Macbeth

This post is about Shakespeare’s play Macbeth.

PLOT/THEME/STYLE

Macbeth comes billed as a tragedy, and it lives up to its billing. Pulled from historical chronicles, the play’s protagonist is a medieval Scottish nobleman who wants to become king. After witches prophesy that he will be king, Macbeth makes their prediction come true by killing the Scottish king with the help of his wife. This only takes up two of the play’s five acts. The remainder of the play examines what happens to a man who gains a kingdom and loses his soul and end with his wife’s suicide and his own death in battle.

The titles of Shakespeare’s comedies don’t highlight characters. Instead they focus on the play’s subject or theme: Midsummer Night’s Dream, All’s Well That Ends Well, Measure for Measure, or As You Like It. The title of Shakespeare’s tragedies always name the central character: Romeo + Juliet, Julius, Hamlet, Othello, Lear, etc. Macbeth’s meaning, then, is tied up with its protagonist. How does a man go from recognizing that he can’t murder someone because of the consequences both on earth and in the afterlife to declaring that life is a “tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing”? Our analysis of the play’s worldview and meaning should help us answer that question.

Finally, the play’s style is both fast-paced and condensed. The scenes almost all end with poetic couplets. We see the effects of violence (blood, injuries, madness) but rarely the violence itself. You could stage every single scene at night. The opening scene mentions “fog and filthy air,” and the play’s portrayals of virtue are few and far between. Macbeth’s descent is unrelenting, and I for one am thankful the play is as short as it is. For a play this bleak to be as long as Hamlet would be unbearable.

INTERPRETATION: HISTORICAL/MYTHICAL/RHETORICAL

Historical Criticism: Scholars have favored this angle on the play over the past forty years. Pertinent facts include:

A. Shakespeare’s acting company was now patronized by King James and were known as The King’s Men

B. King James was Scottish and traced his royal lineage back to Banquo, one of Macbeth’s victims

C. The play alludes to the Gunpowder Plot, a failed attempt by Catholic revolutionaries to assassinate the King and parliament

D. King James was fascinated by witches, had written a book entitled Daemonologie, and claimed that he had been under attack by witches when he went to marry Queen Anne

E. Shakespeare changes some key facts from the historical chronicle he gets the story from: he makes Duncan a stronger king than the chronicle, shortens Macbeth’s reign to make it seem more disastrous, and adds details about the witches continued prophecies and Lady Macbeth’s sleepwalking death.

[Ed. note: it occurs to me here that the historical facts I include should themselves be subject to a larger Biblically-committed interest rather than a string of arbitrary facts from history…I’ll have to think more about this]

The modern historical, secular readings of the play focus on the arbitrary use of violence or to highlight how subversive characters like Lady Macbeth, the witches, and even Macbeth were for their period.

Mythical Criticism: This is the classic story of a man and woman with a conscience choosing to break bad. Lady Macbeth and Macbeth take alternate roots to get to the same place. Lady Macbeth affects evil from her first appearance but reveals in the final act that she’s never been able to quiet her conscience. Macbeth starts off more sensitive to his wrongdoing than his wife, but his tragedy is to gradually lose his ability to be moved as the play goes on. In the final act, he barely registers his wife’s death.

It’s easier for me to think of books and shows indebted to these characters (almost every gangster film and film noir owe a great deal to Macbeth) than it is to think of precursors. But the tragic form is recorded in the chronicles of the Hebrew kings. I’ve often thought that Macbeth is a David-like figure who makes the mistake David never makes: regicide. Thereafter, Macbeth turns into Saul, a witch-consulting mad man who ends up losing his kingdom.

Shakespeare’s other tragedies provide good comparisons too. Banquo’s ghost takes its place alongside the ghost of Hamlet’s father and the ghost of Julius Caesar in Shakespeare’s Phantasmatic Gallery. Banquo’s ghost is clearly the product of Macbeth’s guilty conscience, and its public haunting and Macbeth’s frightened response demonstrate that he’s not yet inured to the evil he’s committed.

Finally, the myth of inheritance runs deeply through this play. Only Macbeth and Macduff have wives. Only Banquo and Macduff have young children. Old Siward sees his son die. Macbeth laments Fleance’s escape but fails to do anything to have a son himself to give his throne to. All of this hearkens back to the themes of Shakespeare’s history plays and the Hebrew kings of the Old Testament: a concern with succession and revolution.

Rhetorical Criticism: The symbols of Macbeth come directly out of the first three chapters of Genesis: light, darkness, sun, moon, stars, rocks, plants, birds, creeping things, and men and women who fall. The reason this play resonates so much with audiences is that it tells in a condensed and concentrated form the temptation and fall of humanity through the temptation and fall of a particular man. This, of course, deserves to be in the Mythical Criticism category, now that I think about it. I guess what I’m drawing attention to here are the images and symbols we hear throughout the play.

Here’s a particularly rich passage. When Macbeth goes back to the witches in Act 4, he utters an incantation over them, demanding for more prophecy.

I conjure you by that which you profess
(Howe’er you come to know it), answer me.
Though you untie the winds and let them fight
Against the churches, though the yeasty waves
Confound and swallow navigation up,
Though bladed corn be lodged and trees blown down,
Though castles topple on their warders’ heads,
Though palaces and pyramids do slope
Their heads to their foundations, though the treasure
Of nature’s germens tumble all together
Even till destruction sicken, answer me
To what I ask you. (4.1.51-64)

The speech is meant to capture the witches’ connection to disordered nature. The wind and the waves are destructive. Crops and trees are spoiled. The things men make–church, palaces, pyramids–fall too. But the witches don’t necessarily have to do anything to nature to unleash its brokenness. Macbeth isn’t perfect before he falls. He is courageous and valiant, yes, but his dark desires lurk even in his first appearance. When Macbeth says he wants knowledge even if it means total destruction, he is simply repeating Adam and Eve’s sin in the garden. Of course, because he’s fallen, he interprets the prophecies poorly. The witches hand him equivocal language that makes Macbeth overconfident.

I know that unpacking these images ultimately bleeds into mythical criticism, but I don’t think that I had really noticed these images and symbols before.

WORLDVIEW: Does this play support a Christian worldview?

Sovereignty: God and the devil exist in this world. God is the source of good and the devil the source of evil. The physician exclaims, “God, God forgive us all” when he sees Lady Macbeth’s obvious guilt. The characters acknowledge that true power comes from a spiritual authority greater than man, and that the truly power

Hierarchy: Readers of the play have long puzzled over how much authority the witches have. If God is really in control of the world, then what kind of power do the witches possess? I think the play says that these witches are subordinated to men’s wills. They can’t kill the sailor who they want to torture, and they can’t simply take nuts from the salty woman who refuses to share. So the spiritual realm does influence the material realm, but at a deeper level than the witches.

There’s clearly a hierarchy in human affairs. The king is above the thanes and the thanes above the commoners. The relationship between man and wife is another hierarchy that gets troubled in the play. Lady Macbeth exerts considerable influence over Macbeth.

Ethics: The play begins with rebellion and war. Macdonwald turns on Duncan. The Norwegians, in concert with the Thane of Cawdor, attack Scotland. Macbeth fights on the right side. He defends his king like he should

Then Macbeth must deal with his own ethical dilemma. There appears to be no way for him to be king without Duncan’s death. No one will kill Duncan for him, but he knows that killing Duncan is wrong for at least two reasons: first, Duncan is his kinsman and king, and second, Duncan is his houseguest.

Sanctions: The play makes clear that murder will out. Blood begets blood. Lady Macbeth can talk tough, but her conscience testifies to the guilt she feels. Macbeth must perform more atrocities to cover his first crime. As he kills a king, then his friend, then a man’s wife and kids, Macbeth grows cold and monstrous. He is a tyrant. He makes Scotland a hell on earth.

He initially balks at killing Duncan because of the consequences. After death, Macbeth will get what’s coming to him. Even scarier, however, is that murder will out in this life. The rest of the play confirms that fear. When he announces that life is meaningless, he is not speaking for Shakespeare. Through Macbeth, Shakespeare shows that one effect of murder is the eventual inability to find meaning in anything. Macbeth has not only murdered sleep. He has murdered meaning for himself.

The future: Shakespeare wrote this play knowing that Banquo’s descendant would take the throne. Yet the play ends with Malcolm back on top. This won’t stand. Malcolm will not be on the throne for long. Fleance will return. Only then will there be continuity. According to Macbeth, tomorrow is just like the day before, and that’s a bad thing. This simply isn’t true. Ask the people of Scotland if regicide occasions continuity. It’s remarkable if succession happens once, much less the generation after generation succession recorded in Banquo’s line.