MACBETH

How prophecy shapes the story of Macbeth

How prophecy shapes the story of Macbeth

Introduction

Macbeth not only is the shortest of William Shakespeare's great tragedies but also is anomalous in some structural respects. The action moves forward in a swift and inexorable rush. The story is focused on the various consequences of the murder of Duncan, rather than on the ambiguities or moral dilemmas that had preceded and occasioned it.

Discussion

Impact of Prophecy on Character

Macbeth's allusion to the witches' prophecy—"none of woman born ….Shall harm Macbeth" (4.1.80-81), becomes virtually a talisman to ward off danger; even after he has begun to doubt the equivocation of the fiend (5.5.43), mere repetition of the phrase seems to Macbeth to guarantee his invulnerability.

When Macbeth's first words echo those we have already heard the witches speak—"So fair and foul a day I have not seen" (1.3.38); "Fair is foul, and foul is fair" (1.1.11)—we are in a realm that questions the very possibility of autonomous identity. The play will finally re-imagine autonomous male identity, but only through the ruthless excision of all female presence, its own peculiar satisfaction of the witches' prophecy.

The witches' prophecy has the immediate force of psychic relevance for Macbeth partly because of the fantasy constructions central to 1.7: “Be bloody, bold ….shall harm Macbeth” [4.1.79-81]. The witches here invite Macbeth to make himself into the bloody and invulnerable man-child he has created as a defense against maternal malevolence in 1.7: the man-child ambivalently recalled by the accompanying apparition of the Bloody Child. For the apparition alludes at once to the bloody vulnerability of the infant destroyed by Lady Macbeth and to the blood-thirsty masculinity that seems to promise escape from this vulnerability, the bloodiness the witches urge Macbeth to take on. The doubleness of the image epitomizes exactly the doubleness of the prophecy ...