Linguistic Taboos and the 'Unscene' of Fear in Macbeth.

Macbeth’s unsaying the murder of Duncan through a euphemistic use of “doing” encodes an inextricable tangle of fear and desire in speech, which translates itself visually into the “unstaging” of the killing of the king, comparable to similar strategies of visual concealment and narrative disclosure in both Aeschylus’s Agamemnon and Cassandra’s vision in Seneca’s Agamemnon. The article offers a discussion of how taboo language in Macbeth is integrated in drama and in fact shapes its pragmatics. As in Aeschylus’ Oresteia, the language of phobos makes for a strategic use of space and unseen, or “split”, scenes, investing the idea itself of tragic action and reshaping the convention of visual ineffability.