers would say, ’The hero and heroine do not speak like young people, nor like old ones’; but, though I think this is so, it can hardly be demonstrated.  Perhaps however the following small indications, mostly of a different kind, tend to the same result.

(1) There is no positive sign of youth. (2) A young man would not be likely to lead the army. (3) Macbeth is ‘cousin’ to an old man.[294] (4) Macbeth calls Malcolm ‘young,’ and speaks of him scornfully as ’the boy Malcolm.’  He is probably therefore considerably his senior.  But Malcolm is evidently not really a boy (see I. ii. 3 f. as well as the later Acts). (5) One gets the impression (possibly without reason) that Macbeth and Banquo are of about the same age; and Banquo’s son, the boy Fleance, is evidently not a mere child. (On the other hand the children of Macduff, who is clearly a good deal older than Malcolm, are all young; and I do not think there is any sign that Macbeth is older than Macduff.) (6) When Lady Macbeth, in the banquet scene, says,

     Sit, worthy friends:  my lord is often thus,
     And hath been from his youth,

we naturally imagine him some way removed from his youth. (7) Lady Macbeth saw a resemblance to her father in the aged king. (8) Macbeth says,

     I have lived long enough:  my way[295] of life
     Is fall’n into the sere, the yellow leaf: 
     And that which should accompany old age,
     As honour, love, obedience, troops of friends,
     I may not look to have.

It is, surely, of the old age of the soul that he speaks in the second line, but still the lines would hardly be spoken under any circumstances by a man less than middle-aged.

On the other hand I suppose no one ever imagined Macbeth, or on consideration could imagine him, as more than middle-aged when the action begins.  And in addition the reader may observe, if he finds it necessary, that Macbeth looks forward to having children (I. vii. 72), and that his terms of endearment (’dearest love,’ ‘dearest chuck’) and his language in public (’sweet remembrancer’) do not suggest that his wife and he are old; they even suggest that she at least is scarcely middle-aged.  But this discussion tends to grow ludicrous.

For Shakespeare’s audience these mysteries were revealed by a glance at the actors, like the fact that Duncan was an old man, which the text, I think, does not disclose till V. i. 44.