Macbeth doth murder sleep’. . . .
Still it cried, ‘Sleep no more!’ to all the house:
‘Glamis hath murther’d sleep, and therefore Cawdor
Shall sleep no more; Macbeth shall sleep no more.’”[153:2]
Dr. Bucknill, it is true, considers that this is not an hallucination, on account of the word “methought.”[153:3] But the same word would have been used of the dagger, which the critic himself admits to have been an hallucination. Nor is the length of the fancied speeches any
obstacle, the greater part of the speech in which they occur being Macbeth’s own embellishment of the event.
The hallucination at the banquet is more formidable. Macbeth, having caused Banquo to be murdered—the murder being unknown to his guests—is regretting his absence, “thus by a voluntary mental act calling before his mind’s eye the image of the murdered man.”[154:1] At the mention of him, an image rises in the place reserved for Macbeth himself. It shakes its “gory locks” at the murderer, it nods but will not speak, and only vanishes like the “air-drawn dagger,” when Macbeth begins to overcome his fear and brave it. When he pledges Banquo it appears again; once more he declaims violently against it and it vanishes, but not before he has
. . “displac’d the mirth, broke the good meeting
With most admir’d disorder.”[154:2]
to say nothing of a certain amount of suspicion attached to it.