SOURCE: Ide, Richard S. “The Theatre of the Mind: An Essay on Macbeth.” ELH 42, no. 3 (fall 1975): 338-61.

[In the following essay, Ide observes the seemingly divided structure of Macbeth as both the psychological tragedy of Macbeth and a symbolic/cosmological tragicomedy of good and evil—two perspectives that intersect in Duncan's murder and are integrated in Act V of the drama.]

Certainly one of the most difficult problems facing the critic of Macbeth is its bipartite structure. The play appears to be two plays. The striking change in tone and perspective at the structural seam¹ shifts emphasis away from the psychological tragedy to a symbolic pattern of retribution; the personal tragedy of crime and punishment is assimilated into a broader pattern of death and regeneration. For three acts the audience has thought with Macbeth and looked at the world largely through his eyes; but now at the end, when his heart is hardened and initial engagement is turned to detachment, the audience must readjust to a counter-movement of light, hope, and grace. The play progressively opens upon a cosmic panorama. Heaven, virtue, and divine kingship return to Scotland, and those who once looked with Macbeth are asked to look at him, to judge the murderer from an enormous distance, from God's eye, as it were, who so clearly directs the forces of restoration.

These radically disjunctive points of view, the perspective from inside the hero's psyche and the godlike ken from afar, can be isolated most clearly on either side of the play's structural divide; but in reality, as I will argue, they have been contemporaneous perspectives throughout. From the beginning Shakespeare's “daring poetry” and scenic technique create the illusion of a double stage for Macbeth's tragedy. The double perspective from which the audience is initially asked to view the play casts a discomforting ambiguity over the dramatic action, a fair and foul confusion that will be rewarded later when the psychological tragedy (the theater of the mind) and the symbolic tragicomedy (the world stage), the two perspectives and the two structural movements, are superimposed at the regicide and finally placed in clear focus in the restoration battle of act V.

I

The witches who open the tragedy must be taken to some extent as its progenitors. They stand far removed from the current battle and look ahead to a future meeting with Macbeth as if they knew the outcome of the present and commanded the future. But while their relationship to the world stage conveys this vague sense of determinism, their immediate effect is to evoke wonder and puzzlement: who are they and what is happening? The remarks are strangely cerebral, both colorless and paradoxical: “lost and won,” “Fair is foul, and foul is fair” (I.i.4,11).² The large paradox will “hover” over the entire play, but for the moment the audience can see nothing through the “fog and filthy air”; the battle, the sunset, and the name Macbeth are absorbed into the hurlyburly of a metaphysical realm symbolized by the storm, the blank stage, and the ministers of verbal paradox. In effect, the witches place the audience at their own equivocal distance from the world stage and heighten anticipation that the future will bring clarity to the chaos.

It is the more disturbing, therefore, that the sergeant's grotesque exposition provides little relief from doubt and uncertainty.³ His bloody images are confounded in a surrealistic haze (“broil,” “doubtful,” “choke,” “multiplying villainies,” “smoked,” etc.), producing a visual equivocation to stand beside the verbal paradox of the story overture. From the witches' distance the battle is ambiguous, both lost and won, both foul and fair; so, too, the sergeant's distant overview compares the armies to “two spent swimmers” moving indistinguishably in a sea of blood. The superimposition of perspectives here and in the remainder of the passage (I.ii.7-23) is striking and noteworthy. This initial overview superimposes on the ant-like “broil” the outlines of two gigantic swimmers. The poetry then tends to equate one swimmer with Macdonwald, but his gigantic outline soon dissolves into a swarm of humanity, into tiny creatures struggling successfully under Fortune's equivocal smile. At first glance the second swimmer is buried under the swarming armies. “Disdaining” the deity looming over the world stage, with enormous courage and great effort a diminutive Macbeth hacks his way into the forefront of our imaginations. The poetry zooms in on the flashing sword carving a passage through the massed armies; and when Macbeth himself finally does emerge from the “broil,” the shift in physical perspective has enlarged him to gigantic proportions, creating a startling and appallingly vivid closeup for his conclusive victory: “Till he unseam'd him from the nave to th' chops, / And fix'd his head upon our battlements” (I.ii.22-23).

Once again, however, Macbeth's “fair,” if terrifying, victory is cast into doubt by a return to a wider temporal and spatial perspective:

As whence the sun 'gins his reflection,
Shipwracking storms and direful thunders break,
So from that spring, whence comfort seem'd to come,
Discomfort swells.

(I.ii.25-28)

For a moment the sergeant becomes both commentator and visionary, stepping back from the close-up experience of Macbeth's victory to relate his “fair is foul” sententia with prophetic authority (“Mark, King of Scotland, mark”). The conclusive action, the “fair” victory, fades into the ambiguous fog of a distanced point of view.

The second half of the sergeant's narrative diminishes (rather than enlarges) the hero through a similar manipulation of perspective. The audience imaginatively focuses on the two figures of Macbeth and Banquo setting out to meet the Norweyan threat as “canons overcharg'd with double cracks”:

Except they meant to bathe in reeking wounds,
Or memorize another Golgotha,
I cannot tell—
But I am faint, my gashes cry for help.

(I.ii.40-43)

Perspective and meaning are blurred as if in the smoke of the cannons. Here one visualizes human figures ready to bathe, yet the water becomes blood and the cleansing stream a reeking wound. The perspective shrinks Macbeth and Banquo (they are bathing … in a wound), and the entire concept is short-circuited (to wash clean … in blood). “Or memorize another Golgotha” complicates the conceptual distortion. The context of the blood-bath becomes a ritual cleansing in that the blood from Christ's wounds on Golgotha was redemptive; at the same time, however, Macbeth and Banquo are the agents of execution. Lustral sacrifice or bloody slaughter? fair or foul? win or lose? The bloody sergeant cannot tell and neither can the audience. Like the voice crying out from the sergeant's gashes, the hero is once again swimming in a sea of blood. He has been distanced by a shift in physical perspective and, once again, his actions have become ambiguous.

Although it would be unwise to pin much significance on a fairly subtle analysis such as this, it seems clear at the very least that Shakespeare's conscious artistic strategy places an enormous burden on his audience. It is difficult and discomforting to maintain a double perspective, to have figure and ground, close-ups and vistas, in liquid dissolution. One final example may help to establish the rationale behind the dramatic strategy:

Sleep shall neither night nor day
Hang upon his penthouse lid;
He shall live a man forbid.
Weary sev'n-nights nine times nine,
Shall he dwindle, peak, and pine:
Though his bark cannot be lost,
Yet it shall be tempest-tost.

(I.iii.19-25)

This preview of Macbeth's curse merges a natural hurlyburly with a psychological hurlyburly. Like the gigantic warrior emerging from the swarm of humanity or the little creature swamped in another's wound, the conjunction of the eyelid and the penthouse roof conveys a sense of double perspective and double identity. On the one hand, the witches curse the man inside the penthouse and toss the sailor in his boat; the supernatural creatures assert control over the sleepless or storm-tossed creature on the world stage. But on the other hand, we simultaneously glimpse the diminutive figure inside the eyelid and the little man inside the body-bark who is tossed by a psychological tempest. From one perspective the man peaks and pines under the witches' curse; from another, he is the captive of his own psychological nightmare.⁴

Here, I think, we have come to the central point. From a panoramic perspective the audience recognizes the existence of a supernatural playwright who oversees the storm and battle and conceives the play's large ironies: the ambiguous fight of Macbeth and Cawdor, Macbeth's entrance at Duncan's ironic cue (I.iv.11-13), the decision of the king to spend the night at Inverness, and many more. The cosmic playwright is initially associated with the witches and their diabolical “charm” which appears to predict events with unfailing accuracy and to control Macbeth's actions and responses: “So foul and fair a day I have not seen” (I.iii.38). And yet, a second perspective also recognizes a little creature on a second stage which we will soon come to associate with the inner theater of Macbeth's psyche. For Macbeth is also the playwright of his own tragedy, one whom we must assume anticipates the witches' prophecy (I.iii.51-52), whose “foul and fair” perhaps demonstrates a psychological affinity with the diabolical forces, and if Banquo's warning is heeded (I.iii.122-26), whose will is open to the solicitations of the witches.⁵

Both Macbeths, the actor on the world stage and the playwright of his own psychological theater, are present in his first significant aside:

                                        Two truths are told,
As happy prologues to the swelling act
Of the imperial theme. …

But although Macbeth confidently places himself in the witches' drama, his visual imagination anticipates the “swelling act” by translating it into a “horrid image,” thus casting a fearful ambivalence over his role:

                              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? Present fears
Are less than horrible imaginings.
My thought, whose murther yet is but fantastical,
Shakes so my single state of man,
That function is smother'd in surmise,
And nothing is, but what is not.

(I.iii.127-42)

The witches' stormy overture and the sergeant's bloody turmoil, both the verbal and the visual equivocation, have prepared the audience to enter into Macbeth's psychic chaos. One startling, bloody image flashes across Macbeth's psychological fog with such intensity that the frightful thought cannot be articulated. The witches' prophecy in the stormy chaos of scene iii may have set the tragedy in motion, but Macbeth's aside placed against the scenic backdrop reveals a second creation from chaos. For a moment the drama controlled by chance and the witches “yields” to Macbeth's imaginative dramatization of the imperial theme. And ultimately, although “chance” will prepare the stage, Macbeth as dramatist will bring the “horrid image” to realization.

In Macbeth's extraordinary aside he creates a picture of the future so powerful that present thought is absorbed into the horrible imagining. Macbeth's imaginative “rapture,” however, does more than relocate reality in the psychological world (“And nothing is, but what is not”); it tends to transform present things into future visions, to interpret present images as symbols of future consequences. Later, for example, the real dagger will gravitate towards the imaginary dagger his imagination has already bloodied, as if the present moment were dictated by the future vision; at the same time, Macbeth will dress himself in the murderer's role and in a state of trance, as if following a visual script, will stride off stage to fulfill his “horrid image.” At the moment of the murder, in other words, function will no longer be “smother'd in surmise”; it will rather be an instrument under the imagination's command.

The more immediate point, however, is that Shakespeare's tragic hero exhibits a genius for symbolism. His visual imagination is capable of superimposing picture upon picture to an extent that it becomes impossible for him to delineate present from future, perspective from perspective. This is why I think Helen Gardner is ill-advised in limiting the context of those striking passages in act I, scene vii,⁶ passages which have been tirelessly explicated but to which I must again return:

                                                            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-tongu'd, against
The deep damnation of his taking-off.

(I.vii.16-20)

Despite an earlier logic and syntax of cool objectivity and despite explicit protestations to the contrary, Macbeth's fear of heavenly retribution is so powerful that it swells up from the subconscious to smother the virtues' plea against the regicide: “Duncan's virtues pleading at an earthly tribunal, because of their strength of innocence, are like angels (both innocent and strong), angels who shall herald a heavenly tribunal which shall damn Macbeth for Duncan's murder.” One image triggers a second, the second a third, each succeeding image superimposed on the former, until the original vision has been transformed into a charged symbol containing at once present thought and future imaginings, fear of earthly judgment and fear of heavenly judgment.

And Pity, like a naked new-born babe,
Striding the blast, or heaven's Cherubins, hors'd
Upon the sightless couriers of the air,
Shall blow the horrid deed in every eye,
That tears shall drown the wind.

(I.vii.21-25)

The imaginative process in this passage is similar, yet the visual leap from the weak “new-born babe” to the powerful figure “striding the blast” is elliptical. The babe of pity seems to trigger once again the forensic power of innocence and virtue which in turn recalls the powerful angels with their trumpets of judgment. Hence, the vision of a Christ-like child, at once pitiful victim and powerful judge, the naked babe who will stride the blast, flashes across Macbeth's mind: “He rode vpon the Cherubyns and did flye: / he came flyenge with the winges of the wynde” (Psalms 18:10).⁷

The fearful images of earthly and apocalyptic retribution spring from Macbeth's imaginative contemplation of Duncan's murder (“Besides, this Duncan …”). It is ironical that these psychological prohibitions against the regicide are precisely what define Macbeth's slaughter of innocence. In Macbeth's imagination Duncan is a charged symbol; but it is not until the discovery scene, when Shakespeare allows Macduff choric stature, that the full dimensions of the “horrid image” are presented in symbolic stasis. At this crucial moment in the play Macduff sees more and infers more than he could possibly know in propria persona; what he reads out of the murder are the symbolic perspectives Macbeth had read into the murder.

MACD.
O horror! horror! horror!
Tongue nor heart cannot conceive, nor name thee!
MACB., Len.
What's the matter?
MACD.
Confusion now hath made his masterpiece!
Most sacrilegious Murther hath broke ope
The Lord's anointed Temple, and stole thence
The life o'th' building!
MACB.
What is't you say? the life?
LEN.
Mean you his Majesty?
MACD.
Approach the chamber, and destroy your sight
With a new Gorgon.—Do not bid me speak:
See, and then speak yourselves.—
                                                                      Exeunt Macbeth and Lenox.
                                                                                                                        Awake! awake!—
Ring the alarum-bell.—Murther, and treason!
Banquo, and Donalbain! Malcolm, awake!
Shake off this downy sleep, death's counterfeit,
And look on death itself!—up, up, and see
The great doom's image!—Malcolm! Banquo!
As from your graves rise up, and walk like sprites,
To countenance this horror!
                                                                                                                        Bell rings
Enter Lady Macbeth
LADY M.
                                                  What's the business,
That such a hideous trumpet calls to parley
The sleepers of the house? speak, speak!

(II.iii.64-83)

As the visual emphasis of the passage makes clear, the murder scene is a picture, terrifying in itself and terrifying for the symbolic perspectives Macduff sees in it. Like the visual tyranny of Macbeth's “horrid image,” sight delivers meanings that cannot be conceived or named. And yet, of course, Macduff's choric pronouncement does conceive and name the regicide and in the process allows the audience full imaginative freedom to visualize what it could only glimpse through vague and shifting perspectives from the moment of its inception in Macbeth's mind to its bloody execution in the previous scene.⁸ Macduff's passage, then, is pivotal not only to our understanding of the symbolic perspectives of Duncan's murder but to our understanding of the larger structural relationship between the world stage and the theater of the mind. It is with Macduff's discovery passage as backdrop that I would like now to discuss the symbolic characterization of Duncan and the double perspective which views Macbeth as actor on one stage and playwright of a second stage.

II

Shakespeare has created an expansive and suggestive context for the dramatization of Duncan's kingship. In act I, scene iv, Duncan appears as a liege lord who is quick to reward the faithful service of his vassals, as a paternal figure who accepts the duties of his “children and servants” and folds them to his heart, and as a sovereign planter who nourishes his servants in love and banquets on the harvest of their service. When Duncan next appears in scene vi, he radiates an aura of innocence and benign propriety which is enhanced by the imagery of the “holy supernatural.”⁹ But just prior to his arrival at Inverness, however, Lady Macbeth had uttered a black invocation, praying that the “murth'ring ministers” unsex her and frustrate her natural instincts that she might forward the murder plot. The dark context creates a pointed irony for the king's advent. The lyric song of fertility, bounty, and natural grace which began the scene is meant to celebrate the arrival of the innocent victim.

In this context, then, Lady Macbeth confronts Duncan with outrageous deceit and mock homage. Her husband had made his formal account of stewardship earlier (I.iv); now Lady Macbeth returns to the master-servant, liege lord-vassal relationship:

                                                                                                                        All our service,
In every point twice done, and then done double,
Were poor and single business, to contend
Against those honours deep and broad, wherewith
Your Majesty loads our house: for those of old,
And the late dignities heap'd up to them,
We rest your hermits. …
                                                                                                              Your servants ever
Have theirs, themselves, and what is theirs, in compt,
To make their audit at your Highness' pleasure,
Still to return your own.

(I.vi.14-28)

This impersonal, formulaic language which troubled Coleridge has suggestive overtones. Lady Macbeth is unworthy that her Lord come under her roof. The harvest imagery—“loads our house,” “heap'd up to them”—recalls the shower of blessings the sovereign planter bestows on his servants, while the language of accounting—“twice done,” “compt,” “audit”—evokes the theme of “The Parable of the Talents” (Matt. 25:14-30). Indeed, when considered together with the formulaic language and gesture of homage to the liege lord, the allusive echo suggests a kind of mock offertory. Two themes stressed repeatedly in Offertory Verses were: 1) man's absolute dependence on the Sovereign, and 2) man's duty to make a just accounting of God's blessings:

… all that is in the heavens and in the earth is thine. … Both riches and honor come from thee and thou rulest over all.

(1 Chron. 29)

Everyman shall give as he is able, according to the blessing of the Lord your God which he has given you.

(Deut. 16:16)¹⁰

At the Offertory we offer back to the Sovereign ourselves and all He has given us, this reckoning the first fruits of the final account of stewardship. That is the point of “The Parable of the Talents” and there is a faint suggestion of the final harvest and final audit in Lady Macbeth's language.¹¹

Additionally, the paradox implicit in offering the liege lord what is already his parallels precisely the paradox of the Christian sacrifice. For example, at the prayer of Oblation following the Communion, we offer the Victim to Himself, and at the same time we beseech the Liege Lord to accept “this our bounden duetie and service.”¹² And later in the prayer we ask God to respond to our offering by filling us with grace and heavenly benedictions. Duncan had accepted Macbeth's homage earlier; his language at the close of this scene reiterates his acceptance and suggests its sacramental meaning: “We shall continue our graces towards him” (I.vi.30). The innocent Duncan has been deceived by the mock homage and unwittingly begins to carry out his role as sacrificial victim. He accepts the offering of himself.

At Duncan's exit Shakespeare moves immediately to the supper setting and to Macbeth's soliloquy “If it were done, when 'tis done.” The sacramental implications of scene vi, of course, make more compelling the tentative associations of the royal banquet with the Last-Supper and of Macbeth with the betrayer.¹³ The stage has been set for Macbeth's foul deed. Chance has provided the opportunity, Lady Macbeth the spur, and the cosmic playwright associated initially with the diabolical witches has woven into the luminous dramatization of Duncan's ideal kingship a black counter-order of unnatural murder, treacherous deceit, and sacramental blasphemy. But it remains for Macbeth to poison the chalice. Ironically, his psychological prohibitions against the regicide have worked hand-in-glove with the cosmic playwright's dramatization of order and counter-order; while they have testified to Duncan's innocence and virtue, they have also helped to define the awful proportions of the crime. Nevertheless, if Macbeth is to play the role in the witches' “imperial theme,” he must dupe his conscience and his will, those prohibitive powers which warn that he is about to enter a “drama of chaos.” This he does, and it is important to note that he carries out the self-deception by creating his own equivocal stage in the psychological theater of the mind.

In the moments before the murder (II.i), Banquo has palled the time with frightful dreams and psychological burdens. Still, he has kept his allegiance free and fought off the sympathy with evil which seems a property of the night and the witching hour. Macbeth, however, has blotted his allegiance. At the telling moment he wishes to be alone with his thoughts: “Go, bid thy mistress, when my drink is ready, / She strike upon the bell” (II.i.31-32). The murder weapon appears to Macbeth in vision, and his imagination soon dresses the dagger in its bloody role. Macbeth himself appears drawn to the future vision, as if it dictated present activity (“Thou marshall'st me the way that I was going”). And yet, before he can go, he seems compelled to shroud the instrument, the moment, and the approaching deed in a beautiful prayer to darkness and evil:

                                                                                Now o'er the one half-world
Nature seems dead, and wicked dreams abuse
The curtain'd sleep: Witchcraft celebrates
Pale Hecate's off'rings; and wither'd Murther,
Alarum'd by his sentinel, the wolf,
Whose howl's his watch, thus with his stealthy pace,
With Tarquin's ravishing strides, towards his design
Moves like a ghost.

(II.i.49-56)

Macbeth attempts to purge deep-seated misgivings about the murder by transmuting them into the solemnity of a black liturgy and attempts to free himself for the deed by identifying with the “murdering creature” of the surrealistic world of night.¹⁴ In his present state of rapture, he makes the “horrid image” more palatable to his prohibitive conscience by wrapping the deed in a ceremonial liturgy and dressing himself as celebrant. Through an extraordinary act of self-incantation (at the same time a self-equivocation), Macbeth becomes a ghastly priest awaiting the signal which will call him to the sacrificial chamber. The Communion bell rings, and Macbeth draws near to his “drink”: “I go, and it is done”—consummatum est. “The bell invites me”—the Invitation was a formal prayer in the liturgy prior to the Communion: “Drawe nere and take this holy Sacrament to youre comfort.”¹⁵

At the moment of the murder, Malcolm and Donalbain wake from their bad dream to utter a strange benediction (“God bless us”) and soon after occurs a parodic Ablution, the washing of hands after the sacrifice: “Go, get some water, / And wash this filthy witness from your hand” (II.ii.45-46). Finally, the knocking at the gate acquires a similar significance in this symbolic pattern of sacrifice. Many critics have parallelled the scene to the dramatic set-piece of the Mystery Play tradition, the Harrowing of Hell,¹⁶ which took place after Christ's death and before his Resurrection.

Macbeth had assumed at the crucial moment a self-created role in the theater of the mind, one which was absolutely congruent to his role on the world stage as minister of the witches' black counter-order. His parodic sacrifice fulfills the pattern of black ritual the larger drama had established and undoes the sacramental relationship between God and King, God and Scotland. Duncan's bloodletting has loosed a graceless and godless reign of sin, tyranny, and death on Scotland. The regicide has been a “sacrilegious Murther” indeed, a Black Communion with Macbeth as High Priest.

Shakespeare's symbolic overlay becomes clearer, I think, when one considers some of the supporting emphases in the tragedy: on blood and slaughter, for example, and on the numerous perversions of eating and drinking.¹⁷ These vivid and insistent images serve as a naturalistic chorus for Macbeth's crude sacrilege, the bloody perversion of the Lord's Supper. After the regicide the concepts of feasting and slaughter are inseparable. Macbeth invites Banquo to a state dinner, but the invitation is a front for his murderous designs; later, the appearance of the cutthroats and the gruesome vocabulary of murder comment upon the “feast” as pointedly as the bloody ghost comments upon the banquet table. The Scottish Lord who wishes to “free from our feasts and banquets bloody knives” (III.vi.36)—recalling the murders of both Duncan and Banquo—unites feasting and slaughter as surely as Macbeth himself does: “I have supp'd full with horrors” (V.v.13). Finally, all these metaphoric emphases seem drawn together in a restatement of theme by the witches' “hell-broth,” the “charm” made of flesh and blood and concocted in accordance with an infernal liturgy, the source of those deceitful visions which promise Macbeth life and bring him death.

Macduff's description of the bloody chamber, however, reveals more than the “sacrilegious Murther.” To approach the other symbolic perspectives of the regicide it will be necessary to return to the moments after the murder when Macbeth's blasphemy releases a psychic wave of heavenly retribution. His earlier fears had anticipated the consequences, and as he did in his earlier poetry, Macbeth now reads damnation into the images of the present moment. This psychological retribution he cannot “jump.” The self-accusation surfaces immediately. “God bless us” was a charm against sorcery and witchcraft, a prophylactic against evil thoughts, and, more specifically, an invocation for protection against the devil.¹⁸ Macbeth, however, has been the minister of those diabolical forces. When the voices from the second chamber break through his trance, Macbeth is left naked, deserted by his role. Guilt seizes him and “Amen” sticks in his throat. The yearning for a former innocence is asserted in that lyric voice of accusation (“Macbeth doth murther Sleep”) which signals that conscience has awakened to judge the self-deceived dramatist, to flood his mind with guilt and fear, and to transmute the washing of hands into a terrifying vision of judgment: “No, this my hand will rather / The multitudinous seas incarnadine” (II.ii.60-61). The murder has been a spiritual suicide;¹⁹ Macbeth has drunk judgment upon himself: “… bewayle your sinnes, and come not to thys holy Table; lest after takying of that holy Sacrament, the Devill entre into you as he entred into Judas, and fill you ful of al iniquities, and bring you to destruccion, both of bodye and soule.”²⁰ In poisoning the chalice Macbeth has betrayed his former innocence and prohibitive conscience, that better part of himself, which he had dressed as celebrant in the liturgical theater of the mind.

Now that Macbeth's reawakened conscience enables him to judge his actions from a distance, the self-doubts and self-recriminations knock at his ribs as fearfully and as forcefully as the knocking at the gate. While Macbeth drifts further into painful introspection, the dramatic symbol of his guilt, the booming knocks, become more insistent. He sees clearly the ugly sacrilege behind the liturgical charade, and he cannot face the damned, terrifying creature who from center-stage in the theater of the mind mocks the self-deceived dramatist. The spiritual damnation is acknowledged, and in another state of rapture Macbeth gazes upon the hell within. The porter scene, perhaps Shakespeare's most sophisticated and brilliant dramatic inset, allows the audience a glimpse of that horrible psychological stage. When Macbeth exits, lost in himself, the porter of hell-gate stumbles before us to play out the murderer's psycho-drama.

“Who's there?”—precisely what Macbeth asks of himself. And as the petty citizens pass in review—the farmer-suicide who betrays himself while expecting too much, the equivocator whom heaven has damned, the dwarfish thief who has stolen clothes—the answer is insistent: Macbeth is there, the several faces of the damned murderer are there. Macbeth's little “castle” is under siege, and the drunken porter, the Vice-like impresario himself, reflects obliquely on the wretched master within. At the knocking at the gate, the porter wakes from a drunken stupor with hell and damnation on his mind, a dramatic counterpoint to Macbeth's own experience after the crime. The “base carousing till the second cock,” the urine, and the vomit—all perverted forms of nourishment—supply an ugly, naturalistic commentary on Macbeth's activity during those same hours. From one perspective, in other words, the knocking at the gate and the porter scene announce the arrival of the retributive forces who will eventually pay Macbeth in kind for his crime; but from a second, superimposed perspective, we see on stage a hellish dramatization of Macbeth's psychological theater.

This abrupt shift from sacrilege to judgment in the murder scene is reemphasized by Macduff's shift from the “sacrilegious Murther” to the explicit imagery of Doomsday at the discovery:

Banquo and Donalbain! Malcolm, awake!
Shake off this downy sleep, death's counterfeit,
And look on death itself!—up, up, and see
The great doom's image!—Malcolm! Banquo!
As from your graves rise up, and walk like sprites,
To countenance this horror!

(II.iii.76-81)

The metaphors begin a process of equation relating a daily sleep with an eternal sleep, the bed with the grave. Following the apocalyptic portents Lennox had described (II.iii.55-62), the imaginative vision of waking from the grave prepares for the double reference of Lady Macbeth's trumpet:

                                                            What's the business,
That such a hideous trumpet calls to parley
The sleepers of the house?

(II.iii.81-83)

The primary image conveys a call to a conference of war, and this is the first assembly of the retributive forces. But a heavenly trumpet is superimposed on the military symbol. While the trumpet anticipates the restoration in historical time, it also prefigures a heavenly retribution at the final audit. This apocalyptic “trumpet” is reinforced by the hurlyburly on stage: Lady Macbeth is the first to “wake” from her sleep, to rise up from her grave at Macduff's command, and join the chaotic assembly of judgment.

The “trumpet,” of course, is psychic. Lady Macbeth wakes psychologically to the alarum bell with hell and damnation on her mind. She has shared her husband's “drink,” which for her as for Macbeth and the porter who reflects upon him will become the cup of staggering, “the cup of the wine of wrath.”²¹ Though Lady Macbeth is play-acting here, the psychological validity of the moment will become clear in the sleepwalking scene of Act V.²² She is eventually shut up in a psychic world of torment, and like her husband's “torture of the mind” and “restless ecstasy” (III.ii.21-22), her tortured sleep here on this “bank and shoal of time” prefigures her eternal sleep: “Hell is murky” (V.i.35).²³

But more important for our purposes, the “trumpet” inevitably recalls the imaginative power which translated virtues pleading at an earthly tribunal into “angels, trumpet-tongu'd, against / The deep damnation of his taking-off.” Macbeth's psychological damnation had been evident in the moments following the murder; later, he bluntly acknowledges the consequences of the regicide:

For Banquo's issue have I fil'd my mind;
For them the gracious Duncan have I murther'd;
Put rancours in the vessel of my peace,
Only for them; and mine eternal jewel
Given to the common Enemy of man …

(III.i.64-68)

He is assured of damnation. What rankles him, however, is that he has not solidified his hold on the kingship. Banquo and his royal lineage threaten Macbeth's lease on life and on the crown (III.i.47-71). They represent the earthly retribution Macbeth had feared, and for this reason he falls to pieces at the sight of Banquo's fearful resurrection:

                                                                                                    … the time has been,
That, when the brains were out, the man would die,
And there an end; but now, they rise again,
With twenty mortal murthers on their crowns,
And push us from our stools.

(III.iv.77-81)

As might be expected, Macbeth's excited imagination reads the ghost symbolically: Banquo, “crowned” with murders, rises in revenge as symbol of the lineage which will unseat Macbeth.

Nevertheless, Macbeth's fear and guilt seem to stick deeper than this. The ghost symbolizes more than its royal offspring. Macbeth refers repeatedly to Banquo's fearful resurrection from the grave (III.iv.70-72, 78-82, 92), for the ghost represents the proof and embodiment of the life-after-death which Macbeth is so anxious to deny (III.iv.69, 92-94, 105-06). In fact, in the tragic hero's psyche, Banquo came first as a figure of accusation at a tribunal of judgment: “Thou can't not say, I did it: never shake / Thy gory locks at me” (III.iv.49-50). The resurrection from the grave and the silent accusations, as much as the threat of earthly retribution, throw Macbeth into a psychic hurlyburly. The discord imaged in the theater of the mind is projected on stage, translating the facade of nourishment, concord, and social order into another prefigurement of the chaotic assembly of judgment.

Macbeth's self-estimation had suffered a terrifying diminution after the regicide; he had since played out the hoax of the dwarfish thief and despicable murderer with the assurance that the witches had destined him to become king and with the assumption that he would remain king through his natural lifetime. As in the case of Duncan's murder, however, the dramatist's initiative in killing Banquo has flooded the psychological theater with fear and guilt. And what is perhaps worse, he has been “unmanned” by the presence of Banquo, miraculously risen from the dead by a supernatural power Macbeth can neither understand nor outface. After the banquet, therefore, Macbeth is forced into two decisions. The decision to cross the river of blood betrays the utter desperation of a damned and tormented soul who must either drown his conscience or forever remain its hostage. The decision to learn the worst from the witches betrays Macbeth's utter helplessness on a stage directed by supernatural powers beyond his control. The dramatist's attempts to determine the future had twice led to self-betrayal; he now must annihilate that psychological theater and place all in the witches' hands. In the final acts of the play Macbeth emerges on the cosmic stage as a stereotypical villain, every inch the ranting tyrant of a drama he blindly hopes or desperately believes the witches have written.

III

At the discovery of Duncan's murder, Macduff's vivid images articulate the horror of the crime and prefigure the inevitable judgment. Macduff has been a prophet of doom for both Macbeth and Lady Macbeth. Her bloody and hellish role in the witches' drama is ultimately introverted into the private theater of a distraught psyche; the sleepwalking scene dramatizes her fearful damnation. Macbeth's damnation runs counter to hers. The initial mental curse is ultimately projected into the world; he becomes the creature his psyche has created, a damned satanic tyrant reigning over the hell on earth. As I suggested at the outset, however, there is a wider perspective by which to judge Macduff's description of the “horrid image.” For the counter-movement of the play, the pattern of Christian tragicomedy, Macduff's announcement bears good tidings. He has come to wake the king; we hear him cry out “Awake, awake,” and there shall be an awakening. Shakespeare has patterned the counter-movement of the play on the resurrection promise of the Easter liturgy and on the concept of Duncan's anointed kingship. Before proceeding into an admittedly speculative portion of the essay, it would be helpful to recall that Macbeth was in many respects a royal play and that as nearly as it can be dated it was composed in February-March-April of 1606.²⁴ With this in mind, we return again to Duncan's symbolic portrayal.

Duncan was the “anointed” king, he was the christus of the Lord. Richard II indicates that Shakespeare knew the king's role was in imitation of Christ. James I, of course, also knew it. In an address to the First Parliament in 1603, James makes explicit use of Christological language and analogy: “I am the Husband, and the whole Isle is my lawfull Wife; I am the Head and it is my Body; I am the Shepherd, and it is my flocke.”²⁵ The allusions are to Christ as the groom of the Church, as the head of the Mystical Body, and as the Good Shepherd of Scripture. Further, as Ernst Kantorowicz has documented, from the analogy of Christ's double nature as expressed in the Athanasian Creed, Elizabethan jurists had drawn the analogy of ‘the King's two bodies’: the King dies as man, but the King, the anointed office, is immortal.²⁶ In this political sense, then, Duncan has never died. Macduff had come to wake the king and, though it seems a Providential equivocation worthy of the witches, he does wake the King in the figure of Malcolm. And it is Malcolm who remains rightful king through Scotland's darkest hours.

But clearly, the political justification for completing the sacrificial pattern with an Easter morning resurrection would remain little more than hollow and appliqued historicism were it not for Duncan's more important role in imitation of Christ. Duncan has been sacrificed as his exemplar was. Macduff's image of “sacrilegious Murther,” culminating a pattern of diabolical invocation, mock Offertory, and Last Supper, describes a black parody of Christ's sacrifice. Macbeth has “broke ope / The Lord's anointed Temple, and stole thence / The life o'th' building”; the rending of the bed curtain, the forced access through Duncan's flesh, the rape of the tabernacle—those superimposed pictures Macduff asks us to imagine—have been the blasphemous perversion of the Blood Sacrifice of the New Law.

At Christ's death the rending of the curtain which isolated the Holy of Holies signified that a heavenly sanctuary had superseded the Old Testament type. The curtain itself typified Christ's flesh: “seeing therfore brethren that by the meanes of the bloud of Jesu, we have liberty to enter into the holy place by the newe and livyng waye, which he hath prepared for us, through the vayle (that is to saye, by his fleshe): … let us drawe nye. …”²⁷ Christ (as High Priest) allowed His flesh to be rent (as Victim) that we might have unimpeded access through the curtain to the heavenly sanctuary. Moreover, the “wine of life” which flowed from Christ's flesh was redemptive; it promised future life. For this reason, his death on Good Friday woke the dead to the promise of a final awakening: “And beholde, the vayle of the temple did rent into two partes, from the top to the botome, and the yerth did quake, and the stones rent, and the graues did open, and many bodies of the saintes, which slept, arose and went out of the graues after his resurreccion, and came into the holy city, and appeared unto many” (Matt. 27: 51-53).²⁸ As the Easter Anthem states, Christ's death enabled us to conquer death: “Christ is risen againe: the first fruits of them that sleep: for seeing that by man came death, by man also cometh the resurreccion of the dead. For as by Adam all men doe die, so by Christe all men shalbe restored to lyfe.”²⁹ Macbeth's blasphemous murder of the “anointed” king had anticipated a resurrection to judgment; Duncan's sacrifice in imitation of Christ promises a resurrection to life. Both the “fair” and the “foul” perspectives of the regicide are reflected in Macduff's imagery and in the symbolic hurlyburly on stage.

The dramatic allusion to the Harrowing of Hell evokes the context of Christ's victory over Satan, and the explicit imagery of apocalyptic portents, sacramental sacrifice, and awakening from the grave recall the final resurrection to life promised in His death and resurrection. These reverberations, together with Duncan's political and sacrificial imitations of Christ, justify the reading of Macduff's “foul” images as “fair” images which prefigure good tidings. This grand equivocation, the “fair and foul” ambiguity at the heart of the tragedy, supports the two structural movements of the play. Both the psychological tragedy of crime and punishment and the tragicomic movement of death and regeneration are adumbrated in the discovery scene. And perhaps equally important, the distanced perspective which recognizes the “fair” promise implicit in Macduff's “foul” tidings recognizes as well that a cosmic playwright more powerful than the witches is asserting control over the world stage and guiding the forces of restoration, his ministers on earth:

                                                                                Thither Macduff
Is gone to pray the holy King, upon his aid
To wake Northumberland, and warlike Siward;
That, by the help of these (with Him above
To ratify the work), we may again
Give to our tables meat, sleep to our nights,
Free from our feasts and banquets bloody knives,
Do faithful homage, and receive free honours …

(III.vi.29-36)

The restoration will reestablish the rightful relationship of God and his earthly servants and return to Scotland the fruitful and gracious kingship which Duncan had embodied.

It is in this sense, then, that Duncan is resurrected on earth in the figure of Malcolm. In act IV, scene iii, a scene symbolic of Malcolm's awakening to kingship,³⁰ the son comes to embody the innocence and saintliness of his father much as he renews his role as king. Duncan had earlier pronounced his son heir apparent, indeed almost “planted” his son heir apparent in that peculiarly rich context of sowing and reaping. Then and throughout the play the natural cycle which turns from seed to harvest to seed calls to mind the double meaning of the scriptural tradition. For Christ and for Duncan as well: “Unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains alone, but if it dies, it bears much fruit” (John 12:24). The scriptural reverberation seems appropriate because Malcolm not only renews Duncan's kingship, he brings it to maturity.³¹ The father had promised “signs of nobleness, like stars, shall shine / On all deservers” (1.4.41-42); Malcolm fulfills the promise in a verbal recollection of the sovereign planter's recompense and bounty:

                                                                      My thanes and kinsmen,
Henceforth be Earls; the first that ever Scotland
In such an honour nam'd. What's more to do,
Which would be planted newly with the time, …
                                                                                by the grace of Grace,
We will perform in measure, time, and place.

(V.ix.28-39)

The continuation and the perfection of Duncan's earthly kingship and his symbolic resurrection in the figure of his son signify what the play insists on time and again: the saintly Duncan has been resurrected to eternal life. Duncan sleeps in peace; his death has borne much fruit on earth and in heaven.³²

Banquo also takes part in the Christian paradigm of death and resurrection. He fathers a line of kings. Macduff had called on Banquo to rise up from his grave, and the “sprite” of Banquo is resurrected in time as dramatic symbol of his plentiful offspring.³³ James I, of course, is the fruit of this rich Christian harvest. Finally, Scotland itself is raised from its death-bed. The day of deliverance is at hand. Malcolm and the forces of restoration are the medicine for the “sickly weal,” and significantly, blood is the restorative agent. Cathness suggests to the others: “… pour we, in our country's purge / Each drop of us,” and Lennox replies, “or so much as it needs / To dew the sovereign flower, and drown the weeds” (V.ii.28-30). Blood is both a restorative agent which brings life and a punitive agent which brings death: fair or foul, lustral sacrifice or bloody slaughter, the vessel of peace or the poisoned chalice. The theme of “miraculous cure” had been introduced explicitly into the play with Edward the Confessor in Act IV, but it had been implicit in Duncan's sacrifice and foreshadowed in Macduff's poetry. The tragicomic movement of the play had been patterned on such a “miraculous cure,” Christ's blood sacrifice and the Christian promise of a resurrection to life.

The “sovereign flower” shall be separated from the “weeds,” the wheat from the chaff, both at the earthly reckoning on the battlefield and at the final reckoning. Macbeth had no issue on earth; in direct contrast to Duncan and Banquo, his death shall bring forth no fruit. Yet the earthly significance figures forth the symbolic one: unlike the father of kings, Macbeth shall die to eternal death.

                                                                                                                        Macbeth
Is ripe for shaking, and the Powers above
Put on their instruments.

(IV.iii.237-39)

The divine playwright of the world stage will enact his decree through his earthly instruments, Malcolm and the forces of restoration. Yet the allusive language recalls the final harvest and the “Babe's” injunction to the angels of judgment: “… for there I will sit to judge all the nations round about. Put in the sickle for the harvest is ripe” (Joel 3:12-13).³⁴

The double reference to restoration and Apocalypse, to earthly and heavenly retribution, is recurrent throughout the final scenes of the play. Macbeth snatches confidence from the witches' equivocations and relegates the threat of Banquo's ghastly apparition together with the movement of Birnam wood to a time outside the natural cycle of life:

                                                                                                              Sweet bodements! good!
Rebellious dead, rise never, till the wood
Of Birnam rise; and our high-plac'd Macbeth
Shall live the lease of Nature, pay his breath
To time, and mortal custom.

(IV.i.96-100)

Later, the theme is restated in a description of the restoration forces: “Revenges burn in them; for their dear causes / Would, to the bleeding and the grim alarm, / Excite the mortified man” (V.ii.3-5). The “rebellious dead” and the “mortified man” join forces with God's soldiers of restoration. Macbeth's hyperbolic bravado and apocalyptic oaths notwithstanding (III.ii.16-19; IV.i.52-61), the symbolic spirits of vengeance will rise when Birnam wood moves and nature runs amuck, just as Macbeth had earlier predicted: “And his gash'd stabs look'd like a breach in nature / For ruin's wasteful entrance' (II.iii.113-14). Putting aside the present false confidence, the symbolic perspective which recognized that the forced entry through Duncan's flesh led to an earthly and apocalyptic hurlyburly has forecast the “bleeding” and “grim alarm” of act V. Macbeth will once again be swimming in a blood-bath, one whose ambivalent signification signals life and regeneration for Scotland and death and damnation for Macbeth.

The decision to cross the river of blood and to smother surmise in function³⁵ had momentarily drawn the curtain on the theater of the mind. He had drowned his conscience through habitual blood-bath and with it his imaginative vision of the world. The conjunction of hand and head obliterated the interior distance he once had on his actions. The cold, objective tone of “the yellow leaf” (V.iii.22-28) is not that of “rapt” self-appraisal; Macbeth looks at his life as a tired old actor looking at his role. Lady Macbeth's death gives the actor a similar pause:

                                                                                                    Out, out, brief candle!
Life's but a walking shadow; a poor player,
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,
And then is heard no more: it is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.

(V.v.23-28)

Macbeth sees himself, finally, as a ranting tyrant on an absurd world stage. He has been an instrument of chaos in a diabolical scenario, a poor player (like all the rest) whose life can have only one meaningful issue—death. The double reference of the imagination has collapsed in the end to an absolute literalness: life is totally without significance. The witches and the supernatural “idiot” they represent have betrayed the actor into the irrational drama he had mistaken for “the imperial theme.”

But never has Macbeth been so wrong. He himself has been the “idiot,” his drama one of self-betrayal, and his actions charged with symbolic significance. When Macbeth learns that Birnam wood approaches and that nature has run amuck, a final psychological reflux floods his little theater. The witches' equivocations throw Macbeth back on his own resources, and he once again writes the script for his own tragedy. With death at hand, in utter desperation and with bestial defiance, he forfeits the security of the castle, reads apocalypse into the moment (“Blow, wind! come, wrack!”), and dares the hurlyburly. The irrational playwright creates a closing movement for the absurd drama of chaos which he himself had written all along. And yet, from a second distanced perspective on the action, the audience recognizes that the true cosmic playwright now controls the world stage and is prepared to create pattern out of the chaos and significance out of Malcolm's victory and Macbeth's defeat. Ironically and pointedly, Macbeth's psychological stage this time complements hand-in-glove a wider symbolic drama not of the witches' making as he had earlier hoped, but of God's as he had earlier feared. The alarum bell rings once again, and five times in the sixty lines before the tyrant's death we hear that psychic trumpet, now dramatic symbol of Macbeth's damnation and Scotland's resurrection.

Notes

1. Act III, scene vi introduces the counter-movement of the play. The structural divide is so prominent that Henry N. Paul thinks the conclusion of the play was written several months after the start; see his The Royal Play of Macbeth (New York: Macmillan, 1950), pp. 36ff., 304ff.

2. Citations are to the Arden edition of Macbeth, ed. Kenneth Muir, 9th ed. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1962).

3. The ambiguities and ironies of the sergeant's narrative have been pointed out often. See especially John Holloway, The Story of the Night (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1961), p. 58ff.

4. I am referring only to the dramatic function of the witches in this paragraph. Shakespeare seems to have left open the more difficult and perhaps extraneous question of their ontology; see, for example, A. C. Bradley, Shakespearean Tragedy (New York: Macmillan, 1904), pp. 340-49, and Madeleine Doran, “That Undiscovered Country,” PQ [Philological Quarterly], 20 (1941), 413-27. I hope to make clear, however, that although the witches convey an initial impression of determinism the audience soon recognizes that Macbeth is self-betrayed and that the witches who know the future do not determine the future.

5. See Muir's note, p. 20.

6. “A Reply To Cleanth Brooks,” included in Approaches To Shakespeare, ed. Norman Rabkin (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1961), pp. 90-98.

7. I follow Muir who quotes from Coverdale. See also Matt. 24:31 and 1 Thess. 4:16.

8. Shakespeare could not risk an on-stage murder like that in Julius Caesar, for example, where the bare-faced treachery and bloody slaughter mock the ritual sacrifice Brutus had envisioned. “Shakespeare magnifies the horror of the dead by continually shifting its outlines, else it would find a fixed lodgement in our imaginations and become a vulgar crime. We are never allowed to see its real face”—quoted from Macbeth, ed. Mark Harvey Liddell (New York: Doubleday, 1904), p. 51.

9. L. C. Knights, Explorations (London: Chatto & Windus, 1946), p. 22. See also G. Wilson Knight, The Wheel of Fire (London: Oxford University Press, 1930), p. 140ff., and D. A. Traversi, An Approach To Shakespeare (Garden City: Doubleday, 1956), pp. 153-54, 167.

10. The verses are taken from the Scottish Liturgy of 1637; see Anglican Liturgies of the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries, ed. W. Jardine Grisbrooke (London: SPCK, 1958), pp. 168-69. I am not offering a textual allusion but a conceptual analogy in citing the anachronistic 1637 Liturgy. Perhaps the best explanation of the Offertory symbolism is found in the rubric of a late 17th century liturgy: “It being the Ancient Holy rite, among all mankind, to pay Honour to God, by making their Address to Him with Presents and Offerings, in Recognition of his absolute Dominion, and their dependence upon and Subjection to Him (as with us Freeholders, pay their chief rents to the Lord of whom they hold) … the People are to be instructed and admonished to present their Offerings with Reverence, as the Offerings of God, and to God, for the Purpose aforesaid, and as Symbolical Oblations of Themselves, and all they are or have, unto Him. …”; see the “Liturgy of Edward Stephens” (c. 1696) in Anglican Liturgies, p. 210.

11. M. Moelwyn Merchant, “His Fiend-Like Queen,” ShS [Shakespeare Survey], 19 (1966), p. 78, notices the double reference of human justice and Last Judgment in the “audit” passage and cites Romans 14:12—“So each of us shall give account of himself to God.”

12. Quoted from The First and Second Prayer-Books of King Edward The Sixth, ed. E. C. S. Gloucester (New York: Dutton, 1910), p. 390. Shakespeare frequently quoted Psalms from the Prayer-Book and was no doubt familiar with the liturgy. The Book of Common Prayer (1559) was probably Shakespeare's edition, but it was substantively based on The Second Prayer-Book of Edward VI (1552) and, for our purposes, indistinguishable from it. See H. R. D. Anders, Shakespeare's Books (Berlin: Reimer, 1904), chap. 6; and Richard S. H. Noble, Shakespeare's Biblical Knowledge (New York: Octagon, 1970), pp. 14ff., 76ff.

13. See especially Roy Walker, The Time Is Free (London: Andrew Duckers Ltd., 1949), pp. 53-55. Walker similarly stresses the sacramental symbolism of the regicide. See also Muir's note, p. 37.

14. Arnold Stein, “Macbeth and Word-Magic,” Sew, 59 (1951), p. 275. See also Matthew Proser, The Heroic Image in Five Shakespearean Tragedies (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1965), p. 64; Paul A. Jorgenson, Our Naked Frailties (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1971), pp. 62-66. Macbeth's trance-like state at this moment (noted by Bradley, Kittredge, Dover Wilson, et al.) emphasizes his need for role-playing. On the importance of role-playing to Macbeth and the theatrical metaphor to the play, see John Lawlor, The Tragic Sense in Shakespeare (London: Chatto & Windus, 1960), pp. 137-46; and V. Y. Kantak, “An Approach To Shakespearean Tragedy: The ‘Actor’ Image in Macbeth,” ShS, 16 (1963), 42-52.

15. Prayer-Books, p. 386.

16. See John W. Hales, Notes and Essays on Shakespeare (London: George Bell, 1884), pp. 284-86; John B. Harcourt, “‘I Pray You, Remember the Porter,’” SQ [Shakespeare Quarterly], 12 (1961), 393-402; and especially, Glynne Wickham, “Hell-Gate And Its Door-Keeper,” ShS, 19 (1966), 69-74.

17. From the eating of the “insane root,” to the banquet betrayal (I.vii), to the slaughter of sleep (chief nourisher of life's feast), to Duncan's horses devouring one another, to the maws of kites and the supper of horrors—eating is perverted throughout. So, too, the metaphors of drinking—from the poisoned chalice, to the drunken hope, to the limbec of reason. Everyone seems to be drinking the night of the murder, including Lady Macbeth (II.ii.1), and the effect is to frame Macbeth's blasphemy with an ugly perverted naturalism.

18. See Liddell, pp. 66-67; Kittredge, p. 137; and The New Shakespeare Macbeth, ed. J. Dover Wilson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1947), p. 122.

19. I slightly redefine M. C. Bradbrook's perceptive comment in “The Sources of Macbeth,” ShS, 4 (1951), p. 46.

20. Prayer-Books, p. 385. See also the Holy Thursday Epistle (1 Cor. 27).

21. See Rev. 14:17-20; Isa. 51:17, 51:22, 63:1-6; et al.

22. B. L. Reid links the imagery of the discovery scene with the sleepwalking scene in “Macbeth and the Play of Absolutes,” Sew, 73 (1965), pp. 30, 42.

23. An excellent discussion of the “hell on earth” in Macbeth can be found in Paul A. Jorgensen's Our Naked Frailties, esp. pp. 27-39, 137-39.

24. This is not to say that it is only a royal play. The approximate dates of composition are Henry N. Paul's; see The Royal Play of Macbeth, p. 237ff.

25. “Speech of 1603,” quoted from The Political Works of James I, ed. Charles Howard McIlwain (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1918), p. 272.

26. The King's Two Bodies (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957), esp. p. 165ff. and chap. 7.

27. Heb. 10:19-22; quoted from Prayer-Books, p. 103. The passage was recited in the Good Friday Epistle.

28. Quoted from Prayer-Books, p. 85. This was the Palm Sunday Gospel.

29. Ibid., p. 371.

30. Shakespeare has telescoped Malcolm's coming-of-age in England into the opening confrontation with Macduff. The audience last saw Malcolm after his father's murder; he was weak and cowardly, fleeing personal danger and, in effect, abdicating his election to the throne. As the scene opens, the audience recognizes once again the weak, ineffectual boy; it does not know, any more than Macduff, that Malcolm is testing him. For Macduff and for the audience as well, Malcolm is transformed in the course of the scene from weakness to strength, from personal degradation to sainthood. The test is for Malcolm a symbolic purge of weakness and sin, a preparation for kingship; for the audience, it is a symbolic awakening to kingship. For the first time in the play Malcolm assumes the stature of his saintly father and his saintly mother. She also, one notes, “dies daily” in imitation of Christ: “O God, who for our redemption dyddest geue thyne only begotten sonne to the death of the Crosse: and by his glorious resurreccion haste delyuered us from the power of our enemye: Graunte us so to dye dayle from synne, that we maye euermore lyve with him in the joy of hys resurrecftion; through the same Christe our Lorde. Amen.” Easter Anthem, quoted from Prayer-Books, p. 110.

31. A similar point is made by M. C. Bradbrook, “The Sources of Macbeth” (p. 38), and by Henry N. Paul, The Royal Play of Macbeth (pp. 177-78). The earthly “fruit” Duncan's death engenders and the king's “perfection” in the figure of Malcolm are related, I suspect, to Malcolm as founder of the Scottish dynasty.

32. W. A. Murray thinks that the “perfection” of Duncan's earthly life in heaven is suggested by the image of his “golden blood.” This would be consistent with the play's symbolism and with Macbeth's imagination. He looks at the real blood and in gilding it in the gold perfection of heaven reads the future into it: “Here lay Duncan, / His silver skin lac'd with his golden blood” (II.iii.11-12). See “Why Was Duncan's Blood Golden?,” ShS, 19 (1966), 34-44, esp. p. 42.

33. The metaphor of “perfection” may also apply here. Banquo's “blood-bolter'd” head, the twenty mortal murders on his “crown,” seems to be perfected on earth in the “gold-bound brows” of his lineage; see IV.i.112-24.

34. As I understand the passage, “Macbeth is ripe for shaking” as the grain harvest is ripe for threshing. The angels take up their sickles for the final harvest in which the wheat shall be separated from the chaff. I cite Joel 3:12-13, but the harvest of judgment imagery is recurrent throughout the Old and New Testaments.

35. Arnold Stein's phrase in “Macbeth and Word-Magic,” p. 284.