Macbeth is a fast-moving play, and as early as Act 1 the hero is faced with the terrible consequences of his actions. Although at this point the murder of the King is hypothetical, Macbeth is deeply unsettled by the prospect. This is made manifest in an intense soliloquy that could have led to a change of heart – we cannot know – had it not been interrupted by Lady Macbeth:

1. Besides, this Duncan

2. Hath borne his faculties so meek, hath been

3. So clear in his great office, that his virtues

4. Will plead like angels, trumpet-tongu’d, against

5. The deep damnation of his taking-off;

6. And pity, like a naked new-born babe,

7. Striding the blast, or heaven’s cherubin, hors’d

8. Upon the sightless couriers of the air,

9. Shall blow the horrid deed in every eye,

10. That tears shall drown the wind. I have no spur

11. To prick the sides of my intent, but only

12. Vaulting ambition, which o’erleaps itself,

13. And falls on th’ other.

14. (1.7.16–28)

Enter Lady Macbeth. Macbeth has worked himself into a position where he recognises the paucity of his motivation, and the magnitude of his victim’s merits. He is distracted from this meditation by the latest news. One thing that has often struck readers about this passage is the extraordinary simile at its heart: ‘pity, like a naked new-born babe’. The resemblance proposed by the word ‘like’ doesn’t readily resolve into clarity after it is thought over. Once it seemed to me, for example, to be symptomatic of a special kind of spontaneity in Shakespeare’s language. Without imputing any actual lack of design in the creation of such a simile, I felt the effect was of an extravagant display of linguistic crisis. Reader and text, or perhaps reader and writer, find themselves at the edge of a precipice, where the abstract noun ‘pity’ clearly begs an appropriately energetic complement to ‘like’. The ‘naked new-born babe’ effects a kind of rescue, in that the line continues past the point of crisis, and the simile itself expands onward, accumulating more strange and vivid material. The obscure aspects of its meaning, and the vertiginous quality in the reader’s experience, remind us of the expressive problems underlying such moments of dramatic intensity.