DISCUSS SYMBOLIC IDEAS IN THE IMAGERY OF 'MACBETH'

DISCUSS SYMBOLIC IDEAS IN THE IMAGERY OF ‘MACBETH’

Ans.

William Blake’s illustrations of his prophetic books constantly remind the function of Shakespeare’s images. These are not illustrations in the ordinary sense of the term, the translation by the artist of some incident in the narrative into a visual picture; they are rather a running accompaniment to the words in another medium, sometime symbolically emphasising or interpreting certain aspects of the thought, sometimes and even repellent, vivid, strange, arresting, sometimes drawn with an almost unearthly beauty of form and colour. Thus, as the leaping tongues of flame, which illustrate the pages of ‘The marriage of heaven and Hell’, show the visual form which Blake’s thought evoked in his mind, and symbolize for us the purity, the beauty, and the two-edged quality of life and danger in his words, so the recurrent images in Macbeth’ or ‘Hamlet’ reveal the dominant picture or sensation- and for Shakespeare the two are identical- in terms of which he sees and feels the main problem or theme of the play, thus giving us an unerring clue to the way he looked at it, as well as a direct glimpse into the working of his mind and imagination.

These dominating images are a characteristic of Shakespeare’s work throughout, but whereas in the earlier plays they are often rather obvious and of set design, taken over in some cases with the story itself from a hint in the original narrative, in the later plays, and especially in the great tragedies, they are born of the emotions of the theme, and are, as in Macbeth, subtle, complex, varied, but intensely vivid and revealing; or as in ‘king Lear’, so constant and all-pervading as to be reiterated not only in the word-pictures, but also in the single words themselves.

There are certain recurrent symbolic images in Shakespeare such as that of a tree and its branches, and of planting, lopping or rooting up, which run through the English historical plays; they are conscious of the imaginative effect of the animal imagery in ‘King Lear’, or of the flesh of explosive in Romeo and Juliet.

There is a certain range of images, and roughly a certain proportion of these, to be expected in every play and that certain familiar categories, of nature animals, and that may be termed ‘everyday’ or ‘domestic’, come first. But besides those, especially in the tragedies, certain groups of images which, as it were, stick out in each particular play and immediately attract attention because they are peculiar either in subject or quantity, or both.

The imagery in ‘Macbeth’ is more rich and varied, more highly imaginative, more unapproachable by any other writer, than that of any other single play. It is particularly so in the continuous use made of the simplest, humblest, everyday things, drawn from the daily life in a cottage, or a vehicle for sublime poetry.

The ideas in the imagery are in themselves more imaginative, more subtle and complex than in other plays, interwoven, the one with the other, recurring and repeating. There are at least four of these main ideas and many.. subsidiary ones.

One is the picture of Macbeth himself: Few simple things have such a curiously humiliating and degrading effect as the spectacle of a small, ignoble man enveloped in a coat far too big for him. Comic actors know this well Charlie Chaplin. for instance and it is by means of this homely picture that Shakespeare shows us his imaginative view of the hero, and expresses the fact that the honours for which the murders were committed are, after all, of very little worth to him.

The idea constantly recess that Macbeth’s new honours sit ill upon him, like a loose and badly fitting garment belonging to someone else. Macbeth himself first expresses it, quite early in the play, when, immediately following the first appearance of the witches and their prophesies, Ross arrives from the king and greets him as thane of Cawdor, to which Macbeth quickly replies: “The thane of Cawdor lives: why do you dress me in borrow’d robes ?”

(Act 1, Scene VII)

And a few minutes latter, when he is rant in ambitious thoughts suggested by the confirmation of two out of three “prophetic greetings”, Banquo, watching him, murmurs:

“New honours come upon him,

Like our strange garments, cleave not to the mould

But with the aid of use”.

(Act I, Scene VII)

When Duncan is safely in the castly, Macbeth’s better nature for a moment asserts itself and, in debate with himself, he revolts from the contemplated deed for a threefold reason:

(i) because of its incalculable results,

(ii) treachery of such action from one who is both kinsman and host, and

(iii) Duncan’s own virtues and greatness as king.

When his wife joins him, his repugnance to the deed is as great, but it is significant that he gives three quite different reasons for not going ahead with it, reasons which he hopes may appeal to her, for he knows the others would not.

Macbeth urges his wife that their planned deed of murdering the king in their own castle would upset everything the honours and reputation lately won should be exploited to their best advantage.

In order to express the position, Macbeth ironically, chooses to employ the metaphor of clothes:

“I have bought

Golden opinion from all sorts of people.

Which would be worn now in their newest gloss,

Nor cast aside so soon.”

To which Lady Macbeth retorts contemptuously, and quite unmoved

“Was the hope drunk

Where in you dress’d yourself?”

(Act I, Scene VII)

After the murder, when Ross says he is going to Scone for Macbeth’s coronation, Macduff uses the same simile:

“Well, may you see things well done there: adieu !

Lest our old robes sit easier than our new !”

And at the end, when the tyrant is at bay at Dunsinane and the English troops are advancing, the Scottish Lords still have this image in their minds. Caithness sees him as a man vainly trying to fasten a large garment on him with too small a belt:

“He cannot buckle his distemper’d cause

Within the belt of rule;”

While Angus, in a similar image, vividly sums up he essence of what they all have been thinking ever since Macbeth’s accession to power:

“…….now does he feel his title

Hang loose about him, like a giant’s robe

Upon a dwardfish thief.”

This imaginative picture of a small, ignoble man encumbered and degraded by garments unsuited to him, should be put against the view emphasised by some critics (notably Coleridge and Bradley) of the likeness between Macbeth and Milton’s Satan in grandeur and sublimity.

Macbeth is without doubt, built on great lines and in heroic, proportions, with great possibilities. He is great, magnificently great, in courage, indomitable passionate ambition, in capacity to feel and in imagination. but he could never be put beside Hamlet or Othello in nobility of nature. There is an aspect in which he is poor, vain, cruel and treacherous creature who snatches ruthlessly over the dead bodies of kinsmen and friend a place and power he is utterly unfitted to possess. Shakespeare, with his unshrinking clarity of vision. repeatedly sees him thus.

The reverberation of sound echoing over vast regions, even into the limitless spaces beyond the confines of the world is another image running through ‘Macbeth.’ Echoing sound and reflected light always caught Shakespeare’s fancy. He is very quick to notice it…. In Macbeth’ the peculiar quality of echoing and re-echoing sound is used to emphasis in the most highly imaginative and impressive way a thought constantly present with Shakespeare in his middle years, the incalculable and boundless effects of evil in the nature of one man.

Macbeth, like Hamlet, is himself fully conscious of how impossible it is a trammel up the consequence of his deed, and by and by his magnificent images of angels pleading trumpet-tongued, ‘pity, like a naked new-born babe’ striding the blast:

“Or heaven’s cherubin horsed

Upon the sightless couriers of the air….”

who

“Shall blow the horrid deed in every eye,

That tears shall drown the wind,”

he fills out imagination with the picture of its being broadcast through great spaces with reverse beating sound.

This is taken up again by Macduff, when he cries,

“each new morn

New widows howl, new orphans cry, new sorrows

Strikes heaven on the face, that it resounds

As if it felt with Scotland and yell’d out

Like syllable of colour,”

(Act IV, Scene II)

and again by Ross, when he is trying to break the terrible news of Macbeth’s latest murders to Macduff-the destruction of his own wife and children-

“I have words

That would be howl’d out in the desert air,

Where hearing should not latch them.”

(Act I, Scene VII)

One cannot conceive easily and commonly a picture, more vivid, of the vastness, of space than this and of the overwhelming and unending nature of the consequences or reverberations of the evil deed.

Another constant idea in the play arises out of symbolism that fight stands for life, virtue, goodness and darkness for evil and death. “Angels are bright’, the witches are ‘secret, black and midnight hungs’, and the movement of the whole play, according to Dowden, might be summed up in the words, good things of day begin to droop and drowse…. It is assumed throughout that the evil is so horrible that it would blast the sight to look on it, so darkness or partial blinging is necessary to carry it out.

Ironically, Duncan starts the simile, the idea of which turns into a leading motive in the play. In conferring the new honour on his son, he is careful to announce that others, kinsmen and thanes, will also be rewarded:

“Signs of nobleness like stars, shall shine

On all deservers.”

(Act I, Scene VII)

Immediately Macbeth realizes that Malcolm, now a Prince of the realm, is an added obstacle in his path, and suddenly, shrinking from the blazing horror of the murderous thought which follows, he cries to himself.

“Stars, hide your fires:

Let not light see my black and deep desires.”

(Act I, Scene VII)

The idea that evil deeds be done only in darkness is ever present with both Macbeth and his wife as is evident is their two different and most characteristic invocations to darkness; her blood curdling cry:

“Come thick night,

And pull thee in the dumnest smoke of hell,”

(Act I, Scene VII)

And when Banquo, sleepless, uneasy, with heart heavy as head, crossed the courtyard on the fateful night, with Fleance holding the flaring torch before him, and, looking up to the dark sky, mutters:

“There’s husbandry in heaven,

Their candles are all out,”

(Act I, Scene VII)

and we know that the scene is set for treachery and murder.

So it is apt that on the following day “dark night strangles the travelling lamp’, and

“darkness owes the face of earth entomb

When living light should kiss it,”

Yet another constant idea which is of deeds too terrible for human eyes to behold. Lady Macbeth scoffs it, “the sleeping and the dead are but as pictures”,

“its the eye of childhood

That fears a painted devil.”

but Maduss, having seen the slain king, rushes out, and cries to Lennoz.

“Approach the chamber, and destroy your sight

With a new Gorgon”

(Act I, Scene VII)

Macbeth boldly asserts he dare look on that “which might appai the devil,” and the horror and fear he feels on seeing one “too like the spirit of Banquo” in the procession of kings is expressed in his agonised cry.

“Thy crown does sear mine eye-balls,”

In his bitter and beautiful words at the close, the dominant thoughts and images are the quenching of light and the empty reverberation of sound and fury, “signifying nothing”,

The fourth of the symbolic ideas in the play is one which is very constant with Shakespeare and is to be found all through his work, that sin is a disease-Scotland is sick.

So Macbeth, while repudeating physic for himself, turns to the doctor and says it he could by analysis find Scotland’s disease:

“And purge it to a sound and pristine’s health:

I would applaud these to the very echo,

That should applaud again….

What rhubarb, senna, or what purgative drug,

Would scour these English hense?”

(Act I, Scene VII)

Malcolm speaks of his country as “weeping, bleeding and wounded” and later urges Macduff to

“Make us medicines of our great revenge.

To cure this deadly grief,”

(Act I, Scene VII)

While Caithness calls Malcolm himself the “medicine of the sickly weal”, “the country’s purge”.

It is remarkable that all Macbeth’s images of sickness are remedial or soothing in character: balm for a sore sleep after fever, a purge, physic for pain, a “sweet obvious antidote”. thus intensifying his passionate and constant longing for well-being rest, and above all, peace of mind.

Idea of Unnaturalness’ of Macbeth’s crime is a convulsion of nature. Macbeth himself says that Duncan’s wounds “look’d like a breach in nature”

“For ruin’s wasteful entrance.”

and compares his murder to the sacrilege of breaking open the Lord’s anointed temple.

The events which accompany and follow it are terrible because unnatural: an owl kills a falcon, horses eat each other, the earth was feverous and did shake, day becomes night; all this says the old man, is unnatural,

“Even like the deed that’s done,”

Macbeth’s greatest trouble is the unnatural one that he has “murdered sleep,” and the whole feeling of dislocation is increased by such images as “let this frame of things disjoint”, of by Macbeth’s conjuration to the witches with the terrible list of the convulsions of nature which may result from their answering him. Indeed, if from one angle the movement of the play may be summed up in Macbeth’s words,

“Good things of day begin to droop and drowse,”

from another it is aimlessly described by the doctor in his diagnosis of the doomed Queen’s malady as “a great perturbation of nature”.

In addition to these running images symbolizing or expressing an idea, there are groups of others which might be called atmospheric in their effect, that is they raise of increase certain feelings and emotions.

Such is the action of rapid riding which contributes and emphasizes a certain sense of rushing relentless, and goaded motion, of which we are very conscious in the play. This is symbolized externally by the rapid ride of the messenger to Lady Macbeth arriving “almost dead for breath” ahead of Macbeth, who himself has outridden Duncan, who remarks in unconscious irony,

“he rides well,

And his great love, sharp as his spur, hath hold him

To his home before us”.

(Act I, Scene VII)

It is noticeable what a large part riding plays in the, images which crowd on Macbeth’s heated brain when he is weighing the pros and cons of his plan the new born “striding the blast”, heaven’s cherubin horsed

“Upon the sightless couriers of the air”

and finally, the vision of his “intent”, his aim as a horse lacking sufficient spur to action, which melts imto the picture of himself as a rider vaulting into the saddle with such energy that it “o’er-leaps itself’ and he falls on the further side.

The feeling of fear, horror and pain is increased by the constant and recurring images of blood; these are very marked and have been noticed by others, especially by Bradley, the most terrible being Macbeth’s description of himself wading in a river of blood, while the most stirring to the imagination. perhaps in the whole of Shakespeare, is the picture of him gazing rigid with horror, at his own blood-stained hand and watching it dye the whole green ocean red.

The images of animals also, nearly all predatory unpleasant, or fierce, add to this same feeling, such are a nest of scorpions, a venomous serpent and a snake, a “hall-kite” eating chickens, a devouring vulture, as warm of insects a tiger, rhinoceros, and bear, the tiny birdine fighting the owl for the life of her young, small birds with the fear of the net, time pitfall, or gin, used with such bitter ironic effect by Lady Macduff and her boy just before they are murdered. the shrieking owl and the bear tied to a stake fighting savagely to the end.

The symbolism in the imagery of ‘Macbeth’ is complex and varied. The subtle but definite and repeated action of this imagery on our minds accentuate emotions of pity, fear and horror.

(Caroline spurge on in ‘Shakespearean criticism’.)