Shakespeare’s Phenomenology of Time in Macbeth

Abstract

ABSTRACT There is an essential ‘doubleness’ of time in Macbeth. The witches play with equivocation and dissonance through their foreshadowing of events while the fictional world of the drama folds into the early modern English stage in performance. The future seeps into the present and past by disrupting the structure of time and corrupting the protagonist’s moral action and conscience. This article investigates Shakespeare’s phenomenology of time in Macbeth. As a philosophical lens, phenomenology rejects the idea of time as a ‘series of nows’ and instead examines the rich, lived experience of Being-in-the-world by ‘letting things show themselves in their manner of appearing’. Drawing on phenomenology, Matthew Wagner outlines several qualities of time in performance, including temporal ‘thickness’, ‘dissonance’ and ‘materiality’ that are explored in this article. The character of Macbeth believes that he no longer has freedom over his destiny and that his choices – and more importantly, those of others – will ultimately have no effect. He is presented with possibilities for action in the future, changing his relationship to others as he encounters a crisis of authenticity: he resolutely seizes power, but he fails to take temporality into account – or rather has it handed over to him – thus making his present a kind of past. In this way, Shakespeare dramatises Macbeth’s rejection of ‘shared time’, resulting in discord and duplicity, enabling time to show itself from itself in performance.