Macbeth is a play of blood.

And of ‘the black’.

Of birds, too (fifteen, if you’re counting, and that depends on how you feel about Macbeth calling someone a “loon”).

In all that (genuinely) hugely interesting noise, it’s easy to overlook hands.

Hands matter.

What they do, or refuse to do, shapes the play, and how we react towards the characters. That extends to other Shakespeare plays, as I’ll refer to shortly.

In Macbeth?

Lady Macduff laments that her husband “wants the natural touch”¹: his absence keeps him alive, but leaves his family to be slaughtered.

Elsewhere, hands can heal.

In (yet another) pointed nod to James I, the English king (Edward the Confessor, not Edward I) cures ‘the evil’ through touch:

“his touch—
Such sanctity hath heaven given his hand—
They presently amend.”

And then, of course, there are Macbeth’s hands.

They begin with Duncan’s murder, but they do not stop there. The violence spreads: Banquo, Macduff’s household, an entire kingdom unravelling. Ross captures the effect in one of the play’s bleakest passages:

“Alas, poor country!
Almost afraid to know itself. It cannot
Be call’d our mother, but our grave”

This is the Scotland Macbeth’s hands have made. Duncan is not an isolated victim, but the beginning — Patient Zero in a widening contagion.

However, I want to introduce a couple of ideas I often speak to students about.

Firstly, the difference between literally having blood on your hands, and the associated fear of being caught ‘red-handed‘.

At A-Level, Richard III has any number of people murdered at his command. See a recent Shakespeare Sunday. At GCSE, ask yourself how many people Macbeth actually kills, with his own hands, after Duncan …

Which leads us to the second point which connects these characters.

Both are unapologetically heroic warriors, the kind we might not have seen or read about since Troy defined the hero. Macbeth can cleave a man in two — that’s how physically strong he is. Richard can kill a reigning king (Henry VI), when that should consign you to hell in the worldview Dante advocates.² That’s how mentally strong he is.

But for both, there’s a huge difference between killing in the hot blood of the battlefield, and in the cold blood which is the domain of murder.

When it comes to the latter, well, that’s what lackeys are for, right?

So let’s return to that extraordinary situation, where Macbeth suddenly looks at his hands and understands what it means to be a murderer. The ‘regicide’ stuff can come later.

In the immediate aftermath of Duncan’s killing, Macbeth cannot bear to go back to the scene to return the daggers he distractedly brought away:

“I am afraid to think what I have done.
Look on’t again I dare not.”

Lady Macbeth responds with brisk practicality:

“A little water clears us of this deed.”

Even with the euphemism on ‘deed’, her language is simple, controlled, practically monosyllabic, and almost domestic.

Macbeth is not.

Instead, Shakespeare gives him two of the most gloriously overreaching words in the play, maybe in all his surviving plays: multitudinous and incarnadine.

I often teach Shakespeare’s iambic pentameter as having a ‘budget’ of ten syllables per line. If a word is going to use most of it up, it needs to earn its place. Here, he uses almost all of it up in just two words. Take a moment to say them out loud. They are almost absurdly rich, the kind of words you have to chew upon, as if the mouth must work to keep pace with the thought.

Multitudinous overwhelms Lady Macbeth’s ‘little’. Not just more water, but immeasurable water, seas upon seas. It’s bewildering and limitless, like the mounting death toll of the play.

And incarnadine? A strange, stretched word, twisted into service as a verb. Not simply to redden, but to transform, to stain the natural world itself.

Only after that expansion do we arrive at something plainer:

“Making the green one red.”

It feels almost like translation. The imagination surges; the truth lands, as the character begins to recover himself.

Shakespeare names relatively few colours in Macbeth, but the ones he uses do their work. Green here is not decorative. It is the colour of the natural world, of life, of order.

Macbeth does not clean himself within it.

He changes it. Duncan’s horses eat each other.

Macbeth wants to wash his hands.

Instead, he remakes the world in their image.

Why? Maybe because ambition has driven him insane?

References

1. All Shakespeare references taken from https://www.opensourceshakespeare.org
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2. https://www.gutenberg.org/files/1001/1001-h/1001-h.htm
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