Download Macbeths downfall and tragedy and more Cheat Sheet Literature in PDF only on Docsity!
the opening scene of Macbeth comprises exactly eleven lines. Yet within its imagery and the dual and paradoxical nature of its dialogue is embodied virtually the whole the matic structure of the play. With the very first words ("When shall"), the element of future time is initiated. There is also the introduction of the witches, whose prophetic statements immediately ally them with the forces of destiny as well as with future time. Additionally, the witches are linked with disordered nature (thunder and lightning) and with the extinction of illumination ("fog", "set of sun", "filthy air"), which latter phenomenon, together with their association with air, endows them with an insubstantial, almost illusory aura. Finally, there is the element of paradox established by the statements "When the battle's lost and won" and "Fair is foul, and fold is fair," with their dual and diametri cally opposed implications, which statements inaugurate the prin ciple of duality upon which the play is based. For everything in the play, from the action to the characters, is rendered in a double light?all in terms of paradox or contradiction. As Mac beth is shortly to realize: "Two truths are told,/... and nothing is/But what is not." All of the foregoing elements are facets of the central theme of the play: the theme of illusion or, alternatively, delusion or self-deception. Macbeth's illusion lies in his belief that he can transcend destiny. Symbolically, therefore, he arrogates to him self the properties of a god, whose exemption from mortal limita tions is embodied in the conviction that "I bear a charmed life" and "none of woman born/Shall harm Macbeth." At the beginning of the play, Macbeth's nature is still
"single"; there has not yet occurred that dichotomy between in tellect and action which is to sunder his nature into two warring entities. With the conception of the possibility of murder, how ever, this "singleness" begins to crack: My thought, whose murder yet is but fantastical, Shakes so my single state of man that function Is smothered in surmise, and nothing is But what is not. This "murder of thought" metaphor is important for several reasons. First, it points up the irony of the crime that Macbeth is shortly to commit, for in murdering the king Macbeth simul taneously murders not only the future he is attempting to ensure but his own reason and moral consciousness. Ultimately, there fore, Macbeth is his own assassin. That he has destroyed his capacity to think and feel is enunciated by Macbeth himself at the conclusion of the play: The time has been, my senses would have cooled To hear a night-shriek, and my fell of hair Would at a dismal treatise rouse and stir As life were in 't. I have supped full with horrors. Direness, familiar to my slaughterous thoughts, Cannot once start me. The murder of moral consciousness is likewise articulated: Had I but died an hour before this chance, I had lived a blessed time; for from this instant
... grace is dead, The wine of life is drawn.... The element of sleep is also important. Sleep in the play is equated with life ("chief nourisher in life's feast"), and the fact
A dagger of the mind ...? This same image is subsequently employed by Lady Macbeth after her husband's vision of Banquo's ghost: This is the very painting of your fear. This is the air-drawn dagger which, you said, Led you to Duncan.... When all's done, You look but on a stool. Compounding the illusionary significance of the dagger is the fact that it is "air-drawn", which symbolically relegates it to the realm of the witches ("they made themselves air"; "they vanished/Into the air"; "infected be the air whereon they ride"), together with the fact that Macbeth is the only person in the hall to whom Banquo's ghost is rendered visible. There is also Macbeth's auditory hallucination just after he has slain the king: Methought I heard a voice cry 'Sleep no more! Macbeth does murder sleep'... Illusion reaches its peak in Lady Macbeth's sleepwalking scene, nightmare being the supreme embodiment of illusion as well as the culmination of the play's nightmare backdrop. Shortly after the murder, Lady Macbeth had calmly asserted: "A little water clears us of this deed." What Lady Macbeth is saying is that one can commit murder while still retaining one's innocence; she is thus rendered, initially at least, as the antithesis of Mac beth: Will all great Neptune's ocean wash this blood Clean from my hand? No.... The sleepwalking scene, however, demonstrates that she has fallen heir to the same sensory illusions ("Out, damned spot!")
for which she initially rebuked Macbeth, which phenomenon is symbolically heightened by the fact that during the entire sleep walking sequence her eyes remain open. The equating of illusion with the extinction of light which is in turn equated with the destruction of reason is signified in terms of darkness generally in conjunction with blindness. There is Lady Macbeth's dialogue prior to the slaying of Duncan: Come, thick night,... That my keen knife see not the wound it makes, Nor heaven peep through the blanket of the dark.... There is Macbeth's invoking of "seeling night" to "scarf up the tender eye of pitiful day" and his commanding the stars to "hide your fires;/Let not light see my black and deep desires." There is the question of the third murderer, after Banquo's assassination, "Who did strike out the light?" And there is the sleepwalking scene in which Lady Macbeth's "eyes are open.... but their sense are shut." All of the foregoing elements?Macbeth's double nature, the opposition of illusion and reality, and the dual and paradoxical nature of the crime itself?are facets of the principle of duality underlying the play. Macbeth's dichotomy is, as noted above, one between intellect and action. As Lady Macbeth observes, he is "afeard/To be the same in thine own act and valor/As thou art in desire". The porter's dialogue on drinking constitutes the comic perspective of this same dichotomy ("It provokes the de sire, but it takes away the performance") and simultaneously merges it with the full implications of the illusion: "It makes him and it mars him; ... in conclusion, equivocates him in a sleep, and
Macbeth's statement that he "burned in desire to question them", which burning motif is subsequently employed by Lady Macbeth: "What hath quenched them hath given me fire." These burning images are not only connotative of Hell, but are also a variation of the witches' incantation, "Fire burn and cauldron bubble." The atmosphere of Hell deepens with Lady Macbeth's invoking of "thick night [to] pall thee in the d?nnest smoke of hell". That Macbeth is not oblivious to the spiritual implications of the crime is signified by numerous statements: If th' assassination Could trammel up the consequence, and catch, With his surcease, success; that but this blow Might be the be-all and the end-all?here, But here, upon this bank and shoal of time, We'd jump the life to come. ... his [Duncan's] virtues Will plead like angels trumpet-tongued against The deep damnation of his taking-off.... Macbeth's decision, however, is between salvation and future glory, and it is the path of future glory which he elects to tread. With the murder of Duncan, damnation is virtually complete, as signified by the fact that the crime is concomitant with the in ability to pray: But wherefore could I not pronounce 'Amen'? I had most need of blessing, and 'Amen' Stuck in my throat. Additionally, there is Macbeth's "murder" of sleep. For sleep is not only equated with life, but with innocence and salvation as
well: 'Sleep no more! Macbeth does murder sleep'?the innocent sleep... But they did say their prayers, and addressed them Again to sleep. Macduff observes that "not in the legions/Of horrid hell can come a devil more damned/In evils to top Macbeth," and Mal colm equates Macbeth's fall, in magnitude and implication, with Satan's: "Angels are bright still, though the brightest fell... ." Even more noteworthy is the virtual equating of the king figure with Christ, as depicted by the king's miraculous power of healing conjointly with his "heavenly gift of prophecy". Let us first examine the king as healer, as portrayed by a doctor: There are a crew of wretched souls That stay his cure: their malady convinces The great assay of art; but at his touch, Such sanctity hath heaven given his hand, They presently amend. The identification of the king with "heaven", "sanctity", and "soul"?and therefore, in symbolical terms, with salvation? should be carefully noted, as should the emphasis on the phenomenon of his power to heal by touch, for it recalls the figure of Christ the healer depicted by Saint Luke: ... all they that had any sick with divers diseases brought them unto him; and he laid his hands on every one of them, and healed them. (Luke 4:40) The "healing benediction" of the king is to be contrasted with the doctor's total inability to cure Lady Macbeth and his con tention that "more needs she the divine than the physician,"
is itself employed in every conceivable context, the most thematically all-inclusive being the witches' incantatory "Double, double, toil and trouble." There is Macbeth's decision to make the assurance of his future "double sure" by taking "a bond of fate", and Lady Macbeth's service to Duncan "in every point twice done, and then done double". There is also the fact that the king is staying at Macbeth's castle "in double trust". And there is Macbeth's final, tragic realization of the true nature of the witches, those "juggling fiends.. ./That palter with us in a double sense" and "[lie] like truth". Since destiny is indissolubly linked with time, Macbeth is ultimately attempting to control both. He is thus essaying to place himself exterior to time and exempt himself from its laws. Time is represented in the play by two diametrically opposed devices: the imagery of planting and harvesting, symbolic of the natural projection of time, and the element of prophecy, symbolic of the unnatural projection of time. The king is associated with the natural order of time, and, within the context of the planting imagery depicting him, with the process of natural growth and fruition associated therewith: I have begun to plant thee, and will labor To make thee full of growing. Implicit in this metaphor is the king not only as a source of growth but as a source of life, a phenomenon early recognized by Banquo ("There if I grow,/The harvest is your own") and in corporated in Ross's observation: "Thriftless ambition... will ravin up/Thine own life's means!" Growth, therefore, represents the medium by which present and future are bridged, the future being synonymous with the fruition which is the
natural consequence of that growth, and the whole process being emblematic of the natural continuum of time. Conversely, prophecy leaps over the process of growth by mirroring the future in the present instant. Thus Lady Mac beth, in choosing to realize the fruits of prophecy rather than of natural growth, is the incarnation of this phenomenon: Thy letters have transported me beyond This ignorant present, and I feel now The future in the instant. So also is Macbeth: But here, upon this bank and shoal of time, We'd jump the life to come. The use of "jump" conjointly with "time" serves a dual purpose: it connotes not only the sense of "risk", the Elizabethan meaning of the word, but the sense of "leaping over", which metaphor is continued several lines later in Macbeth's enunciation of "vaulting ambition, which o'erleaps itself". It is thus the irony of the play that Macbeth, in murdering the king, destroys not only the fountainhead of his existence but, simultaneously, the access to the very future he is attempting to ensure. Symptomatic of Macbeth's preoccupation with destiny is the fact that he continually thinks in terms of future time: "But of that tomorrow"; "But we'll take tomorrow"; "Tomorrow/ We'll hear ourselves again"; "Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow". The perverting of the natural order of time is reflected generally in the supplanting of daylight by darkness and specifically in the imagery of inverted time: By th' clock 'tis day,
derives. For paradox is the very nature of illusion simply by virtue of the fact that illusion is the inverse of reality and there fore "nothing is/But what is not." Thus everything in the play is rendered in a double perspective. Thus Macbeth, in forging his future, severs his very access to that future; in the process of vanquishing time, he is vanquished by time. Macbeth himself is depicted in dual and paradoxical terms as a consequence of the sundering of his nature engendered by the illusion, the principle of duality being further embodied in the ensuing "fair/foul" in version attaching to character, events, and even dialogue. But perhaps the greatest irony of all is that phenomenon ac companying the moment of truth?that phenomenon wherein Macbeth, in suddenly comprehending the limitations imposed by mortality, transcends that mortality. For the grandeur with which he confronts the inevitability of his own doom, together with the absolute and transcendent clarity of his vision, belongs only to greatness and the gods
