Reading Paul Cantor’s article “‘A Soldier and Afeard’: Macbeth and the Gospelling of Scotland” has provoked a series of questions about the play’s theme.
Cantor argues that the play represents a clash between pagan and Christian values. Macbeth’s dilemma, in short, is that he is a pagan warrior who has been gospelled by Christianity just enough to develop a bad conscience. The play’s drama, Cantor argues, comes from the way Shakespeare sharply contrasts Macbeth’s manly pagan violence and his meek Christian conscience.
A couple of things bothered me about his argument.
- The evidence Cantor uses for Macbeth’s “compassionate religion” is Lady Macbeth’s statement: “I fear thy nature; / It is too full o’ the milk of human kindness.” This is not the Christian view of human nature! If this is the way Lady Macbeth sees her husband, it’s not because he’s become a Christian. In general, the play’s view of nature is benevolent, and this point deserves greater deliberation.
- Cantor never mentions sin, despite the fact that Duncan, the saintly king, is the one character in the play who confesses: “The sin of my ingratitude even now / Was heavy on me,” he tells Macbeth. That is, Cantor reads Macbeth’s “nature” as somehow Christianized but doesn’t deliberate on the play’s view of “sin,” which would have been one of the key theological terms introduced by Macbeth’s proselytization.
- Cantor’s view of Christianity as “otherworldly” is contradictory. He reads the English as representative of the “gospelling” process of Christianity in Scotland, seeing as how they are led by the “saintly” King Edward. Yet this same English army helps Malcolm take Scotland back from England, actions which Cantor elsewhere calls the hallmark of pagan cultures. Which is England: pagan or Christian?
- Cantor fails to account for the play’s multiple uses of “grace.” The tension between “nature” and “grace” was one frequently explored in medieval and Renaissance literature, and given the frequency with which “nature” and “grace” are both used in the play, they deserve more examination together.
I am pursuing a theme of judgment or sanctions in the play. The play’s power comes from merging the general judgement of the fall with the particular judgment on Macbeth because of his fall.
This is the reason I’m interested in how the play discusses grace, nature, and redemption. I think that the play deliberately presents elements of unfallen nature: that is, nature before Adam and Eve sinned. This is juxtaposed with a disordered world that clearly bears the mark of their sin. Characters talk as though nature is unfallen when something is clearly rotten in the state of Scotland. This global theme is repeated at the level of Macbeth’s character: an innocent man who chooses to sin and thus invites judgment. He both is a sinner before he murders Duncan (i.e. he’s human and born with a corrupted nature), and his sin after Duncan’s death merits temporal and eternal retribution.
I will continue to work on this.
Experiments in Criticism 