Sandra Clark
Institute of English Studies, School of Advanced Study
University of London
(This is very much a work in progress, and has changed shape several times, as may well
be evident, and must stop here, even though it’s far from ready. If anyone can think how
to improve it, I’d be most grateful for suggestions.)
Doubtful Knowledge in Macbeth
In All’s Well the old lord Lafeu believes that he has witnessed a present day
miracle and this makes him ready to accept the idea that the unknown need not be
frightening or even require to be explained:
They say miracles are past; and we have our philosophical persons to
make modern and familiar, things supernatural and causeless. Hence is it that
we make trifles of terrors, ensconcing ourselves into seeming knowledge when
we should submit ourselves to an unknown fear (2.3.1-6).
For him it is wrong to seek after origins. Like Sir Thomas Browne in Religio Medici, he
delights in ‘wingy mysteries’. Things ‘supernatural and causeless’ can be accepted for
what they are.1 But elsewhere in Shakespeare it is terrible to live in a state of ‘unknown
fear’. The Bastard in King John describes how fear is bred from uncertainty:
I find the people strangely fantasied;
Possess’d with rumours, full of idle dreams,
Not knowing what they fear, but full of fear. (4.2.144-6)
Ross in Macbeth speaks similarly of the relationship between rumour, uncertainty and
fear:
. . . cruel are the times, when we are traitors,
And do not know ourselves; when we hold rumour
This is reminiscent of Keats’s theory of negative capability, which a poet might achieve
by dwelling in ‘uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact
and reason’. I want to acknowledge an indebtedness here to Mary Floyd- Wilson’s
discussion of All’s Well in Occult Knowledge, Science, and Gender on the Shakespearean
Stage (2013), chapter 1.
1
1
From what we fear, yet know not what we fear,
But float upon a wild and violent sea
Each way, and move. (4.2 17-22)
Without the underpinning of Lafeu’s Christian conviction, uncertainty and lack of
knowledge generate a fear that increases the more for having no specific origins. Lafeu’s
view is appropriate to his circumstances: he has just witnessed Helena’s quasimiraculous cure of the king. But otherwise submission to the unknown is not often
possible or easily achieved. For Ross, living in a state of uncertainty is like being adrift
on the ocean, completely powerless. Uncertainty expresses itself in rumour, ‘a pipe
blown by surmises, jealousies, conjectures’ (2 Henry IV, Prol), and rumour generates fear
and doubt. Those with evil intentions can manufacture doubt and manage it to suit their
particular purposes, as when Richard III fabricates the rumour that his wife Anne is
’very sick and like to die’, or Iago creates ‘exsufflicate and blown surmises’ about
Desdemona’s chastity. Rumour and surmise complicate ideas about knowledge and the
kind of certainty that derives from knowledge. In many situations, knowledge is
produced from an understanding of origins and causes. The fear of which Ross and the
Bastard talk derives from lacking such knowledge.
My focus in this paper will be on Macbeth as a play about having, or not having
knowledge, both in the case of Macbeth himself, and of the audience. As has been
observed, ‘know’ and its cognates occur frequently in it, with Macbeth himself having
most usages. 2 What kinds of knowledge are necessary to understand what goes on in
the play? Macbeth is obliged to confront a series of events the causes and origins of
which he is uncertain, and he must choose how to interpret them. Does he need to
ascertain why certain things happen before acting on them? On what should he base his
understanding? The audience is equally challenged to interpret these events, but may
perhaps put into play knowledges other than those Macbeth draws on to do so.
The first of these events is the encounter between Macbeth, Banquo and the
Weird Sisters in 1.3. Before he appears, Macbeth is an already established figure, a
military hero, ennobled for his feats in battle with a new title, but the Sisters plunge him
into a world of uncertainty, and he must decide how to deal with it. While the Sisters
know who he is, he does not know who they are, or on what basis they can claim such
knowledge of him and his fellow soldier Banquo. They present both men with tantalising
2
Arthur Kinney, ‘Macbeth’s Knowledge’, Shakespeare Survey 57 (2004), 11-26, 24.
2
predictions of the future which, as Banquo later puts it, set them up in hope. But these
predictions are enigmatic and incomplete, and Macbeth is desperate for more
information:
Stay, you imperfect speakers. Tell me more.
By Finel’s death, I know I am Thane of Glamis,
But how of Cawdor? . . .
. . . Say from whence
You owe this strange intelligence, or why
Upon this blasted heath you stop our way
With such prophetic greeting? (1.3. 68-76)
For him, one of the predictions has already come to pass, and when the next is, to his
surprise, immediately realised, he not unnaturally interprets the predictions as ‘happy
prologues to the swelling act / Of the imperial theme’. He feels certain that the
prediction that he will be ‘king hereafter’ is bound to come true, and it is important to
recognise that his faith would not have seemed unjustified in this period. In early
modern England, as for several centuries past, much faith was invested in prophecy as a
source of knowledge and authority, particularly where matters of royal succession were
concerned, and prophecy, it was accepted, might emanate from mysterious sources. The
accession of James VI and 1 to the throne of England, which had recently taken place
when Shakespeare wrote Macbeth, was bolstered by recourse to numerous ancient
prophecies that foretold a Scottish succession, and it helped James’s cause that he was
seen as a ‘long - lost British king’.3 The status of prophecy, although debunked by some,
was high in the early modern period, and it could be drawn on, to provide, as the
historian Keith Thomas puts it ‘a validating charter . . for new enterprises undertaken in
the face of strong contemporary prohibitions. [Prophecies] justified wars or rebellions
and they made periods of unprecedented change emotionally acceptable to those who
lived in them’ (503). In this context the prophecies of the Weird Sisters foretelling royal
futures for Macbeth and Banquo have a special resonance. Banquo may be uncertain
whether the Sisters can ‘look into the seeds of time / And say which grain will grow and
Keith Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic (1971), 495. In particular, The Whole
Prophesie of Scotland, England, & Somepart of France, which consists of a whole series of
prophecies by Merlin, Thomas Rymer, Bede, and many others, was printed in 1603 by
the King’s printer, Robert Waldegrave, and helped support the new King. It predicts the
coming of ‘a Lord out of the North’ with a great entourage to claim the crown of England.
See Tim Thornton, Prophecy, Politics and the People in Early Modern England (2006), 578.
3
3
which will not’, but as events demonstrate, they can. They have, as Macbeth tells his wife
in the letter, ‘more in them than mortal knowledge’.
Prophecies represent a kind of knowledge not necessarily open to question, but
not therefore morally suspect. Their origins cannot always be traced. In early modern
England it was antiquity as such that gave them their prestige, and while historians such
as Keith Thomas have argued for a gradual rejection of magic, witchcraft, superstition
and other forms of ‘non-rational’ knowledge during this period as part of a progress
towards rationality and enlightenment, others have suggested that traditional belief
systems, such as that which accepts ancient prophecy as authoritative, persisted and
interacted positively with newer ways of assessing knowledge.4 Tim Thornton makes a
strong case for the importance of prophecy as both a source and a mode of knowledge in
this period, and shows how seriously monarchs and their advisors engaged with it. The
question of the status of prophecy is raised early in the play. Both Banquo and Macbeth
worry about the origins of the Sisters’ predictions. Macbeth wants to know where they
get their information and what their purpose is in imparting it. But the Sisters are not
subject to command and will not stay to answer. Their mode of departure baffles
Macbeth and Banquo and makes them doubt the evidence of their senses: ‘Have we
eaten on the insane root / That takes the reason prisoner?’ Elsewhere in the play,
confusion of the senses is drawn upon to account for what otherwise seems inexplicable.
Macbeth wants to know how to explain what has happened to him. For Banquo, the
mysteriousness is suspicious, and he is wary of the implications of the Sisters’ promises
for him: ‘The instruments of darkness tell us truths; / Win us with honest trifles, to
betray’s / In deepest consequence’. Later, however, when he has had time to consider
these promises more fully, he is prepared to entertain the possibility that they have
something to offer him:
If there come truth from them –
As upon thee, Macbeth, their speeches shine –
Why by the verities on thee made good,
May they not be my oracles as well
And set me up in hope? (3.1. 7-10)
Thornton uses the term ‘non-rational’ (9) and develops these ideas more fully than I
can.
4
4
No longer distrustful, he accords their words the status of ‘verities’ and ‘oracles’. As
Shakespeare knew, King James claimed descent from Banquo, thane of Lochaber, a
fictional ancestor invented by Boece in his Scotorum Historiae to stand as ‘the beginner
of the Stewarts in this realm, from whom our King now present [James V, grandfather to
James VI and I] by long and ancient lineage is descended’.5 That the Sisters predict an
event that has already come to pass during the lifetime of the play’s first audiences
complicates the issue of their knowledge and the basis of their authority. This lineage is
celebrated in the ‘show of kings’ presented to Macbeth by the Sisters in 4.1. To his
horror, it stretches out ‘to th’crack of doom’, allowing no space for the insertion of his
own descendents. Of course, Banquo’s descendents are not shown succeeding to the
throne in the play, but King James’s belief in primogeniture and the divine right of kings
gives the king a presence in it at many points. For the audience, the knowledge of his
connection with Banquo underlies the Sisters’ predictions from the start, and points up
Macbeth’s partial knowledge in an ironic way. Thus the play seems to take an
ambivalent position on the Sisters’ foreknowledge; if it does originate from instruments
of darkness, nonetheless its truth – like that of ancient prophecy - is borne out in the
present moment.
Issues of mysterious origins are raised again in the episode of Macbeth’s vision
of the dagger in 2.1 His response to it testifies to a longing for certainty as to its
ontological status. As with the first appearance of the Sisters, he cannot be sure how real
it is. He is at first convinced there is something present which he can see, even if he
cannot touch it. For an early modern audience it would be possible to decode this
moment from the perspective of natural knowledge and humoral science. Thus,
Macbeth’s hallucination of the dagger could be interpreted as the product of imagination
not reined in by reason and judgment, as he himself seems to do. Attempting both to
describe and to analyse this overwhelming emotional experience, he theorises about his
inability to take hold of the dagger, so vividly present to his eyes:
Art thou not, fatal vision, sensible
To feeling as to sight? Or art thou but
A dagger of the mind, a false creation,
Proceeding from the heat-oppressèd brain? (2.1.36-9)
Hector Boece, Scotorum Historiae, eds. E.C.Batho and H.W.Husbands, The Chronicles of
Scotland, Compiled by Hector Boece, Translated into Scots by John Bellenden, 1531, 2 vols
(1938, 1941) 2.144, quoted in Nick Aitchison, Macbeth: Man and Myth (1999), 117
5
5
The phrase ‘heat-oppressèd brain’ signifies humoral disturbance. Violent emotion felt in
the heart, which was regarded as a furnace supplying the necessary vital heat to the rest
of the body, could overheat the humours in the stomach, causing vapours to ascend to
the brain. The brain should normally be cold and moist, as explained by Thomas Vicary
in The Englishmans Treasure (1596): ‘And why he [the brain] is colde and moyst, is, that
hee should by his coldnessse and moystnesse abate and temper the exceeding heate and
droughte that commeth from the Heart’ (17). The heated brain produces malfunctioning
of the senses. This is a sort of knowledge Macbeth possesses, but it does not prove
conclusive as an explanation. For a moment he cannot choose between two possibilities,
equally alarming and mysterious:
Mine eyes are made the fools o’th’other senses,
Or else worth all the rest. (2.1.44-5)
But he recovers, controlling his fear, and appealing to his reason. He concludes that it is
the ‘bloody business’ telling his eyes something that is not true, and setting his sense
impressions at odds with one another. The origins of the dagger remain ambiguous; it
might be a symptom of pathological disturbance, and hence natural in origin, but it
might be something more. The early modern imagination was a morally as well a
physically dangerous faculty, because it provided a channel through which the devil
might access the mind and its thoughts. The Calvinist William Perkins believed that,
since the fall, ‘the Imagination of mans heart is evill, even from his youthe’ and that the
‘thoughts of the Imagination are all naturally wicked’ (12, 22).6 But if the devil has sent
this vision – and in other plays daggers may be temptations to despair and suicide7 crucially it does not deter Macbeth from proceeding with his plan. The sudden
spattering of the dagger with ‘gouts of blood, which was not so before’ he reads as a
prediction rather than a warning: ‘Thou marshall’st me the way that I was going, / And
such an instrument I was to use’.
It is worth considering at this point, in a play which begins with special effects,
thunder and lightning, and features many mysterious appearances, what theatrical
status, if any, the dagger is accorded. It is regularly accepted that it is a ‘phantom
dagger’, and not represented visually, although in the present day, at least, it is possible
6
William Perkins, A Treatise of Mans Imagination (Cambridge, 1607), 12, 22
7
E.g Tamburlaine Part 1, 3.2 88-106 and Faustus 5.1 54
6
to use lighting and other effects to show it.8 Given the play’s concern with magical
shows and spectacular representations of the ‘non-natural’, it is not impossible to relate
this image to them; it is, like the Sisters’ appearance to Macbeth and Banquo, ‘a kind of
enactment of unreadability’.9 The Sisters, according to the Folio stage direction, do not
simply exit but ‘vanish’ (and also in 4.1).10 Banquo and Macbeth comment on the
strangeness of their disappearance. The manner of their exit must have been executed in
some way to support this impression. Marvin Rosenberg, in his history of the play in the
theatre, The Masks of ‘Macbeth’, says that ‘the vanishing is properly spectacular – a coup
de theatre’, adding ‘as Gordon Craig suggested, its very legerdemain “must be a delight
to see”’. 11 Might this suggest an instance of stage trickery that could include the dagger?
Another event, equally indeterminate and questionable in origin soon follows. When
Banquo’s ghost appears and ‘sits in Macbeth’s place’ Macbeth at first seems to think it is
a trick or practical joke, produced by someone present: ‘Which of you hath done this?’.12
Reginald Scot in his Discoverie of Witchcraft (1584) gives examples of conjuring tricks
whereby an audience is deceived into thinking it is seeing displaced bodies and violent
and bloody spectacles. The ‘decollation of John the Baptist’ illustrated in the Discoverie
(352) is the most famous. Scot is strongly condemnatory of such legerdemaine, which he
calls ‘juggling’; its aim is ‘onelie to abuse mens eies and judgments’ (227). Charms, tricks
and magic spectacles might share sinister connections. Philip Butterworth in his
fascinating exploration of stage trickery and the production of illusion, Magic on the
Early English Stage, discusses the relationship between the knowledge of what is ‘real’,
and the understanding of an illusion on the stage. ‘That which represents the “outwarde
apparance” stands for one reality and that which concerns the illusion represents the
other’ (156); Butterworth goes on to say that ‘The likeness of the two realities may be
such that they are promoted to become indistinguishable to the audience’, though
Marvin Rosenberg, The Masks of Macbeth (1978), 299, gives examples of this. It does
appear in Polanski’s film.
9 Diane Purkiss, The Witch in History (1996), 208. Purkiss draws attention to many
elements of indeterminacy and unreadability in Macbeth, allowing that the play makes
space for interpretations by those ‘with different knowledges and agendas’, but her aim
is debunk the play’s handling of witchcraft as ‘unbridled sensationalism’, ‘pandering
shamelessly’ to low tastes.
10 Alan C. Dessen and Leslie Thomson in A Dictionary of Stage Directions in English
Drama 1580-1641 (1999) give several example of stage directions for vanishing where
they believe stage trickery would have been involved, though they do not consider that
this would have happened with more than one figure.
11 Marvin Rosenberg, The Masks of ‘Macbeth’ (1978), 126. Rosenberg gives examples of
the use of he terms ‘sleight- of -hand’ to effect this exit.
12 Given that the ghost sits in Macbeth’s place at the table, this seems to me the most
likely reading, though he might mean, Who has killed Banquo?
8
7
perhaps more to the point here is that they may become indistinguishable to the
characters onstage but NOT to the audience.
Once the horrible figure interacts with Macbeth, nodding and shaking its ‘gory
locks’, he revises his view of it (though he never calls it a ghost). Now he interprets it as
a manifestation of a new order of nature, which he cannot come to terms with:
Blood hath been shed ere now, i’th’olden time,
Ere humane statute purged the gentle weal;
Ay, and since too, murders have been performed
Too terrible for the ear. The time has been
That when the brains were out, the man would die,
And there an end. But now they rise again
With twenty mortal murders on their crowns
And push us from our stools. This is more strange
Than such a murder is. (3.4 75-83)
In former days, a primitive but comprehensible past to which Macbeth desires to return,
the dead stayed dead, but this is not the case now; he no longer lives in ‘th’olden time’,
and Banquo’s rising again is ‘more strange / Than such a murder is’. He struggles to
make sense of it as part of a world-order where ‘Augures, and understood relations,
have / By maggot-pies, and choughs, and rooks brought forth / The secret’st man of
blood’. In other words, predictions and prophecies can, if their instruments are rightly
interpreted, reveal what is normally hidden. They belong to the new world of ‘humane
statute’. How they do this is not, and does not have to be, explained. The operation of
occult forces in nature brings about events which must be accepted in their strangeness.
Macbeth appeals here to the world of occult knowledge and hidden sympathies, where
correspondences between radically unlike things (‘understood relations’) occur and are
not subject to question.
The terrifying manifestation of Banquo’s reappearance over, Macbeth attempts
to regain control and to understand what is happening. He mentions the surveillance he
is exercising over potential enemies – ‘There’s not a one of them but in his house / I
keep a servant feed’ – and he plans his next move: v
I will tomorrow
8
And betimes I will – to the weird sisters.
More they shall speak. For I am bent to know
By the worst means, the worst. (3.4. 132-5)
In the play’s most spectacular scene, 4.1, the Sisters appear conjuring, carrying out a
spell according to prescribed formulae; the time is right, the necessary ingredients are
all at hand, and everything is in place to ensure that ‘the charm is firm and good’. They
have in front of them a cauldron, perhaps boiling and bubbling in view of the audience,
and capable of sinking mysteriously into the ground at the required moment. 13 They are
dealing in the secrets of their art when they intuit the arrival of Macbeth (‘By the
pricking of my thumbs / Something wicked this way comes’). He is desperate for
certainty and knowledge, which he now has confidence that the Sisters will provide. ‘I
conjure you by that which you profess, /Howe’er you come to know it, answer me’. ‘That
which you profess’ means ‘that which you have knowledge of’; it is a convenient
circumlocution – Macbeth does not know what it is that the Sisters know. In contrast
with their manner in 1.3, the Sisters not only interact with Macbeth but are willing to do
as he asks, and even quite forthcoming: ‘Say, if thou’st rather hear it from our mouths, /
Or from our masters?’ These ‘masters’ (perhaps meaning ‘instruments’ rather than
adepts)14 have special knowledge, and know Macbeth’s thoughts before he can voice
them; their injunctions are readily comprehensible to him, and he is immediately
pleased by them: ‘Sweet bodements, good’, although of course he does not perceive the
level of ambiguity in them that is soon to be revealed. Macbeth is not puzzled by the
symbolic meanings of the apparitions; he thinks he has read them aright and knows
what they mean. Many subsequent commentators have been less sure, and it is clear to
the audience that Macbeth’s confidence is mistaken. Sharon Jaech plausibly suggests
that the figures of the armed head, the bloody child and the crowned child are all
familiar images from the long tradition of political prophecy, and would have conveyed,
in riddling terms, ideas of ‘death, destruction and ultimate deliverance’ unfavourable to
Macbeth’s cause. 15 Shakespeare took the episode from his sources, but the form taken
by the apparitions was his own choice. Macbeth lays claim to certainty about his own
immediate future, based on trust in his own interpretation of the predictions:
Philip Butterworth, in Theatre of Fire: Special Effects in Early English and Scottish
Theatre (1998), gives examples of boiling cauldrons, with smoke, fire and other
pyrotechnical effects, from which a figure could emerge (48-54).
14 This suggestion is offered in the gloss on 5.1.41 (‘Weak masters though ye be’) in the
Additional Notes to Kermode’s edition of The Tempest (Arden 6th ed., 1958), 173
15 Sharon L. Jansen Jaech, ‘Biblical Prophecy and Macbeth’s “Sweet Bodements””, SQ 34.3
(1983), 297.
13
9
Rebellious dead, rise never till the wood
Of Birnam rise, and our high-placed Macbeth
Shall live the lease of nature, pay his breath
To time and mortal custom. (4.1. 96-9)
But still he needs more confirmation, and his heart ‘throbs to know one thing’; the
Sisters try to dissuade him – ‘Seek to know no more’ – but he ‘will be satisfied’. This is
the Macbeth who read encouragement in the hallucination of the dagger, and dared the
Ghost of Banquo to appear, who professed himself ‘bent to know / By the worst means,
the worst’. The knowledge that the Sisters now offer him, by means of another special
effect, that the line of Banquo’s descendants stretches endlessly into the future, is
knowledge that he regrets obtaining, yet for once it is unambiguous. The audience, with
their new king on the throne, knows it is true, even if it is provided by beings of
ambiguous authority.
Macbeth’s attitude to the Sisters as sources of knowledge is now conflicted. His
reaction to the ‘horrible sight’ of the line of kings is to curse and repudiate them:
‘Infected be the air whereon they ride, / And damned all those that trust them’.
Nonetheless he clings to his reading of the predictions made by the Apparitions, trusting
in the Sisters as ‘the spirits that know / All mortal consequences’, until the very last
minute, when Macduff proves this reading to be wrong. Is it significant that Shakespeare
makes his audience privy to the manufacture of what is to Macbeth a supernatural
manifestation, the coming of Birnam Wood to Dunsinane? It takes the appearance of the
man ‘not of woman born’ to convince him that the Sisters have been tricking him all
along. Now he dismisses them as ‘juggling fiends. . . that palter with us in a double sense,
/ That keep the word of promise to our ear / And break it to our hope’. Prophecy (‘the
word of promise’), he now recognises, is a kind of knowledge that can easily be
misinterpreted; but, crucially, he seems to blame the Sisters for this, rather than himself.
The epithet ‘juggling’, although usually glossed as deceptive or cheating (and Macbeth of
course is referring to ambiguous speech not physical action), has undertones of the
kinds of trickery practiced by stage magicians and those who create the sort of
legerdemain that Macbeth initially thinks responsible for the illusion of Banquo’s ghost.
Butterworth gives examples to suggest that early modern writers distinguished
between juggling, meaning legerdemain or conjuring in the modern sense, and magic or
sorcery. He cites Thomas Cooper, The Mystery of Witchcraft (1617) who separates
10
‘Witch-craft which is performed by charmes’ from juggling ‘When strange Feats are
performed, not by reall charmes, but onely by deluding of the eye, and some
extraordinarie sleight: Not that any such thing is effected in Truth, but onely in
Appearance, to the deceived judgment, being perverted by such delusions as the eye
falsely apprehends’. 16 Macbeth’s identification of the Sisters seems to represent for him
a moment of recognition, almost of anagnorisis in the Aristotelian sense, where he
understands too late how his misidentification of the Sisters and the knowledge they
offered has brought about his undoing. He now ‘knows’ what he ought to have known all
along. But how could he have known this from the start? To interpret the events that
befell him, and understand their origins, knowledges of very different kinds would have
been required: of prophecy, magic, occult phenomena – ‘augurs and understood
relations’- as well as of the kinds of trickery and sleight of hand that lay false claim to the
occult. Macbeth desperately needed to know, and dreaded to be in a condition of
unknowing; but his struggle for certainty made things worse rather than better for him.
How far does the play create and exploit a gap between the knowledges that an audience
might legitimately be expected to bring to bear on the events of the play and those that
its protagonist entertains? Can an audience, with its access to different accounts of
knowledge and its origins, entertain the idea of the Sisters both as possessors of ‘more. .
. than mortal knowledge’ and also as ‘juggling fiends’, whereas for Macbeth they must
be one or the other? I suggest that if Macbeth had been able to accept ‘things
supernatural and causeless’ without enquiring into their origins, allowing chance to
make him king ‘without [his] stir’ (1.3.142-3), he might have lived ‘the lease of nature,
[paid] his breath / To time and mortal custom’ (4.1.98-9) as he believed he would.
16
Butterworth, Magic, 185, quoting Cooper, 171.
11