‘Is this a dagger which I see before me, / The handle toward my hand?’ (Macbeth) This scene is often staged, and filmed, with the dagger suspended in mid-air. But this makes the implied boundary between the real and the hallucinatory too clear-cut: as numerous critics have pointed out, the point is that Macbeth believes that the dagger is real at first, rather than knowing it to be an illusion from the outset. For this reason, perhaps we’re better off picturing a dagger resting on a nearby table, lying flat; this also makes it easier to understand how the ‘handle’ of the dagger is ‘towards’ Macbeth’s hand, as if inviting him to pick it up.
After Macbeth has ‘seen’ the dagger before him, the handle towards his hand, he then begins to doubt himself. see thee still. This line indicates that Shakespeare intended the actor playing Macbeth to attempt to pick up the dagger, only to find that it’s made of air. There’s an implied stage direction here for Macbeth to reach to grab the dagger, only to find there’s no dagger there. In other words, if this is a ‘fatal vision’ or hallucination, it appears to be one that is assailing his sense of sight only. In other words, ‘sensible’ here means pertaining to the senses, rather than the modern meaning of the word. Macbeth is a play obsessed with touch and the tangible, with what can be grasped and touched: it is a play full of hands, a most hand-y play.
But here, we are seeing the first of many hallucinatory (or are they merely hallucinatory, or perhaps supernatural?) experiences Macbeth will have. The question is whether this dagger is a result of his ‘heat-oppressed’ (the second word should be pronounced with three syllables, for the metre of the line) or fevered brain. Another piece of implied stage direction: the actor playing Macbeth goes to his belt (or similar) to draw a real dagger he has in his possession (the one he will use to murder Duncan shortly after this scene). More implied stage direction – the dagger seems to point in the direction of the room where Duncan lies asleep. But which dagger? Still the imagined one, presumably. Though this isn’t certain: it could be that Shakespeare is now referring to the real dagger that Macbeth has just drawn, and which audiences in the theatre can see with their own eyes. The very soliloquy seems to blur the boundaries between real and imaginary, as if we ourselves are meant to lose track of the real dagger and the imagined one.
As so often with a Shakespeare soliloquy, here we find Macbeth arguing with himself, changing his mind mid-line. The detail of the dagger intensifies: he now sees (or thinks he can see) drops of blood on the blade and ‘dudgeon’ (the handle of the dagger). But he immediately says there isn’t any blood on the dagger (whether or not a dagger is there, he seems to know the blood is imagined), and merely a result of his thoughts being so turned towards bloody deeds (i.e. the planned murder of Duncan).
Hecate, the goddess of witchcraft in classical mythology, performs ‘offerings’ or rituals – we’re back to Macbeth’s encounter with the three Witches or Weird Sisters. The word ‘murder’ should perhaps be capitalised (it is in some editions) to make it clear that Macbeth is personifying it as Murder. Macbeth calls upon the earth to render his steps similarly silent, so that nobody will be alerted to his plans as he enters Duncan’s chamber and murders him. It’s become clear by this point that the dagger appearing to him has made Macbeth’s mind up: he plans to go through with the deed. Macbeth takes the sound of the bell as a sign that he should go and kill Duncan. And this is where the scene ends, a scene that had begun with that unsettling vision of a dagger that wasn’t really there. Macbeth will next murder Duncan, an act that will cause him to ‘see’ more visions, ghosts, and hallucinations later in the play. Macbeth is, of all of Shakespeare’s plays, perhaps the most attuned to the various senses: sight, sound, and touch are all vividly felt here. But the most powerful sense of all is that imaginary sense of something being there when it isn’t.
