[In the following essay, Foster contends that Macbeth is a slave of time, a man who questions whether his fate is predetermined yet whose boundless will to power leads him to seize the future on his own terms and create himself king. However, the critic proposes, Macbeth's failure to transcend the inexorable progress of time, his most pernicious enemy, ultimately leads him to a nihilistic conviction that his life—indeed all life—is meaningless.]

James I, in his preface to the Basilikon Doron (1603), notes that men must “be very warie in all their secretest actions, and whatsoeuer middesses they vse for attaining to their most wished ends.” This is especially true, he says, in the affairs of kings:

for Kings being publike persons, by reason of their office and authority, are as it were set (as it was said of old) vpon a publike stage, in the sight of all the people; where all the beholders eyes are attentiuely bent to looke and pry in the least circumstance of their secretest drifts: Which should make Kings the more careful not to harbour the secretest thought in their minde … assuring themselues that Time the mother of Veritie, will in the due season bring her owne daughter to perfection.¹

We have no record of James's critical response to Macbeth, but there are many who would applaud his meditation on the old figure of the “player-king” as a commentary on Shakespeare's Scottish tragedy: Truth, the daughter of Time, has at last a coming-out party in Act V, as riddling prophecies are unravelled, and as King Macbeth, “the secretest man of blood,” is shown to his countrymen for what he is, a fiendlike butcher, so unlike his spiritual opposite, that most sainted prince, young Malcolm.² The sin, disease, chaos, and falsehood of Macbeth find their answer in Malcom's piety, medicine, order, and truth. Macbeth, like those nineteenth-century French narratives discussed by Roland Barthes, raises “the question as if it were a subject which one delays predicating; and when the predicate (truth) arrives, the sentence, the narrative, are over, the world is adjectivized (after we had feared it would not be).” In short, Shakespeare in his Scottish play poses a problem and solves it, producing thereby a drama which follows Barthes' “classic” narrative pattern: “Truth, these narratives tell us, is what is at the end of expectation. This design brings narrative very close to the rite of initiation (a long path marked with pitfalls, obscurities, stops, suddenly comes out in the light); it implies a return to order, for expectation is a disorder.”³ This, some would say, is no less true of the disorder in Macbeth's Scotland than of the narrative's own “disorder” of expectation. In fact, the expectation of order is so strong at the close of Macbeth that critics for years have out-Malcolm'd Malcolm in their expressions of a beatific future. “Blood will cease to flow,” writes one, “movement will recommence, fear will be forgotten, sleep will season every life, and the seeds of life will blossom in due order.” “Virtue and justice are restored,” exclaims another. “The time is free, the ‘weal’ once more made ‘gentle.’” “The true cosmic playwright”—God—“now controls the world stage,” writes a third, “and is prepared to create pattern out of the chaos and significance out of Malcolm's victory. …” “No longer will innocent flowers shelter serpents,” writes a fourth. “Appearances will be attuned again with reality. … Macbeth's reign becomes the memory of a nightmare, scarcely disturbing Scotland's serene future.”⁴ All will be performed in measure, time, and place.

I

What interests me is not so much whether these critics are right or wrong in their unequivocal prophecies of bliss, but that such prophecies are made at all. It is not that I fault them for speaking of Malcolm and Macduff and company as “real” people with a “real” future, for insofar as the text comments on a past or future beyond the confines of narrative time, it is our business to discuss it as part of the fiction, as an inherent part of what defines the world of Macbeth. But it is curious that the criticism, until very recently, has been so unanimous in its expectation of a return to order after Macbeth's demise. For how can we know, finally, what sort of world it is that Malcolm's Scotland has inherited? We have, of course, the testimony of Macduff that the “time is free,” which is perhaps the most oft-quoted line from the play outside Macbeth's “tomorrow” soliloquy; and most have taken his word as gospel, assuming either that Macduff is a man of astute judgment, or else that his words have a kind of magical efficacy in defining his world's future. Yet Macduff is the man who fled to England to escape Macbeth's bloody sword, while trusting his wife and children to the power of positive thinking; and though he declares that the time is free, he does so in a play in which the “good” characters are marked by their signal inability to learn from their mistakes. His declaration carries no greater freight of truth than Duncan's announcement in 1.2 that the Thane of Cawdor shall never more deceive his bosom interest.

From the play's opening line, the text glances repeatedly at Scotland's troubled future, as the natural harvest and inevitable repetition of a troubled past. In Malcolm we are presented with a future king whose speech—beginning with his self-impeachment (the only lie ever told by this “weak, poor, innocent lamb”), or perhaps even with his odd response to the news of his father's murder (“O, by whom?”)—displays nothing but an empty bosom, a cunning mind, and a ready tongue. And though we are not told which of the two princes laughed in his sleep as Duncan bled, in the end it makes no difference, for at the close revenges still burn in men, and it is “certain” that Donalbain is not with his brother (5.2.7-8). In fact, his conspicuous and pointed absence in the fifth act (by which Shakespeare refers his audience to Holinshed's familiar chronicles) might well prompt Malcolm to say of Donalbain what Macbeth once said of Fleance: his absence is material. Holinshed reports that Malcolm eventually died a gruesome death, his head skewered through the eye upon the spear of an English knight; after which Donalbain returned from Ireland, slew Malcolm's eldest son, and usurped the throne. Moreover, during Malcolm's reign, “all the laws that Makbeth had ordeined were abrogated”; the whole realm was given over to “intestine rebellion,” “slaughter in all parts,” “more crueltie than euer had beene heard of before,” “discommoditie and decaie,” “outragious riot,” “licorous desires,” “corrupted abuses,” “riotous manners,” and “superfluous gormandizing.”⁵ If art in this case imitates a life, Malcolm's crafty false-speaking against himself is only too true.

Nor can there be a “return” to order when there was none to begin with. We are given no hint in Shakespeare that Duncan's reign was ever anything but bloody and chaotic. Indeed, the King's opening question, “What bloody man is that,” might well be answered, “a Scotsman.” Word of rebellion, treason, betrayal, and killing come post with post, without so much as breathing space between. An ineffectual king, Duncan can do nothing but inquire after “the newest state” of a broil which seems to have no beginning or end. And insofar as the three weird sisters represent the forces of darkness, the first line of the play—“Where shall we three meet again”—suggests already that what we shall see on the heath, or stage, is a repetition, more of the same.

That Macbeth follows a narrative curve from order/goodness/truth to chaos/badness/falsehood and back again is the illusion of those who would have their drama serve, not as a metaphor for life (in which our search for a first cause or grammatical subject drives us ever into the dark backward and abysm of time), but rather as a metaphor for some fictive or dream reality that has, in fact, a beginning, middle, and end: that is, a neatly contained world without causality or transience. In this respect, the reader's demand for a narrative based on the diad of subject and predicate, noun and verb, on expectation and desire for its imminent closure, is kin to the old cry for “poetic justice,” for it demands that the poet belie his world in the interest of the reader's metaphysical comfort. In the end, of course, all poets, all tests, do belie life; but the old demand for hermeneutic narrative, in which “truth” predicates an incomplete subject, is the demand for a conventional lie, the expected lie, linked, as Barthes would say, “to the kerygmatic civilization of meaning and truth, appeal and fulfillment.”⁶

In Macbeth the predicate, as truth, never arrives; nor is the world adjectivized, except by characters within the fiction, all of whom are partial to the action, and hence, unreliable judges. Shakespeare never essays to articulate the truth of Macbeth's history, nor even offers us a sum of perspectives which, when viewed holistically, comprise the truth. What we get instead is a variety of conflicting interpretations expressed by figures who themselves exist (until our imagination amends them) only as interpretation, as words in a text. “Some say he's mad; others, that lesser hate him, / Do call it valiant fury” (5.2.13-14). It is impossible to say, finally, whether Macbeth is aptly named “coward” or “brave,” “Bellona's bridegroom” or “bloody villain,” “royal lord” or “dwarfish thief,” “Majesty” or “monster,” “something wicked” or “angry god,” “noble partner” or “abhorréd tyrant.” Even the adjectives most frequently used to describe him—“good” (ten times) and “worthy” (nine times)—are neither true nor false, for all such words refer us not to any external reality but only to the figures who voice them, even as Macduff's “time is free” directs us not to truth, but to an interpretation, that is, to Macduff's own vision of a redeemed future, and to his sense that time past has been chained, hampered, enthralled by that cruel tyrant whose head is now mounted on a stick. Were the detached head able to speak in the final scene, it would, no doubt, say it was the other way around, that time was the tyrant, Macbeth time's fool and slave.

But if the passage of time in Macbeth fails to bring truth to perfection, the language of time may at least serve as a vantage from which to gain a new perspective: for time, in Macbeth, is the mother of many words. Nearly everyone is heard to “pay his breath to time” (4.1.99), from the lordly Malcolm to the lowly porter. Predictably, all this talk of time has generated a good deal of critical discussion as well; but according to the orthodox consensus (in essays by Stephen Spender, Roy Walker, Barbara Parker, Fred Turner, Ricardo Quinones, Francois Maguin, and Wylie Sypher, among others), this textual preoccupation with time and time's laws only serves to confirm Macbeth as a “closed” play (Sypher's term) in which the untimely Macbeths knock the time out of joint only to have the Malcolm-Macduff-Nature team knock it back in.⁷ As articulated by Frank Kermode, “The suffering of the Macbeths may be thought of as caused by the pressure of the world of order slowly resuming its true shape and crushing them. This is the work of time; as usual in Shakespeare, evil, however great, burns itself out, and time is the servant of providence. Nowhere is this clearer than in Macbeth. The damnation of the principal characters involves murder and destruction, outrage not only upon the state but upon the whole cosmos; but the balance is restored.” Kermode goes on to survey the numerous references in Macbeth to time and time's laws, and concludes, “As in Spenser, Time, apparently the destroyer, is the redeemer; yet it is itself redeemed. It seems very characteristic … of Shakespeare that there should be, in the greatest of the plays about human guilt, these semantic complexities concerning time, the element in which human life succeeds or fails, in which virtue is tested and evil brought to good.”⁸ Thus Macbeth's true history, which begins with a capital crime, ends (to use a figure from Othello), in a “bloody period.” Be sure your disorders will find you out.

But when hermetic abstractions of Time-as-redeemer are set aside long enough for us to look at the actual language used, we find that Macbeth is plagued by a persistent though largely unconscious impulse to take revenge on time itself, as the chief obstacle to the human will, as the very devil from which man must be redeemed. Perhaps the most famous (though by no means original) formulation of his dilemma is that expressed by Nietzsche's Zarathustra:

‘It was’—that is the name of the will's teeth-gnashing and most lonely affliction. Impotent against what is transpired, the will is a resentful spectator of all that has passed.

The will cannot will backwards; that it cannot break time and time's covetousness—that is the will's loneliest affliction.⁹

But this passage is often misunderstood. The human will does not resent simply the “what was” of time, or the past. Time exists as past, present, and future, and contains not only an “it was” but an “it is” and an “it shall be.” By stressing the “it was” as the object of the will's resentment, Nietzsche is concerned not merely with time past, but with time passing, with transience. The past bears the brunt of the will's resentment only because the past most obviously is ground whereon the will cannot operate. That which has come before cannot be changed or recreated in any literal sense. Therefore, having stumbled over this immovable rock, the will yields to a counter-will, a willing-against, an impulse to “get even.” All sentiment becomes ressentiment. Seeking to liberate itself from its chains, the resentful will lashes out against time and time's laws, sometimes in foolish ways:

Alas, every prisoner becomes a fool! The imprisoned will, too, releases itself in a foolish way.

It is resentful that time does not run back. … And so, out of rage and ill-temper, the will rolls stones about, taking revenge on him who does not, like it, feel rage and ill-temper.

Thus the liberating will becomes a felon, and upon all that can suffer it wreaks revenge for its inability to go backwards.

This, yea, this alone is revenge itself: the will's aversion to time and time's “It was.”¹⁰

Shakespeare's Troilus, in speaking of love, observes “that the will is infinite and the execution confined, that the desire is boundless and the act a slave to limit” (T & C, 3.2.80-82). Substitute the will to power for the sex drive, and we have the problem of Macbeth. Here is the figure of an infinite will trapped in a finite, transient body. The driving force behind Macbeth is not just a petty ambition to be named King of Scotland, but a far more radical impulse to be King over life itself, as indicated by his verbal obsession with time, causality, and transience. Macbeth would “entreat an hour to serve” his will, rather than vice versa (2.1.22). But for time's inexorable laws, his will “had else been perfect, / Whole as marble, founded as the rock. / As broad and general as the casing air.” Instead he finds his will “cabined, cribbed, confined, bound in,” (3.4.25), “the servant to defect, / Which else should free have wrought” (2.1.17-18). Unable to stem the flow of time, or to clip the chains of causality, unable to alter or recover that which time has established as the order of accomplished fact, Macbeth feels compelled to express his resentment in acts of bloody execution.

Macbeth's rage against time, like his impulse to murder Duncan, lies hidden until that fateful meeting with the weird sisters on the road to Forres. Heretofore his resentment has been repressed, denied, locked away in the unconscious. Since present fears are less than horrible imaginings, this Thane of Glamis has cast himself into the thick of every fray, “Nothing afeard of what [him]self didst make, / Strange images of death” (1.3.96-97); he has preferred to blot out the inner impulse, or “horrible imagining,” with an external sign, or “image of death.” Therefore, when it comes to protecting Duncan from the daggers of ambitious men, Macbeth is the nonpareil. The bloody man who brings report “of the revolt / The newest state” (1.2.1-2) cannot imagine what has possessed the Thane of Glamis to fight so relentlessly against overwhelming odds, unless perhaps he “meant to bathe in reeking wounds, / Or memorize another Golgotha” (1.2.39-40). But there is an element here of psychological realism, for according to Freud, drive (whether it be the will to power, sex drive, death drive, or poetic will) employs various mechanisms to defend itself against its own completeness, against its own need to look at what cannot be seen. Thus Macbeth's zeal in slaying the King's foes may be understood as a reaction formation by which he seeks to secure his ego against the return of bloody, repressed impulses from within.

The net effect of the witches' visit is that Macbeth is stripped forever of his ability to defend himself against his own black desires—which is why he “starts” when the weird sisters name him “King hereafter.” Their prophetic greeting is at once a fresh beginning and a cause of terror, for the suggestion that he may yet be King brings to mind, involuntarily, the repressed image of a bloody corse, a horrid vision of slain royalty which unfixes his hair and makes his seated heart to knock against his ribs, “against the use of nature.” He therefore attempts to dismiss the matter, and murder his murderous thought, with a chopped couplet, a failed attempt at closure: “Come what come may,” he says, “Time and the hour runs through the roughest day” (1.3.147-48). That his words are spoken not in resignation, but with an edge of resentment, is made apparent not only in the potentially bloody verb, “runs through,” but in the swelling act which follows. Were he resigned, there would be no assassination, and no play.

By referring him to “the coming on of time, with a ‘Hail, King that shalt be!’” the weird sisters legitimize, as it were, Macbeth's claim to a kingly title. But every title—whether it be the name of king, father, god, or Thane of Cawdor—is a “former title” (1.2.65). We always arrive too late: someone else has always come first. Macbeth, likewise, feels a vague resentment that he has not come first, that another should be already that which he wishes himself to be. Like many of his contemporaries, he would like to be King, and he is nearer than most to the crown. Unfortunately, Duncan exists already as the thing itself. Macbeth has been deprived of the kingship, as it were, by his own “belatedness.” Since Duncan holds a prior claim to the title, having come first in time, Macbeth must wait on time, as time's slave, for that which is “rightfully” his. It is an injury to his will, and Duncan will suffer for it.

It is here on the road to Forres that Macbeth's conscious assumptions about time are first called into question, as the play begins to probe the nature of man's relationship to time and causality. For example, there is in Banquo's phrase, “the seeds of time,” a genitive, and generative, ambiguity. If the “of” signifies composition or content (box of alabaster, bag of groceries), if the seeds of time exist as sprouts of future time in potentia, the implication is that the future is not yet determined: men are the gardeners of their world, and as willful creators with “free hearts” they may cultivate this or that seed of time, causing it to flourish. That this is Duncan's view is made apparent in his words to Macbeth: “I have begun to plant thee,” he says, “and will labor / To make thee full of growing” (1.4.28-29). If, on the other hand, the “of” is possessive, and time itself is the gardener, then it is left to the goddesses of destiny to say which grain will grow and which will not. The future then is fixed, contained in the present, and though man's seated, or “seeded,” heart may knock against the use of nature, time shall have its pleasure. This is Banquo's assumption, which is why he neither begs nor fears the witches' favors nor their hate.

Banquo's organic perception of time and stoic indifference to the chains of causality are foreign to Macbeth's mind. Macbeth advises men to plant themselves (3.1.129), and holds that man may be the master of his time (3.1.40). He therefore recoils before the witches' strange intelligence, for their words, their “shalt be” instead of “mayst be,” or even a “shalt be—if,” implies that all growth is foreordained. In this more than mortal knowledge the Thane of Glamis “seems rapt withal,” and wrapped as well, perceiving himself as, perhaps, a mere seed cast by time and fortune—a fearful meditation. Ironically, it is at precisely this moment, in which he hears himself named King hereafter, that the chilling thought first occurs to Macbeth that he may, in fact, be no more than time's slave.

That Macbeth cannot command transience is illustrated for him, as for us, in his command to the weird sisters: “Stay, you imperfect speakers,” he says, “tell me more / … Speak, I charge you” (1.3.70, 78). But the women promptly vanish, like the inhabitants of the earth, “Into the air, and what seemed corporal melted / As breath into the wind” (1.3.81-82). Macbeth's cry—“Would they had stayed!”—should, I think, be spoken on stage not wistfully, but with sudden and unexpected anger. Here was a vision of that earthly transience before which the self is nullified, and the assertive “will” reduced to “would.” Banquo and Macbeth, no less than these three old women, are among earth's “bubbles” (1.3.79), to be burst, sooner or later, by antic Death's little pin.

Lost in his contemplation of time's “it was,” Macbeth is overcome with a temporal vertigo that dizzies his speech. For example, when he learns that he has been named Thane of Cawdor, he says, “The greatest is behind” (1.3.117). Macbeth's conscious meaning is that the greatest is “to follow,” is yet to come, but the odd phrasing, which curiously conflates past and future, contains a suspicion that the greatest is irredeemably “behind him,” has come and gone.

Again, when he turns to those who stay upon his leisure, Macbeth excuses himself, saying, “My dull brain was wrought / With things forgotten” (1.3.149-50). The sentence itself is an attempt to murder the thought of killing Duncan. We might expect Macbeth to say, “My dull brain was wrought with matters that I will forget about for now. Let us toward the King.” Rather, his use of the past participle seems an attempt, in mid-sentence, to pronounce himself free of that horrible imagining which continues to shake him. Thus his lie to Banquo and company is a lie also to himself, for his mind is wrought with deeds, names, and men that are all but forgotten.

Having been referred to the coming on of time, Macbeth can see only time's “it was.” That which is great to be, is only a mirroring repetition of that greatness which lies behind. “Kind gentlemen,” he says, “your pains / Are registered where every day I turn / The leaf to read them” (1.4.150-52). But which way are the pages turning, forward or backward? He seems to mean, “Each day you perform new favors to be recorded,” but his words demand another reading as well: every day of his life he turns a new leaf, looking for a blank page on which to inscribe his name, only to find, already recorded there, the pains of kind (like-minded) gentlemen. As he speaks to his friends, Macbeth sees nothing before him but the spectres of the past. Every dread exploit, every heroic deed, every great name, is anticipated by time. Moreover, even if he does succeed in carving out a name and passage, his life will only fall into the sear, the yellow leaf of a tedious chronicle (5.3.22-23)—so that nothing is, but what is not.

In considering what motivates Macbeth, our vision has been too easily clouded by our own conventional goodness and perhaps, too, by the timidity of our evil. The traditional view of Macbeth as a man torn between his black desires on the one hand and Christian virtue on the other is too simple. For example, the thought occurs to Macbeth, “If chance will have me king, why chance may crown me, / Without my stir” (1.3.143-44). According to the customary reading of these lines, Macbeth has, then, good cause not to murder Duncan: if the weird sisters speak true, he need only wait, and the crown will fall into his lap—and that, perhaps, is Macbeth's conscious meaning. But we may perceive also in this short aside a spur to regicide: for if chance crowns him without his stir, what will he have gained? Only that which was foretold, a fruitless crown and barren sceptre. But he will have lost much. It is essential to Macbeth that he create himself as King, that he be crowned not passively by the hands of time and chance, but actively, by his own mortal hands. To be made King without his stir will not answer for him the question of whether or not he is simply time's slave, subject to experience whatever time has in store. Macbeth's question is not, Dare I do a wicked deed to gain the Scottish crown, but rather, Do I dare disturb the universe? Shall I resign myself as the slave of limit, or shall I seek to liberate myself, by jumping the life to come and seizing the future now, on my own terms? Lady Macbeth, therefore, says more than she knows when she chides her husband, saying that when neither time nor place adheres, he “would make both,” but when “they have made themselves,” their very fitness doth “unmake him” (1.7.51-54). The paradox of willful self-creation could not be more succinctly stated. Macbeth is nothing afeard of what he makes himself (1.3.96), but only of what makes him.

Macbeth's answer to his humiliation at the hands of the clock is to take a literal revenge: he will attack time with a dagger, will break time's laws, will take the future now in the ignorant present, seizing forcibly that which he has come already to perceive as his—the name and all the addition to a king. But the name of king, in Macbeth's mind, is no ordinary name, and his deed shall be no ordinary deed. Macbeth, like Cleopatra, wills “To do that thing that ends all other deeds, / Which shackles accidents and bolts up change”; but he is far from sharing Cleopatra's opinion that “'Tis paltry to be Caesar,” nor perceives that a king, “not being Fortune,” is but “Fortune's knave” (A & C, 5.2.2-6). Cleopatra wills to defeat time by transforming herself into an everlasting legend. Macbeth cares nothing for legend. He'll defeat time literally, by creating himself King of the empirical realm whether or not Fortune wills to have it so. He'll have a name greater than any name named under Heaven.

Harold Bloom, in his essay on poetry as a mode of lying against time, has followed the Gnostic Valentinius in noting that mortal man, desiring to transcend time and flesh and death, may fashion images, in the name of a god, which in turn become objects of fear to him, as for example, the idolator with his stone idol, or the terrified speaker of Blake's “Tyger.” This fear may be identified as the fear of a name, whether it be the artist's fear of a daemonic name (in having fashioned the unheimlich, or “uncanny”), or the pagan's creation of a god with a name greater than his own.¹¹ Macbeth likewise, perceiving himself to be a slave of time, quakes not so much at the thought of mere killing as at the image, fashioned by himself, of “King” Macbeth, a being which seems, in his mind's eye, to transcend time. The name of King, pre-existent and immortal, and endowed with a power and freedom not available to Macbeth as subject, seems to offer the promise of a new temporality in which time and death become subject to the self. Macbeth, like the sublime poet, like the savage idolator, thus creates an image before which he may bow the knee, populating the empty vault with a god after his own fashion. If he trembles before the image of a fallen King Duncan, he trembles also before the image of King Macbeth, a being shaped not by time but by his own devices, a sublime creation, greater than himself, a King of kings, and killer of kings. It is this doubly frightening thought which makes his heart knock against his ribs, for having once fashioned in his mind the image of King Macbeth, that identity alone seems authentic. To be a self-made King is to be sublime. To be less is nothing.

It now becomes clear why Macbeth's mind is given to such marvellous soliloquies regarding the horror of the deed he is about to perform: Macbeth needs these images, as it were, to convince himself of the sublimity of his crime. His fecund imagination would rescue the intended act from time's abyss, and endow it with meaning. While “pity, like a naked newborn babe, / Striding the blast” and “heaven's cherubin horsed / Upon the sightless couriers of the air” appear strong against the deed, it is precisely such images that allow Macbeth to continue believing that a knife in Duncan will indeed break the bands of transience. Pale Hecate's offerings, images of withered murder alarumed by the wolf, Tarquin's ghostly presence, all help to reassure Macbeth's heat-oppressed brain that his crime will surely be a deed horrid and grand enough to free his will from its chains. For most men, such visions were enough to sickly o'er the native hue of resolution, but Macbeth's bloody dagger, a false creation, only marshalls him the way that he was going. He must allow nothing to “take the present horror from the time” (1.7.58). I do not suppose, of course, that Macbeth knows all this. Maybe Shakespeare knew it, in his own way, but the argument is not, finally, a “psychological” one, for it takes place in the interstice of a continuing textual preoccupation with time and causality.

Ironically, Macbeth's deed, crucifixion of sorts, does seem to shock time into a momentary stasis: “By th'clock tis day,” says Ross, “And yet dark night strangles the traveling lamp” (2.4.6-7). It is a critical commonplace to note that the shock is only momentary; but the reaction is not, as in DeQuincey's formulation, a matter of the “human” making its reflux upon the “fiendish.” Rather, time and transience reassert themselves, as Macduff calls “timely” upon the King. Nor was time or the “natural order” ever really assaulted, though many Scotsmen would interpret it so. 'Twas a rough night, but the regicide, no less than Macdonwald's rebellion, Norway's invasion, the earthquake and storm, is a confused event “New hatched to th'woeful time” (2.3.53). There is no causal link between Macbeth's deed and the storm, any more than between Macdonwald's rebellion and the “contending 'gainst obedience” of Duncan's horses (2.4.17). Brutal violence, whether by man or beast, is very much a part of the so-called “natural order,” both before and after Duncan's death.

To seize the kingship had seemed to Macbeth a deed to stop “the spring, the head, the fountain,” the “very source” of natural succession, while halting also the flow of kingly blood (2.3.100-01). It is neither. If one man may seize the crown by violence without an apocalypse, so then may another. The sun has not yet come full circle before King Macbeth realizes that his fears in Banquo stick deep. Banquo, who in his sleep is given to cursed thoughts (2.1.7-9), has confessed that he, too, dreams at night of the weird sisters (2.1.20); and Macbeth notes that he “chid the sisters, / When first they put the name of King upon me”—an observation which suggests that Banquo resents Macbeth's priority, resents that the sisters did not first put the name of King upon him (3.1.58). Macbeth had hoped that his deed without a name would trammel up consequence. Finding it otherwise, he is vexed by every minute of Banquo's being (3.1.117), and resolves that it “must be done tonight” (3.1.131). If the assassination of Duncan proved nothing, the murder of Banquo and Fleance will, for the seeds of Banquo then will never grow as prophesied. Just two more murders will “Cancel and tear to pieces that great bond” which keeps him pale, the bond of causality, or “fate,” which subjects him as time's debtor, captive, and slave (3.2.49-50).

When he has come to terms with the killers, Macbeth exclaims happily, “It is concluded!” (3.1.141)—only to find, once again, that nothing is concluded. Lady Macbeth, for her part, would like to think that “Things without all remedy / Should be without regard: what's done is done” (3.2.11-12). But she soon finds herself asking her lord, “What's to be done?” (3.2.44)—as if to say, What's yet to be done? What shall be done? What ought to be done? What can or does it mean—“to be done?”

When the murderers return and tell the King “how much is done” (3.3.22), his fit comes again, in the figure of Banquo's ghost; although “when all's done,” he looks but on a stool. The vision only hardens his resolve: “It will have blood, they say: blood will have blood. / Stones have been known to move and trees to speak”—or stones to speak and trees to move—“Augures and understood relations have by maggot-pies and choughs and rooks brought forth / The secret'st man of blood” (3.4.123-27). Here again, the usual error is to hear in these words only the voice of fear, when there is, in fact, some metaphysical comfort (for Macbeth, as for us) in the thought that the natural order has risen up against him—else the sublimity of his crime threatens to vanish into a futile insignificance, as mere death and emptiness. Nature's supposed opposition will not, therefore, discourage Macbeth from doing his will: “… I will … / … I will … / … I will … / … For mine own good / All causes shall give way.” In other words, “All considerations shall be forgot as I take my revenge on all causation.” It will be a bloody, tedious business: for “I am in blood / Stepped so far that, should I wade no more, / Returning were as tedious as go o'er” (3.4.131-41). There is now only a “going o'er” (and over and over), and no “o'erleaping.” In the landscape of Macbeth's imagination there is a swift river of time, a tide of blood having as its source time's “it was” and all that has gone before. He once conceived himself as outside time, on the bank and shoal, seeking to o'erleap transience to reach the golden shore of a timeless present. But having once pricked the sides of his intent and spurred vaulting ambition, Macbeth has jumped the life to come, and—fallen in! If he makes it now to that other shore, it will only be by slogging through blood up to his ears.

The Thane of Fife is next to bleed. When Macbeth learns, from the apparition of the armed head, that he should “Beware Macduff,” he vows to “make assurance double sure / And take a bond of fate” (4.1.71, 83-84) to make fate prisoner and debtor to himself. Best to force the apparition to keep its word of promise: he will kill Macduff, and have done. But once again, Macbeth arrives too late, for the Thane of Fife is fled to England. “Time,” exclaims the King, “thou anticipat'st my dread exploits” (4.1.144). From now on, it will be an open battle. If Macbeth cannot make his time stand still, he will make it run:

The flighty purpose never is o'ertook
Unless the deed go with it. From this moment
The very firstlings of my heart shall be
The firstlings of my hand. And even now,
To crown my thoughts with acts, be it thought and done.

(4.1.145-49)

And “Thus,” in Zarathustra's words, “the liberating will becomes a felon, and upon all that can suffer it wreaks revenge for its inability to go backwards.”¹² Have I arrived too late to kill Macduff? Very well, I'll kill “His wife, his babes, and all unfortunate souls / That trace him in his line” (4.1.152-53). This is a key moment in the history of Macbeth's reactivity, as we go from Macdonwald to Duncan to Banquo to the Macduffs. Macbeth turns again to frantic killing, as if on a battlefield, as a means of erasing the temporal interval between acts, by constantly acting, allowing time no interval for re-action, and no chance to anticipate him, like a boxer who flails his opponent against the ropes. His brandished steel will smoke in bloody execution until such time as he can say, “It is done.” Thus “Each new morn / New widows howl, new orphans cry, new sorrows / Strike heaven on the face” (4.3.5-6). What's the newest grief? “Each minute teems a new one,” for each minute is itself a grief, a ceasing to be, an injury to the will that must be avenged with the sword (5.3.174-76). Yet Macbeth finds that with each bloody revenge, time will “close and be herself, whilst our poor malice / Remains in danger of her former tooth,” her “it was” (3.2.14-15).

Too late, Macbeth realizes that “He cannot buckle his distempered cause / Within the belt of rule” (5.2.15-16). Having willed himself to be a causeless man, a self-made king, he learns that causation resists the will as surely as “being” resists “being done.” There is stasis only in death. This recognition that being exists only as transience proves too great a burden for his will to bear. The formula, “Nothing is, but what is not,” turns upon itself: What is, is nothing, for all that is, is transient, a vanishing into the abyss:

Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,
To the last syllable of recorded time;
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death.

(5.5.19-23)

Macbeth has always favored “tomorrow” as the blessed ground whereon the will may appear to operate freely: “We'll take tomorrow” (3.1.22); “But of that tomorrow” (3.1.32); “Tomorrow / We'll hear ourselves again” (3.4.32-33); “I will tomorrow, / And betimes I will, to the weird sisters” (3.4.133-34). But now his will seems extinguished by the stuttering repetition of a million deadly tomorrows endlessly the same. It does not matter, in the end, what history's “last syllable” is. Macbeth knows it only as a “like syllable of dolor,” a sound that signifies nothing. Three, or four, or a billion tomorrows cannot finally be distinguished from the plural yesterday which led like-minded gentlemen to their inevitable, and redundant, conclusion.

Thus Macbeth comes at last to cast off the sublimity of self-creation in spite of time, as he embraces the sublime necessity of dying in time. “Out, out, brief candle!” If a man cannot have, cannot be, the be-all and the end-all, better then not to be, better that no man should be, that earthly existence itself should cease to be. Thus spake Zarathustra: “Because the willer must suffer, because he cannot will backwards—thus willing itself and all life has been perceived as—punishment! … until at last madness preached: ‘Everything passes away; therefore everything deserves to pass away!’”¹³ “What's done cannot be undone” (5.1.71)—which is precisely why Macbeth wishes that “th'estate o' th' world were now undone” (5.6.50). He'd have “nature's germens tumble all together, / Even till destruction sicken” (4.1.59-60).

It is his weariness of time's petty procession which allows Macbeth finally to embrace his fate: “Blow wind, come wrack!” he cries. “There is nor flying hence nor tarrying here” (5.5.51, 48), no afterlife or permanence, nothing but death and transience, a passing away. He therefore leaves the safety of Dunsinane, a castle which might indeed have laughed a siege to scorn, and marches forth to meet his fate, come what come may, motivated no longer by “poor malice” and a will to revenge but by a profound acceptance of death—of his own and every man's.

Yet, as a man bound to Fortune's wheel, Macbeth has come around, at least, to perceive the futility of brandished steel and smoking execution, unlike those “good” men in his world who still look to revenge as the answer to their ills: “Be comforted,” says the future King. “Let's make us med'cines of our great revenge, / To cure this deadly grief” (4.3.213-15). Caithness likewise sees in Malcolm's burning revenge “the med'cine of the sickly weal” (5.2.27), with an unintended pun on “wheel,” for he fails to apprehend that literal revenges lead inevitably to revenges in kind. Revenge cannot, in fact, cure deadly grief, for it is revenge itself which makes grief deadly. Time's “it was” cannot be remedied in the empirical realm. Therefore, says Macbeth, “Throw physic to the dogs, I'll none of it” (5.3.47). Having acknowledged his fate as time's fool, he is determined only to fight the course, to see the dismal story out, to meet his enemy on the field beard to beard, and let the gashes fall where they may; for though revenge as a physic may comfort the dogs that bait the bear-like king (5.7.1-2), Macbeth for his part has come to perceive it rather as a poisoned chalice which men raise to their own lips, a sickly wheel which returns to plague the inventor—though there is, of course, no “inventor,” no author, no prime mover. That was his illusion in Act I. All revenges are revenges in kind, more of the same, and every deed has a pre-existent name, including regicide.

Resolved still that he “must not yield / To one of woman born,” King Macbeth learns, too late, that his adversary was “from his mother's womb / Untimely ripped” (5.8.12-16). Macduff, the living consequence of Macbeth's revenges of the past, appears as the outcome of an untimely breach in nature. Macbeth must face him and perish, or yield, and live to be the literal fool of time, “the show and gaze o'th'time,” a poor player on a tether to be baited with the rabble's curse. “I will not yield,” he vows, “To kiss the ground before young Malcolm's feet” (5.8.27-28). The ground before young Malcolm's feet is Scotland's future, a dusty path which Macbeth has no will to see. Rather, he will continue to carve his own passage till he finds himself concluded on the bloody point of Macduff's sword: “Yet I will try the last … / And damned be him that first cries, ‘Hold, enough!’” (5.8.32-34).

When Macduff enters with “King” Macbeth's severed head fixed upon a spear, he greets Malcolm, saying, “Hail, King! for so thou art: behold, where stands / Th'usurper's cursed head. The time is free” (5.8.54-55). Macduff means, of course, that Malcolm may now be called “King,” since the world has been liberated from the tyrant Macbeth. But the ambiguous “so” suggests a second, ironic, meaning: “O ‘King,’ behold this pitiful scarecrow, this death's head upon a stick: for so thou art. The man who would be king is a poor usurper, cursed by time; for time, in fact, is king, and time is free to work his will on all his human slaves.” Fortune thus has granted to Macbeth his wish that he “memorize another Golgotha”: for when his robes have been removed, we, like Malcolm, may behold Shakespeare's macabre caricature of the human potentate, “a new Gorgon,” the King of kings, in a grotesque crucifixion, “as our rarer monsters are, / Painted upon a pole, and underwrit, / ‘Here you may see the tyrant’” (5.8.25-27).

If indeed the late King's bodiless head may serve the usurping Malcolm as a mirror by which to view his own figure and fate (even as Macdonwald's might have done for Macbeth), then King Malcolm—Macbeth's first cousin once removed—is next in line to tread the dusty path to Calvary, as in the Chronicles. He has been revenged on his foes, and in his final speech vows to make himself “even” with his thanes and kinsmen in exchange for their several loves (5.8.62). But Malcolm will not be “even” with his subjects until he, too, lies like Macbeth, “planted newly with the time,” six feet beneath the earth, that another seed may grow. His revenge on Macbeth and time, his succession to the throne of Scotland, is not a redemption but another belated repetition, for in the world of Macbeth, all such literal revenges, unlike the poet's figurative revenge, in the end yield only death.

John Irwin has noted that this phenomenon, this impulse to take revenge on time and its inevitable failure, seems to be “the very essence of tragedy”: “for I take it that all tragedies are in a sense revenger's tragedies—actions in which the central figure (or the audience observing him) comes to the tragic awareness that, because of the irreversibility of time, man in time can never get even, indeed, comes to understand that the whole process of getting even is incompatible with time.”¹⁴ There is no better play to illustrate Irwin's point than Shakespeare's Macbeth. Having lashed out at time and failed, Macbeth's frustrated will gradually turns against itself, and yields finally to the nihilistic conclusion that all life is punishment, all existence incoherent gibberish to the last petty syllable of recorded time.

II

The will must be delivered from its aversion to time and transience if ever it is to be delivered from the impulse to degrade what is transient. But to deliver itself from all willing requires a plunge into the abyss, a deliverance from all earthly existence. Rather, the will must find a way to say “yes” to life, a “yes” that would have transience abide, and would not have it degraded to nothingness; a “yes,” not to being as being done, but to being as becoming. But to say “yes” to transience the will must no longer be limited in its temporality by the necessity of an irreversible and immovable past. One answer, then, is to seek a figurative triumph over time. Only through poetry and art—in a different sense, the syllables of recorded time—is the will able to transform “it was” into “it is,” and “thus did it happen” into “thus have I willed it!”

Harold Toliver, in his essay on “Shakespeare and the Abyss of Time,” has said that “Perhaps the central paradox of the play is that the most depraved of Shakespeare's tragic heroes should have become also the most poetic.”¹⁵ For “depraved” let us read “degraded,” and for “paradox,” “irony”: the central irony of the play is that Macbeth, degraded by time, should have become also the most poetic, for Macbeth fails to realize his own powers of figuration. Though masterful in his use of figurative language, he neglects language as an alternate means of transcending time's inexorability. Although his imagination spawns timeless metaphors, his dull brain is, nevertheless, all too literalistic. Macbeth, in waging a literal war on the natural order, “chokes [his] art,” impressing language into the service of a literal revenge. (1.2.9).

What Harold Bloom says about sado-masochistic poets may be applied also to Macbeth, Shakespeare's poetic sado-masochist; to wit, when figuration and sadism are identified, “then we find always the obsession with … belatedness risen to a terrible intensity that plays out the poet's revenge against time by the unhappy substitution of the body, another body or one's own, for time. Raging against time, forgetting that only Eros or figuration is a true revenge against time, the sadomasochist over-literalizes and so yields to the death drive.”¹⁶ Bloom goes on to say that “Sadism and masochism are over-literalizations of meaning,” a “failure in the possibilities of figurative language.”¹⁷ As “a furious literalism,” sadism “denies the figurative representation of essence by act. … Lacking poetry, the sado-masochist yields to the literalism of the death drive precisely out of a rage against literal meaning.”¹⁸ Macbeth wills to degrade all that is, because he has failed to recognize in his own mythopoeic imagination the tool by which he may redeem actuality and say “yes” to life; he has not perceived that the only revenge on time's “it was” is figurative and poetic; to seek a literal revenge is to yield to the abyss. Thus, when his literal revenges on time have failed, he accepts literal death.

Against the literalism and compulsive repetition of Macbeth's death drive, Shakespeare has set his own sublime poetic will. In Macbeth the impotence of kings before time is contrasted with the dramatist's power to recover the past, and to impose upon it his own order, by means of poetic figuration. This is not, of course, peculiar to Macbeth. As Irwin has noted, “One might say that the purpose and point of … all narration is to use the temporal medium of narration to take revenge against time, to use narration to get even with the very mode of narration's existence in a daemonic attempt to prove that through the process of substitution and repetition, time is not really irreversible.”¹⁹ Historical narrative is, in its very essence, an argument against time, a willful recovery and revision of the past, a revengeful substitution of “it is” for “it was.” Moreover, Bloom's point is well taken that this argument inevitably splits in two, for after displacing time's “it was,” the poetic will “needs to make another outrageous substitution of ‘I am’ for ‘It is.’ Both parts of the argument are quests for priority.”²⁰ The poetic will's revenge on time, no less than the empirical power thrust, is taken to avenge one's own sense of belatedness.

But what's to be done, then, when time's “it was” is already recomposed by another? Shakespeare, in following Holinshed, is faced with a double perplexity, for he is preceded not only by time, but by recorded time. Shakespeare, therefore, in his dramatic narrative, must assert his priority over both history and “history,” transforming time past, and past narrative, into the timeless presence of an acted text. Doubly redoubling the strokes of his pen, he performs marvels of temporal dexterity throughout the drama, demonstrating that he is not, like his predecessor Holinshed, limited by time. For example: the script of Macbeth's performance against Norway and Macdonwald which King Duncan “reads” is, in fact, a tale told by a dramatist some 550 years later (1.3.90, 97). Again, when “Two truths are told / As happy prologues to the swelling act / Of the imperial theme” (1.3.127-29), the act is at once a self-aggrandizing, bloody deed in the dramatic future, and the present grand dramatic performance of an historical deed already done. Macbeth, who has in his head “strange things … / Which must be acted ere they may be scanned” (3.4.140-41), alludes unwittingly to the day in which his thoughts shall be set to lines of blank verse, having been acted by him ere scanned by a player, and acted by a player ere scanned by the world at large. Again, the heavens which, “troubled with man's act, / Threatens his bloody stage” (2.4.5-6), are at once the “real” heavens over Macbeth's Scotland and the imaginary “heavens” over Shakespeare's bloody stage, some six centuries after the fact. Time and again we find that the dramatist need not be bound by terrestrial or by narrative time. Past, present, and future may be captured in an instant.

Any well-crafted play is, of course, bound to be more immediate, more “present,” than an equally well-crafted prose narrative of those same events. If dramatist and historian alike are friends that lie like truth, if both tell lies against time, at least the dramatist's “it is” recalls the past in a way that the historian's “what was” can never hope to match. But Raphael Holinshed tells many a sad story of the deaths of kings, some deposed, some slain in war, some haunted by the ghosts that they deposed, some sleeping killed, all murdered by time. What, then, was there, given the six long volumes of the Chronicles, about the tale of King Makbeth that alone captured Shakespeare's imagination? Almost any story therein might have served as a vehicle by which to displace time's “it was” with the dramatic present. But what in Makbeth's life story suggested to Shakespeare a possibility to assert his own “I am?” The answer is not immediately apparent. His selection of Makbeth, at first glance, seems rather arbitrary, for as Holinshed tells the story, it would appear to have little in the way of dramatic potential: “To be briefe, such were the woorthie and princely acts of this Makbeth in the administration of the realme, that if he had atteined therevnto by rightfull means, and continued in vprightnesse of iustice as he began, till the end of his reigne, he might well haue been numbred amongest the most noble princes that anie where had reigned.”²¹ There was, of course, the murder of Duncan, the portents in earth and sky, and the attendant prophecy of witches to lend interest to the story, but regicides, omens, and prophecies are all but commonplace in Holinshed. If anything, the Makbeth of the Chronicles is distinguished not by his evil, but by his goodness, specifically by his “manie holesome laws and statutes.” Holinshed lists in all twenty laws enacted by King Makbeth for “the publike weale of his subiects.” But the statute which seems most to have intrigued Shakespeare is the King's decree that poor players should be heard no more: for Holinshed reports that Makbeth was the first Scottish king to outlaw such vain and foolish entertainments: “Counterfeit fooles, minstrels, iesters, and these kind of iuglers, with such like idle persons, that range abroad in the countrie, hauing no speciall license of the king, shall be compelled to learne some science or craft to get their liuing; if they refuse so to doo, they shall be drawen like horsses in the plough and harrows.”²²

King Makbeth's hubris in asserting his supremacy over players, in licensing the few and demeaning the rest, thus lends to the “Tomorrow” soliloquy of Shakespeare's Macbeth a wonderful irony: we may see now why it should be especially galling to this great usurper that his life in retrospect should appear so like the antics of a poor player strutting and fretting upon a stage. The King is forced to turn to the player for a metaphor by which to express the meaning of his own meaninglessness—thereby giving to the player a possibility for value and meaning which he himself cannot seem to find. Holinshed, for his part, wholly approves of King Makbeth's diligence in having protected the commonwealth from such theatrical knaves.²³ But it is here that Shakespeare makes his figurative revenge on time complete, for we find in Macbeth that the tables are turned. Counterfeit kings, with such like idle persons, may not range abroad without special license of the playwright, but are compelled to learn the art of playing to get their living. Macbeth, the man who begins the play as “Bellona's bridegroom lapped in proof,” the minion of his race, thus must die “with harness on [his] back,” not only as time's fool, but as time's jade, carving his bloody furrow at the crack of the dramatist's whip (1.2.19, 54; 5.5.52).

In their moment of defeat, most earthly kings, like the King of Norway, crave composition (1.2.59). Their fate, thereafter, lies in the hands of fiends who lie like truth. It is not the sort of immortality sought by King Macbeth. Unlike Hamlet or Cleopatra, Macbeth expresses no desire to have his story told, for it seems a tale told by an idiot. He would not have the moment of his greatness reduced to a flickering shadow-show for generations to come. Indeed, his aversion to Banquo's ghost appears to be, at least in part, the unspeakable horror of one day being pulled from his tomb by “these juggling fiends” (5.8.19), by players “and these kind of iuglers” (Holinshed), whom the historical Makbeth once outlawed; it is a fate which Macbeth cannot endure to think on. “Hence, horrible shadow!” he cries. “Unreal mock'ry, hence!” (3.4.107-08). Such imitations of immortality are not to his liking.

Seeing Banquo resurrected upon the stage, Macbeth cries out,

If charnel houses and our graves must send
Those that we bury back, our monuments
Shall be the maws of kites.

(3.4.72-74)

Macbeth is thinking here of his own dusty death; when he passes, better that his flesh should be hacked and fed to birds than to be resurrected thus. If, in the false creations of heat-oppressed brains, men may rise again with twenty mortal murders on their crowns, it will surely push kings from their stools (3.4.80-83); therefore, Macbeth will none of it. He feels his secret murders sticking on his hands, and the intuition that such murders, too terrible for the ear, may be “performed,” leaves him sick and trembling—so that, when the vision passes, he is left only with the desperate hope that no one should “muse” at him (3.4.78, 86). The worst fate that Macbeth can imagine is to survive in time only as a display of “unreal mock'ry,” or as an illustration for an underwrit text which says, “Here you may see the tyrant.”

Macbeth's wish is not granted, for it was ordained otherwise. This once and future king, whose brain the playwright wrought with things not to be forgotten, is to be cast forever as a slave of time, his life transformed into a timeless act. In his hour upon the stage, he will speak the same lines, hear the same prophetic greeting, make the same futile gestures. Each time he is ushered forth, he will waver in his determination to kill the King, wondering if his will is truly free. His secret murders shall be performed not just once, but o'er and o'er, so long as men can breathe, or eyes can see. And, full of sound and fury, he'll proceed to his own smoking execution, only to be heard no more—until the next performance.

If there is a lesson to be learned in all this, it is not the moral didacticism of a narrative which seeks to demonstrate the wickedness and chaotic consequences of ambition or regicide, but rather a living illustration of how far superior the poet is to the king, and the figurative to the literal revenge on time. Kings may like to think themselves the harbingers of the life to come, but when the hurlyburly's done, when kings and subjects are dead and rotten, it is the verbal jugglers, the poets and playwrights, who “give them all breath, / Those clamorous harbingers of blood and death” (5.6.9-10). In this regard, it is worth noting Shakespeare's final salute to his own magnificence, for Macbeth, having begun with one prediction, closes with another. Malcolm promises to use his time wisely:

Producing forth the cruel ministers
Of this dead butcher and his fiendlike queen,
. …—this, and what needful else
That calls upon us, by the grace of Grace
We will perform in measure, time, and place.

(5.8.68-73)

It is on this note that the play draws to a close, while drawing us, at the same time, to the play's beginning. Shakespeare asserts his priority one last time, pointing in advance to his own masterful triumph over temporality. When all's done, someone shall “muse” at Macbeth. Malcolm unwittingly looks ahead to the day in which the King's Men will produce forth Macbeth and his fiendlike queen and all their cruel ministers, performing the story in measured verse, at Hampton Court, in 1606, by the grace of his Grace, the King—and by the conjurations of a wizard poet, whose redemptive time is the timeless present of that measure itself.

Notes

1. James I, “To the Reader,” preface to Basilikon Doron, in The Political Works of James I (New York, N.Y., 1965), 5.

2. Quotations are from the Signet Classic Shakespeare, ed. Sylvan Barnet (New York, 1972).

3. Roland Barthes, S/Z, tr. Richard Miller (New York, 1974), p. 76.

4. Mark Van Doren, “Macbeth,” in Shakespeare (New York, 1939), p. 230; Frank Kermode, “Macbeth,” in The Riverside Shakespeare (Boston, 1974), p. 1307; Richard S. Ide, “The Theatre of the Mind,” in ELH 42 (1975), 359; and Herbert R. Coursen, Jr., Christian Ritual and the World of Shakespeare's Tragedies (Lewisburg, Pa., 1976), p. 369. What makes these quotations the more remarkable is that I took them at random from the few sources available on my own desktop. A host of more egregious examples may be found elsewhere.

5. Raphael Holinshed, Holinshed's Chronicles of England, Scotland, and Ireland: in six volumes, rev. John Hooker et. al. (1587; rpt. London, 1807-08), V, 289-84.

6. Barthes, p. 76.

7. Stephen Spender, “Time, Violence, and Macbeth,” Penguin New Writing, III (New York, 1946), pp. 115-26; Roy Walker, The Time is Free (London, 1949); Barbara L. Parker, “Macbeth: The Great Illusion,” Sewanee Review 78 (1970), 476-87; Frederick Turner, Shakespeare and the Nature of Time (Oxford, 1971); Ricardo Quninones, The Renaissance Discovery of Time (Cambridge, Mass., 1972), pp. 351-60; Francois Maguin, “The Breaking of Time: Richard II, Hamlet, King Lear, Macbeth,” Cahiers Elisabethains 7 (1975), 25-41; Wylie Sypher, The Ethic of Time (New York, 1976).

8. Kermode, p. 1310.

9. Friedrich Nietzsche, “Von der Erlösung” in Nietzsches Werke 2 vols., ed. Gerhard Stenzel (Salzburg, 1952), II, p. 421. (My translation of Nietzsche.)

10. Nietzsche, II, p. 421.

11. Harold Bloom, “Lying against Time: Gnosis, Poetry Criticism,” in Agon (Oxford, 1982), p. 53.

12. Nietzsche, I, p. 421.

13. Nietzsche, I, p. 421.

14. John Irwin, Doubling and Incest/Repetition and Revenge: A Speculative Reading of Faulkner (Baltimore, Md., 1975), p. 4.

15. Harold Toliver, “Shakespeare and the Abyss of Time,” JEGP 64 (1965), 250.

16. Bloom, “Freud's Concepts of Defense and Poetic Will,” in Agon (1982), p. 140.

17. Bloom, Agon, p. 139.

18. Bloom, Agon, p. 140.

19. Irwin, p. 4.

20. Bloom, Agon, p. 124.

21. Holinshed, V, p. 270.

22. Holinshed, pp. 270-71.

23. Holinshed, p. 271.