“Fair is foul, and foul is fair.” — we hear the witches say this in the first scene of Macbeth, and the moral confusion it describes dominates the play. Another word for “fair” is “good,” and another word for “fair” is “evil” or “ill,” so the witches are announcing their temptation strategy: get Macbeth to confuse good and evil.
This was, of course, the sin that Adam and Eve committed. They too fell to a temptation that promised god-like power, the ability to know good and evil by committing evil. The consequences were deadly. I think that one explanation for the tragic power of Macbeth is the way it repeats Adam and Eve’s sin through Macbeth and Lady Macbeth’s moral failings and the consequences of that sin.
In the first part of my argument, I will survey how the seven days of creation show up in the play in a distorted way, as through each good act of creation is being seen in a funhouse mirror.
The void and formless earth is echoed in the “hurlyburly” and “fog and filthy air” of Act 1 Scene 1.
Light and darkness, the products of creation’s first day, are continually conflated. In Act 2, for instance, Ross tells the Old Man, “[B]y the clock, ’tis day, / And yet dark night strangles the travelling lamp.”
Lady Macbeth seeks to obscure the heavenly expanse created on Day 2:
Come, thick night,
And pall thee in the dunnest smoke of hell,
That my keen knife see not the wound it makes,
Nor heaven peep through the blanket of the dark…
The connection between the earth and waters from Day 3 gets hinted at in Banquo’s line to Macbeth, “The earth hath bubbles, as the water has,” and Banquo too hints at that same day’s seeds and vegetation when he asks if the witches’ knowledge extends to “the seeds of time, / And say which grain will grow and which will not.”
The sun, moon, and stars appear throughout the play but bring no comfort. Macbeth requests, “Stars, hide your fires” in Act 1. Fleance testifies, “The moon is down” in Act 2. Macbeth declares, “I gin to be aweary of the sun” in Act 5.
The birds from Day 5 range from the “the obscure bird” which “Clamour’d the livelong night” to “the crow” which “Makes wing to the rooky wood” bringing with it night and Duncan’s death. The bird that makes its “procreant cradle” in Macbeth’s castle echoes the command for the birds of the air and fish of the sea to be fruitful and multiply, albeit in a castle about to be marked by murder.
We encounter a distorted version of humanity’s creation on Day 6 when Lady Macbeth requests that supernatural spirits “unsex me here.” The play’s continual emphasis on what it means to be a man (“I dare do all that may become a man” or “in the catalogue ye go for men”) is contrasted with the creation emphasis on men and women being made in God’s image. The closest we get to this more sanctified vision of humanity comes only after Duncan dies and Macduff calls the king, “The Lord’s anointed temple.”
Finally, the day of rest on creation’s seventh day gets a distorted representation in Lady Macbeth’s sleepwalking as well as the general fear the play’s characters have of sleep and rest. “A great perturbation in nature,” the doctor declares, “to receive at once the benefit of sleep, and do the effects of watching.”
Banquo asks the “merciful powers” to “Restrain in me the cursed thoughts that nature Gives way to in repose!” The entire play records a fallen world, one already under the curse of sin. Macbeth and Lady Macbeth are surrounded by a created order that should point them to God. Instead, they confusedly read fair as foul and foul as fair. When they give into temptation, like Adam and Eve, they too reap the consequences.
I’ll examine those consequences more fully in my next post.
Experiments in Criticism 