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Introduction to Macbeth
[A lecture prepared for English 366: Studies in Shakespeare, by Ian
Johnston of Malaspina-University College, Nanaimo, BC.
Some Introductory Considerations
Macbeth, as I have already mentioned, is in some
respects a relatively simple play. Like Richard III and
numerous pre-Shakespearean plays, its structure follows a
standard conventional form: the rise and fall of a great
man. The first part of the play follows Macbeth's rise to
power. By 3.1 he has assumed the kingship. The rest of the
play follows the disintegration of all he has achieved, a
process which culminates with his death and the
installment of new king. In that sense, there is very little
difference in the structure between Richard III and Macbeth.
But, of course, they are vastly different plays. And in this
lecture I want to focus, in particular, on the key difference,
the psychological portrait of the hero. Earlier, in the lecture
on Richard III, I strongly suggested that in Richard there is an
amalgam of different theatrical depictions of evil and that,
from my point of view, the predominant one was the ViceMachiavel, the Devil incarnate, who is presented in such a
way that we are not encouraged to probe very much into his
motivation, his psychological response to events as they
unfold, and his disintegration. We do have some clear hints at
a possible psychological source for Richard's conduct (the
opening soliloquy points to his deformity and his inability to
love), but I suggested that these are more symbols of his evil
than their cause. This approach to Richard's character allows
us to develop in more detail an appreciation for how much
the effects of this play depend upon Richard's theatricality, on
his outward behaviour (which he invites us to admire in a
shared understanding of how clever he is in comparison with
everyone else), rather than on any inward complexity.
Macbeth is totally different. There is nothing at all
theatrical about the presentation of his character. He does
not, like Richard, confide in us or seek to establish any cozy
relationship with the audience. There is nothing in Macbeth's
character or conduct which invites us to see any black
humour in the play (other than the brief scene with the
porter). Instead there is an astonishingly penetrating
development of Macbeth's character. The focus here is
directly upon what he is thinking and feeling, why he acts the
way he does, and what consequences his own evil brings
about upon himself. And the profundity of Shakespeare's
examination of these questions makes this play immeasurably
more complex than Richard III. Macbeth is one of
Shakespeare's most compelling characters, and the play is, of
all Shakespeare's great tragedies, the one which responds
most immediately to character analysis. One quality, in
comparison with Richard III which makes this difference
very apparent, is that in Richard III most of the really
effective drama takes place in the first half, during Richard's
rise to power (where the focus is squarely on Richard's
devilishly clever actions); in Macbeth, by contrast, the
second half of the play, which features the disintegration of
Macbeth's world, compels even more attention than the first
half.
So I would like to begin by examining some key
questions of Macbeth's character. I don't want to suggest that
there are not some vitally important themes being explored
here, but I would like to defer an examination of those until
we have dealt with the protagonist.
Macbeth as a Tragic Character
Macbeth's story is obviously a tragedy in the formal
sense. At the start of the play he is a very successful and
highly esteemed member of a social group, loaded with
honours and enjoying every prospect of further
commendation. He has a loving wife and a secure home in
his castle at Inverness. As the play opens, we learn of his
heroic actions in defense of the kingdom. We see him interact
with other nobles, and their friendship and esteem are
evident, as is Duncan's high regard, which expresses itself in
terms of fertile growth, the beauty of natural processes, and
spontaneous generosity (with promises of more to come).
At the end of the play Macbeth is totally alone. He has
lost all his friends, he is universally despised, his wife is dead,
and all his most eager hopes have been disappointed. He is a
man without a place in the social community. He has become
totally isolated. In Roman Polanski's film, Macbeth stands
alone in his castle to fight the entire army coming in to kill
him, one by one. That image seems entirely appropriate given
what has happened.
All this loss of things which made him a great man has
come about because of his own free decisions. Nothing that
Macbeth does in the play is forced upon him, and he is never
deceived by some human agent (someone manipulating him).
In that sense, he alone is the architect of his own destruction,
and the more he tries to cope with what he senses is closing
in on him, the more he aggravates his deteriorating condition.
His death is thus the inevitable consequence of what he has
chosen to do for his own reasons. Whatever the nature of his
challenge to life, he destroys himself.
The Murder of Duncan
So one might usefully begin with the obvious question:
Why does Macbeth decide to launch his bloody career by
murdering Duncan? Why is he not sufficiently happy with the
high social position he occupies and the honoured status he
has acquired among his peers? There is a very simplistic
answer to this (much beloved some teachers who do not wish
to wrestle with complex issues), and that is to say his problem
is that he is too ambitious. Ambition is a sin, of course, and
therefore Macbeth is punished for his sins. If we are not
prepared to probe much more deeply, this response to the
question is almost entirely unsatisfactory, because it is much
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too simple and neat. It turns the work from an extraordinarily
complex study of evil into a straightforward morality play and
closes off discussion of the most challenging aspects of the
work.
Now, there is some evidence for the charge of ambition.
Macbeth does want to become king, and he refers to that
desire as ambition ("I have no spur/ To prick the sides of my
intent, but only/ Vaulting ambition which o'erleaps itself/
And falls on th'other" (1.7.25-28). But we need to be careful
here not automatically to take a character's own estimate of
his motivation for the truth, or at least for a completely
adequate summary statement of all that needs to be said. We
need to "unpack" just what that concept of ambition contains
in the character to whom we apply it.
For a fascinating aspect of Macbeth's motivation is that
he is in the grip of something which he does not fully
understand and which a part of him certainly does not
approve of. This makes him very unlike Richard Gloucester,
who announces his plans with glee and shows no scruples
about what he has to do (quite the reverse: he looks forward
to doing away with his next victim and invites us to share his
delight). Clearly a part of Macbeth is fascinated with the
possibility of being king. It's not entirely clear where this
desire comes from. The witches (whom we will discuss later)
put the suggestion into the play, but there is a strong hint
from Lady Macbeth that she and her husband have already
talked about the matter well before the play begins--"What
beast was't then/ That made you break this enterprise to
me?" (1.7.48-49). In that case, the appearance of the witches
may be, in part, a response to some desire in Macbeth. He has
not exactly summoned them, but they are responding to his
innermost imaginative desires (more about this later).
What seems clear is that Macbeth is constantly changing
his mind. His imagination is in the grip of a powerful tension
between his desire to see himself as king and his sense of the
immorality of the act and of the immediate consequences,
which he knows will be disastrous. Part of the great
fascination we have with Macbeth's character is that he has a
very finely honed moral sense and never seeks to evade the
key issues (rather like Claudius at prayer in Hamlet). He is no
hypocrite in this respect. He knows he will have to violate
what he believes. Moreover, he is intelligent enough to
appreciate the public consequences of killing Duncan. In that
sense he is totally different from Richard who seems to
believe that once he is king he will have all that he wants.
Macbeth knows, even before he does the deed, that he will
have to pay and that the cost will be high. But he cannot
shrug off the desire.
It's not that Macbeth is averse to killing. He is famous as
a warrior, and the first thing we hear about him, well before
he enters, is that he is drenched in blood and has slit
someone open from the nave to the chaps. His high social
status comes from his effectiveness as a bloody warrior. So
it's not a compunction about killing that holds him back. It is
rather a clear awareness that in killing Duncan he will be
violating every rule that holds his community together. This
awareness is accompanied by an intelligent appreciation for
the immediate consequences to himself:
But in these cases
We still have judgement here, that we but teach
Bloody instructions which, being taught, return
To plague th'inventor. This even-handed justice
Commends th'ingredience of our poisoned chalice
To our own lips.
To act on his desire to become king is to drink from a
poisoned chalice. No one knows that better than Macbeth.
And when that awareness is uppermost in his mind, he
determines not to carry out the murder but to enjoy his newly
won social honours.
The problem is that his imagination just will not let go of
the possibility that he can become king. Banquo, too, is also
tempted by the witches (he would like to talk further about
what they said), and, it seems clear, likes to remember what
they have prophesied for him. But Banquo puts at the front
of his consciousness an awareness that if he should try to act
to bring about that favourable event, he will compromise his
honour, that is, his place in the social community). So the
rosy prospect of a royal line of descendants does not grip
Banquo's imagination; it does not, in a word, obsess him, as it
does Macbeth, who cannot put from his mind so easily the
vision of himself as king; it's a possibility which will not leave
him alone.
One of the chief functions of Lady Macbeth in the early
part of the play is to keep this vision alive within him by any
means at her disposal. She taunts him to act on his desires.
What she is saying, in effect, is that he must not let any
communal scruples stand in the way of his realization of
everything which he wants for himself (in other words, he
should not be like Banquo). Unlike Macbeth, she has no
countervailing social conscience. In fact, she expressly
repudiates the most fundamental social aspect of her being,
her role as a woman, wife, and mother. Interestingly enough,
part of her tactics with Macbeth is to urge him to be more of
a man. She identifies his scruples as something unmanly.
We should not on that account blame her for Macbeth's
actions. He freely chooses to kill Duncan in response to his
own deepest desires. Neither his wife nor the witches compel
him to do what he does, and he is free at any time to refuse to
carry out the murder or, having carried it out, to seek out
various courses of new action. But his decision to carry out
the deed is marked by a curious indecision. In a sense,
Macbeth is never entirely satisfied with or firm about what he
needs to do to become king or what he really wants to do.
When he goes out to commit the murder, he is hallucinating
the sight of a dagger leading him toward the deed, and he is
filled with a sense of horror at what he is about to do. He is,
it seems, in the grip of his imagination and is not serving
some conscious rational decision he has made. But, in the
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very act of letting his imagination lead him on, he is aware
that what he is doing is wrong. It's as if the dagger is pulling
him toward the murder (against his will)--he's following an
imagined projection of his desires, rather than being pushed
into the murder by some inner passion.
For that reason, for a long time I found it difficult
entirely to accept the fact that Macbeth is capable of killing
Duncan. How can a man in such an odd state, with so many
huge reservations about what he has to do, a man who is
pulled toward his victim in a virtual trance, actually commit
the violent act? My doubts were not resolved until I saw the
Polanski film of Macbeth, which, unlike theatrical
productions, shows us the murder. In that film, the moment
is brilliantly realized, one of the greatest scenes in the history
of movies of Shakespeare's plays for the interpretative insight
it provides.
Macbeth enters with the daggers, looks down on
Duncan, and hesitates. It's as if he suddenly realizes just what
he is about. He starts to draw back, as though refusing to
undertake something so horrible, changing his mind, as he
has done before. Then, and this is an extraordinarily revealing
interpretative moment, Duncan wakes up. He sees Macbeth
standing over him with the daggers and is about to cry out.
Macbeth now knows he has little choice. By following his
imaginative vision and entering the room, he has already
compromised himself; he has, in effect, already surrendered
to evil, and to protect himself he murders the king (in a very
bloody scene).
This interpretation of the murder is, as I say, quite
brilliant, because it brings out something central to this entire
play: Macbeth has freely chosen to embrace evil in his
imagination. He has not resisted the impulse to imagine
himself king and what needs to be done in order for that to
come about (or he has not resisted it sufficiently). But he
vacillates, knowing full well what the act means. For as long
as he has not actually killed Duncan, he thinks he is free to
imagine what being king would be like, that is, he is free to
indulge in his evil desires, and yet he is also free to change his
mind (as he does). But before he realizes it, his commitment
to his evil desires has trapped him. By taking pleasure in
imaginatively killing Duncan and letting that vision lead him
into Duncan's bed chamber, he creates a situation where he
has to carry out the murder without having actually decided
once and for all to do so. His imagination has committed him
to evil before his conscious mind realizes that the decision
has been made. As I shall mention later, this moment seems
to me to express something powerful and complex about the
nature of evil in the play.
It's important to stress the imaginative tensions in
Macbeth's character before the murder and to appreciate his
divided nature. That's why summing up his motivation with
some quick judgment about his ambition is something one
should resist. That resolves the issue too easily. Macbeth, in a
sense, is tricked into murdering Duncan, but he tricks
himself. That makes the launching of his evil career
something much more complex than a single powerful urge
which produces a clear decision.
After all, one needs to notice clearly how he is filled with
instant regret at what he has done. If driving ambition were
all there was to it, one would think that Macbeth and his wife
would not become morally confused so quickly. Macbeth's
entrance after the killing brings out really strongly a sense that
if he could go back to the speech about the imaginary dagger,
he would not carry out the murder. Lady Macbeth thinks a
little water will solve their immediate problem; Macbeth
knows that that is too easy. He cannot live with what he is
done and remain the same person.
Macbeth As King
The tragic element of Macbeth's character emerges most
clearly from his career after the killing of Duncan, above all in
his decision that, having violated all the most important rules
of communal society by killing Duncan, he will continue in
the same course of action, even if that means, as it obviously
does, that he will simply bring upon himself even greater
suffering than the killing of Duncan occasions.
It worth asking ourselves what in Macbeth commands
our attention throughout the second half of this play. After
all, he is in many respects the least admirable tragic hero of
all. In characters like Othello, Romeo, Cleopatra, Lear,
Antony, Hamlet (to say nothing of Oedipus, Ajax, or
Clytaemnestra) we can usually find something to admire. We
may not like them (they are not very likable people), but there
is something in their characters or their situation on which we
can hang some sympathy, even if there is not enough for us
to rationalize away their actions. But Macbeth is a mass
murderer, who does away with friends, colleagues, women
and children, often for no apparent reason other than his
own desires. Why do we keep our attention focused on him?
The answer, I think, has to do with the quality of his
mind, his horrible determination to see the entire evil
business through. Having, with the murder of Duncan, taken
charge of the events which shape his life, he is not now going
to relinquish the responsibility for securing his desires. The
most remarkable quality of the man in this process is the
clear-eyed awareness of what is happening to him personally.
He is suffering horribly throughout, but he will not crack or
seek any other remedy than what he alone can deliver. If that
means damning himself even further, then so be it.
This stance certainly does not make Macbeth likable or
(from our perspective) in many respects admirable. But it
does confer a heroic quality upon his tragic course of action.
He simply will not compromise with the world, and he will
pay whatever price that decision exacts from him, even
though as his murderous career continues he becomes
increasingly aware of what it is costing him.
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It seems clear that what his murder has cost him is the
very thing that made him great in the first place. For no
sooner has he become king than he becomes overwhelmed
with fear, nameless psychological terrors which will not leave
him alone. We know that Macbeth has had enormous
courage before, but there's a powerful irony manifesting itself
in the fact that his evil has made him terrified of his inner
self. He stands up to that fear and that terror--in fact
throughout most of the second half of the play Macbeth is
obsessed with removing his inner torment. His later murders
are motivated by that far more than by any political
considerations or any desire for physical security. The
fascination we have with his character stems, I think, from his
increasingly futile attempts to resolve the inner pain which he
has brought upon himself (and his accurate diagnosis of what
is going on inside him). Those attempts lead finally to his selfdestruction.
But right after the coronation of Macbeth, just before
the banquet scene, Macbeth and his wife are clearly changing
in different directions. He has further murders planned (of
Banquo and Fleance), but he is not telling her about them. He
is resolved to proceed alone, to do whatever is necessary to
ease his mind without any moral scruple (although his body is
still fighting that commitment to evil, hence the frequent
references to a lack of sleep).
This quality sets him clearly apart from his wife. She has
thought that a little water and a few lies will clear them of the
murder of Duncan, but she cannot evade the psychological
consequences of what she has encouraged Macbeth to do.
She lacks his will power, his determination to continue, his
ability to withstand the inner torment. And so as he becomes
more and more determined to keep killing his way to some
final solution, she falls apart. This begins with her fainting
spell as soon as the news of Duncan's death becomes public,
continues in her anxious fretting before and after the banquet
scene, reaches its clearest expression in her sleepwalking, and
culminates in her suicide. This lack of inner will to confront
fully the consequences of her and Macbeth's actions makes
her story one without the tragic significance of her husband's.
This declaration is worth close scrutiny. Macbeth cares
less about the future of the world than he does about his own
determination to "resolve" his inner torment. He is
determined to set his life in order, to obtain what he set out
to acquire with the first murder. And nothing in the world is
going to stop him. The murder of Banquo and Fleance stem
from this desire. It's not that they present any immediate
threat. Macbeth appears secure on the throne, and there is no
talk anywhere of any immediate rebellion. But his mind is not
at ease, and that is Macbeth's overwhelming concern. The
emphasis here is totally psychological rather than political.
The phrase "lack of inner will" above is not meant to
indicate some serious limitation in Lady Macbeth. For at the
root of her difficulty is her inability to divorce herself from
her own human nature. She had thought that she could
unsex herself, push away from her any of her deepest feelings
about, for want of a better word, love of others, and become
a pure agent of destruction. So long as the murders have not
started, she plays that role with great rhetorical effectiveness
(especially in her taunts about Macbeth's manhood). But
once Duncan is dead, she finds herself in the grip of the most
powerful human feelings, without any of her husband's
determination to act to resolve those feelings. With this in
mind, her reference to Duncan looking like her father takes
on an important resonance.
What's particularly noticeable, too, is the way in which,
following the murder of Duncan, their relationship becomes
estranged. We have every reason to believe that before
Duncan's murder, they are very close. Certainly Macbeth
shares all his thoughts and feelings with her, and she feels
quite equal to speaking candidly to him about what she thinks
he must do. They are (and this, in my view, is an important
point for a production to bring out) at first a very close and
loving couple.
But let the frame of things disjoint, both the worlds
suffer,
Ere we will eat our meal in fear, and sleep
In the affliction of these terrible dreams
That shake us nightly. Better be with the dead,
Whom we to gain our peace have sent to peace,
Than on the torture of the mind to lie
In restless ecstasy.
However, he has not lost his moral sense. Again, he is
under enormous tension, for he still feels the pull of the "that
great bond." His dreadful prayer to the night--a passage
particularly eloquent for its evocation of the horror of what is
happening--is a plea for the suppression or the elimination of
the scruples he still might have:
Come, seeling night,
Scarf up the tender eye of pitiful day,
And with thy bloody and invisible hand
Cancel and tear to pieces that great bond
Which keeps me pale. (3.3.47-51)
Just as his wife does before the murder of Duncan,
Macbeth is here urging the dark powers of the night to take
away any vestiges of human feeling he still has for the
communal standard, the "great bond" which links him to his
fellow creatures. Lady Macbeth made the prayer, but could
not sustain that urge. Macbeth ends the speech with a key
statement:
Things bad begun make strong themselves by ill.
What matters increasingly to him is not whether
something is good or bad; for he is willing himself beyond
those moral categories into a state of being in which acting on
his own desires is all that concerns him. What matters now is
the strength to keep going on the course where he imposes
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his desires on the world, even at the expense of any lingering
connections he may feel to that society of which he was, only
a short while ago, a very honoured part.
desire to win but because wants to take charge of the final
event, his own death. The life he has created for himself
leaves him with nothing else to do.
What we witness, as Macbeth continues to murder his
way in the frantic desire for peace of mind, is his gradual
dehumanization. His loss of physical relationships is
accompanied by something even more horrible, his loss of
any power to feel sensitively about life. In a sense, he gets
what he has prayed for. The great bond that links him to
other human beings does virtually disappear, so that the
pursuit of his desire for inner peace makes him care less and
less for anything life has to offer. In other words, the
successful attainment of his human desires creates a life with
no human value in it. What is the point of realizing one's
desires when there is nothing left in the world one finds
desirable?
As many people have observed, the theatrical metaphor
in this famous speech resonates throughout the play.
Macbeth has, in a sense, tried to seize control of the script of
his life, to write it in accordance with his desires, in the clear
knowledge that that's probably going to be disastrous.
Instead of living out his life, as normal people (including
Banquo) do, in a drama out of his total control, he seeks to
change the plot. And the result is a play that leaves him
feeling increasingly pained, disoriented, and afraid (that we in
modern terminology might call inauthentic). His returns to
the witches and the murders that result are frantic attempts to
keep rewriting the script, to turn it into something answering
his needs. But all he succeeds in doing is to turn the play into
a sinking nightmare of strutting and fretting (in which,
interestingly enough, there are frequent references to how his
clothes, like a poorly cut theatrical costume, just don't fit).
I have lived long enough. My way of life
Is fall'n into the sere, the yellow leaf,
And that which should accompany old age,
As honour, love, obedience, troops of friends,
I must not look to have, but in their stead
Curses, not loud but deep, mouth-honour, breath
Which the poor heart would fain deny and dare not. (5.3.2329)
That is the reason why, when he receives the news that
his wife is dead, he response is so low key and bitter. In one
of the very greatest speeches in all of Shakespeare, he accepts
the news with a horrifying calm:
She should have died hereafter.
There would have been a time for such a word.
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)
This famous speech acknowledges fully the empty
mockery his life has become. Once again, the remarkable
quality of this passage is Macbeth's refusal to evade the reality
of the world he has created for himself. His life has become
an insane farce, not because he no longer has any power or
physical security (he has both and, as he remarks earlier,
could easily withstand the siege), but because he has ceased to
care about anything, even about his wife. There is no one to
blame but himself, and he has learned too late the truth of
what he understood would happen if he gave into his desires
and killed Duncan. It's not surprising that immediately after
this speech, once he hears about the moving wood, he
decides to end it all in a final battle, not because he has any
This point above about Macbeth's bringing about his
own death is an important element in his tragedy. Having set
himself above all conventional morality and prudence to
tackle life on his own terms in answer to his desires, Macbeth
will remain in charge until the end. Like so many other great
tragic heroes (Oedipus, Lear, Coriolanus, Othello, and so on),
he self-destructs (this makes his ending significantly different
from Richard III's). He has come to the full recognition of
what taking full charge of his own life, without any
concessions to his community, really means. And that
realization fills him with a sense of bitterness, futility, and
meaninglessness.
The Witches: Agents of Evil?
No discussion of Macbeth would be satisfactory which
did not make some attempt to deal with its most famous
symbols: the coven of witches whose interactions with
Macbeth play such a vital role in his thinking about his own
life, both before and after the murder of Duncan. Banquo
and Macbeth recognize them as something supernatural, part
of the landscape but not fully human inhabitants of it. They
have malicious intentions and prophetic powers. And yet they
are not active agents in the sense that they do anything other
than talk and offer visions and potions. They have no power
to compel. So what are we to make of them?
A good place to begin is to dispel at once any temptation
to indulge in that misleading exercise which encourages us to
think that we can only adequately deal with these witches by
appeals to historical facts, like the beliefs of a seventeenthcentury audience or the intense interest of James I in witches.
All that may be true, but we are not in the seventeenth
century, and the purpose of these lectures is not to take us
back there. If we are to explore the significance of these
witches we must do so by treating them as vital poetic
symbols in the play, essential manifestations of the moral
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atmosphere of Macbeth's world (like the ghost in Hamlet),
and every bit as intelligible to a modern audience as to
Shakespeare's.
The most obvious interpretation of the witches is to see
them as manifestations of evil in the world. They exist to
tempt and torment people, to challenge their faith in
themselves and their society. They work on Macbeth by
equivocation, that is, by ambiguous promises of some future
state. These promises come true, but not in the way that the
victim originally believed. The witches thus make their appeal
to Macbeth's and Banquo's desire to control their own future,
to direct it towards some desirable ends. They have no power
to compel belief, but they can obviously appeal strongly to an
already existing inclination to force one's will onto events in
order to shape the future to fit one deepest desires.
Banquo's importance in the play stems, in large part,
from his different response to these witches. Like Macbeth,
he is strongly tempted, but he does not let his desires
outweigh his moral caution:
But 'tis strange,
And oftentimes to win us to our harm
The instruments of darkness tell us truths,
Win us with honest trifles to betray's
In deepest consequence. (1.3.120-124)
Macbeth cannot act on this awareness because his desires
(kept alive by his active imagination and his wife's urging)
constantly intrude upon his moral sensibilities. Hence, he
seizes upon the news that he has just been made Thane of
Cawdor, using that information to tell him what he most
wants to believe, that the witches tell the truth.
This supernatural soliciting
Cannot be ill, cannot be good. If ill,
Why hath it given me earnest of success
Commencing in a truth? I am Thane of Cawdor. (1.3.129132)
But Macbeth's inner question here has already been
answered by Banquo a moment before (in the quotation
immediately above). Macbeth's framing the question in this
way is an indication, not that he has not heard what Banquo
has just said, but that he doesn't want to believe it.
The witches, in other words, appeal to what Macbeth
wants to believe. They don't make him believe it. And they do
not tell him what to do in order to achieve what they
prophesy. They say nothing about killing Duncan (or anyone
else). In that sense, they cannot be the origin of the idea of
the murder. They may be appealing to that idea (which we are
given to believe originates in Macbeth some time previously),
but they do not create it.
The same is true of their later prophecies about Birnam
Wood and about no one of woman born being able to harm
Macbeth. These confirm for Macbeth the fact that acting on
his desires will keep him secure, that he can take charge of his
future with nothing to fear. But these prophecies do not offer
any specific instructions about immediate actions. We must,
thus, I think, resist any temptation to see Macbeth's actions as
determined or controlled by the witches. He is always free to
choose how he is going to act.
Hence, these witches exist as constant reminders of the
potential for evil in the human imagination. They are
ineluctably part of the natural world, there to seduce anyone
who, like Macbeth, lets his imagination flirt with evil
possibilities. They have no particular abode and might pop up
anywhere, momentarily, ready to incite an eternal desire for
evil in the human imagination, the evil which arises from a
desire to violate our fellow human beings in order to shape
the world to our own deep emotional needs.
It's important to note that the witches are not dealt with
in this play. By the end, Macbeth has been defeated and
killed, but the witches are still around, somewhere. Years ago,
when I directed a production of Macbeth I considered the
fact that nothing is said about the witches in the resolution
and that the audience will naturally wonder about them. It
struck me then that they must be observing the final
celebration, there on the stage hovering around the solemn
pieties and celebration at the end, and thus lending a
powerful note of irony to the triumph of the forces of good
over Macbeth. It's as if such a conclusion is saying something
like, "Yes, you have dealt with one evil man, but if you think
you have therefore dealt with evil, you are indulging in
illusory hopes."
Polanski's film of the play makes such a irony in the end
even stronger by concluding the film with a scene of
Donaldbain riding alone in to meet the witches, a scene
which brings out a sense that the cycle we have witnessed is
going to continue. Polanski links that with the rebellion of the
Thane of Cawdor, so that we get a vision of human life which
is a series of manifestations of evil and the corresponding
efforts to deal with those who respond to it. Macbeth's story
thus is simply one episode in an endlessly bloody and
repetitive struggle.
The cyclical nature of the recurrent visions of evil may be
underscored by a predominant contrast throughout the play
between light and darkness. Macbeth is an intensely dark play,
metaphorically and literally. After Duncan's conversation
about the natural pleasantness of Macbeth's castle, such
references to nature as benevolent disappear, and we are
plunged into a world of twilight and darkness, a constant
sense that Macbeth's prayers to the evil in the world are
bringing out the gradual extinction of any life-sustaining light
and growth. The forces of Malcolm are described in terms of
regeneration and a newer and healthier vitality (the
miraculous power of the English king to heal illness is an
important image of that point). But there may be (depending
on how the play is staged) no firm sense that the final
triumph of the forces of goodness over this manifestation of
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evil have done anything to alter the recurring cycle. For the
play has not banished the darkness; it has simply brought
back a circle of light.
Postscript I: The Vision of Evil in Richard III and
Macbeth
It should be clear from some of the above remarks that
the vision of evil in Macbeth is considerably more complex
than the vision in Richard III. The latter play places the evil
in a particularly evil personality who, nevertheless, carries out
God's work in punishing past evildoers, like Clarence,
Edward, Hastings, and so on, before he himself is finally
destroyed by the forces of goodness. As I mentioned in the
lecture on Richard III, this vision is a traditional allegorical
understanding of history as the working out of God's
providence, a system in which evil itself works towards God's
final purposes in history.
I mentioned in our consideration of Richard III that
there is a sense that Shakespeare, in writing the play, found
this vision of evil in some respects too easy, for there are
moments (like the seduction of Anne or Clarence's dream)
where we do sense much more complex reverberations. But
such moments are not sustained, and the final movement
which brings closure to the first history cycle is almost
formulaic.
Macbeth offers us something much more complex and
challenging. Here the potential for evil, manifested in the
witches, is a permanent feature of the landscape, with no
redeeming higher moral purpose like some providential
scheme. The witches thus exist as a permanent threat, not
only to particular individuals but also to the human
community. They exert their effect through the deepest
desires of human beings to set aside their shared sense of
communal values, and they deceive those who listen to them
with equivocating promises: they punish (if that is the right
word) those whom they successfully tempt by giving them
what they want, by living up to their promises, only to reveal
just how empty and self-destructive life becomes for those
who surrender to their egocentric desires.
Is Macbeth, then, a Christian play? There are many
explicitly religious references and some strong suggestions of
a Christian morality at work (especially alluding to Malcolm,
the English King, and the forces moving against Macbeth).
But the overt Christian belief system is not insisted upon
(there is no institutionalized religious presence in the play, as
there is in the history plays), and the sense that evil has an
objective existence, over and apart from any divine purposes,
both in the landscape and in the imaginations of individuals,
is disturbing in a profoundly un-Christian sense. And there is
no insistence at all upon any future judgment. The sense is
explicitly that the judgment upon Macbeth is "here," in this
world, that Macbeth's affirmation of himself at the expense of
any communal morality brings its social and psychological
consequences in this life. The great bonds of nature which
Macbeth and his wife violate might be interpreted, I
suppose, from a Christian perspective, but the play does not
require that, and to the extent that such a Christian
interpretation might ease the unsettling complexities of the
vision of evil in the world (by imposing a reassuring doctrine
upon the conclusion of the play), I would tend to reject it. If
we see the metaphysical questions about good and evil as
central to a religious sensibility, then Macbeth is a profoundly
religious play, but it does not deliver an explicitly Christian
message (here again there is an important difference perhaps
between Macbeth and Richard III).
That may be the reason why in his extremely effective
interpretation of the play, Polanski set Macbeth back in pagan
times, in a very tough militaristic society dominated by
assertions of force amid an unforgiving natural setting. Such a
vision helps us see even more clearly (as many of the best
tragedies almost always do) the fragile and perhaps illusory
nature of those social institutions which we like to believe in
at those moments when we feel we need an ordered and
morally significant community. Macbeth's decision to move
beyond that morally significant community has failed, his
attempt to impose a new order based on murder has failed,
but his attempt has exposed the falseness of any complacent
assumptions about the effectiveness of traditional order to
hold evil easily at bay.
How we interpret the ending of Macbeth will, in large
part, depend upon how we see the role of the witches at the
end. Some (e.g., Goddard) see the end as an unambiguous
triumph of good over evil. Scotland has been cleansed by the
combined forces of the Christian English king, who has
miraculous powers to cure disease, and the Scottish nobility.
My own sense is that the ending is a good deal more
ambiguous, for the witches are still around and have not been
dealt with. If they are present on stage as the lights fade, then
the victory over Macbeth will be a good deal more ironic.
I tend to see this play as insisting that the human
community exists in a small arena of light surrounded by
darkness and fog. In this darkness and fog, the witches
endlessly circle the arena of light, waiting for someone like
Macbeth to respond to his imaginative desires and perhaps
natural curiosity about what lies beyond the circle. There will
always be such people, often among the best and the
brightest in the human community. So overcoming one
particular person is no final triumph of anything. It is a
reminder of just how fragile the basic moral assumptions we
make about ourselves can be. In that sense, Macbeth, like all
great tragedies, is potentially a very emotionally disturbing
play. It does not reassure us that the forces of good will
always prevail, rather that the powers of darkness are always
present, for all our pious hopes and beliefs.
One final point. To talk this way about a vision of evil is
to offer a comment upon a thematic concern of the play. But
one should not therefore think that Macbeth is somehow a
coherent philosophical statement of such a theme, something
which invites rational analysis. Macbeth is a work of art, and
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if it is effective, it does its work through our emotional
responses to the poetry (and the action in a performance), not
by making some closely argued case about the nature of the
world.
Postscript 2: The Witches Once More: The Revenge
of the Proletariat or The Revenge of the Id?
The above interpretative suggestions about the witches
has deliberately ignored questions a modern reader might well
raise: What about the witches as people? Why are they
women? Is there any point to examining the social and
political implications of the presence of these characters?
Traditionally, these questions have not mattered very much,
for the various approaches to Macbeth have treated them
very much the way I have above (as symbolic manifestations
of the potential for evil). However, an eminent modern
literary critic, Terry Eagleton, raises a new possibility:
To any unprejudiced reader--which would seem to
exclude Shakespeare himself, his contemporary audiences and
almost all literary critics--it is surely clear that positive value in
Macbeth lies with the three witches. The witches are the
heroines of the piece, however little the play itself recognizes
the fact, and however much the critics may have set out to
defame them. (William Shakespeare, p. 2)
For Eagleton, the social reality of the witches matters.
They are outcasts, living on the fringe of society in a female
community, at odds with the male world of "civilization,"
which values military butchery. The fact that they are female
and associated with the natural world beyond the aristocratic
oppression in the castles indicates that they are excluded
others. Their equality in a female community declares their
opposition to the masculine power of the militaristic society.
They have no direct power, but they have become expert at
manipulating or appealing to the self-destructive
contradictions of their military oppressors. They can see
Macbeth's destruction as a victory of a sort: one more
viciously individualistic, aggressive male oppressor has gone
under.
This suggestion is not (I think) entirely serious (Eagleton
observes that the play does not recognize the issue he is
calling attention to), but it underscores a key point in the
tragic experience of Macbeth, its connection to a willed
repudiation of the deep mysterious heart of life, the place
where sexuality and the unconscious hold sway. This aspect
of life is commonly associated with and hence symbolized by
women, for complex reasons which there is not time to go
into here (but which would seem to be intimately bound up
with women's sexuality and fertility, contacts with the
irrational centres of life which men do not understand and
commonly fear). In seeking to stamp his own willed vision of
the future onto life, the tragic hero rejects a more direct
acquaintance with or acceptance of life's mystery. Both
Macbeth and Lady Macbeth intuit this point, because they
both pray to the gods to make them "unnatural." And they
both pay the price, for nature will never subordinate herself
for long to the individual's desire to exercise control over her.
In that sense, Macbeth, like other tragedies, might be said to
call attention to the "unnatural" or "oppressive"
understanding of life inherent in traditional tragedy.
The notion that Macbeth and Lady Macbeth are, in a
sense, punished by some life force drew a short comment
from Freud (in Some Character-types Met With in Psychoanalytical Work, 1916), in response to questions about the
accuracy of Shakespeare's depiction of their motivation and
subsequent psychic breakdown. While confessing himself at
something of a loss to account for the characters of Macbeth
and Lady Macbeth in detail, Freud sees an important
suggestion in the notion of childlessness:
It would be a perfect example of poetic justice in the
manner of talion if the childlessness of Macbeth and the
barrenness of his Lady were the punishment for their crimes
against the sanctity of generation--if Macbeth could not
become a father because he had robbed children of their
father and a father of his children, and if Lady Macbeth
suffered the unsexing she had demanded of the spirits of
murder. I believe Lady Macbeth's illness, the transformation
of her callousness into penitence, could be explained directly
as a reaction to her childlessness, by which she is convinced
of her impotence against the decrees of nature, and at the
same time reminded that it is through her own fault if her
crime has been robbed of the better parts of its fruits.
Freud notes that the compressed time frame of the play
does not invite this analytical conclusion, so he does not push
home this possibility. And he concludes his short remarks
with the suggestion (developed from Ludwig Jekels) that
Macbeth and Lady Macbeth are, in effect, a single personality,
so that, considered as a unit, "Together they exhaust the
possibilities of reaction to the crime, like two disunited parts
of a single psychical individuality, and it may be that they are
both copied from the same prototype." This final suggestion
might help us to see that the impact of the tragedy is, in part,
conveyed to us by the falling apart of the couple who, when
we first meet them, seem entirely in harmony with one
another (a point mentioned earlier).