This basic interpretation of Macbeth deals with structure, ethics and characterisation.

Written late in 1606, Macbeth postdates Hamlet (1600-1601), Othello (1603-1604) and probably King Lear (1605-1606). The world view of King Lear is darker than that of Macbeth, but in setting Macbeth, where almost everything happens at night, is certainly the darkest of Shakespeare’s tragedies. This has been exploited by movie makers ranging from Orson Welles (film noir, 1948) through Roman Polanski (1971) to Justin Kurzel (2015, starring Michael Fassbender and Elizabeth Debicki). In the very first stagings of Macbeth, during the afternoon in London’s open-roofed Globe Theatre, Shakespeare’s language was what mostly conveyed this tragedy’s eerie and dark settings to the audience (see Nicholas Brooke’s introduction to the Oxford edition: 2). Props like candles and torches were the secondary means. Macbeth’s pervasive references to darkness, thunder and lightning, cold and blood—all of which feature in the first few lines—mean that, like King Lear, Macbeth is a fine example of Jacobean Gothic drama. (Think Dracula!) The physical darkness that pervades and dominates the action is a fitting symbol for the subject matter: Macbeth is the story of a man’s journey to damnation.

In an essay published in Burton Raffel’s edition of Macbeth in the Annotated Shakespeare series, Harold Bloom quotes from the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche’s “On the morality of the stage” (Daybreak 1881, section 240). Nietzsche argues that “the poets…and especially Shakespeare, love the passions as such, and not least the passion that welcomes or even looks for death…. It is not guilt and its evil outcomes they have at heart.” Further according to Nietzsche, dramatists of Shakespeare’s stature pour into their works the energy and adventure of life—“the stimulant of stimulants, this exciting, changing, dangerous, gloomy and often sun-drenched existence” (quoted Bloom 174). If Nietzsche gives us concepts of passionate life and equally passionate death to apply to Macbeth, Roland Barthes gives us the notion of the “bliss” (jouissance) of the text. The text of Macbeth is full of the jouissance of passionate language and action; it’s full of the jouissance of love and war; of the jouissance of tragic death trending to despair and destruction. Shakespeare’s company, the King’s Men, was in the entertainment business, so engaging the audience on many emotional levels was their primary goal. Accordingly, Macbeth is a play of limitless imaginative range, which actors, producers and film-makers have creatively exploited for generations.

I’ve quoted Bloom quoting Nietzsche, partly because I think Nietzsche’s amoral approach to drama can usefully be applied to Macbeth, but mainly to counterbalance the approach I’m taking in this lecture. Here I provide a moral reading of Macbeth, with full emphasis on “guilt and its evil outcomes,” the elements that Nietzsche scorns in contrast with the play’s passion and creative energy. I’ll be interpreting Macbeth sequentially, act-by act. My justification for applying Christian theology and ethics is historical: Shakespeare and his contemporaries, including his company’s patron King James I, accepted these as the rightful rulers of their thoughts and actions.

As I retell and examine Shakespeare’s dramatising of Macbeth’s progressive moral and spiritual corruption, you might like to consider these questions, which may help us get to the heart of Macbeth’s tragedy.:

1. Do we as the audience or readers continue to care what happens to this evil, treacherous and merciless man—this murderer of his friends and innocent children?
2. If we do continue to care, can you find reasons, either in the play or outside it, why this might be?

Act 1: The Beginning of Macbeth’s Journey

The First Folio (1623) contains the earliest surviving text of Macbeth. At the beginning of Macbeth’s dark journey we meet the three beings who are always referred to in the play’s dialogue in the First Folio as the Weird Sisters. The Shakespearean and modern word “weird” derives from wyrd, the Old English, i.e. Anglo-Saxon, word for fate. In Greek mythology the three Fates are goddesses. Clotho first spins the thread of life for every mortal, Lachesis measures it, and Atropos cuts it with her shears. As his tragedy unfolds, Macbeth discovers to his cost that the Weird Sisters wield a similar power over his own fate, but with the added proviso–stemming from the Christian doctrine of free will–that they are powerful only if he consents.

Instead of the “Weird Sisters,” the First Folio’s stage directions and speech headings (as opposed to the dialogue) refer to “three witches.” This identifies these characters with evil figures of Christian mythology, rather than with the morally neutral Fates. One of the first things that we learn is that each witch has her own “familiar,” an animal companion—cat, toad—who is an incarnation of the particular devil who advises and supports her. This demonic addition to their characterisation twists the Weird Sisters’ power as the Fates in the direction of moral evil. They combine the blind power of the Greek goddesses with the evil power of the Christian devil. They are not neutral spinners of destiny but malignant beings whose function is to deceive humans and to bring them to hell.

In addition, the Weird Sisters are associated with the power of wild nature—caves and barren heaths untouched by civilisation and ruled by thunder and lightning, by confusion and disorder. To coin a binary opposition typical of patriarchal cultures such as our own, this is the dark realm of feminine emotion, antagonist to the sunlight of masculine reason. Wild nature is the earthly gateway to what the Porter calls the “everlasting bonfire” that is Macbeth’s destination.

Ambition

The Weird Sisters’ purpose in coming together in Scene One is to meet with Macbeth, and secondly with Banquo. Macbeth’s ambition, which has already, even before the play opens, led him and Lady Macbeth to plot against his rightful and righteous King, Duncan, is the “fatal flaw” that has attracted the demonic forces of evil to Scotland. Macbeth himself has given them power. The Weird Sisters are the incarnation of his corrupted free will. They are the outward manifestation of his pre-existing consent to future acts of treachery and murder.

Macbeth explores the evil consequences of ambition, which Shakespeare and his contemporaries regarded as a sin. This is a difference between Shakespeare’s time and our own. Late-stage capitalism tends to value and even promote ambition as a drive for achieving what it judges to be fulfillment–advancement, high status and wealth. By contrast, the Jacobeans understood ambition as a moral flaw, both in the individual, because it ruled out peaceful and contented living, and in the state, because it caused conflict and disorder, trending at worst into bloodshed and civil war. In Shakespeare’s Macbeth, the protagonist’s ambition has both of these outcomes.

Throughout Act 1, the grip of Macbeth’s ambition is evident in his excited reactions to the Weird Sister’s prophecies—that he is the Thane of Glamis, and the Thane of Cawdor, and “shalt be king hereafter” (1.3. 48-50). However Banquo, who is a much more honest, transparent and acute fortune-teller than the Weird Sisters, has a warning:

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.— (1.3.124-127)

The speech shifts the outer conflict between the good Banquo and the evil sisters into Macbeth’s mind and feelings, which are far from contented and serene in the present, and which will grow more and more chaotic and agonising as his corrupted will plays itself out in his actions and their consequences. Macbeth’s present terror at the regicide he is planning:

Whose horrid image doth unfix my hair
And make my seated heart knock at my ribs
Against the use of nature (lines 136-138);

his feeling that that he is falling apart—“shakes so my single state of man” (line 141)—;  and the delusions that he is threatened with—“…and nothing is/ But what is not” (lines 142-143); are the first hint of experiences that Macbeth will come to endure in their full horror as the tragic action unfolds.

Treachery

As well as ambition, the three Sisters in Scene 1 introduce the theme of treachery and false- seeming that pervades Macbeth. This is in the chorus spoken by all three:

Fair is foul, and foul is fair,
Hover through the fog and filthy air. (lines 11-12)

Their prediction comes true: Macbeth and Lady Macbeth commit repeated acts of foul treachery, which they hide, or try to hide, under a fair appearance of benevolence and virtue. Shakespeare shows how the betrayals spread outwards from the centre of power—the king and queen—until they infect the whole of the body politic–all levels of Scottish government and most of the common people. In the end, no one knows who they can trust, and the result is chaos, civil war and invasion by England, which Macbeth represents to its patriotic English audience as a benevolent foreign power.

The theme of treachery in Macbeth is multi-layered, broadly based and powerful. It is poetic justice that Macbeth as chief traitor and deceiver is finally betrayed and deceived himself, when the Sisters’ guarantees of victory turn out to be fair-sounding lies. Colluding with the devil from before the play’s opening scene, the Weird Sisters have been, and continue to be, Macbeth’s companions on his journey to damnation .

Act 1, Scene 4 fully expresses the theme of “Fair is foul and foul is fair.” Macbeth gives a courtly, somewhat stiff, speech (lines 22-27) thanking Duncan for honouring him with a new title, Thane of Cawdor. However, immediately afterwards Duncan makes his son Malcolm Prince of Cumberland and names him his heir. Macbeth’s soliloquy in response reveals his ambition through the play’s pervasive imagery of darkness, which he wants to overshadow light:”…Stars hold your fires,/Let not light see my black and deep desires” (lines 51-52). Act 1 Scene 4 ends ironically with Duncan’s praise of Macbeth’s valour. He says that Macbeth’s praises are like a banquet to him and calls him “a peerless kinsman” (line 55). In other words, Macbeth’s courtly hospitality and fair speech are a foul lie–merely a disguise for “the fog and filthy air” of ambition and treachery. Irony continues to the end of Scene 4 with Duncan’s praise of Macbeth’s valour. He says that Macbeth’s praises are like a banquet to him and names him “a peerless kinsman” (line 55).

Courage

Macbeth Act 1, Scene 2 begins with the “bleeding” Captain’s account of Macbeth’s and Banquo’s courage and prowess in defeating, first the Scottish rebel, “merciless Macdonald”; secondly his ally, Sweno King of Norway; and thirdly the Thane of Cawdor—a nobleman who has betrayed his king. Despite his moral decline through the play, courage never deserts Macbeth, even when he is facing death. The theology behind this is the notion that evil cannot exist without an element of the good existing within it. Being itself is such a “good”; and so are all the virtues, including courage.

Duncan orders the execution of the Thane of Cawdor and confers his title on Macbeth as a reward for Macbeth’s valour and fair-seeming loyalty (1.2.68). This creates a neat structural repetition between the beginning of the play and the end. Just as the first Thane of Cawdor proved to be treacherous, so does the second (Macbeth). The words that Ross uses to describe the fight between Macbeth and Cawdor point ironically to Macbeth being Cawdor’s reflection: “Bellona’s bridegroom (Macbeth) …Confronted him (Cawdor) with self-comparisons” (1.2.55; i.e. matched him as fighter in every respect; Bellona is the Roman goddess of war). This is another of Act 1’s true prophecies. The first Cawdor repents his treachery and dies bravely. As Prince Malcolm reports to his father, the king: “Nothing in his life became him like the leaving of it.” (1.4.8). In Act 5, Macbeth too will choose a brave death over captivity and ignominy. The difference between himself and Cawdor, however, is that by the time he dies Macbeth’s repeated consent to evil has brought him to where he has ceased to hope for redemption. He has done evil beyond hope. He cannot repent; and he does not ask God for forgiveness. In accordance with Christian theology as understood by Shakespeare’s contemporaries, and unlike the first Thane of Cawdor, Macbeth’s despair at the consciousness of his guilt damns him while he is still living. Macbeth pursues a deepening spiral of evil which is, however, countered by the rallying forces for good..

The Last Scenes of Act 1

Scene 5 moves away from the darkness and bloodshed of battles fought between soldiers in barren landscapes to a scene inside Macbeth’s castle, where Lady Macbeth is reading her husband’s letter. The change of pace, the move away from active male figures to a solitary woman, is underlined by a switch from verse to prose. A domestic scene follows warfare. Dangers and threats are now to be disguised by courtly decorum. The script extends the identification, already established through the witches, between women and evil, when Scene 5 foreshadows that much of the drive for Macbeth’s future crimes will come from his wife. Lady Macbeth attributes an innate resistance to treachery to her husband—famously, “the milk of human kindness” (line 16) which she is determined to overcome–in order to foster the ambition that she also sees in him. However, like Macbeth, Lady Macbeth is deceived by the false promises of the Weird Sisters reported by Macbeth in his letter. She agrees with Macbeth that these are messengers of “Fate and metaphysical aid” (lines 26-27). In one of the play’s best-known soliloquys, Lady Macbeth rules out compassion and welcomes the forces of darkness into her being (lines 39-53).

However the arrival in Scene 6 of Duncan and Banquo, with their talk of protective masonry, summer, Heaven, nesting martlets, and sweet and delicate airs (1.6.1-10) provides a brief respite from darkness, evil forces, and the croaking of Gothic ravens. These sunny allusions are metaphors for the virtue and honesty of Duncan and Banquo. Thy suggest that goodness exists, and that some princes offer protection and peace to their people in their pursuit of happiness.

In Scene 7, the last scene of Act I, these qualities are submerged once again as Lady Macbeth persuades her husband, despite his misgivings, to go ahead with his plan to murder the king. The following questions may assist your reading of Scene 7:

Macbeth: —Act 1, Scene 7

1. Outline the process of reasoning that Macbeth follows in his opening soliloquy (lines 1-28).
2. Find in this soliloquy examples of similes, metaphors, repetition of words and syllables, alliteration and crescendo (building to a climax). How does each of these literary devices a) deepen the meaning of what is being said; and b) heighten the impact of the speech? What happens that prevents Macbeth’s soliloquy from achieving its climax?
3. What decision (which is really the delayed climax of his soliloquy) does Macbeth impart to Lady Macbeth (lines 31-35)?
4. Explain the reasoning, and the psychology behind the reasoning, which Lady Macbeth uses to persuade her husband to reverse his decision.
5. Name and exemplify the linguistic persuasive devices (i.e. rhetoric) that Lady Macbeth uses to change her husband’s mind? (Think questions, analogies, repetitions, metaphors and descriptive vocabulary.)
6. What plan do the Macbeths agree on?
7. Which aspects of Duncan’s murder does Lady Macbeth’s account gloss over or omit? What form do these elided details take, and what power do they take on, in Act 2, for example?—think weapons and blood!
8. In what ways does this dialogue between husband and wife emphasise gender differences?

 Macbeth Act 1 is fast-moving and geographically diffuse. Two wilderness scenes interspersed with thunder and lightning feature the Weird Sisters; there are reports of battles; an execution; messengers travel to and from King Duncan on the battlefield; scenes 5, 6 and 7 bring the whole cast to Macbeth’s castle at Inverness; and in scene 7 Lady Macbeth overcomes Macbeth’s objections to murdering Duncan.

 The Structure of Macbeth

The two sequences, or plot steams, in Macbeth produce a double pattern if you view them side by side. The pattern is most obvious in the witches’ scenes that open each sequence (Acts 1-3 and Acts 4-5), and in the climactic deaths of the two successive Thanes of Cawdor.

SEQUENCE ONE

Act 1: (Beginning)

• Opens with the three Weird Sisters
• 1.3 their threefold prophecy: Glamis, Cawdor, King
• Death of Cawdor #1

Act 2: Duncan’s Murder: (Part One of Macbeth‘s Double Climax)

• Preceded and followed by evocations of Nature’s occlusion (2.2.50-61) and confusion (2.3.53-62);
• Ends with ironic commentary by Old Man, Ross and Macduff: unnatural events (2.4.1-19).

Act 3: Banquo’s Murder (Part Two of Macbeth‘s Double Climax)

• Macbeth as King (fulfilment of third prophecy)
• Ends with ironic commentary by Lennox and “another Lord”: Malcolm is in the English court; Macduff has fled to England to seek help from “the most pious Edward” (4.1.27).

SEQUENCE TWO

Act 4: Murder of Macduff’s Family (Anticlimax)

• Opens with the three Weird Sisters (Hecate and the other Witches were probably added by Shakespeare’s collaborator Thomas Middleton)
• 4.1.87-119: 3 apparitions—armed head, bloody child, “child crowned with a tree in his hand”—their threefold prophecy: beware Macduff; “…none of woman born/Shall harm Macbeth”; “Macbeth shall never vanquished be, until/ Great Birnam Wood to high Dunsinan Hill/Shall come against him.”
• In England, Malcolm tests Macduff; news comes of his family’s murder

Act 5: Deaths (Final Climax of the Whole Play)

• Death of Lady Macbeth
• Fulfillment of second trio of prophecies
• Death of Cawdor #2, i.e. Macbeth

Above is a summary of the structural patterning of Macbeth. You should notice:

1. This is an action-packed, suspenseful and fast-moving plot.
2. Unusually for a Shakespeare play, there is no sub-plot. With doubling of parts, a performance of Macbeth needs only about a dozen actors.
3. The recurrence through the play of the number three anchors the structure. One suggestion is that the recurring number threes symbolise the Holy Trinity, working to accomplish justice from beneath the human (and diabolic) interchanges.
4. The play’s structure consists of two sequences (streams) of decisions, events and outcomes, in Acts 1-3 and in Acts 4-5. Scenes with the Weird Sisters open both sequences. The first sequence, climaxing in Act 3, predicts Macbeth’s rise; the second sequence, climaxing in Act 5, demonstrates his fall. This shapes the play as an inverted “V”—the Greek Delta Δ, or pyramid shape, the symbol of ambition, which Milton’s simile in Paradise Lost applies to Satan: “Springs upward like a pyramid of fire” (Book 2, line 1013). (Again, this may be going too far!)
5. The script allows few pauses for commentary or contemplation, but the following interruptions to the fast flow of events repay attention: A. The two cautiously ironic exchanges—between Ross, Macduff and the [wise] Old Man, and between Lennox and the [unnamed] Lord—that respectively round off Acts 2 and 3. These inform the audience of the wider consequences of Macbeth’s usurpation, namely the doubts and fears that are undermining order, trust and peace in Scotland. B. Often understood as bawdy comic relief, the famous scene with the Porter (2.3) intervenes between the silent murder of Duncan and its noisy discovery. The discovery is marked by loud knocking, confusion, distressed comings and goings, Macbeth’s report of his murder of Duncan’s attendants, and a ringing alarm bell. In addition to its immediate impact as comic suspense, the Porter’s monologue is a miniaturised version of Macbeth’s tragic journey. Imagining himself as doorkeeper to Hell, the Porter confides to the audience a list of the sinners that he’ll admit: a farmer who holds back grain from plentiful harvests so as to sell it at a higher price during famines; a liar or “equivocator”–a name given to participants in the “Gunpowder Plot” (1605) to blow up King James I and the House of Lords; and a tailor who cheats his customers by using less fabric than they’ve paid for. As well as thus satirising recent events and contemporary abuses, the Porter scene establishes hell as Macbeth’s destination for his crime of murder. But the audience isn’t immune either, since the Porter reminds them that lesser sinners—the avaricious, the untruthful, and the lecherous–are also doomed to damnation. The Porter scene’s broad range of meanings includes giving a comic twist to Macbeth‘s depiction of a hero’s damnation. The scene is funny, satiric, grotesque, sexy, macho and horrific, all at once.
6. The fast-moving and unified action of Macbeth slows in Act 4, which consists of varied scenes in diverse settings, among which are the Macduffs’ castle in Fife, Scotland, and the distant English court of King Edward the Confessor.
7. The long third scene of Act 4, which is set in England, consists of:

• Malcolm’s testing of Macduff, first by accusing him of treachery, and secondly by pretending to be addicted to vices that unfit him for kingship.
• A Doctor then introduces what seems like a digression by reporting King Edward’s miraculous curing of his people’s scrofula, also called the “King’s Evil” (lines 139-158), a form of tuberculosis affecting the lymph nodes, especially of the neck.
• The scene ends with Ross’s report of social breakdown in Scotland and the murder of Macduff’s wife and children.

Act 4 Scene 3 intensifies the contrast between good and evil in Macbeth by demonstrating the goodness of Macbeth’s opponents. The dialogue stresses the kingly virtues and saintliness of Malcolm and Edward (see lines 118-131). It confirms Macduff as “Child of integrity” (line 116) in opposition to Macbeth’s moral and mental dis-integration. Arriving at the end of the scene, the news of Macbeth’s murder of Macduff’s innocent family confirms his complete surrender to evil.

Set indoors in an orderly, civilised country ruled by a saintly king, and affirming a just universe and the power of humans to choose between a good and an evil path, Act 4 Scene 3 lacks the energy and immediate theatrical and visual impact of the wild Scottish scenes, ruled as they seem to be by the forces of darkness.

On the basis of the play’s structure—the development and resolution of its conflicts—we can argue that, more obviously than most of Shakespeare’s plays, Macbeth reinforces both the moral binary of good and evil, and the gender binary of masculine and feminine. In addition, this tragedy tends to associate male characters with moral and spiritual awareness, and even with goodness achieved; and female characters with moral blindness or indifference (Lady Macbeth), and with active malevolence and evil (the Weird Sisters). Act 5 dramatises Lady Macbeth’s suicide and Macbeth’s suffering and death at the hands of the deeply wronged Macduff; and the play ends with the triumph of the good king Malcolm, his father Duncan’s rightful successor. These outcomes invite the comforting conclusions that the universe is just and orderly, and that the light of masculine-mind rationality triumphs over the darkness of feminine-feeling. Justice prevails. Civilisation wins over nature.

Unfortunately, the world may not be so simple and so just: written probably a year before Macbeth, Shakespeare’s King Lear deeply interrogates the good/evil binary, and our trust that goodness will ultimately prevail.

We saw in our analysis of Act 1. 3. 128-142 that merely contemplating this act of murder and betrayal causes Macbeth

• to suffer present terror (loss of peace)
• to fear disintegration (loss of his moral integrity, or wholeness)
• to mistake delusions for truth (loss of mind).

These experiences become more and more intense as Macbeth’s dark journey continues.

Act Two: Macbeth’s Journey and Duncan’s Murder—Part One of Macbeth’s Double Climax

The staging of Duncan’s murder draws its power from ingrained human fears of darkness and the unknown. Act 2 embroiders this fear by naming animals traditionally associated with darkness, blackness and the moon, among them the wolf (“withered murder’s” sentinel, 2.2.53-54), an owl’s shriek and “a mousing owl” (2.2.16; 2.4.11-13), and the raven, crow, toad, and cat. Macbeth’s unnatural murder of his king and kinsman is a crime against the social order. Nature responds by producing an equal disorder: “Nature seems dead” (2.2.51)..

On Shakespeare’s stage Duncan’s murder doesn’t take place where the audience can see it. The murder is foretold in Macbeth’s soliloquy: “Is this a dagger that I see before me…?” (2.1.31-65). As he speaks, blood covers the blade and handle of his visionary dagger, he remembers Hecate, queen of witches and goddess of the waning or occluded moon, and describes “withered Murder” gliding like a ghost to Duncan’s bedside. Afterwards, the reality of Macbeth’s evil deed reaches the audience in his horror at what he has done, in the blood on Macbeth’s and Lady Macbeth’s hands; in his refusal to return the daggers to the murder scene, in his inability to repeat the drugged grooms’ “Amen”, and finally in the voice that cries: “Macbeth shall sleep no more” (2.2.42). The reactions of characters like Macduff who view Duncan’s body in the next scene drive home the true horror of Macbeth’s crime.

Shakespeare’s stage had limited resources, but his decision to report rather than to perform the central event and turning point of Macbeth was probably driven not by necessity but by art. The peripheral descriptions which encouraged his audiences to imagine Duncan’s murder no doubt heightened their terror, both at the deed itself and its consequences. Virtually the whole action of Macbeth targets primeval or subconscious fears of darkness and the unknown. Since James I was the patron of Shakespeare’s company, there may also have been political reasons, or reasons of tact, for not acting out the murder of a king to a London audience so soon after James had only just survived the Gunpowder Plot. Films of Macbeth, including Justin Kurzel’s 2015 version, usually do draw on the resources of modern cinema to act out the murder. The creativity Macbeth inspires in artists who work in spheres beyond live theatre (painting and music as well as cinema and electronic media) sustains the global reach of Shakespeare’s story of a man’s journey to hell.

Within the play Duncan’s murder robs Macbeth of peace, integrity and finally his mind–the ability to distinguish between the real and the unreal. Sleeplessness and increasing confusion are Macbeth’s and Lady Macbeth’s fate for the remainder of the play. The couple’s evil deed separates husband from wife and both from the people around them. Each becomes locked inside his own anguished consciousness.

In Act 1 Scene 7, the arguments against Duncan’s murder that Macbeth puts to himself are quite different from the argument he puts to his wife. This invites the conclusion that their marriage isn’t all that close to begin with. However, husband and wife grow much further after the murder. It’s chilling that the decision to murder the Duncan’s attendants is Macbeth’s alone (2.3.104-119). It’s as if, once he has started killing, he can’t stop (serial killer!). Or, more likely, he murders the attendants, because if dead they can’t defend themselves or plead their innocence. In any case, this man who, unlike Lady Macbeth, resisted an act of treachery and murder in the beginning, now takes the initiative himself, and exceeds Lady Macbeth’s expectations. It’s clear that isolation, caused by their enforced silence, adds to the burden of Macbeth and his wife.

Act Three: Banquo’s Ghost—Part Two of Macbeth ‘s Double Climax

Macbeth’s main motive for arranging Banquo’s murder is to defend his kingship against the Weird Sisters’ prophecy that Banquo will be father to a line of kings. This motive isn’t based on reason or observation. Instead, the fear aroused by “these terrible dreams/ That shake us nightly” (3.2.19-21) has developed into what we would call paranoia. His intense fear drives Macbeth to commit acts of treachery without the resistance–i.e. inner integrity or moral goodness–that he had to overcome in murdering Duncan. Macbeth inspires Banquo’s murderers with the very same argument that Lady Macbeth has used on him–that committing murder confirms a man’s manliness, and refusing to do so makes a man a coward:

Ay, in the catalogue ye go for men,…

Now, if you have a station in the file
Not i’ th’ worst rank of manhood….(3.1.92-103)

From Act 3 on, much of what Macbeth (and also Lady Macbeth) says is ironic if we place it in the context of his earlier thoughts and actions. Whereas Lady Macbeth persuaded and plotted the details of Duncan’s murder, now Macbeth acts alone, and even refuses to tell his wife his plans: “Be innocent of the knowledge, dearest chuck,/Till thou applaud the deed” (3.3.48-49). This indicates the couple’s increasing estrangement. Macbeth welcomes the coming of “seeling night” (line 49–night which, like a falconer will sew up the eyes of the hawk he is training for hunting), and provides a second list of night creatures to match the Weird Sisters’ familiars (1.1.7-8)—bat, beetle, crows, rooks—, and a second reference to Hecate (line 44). The two lists, the frequent references to animals associated with blackness and the night, and above all the many animals and animal and human dismembered parts that go into the Weird Sisters’ stew pot in Act 4, Scene 1 exemplify the nets of imagery that underlie and enrich Shakespeare’s best dramatic writing. The structural patterning of Macbeth is apparent in the way the two acts of murder, one in Act 2 and the second in Act 3, echo each other poetically and linguistically.

The Banquet Scene is a penetrating revelation of the operations of tyranny. Like Stalin and Hitler, Macbeth and Lady Macbeth are intent on preserving an appearance of virtue and benevolence as a mask for their ruthless and murderous deeds. Fear is the main motivator of these deeds. First Murderer reports Banquo’s butchering and his son Fleance’s flight at the beginning of the banquet. Not by computer-generated effects, but simply by having the ghost take a seat at the table opposite Macbeth, Shakespeare creates a deeply frightening event. (The ghost will probably sit with his back to the audience; Macbeth will face him across the table.) Blood, which has featured in the battles of Act 1 and in Duncan’s murder in Act 2, also besmears Banquo’s ghost, who has risen with “twenty mortal murders on [his] crown” (3.4.82). The banquet scene intensifies Macbeth’s terror, delusions, and isolation: the latter especially, because only he can see the ghost. The banquet marks an important stage in Macbeth’s disintegration, and intensifies suspicions and uneasiness at the Scottish court.

Act 4: Macbeth’s Visit to the Weird Sisters

Instead of the witches taking the initiative, as in Act 1, now Macbeth himself seeks them out. His curse at the end of the scene (4.1.153) on all who trust the witches is an example of dramatic irony, produced by a difference in knowledge or awareness—Macbeth doesn’t apply these words to himself, but the audience will. Lennox then reports Macduff’s flight to England. This news, and the lift in confidence that has come from the Witches, energise Macbeth’s ruthlessness. “From this moment,/ The very firstlings of my heart shall be/ The firstlings of my hand,” (4.1.161-163) he says, as he plans the murder of Macduff’s family.

The family scene immediately following makes a powerful contrast with the preceding Weird Sisters scene, and extends the binary of evil versus good featured in Macbeth. Lady Macduff’s bravery and outspokenness about what she insists is her husband’s desertion makes her the play’s only significant woman to side with “the good.”

Act 5: Deaths of Lady Macbeth and Macbeth

It’s yet another sign of his encroaching damnation that Macbeth’s main attendant in Act 5 is called Seyton. Probably a pun on “Satan,” the name suggests that Macbeth has graduated in the school of witchcraft to the point where he has his own demonic familiar!

To Seyton he describes his disintegration in a seasonal (autumn) metaphor—“my way of life/Is fall’n into the sere, the yellow leaf” (5.1.23), and speaks poignantly of his isolation—his remaining companions curse him silently and stay with him out of fear (5.1.23-28). Macbeth’s terrible loneliness intensifies in the scene of Lady Macbeth’s sleep-walking madness (5.3). The shriek from her women that marks her death leads him to discover that he has become numb and indifferent to such dire events—“I have supped full with horrors” (5.5.13). Macbeth is now incapable of feeling sorrow or joy, or anything else, with any intensity. He experiences life as boring, monotonous and meaningless. His well-known outpouring of nihilism and despair follows immediately: “Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow…” (5.5.16-28)

In Macbeth Shakespeare succeeded as well as any writer ever has in depicting a man’s journey to hell. The Tragedie of Macbeth, as the play is titled in the First Folio, has tracked the progress of those who “go the primrose way to th’everlasting bonfire” (Porter: 2.3.18). Despair is the last step on this journey. The bloodbath so prominent in this tragedy extends to Macbeth’s slaying of young Seyward, whom his father honours for maintaining heroic manhood in death. Finally, the forces of good and evil confront each other in the climactic battle between Macduff and Macbeth. After Macbeth discovers the Weird Sisters’ final trickery (“equivocation”), that Macduff is indeed not “of woman born”, having been brought “untimely” into the world through a rough and ready caesarean section, he at first refuses to fight, but does so to avoid being shamed by the victors. His courage defends himself, not others, not his family or his community or Scotland. His last appearance—appropriately in such a blood-soaked tragedy—is as a head affixed to Macduff’s lance.

Good has clearly triumphed over evil, but the question of audience members’ responses to Macbeth’s escalating suffering and bloody death remains open.

1. A form of tuberculosis affecting the lymph nodes, especially of the neck. ↑

WORKS CITED

Shakespeare, William. The Tragedy of Macbeth. Ed. Nicholas Brooke. Oxford: Clarendon P, 2008.

—. Macbeth. Ed. Burton Raffel, with an Essay by Harold Bloom. The Annotated Shakespeare. New Haven and London: Yale UP, 2005.

 Macbeth and King Lear: Recommended Online Lectures

Marjorie Garber (Harvard): Lectures on Macbeth and King Lear http://freevideolectures.com/Course/2746/ENGL-E-129-Shakespeare-After-All-The-Later-Plays/5

Emma Smith (Oxford): Lectures on Macbeth and King Lear http://mediapub.it.ox.ac.uk/feeds/129168/audio.xml