Sight, Light, Darkness, and Blindness






When King Duncan announces that his eldest son Malcolm is heir to the throne, he says that Malcolm won't be the only one who receives new honors. The King promises that "signs of nobleness, like stars, shall shine / On all deservers" (1.4.41-42). Moments later Macbeth also uses starlight as a metaphor for what is good and noble. As he is thinking of murdering both the King and Malcolm, he says to himself:
              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.  (1.4.50-53)
In short, his desires are so terrible, that he can't stand to have the stars shine on them; he doesn't even want to look at them himself.

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At the end of a soliloquy in which Lady Macbeth talks herself into a murderous state of mind, she calls upon night to hide her deed from heaven and from herself: Come, thick night, / And pall thee in the dunnest smoke of hell, / That my keen knife see not the wound it makes, / Nor heaven peep through the blanket of the dark, / To cry "Hold, hold!" (1.5.50-54). In both its ideas and imagery, this passage is remarkably similar to Macbeth's speech in the previous scene.

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When Macbeth is thinking about what's going to happen after he has killed King Duncan, he says that "pity, like a naked new-born babe, / Striding the blast, or heaven's cherubins, horsed / Upon the sightless couriers of the air, / Shall blow the horrid deed in every eye, / That tears shall drown the wind" (1.7.21-25). "Cherubins" are small angels, portrayed as chubby, naked children; we call them "cherubs." And "the sightless couriers of the air" are the winds, imagined as invisible ("sightless") horses. This elaborate metaphor suggests that pity for King Duncan will be like that kind of wind that blows so hard that it brings tears to your eyes.

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After the moon has gone down on the night in which Macbeth kills King Duncan, Banquo says to Fleance, "There's husbandry in heaven; / Their candles are all out" (2.1.4-5). He means that there's not a star to be seen in the sky. If we think back, we may remember that this is exactly the kind of night Macbeth wanted, because he thought it might conceal his own guilt from himself. (See the first entry on this page.)

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Later in the same scene, when he is alone and waiting for the bell that will summon him to kill King Duncan, Macbeth hallucinates, and sees a dagger. He knows that it is a "dagger of the mind," but he wonders about its significance. He thinks that either "Mine eyes are made the fools o' the other senses, / Or else worth all the rest" (2.1.44-45). In other words, either his eyes are (like fools) tricking him, or they are showing him what he must do, and so are "worth all the rest" of his senses put together.

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"I'll go no more: / I am afraid to think what I have done; / Look on't again I dare not" (2.2.47-49), says Macbeth when his wife tells him that he must take the bloody daggers and put them with the King's grooms. Before Macbeth killed his king, he wanted to be able to do it without looking; now the very idea of looking at what he has done petrifies him.

His wife, on the other hand, thinks Macbeth's fear of looking is childish. She tells him that "the sleeping and the dead / Are but as pictures: 'tis the eye of childhood / That fears a painted devil" (2.2.50-52).

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After Macduff has discovered King Duncan's bloody corpse, he rushes out and tells Macbeth and Lennox to "Approach the chamber, and destroy your sight / With a new Gorgon: do not bid me speak; / See, and then speak yourselves" (2.3.71-73). The most well-known Gorgon is Medusa; just looking at her would turn a man to stone, so Macduff is saying that the mere sight of Duncan's body would make a man blind. But then he says that when Macbeth and Lennox do see the body, they will "speak" -- shout and cry in grief -- as he is doing. In either case, the effect will be produced not by words, but by actually seeing.

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It's strangely dark on the morning after the night of King Duncan's murder, and Ross says to an Old Man, "by the clock, 'tis day, / And yet dark night strangles the travelling lamp" (2.4.6-7). The "travelling lamp" is the sun, which should be lighting the new day. Ross goes on to speculate that the night is stronger than the day, or that the day is ashamed of itself. In either case, the cause would be the murder of King Duncan. The night would be strong because in that night the good King was murdered, and the day would be ashamed to shed light on the bloody scene of the murder.

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After he has made all of the other arrangements for the murder of Banquo, Macbeth tells the murderers that "Fleance his son, that keeps him company, / Whose absence is no less material to me / Than is his father's, must embrace the fate / Of that dark hour" (3.1.134-137). The hour will be "dark" both literally and metaphorically. Literally, Banquo and Fleance will be riding after dark, and that's when they will be ambushed. Metaphorically, the hour will be dark because that's when they will meet the final darkness of death. (As it turns out, Fleance escapes.)

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After he has arranged for the murder of Banquo, Macbeth tells his wife that their problems will be solved by a deed to be done at nightfall. He doesn't tell her exactly what he has planned, but he very much wants night to come, and he falls into a kind of reverie in which he speaks to the night. In the reverie Macbeth mentions a "great bond," which is usually explained as Banquo's lease on life, so Macbeth is asking the night to take away Banquo's life, because Banquo makes Macbeth "pale" with fear:
              Come, seeling night,
Scarf up the tender eye of pitiful day;
And with thy bloody and invisible hand
Cancel and tear to pieces that great bond
Which keeps me pale!     (3.2.50)
The passage has two images of blinding. "Seeling" means "blinding" of a particularly cruel kind. In order to make them tame, falcons were seeled by sewing their eyelids shut. The second image of blinding is "scarf up," which means "to blindfold." And it is the day which must be blinded, because the deed that Macbeth wants done is too cruel to be seen in the light of day.

Also, before and after this passage, Macbeth describes the night as filled with flying creatures, "night's black agents" -- the bat and the beetle, the rook and the crow. And in the night stands Hecate, a visitor from the underworld who is the protector protectress of witches. The night that Macbeth imagines is mysterious and dangerous, and he wants it that way because it makes him feel stronger.

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The murder of Banquo takes place in the dark. First Murderer says that "The west yet glimmers with some streaks of day" (3.3.5), but when Banquo and Fleance enter, Fleance is carrying a torch to light the way.

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After the Ghost of Banquo has ruined Macbeth's banquet, and all the guests have departed, Macbeth asks his wife "What is the night?" She answers, "Almost at odds with morning, which is which" (3.4.125-126). Then Macbeth states his intention to continue his bloody course of action, and says, "Strange things I have in head, that will to hand; / Which must be acted ere they may be scann'd" (3.4.138-39). "Scann'd" meant "thought about," and it also meant "carefully looked at," as it does today. And "ere" means "before." Macbeth is saying that there are certain things that he needs to do before he thinks about them or carefully looks at what they really are.

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In the scene after the scene in which Macbeth says that he will visit the witches again, Hecate tells the witches that she will prepare illusions that will make Macbeth "spurn fate, scorn death, and bear / His hopes 'bove wisdom, grace and fear" (3.5.30-31). What Macbeth thinks he sees will lead him to destruction.

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When Macbeth goes to the witches to learn his fate, he greets them as "you secret, black, and midnight hags!" (4.1.48). An earlier scene suggests that Macbeth's visit actually occurs in the morning, but Macbeth associates dark with evil.

Later in the scene, Macbeth demands to know if Banquo's descendants will be kings. The witches warn him not to ask, but he insists, so they call out, "Show his eyes, and grieve his heart" (4.1.110). At this, there appears a parade of eight kings, escorted by Banquo. As soon as Macbeth sees this, he wishes he that he could stop looking, but he can't. When he sees the first king, he says to it, "Thy crown does sear mine eye-balls" (4.1.113). Yet he keeps looking. By the time the fourth one appears, he says, "Start, eyes!" (4.1.116), as though he could command his own eyes to jump ("start") out of his head and make him blind. Yet still he looks, though he promises himself that he'll "see no more" (4.1.118).

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In Lady Macbeth's sleepwalking scene she enters holding a candle, and the doctor asks her gentlewoman how the lady happens to have the candle. The gentlewoman replies, "Why, it stood by her: she has light by her continually; 'tis her command" (5.1.22-23). The doctor then points out, "You see, her eyes are open" (5.1.24), and the gentlewoman replies, "Ay, but their sense is shut" (5.1.25). Thus we see that Lady Macbeth, who eagerly awaited the dark hour of King Duncan's murder, is now afraid of the dark. And though her eyes are open, she can see only her own memories of murder. As she sleepwalks, Lady Macbeth imagines she sees a spot of King Duncan's blood on her hand. She rubs her hands to try to wash it away, but it won't disappear, and then she hears the bell that she rung to summon her husband to the murder of his king.