Essay: Macbeth’s Fear: How His Dread of His Own Inhumanity Leads to Compelling Consequences

This menacing fear that creeps up on him on the night of the murder continuously increases, until it almost seems to crush him (Unterstenhöfer, p.186, l.7-10).
While most Macbeth-interpreters (such as, for instance, Harold Bloom or Levin L. Schücking) claim in this context that Macbeth shuns his first misdeed merely out of fear of the consequences, especially Bradley is convinced that he recoils from the deed solely due to its vileness, or rather because of his dread of his own inhumanity (see Bradley, p.297, ll.1-16.). The only truly plausible conception, however, lies in the combination of these views; namely, that Macbeth neither hesitates exclusively because of the consequences, nor due to the mere abomination of the murder, but because of both. This explicitly arises out of his monologue in act one, scene seven, in which he first considers the – for him – negative impacts followed by the baseness of the planned assassination itself. Initially, both seem to firmly speak against the performance of the deed.
Before the murder of Duncan, the torture of his earthly hell lies in his premonition of the negative consequences in this life – since he knows: whoever commits such a deed teaches others to act the same way; thus, a murder plot could soon be directed against him too – as well as in the afterlife – being eternal damnation since he destroyed the divinely ordained order – of which Macbeth is fully aware and which he is firmly alert to. Besides, “when he talks of the moral implications of the deed before murdering, he is not ‘really’ there: he is ‘rationalising’ his fear.” (Moorthy, p.194, l.42-43).
After this murder, on the other hand, his inner agony lies in the dread of his own inhumanity, which, though he reasonably declares it to himself as fear of revenge and betrayal, is essentially the same nightmarish memory of the sinfully shed blood that also haunts Lady Macbeth afterwards. The extent of this torture, which Shakespeare’s powerful language makes comprehensible for the audience, pushes him further ahead (see Rojahn-Deyk, p.219, ll.19-27). The fact that he fears this step of regicide is hardly surprising, since it constitutes the greatest risk of his life.
Immediately after the first murder, the depressing nightmarish silence in Macbeth’s imaginary auditory experience breaks. The fear of Duncan’s half-awake sons, whom he has heard, accumulates his own “unknown fear” so that he hallucinates voices that vividly remind him how shamefully he has violated nature by murdering his own sleep (Unterstenhöfer, p.166, ll.17-24): “[…] ’Sleep no more. / Macbeth does murder sleep’ – the innocent sleep, / Sleep that knits up the ravelled sleave of care, / The death of each day’s life, sore labour’s bath, / Balm of hurt minds, great Nature’s second course, / Chief nourisher in life’s feast –“ (Macbeth, Act 2, Scene 2, l.36–41). What also appears plausible is Jan Kott’s view, according to which Macbeth has murdered Duncan out of fear, and continues to kill out of fear since he neither can nor wants to admit to having severe misgivings about murder; he simply cannot accept a Macbeth who is afraid of killing the king (Kott, p.119, l.6-7). Thus despite all his objections, which he undoubtedly has, he wants to avoid looking like a coward to his wife – but also to himself – by all means, since that would be the case if he passed up such a one-time opportunity (since, that night, Duncan of all people put himself into his care) to, through the murder, become king himself.
Right after this murder he is plagued by serious pangs of conscience which, out of fear, keep him from bringing the bloody daggers back to the servants and from beholding the murdered once again: “I’ll go no more. / I am afraid to think what I have done; / Look on’t again, I dare not.“ (Macbeth, Act 2, Scene 2, l.51–53). The subsequent knocking on the gate makes clear that, henceforth, every sound appalls him. With horror, he has to realize that he can never be freed from the guilt that he has just imposed on himself; that is why he would gladly undo everything again (see Macbeth, Act 2, Scene 2, l.75). According to Kiernan Ryan’s somewhat bold, not entirely traceable interpretation, ”Macbeth’s immediate dread after killing Duncan is not that he now bears the guilt of regicide, of having betrayed ‘the service and the loyalty’ he owed his monarch’s ‘throne and state’ (Macbeth, Act 1, Scene 4, l.22; l.25) as ‘his kinsman, and his subject’ (Macbeth, Act 1, Scene 7, l.13), but that he ‘hath murdered sleep’ (Macbeth, Act 2, Scene 2, l.43), which Lady Macbeth later calls ‘the season of all natures’ (Macbeth, Act 3, Scene 4, l.139), and thus has severed himself from this ‘innocent’ (Macbeth, Act 2, Scene 2, l.37) common blessing which bound him to his kind.” (Ryan, p.64, l.10-18).
He leads a life of fear and only has nightmares (Macbeth, Act 3, Scene 2, l.19-20: “[…] In the affliction of these terrible dreams / That shake us nightly.”), which means that his acoustic hallucinations have thus confirmed.