SOURCE: Brooke, Nicholas. Introduction to The Oxford Shakespeare: The Tragedy of Macbeth, edited by Nicholas Brooke, pp. 1-82. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990.

[In the following excerpt, Brooke surveys the importance of stage illusion to Macbeth and examines Shakespeare's rich use of language in the drama.]

1. ILLUSION

Macbeth was first produced at a time of radical theatrical change in England. It seems to have been written during 1606 and to have been presented at the Globe Theatre fairly late in that year, and so to have been conceived for performance in daylight, in a constantly light space which could not be physically transformed into darkness. Two years later, in 1608-9, Shakespeare's company, the King's Men, took over the Blackfriars Theatre which had been adapted from the hall of the medieval friary and was therefore basically a dark space into which artificial light had to be introduced—which has been the normal state of all European theatres ever since. From then until the London theatres were finally closed in the 1650s after repeated injunctions from Cromwell's government the repertory had to be adapted for performance in both theatres, in both conditions. Shakespeare's last plays, from The Winter's Tale to The Tempest (including his collaborations with Fletcher) show remarkable ingenuity in devising spectacular effects which could take advantage of the dark theatre and of the experience of the company in participating in Court masques, while still being performable at the Globe. Most of Shakespeare's earlier plays could no doubt have been easily adapted for revival in the new situation since the basic configuration of the stage seems to have been much the same, but Macbeth was a special case: about two-thirds of this play written for the daylight theatre is set in darkness.

All theatre depends, in one way or another, on illusion, but Macbeth is exceptional in affirming continuously a direct contradiction of the natural conditions: the transformation of daylight into darkness is a tour de force which establishes illusion as, not merely a utility, but a central preoccupation of the play, dramatically announced by an opening unique in Shakespeare's plays, the use of the non-naturalistic prologue by the Weïrd Sisters in 1.1. There follows a carefully controlled range of forms of dramatic illusion which needs to be enumerated, not only because it is so frequently mutilated by the naturalistic tradition of modern theatre, but also because it clarifies the study of illusion as a structural foundation of the play.

1. Darkness in daylight is established symbolically by torches and candles whose effect depended on the power of theatrical convention to which a modern audience cannot respond so directly as a Jacobean one, but that is greatly extended linguistically by direct statements, allusions, or indirect suggestion of verbal imagery. The sequence of dark scenes is initiated in 1.5 by Lady Macbeth's invocation to the powers of darkness (39-53), and by her later reference to ‘This night's great business’ (67); it is sustained through all major scenes until the end of 4.1. The Folio text calls for Hautboys and Torches at the beginning of 1.6, but that is probably a book-keeper's anticipation of props needed to open 1.7, where they stress the arrival of darkness alongside a dumb-show of preparations for the evening feast; 1.6 opens in dialogue that reverses the illusion of darkness, Duncan and Banquo exchanging descriptions of the castle's pleasant seat, air, jutty, frieze, the martlet's procreant cradle, etc. This is regularly quoted as an example of Shakespeare's use of words to set a scene, but in truth it is not typical; it is quite exceptional in its invitation to detailed visualization; what we must visualize is not there, of course, but the implied daylight literally is. The illusion of darkness can be withdrawn at will (and then resumed), but with the significant irony that Duncan and Banquo misread the signs: there is nothing gentle or procreant here.

2. The Weïrd Sisters are visible to us, and to Macbeth, and to the less questionable sight of Banquo (a touchstone of common sense, like Horatio in Hamlet, even if less solid). The Sisters cannot be reduced to projections of Macbeth's mind, they are not mere delusions; though just what Macbeth and Banquo see is very questionable. Banquo describes them while they are on stage:

                                                                                                              What are these,
So withered, and so wild in their attire,
That look not like th'inhabitants o'th' earth
And yet are on't?

(1.3.39-42)

No wonder presentations in the theatre vary so much, since they cannot be made to ‘look like’ this; and if they could, Banquo's words would be redundant. Word, here, is against sight: we are bound to see that they are not what Banquo says; but it is more likely that his description influences our perception than that we conclude that his sight is different from ours. The ambiguity extends to their nature: there is still argument as to whether they are supernatural, or merely village witches, strange old women, as Banquo's later words suggest:

                                                                      You should be women,
And yet your beards forbid me to interpret
That you are so.

(45-7)

They call themselves the Weïrd Sisters, and Banquo and Macbeth refer to them as such; the only time the word ‘witch’ is heard in the theatre is in l. 6 of this scene, when the First Witch quotes the words of the sailor's wife as the supreme insult for which her husband must be tortured. ‘Weird’ did not come to its loose modern usage before the early nineteenth century; it meant Destiny or Fate, and foreknowledge is clearly the Sisters' main function. But the nature of their powers is still ambiguous: they are actively malicious to the master o'th' Tiger, but have not the power to destroy him:

Though his bark cannot be lost,
Yet it shall be tempest-tossed.

(24-5)

They can appear to Macbeth at will (theirs or his), but confine their interference to prediction. All these powers were, of course, attributed to village witches, but the Weïrd Sisters are more decisively supernatural; confusion has largely arisen because the Folio text refers to them in stage directions and speech prefixes as ‘witches’. Their ambiguity, of nature and of power, is fundamental to the ambiguities of experience and knowledge which the play develops.

The conflict of words and appearance is repeated at their exit: we must ‘see’ them go, but we cannot this time (when they are no longer there) verify the description:

BANQUO
The earth hath bubbles, as the water has,
And these are of them; whither are they vanished?
MACBETH
Into the air; and what seemed corporal melted
As breath into the wind.

(79-82)

Whether they actually go into smoke, down a trap, or flying, it cannot ‘look like’ this; sight ceases to be rationally reliable:

BANQUO
Were such things here as we do speak about?
Or have we eaten on the insane root
That takes the reason prisoner?

(83-5)

3. The dagger is an opposite case: the Weïrd Sisters are attested by sight (ours and Banquo's, besides Macbeth's) but are indefinite in form; the dagger is entirely specific in form though not literally seen by anyone—even Macbeth knows it is not there:

Art thou not, fatal vision, sensible
To feeling as to sight? Or art thou but
A dagger of the mind, a false creation
Proceeding from the heat-oppressèd brain?

(2.1.37-40)

This kind of optical illusion is well known, especially in feverish conditions—the brain registers as sight what is not directly stimulated by optic nerve. Macbeth proceeds to confuse perception further by drawing his actual dagger and then seeing the illusory one as still more vivid, with ‘gouts of blood, ❙ Which was not so before’ (47-8)—which is how the actual one will be in the next scene.

Words play a great part here, but not words alone: the invisible dagger is necessarily created also by his body, gesture, and above all by his eyes, which focus on a point in space whose emptiness becomes, in a sense, visible to the audience.

4. Banquo's ghost is different again: it is seen by Macbeth, it was seen by Simon Forman at the Globe in 1610-11, and it has been seen by audiences in most productions since. Thus far it contrasts with the dagger, but it is also in a different case from the Weïrd Sisters because it is seen by no one else on stage:

LADY Macbeth
                                                                                                    When all's done,
You look but on a stool.

(3.4.67-8)

This differs from the dagger because the emptiness here is not of our perceiving, and from the Sisters because here the ‘reliable witnesses’ contradict our sight. Scepticism, therefore, becomes as questionable as credulity. The whole effect is aborted if, as so often nowadays, no physical ghost appears on stage.

5. The apparitions in 4.1 are a climax to this sequence of stage illusion tricks, though the formal elaboration is not technically the most surprising or exciting (it neither requires nor gets the conjuring-trick surprise of the others). It can use elaborate machinery, but it can equally be done with simple effects—cauldron, smoke, a trap, or even less. It is the Weïrd Sisters' fullest scene, and it is their last; but however superbly nasty their incantation and however spectacular what follows, it does not aim at mystification, and the recapitulation of their disappearance in 1.3—Lennox seeing nothing of their departure (4.1.151-2)—does not this time conflict with our sight since he was off-stage at the time.

From this point on there is a radical change in the presentation of illusion: rational sight progressively displaces potential deception.

6. Lady Macbeth's sleep-walking in 5.1 is essentially about delusion, but caused by psychological disturbance not by supernatural agency; our recognition of a natural phenomenon is endorsed by Doctor and Nurse, who also recognize a connection with guilt dreams in its jumble of displaced memories. The mysterious is being progressively dissipated and is finally eliminated in

7. Birnam Wood, whose moving is an exercise in camouflage (5.4.4-7) of a kind which is still a commonplace of infantry tactics. Illusion is being reduced to rational explanation, and the cheating account of Macduff's birth (5.7.45-6) marks the end of this process. There are, in Macbeth's words, ‘no more sights’ (4.1.170); the audience is given a full explanation of Birnam Wood before the event, and will scarcely be surprised by the revelation of Macduff's birth.

The Tempest follows a remarkably similar pattern through a varied range of stage illusions to their formal climax in the masque of goddesses (4.1.39-142), and thereafter a progressive withdrawal until the final ‘magic’—Ferdinand and Miranda discovered playing chess (5.1.173.1)—is magical only to that part of the stage audience which believed them dead; to us it requires only the pulling of a curtain. At the end, Prospero's epilogue has the actor asking for applause to release him finally from his role. But The Tempest opens with an exceptional display of realism, the presentation of a shipwreck on stage, which is then immediately revealed as the dramatic illusion which, of course, it has to be:

MIRANDA
If by your art, my dearest father, you have
Put the wild waters in this roar, allay them.

(1.2.1-2)

That calls immediate attention to the nature of dramatic illusion, and establishes it as mediator between Magus controlling his spirits, and naturalistic rationalism. In Macbeth it is the opening by the Weïrd Sisters which proposes a relation between supernatural and natural phenomena. No amount of quotation from King James's early and credulous Demonology¹ will transfer the Sisters from a category of belief into one of verifiable knowledge. The Weïrd Sisters are, like Ariel and Caliban, essentially creatures of drama, not merely naturalistic representations of old women.

8. Macbeth does not begin with an illusion of realism, but it does end with one: ‘Enter Macduff, with Macbeth's head’ (5.7.83.1)—presumably stuck on the end of a pike (see ll. 84-5). That direction proposes a trompe-l'œil head, an art like that attributed to Giulio Romano at the end of The Winter's Tale, achieved here, no doubt, by a life-mask of Burbage. That final effect is peculiar, for Malcolm, always an equivocal figure, capitalizes briskly on the decapitation ‘Of this dead butcher and his fiend-like queen’ (l. 99). When last seen sleep-walking, Lady Macbeth was anything but fiend-like, and the only visible butcher here is not Macbeth but the ‘heroic’ Macduff with the grotesque head he offers to Malcolm's ‘Christian’ triumph.

9. The eight distinct forms of dramatic illusion discussed so far are all dependent on staging: darkness in light, the Weïrd Sisters, the dagger, Banquo's ghost, the apparitions, Lady Macbeth's sleep-walking, Birnam Wood, Macbeth's head. The ninth, recurrent throughout the play, is the purely verbal creation of a highly visual but unseen world of babes and cherubim, rooky wood, murdering ministers, and horses eating each other; the unusual stress on sensory actuality leaves audiences with an undefined sense of having seen, smelt, touched far more than we have, though, as with Macbeth's dagger, we know there's no such thing.

2. LANGUAGE

The most elaborate instance of spectacular linguistic effect is Macbeth's soliloquy at the opening of 1.7, which is striking not only for the achievement of its climax, but also for the process by which that is arrived at, and the rapid transpositions of language involved. It opens with a notably plain vocabulary, but a syntax so contorted as to amount to word-juggling:

If it were done when 'tis done, then 'twere well
It were done quickly;

(1-2)

The tongue-twisting implies mental conflict, with a growing desire to suppress the knowledge of guilt:

                                                                                if th'assassination
Could trammel up the consequence and catch
With his surcease, success,

(2-4)

The pattern of conditional clauses is extended, but the vocabulary is now mixed with a number of polysyllabic words emphasizing the evasion of thought: ‘assassination’ and ‘consequence’ act as euphemisms for murder and guilt which emerge in the word-play that translates ‘surcease’ into ‘success’, and so leads to the conditional

                                                                                                              that but this blow
Might be the be-all and the end-all—here,

(4-5)

The apparent resolution is very similar to ‘'twere well ❙ It were done quickly’, and equally superficial; the sentence is apparently complete, but an attempt is made to strengthen it by syntactic doubling of the last word which functions both as end of that clause and beginning of the next (hence the editorial problem of punctuation):

                                                                                                                                                      —here,
But here, upon this bank and shoal of time,
We'd jump the life to come.

(5-7)

The monosyllables return to close, finally, the long contorted sentence. But the simplicity is deceptive, for the strong rhetorical gesture allows another suppressed level of thought to emerge, religious fear. It is immediately withdrawn, at the expense of reopening the argument:

                                                                                                    But in these cases
We still have judgement here,

(7-8)

A third ‘here’ takes us back to the false hope of resolution, and refutes it, but ‘judgement’ does not immediately signify the law, or rather is not allowed to, for the obscure words that follow deal apparently only with the inevitability of revenge:

                                                                                                                        that we but teach
Bloody instructions, which being taught, return
To plague th'inventor.

(8-10)

‘Bloody’ and ‘plague’ betray the evasions, and the language expands to reveal the power of what has been evaded:

                                                                                This even-handed justice
Commends th'ingredience of our poisoned chalice
To our own lips.

(10-12)

The emblematic justice leads to ‘ingredience’ and ‘chalice’, both words with strong ecclesiastical associations. Justice and religion have both emerged again, in a language more expansive and elevated than any before. It is, once again, returned to a manageable level, of socio-moral orthodoxy, the ties of kinsman, subject, and host; but what follows after is quite extraordinary:

                                                                                          Besides, this Duncan
Hath borne his faculties so meek, hath been
So clear in his great office, that his virtues
Will plead like angels, trumpet-tongued against
The deep damnation of his taking-off;
And pity, like a naked new-born babe,
Striding the blast, or Heaven's cherubim, horsed
Upon the sightless couriers of the air,
Shall blow the horrid deed in every eye
That tears shall drown the wind.

(16-25)

It is the process, here, which is all-important: the process of amplification from Duncan's virtues to ‘the sightless couriers of the air’ is startling in its strangeness. Cleanth Brooks, in a celebrated essay on the naked new-born babe,² noted the strangeness but after enumerating the other references to babes in the play (which are indeed striking) concluded as though the significant image-train resolved the superficial strangeness. It does not, because it is not simply the individual images that are strange, but the very structure in which they emerge, and explanation must not dispel that.

Language has been under pressure from the beginning of the speech: here that is even more marked and more concentrated in syntax, words, and images; the argument is sustained, with the suppressed allusions to law and to religion emerging through what are in effect puns, though very far removed from jokes, and to them is now added a dimension of rhetorical grandeur which may have been implied before, but has never yet been allowed to develop. The primary sense of ‘plead’ here is the legal one, but associated with angels it immediately takes on the sense of ‘beg’ which leads towards ‘pity’ two lines later. The angels themselves appear first as a simple cliché metaphor, but immediately become concrete, blowing trumpets, and transpose through the babe into Heaven's cherubim; simultaneously the ‘blast’ is the jet of air on which the babe strides, and which can be seen as the jets blown through the trumpets, and it is also the sound which the trumpets make; in both senses it ‘blows the horrid deed’.

The main image-trains are therefore of sight and of sound. The sound is an obvious crescendo from ‘plead’ through ‘trumpet’ to ‘blast’. Sight is equally achieved as crescendo, first by becoming progressively more specific from the vague ‘angels’, through ‘trumpet-tongued’ into the insistently detailed ‘naked new-born babe’, and then by literal enlargement from ‘babe’ through cherubim, ambiguously represented either as cherubic babies or as androgynous adolescents in paintings of the period, which in final glory mount the sightless couriers of the air. ‘Sightless’ means both ‘blind’ (as winds move blindly) and ‘invisible’, and at this point the whole visual structure dissolves into the unvisualizable ‘Shall blow the horrid deed in every eye ❙ That tears shall drown the wind’. Sight and sound equally disappear in this rhythmic cadence, and distinct sense with them; the tears should be such as angels weep, but that sense is lost in the diminuendo which follows the climax; it is possible to rationalize the lines in various ways (wind causes eyes to water), but it is clearly irrelevant to do so: the grand vision has dissolved.

But Macbeth's speech does not end there, his argument is sustained in simple metaphor:

                                                                                                    I have no spur
To prick the sides of my intent, but only
Vaulting ambition …

(25-7)

The whole passage is, of course, constructed out of metaphor, but in a peculiar way: the vision is a self-sustaining structure of words closely related by juxtaposition, but not by syntax. The repetition of ‘like’—‘plead like angels’, ‘pity, like a … babe’, extended by implication in ‘or [like] Heaven's cherubim’—divides tenor and vehicle so emphatically that these should function as simple expository metaphors where all the stress is on the tenor, Macbeth's moral argument. In fact, we almost lost sight of that until it re-emerges in the final lines where the horse metaphor is indeed used again, but now it really is expository, affirming the nature of ambition. In the mean time the extraordinary baroque vision has been entirely created out of the metaphoric vehicles. The eruption stresses, certainly, the legal and (paramount here) the religious thoughts which Macbeth has tried all along to suppress, and thus far a Freudian account of the speech will satisfy; but only thus far. We certainly credit Macbeth with religious fears, but to credit him with the specific images of them would inevitably lead to Bradley's error of assuming him to be an exceptionally imaginative man. That would make him a poet, and depend on the same fallacy as believing that because most of Shakespeare's characters speak in blank verse they are all poets.

This constitutes an exceptional difficulty for the actor: not all the words he has to speak as Macbeth can properly be said to constitute part of his sub-text for the role. Macbeth and Richard III both demand virtuoso acting, but whereas Richard is a show-piece for the actor's skills, Macbeth offers virtually no scope for an actor's egotism. His language is, and is not, the property of his role, for it recurs in other speakers, most conspicuously Lady Macbeth. It is unique to the play, not to the man. Ben Jonson wrote in Timber ‘Language most shows a man: speak that I may see thee’,³ and applied this principle in his plays, creating distinctive languages for his major characters; they often speak verse, but their poetry is an extension of their idiosyncratic speech, as with Mammon or Subtle, or commonly enough of the role they are for the moment playing, as with Doll, Face, or Volpone. There is almost no problem in Jonson's plays of characters speaking a language which is rather a property of the play than of themselves. Nor is there with some of Shakespeare's most obvious ‘character’ roles, such as Juliet's nurse or Shylock: their very distinctive speech intensifies into its own verse, but that verse remains distinctively their own and finds no reflection in other utterances (except by direct parody). That is, however, a fairly rare distinction in Shakespeare's work; minor members of the cast are always liable to break out into language of which, it is clearly understood, they can have no personal experience—the Welsh Captain, for instance, in Richard II, or Vernon in 1 Henry IV:

All plumed like ostriches, that with the wind
.....Baiting like eagles having lately bathed,
Glittering in golden coats like images …

(4.1.98-101)

They are images: images of the show that Henry is putting on; and, because it is not simply show, images of a glorious honour which is one co-ordinate of the play; but they are not at all images of Vernon, whose language elsewhere is plain and undistinguished—we see the images and not the man.

But at least there the language is not in necessary contradiction of the man, an undefined soldier who may be supposed to rise to fine sights. Shakespeare sometimes went further:

The west yet glimmers with some streaks of day.
Now spurs the lated traveller apace
To gain the timely inn …

(3.3.5-7)

There has been wild speculation on the identity of the Third Murderer in Macbeth, but none about the First, who speaks these lines; they belong absolutely to the play and are alien to the speaker.

It is a large step from what can loosely be called ‘choric’ speeches for minor characters to the major soliloquies of the principals, for they are certainly men and women and unquestionably shown by their speech. But the mode of showing, and the degree, still varies substantially. Richard III's opening soliloquy is composed out of two much older conventions, that of the Presenter (or Chorus), and that of the self-declaration of the Vice; it becomes more than either in the knowing self-projection of Richard into both roles, yet it still serves both functions as well. Hamlet's soliloquies are usually discussed as direct self-revelations of a very self-conscious man, and that seems appropriate: he speaks a variety of languages, and when he waxes most poetical it is always recognizable as self-dramatization. All his languages do echo elsewhere in the play from speakers as diverse as Horatio, Polonius, Claudius, and the Ghost; the inner and outer bearings of man and environment are significantly equivalent, and just as the man has no easily recognized integrity, so also the play has no single language by which it can be identified. Othello is a different case, for what Wilson Knight dubbed the ‘Othello music’⁴ does substantially characterize the play; but it is spoken by Othello alone and so generates the well-worn critical problem that only Othello can articulate his own valediction: he alone has the language worthy of it—or, as T. S. Eliot suggested, he is ‘cheering himself up’.⁵ That is not a problem in Antony and Cleopatra, for although the play's characteristic magnificence is distinctively embodied in hero and heroine, their language is heard in various other mouths: in Philo's opening speech (1.1.1-13), Enobarbus's ‘The barge she sat in’ (2.2.197-246), and even from Caesar when he reminisces about Antony in the Alps (1.4.55-71). It adumbrates an imperial theme in the largest terms, yet it is always used by or about the man and woman: the principle that it ‘shows’ them is not violated. The fact that an actor may speak a language remote from the individual he represents is very clear here, yet it is not conspicuously a problem.

Macbeth is a different matter. We know the First Murderer speaks for the play, not for himself; so, really, do Duncan and Banquo in 1.6:

DUNCAN
This castle hath a pleasant seat, the air
Nimbly and sweetly recommends itself
Unto our gentle senses.
BANQUO
                                                                                This guest of summer,
The temple-haunting martlet, does approve,
By his loved mansionry, that the Heaven's breath
Smells wooingly here …

(1-6)

The benignity may fit Duncan; it is not especially characteristic of Banquo (nor necessarily inappropriate either). Ross and the Old Man in 2.4 function like the Welsh Captain, but with a language so like Macbeth's own that the distinction of man from words is even more striking:

                                                                                                              By th' clock 'tis day,
And yet dark night strangles the travelling lamp;
Is't night's predominance, or the day's shame,
That darkness does the face of earth entomb
When living light should kiss it?

(6-10)

The characteristics amplify as they describe Duncan's horses:

Beauteous and swift, the minions of their race,
Turned wild in nature, broke their stalls, flung out,
Contending 'gainst obedience, as they would
Make war with mankind.

(15-18)

That is not said about Macbeth, but it might perfectly be said by him. He sees strange sights, but they are not distinctively his. We do not credit all his words to his distinct consciousness, and frequently do not know whether to do so or not. An obvious case is his speech after the murder is revealed:

Had I but died an hour before this chance,
I had lived a blessèd time …

(2.3.93-4)

The words so perfectly extend his private musings before the event that it is quite ambiguous whether they are here a private utterance or a public speech. Kenneth Muir argued that Macbeth was unconscious of the truth of his words, but he quoted Middleton Murry to the opposite effect: ‘Macbeth must needs be conscious of the import of the words that come from him.’⁶ The choice is vitally important for an actor, since it involves the difference between an aside and an address to others on the stage. I am positive that Murry was wrong, but not positive that Muir was right. The ambiguity remains, and the actor need not eliminate it. But this is certain, that Macbeth may speak words beyond his consciousness; which means that his language may show us things other than the man.

I have shown that ambiguity in the opening soliloquy of 1.7; it does not only affect Macbeth: Lady Macbeth frequently uses a very similar language, and the actress has similar problems to contend with. They are made more acute by the more positive form of statement to which she is prone:

                                                                                I have given suck, and know
How tender 'tis to love the babe that milks me …

(1.7.54-5)

The question whether Lady Macbeth ever had a child has been so much discussed that it is hard now to tell how odd her words should sound. In theory it should be impossible to go behind the direct assertion of a dramatic character and question its veracity unless the context gives her the lie. Macbeth does not retort ‘When did you ever give suck?’; so there it is, she did. Or did she? Dover Wilson quoted Eckermann's Conversations with Goethe for 18 April 1827: ‘Whether this be true or not does not appear; but the lady says it, and she must say it, in order to give emphasis to her speech.’⁷ Exactly: and it is impenetrably ambiguous whether she means it, let alone whether it is true or not. But as an imaginative fact that babe is certainly very vivid to us in ways that are no part of Lady Macbeth's consciousness: it takes its place, with Macbeth's naked new-born babe, and all the other babes of the play, in a dimension well beyond the reach of the characters.

I do not believe that that example need be any special problem to the actress; but Lady Macbeth's earlier soliloquy, in 1.5, unquestionably is:

                                                                                                              Come, you spirits
That tend on mortal thoughts, unsex me here,
And fill me from the crown to the toe, top-full
Of direst cruelty.

(39-42)

The actress's problem is whether to make this a literal invocation of the spirits, in which case she must enact some appropriate ritual on the stage, or to project it as at least partly metaphoric, an extreme form of autosuggestion. Kenneth Muir argued decisively for the first, believing that it was Mrs Siddons's interpretation, quoting her ‘Remarks on the Character of Lady Macbeth’: ‘[She] having impiously delivered herself up to the excitements of hell … is abandoned to the guidance of the demons she has invoked’.⁸ But I am not certain this is quite literal: Mrs Siddons invoked her spirits in a whisper, and the effect is rather that the demons turned out more real than she imagined—as conscience does later in the sleep-walking scene (5.1). If she does literally enact a ritual, it becomes odd that no other such ritual ever occurs, just as the solitary reference to her child becomes odd if it is literally believed. Muir commented that we need not necessarily assume that Shakespeare himself believed in demoniacal possession; I agree, but would add that we need not necessarily believe that Lady Macbeth did either. If, on the other hand, the speech is allowed a primarily metaphoric force, then its extraordinary language tends to divide its reference (never, of course, precisely) between a relatively simple level corresponding to her consciousness, and a far more obscure level in which her words reverberate with images we do not specifically understand to be hers.

Lady Macbeth's speech therefore resembles Macbeth's of fifty lines later in its double focus—on herself, and far outside herself. It resembles it also in structure. She began, before the Messenger's entry, with a direct discussion of Macbeth's tricky conscience:

                                                                                What thou wouldst highly,
That wouldst thou holily; wouldst not play false,
And yet wouldst wrongly win.

(19-21)

a syntactic tangle which is closely echoed in Macbeth's tongue-twisting opening. From there, as Macbeth's images amplify through deep damnation to the naked new-born babe and Heaven's cherubim, so hers expand from

                                                            The raven himself is hoarse
That croaks the fatal entrance of Duncan
Under my battlements.

(37-9)

to ‘Come, you spirits’ and so to ‘Make thick my blood’ and

                                                                                Come to my woman's breasts
And take my milk for gall, you murd'ring ministers,
Wherever, in your sightless substances,
You wait on nature's mischief.

(46-9)

The spirits have become ‘murd'ring ministers’ and finally ‘thick night’ as the speech reaches its climax in Hell and Heaven:

                                                                                                                        Come, thick night,
And pall thee in the dunnest smoke of Hell,
That my keen knife see not the wound it makes,
Nor Heaven peep through the blanket of the dark
To cry, ‘Hold, hold’.

(49-53)

The one verbal echo in Macbeth's speech is of the striking use of ‘sightless’ meaning both ‘blind’ and ‘invisible’—‘sightless substances’ and ‘sightless couriers of the air’. Finally, Lady Macbeth ends, as Macbeth does later, in plain language, though in both cases it is unclear whether the thought is complete or is interrupted: she ends ‘To cry, “Hold, hold”’ and he enters, while he ends ‘which o'erleaps itself ❙ And falls on th' other’ and she enters. In both speeches the extraordinary imagery is left behind, and the thought-trains extend beyond it, so that the effect is as though the thought-trains represent the consciousness of the speakers while the image-train in its specific form has been raised above and beyond their distinct consciousnesses. Only, of course, in its specific form; they are understood to use metaphor, and to be able to see ‘sights’, but not necessarily to be aware of these specific sights.

We, on the other hand, are vividly aware of them, of the likeness between them, and of the likeness to other utterances by the Macbeths and by other people in the play—Duncan and Banquo, Ross and the Old Man, the First Murderer, and so on. The situation resembles that of a traditional mode of painting where human figures are shown at ground level in a rapt contemplation in which they may well see visions, but do not seem to be seeing the specific angels, devils, or other images which are painted around and above them. Pictorially that is a common enough convention; dramatically it may often be partially realized, but in such a fully developed form Macbeth is unique, as it is unique in the extent of specific visualizing it demands of its audience. The effect is achieved by an ambiguity of reference: Macbeth and Lady Macbeth do ‘see’, and they do use metaphor, yet the extraordinary visual details strike us as not actually theirs, as in fact a property of the play which exists outside them. Not merely outside them, but almost in opposition to them, as of something which it would be better for them if they did see: ‘nothing is ❙ But what is not’ (1.3.142-3) has more meanings than Macbeth assigns to it, and ‘what is not’ eventually destroys him.

Their languages are finally brought together in 3.2. Lady Macbeth opens, as both of them had in Act 1, with a see-saw structure:

                                                            Nought's had, all's spent,
Where our desire is got without content;
'Tis safer to be that which we destroy,
Than by destruction dwell in doubtful joy.

(5-8)

She is interrupted by Macbeth's entry, and he seems to amplify her meaning:

                                                                                Better be with the dead,
Whom we, to gain our peace, have sent to peace,
Than on the torture of the mind to lie
In restless ecstasy.

(21-4)

But their understandings are exactly opposite; she proposes to beat down the fear, ‘Things without all remedy ❙ Should be without regard—what's done, is done’ (ll. 12-13); while he hints at further action:

O, full of scorpions is my mind, dear wife—
Thou know'st that Banquo and his Fleance lives.

(39-40)

She meets that with ambiguity: ‘But in them nature's copy's not eterne’ (l. 41). She, it appears, understands ‘they won't live for ever’, whereas he takes her words to imply ‘they can be killed’: ‘There's comfort yet, they are assailable’ (l. 42); and so goes on to, ‘there shall be done ❙ A deed of dreadful note’ (ll. 46-7). His meaning is patent, and she retreats from it, refusing rather than failing to grasp it, as he instantly recognizes:

LADY Macbeth
What's to be done?
MACBETH
Be innocent of the knowledge, dearest chuck,
Till thou applaud the deed …

(47-9)

As he advances in ruthlessness, she retreats in fear; the roles established for them earlier in the play are reversed here, and he proceeds to develop an invocation that follows hers in 1.5 in form, word, and image so closely that in the theatre we need no special training to have at least the feeling that we have heard its like before:

                                                                                                    Come, seeling night,
Scarf up the tender eye of pitiful day,
And with thy bloody and invisible hand
Cancel and tear to pieces that great bond
Which keeps me pale. Light thickens,
And the crow makes wing to th' rooky wood;
Good things of day begin to droop and drowse,
Whiles night's black agents to their preys do rouse.

(49-56)

The connection is by no means confined to the opening phrase; ‘scarf’ recalls the ‘blanket’ of the dark; ‘tender eye of pitiful day’, the ‘compunctious visitings of nature’; ‘invisible’, ‘sightless’; ‘light thickens’, ‘thick night’; ‘crow’, ‘raven’; and, of course, the opposition of Night and Day is the foundation of the amplifying oppositions on which both speeches are constructed.

In one respect this speech does differ from its predecessors: they were soliloquies interrupted by the other's entrance; here both are on stage, and Macbeth concludes his thought in couplets which are superficially conclusive:

—Thou marvell'st at my words; but hold thee still,
Things bad begun make strong themselves by ill—

(57-8)

‘marvell'st’ is ambiguous; she might well marvel at his images, but at the plain level to which he has now returned, she is only said to be bewildered by what he is talking about—which is Banquo's murder; the point of their dialogue remains unmentioned and unmentionable, as Duncan's murder was in Act 1. This, as before, is the point at which Macbeth's thought-train runs out beyond the image-train, which here never seemed to suggest such literal invocation of spirits as Lady Macbeth's in 1.5. What the couplet establishes is not an accord but the reverse, the final breakdown of communication between them. Macbeth is unique among Shakespeare's tragedies in centring on an intimate marriage (Othello's was never that). In Act 1 they did not hear each other's soliloquies, but always knew each other's thoughts. It is some while before Duncan's murder is made explicit between them, but they know at once that it is in each other's mind. That has, in the past, caused speculation about a missing scene or scenes in which they should have explained their thoughts to each other—which is absurd, because there is nothing even faintly unusual about this degree of understanding between any couple who live together (which is not to say that couples don't often find it remarkable, or that it does not function as part of the structure of supernatural hints in the play; only that it is as natural as sleep-walking). The characters of the two principals are simply and clearly defined, which has made them a favourite topic for junior exams; it is their relationship which is the focus of real interest in the play. It changes radically in 3.2, and they are never intimate again; simultaneously their roles are reversed, and he now displays the determination on blood which was once hers alone, but which she can no longer sustain.

This requires that they shall act very closely together; but the way in which the text presents it gives actors problems. Inevitably, seeking to enlarge the intimacy, they look for further expression of it. In the last fifty years or so this has tended towards sexuality, whether of the crudely obvious kind of Polanski's film (1971), or the more subtle embraces of Jonathan Pryce and Sinead Cusack (RSC 1986-7). The attempt is natural enough, but however it is done it seems curiously extraneous; it calls attention to an important fact: no play of Shakespeare's makes so little allusion to sex. There is none at all for the editor to explicate in the main scenes, allusions arise only in two places (besides the songs), the Porter's drunken bawdy in 2.3, and Lady Macduff's witty interchange with her son in 4.2. Both are striking interludes of ‘normal’ humanity offsetting the play's obsessive abnormality: the Porter ushers Macduff in to the hell of Duncan's murder; Lady Macduff's family domesticity gives way to slaughter. Where sexuality might most be expected, between the Macbeths, or in the Weïrd Sisters' obscenities, it is completely absent. There is another significant absence from the play: although it is politically sensitive and perceptive about the hell of tyranny, it is so exclusively within the narrow society of the thanes; there is no sign of the populace, or of any concern for people at large. Even the laments for Scotland in 4.3, Macduff's ‘Bleed, bleed, poor country’ (l. 31) and Ross's speech at 164-73, treat the country as an emblem without specifying its people. The Weïrd Sisters, again, do not invite thought about the social problems of old women on their own, nor about witchcraft as an attack on women altogether, though the best known of Elizabethan studies of witchcraft, Scot's Discovery of Witchcraft (1584), concentrated on both, and castigated the witch-hunters for the evil manifestation they were; even King James, though he had been all too credulous in his early Demonology, became increasingly sceptical later, and though he never shared Scot's total scepticism, yet came to fancy himself more as an exposer of fraud than as a persecutor of witches.⁹ Once again, it is the Porter alone who, in his brief scene, reminds the audience of the world that the play elsewhere so completely excludes; as he had from at least the fourteenth century onwards, the drunken clown inverted the assumed hierarchical order of things to assert human concerns supposed to be suppressed; his role and his language, coarse and bawdy prose, are indivisible, and the derisive laughter he so unexpectedly secures (when well played) radically adjusts our perspective on the play, illuminating the exclusions which otherwise we could only suspect. His role as devil-porter relies on the Harrowing of Hell in the mystery-play cycles, though he abandons it before he admits Macduff:¹⁰ however effective it may be to identify Macbeth's castle with Hell, it is not possible to see Macduff as Christ.

The language that I have analysed as characteristic of the play is extraordinarily rich in what it does develop, and remarkable too in its exclusiveness; in politics, Macbeth contrasts strikingly with Julius Caesar before it and with Coriolanus after; they both offer Rome as an entire city-state, and Lear indicates a whole society through the curious range of Edgar's disguises; Antony and Cleopatra, probably written in the same year as Macbeth, is as comprehensive in its political concerns as it is insistent on sexuality. The contrasts identify the peculiar concentration of this play, represented not only in its brevity overall, but also in the density of language which makes commentary so difficult and so rewarding. But this language is closely related to another that recurs in the play, where apparent density turns out only to be tortuous courtesy, where commentary is laborious and unrewarding. The bleeding Sergeant's inflated rhetoric in 1.2 has the function of the classical messenger to explain its diffusion, but Ross's obscurity in 1.3 is more typical:

The King hath happily received, Macbeth,
The news of thy success; and when he reads
Thy personal venture in the rebels' fight,
His wonders and his praises do contend
Which should be thine, or his.

(89-93)

Superficially this may resemble Macbeth's language, but in fact it is its opposite, and the difference is felt when Macbeth speaks aside a few lines later:

This supernatural soliciting
Cannot be ill, cannot be good. If ill,
Why hath it given me earnest of success,
Commencing in a truth? I am Thane of Cawdor.
If good, why do I yield to that suggestion
Whose horrid image doth unfix my hair
And make my seated heart knock at my ribs
Against the use of nature?

(131-8)

Macbeth's words amplify through horrid imaginings to murder, and he concludes that ‘nothing is ❙ But what is not’ (142-3). The whole process, however diffuse and rhetorical it may superficially appear, is at once logically clear and expressively condensed. Ross's speech was neither; his language is an elaborate mask which conceals no substantial meaning.

Later in the play, however, the mask does develop a function, when the conditions of tyranny deprive any communication of mere courtesy, and meaning must be obscured because no man can be trusted. This characterizes 3.6, when Lennox and another lord fence verbally with each other before their mutual sympathy is established:

How it did grieve Macbeth! Did he not straight
In pious rage the two delinquents tear,
That were the slaves of drink, and thralls of sleep?
Was not that nobly done? Ay, and wisely too—
For 'twould have angered any heart alive
To hear the men deny't. So that I say,
He has borne all things well …

(11-17)

A similar double-talk baffles Macduff when Malcolm receives him in England in 4.3, and is put to a different purpose as Ross delays telling of the murders of Macduff's wife and family.

The primary language of Macbeth, that of the thanes, divides into three distinctive usages: the empty elaboration of courtesy, the masked talk of potential conspirators, and, above all, the condensed approach to what is not that is most distinctive of the play. In total contrast is the Porter's prose; and another contrast, equally strong, is provided by the Weïrd Sisters' short-lined verse, variable in rhythm and in rhyme, elliptical and enigmatic in sense. They do not joke, and they are not bawdy, yet their weirdness has a comic edge to it which intensifies the sinister malice they engender. It was probably a particular tradition in their performances before the Commonwealth which led to their being still played by men after the advent of actresses, and they continued to be the province of clowns until the nineteenth century. The eighteenth century came to question the pertinence of their antics, and Kemble restrained what he found an affront to the play's dignity—his dignity as the hero. No doubt eighteenth-century ‘Sisters’ got out of hand, but male actors still sometimes take one or more of the parts, and I should record that a notably camp performance by the Second Witch at Stratford, Ontario, in 1971 was more effectively mysterious than any other I recall. It is not only in appearance that the Sisters present puzzles for performance, and any account of their language should recognize this.

Notes

1. Edinburgh, 1597; London, 1603.

2. ‘The Naked Babe and the Cloak of Manliness’, in The Well Wrought Urn (New York, 1947; London, 1968), 17-39.

3. Timber: or, Discoveries … (1641), in Works, ed. C. H. Herford, Percy and Evelyn Simpson, viii (Oxford, 1947), 625.

4. G. Wilson Knight, The Wheel of Fire (1930), 107-31.

5. T. S. Eliot, ‘Shakespeare and the Stoicism of Seneca’ (1927), in Selected Essays (1932), p. 130.

6. See note on ll. 89-94 in his edn.

7. Wilson, commentary note on 1.7.54.

8. Muir, Introduction, pp. lviii-lix; Thomas Campbell, Life of Mrs. Siddons, 2 vols. (1834), ii. 12.

9. See pp. 78-9.

10. See pp. 79-81.