[In the following essay, Scott explores the relationship between self-knowledge and verbal equivocation in Macbeth.]

MALCOLM
                                                            For even now
I put myself to thy direction, and
Unspeak mine own detraction, here abjure
The taints and blames I laid upon myself,
For strangers to my nature. I am yet
Unknown to woman, never was forsworn,
Scarcely have coveted what was mine own,
At no time broke my faith, would not betray
The devil to his fellow, and delight
No less in truth than life. My first false speaking
Was this upon myself. …
MACDUFF
Such welcome and unwelcome things at once
'Tis hard to reconcile.

(Macbeth, IV.iii.121-39)

[G. E. Moore] had a kind of exquisite purity. I have never but once succeeded in making him tell a lie, and that was by a subterfuge. “Moore,” I said, “do you always speak the truth?” “No,” he replied. I believe this to be the only lie he had ever told.

(Bertrand Russell, Autobiography, chap. 3)

The assignment of truth to one's statements about one's own truthfulness or falsity is a perilous business. Despite Russell's playful assertion, neither a yes or a no from Moore—assuming his perfect probity at all other times, and applying his present answer to itself as one instance—can be strictly false. In contrast Malcolm, who has disparaged his potential as king ostensibly as a test of Macduff's loyalty, has a hard time extricating himself from the admission of falsehood, which (especially in suspicious times) seems as unkingly as the actual content of the lies themselves. Believed or not, Malcolm's self-chastisement must weaken his position, both personally and in general. Wilbur Sanders says that “The very act of envisaging the corruption of his own nature has tainted him. …”¹ Steven Mullaney writes that “For Macduff the experience is a discomposing one, for it reveals a family resemblance between authority and its other where no relation was expected,” and he reminds us that at some early time Macbeth too might have truly vouched for his own honor in much the way that Malcolm does.² Indeed the problems of these self-descriptions become all the more intriguing if we consider that Macbeth meditates self-detractions to himself through soliloquy before verifying them in action by Duncan's murder, though we may well take his word for it that they are already true in thought. In this case does soliloquy then become something like self-fulfilling prophecy?

Malcolm's difficulty in freeing himself from falsehood must sound painfully like the experience of many in Shakespeare's troubled age. There are ample patterns in religious events of the day for extreme reversals of sworn views—and their holders may be less able than Malcolm to come out honorably. Samuel Harsnet, whose Declaration of egregious Popish Impostures left its mark on King Lear, prints the deposition of Anthony Tyrrell, a priest who took part in exorcisms, then recanted and gave information regarding the practice to the Lord Treasurer, later returned to Catholicism, and afterward renewed his testimony in the deposition. In his second Catholic phase the priests urged him to reaffirm the truth of the exorcisms he had denounced to the government. After the fact he explained that he “did willingly yeeld, nothing doubting but that, if God should once againe so draw his grace from mee, as that I should become to be as then I was (that is, wholy addicted to popery, as I trust in his mercy hee will neuer doe) I should be as ready againe to deny all that now I haue affirmed vpon my oath, as I was before.”³ Even now, engaged under oath and studied in self-denunciation, he gives little promise of stable truth.

Moreover, the Jesuits had a prime reputation as liars because of their doctrine of equivocation, alluded to in Macbeth, which allowed a Catholic pressed under oath to evade hard questions about the activities of priests and other specified topics by answering in a sense hidden from and contrary to the meaning of the questioner. The ex-priest Thomas Bell writes “that the Iesuites are notorious lyers, and that their owne fellowes can not tell when to trust them,” and the anti-Jesuit priest Christopher Bagshaw that “they are commonly held now adayes great lyars; and it is come to that passe, that though they sweare, men will not beleeue them.”⁴ William Clarke asserts that “the Iesuits ordinary practise in equiuocating, when they haue beene examined; is so manifest, and notorious, as in very deede almost euery ordinary officer vnder her Maiestie, hauing been acquainted with examining of them, are so well acquainted therewith, as ordinarily they will vrge them therewith; yea and commonly say, that they know not when to giue credite to theyr aunswers, making all the exceptions of such equiuocating they can. …”⁵ There is a reasoned basis in Jesuit doctrine to prompt such doubt: Henry Garnet, whose manuscript Treatise of Equivocation codified the practice for English Jesuits, argued that a Catholic under oath could “admitte the oath with this intention, that he will answere directly and trewelye (and if so they vrge hym), without all equivocation, so farre as he is assured, without all doubte or scruple, that he may or is bounde. And if they make hym sweare that he hath no private intention, or secreat meaning, lett hym sweare it also with that very same secrett vnderstandinge, that he hath no such meaning to tell them.”⁶ Thus, complains Thomas Morton, “this is the mouth of Satan, to sweare by an aequiuocation We do not aequiuocate; and vrged againe to sweare this without aequiuocation, to sweare aequiuocatingly we doe not aequiuocate, &c. Heere is contention without end, by this aequiuocation which is as bottomlesse as the pit of hell.”⁷ These severe comments reveal a problem the witnesses share with Malcolm: once the possibility of falsehood or of hidden or oblique meanings is broached, it becomes difficult to return to straightforward utterance (assuming there is such a thing) because that utterance will be subjected to the same suspicious interpretation as all the others.

The suggestion of falsehood or obliquity need not be explicit. Writing of situations where hidden meaning is implied by “particles” (i.e., particular details or qualifying circumstances), Garnet asserts that “the judge, if he be wise, hath cause alwayes to vnderstand these particles; for so the circumstance of place, tyme, and person do iustely afforde …” (p. 18). There is thus a tacit convention of interpreting speech by its author's circumstances, which imply an indirectness (however undefined the resultant meaning might be) that operates without a need for overt signals.

These examples clarify some problems of self-description in Macbeth. The equivocal oaths not to equivocate, and Malcolm's difficulty in persuading Macduff that he is not lying now in saying that he was lying about himself a few moments ago, show the emptiness of self-referential professions of truth: a statement such as “This very sentence is true,” with nothing but itself to support it, does not stand. And if meanings may implicitly be tailored to the situation of the speaker and, like Macduff with Malcolm, we are heavily reliant on the speaker's own self-descriptions (again, words supported by words), both the nature and the veracity of what is being asserted must be seriously qualified. Not far removed from the purportedly self-verifying example just given is the philosophers' model for a self-referential, self-undermining statement, the liar paradox, “This very sentence is false”; as the obverse of the previous example it reflects back on itself to seem false if true, and true if false. There is good reason to think that Shakespeare knew this paradox from Thomas Wilson's The Rule of Reason (1553 or later edition).⁸ He certainly knew a great deal of the controversy about equivocation, and his interest in the problematics of oaths and of known but tacit lying appears in Sonnet 138: “When my love swears that she is made of truth / I do believe her, though I know she lies. …” In the language, logic, and polemic of his time, Shakespeare had (for what it is worth) a rich storehouse of unsupported and easily undermined oaths, and self-referring and self-canceling speech.

There is of course much that is worthy of question about the witches' triple salutation of Macbeth as Glamis, Cawdor, and king-to-be; the words are both dubious in their origin and only too easy and fearful in their validation. What first impresses Banquo, who is for the moment a disinterested interpreter, is that the greetings “sound so fair,” though his later questions, “have we eaten on the insane root / That takes the reason prisoner?” and “What, can the devil speak true?” betray a suspicion of the source (I.iii.52, 84-85, 107). Macbeth, though, is at once narrower in his scrutiny of truth: he thinks the Thane of Cawdor still alive, though we know otherwise and he soon will too. He hopes (as it seems) for falsehood in this message about Cawdor because of the way he takes the other one, which is clearly phrased as prophecy: he must fear that in foretelling kingship the sisters know his “thought, whose murder yet is but fantastical” (l. 139), and may even have the power to bring it about.⁹ When the title of Cawdor becomes a reality, even the traditional association of truth with good cannot assuage his worry that secret evil may also come true:

                                        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.

(I.iii.130-38)

Not far beneath the surface is concern about his own possible role even if events are controlled by other forces. Both “soliciting” and “suggestion,” besides their other meanings, carry some overtones of temptation. As his fears grow into horrible imaginings, those imaginings themselves are to be feared: are the witches working on him by self-fulfilling prophecy, and must it therefore come true (verify itself in an etymological sense) merely because it is said? If the prediction is fated to be true, the best he can hope is for a guiltless passivity: “If chance will have me king, why, chance may crown me / Without my stir” (I.iii.143-44). And if imaginings have so taken over his whole being that “nothing is / But what is not” (I.iii.141-42), the question is whether “what is not” is (though still within his own mind) in some way that will require that it be outwardly in his own conscious and willed action.

Strange too is the prospect that a horror can be a temptation. It becomes a more active temptation because it seems destined to be true. Yet so quickly and fully is Macbeth entered in, later obstacles do not lessen the allure. On hearing Duncan proclaim Malcolm Prince of Cumberland, he seeks to deceive not only heaven but himself: “Stars, hide your fires; / Let not light see my black and deep desires. / The eye wink at the hand; yet let that be / Which the eye fears, when it is done, to see” (I.iv.50-53). The passive voice tries to make the nameless act of the hand as impersonal as a deed fated by prophecy, even though Macbeth is now consciously considering action. His overt statement suggests positive effort to equivocate with himself: the tongue also (in an unavoidably mixed metaphor) conspires to wink at the hand. Reasoning about equivocation approaches the problematics of this kind of soliloquy or aside in this argument of Garnet as paraphrased by Morton: “Thus, If I were alone and should talke with my selfe, and say one thing, vnderstanding a thing different from that, this is not a lie” (p. 68; cp. Garnet, p. 15). Morton's reply not only denies implicitly the dramatic conventions but dismisses the kind of conscious self-deceit declared by Sonnet 138 and indeed any verbalized self-consciousness: “the vse of speech was not ordained for a looking glasse, whereby a man might see himselfe, but as the Interpreter of the mind, whereby he might be knowen of others. … And can any by any wilfull lie deceiue his owne selfe, as thereby be made ignorant of his owne meaning? This were to distract a man from himselfe.” Yet not only does Macbeth seek to describe such distraction, he tries to induce it. Macbeth wants consciously to deceive himself; and if such a wish cannot be articulated without an artificial dramatic convention, cannot even be expressed without undermining itself and thereby rending the self, we see all the more the extremity of his situation.¹⁰

It is true that Macbeth's great meditation on the consequences of murder seems to cultivate rather than suppress self-knowledge; but his manner of cultivation has its own subtle, perhaps necessary, forms of evasion if not suppression:

If it were done when 'tis done, then 'twere well
It were done quickly. If th' assassination
Could trammel up the consequence, and catch
With his surcease success, that but this blow
Might be the be-all and the end-all—here,
But here, upon this bank and shoal of time,
We'd jump the life to come. But in these cases
We still have judgment here, that we but teach
Bloody instructions, which, being taught, return
To plague th' inventor. This even-handed justice
Commends th' ingredience of our poison'd chalice
To our own lips. He's here in double trust:
First, as I am his kinsman and his subject,
Strong both against the deed; then, as his host,
Who should against his murderer shut the door,
Not bear the knife myself. 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;
And pity, like a naked new-born babe,
Striding the blast, or heaven's cherubin, hors'd
Upon the sightless couriers of the air,
Shall blow the horrid deed in every eye,
That tears shall drown the wind. I have no spur
To prick the sides of my intent, but only
Vaulting ambition, which o'erleaps itself
And falls on th' other—

(I.vii.1-28)

One eventual outcome of the murder he contemplates here is the dramatically ironic one that Macbeth is in fact deposed and killed; and the interesting implication is that, as he predicts he will, Macbeth himself does teach these bloody instructions to, of all people, the fleeing Macduff and the pallid Malcolm. Indeed, these are perhaps the hardest kinds of bloody instructions to reckon with: not that others, seeing the success of Macbeth's ambition, will try to emulate him (as in the dramas about the Wars of the Roses), but that he will face, and be responsible for the actions of, forces claiming just revenge and supported by pity. Fully to imagine the crime with its attendant breach of trust is to see how its success becomes its failure; but Macbeth might well not envision pity thus without the actual intent of a murder that will rouse it. As Colin Manlove says, “In the very act of envisaging so fully the ghastliness of the deed to others, he has imagined himself as having done it.”¹¹

So, more than ever before, his fears become imaginings, and even beget new imaginings of ruinous consequences. But if, to compare Freud, some unconscious impulses can become conscious only on condition of their being denied (a denial which for Freud actually reinforces their validity), Macbeth brings to mind his impulses perhaps also on the equivocal condition of their being denounced and shown futile, again without invalidating them.¹² (Knowledge of futility is in another way not a deterrent for him: he knew all along the prophecy about Banquo's heirs, but only takes it to heart once he becomes king.) Peter Ure speaks of Macbeth as being a parody of an artistic creator;¹³ his masterwork may be forbidden fruit and the not-sufficiently daunting results of eating it, and the impact may be a mingling of allure and terror. To return to the liar paradox, what he says may ironically undermine itself precisely by being an instance of itself, and his words turn back on him from the fact and the circumstances of their use. Not only is he reminding himself that others will learn bloodshed from him, he is, as a person weighing the thought of murder, in the process of imaginatively teaching himself bloody instructions. His conclusion in the soliloquy proper is not actually a resolve not to do the deed, but an image of his self-destructive (yet not disavowed) motivation. Though consciously he seems to accumulate reasons not to act and declares them to his wife, he must know well from their brief reunion that she will overpower his qualms; he may unwittingly rely on her to do so. Indeed not only is he not finally dissuaded from bloodshed against Duncan by his misgivings, he even goes on self-taught to other bloody instructions: the guards, Banquo, Macduff's family. With results equivocally subversive of their supposed purpose, Macbeth's thoughts actually inure him to the spilling of blood. The witches do after all have their way through the workings of his mind, though he beguiles himself with a fully intended resistance.

This whole process by which Macbeth is drawn in is epitomized by his vision of the dagger:

Is this a dagger which I see before me,
The handle toward my hand? Come, let me clutch thee.
I have thee not, and yet I see thee still.
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-oppressed brain?
I see thee yet, in form as palpable
As this which now I draw.
                                                  [Draws dagger.]
Thou marshall'st me the way that I was going,
And such an instrument I was to use.
Mine eyes are made the fools o' th' other senses,
Or else worth all the rest. I see thee still,
And on thy blade and dudgeon gouts of blood,
Which was not so before. There's no such thing.
It is the bloody business which informs
Thus to mine eyes. …
.....                                        Thou sure and firm-set earth,
Hear not my steps, which way they walk, for fear
Thy very stones prate of my whereabout,
And take the present horror from the time,
Which now suits with it.

(II.i.34-50, 57-61)

The apt words of R. A. Foakes about this apparition can be turned back upon Macbeth's recent past:

At first symbolising his terror and desire to do the deed, it then becomes an emblem of the deed achieved, and as the vision fades, Macbeth's soliloquy ends with a series of images willing his identification with the powers of darkness, even as they register the ‘present horror’ of the moment. The lines suggest a link with the Weird Sisters, in their reference to witchcraft and to Hecate, and mark Macbeth's awareness that he is aligning himself with evil; but his full sense of the terrible nature of the murder he is about to do also makes the overcoming of his own scruples, of the horror he feels, of all the large part of himself that rebels against it, so much the greater challenge.¹⁴

The dagger seems to him as palpable as the witches' prophecies which have begun to come true. Foakes says of the next development, the allusion to the eyes and the other senses (ll. 45-46), that his eyes “show through this illusion what is compelling him from within”; the vision with its attendant self-knowledge wakes in him the action itself, here foreshadowed as he draws his own dagger. Then the blood standing on the airy vision reminds him again, as the encounter with the witches first had, of the murderous thoughts which are truly his own yet (he would like to think) seem somehow put upon him as if by unknown forces. But whatever incitement that blood, and the horror of the night, may be, he tries to deny the reality of the bloody vision and hide himself from his guilty surroundings. His imaginings impel him onward, yet he must refuse their actuality as they lead him.

In his struggle to undo himself while yet hiding knowledge of that action from himself, Macbeth relies, perhaps unconsciously, on his wife's unrestrained will and open acknowledgment of its force. Manlove says of Macbeth's matter-of-fact announcement to her of Duncan's plan to arrive and then leave “Tomorrow, as he purposes” (I.v.60), “He can pretend that everything he says of Duncan's visit is perfectly natural, can seek to divide himself from his evil purpose so that his wife will be his prompter” (p. 139) and will, for instance, exclaim, “O, never / Shall sun that morrow see!” She readily enacts and gives power to the impulses he feels obliged to resist, even if she must as a rationale unconsciously falsify his nature: he is by her standards too full of the milk of human kindness. Thus, as she ministers to his need for self-deceit, she forms an image of him that allows her the roles she herself craves of not only king-maker but devil-maker. This couple, whose relationship many critics have found highly charged sexually, unconsciously carry out variant hypothetical senses of the ending of Sonnet 138: “Therefore I lie with her, and she with me, / And in our faults by lies we flattered be.”¹⁵ The role Lady Macbeth chooses puts her effectively in rivalry with the weird sisters: as she reads of their message, which confirms for her too the reality of “fate and metaphysical aid,” she charges the absent Macbeth to “Hie thee hither, / That I may pour my spirits in thine ear” (I.v.25-26), a contrast not only between her spirits and Macbeth's, but between hers and the witches' in power over his ear. But she becomes adequate to the mission only by her dread prayer:

                                                                                          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! Make thick my blood;
Stop up th' access and passage to remorse,
That no compunctious visitings of nature
Shake my fell purpose, nor keep peace between
Th' effect and it! …

(I.v.40-47)

Whether or not this happens, a terrible price is somehow exacted, as in the Sleepwalking Scene. But she gains her object, to outdo the witches by overwhelming Macbeth's last resistance to the tempting images they have stirred in him. Throughout, there are unknowing complicities of falsehood and flattery (some of it self-flattery) by husband and wife even in their frankly acknowledged commitments to evil. Thus it is that once again open warnings subvert or invert themselves and become incitements.

As he learns to do the deed that fills his imagination, Macbeth tries also to practice his wife's counsel to “Look like th' innocent flower, / But be the serpent under 't” (I.v.65-66). He hardly seems a success at it; the result is best described by Lady Macbeth's comment on the plan to accuse the grooms of Duncan's death, “Who dares receive it other?” (I.vii.78). In the two rumor scenes—II.iv and III.vi—Macduff and Lennox clothe their criticisms of Macbeth in irony (Lennox only partly, Macduff so fully that scarcely anything but his intention of going home instead of to the investiture gives him away). Irony, a circumspect figure of rhetoric that is still much used in politically repressive situations, gives the lie by convention to the surface meaning of what is said; it might be considered an implicit variant on the liar paradox, though it is only as fully unsettling as that paradox when it is (in Wayne Booth's terms) unstable and infinite.¹⁶ Here it discreetly unmasks actions that were themselves, as suggested by Lady Macbeth's rhetorical question, by no means totally hidden. The counterpart in deeds of the liar paradox is well described by these words of Brian Vickers on the events of the play: “once it has gained its desires, evil can afford to declare itself. Yet in Macbeth's case that declaration was not voluntary, or the result of carelessness. His guilt has been exposed by his own actions.”¹⁷ For whatever reasons—conscious or unconscious, voluntary or involuntary—supposedly hidden actions can disclose themselves and to that extent function like liar paradoxes, challenging the beholder in turn to enter into a “knowing” self-deception. As he acknowledges more openly to himself his commitment to evil and ceases to need his wife as a counterweight to his conscience, Macbeth takes the initiative in deeds and hides them from her, though by the time of the raid on Macduff's castle he is quite open in his intimidation of all the thanes. All these developments figure in his conclusion (which he does divulge in general terms to his wife) that “I am in blood / Stepp'd in so far that, should I wade no more, / Returning were as tedious as go o'er” (III.iv.137-39). He has achieved, though at other great costs, release from doubts about his nature (so that secrecy from his wife is a kind of openness with himself) and about his ability to act out evil, and also release from the need for hypocrisy. His full commitment to evil makes for a new honesty with himself and implicitly the nation, though it is a self-undermining honesty.

Another of Macbeth's honesties consists in speaking lies which by his own actions, even the very words themselves,¹⁸ come true. Though there is a sort of honesty in the outcome, the starting point is outrageous hypocrisy with no intention of truth. There is thus a particular force in Macbeth's extravagant lament for Duncan:

Had I but died an hour before this chance,
I had liv'd a blessed time; for, from this instant,
There's nothing serious in mortality;
All is but toys. Renown and grace is dead;
The wine of life is drawn, and the mere lees
Is left this vault to brag of.

(II.iii.92-97)

Among several critics who have recognized senses in which these words come true, perhaps the best commentator is Wilbur Sanders:

… by making Macbeth spokesman for this insight, Shakespeare imparts a peculiar twist to the sense—Renown and Grace is dead. Though it is Macbeth's self-accusation that speaks, recognising how he has uncreated something which it is not within his powers to recall to life either in Duncan or in himself, nevertheless he has performed the murder of Renown and Grace for his world, as well as for himself. For the world of the play, too, these things are dead.

(pp. 257-58)¹⁹

Macbeth has indeed performed through these words (and thus made them an instance of what they announce) the same murder of virtues that he has in another sense enacted physically. His hyperbole—a figure that Puttenham calls “the loud lyer”²⁰—must be heard by the thanes, whatever their suspicions, in the spirit of “Who dares receive it other?” Thus his rhetoric ensures that all court rhetoric hereafter will ring false, though its hearers or speakers may guess or even know the truth. And there is still more performative force to his words about Banquo. Even while trying to spy out his travel plans to plot his death, Macbeth charges Banquo not to miss the banquet (III.i.27). Then, when he knows Banquo lies in a ditch, he tells the company he wishes “the grac'd person of our Banquo present, / Who may I rather challenge for unkindness / Than pity for mischance” (III.iv.41-43). Though he is horrified when the spirit of Banquo responds to this reproach and invitation, he renews it with a toast and again sees the apparition, which this time also leaves at his bidding. The point is not only that murder will out, although that is the theme of most of his asides here; the guilt really becomes public only to the extent that Macbeth himself behaves strangely. In his compulsive repetition, Macbeth seems actually to be testing and fearing the power of his own words, as he had first shaken at the witches' imposing speech. So it is not surprising that he should now seek out the witches and desperately trust “to know, / By the worst means, the worst …” (III.iv.135-36). Having found against his will what seems a supernatural power to make evil come true by lying, he must trace this power to its apparent source and know the full range of that evil.

Macbeth's suspicions of the witches whom he has determined to consult again should have been an important context for his understanding of their messages, since, as Garnet argues, the circumstances of the speaker are a sufficient clue to the presence of equivocation. Macbeth had first believed the witches not because he wanted to (at least, one side of him) but because their prophecies began to come true in quite a literal sense and because they seemed to have access to the frightening secrets of his heart. Now he so craves foreknowledge, still of a literal sort, that he suppresses his doubts and better judgment. Though he had once been honest with himself about the consequences of evil while self-deceiving about his motives for thinking of them, he now is fully aware of his purposes but unwilling to give the foretelling of consequences a proper scrutiny.

The question of literalism is relevant because the issue is one of interpretive conventions (including the role of figurative meaning): the debates about equivocation, on their more intellectual level, rehearsed the canons of scriptural interpretation, which stood in those days for a semiotics. The Jesuit account of equivocation as a method of scriptural exegesis relied in a major way, as explained by Frank L. Huntley, on the concept of mixed propositions, part spoken and another part only thought or held as a mental reservation; the unspoken portion gave a new turn to the meaning.²¹ Mental reservation was claimed to be necessary to explain many scriptural passages as being not lies if rightly understood; the foremost Jesuit partisan, Robert Parsons, argued, for instance, among many examples, that John the Baptist's negative answer to the question “Are you a Prophet?” (John 1:21, translated differently in the King James version) was a model for priests to deny their office when unlawfully asked.²² Mixed propositions might also have a visual component: Huntley mentions an anecdote that St. Francis of Assisi helped a poor man escape his pursuers by looking the wrong direction while saying “He went that way,” but pointing the true way inside his sleeve: and Parsons invents a facetious instance that his opponent Thomas Morton might receive a bequest when a dying man says “I giue and bequeath vnto Thomas Morton,” then (his voice failing) writes “a thousand” and points to a gold angel.²³

Morton's counterclaim is that the problematic scriptural passages can be interpreted figuratively through multiple verbal meanings rather than addition of understood phrases or clauses; thus John is not a prophet in the senses meant by the questioners but in another sense.²⁴ He considers that the equivocations in Parson's examples “are not properly Mentall, but Verball, because the meanings which he calleth Reseruations, were implied in the words of those sentences, and in the circumstances thereof” and he generalizes that “there is no speech in Scripture, whether it be proper or figuratiue, but it accordeth vnto the vse of the outward words and the meaning may possibly be apprehended by an intelligent Reader, who can iustly obserue the phrase of speech, and the due circumstances thereof” (pp. 157, 129). The principle of latent double meaning to which Morton appeals is amphibology; it is a major concept for Parsons too, but he considers it only one form of equivocation, and he emphasizes that use of different meanings by different persons in scriptural examples creates misunderstanding among those persons.²⁵ A basic assumption by Morton is revealed by this quotation he gives on the ethics of equivocation from Azorius, a Catholic casuist whom he frequently cites: “If the words we vse are not according to their common signification among men, ambiguous or doubtfull, and haue only one sense, we ought to vse them in that sense which they haue in themselues … but he doth lie who vnderstandeth his speeches otherwise than they do signifie in themselues.”²⁶ Most words, it seems, have only a single meaning, which resides in the word itself (though some have more than one, also inherent in the word, and though there is also ambiguity of syntax). There is an obligation to use, and a right to interpret according to, these intrinsic meanings; the trouble with mental reservation is that deviant senses are not signaled.

The problem in interpreting equivocations is thus measured at least partly by the gap between mental reservation as a possible hidden tactic of the speaker or writer and the conventional resources of construing language available as well to hearers and readers, the latter exemplified by amphibology and the circumstances of the speaker or writer.²⁷ In the scriptural examples the need for an equivocal reading is usually argued from the inadequacy of literal meaning; is evident literal falsity therefore a means of conveying figurative truth? Puttenham emphasizes the duplicity of figures, “because they passe the ordinary limits of common vtterance, and be occupied of purpose to deceiue the eare and also the minde, drawing it from plainnesse and simplicitie to a certaine doublenesse, whereby our talke is the more guilefull & abusing” (p. 154), and he sets forth the conventions for doing this (thereby reducing whatever “deceit” there might have been). The contradictory self-reference of the liar paradox is not fully present here, since the evident falsehood is literal whereas the truth it supposedly points to is figurative; but the two might come into paradoxical conflict if the equivocation were so thorough as to break down the barrier between figurative and literal.

The specific issue in the play is the nature of the equivocation, and the possibility for decoding it, in the apparitions and their messages given to Macbeth at his urging: the armed head that warns “Beware Macduff,” the bloody child that tells Macbeth to “Be bloody, bold, and resolute; laugh to scorn / The pow'r of man, for none of woman born / Shall harm Macbeth,” and the crowned child bearing a tree who advises and prophesies “Be lion-mettled, proud, and take no care / Who chafes, who frets, or where conspirers are. / Macbeth shall never vanquish'd be until / Great Birnam wood to high Dunsinane hill / Shall come against him” (IV.i.71, 79-81, 90-94). In one literal reading the last two of these prophecies describe impossibilities and thus misleadingly give hopeful messages; indeed, as Howard Felperin says, “It is only when we suppress their literal meaning (and our own literalism) and take the prophecies solely at a figurative level that they can be said to ‘come true’ at all. …”²⁸ They are like the trick prophecies in Act I, Scene iv of 2 Henry VI, where Suffolk is warned of death by water (he dies at the hand of Walter Whitmore) and Somerset is advised to shun castles (the Castle Inn at St. Albans being the place of his doom), though we may sense more importance in the present tricks. Yet they are not wholly tricks, for taken literally the words conflict with the companion prophecy about Macduff; there is this much of a verbal signal to interpret them warily. And the mixed propositions of verbal and visual do somewhat more to express the nature of the verbal equivocation: as various critics point out (though it surely takes second-guessing to perceive it) the bloody child hints Macduff's caesarian birth and the crowned child holding the tree suggests the heir to the crown bearing a cut branch. But the spectacle too has its varied tonalities: apart from the blood and the content of the verbal messages, the babes and the tree could have been “life-themes” (G. Wilson Knight), or “the unpredictable future” and “the living green of nature itself” (Cleanth Brooks).²⁹ The very proliferation of conflicting or doubtful messages and symbols should itself hint that there may be traps of interpretation.

The greatest trap of all is precisely in Macbeth's relation to what is told him. As Sanders remarks of all the prophecies in the play, including especially the earlier ones:

The very predictions seem to presuppose the effect they will have upon Macbeth—as if a deterministic net had been cast over the whole action. … The double nature of the prophecies (as merely descriptive and so powerless to effect what they predict, and yet binding upon Macbeth as a kind of Fate) is reflected in his equivocal attitude to them: in so far as he acts, he takes the future on his shoulders and undertakes to create it, thus becoming the accomplice, or even the master, of his fate; yet he persists in regarding the future as pre-ordained and Fate as his master.

(pp. 280-81)

This perception of Macbeth's involvement in the prophecies' completion is powerfully, if indirectly, true in the three predictions borne by the apparitions. Whatever the need to beware Macduff already, Macbeth greatly increases the danger by slaughtering Macduff's family. The spirits actually counsel against this by urging him to scorn the power of man and take no care about conspirers; yet the predictions on which that hopeful advice is based prove equivocal, though again there are warning signs. In any case, though, by a further ironic turn, Macbeth makes false hope and bravado a reason to discard after all the small bit of potentially helpful guidance among much that is deceptive:

Then live, Macduff; what need I fear of thee?
But yet I'll make assurance double sure,
And take a bond of fate. Thou shalt not live,
That I may tell pale-hearted fear it lies,
And sleep in spite of thunder.

(IV.i.82-86)

This resolution of his is redirected in a worse way still when news comes through that Macduff has fled, leaving his family unprotected. Thus Macbeth takes literally what needs to be figurative, fails to measure words by sights, and misplaces both doubt and trust. He mistakes a complex of deceptions, but one that by that same token should not be deceptive that it is deceptive. Though he is merely auditor and spectator of the apparitions, being denied direct intervention by speech, he breaks the plane of their self-contained reality in another way by helping to create his own deceptions and fulfill one prophecy literally by perceiving the literal impossibility of the others. In becoming a part of the self-deluding show and undoing some literalisms to confirm another, he skews the boundaries of literal and figurative and of perceiver and perceived, with paradoxical results.³⁰

More paradoxical still is Macbeth's powerful meditation on hearing his wife's death, in words which reflect not only on themselves and the life they describe but on actor and audience:

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.24-28)

Although one impulse we may have is to dissociate ourselves from this view of life and say that life is meaningless to Macbeth only because he has made it so, the words here must bring to a crisis the general question posed by Bernard McElroy: “How can a man who violates his humanity tell us so much about what humanity is?”³¹ To this question we may add: “especially when he tells us that life signifies nothing?” The problem is further sharpened in Sanders's quotation from Lascelles Abercrombie as if to foretell the progeny of Saussure: “in the very act of proclaiming that life is ‘a tale told by an idiot, signifying nothing’, personal life announces its virtue, and superbly signifies itself” (Sanders, p. 303). The self-reference bothers Sanders, who wishes to avoid “the guillotine criterion of philosophic respectability, which would make Macbeth's sentiments appear self-condemned in the very utterance”; on the contrary, in the context of the liar paradox (a traditional challenge to philosophic respectability that is not considered by Sanders) letting the contraries battle each other need not really cancel them. It is the poor player acting Macbeth who tells, in words that signify that they signify nothing, of the poor player as a symbol of nothingness; there is then at least a double self-reference, one dimension of which is metadramatic. Thus David Willbern suggests that “Even that most desperate and apparently nihilistic statement of the nothingness of theatrical significance, which Macbeth utters at the end of his play, sounds some positive notes of affirmation: that it is the player, the stage, and the tale that signify, award significance to, exist within and create images for, nothing”; and from an actor's viewpoint (and less positively) Ian McKellen asks his audiences something like “If Macbeth thinks McKellen is wasting his time, what the hell do you think you're doing watching me?”³² It is right that the audience should be drawn in here: we somehow try to look for meaning not only in these words but in the whole play, and we presumably draw our criteria for meaning in some fashion from the life that is here said to be meaningless. All this would seem to dissolve reality in some more severe way than Puck's epilogue ever could; but Macbeth, the actor, and we all contemplate in some manner the minimal features of our humanity (not least of which is the ability to delimit what we are not in words which create their own limitations by denying themselves). Thus our common enterprise achieves a kind of essentiality through the excluding and self-annulling assertion of nothingness. If Lear achieves “the thing itself” by giving away all in folly and contemplating nothingness, Macbeth attains that negative vision by a commitment to evil that reduces his life to nothing; and it is such a vision that compels us to join in understanding though we would not or dare not in action. We share with the criminal because we care about (and are) the poor player. When, confronted at once thereafter with the deceptive truth of the prophecies, Macbeth denounces “th' equivocation of the fiend / That lies like truth …” (V.v.43-44), we should recall that it is the function of the player to lie like truth and of the audience to believe what it knows to be equivocation. These thoughts apply though the apparitions in fact declared deceptive impossibilities (rather than apparent truths) and though Macbeth equivocated with himself in rejecting them. We ourselves must cannily credit the nothingness of the very drama that shows us the double vision, of the nothingness itself and of the means by which Macbeth reaches it.

At this distance the confidence of a Malcolm in veracity and of a Thomas Morton in the inherent meanings of words seems superficial. Macbeth “teaches” us far more than the circumstances of his own story would seem to allow—even if that “far more” is itself a sense of limitations shown by means that delimit themselves. Through the many equivocal analogues of the liar paradox—exposures of figurative meaning (be they metaphors, hyperboles, ironies, puns, or other equivocations), portrayals of self-deception (tacit or “open”), displays of acts or words that dare others to perceive their evident falsity, and exhibits of initially false but self-fulfilling prophecies which undermine the self and of lies which performatively become truths—we confront the metadramatic illusions with which the play both forbids and compels us to delude ourselves.

Notes

1. The Dramatist and the Received Idea (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1968), p. 262. Quotations from Shakespeare come from David Bevington's edition of the Complete Works, 3rd ed. (Glenview, Ill.: Scott, Foresman, 1980). I gratefully acknowledge the assistance of the University of Kansas General Research Fund grant 3612-X0-0038.

2. “Lying Like Truth: Riddle, Representation and Treason in Renaissance England,” ELH, 47 (1980), 42. Joan Hartwig sees Malcolm's self-misrepresentation as parody of Macbeth's degenerated nature (Shakespeare's Analogical Scene [Lincoln: Univ. of Nebraska Press, 1983], pp. 57-65). Ninian Mellamphy compares Malcolm's well-meant deceit to his later camouflage with the branches of Birnam wood (“The Ironic Catastrophe in Macbeth,” Ariel, 11 [1980], 12-13).

3. Harsnet, A Declaration of egregious Popish Impostures (London, 1603), p. 255: Mention of equivocation, my next topic, occurs on pages 165 and 167-68, and the doctrine is implicit in Tyrrell's comments following the quotation. Did Tyrrell perhaps try to sabotage his testimony, insofar as he dared, by presenting himself as untrustworthy? His career is briefly considered by D. P. Walker, Unclean Spirits (Philadelphia: Univ. of Pennsylvania Press, 1981), pp. 44-45. Discussions of Harsnet include Henry N. Paul, The Royal Play of Macbeth (New York: Macmillan, 1950), pp. 96-102; William R. Elton, King Lear and the Gods San Marino, Calif.: Huntington Library, 1966), pp. 89-94; Stephen Greenblatt, “King Lear and Harsnett's ‘Devil-Fiction,’” Genre, 15 (1982), 239-42.

4. Bell, The Anatomie of Popish Tyrannie (London, 1603), p. 58; Bagshaw, A True relation of the faction begun at Wisbich (n.p., 1601), p. 73. Good guides to the various disputes and their participants are Peter Milward, Religious Controversies of the Elizabethan Age (Lincoln: Univ. of Nebraska Press, 1977), and his companion volume on the Jacobean age (Religious Controversies of the Jacobean Age [Lincoln: Univ. of Nebraska Press, 1978]). There are discussions of equivocation in Macbeth in Paul, pp. 237-47; Kenneth Muir's Arden edition, rev. ed. (London: Methuen, 1962), pp. xv-xviii, xxv-xxvi; Frank L. Huntley, “Macbeth and the Background of Jesuitical Equivocation,” PMLA, 79 (1964), 390-400, with reply by A. E. Malloch, PMLA, 81 (1966), 145-46; Huntley, Essays in Persuasion (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1981), pp. 40-47; Mullaney; and Camille Wells Slights, The Casuistical Tradition (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1981), pp. 106-32.

5. A Replie unto a certaine Libell, latelie set foorth by Fa: Parsons (n.p., 1603), fol. 90.

6. A Treatise of Equivocation, ed. David Jardine (London, 1851), pp. 103-4. (Newberry Library copy.)

7. A Fvll Satisfaction Concerning a Dovble Romish Iniqvitie; hainous Rebellion, and more then heathenish Aequiuocation (London, 1606), Part 3, p. 89 (I have deleted a period before the first italics). Morton obviously reacts also to the Gunpowder Plot. Michael Goldman writes thus about these two “iniquities”: “The destruction at one fell swoop of the entire ruling order of England, apparently averted only at the last moment; the readiness of priests of God to swear to a lie on principle—such discoveries must have seemed to many abruptly to open an abyss of evil possibility in the foundations of normal life” (“Language and Action in Macbeth,” in Focus on Macbeth, ed. John Russell Brown [London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1982], p. 144).

8. The appropriate passage is in the edition of The Rule of Reason by Richard S. Sprague (Northridge, Calif.: San Fernando Valley State College, 1972), pp. 216-17. I have given reasons for Wilson's relevance in “The Paradox of Timon's Self-Cursing,” Shakespeare Quarterly, 35 (1984), 290-304; to these should be added Wilson's mention of a dream which warns against believing dreams, like Mercutio's by-play in Romeo and Juliet, I.iv.50-51. “This very sentence is true” is a truth-teller paradox, like the examples in J. L. Mackie, Truth, Probability and Paradox (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1973), p. 298. A later book on the liar paradox, to supplement my references in the article just mentioned, is Recent Essays on Truth and the Liar Paradox, ed. Robert L. Martin (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1984).

9. Sanders (see fn.1) speaks of “the coincidence, in the Witches, of apparent objectivity with a heart-stopping fidelity to [Macbeth's] inmost consciousness …” (p. 278).

10. An alternative reading of Macbeth's character would find his soliloquies not necessarily reflective of his consciousness, or ambiguous whether they do represent conscious thought. (Nicholas Brooke, “Language most shows a man … ? Language and Speaker in Macbeth,” in Shakespeare's Styles, eds. Philip Edwards, Inga-Stina Ewbank, and G. K. Hunter [Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1980], pp. 70-71.) If the choice is a matter of personal taste and one's own impression of the play, I should say only that I find conflict in Macbeth's mind both truer to my impression and more interesting in itself. Robin Grove sees in Macbeth “a conscience caught into self-destruction: suddenly and without warning caught into a state of disbelief or self-undoing, where previous certainties are lost and nothing holds as it used to at some sticking-place” (“Multiplying Villainies of Nature,” in Brown, Focus on Macbeth, p. 120.) Slights (p. 111) argues interestingly that recognition of equivocation turns it into paradox—though, like the other critics she cites, she does not deal in particular with the liar paradox in this play.

11. The Gap in Shakespeare (London: Vision; Totowa, N.J.: Barnes & Noble, 1981), p. 144.

12. Freud, “Negation,” trans. Joan Rivière, The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works, XIX (London: Hogarth Press, 1961), 235.

13. Ure, Elizabethan and Jacobean Drama, ed. J. C. Maxwell (New York: Barnes & Noble, 1974), p. 45.

14. “Images of Death: Ambition in Macbeth,” in Focus on Macbeth, p. 17. Slights considers that in this soliloquy Macbeth retreats from the vivid image of evil to stage villainy (pp. 115-16).

15. The sonnet is discussed by Christopher Ricks, “Lies,” Critical Inquiry, 2 (1975), 130-31.

16. A Rhetoric of Irony, (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1974), pp. 240-77.

17. “Shakespeare's Hypocrites,” Daedalus, 108 (1979), 61.

18. Here would be a wry turn to the performative speech acts of J. L. Austin. For self-undermining and self-referential speech acts in relation to the liar paradox, see my article “The Paradox of Timon's Self-Cursing.”

19. Vickers says that “this speech is both self-fulfilling—Macbeth will not enjoy any ‘blessed time’ from this point onwards—and literally true, since ‘grace is dead,’ and Macbeth has killed it (one of its forms is sleep, which he has also murdered)” (p. 60). I think “performative” is more accurate here than “self-fulfilling,” but the close kinship of the two ideas is instructive.

20. The Arte of English Poesie, eds. Gladys Doidge Willcock and Alice Walker (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1936), p. 191. Macbeth's rhetoric here is worth contrasting with the tightly controlled litotes of I.iv.22-27, with which Macbeth fends off Duncan's hyperbolic praise. For Duncan's hyperboles, see Harry Berger, Jr., “The Early Scenes of Macbeth: Preface to a New Interpretation,” ELH, 47 (1980), 20-22.

21. Essays in Persuasion, p. 42.

22. A Quiet and Sober Reckoning with M. Thomas Morton (St. Omer, 1609), p. 487.

23. Huntley, pp. 41-42; Parsons, A Treatise Tending to Mitigation towarde Catholicke-Subiectes in England (St. Omer, 1607), p. 326.

24. The Encounter against M. Parsons (London, 1610), Bk. II, pp. 142-43.

25. On amphibology, see Morton, Encounter, II, 127, I, 211; Parsons, Mitigation, p. 313; and Huntley and especially Mullaney. Though the fullest discussions of these issues in the religious polemics postdate Macbeth, the combatants appeal to the conventions of classical rhetoric and to scriptural interpretations by the Church Fathers.

26. A Preamble vnto an Incounter with P. R. [i.e., Robert Parsons] (London, 1608), p. 83. The assumption of a standard literal meaning is usual in the rhetoricians' definitions of tropes, as in Puttenham's of metaphor as “a kinde of wresting of a single word from his owne right signification, to another not so naturall, but yet of some affinitie or conueniencie with it” (p. 178).

27. Mullaney makes a connection between mental reservation and speaker's intention, but he rightly insists that in this play equivocal language gets out of Macbeth's intended control (p. 40).

28. Shakespearean Representation (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1977), p. 134. Stephen Orgel has suggested in correspondence that emphasis on “born” in the second prophecy could signal a restrictive but literal reading which Macbeth does not make. Likewise, he says, “Birnam wood” in the last prediction could mean simply “wood from Birnam”—though in that case one would be reading against the syntactical matching of “wood” and “hill.” Though G. Wilson Knight glances at the role of prophecies in 2 Henry VI and Macbeth (my next point), he does not compare their equivocal natures (“Notes on Shakespeare,” The New Adelphi, 1 [1927], 71).

29. Knight, The Imperial Theme, 3rd ed. (London: Methuen, 1951), pp. 150-51; Brooks, The Well Wrought Urn (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1947), pp. 46-47. (Brooks's second phrase applies actually to the branches carried by Malcolm's army rather than to the apparition that foretells them.)

30. More paradoxical, but perhaps differing in degree rather than kind, are the techniques of contemporary metafiction, which include paradoxical self-reference. See Patricia Waugh, Metafiction (London: Methuen, 1984), esp. pp. 100, 133, 141-42. Also comparable may be the “strange loops” perceived in the arts and thought of various eras by Douglas Hofstadter, Gödel, Escher, Bach (New York: Basic Books, 1979).

31. Shakespeare's Mature Tragedies (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1973), p. 217. Norman Rabkin in effect describes a double bind as of the essence of Macbeth's situation: “the regicide's lack of pleasure in his accomplishments is presented not moralistically, as a judgment on evil deeds, but as a defining fact of the deeds themselves” (Shakespeare and the Problem of Meaning [Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1981], p. 102).

32. Willbern, “Shakespeare's Nothing,” in Representing Shakespeare, eds. Murray M. Schwartz and Coppélia Kahn (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1980), p. 257. McKellen, one-man performance and commentary on selected passages from Shakespeare, quoted from memory of televised version. Rosalie Colie discusses this speech but without reference to the liar paradox, though she considers that topic elsewhere (Paradoxia Epidemica [1966; rpt. Hamden, Conn.: Archon, 1976], pp. 236-37).