MACBETH But let the frame of things disjoint, both the worlds suffer,
Ere we will eat our meal in fear, and sleep
In the affliction of these terrible dreams
That shake us nightly. Better be with the dead
Whom we, to gain our peace, have sent to peace
Than on the torture of the mind to lie
In restless ecstasy. Duncan is in his grave.
After life’s fitful fever he sleeps well.
Treason has done his worst. Nor steel, nor poison,
Malice domestic, foreign levy, nothing
Can touch him further. (3.2.18-28)
Macbeth is pretty much doing a 0-60 breakdown here, although he expresses it as a kind of defiance. Let everything fall apart, he says, let the frame of things disjoint, fall into chaos, and both the worlds suffer, both this life and the next: I don’t care. I don’t want to eat in fear, and go to sleep terrified, in the affliction of these terrible dreams that shake us nightly. Macbeth’s having nightmares: this comes back again and again, and it’s a reminder of the curse he heard, that he repeated after the murder: Sleep no more, Glamis hath murdered sleep and therefore Cawdor shall sleep no more. Macbeth shall sleep no more. The night terror is so vividly, economically evoked that the idea of not being able to eat without fear is easily passed over—but that’s going to come back shortly, oh yes. It would be better to be dead than to be living like that (like this?) he goes on: better be with the dead, whom we, to gain our peace, have sent to peace (yes, the ones I killed, as I thought, to secure my own safety) than on the torture of the mind to lie in restless ecstasy. The torture of the mind, being racked: the implicit bed has become a rack, and so the earlier disjoint resonates here too, horribly, a body and a mind under appalling strain, tossing and turning, unquiet, restless ecstasy, literally being beside oneself with fear. (The torture of Guy Fawkes?) A brilliant evocation of insomnia, anxiety, terror, the opposite of the familiar, innocuous idiom of ‘peace of mind’, the thing that Macbeth has utterly lost. Duncan is in his grave! lying down again, better a grave than the rack of sleepless life; Macbeth’s mental torture a kind of living death. (Lear: ‘he hates him that would upon the rack of this tough world stretch him out longer’.) After life’s fitful fever Duncan sleeps well; he doesn’t have to cope with—all this—any more. Life to Macbeth now is not only torment, dis-ease but disease, a fever. Duncan’s asleep though, he’s fine. Treason has done his worst: that’s now, clearly, one of the things that Macbeth fears; he fears someone like himself; he fears himself. Nor steel, nor poison, malice domestic, foreign levy, nothing can touch him further. The assassin’s dagger (steel, cutting, slashing, piercing through, always there in Macbeth’s mind’s eye) or stealthy poison, whether motivated by malice domestic, local grievances and plots, or foreign levy, an invasion or even assassin suborned by a foreign power. None of that can touch him further. Lucky Duncan.
There’s echoes of Hamlet here and his longing for death—’to die, to sleep’—but Macbeth isn’t yet worried about the something after death. This living death of paranoia, guilt, fear, that’s bad enough.
