Clothing

Clothing shows up an awful lot in the play – it seems like there's always talk about robes and nightgowns and what not. Was there a sale at Old Navy or is something else going on here?

Let's think about this for a minute. When Macbeth first hears that he's been named the Thane of Cawdor, he asks Angus why he is being dressed in "borrowed" robes (1.3.7). Macbeth doesn't literally mean that he's going to wear the old thane's hand-me-down clothing. Here, "robes" is a metaphor for the title (Thane of Cawdor) that Macbeth doesn't think belongs to him. (At this point in the play, Macbeth is corrupt.) OK. Seems like clothing metaphors are going to be about power in Macbeth, right?

Toward the end of the play (when everybody hates Macbeth, who has become a corrupt monarch), Angus says that Macbeth's kingly "title" is ill-fitting and hangs on him rather loosely, "like a giant's robe / Upon a dwarfish thief" (5.2.2). Angus isn't accusing Macbeth of stealing and wearing the old king's favorite jacket, he's accusing Macbeth of stealing the king's power (by killing him) and then parading around with the king's title, which doesn't seem to suit him at all. We can use our own clothing metaphor to say that Macbeth's not quite "big enough" to fill the former king's shoes.

There are other some ways to read the clothing metaphor. In a famous book called The Well-Wrought Urn, literary critic Cleanth Brooks offers a lengthy discussion about the play's clothing imagery. Here's what he has to say about Angus's comment that Macbeth looks like a "dwarfish thief" wearing a "giant's robe":

The crucial point of the comparison, it seems to me, lies not in the smallness of the man and the largeness of the robes, but rather in the fact that—whether the man be large or small—these are not his garments; in Macbeth's case they are actually stolen garments. Macbeth is uncomfortable in them because he is continually conscious of the fact that they do not belong to him. There is a further point, and it is one of the utmost importance; the oldest symbol for the hypocrite is that of a man who cloaks his true nature under a disguise. (48)

Brooks's point is slightly different than our own. He believes that the point of all this is not necessarily that Macbeth can't fill the king's big shoes, so to speak, but that Macbeth looks "uncomfortable" as king because he's stolen the crown from Duncan and he knows it doesn't belong to him. Brooks also argues that the clothing metaphor is about deception and hypocrisy, which, as we know, runs throughout the play.

There's a lot to say about Macbeth's "robes" so we'll want to keep an eye on this as we read the play.