MACBETH                  Now o’er the one half-world

Nature seems dead, and wicked dreams abuse

The curtained sleep; witchcraft celebrates

Pale Hecate’s off’rings; and withered murder,

Alarumed by his sentinel the wolf,

Whose howl’s his watch, thus with his stealthy pace,

With Tarquin’s ravishing strides, towards his design

Moves like a ghost.                (2.1.49-56)

The (in)visible dagger might be the more famous bit, but it’s this part of the speech that’s properly shiver down the spine unsettling and uncanny, its vocabulary and syntax, and especially its adjectives, being just a bit off-kilter. It’s night; the one half-world is the hemisphere currently in darkness (the word night does not appear anywhere in this speech; Banquo has begun the scene by asking, how goes the night? well, this is how the night goes…) Because it’s dark, nature seems dead: is that a good thing or a bad thing? Would it be better if it were to be wholly dead, or is seeming preferable? Nature here is the natural world, but also, perhaps, human nature, human consciousness. Sleep is a kind of death, therefore, and what the death of nature allows is the unnatural, here wicked dreams. (Content unspecified, no need.) And they abuse the curtained sleep, sleep that should be as safe and secure as a bed with its curtains drawn, shutting out the dark and the cold as well as—anything else. An attack, not just on the sleeper, but on sleep itself, in the heart of the house. In the dark, too, witchcraft (not just witches; something larger, less definite) celebrates pale Hecate’s offerings. Hecate, goddess of witches, is pale because she is associated with the moon; here, perhaps, the pale is unexpected in the midst of all this darkness, but it’s a sickly gleam. Her offerings are the rituals of witchcraft, suggesting sacrifice, a black mass. Murder is withered because it’s perhaps being imagined as an old man, but also, perhaps, because to imagine murder as ancient reinforces that Macbeth is a Cain figure, the Biblical first murderer, killing not his brother but his kinsman and his king. (Withered is also simply a horrible adjective, implying dryness, sterility, lifelessness.) And murder is accompanied by his sentinel, a wolf (or rather the wolf), prepared to give the alarum, the warning, with his howl, his watch, his signal. Tension tension tension, imagining this wolf, always on the point of the howl, which will come (like the bell) and soon.

A swerve into the more human: murder’s pace is stealthy, every step measured, inexorable, but at the same time with the urgency of Tarquin, the Roman prince, on his way to rape Lucretia. (Shakespeare’s Lucrece had been published for the first time over a decade earlier and was about to be reprinted for the fifth time; he came back to both the story of Lucretia and his own version of it repeatedly throughout his career.) What Tarquin adds here is complex. He is not a murderer but a rapist; his attack on Lucretia leads to the downfall of the Roman kings and the establishment of the republic. He is a guest who attacks his host, not a host attacking his guest. He betrays his friend and comrade, Lucretia’s husband Collatinus. In Shakespeare’s poem, his creeping progress through the sleeping house to Lucrece’s bedchamber is not simply a tension-building prequel to his attack, but also a version of it, a violation of a house’s security and sanctuary. In a notably unpleasant way, the invocation of Tarquin also gives Macbeth’s own planned attack a kind of erotic urgency, and suggests that it is a sexual violation as well as a murder. Early modern actors and audiences associated particular ways of walking with particular character types: tyrants like Tamburlaine, for instance, ‘stalked’ proudly, and Tarquin’s strides, which could be Macbeth’s too, might be recalling that stalk. Then Tarquin (who has, after all, been evoked only as a manner of walking) vanishes, and it’s back to murder, stealing silently towards his design, his plan like a ghost…