He already knows from his wish for self-splitting – “The eye wink at the hand; yet let that be / Which the eye fears, when it is done, to see.” (Macbeth, Act 1, Scene 4, l.52-53) – that his intended regicide cannot just be an individual event (Lüthi (1969), p.24, l.16-17), but that it is going to entail horrible consequences.
His imagination puts him insofar under pressure as that it, as it seems to him, lets the closely tangible gain of power – of now consequently having to become king after the successful first prophecy – figuratively float before his eyes, in a manner of speaking. Thus, along with his ambition and the persuasion through his wife, it only sets the ball rolling.
Thereby the witches appear to Macbeth as messengers of valid truths, but in reality they completely deceive him, or rather he deceives himself since he wants to see something in them that they are not. That way, their prophecies lead to death and destruction. This becomes especially clear in the last three prophecies which lead Macbeth to believe that he is invincible when, in fact, he has already lost and his approaching end is only a matter of time (Mürb, p.36, l.13-19).
Due to his vision of Banquo’s ghost, and especially his reaction to it, the gathered Lords actually ought to consider him mentally ill or mad1 or should at least become suspicious here at the latest. From this event, an opposition against Macbeth begins to form up. Macduff, who is feared by him, has already fled in order to ask Malcolm and the English king for help; the other Scottish nobles, who now surmise Macbeth’s crimes – which, for instance, becomes evident during the conversation between Lenox and another lord in act three, scene six – also gradually turn their back on their new king.
The second series of prophecies – which Macbeth, due to his imagination, interpreted in his favor – initiates his decline and doom since, in his arrogance, he is convinced that no one could do him any harm and so he has Macduff’s family murdered, making the latter his mortal enemy who, in the end, performs his deadly revenge. Thus he indirectly dies due to his power of imagination and his megalomania.
Because of his imagination, Macbeth commits the most atrocious crime of Shakespeare’s time by murdering the king, the head and center of human society. Thus the overcomer of treason becomes a traitor himself. This wanton misdeed constitutes a sacrilege of the first order since, according to Elizabethan beliefs, it destroys the divine order of existence, so that disorder and chaos arise and the fixed structure of the world threatens to collapse.
The human society is also being haunted by murder and violence, until the natural order is restored by Macduff’s murder of Macbeth as well as Malcolm’s accession to the throne as the legitimate ruler (see Mürb, p.37, l.18-22). Hence, Macbeth’s fears, which he had before the murder, are, according to Elizabethan beliefs, entirely justified since, as a consequence, the regicide and usurper has to, after a violent death (since that also rated as part of divine providence in this case), expect eternal pains of hell in the afterlife (see Unterstenhöfer, p.177, l.14-16).
Macbeth’s crimes, as a result of his ‘degenerate’ power of imagination, appear as violations of the entire cosmos; his reign is put on a level with a disease that infects the whole nation and would eventually destroy it if it was not for the healing powers – that are certainly interpretable as divine providence – personified in the English king as well as in Siward, Malcolm and Macduff (see Macbeth, Act 4, Scene 3, ll.141-159).
Through external occurrences, too, Shakespeare illustrates the destruction of the divine order caused by Macbeth, since all sorts of unnatural things happen in the night of Duncan’s murder and afterwards: Thus, it becomes pitch-dark during the day, owls kill falcons and Duncan’s horses eat each other (see Macbeth, Act 2, Scene 4, ll.1-19. Certainly the human society is also haunted by distrust, murder and violence until the natural order is restored by the accession of the rightful king Malcolm (see Mürb, p.37, l.18-22).
Thus, owing to his perverted pursuit of power, he oversteps the moral border that is set in the human striving – from Shakespeares viewpoint – and, in doing so, allows an objective evil to take possession of him and operate through him. This effect – the “curse of the evil deed” (>>Fluch der bösen Tat<<), the ever more continuing spiral of violence – is being brought into the center of presentation (Rojahn-Deyk, p.219, ll.7-15).
The whole story appears not only to the recipients, but also to Macbeth, like a nightmare in which everything and everyone sinks. Seduced by the witches and his wife, his power of imagination rapidly gets out of control. Thus, as a result, he activates a mechanism of violence in order to enforce his goals and is later crushed by it. He wades through a nightmare which rises up to his throat, leaving no turning back: “I am in blood / Stepped in so far, that should I wade no more, / Returning were as tedious as go o’er.“ (Macbeth, Act 3, Scene 4, l.134–136 / see Kott, p.111, l.7-10).
The great hero Macbeth who, according to Duncan’s last will, was supposed to grow – “I have begun to plant thee, and will labour / To make thee full of growing.“ (Macbeth, Act 1, Scene 4, l.28–29) – has made himself a dwarf2 (Lüthi (1969), p.28, l.37ff.). As he already correctly observed, his ambition has actually reared up so high that he overturned and achieved the opposite of his goal (see Macbeth, Act 1, Scene 7, l.25-28 / Lüthi (1969), p.29, l.3-4).