Knock within
MACBETH Whence is that knocking?
How is’t with me when every noise appals me?
What hands are here! Ha, they pluck out mine eyes.
Will all great Neptune’s ocean wash this blood
Clean from my hand? No; this my hand will rather
The multitudinous seas incarnadine,
Making the green one red.
Enter Lady
LADY My hands are of your colour, but I shame
To wear a heart so white. (2.2.54-62)
Knock within. And the audience should jump: this scene has been so intense, so vividly interior, full of terrible imaginings, both visual and aural—but this is a real knocking. The intrusion is so extreme that Macbeth can’t place where it’s coming from, in his own castle: is it coming from outside or inside? (Within doesn’t help; that’s best thought of as offstage, although it’s perhaps less completely offstage than the wings in a modern theatre; it’s a bit more like an unseen part of the stage itself, behind the wall of the tiring house, at least in an early modern playhouse.) So for the moment the audience doesn’t know where the knocking’s coming from either. Left alone, Macbeth contemplates his predicament: how is’t with me when every noise appals me? What kind of state am I in? Here appals means shocks, horrifies, but also, literally, makes pale; he’s blenched, another element in the patterning of colours in this scene, red, white, black, gold—and about to add another. Distracted, again, by his hands: what hands are here! their appearance is horrific, clearly, but also there’s a sense that they don’t seem to belong to him, another example of the traumatised dissociation he’s experiencing. Ha, they pluck out mine eyes, a violent blinding, Oedipus-like, in horror at what he’s done, but also, again, part of one of the play’s patterns, to do with darkness, blindness, the inability to see clearly.
Will all great Neptune’s ocean wash this blood clean from my hand? Will anything, all the water in the sea, be able to cleanse not simply my hands, but my soul of this stain? (Lots of classical antecedents for the conceit but also, surely, Pilate, attempting to wash his hands of the death of Christ.) Macbeth perhaps gestures with his bloody hand as he says, no, nothing can make my hands clean again; there’s so much blood here, such horror, such a deep stain that instead it would dye the sea itself, polluting it irrevocably, as those two enormous, rolling polysyllables dominate the line, multitudinous, appropriately meaning vast, and incarnadine, meaning to redden, but with a fleshly, carnal homophone at its heart. So much blood, that it will make the green one red. Crux alert! The Folio has a comma after one, so that the green one is the sea, reddened with blood. Without the comma, the green (again the sea) is one red, completely changed in hue, an even scarlet. Whatever (and it’s debatable whether the difference is audible) there’s a lot of blood; blood is all that Macbeth can see and imagine, when he looks at his hands. It’s apocalyptic: the sea turns to blood in the book of Revelation as one of the signs of the end of the world (Revelation 8.8, 11.6, 16.3).
Enter Lady Macbeth, her hands now bloody too: my hands are of your colour, but I shame to wear a heart so white. Scorn and defiance, but also identification: we are in this together, I’ve taken on the same stain, the same terrible mark. And recognition: she can see the state he’s in, his pallor, which she attributes to his heart, pale and weak. There’s a glance back to Hamlet, or at least drawing on the same conventions: red is the colour of action and courage, a natural, ruddy complexion, the ‘native hue of resolution’, Hamlet calls it, but white is what Hamlet terms the ‘sickly cast of thought’, the pallor of anxiety and fear. Macbeth thinks too much. Lady Macbeth acts. And they stand there in the dark, holding out their bloody hands to each other.
