Macbeth
Prompt #19 · Macbeth
Prompt Type: Symbol/Motif
Throughout the play, darkness and night are invoked by characters seeking to hide their deeds from heaven and from themselves. Analyze how Shakespeare uses imagery of darkness to explore the theme of appearance versus reality and the attempt to conceal moral transgression. Explain how it contributes to the meaning of the work as a whole.
Quote 1
“Come, thick night, / And pall thee in the dunnest smoke of hell / That my keen knife see not the wound it makes, / Nor heaven peep through the blanket of the dark / To cry, “Hold, hold!””
Act I, Scene 5
Argument
Lady Macbeth explicitly invokes darkness to conceal her murderous intent from both divine judgment and her own moral awareness, using the metaphor of night as a 'blanket' to hide transgression from heaven. This early invocation establishes darkness as a deliberate tool for suppressing moral reality beneath false appearances.
Quote 2
“Stars, hide your fires! / Let not light see my black and deep desires. / The eye wink at the hand, yet let that be, / Which the eye fears, when it is done, to see.”
Act I, Scene 4
Argument
Macbeth's apostrophe to the stars demonstrates his conscious attempt to use darkness to hide his 'black and deep desires' from both external observation and his own conscience ('the eye wink at the hand'). This reveals the paradox at the heart of appearance versus reality: he seeks to perform deeds he cannot bear to witness himself.
Quote 3
“Thou seest the heavens, as troubled with man’s act, / Threatens his bloody stage: by the clock ’tis day, / And yet dark night strangles the travelling lamp.”
Act II, Scene 4
Argument
The pathetic fallacy of darkness strangling daylight after Duncan's murder exposes how the concealment fails—nature itself reveals the moral transgression through unnatural darkness. This inversion shows that while characters invoke night to hide their deeds, the darkness ultimately becomes a visible symbol of the evil they cannot truly conceal.
Quote 4
“And oftentimes to win us to our harm, / The instruments of darkness tell us truths; / Win us with honest trifles, to betray’s / In deepest consequence.—”
Act I, Scene 3
Argument
Banquo explicitly names darkness as a deceptive force that conceals truth ('instruments of darkness tell us truths'), revealing how the play's darkness imagery operates on multiple levels—both as literal concealment and as metaphorical deception that masks moral reality beneath superficial appearances.
Quote 5
“Is this a dagger which I see before me, / The handle toward my hand? Come, let me clutch thee:— / I have thee not, and yet I see thee still.”
Act II, Scene 1
Argument
The dagger vision occurs in darkness and embodies the appearance-versus-reality paradox central to the play's darkness imagery: Macbeth sees what is not there ('I have thee not, and yet I see thee still'), demonstrating how darkness creates a space where moral reality becomes distorted and the boundary between deed and imagination dissolves.