Then Face to Face: Timing Trust in Macbeth

Abstract

How does the temporality of trust shift as one moves from face-to-face interactions to larger social, technical, natural, and supernatural environments? This essay juxtaposes the most visceral elements of trust with more abstract ones by attending to length of the time span across which trust is understood to operate. Jennifer Waldron shows how Shakespeare’s Macbeth juxtaposes the split-second timing of face-to-face trust in the present with an apocalyptic time frame that imaginatively extends over vast reaches of time and space. Waldron argues that Macbeth’s actions simultaneously rupture natural temporalities of trust and supernatural ones. During the course of the play, Macbeth desperately attempts to seal off time, to contain Banquo and Duncan in their graves, and to avoid countenancing his own act of murder. Yet in spectacles such as the appearance of Banquo’s ghost and the line of kings presented by the witches, theater audiences witness several different versions of an apocalyptic theater.