When Macbeth first utters the word murder,
giving voice to the deed he has thus far only imagined, he admits that the
thought of assassinating Duncan and taking his crown “shakes so [his] single
state of man” that it has supplanted reality in his mind. “Nothing is,” he
declares, “but what is not.”
In Shakespeare’s time, single
had another meaning besides “sole”: it could also mean “weak” or “feeble.”
Macbeth may be referring in that line to his own human frailty and
susceptibility, rather than to his individuality. Nevertheless, that word single
also contrasts ironically with the constant dualities that riddle the play: the
ambiguities, the double meanings, the deceptive appearances, the paradoxical
linking of opposites.
“When the battle’s lost and won.” “Fair is foul, and foul is
fair.” “This supernatural soliciting / Cannot be ill; cannot be good.” “Look
like th’ innocent flower / But be the serpent under’t.” “If it were done [i.e.,
over with], when ’tis done [i.e., committed].…” These and countless other
antitheses throughout the play reflect the deadly doubleness of Macbeth’s
world.
Under the fracturing pressure of that duality, any
singleness, any integrity, that Macbeth might once have claimed gives way to a
relentless disintegration, both for him and his wife, as darkness overwhelms
its opposite. The eyes may be open, but their moral sense is shut, enabling a
lauded hero of the battlefield to turn himself into a murderer of women and
children.
By the end, Macbeth’s world appears to him to be a kind of
waking nightmare, one in which woods may walk and a sword may be wielded by a
man unborn. The logic-defying duality of his early observation that “nothing is
/ But what is not” now seems all too true, as the reality of what is threatens
to unravel into what cannot possibly be.
David Prosser is the Stratford Festival’s Literary and
Editorial Director.