ABSTRACT
Macbeth begins with some wonderful orchestration: first, the high, unearthly voices of the Witches against resonating thunder and the animal noises of their invisible familiars; then the sounds of a distant battle-cries, whinnies, trumpet calls, the clash of arms-as background to the narrative of the wounded man who brings Duncan news of Macbeth’s exploits in a hoarse, effortful voice that weakens to a whisper as the battle fades. A typical expository character, the bleeding Captain helps to get the story of the play off the pages of Holinshed and onto the stage. He is also an ad hoc messenger whose elaborate narrative belongs to the Nuntius tradition, while in the play’s social mirroring he is a representative executant-cum-victim of a struggle for power such as will continue, with different contestants, throughout the tragedy. But he has a further function which is different in kind from those considered in the preceding chapters. Each half of his tale of double carnage works up to a horrifying picture: Macbeth’s slaying of Macdonald, whom he ‘unseamed …from the nave to the chops’ (1.2.22) and Macbeth and Banquo fighting in the current battle as if ‘they meant to bathe in reeking wounds’ (39). Grotesque and disturbing, these images will recur elsewhere in the play: the garment in Duncan’s ‘silver, skin laced with his golden blood’ and in the daggers of his supposed murderers ‘unmannerly breeched with gore’ (2.3.112, 116), the blood bath in Macbeth’s
This generative power of the Captain’s images is strengthened by the active force of his epithets-smoking, reeking-and by the effect his visible suffering has upon us: our response to his physical pain-‘My gashes cry for help’—lays the foundation for our awareness of Cain’s blood’s crying from the ground as ‘each new day a gash’ (4.3.40) is added to Scotland’s wounds.
