Signifying Nothing

And again I post a bit of my Macbeth paper. This is the conclusion, which doesn't fully do the paper justice in that it doesn't give a nice tidy overview, but it does give the conclusion I came to while writing it... which, surprisingly enough, is where I thought I was going. So cookies (mmmm... peppernuts) for me for getting it right this time.

Macbeth is a play whose complex and amphibolic language leads only to more complexity; the inability of character or audience to interpret language or action invests the play itself with prophetic agency. The theatricality of the lines, the roles, and the sense of prophetic predestination that hover throughout the text can only be comprehended from a position of hindsight; Macbeth’s words and deeds, like the prophecies of the Weird Sisters, culminate only in a return to themselves. Like the play, Macbeth’s speech is self-reflexive; just as the play must return to its beginnings –since it returns to the same field of battle on which it begins – the language of the play haunts itself. Characters repeat linguistic patterns, words, and images found earlier in the lines, actions – battle, murder, and prophecy – recur again and again, further complicating a play already dark and murky with the equivocation of political prophecy. Self-destructive treason and the haunting discourse of amphibology reduce the play to the strutting and fretting of a poor player upon the stage of political battle, ultimately, in its amphibolic circularity, full of sound and fury, but signifying nothing.

When the battle's lost and won

The current project is on Shakespeare's Macbeth and the language and performance of treason - not only how treason is depicted in Macbeth, but how Macbeth himself is forced into committing treason (and ultimately destroying himself) by his inability to fully comprehend both the prophecy of the Weird Sisters AND of the text of the play itself.

The following is my working introduction.

In the context of London, 1606, William Shakespeare’s Macbeth offers an imagined world inverted by the “hurleyburly” (1.1.3) of war, treachery, and treason. The prophecies of the three Weird Sisters set the stage (literally) for the action of the play, infusing the text (performed and written) with the discourse of political treason and equivocation. Historically situated after the Gowrie plot and the discourse of equivocation espoused by the Jesuits, Macbeth’s amphibology resonates with the political ideology of James I’s England. However, Shakespeare’s play does not limit its textual ambivalence to a discourse of treason grounded entirely in the figures of the Weird Sisters; magic is not entirely to blame for the disintegration of Scotland in the play. In fact, the language and actions of the play itself contain more amphibolic complexities than the brief and often unintelligible (at least to the other characters) scenes containing the Weird Sisters. The body of the text – characters, roles, actions, and language – performs its own prophecies, ultimately determining Macbeth’s fate itself – the Weird Sisters’ presence seems almost superfluous and serves only to reinforce the amphibology of the text in human form. Concerns of treason and equivocation run rampant through the hurlyburly of the play, ultimately culminating in Macbeth’s self-destruction qua his own inability to read himself; the amphibology of both body (role and action) and text (language) are inaccessible to Macbeth (and to Lady Macbeth), destroying them both because they are incapable of fully accessing the multivalent meanings of their own treachery.