ABSTRACT
The epigraphic title of this chapter comes from Macbeth’s soliloquy in 3.1. It represents the first uncompromised thought we hear from the new king after he becomes-to borrow from a usurping king at a critical moment in another play-possessed of the effects for which he did the murder: “To be thus is nothing, but to be safely thus” (47).1 Macbeth’s first words sound the vacuity of his predicament as an illegitimate king without issue, and underscore the surprising and ironic letdown he encounters after having obtained exactly what the Weird sisters promised him and for which he played “most foully.” The audience must derive the agony of Macbeth’s existence from a statement that is an apparent paradox. Only the proform “thus,” fulfilled subsequently by Macbeth’s deep-sticking fears of Banquo’s royal nature and his own childlessness, gives meaning to his otherwise nonsensical statement. Yet, such knowledge does not erase the sentiment’s essential paradox. To be in any way by definition is the opposite of nothing. Moreover, even with the benefit of explanation, Macbeth’s sentiment remains paradoxical at its core. We make sense of the apparent paradox only when we replace it with a real one whereby Macbeth experiences two temporally distinct, and therefore mutually exclusive, selves at once-the present self of kingship and the future self obliterated by the failure to produce a tender heir who might bear his memory-and lives, like Lady Macbeth, in the heady intoxication of royal hope, in a perpetual state of feeling “the future in the instant” (1.5.58).
