Macbeth Act II Scene I Dagger Soliloquy

‘Is this a dagger which I see before me’
Note: the soliloquy beginning ‘Is this a dagger which I see before me’ appears in Act II Scene 1 of
Shakespeare’s Macbeth.
‘Is this a dagger which I see before me’ is often staged, and filmed, with the dagger suspended in
mid-air. But this makes the implied boundary between the real and the hallucinatory too
clear-cut: as numerous critics have pointed out, the point is that Macbeth believes that the
dagger is real at first, rather than knowing it to be an illusion from the outset.
For this reason, perhaps we’re better off picturing a dagger resting on a nearby table, lying flat;
this also makes it easier to understand how the ‘handle’ of the dagger is ‘towards’ Macbeth’s
hand, as if inviting him to pick it up.
Is this a dagger which I see before me,

The handle toward my hand? Come, let me clutch thee.
After Macbeth has ‘seen’ the dagger before him, the handle towards his hand, he then begins to
doubt himself.
I have thee not, and yet I see thee still.
This line indicates that Shakespeare intended the actor playing Macbeth to attempt to pick up
the dagger, only to find that it’s made of air. There’s an implied stage direction here for Macbeth
to reach to grab the dagger, only to find there’s no dagger there.
Art thou not, fatal vision, sensible

To feeling as to sight? or art thou but
A dagger of the mind, a false creation,
Proceeding from the heat-oppressed brain?
In other words, if this is a ‘fatal vision’ or hallucination, it appears to be one that is assailing his
sense of sight only. In other words, ‘sensible’ here means pertaining to the senses, rather than
the modern meaning of the word. Macbeth is a play obsessed with touch and the tangible, with
what can be grasped and touched: it is a play full of hands, a most hand-y play.
But here, we are seeing the first of many hallucinatory (or are they merely hallucinatory, or
perhaps supernatural?) experiences Macbeth will have. The question is whether this dagger is a
result of his ‘heat-oppressed’ (the second word should be pronounced with three syllables, for
the metre of the line) or fevered brain.
I see thee yet, in form as palpable

As this which now I draw.
Another piece of implied stage direction: the actor playing Macbeth goes to his belt (or similar)
to draw a real dagger he has in his possession (the one he will use to murder Duncan shortly
after this scene).
Thou marshall’st me the way that I was going;
More implied stage direction – the dagger seems to point in the direction of the room where
Duncan lies asleep. But which dagger? Still the imagined one, presumably. Though this isn’t
certain: it could be that Shakespeare is now referring to the real dagger that Macbeth has just
drawn, and which audiences in the theatre can see with their own eyes. The very soliloquy seems
to blur the boundaries between real and imaginary, as if we ourselves are meant to lose track of
the real dagger and the imagined one.
And such an instrument I was to use.

Mine eyes are made the fools o’ the other senses,
Or else worth all the rest;
In other words, either his sight is in conflict with all his other senses (such as touch), or else his
eyes are worth more than the rest of his other senses put together, and he should trust what he
sees. Indeed:
I see thee still,

And on thy blade and dudgeon gouts of blood,
Which was not so before. There’s no such thing:
It is the bloody business which informs
Thus to mine eyes.
As so often with a Shakespeare soliloquy, here we find Macbeth arguing with himself, changing
his mind mid-line. The detail of the dagger intensifies: he now sees (or thinks he can see) drops
of blood on the blade and ‘dudgeon’ (the handle of the dagger).
But he immediately says there isn’t any blood on the dagger (whether or not a dagger is there, he
seems to know the blood is imagined), and merely a result of his thoughts being so turned
towards bloody deeds (i.e. the planned murder of Duncan).
Now o’er the one halfworld

Nature seems dead, and wicked dreams abuse
The curtain’d sleep;
It’s night time, and across the whole northern hemisphere or ‘half-world’, things seem to have
come to a halt. Dreams of witchcraft and evil disrupt Macbeth’s sleep: he’s up and about, but the
boundary between dreaming and waking seems to have been disturbed.
witchcraft celebrates
Pale Hecate’s offerings, and wither’d murder,
Alarum’d by his sentinel, the wolf,
Whose howl’s his watch, thus with his stealthy pace,
With Tarquin’s ravishing strides, towards his design
Moves like a ghost.
Hecate, the goddess of witchcraft in classical mythology, performs ‘offerings’ or rituals – we’re
back to Macbeth’s encounter with the three Witches or Weird Sisters.
The word ‘murder’ should perhaps be capitalised (it is in some editions) to make it clear that
Macbeth is personifying it as Murder: Murder has been roused awake by his watchdog, the wolf,
and like Tarquin – the man who raped Lucrece in a story Shakespeare had earlier written about
in his narrative poem The Rape of Lucrece, hence ‘ravishing’ – moves towards his prey, silently
and stealthily like a ghost.
Thou sure and firm-set earth,

Hear not my steps, which way they walk, for fear
Thy very stones prate of my whereabout,
And take the present horror from the time,
Which now suits with it.
Macbeth calls upon the earth to render his steps similarly silent, so that nobody will be alerted to
his plans as he enters Duncan’s chamber and murders him. It’s become clear by this point that
the dagger appearing to him has made Macbeth’s mind up: he plans to go through with the deed.
The phrase ‘take the present horror from the time’ is a little more difficult to interpret: the most
likely meaning is that Macbeth thinks that if he moves silently that will remove the horror from
this moment, since the sound of his footsteps will fill him with fear over what he is going to do.
As things stand, though, horror and this moment are perfectly ‘suited’ or matched, i.e. ‘Which
now suits with it.’
Whiles I threat, he lives:

Words to the heat of deeds too cold breath gives.
Although it’s ungrammatical (it was common in Shakespeare’s time to have a plural paired with
a singular verb, so ‘Words … gives’), the second line means that it’s no good talking about all
this: he just needs to go ahead and commit the deed itself. The deed is ‘hot’ but his words are
‘cold’, i.e. the more he talks about doing it, the weaker (or cooler) his resolve grows.
[a bell rings]
I go, and it is done; the bell invites me.
Hear it not, Duncan; for it is a knell
That summons thee to heaven or to hell.
Macbeth now takes the sound of the bell as a sign that he should go and kill Duncan. And this is
where the scene ends, a scene that had begun with that unsettling vision of a dagger that wasn’t
really there. Macbeth will next murder Duncan, an act that will cause him to ‘see’ more visions,
ghosts, and hallucinations later in the play.
Macbeth is, of all of Shakespeare’s plays, perhaps the most attuned to the various senses: sight,
sound, and touch are all vividly felt here. But the most powerful sense of all is that imaginary
sense of something being there when it isn’t.

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‘Is this a dagger which I see before me’

Is this a dagger which I see before me,

I have thee not, and yet I see thee still.

Art thou not, fatal vision, sensible

I see thee yet, in form as palpable

Thou marshall’st me the way that I was going;

And such an instrument I was to use.

I see thee still,

Now o’er the one halfworld

Thou sure and firm-set earth,

Whiles I threat, he lives:

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