MACBETH [Aside] The Prince of Cumberland! that is a step On which I must fall down, or else o'erleap, For in my way it lies. Stars, hide your fires; Let not light see my black and deep desires: The eye wink at the hand; yet let that be, Which the eye fears, when it is done, to see. [Exit]
This is a play in which appearances and realities never seem to fit wholly together and there is no better example of this than Macbeth himself. His aside reveals his willingness to kill - or at least to act to wrest control of the throne - even before his wife's forceful persuasions. He fears his own murderous side but forces himself to turn his head away from his heart - to "let that be" - not realising the catastrophic consequences of his actions. His aside starts with Malcolm's new title of "Prince of Cumberland" uttered in spite (the plosives lending themselves to being spat out in anger). He realises that Malcolm is now a barrier between him and the throne, a "step / On which I might fall down, or else o'erleap". There is an immediacy to his assertion which shows he is no longer prepared to wait for the prophecies to come true, and "o'erleap" prefigures his later "vaulting ambition". Macbeth breaks off in an apostrophe to the stars, picking up Duncan's earlier simile. Whereas Duncan's stars are "signs of nobleness" which "shall shine on all deservers", Macbeth instructs his stars to "hide your fires". If the light within the night sky signifies the nobility Macbeth appears to hold to his heart, he deliberately hides from them, from his nobility, to strike at the crown from the shadows. By refusing the light for his "black and deep desires", he forfeits his status as a "deserver" and is forced to suffer in return. The stars are also a metonym for God and Fate, and Macbeth's command of them in the imperative "hide" shows a transgressive desire to put aside fate and take his own path (not for the first time - in battle, too, he fought "disdaining Fortune"). He desires the cover of a metaphorical darkness for his acts, and the play is plunged into a tonal and moral darkness. Macbeth still makes some attempt to repress his thoughts, though this becomes motivated by self-denial when he asks to let "the eye wink at the hand". In the same way that his "eyes are made the fools o' the other senses" in the dagger scene in 2.1, his "eye" represents his logic, his tether to reality. By directly looking away from this reality, he becomes more and more disconnected from it. By the end of the play, he will rely not on action and proof, but rather false promises and prophecies. Unlike many of his other flaws, his willing and conscious disconnect from the world around him cannot be blamed on spirits or the supernatural: the fault seems here wholly his own.
- Ken