Macbeth: Act 3 Commentary

In this act, Macbeth begins to bear the consequences of his actions. Ironically, this occurs while his conscience is less pricked about his ethical decisions in the moment. Still his guilt–manifested through Banquo’s ghost–shows that he cannot hide from himself the sanctions he knows his actions deserve.

  1. Scene 1 opens with Banquo alone. He suspects that Macbeth gained the crown, but he does not resolve to confront his friend. While this complicates Banquo’s character in the play (in the source, Banquo participates with Macbeth in Duncan’s murder), it also lets us know that while Macbeth does not temporally feel judgment for the murder, his evil has not escaped others’ notice.
  2. Macbeth contrasts a “gospelled” response to injustice with a manly response as he talks with the men he wants to murder Banquo and Fleance. The “gospelled” response presumably means one that turns the other cheek and forgives enemies while Macbeth asserts the virtue of manly violence. The problem with this juxtaposition as articulated by critics is that it assumes Macbeth’s reading of Christianity is a good one and applies equally to himself, as though Macbeth thinks that the Christian king would be as merciful as he accuses these men of being. Contemporary biblical exegetes would not have seen a tension between a just king who punishes wrongdoing and a faithful king who pledges fealty to Christ. As king, Macbeth is in a position to administer sanctions of reward or punishment, something these men could easily throw back in Macbeth’s face. “If Banquo deserves punishment, why not judge him yourself? Why use subterfuge” Macbeth wouldn’t have a good answer for that because he’s not operating by any real ethical code.
  3. While Macbeth expressed no compunction about ordering Banquo’s death, he clearly feels guilty for Duncan’s murder. “Scorpions” afflict his mind, and he claims to suffer “terrible dreams.” Part of Macbeth’s powerful imagination is this ability to sense why what he’s done is wrong. An interesting note here is that when Macbeth express envy about Duncan’s rest–i.e. Duncan is dead now and no longer has the burdens of living–he dismisses the “heaven or…hell” that marked his pre-murder rhetoric. Is the true peace that Duncan is in his “grave“? This might confirm a reading of Macbeth as a newer Christian, although his naturalistic reading of death is not one advocated by pagans, who still believed in an afterworld.
  4. The murderers show that evil is hard to complete. “If it were done when ’tis done,” Macbeth said in Act 1 Scene 5, but the murderers’ bumbling of the Fleance assassination shows that’s a mighty big “if.” Such violence is never done.
  5. Macbeth’s reaction to Banquo’s ghost again brings up the question of whether or not he believes in the afterlife. He says, “The time has been, / That when the brains were out, the man would die, / And there an end. But now…” He goes on to speak of resurrection. While no one else sees the ghost, it’s clear that Banquo haunts Macbeth’s conscience. Banquo’s eternal resonance highlights the eternal punishment awaiting Macbeth for the crime he has committed.
  6. The witches appear troubled by Macbeth too. Scene 5 is strange. Macbeth doesn’t love the witches. He only uses them for his own gain, Hecate says. She promises judgment too. Thus, Macbeth is going to receive punishment not only from heaven, but from hell. Macbeth wanted to be “safely thus.” Hecate mocks “security.” If you’re meriting judgment from above and below, you really have no security.
  7. Lennox and the Lord discuss the odd sanctions in Scotland. If you’re pitied or loved by Macbeth, you die. This, of course, is ironic, and the two speakers know it to be so. Against Macbeth, they pit England’s “pious” king Edward and even God, the “Him above” who will “ratify” the efforts to take Macbeth down. This is the bookend to the Hecate scene.

Macbeth: Act 2 Commentary

In Act 2, Macbeth murders Duncan and begins to experience temporal blessings and punishments.

  1. Macbeth knows the afterworld awaits the dead. He tells Duncan to mark the bell that “summons thee to heaven or to hell.” This is a Christian world with eternal rewards and punishments. One question: why is this a question? I thought Duncan was a saint!
  2. Lady Macbeth does not see death as a gateway to heaven or hell. She sees the here and now, and as of Act 2 Scene 2, Duncan is dead. That’s all that matters. She tells Macbeth “the sleeping and the dead / are but as pictures.” Yet she couldn’t kill Duncan herself because he “resembled” her “father.” This is a portent of Lady Macbeth’s guilt.
  3. Macbeth says that “To know my deed ’twere best not know myself.” This is because his conscience bears witness to not only what he’s done, but what such a deed merits in eternity.
  4. Scene 3 is a parade of reactions to murder. The diversity of responses mirror the possibilities of rewards and punishment that temporally follow good or evil deeds. The Porter jests because he’s clueless. Macduff talks about the murder in religious terms by comparing Duncan’s body to “the Lord’s anointed temple” and “a new Gorgon.” Lady Macbeth faints. Macbeth flaunts righteous anger. Banquo is thoughtful. Malcolm and Donalbain don’t cry or speak so they appear guilty.
  5. In Scene 4, the Old Man gives an interesting reading of the entire act: “God’s benison go with you and with those / That would make good of bad and friends of foes.” The Old Man voices Joseph’s sentiment from Genesis that what man meant for evil may be meant for God. This could mean redemption and forgiveness: the short-circuiting of sanctions. Or it could mean that take real punishments and use them as a blessing.

Macbeth: Act 1 Commentary

The first act presents Macbeth with an ethical dilemma: how should he respond to the prophecy that he will be king? His decision hinges on his concept of sanctions.

  1. The witches begin the play by talking about “when the battle’s lost and won.” The witches are agents of confusion, and part of their confusion will be to substitute temporal blessings for eternal damnation. They make the foul appear fair and the fair appear foul.
  2. Scotland has rebels (Macdonwald and the Thane of Cawdor) and attackers (Norway). While on the surface, the two sides appear to be equal, Macbeth and his Scottish comrades ultimately prevail. Macbeth has heaps of praise lavished on him; he is “valiant,” “worthy,” and “noble.” We’ve now heard his name in each of the first two scenes without seeing him.
  3. Macbeth’s first line echoes the witches’ statement in the first scene: “So foul and fair a day I have not seen.”
  4. The witches prophesy that Macbeth will be the Thane of Cawdor and king but that Banquo’s children shall be kings. In an aside, Macbeth grapples with whether or not this “supernatural soliciting” is good or bad. On the one hand, it promises good things. On the other hand, it tempts Macbeth to do something evil. Macbeth does not overtly mention killing Duncan, but he mentions a “horrid image” and “murder.” Macbeth already feels guilt for something he hasn’t done.
  5. The Thane of Cawdor repents of his sin before his execution. While his life was lived in deception, his death is marked by open confession.
  6. Macbeth’s wish that his “eye” would “wink at the hand” is a perversion of Christ’s Sermon on the Mount admonition that, in giving, “do not let your left hand know what your right hand is doing.” Macbeth wants to hide his own dark desires from himself.
  7. Lady Macbeth articulates the delusion of evil: erasing its curse. “Thy letters have transported me beyond / This ignorant present, and I feel now / The future in an instant.” If this were really true, Lady Macbeth would not go through with their plan. She too has hidden the reality of her desires from herself.
  8. Macbeth’s soliloquy in scene 7 contemplates two judgments: one on earth and one in the life to come. Macbeth says that if he could handle earthly judgment, he would risk eternal judgment. However, he knows that earthly judgment is no joke. Duncan is saintly, and Macbeth fears what will happen when his own “blood instructions…return / to plague th’inventor.” If he decides not to kill Duncan, he does so because the ministers of eternal judgment will sanction his deeds in this world.
  9. Lady Macbeth chooses to imagine the blessings their murder will occasion. Macbeth has seen the punishment. Lady Macbeth’s rhetoric prevails.

Macbeth: A Covenantal Outline

I begin writing on Macbeth today, the play I have connected with the covenantal concept of Sanctions. It could really be a play about ethics too, but I think the play’s action is more about the consequences for Macbeth’s murder of Duncan rather than the ethical decision itself.

PLOT

  1. Macbeth, Scotland’s greatest warrior, receives a prophecy from three witches that he will become king.
  2. With his wife’s help, Macbeth murders the Scottish king Duncan and assumes the throne.
  3. Macbeth becomes a tyrant, killing anyone he deems a threat to his power including his friend Banquo and the family of his rival Macduff.
  4. While the witches give Macbeth ambiguous prophecies concerning his future, Duncan’s son Malcolm builds an army of Scottish expatriates and English soldiers to challenge Macbeth.
  5. Lady Macbeth commits suicide out of guilt, and Macbeth comes to see the world as meaningless, falling in battle to Macduff. As the play ends, Malcolm assumes the throne.
Continue reading “Macbeth: A Covenantal Outline”

The Bible as Literature or Literature as The Bible

The following is an abstract for a paper I’m working on. It’s at the heart of my covenantal literature project.

Literary scholars seeking to integrate faith and literature have faced a perpetual problem: an inability to agree on the how the Bible and literature are connected.  On the surface, the ubiquitous “Bible as Literature” course constitutes one solution. In practice, however, the course more frequently offers a more secularized Bible rather than a more faithful literature. This is because the definition of “literature” scholars bring to the course is either spiritually neutral or overtly secular. The irony is that literature’s definition is far from stable. In his landmark Anatomy of Criticism (1957), Northrop Frye wrote, “We have no real standards to distinguish a verbal structure that is literary from one that is not.” Postmodern literary theory magnified an existing dilemma. Little wonder, then, that integrating faith and literature is difficult. We can’t agree what it is we are supposed to integrate faith with.

In this paper, I argue that rather than defining literature first and bringing that definition to the Bible, we should take the highly symbolic and stylistically diverse writing in scripture as a more faithful and firm basis for a definition of literature. We need not cordon off literary with words like “fictive” or “make believe.” Rather, we see literature as a kind of writing that is not primarily discursive and analytical, but symbolic and artistic. This allows us to see Christ “a true myth,” according to C.S. Lewis, “a myth working on us the same way as the others, but with this tremendous difference that it really happened.”

Here is where the integration of faith and literature begins.

Hamlet: Two Final Contexts

In this post, I complete the work begun here. These contextual details involve sanctions and succession.

Classical vs. Christian Views of the Afterlife: When Hamlet pictures an actual example of revenge, his image is classical. In his dialogue with the player king, Hamlet remembers Pyrrhus, the son of Achilles, who avenges his father’s death by killing Priam. This is what the classical world would think of as proper vengeance: without remorse and striking with “malicious sport.” This would be a fitting end for Claudius, if not Priam. The problem is that the classical world could validate such action because there were no excessive eternal consequences for injustice. The Greeks believed that the positive sense of immortality only came through earthly glory.: one’s name living in fame after one’s death The best that a hero can hope for in the afterworld is existing as a shade, something that even the greatest of warriors experiences as a fate far worse than being a slave on earth. The reward for a life well-lived is not eternal bliss. It is earthly glory.

Christianity, on the other hand, views the afterlife as the ultimate realm of judgment. Hamlet is thinking of this in his first soliloquy. He can’t commit suicide because the “Everlasting” has “fix’d His canon ‘gainst self-slaughter.” He calls the afterlife “the undiscovered country” in his “To be or not to be” soliloquy. He considers “readiness” all in Act 5 because he recognizes the doctrine of eternal providence. This eternal vista is a much broader one than that offered by the classical world. The stakes for action are higher.

Perhaps most indicative of this clash is Hamlet’s reasoning in not killing Claudius in Act 3. He has more to consider than Claudius’s earthly punishment. Hamlet does not want Claudius to be materially damned but eternally blessed. He holds back his sword.

Pyrrhus would not have seen this distinction.

The Source Text: The story of Hamlet originates in a 12th Century Danish chronicle by Saxo Grammaticus and is indebted to even older pagan sagas about Danish kings. Amleth, the prince of Denmark, avenges his father’s death by first feigning madness, avoiding his uncle’s traps, then setting the palace on fire and killing his uncle. Amleth goes on to rule Denmark successfully. The story is pagan and brutal and further highlights many elements of Shakespeare’s Christian adaptation.

Tess of the D’urbervilles: A Covenantal Plot

Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the D’urbervilles displays the doubt and religious skepticism of the late Victorian period. I’m teaching it right now. It is more overt in its engagement with religion than Pride and Prejudice and Great Expectations and more problematic.

Here’s an outline of the plot using the covenant model.

  1. Tess Durbeyfield, a beautiful country girl, appears fated for trouble beyond her deserving. She is assaulted by her supposed relative Alec D’urberville and bears a child that dies. Her husband abandons her when he discovers her past. Left alone and fearing for her family, Tess returns to her assaulter, whom she murders when her husband returns. The narrator stresses in the book’s final paragraph, “‘Justice’ was done, and the President of the Immortals, in Æschylean phrase, had ended his sport with Tess.”
  2. The very people who should defend Tess work against her. Her parents, John and Joan, send her into the pit of the lion then dismiss her when she returns home besmirched. Alec, her supposed relative,
  3. Tess’s purity is at the heart of the book: should Angel judge her for what Alec did to her? Society does. The narrator remains skeptical about God existing or caring about Tess if he did. Angel has a change of heart regarding Tess’s purity.
  4. Hardy wants to understand the apparent incommensurability of sin and punishment, so he imposes heavy penalties on his characters. While Alec and Tess die, Angel ends the novel a withered shell of his former self. Sin alone cannot explain these characters’ fates.
  5. The novel ends with Angel potentially marrying Tess’s younger sister, Liza-Lu. Angel doesn’t believe in the afterlife. According to Angel, the pair will not reunite in eternity.

Hamlet: Contextual Questions

I continue to follow up my commentary and exploration of symbols with research into Hamlet‘s contexts. Here are the questions I am attempting to answer.

Transcendence: Does Roman Catholic or Protestant theology determine how you read the play?

Hierarchy: What were the key debates in political theory at the time about how to handle an unjust king or tyrant? Relatedly, how did one determine which kings were tyrants?

Ethics: What kind of action did classical and Christian models of heroism recommend to people in Hamlet’s situation?

Sanctions: Correspondingly, what were the benefits or disadvantages that accompanied classical and Christian heroism?

Succession: How does Shakespeare alter the source from which he takes the play’s central plot?

My template for contextual questions requires me to investigate theology/religion, politics, more significant historical worldviews, and sources.

Hamlet: Additional Contexts

I am currently reading through Paul Cantor’s short book on Hamlet and finding it illuminating on the subject of ethics/sanctions.

Cantor argues that the tension in the play is not primarily between Catholic and Protestant ethics but between Classical and Christian ethics. We can sum up the difference by saying the former encourages revenge while the latter prohibits it.

These contrasting worldviews similarly have contrasting sanctions. For the classical world, the purview is this world. For Christianity, the purview is eternity.

Hamlet, Cantor argues, stands poised between these two worlds, making him the true Renaissance man, the representative of an era that attempted to revive the classical world in a Christian society. His father’s world was classical and supported military strength and action. Christianity favors moral strength and forgiveness. Hamlet is intelligent enough to see the attractive qualities of both.

Cantor is a Hegelian and believes that tragedy contrasts two good qualities: classical heroism and Christian heroism. I want to make this same argument about the potentially competitive offices of Prophet, Priest, and King.