Introduction

Although by the end of the play, the word “harbinger” bears our modern sense of an omen or forerunner (5.6.10), its appearance here is more technical: the harbinger was the court official who preceded the monarch on his or her progresses in order to ensure, among other things, that “the bedrooms had chairs, beds, carpets, and hangings”—tasks gathered under the rubric of “appareling,” the same term used when great halls and banqueting houses were set up as theaters using timber frames and handsome textiles to assemble stages and seating.2 Duncan has just spoken of “investing” Malcolm as heir (1.4.41), one of many references to formal attiring in the play. What is at stake in the harbinger’s charge is another kind of investiture, not of persons but of spaces, which will be decked with special fabrics whose affordances of enclosure and warmth also symbolize magnificence and support the tremulous sense of occasion required by the hosting of a king.3 Duncan will presumably meet his end in a properly outfitted state bed, a confection of elaborate tapestries hung on a wood frame that erected a chamber within the chamber, a holy of holies for royal guests.4 Duncan is killed as a guest in his sleep, a violation of the simultaneously social and somatic forms of trust that the rituals, architecture, and accoutrements of hospitality are designed to cultivate.