MACBETH

 

- If 'why did this have to happen?' is tragedy's great question, why do the evil events happen in Macbeth? As in most Shakespearian tragedies, the sources of evil are complex. -As for a tragic flaw, Macbeth is ambitious, of course; more interestingly, he is abnormally imaginative and sensitive, for a murderer. - Far from having the poker face necessary for keeping secret murders quiet, he shows everything in his face. 'Why do you make such faces?' demands his wife (3.4.66). 'Your face ... is as a book where men,/May read strange matters', she tells him, advising him instead to 'look like the innocent flower, / But be the serpent under't' (1.5.60-4). Macbeth suffers for a crime before he even commits it, because he imagines it so thoroughly.

- He imagines murdering the King and the 'horrid image cloth unfix [his] hair / And makes [his] seated heart knock at his: ribs'. -Even a hideous reality disturbs him less than do 'horrible imaginings', and although the murder is as yet only a fantasy, it shakes his psyche to the foundations, until he can no longer distinguish between fantasy and reality: 'nothing is / But what is not' (1.3.134-41)-Lady Macbeth is less imaginative and doesn't start suffering until after the crime; but she is fully as sensitive as Macbeth (she is the one who relives details of the murder nightly in her sleepwalks and sees blood on her hands forever). The fatal combination of lack of imaginative foresight and hypersensitive visual memory drive her to insanity and suicide.

-Villains are normally part of the 'outside forces' against which a hero contends; but in this tragedy Shakespeare collapses the villain role into the protagonist role: the Macbeths are villains-as-heroes. -Macbeth is the clearest example of a Shakespearian departure from Aristotle's dictum that tragedy involves unmerited misfortune, since the Macbeths fully deserve their misery. But by putting them in the role of tragic heroes, Shakespeare seems to invite us to sympathize with them, guilty or not. - Unlike a murder mystery, in which we see through the eyes of the law, here we view crime through the criminals' eyes, with a corresponding demand put upon us to understand how those criminals feel.

-Though they are criminal, we can't heap all blame on the Macbeths: outside forces are at work as well, in forging the evil of the play. Was murder the Macbeths' destiny?

THE WEIRD SISTERS

- Macbeth begins with witches. Before the inception of the play proper, before the audience is introduced to the title character or any of the Scottish nobility or soldiery, the stage is overtaken by creatures from another world. - But who are these “witches,” as they are usually called? Are they male? Female? Real or imaginary? Benevolent or wicked? Are they, indeed, supernatural, or are they merely old Scottish ladies with a curious rhyming dialect of speech?

-In fact, only once in the actual spoken text of the play is one of them called a witch, and that is in an account of an offstage moment—the rude refusal of a sailor's wife to share her chestnuts: “ Aroynt thee, witch, the rump-fed ronyon cries” (1.3.5). Usually, however, the witches in Macbeth are called not “witches” but “weird sisters.” - Wyrd is the Old English word for “fate,” and these are, in a way, classical witches as well as Scottish or Celtic ones, Fates as well as Norns. - The Three Fates of Greek mythology were said to spin, apportion, and cut the thread of man's life. But the Macbeth witches are not merely mythological beings, nor merely historical targets of vilification and superstition:

on the stage, and on the page, they have a persuasive psychological reality of their own.-What Shakespeare did with the weird sisters was make them into an emblematic state of mind, the unmetaphored counterpart of the ambiguous and powerful Lady Macbeth. --- Are the “witches” inside or outside Macbeth? Are they part of his consciousness, prompting him to ambition or murder—or are they some external supernatural force? - The nature of theater does not require an either/or answer to this question; the success of Shakespeare's play is in producing both of these effects, alternately and concurrently. -The witches are both inside and outside the mind of the protagonist; they tell him what he has already been thinking.

-If the witches are causative, it is not because they tell Macbeth what to do—or, in fact, because they tell him anything—but because they allow him to interpret things as he wants to see them. -They are “real” in the sense that they are visible and audible onstage, unlike, for example, the dagger that he sees before him, “[t]he handle toward my hand,” or the voice that cries “ ‘Macbeth shall sleep no more' “ (2.2.41). -But the stage “reality” of the witches is clearly coded, by the play, as of a different order. Unlike the voice and the dagger, the witches are seen, heard, spoken to, and vouched for by another onstage witness, Banquo, who provides very much the same kind of independent assurance as does Horatio, in Hamlet, who sees the ghost of Hamlet's father

-. Both Horatio and Banquo play a crucial role in establishing a link of verisimilitude with the audience. They are—in the play's terms—ordinary people like ourselves. They are the confidants and companions of the tragic hero. And what they confess to seeing and hearing, we may believe also. - The weird sisters hint, they speak in riddles, and they leave their hearers to decipher answers to the riddles they propose. Plainly these witches are not causes; -Banquo, who has heard that his sons will be kings, does not immediately go off to commit murder to fulfill the prophecy, but Macbeth does. In fact, like all omens and portents in Shakespeare, the witches exist to be interpreted. They are the essence of ambiguity, ambiguous not only in their speech but in their gender: “You should be women, / And yet your beards forbid me to interpret / That you are so” (1.3.43–45).

- It is Banquo who speaks here, and his word “interpret” is a telling one. If only Macbeth had felt similarly forbidden to interpret. They “should be women,” yet they are bearded. - --- Furthermore, they are neither wholly of the air nor of the earth, but rather a combination of these dark elements: “The earth hath bubbles, as the water has, / And these are of them” (1.3.77–78). - Most strikingly, they speak in “charms,” or magic riddles, and their language is dominated by what in the play is called “equivocation”: “the equivocation of the fiend, / That lies like truth” (5.5.41–42).-The word “equivocation” was much in use in the period, since it was a technical term used to describe the “mental reservation” by which Jesuits, often suspected of treason because of their Catholic faith, could tell untruths or partial

truths under interrogation without breaking their wordto God. -Equivocation: ambiguity, the dangerous double meanings of language. Macbeth, we will see, is an equivocator in all things: a man who is split in two directions, who commits murder to become King, and suffers every moment once he is King.- “Fair is foul, and foul is fair,” say the witches. In their world, nonhuman and antihuman, everything is equivocal—literally double-voiced. - And Macbeth— whose mind encompasses these witches, so that they reflect his own appetite, his own uncensored wish fulfillment—declares, the first time we see him, in his very first words, “So foul and fair a day I have not seen” (1.3.36).

- So foul and fair. His mind is already in a condition to receive the witches and their tempting message. His echo of them is unconscious, but it is there.“Double, double, toil and trouble,” the witches chant.

- There's clear evidence in the play that the Macbeths have discussed murdering the King before Macbeth ever met the three sisters.' But the presence of these supernatural agents in the play still suggests a complex interaction between human agency and a malign destiny.

- The protagonists' culture, too, offers hostile elements: it apparently valorizes violence and ambition over more humane values.

-Between the evil gore of murder and the 'good' gore of battle described so graphically in the opening scenes there is a very fine line: the latter in some ways seems merely to set the stage for the former.- The prominence of Lady Macbeth as co-protagonist is unusual in tragedy, normally a male-oriented genre. She joins only two other genuinely powerful female figures in Shake spearian tragedies (Cleopatra in Antony and Cleopatra and Volumnia in Coriolanus), and all three are powerful at the expense of the man to whom they are closest, whom they help to ruin. Like most other female tragic figures, Lady Macbeth loses her personal power and dies before Act Five.

-The play's four temptresses—three witches and Lady Macbeth—have prompted many to regard Macbeth as a misogynistic play which ascribes evil to a female principle; but the play destabilizes simplistic thinking about men and women or about 'masculine' or 'feminine' character traits. - Macbeth himself challenges—at least initially—Lady Macbeth's definition of manliness as innately violent, ambitious, and murderous-, he argues that gentleness and compassion are basic human values, not flaws of the effeminate. -She taunts him, 'When you durst do it [commit the murder], then you were a man', and tempts him with the prospect of becoming, if he murders the king, 'so much more the man' (1.7.49-51); but he declares, 'I dare do all that may become a man; / Who dares do more is none' (1.7.46-7).

-Macbeth's two tragic heroes give us special opportunities to observe what a tragic hero is like. The Macbeths, like other tragic heroes, possess strongly individualized characters. Lady Macbeth displays a unique blend of murderous toughness, delicate squeamishness, and fear of her own tenderness. - Macbeth possesses a complex individuality, suffering for a deed before he even does it, imagining actions in such vivid pictorial detail that it often verges on hallucination, and speaking in highly individualized, associative speech patterns, as in his 'tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow' soliloquy (5.5.16-27) – -Macbeth:

“Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow,/Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,/ To the last syllable of recorded time

;/And all our yesterdays have lighted fools/The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!/Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player,/That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,/And then is heard no more. It is a tale/Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,/Signifying nothing.” (5.5.16-27) - In this speech, 'tomorrow' makes Macbeth think of 'yesterdays', which he personifies as fools carrying candles in a tomb, which leads to a metaphor of life as a candle, which reminds him of a shadow, which (because of another meaning of 'shadow') makes him think of actors, which reminds him of storytellers, all in the space of a very few lines, and all imagined visually, or in terms of sound—Macbeth's senses are abnormally vigilant. - He carries the rhetorical figure of personification almost to the lengths of hallucination, so visual is his mode of thinking:

a man whose imagination can turn a personified abstraction like Pity into a 'naked new-born babe' in a storm, or a personified abstraction like Ambition into a spurred rider vaulting onto a horse (1.7.21-8), may sooner or later clutch at daggers hanging in the air.-Typically of tragedy, the Macbeths are seen more in their private than their public character: even in this play of political ambition, the emphasis falls on what ambition does to the soul more than on what it does to the state. -We witness here the complete unravelling of two strong personalities. Lady Macbeth, initially the stronger partner, who pushes her husband to action and holds him together when he keeps threatening to crack, ultimately breaks down first, driven to madness and probable suicide by nightmares in which she relives the murder.

-And that preternaturally sensitive man Macbeth grows brutalized, hardened almost beyond recognition. The man who once stared aghast at his murdered king's blood upon his hands now confesses he has 'almost forgot the taste of fears' (5.5.9). - His senses, once honed (sharpened) to a razor edge, are now so dulled he can barely respond when he hears women shrieking in the castle:

The time has been my senses would have cooled

To hear a night-shriek, and my fell of hail Would at a dismal treatise rouse and stirAs life were in't. (5.5.10-13)

-But now horror is merely 'familiar' amidst his 'slaughterous thoughts'. He can hardly even respond when he learns that the women are crying at the death of his wife: 'She should have died hereafter. / There would have been a time for such a word' (5.5.16-17).- The horror of their own deeds which destroys their individual personalities also destroys their marriage. The Macbeths, ironically one of the most close-knit of Shakespeare's married couples as the play begins, find that one of crime's lessons is that partners can't stay together in it. -Macbeth doesn't tell Lady Macbeth about his plan to murder Banquo and Fleance: 'Be innocent of the knowledge, dearest chuck, / Till thou applaud the deed' (3.2.46-7).

-Nor does he consult her on his barbaric plan to exterminate Macduff's wife, children, and servants; we are left to infer that she identifies with this poor murdered wife, as she murmurs in her sleep, 'The thane of Fife had a wife. Where is she now?' (5.1.36-7).- In comedies, and in plays by some of Shakespeare's contemporaries, dramatic characters do not change gradually—either they are relatively static in their behaviour, or they undergo instantaneous character reversals such as Duke Ferdinand's religious conversion in As You Like It. -One of the hallmarks of Shakespearian tragedy is that characters change over time, in believably gradual modulations. -Sometimes they grow, as King Lear grows from a petulant, egomaniacal old tyrant into a humane man who worries about

the poor and whose gaze has turned outward: he dies not justifying himself, but thinking only of Cordelia. -Sometimes they shrink, as Othello dwindles from a magnificent, heroic, self-possessed general into a cramped, suspicious wife-abuser, shrivelled of soul. The Macbeths are among those who shrink.- Like other tragic heroes, the Macbeths suffer from isolation: each is left alone at the moment of greatest agony. The crime alienates the Macbeths from each other, and from the very society they had sought the honour of leading. - Before this happens, the two spouses together form a complex whole, so in tune with each other (in early scenes) that they echo each other's words and thoughts even when they are apart.

- Lady Macbeth in soliloquy,planning Duncan's murder, invokes night so that she will figuratively not have to see what she is doing: Come, thick night .. .

That my keen knife see not the wound it makes,/ Nor heaven peep through the blanket of the dark. (1.5.48-51)

-Macbeth in soliloquy, planning Banquo's murder, invokes night for exactly the same reason: 'Come, reeling night,/ Scarf up the tender eye of pitiful day' (3.2.47-8). -These wishes are uttered in soliloquy—it is themselves the Macbeths are trying to blind. To render their evil intentions relatively invisible to themselves, both use euphemisms to avoid having to say 'murder', such as the 'business' (1.5.66, 1.7.31, 3.1.126), 'his taking-off' (1.7.20), and 'I have done the deed' (2.2.14).

- Even 'business' and 'deed', though having a much higher invisibility quotient than 'murder', are still nouns, and the Macbeths prefer pronouns, as in the oft-repeated 'do it', or 'he is about it' (2.2.4)—the latter, uttered by Lady Macbeth at the moment Macbeth is killing Duncan, causes 'Macbeth' to disappear into 'he' as well as 'murder' into 'it'; the victim disappears entirely. - Often a pronoun's antecedent is unspecified, as in Lady Macbeth's opening soliloquy, which begins Act One, Scene Five. Tellingly for their close relationship, she begins by speaking in Macbeth's voice, reading aloud a letter from him:

'They met me in the day of success, and I have learned by the perfect'st report they have more in them than mortal knowledge'.

- Here the weird sisters' identity disappears into two 'they's' and a 'them' (Macbeth has never asked their names, anyway). -As Lady Macbeth's soliloquy begins in medias res (in the middle of events or a narrative), Macbeth two scenes later begins a closely analogous soliloquy in mid-meditation; like hers, it features a pronoun whose antecedent noun has been suppressed: 'If it were done when 'tis done, then 'twere well / It were done quickly' (1.7.1-2). -Here again the pronoun 'it' replaces the noun 'murder', and even 'it' is contracted to "t' in "tis' and "twere', diminishing the crime almost to invisibility (that tiny 't') or inaudibility.

- The witches parody the Macbeths' grammar of invisibility, their terror of naming, when Macbeth visits them to demand 'How now, you secret, black, and midnight hags, / What is't you do?' - Flinging his weasle-verb 'do' and his miniaturized ''t' in his face, they reply in Macbeth-speak: 'A deed without a name' (4.1.64-5).-In this context, it is fitting that actors' superstitions have preserved for this play the fear of naming something frightful: it is supposedly bad luck, even now, to refer to 'the Scottish play' by its true title.

-The Macbeths talk uncannily alike, even when apart. Writing at the height of his creative powers, Shakespeare creates speech patterns perfectly expressive of character and situation. In the Macbeths' language of evasion, we find two people determined not to look squarely at what they are doing. -Unlike King Lear, whose characters are forced to 'see better' as the tragedy progresses (1.1.58), Macbeth gives us protagonists who start out seeing the situ ation and themselves pretty clearly:   'I am his kinsman and his subject, / Strong both against the deed-, then, as his host, / Who should against his murderer shut the door, / Not bear the knife myself' (1.7.13-16), Macbeth reminds himself, when contemplating regicide.

-But they know their own sensitivity well enough to realize that to go through with their ruthless drive for power, they must commit murders with averted face: 'Stars, hide your fires, / Let not light see my black and deep desires; / The eye wink at the hand; yet let that be / Which the eye fears, when it is done, to see' (1.4.50-3). -'To know my deed', Macbeth acknowledges, "twere best not know myself' (2.2.71).-Their shared language of euphemism and evasion expresses this situation, but it also reminds us how close they are to each other, how perfectly in tune their two minds are. A couple who can accurately read each other's suppressed nouns is a very intimate couple.

- The tragic waste of the play lies not only in their deaths, nor even in the probable loss of their immortal souls, but also in the destruction of a marriage, in the tragic estrangement of two lost souls who have loved each other.

STUDY QUESTIONS:

1. How would you characterize the relationship between Macbeth and Lady Macbeth. If the main theme of Macbeth is ambition, whose ambition is the driving force of the play—Macbeth’s, Lady Macbeth’s, or both?

2. One of the Aristotelian principles of tragedy is that the hero's downfall is caused by a moral weakness or flaw that inexorably leads him to his tragic destiny. In this respect, can Macbeth be seen as an Aristotelian tragedy?  What basic human flaws or weaknesses does Macbeth display?  How do they contribute to his downfall? 3. The three witches have been seen as figures of the Greek Fates, who respectively spin, measure out and cut the thread of human life.  Note how the scenes with the "weird sisters" punctuate and structure the play.  To what extent do their predictions dictate events?  Are their prophecies binding?  Is Macbeth trapped by destiny, a victim of fate, or does he have free will?  How do we know?