Audiences recoil from Macbeth, but he recoils from himself too. After Macbeth murders King Duncan, a knocking at the gate startles him, and Macbeth wonders, \u201cHow is\u2019t with me, when every noise appals me?\u201d\u009d He stares at his bloody hands as if they belonged to someone else\u2019s body: \u201cWhat hands are here?\u201d\u009d He knows that the \u201cmultitudinous seas\u201d\u009d can\u2019t wash away the stain of Duncan\u2019s blood, and later he is haunted by the ghost of Banquo. Macbeth \u201cmurder[s] sleep\u201d\u009d and so deprives himself of that nightly \u201cbalm of hurt minds.\u201d\u009d Almost no one hears \u201cTomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow\u201d\u009d and thinks, \u201cWell, Macbeth, you deserve it.\u201d\u009d He does deserve it, but Shakespeare has shown us enough of Macbeth\u2019s shocked soul and tortured conscience to convince us that he\u2019s human.<\/p>\n
Shakespeare is no liberal sentimentalist. He knows that evil is evil, and knows that Macbeth chooses evil. A. C. Bradley saw the play as evidence of Shakespeare\u2019s feel for the \u201cincalculability of evil\u201d\u201dthat in meddling with it human beings do they know not what.\u201d\u009d We don\u2019t know where evil will lead; we can only be sure that the result \u201cwill not be what you expected.\u201d\u009d Macbeth dramatizes what Colin McGinn has described as the surprising character of evil.<\/p>\n
Shakespeare humanizes Macbeth to hold him up as a mirror to nature, our nature. We pity, and fear, because we recognize that the evil that surprises us in Macbeth is our own.<\/p>\n