Chapter 4 - Language
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 June 2012
Summary
‘In a double sense’ (Macbeth 5.7.50)
After encountering Banquo's ghost sitting at his table, the tortured Macbeth vows to return to the witches, ‘for now I am bent to know / By the worst means, the worst’ (3.4.133–4). The weird sisters summon up their ‘masters’ (4.1.62) in the form of three apparitions. The warning of the first, ‘beware Macduff’ (70), is, however, swiftly overtaken by the apparent comfort offered by the second two apparitions. The bloody child tells Macbeth that ‘none of woman born / Shall harm Macbeth’ (79–80), and the crowned child announces that ‘Macbeth shall never vanquished be until / Great Birnam Wood to high Dunsinane Hill / Shall come against him’ (91–3). Macbeth, unsurprisingly, takes these statements as expressions of his literal invulnerability: to him, that none of woman born shall harm Macbeth is simply a more elaborate way of saying that Macbeth shall never be harmed; the impossibility of trees moving up the mound of his castle means that the apparition is promising that he will never be vanquished. That is to say, Macbeth paraphrases the precise terms of the prophecies. And, as the play goes on to reveal, those paraphrases are strikingly inaccurate. The specificity – we might even say the poetry – of the terms of the apparitions' promises was what mattered, and their ostensibly impossible conditions become literally true when Malcolm's forces disguise their approach to Dunsinane by cutting switches from Birnam Wood and Macduff reveals himself to have been born by Caesarean Section just before decapitating Macbeth.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- The Cambridge Introduction to Shakespeare , pp. 71 - 89Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2007