º While Macbeth commits the murder of the king off stage, Lady Macbeth boasts of her boldness and cunning: “That which hath made them drunk hath made me bold” (1). Throughout this furtive scene of regicide, Lady Macbeth continues to hector her husband for his fears and scruples: “A foolish thought” (24); “Consider it not so deeply” (33); “You do unbend your noble strength, to think | So brainsickly of things” (48-49); and “Infirm of purpose! | Give me the daggers. The sleeping and the dead | Are but as pictures.” (51-52). To her, Macbeth’s fears seem overwrought and unmanly: “’Tis the eye of childhood | That fears a painted devil” (56-57). Again, for her the theatre of the mind, the imagination, is foolish and dismissable. But in Shakespeare such an attitude is always naïve and often a prelude to destruction. Returning the bloody knives to the king’s chambers to implicate the grooms, Lady Macbeth assumes that “A little water clears us of this deed” (70). To her this deadly act is not (yet) real, but part of a “painted” act, a simulacrum.
But there is, I think, another Lady Macbeth lurking in this scene, one that predicts her later sleepwalking, madness, and suicide. This Lady Macbeth notices that Duncan resembles her own sleeping father (12-13) and fears that too much thinking will undo not only her husband (74-75), but will destroy them both: “These deeds must not be thought | After these ways; so, it will make us mad” (36-37). Through use of the imagination, through serious thinking, lies our best chance to avoid sin by preconceiving of its terrible and multiple consequences; and through imagination and in the mind lie the surest punishments for having sinned. Lady Macbeth does not have as much control over Lord Macbeth or over her own subconscious as she had “imagined.” Her deepest sin thus involves her refusal or inability to imagine, to conceive morally what she is about – the political and moral repercussions, the true value of human life, the depths of self-revenging misery.
Perhaps Shakespeare’s principal dramatic decision in this scene comes in choosing not to show us the murder. Shakespeare had clearly been considering and experimenting with the affective alternation of showing and telling since his first, too-bloody tragedy, Titus Andronicus. Which technique has more dramatic potency? Which provides the dramatist with the most effective control of perspective? What rhythm of sight or report best moves the action forward? Shakespeare does not show us the gruesome murders of 2.2 because presumably at this stage in his action he wants us to focus more on consequences than on the deed itself, more on Macbeth’s nerve-wracked reactions than on Duncan, more on the murderers’ bloodied hands than on the smeared corpses. Unlike his lady wife, Macbeth knows that now not “all great Neptune’s ocean [can] wash this blood | Clean from [his] hands” (63-64), and that their sin will spread, turning even “The multitudinous seas incarnadine” (65). (This luscious, invented word reminds us of the Latin incarnatus, the miraculous act in Christianity by which Christ the god became man. In slaughtering their king, kinsman, and guest, the Macbeths have enacted a sacrilege, an inversion, a perversion, against this life-giving paradigm.)
The idea that particularly haunts the more imaginative Macbeth has to do with the slaughter not only of his king but of his own peace and reason: “Methought I heard a voice cry ‘Sleep no more! | Macbeth does murder sleep’ ” (38-39). We are here reminded that the witches have vowed that “Sleep shall neither night nor day | Hang upon his penthouse lid; | He shall live a man forbid” (1.3.18-20), and that night thoughts have already begun to torment both Macbeth and Banquo. Poignantly, Macbeth remembers another, life-giving kind of sleep – “the innocent sleep, | Sleep that knits up the raveled sleeve of care, | . . . | Balm of hurt minds, great nature’s second course, | Chief nourisher in life’s feast” (39-43). This memory of nourishment is now interrupted as, once again, the peremptory Lady Macbeth interrupts his thoughts and line. The scene begins with the death hoot of the scavenger owl, continues in angry whispers, and ends with an insistent, guilt-deepening knocking at the castle gate. Voyager Palex Palex Palex Voyager ·Palex ·‚Voyager ‚4Palex 4?Palex ?ÂPalex ˜Palex ˜ ËPalex Ë ÚPalex Ú “Palex “ ”Voyager ”
