At this point at the latest he has given up any hope of an improvement of his tragic situation. He senses and knows that his end is drawing near.
Thus here, towards the end of the play, Macbeth can, if at all, only hope to survive, or rather to delay his death as long as possible and, in the process, tear as many of his enemies with him into death as possible, after he has now realized that death – even though he thought himself to be invulnerable up to this point due to his interpretation of the second prophecy series – is now inescapable for him as well.
9.1.4 Findings
Thus summarizing, it remains to be adhered that, since the prophecy of royal dignity, Macbeth fully and deliberately walks the path of crime and repeatedly succumbs to the short-lived hope that he could draw advantages from it, or that he would at least remain spared of the consequences (Standop, p.250, l.16-18). Yet he is consistently caught up by the aftermaths of his misdeeds (which, however, will not be thematized in greater detail at this point yet).
At the end of the play, any hope that he entertained turned out to be a merely illusory assumption, which either does not come true for him at all – such as, for instance, the desired happy life as king, the longed-for finality in the shape of security and certainty through the murders of Duncan and Banquo, as well as his hoped-for invulnerability after the witches’ prophecies in the fourth act – or at least provides him no permanent advantage. Thus, even though he becomes king, his life quality deteriorates drastically by it, instead of improving1. Lastly, he experiences solitude, despair as well as the loss of the world and the own self inside it.
Disillusioned, Macbeth has to finally realize shortly before his death that he did not become the royal hero, who would have succeeded in ringing in a new glorious era that stands in close connection with his name, like he possibly has envisioned in his pipe dreams, but that his life turned out to be – as bitter as it might be for him – “a tale / Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury / Signifying nothing.“ (Macbeth, Act 5, Scene 5, l.25–27) in the end (see Ryan, p.65, l.17-19). He has strived for self-superelevation and, in the process, ultimately destroyed himself and his own soul.
9.1. Imagination as a Mirror of Fears and Apprehensions: Negative Anticipation of the Future
In this chapter it shall now be examined what significance imagination has in the shape of fear in Macbeth, and what impact it has on both the tragic hero as well as the course of the plot. In the course of this, it will also be discussed in how far one can actually describe this tragedy as “a study in fear” – as, for example, does Lily B. Campbell2 (Campbell, p.208ff.). Pursuant to Aristotle (see Aristotle, The Art of Rhetoric, p.71, 1382a19-b27), Campbell gives a listing (still relevant today) of the people we generally fear:
“[…] we fear the enmity and anger of those who have power to do us harm; we fear injustice in the possession of power; we fear outraged virtue; we fear those who have us at their mercy, and therefore we fear those who share a secret with us lest they betray us; we fear those that have been wronged lest they seek retaliation; we fear those that have done wrong, since they stand in fear of retaliation; we fear those who have shown their power by destroying those stronger than we are; we fear those who are our rivals for something which we cannot both have at once. And the table stands as a pattern for the fears and murders and revenges of Macbeth.” (Campbell, p.211, ll.5-15).
Similar as to Seneca, the reign of the tyrant Macbeth is based on fear. It definitely stands in the center of the entire tragic events. The feeling of constant threat imposes compulsions on his actions, which make him act arbitrarily.
First of all, it is to be determined that almost all of Macbeth’s actions – especially after his murder of the king – are influenced directly or indirectly by his fear which, along with his “vaulting ambition”, disables all moral considerations. Fear and ambition mutually depend on each other and are experienced by him as driving psychological forces that, independent of desire and thinking, slowly gain more and more strength and gradually drive out everything else from the consciousness. Like the greed for power, fear too arises autogenously (Unterstenhöfer, p.164, l.15-22).
Through Macbeth, Shakespeare demonstrates how fear – in a creeping way and continuously increasing – reaches an intensity against which there is no more resistance (Unterstenhöfer, p.164, l.23-26). Additionally, he illustrates how the initial illusory character of fear (Macbeth, Act 1, Scene 3, l.51–52: “why do you start, and seem to fear / Things that do sound so fair?“) becomes consciously experienced reality (Macbeth, Act 1, Scene 3, l.139-140: “Present fears / Are less than horrible imaginings.“) which, through the overvalued conception of ‘murder’ merges into fear (Angst) – an emotional state that, in contrast to dread (Furcht), complies with an undefined threat to life (Unterstenhöfer, p.165, l.22ff.).