Examples Of Authorial Attitudes In Macbeth

William Shakespeare’s The Tragedy of Macbeth uses characterization to reveal the following authorial attitude: hallucinations illumine the characters’ murderous universes. Attitude, personal thoughts, and speech respectively reflect the authorial attitude.
Shakespeare uses attitude to portray Macbeth’s dagger episode as a murderous epiphany. Macbeth’s violence initially faces inner hesitance and indecisiveness: “If we should fail, -”(1.7.58). However, Macbeth gains animation as he psychologically hoists the symbolic dagger: “Is this a dagger which I see before me/The handle toward my hand…A dagger of the mind…this which I now draw,” (2-1-33-34,38,41). After psychologically holstering the dagger, Macbeth roams the area emotionally prepared and often eager to kill. For example, once Macbeth realizes that murdering Banquo could render benefit, he passionately and decisively
plans Banquo’s demolition: “And with thy bloody and invisible hand/Cancel and tear to pieces”(3.2.50-51). Although some interpret the dagger episode inversely, “The immediate effect of the vision is to cause a powerful recoil,”(Hobson 133) those interpretations ring erroneous since if the vision was indeed reflecting hesitance, Macbeth’s irresolute spirit would thereby cower rather than reaching to grasp the dagger confidently. The dagger seems to have awakened Macbeth’s true murderous character, thereby animating and contenting Macbeth: “the effect is confidence and animation, and he tries to lay hold of the dagger”(Furness 119). The true and now released Macbeth can finally live genuinely.
Additionally, Shakespeare uses personal thoughts to depict blood as murder’s residue, permanently affecting the murderer’s universe. Biologically, blood serves as life’s juices, sustainer, and essence; therefore, Shakespeare uses loose, non-sustaining, and deathly blood to illumine the murderer’s obtained conscience. Shakespeare suggests that a single murder engenders a forever bloody, murderous conscience. After Macbeth’s first murder (King Duncan), Shakespeare uses loose blood to paint Macbeth’s universe murderously: “Will all great Neptune’s ocean wash this blood? / No, this my hand will rather / The multitudinous seas incarnadine, / Making the green one red" (2.2.57-60). Although Lady Macbeth merely stimulated Duncan’s murder, Shakespeare views Lady Macbeth’s stimulation as enough to stain her conscience murderously red:
Out, damned spot! out, I say!/One: two: why, then, 'tis time to do't./Hell is murky!/Fie, my lord, fie! a soldier, and afeard? What need we fear who knows it, when none can call our power to account? / Yet who would have thought the old man to have had so much blood in him? (5.1.35-40)
Interestingly, the conscience-illuminating blood seems to inversely affect the characters’ attitudes:
The blood symbolism serves as a continuous indicator of character’s emotional progression.
Macbeth and Lady Macbeth’s reactions to blood underline inverse attitude changes. Macbeth moves from immeasurable guilt to callous killer, while Lady Macbeth starts as the callous killer and falls into a state of despair (Lowe 3661).
Ironically, as the play nears its end, Shakespeare portrays Macbeth’s murderous, bloody conscience as fully saturated: "Of all men else I have avoided thee: / But get thee back; my soul is too much charged / With blood of thine" (5.8.5-7). "Charged" means full and overburdened, and the "blood" connotes Macduff’s family’s murders, which overload Macbeth’s conscience. However, Macduff simply views murder’s physical components (i.e. his sword), and he refuses to accept consciences effects and hindrance: "My voice is in my sword, thou bloodier villain / Than terms can give thee out!" (5.8.7-8). Macduff’s physical perspective proves superior as he prevails murdering
Macbeth. Moreover, Shakespeare uses speech to depict darkness as a tool the characters use to blind their morals (light) and illumine their murderous universe. As Macbeth first contemplates murder, he displays darkness’ power to blind his morals, thereby sanctioning his immoral desires: “Stars, hide your fires/ Let not light see my black and deep desires/The eye wink at the hand; yet let that be/Which the eye fears, when it is done, to see”(1.4.50-53). Similarly, Lady Macbeth uses darkness to block her constricting morals (“heaven”), thereby attaining the opportunity to act immorally: “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!”(1.5.40-44). Shakespeare uses these light and dark symbolisms to frequently distinguish Macbeth and Lady Macbeth’s ethical standpoint, using the Elizabethan Great Chain of Being. In the Chain’s proper order light dominates, but when the Shakespeare’s characters jumble the Chain, darkness and evil reign. Therefore, when Macbeth kills King Duncan and assumes his throne, the Great Chain of Being shatters and ethical darkness prevails:
The evil that is being done is so horrible that it would blast the sight to look at it; so that darkness, or partial blinding, is necessary…it is Macbeth’s murderous thoughts about Duncan that starts this simile. (Spurgeon 112)
With his disorderly act, Macbeth hands darkness the superiority: “By th’ clock ‘tis day / And yet dark night strangles the traveling lamp / Is’t night’s predominance or the day’s shame / That darkness does the face of Earth entomb / When living light should kiss it (2.4.6-10). Once darkness becomes superior, Macbeth and Lady Macbeth further illumine their dark murderous universes; for example, Macbeth refers to his later murder as the dark hour: "Fleance his son, that keeps him company, / Whose absence is no less material to me / Than is his father's, must embrace the fate / Of that dark hour" (3.1.134-137). Whether the dagger, blood, or darkness acts as the illuminator, many Macbeth characters share a core murderous conscience. These differing hallucinations serve to show both the hallucinating character and those witnessing the episode the character’s core murderous conscience. Perhaps, Shakespeare believes that distilled humans generally leave a murderous core and therefore people must face the existential choice whether to unearth their evil essence.