MACBETH      [aside] Two truths are told,

As happy prologues to the swelling act

Of the imperial theme.— I thank you, gentlemen.—

This supernatural soliciting

Cannot be ill, cannot be good. If ill,

Why hath it given me earnest of success,

Commencing in a truth? I am Thane of Cawdor.

If good, why do I yield to that suggestion

Whose horrid image doth unfix my hair

And make my seated heart knock at my ribs,

Against the use of nature? Present fears

Are less than horrible imaginings.

My thought, whose murder yet is but fantastical,

Shakes so my single state of man that function

Is smothered in surmise, and nothing is

But what is not. (1.3.123-138)

Oh this is so so good (going to be a long one, impossible to break this terrified vomiting-forth). To start with something entirely obvious: it’s not a soliloquy, technically, because there are other characters on stage; they’re not concealed in any way (as is sometimes the case in Hamlet, for instance), they’re not asleep or thought to be dead. Part of this speech’s intensity comes from the way in which it’s located in a space and an occasion which are shared; it makes it more precarious, more urgent, because the possibility of being overheard is ever-present. Macbeth can’t say—as Hamlet does, with relief—Now I am alone. Yet he’s absolutely got to get this out; he’s like a man—possessed. So. Two truths are told, that he is Thane of Glamis and, now, Thane of Cawdor. But they are (merely) happy prologues, fortunate introductions, to the swelling act, the developing possibility, the rising action, of the imperial theme, the matter of the crown, of becoming king. Swelling is useful, here; it’s got a real physicality to it, the sense of something acting within the body, growing. Does he clutch his chest, his throat? In any case, the others look over, perhaps concerned, perhaps simply seeing what he’s up to: I thank you, gentlemen, he reassures them. Everything’s fine. (Everything’s very much not fine.)

So he works through it. This supernatural soliciting, well, it’s ambiguous—equivocal. It cannot be ill, cannot be good. Soliciting’s got a wonderfully broad range of meaning: to disturb or incite, entreat or urge, persistently. It has the particular sense of asking a woman for (sexual) favours (although soliciting in the sense of prostitution emerges later). There are more neutral senses, simply to request or entreat—but many of them are already negative; they suggest immorality. Even as Macbeth is being even-handed, good and ill, he’s using a word which frequently is not. If such soliciting (and he doesn’t seem hugely interested in supernatural? it’s more neutral than, say, devilish, or satanic) is ill, evil in its intent—why has it given me earnest of success, commencing in a truth? (Didn’t he listen to Banquo? That’s how evil works, seducing with the straightforward truth, the easy win.) They spoke truth. I am Thane of Cawdor, indeed. But (and he does have a bit of a wobble here) if it’s all good, why do I yield to that suggestion whose horrid image doth unfix my hair and make my seated heart knock at my ribs, against the use of nature? FABULOUS. He describes the effect so vividly, his pounding heart (knocking, no less—knocking’s going to come back), his hair standing on end, flesh creeping. But he doesn’t describe that suggestion or the horrid image itself; those are left undescribed, and are all the more frightening for it, because we experience the sensations in our own bodies, while our own minds have to imagine, picture what might be horrific enough to generate such sensations; we have to put into words, or pictures, what Macbeth is now contemplating, which is murder, regicide. GENIUS. (It’s against the use of nature, that is, hearts shouldn’t leap around like that, but the wording also suggests unnaturalness, the disruption of the natural order.)

Present fears—actual horrors, such as Macbeth is clearly accustomed to witnessing, and perpetrating, on the battlefield—are easier to deal with than horrible imaginings. Yes. And now my thought, the actualisation of which (except he says murder, meaning execution—well, we know what he means) is so far merely a fantasy, fantastical, unbelievable, is unsettling my entire being, my body, my sense of myself as a coherent and autonomous human agent. (That sense of the fraught relationship between minds and bodies, thinking and doing, comes back again and again in the play.) And now function is smothered in surmise; I’m paralysed by thinking, wondering, imagining, I can’t act, can’t move (and smothered, like swelling, is again horribly corporeal; a gasping, choking sensation). And nothing is but what is not. What I’m thinking about, obsessing about, imagining, is clearer than what I can see, where I am, who I’m with, and who I am.