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 dwarf1 (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).
Macbeth’s self-alienation has an impact on the entire happenings since, due to his crimes and tyranny, everything distorts and becomes estranged to itself – most of all Macbeth himself. Thus the overcomer of rebellion turns into a rebel himself, the host becomes a murderer of his guest, he owes gratitude and gives death. At first he is “full o’th’ milk of human kindness” (Macbeth, Act 1, Scene 5, l.17), but develops into the horror of mankind – the sensitively feeling turns into the heartless, insensitive and unscrupulous (Lüthi (1969), p.29, l.40ff.).
According to Max Lüthi, the protagonist does not only murder the king, but makes the entire kingship become estranged to itself. As for Shakespeare, being a king signifies the possibility of the highest development of a human. Macbeth becomes a slave to destruction in his reign. Kingship means healing, and to bring salvation, whereas Macbeth brings illness and death to his country (Lüthi (1969), p.30, l.7-12).
Even though the last consequence in the course of the drama – being the chaos of universal destruction – is prevented in the end by proclaiming Malcolm as the rightful king of Scotland and, therefore, restoring the civil order, nothing is going to be the same as before since, due to Macbeth’s tyranny, the possibility of liquidation of all fixed conditions is now present (Breuer, p.366, ll.11-18).
Summarizing, it can be said that Shakespeare uses Macbeth’s imagination as the essential means to grant the audience deeper insights into the psyche of his protagonist. At the same time, through this nuanced introspection, which also includes its motives for the respective actions, the dramatist illustrates the individuality of his tragic hero.
Imagination and Reality – Two Entirely Different Worlds in Macbeth – Annotations on the Dual Time Structure in the Drama
9.1 The Discrepancy Between Imagination and Reality in Macbeth
9.1.1 General Information
In Macbeth, a dual time structure can be determined: While the ‘external’ action, namely the real course of the plot, takes place in the present, the ‘internal’ action, here being the imaginative events in Macbeth’s mind, happens primarily in the future. He mentally anticipates future happenings or at least foresees them partially. Thus he practically lives in two different worlds: In reality and in the ‘dreamworld’ of his imagination. Hence, within the drama the reality of the plot – the here and now of the play – is confronted with Macbeth’s future-directed imagination, which massively influences, if not even determines, the course of events.
In this regard, the witches also possess a special relevance since, by plunging the action into an atmosphere of bleakness, evil and ambivalences – “Fair is foul, and foul is fair” (Macbeth, Act 1, Scene 1, l.9) – they, in a way, create the frame that, in Macbeth’s case, ultimately contributes to moving the visionary images into the factuality of reality (Ahrens, p.893, l.28ff.).
9.1.2 Macbeth Between Two Different Worlds
Macbeth stands on the border between the world of reality and the world of fantasy, but the further the course of the drama progresses the more he leaves reality behind and dedicates himself to his irrational, future-oriented imagination. The latter quickly brings him his greatest success by making him king through murder, after his arbitrary, imaginative interpretation of the first prophecy – “All hail Macbeth, that shalt be king hereafter.” (Macbeth, Act 1, Scene 3, l.50) – but it also drives him into his ruin at the end of the play due to his false interpretation of the witches’ ambiguous second prophecy series (see Macbeth, Act 4, Scene 1, l.70-71; l.78-80; l.89-93).
The witches showed Macbeth the truth, since Macduff does pose a deadly threat to him and because, indeed, no man born by a woman can do him any harm, just except that Macduff came into the world through a Caesarean section; another truth is that Macbeth is ultimately defeated when the forest of Birnam – only in the shape of the English-Scottish army camouflaged with branches and twigs – rises up to his castle Dunsinane. Nevertheless, at the same time they have deceived him with their words insofar as that Macbeth does not see through the ambiguity of their prophecies and, therefore, misinterprets them, which causes him, since he now thinks himself invincible, to commit terrible actions – especially the motiveless and ruthless contract killing of Macduff’s family – which eventually end in fatal consequences for him because Macduff takes deadly revenge on him.
Besides, the witches themselves were also already seen as products of Macbeth’s imagination, hence as not really existent. They were rather interpreted as symbolic illustrations and independent embodiments of his ambition and his wishes and hopes – as projections of movements of his soul into the outside world. Though this psychoanalytically profound interpretation constitutes a misconception since, on the one hand, it contradicts the contemporary idea of witches as real embodiments of evil, because many Elizabethans – not least James I. who, like already mentioned, wrote a book about demonology (1597) – believed in the existence of supernatural beings such as, for instance, witches or demons; on the other hand, it is to be taken into account that, apart from Macbeth, Banquo has also seen them on the heath and talked to them (see Macbeth, Act 1, Scene 3, ll.39-69), so that it is impossible to talk of a mere fantasy in this case.