Lisbon’s Hebrew Bible: Medieval Jewish Art in Context
Metropolitan Museum of Art Exhibited from Nov. 22, 2011–Jan. 16,
2012 Within Shakespeare’s worldview, an assassination like
Macbeth’s of King Duncan upset the so-called Great Chain of
Being, or the cosmological organizational chart, in which power
structures that were clearly articulated could only be disrupted
at a cost. Immediately after Macbeth and Lady Macbeth conspire
in the murder of Duncan, there is a report from Lennox, a lord,
that nature itself seems to be suffering the repercussions of
the assassination (though Lennox doesn’t yet know that Duncan
has been killed). “The night has been unruly. Where we lay, Our
chimneys were blown down and, as they say, Lamentings heard i’
th’ air, strange screams of death, And prophesying with accents
terrible Of dire combustion and confused events New hatched to
the woeful time. The obscure bird Clamored the livelong night.
Some say the Earth Was feverous and did shake,” Lennox
testifies. To which Macbeth respon