Of Anxiety in Shakespeare’s Macbeth

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This essay reads Shakespeare’s Macbeth in the light of anxiety by drawing on Heidegger’s idea of angst as opposed to furcht in Being and Time. By and large, the discussion is divided into two parts. The first part focuses on the illumination of anxiety itself whereas the second part addresses anxiety in relation to hospitality. To be more specific, I argue that anxiety is an uncanny feeling of uneasiness mostly generated from an encounter with strangeness and that it escalates into the level of indefinity and uncontrollability beyond mood, thereby raising a phenomenological concern of Being. Macbeth’s interiority, especially after his encounter with the Witches, is a case in point. He feels strange about himself, which leads to the uncanny experience of blood and knocking sound after he assassinates Duncan. Consequently, everything that used to familiar to him becomes strange and he feels anxious about it. He is not even able to identify what causes his anxiety. He thinks that he can eliminate it once he kills Banquo and his son Fleance. But he is wrong about that because the more he kills, the more he feels anxious. He cannot do anything about his anxiety except that he takes it as his Being, as Heidegger ethically suggests, thereby liberating himself from it, paradoxically speaking. But he refuses to do so, which deepens his feelings of anxiety. For the second part of this essay, I claim that Macbeth’s anxiety problem can be addressed along with two hospitality(or hostility) scenes in the play. It is because the origin of anxiety feelings has something to do with a situation in which hosts meet guests both literally and symbolically. Hosts can experience an uncanny and uneasy feeling from their own place being taken by their guests. According to the law of hospitality, which Heidegger implies in the aforementioned book and which Shakespeare dramatizes in Duncan’s visit to Inverness, hosts ought to welcome guests as their real master, which of course may lead to uneasy feelings on the part of the former. This is precisely what Macbeth cannot take for granted. Rather, he takes the advantage of his guests by maximizing his position of host in order to place them under his control. Doing so, thinks he, would reduce his feelings of anxiety about uncontrollable guests. However, Macbeth’s anxiety increases against his will until he dies because all of his attempt to control guests fail, as best shown in the appearance of Banquo’s ghost in the banquet scene. Macbeth cannot control the unexpected guest in the first place because it is always already beyond his intelligibility. Nor can he define it in his own terms because its transcendence as the feelings of anxiety always already overflows him. Macbeth has no choice but to take it for granted in order to feel peaceful. He does so only on the threshold of his death.