LADY MACBETH
Come to my woman's breasts, And take my milk for gall, you murdering ministers, Wherever in your sightless substances You wait on nature's mischief! Come, thick night, And pall thee in the dunnest smoke of hell, That my keen knife see not the wound it makes, Nor heaven peep through the blanket of the dark, To cry 'Hold, hold!'
Having begun her soliloquy by invoking the spirits, Lady Macbeth's words continue to build, as she seems to become frenzied and overcome with ambition. Rather than possessing her usual calm, regal serenity, she is worked up and her lust for power is evident. Her imperative verbs - “come”, “take” - continue as she demands the spirits to take her “milk for gall”. This could be a reference to Hippocrates’ Four Humours, and the idea that an imbalance can cause disease. Gall (also known as bile) was thought to make the patient ruthless and insolent, and the fact that Lady Macbeth is calling on these supernatural powers to effectively make her unwell makes her seem delirious and raving. The juxtaposition of “gall” with “milk”, a typically maternal and nurturing image, amplifies this effect through the shock in her transgression of societal norms. Given its place in a speech summoning the supernatural, it perhaps also alludes to James I’s alteration in Exodus of the line “thou shalt not suffer a poisoner to live” to “thou shalt not suffer a witch to live”; given James' theatre patronage, it seems plausible that Lady Macbeth's alignment with the metaphysical world is designed to play on his fascination with – and fear of – witchcraft. This soliloquy creates a tight link between poison, madness and the supernatural, one which will be untangled and retangled as the play progresses. The "murdering ministers" she summons are "sightless substances", either (both?) poisonous or bewitching. That they are "sightless" suggests invisibility, but also blindness: this is a play about what can be seen and what is hidden, and evil here is shapeless and disguised. Where Macbeth wishes the "eye wink at the hand", here there is no option to see the spirits she is summoning. The imagery here extends from the ominous tones of the "raven" to the full-blown imagery of Hell: "thick Night", "pall", "dunnest smoke". Lady Macbeth plunges us into darkness, overturning any natural order. Her immoral actions can only be concealed within a turbulent, hellish world, where "fair is foul and foul is fair". The metaphor of sight (and blindness – or deception) is extended: it is not her own eyes she wishes to deceive, but God's, as she fears that heaven will “peep through the blanket of the dark” to warn Duncan ("'Hold, hold!" - the half line and repetition serving as the climax of the speech). The binary Hell/Heaven imagery shows that she is under no illusions as to the immorality and consequences of her crime. The metaphor could also encapsulate her relationship with her husband, with “heaven” representing Macbeth’s nobility and “the blanket of the dark” being her overmastering, suffocating need for authority. Lady Macbeth’s
acknowledgement of her own fallibility here is interesting, as it seems that she still possesses enough common sense (despite her excitement) to consider her plan and its potential flaws carefully. She knows that Macbeth’s devotion to the King will be problematic and, for the audience, it seems intensely ironic that it is Macbeth's patriotism and invincibility on the battlefield that means Lady Macbeth cannot feel invincible. She inverts the image of a “blanket” to remove its positive connotations of comfort and contentment and replace them with the idea that the blanket is concealing an inescapable, ever-present evil. She desperately wants the help of dark, supernatural forces, yet - despite her summons of the cover of darkness - her attempts to conceal her actions will be futile (the imagery of "dunnest smoke" here in stark contrast to the "perfumes of Arabia" in 5.1). The invocation in this soliloquy is both literal and metaphorical. It weaves words, like a spell. It is physical, demanding powerful presence on stage. It externalises Lady Macbeth's internal conflict (much as Macbeth will do, though he will use imagery of heaven). Perhaps most disturbingly, it shows that – despite her euphemisms and metaphorical language - she has made a deliberate, knowing, unequivocal choice of evil.
- Emily
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