‘There’s no such thing’: nothing and nakedness in Polanski’s Macbeth

Summary

The ‘nothing’ that persistently haunts the images of Macbeth has been interpreted in terms of a condition of language and of self. After murdering Duncan, Macbeth appears ‘lost’ in thought and tells his wife, ‘To know my deed, ’twere best not know myself’ (2.2.69–71). As he pursues a future foretold to him by the prophecies of the three Weird Sisters, he begins to identify less and less with his former self, until ‘All causes ... give way’ (3.4.135) and life is no more than a ‘walking shadow’, absent of truth or meaning (5.5.23). Terry Eagleton writes that, in seeking to take possession of the throne, Macbeth will, in fact, ‘become less than human in trying to become more’, until eventually too much ‘inverts itself into nothing at all’. Malcolm Evans extends a reading of the protagonist’s loss of identity to a more thorough exploration of ‘the crisis of the sign and unequivocal discourse in the play’. For Evans, the ‘potentially baffling opacity’ of the play’s linguistic modes is a disorder that moves beyond the ‘imperfect’ speaking of the Witches to several other central characters in Macbeth.

However, given the ‘double’ nature of the Witches in leading Macbeth towards a prophesized future that will both ‘scorn / The power of man’ (4.1.95–6) and bring about his own downfall, the most immediate explanation for the play’s signified nothing lies with the Witches themselves, or more specifically, with the ambiguous territory of the female body.5 For the male, to look on the naked female body and its external lack may provoke a sense of absence within the male himself, as the power of the incomprehensible female ‘nothing’ subsequently threatens to become everything: ‘a yawning abyss within which man can lose his virile identity’.