Grammatical expressions of time in Macbeth

Abstract

Grammatical strategies in Macbeth comprise one of the play's most fascinating yet unexplored poetic and political devices. Constructions of tense, aspect, and mood inform Macbeth's attempts to articulate the pressures of time and mutability, stretching the grammatical categories allowed by the English language. These irregular extensions of past, present, and future linguistically correlate with the political crises and ruptures in the play. Following an examination of the influential Lily's Grammar, I show how the semantic matrix of tense, aspect, and mood expresses the warped sense of time constituting Macbeth's psychology as well as dissolution of moral order.