MACBETH      Go bid thy mistress, when my drink is ready,

She strike upon the bell. Get thee to bed.

Exit [servant]

Is this a dagger which I see before me,

The handle toward my hand? Come, let me clutch thee.

I have thee not, and yet I see thee still.

Art thou not, fatal vision, sensible

To feeling as to sight? Or art thou but

A dagger of the mind, a false creation

Proceeding from the heat-oppressèd brain?                      (2.1.31-39)

A homely detail to start with: go bid thy mistress, when my drink is ready, she strike upon the bell.The bell is clearly his signal that Duncan’s servants are insensible, pre-arranged, but it’s apparently not unusual for Macbeth to have a hot drink at bedtime: a posset or caudle, spiced ale or wine or something milky, a Jacobean Horlicks. (Incongruous visions of the Macbeths’ customary evening routine.) So, like the last scene of Faustus, the terminus of this scene is going to be set by a bell, and waiting for that bell to strike is going to be one of many things that increase the scene’s tension. On the page it’s not obvious, and it probably won’t be in a modern dress production either, but can it be inferred that the servant takes the torch or lantern when he or she exits? If so, Macbeth is in darkness; that’s the context for his speech, utter darkness. Get thee to bed, he says to the servant, not out of concern, but because everyone must be asleep, so far as is possible, for what he plans to do next. No witnesses.

I do not want there to be a dagger visible in this scene. Not even on film. (Especially not on film. I loathe the Polanski film for many reasons, but the perky zooming blinky little dagger, with its light-sabre sound effects, is right up there.) It has to be a dagger of the mind, and Macbeth himself canvasses that possibility, even as he really, really sees it. So there’s lots of different ways of playing this Really Famous line—is this a dagger which I see before me, the handle toward my hand?—wonderingly, resignedly, with excitement, with fear. It’s not a threat—the handle is toward his hand, not the point—but it’s an invitation. To murder, yes; not impossibly to suicide, too, a temptation offered to Faustus, among others. And so he tries to clutch it. (Accepting that invitation, implicitly?) It’s most effective, I think, when he does it deliberately, making it clear that he sees the dagger, its shape, its position, entirely clearly; less convincing if he simply waves his hand around. A bit of bafflement: I have thee not, and yet I see thee still. A stark monosyllabic statement of fact, a perfect blank verse line. It’s absolutely there, I just can’t grasp it. He tries to puzzle it out: art thou not, fatal vision sensible to feeling as to sight? He absolutely believes the evidence of his eyes, but his other senses, in this case touch, can’t back it up. And so he has to conclude that he’s maybe going a bit mad. Art thou but a dagger of the mind (which is frightening enough; perhaps more frightening?), a false creation proceeding from the heat-oppressèd brain?In terms of Renaissance physiology, an over-heated brain makes fumes, illusions; brain fog. I’m seeing things; I’m delirious. (And also hot: his blood is up, he’s full of passion.)

One of the complicated energies that the first part of this scene has, perhaps, is the actor’s. Whereas Macbeth opens the previous scene in soliloquy (If it were done…), albeit it’s a fantastically difficult one, he can be revved up from the start, and he ends the scene on the high of erotic obsession, joint enterprise, and folie à deux. But all that has to be suppressed for his little encounter with Banquo, with the actor still knowing, in some part of their brain, that they’ve got this Really Big soliloquy to come, even more intense than the one in the previous scene, because madder, darker, even more sinister in its visuals. That’s for another day…