Julian Rubinfien Ms. Mazzurco European Literature Period 10 19 October 2015 I Have Thee Not, and Yet I See Thee Still Modern psychologists try to divide the human mind into distinct and logical parts. Sigmund Freud, for example, developed the idea of the separate id, ego, and superego. According to Freud, within every human mind lies the same basic psychological structure; everyone shares–subconsciously–the sex drive, the fear of death, and the desire to conform to society’s standards. In The Tragedy of Macbeth, William Shakespeare approaches the mind in a very different way, showing a soul where divisions are murky and unclear. The whole self can be invaded by, and struggle to suppress greed, ambition, and violent rage, and it is these passions that lie at the root of Macbeth’s and Lady Macbeth’s tribulations throughout the play. As these emotions are amplified and released within their minds, Macbeth and Lady Macbeth go insane. Where one of Freud’s hallmark ideas was to define the line between the conscious and the subconscious, in Macbeth, the boundary between the two is not clear. A major recurring aspect of the two main characters’ shared lunacy is hallucination, a motif that is regularly encountered throughout the story. When watching the play, one never truly knows what is real and what isn’t, and this applies to the characters, too; in each instance of hallucination, the character having the hallucination tries to fight his or her way back to reality, but fails. Shakespeare keeps his audience in suspense, with everyone hoping that each time a character hallucinates, he or she will come back to reality. In this, the play is a little surreal–and this quality is heightened by the lack of context (though the characters are supposed to be kings and lords, one never sees the kingdom nor the people they rule) and by the way moments of great importance (Duncan’s murder and Macbeth’s coronation, for example) are not shown. In addition, Shakespeare includes three witches in the story. Though many in his time believed in witches, the Weird Sisters are not simply demons that meddle in human activities. Instead, they are personified, externalized representations of the insanity that insidiously worms its way through the minds of Macbeth and Lady Macbeth and brings them to destruction. In Act 1, Scene 1, the three witches speak about when they will meet next, hinting at Macbeth and Banquo’s ongoing battle. Amid thunder and lighting, they say, “When shall we three meet again?/When the hurly-burly's done,/When the battle's lost and won” (7). In the very beginning of the play, the first characters the audience are introduced to are not kings, lords, Macbeth and his wife, or any other humans; instead, the first scene depicts the three witches. This represents a tradition in Shakespeare’s plays, where he often opens or closes a play with abstract, usually foreboding words spoken by mythical side characters, but in this case it thrusts the audience right into the evil dream that will take Macbeth over completely. When they first appear, they don’t speak of any of the other characters, and it’s not entirely clear if they exist in a realm outside of the real world. However, it does seem as if they are speaking in parallel with events in the real world, and in the next scene, we learn that Macbeth and Banquo have just fought an incredibly bloody and brutal battle against Macdonwald (the traitor who betrayed Duncan). From this, it’s safe to assume that the witches are speaking at the same time as the battle: they arise out of the savagery of the battle itself. Macbeth and Banquo have both gone nearly insane together during the fight, and the witches are representations of the madness that begins to go wild within Macbeth’s and Banquo’s minds. In fact, Macbeth and Banquo are initially disbelieving of the witches’ existence; they demand that the witches prove that they’re real, but become more and more mesmerized by them, and by the end of the scene they have come to believe fully in the words and actuality of the Weird Sisters. As the story goes on, Macbeth’s delusion begins to manifest itself in more and more drastic symptoms. Beginning in Act 2, the theme of hallucination begins to reappear at a high frequency, demonstrating the deteriorating mental health of Macbeth and Banquo. Because Macbeth is the main character in the play, we mostly see signs of his lunacy, but the witches also represent the madness that develops in Banquo before he is killed. In Act 2, Scene 1–when Banquo enters his sleeping chambers–he says to his son, Fleance, “A heavy summons lies like lead upon me,/And yet I would not sleep. Merciful powers,/Restrain in me the cursèd thoughts that nature/Gives way to in repose” (49). Hearing the three witches’ prophesies deeply affected Banquo (not only Macbeth), and a few lines later, he confides to Macbeth that, the night before, he had dreamt of the witches. In the following scene, Macbeth experiences a much more acute symptom of his madness. Alone on the stage, he experiences a hallucination in which he imagines a bloody dagger hanging in the air in front of him. He says, “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” (51). As the story goes on, Macbeth’s lunacy consumes his mind more and more. He begins to experience serious delusions and confusion. As in his earlier hallucination of the witches, Macbeth first speaks incredulously, denying the existence of the dagger. Though he tells himself that he doesn’t actually have the knife, he becomes, once again, mesmerized with his delusion and convinced of its actuality. This hallucination–of a dagger suspended in midair, pointing towards Duncan’s room–partially represents Macbeth’s loss of control over his mental condition, but it also represents guilt. Macbeth, facing the fact that he is about to kill his beloved king and become a traitor, is hit with a wave of guilt so powerful that his mind breaks down and convinces him to see something that isn't real, in order to justify the crime he will commit. When the audience watches this occur, they immediately wonder what can make him do such a thing, especially when he resists it so strongly, and hope intensely that he will regain control of himself, banish his terrible visions, and go back to being the good and loyal man he seemed to be when the play began. Unlike Macbeth and Banquo, Lady Macbeth never actually sees the witches; however, she experiences the same type of lunacy as the former men, and to an extent that neither of them ever reaches. Near the end of the story, Lady Macbeth goes absolutely mad, to the point where she must be confined in her bedroom and watched constantly by nurses. Near the end of her life (which comes by suicide), she sees spots of blood on her hand that she cannot remove. She says in horror, “Out, damned spot, out, I say! One. Two… Yet who would have thought the old man to have had so much blood in him?…All the perfumes of Arabia will not sweeten this little hand!” (163). In most interpretations of the story, Lady Macbeth is seen as a villain who induces Macbeth’s greed and rage, convincing him to commit many evils. Along with the witches, she is perceived by many as manipulative and malicious, but never a victim. However, a more interesting way to read Macbeth is to see her a victim, too, as much or maybe even more of one than her husband. The nonexistent blood on her hand, like Macbeth’s hallucination of the dagger, represents her guilt over her uncontrollable, consuming feelings of greed, ambition, and blood-lust, the same qualities that Macbeth struggles over and personifies in the witches and the dagger. The first time we meet Lady Macbeth, it is as she reads Macbeth’s letter, in which he tells about his victory in battle against Macdonwald, about the witches and about their prophecy that he will become king. This is a fragile moment for her; perhaps she imagines that her husband was already dead, but when she receives his letter, she too begins to be devoured by the part of her mind filled with ferocity, and meticulously plots how to murder Duncan when he visits her. In any story, there are two questions that retain suspense and keep viewers watching. They are: ‘What are the characters going to do next?’ and ‘Would I have done the same?’. Both questions are essential, and both operate, to some extent, on the subconscious level of the viewer. Without them, a story is meaningless. For example, writing a compelling story about a sinking ship is impossible–however, writing a compelling story about the sailors on the ship (who must decide whether to save the ship or jump off) is a great idea and has been done many times. We care about the characters in a story because we see them making the same kinds of choices we have to make. This principle only works, though, if the main characters have a choice in how the story will go. In Macbeth, the story would be meaningless if Macbeth and Lady Macbeth were not involved in their fates and their actions were simply being orchestrated by demonic witches; if they don’t have the freedom not to kill Duncan, the story automatically becomes far less interesting. If one comes at it from the other direction, however–that they did have a choice, but chose to go down the paths they went down–the viewer immediately asks ‘Would I have done the same?’ Then, however, the audience has to wonder what role the witches really play in Macbeth. The answer is partly, of course, a hallucination of Macbeth and Banquo’s and a symbol of greed, ambition, and ferocity in the human mind. However, it’s also possible to say that the witches are Macbeth’s personal justification for his actions. Freud believed that humans are much better at lying to each other than they are at lying to themselves. That is, though we may assume, we never know the true motives for why we do anything. Perhaps, as Macbeth rationalized his lust for power, his subconscious mind decided that the guilt was too much for him to bear and it created the witches. By convincing himself that the witches were responsible for his actions, he relieved himself of the blame for the sins he committed.

Julian Rubinfien

Ms. Mazzurco

European Literature Period 10

19 October 2015

I Have Thee Not, and Yet I See Thee Still

Modern psychologists try to divide the human mind into distinct and logical parts. Sigmund Freud, for example, developed the idea of the separate id, ego, and superego. According to Freud, within every human mind lies the same basic psychological structure; everyone shares–subconsciously–the sex drive, the fear of death, and the desire to conform to society’s standards. In The Tragedy of Macbeth, William Shakespeare approaches the mind in a very different way, showing a soul where divisions are murky and unclear. The whole self can be invaded by, and struggle to suppress greed, ambition, and violent rage, and it is these passions that lie at the root of Macbeth’s and Lady Macbeth’s tribulations throughout the play. As these emotions are amplified and released within their minds, Macbeth and Lady Macbeth go insane. Where one of Freud’s hallmark ideas was to define the line between the conscious and the subconscious, in Macbeth, the boundary between the two is not clear. A major recurring aspect of the two main characters’ shared lunacy is hallucination, a motif that is regularly encountered throughout the story. When watching the play, one never truly knows what is real and what isn’t, and this applies to the characters, too; in each instance of hallucination, the character having the hallucination tries to fight his or her way back to reality, but fails. Shakespeare keeps his audience in suspense, with everyone hoping that each time a character hallucinates, he or she will come back to reality. In this, the play is a little surreal–and this quality is heightened by the lack of context (though the characters are supposed to be kings and lords, one never sees the kingdom nor the people they rule) and by the way moments of great importance (Duncan’s murder and Macbeth’s coronation, for example) are not shown. In addition, Shakespeare includes three witches in the story. Though many in his time believed in witches, the Weird Sisters are not simply demons that meddle in human activities. Instead, they are personified, externalized representations of the insanity that insidiously worms its way through the minds of Macbeth and Lady Macbeth and brings them to destruction.

In Act 1, Scene 1, the three witches speak about when they will meet next, hinting at Macbeth and Banquo’s ongoing battle. Amid thunder and lighting, they say, “When shall we three meet again?/When the hurly-burly's done,/When the battle's lost and won” (7). In the very beginning of the play, the first characters the audience are introduced to are not kings, lords, Macbeth and his wife, or any other humans; instead, the first scene depicts the three witches. This represents a tradition in Shakespeare’s plays, where he often opens or closes a play with abstract, usually foreboding words spoken by mythical side characters, but in this case it thrusts the audience right into the evil dream that will take Macbeth over completely. When they first appear, they don’t speak of any of the other characters, and it’s not entirely clear if they exist in a realm outside of the real world. However, it does seem as if they are speaking in parallel with events in the real world, and in the next scene, we learn that Macbeth and Banquo have just fought an incredibly bloody and brutal battle against Macdonwald (the traitor who betrayed Duncan). From this, it’s safe to assume that the witches are speaking at the same time as the battle: they arise out of the savagery of the battle itself. Macbeth and Banquo have both gone nearly insane together during the fight, and the witches are representations of the madness that begins to go wild within Macbeth’s and Banquo’s minds. In fact, Macbeth and Banquo are initially disbelieving of the witches’ existence; they demand that the witches prove that they’re real, but become more and more mesmerized by them, and by the end of the scene they have come to believe fully in the words and actuality of the Weird Sisters. As the story goes on, Macbeth’s delusion begins to manifest itself in more and more drastic symptoms.

Beginning in Act 2, the theme of hallucination begins to reappear at a high frequency, demonstrating the deteriorating mental health of Macbeth and Banquo. Because Macbeth is the main character in the play, we mostly see signs of his lunacy, but the witches also represent the madness that develops in Banquo before he is killed. In Act 2, Scene 1–when Banquo enters his sleeping chambers–he says to his son, Fleance, “A heavy summons lies like lead upon me,/And yet I would not sleep. Merciful powers,/Restrain in me the cursèd thoughts that nature/Gives way to in repose” (49). Hearing the three witches’ prophesies deeply affected Banquo (not only Macbeth), and a few lines later, he confides to Macbeth that, the night before, he had dreamt of the witches. In the following scene, Macbeth experiences a much more acute symptom of his madness. Alone on the stage, he experiences a hallucination in which he imagines a bloody dagger hanging in the air in front of him. He says, “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” (51). As the story goes on, Macbeth’s lunacy consumes his mind more and more. He begins to experience serious delusions and confusion. As in his earlier hallucination of the witches, Macbeth first speaks incredulously, denying the existence of the dagger. Though he tells himself that he doesn’t actually have the knife, he becomes, once again, mesmerized with his delusion and convinced of its actuality. This hallucination–of a dagger suspended in midair, pointing towards Duncan’s room–partially represents Macbeth’s loss of control over his mental condition, but it also represents guilt. Macbeth, facing the fact that he is about to kill his beloved king and become a traitor, is hit with a wave of guilt so powerful that his mind breaks down and convinces him to see something that isn't real, in order to justify the crime he will commit. When the audience watches this occur, they immediately wonder what can make him do such a thing, especially when he resists it so strongly, and hope intensely that he will regain control of himself, banish his terrible visions, and go back to being the good and loyal man he seemed to be when the play began.

Unlike Macbeth and Banquo, Lady Macbeth never actually sees the witches; however, she experiences the same type of lunacy as the former men, and to an extent that neither of them ever reaches. Near the end of the story, Lady Macbeth goes absolutely mad, to the point where she must be confined in her bedroom and watched constantly by nurses. Near the end of her life (which comes by suicide), she sees spots of blood on her hand that she cannot remove. She says in horror, “Out, damned spot, out, I say! One. Two… Yet who would have thought the old man to have had so much blood in him?…All the perfumes of Arabia will not sweeten this little hand!” (163). In most interpretations of the story, Lady Macbeth is seen as a villain who induces Macbeth’s greed and rage, convincing him to commit many evils. Along with the witches, she is perceived by many as manipulative and malicious, but never a victim. However, a more interesting way to read Macbeth is to see her a victim, too, as much or maybe even more of one than her husband. The nonexistent blood on her hand, like Macbeth’s hallucination of the dagger, represents her guilt over her uncontrollable, consuming feelings of greed, ambition, and blood-lust, the same qualities that Macbeth struggles over and personifies in the witches and the dagger. The first time we meet Lady Macbeth, it is as she reads Macbeth’s letter, in which he tells about his victory in battle against Macdonwald, about the witches and about their prophecy that he will become king. This is a fragile moment for her; perhaps she imagines that her husband was already dead, but when she receives his letter, she too begins to be devoured by the part of her mind filled with ferocity, and meticulously plots how to murder Duncan when he visits her.

In any story, there are two questions that retain suspense and keep viewers watching. They are: ‘What are the characters going to do next?’ and ‘Would I have done the same?’. Both questions are essential, and both operate, to some extent, on the subconscious level of the viewer. Without them, a story is meaningless. For example, writing a compelling story about a sinking ship is impossible–however, writing a compelling story about the sailors on the ship (who must decide whether to save the ship or jump off) is a great idea and has been done many times. We care about the characters in a story because we see them making the same kinds of choices we have to make. This principle only works, though, if the main characters have a choice in how the story will go. In Macbeth, the story would be meaningless if Macbeth and Lady Macbeth were not involved in their fates and their actions were simply being orchestrated by demonic witches; if they don’t have the freedom not to kill Duncan, the story automatically becomes far less interesting. If one comes at it from the other direction, however–that they did have a choice, but chose to go down the paths they went down–the viewer immediately asks ‘Would I have done the same?’ Then, however, the audience has to wonder what role the witches really play in Macbeth. The answer is partly, of course, a hallucination of Macbeth and Banquo’s and a symbol of greed, ambition, and ferocity in the human mind. However, it’s also possible to say that the witches are Macbeth’s personal justification for his actions. Freud believed that humans are much better at lying to each other than they are at lying to themselves. That is, though we may assume, we never know the true motives for why we do anything. Perhaps, as Macbeth rationalized his lust for power, his subconscious mind decided that the guilt was too much for him to bear and it created the witches. By convincing himself that the witches were responsible for his actions, he relieved himself of the blame for the sins he committed.