Macbeth by William Shakespeare (Murder Scene)

 

Macbeth

by William Shakespeare

(Murder Scene)

 

Dagger Scene or ‘Murder Scene’ is the first impression of the witches’ vocation. In the meeting scene witches tell Macbeth that he will be the king. The prophecy makes him more ambitious and with the help of Lady Macbeth and her will power he murders King Duncan. Originally Macbeth is not a vicious person. He is not a born criminal as nobody else is. He is a kind-hearted person, that’s why his wife’s suggestion of killing Duncan perplexes and disturbs his conscience and his imaginative mind starts imagining unreal scenes. In psychology these types of imaginations are known as ‘hallucinations’ which means to see something which is not present or seeing something imagined.

Dagger is the outcome of the planning of Duncan’s murder. It is also the result of Macbeth’s over ambitious nature. In this way Macbeth himself is responsible for not only the ‘Dagger scene’ but also the other hallucinations of the play. Lady Macbeth taunts Macbeth “What beast was it then that made you break this enterprise to me”.

Macbeth has already spoken to her on this subject before the arrival of Duncan to his palace. The murder is to be done something at some time in some place and by someone. This is clear that Duncan is to be murdered and it was Macbeth who thinks of this deed.  His mind was set on the throne before he meets the witches.

It is not correct to say that the witches give Macbeth the idea of murdering Duncan. If it is so, Banquo too should have been similarly affected by the supernatural as Macbeth is. Thus, we can say, all these supernatural beings and the hallucinations are nothing but the products of Macbeth’s heat oppressed mind.

After meeting with the witches Banquo is mentally upset and evil thoughts come to him but he praises the god to save him. He does not join Macbeth in his crime. Macbeth is deeply agitated and nervous when he sees an airy dagger pointing the way to the room where Duncan is sleeping. Macbeth stables himself by calling upon the spirit of murder. He is morally responsible for the murder of Duncan.

Banquo’s knowledge of the witches’ prophecy makes him both a potential ally and a potential threat to Macbeth’s plotting. For now, Macbeth seems distrustful of Banquo and pretends to have hardly thought of the witches, but Macbeth’s desire to discuss the prophecies at some future time suggests that he may have some plans in mind. The appearance of Fleance, Banquo’s son, serves as a reminder of the witches’ prediction that Banquo’s children will sit on the throne of Scotland. We realize that if Macbeth succeeds in the murder of Duncan, he will be driven to still more violence before his crown is secure, and Fleance will be in mortal danger.

Act 2 is concerned with the murder of Duncan, but the deed itself does not appear onstage. This technique of not allowing us to see the actual murder, may have been borrowed from the classical Greek tragedies of Aeschylus and Sophocles. In these plays, violent acts abound but are kept offstage, made to seem more terrible by the power of suggestion. The effect on Lady Macbeth of her trip into Duncan’s bedroom is particularly striking. She claims that she would have killed Duncan herself except that he resembled her father sleeping. Her comparison of Duncan to her father suggests that despite her desire for power and her harsh chastisement of Macbeth, she sees her king as an authority figure to whom she must be loyal.

Macbeth’s fear about the murder is echoed by several sounds and visions, the hallucinatory dagger being the most striking. The dagger is the first in a series of guilt-inspired hallucinations that Macbeth and his wife experience. The murder is also marked by the ringing of the bell and the knocking at the gate. The knocking conveys the heavy sense of the inevitable, as if the gates must eventually open to admit doom. The knocking seems particularly ironic after we realize that Macduff, who kills Macbeth at the end of the play, is its source. Macbeth’s eventual death does indeed stand embodied at the gate.

The motif of blood recurs here in Macbeth’s anguished sense that there is blood on his hands that cannot be washed clean. Lady Macbeth tells him that the blood can be washed away with a little water. But, as Lady Macbeth eventually realizes, the guilt, that the blood symbolizes, needs more than water to be cleansed away. Her hallucinations, in which she washes her hands obsessively, lend irony to her insistence here that “little water clears us of this deed”.

To sum up, ‘the dagger scene is due to the imagination of both Macbeth and Lady Macbeth. Both husband and wife with their imagination make their life miserable.