Reversal of Nature in Macbeth

Reversal of Nature in Macbeth

The Tragedy of Macbeth is definitely Shakespeare's most violent play. The main theme of the play is the reversal of values and of nature itself, triggered by the evil actions and murders of Macbeth and his wife. The reversal of the natural order is announced from the introductory lines of the play, in the discourse of the three witches: "Fair is foul, and foul is fair"(1.1.12) the main plot of the play, the killing of Duncan, the king of Scotland, is a common subject for tragedy during the Renaissance age, and a recurrent one in Shakespeare's plays. The belief that royalty was foreordained by divinity explains why the act of murdering a king was considered as a reversal of order and of values. When the murder is done, the old man significantly proclaims it as "unnatural," comparing it to the killing of a falconer by an owl. Thus, throughout the play, there are direct hints to the reversal of nature caused by the dreadful murders, as well as descriptions that reveal absolute natural disorder, like the sun's refusal to shine for example. The murderous acts are seen thus as a menace against the basic order of the universe itself.

Thus, in the first place, the murders performed by Macbeth and his wife are, as Macbeth himself says "against nature." The supernatural forces embodied by the three witches that foresee the future of Macbeth as a king of Scotland represent the reversal of nature, and its transformation into utter disorder and nightmarish illusion. Macbeth wonders about the foretelling of the witches and already observes the relativity of the values of good and evil: "Cannot be ill, cannot be good: if ill, / Why hath it given me earnest of success, / Commencing in a truth? I am thane of Cawdor: / if good, why do I yield to that suggestion / Whose horrid image doth unfix my hair / and make my seated heart knock at my ribs, / Against the use of nature?" (1.3.126-34) Thus, as Macbeth emphasizes, the supernatural and the evil take control of reality and nature, making him feel their horrors with full force. The supernatural is also present in the form of the ghosts that hunt Macbeth, like that of the bloody dagger appearing before him or that of Banquo sitting in his own chair at the feast. As in Hamlet, the evil deeds performed awaken the unnatural spirits, bringing utter confusion to reality. All these preternatural manifestations, point to the fact that evil can not come from any natural impulse but only from a "supernatural soliciting," as Macbeth calls it. (1.3 130)

The supernatural embodied by the witches is also paralleled by a reversal of natural processes. The sun refuses to shine, the forces of nature run wild and everything seems unreal. Haunted by the image of the bloody dagger, Macbeth propounds that "nature seems dead," and reality has turned into a nightmare. All there is left of nature is the abuse of the "wicked dreams": "Now o'er the one halfworld / Nature seems dead, and wicked dreams abuse / the curtain'd sleep; witchcraft celebrates / Pale Hecate's offerings, and wither'd murder, / Alarum'd by his sentinel, the wolf,/Whose howl's his watch, thus with his stealthy pace."(2.1. 56-62)

The main theme of the play is thus clearly outlined by Macbeth's soliloquy: evil itself is unnatural, and when unleashed it transforms reality into a wicked dream. The figure of Hecate, the Greek goddess of the underworld and of witchcraft at the same time, is meant to emphasize the turning of the natural into the preternatural. Also, the adjective that Macbeth uses to describe murder, "wither'd," suggests that the bloody killings are first of all a crime against nature, a force that not only destroys what it aims at but sears and withers all nature. There is significant emphasis on the natural imagery of the play, like in King Lear for example, suggesting that nature itself cannot remain indifferent to the acts of man. If in King Lear the whole nature seems to burst into a tempest similar to the king's madness, in Macbeth nature collapses into an ultimate chaotic state, in which the laws of nature are reversed and confused. As L.C. Knights observes in his study entitled Macbeth: A Lust for Power, the forces of evil obliterate the light of reason in man and bring about utter disorder in nature: "Well before the end of the first act we are in possession not only of the positive values against which the Macbeth evil will be defined but of the related aspects of that evil, which is simultaneously felt as a strained and unnatural perversion of the will, an obfuscation of the clear light of reason, a principle of disorder (both in the "single state of man" and in his wider social relations), and a pursuit of illusions."(Bloom, 41) Any act of evil is seen thus to change the basic structure of the universe and to transform nature into a desolated chaos.

It is not only the natural, physical environment that becomes extremely chaotic through evil, but the human nature as well. All through the play, Lady Macbeth calls upon the forces of evil to keep at bay the "compunctious visitings of nature." It is thus plainly shown that there can be no enactment of malignancy without a reversal of human nature: "The raven himself is hoarse / That croaks the fatal entrance of Duncan / Under my battlements. Come, you spirits / That tend on mortal thoughts, unsex me here, / and fill me from the crown to the toe top-full / of direst cruelty! make thick my blood; / Stop up the access and passage to remorse, / That no compunctious visitings of nature / Shake my fell purpose, nor keep peace between / the effect and it!"(1.5.40-51) the invocation that Lady Macbeth addresses to the spirits, urging them to "unsex her" is also significant: what she asks for is to be made infertile, and therefore to be herself transformed into an unnatural being, that can have enough force to murder. The chain of murders that follow the initial murder of Duncan also points to the fact that once unleashed, the malefic forces will take over man and nature and will be very hard to stop. Also, Lady Macbeth's frequent complaints against Macbeth's nature which is, according to her too human for murder, evince the same idea that wickedness can only reign when humanity and naturalness are somehow suffocated. The tyranny of evil is thus the equivalent of a reversal of nature. When Macbeth is hunted by Duncan's ghost, he realizes the stabs looked like " a breech in nature"(2.3.139), thus suggestively linking the murderous marks on the human body with the marks that such an act inevitably leaves upon nature, emptying it of its meaning. The holes in nature are symbolic and point to the hollowness of evil, its basic unnaturalness that recalls the image of chaos and of void. Everything is ultimately reversed. As Lady Macbeth urges her husband, he has to pretend and look like a "innocent flower" with a serpent underneath it (1.5. 73-74). Again, this imagery taken from nature suggests that humanness must be curbed and used only as a mask, in order to perform evil.