Numb: Sensory Denial in Shakespeare’s Macbeth
Nearly 400 years since his death, people around the world are still unpacking the brilliance of William Shakespeare. One of his hallmark tools is the use of image patterns to weave a theme through both the events and the images and metaphors of his play. Few image patterns are more deeply or more brilliantly woven into a play that the pattern of sensory denial in his famous Macbeth. In Macbeth, Shakespeare deftly uses sensory denial to show that Duncan 's murder is too terrible to see, hear, and think about because it is an inversion of the Great Chain of Being in order to make regicide seem completely deplorable.
First, the pattern of sensory denial heightens the gravity and seriousness of Duncan’s …show more content…
Right after he murders Duncan, Macbeth reveals: “I am afraid to think what I have done;/ Look on’t again I dare not,” (2.2.712-713). Now that the deed is done, his desire to block it from sight becomes more personal, motivated by a fear of the deed itself more than a fear of mere discovery. Macbeth begins to wish for more than just blindness: “To know my deed, 'twere best not know myself,” (2.2.742). After murdering Duncan, Macbeth now longs to numb all of his senses at once and` lie unconscious rather than face what he has done. He and his wife’s wish to deaden their senses, having grown from a desire for secrecy to a desperation to escape from their own guilt, soon becomes their “new normal”. Lady Macbeth’s attendant tells a doctor several months afterward that Lady Macbeth has become prone to sleepwalking, and during such an episode the doctor notes that “her eyes are open”, to which the woman responds: “Aye, but their sense is shut,” (5.1.2150-2151). All of these intensifications of sensory denial point to the fact that Macbeth did not just murder someone – he dared to murder his superior and break the Great Chain of Being. As he muses to …show more content…
Like any artist who manages to stay in business, Shakespeare is as brilliant in his strategies for pleasing his audience as he is in his use of meter and deeply-layered imagery. Living from around 1564 to 1616, Shakespeare wrote Macbeth during the reign of King James I. Because his predecessor, Elizabeth I, had no heirs, James was a somewhat distant relative of Elizabeth and therefore desperate (and somewhat paranoid) about protecting his own crown. Shakespeare knows this, and so he creates Macbeth, a war hero who earlier: “unseam 'd [his enemy] from the nave to the chaps,/ And fix 'd his head upon our battlements,” (1.2.41-42). Shakespeare takes this undauntable man and then uses the prevalent motif of sensory denial throughout the play to show that the murder of your king is so terrible and so unthinkable that this manly, valiant man cannot bear to see it. He cannot bear for his own knife to see the wound it makes, and he does not dare even to look at the King’s bloody body a second time because he is so horrified. He is forced to numb his senses so repeatedly that eventually he cannot awaken them, and he and his wife walk around blind to the terrible things they do during the day and unable to unsee them while they sleep. All of this not only makes the play dramatic and fun to watch, but proclaims to the audience
Nearly 400 years since his death, people around the world are still unpacking the brilliance of William Shakespeare. One of his hallmark tools is the use of image patterns to weave a theme through both the events and the images and metaphors of his play. Few image patterns are more deeply or more brilliantly woven into a play that the pattern of sensory denial in his famous Macbeth. In Macbeth, Shakespeare deftly uses sensory denial to show that Duncan 's murder is too terrible to see, hear, and think about because it is an inversion of the Great Chain of Being in order to make regicide seem completely deplorable.
First, the pattern of sensory denial heightens the gravity and seriousness of Duncan’s …show more content…
Right after he murders Duncan, Macbeth reveals: “I am afraid to think what I have done;/ Look on’t again I dare not,” (2.2.712-713). Now that the deed is done, his desire to block it from sight becomes more personal, motivated by a fear of the deed itself more than a fear of mere discovery. Macbeth begins to wish for more than just blindness: “To know my deed, 'twere best not know myself,” (2.2.742). After murdering Duncan, Macbeth now longs to numb all of his senses at once and` lie unconscious rather than face what he has done. He and his wife’s wish to deaden their senses, having grown from a desire for secrecy to a desperation to escape from their own guilt, soon becomes their “new normal”. Lady Macbeth’s attendant tells a doctor several months afterward that Lady Macbeth has become prone to sleepwalking, and during such an episode the doctor notes that “her eyes are open”, to which the woman responds: “Aye, but their sense is shut,” (5.1.2150-2151). All of these intensifications of sensory denial point to the fact that Macbeth did not just murder someone – he dared to murder his superior and break the Great Chain of Being. As he muses to …show more content…
Like any artist who manages to stay in business, Shakespeare is as brilliant in his strategies for pleasing his audience as he is in his use of meter and deeply-layered imagery. Living from around 1564 to 1616, Shakespeare wrote Macbeth during the reign of King James I. Because his predecessor, Elizabeth I, had no heirs, James was a somewhat distant relative of Elizabeth and therefore desperate (and somewhat paranoid) about protecting his own crown. Shakespeare knows this, and so he creates Macbeth, a war hero who earlier: “unseam 'd [his enemy] from the nave to the chaps,/ And fix 'd his head upon our battlements,” (1.2.41-42). Shakespeare takes this undauntable man and then uses the prevalent motif of sensory denial throughout the play to show that the murder of your king is so terrible and so unthinkable that this manly, valiant man cannot bear to see it. He cannot bear for his own knife to see the wound it makes, and he does not dare even to look at the King’s bloody body a second time because he is so horrified. He is forced to numb his senses so repeatedly that eventually he cannot awaken them, and he and his wife walk around blind to the terrible things they do during the day and unable to unsee them while they sleep. All of this not only makes the play dramatic and fun to watch, but proclaims to the audience