LADY                          Come to my woman’s breasts

And take my milk for gall, you murd’ring ministers,

Wherever in your sightless substances

You wait on nature’s mischief. 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!’                (1.5.43-50)

The horror of this speech lies as much in its indistinctness as in its specific details. There’s an erotic, transgressive charge in the imagining of the murd’ring ministers—whatever shape or form they might take—being nursed at her breasts. Do they feed on her woman’s milk, as they would on black and bitter gall, or do they replace the milk with gall, another strange image of transfusion, of Lady Macbeth’s rejection of the capacity of her body to nurture and keep safe? There’s a strangely appropriate fluidity to the colours being imagined here, bloody red, milky white, black gall, and it matches the formlessness of the murdering ministers—spirits? shape-shifting familiars? they’re servants, attendants, doing someone else’s bidding, but it’s not clear whether they’re under Lady Macbeth’s command or, ultimately, someone else’s. They are sightless because they are invisible, but also, implicitly, because they are unable to see, or at least that’s what the ear also hears; they wait on, attend, accompany nature’s mischief, like the servants that they are, but the suggestion is also that they’re always poised to participate, to get involved when things go wrong, when wrong is being done. They’re there, waiting.

It’s easy to think about King Lear as the play ‘about’ blindness. Macbeth is interested in sightlessness too, in particular being trapped in a total darkness, often willingly, and that’s what Lady Macbeth goes on to invoke, for her final invocation is to night. The darkness of night, thick night, is to be further wrapped, palled (like a coffin) in the dunnest smoke of hell, smothered in black fumes, choking, unable to see or breathe. Darkness in this play is not merely visible, but felt, experienced in the body. And in that darkness, a keen knife, creepily imagined as being able to see (or not see) the wound it makes, as if that wound is another eye, or a mouth. Darkness is a blanket, heavy and dense; its familiar domesticity (bed, sleep) should be comforting, perhaps, but here it smothers. The darkness is too thickeven for heavento see; no peephole stars. Even God can’t see this, or prevent it; there will be no cry of ‘hold, hold!’ It’s not literally being described but there’s a flashing image of a blade slashing a blanket.

Lady Macbeth’s extraordinary speech is a perverse epithalamium, a wedding song expressing longing for night to come so that the marriage can be consummated: its ‘come, night’ echoes Juliet. That gives it an erotic charge in a formal sense, but there’s a brutal sensuality in the imagining of bodies being exposed, touched, penetrated, and in the slipperiness and mobility of skin, spirits, smoke; a violated bed, and a coffin wrapped in darkness.