Feeling Criminal in Macbeth

Macbeth's murder of Duncan is a sensible crime, not because it's practical or judicious (it's neither), but because it's born of the senses and experienced as sensation. This is not to say that Macbeth does not think himself into the criminal event, but that the thinking he does he does with his body. Macbeth presents criminal thoughts not as ontologically distinct products of the intellect or soul, but as secretions of the senses, properties of active receptive bodies moving through a world of things. Focusing on the dagger scene in act 2, scene 1, this essay shows how criminality becomes a field for phenomenological speculation in the play. Macbeth's experience of criminal becoming is characterized by what Bruce Smith calls "a relational way of knowing," one in which murderous thoughts are shaped by physical, sensual interaction with the objects of the material world.¹ For Macbeth, then, being criminal might more accurately be described as feeling criminal. Criminality is less a state of being than "a unit of experience,"² a process involving both ideas and things in a way that forces us to abandon the mutually exclusive categories of subject and object.

Criminality was a career-long preoccupation for Shakespeare, and his approach to the topic varied from play to play, from poem to poem, and even within individual plays or poems. Still, one can identify a marked tendency in his writing to seek criminality beyond the flesh. In The Rape of Lucrece, it is "some untimely thought did instigate" Tarquin's "all too timeless speed" (ll.43-44) towards the woman he would violate. Richard Duke of Gloucester is from the very outset of Richard III defined as someone whose criminality originates within, at the level of thoughts, someone who is malicious to the core and who understands, moreover, the inner reaches of the self to be not only a source of crime, but also a place of concealment: "Dive, thoughts, down to my soul" (1.1.41), he says as Clarence approaches. Angelo, in Measure for Measure, begins the play with a strikingly positivist approach to crime: "What's open made to justice, / That justice seizes" (2.1.21-22, emphasis added), he admonishes Escalus. But it is not long before Isabella directs him to his "bosom," his "heart," for signs of his own "natural guiltiness" (2.2.137, 138, 139), and it is, indeed, from within that his first pangs of illicit lust for Isabella eventually emerge. Othello quite literally seeks criminality beyond the flesh, seizing Desdemona and gazing into her eyes—the window to her soul—in a bid to glimpse the canker of disobedience that he feels convinced must be lodged within her (4.2.25-30). Macbeth may initially strike us as consistent with these earlier plays and poems. To be sure, Macbeth teaches us not only that power corrupts, but also that knowledge corrupts: bad thoughts lead to bad deeds. The murder of Duncan finds its source in Macbeth's acquisition of eerily untimely knowledge from the witches: "All hail, Macbeth, that shalt be King hereafter" (1.3.50). And when he hisses despairingly to Lady Macbeth, "O, full of scorpions is my mind, dear wife" (3.2.36), he is referring not only to the guilt and paranoia that has seized hold of him since the murder, but also to those corrupting seeds of knowledge from which his malice (first towards Duncan and now towards Banquo and Fleance) originally sprung.

More pervasive in Macbeth, though, is an account of criminality that cannot be described adequately through rigid dichotomies of mind and body or mens rea (guilty mind) and actus reus (guilty act).³ Similar to the way theorists of the passions in Renaissance Europe relied on a psychophysiology that blurred the boundaries between inner and outer,⁴ Shakespeare imagines crime in Macbeth not in sequential terms (first I think, then I do), but in terms of a fluid, phenomenological exchange between mind and matter to the extent that criminal thoughts and criminal acts are often difficult to distinguish. Early on in the play, Macbeth speaks of...