‘Fears and Scruples Shake Us’: Ecological and Perceptual Instability in Macbeth

Abstract

ABSTRACT With the aid of his wife, Macbeth searches for a ‘single state’ of selfhood that will place him unequivocally and permanently in a position of ultimate power. From the start of the play, however, Macbeth is told – and seems to know – that such an ideal is impossible. Macbeth’s Scotland is a world of spatial and temporal motion that permits no pause in place or time and therefore no location or moment within which to describe any experiential situation or settle into any political or personal position. Self-knowledge is not won by human beings in philosophical or academic isolation but in synchronicity and symbiosis with environmental forces. The ecologies of the play – the witches, earthquake, the foul air, thunder and lightning – ensure the relentlessly dynamic and imbricated phenomenology of space and time that stops up the access to success for the Macbeths.