SOURCE: Wills, Garry. “Macbeth.” In Witches and Jesuits: Shakespeare's Macbeth, pp. 125-44. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995.

In the following essay, Wills explains obscure passages and words in Macbeth—such as the specific placement of stage directions, textual cues for clothing and props, and alternative emendations for proscribed editorial revisions—and examines the ways in which the play might have been more clearly perceived by a Jacobean audience than by a modern one.

Lady Macbeth asks of her evil spirits that they make her insensitive (stopping up the passages of remorse, 1.5.44), and she is relieved to see that wine contributes to that useful deadening (2.2.1). Macbeth wants his own psychic mechanism to be short-circuited. At first he simply observes that “function / Is smother'd” when his surmise leaps toward new possibilities (1.3.140-41). But he soon desires that the eye not know what the hand is up to (1.4.52), that events swallow up...