Follow Me Down
Feraco
Search for Human Potential
10 November 2011
If you gaze long into an abyss, the
abyss will gaze back into you.
Frederick Nietzsche
We are merely the stars’ tennis
balls, struck and banded, which
way chooses.
John Webster
Maybe all one can do is hope to end
up with the right regrets.
Arthur Miller
Just Your Average Shakespeare
 At first blush, Macbeth looks something like
the Shakespearean plays you’ve read over
your high-school careers.
 True, the playwright forsakes the sonnetheavy style of Romeo and Juliet, typically
resorting instead to blank (non-rhyming)
verse.
 The Weïrd Sisters are the only figures who
consistently speak in rhyme
 This makes a certain amount of sense, considering
that they stand outside of the chaotic events
consuming the other characters’ lives.
 But those ten-syllable lines, written in that
familiar alternating-stress-and-unstress
style, are easy to mistake for “regular
Shakespeare.”
Going…Backwards?
 That initial sense of familiarity quickly gives
way to an inescapable conclusion:
Shakespeare’s linguistic structures are far
more disordered than in his earlier works.
 Those ten-syllable lines do not, in fact,
consistently follow the unstress/stress
rhythms we found in, say, Romeo and Juliet
 Shakespeare’s iambic pentameter helped define
him, but perfect examples of it rarely appear here.
 While we might expect Shakespeare’s
language to get cleaner as he matures –
although it has an uncertain completion
date, Macbeth was finished near the end of
his career, and was almost certainly written
at least a decade after Romeo and Juliet – two
important things are going on here.
Confidence and Experiments
 Firstly, Shakespeare actually tended to
experiment more with language as he aged.
 Rather than leave behind youthful
precociousness for a staid, steady adult
style, the playwright behaved like a man who,
having mastered the fundamental methods
of dribbling a basketball, swore never to use
those methods again and dedicated himself
instead to discovering how many
unconventional ways he could bounce the
ball.
 Confidence, not a lack of skill, drove
Shakespeare to break from the linguistic
routines he’d built for himself, and enabled
him to challenge the expectations of viewers
who would have seen some of his other plays.
Disorder, Disorder…
 More importantly, the newly disordered
structure of the language, when combined
with the cause/effect nature of the play’s
human behaviors and choices, reflects the
play’s disordered world and action.
 The specter of disorder, of things falling
apart (a la War), hangs over everything in
the play. Take the Weïrd Sisters’ chant – “Fair
is foul, and foul is fair” – which virtually
kicks off the script, as the witches meet
before the Scots’ battle with the rebels (and
Norwegians!) has finished.
 Shakespeare uses the witches’ chant to
foreshadow his play’s blurring/reversal of
moral lines.
 Macbeth, like Sisko, is a (mostly) good man
who’s quickly swallowed by a darkness much
larger than himself, and who ultimately
succumbs to it.
Tension and Thrill
 But the tension between order and
disorder, expectation and free will,
between doing what’s “right” and
doing what’s easy, informs almost
every other character’s choices as
well.
 When Duncan allows himself to trust
others in the wake of the Thane of
Cawdor’s betrayal, it seems like a
moment worthy of applause
 It takes great courage to reach out to
others under any circumstances, let alone
after someone you cared about used that
trust as a weapon.
Lonely Rests the Crown
 But Duncan’s willingness to trust
someone gets him killed,
destabilizing his already war-torn
nation even further.
 As a responsible leader, does he
even have the luxury of
suspending his skepticism?
 Or is that one of the tradeoffs you
make when assuming the mantle
of responsibility – the
counterintuitive swapping of
power for insecurity?
Courageous Cowardice
 Moreover, young Malcolm and
Donalbain’s decision in the wake of
their father’s murder seems prudent
at first.
 Consider that, while it “appears”
Duncan’s killers have already gotten
their just desserts, the young men
aren’t fooled into relaxing their
guard.
 Rather than get complacent – simply
assuming the throne, as would have
been expected of Malcolm – the two,
realizing that the threat remains,
decide to flee the homeland.
At All Costs, By Any Means
 This isn’t a simple matter of selfpreservation: if it were, the decision to
split up seems shortsighted, since the
two would be safer together than
apart.
 The fact that they do split up indicates
that preservation of the royal line –
here we get child/family/lineage issues
yet again, which makes sense
considering the nature of how power
and wealth are transmitted in ancient
Scottish society – takes precedence
over everything else.
Backfire
 Yet that seemingly prudent plan – go into
hiding, identify the threat, call on our
father’s allies, retake the throne once the
killer reveals himself and we’ve eradicated
him – is undermined by the manner in which
they carry it out.
 By not announcing to everyone that the
killer’s been found, their decision to flee
conveys cowardice.
 On the one hand, this theoretically buys
them time; the killer, seeing them depart of
their own volition, apparently panicked and
afraid, won’t dedicate many resources to
coming after them.
 On the other hand, the panicked/fearful
reaction is all the Scottish people will see;
their “cowardice” makes it easy for Macbeth
to pin the blame for Duncan’s murder on
them once they’ve fled.
Control and Blindness
 Other characters, such as Macduff and
Macbeth himself, go on to do the same type
of thing: make a decision that seems
reasonable at the time, only to
unintentionally bring about the
circumstances that lead to their downfalls.
 There seems to be a running question of
whether man, for all his planning, scheming,
strategizing, and cleverness, really has a say
in what happens to him, or control over both
actions and consequences – whether we are,
in fact, capable of seeing how things work,
and whether we have any power over the
universe beyond acting in accordance with
the rules of the chessboard.
 Control and blindness are pet themes of
Shakespeare’s, as anyone who’s read any of
his tragedies can attest.
The Queen’s Prison
 If the universe is a chessboard, we’d like to
think of ourselves as queens – able to move as
freely as we like through our lives, confident
and in control.
 But even the queen is limited – she can only
move once before she’s forced to wait for her
opponent’s reaction, which she must then
process and react to accordingly.
 In other words, a seemingly free actor is
bound by a surprising number of
restrictions.
 A frequent reader of Shakespeare often
wonders whether we, or the stars, ultimately
determine what happens on the earthly
plane.
 For if we can’t choose to defy our fates…can
we really condemn anyone for their actions?