"Unreal Mockery": Unreason and the Problem of Spectacle in Macbeth

Abstract

Disorder is a given in the world of Macbeth, effectively precluding the construction of either a stable subject or center. The drama is framed by the deaths of Cawdor and Macdonwald in act 1 and that of Macbeth in act 5, to suggest that the particular traitor may be vanquished, but treason itself escapes containment.' Indeed, persistent alignment with unreason in the play implicates the instability of symbolic closure, the rites of containment by which authority is generated and affirmed. Far from containing treason, the mutilated body of the traitor-whether that of Macdonwald, Cawdor, or Macbeth-at once represents and reproduces rifts in the body politic. The unreason that troubles and exceeds the apparent restoration of order at the close of Hamlet is in Macbeth inscribed in a multiplicity of unstable signifiers-treason, madness, and the supernatural, liminal, and spectacular spaces where distinctions between the fantastical and the demonic, subjectivity and subversion, are collapsed. Macbeth is informed by a conception of treason in its most spectacular, theatrical manifestation, but rather than endorsing the ideological efficacy of the of punishment-on either scaffold-the play posits spectacle itself as the locus of unreal mockery and radically ambiguous effects. Steven Mullaney has offered an incisive investigation of treason's performance in Macbeth and in Jacobean England. There are suggestive analogies to be drawn between the one scaffold and the other, Mullaney asserts, but he insists nevertheless that it would be wrong to equate the two: