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.
9. Imagination and Reality – Two Entirely Different Worlds in Macbeth – Annotations on the Dual Time Structure in the Drama
9.1 The Disparity 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 rises up to his castle Dunsinane – in the shape of the English-Scottish army camouflaged with branches and twigs. 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.
But back to the actual topic. For Macbeth, reality is thus interchanged because since the prophecy of the first act, which predicts him the title of king, only what he sees in this visionary conception exists for him: “And nothing is, but what is not.” (Macbeth, Act 1, Scene 3, l.144 / Naumann, p.381, l.2-4). This determination of Macbeth can be classified as a keyword for the violence of the unreal in Shakespeare’s dramas. Nothing real has such a power and impact, according to Macbeth, as the unreal illusions of our mind. But his words also hold in a broader sense: Only what is not, is fully alive, because it wants to become real. He himself experiences this in a terrible way. What is not yet – thus in his case the murder of Duncan, whatever the cost – pushes into realization. The already real, or realized, now does not have such power anymore; it is already about to vanish, to slide back into nothingness.