But it proves more difficult to eradicate both future and past than the tyrant imagines. Fleance manages to flee. And just as Richard was haunted in his dream by the ghosts of those he has killed, so Macbeth, at the royal banquet he and his wife host, is haunted by the blood-spattered ghost of Banquo. The apparition figures as an emblem not of the tyrant’s repressed conscience but, rather, of his psychological deterioration.
