“I am not idle,” he says, and he is right. But thick-coming fancies disturb him. The ghost of Susan appears. He stares at it fixedly, then turns to the other side, only to be confronted again by the apparition. When it vanishes he is raving of “a force in which were drawn a thousand ghosts, leap’d newly from their graves, to pluck me into a winding-sheet.” He has, so he says, “Some windmill in my brains for want of sleep,” but sleep only comes with the unburdening of the guilty conscience.[151:1]
Macbeth (like Frank Thorney) is at no time
in the play insane, but he becomes the victim of “horrible imaginings” which beyond a certain point seem to him to be real.[152:1] Macbeth is predisposed to hallucinations by a remarkably vivid power of imagination, which finds expression from the very outset of the play. The mere suggestion of the murder of Duncan he describes as a “horrid image” which unfixes his hair and makes his seated heart knock at his ribs, against the use of nature. Thus we have a character whose imagination torments him throughout his career of crime till he has “supped full of horrors” and the “taste of fears” has almost lost all significance.[152:2]
In the well-known “Dagger Scene”[152:3] we are confronted with the first of Macbeth’s hallucinations. It is before the murder of Duncan, and the spectral dagger only deceives him for a moment. Making an unsuccessful attempt
to clutch it, he is for a short moment at a loss to explain a weapon which he can see but cannot handle. Then he rightly concludes that it is but a “dagger of the mind, a false creation”; his eyes “are made the fools o’ the other senses,” yet the image does not disappear till courage comes again and with it “the heat of deeds.”
Duncan is murdered; “after life’s fitful fever he sleeps well,” but the regicide’s better self torments him more and more, and the Lady fears for his sanity:
“These deeds must not be thought
After these ways; so, it will make us mad.”[153:1]
Macbeth, however, is losing his self-control. At the moment of the murder a fresh hallucination troubled him, and though its true nature is now recognised, and he can “moralise” upon it, its very mention fills the Lady with fears.
“Methought I heard a voice cry, ‘Sleep no more!