Imagery in Macbeth

1. Imagery in Macbeth A02 Macbeth specific A03 Genre generic

2. Light and Dark • The simplest imagery connate with the binary opposition of good v. evil. • The very first reference is in the opening scene; the witches are meeting Macbeth ‘ere the set of sun’, i.e. a time of day when ‘good things of day begin to droop and drowse, while Night’s black agents to their preys do rouse.’

3. Stars • In Romeo and Juliet, the stars are linked to Fate. In the Merchant of Venice the stars are neutral looking down ‘on a naughty world’, whereas in Macbeth they are much more benign; ‘but signs of nobleness, like stars, shall shine on all deservers,’ Macbeth’s response to Malcolm being named heir to the throne is ‘Stars hide your fires! Let not light see my black and deep desires.’ • In the opening of Act II, Banquo is feeling restless and observes that ‘There’s husbandry in heaven; their candles are all out.’ He also notes that the Moon is down, important because moonlight is reflected sunlight.

4. Night • When Lady Macbeth hears of Duncan’s arrival, she invokes the Night: ‘Come, thick Night, and pall thee in the dunnest smoke of Hell, that my keen knife see not the wound it makes, nor heaven peep through the blanket of the dark, to cry ‘Hold, Hold’. • When Macbeth invokes the Night prior to Banquo’s murder, the words are strangely familiar: ‘Come seeling Night, scarf up the tender eye of pitiful Day, and with thy bloody and invisible hand, cancel and tear to pieces that great bond…’ • And the strange passage: ‘by th’clock ‘tis day, and yet night strangles the travelling lamp.’

5. Sight • Sightless couriers are the winds, but the murthering ministers are invisible. Macbeth is afraid to look upon what he has done which Macduff says will destroy one’s sight, while the sight of Banquo’s ghost ‘would appal the devil.’ While Lady Macbeth says ‘the sleeping and the dead are but as pictures,’ like Macbeth’s fear.

6. Hell • Within the bowels of these elements, Where we are tortured and remain forever. Hell hath no limits, nor is circumscribed In one self place, for where we are is hell, And where hell is must we ever be. And, to conclude, when all the world dissolves, And every creature shall be purified, All places shall be hell that is not heaven." Christopher Marlowe (Dr Faustus: the A-text) • Lady Macbeth says ‘Hell is murky’ and is so afraid of the dark that she keep a candle by her.

7. Blood • The word blood occurs more times in Macbeth than in any other play. It is both a symbol for life and a metaphor for death. • Duncan’s first words ‘What bloody man is that’ in many respects sets a complex of ideas to run through the play’s ‘bloody business’: conflict; murder; guilt etc. • Lady Macbeth’s ‘dammed spot’ is in fact her witch mark as well as the mark of her guilt.

8. At the beginning of the Banquet scene, the murderer appears with Banquo’s blood on his face. When Macbeth names Banquo, the ghost appears, and reappears when his name is repeated. Blood will have blood refers to vengeance. (Cain/Abel) James 1’st Daemonologie reports the belief that in the case of a secret murder the body will exhume blood in the presence of the murderer (cp. Richard III) Macbeth admits that he ‘is stepped so far in blood, that should I wade no more, returning were as tedious..’ The second apparition tells Macbeth to be ‘bloody, bold, and resolute.’ Scotland is both ‘diseased’ and ‘bleeds’ under Macbeth’s rule

9. Gothic links • Is it the ‘blood on Macbeth’s hands that makes his rule diseased, untrammelling the consequences. • Lady Macbeth wants her blood to become ‘thick’ – it was believed at the time that woman’s blood was ‘thin’ compared to a man’s. • In Dr Faustus. Faustus makes a pact with the Devil, written with his own blood, and when it starts to congeal, Mephistopheles brings fire to ‘melt’ it again. • In Dracula, the ‘disease’ is spread by blood. • What is the contemporary relevance? • In Wuthering Heights bloodlessness is seen as a sign of approaching death, or death (as it is in Dracula)

10. Number • Doubling – ‘the indefinite binarie’ – the undoing of unity and limit,; the production of error, confusion, duplicity, darkness, devilry; aural link between double and doubt. • The ‘two truths’ undo his ‘single state of man.’ • Pairings: the hand - knife, the eye - hand • Doubleness is in equivocation, antithesis, contradiction as well as duplicity. • Macbeth wants ‘more’, dislikes ‘enough’ • The use of three (parodying the Trinity), and its multiples – the witches, three murderers

11. Clothing • The Thane of Cawdor lives: why do you dress me in borrowed robes? • New honours come upon him, like our strange garments, cleave not to their mould but with the aid of use. • I have bought golden opinions from all sorts of people which would be won now in their newest gloss. • Was the hope drunk wherein you dressed yourself? • Lest our old robes sit easier than the new. • He cannot buckle his distemper’d cause within the belt of rule. • Now does he feel his title hang loose about him, like a giant’s robe upon a dwarfish thief.

12. Time • Cf. 1- I-7 the natural scheme would be to know the present and not the future, Lady Macbeth’s reverses this when reading the letter – the witches’ prophecies are for the future – twice. • Time gets so squeezed that it becomes a syllable. Macbeth’s thoughts about consequences (the future) is replaced of acting without thought (of the consequences); if time is compressed there can be no creation (or procreation) and hence no children. Macbeth tells Malcolm ‘the fountain of your blood is stopped.’ while Lady Macbeth has asked that ‘compunctious visitations of nature’ cease.

13. ‘Each man may be master of his own time’ • But not his liberty, and hence not free of time, or significantly, time for choice. • Macbeth’s actions are increasingly, as it were, automatic: a) I have lived long enough – • b) tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow – • c) I’gin be weary of the sun. • At the end, time and measure is re-established.