Thread by @GCSE_Macbeth

Act 2 Sc 1 l.33
MACBETH: Is this a dagger which I see before me?

For such a famous part of the play, I think this soliloquy is tough to pin down. This is my attempt. Here goes.

(Thread)
1/

A "dagger" is not Macbeth's weapon. Macbeth is a warrior; his sword is his weapon: the "brandish'd steel" we heard about in (1.2). It's no coincidence we just saw moral and upstanding Banquo with his sword a few lines ago. 2/

"See before me" -- sight and seeing are major ideas in the play, and we'll come back to them after the murder. But "before me" could have two meanings: the dagger is in front of Macbeth, but also the dagger is in his future.

3/

Macbeth speaks to the dagger: "come, let me clutch thee". Is he asking for the bravery to go ahead with the murder? Or is he just wanting to know if he's hallucinating or not?

4/

"I have thee not, and yet I see thee still." Macbeth's first response to the witches' prophecy was a blurring of the real present and the imagined future: "nothing is but what is not" (1.3). The murder is so close now and his hold on reality starts to slip.

5/

Macbeth asks if the dagger is "sensible to feeling". A search of opensourceshakespeare.org suggests Shakespeare used "feeling" to mean both TOUCH and EMOTION, and I think it's ambiguous here. If it only meant "touch", would "sensible to feeling" be a tautology?

6/

"dagger of the mind" -- the play is full of references to hurt and damaged minds, so this isn't just a hallucination, it's a wound to Macbeth's own consciousness:
"hurt minds" (2.2), "filed my mind" (3.1), "torture of the mind" (3.2), "infected minds" (5.1).

7/

But then is Macbeth excusing himself when he claims a "heat-oppressed brain"? Does "heat-oppressed" allow for the possibility that Macbeth has damaged himself through his evil intentions, or is he claiming to be ill?

8/

"Thou marshalls't me the way that I was going" is fascinating. It encapsulates the tension between fate, human influence and free will. What does that mean, to be steered to do the thing you were going to do anyway? Is that the role of the witches, LM or M's own ambition?

9/

"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."

When Macbeth sees the blood, the messy reality of the imminent murder hits home, and he realises the cause of his vision. 10/

But...he seems to fully accept now that he WILL commit the murder. In a change of tone he aligns himself with the evil forces of night.
"Now o'er the one halfworld
Nature seems dead, and wicked dreams abuse
The curtain'd sleep"

We already know Banquo has "wicked dreams"... 11/

Macbeth's words prepare us for the unique, primal awfulness of being killed in your sleep. Nature won't just "SEEM" dead, and it won't just be "DREAMS" that abuse the sleeping.

So it's interesting that Macbeth personifies murder as having "Tarquin's ravishing strides" 12/

Sextus Tarquinius was the son of the last King of Rome, and his Rape of Lucretia (about which Shakespeare wrote) set in motion events that led to the overthrow of Rome's monarchy.

But why does Macbeth invoke a rape, not a murder, as an analogue for his own crime? 13/

The image of a wicked man creeping around at night is fitting, and the political aspect is suggestive.

But there's something about the murder as a violation, as an intrusion into a private space, that magnifies its unnatural horror.

14/

Shakespeare brillianty constructs and elongates the imagined space beyond the stage: a curtained bed, within a bedchamber, through the door that leads to a space beyond where Macbeth now stands. The murder gains in power through being so inaccessible to the audience. 15/

"Thou sure and firm-set earth,
Hear not my steps [...] for fear
Thy very stones prate of my whereabout,
And take the present horror from the time,
Which now suits with it."

M compares himself with personified Murder. He cannot, as Murder can, move silently "like a ghost" 16/

I think Macbeth means he doesn't want the earth to give away the secret of the murder. (This isn't what the Arden editors think, and they're the Arden editors, so take that with a pinch of salt.)
Again, Macbeth feels desperately attached to the present, in fear of the future. 17/

"Whiles I threat, he lives:
Words to the heat of deeds too cold breath gives."

This moment, where the protagonist weighs up the merits of thoughts and actions, seems to a be a trope in Shakespearean tragedy. Hamlet is an entire play about it!

18/

I just realised I *really* want to write about the relationship between words and deeds in Macbeth, but that will have to wait for another night.

In the mean time, good S&C question for your students: Is Macbeth right? Aren't deeds in Macbeth precipitated by words?

19/

And lastly: "I go, and it is done."

A couple of scenes ago, M was wondering if "done" could really mean "done". Now he seems to believe in "done". And I like, still, the confusion of present and future here: the murder is as good as done, even though it hasn't happened yet. 20/

End of thread.

Thank you for reading if you made it this far. Goodnight.

21/21