A thought experiment: let’s say that the audience of Shakespeare’s Macbeth could hear none of the play’s words. All they could do to infer the plot is see what happened on stage. What kind of play would they see?
- The play opens with a corrupt world presided over by the witches. Any hint that nature is benevolent or the world is good comes from dialogue, not from the play’s performance.
- Macbeth himself only fights in the play’s final two scenes. We do not see the murder of Duncan, only its aftermath, and Macbeth’s other murders are conducted by proxy. Only when he actually fights Malcolm’s army do we see Macbeth, the man labeled Bellona’s bridegroom in the opening scene. We don’t actually see his warrior bona fides or proof that his nature is too full of the milk of human kindness. Both are attested to by others rather than demonstrated on stage.
- For a play that talks about blood and violence, it refuses to show a murder itself until midway through the play when the cutthroats murder Banquo.
- We fail to see overt signs of grace from the play’s two saintly rulers: Duncan and Edward. Duncan’s meekness happens offstage. Without dialogue, we wouldn’t know Edward exists.
- The play ends with Malcolm, an ancillary figure in Act 1 Scene 2, moving to center stage in Act 5 Scene 8.
Here’s the point. If the play contrasts Macbeth’s pagan heroics with his Christian morality, then the action of the play ends with him most in the throes of the heroic model. This is his nadir. The play refuses to directly show us his noble heroism in battle.
I bring this up because I’ve continued to think about Paul Cantor’s argument that the play’s tragic action comes from a clash between pagan and Christian heroism.
The problem is two-fold. First, that action itself does not bear this clash out. It is an intensely psychological drama for Macbeth that only moves toward staged action once his fate has been sealed, or, more precisely, as the seal of that fate. Second, the play’s audience certainly was not recently gospelled, so their interpretation of the tragedy would not have mirrored the conflict Cantor finds in the play. They had long been Christians. Their tension was one between Catholicism or Protestantism, two theologies where the central dilemma is the relationship between grace and nature.
Finally, looking at the action alone shows Macbeth bringing about his own judgment by seeking more and more overt evil. We only see the results of his murder of Duncan. That brings him the crown. We see him solicit Banquo’s murder and yield the play’s high point: Banquo’s ghost, which only Macbeth and the audience can see. Instead of repenting, Macbeth seeks out the witches, the dark figures who sought him out in Act 1. After Macbeth orders Macduff’s family murdered, he remains cloistered in his castle while Malcolm’s army attacks.
Macbeth has had time to repent. The tragedy is that he rejects those opportunities and dies at the hand of his counterpart, Macduff.
Experiments in Criticism 