Sonnet 73

William Shakespeare 

That time of year thou mayst in me behold
When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang
Upon those boughs which shake against the cold,
Bare ruin’d choirs where late the sweet birds sang.
In me thou seest the twilight of such day
As after sunset fadeth in the west,
Which by and by black night doth take away,
Death’s second self, that seals up all in rest.
In me thou seest the glowing of such fire
That on the ashes of his youth doth lie,
As the death-bed whereon it must expire,
Consum’d by that which it was nourished by.
   This thou perceiv’st which makes thy love more strong,
   To love that well which thou must leave ere long.

Is there such a thing as melancholy goosebumps? I’d wager yes, when judging my reactions to this sonnet set in fall. They prompted a quick turn-around to the glorious colors found on quotidian walks last week, promising that in every season there is radiance, whether we have to leave it behind or not.

The real reason I was thinking of Shakespeare, though, came from a mind boggling linguistic analysis of another of his creations that is giving us more than goosebumps, instead creeping us out: Macbeth.

Researchers set out to find the source of the fact that actors and audiences alike find the language of the play unsettling, in addition to the horrors unraveling in the plot, or the horrors imposed on us by thinking through the psychology of the main protagonists.

“Actors and critics have long remarked that when you read Macbeth out loud, it feels like your voice and mouth and brain are doing something ever so slightly wrong. There’s something subconsciously off about the sound of the play, and it spooks people. It’s as if Shakespeare somehow wove a tiny bit of creepiness into every single line. The literary scholar George Walton Williams described the “continuous sense of menace” and “horror” that pervades even seemingly innocuous scenes.”(Ref.)

They looked at the rhythm of the words spoken, some jarring ones like the witches’ spells. They looked at the frequent repetitions of phrases, moving from one set of characters to the next. And they counted words and the frequency of their use.

Some results of the statistical word count were unsurprising – yes there are creepy words galore, like “knock”, “cauldron”, “tyrant”, “weird”, “trouble”, “dagger”, “fear”, and “horror”.

Astonishingly, though, there was also an unusually high frequency of the simple word “the.” So they went back and read the play to see where it appeared when unexpected.

Consider the lines, spoken by Lady Macbeth when she is already nervous and distraught:

“It was the owl that shriek’d, the fatal bellman, which gives the sterns’t good night..”

The owl? Not an owl, which would be normal phrasing if we hear such creature in the night? Do we know which owl she’s talking about, since she assumes our familiarity with “the” owl? Something is off here; is she referring to a real thing or the proverbial idea of that messenger?

Many of those examples can be found throughout the text, and they transfer the play’s theme of equivocation – one of the reasons why it is not just a tragedy but something more akin to horror – onto the audience. “The Scottish Play” – how people who fear they might be cursed when performing, refer to it, is not just a horror play because of its body count (although if you consider, there are so many deaths caused directly or indirectly by the protagonist.) It’s not the horror of a good man corrupted into nihilism by a lust for power in front of our very eyes, or the fateful demise induced by guilt of those who share his lust for power. It is not the supernatural horror, potentially induced by real witches or real ghosts and other apparitions. It is the psychological equivocation of what is real and what might be hallucinated, what was truly prophesied or self-enacted by way of (mis)interpretation of the witches chant. It is about losing one’s mind, the greatest horror imaginable.

So much ambiguity, so much fear induced by not knowing the nature of it all. The equivocation was likely enforced by a raging debate in 1606 about the nature of witches. Shakespeare might have likely read the Discovery of Witchcraft published by Reginald Scott in 1584, arguing that it was all a hoax, contradicting royal beliefs of the times that witches were real and to be persecuted.

This ambiguity is now extended to the audience, when subtle use of words like “the” which signal that we should be familiar with the item mentioned – are we? Why would we be? Do we know ourselves or have we missed something? Uncertainty hinted at, established. Disquieting creepiness ensues. (More examples can be found here where I was alerted to all this in the first place.)

Clever, clever. Back in goosebump land, however.

Below are some stunning performances of the play.

Music is – one of my favorite of all times – Verdi’s Macbeth.