Violence dominates Macbeth from the opening scene where the use of pathetic fallacy in the setting: thunder and lightning’ confirms that the audience is entering into a disruptive universe where anarchy and malevolence reign. ‘ fair is foul’ this paradox embraces the immoral nature of the witches and their predilection for destabilising communication.
Their language is literally and metaphorically contaminating and therefore violent.,This contamination creates an unsettling and even violent effect on Macbeth in particular, but also Banquo too, who recognises their malignant intentions, yet chooses to remain disastrously silent about his suspicions about Duncan’s murder. Such silence leads to his own murder and perhaps allows the violent tyranny of Macbeth to endure for far longer than it should.
Physical violence is prominent from the second scene of the play. It is an irony that Macbeth’s excessive violence committed against the rebel, the ‘ merciless Macdonwald’ inspires awe and praise from his fellow nobles and the King:, ‘ O valiant cousin! Worthy gentleman.! ‘ yet the same capacity for untrammelled violence leads to a succession of bloody murders later in the play which are anything but noble and worthy. Indeed the evisceration and beheading of Macdonwald foreshadows the execution of Macbeth (and decapitation) by Macduff in the penultimate and final scenes of the play. Violence begets violence and destiny seems irrevocably linked to such cruelty.The main source of mental violence in the play aside from the witches who use language to mentally taunt their victims, is surely Lady Macbeth. Macbeth is peculiarly susceptible to his wife’s taunting words which demean his manhood and even denigrate his character through accusations of cowardice. It is ironic that in the privacy of Macbeth’s home, his marriage to Lady Macbeth is both passionately intimate and emotionally violent. ‘ Are you a man? …O proper stuff! This is the very painting of your fear.’ Here Macbeth is humiliated by the derogatory accusations of his wife who displays a dangerous intolerance towards her husband’s horrot and dismay at the vision of Banquo’s ghost. True, she is not able to see the ghost but her insensitivity to her partner’s violently out of control conscience shows she is without compassion and severely limited in her imagination. If these shortcomings are due to her arrogant assumptions that she can repress all her ‘female’ humanity then she is ultimately punished for such trite remarks through her succumbing to a violent madness in Act Five. In the first scene of the last Act, the once dominant , self- assured figure of Lady Macbeth has become almost a figure of pity, violently haunted by the deeds she so dismissed as mere ‘pictures’ which now prove impossible to suppress or contain. Her suicide off stage testifies to her mental suffering wrought by her desperate ambition which ultimately came to nothing. She is not even mourned by the husband she adored because he has no time to reflect and can only say in the most nihilistic and emotionally devastating lines of the play:,’ it is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.’
