Of all of Shakespeare’s plays, I am singularly intimate with Macbeth. It is strange to academically study a play that I’ve acted in. The two forms of intimacy with the characters and language—close-reading and performing—are so different. There was something personally transformative about inhabiting Lady Macbeth at the age at which I inhabited her. Her power, drive, and determination were intoxicating, her greed and agency strangely admirable, at least for a woman of the time (Shakespeare’s time and my own). I remember looking forward to stepping into her skin at each rehearsal, because where I was an insecure teenager who frequently felt powerless, unsure what I wanted from life or what kind of respect the world owed me, she knew exactly what she wanted and had no compunctions in pursuing it. I really felt that power flowing through me when I hooked the metal clasp of the scarlet robe I wore, stood taller than I ever would, and allowed her words to come out of my mouth.
But now I’m a middle-aged reader. Lady Macbeth’s agency, ambition, and stop-at-nothing greed are more familiar, and certainly less aspirational, as both literary trope and real-life mindset. I will always love her, but she is less personally compelling to me because I have been her at times, in many small ways (short of murder of course). I am more struck by the equivocator himself, Macbeth, and the way the play sets up contrasts and then inverts them, as in the play’s famous refrain, “Fair is foul” (I.i.10), in order to trip him up. I read Macbeth now struck by an uneasy tension: Shakespeare forces us to feel for Macbeth at almost every step of the plot (until the final act, Lady Macbeth can take care of herself). Even if we disapprove of his decisions, we see the chain of circumstances that lead him to the inevitable de casibus conclusion. This empathy makes us complicit. A psychologically rich strategy on Shakespeare’s part, to show a descent into evil as something to which we could all fall prey, given the right external stimuli. Though he deliberately chooses evil, Macbeth is acutely aware of—and able to articulate—the evil he at first rejects. In the introduction to The Arden Shakespeare, Kenneth Muir notes the intimacy we feel with Macbeth and his decisions: “Shakespeare wished to get under the skin of a murderer, and to show that the Poet for the Defense, through extenuating nothing, can make us feel our kinship with his client, can make us recognize that if we had been so tempted, we too might have fallen” (xliii).
Because for my birthday I bought myself a subscription to the Oxford English Dictionary, I thought I’d cash in on the purchase and comb the language of Macbeth’s pivotal dagger scene for interpretable, equivocating language, because the “correct” interpretation of signs is a central preoccupation of the play. A phantom dagger appears to Macbeth, and we watch him struggle to interpret it. It could be a warning (“fair”) or a temptation (“foul”). The Oxford English Dictionary defines “equivocation” as “the expression of a virtual falsehood in the form of a proposition which (in order to satisfy the speaker's conscience) is verbally true.” Macbeth’s conscience is never hidden from us: We feel it acutely:
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? (II.i.34-39).
Macbeth’s words betray his hesitance about the moral validity of the dagger. Created either by an external, malignant force, it could as easily originate from his own already-guilty mind. Macbeth refers to the vision as “fatal,” which can mean either “allotted or decreed by fate” or “producing or resulting in death” (OED). On the one hand, the dagger might be a prophetic device showing him the way to glory; on the other, a warning from his own soul against future action (indeed, the subsequent murder seals Macbeth’s fate as much as the king’s). Such equivocation is manifest in subsequent lines as well: “Thou marshall'st me the way that I was going / And such an instrument I was to use” (II.i.42-43). The verb “to marshal” has two meanings: “to place in proper rank” or “to conceal a defect” (OED). Thus, the dagger might be “marshaling” Macbeth to his proper place as king or obfuscating the immorality of becoming king. The noun “instrument” is a morally neutral word. He uses “Instrument” instead of “weapon,” “knife,” or even “implement” (which would retain the meter), ethically distancing himself from the deed. Macbeth continues:
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 (2.1.44-49).
“Business,” another morally neutral word, corresponds to “instrument.” The dagger was the equivocator. Now Macbeth is, with his careful choice of morally neutral language. At the line “There’s no such thing,” Macbeth ceases to speak to the dagger and begins to speak to himself. These terse words represent a turning point in the soliloquy: he begins to take responsibility for a crime he hasn’t yet committed.
Lady Macbeth will always be my girl, but at my age, from my vantage, watching Macbeth struggle and eventually choose evil is more frightening—a more potent warning about the confusing complexities of evil, and of good.
Works Cited
“Equivocation.” Oxford English Dictionary, Oxford University Press, 2019, oed.com/view/Entry/70179?redirectedFrom=equivocation#eid. Accessed 3 Feb 2021.
“Fatal.” Oxford English Dictionary, Oxford University Press, 2019, oed.com/view/Entry/70179?redirectedFrom=fatal#eid. Accessed 4 Feb 2021.
“Marshall.” Oxford English Dictionary, Oxford University Press, 2019, oed.com/view/Entry/70179?redirectedFrom=marshall#eid. Accessed 4 Feb 2021.
Shakespeare, William. The Tragedy of Macbeth. Kenneth Muir, Editor, Penguin Group, 1963.