The Bard of Avon shows in his tragedy Macbeth an evil couple who face the dark hand of death – as a result of criminal deeds. Let us look closely at the growing, enveloping darkness of the play as it progresses.
In his book, On the Design of Shakespearean Tragedy, H. S. Wilson identifies the darkness in the play with evil, hell, devils:
Mr. Kenneth Muir, in his introduction to the play – which does not, by the way, interpret it simply from this point of view – aptly describes the cumulative effect of the imagery: “The contrast between light and darkness [suggested by the imagery] is part of a general antithesis between good and evil, devils and angels, evil and grace, hell and heaven . . . (67-68)
A.C. Bradley in Shakespearean Tragedy comments on the darkness within the play:
The vision of the dagger, the murder of Duncan, the murder of Banquo, the sleep-walking of Lady Macbeth, all come in night scenes. The Witches dance in the thick air of a storm or, ‘black and midnight hags’, receive Macbeth in a cavern. The blackness of night is to the hero a thing of fear, even of horror; and that which he feels becomes the spirit of the play. The faint glimmerings of the western sky at twilight are here menacing: it is the hour when the traveller hastens to reach safety in his inn, and when Banquo rides homeward t meet his assassins; the hour when ‘light thickens’, when ‘night’s black agents to their prey do rouse’, when the wolf begins to howl, and the owl to scream, and withered murder steals forth to his work. (307)
In “Macbeth as the Imitation of an Action” Francis Fergusson states the place of darkness in the action of the play:
It is the phrase…
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…re: The Tragedies. A Collectiion of Critical Essays. Alfred Harbage, ed. Englewwod Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1964.
Knights, L.C. “Macbeth.” Shakespeare: The Tragedies. A Collectiion of Critical Essays. Alfred Harbage, ed. Englewwod Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1964.
Lamb, Charles. On the Tragedies of Shakespeare. N.p.: n.p.. 1811. Rpt in Shakespearean Tragedy. Bratchell, D. F. New York, NY: Routledge, 1990.
Shakespeare, William. The Tragedy of Macbeth. http://chemicool.com/Shakespeare/macbeth/full.html, no lin.
Warren, Roger. Shakespeare Survey 30. N.p.: n.p., 1977. Pp. 177-78. Rpt. in Shakespeare in the Theatre: An Anthology of Criticism. Stanley Wells, ed. England: Oxford University Press, 2000.
Wilson, H. S. On the Design of Shakespearean Tragedy. Toronto, Canada: University of Toronto Press, 1957.
Shakespeare’s Macbeth – Macbeth’s Dark Quality
Macbeth’s Dark Quality
It is obvious to the reader of Shakespeare’s tragedy Macbeth that there are varying types and degrees of darkness in the drama. We shall look at this in detail within this paper.
L.C. Knights in the essay “Macbeth” describes the moral darkness into which Macbeth lowers himself:
The main theme of the reversal of values is given out simply and clearly in the first scene – “Fair is foul, and foul is fair”; and with it are associated premonitions of the conflict, disorder and moral darkness into which Macbeth will plunge himself. (95)
Charles Lamb in On the Tragedies of Shakespeare comments on the “images of night” and their impact on the audience:
The state of sublime emotion into which we are elevated by those images of night and horror which Macbeth is made to utter, that solemn prelude with which he entertains the time till the bell shall strike which is to call him to murder Duncan, – when we no longer read it in a book, when we have given up that vantage-ground of abstraction which reading possesses over seing, and come to see a man in his bodily shape before our eyes actually preparing to commit a muder, if the acting be true and impressive as I have witnessed it in Mr. K’s performance of that part, the painful anxiety about the act, the natural longing to prevent it while it yet seems unperpetrated, the too close pressing semblance of reality,give a pain and an uneasiness [. . .]. (134)
Roger Warren states in Shakespeare Survey 30 , regarding Trervor Nunn’s direction of Macbeth at Stratford-upon-Avon in 1974-75, how the witches represented the darkness of black magic:
Much of the approach and detail was carried over, particularly the clash between religious purity and black magic. Purity was embodied by Duncan, very infirm (in 1974 he was blind), dressed in white and accompanied by church organ music, set against the black magic of the witches, who even chanted ‘Double, double to the Dies Irae. (283)
In “Macbeth as the Imitation of an Action” Francis Fergusson states the place of darkness in the action of the play:
It is the phrase “to outrun the pauser, reason [2.3],” which seems to me to describe the action, or motive, of the play as a whole. Macbeth, of course, literally means that his love for Duncan was so strong and so swift that it got ahead of his reason, which would have counseled a pause.