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.