Perhaps the king's wounds did indeed look like a great, gaping hole in life itself, a hole that lets in death and destruction. Macbeth is lying about his motives, but his sense of horror may be genuine. When Macbeth explains why he killed King Duncan's grooms, he describes the horrifying sight of the dead king's body: "And his gash'd stabs look'd like a breach in nature / For ruin's wasteful entrance" (2.3.113-114). The second course of a meal was the main course, not the appetizer or the dessert, and so the "chief nourisher." Macbeth feels that he will never again be nourished by kindly nature. He speaks of sleep as "great nature's second course, / Chief nourisher in life's feast" (2.2.36-37). Later in the scene, after Macbeth has killed the king, he frets that he has murdered sleep and that he will never sleep again.
Here she uses the word "nature" in the sense of life, which struggles with death. "Nature seems dead" because it's dark and quiet out, but as people fall asleep human nature seems dead, too, and then wicked dreams can take control.Īs Lady Macbeth waits for Macbeth to murder King Duncan and return to her, she says of the king's grooms, "I have drugg'd their possets, / That death and nature do contend about them, / Whether they live or die" (2.2.6-8). In any case, such thoughts of evil are not natural they are what human nature "gives way to" when we are going to sleep.Īfter Banquo has gone to bed, Macbeth hallucinates, seeing a bloody dagger in the air, and then he tells himself that it is the time of night for such a hallucination: "Now o'er the one half-world / Nature seems dead, and wicked dreams abuse / The curtain'd sleep" (2.1.49-51). He certainly suspects that Macbeth intends evil to King Duncan, and he may also have some doubts about his own ambition or his own safety. Banquo doesn't say just what thoughts are disturbing his sleep, but we can guess that they have to do with the witches' prophecies. Just before Macbeth murders King Duncan, Banquo is preparing to go to bed, and says to his son, "A heavy summons lies like lead upon me, / And yet I would not sleep: merciful powers, / Restrain in me the cursed thoughts that nature / Gives way to in repose! (2.1.6-9). "Take my milk for gall" means "take my milk away and put gall in its place," and "wait on" means "assist," not just "wait for," so she seems confident that somewhere in nature there are demons with the power to make nature itself unnatural. In the next breath, she calls upon those evil spirits - the "murdering ministers" - to "Come to my woman's breasts, / And take my milk for gall, you murdering ministers, / Wherever in your sightless substances / You wait on nature's mischief!" (1.5.47-50). Lady Macbeth wants to be unnatural, so that she can be "fell," deadly. "Compunctious visitings of nature" are the messages of our natural human conscience, which tell us that we should treat others with kindness and consideration. To prepare herself, she calls upon evil spirits to "Stop up the access and passage to remorse, / That no compunctious visitings of nature / Shake my fell purpose" (1.5.44-46). It's as though his body is warning him against what his mind is thinking.Īfter Lady Macbeth receives her husband's letter, she is eager to talk him into doing the murder she knows that he has in mind. The "use of nature" means the way things usually and naturally are, so Macbeth means that he is not used to feeling this way. "Suggestion" means "temptation," so Macbeth is asking himself why he feels himself giving into temptation, especially a temptation that makes his heart race and his hair stand on end.
Later in the scene, after he has received news that he has been named Thane of Cawdor, Macbeth asks himself "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?" (1.3.134-137).
They are inhabitants of this world who look like they should be human, but in them the human form is unnaturally distorted. The witches are not fiends that only visit this world. He also tells them, "You should be women, / And yet your beards forbid me to interpret / That you are so" (1.3.45-47). "What are these / So wither'd and so wild in their attire, / That look not like the inhabitants o' the earth, / And yet are on't?" (1.3.39-42), wonders Banquo when he first sees them. The witches show us what the unnatural looks like.
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