My new favourite literary device

Tomorrow with the 11th grade we're looking at Macbeth's first hallucination, in which he sees a dagger floating in the air before him. He says,

Come, let me clutch thee.

I have thee not, and yet I see thee still____

Art thou not, fatal vision, sensible

To feeling as to sight_____

or art thou but

A dagger of the mind, a false creation,

Proceeding from the heat-oppressed brain_____

I see thee yet, in form as palpable

As this which now I draw______

Thou marshall'st me the way that I was going;

And such an instrument I was to use______

Mine eyes are made the fools o' the other senses,

Or else worth all the rest_____

I see thee still,

And on thy blade and dudgeon gouts of blood,

Which was not so before______

I have taken out the end punctuation so students can add the punctuation they deem appropriate.

I am captivated by the effect of Macbeth's direct address of the knife. His childlike fascination with the vision, his misty-eyed, unselfconscious state of wonder, reveals a tenderness in him we haven't seen yet. He seems to have stopped thinking, and is just reacting to what happens in front of him. I find it endearing.

I want to be able to tell the students what kind of device this is, and so I searched "direct address of inanimate object." An apostrophe, I learned, is not always an address of an inanimate object, but it does have this same effect of breaking with the normal timbre of the play's flow of dialogue.

Look at this magnificent example from Julius Caesar:

• "O, pardon me, thou bleeding piece of earth, / That I am meek and gentle with these butchers! / Thou art the ruins of the noblest man / That ever lived in the tide of times." Julius Caesar, Act 3, Scene 1

And this one from Melville.  

• "Ah Bartleby! Ah Humanity!" Herman Melville, "Bartleby, the Scrivener"

I think we all speak in apostrophe more often than we realise. I certainly do, during my own unpublished monologues. They capture our desire to be heard and not heard at the same time, I think.