Macbeth: Instruments of Perversion

Surreal, unexplainable, bizarre, dreamlike. Terms such as these are often used to describe the feelings associated with Shakespeare's Macbeth. These unreal qualities are the result of numerous twisted perversions in the plot and characters. Macbeth and Lady Macbeth are chased by equivocation, trying to balance out reality and their dream-world though they are entrenched in a fog of uncertainty and doubt. Macbeth himself quickly becomes an instrument of this distortion due to the influences of the Weird Sisters, Lady Macbeth, and the unstoppable chain of events his initial violence sets off.

Macbeth is constantly in a state of dreaming, thought he does not realize it. In fact, most of the time, he cannot tell the difference between reality and dreaming. The most prevalent perversion of reality is the confusion between inside and outside. Firstly, the hallucinations experienced by Macbeth and his wife are examples of this disorder. During one of his soliloquies, Macbeth asks:

Is this a dagger which I see before me,

The handle toward my hand? Come, let me clutch thee.

I have thee not, and yet I see thee still/

Art thou not, fatal vision, sensible,

To feeling as to sight? Or art thou but

A dagger of the mind, a false creation

Proceeding from the heat-oppressed brain? (2.1.44-50)

Macbeth is questioning his own sanity, whether or not this dagger he sees before him is part of the real world or created by his troubled mind. After Lady Macbeth takes part in the murder of King Duncan by replacing the bloody daggers in the hands of the guards, she is filled with guilt and sleepwalks almost nightly. Her continuous need to wash her hands is a sign of this guilt, and she is also confusing what should be inside and s...

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...as stolen away as well. Duncan was also robbed of a natural transition into death because of Macbeth's ambition, fueled by the prophecies of the Weird Sisters and the desires of his equally ambitious wife.

The story of Macbeth and his short-lived struggle for the crown is an excellent example of how perversions in the physical world and in the mind can alter one's perception to the point of total confusion. There is no way that Macbeth could have stopped the series of events that transpired after he killed the king and, in so doing, killed the rational world. Though the play itself does not move entirely into a dream-world, the characters cannot always see through the haze of uncertainty and chaos that Macbeth's ambition brings upon their world.

Works Cited

Shakespeare, William. Macbeth. The New Folger Library. Washington Square Press: New York, 1992.