Macbeth – A. J. Drake's Shakespeare Site

Macbeth begins not by introducing us to the main characters, Macbeth and Lady Macbeth, but to the three witches or “weird sisters” who will tempt this ordinarily loyal thane of Scotland’s King Duncan. These strange women’s sense of expectation is palpable as they establish the when and where of the meeting they already know is coming with the Thane of Glamis and his fellow soldier Banquo.

The witches’ concluding chant in this scene is, “Fair is foul, and foul is fair, / Hover through the fog and filthy air” (918, 1.1.11-12). They pray, then, for a world turned upside down, and in place of groundedness and certainty, a “hovering” through the dark and stormy elements. As Hecate will later say, much of human life is about satisfying ambition but also about finding security, achieving the sure thing. With these two baits, they will hook Macbeth and reel him in.

In his lectures on Shakespeare, Coleridge says that the value of supernaturalism in Macbeth is to set an excited tone right away and prepare us for Macbeth’s killing of Duncan in Act 2. [1] But as Coleridge knows, the supernatural is more than a plot device: the insight of the witches is authentic. These characters are more than a metaphor for states of mind or human tendencies such as ambition. Evil is a power in Shakespeare’s world, and the man for whom the play was written, King James I, himself wrote on the subject of daemonology.

Indeed, the Norton editors remind us that the witches are never apprehended or punished once Macbeth is dead and Malcolm inherits the throne, and they refer to the play’s “nebulous infection, a bleeding of the demonic into the secular and the secular into the demonic.” [2]

Act 1, Scene 2 (918-19, an exhausted messenger reports to the Scottish king Duncan with the details of a battle against rebels; Macbeth and Banquo figure prominently in his account; Duncan sentences the rebellious thane of Cawdor to death, and dispatches messengers to inform Macbeth, thane of Glamis, that the title now belongs to him.)

Macbeth is already a hero when the play begins. Much of what is narrated in Scene 2 concerns his bravery during the battles against the rebels Macdonald, Cawdor, as well as the King of Norway. His martial valor exceeds that of everyone else in the field, and there’s an exuberant quality to his actions in the service of King Duncan:

Macbeth, as reported by a fellow soldier, could not have been braver: he, “Disdaining fortune with his brandished steel, / Which smoked with bloody execution, / Like valor’s minion carved out his passage / Till he faced the slave [Macdonald] …” (918, 2.17-20), killed the rebel, and fixed his head at the top of the Scottish battlements. So the image of the bold and loyal warrior is set, and Macbeth will be able to use this well-earned image to his advantage against Duncan, just as the former Thane of Cawdor did.

Act 1, Scene 3 (919-23, the three witches hail Macbeth as “Thane of Glamis,” “Thane of Cawdor,” and finally as “king hereafter”; Banquo, they declare, will sire kings, but never be one himself; after the witches vanish, Ross and Angus report to Macbeth that he is now Thane of Cawdor; Macbeth recoils at the unwholesome thoughts swirling within him on the prospect of becoming king, and references chance; he seems distracted, but suggests that he and Banquo should talk soon.)

The classical Fates were Clotho the spinner, Atropos the “unturning” cutter, Lachesis the “allotter” or measurer, daughters all of Zeus and Themis. [3] As the ancients saw it, the Fates or Moirai possessed a power over events independent even of the gods, who could not control them. This conception of an externally imposed fate is impersonal and irrational; there’s no ultimate meaning to it.

The witches in Macbeth are in a different category: they don’t possess deterministic power over mortals. The witches claim to know (and really seem to know) that Macbeth will first be Cawdor and then king, while Banquo will father many kings. But they don’t claim the direct power to alter events. This is clear from the way one witch responds to an insult: she says that she will plague the insulter’s husband, but can’t stop his ship from reaching port: “Though his barque cannot be lost, / Yet it shall be tempest-tossed” (828, 3.23-24).

The witches, then, do not set a person’s ultimate fate—they have power to suggest and “lead on,” and the power to generate circumstances, but not the ultimate power to kill.

Neither do they force Macbeth to do what he subsequently does. He may seem almost hypnotized by the witches, but hypnotism only works because people secretly want to do the things they are supposedly commanded to do. [4] That sounds like the correct way to describe the relationship between Macbeth and the witches. They can set forth a vision, but they can’t make Macbeth’s decisions for him. They don’t diminish his “free will” to kill or not to kill.

Perhaps what the witches know most intimately is Macbeth’s character. Their meeting with him isn’t an anonymous call or an accident; they know who he is and prepare to meet him at the end of the “hurly-burly,” the battle. (920, 1.1.3) They have given Macbeth the apparent certainty that he is to become king, and he will do exactly as he subsequently does. Perhaps the most important thing the witches know is that the measure of ambition in their man outweighs his conscience. He himself evidently does not know that—at least not yet.

What exactly do these “weird sisters” tell Macbeth and Banquo? They “hail” Macbeth as “Thane of Glamis” (which he is), “Thane of Cawdor,” and finally “king hereafter” (920, 1.3.951). Banquo notes that this strange hailing has had a profound effect on his fellow soldier, so that “he seems rapt withal” (921, 1.3.58).

Banquo wonders why the witches have not yet said a word to him, and, professing to them that by no means will he “beg nor fear / Your favors nor your hate” (921, 1.3.61-62), still he wants to know the truth about his own future. This is not, perhaps, an entirely convincing boast on Banquo’s part: if he doesn’t care about the future, why is he asking about it at all? It seems that this line of inquiry is a bit slippery of Banquo—at the least, he is as subject to that double-edged human feeling, curiosity, as anyone else.

For Banquo, then, the witches have a less dramatic message than the one they gave Macbeth, but still a startling one: “Thou shalt get kings, though thou be none” (921, 1.3.68). It will soon become apparent that the prophecies served up to the two friends will tear them and Scotland apart, for both men are bound to find the dynastic conflict thereby established unsustainable.

Macbeth’s mind first turns to the question of provenance: where, from whence, he demands of the witches, does this information come? And just like that, the sisters vanish into the air. Evidently, at least for the present, they have no intention of revealing their sources. But new information soon comes Macbeth and Banquo’s way, in the form of Ross, who arrives with the news that Macbeth is now, indeed, to be hailed at Thane of Cawdor since that is Duncan’s will.

Banquo takes Macbeth aside and makes a worrisome statement to him: “oftentimes to win us to our harm, / The instruments of darkness tell us truths, / Win us with honest trifles, to betray’s / In deepest consequence” (922, 1.3.125-28). Banquo’s deeply Medieval Christian mind puts moral considerations first, which will save him from becoming a second Macbeth: he will never trust the source of a prophecy which would seem to deliver a fate out of alignment with honest effort and achievement.

When Banquo turns to speak to Ross, Macbeth lets us in on his own first reflections: “This supernatural soliciting / Cannot be ill, cannot be good” (922, 1.3.132-33). For him, the witches’ hailings and attached promises set up a moral antinomy of sorts: how can they be either good or ill? How both?

It’s clear that the prophecies are already having a profound and unsettling effect on Macbeth. He admits that his thoughts have turned to “murder,” and even though that murder is “yet … but fantastical” (922, 1.3.141) or imaginary, it disturbs him greatly that he has turned so intuitively and immediately to such horrible imaginings. How can that be good?

Still, how can being Thane of Cawdor, and then king of Scotland, be bad? Banquo might be able to answer this question, but Macbeth’s latent ambition is stronger than Banquo’s, and he cannot presently answer it. The new Thane of Cawdor finds that this strange experience “Shakes so my single state of man / That function is smothered in surmise, / And nothing is but what is not” (922, 1.3.142-44). As the Norton footnote 1 for pg. 922 suggests, this marks the point at which Macbeth’s internal integrity splits in two: he is now both the same honorable man, and a likely traitor.

All that Macbeth had formerly taken for granted is now in play, and murderous thoughts coexist uneasily with his hope that “If chance will have me king, why, chance may crown me / Without my stir” (923, 1.3.146-47). For the time being, Macbeth says only to Banquo that both of them should reflect upon what has just happened, and then speak freely to each other.

Act 1, Scene 4 (923-24, sentence has been passed on the rebel Cawdor; when Macbeth and Banquo arrive, Duncan thanks them effusively; the King promises blessings to Macbeth and Banquo, but also declares his son Malcolm heir, and says he means to visit Macbeth at Inverness; Macbeth is unsettled by Duncan’s announcement since now, if he would be king, he will need to act rather than rely on fate; Macbeth leaves to prepare his castle for Duncan’s stay.)

Duncan is still shocked by the treachery of the now executed Thane of Cawdor, saying, “There’s no art / To find the mind’s construction in the face. / He was a gentleman on whom I built / An absolute trust” (923, 1.4.11-14). The reverend old king [5] is apparently not in possession of the proto-Machiavellian dictum that one should not be quick to trust others since people are seldom inwardly what they appear to be outwardly. [6]

The King makes Malcolm Prince of Cumberland and heir to the throne, which galls Macbeth, who apparently thought the crown might come to him as decently as the honors he has won up to this point: Malcolm’s preeminence, Macbeth realizes, is “a step / On which I must fall down or else o’erleap, / For in my way it lies” (924, 4.48-50), and it reinforces the division within him that was already begun by the end of the third scene: now he says, “Stars, hide your fires, / Let not light see my black and deep desires …” (924, 1.4.50-51).

Act 1, Scene 5 (924-26, Lady Macbeth reads Macbeth’s letter about his encounter with the witches; she fears that her husband is too kind-hearted to kill for a crown; a messenger informs Lady Macbeth that the King is on his way to Inverness, and she prays to whatever spirits “tend on mortal thoughts,” asking them to “unsex” her and fill her with the cruel spirit required for the ruthless work at hand; when Macbeth arrives, Lady Macbeth tells him she will take charge: he should play the innocent host.)

Lady Macbeth reads Macbeth’s letter detailing his meeting with the weird sisters, and in reading this communication, her intuition and determination are on full display: better even than the witches, she is thoroughly familiar not just with her husband’s until recently latent ambitiousness, but also with the fissures in his character: he would have the ill-got gains that he has been promised, but not act dishonorably to get them.

Macbeth would enjoy the fruits of wickedness, but not practice that wickedness to gather the fruit in the first place. Macbeth, that is, has always been a walking contradiction, an embodied antinomy of a man. He is, says his Lady, “”too full o’th’ milk of human kindness / To catch the nearest way” (925, 1.5.15-16). That is, Macbeth does not possess the unholy set of vices that need to be aligned if a person is to be effectively, successfully bad.

But no matter—Lady Macbeth is confident in her ability to deal with this problem, as she sees it. Like a political succubus, [7] she will work intimately with her husband to take away his failings and transform him into the perfectly ruthless man she believes he can be: addressing the absent Macbeth, she says “Hie thee hither, / That I may pour my spirits in thine ear / And chastise with the valor of my tongue / All that impedes thee from the golden round …” (925, 1.5.23-26).

She will make sure he’s “man enough” to strike home and take what “fate and metaphysical aid” (925, 1.5.27) appear to have told him is his.

From the very outset, Lady Macbeth calls upon apparently infernal powers for assistance, and prays that she may be stripped of the supposed faults inherent to her gender: “Come, you spirits / That tend on mortal thoughts, unsex me here, / And fill me from the crown to the toe top-full / Of direst cruelty!” (925, 1.5.38-41)

In what may be the most chilling speech in all of Shakespeare, Lady Macbeth shows us that she, the woman whom Macbeth calls his “dear- / est partner of greatness” (925, 1.5.9-10), is exhilarated at the news of the great change to come, and calls on the heavens to make her as steely and strong as a male warrior, stopping up all portals of sentiment and leaving room and capacity only for necessary action. (925, 1.5.36-52)

Lady Macbeth clearly has no doubt that the witches’ prophecy will come true and that it will require a violent assist from her husband, but her role is that of the cunning woman, the plotter and seducer. It’s worth noting that this essentially equal partner of Macbeth cannot have turned overnight into the passionate devotee of such rough action as she now plans: this is who she is, but also, evidently, who she has been all along. Perhaps that ought to make us reflect on how we view the character traits of Macbeth himself.

Even those who are experiencing Macbeth for the first time might also consider that going forward, Lady Macbeth’s prospects for a felicitous ending are not good. As in classical tragedy, when a woman arrogates to herself the attributes of a male hero, she will be destroyed. [8] As the play proceeds and Macbeth steps up to become the hardened king his wife had prayed for, she will lose her “unsexed” qualities of the first act, and with them the capacity to steer Macbeth by means of gender-policing taunts and reproaches. But let’s save further commentary on that development for later discussion.

The fifth scene ends with Lady Macbeth already taking charge. When Macbeth arrives home, she gives him wickedly good advice: “Look like th’innocent flower, / But be the serpent under’t” (926, 1.5.63-64). All he needs to do for now is play the good host, and leave the arrangements to his very capable partner.

Act 1, Scene 6 (926-27, nearing the castle in Inverness, Duncan and Banquo share their appreciation of the place and its environment; Lady Macbeth welcomes the royal party with perfectly feigned graciousness.)

Duncan arrives in a fine mood at Macbeth’s castle, praising its location as “a pleasant seat” (926, 1.6.1), and Banquo adds his observation that here, “The air is delicate” (926, 1.6.10). Truly, Macbeth is “the man in the high castle.” [9] The King and Lady Macbeth exchange perfectly gracious—his genuine, hers feigned—guest-host greetings, and he is gently conducted into the castle. Since Macbeth is indoors, the Lady is playing the role of the “innocent flower,” as she just a bit earlier recommended to him.

Act 1, Scene 7 (927-29, Macbeth ponders the self-destructive nature of vain, ambitious, evil acts such as the killing he now contemplates, and admits what a terrible betrayal of hospitality Duncan’s murder would be and how shocked all Scots would be to hear of it; still, when he tells Lady Macbeth that the plot is off, she quickly brings him round to enthusiastic support for her own wicked plan.)

Ruminating on the deed to come, Macbeth fully recognizes the dilemma that he faces: “If th’assassination / Could trammel up the consequence and catch / With his surcease success—that but this blow / Might be the be-all and the end-all!” (927, 1.7.2-5) If only, that is, killing Duncan could be like catching a prized fish in a net without dredging up other, unwanted things in the act of dragging. [10] But of course that is the problem with wicked acts: they inevitably lead to still more wicked acts, lest exposure strip one of ill-got gains or power.

Throughout this medieval-style conversation with his conscience, Macbeth acknowledges the Augustinian point that evil is invariably and profoundly self-destructive, [11] and that when a person commits an evil deed, he or she becomes the slave of that deed. As the line from another Shakespeare play, All’s Well That Ends Well, runs, “he must needs go that the devil drives.” [12]

At this point, Macbeth sounds like a Stage Villain 2.0. In other words, he is announcing that he knows how terrible the crime that he means to commit really is. But what at least temporarily saves him from deserving this title is that he still doesn’t feel certain that he should go through with it. His further thoughts only lead him even farther away from the dreadful act: Duncan, reflects Macbeth, is his feudal lord, his guest, and a good man whose murder would generate untold pity throughout Scotland. (927, 7.12-20)

The prospective deed is in all ways damnable, and Macbeth is in no doubt of its source in wicked ambition or the likelihood of retribution: as he says, “we but teach / Bloody instructions which, being taught, return / To plague th’inventor” (927 7.8-10) and “I have no spur / To prick the sides of my intent, but only / Vaulting ambition…” (836, 7.25-27). As Robert Bridges asks, how could someone so horrified by the prospective crime actually commit it?

The Norton editors point out that Macbeth may be Shakespeare’s most self-aware villain; [13] unlike, say, Richard III, whom we can hardly imagine doing other than what he does, Macbeth has the capacity to do good or ill; we know that his choice is sincerely meditated and deeply felt, and he understands the nature of what he’s about to do.

Nonetheless, Lady Macbeth brings him round to his longstanding code as a warrior: his masculine honor, she convinces him, calls for him to take the crown, not sit back and wait for it to be delivered to him by good fortune. She taunts her husband with stinging reproaches such as, “When you durst do it, then you were a man …” (928, 1.7.49).

Lady Macbeth has had a child and suckled it, she continues, but all the same, she tells Macbeth, “I would, while it was smiling in my face, / Have plucked my nipple from his boneless gums / And dashed the brains out, had I so sworn as you / Have done to this” (928, 1.7.56-59). It is hard to imagine a more misguided or pitiless conception of what it means to be a man, coming even after Macbeth has protested this line of thinking in his wife. (928, 1.7.45-47)

Still, Lady Macbeth’s efforts are successful, and Macbeth is brought round, and gets down to the brass tacks of planning how to get away with the murder they intend.

The basic conflict between Christian sentiment and pagan heroism we find in the revenge play Hamlet [14] also obtains in the later play Macbeth: Macbeth’s bloody Senecan ambition can only be satisfied by violating Christian principle. Faced with competing codes since he will have it so, he must make a moral choice. He has made division within himself, and in consequence must carefully manage the yawning divide between what is and what seems to be: “Away, and mock the time with fairest show; / False face must hide what the false heart doth know” (929, 1.7.81-82).

This is not much different from the advice his wife earlier gave him. Now Macbeth has made it his own.

ACT 2

Act 2, Scene 1 (929-31, as a guest at Inverness, Banquo is unsettled since, in his dreams, he has felt the pull of the witches’ promises; Macbeth agrees that they should speak soon; by himself, Macbeth envisions—or actually sees—a blood-smirched dagger that points him toward the sleeping Duncan’s room; he prepares himself by reflecting on the fitness of the midnight hour for such a deed as killing an unsuspecting king; when Lady Macbeth rings the bell to signal that the time is right, Macbeth stalks toward the fatal scene.)

While Duncan showers gifts upon Macbeth’s household, Banquo finds it impossible to get to sleep since he is troubled by disordered thoughts, and when he greets Macbeth, he admits to him that, he “dreamt last night of the three weird sisters” and is mindful of the truth that they have brought to Macbeth. (930, 2.1.20-21) Macbeth says that if Banquo will lend his support, it will bring much honor to him. But Banquo remains somewhat aloof—he is not convinced that his friend’s offer is itself honorable.

After this unsatisfying conversation, Macbeth is alone with his thoughts, and they are not wholesome ones. “Is this a dagger which I see before me, / The handle toward my hand? Come, let me clutch thee. / I have thee not, and yet I see thee still” (930, 2.1.33-35). He questions the ontological status (i.e., the existence or non-existence) of the dagger as a material object: might it be rather “A dagger of the mind, a false creation, / Proceeding from the heat-oppressèd brain”? (930, 2.1.38-39)

There is a third possibility in Shakespeare’s universe, of course—the dagger might be a supernatural but altogether real visitation, another trick played by the witches with the aid of their familiar evil spirits in service of the Devil. Whatever may be the case, the dagger accomplishes its function. As Macbeth says to the thing, “Thou marshall’st me the way that I was going” (930, 2.1.42).

The bloody knife concentrates and gathers up Macbeth’s spiritual and bodily forces. Its power may seem to take the cast of fate or necessity, but it seems better to suggest that it makes manifest the weirdness of the world through which Macbeth now walks: even as he goes to commit the murder that will change him forever after, the very objects seem to speak to him or somehow to move him, tormenting him with animistic pranks.

What we are most likely witnessing in this scene is not Macbeth still tormenting himself with doubts, but rather more like reaffirmation, a plucking-up of sufficient audacity and steadiness to accomplish the task at hand. By the scene’s end, Macbeth is stalking “With Tarquin’s ravishing strides” (930, 2.1.55) directly to the chamber where the unsuspecting king lies. The bell rings by prior arrangement with Lady Macbeth, and Macbeth goes to it.

He prays for an easy, quiet kill that accords with the silence and deadness of nature itself: “Thou sure and firm-set earth, / Hear not my steps, which way they walk, for fear / Thy very stones prate of my whereabout …” (930, 2.1.56-58). But we know that such ease when a man is dealing out violent death cannot be. It will always be a horrid, bloody affair. [15]

Act 2, Scene 2 (931-32, on edge, Lady Macbeth waits for Macbeth to finish his work and return; Macbeth soon returns, overwhelmed with horror at his own actions; he still clutches the knives that he used to kill Duncan, which he was supposed to place next to the servants the couple mean to finger for the crime; since Macbeth is immobilized with guilt, Lady Macbeth takes the daggers and sets them beside the grooms; she returns to her petrified, “unmanned” husband and tells him to get dressed and wash his blood-soaked hands.)

Each in their own way, both Macbeth and Lady Macbeth show considerable weakness once the murder has been committed. As for Lady Macbeth, she is anxiety-ridden while going through the minutes it takes for the plot to be executed. The cry of an owl seems to startle her, and then she fears that the grooms have regained consciousness and found out Macbeth before he could carry out the murder.

Most telling of all, however, is the Lady’s admission, “Had he not resembled / My father as he slept, I had done’t” (931, 2.2.11-13). She saw the sleeping old Duncan and couldn’t shake from her mind thoughts of filial affection and respect for her own family patriarch. Lady Macbeth is not as thoroughly “unsexed,” it seems, as she desires to be.

Macbeth’s initial reaction to his bloody act is one of horror and disbelief: why didn’t anyone hear anything? (931, 2.2.14) He is shaken, as well, by his inability to say amen in response to the grooms’ sleepy “God bless us” (931, 2.2.29-31, 34-35), and reports to Lady Macbeth that after stabbing Duncan, “Methought I heard a voice cry, ‘Sleep no more! / Macbeth does murder sleep’…” (932, 2.2.38-39).

Macbeth even suffers from a touch of “Lady Macbeth’s disease,” as that condition later manifests in her. [16] He asks, “Will all great Neptune’s ocean wash this blood / Clean from my hand?” (932, 2.2.63-64) The hand-washing in this scene is both practical, since the evidence must be eliminated, and ritually significant as an act of forgetting, if not of attaining forgiveness. But it gives no relief, which is an ominous sign for Macbeth and his wife, in spite of the latter’s seeming confidence that “A little water clears us of this deed” (932, 2.2.70).

The knocking at the gate “appalls” Macbeth (932, 2.2.61). By now, his sensibilities are both heightened and deranged. Macbeth’s final words in this scene point the way forward: “To know my deed ‘twere best not know myself “ (932, 2.2.76). Necessary now is the deadening of his own consciousness, and certainly of his conscience, which is yet raw.

But for the moment, Lady Macbeth must grab the daggers from her husband and take care of insinuating the grooms’ guilt for Duncan’s murder. (932, 2.2.55-56) At this point, she plays the role of the “man” to protect both her temporarily incapacitated husband and herself.

Act 2, Scene 3 (933-36, a drunken porter, hearing knocking, takes on the persona of a porter guarding hell’s gates; he allows entrance to Macduff and Lennox, whose charge it is to wake Duncan; Macbeth welcomes them; Macduff goes to rouse Duncan, but returns yelling bloody murder; Macbeth and Lennox investigate: Lennox believes the servants are guilty, but Macbeth confesses that he has just slain them; Macduff is incredulous, but Lady Macbeth faints and requires attention; Malcolm and Donalbain realize that they are in danger, and decide to flee Scotland.)

The porter hears knocking at the castle’s gates, and for his own amusement, he rehearses the role of a porter at Hell’s gates, generating in the process what may be the world’s first “Knock, knock” jokes. This scene (933, 2.3.1-35) points us toward the true nature of Macbeth’s crimes, and the reason why he is bound to be disappointed in what they bring him by way of a life.

First to require consideration are the porter’s five references to “equivocation” and variants on that word, which the Norton editors explain were quite topical when the play was written and performed. [17] To equivocate is a kind of verbal deception: to speak in an ambiguous, slippery way with the intention of deceiving others, avoiding a commitment, etc. [18]

The porter uses the term in a couple of ways: first in relation to one of the imaginary entrants to hell, and secondly in relation to anyone who drinks alcohol: strong drink, he says, plays the equivocator with the drunken man whose sexual desire is aroused, in that it “provokes the desire / but it takes away the performance” (933, 2.3.24-25).

Although the connection is one we ourselves, and not the porter, must make, the witches’ prophecies function in much the same way. Like an intoxicating brew, those promises or prophecies arouse Macbeth’s latent ambition, his desire, for advancement. But if we want to arrive at an adequate analogy, what is the equivalent of the “performance” that this same intoxication supposedly “takes away”? What are the witches promising in their equivocal way that will not be delivered?

It can’t be simply Macbeth’s taking of the crown by murdering Duncan since, after all, he manages to complete that act without much trouble. No, the “consummation” or completion of the action given rise by Macbeth’s desire must be security. Macbeth, as he will say explicitly later on, does not simply want the crown and the power that goes with it; he wants to enjoy these things in perpetuity, and he wants to be able to pass along that power to an heir that he himself has fathered: generational immortality, as we might call it. [19]

The witches, however, did not include any “clause” in their prophecy that indicated whether Macbeth would be king for three decades, three days, or three minutes—they offered no real glimmer of security, and no explanatory codicils were allowed. When Macbeth decides to follow the path made visible for him by the witches’ prophecies, he is doing so without getting the full story about what that path entails for his and Lady Macbeth’s ultimate well-being. In the end, Macbeth will find that even his boldest deeds bestow no freedom, but are merely reactions to a bitter necessity of his own making.

Ultimately, then, unrestrained ambition leads to madness, making its indulgers lose free will and self-respect. In that way, Macbeth becomes as impotent as the drunken lecher of the porter’s imagining, even as he hacks his way through the kingship he has wrongly won.

There is yet another function of the drunken porter scene, aptly recognized by the Romantic-Era critic Thomas De Quincey. In his essay, “On the Knocking at the Gate in Macbeth,” this author writes that the porter scene captures the moment when a murderous act beyond civilized existence gives way to the normal, everyday dimension of life. One can’t, after all, live in a perpetual state of monstrous depravity and horror. [20]

That’s why, De Quincey explains, the porter scene is so effective, even startling: even as Macbeth is living the internal consequences of his diabolical act, he hears the same knocking at the gates that the comical, everyday porter hears, and must then return to the quotidian dimension of life, with its demands on our attention that displace our self-centered internal discourse and force us to confront reality.

Part of this reality, for Macbeth, involves his need to cover up what he and his wife have done. He seems to pass the “appearance of genuine emotion” test when Macduff returns to inform all present of the horrible, bloody scene he has discovered. But when Macbeth goes off and kills the grooms and attributes this act to the righteous fury grounded in his love for the good old king, his performance is not well received.

Macbeth attempts to justify his rash action to all present by blurting out, “I do repent me of my fury / That I did kill them” (935, 2.3.103-04), but his effort receives only Macduff’s incredulous, pointed question, “Wherefore did you so?” (935, 2.3.104) Macbeth’s further effort to rationalize his killing of the grooms seems to do even less for him, and only Lady Macbeth’s fainting spell—a “fortunate fall,” and perhaps a deliberate one—saves him from further scrutiny on the matter.

All in all, the porter’s brief moment in the spotlight widens the frame beyond the selfish circle of Macbeth and his wicked wife. The porter couldn’t care less about the goings-on at the castle. He has his own desires, his own problems, his own wisdom. Moreover, his play-acting as Satan’s gatekeeper cuts Macbeth’s role as a monster and “grand criminal” down to size, so that we may, for a time, see in it a damnably common act of betrayal, fueled by vile ambition and justified by knavish equivocation. [21]

Finally, Malcolm may be inexperienced, but he’s a good enough budding Machiavellian to figure out that it’s time to head for England. He and his brother Donalbain are “the usual suspects,” and he knows somebody has a powerful interest in framing the two of them. But Donalbain, who will depart for Ireland, gives the best summation of affairs: “Where we are, / There’s daggers in men’s smiles” (936, 3.136-37).

Act 2, Scene 4 (936-37, Ross and an elderly man discuss the strange, unnatural things that have been happening in Scotland since Duncan’s murder; Macduff informs them that Duncan’s two sons have been accused of bribing the grooms to assassinate him; he also says Macbeth has been appointed king; Ross departs to attend Macbeth’s coronation at Scone, but Macduff declares that he will instead go home to his castle at Fife.)

An eclipse of the sun occurs, and an old man makes the connection: the eclipse is “unnatural, / Even like the deed that’s done” (946, 2.4.10-11). The natural world will signify, it will itself turn weird, and have its revenge for the unnatural acts, the wicked artifice, enacted by Macbeth and his wife. The man will struggle with conscience and, at least for a time, will seem to have killed it altogether, along with fear, but in the end he will be destroyed.

But that is still to come. For the moment, Macbeth is a great success, and we hear that he has traveled to Scone to be crowned king. (947, 3.4.31-32) Ross will go to Scone to see the coronation, but Macduff will return home to his castle at Fife.

ACT 3

Act 3, Scene 1 (937-41, Banquo, invited by Macbeth to a feast that evening, suspects the worst about his old colleague, but says he will attend; Macbeth, anxious and mindful of the witches’ prophecy about Banquo’s future as the father of many kings, hires a couple of disgruntled men to kill Banquo and his son Fleance as they return in darkness to Inverness; Macbeth says in soliloquy that his goal is security: “to be safely thus.”)

Banquo’s ambition appears at the outset of this scene, but only as distrustful speculation about Macbeth: “Thou hast it now: King, Cawdor, Glamis, all / As the weird women promised, and I fear / Thou play’dst most foully for’t. Yet it was said / It should not stand in thy posterity …” (937, 1.1-4). Immediately after these reflections, Banquo finds himself warmly invited to dinner by Macbeth and Lady Macbeth. How can he say no?

Meanwhile, in front of the palace gate attend the two men whom Macbeth has already chosen as Banquo and Fleance’s assassins. Alone at last, the new king sums up his goal to himself, “To be thus is nothing, but to be safely thus” (938, 3.1.48). Even so, his obsession with Banquo seems to go beyond the critical concern just stated: Banquo’s continued existence is simply unbearable to him: if the witches are indeed correct, then, says Macbeth, it’s all for naught: “For Banquo’s issue have I filed my mind, / For them the gracious Duncan have I murdered …” (939, 3.1.65-66).

Though but freshly planted on his throne, Macbeth is already confronting the hollow-man ruin of himself that he will soon become: the witches promised him only “a barren scepter” (939, 3.1.62). At the cost of his soul, the “eternal jewel” (939, 3.1.68) possessed by even the humblest of men, that barren scepter is all he presently has.

As he is ruminating in this unhappy way, in come the hired assassins. Macbeth easily wrenches their thoughts in a bloody direction by insisting that Banquo is somehow responsible for every setback they’ve suffered. The two men proclaim themselves more than desperate enough to undertake whatever Macbeth bids them do, and the bargain is struck. Banquo and Fleance must both die this very night.

The play as a whole deals with the relationship between spiritual error and its material and psychological consequences, and we are already beginning to register a change from the initially pensive Macbeth of the time before the murder of Duncan to “Macbeth 2.0.” This Macbeth is hardened, resolute, ruthless: a man willing to betray and strike down anyone who threatens him. His busy wickedness at present is, it should be noted, the flip side of acedia or apathy, a state of being we will find him entering later in the play.

Act 3, Scene 2 (941-42, Macbeth and Lady Macbeth express their anxieties—it seems that both of them have been shaken by terrible dreams; most of all, Macbeth is obsessed with Banquo’s continued existence; the new King mentions obliquely that something will happen tonight, but will not share the details with his wife.

As this scene opens, we hear an intimate conversation between Macbeth and Lady Macbeth that brings home both the psychological disturbance and distress caused by what they have done and their determination to quell such effects and govern in untroubled security. Lady Macbeth issues the all but despairing reflection that “’Tis safer to be that which we destroy / Than by destruction dwell in doubtful joy” (941, 3.2.6-7). At the same time, she apparently feels obliged to buck up Macbeth’s spirits, saying, “Things without all remedy / Should be without regard. What’s done is done” (941, 3.2.11-12).

Macbeth’s thoughts betray a similar mixture of self-defeating melancholia with earnest resolutions that better times will come: the King says, “But let the frame of things disjoint, both the worlds suffer, / Ere we will eat our meal in fear, and sleep / In the affliction of these terrible dreams / That shake us nightly” (941, 3.2.16-19).

Macbeth’s strongest resolution is telling with regard to how far he and his wife have come: until Banquo is dealt with, he says to Lady Macbeth, “we / Must lave our honors in these flattering streams / And make our faces vizards to our hearts, / Disguising what they are” (941, 3.2.31-34). But in truth, the need to keep up this division between being and seeming will never diminish, and it is what will eventually tear Lady Macbeth apart, and alienate Macbeth from everyone around him. Still, there is no alternative if they want to keep the power they have falsely won.

“What’s to be done?” asks Lady Macbeth. (942, 3.2.43) She seems to suspect that Macbeth will have Banquo killed, but he keeps this partly to himself. “Why?” we might ask, since the she is already complicit in the worst that Macbeth has done.

Still, the king is intent on keeping his plans to himself, plans that entail the murder of Banquo and Fleance: “Come, seeling night, / Scarf up the tender eye of pitiful day, / And with thy bloody and invisible hand / Cancel and tear to pieces that great bond / Which keeps me pale!” (942, 3.2.45-49). This is a hawking metaphor. [22] The rational, humane eye of daytime must be kept shut to open up the terror-laced opportunities of night. One bad deed calls for another: as Macbeth says, “Things bad begun make strong themselves by ill” (943, 3.2.54).

As yet, Macbeth doesn’t seem to realize that no security for him or his queen will ever emerge.

Act 3, Scene 3 (942-43, an extra man joins Macbeth’s two hired assassins; together, they cut down Banquo and leave his corpse in a ditch with many gashes; Fleance, however, escapes, and the killers go to inform Macbeth of the outcome.)

Three assassins kill Banquo right after 943, 3.3.21. Fleance, however, escapes. Ironically, his escape seems to be facilitated by one of the murderers’ decision to put out the torch as he fights with Banquo. The night-spirit that Macbeth invoked as his benefactor has instead allowed Fleance to get away.

Act 3, Scene 4 (943-46, the banquet commences, and one of the assassins shows up to fill Macbeth in on the outcome of their efforts to kill Banquo and Fleance; when Macbeth joins the guests at dinner, Banquo’s ghost is sitting in his place and glaring at him, apparently nodding his “gory locks” in mockery; Macbeth and Lady Macbeth make excuses to distract the guests, but the ghost soon returns. (SYNOPSIS CONTINUES …)

This much-admired “banquet scene” is the play’s climax, the point of maximum tension. In it, Banquo’s gore-bespattered, wound-covered ghost appears during the feast that Macbeth and his queen are hosting so as to help normalize their reign. This apparition takes his seat in Macbeth’s place of honor only after the First Murderer privately delivers to Macbeth the bad news that while Banquo is indeed dead, Fleance escaped into the night.

For all the guests understand, though, everything is fine, and civility and graciousness reign at the table. At least they do so until Macbeth declares strangely that the table is full, and there’s no place for him to sit, and moments later he says with horror, “Thou canst not say I did it. / Never shake thy gory locks at me!” (944, 3.3.50-51) Lady Macbeth is at first shocked like everyone else, and then privately contemptuous of her husband’s outburst, saying, “When all’s done, / You look but on a stool” (944, 3.3.68-69). But there sits Banquo, nodding his terribly gashed head, probably smiling at the shattered Macbeth.

Macbeth’s guests see only a fit of madness that unmans the King. They don’t even know Banquo is dead, only that he’s missing. This scene directly undoes Macbeth’s attempt to play the smooth Machiavel: his behavior unsettles everyone around him, including Lady Macbeth. His strange words pay tribute to the weirdness of the time, and are truly chilling: “The times has been / That, when the brains were out, the man would die, / And there an end. But now they rise again …” (945, 3.4.80-82). Macbeth is a haunted man, and a second visitation from the ghost only makes that still more evident.

How to deal with this dreadful turn of events? Most immediately, Lady Macbeth orders all the guests to make a hasty exit from this catastrophic public relations failure. When Macbeth recovers his wits somewhat, he determines to find out the worst and thereby discover the most brutal and efficient means to maintain his power. He declares, “I will . . . to the weird sisters. / More they shall speak, for now I am bent to know / By the worst means the worst” (946, 3.4.135-37). There’s no need for Macbeth to hold back since he’s already deep in evil, haunted by the dark forces to which he has succumbed: “I am in blood / Stepped in so far that, should I wade no more, / Returning were as tedious as go o’er” (946, 3.4.138-40). [23]

He must now act so quickly that there’s no time left to analyze his actions beforehand. As quickly as the mind can conceive, the hand will act (946, 3.4.141-42).

Act 3, Scene 5 (946-47, in this scene probably written by Thomas Middleton, Hecate, the Queen of the Night, scolds the three witches for neglecting to bring her into their “Macbeth” project, but promises that she will work up a fittingly dreadful ending for the whole affair.)

In this scene that many textual scholars believe was written not by Shakespeare but by a collaborator, Thomas Middleton, [24] Hecate, Queen of the Night, upbraids the witches for not apprising her of their work with Macbeth. She also has nothing good to say about Macbeth himself. Him, she categorizes as an ordinary mortal, no more than “a wayward son, / Spiteful and wrathful, who, as others do, / Loves for his own ends, not for you” (947, 3.5.11-13). In other words, Macbeth does not do evil for its own sake, but only to achieve his own selfish ends.

Hecate mocks human pretensions to permanence and safety, saying, “you all know security / Is mortals’ chiefest enemy (947, 6.5.32-33). As the Norton gloss points out, “security” in Hecate’s context means “overconfidence.” It may, however, bear the additional sense of “being sure of what you’ve gained.”

Act 3, Scene 6 (947-48, speaking with a Scottish lord, Lennox mocks Macbeth’s “fake news” interpretations of all the violence that has been going on in the country; the Scottish lord tells him that Macduff has gone to England to get military help in taking Macbeth down.)

Lennox, in conversation with a Scottish nobleman, repeats in ironic mode the “official, state-sponsored versions” of events that Macbeth’s regime has been putting out, and we also hear that Malcolm has found refuge at the court of England’s King Edward the Confessor. Macduff has followed Malcolm there to seek military help from Edward against Macbeth.

ACT 4

Act 4, Scene 1 (948-52, as the witches finish brewing up an awful potion in their cauldron, Macbeth arrives and demands that they help him attain the security he seeks; they call up three apparitions: an armed head, a bloody child, and a child wearing a crown and holding a tree in his hand; Macbeth is told by these figures that he must “beware Macduff,” that “none of woman born” can hurt him, and that his kingdom will last until “Great Birnam Wood” comes to Dunsinane. (SYNOPSIS CONTINUES …)

Like Act 3, Scene 5, this scene seems to have been at least partially written by Thomas Middleton. Macbeth meets for the second time with the weird sisters, determined to know the worst. Three apparitions come in succession, each with its own information to impart.

The first is “an armed head” that tells Macbeth to “beware Macduff.” The second is “a bloody child” that says “none of woman born” will harm him, and the third, a crowned child holding a tree in his hand, proclaims that only when Birnam Wood comes to Dunsinane Hill will he be defeated. (950-51, 4.1.70-93) Taken together, these prophecies seem to offer a very strong measure of certitude.

Still, Macbeth remains unsatisfied. He demands information about Banquo’s line, and he is presented with a series of eight kings, Banquo being the eighth and holding a magic-mirror image of his issue reigning forever. This vision profoundly unsettles Macbeth, and he exclaims in shock, “What, will the line stretch out to th’ crack of doom?” (951, 4.1.116) Macbeth considers his own life safe, but he is frustrated since, for him, as with most monarchs, perpetuity is the ultimate emblem of success.

Macbeth will do anything to secure his throne, perpetual or not, so he resolves from this time onward to perform his bloody deeds as soon as they are conceived. As he puts it, “From this moment / The very firstlings of my heart shall be / The firstlings of my hand … / The castle of Macduff I will surprise …” (952, 4.2.143-147, 149). Macduff’s family is to be slaughtered. There is no time for further reflection, and certainly no occasion for pity.

Act 4, Scene 2 (952-54, Ross travels to Macduff’s estate and defends Macduff’s hasty departure for England, but now Macduff’s family is completely helpless to avert the disaster coming their way; a messenger comes to tell Lady Macduff she must flee, but it’s too late: Macbeth’s thugs arrive and ruthlessly kill the Lady and her little son.)

Ross comes to the castle at Fife where Macduff has left his family. This loyal friend tries to justify Macduff’s decision to leave the family alone while he goes to seek military assistance against Macbeth, but it’s hard going. Lady Macduff’s words to her son suggest that she fears her husband is already dead. Ross stays only a short time, and departs.

Before they are cruelly murdered, Lady Macduff and her son give us yet another perspective on the great events that overtake them and afflict the kingdom of Scotland: the boy’s innocence strikes home when he says in response to Lady Macduff’s insistence that traitors must be hanged, “the liars and swearers are fools, for there are liars and / swearers enough to beat the honest men and hang up them” (953, 4.2.54-55).

Soon thereafter, a frightened messenger arrives and begs Lady Macduff to leave the castle at once. But it is too late—Macbeth’s thugs burst in, immediately stab the child and set after the Lady to kill her as well.

In this scene, we hear and see the private consequences of public disorder. Before the murderers break in, though, we also see an emphasis on the natural affective ties that bind people and reinforce charity and social order: both Ross and the lower-class messenger show more concern for Lady Macduff and her family than anyone shows for anyone else in the play. This is a dimension of humanity that both Macbeth and his queen have scorned.

Why, finally, did Macduff leave the family unprotected? To us, he may seem culpable in this since he puts affairs of state before his family’s safety. But it’s fair to say that Macduff, like so many good characters in Shakespeare, probably couldn’t imagine the depths of depravity to which a wretch like Macbeth could sink. Unfortunately, wickedness tends to outpace goodness, and what some people can scarcely conjure in a nightmare, others readily do without conscience or remorse.

Act 4, Scene 3 (954-60, Macduff meets with Malcolm at court in England and encourages him to strike at Macbeth immediately; fearing that Macduff may be acting on Macbeth’s behalf, Malcolm tests him by rehearsing reams of self-accusatory nonsense about his own alleged wickedness; Macduff passes the test, so Malcolm informs him that the English king Edward has supplied 10,000 troops, to be led by Old Siward, to invade Scotland. (SYNOPSIS CONTINUES …)

When Macduff arrives in England, the Scottish heir apparent Malcolm laments Scotland’s downfall and voices his skepticism as to whether Macduff’s intentions are honorable or treasonous. Macduff forcibly rebuffs this suspicion, but Malcolm is determined to test him by a rather strange method. Namely, he mock-confesses to Macduff what an awful villain he himself is—next to him, he says, the traitor Macbeth is “as pure as snow” (955, 4.3.53). Macduff’s answers to Malcolm’s protestations of debauchery and corruption are almost amusing, and they reduce neatly to an admission that no-one really expects kings to behave themselves anyway.

But this claim is issued only to test Macduff’s moral steadfastness, and it is his final expression of disgust with the sum total of vices that convinces Malcolm he’s on the level: “These evils thou repeat’st upon thyself / Hath banished me from Scotland. – O my breast, / Thy hope ends here” (957, 4.3.112-14).

Malcolm’s ploy underscores the crime Macbeth committed in moving from thought to act, and ultimately his interaction with Macduff reassures us that while all human nature is corrupted, the corruption’s effects can be kept in check.

Macbeth’s “throne of blood” [25] need not become the universal, irresistible pattern of royal conduct, even though we saw in the previous scene what happens to the innocent when nobility does not resist: derangement and denaturation of the very landscape and destruction of life and property, as is well indicated by Ross when he says that in Scotland, “good men’s lives / Expire before the flowers in their caps, / Dying or ere they sicken” (958, 4.3.171-73).

Macduff is relieved to hear that Malcolm was only testing him, and there is much helpful news thanks to the help coming miserable Scotland’s way from England’s Edward the Confessor, whose praises the three Scotsmen have just been singing. Ten thousand troops are Edward’s contribution to the Scottish effort to rid the nation of its tyrant.

The end of the third scene is nearly unbearable in its concentration on Macduff’s grief over the news that Ross brings. After having dissembled about the matter, he informs the man that his wife and children have all been cruelly slain by Macbeth’s agents. Macduff is stunned, and Malcolm’s inexperience shows when he immediately tries to harness Macduff’s grief.

This future king sounds like a young man filled with valorous words from some classical manual of rhetoric. As Macduff says of the putter-forth of this untimely effort, “He has no children” (959, 4.2.216); i.e., he can’t feel the loss of children as a grown man who has them must. Macduff, unlike Macbeth, is still human, and does not subscribe to the “hardness” doctrine of masculinity set forth by the usurping royal couple. Nature’s bonds of affection are still powerful within him, and Macduff, ever the warrior, soon comes round to Malcolm’s program of action: revenge.

ACT 5

Act 5, Scene 1 (960-61, Lady Macbeth has been walking, talking, and even writing in her sleep; a gentlewoman and a doctor watch Lady Macbeth, who continually rubs her hands as if trying to wash them clean, and exclaims with horror that the rubbing doesn’t work; the doctor’s diagnosis is that the Queen needs the help of a priest, not a medical practitioner.)

By now, Lady Macbeth has been driven mad by her guilt, and has obsessive-compulsive disorder, in this case a hand-washing compulsion. As a gentlewoman assistant and a doctor listen in on her disordered night-thoughts, the queen asks nobody in particular, “who would have / thought the old man to have had so much blood in him?” (960, 5.1.34-35) The queen’s physical manifestation of hand-washing reveals a psychic derangement: she can’t expunge her guilt, which shows up as imaginary blood stains on her hands, and her physician can do nothing to help her.

After hearing the Lady’s final utterance of the night, which is, “I tell you yet again Banquo’s buried; he / cannot come out on’s grave” (961, 5.1.56-57), the doctor admits his frustration even as he gives his diagnosis, saying, “More needs she the divine than the physician” (961, 5.1.67). But this is something only to think in the tyranny where he resides, not something to speak out loud.

What is the point of showing Lady Macbeth’s insanity, a psychological problem, when the supernatural agents who set the stage for disaster seem real enough? Macbeth is not a pure psychodrama, but the witches are not causes of human evil; they only assist those who would deal in wickedness.

What affects Lady Macbeth in the private sphere and in purely mental terms plays out for Macbeth in the broader public sphere that belongs to him as king. Action, battles and machinations constitute his attempt to scrub his hands and conscience clean, but violence and betrayal accomplish no such thing. Vain repetition rules the day: wedded to his illegitimate power, Macbeth will repeat the same pattern to the bitter, desperate end.

Act 5, Scene 2 (961-62, Macbeth’s Scottish opponents go toward Birnam Wood to combine with Malcolm, Siward and their 10,000 English fighters; Menteith and Caithness discuss what they suppose Macbeth is doing and feeling now that his opponents are closing in.)

Menteith, Caithness, Lennox and Angus head for Birnam Wood, where they expect to combine with the English-lent forces led by Malcolm, Siward, and Macduff. Meanwhile, they say, Macbeth is busy fortifying Dunsinane Castle and commanding the troops that have not already revolted from him. Angus offers a memorable image of Macbeth’s present shrunken condition: “Now does he feel his title / Hang loose about him, like a giant’s robe / Upon a dwarfish thief” (962, 5.2.20-22).

Act 5, Scene 3 (962-64, Macbeth has apparently received ominous dispatches about the pair of forces coming to destroy him, but still trusts the promises made to him by the witches’ apparitions; he abuses his servant “Seyton” for affirming the bad news, and reflects that he has reduced himself to the sad life he now lives; Macbeth asks searching questions of the now deranged Lady Macbeth’s physician, but he knows what really ails her.)

Macbeth’s opponents are on the march towards Birnam, but the king has deluded himself by now—he had earlier denounced the witches for the visions afforded him—and thinks he still leads a charmed life thanks to the promises supposedly tendered by the three apparitions, so he dismisses those who are abandoning him: “Then fly, false thanes, / and mingle with the English epicures!” (962, 5.3.7-8) What should he fear? As he says, “Till Birnam Wood remove to Dunsinane / I cannot taint with fear” (962, 5.3.2-3).

But Macbeth’s claims ring hollow, as he himself reveals even as he summons his servant Seyton: [26] “I have lived long enough. / My way of life / Is fall’n into the sere, the yellow leaf, / And that which should accompany old age, / As honor, love, obedience, troops of friends, / I must not look to have…” (963, 5.3.22-26). The words are aesthetically impressive, but hollow and not directly related to the realm of action: this man is tired of living, and would just as soon get it over with. The crown he stole is no longer worth the trouble it takes to maintain.

Still, Macbeth resolves to steel himself in violence, saying, “I’ll fight till from my bones my flesh be hacked” (963, 5.3.33). This is determination that stems from despair, one almost wants to say apathy, though that is probably not quite right.

In any case, Macbeth also remains distant from his wife’s sufferings. He asks the doctor in a philosophical moment, “Canst thou not minister to a mind diseased?” Can’t the learned doctor “Pluck from the memory a rooted sorrow” and “Raze out the written troubles of the brain …” (963, 5.3.40-42)? When the doctor answers that he really can’t, Macbeth rejects “physic” altogether. What good is doctoring if it can only somewhat heal physical maladies, and not the disorders and injuries to which the mind is subject?

As for his own situation, Macbeth still thinks the witches’ charms are better than any medicine. He repeats what he had said at the scene’s beginning: “I will not be afraid of death and bane / Till Birnam forest come to Dunsinane” (964, 5.3.59-60). The doctor would rather be anywhere than Dunsinane Castle. As he says, “Profit again should hardly draw me here” (964, 5.3.62). Being a doctor to the stars pays well, it seems, but it has its pitfalls.

Act 5, Scene 4 (964, with the Scottish and English forces now combined at Birnam Wood, Malcolm tells his men each to cut off a branch from the forest’s trees so as to prevent Macbeth from making an accurate assessment of their strength.)

In Birnam Wood, Malcolm orders each of his soldiers to cut down a tree bough (964, 5.4.4-7) and use it to deceive Macbeth’s defenders about the advancing host’s numbers. So Birnam Wood is coming to Dunsinane, even though we and Macbeth are not witnessing a violation of the laws of nature, as the witches’ phrasing allowed us to believe.

Act 5, Scene 5 (964-65, Macbeth expresses confidence in his castle’s strength as Malcolm, Siward, and their combined forces come on; Lady Macbeth dies, and Macbeth responds in a despairing, if poetical, way: life, he says, is “a tale / Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, / Signifying nothing”; a messenger reports that Birnam Wood is, in a strange sense, coming to Dunsinane; Macbeth decides to leave the castle and fight Malcolm out in the open.)

Macbeth is convinced that he is beyond the reach of the troops massed against him: “Our castle’s strength / Will laugh a siege to scorn” (964, 5.4.2-3). But even he is not fully prepared for the news that Seyton brings next. The wailing of women that strikes Macbeth’s ears does not shake him, for as he says, “I have almost forgot the taste of fears” (965, 5.4.9). But the announcement of Lady Macbeth’s miserable descent into oblivion leads him to a startlingly nihilistic place. “She should have died hereafter,” he says somewhat ambiguously. (965, 5.5.17)

As the Norton footnote 1 for this line suggests, this utterance could either mean, “she would have died sometime anyway,” or it could mean, “it’s a pity that she didn’t die in better circumstances than these.” The rest of the passage would seem to favor the first meaning since in it Macbeth speaks what may be his most haunting lines in the play, culminating in the soul-crushing description of life as “a tale / Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, / Signifying nothing” (965, 5.4.26-28).

Soon, a messenger sparks Macbeth’s wrath by informing him about what appears to be a moving forest. The King first threatens the messenger, and then openly invites general decreation and destruction: “I ‘gin to be aweary of the sun, / and wish th’estate o’th’ world were now undone” (965, 5.5.49-50). He will fight all the same, but these beautiful words he speaks are also the most hollowed-out husks of language he has yet spoken. Language, too, has failed Macbeth—he can still speak with eloquence that moves us, but surely such eloquence can do nothing for him but deepen his weariness of life.

And so Birnam Wood is indeed come to High Dunsinane. Finally, Macbeth admits that he has lost his certitude, his “security” in the sense that Hecate lent that word in Act 4, Scene 1. [27] The king gives a final command: “Arm, arm, and out!” (965, 5.5.46) He will leave the now illusory safety of his high castle and go to fight Macduff, Malcolm and the rest of his enemies in the open field.

Nature, here represented by “Birnam Wood,” must by now seem quite bizarre and uncanny to Macbeth because he himself has become unnatural, even monstrous. This apparent weirdness in the behavior of nature serves as a way of punishing him: he has betrayed his natural lord, Duncan (his “father” in Jacobean political theory) [28] and turned his marriage bond into a criminal partnership to the ruination of Scotland.

In broad terms, the deployment of natural objects to pay Macbeth back stems from the fact that Shakespeare is working within a Christian framework where sin has deranged the entire Creation, just as it will later in Milton’s Paradise Lost: Eve “pluck’d, she eat, / Earth felt the wound, and Nature from her seat / Sighing through all her Works gave signs of woe, / That all was lost.” [29] Nature responds as by sympathetic magic to human error, reflecting that error back to us if we know how to interpret nature’s signs.

The weird, or the uncanny, is in this context a function of Providence, which makes use of whatever is at hand to punish transgressors.

Act 5, Scene 6 (965, Malcolm and Siward arrive in front of Dunsinane castle, and briefly review their battle plan.)

Malcolm orders the men to cast down their tree boughs hewn from Birnam Wood. There’s no need of deception anymore—the time has come to fight. Siward and his son will lead the first wave of battle, and Malcolm and Macduff will do whatever else needs doing. Siward trusts in his military might to arbitrate the quarrel between the righteous invaders and the treasonous king: “Do we but find the tyrant’s power tonight, / Let us be beaten if we cannot fight” (966, 5.6.7-8).

Act 5, Scene 7 (965-69, Macbeth kills the confident young Siward; Macduff enters, looking for his nemesis; Malcolm has accepted the surrender of those in Dunsinane castle, and some of Macbeth’s forces are deserting or not fighting in earnest; Macduff locates Macbeth and tells him he was not “of woman born” directly but by a Caesarean procedure; Macbeth’s spirits flag at this news, but he fights and is slain. (SYNOPSIS CONTINUES …)

As the battle begins, Macbeth confidently kills young Siward, and rejects classical honor-suicide, choosing to direct violence at others instead. But then, to his consternation since he already feels guilt over the killing of the man’s family, the King is confronted by Macduff, who reveals that he was born by caesarean section, saying, “Macduff was from his mother’s womb / Untimely ripped” (967, 5.7.45-46).

This new information causes Macbeth to lose his courage and momentarily drop his adamantine front, but he quickly recovers with curses against the witches on his lips: ”be these juggling fiends no more believed, / That palter with us in a double sense, / That keep the word of promise to our ear / And break it to our hope” (967, 5.7.49-52). In other words, back to hell with such equivocators.

Shorn of the allegedly supernatural strength of the witches’ prophecies, Macbeth can do nothing but fight to the last. He will not surrender, and is duly slain by the resolute avenger Macduff. In the end, the terms Macduff and others use to describe him strip him of humanity: a baited bear, and a hell-hound. Lady Macbeth, too, is described by Malcolm as “fiend-like” (968, 5.7.99). Macduff has sworn revenge against this monstrous sinner, and he gets it.

From the time of their first terrible deed onward, Macbeth and Lady Macbeth tried to kill all sentiment within themselves, and it seems fitting that the end of the play isn’t at all sentimental. Siward rejects the license of mourning over his son in battle, saying only, “Had I as many sons as I have hairs, / I would not wish them to a fairer death” (968, 5.7.78-79).

Malcolm, in accepting the crown, promises to perform all the necessaries in the proper, decorous way. The kingdom has been set right, and the emphasis is on order and ceremony, spare and fitting words coming in advance. This seems appropriate given the derangement of the kingdom and of the dead king and queen’s psyches. A return to legitimate order must seem just short of paradise by now.

Finally, we might concentrate on Macbeth’s concluding musings and resolutions in the last several scenes. Do they constitute a classical recognition scene or not? Coleridge says the play is “pure tragedy” [30] rather than “reflective” as Hamlet. But surely there is no lack of introspection or understanding coming from Macbeth. His tragedy involves the process of desiring honors and attaining them by unjust means, of buying into the epistemological and moral ambiguity proffered by the Weird Sisters.

Does Macbeth learn anything by the play’s end? He understands what he has done and why it was wrong, but it doesn’t matter to him anymore. His life has become meaningless. This play shows its great maturity in the quality of Macbeth’s final musings: the language accorded the isolated, brittle king is some of the finest Shakespeare ever gave to any character. Its mixture of wonderful aesthetic quality and utter hollowness of spirit shows an intellect undebased, but constrained now to describing and coming to terms with a situation that would horrify anyone with normal sensibilities.

Macbeth’s fine words are insightful, but they are hollow, as if he himself can’t feel them and finds no comfort in them. They are empty words, not a curative and certainly no better than the “physic” he had earlier cast to the dogs because the doctor couldn’t heal his wife’s spiritual disorder.

As so often in Shakespeare, great interest is taken in the way a key character handles the relationship between actions and words: the words spoken by Macbeth to explain his situation to himself and his actions to others provide no relief, for that is beyond the power of language in such cases, at least when it is not accompanied by sincere sentiment.

Shakespeare’s plays have various ways of dealing with the consequences of tragic mistakes, with respect to the ability to act. King Lear, for example, gains insight at the expense of being able to wield power. By the end of the play, he and his daughter Cordelia are at the mercy of their enemies, so even if they have become “God’s spies,” they can’t act in the political realm anymore. [31]

Macbeth follows a different pattern—once he makes his choice, he must take on the ruthlessness of the tyrant who holds his throne by injustice. Blood draws on blood until, as Macbeth says, there’s no point in going back. He acts boldly and dies fighting, but such desperation hardly makes him a hero. Instead, he’s the puppet of actions that stem from his own perverted will.

The witches shoot an arrow into the heart of Macbeth, but that is not to say they are ultimately responsible for his crimes. Ambition is a kind of madness, but it is a lucid madness: [32] images present themselves to Macbeth, truth comes as presentiment, and ambition drives him to inhabit the vision. The consequences of his behavior are predictable, if strange. Shakespeare’s genius is to take what might have been a stage villain and make him a three-dimensional character, but a three-dimensional character who is nonetheless a stunning failure as a human being.

As for the play’s politics, it’s difficult to see how some critics’ claims that Macbeth is tinged with nihilism can be correct, given that the play was in part written for King James I. Why would Shakespeare deal with kingship in such a manner when he wanted an absolutist monarch to enjoy the play?

The older, and more tenable, view of Macbeth’s moral dimension is that sin punishes itself inexorably, even if the interval between commission and punishment is sometimes very long. It is fair to suggest that anarchy shadows this play, but only in a narrow manner—the king is human, even though political doctrine says he has two bodies, one mortal and the other representative of kingship itself. [33] Macbeth makes a bad but entirely free choice, and from that point onward his choice entraps him in a fate that generates chaos for others who must abide in his realm.

Macbeth himself marches in linear fashion to his death, behaves like a beast (losing his title to humanity), and dies fighting. The Christian point is that free will, misused, becomes the slave of so-called fate, or necessity. This is a basic point made by Saint Augustine in his Enchiridion and other works. [34] Or as Oscar Wilde said in a more generalized context, when we act we become puppets. [35] Shakespeare might add, “Only when we act badly.” Apparent disorder on the ground does not imply disorder in the heavens, or chaos in the fundamental nature of things.

Still, we may do well to take the point made by Norton editor Stephen Greenblatt in his Introduction to Macbeth about the strangeness and equivocal quality of the play’s supernatural realm. It seems accurate to suggest, as Greenblatt does, that the secular and the demonic, the physical-material and the spiritual, are by no means easy to keep strictly separate. The witches’ “equivocation” is a power stalking human desire and endeavor. We might even say that it receives a strong assist from the inherent ambiguity of language itself.

Edition. Greenblatt, Stephen et al., editors. The Norton Shakespeare: Tragedies + Digital Edition. 3rd ed. W. W. Norton, 2016. ISBN-13: 978-0-393-93860-9.

ENDNOTES

*To return to exact part of the text referenced by the endnotes below, left-click on the endnote’s numbered link. By contrast, the blue scroll-up button at the bottom right of the page returns to the top of the document.

[1] Coleridge, Samuel Taylor. Macbeth in Lectures on Shakespeare.

[2] See Norton editor Stephen Greenblatt’s excellent introduction to Macbeth, 910. The entire introduction spans from 905-13.

[3] See the entry “Moirai.” Theoi.com. Accessed 8/5/2024.

[4] See “Common Reasons Why Everyone Can’t be Hypnotized.” PsychCentral.com Accessed 8/5/2024.

[5] Shakespeare departs here from his source material, Holinshed’s Chronicles …, in making Duncan a reverend white-haired king, whereas in Holinshed, he is a rather weak, young king. The superiority of Shakespeare’s presentation for dramatic purposes is obvious.

[6] Machiavelli, Niccolò. The Prince. Gutenberg e-text. Accessed 05/08/2024. As a general precept, Machiavelli tells his Medici audience that a prince should cultivate a number of virtues outwardly, but he must not suppose they are always to be observed; that would, in fact, be dangerous.

[7] See the entry Succubus. Wikipedia. Accessed 8/5/2024.

[8] See Aeschylus. The Oresteia. Gutenberg e-text. Accessed 8/5/2024. Clytemnestra, Agamemnon’s wife, and her lover Aegisthus kill King Agamemnon when he returns home from the War in Troy; Prince Orestes subsequently cuts his mother down for her audacious killing of the king.

[9] The reference is to Philip K. Dick’s 1962 science fiction novel, The Man in the High Castle.

[10] Following the Norton editors’ gloss of the famous lines as a fishing metaphor, footnote 1, 927.

[11] Augustine of Hippo. The Enchiridion: On Faith, Hope, and Love. See Ch. IV, The Problem of Evil, which provides a useful summary. Trans. Albert C. Outler, 1955. Accessed 2/29/2024. See also Augustine’s The City of God, Vol. 1, Book Twelve. Trans. and ed. Marcus Dods. Gutenberg e-text. Accessed 2/29/2024.

[12] Shakespeare, William. All’s Well That Ends Well. In The Norton Shakespeare: Comedies, 3rd ed. 971-1033. Lavache says to the Countess, “he must needs go that the devil drives” (978, 1.3.24-25).

[13] On Macbeth’s agonizing self-awareness, see Norton editor Stephen Greenblatt’s excellent introduction to Macbeth, 906. The entire introduction spans pp. 905-13.

[14] Shakespeare, William. The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark. Second Quarto with additions from the Folio. In The Norton Shakespeare: Tragedies, 3rd ed. Combined text 358-447.

[15] Shakespeare, William. The Tragedy of Julius Caesar. In The Norton Shakespeare: Tragedies, 3rd ed. 288-343. See 304, 2.1.173-74, where Brutus says to his fellow conspirators, “Let’s carve him as a dish fit for the gods, / Not hew him as a carcass fit for hounds.”

[16] In modern clinical psychiatry, this condition is usually called “Contamination OCD.” (Brainsway.com, accessed 8/5/2024.) It’s telling that this condition does not permanently overwhelm Macbeth’s consciousness, but it does so in Lady Macbeth’s case: she proves not to be strong enough to take on the “male” role in this tragic drama (as she defines it, not as it is or should be) and survive the terrible stress that goes with the role.

[17] See Norton footnote 3 for pg. 933 concerning the significance of the term “equivocation” for the nearly disastrous Gunpowder Plot against King James I. See also “The Gunpowder Plot and Shakespeare’s Macbeth.” RSC website shakespearesglobe.com. Accessed 8/7/2024. The “equivocator” that the porter in Macbeth refers to is Henry Garnet, who heard Robert Catesby’s confession and learned that he knew about the planned Gunpowder Plot of 1605 to blow up King James I and Parliament. Garnet at first denied knowing anything about the plot, and later claimed his concealment of information was done for the benefit of God. He was hanged, drawn, and quartered.

[18] See Wiktionary’s definition of “equivocation.” Accessed 8/6/2024.

[19] “To be thus is nothing, but to be safely thus,” says Macbeth. (938, 3.1.48)

[20] See De Quincey, Thomas. “On the Knocking at the Gate in Macbeth.” Shakespeare-online.com. Accessed 8/6/2024.

[21] Shakespeare carries us along with Macbeth’s story, but he won’t let us merge our identity with the protagonist’s identity. We don’t hear a claim like that of Satan in Milton’s Paradise Lost (“the mind is its own place”), but something more like John Donne’s statement, “No man is an island, entire unto itself.” Shakespeare is interested to show how people respond to one another, not just how they behave without references to others’ perceptions, needs, and desires. See Milton, John. Paradise Lost. Book 1.254-55. Milton Reading Room. Accessed 8/5/2024. See also Donne, John. “Meditation 17” in Devotions.

[22] Norton 942, footnote 9.

[23] Macbeth’s words may remind us of Richard III’s resolution, “I am in / So far in blood that sin will pluck on sin. / Tear-falling pity dwells not in this eye” (4.2.64–67). It would be tiresome to Macbeth to retrace his steps, to be penitent; the only way is forward, wading through more blood. But that way forward may also now begin to seem tedious.

[24] See the Norton Textual Introduction note, 915.

[25] The title of Japanese director Akira Kurosawa’s famous film adaptation of Macbeth in a Samurai setting.

[26] The name “Seyton” is no doubt, for comic effect, pronounced as “Satan.”

[27] The sense, that is, of “overconfidence.” See the Norton marginal gloss for “security” on 947.

[28] See King James I’s treatises Basilikon Doron and The True Law of Free Monarchy. EEBO U-Mich. Accessed 8/7/2024.

[29] See Milton, John. Paradise Lost 9.781-84. The Milton Reading Room. Accessed 8/7/2024.

[30] Coleridge, Samuel Taylor. Macbeth in Lectures on Shakespeare. Gutenberg e-text. Accessed 8/7/2024. Coleridge writes, “there is an entire absence of comedy, nay, even of irony and philosophic contemplation in Macbeth,—the play being wholly and purely tragic.” This seems like a bit of an overstatement: what of the “drunken porter” scene? Or naming Macbeth’s servant, “Seyton”? And what about Macbeth’s thoughts in Act 5 concerning the meaning of life?

[31] Shakespeare, William. King Lear. Folio with additions from the Quarto. In The Norton Shakespeare: Tragedies, 3rd ed. Combined text 764-840. See 832, 5.3.3-19.

[32] The French term is folie lucide, sometimes translated as “moral insanity.” See “From Moral Insanity to Psychopathy.” Intechopen.com. Accessed 8/7/2024.

[33] Kantorowicz, Ernst. The King’s Two Bodies: A Study in Medieval Political Theology. Princeton UP, 2016. Orig. published in 1957.

[34] Augustine of Hippo. The Enchiridion: On Faith, Hope, and Love. See Ch. IV, The Problem of Evil, which provides a useful summary. Trans. Albert C. Outler, 1955. Accessed 2/29/2024. See also Augustine’s The City of God, Vol. 1, Book 12. Trans. and ed. Marcus Dods. Gutenberg e-text. Accessed 2/29/2024.

[35] Wilde, Oscar. The Critic as Artist: With Some Remarks upon the Importance of Doing Nothing. Gutenberg e-text. Accessed 8/7/2024. The statement by Gilbert is, “When man acts he is a puppet. When he describes he is a poet.”

Commentaries onShakespeare’s Tragedies

ACT 1

ACT 2

ACT 3

ACT 4

ACT 5

ENDNOTES

Commentaries on
Shakespeare’s Tragedies