[In the following essay, Cunningham examines ways in which modern audiences reconcile Macbeth's double roles as hero and villian.]

Actors consider Macbeth to be so'unlucky'that many of them will never allow it to be named, but refer to it as in the title above ['The Scottish Play']: Peter o'Toole, when playing the leading role, always called it'Harry Lauder', after a once famous Scottish comedian. No other play of the three dozen Shakespeare wrote has such a reputation for disaster, so it may be worth asking why this should be so. The usual explanation given is that much of the play is performed in gloomy, underlit settings and it ends with some vigorous hand-to-hand fighting, always a likely source of calamity on stage. Yet other plays have underlit episodes and many of his history plays—to which group this, in a way, belongs—involve fighting and'killing'in their later scenes, when the tired actors may be at risk.

A more likely reason for its unpopularity amongst performers is that it is rarely a successful play in the theatre. Twentieth-century actors seldom become famous for their presentation of Macbeth—-if they do it well, people praise them for succeeding despite the difficulty of the role. The crux of the difficulty is nothing to do with lighting or fighting, but the nature of the main character: the hero of Macbeth is also the villain, and it seems almost impossible to reconcile the two roles in a way that will satisfy a modern audience. Other major roles show flawed characters, perhaps—Hamlet with his warped depressive's view of the world, Othello with his hypersensitive jealousy—but none pursues a deliberate course of evil as Macbeth does. Richard III does so, but he is a villain—and we might remind ourselves that, in the eighteenth century for example, a number of great actors were famous for their performances of Richard and of Macbeth. Perhaps an earlier age did not see the paradox, the villain/hero, quite as we do?

The word'tragedy'like the word'hero'is capable of several definitions, including the popular one which covers any sort of calamity from a chip pan on fire to a Test cricketer with a sprained wrist via airline crashes and massacres in remote countries. Calamity is, indeed, central to the way we all think of this word. The classical definition of it was given by Aristotle two thousand years before Shakespeare wrote his play. Roughly summarised, Aristotle said that a tragedy must show the sudden downfall of a great man in a position of high prosperity. It should arouse pity and terror in the audience—pity because they should be able to relate to the hero, terror at the power of the gods before which we are so impotent—and should help to cleanse them a little of the arrogance that mankind has always suffered from—the proud assumption that he is the master of his fate; he, in short, is God.

Though this definition may seem austere and academic to a modern student, it is a sound one: a disaster is most impressive when it strikes someone of great stature at the pinnacle of success; it can leave us feeling a little more humble than we were before we saw or read it—can cut us down to size for a while, at least. But this will only work if we can relate ourselves in some way to the hero, and an impossibly virtuous character alienates an audience, becomes some kind of Superman. To prevent this, Aristotle suggested that the hero should have some kind of human weakness, and, early in the present century, this'flaw', as it is usually called, was worked into an elaborate theory of tragedy which was so influential that it still affects most people who study the genre—and it certainly offers a convenient'explanation'of Macbeth. The human weakness of the hero becomes'the tragic flaw'—the root of the entire development of the play. So Othello's'flaw'is jealousy, Hamlet's indecision and so on. Macbeth, of course, suffers from ambition. It is a neat explanation for which Macbeth's own speeches about his ambition seem to provide good evidence, but it is not a lot of use to an actor trying to make sense of a complex role to an audience, and that has always been and always must be the most important criterion in any interpretation of such a play, intended, as it was, only to be acted, not studied.

Modern theatrical directors have not lacked ideas to try to make the play effective. Macbeth, we are told, meets the Witches when he is suffering from'battle fatigue', the Second World War term for what used (more bluntly) to be called shell-shock. So the military aspect of the man—certainly an important one—is heavily emphasised, and it does not take long to move from this view of the play to our vision of a military society: a Fascist Macbeth is perfectly playable, though surely he is wildly different from any noted Fascist leader of our century? Our horror of military rule is matched by our concern for the deprived, and the Witches can be played as neglected old ladies, desperately poor, whose part therefore becomes a social statement Such performances strike the viewer more by their ingenuity than by any insight they give into the central puzzle, but a brief glance at these ideas will begin to give us a notion of how very hard it is to interpret any of this play in our times. The death of young Macduff may still disturb (though it is very hard to act it—no small boy can make a convincing job of'He has killed me, mother') but we, like Macbeth, have'supped full with horrors'and have read of, seen perhaps in a documentary film, awfulness on such a scale that the casual butchering of a precocious lad seems trivial: we know too well how autocratic powers maintain themselves by systematic reigns of terror and the catalogue of suffering that Ross gives at the end of Act IV fails to shock us. We don't believe in witches. If we revere the monarchy it is in a very different way from what folk felt about it in 1605. Perhaps we don't really believe in evil—few of us, to be sure, believe in hell. To our blasé minds, both heroism and evil seem naive, simplistic: all heroes, we suspect, are looking for their fifteen minutes of fame complete with television interview, all evils are social or'psychological'. No wonder'the Scottish Play'gives actors such a hard time.

At least, students may console themselves by recalling that this is about the shortest play Shakespeare wrote—yet producers often feel they must shorten it further. The text is probably short because it was censored politically. Today the director will often cut out the scene where Macbeth sees the show of kings and the passage in IV.3 where Malcolm talks about the King of England curing diseased people who flock to him: these episodes refer specifically to James I (effectively patron of Shakespeare's company), to his ancestry and interest in the divine authority and power of kingship. They make little sense to a modern audience.

Yet even when we try to strip away such'difficult'passages as this we are left with the central problem more strikingly obvious than ever: there is no hero. Macbeth starts to'fall'as soon as the play begins; Malcolm makes a late run—he has just one good scene, the one that takes place in England, to build himself up a little in the eyes of the audience—and we are expected to join in the general junketing at the end when the patriotic hero of Act I has somehow become a'dead butcher'. How is the actor—how are we the readers—to make any coherent sense of this?

We might begin our search for an answer with Aristotle's analysis in mind. It is at once apparent that Macbeth is a great man and that he is at the height of his success in life at the beginning of the play. The injured soldier from the battlefield speaks of his courage in the highest terms and Duncan is full of praise for him as for Banquo (a tactful balance, as Banquo was an ancestor of James I, early in whose reign the play was written). The first stage in his downfall is often said to be when he meets the Witches, who suggest a great future for him. This is to ignore a very important speech. When Banquo and Angus bring him the news that the first prophecy has, in fact, come true—that he is Thane of Cawdor—he shares his thoughts with the audience in a long'aside'(I.3.129 onwards). If the vision he has had is good, as it has certainly foretold something good, a well-deserved reward, he asks:

. . . why do I yield to that suggestion
Whose horrid image doth unfix my hair,
And make my seated heart knock at my ribs
Against the use of nature? . . .
My thought, whose murder yet is but fantastical,
Shakes so my single state of man . . .

(I.3.133-139)

What suggestion? The Witches made no suggestions at all, but simply addressed him by three titles, the third being'King hereafter'. They say nothing of'murder'and Macbeth specifically speaks of'my thought'as the origin of the'fantastical'(that is, imagined only) murder. The Witches have merely triggered off a thought that he was already disposed to have, perhaps? Yet in the course of Act I, scene 7 we learn more about his previous thoughts. Lady Macbeth says:

Nor time nor place
Did then adhere, and yet you would make both

(I.7.51-52)

—referring to the occasion when Macbeth first spoke to her of'this enterprise', that is the murder of Duncan. This has to be a reference to plans before the play began, before he had ever seen the Witches. When he does meet them, they merely confirm him in an idea he already had. On this view of him, Macbeth is a total villain, false from the start, and it is possible in performance to represent him so. Yet such an interpretation does not succeed well with audiences. A total villain is not very interesting, and Shakespeare rarely offers us one. In Hamlet, for example, Claudius is saved from being a pantomime wicked uncle by the torments of guilt he suffers, yet guilt is something Macbeth seems hardly to feel at all: at the end of the play he regrets that his age is friendless, that is all, and his wife's death elicts merely the comment that she died at the wrong moment.

Lady Macbeth, indeed, gives us another way of looking at him. Clearly she understands his nature well, and in her first scene (I.5) she gives us a pithy account of her husband. One phrase in particular may strike any listener:' . . . wouldst not play false,/ And yet wouldst wrongly win'(I.5.19-20). Few of us can face this truth about ourselves. We would all like to have things we should not have, and would accept them if somehow, without quite committing a crime ourselves, we could have the millions in the Swiss bank account that many modern villains probably have and enjoy. Are we to see Macbeth as some kind of universal man, a figure who symbolises our liability to temptation and is actually tempted? This seems rather to diminish him to something less than a hero or a villain: to make him just a fallible mortal who happens to be offered an extraordinary prize, of which he has dreamed.

This scene—surely a key episode in the play—has given rise to a different view, emphasising the role of Lady Macbeth rather than of her husband. She says that she will pour her spirits into his ear, chastise him with the valour of her tongue. Macbeth appears to some interpreters as a man basically good but lured or forced into evil by an unscrupulous wife—in other words, Macbeth is the hero, Lady Macbeth the villain. Productions based on this supposition run grave danger of the hero appearing to be a mere hen-pecked husband, but there is quite a strong case to be made here: in the scene during the banquet given for Duncan (I.7) Macbeth appears as having wholly resolved to go no further with the plot, and giving a very precise account of the reasons for ('vaulting ambition') and against.

The speech (I.7.1-28) deserves and will receive further examination because it shows us a lot about Macbeth, but the important thing to the Lady-as-villain school of thought is that, at the end of his closely argued case for going no further, his wife is able completely to change his mind for him. Yet to see her as his evil genius presents difficulties later on, when it is very clear that she is no party to his misdeeds:'Be innocent of the knowledge, dearest chuck'he says (III.2.45), having conceived and plotted the murder of Banquo entirely on his own, as he apparently carries out his campaign of terror throughout Scotland later on. The Lady's villainy runs out almost as soon as Duncan has been murdered, where she has had the wit to tell her husband to get suitably dressed but the lack of foresight to think that merely washing off the blood will wash away the guilt. Her subsequent unhappiness, loneliness and suicide make her a fascinating character, and perhaps one of the reasons for the play's ill reputation is that the'heroine'so much over-shadows the hero—unless he has found a really effective way to play his part.

This brings us to other ways of interpreting him. In a popular edition of the complete works, C J Sisson speaks of'complex issues in the mind of a poet-warrior', thus succinctly expressing a widely held view of the central character. Macbeth has some fine speeches and they are, of course, poetry because Shakespeare wrote in verse. It is silly to praise Macbeth for his poetry—though critics have done so—when we should be praising the author. Shakespeare wishes us to see how Macbeth thinks and feels, and to see it as vividly as possible, so of course he gives him eloquent, sometimes beautiful, verse. Even so, he is easily misunderstood. To take the most famous example, the'Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow'of Act V, scene 5 (lines 19-28), we can readily see that it is a passage with perfect cadences to express despair, and with skilfully developed images—'day to day'linking with'all our yesterdays','lighted'with the'brief candle', and that, possibly, with the'poor player'since extras were called'shadows'. But what it actually says, as at least one critic believes, is that Macbeth is off his head: at the time of the play's composition, no sane man believed that the world had no meaning at all. That is to deny God, to deny everything. A nihilist hero is himself nothing, and the play must fail if there is a blank at the heart of it. At best the speech is a statement of total despair, a condition that interests us very briefly because it leads nowhere.

The poetic eloquence of this speech may actually hinder the modern reader from perceiving its meaning: this is not true of two of Macbeth's soliloquies, the one to which we have already referred, in the last scene of Act I, and the famous'river of blood'image (Act III.4.135-137)—nominally spoken to Lady Macbeth, but really his own thoughts shared with the audience, for by this stage in the play his wife knows almost nothing of what he is up to.

The first speech (I.7.1-28), as we have said earlier, is important both for the light it throws on his divided nature, and thus his role in the play, and for the help it can give the modern reader or viewer in understanding the nature of his action to the full. We are accustomed now to think of famous figures as being at risk—presidents and popes, ministers and judges have been victims of murderous attacks, highly publicised. The murder of one sweet old gentleman may not seem to us a very great matter. In this speech Macbeth with agonised care sums up all the reasons why it would be infamous of him to kill Duncan: the King is his relative as well as his monarch; he is a guest of the castle whom the laws of hospitality protect; he has been a good king—above all lacking in the corruption which power so often brings—'So clear in his great office'. Macbeth, with the ruthless insight into his own nature that is so special to him, says he has only'vaulting ambition'to urge him on. To us ambition is a virtue, to the Elizabethans it was a sin, for it suggested a kind of impatience against God who had called you to your station in life. Thus the only reason for the murder is a bad one. The reasons against it: it is a crime against kinship; against kingship, itself a triple sin for it is a crime not only against the man who is killed, but against the society which he heads and against God, under whose power the anointed ruler holds sway; against the laws of hospitality; against natural justice which says that Duncan is a good man and therefore should be protected, not destroyed. This analysis, which the original audience would have grasped without elaboration as the concepts were familiar, helps us to realise the enormity of the offence which Macbeth commits: more interestingly it helps us to see into his mind. He is absolutely clear about the nature of the act he contemplates and rejects it. His reason for changing his mind we shall consider in a moment.

The'river of blood'image, like the passage we have just considered, helps us in two ways: once again it shows his very clear perception of the nature of his deeds and the position in which he stands; but it also offers an explanation of why he continues on his dreadful course. The whole play may be seen as a working-out of the metaphor. Once you start on a wrong course of action it is almost impossible to go back—indeed, how could Macbeth'return'? He cannot bring Duncan back to life, or give up his kingdom to Malcolm—who would execute him no doubt—or call Banquo from the grave. He may, in fact, be seen as a man who is the victim of the logic of power-politics: do one ill deed, and you have to do more, until you find you have to tyrannise the whole world and retain your power by terror—including the murder of the children of dissidents. So have dictators always done.

If this is our view of the man—a hero who makes one false step and then cannot retrace it—the reason why he takes that step becomes very important, so we now return to the passage in Act I where he decides to stop before it is too late. The conventional explanation of the change is that his wife, so much stronger than he is we are told, persuades him. His wife is his inferior in reasoning: as soon as the murder is done, Macbeth knows it can never be undone, that the blood will remain on his hands; his wife believes that'a little water clears us of this deed'. But she has a shrewdness that gives her power. We have seen that, in the episode where she receives her husband's letter, she shows a very good knowledge of the kind of man he is. Thus she knows exactly what taunt will stir Macbeth beyond endurance, and applies it: he cannot bear to be called a coward, so that is what she calls him.

If we are to consider Macbeth as in some sense heroic, we might start with this, for the play begins and ends with it. In the earliest part of the play there is constant reference to Macbeth's great courage on the battlefield. In the last section, though he sees clearly (as usual) how all the odds are against him—the prophecies of his death all fulfilled—he calls upon what he has always had:'Yet I will try the last,'he says, and engages Macduff with sword and shield. Physical courage never deserts him—his horror at the ghost of Banquo is moral, the spectre of his own guilt appals him—and in the last Act it is very noticeable indeed how brisk he is, even as premonitions of the end crowd in on him.

Perhaps the way he dies illustrates Shakespeare's own awareness of the problem we have been examining. If Macbeth is a great man, in particular a very brave one, and if we are, late in the play, reminded of this fact rather energetically, our sympathy might go more to him than the conclusion of the play requires. So, it may be argued, he is killed offstage in order that we may not see him bravely fighting against odds which have been loaded by destiny itself. More probably, in my view, he is killed offstage so that his head can be brought on. This is not an easy moment to stage nowadays, for a very good reason: most of us have never seen a severed head. Elizabethan audiences might well have done, for they turned out in enormous crowds to see executions, and the very gruesome ritual of death for high treason was highly popular. At the end of the calculated savagery the executioner cut off and held up the head for all to see. In the earlier part of the business, the disembowelling, the executioner got his hands and arms covered in blood—hence the'hangman's hands'that Macbeth speaks of immediately after killing Duncan (II.2.27). These images would have had a powerful effect on the audience, which is now lost.

If the final image of Act V is of a traitor justly punished and giving way for true leadership and restoration of a sick country, it is not the image of the whole Act. If we compare what we see in the previous Act, our perplexity increases. The bulk of Act IV is taken up with the extent of Macbeth's evil. In the first scene he is shown threatening omens by the Witches, but these seem only to confirm him in his course. In the second scene we actually see acted out a piece of calculated terrorism, the murder of women and children by jeering, brutal agents. The third, set in England, gives us a long catalogue of the appalling state of Scotland under his rule, where no one is safe; political murder so common, people are not even curious about it; and good men are at highest risk. This is villainy at its most extreme, and conscious villainy at that, deliberate, remorseless.

Yet in much of Act V there seems to be an attempt to re-create the heroic soldier of Act I, even if he fights in a wrong cause, with an additional touch to catch our sympathy. When Macbeth says:

. . . my way of life
Is fallen into the sere, the yellow leaf;
And that which should accompany old age,
As honour, love, obedience, troops of friends,
I must not look to have . . .

(V.3.22-26)

we can almost feel sorry for him in his loneliness, an aspect of his life intensified a moment later when the Doctor brings news of his wife—and then tells the audience that he wants to desert as others are doing. Of the courage that still fills Macbeth, aware as he is of his own hopelessness and the reasons for it, we have already spoken. Surely there is something of a hero left?

Perhaps our way through this, whether we act or study the play, is to follow the course, step by step, which leads from the'valour's minion . . . worthy gentleman'of the second scene to the'dead butcher'of the end. We do begin with a great man, he is at the height of his achievement, fortune does seem to smile on him, even if he has the capacity to think of evil—we all have, after all. Pride is his undoing—pride in his valour, the pride that lets him think he can succeed against all the odds, can interpret his own destiny as given by the Witches in his own way. His downfall, it may be argued, is in two stages: the first fall is when he changes his mind about killing Duncan, which leads inevitably to other evil and ends in total tyranny; the second is his actual death at the hands of a man he has wronged in the service of a ruler he has usurped. He does indeed become the villain, but he never quite loses our sympathy because, at every stage, he is so painfully aware of what he is doing, and because of the element of'inevitability'referred to earlier. After a single wrong move carried out in full awareness of its evil, he is in a way no longer the murderer but the victim of that remorseless power of destiny which should, as Aristotle said, arouse our pity and our terror.