Beyond Grade 9 Macbeth is Easy
Well, I think it is.
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Here is an Extract
“Methought I heard a voice cry 'Sleep no more!
Macbeth does murder sleep', the innocent sleep,
Sleep that knits up the ravell'd sleeve of care…”
Grade 7
The obvious interpretation might be that this is his conscience attacking him for what he has done, so that he will “sleep no more”. Later in the play, Lady Macbeth comments on his lack of sleep. But, by the time she is suffering with guilt and sleepwalking, Macbeth is probably sleeping well. This is why they sleep apart, because her nightly sleepwalking would disrupt him. He also observes later that he had “almost forgot the taste of fears”, which implies his guilt does not last long. He is not lying in bed at night full of fear or guilt.
Grade 8
However, it is also true that his early kingship is destroyed by fear, and he seems to take no pleasure in being king. His fear begins here, conveyed in the rapid repetition of “sleep”, and then his trochaic emphasis of sleep at the beginning of the line. “Sleep” also takes the previous line to eleven syllables, and the he loses control of the iambic stresses.
Grade 9
We can also see that the personification of sleep as a knitter, repairing what has metaphorically unravelled during the day, as a feminine image. This, perhaps, is the moment in which Macbeth kills the feminine part of himself, and also then kills the feminine influence of his wife. He stops listening to her advice.
This leads directly to an inversion of the power relationship in the marriage. Macbeth is filled with feminine fear, refusing to take the daggers back, so Lady Macbeth must do it herself. She belittles him for his fear, showing a breakdown of trust, and also that she is taking on the more masculine role of bravery:
“Give me the daggers: the sleeping and the dead
Are but as pictures: 'tis the eye of childhood
That fears a painted devil.”
Beyond grade 9
But there is another possibility as to why Macbeth cannot let go of the daggers. They satisfy his bloodlust. He ordered the imaginary dagger to “Come, let me clutch thee” and now we see that he is still clutching the real thing.
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The usual interpretation is that the moment he has murdered Duncan, he regrets his attack against the natural order, The Great Chain of Being and God. Certainly we can back this up by his worry that he could not say “Amen”, as though he has suddenly found God.
However, his description of killing Duncan gives us other possibilities:
“Will all great Neptune's ocean wash this blood
Clean from my hand? No, this my hand will rather
The multitudinous seas incarnadine,
Making the green one red.”
Neptune, of course, is a pagan god, who predates Christianity. As so often, Macbeth gives us a classical reference when he is acting against a Christian God. Perhaps he is beginning to reject Christianity.
Grade 7
His hand is covered in so much blood in this metaphor that it will “incarnadine” every sea. This symbolises how unnatural the act of regicide is – it is a sin which can never be washed away. However, Neptune does not wash away sin – this is a purely Christian idea, in the form of baptism.
So, if the idea of washing a way his sin does not work, then Macbeth might be referring to his feelings of guilt at killing the king. Just as Lady Macbeth will focus on the “spot of blood still” metaphorically on her hand, this “blood” is a metaphor for his great guilt.
Grade 8
Perhaps. But another possibility is that Macbeth is shocked at the truth he has uncovered about himself. Once again, it is not that he is ambitious that appals him, it is that he is addicted to bloodlust. What appals him is that he is so attracted to the act of slaughter, that he will even kill Duncan. Their plan does not depend on a quick death, but on faking the grooms killing Duncan in a drunken frenzy. The grooms need to be covered in blood, so Duncan must be killed with two daggers and multiple stab wounds. This will reveal how powerfully he is addicted to bloodlust when he kills the grooms, entirely against Lady Macbeth’s plan.
This interpretation shows Macbeth’s self-discovery that he is this kind of killer, who enjoys this bloodthirsty way of killing.
Grade 9
In this scene, Lady Macbeth repeatedly has to take control of her husband, in a role reversal of power in the marriage. She criticises him for not being her equal, but for becoming feminine, which is why she is so angry when she observes:
“My hands are of your colour; but I shame
To wear a heart so white.”
One reading is that the “white” of his heart is the white of the “milk o’ human kindness”. Macbeth has gone against his true, kind “nature” by killing the king. But in the moment of killing Duncan, his conscience has reminded him of who he really is, prompting guilt, madness, and making him react in the Jacobean idea of a female way.
But another symbolic use of “white” is surrender, which is particularly relevant to Macbeth the warrior. The logical outcome of a martial society is that the most successful military tactician should also be the ruler, the king. In this view, Macbeth deserves to be king because of his military success. When she accuses him of having a “heart so white”, she is accusing him of failing in this warrior status, and to remind him that he should deserve it as the better warrior. Instead he is being too cowardly to become king.
She is angry that this will stop Macbeth supporting her in her personal battle against the patriarchy, to achieve equal status with men. Her anger is that Macbeth will not fight to give her that equality. She can’t allow him to give up now, when the murder will be for nothing. Remember, at this point, Malcolm should become king. By killing Duncan, they have not yet managed to “jump the life to come”. She won’t become queen.
Macbeth now gives up his status, and raises hers. Macbeth refuses to act, so she has to. We will also see this after his coronation at his feast, when she again must take control. The irony is that Lady Macbeth only wants equal status and power as her husband, but at the moment he kills Duncan she passes beyond this to a superior social status. Shakespeare will convey this with the list of instructions and imperative verbs she uses when he sees Banquo’s ghost.
Shakespeare ends scenes with rhyming couplets, which is a convention playwrights of the time used, to signal a conclusion. But Macbeth ends this scene without a rhyming couplet, which conveys how unsettled his mind is, and how he has destroyed the social order.
Macbeth. To know my deed, 'twere best not know myself.
[Knocking within]
Wake Duncan with thy knocking! I would thou couldst!
The conventional interpretation, and one which would certainly please King James, is that Macbeth fully regrets killing Duncan, and immediately wishes he had not done so.
But is Shakespeare up to anything else? It is an interesting idea that he would rather “not know” himself. This is not the same as wishing he had not gone against God by killing Duncan. After all, if he believes in hell, then he is fully aware of the consequences of killing Duncan before he commits the murder. But the fact is he never mentions the possibility of hell before killing Duncan.
It would therefore be very odd for the thought to suddenly strike him now. Instead, the psychological horror he is having to face is to face his own desires and bloodlust, to “know [myself[.” All his life he has killed in his role as a soldier, following orders, defending a country, or a king. Now, for the very first time, he realises that these have been convenient causes. They have masked his true nature, which is that he loves to kill.
We could argue that this is his first moment of anagnorisis, where he discovers an uncomfortable truth about himself. This is a stage that Aristotle, in his Poetics, says the tragic hero must go through.
Aristotle also specifies that the hero should have a peripeteia, a "reversal", where the opposite of what was planned or hoped for by the protagonist takes place. This is the first of many for Macbeth which will prevent him enjoying being king.