Hands and Macbeth
Hands and Macbeth
By Lucy Coleman
In Shakespeare’s Macbeth, the word
‘hand’ is used 37 times. As the play charts its central characters’ gradual
untethering from reality, I postulate that the hand acts as a symbol of
connection; not only to the characters’ community, but also to the divine, and
to the body itself. Throughout the play, both Macbeth and Lady Macbeth
intentionally distance themselves from their bodily and physical realities in
order to externalise and avoid their guilt. Through the changing roles of
hands, Shakespeare shows the physical and linguistic dissociation his
characters induce to be the thing which ultimately drives them to their deaths.‘Give me your hand; / Conduct me to mine host’ (1.6.28-29).[1] The first act of Macbeth regularly returns to hands as synecdochic symbols of support. To take someone’s hand is established as a sign of allegiance: Macbeth is praised for not shaking hands with the rebel Macdonwald (1.2.21-3) just as the weird sisters are introduced ‘hand in hand’ (1.3.32). To hold someone’s hand is evidently an indication of community and interpersonal support. The extension of this is that hands are also representative of wider political support: as Malcom considers returning to Scotland to fight Macbeth, he says ‘there would be hands uplifted in my right.’ (4.3.42). Hands are linked to formal hospitality as Lady Macbeth takes the hand of King Duncan, even as she leads him towards his death (1.6.28-29). She commands Macbeth to use the same gesture of hospitality, repurposing it to manipulate: ‘Your eye / Your hand, your tongue: [should] look like the innocent flower, / But be the serpent under’t’ (1.5.63-66). Maynard Mack’s assertion that ‘every element [Macbeth] contains lives with a double life, one physical, one metaphysical’[2] is especially pertinent to this discussion of hands: They do not only represent the different manifestations of human support, but also religious endorsement. After receiving the news of Duncan’s murder, Banquo says ‘in the great hand of God I stand’ (2.3.130). Given that the monarch of the period, James I, proclaimed a relation to Banquo, it is perhaps unsurprising that Shakespeare extends the ‘hand of God’ to him and not Macbeth; Banquo is bestowed with the divine right of Kings. Indeed, as the Macbeths go against this metaphysical order through repeated regicide – killing not only King Duncan but the royally-blooded Banquo – the religious support offered by the hand is removed. In a subversion of Banquo’s earlier statement, Macbeth later calls on the night for help, saying ‘with thy bloody and invisible hand / Cancel and tear to pieces that great bond’, Banquo’s life (3.2.49-50). While Shakespeare’s ‘hand of God’ was distinctly physical (Banquo ‘stood’ on it), the ‘hand’ of the night is ‘invisible’ and intangible, unable to offer the same support. Due to their manipulations of the hand’s social power, the Macbeths are stripped of every level of support represented by it. Not only the religious, but that of friendship, political support, and the pair’s support from one another as Shakespeare flings the two apart in the play. Lady Macbeth disappears almost entirely from the last two acts of Macbeth; of her 59 total lines, 53 occur in the first three acts. The lost community between the two is starkened by Macbeth’s unemotional response when he hears of his wife’s offstage death: ‘She should have died hereafter’ (5.5.17). Tragically, in Lady Macbeth’s last piece of spoken dialogue, she reaches out to an invisible Macbeth ‘come, give me your hand’ (5.1.63), and like the ‘invisible’ hand of night, when Lady Macbeth calls out for his support, she only clutches air. By removing the multifaceted support synecdochally represented by hands in the play, Shakespeare demonstrates the Macbeths’ untethering from the network of people around them.
‘Go get some water, / And wash this filthy witness from your hand’ (2.2.45-46). Lady Macbeth’s final moments on stage bear clear echoes of the pair’s conversation following the murder of Duncan. In both scenes the characters attempt to wash the blood from their hands, but are unable, placing the blood on the same hallucinatory level as Macbeth’s soliloquised dagger (2.1.32-61). The dialogue between the two moments goes both ways; just as Macbeth prophesies that they shall ‘sleep no more’, manifesting in Lady Macbeth’s later sleepwalking, his wife observes that if not processed correctly, the events ‘will make us mad’ (2.2.33). She suggests that to avoid this, they should consciously dissociate themselves from their bodily realities, a decision which ultimately leads them toward their madness. By characterising ‘the sleeping and the dead […] but as pictures’ and ‘painted devil[s]’, she calls Macbeth to question the reality of what his eye sees, an action which exacerbates the growing disconnection between parts of his body. Immediately after this instruction, Macbeth remarks ‘what hands are here? Ha! They pluck out mine eyes’ establishing his bodily conflict (2.2.59). Lady Macbeth shares in this, as she differentiates between her hands and heart saying, ‘my hands are of your colour; but I shame / To wear a heart so white’ (2.2.61-62). Critics such as Helen Gardener have questioned the reasoning behind Shakespeare’s emphasis on bodily fragmentation, suggesting that ‘Macbeth […] gazes upon his "hangman's hands" as if they were not his’ because ‘what he does is a perpetual offence to what he is.’[3] Shakespeare therefore uses hands, here, to linguistically externalise Macbeth’s guilt as a result of this conflict. His bodily fragmentation is initially effective, as he moves the ‘witness’ of his actions from his ‘heart’ to his hands, allowing Lady Macbeth to command him to wash his guilt away because it is not in him, it is on him (2.2.45-46). It is the guards, after all, who are perceived guilty because their ‘hands […] were all badged with blood’ (2.3.102). Before murdering Duncan, Macbeth expresses that his ‘eye fears, when it is done, to see’ his hands’ actualisation of his ‘black and deep desires’ (1.4.50-53). His internal conflict worsens after the murder scene’s conscious bodily dissociation, stating later in the play that ‘strange things I have in head, that will to hand, / Which must be acted, ere they may be scann’d’, meaning that he would rather allow his hands to do the ‘strange things’ in his head before he thinks about them (4.1.146-148). Therefore, the word ‘hand’ recurs in Macbeth because Shakespeare makes Macbeth’s hand, and not Macbeth, the play’s primary villain.
‘From this moment, / The very firstlings of my heart shall be / The firstlings of my hand’ (4.1.146-148). Despite the effective externalisation of his guilt, Macbeth never stops striving to regain bodily unity, later stating this as he curses himself for Macduff’s escape. Shakespeare stresses that there is power in connection to the body, and that as such, though the Macbeths ease their guilt through their physical, bodily and interpersonal untethering, it is ultimately fatal. As Catherine Belsey observes: Macbeth ‘becomes increasingly isolated from other people’ as ‘his discourse [is] confined to ‘bodily instructions’, ‘explicitly destroy[ing] the unity of the self.’[4] He becomes, in Terry Eagleton’s words, ‘a bundle of broken signifiers’, his wife ‘disintegrate[d] into fragments of hallucinated speech and mindless physical action.’ [5] The Macbeths are torn apart in the conflict between their bodies and their minds. Their tactic of viewing their physical realities as unreal and ‘painted’ in the handwashing scene is proved insufficient in act 4, when, faced with Banquo’s ghost, Macbeth completely ignores his wife’s attempted consolation that ‘this is the very painting of your fear’ (3.4.60). Their intentional bodily disconnection is proven similarly problematic: it is ultimately a bodily loophole which allows Macduff to kill Macbeth (5.8.15-16), and it is Lady Macbeth’s ‘violent hands’ which are stated as killing her (5.8.71-72). There is also a progression towards death in the way Shakespeare depicts Macbeth’s ‘hangman’s hands’ as constantly grasping for intangible objects like the ‘barren sceptre’ (3.1.61) and the dagger (2.1.32-61). When Lady Macbeth speaks her final lines of the play, she places Macbeth in the position of the intangible, hallucinated object, reached towards and not grasped. Macbeth has become so disconnected from the reality around him that he himself has become the hallucination.
In Macbeth, Shakespeare constructs a web of hands, grasping, gripping, clutching and killing. They represent the interpersonal and metaphysical support which is manipulated by and removed from its central characters, whilst charting the fragmentation of the Macbeths’ physical realities. Shakespeare uses the motif to linguistically externalise the characters’ guilt, warning us of the madness which results from bodily disunity, and the rejection of what is real.
References
[1] William Shakespeare, Macbeth, ed. by Kenneth Muir (London: Methuen, 1966), p. 36. All future references are to this edition.
[2] Maynard Mack, ‘The Many Faces of Macbeth’, in Everybody's Shakespeare: Reflections Chiefly on the Tragedies (Lincoln, Nebraska: University of Nebraska, 1993), pp. 183-196 (p. 191).
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