Introduction: the Terrific Sign

Abstract

The plot and theme of Macbeth turns upon the slight and sight of images from the mind. Although Macbeth’s ambition shapes his hearing of the witches, and even though it is his ‘deed of dreadful note’ that disrupts his mind, his Lady’s sanity and Scotland’s state, the drama is a repertoire of feints and deceptions, mysteries and murders, false hearts and false faces, unnatural signs and ghostly remembrances and terror-torn sleep and bloody instructions that inform the action. ‘By the strength of their illusion’, the signs of the times ‘draw him on to his confusion’, and Macbeth is left with nothing but fantasies of fear, courage and destinies — promised signs half-hid in the shadows of his (and our) darker side. The ‘scorpions of his mind’ turn and sting him into damnation and death, stripped of all, like a Job who either never knew righteousness or only remembered innocence from a long ago time.

Is this a dagger which I see before me

The handle toward my hand? Come, let me clutch thee!

I have thee not, and yet I see thee still.

Art thou not, fatal vision, sensible

To feeling as to sight? or art thou but

A dagger of the mind, a false creation

Preceding from the heat-oppressed brain?

Macbeth, II.i