Macbeth
The hypothesis of an unformed Macbeth undercuts the traditional vision of the Macbeth persona of a fearless general and a fully-developed, independent spirit. Bradley describes Macbeth as sublime and awe inspiring, a man with "a passion for power" and an "instinct for self-assertion," who is not only "a bold ambitious man of action" but who has "the imagination of a poet." 6 Bradley's notion of tragedy as "deeds which issue from character" 7 precludes the possibility of Macbeth being based on Macbeth's struggle for selfhood. Bradley explicitly shunts aside any consideration which might challenge the presumption of the tragic hero's wholeness, independence and integrity of character, including the numerous instances of madness in Shakespearean tragedy, which he describes as minor "additions" to the dramas. 8
In contrast, Bernard McElroy begins his discussion of Shakespeare's Mature Tragedies with the comment: “For all their diversity of tone and subject matter, Shakespeare's four mature tragedies, Hamlet , Othello , King Lear , and Macbeth , all embody at least one essential experience in common, the collapse of the subjective world of the tragic hero.” 9
In his essay, "Hurt Minds," Derek Russell Davis sees madness as a central issue of the play. He describes Macbeth's condition at the opening of the play as "something like the demobilization crises with which psychiatrists became familiar at the end of the Second World War." 10 Davis traces the incidents of Macbeth as a psychopathology, concluding of Macbeth and Lady Macbeth that "the form taken by the mental illness in each case precluded any intervention that could have brought reconciliation." 11
Elaborating still further on the centrality of madness in Macbeth , in The Drama of Social Reality , Stanford Lyman and Marvin Scot conceive of Macbeth as a case of "alienation from roles" which revokes Macbeth's most fundamental connections to the world. According to Lyman and Scot, alienation from social reality expresses itself in the individual as the subjective sense of having:
(1) lost the power to take up routine tasks and to assume offices; (2) lost the capacity to continue actions one carried forth with alacrity and matter-of-factness; (3) lost contact with situations or conditions wherein uniformity and familiarity are to be expected; (4) lost the element of self-recognition to be obtained from acting; (5) lost the chance to terminate an action once it has begun, so that demarcations of entry and exit are constitutive features of one's own conscious or habitual actions. 12
They conclude that "Macbeth's life fulfills most if not all of these conditions of alienation." 13
Terry Eagleton in his "rereading" of Macbeth , in William Shakespeare , also repudiates the traditional vision of the tragic hero--exemplified by Bradley--as a fully coherent and courageous individual who is true to himself to the end. Eagleton finds Macbeth to be "chasing an identity which continually eludes him" and "reduced to a ham actor, unable to identify with his role." 14
Rosenberg notes that each of Shakespeare's great tragic heroes--Othello, Lear and Hamlet--is brought to the brink of madness by the intense "inward struggle of the self." Rosenberg catalogues performances of the play in which Macbeth is conspicuously portrayed as insane and reviews some of the literature on the theme of Macbeth's madness.
The syndrome of his "raptness," his hallucinations, his susceptibility to unbalance-- then comes my fit again --has been diagnosed as epileptic (Coriat); he has been seen as verging on madness (Draper), a murderer while under hallucination (Quiller-Couch). Coghill, so sensitively oriented to Shakespeare's theatrical intentions, points out that the text specifies Macbeth's seeming madness; Murray flatly proclaims him mad, . . . . 15
Through its lyricism the play envelops us in Macbeth's reality which, like heaven, is always within reach but never grasped. We find intimations of the lyrical structure of the drama in Bradley's description of the unified interweaving of its elements.
A Shakespearean tragedy, as a rule, has a special tone or atmosphere of its own, quite perceptible, however difficult to describe. The effect of this atmosphere is marked with unusual strength in Macbeth . It is due to a variety of influences which combine with those just noticed, so that, acting and reacting, they form a whole; and the desolation of the blasted heath, the design of the Witches, the guilt of the hero's soul, the darkness of the night, seem to emanate from one and the same source. 16
Among many Renaissance scholars the reciprocity between the world of the play and the inner world of the hero has become recognized as a characteristic feature of tragedy. 17 The outer world of other characters, of events, incidents, and relations, of social reality and the cosmos becomes a metaphor for and commentary on Macbeth's personal dilemmas, subjective conflicts and inner confusion and disintegration--and vice versa. 18 We therefore experience the play as Macbeth's reality. What we in fact experience is a tentative reality of futile hopes, of overweening ambition which frets and hesitates about itself, and aspirations dashed as they are formed. We experience the unresolvedness and aporia of Macbeth's situation, the failure of his reality to coalesce in any satisfactory sense, the inability of Macbeth's ego to integrate with its environment. The basic paradox, the double bind, which Macbeth faces is that, while all influences seem to confirm his basic drive ‘to be a man,’ the situation in which he finds himself dictates that in order to be a man he must destroy exactly those structures--the community of men, the social hierarchy, principle and ethics, the bonds of paternalism between older men and young men and between men and children, friendship, the social order of Scotland and the order of the cosmos--which are necessary to his self-identification as a man. As Lyman and Scot describe this dilemma:
For Macbeth the routine of his role is secured in the orderliness of the feudal structure, which provides a division of labor, a limited set of actions, and a definite kind of office to each person. Macbeth begins his journey to role alienation by plotting to undermine the very structure that gives his own life meaning and joy. 19
By murdering Duncan, his king, and Banquo, his friend, Macbeth, in a literal sense, has destroyed the elements which could have cultivated his sense of selfhood. Macbeth's entanglements with the supernatural world, with his own hallucinations and his wife's deluded guidance precludes self awareness. Through his tyranny Macbeth turns the external world into a mirror of his own tortured soul; as Ross describes it:
Alas poor country!
Almost afraid to know itself! It cannot
Be called our mother but our grave, where nothing
But who knows nothing is once seen to smile;
Where sighs and groans, and shrieks that rent the air,
Are made, not marked; where violent sorrow seems
A modern ecstacy. (IV. iii. 164-70)
Having destroyed the values and social order of Scotland, disturbed even the Universal Chain of Being, Macbeth has collapsed the structures whereby he might have gained a sense of his manhood and of himself.
Macbeth's destiny is to live with the uncertainty and emptiness of the void he has created.
. . . I am sick at heart,
When I behold--Seyton, I say!--This push
Will cheer me ever, or disseat me now,
I have lived long enough. My way of life
Is fall'n into the sear, the yellow leaf,
And that which should accompany old age,
As honor, love, obedience, troops of friends,
I must not look to have; but in their stead,
Curses not loud but deep, mouth-honor, breath,
Which the poor heart would fain deny, and dare not. (V. iii. 19-29)
From the opening of the drama Macbeth proceeds on the track laid down for him by events and convention from youthful presumption and semi-consciousness to--as he wrestles with self-knowledge and discovers evermore furious contradictions--greater depths of un-knowledge and breadths of looming nothingness.
We know very little of the character of Macbeth before the fair-foul day he distinguished himself on the battle field. Yet, everything we do know seems to contradict the image of a self-possessed, noble warrior. Malcolm, in conversation with Macduff, calls Macbeth "bloody,/ Luxurious, avaricious, false, deceitful,/ Sudden, malicious, smacking of every sin/ That has a name: . . . " (IV. iii. 58-60) but the ironic tenor of the conversation and the obvious hyperbole of his statement warns us away from taking these comments as a factual or even an honestly impressionistic assessment of Macbeth. There is a striking contradiction between Lady Macbeth's description of him as "too full of the milk of human kindness" (I. iv. 17.) and "not without ambition, but without the illness should attend it" (I. iv. 19.), and the Captain's description of "brave Macbeth" who "disdaining Fortune" attacked Macdonwald and "with his brandish steel,/ Which smoked with bloody execution," "unseamed him from the nave to th' chops,/ And fixed his head upon our batements" (I. ii. 16-23). Macbeth, late in the play, describes his earlier self, saying: “The time has been, my senses would have cooled / To hear a night-shriek, and my fell of hair / Would at a dismal treatise rouse and stir / As life were in it” (V. v. 10-13).
Lilly Campbell ( Shakespeare's Tragic Heroes: Slaves of Passion ) characterizes Macbeth as driven by fear. His "rash courage", as she describes, is not so much courage as a passion complementary to fear which causes him to fight irrationally--with the courage "of a beast and not of a man." 20 I would agree with Campbell that, while Macbeth shows daring and is capable of action, he is never brave, never certain, never calm or confident. However, fear itself cannot account for his actions--particularly his assassination of Duncan.
The apparent contradiction between how Macbeth feels and what he does, between his fearfulness and his daring can be accounted for by his ongoing struggle to assert and in fact to discover himself. Davis considers Macbeth's reactions to Lady Macbeth's bating and concludes that his being "so sensitive to her taunts suggests that his bravery in battle ‘disdaining fortune’ (I. ii. 17) is an over-compensation for his doubts." 21 Each of Macbeth's actions is an attempt to prove himself or to achieve a position or maintain a position or simply to assert and thereby grasp his own identity. Paradoxically, his actions convince him that "To know my deed, twere best not know myself" (II. ii. 72). The line suggests that Macbeth does not know himself and confirms that the idea of self-knowledge is in his mind and that he is growing conscious of this lack. In other words, Macbeth is motivated by doubt, by fear, by his intuitions of emptiness; each of the deeds he performs is in order to know himself, in fact, to become himself and thereby repudiate his own doubts and misgivings, and his feelings of emptiness and estrangement. His actions have exactly the opposite effect, they increase his estrangement, and the more he is estranged the greater the need for action.
Lady Macbeth, like the Witches before her, lures Macbeth along his path of infamy, but Macbeth is seduced not by power or ambition but by a position (Thane of Cawdor), a role (being the King) and by the implicit promise that with these roles and through the actions required to achieve them he will become whole, secure and, in short, a man. As she pushes him forward, paradoxically, Lady Macbeth, as Macbeth's double, introduces the "doubleness" which holds him back from fulfilment. She is his double in that she as his wife is closest to him, but she also shares in his aspirations even to the point, as her "unsex me" soliloquy suggests, of striving for masculinity. She becomes the symbol of Macbeth being divided against himself, constantly facing self-contradiction, and her madness serves as a cause and a foreboding of his.
Lady Macbeth introduces paradox into Macbeth's life in a variety of ways. That she compels him to be a man, ipso facto, unmans him. Her sang-froid makes Macbeth doubt himself. In awe of her relentlessness, Macbeth tells her, "You make me strange/ Even to the disposition that I owe, . . ." (III.iv. 112-3) Her naked ambition makes Macbeth question ambition--"Vaulting ambition, which o'erleaps itself/ and falls on th' other--" (I.Vii. 27) (the speech is interrupted by Lady Macbeth's entrance). She seems to know Macbeth, how to motivate him through the cant of `being a man,' yet she denies what Macbeth is experiencing. She belittles his hesitations, fears and hallucinations, and castigates him when he sees Banquo's ghost. She impels Macbeth to action and will not let him retreat from his course. Throughout the play she offers a sense of direction--which, paradoxically, is blind, irrational and immoral--to Macbeth's actions. When she is gone the deluded intimation that Macbeth's deeds might amount to something, might have some positive meaning, dies its feeble death along with her. Her death highlights the meaninglessness, the emptiness, of the crimes Macbeth has committed, and of his life.
Much of Macbeth's malaise is caused by the "false selves" which the world in which Macbeth operates demand. Macbeth, against at least a part of his nature, has excelled in bloody carnage, and as a result Duncan grants him a new title and position as Thane of Cawdor. If we ask ourselves how Macbeth could murder Duncan, we should begin our answer by recognizing that the king himself had schooled Macbeth in the propriety of such behaviour by rewarding Macbeth for his savagery with the property and title of an executed nobleman. Apparently new to the game of rebellion, treachery and execution, Macbeth has not inculcated a sense of the limits of the rules. His behaviour is an extension, perhaps even a reductio ad absurdum, of these codes of politics and warfare. From the beginning we find that Macbeth is estranged from his own actions and therefore from the titles he receives from those actions. The world in which he operates seems false, endlessly ironic. "So fair and foul a day" and the Witches' "fair is foul and foul is fair" resonate throughout the play as an echo of Macbeth's ambivalence. "Equivocation," as Sylvan Barnet points out, "is in part what the play is about. The Porter (II. iii) soliloquizes about an equivocator, but we do not have to wait for him to introduce the theme of doubleness or ambiguity." 22 In Macbeth's world, good and evil are indeterminate, good intention reaps disaster (the Porter's description of the farmer), the trusted Thane is a traitor and is brutally executed, the King cannot distinguish the trustworthy from the untrustworthy (be treacherous or be loyal? be determined or be deterred? The situation suggests both possibilities.) Every statement, every event, every apparition carries double and triple meanings, and contradictory instructions. This confusing world is to Macbeth as (from the Porter's description) drink is to the lecher: "it makes him and it mars him; it sets him on and it takes him off; it persuades him and disheartens him; . . . " (II. iii. 32-3).
Prudence demands that Macbeth wear masks and disguises to operate within this world. The solution to Macbeth's dilemma, in a more perfect world, would be for him to find himself and thereby find within himself appropriate directions and limits. In the world in which Macbeth lives, he finds himself constantly dressed "in borrowed robes." (I. iii. 109) Banquo's early description of Macbeth's preoccupied, alienated reaction to his new honours, in fact describes what will become for Macbeth a profound and persistent malaise. "New honors come upon him,/ Like strange garments, cleave not to their mold . . . ." (I. iii. 144-6). His self blindness grows more obstructive with the increasing requirements of masks and false fronts. "False face must hide what false heart doth know" (I. vii. 82). Macbeth cannot grow into his new role, cannot enjoy external reaffirmation of what or who he is because he and Lady Macbeth are constantly forced to `make their faces vizards of their hearts,' "Disguising what they are" (III. i. 34).
Macbeth's actions therefore do not accomplish individuation. He is ambivalent after the victories of the first battle. He seems estranged by the winning of the title of Thane of Cawdor. After the murder of Duncan he is spiritually moribund.
Had I but died an hour before this chance,
I had lived a blessèd time; for from this instant
There's nothing serious in mortality:
All is but toys. Renown and grace is dead,
The wine of life is drawn, and mere lees
Is left this vault to brag of. (II. iii. 90-5)
Immediately upon recognizing the possible truth of the witches' predictions, Macbeth describes how the pressure of this situation, merely imagined, affects him: “My thoughts, whose murder yet is but fantastical, / Shakes so my single state of man that function / Is smothered in surmise, and nothing is / But what is not” (I. iii. 138-40). We can appreciate that no action which Macbeth takes within this double bind can prove psychologically rewarding to him. He outlines the double bind he faces in contemplating the murder of Duncan.
We still have judgement here; that we but teach
Bloody instructions, which, being taught, return
To plague the inventor: this even-handed justice
Commends th' ingredients of our poisoned chalice
To our own lips. He's here in double trust:
First, as I am his kinsman and his subject,
Strong both against the deed; then, as his host,
Who should against his murderer shut the door,
Not bear the knife myself. (I. vii. 7-16)
Macbeth goes on to note Duncan's virtues in office. However, on the other hand, as his conversation with Lady Macbeth indicates, were he to take no action he would still suffer terrible misgivings at his failure ‘to be a man.’ If the forces for and against action are in equal balance, are equally negating of Macbeth's sense of reality, what changes the balance is the imprint of habit. Macbeth allows himself to be governed, almost automatically, by the principle of action as self definition, by the axiomatic formula which claims that thought plus action equals being and disregards the quality of thought and the character of action.
The failure of this formula throughout the play does not prevent him from further action. Later he not only feels he has gone too far to turn back ("I am in blood/ Stepped in so far that, should I wade no more,/ Returning were as tedious as go o'er." (III. iv. 136-138) ), but his increase in alienation offers a double incentive to action. In the first place, his estrangement guarantees his freedom to act; adrift in meaninglessness and anomie he is privileged to act without moral or even logical constraint. Secondly, he holds on to the notion that action will conquer meaninglessness and alienation 23 : "Strange things I have in head that will to hand,/ Which must be acted ere they may be scanned." (III. iv. 136-40)
This is part of the context in which we should understand Macbeth's visit to the cave of the Witches and his subsequent decision to murder Macduff's family. When Macbeth goes to visit the witches, as Bradley points out, "He has no longer any awe of them." 24 They offer him contradictory prophesies and ambiguous apparitions, yet he seems comfortable among them. Bradley concludes that following this meeting Macbeth deals "his last blow at conscience and pity." According to Bradley, "The whole flood of evil in his nature is now let loose." 25 I would contend that the scene should be understood not simply in terms of the metaphysics of evil, but in terms of that same struggle which we infer from his valour on the battlefield, from his susceptibility to Lady Macbeth's taunting, from his murder of the king, from his murder of Banquo, and from his soliloquies on his feelings of emptiness and worthlessness; that is, the struggle to overcome self doubt and insecurity. After his meeting with the witches we sense that Macbeth has made a decision something like Richard III's decision when he "cannot prove a lover" to be "determinéd to prove a villain" (I. i. 30). Seemingly the only identity available to Macbeth is the malevolent one which he finds in the company of the witches. Macbeth's stratagem of behaviour remains that all problems must be resolved through action.
Time, thou anticipat's my dread exploits.
The flighty purpose never is o'ertook
Unless the deed go with it. From this moment
The very firstlings of my heart shall be
The firstlings of my hand. And even now,
To crown my thoughts with acts, be it thought and done:
The castle of Macduff I will surprise,
Seize upon Fife; give th' edge o' th' sword
His wife, his babes, and all unfortunate souls
That trace him in his line. No boasting like a fool;
This deed I'll do before this purpose cool:
But no more sights! (IV. i. 144-55)
Bradley contends that the "sights" refer to the "visions called up by the Witches." 26 I would contend that the implication is that Macbeth is determined to no longer be harassed by ghosts and hallucinations. In other words, Macbeth makes a psychological self-assessment and concludes the cure for his hysteria is greater assertion of his manliness, a firm and whole identity as a man established by strong-willed action. Macbeth's conviction should recall the manner in which Lady Macbeth harangued him for succumbing to both the vision of the knife and the ghost of Banquo.
O proper stuff!
This is the very painting of your fear.
This is the air drawn dagger which, you said,
Led you to Duncan. O, these flaws and starts,
Impostors to true fear, would well become
A woman's story at a winter's fire,
Authorized by her granddam. (III. iv. 60-6)
These visions are diagnosed as resulting from Macbeth's lack of manhood. Macbeth concludes that manliness is the way to defeat the ghost, and when the ghost is gone he feels like a complete man.
What man dare, I dare.
Approach thou like the rugged Russian bear,
The armed rhinoceros, or th' Hyrcan tiger;
Take any shape but that, and my firm nerves
Shall never tremble. Or be alive again,
And dare me to the desert with my sword.
If trembling I inhabit then, protest me
The baby of a girl. Hence, horrible shadow!
Unreal mockery, hence! [exit Ghost]
Why, so: being gone,
I am a man again. (III. iv. 99-107)
Macbeth reasons that once he has taken action against Macduff's family (any equally heinous action would do) he will no longer have these visions because he will be complete, his sense of existence secure. He will have committed himself to an identity of evil and will no longer be troubled by doubts, by conscience and contradictions and the "sights" they cause.
Thus, in the present circumstances, Macbeth's decision to annihilate Macduff's lineage is gratuitous. What it does for Macbeth is to assert his identity within an imagined order of evil. This Satanic identity is better than no identity. This, from Macbeth's perspective, is the cure for his lack of self knowledge, for his doubt and fear, for the repeated dissolution of his sense of reality and his hallucinations. However, the order of evil, as Macbeth discovers, is more delusional, more ephemeral and capricious, more perfidious than the social and moral order which, at this moment, Macbeth has decisively abandoned.
Macbeth's manhood therefore remains lacking. This lack becomes most apparent against the foil of his nemesis, Macduff. The theme of ‘being a man’ is the mysterious center of the drama. We, like Macbeth, never learn exactly what ‘being a man’ means or requires. However, through Macduff, the telos of being a man is shown as immediate, inherent and visceral. Macduff, like Macbeth has considerable guilt to face. Shakespeare does not let his audience turn away from this fact. Lady Macduff chastises her husband's flight and abandonment of his family, immediately before the murderers attack. In the subsequent scene Malcolm raises the question to Macduff: "Why in that rawness left you wife and child, . . ." (IV. iii. 26). When Ross informs Macduff that his family has been slain, Macduff begins to swoon. Malcolm, in a manner that should remind us of Lady Macbeth, uses this opportunity to enlist Macduff into the forces about to attack Macbeth: “Be comforted, / Let's make us med'cines of our great revenge, / To cure this deadly grief” (IV. iii. 213-15). Yet, at first it seems Macduff will not be stirred to revenge, preferring to mourn for his "pretty chicks and their dam." To which Malcolm again calls upon him to "dispute it like a man." Macduff's response reminds us of Macbeth's guilt and self-deprecation, but it also crystallizes the differences between him and Macbeth and directs us toward what has been absent in Macbeth's responses.
I shall do so;
But I must first feel it as a man.
I cannot but remember such things were,
That were most precious to me. Did heaven look on,
And would not take their part? Sinful Macduff,
They were all struck for thee! Naught that I am,
Not for their own demerits but for mine
Fell slaughter on their souls. Heaven rest them now! (IV. iii. 220-27)
Macduff, as is the natural temptation in the face of crisis, questions heaven. Macduff's faith is shaken but not broken. He accepts his guilt but is not destroyed by it. There is a logical contradiction between Macduff's swearing by heaven and, at the same time, pledging himself to revenge, but his intuitive sense of justice overrides the inconsistency and assures the meaningfulness of his actions. In contrast, Macbeth has consistently put action and being a man before meaning and feeling and has consequently, in the effort to estrange himself from his guilt, alienated himself from heaven, from Scotland, and from himself.
Macbeth's madness, in the length of the play, is overdetermined. The Doctor's assessment of Lady Macbeth's ‘infected mind’--"More needs she the divine than the physician" (V. i. 77.)--is typical of mental diagnosis of the period (as we have seen in Burton and in the case of Mary Glower). It reminds us that Macbeth has exposed himself to madness through his trespass with Witches and demons. Yet we can find cause for his madness in his guilt, his grief, and in the haunting of ghosts, in the "unnatural deeds" which, according to the Doctor, "Do breed unnatural troubles," in the play's intimations of possession and melancholy humours, in the frenzy of Macbeth's passion, in his alienation, and in the conflict of passions of the double bind. His pathology is reviewed, speculated upon and diagnosed by Caithness, Angus and Menteith as they advance against Dunsinane.
CAITHNESS
Great Dunsinane he strongly fortifies,
Some say he's mad; others, that lesser hate him,
Do call it valiant fury: but, for certain,
He cannot buckle his distempered cause
Within the belt of rule.
ANGUS
Now does he feel
His secret murders sticking on his hands;
Now minutely revolts upbraid his faith-breach.
Those he commands move only in command,
Nothing in love. Now does he feel his title
Hang loose about him, like a giant's robe
Upon a dwarfish thief.
MENTEITH
Who then shall blame
His pestered senses to recoil and start,
When all that is within him does condemn
Itself for being there? (V. ii. 12-25)
The progress of Macbeth's madness has been all of this--the unruled passion, the roles and "robes" which will not fit, the double bind of a self that rebels against itself. In the end, Macbeth continues to propose a doctrine of action as cure--which by this point rings of obsession and delusion, and mocks the image of the man of action. He holds, with bravura, that with this battle "the mind I sway by and the heart I bear/ Shall never sag with doubt or shake with fear." (V. iii. 9-10) Macbeth calls for his favorite disguise, though "'Tis not needed yet" (V. iii. 34), his "armor."
Disguises and hollow doctrine have not and do not sustain him. Macbeth's final madness is suicidal melancholy, but even here he equivocates: “Why should I play the Roman fool, and die / On my own sword? Whiles I see lives, the gashes / Do better on them” (V. viii. 1-3). When Macduff finds him, Macbeth does not wish to fight. ("My soul is too much charged/ with blood of thine already.") When Macbeth learns that Macduff was "not of woman born" he responds by saying, "I'll not fight with thee." Macduff threatens him with humiliation and Macbeth responds "I will not yield." Macbeth is not only trapped into action but trapped into the habit of action though the ritual of this behaviour has no particular meaning for him at this point, and we must question that it ever had.
Has the play directed us to some ultimate image of manliness? Consider the four models of manhood presented to us in the denouement. We find Macduff, a man not born of woman (which seems to mark him for masculinity), yet he stands before us bearing the head of Macbeth and we cannot help but remember that the play began with the image of Macbeth fixing the head of Macdonwald upon the battlements. Ross proudly announces that Young Siward "only lived but till he was a man" and finds that Macbeth died "like a man" (V. viii. 40 and 42). Siward has lost a son, and responds with alacrity that would lose a thousand more in battle. Paradoxically, the "boy," Malcolm, is now the king. ‘To be a man’: the play turns this cant into a question.
Notes
3. M. Rosenberg, The Masks of Macbeth (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1978), pp. 62-3, discusses the question of Macbeth's age. He is usually visualized as "on the young side of middle age" (notably by Bradley). Rosenberg notes productions in which the couple was portrayed as young; such as, the first Bergman production of the play, Will Quadflieg's portrayal (Germany, 1953), a Polish production in 1964, and in the Polanski film version of the play.
Rosenberg makes the following observations:
Macbeth's father, Sinel, seems lately to have died, making Macbeth Thane of Glamis. His wife speaks of the infant she has suckled, and he urges her to produce men-children, so she is evidently of child-bearing age. (Historically, the Lady had issue by a previous marriage; but we are not to know that. . . . .)
The tension between youth and age, a familiar motif in Shakespeare, pivots doubly around Macbeth: he is the younger man toppling old Duncan, as he will be the old one overturned by Duncan's son. Certainly at the outset Macbeth must seem older than Malcolm--older enough that his heroic achievement and soldierly capacity contrast sharply with the record of the young prince, whose chief role in the battle to save Scotland was to be rescued: some motivation for Macbeth may be seen in this. (62)
As I have noted, Macbeth's actual age is not crucial to the argument I am presenting; however, it would be convenient to the argument if he were envisaged as marginally older than Malcolm, young enough that his new honours, positions and obligations seem strange to him, and younger than Lady Macbeth, perhaps with the same distance of years as existed between Shakespeare and his wife, Anne Hathaway, who was eight years his senior.
4. Rosenberg (pp. 671-2), pursues the theme established by L.C. Knights and Cleanth Brooks that "a babe is Macbeth 's most powerful symbol."
5. Ibid, p. 673.
6. Bradley, A. C. Shakespearean Tragedy (New York: St. Martins, 1904), pp. 294-5.
7. Ibid, p. 10.
8. Bradley identifies three of what he calls "additional factors" in Shakespearean tragedy. These three elements are: (a) madness, "Shakespeare, occasionally and for reasons which need not be discussed here, represents abnormal conditions of mind; insanity; for example, somnambulism, hallucinations." (b) the supernatural, "Shakespeare also introduces the supernatural into some of his tragedies; he introduces ghosts, and witches who have supernatural knowledge." and, (c) chance, "Shakespeare, lastly, in most of his tragedies allows to ‘chance’ or ‘accident’ an appreciable influence at some point in the action. Chance or accident here will be found, I think, to mean any occurrence (not supernatural, of course) which enters the dramatic sequence neither from the agency of a character, nor from the obvious surrounding circumstances." Bradley concludes: "Thus it appears that these three elements in the `action' are subordinate, while the dominant factor consists in deeds which issue from character." Lilly B. Campbell, Shakespeare's Tragic Heroes: Slaves of Passion (New York: Barnes & Noble, 1930), pp. 241-66, takes Bradley to task, at length, for the circular fashion in which he argues for his definition and, more significantly for his exclusion of the three features above, which, according to Campbell, are essential themes in the philosophy of the plays.
Bradley's three "additions," I would argue, add up to one central feature. Witches, spirits and demonic possession were, in Jacobean and Elizabethan England, widely viewed as causes of madness. Chance and the apparently accidental, we have discovered from Freudian psychoanalysis, can in fact be highly significant and revelatory of human motives and their repression. In other words Bradley is attempting to put aside any consideration of psychological weakness or breakdown in the tragic hero.
9. B. McElroy, Shakespeare's Mature Tragedies , (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1973), p. 3.
10. R.R. Davis, "Hurt Minds," Focus on Macbeth , ed. J.R. Brown (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1982), p. 211.
11. Ibid, p. 226.
12. S.M. Lyman and M.B. Scott, The Drama of Social Reality (New York: Oxford University Press, 1975), p. 11.
13. Ibid, p. 11.
14. T. Eagleton, William Shakespeare (New York: Basil Blackwell, 1986), p. 3.
15. Rosenberg, p. 85.
16. Bradley, p. 278.
17. see E. Rothstein, Restoration Tragedy: Form and the Process of Change (Madison: U. of Wisconsin Press, 1967), p. 104. Linda Bamber, Comic Women, Tragic Men (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1982), also points out more generally how the tragedy is dominated by the inner life of the tragic hero.
The tragic heroes, moreover, give the illusion of having an inner life. They have thoughts and feelings which are hidden from the other characters and sometimes even from themselves. If they are aware of their inner thoughts they reveal them to us in soliloquies; if not, they pursue the shadows cast by what is happening inside them. Their inner lives may be revealed by what Maynard Mack has called "umbrella speeches," speeches by other characters under which the consciousness of the tragic hero may shelter. The Fool's speeches in King Lear are an example: we understand from listening to the Fool what is going on inside Lear. Another umbrella speech is Enobarbus's description of Cleopatra on her barge. These speeches reflect the unconscious or unexpressed thoughts of the tragic heroes. Their inner life is mirrored for us even when they are silent. (7)
A.H.R. Fairchild, Shakespeare and the Tragic Theme (Folcroft, PA.: Folcroft Press, 1944), claims of the tragic protagonists: "these characters attempt to deal with life in terms of their own personal and private emotions, to resolve life into a means of gratifying personal feeling" (p.107).
18. This, for example, approximates McElroy's description of Macbeth , pp. 207-8.
19. Lyman and Scot, p. 11.
20. Campbell, p. 237.
21. Davis, p. 214.
22. Sylvan Barnet in his "Introduction" to Macbeth in The Complete Signet Classic Shakespeare (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1972), p. 1229.
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