“Nothing is but what is not”: the Creative Evil of Macbeth

Abstract

Macbeth comes to life by being summoned by the forces of evil. The weird sisters are given the dramatic force to convulse the cyclical feudal violence of Duncan’s realm and to conjure Macbeth’s imaginative consciousness. On the road to Forres, Macbeth is confronted by a radical intrusion from beyond his world, and, like a dark Saint Paul, he is irrevocably transformed by its call. I suggest that Macbeth exists at the crossroads of poetic creation, rapturous inspiration, and demonic negation of extant being. Macbeth voyages into “what is not” (I.iii.141) and that voyage brings him both to a heightened imaginative life and to deadness and closure. Blurring the boundaries between good and evil, the play opens unexpected connections between poetry, early modern theology, and more contemporary philosophy. All these modes – theology, poetry, and philosophy – take us beyond the immediate through a negation of what is. Macbeth suggests that there is something at once animating and potentially evil in the process of negating the world-that-is in favour of a vision of what is not. By giving dramatic life to Macbeth and withholding it from the ‘good’ characters, Shakespeare raises uncomfortable questions about the relationship between poetic creation and evil.