Experiments in Criticism

Dr. Gary North has written a book called The Biblical Structure of History. This work will inform the Western Civ literature curriculum I’m building. He writes:

Biblical history is structured in terms of this pattern: the transition from grace to wrath, followed by the transition from wrath to grace. My book offers this thesis: the transition from wrath to grace applies to all history, not just Bible history.

The Biblical Structure of History

This insight has a clear analogue in literature.

In literature, the plot that moves from grace to wrath is called TRAGEDY.

The plot that moves from wrath to grace is called COMEDY.

Pagan literature prizes TRAGEDY. Christian literature prizes COMEDY.

An application: Macbeth moves from GRACE to WRATH, the grace extended to Macbeth from Duncan to the wrath poured out on Macbeth by Malcolm and Macduff.

There’s so much more to say here. Obviously tragedy does not disappear in a Christian culture. It is, however, transformed. It is temporary. The tragedy of the cross leads to the comedy of the resurrection. The tragedy of the fall leads to the comedy of redemption.

I’ll be hard at work pursuing the implications of this insight…

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?

1. 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.
2. 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.
3. 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.
4. 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.
5. 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.

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.

1. 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.
2. 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.
3. 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?
4. 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.

“Fair is foul, and foul is fair.” — we hear the witches say this in the first scene of Macbeth, and the moral confusion it describes dominates the play. Another word for “fair” is “good,” and another word for “fair” is “evil” or “ill,” so the witches are announcing their temptation strategy: get Macbeth to confuse good and evil.

This was, of course, the sin that Adam and Eve committed. They too fell to a temptation that promised god-like power, the ability to know good and evil by committing evil. The consequences were deadly. I think that one explanation for the tragic power of Macbeth is the way it repeats Adam and Eve’s sin through Macbeth and Lady Macbeth’s moral failings and the consequences of that sin.

In the first part of my argument, I will survey how the seven days of creation show up in the play in a distorted way, as through each good act of creation is being seen in a funhouse mirror.

The void and formless earth is echoed in the “hurlyburly” and “fog and filthy air” of Act 1 Scene 1.

Light and darkness, the products of creation’s first day, are continually conflated. In Act 2, for instance, Ross tells the Old Man, “[B]y the clock, ’tis day, / And yet dark night strangles the travelling lamp.”

Lady Macbeth seeks to obscure the heavenly expanse created on Day 2:

Come, thick night,
And pall thee in the dunnest smoke of hell,
That my keen knife see not the wound it makes,
Nor heaven peep through the blanket of the dark…

The connection between the earth and waters from Day 3 gets hinted at in Banquo’s line to Macbeth, “The earth hath bubbles, as the water has,” and Banquo too hints at that same day’s seeds and vegetation when he asks if the witches’ knowledge extends to “the seeds of time, / And say which grain will grow and which will not.”

The sun, moon, and stars appear throughout the play but bring no comfort. Macbeth requests, “Stars, hide your fires” in Act 1. Fleance testifies, “The moon is down” in Act 2. Macbeth declares, “I gin to be aweary of the sun” in Act 5.

The birds from Day 5 range from the “the obscure bird” which “Clamour’d the livelong night” to “the crow” which “Makes wing to the rooky wood” bringing with it night and Duncan’s death. The bird that makes its “procreant cradle” in Macbeth’s castle echoes the command for the birds of the air and fish of the sea to be fruitful and multiply, albeit in a castle about to be marked by murder.

We encounter a distorted version of humanity’s creation on Day 6 when Lady Macbeth requests that supernatural spirits “unsex me here.” The play’s continual emphasis on what it means to be a man (“I dare do all that may become a man” or “in the catalogue ye go for men”) is contrasted with the creation emphasis on men and women being made in God’s image. The closest we get to this more sanctified vision of humanity comes only after Duncan dies and Macduff calls the king, “The Lord’s anointed temple.”

Finally, the day of rest on creation’s seventh day gets a distorted representation in Lady Macbeth’s sleepwalking as well as the general fear the play’s characters have of sleep and rest. “A great perturbation in nature,” the doctor declares, “to receive at once the benefit of sleep, and do the effects of watching.”

Banquo asks the “merciful powers” to “Restrain in me the cursed thoughts that nature Gives way to in repose!” The entire play records a fallen world, one already under the curse of sin. Macbeth and Lady Macbeth are surrounded by a created order that should point them to God. Instead, they confusedly read fair as foul and foul as fair. When they give into temptation, like Adam and Eve, they too reap the consequences.

I’ll examine those consequences more fully in my next post.

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.

In the play’s final act, Macbeth receives the emotional and physical recompense for his crimes. Lady Macbeth signals her deep guilt over Duncan’s murder. Her suicide prompts Macbeth’s most famous soliloquy, a distillation of nihilistic despair. His fight against Macduff ends the play where it began: a rebel’s head paraded on a spear.

1. Lady Macbeth’s sleepwalking indicates that her trajectory is the opposite of her husband’s. She starts the play unworried about punishment. Now, she says, “What’s done cannot be undone.” The blood on her hands will not come off. Macbeth, on the other hand, began the play fearful of the moral consequences for his crime. This act shows him without a conscience, a man in a moral coma.
2. The doctor indicates that the problem afflicting Lady Macbeth demands a “divine” more “than the physician.” The ultimate judge of Lady Macbeth and Macbeth will be God, not man.
3. The second scene features Menteith and Caithness’s political analysis. How desperate is Macbeth’s position, they wonder, when his own people and his own person judge him? His people don’t follow because of love, and Macbeth himself knows that he’s a murderer so that he “recoils” at himself.
4. We finally see Macbeth in scene three. In many ways, this final act mirrors the first act. In that act, the witches spoke of Macbeth followed by the court speaking of Macbeth’s valiant fury. Then we finally saw Macbeth in the third scene. Everything Lady Macbeth said in scene one and that Menteith and Caithness reported in scene two is confirmed. Macbeth is agitated. He wants Lady Macbeth’s illness cured as easily as one washes one’s hands.
5. Macduff mentions “just censures” in scene four. This is the subject of Act 5: true judgement.
6. Macbeth’s reaction to Lady Macbeth’s death is famous because it sums up his hopelessness. He relies on three different metaphors: a creeping creature, a candle, and an actor. Macbeth has been obsessed with “tomorrow” since the first act where he worried what kind of judgment Duncan’s murder would merit. Now Macbeth fears it doesn’t matter. He’s not worried about eternity. He’s worried about the repetition of a meaningless tomorrow. He’s taken the wrong message from his wife’s death. The problem isn’t that life is meaningless. The problem is that life is meaningful. Actions have consequences. Sin requires judgment.
7. Macbeth suffers the same fate as Macdonwald. Macduff is now Macbeth. The usurper’s cursed head as has been crushed.
8. Malcolm invokes the “grace of grace” in the finale. This is an important theological concept: that all are guilty and require punishment. The problem is that we know Malcolm can’t stay king for long. Fleance and his line are going to have to take over somehow. The nation will continue to suffer upheaval until that prophecy is fulfilled.

The consequences for Macbeth’s crimes are put in place here. The witches’ ambiguous prophecies make him confident that he won’t be punished. The assembled warriors in England show that he will.

1. The witches identify Macbeth as “something wicked.” How evil are you when the witches discern your wickedness?
2. Eternal punishment weighs on Macbeth’s mind. He threatens the witches with an “eternal curse“, which seems odd seeing as how they are already damned by their moral turpitude. He remarks that Banquo’s lineage is stretched out “to th’ crack of doom.” He knows that true safety and security are eternal, not temporal. He has the latter. He wants the former but knows its opposite awaits him.
3. Lady Macduff and her son discuss the proper punishment for traitors. The mom says that traitors are hanged. The boy speculates that this is foolishness. Since there are more liars than honest people, the liars should punish the honest. The implication is that if the world truly is as dark as so many characters say it is (in the next scene, Ross will compare Scotland with hell), then what is restraining evil? Why isn’t the world an even worse place?
4. Macduff and Malcolm continue this discussion in another vein. Malcolm inquires into Macduff’s loyalty then tries to draw Macduff out by feigning his own depravity. What does it say about Scotland if its savior is worth than its tormenter?
5. Macduff blames himself for his family’s death, and part of that blame is acknowledging that his wife and children were punished for something he did. They were killed “not for their own demerits, but for mine.” Macduff also questions why “heaven” did not “take their part.” He’s asking questions about sanctions. If he sinned, why wasn’t he punished? If Macbeth is the sinner, why is Scotland getting punished? The similarity is that just as Macbeth represents the nation as its king, so too does Macduff represent his family as its head. The nation suffers because its head sins, just as Macduff’s family suffers because of the father’s treachery.