Lady Macbeth acknowledges that her husband has ambition. The question is: does he have the willingness to act on that desire?
[Y]et do I fear thy nature;
It is too full o’ the milk of human kindness
To catch the nearest way: thou wouldst be great;
Art not without ambition, but without
The illness should attend it…
Macbeth wonders about this too. The only thing spurring him to act in the face of awful consequences is his ambition.
I have no spur
To prick the sides of my intent, but only
Vaulting ambition, which o’erleaps itself
And falls on the other…
This image is a weird one. Macbeth’s desire is his horse. He goads it into action with ambition. He knows such an action is self-defeating. It will fall on the other side of what it just jumped over.
A quotation from Machiavelli’s Discourses on Livy glosses this reading.
Nature has created men so that they desire everything, but are unable to attain it; desire being thus always greater than their faculty of acquiring, discontent with what they have and dissatisfaction with themselves result from it.
This is a dangerous misreading of nature. It is true that human beings are creatures, as opposed to creators. We are finite and limited. The desire Machiavelli talks about here, however, is not natural. It is a distortion of nature. It is the hallmark of sin and a repetition of the original sin: Adam and Eve’s desire to be god.
Over the next few posts, I will develop a reading of Macbeth that shows its uncanny tragic power comes from the way Macbeth and Lady Macbeth repeat the original sin of Genesis 3 and receive in recompense the broken world of Genesis 4 and beyond.
Experiments in Criticism 