| Summary: | Shakespeare's Macbeth displays a pattern of characters objecting to gestures, be it others' or their own. This includes Macbeth refusing to shake hands with his opponent before the battle, his words to Banquo's ghost quoted in the title above, Banquo's own puzzlement at the weird sisters' placing a finger over their lips, the doctor's suspicions at Lady Macbeth's rubbing her hands and sleepwalking, as well as Malcom's request that Macduff not pull his hat over his eyes. In many of these cases, gesture is pitted against speech, which seems to undermine the classically-derived ideal of "suit[ing] the word to the action, the action to the word" (Hamlet, 3.2.16-18). This essay will suggest that in Macbeth, speech/gesture dissociation meta-dramatically channels the play's representation of heroic decline into an exploration of non-mimetic ways of generating suspense, empathy, and catharsis, in keeping with the turn towards pantomime and pageantry that marked early seventeenth-century drama.
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