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Imagery
Explanation and Analysis—Muddled Senses:
In Macbeth, Shakespeare uses a wide variety of sensory imagery, and there are numerous references to eyes, ears, tongues, and hands. But Macbeth focuses mainly on the idea that human senses can, obscured by "fog and filthy air," become unreliable. Throughout the play, senses variously become divorced from one another or are combined in strange ways, and a recurring motif is the inability of the senses to truly distinguish between reality and illusion.
The idea that a person cannot always trust their senses is introduced in Act 1, Scene 3, when Banquo questions whether the Weird Sisters are real or illusory:
Banquo: Are you fantastical, or that indeed
Which outwardly you show?
In Act 1, Scene 4, Macbeth hopes that his eye will not see what his hand does, since he is ashamed of the deeds he must commit if he wishes to become king:
Macbeth: The eye wink at the hand, yet let that be
Which the eye fears, when it is done, to see.
Lady Macbeth feels a similar sense of guilt, and in Act 1, Scene 5, she calls on night to conceal her activities to the point where she herself will be unable to perceive them:
Lady Macbeth: Come, thick night,
And pall thee in the dunnest smoke of hell,
That my keen knife see not the wound it makes
In Act 1, Scene 6, Duncan and Banquo's olfactory senses prove to be unreliable. Both men comment on the sweet and delicate nature of the air surrounding Inverness, unaware that terrible events will soon occur there. Shakespeare uses tactile and gustatory imagery to describe the feeling and taste of the air:
Duncan: The air
Nimbly and sweetly recommends itself
Unto our gentle senses.
In Act 2, Scene 1, Macbeth's sees a vision of a bloody dagger. The image appears "palpable," but he cannot touch it, leading him to wonder whether his eyes or his hands are deceiving him:
Macbeth: Mine eyes are made the fools o’ th’ other senses
Or else worth all the rest.
In Act 2, Scene 2, after he murders Duncan, Macbeth begins to experience auditory hallucinations as well:
Macbeth: Methought I heard a voice cry "Sleep no more!
Macbeth does murder sleep"
This time, Macbeth is less able to distinguish between reality and illusion, and he begins to focus obsessively on the voice, which he starts to regard as real.
By the time Macbeth sees Banquo's ghost in Act 3, Scene 4, he no longer has the wherewithal to question his senses, even though Lady Macbeth attempts to convince him that Banquo's ghost is merely a stress-induced illusion:
Lady Macbeth: This is the very painting of your fear.
This is the air-drawn dagger which you said
Led you to Duncan.
Later, though, Lady Macbeth herself begins to suffer from visual and olfactory hallucinations. In Act 5, Scene 1, she not only sees blood staining her hands, but she also believes she can smell it:
Lady Macbeth: Here's the smell of the blood still. All the perfumes of Arabia will not sweeten this little hand.
Even though Macbeth and Lady Macbeth's senses are unreliable, the visions they experience have palpable impacts on their physical and mental health.
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