Focus on Macbeth

John Russell Brown

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780367239916
• eBook ISBN: 9781136558801
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

First published in 1982. Macbeth exercises a strange influence over readers and theatre audiences: the words of the text offer no easy clue to meaning or significance and in dramatic structure the play is very different from other Shakespearean tragedies. Many kinds of study are needed in order to understand the tragedy of Macbeth and this book provides a wide range of studies that respect the individuality of the text and examine it from different viewpoints. Contents include: Themes and Structure; Characterization and Narrative, Visual Effects, Performance in the Eighteenth, Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries; Historical and Political Background; Role of Witchcraft; Game Theory. Contributors include: John Russell Brown, Derek Russell Davis, Gareth Lloyd Evans, R A Foakes, Michael Goldman, Robin Grove, Peter Hall, Michael Hawkins, Brian Morris, D J Palmer, Marvin Rosenberg and Peter Stallybrass.

Part 1

Themes and structure

1

Images of death: ambition in Macbeth

R. A. Foakes

Macbeth is Shakespeare’s last and most original play on the theme of the ambitious prince finally overthrown. Its roots lie deep in the medieval and Renaissance preoccupation with tragedy as the fall of great men or women, brought low by fortune’s wheel and so exemplifying the mutability of human life, or overreaching themselves and illustrating the retribution visited upon the proud and sinful. It was natural for Shakespeare to explore the possibilities for tragedy of

sad stories of the death of kings:

How some have been depos’d, some slain in war,

Some haunted by the ghosts they have depos’d,

Some poison’d by their wives, some sleeping kill’d,

All murder’d.

(Richard II, III.ii.156–60)

In writing his early plays he had the impact of Marlowe to absorb, who had broken the moralising pattern of such stories as mirrors for magistrates by showing Tamburlaine striding on to ever further conquests, and endowed with a mind aspiring to beauty and poetry as well as to power and an earthly crown. The Henry VI plays are full of aspiring princes, and culminate in the rise of Gloucester, whose ruthless ambition is qualified by his wit and energy; these plays, and Richard III, nevertheless remain within the conventional pattern. A much more complex study of an ambitious prince is realised in Bolingbroke, who, without seeming to recognise the extent of his ambitions, overthrows and effectively murders Richard II, and achieves the throne, only to be punished by ill health, by constant rebellions, and by the vagaries of Prince Hal. A further variant is developed in Brutus, whose confidence in his own rectitude, the name of ‘honour’ for which his line has always been noted, blinds him to the true nature of the murder of Caesar. Then, in Hamlet, Shakespeare was to develop still subtler variations, in Claudius, a ‘good’ and effective monarch who, we discover, has gained the throne by murder, and in Hamlet himself, driven by events to act as if he were indeed, as he says to Ophelia, ‘very proud, revengeful, ambitious’ (Hamlet III.i.124), but delaying and avoiding action in an attempt to escape from the implications of what he feels he must do, kill Claudius.

Superficially, Macbeth seems to return to a more conventional mode, and on one level it is much more straightforwardly a play about an ambitious prince who overreaches himself in murdering the King, and who brings about his own downfall in the end. But it goes beyond Shakespeare’s earlier treatments of the theme, notably in two ways. One is the new dimension given by the witches, and the sense of evil which is generated largely through their presence in the play; for this enables Shakespeare to show a more profound spiritual change in Macbeth than in any of his earlier protagonists. Boling-broke and Claudius feel their guilt, but Macbeth is shown as creating his own hell. In this the play has links with Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus, but whereas Faustus achieves nothing in return for selling his soul, and in the end, terrified at the prospect of punishment, is whisked off by devils into a traditional stage hell-mouth, Shakespeare expresses dramatically through his presentation of Macbeth that subtler idea of hell verbalised in Mephistopheles’ description of it as ‘being depriv’d of everlasting bliss’ (Scene III, 1.82). Faustus himself seems to begin to understand this in his curses at the end:

curse Lucifer

That hath depriv’d thee of the joys of heaven;

(Scene XIX, II.181–2)

but in Marlowe’s play hell as deprivation remains merely a concept. It remained for Shakespeare to realise on stage what this means in terms of character.

A second way in which Shakespeare breaks new ground in Macbeth is in his deeper study of the nature of ambition, which is the special concern of this essay. Ambition is usually understood in its straightforward sense as an eagerness to gain promotion and power, to rise in the world, and, as Duncan’s general in the field, Macbeth might be expected to fit Bacon’s conception in ‘Of Ambition’: ‘Good Commanders in the Warres, must be taken, be they never so Ambitious . . . . And to take a Soldier without Ambition, is to pull off his Spurres.’ Charles Lamb saw further than this in a striking comment provoked by the actor G.F.Cooke’s playing of Richard III as a ‘very wicked man’ who kills for pleasure:¹

The truth is, the Characters of Shakespeare are so much the objects of meditation rather than of interest or curiosity as to their actions, that while we are reading any of his great criminal characters – Macbeth, Richard, even Iago, – we think not so much of the crimes which they commit, as of the ambition, the aspiring spirit, the intellectual activity, which prompts them to overleap those moral fences.

Lamb was led to notice something especially significant in Macbeth – that the emphasis when we read the play is less on what he does than on the activity of mind connected with his deeds. Lamb strikingly linked, perhaps equated, ambition, aspiration and intellectual activity, in a way which now may seem a little eccentric. For on the one hand, the meaning of ambition is more restricted than this on the one occasion when Macbeth speaks the word, at that point towards the end of Act I when he comes nearest to abandoning the murder of Duncan. At this moment of revulsion against the killing of the King,

We will proceed no further in this business,

(I.vii.31)

Macbeth reduces all that has been exciting him in the contemplation of the death of Duncan to ‘only vaulting ambition’, the mere desire to be King. This would seem to justify the claim that²

Macbeth has not a predisposition to murder; he has merely an inordinate ambition that makes murder itself seem to be a lesser evil than failure to achieve the crown.

On the other hand, Lamb’s comment reduces to a subordinate role the moral issues which to many have seemed of primary importance. The play has been seen as effectively a morality, with an action that can be summarised thus:³

Its hero is worked upon by forces of evil, yields to temptation in spite of all that his conscience can do to stop him, goes deeper into evil-doing as he is further tempted, sees the approach of retribution, falls into despair, and is brought by retribution to his death.

This way of regarding Macbeth as an exemplary play displaying the degeneration of a great criminal who has ‘no morally valid reason for killing Duncan’,⁴ has satisfied many, although it does not account for a sense that somehow, in spite of everything, Macbeth retains an heroic stature at the end, when ‘in the very act of proclaiming that life “is a tale told by an idiot, signifying nothing” personal life announces its virtue, and superbly signifies itself.’⁵ Lascelles Abercrombie’s extraordinary use here of the word ‘virtue’ may be related to Wilson Knight’s view that Macbeth ‘has won through by excessive crime to an harmonious and honest relation with his surroundings . . . . He now knows himself to be a tyrant confessed, and wins back . . . integrity of soul.’⁶

The word ‘ambition’ is used only three times in the play, and always in simple relation to the idea of worldly power, of gaining the throne, as when Lady Macbeth says her husband is ‘not without ambition’ (I.v.16), or Ross explains the supposed guilt of Malcolm and Donalbain for the death of Duncan in terms of ‘thriftless ambition’ (II.iv.28). The compulsion that drives Macbeth is more complex than this, and requires further analysis. A better understanding of why Macbeth does what he does may in turn help to explain the curious contradictions that tend to emerge in the common moralistic accounts of the play, which are torn between condemning him as a criminal and rescuing a grandeur, integrity, even virtue for him at the end. A sense of this difficulty has in part prompted a recent account of Macbeth as lacking ‘the requisite moral sense and agony of conscience that any proper tragic hero must have’;⁷ this is a response to critics who see Macbeth as essentially good, when he has ‘neither moral sense nor awareness of its existence’.⁸ Such an account of Macbeth may seem a strange, even perverse, reading, but it stems from a genuine problem, and involves an important recognition, that Macbeth’s ‘imagination is not under his control; he is its creature.’⁹ For another common assumption about Macbeth is that because he has great poetry to speak he must be an ‘intellectual giant’,¹⁰ when a very important question the text raises is how far Macbeth understands his own words.

Moralistic accounts of Macbeth as falling into temptation, committing a terrible crime and ending in despair, pass too readily by the question that haunts the first two acts, why does Macbeth kill Duncan? It seems plain that he has thought of such a possibility before meeting the witches, or at least that his starting at their greetings of him (I.iii.51) registers his awareness at this moment that what they say gives conscious expression to a half-formed image; and this is confirmed by the first scene in which Lady Macbeth appears, for the death of Duncan is already an idea familiar to her, even to the murder weapon, the ‘keen knife’ that is to do the deed (I.v.49). If the thought of murdering Duncan is already there, so to speak, in the minds of Macbeth and Lady Macbeth, then the notion of Macbeth as tempted needs further scrutiny. The Weird Sisters announce that Macbeth will be king, and since their other prophecy, that he will be Thane of Cawdor, is immediately fulfilled, what they say might rather prompt him to sit tight than to plot to murder the King. Whatever it is that tempts Macbeth to do the deed is in himself and in his wife. And yet, hard on receiving notice of his new ‘honour’, the title of Thane of Cawdor, Macbeth reveals that he is already thinking of murder.

The context for all this is the opening of the play, with its emphasis on the butchery of war. According to Holinshed Macdonwald killed himself in his castle, and Macbeth, finding the dead body, and ‘remitting no piece of his cruel nature’,¹¹ cut the head off and sent it as a present to Duncan. In the play the bleeding Captain describes a much stranger image of death. Macbeth, brandishing his sword, ‘which smok’d with bloody execution’, as if burning with rage, or steaming with hot blood, ‘carv’d’ a passage through men to confront the living Macdonwald:

Which ne’er shook hands, nor bade farewell to him,

Till he unseam’d him from the nave to th’ chops,

And fix’d his head upon our battlements.

(I.ii.21–3)

The suggestion of ripping Macdonwald’s flesh like cloth from the navel to the jaws completes an image of startling ferocity, quite overshadowing the attribute of courage in ‘brave Macbeth . . . . Like Valour’s minion’. It is as if Macbeth delights in such brutal killing, and loves

to bathe in reeking wounds

Or memorize another Golgotha,

(I.ii.40–1)

Is the force of this to suggest that in the heat of battle Macbeth and Banquo destroy all indiscriminately who come in their way, turning the battlefield into another place of a skull, or dead bones? Are they being likened to the soldiers who crucified Christ?

The bleeding captain’s narrative of the battle is supported by the report of Ross, who, on the immediate sentencing of Cawdor to death, is sent to greet Macbeth from the King:

He finds thee in the stout Norweyan ranks

Nothing afeard of what thyself didst make,

Strange images of death.

(I.iii.95–7)

Here, in these opening scenes, if anywhere, Macbeth comes near to being represented as a ‘butcher’ (V.viii.69), so habituated to the horror of the battlefield that he is untroubled by the ‘strange images of death’ he makes and sees all round him.

Yet it is at this point he learns he is Thane of Cawdor: the Weird Sisters have told two truths – he is Thane of Glamis ‘by Sinel’s death’ (I.iii.71), and Thane of ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Original Title Page
• Original Copyright Page
• Contents
• Contributors
• Introduction
• Part 1 Themes and structure
• Part 2 The play in the theatre
• Part 3 Enacting the text
• Part 4 Special studies
• Part 5 A director's view of the play
• Afterword
• Index