SOURCE: Cunningham, Dolora G. “Macbeth: The Tragedy of the Hardened Heart.” Shakespeare Quarterly 14, no. 1 (winter 1963): 39-47.

[In the following essay, Cunningham views Macbeth in terms of his repudiation of his own humanity and subsequent surrender to a compulsion for evil.]

At the closing of the fearful scene in which Macbeth decides to murder his king, he himself foresees the tragic distortion to which he has committed his human nature (I. vii. 79-82):

I am settled and bend up
Each corporal agent to this terrible feat.
Away, and mock the time with fairest show;
False face must hide what the false heart doth know.

He has given his heart away to the worst, to that which is beneath human love. From now on, he is bound to a false appearance and to a false reality in which his moral sensitivity will be considered weakness and his callousness will be strength: “Fair is foul, and foul is fair.” In order to do the deed and in order to live with the accomplished fact, Macbeth must cut himself off from “that great bond” of nature: he must harden his heart and cease to feel as a man.

This defeat of human feeling, though surely an effect of Macbeth's evil actions, seems to be also an important element in the tragic decision itself. No choice can be completed in action without the movement of the passions, and Macbeth, left to his own devices, says clearly that he has only the desire without the energy to move it (I. vii. 25-26): “… I have no spur / To prick the sides of my intent, …”¹ His desire for the kingship, he concludes, is impossible, primarily because he cannot work up the nonhuman feeling which is necessary to get what he wants. It is Lady Macbeth who supplies the emotional power that enables him to settle his will and so complete the act of moral choice that leads ultimately to the catastrophe. If it is this false choice that starts him toward the tragic end, it is the failure to turn back from the choice, to renounce it, that makes ruin inevitable (III. ii. 55): “Things bad begun make strong themselves by ill.” Macbeth, shown in the beginning as having a genuine sense of human kindness, gradually so hardens himself in the custom of evil that he becomes eventually incapable of altering the pattern in which his very being and, for awhile, the total action of the play are fixed.

Appalled by the murder of Duncan, he is driven to seek ease for the tortured mind through deliberate attempts to take himself altogether out of the natural order² (III. ii. 49-50): “Cancel and tear to pieces that great bond / Which keeps me pale! …” He suffers so intensely his fall from where he belongs that he sets out to make himself at home in hell, among the mere dregs of this vault. Already he is sufficiently brutalized to desire universal destruction, if only he can feel safe and at peace:

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. …

(III. ii. 16ff.)

To be set free of that great bond is to achieve the hardened heart that not only dares do more than becomes a man but can also support the non-human actions without fear or pain or remorse. Imagining, then, that further bloody deeds will inure him to such painful consequences, Macbeth resolves to strengthen himself in the custom of evil.

The murder of Banquo, undertaken partly from fear and resentment but also in the wild hope of destroying natural feeling (III. i. 47ff. and III. i. 16ff.), does not, of course, bring the desired peace. But it does strengthen him in the habit of evil to an alarming degree. Its immediate effect is so far to numb his conscience that he resolves to step up the program for making himself a hardened veteran of terrible deeds:

                              … My strange and self-abuse
Is the initiate fear that wants hard use:
We are yet but young in deed.

(III. iv. 142-144)

And so the ghost of Banquo is explained away as a sign of understandable stagefright, which can be easily overcome by further performances, as a beginning actor overcomes his initial nervousness through repeated appearances. The hardening of Macbeth's nature is accompanied by a withdrawal from human kind; the divine light of reason in him darkens to the point where he is no longer in touch with others, and he is thrown back upon a horribly misdirected self-love where the self is conceived as the only reality (III. iv. 135): “For mine own good / All causes shall give way.” Even as he rededicates himself firmly to the worst, however, he remembers briefly that there is still an alternative course open to him:

More shall they speak; for now I am bent to know
By the worst means the worst. For mine own good
All causes shall give way. I am in blood
Stepp'd in so far that, should I wade no more,
Returning were as tedious as go o'er.

(III. iv. 134ff.)

It is possible, he says, to turn back toward the “blessed time” he seeks to erase from memory; but he has already gone so far that returning is as difficult as—indeed more difficult than—to go on his now accustomed way. Where to begin with he had lacked the hard core of feeling for the murder of Duncan, he now lacks the energy to change a course of action he knows to be fatal to his eternal well-being. And he lacks this energy precisely because he has achieved the hard core of feeling; the custom of evil has fastened itself upon him, making it easier and apparently as desirable for him to continue in the groove of compulsive action, where what he does is determined by the will alone and must be done without being thought about:

Strange things I have in head, that will to hand,
Which must be acted ere they may be scann'd.

(III. iv. 139-140)

His will, formerly worked upon from without by Lady Macbeth's emotional appeals, is now bent from within, being moved to evil largely of its own accord, without the incitement of passion or the counsel of reason. He does not fear Macduff, for example, yet he will kill him anyhow from an excess of will in order to perfect himself in the habit of evil—to overcome the initiate fear by hard use—for he still suffers the horror of a divided self which M. Gilson has called the inner tragedy of the sinner's life.³ The decision not to turn back but rather to go ahead with the murder of Banquo commits Macbeth almost entirely to Lady Macbeth's philosophy of man as a beast-like creature of non-rational will: being a man means getting what one wants.

In a comprehensive view of the dramatic action, this decision not to change his course may be taken as the point of no return for Macbeth, as the point from which the catastrophe inevitably follows. His rejection of the briefly considered alternative is closely followed by his own accurate judgment that going on will further harden him, since the particular decision is in itself both the result of previous acts and a token of the hardening they have induced in his human faculties. In deciding not to repent at this time, he makes any later change of heart all the more unlikely, for, as he knows, what the theologically minded psychologists of another day called “long custome of sinne” is a notorious obstacle to repentance.⁴ To put off this basic discipline of the Christian life is a perilous putting off, as all Christendom knew full well, being continuously warned in sermons that they knew not at what hour their Maker would call them to the final accounting. Elizabethan moralists and psychologists moreover—as those of our own day talk about the unconscious and guilt feelings—frequently discuss the commonly accepted psychology of the hardened heart, in which the sinner becomes so fortified and confirmed in the custom of sin that it becomes a habit, corrupting one's human faculties and, as a popular sermon of the 1580's has it, “plunging one ever deeper in the stinking puddle of iniquitie. …” “For long custome of sinne taketh away all sense and feeling of sinne, and maketh as it were another nature unto us.”⁵

There are several analogues to Macbeth's predicament in English tragedy before and during Shakespeare's career,⁶ the most famous being that of another murdering usurper in the prayer-scene of Hamlet. In considering the plight of his soul, Claudius does not repent, because he chooses not to detach his love from those things he has gained by his crime; although the fruit of Macbeth's crime has become dust and ashes, his energy has been exhausted in the service of that which he has wrongly desired, so that he, too, is unable to give up his winnings. They cannot as Claudius clearly sees, continue to eat their cake and be forgiven for having stolen it. In each case, the heart is so encumbered by the burden of its own fulfilled desires that it cannot be turned away from them. These decisions of Macbeth and of Claudius are of essentially the same order and exert similar effects upon the quality of the following dramatic action. Claudius' failure to repent, like Macbeth's, hardens him to commit further evil actions and so contributes its important share to the developing tragic momentum. For if Shakespeare had made either of them repentant, then he would have decided to write a comedy—a play like The Tempest—and would have made other changes accordingly.

Macbeth's decision to go o'er into more blood quickly plunges him still deeper into the iniquity and corruption of another nature. By the end of the banquet scene, he has given himself to the powers of hell, in whose service he hopes to find ease, even if nature be poisoned at its source. Macduff must die “That I may tell pale-hearted fear it lies / And sleep in spite of thunder” (IV.i.84-85). He has come a long way from the defense of his manhood against Lady Macbeth's provocations. Now he will murder for no reason other than to habituate himself to the terrors of his corrupted state and make himself comfortable among them. He will murder Macduff in order to make his heart insensible to its own pain.

The very firstlings of his heart become the firstlings of his hand (IV.i.145ff.), without the review of thought; his will moves automatically, with increased swiftness and violence, toward the solipsistic condition he has set for his goal. The only consideration is a distorted personal consequence, and he becomes the creature of events determined by his previous actions and by their destructive effect upon his soul. Having thus abused his human faculties, he takes on the aspects of another nature, which, as Macduff says, is that of the devil himself:

Not in the legions
Of horrid hell can come a devil more damn'd
In evils to top Macbeth.

(IV.iii.55ff.)

As the catastrophe draws near, there are various comments on Macbeth's shrunken and disordered condition:

                                        Now does he feel his title
Hang loose about him, like a giant's robe
Upon a dwarfish thief.
.....Who then shall blame
His pester'd senses to recoil and start,
When all that is within him does condemn
Itself for being there?

(V.ii.19ff.)

Although he has become hardened in evil to a hellish degree, he continues to feel the horror of what he has done to himself—to suffer, that is, the inner tragedy of the sinner's life. The remnants of his human nature—for he never escapes it entirely—cause even the corrupted nature to condemn itself for being there. These lines of commentary upon Macbeth's inner conflict draw upon a long established and subtle psychology, as some words of St. Bernard on the subject easily demonstrate: “The ills the soul now suffers after sin do not replace that native goodness which is the original gift of the Creator, but they are super-induced on that goodness, and disturb it, deforming an order they can in no wise destroy.”⁷ The other nature that Macbeth has acquired through evil cannot dissolve the image of God in which all men are created. As he remains necessarily conscious of this true nature, he cannot forget either its capacity for excellence or his wilful destruction of that excellence. The only escape from this agonized consciousness—if the only method of recovery is rejected—would seem to be Lady Macbeth's flight into the dumb suffering of insanity. Presented in the beginning as fairly well advanced in hardness of heart and accustomed to the ways thereof, she is spared the anguish of Macbeth's awareness; yet in the end the bitterness of her mortally diseased nature kills her, and it might well be said that she dies of an unbroken heart: “I would not have such a heart in my bosom for the dignity of the whole body” (V.i.61). The logical extreme of the hardened heart is insanity, the complete denial of one's identity as a human being.

Although Macbeth manages to loosen his human bonds, he never escapes them, and so toward the end he feels an appalling loneliness:

                                                                                                    I am sick at heart.
.....I have liv'd long enough. My way of life
Is fall'n 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.iii.20ff.)

Here once more is the comprehensive Shakespearian vision at work: the judgment of Macbeth as a murdering butcher stands firm—and he himself concurs in it—but the judgment includes also pity and fear for the lonely human being confronting his withered heart and counting up the awful losses of having loved for his own ends. Our pity and fear are further directed and enlarged by the method of direct comment to remind us, as in Hecate's reprimand of the Weird Sisters, that Macbeth's kind of loss is essentially a universal human experience:

And, which is worse, all you have done
Hath been but for a wayward son,
Spiteful and wrathful, who, as others do,
Loves for his own ends, not for you.

(III.v.10ff.)

Although he courts it ardently, he never does achieve the love of evil for its own sake, and he remains to the end conscious of all he has lost.

But the possibility of redeeming his losses is once more raised, and the extent of the damage he has inflicted upon himself can be measured by the careless rejection of the Doctor's advice to purge his own soul: “Throw physic to the dogs, I'll none of it!” (V.iii.47). The warning to pause and minister to his impoverished spirit passes by almost without notice as he taunts Heaven with the boast that he is immune from the fear of death. The pursuit of indifference has smothered but not removed his moral sensitivity; he has supped so full with horrors and the disposition to evil is so fixed in him that nothing can move him now, or almost nothing. The sight of Macduff does move him to a terrified remorse: his soul is too much charged already with this man's blood, and Macduff's very presence is a cruel reminder, for us as for him, of the greatness he has lost. Even now Macbeth is able to feel insufficient abhorrence for his sins against the human image to refuse at first to fight, as if he would renounce at last the long war to destroy it. But he has sabotaged the powers of his soul too effectively to move beyond the hopeless self-knowledge that is despair, and we feel that the weary decision to fight Macduff after all is determined almost automatically by what Macbeth now is. As he sees it in his blindness, there are only two alternatives open to him: continuance in his present way of life, henceforth in public disgrace, or death. But a third possibility of escape to heavenly forgiveness is freely offered by Macduff, who has asked Heaven to forgive even “this fiend” if he should escape Macduff's avenging sword (IV.iii). Macbeth, however, does not see that this magnanimous and profoundly charitable offer of life provides a last chance to recover what has been lost—or, perhaps more accurately, he sees the hard work of recovery as too tedious to be endured. Lear prays at the end for Cordelia's life that all sorrows may be redeemed, but here the opportunity to live and redeem his losses is repugnant to the habitual torpor of Macbeth's sick heart. Not to fight Macduff means that he must live on, and he has lived long enough.

The whole point of Macbeth's desperate state is enforced by the quality and position of Macduff in the latter part of the play, as the abnormality of Macbeth's response to the Witches is partly defined by Banquo's reasonable attitude in the opening scenes: Banquo and Macduff dramatize what ought to be in the circumstances—and this is surely Banquo's function in the second witch scene (I.iii), however one may view his later development.⁸ The shaping of Macduff as an even more important normative contrast begins with his flight to England to seek support from the saintly King Edward against the instruments of darkness who guide Macbeth. Macduff is described as “noble, wise, judicious”, and as his departure is the first positive action toward freeing Scotland from tyranny, it is also the beginning of his dramatic movement toward direct conflict with the hero.

The following stages in this development include the memorable view of Macduff's “pretty ones” in action (IV.ii.), which rapidly enlists our sympathy with Macduff; Malcolm's test of Macduff's integrity (IV.iii), which ends with the rightful heir to the throne placing the sacred enterprise against the usurper under Macduff's direction; and Macduff's fully human response to the reported slaughter of his family (IV.iii). By this stage of the action, Macduff stands out clearly as a man who has acted nobly and wisely for the common good, as a character whose dramatic stature has been skillfully developed in recent scenes so that the remaining action is shaped by the conflict between himself and Macbeth. But these scenes, including the moving exhibition of Macduff's grief, have a good deal more than superficial value in organizing the last part of the play for the restoration of order, and the form of the conflict has significance beyond increasing our horror of Macbeth's cruelty: the single state of man which the hero has destroyed in himself is dramatically rendered in the characterization of the antagonist.

The news of the high price he has paid for acting nobly in a brutal world, anchors Macduff's grief firmly to a deeply felt principle of what is proper to man. When Malcolm exhorts him to dispute like a man the loss of those who were most precious to him, he insists, first of all, upon the importance of feeling as a man should feel, and he says that to feel as a man is to be deeply aware of the importance of human beings in themselves and to each other:

                                                                                          I shall do so;
But I must also feel it as a man.
I cannot but remember such things were
That were most precious to me. …

(IV.iii.220ff.)

In this carefully prepared scene, Macduff exhibits a firm allegiance to his human ties and a beautifully ordered capacity for feeling rightly in the circumstances; his response shows how a man ought to feel and emphasizes the importance of feeling humanly.

The tragic movement of the play is illuminated by the ennobled humanity of Macduff as well as by the horrible consequences of Macbeth's repudiation of his human role. It is precisely Macduff's capacity for feeling as a man which the hero has set out to destroy in himself, and a frightening measure of his success can be taken from his response to the death of Lady Macbeth. The almost complete failure to respond emotionally to his wife's death is a striking contrast to Macduff's attitude toward the loss of his family. The quality of Macduff's response renders concretely the proper human feeling which Macbeth has abandoned; when considered beside the weary “She should have died hereafter” (V.v.18ff.), it gives a dramatic reference point for judging the desperateness of Macbeth's condition. The event seems little more than another proof of the meaninglessness of life, an occasion for lacerating himself with his own hopelessness. He not only suffers from an inability to feel for others, but he is also fundamentally unable to feel for himself, to care what happens to him; he has lapsed into indifference, even to his most intimate concerns. Macbeth's inability to feel as a man is a concomitant of the hardening of the heart to which, from the decision to kill Duncan onward, he has deliberately subjected himself. The custom of evil has so damaged his human faculties that he lacks the energy to move in his own vital interests.

The encounter with Macduff presents a mirror in which Macbeth sees with awesome clarity the state of his own soul. Since the antagonist's character has been dramatically formed on the human principles whose violation has led to the hero's ruin, it is altogether appropriate that Macduff should be the focus of this final vision. Their climactic meeting embodies the tragic conflict between what Macbeth should be and what he is, and presents in compressed form the entire tragic process: the attempt to destroy one's humanity must necessarily end in one's own destruction. Faced with a last opportunity to seek grace to save himself, Macbeth can only repeat the habitual pattern of rejection and going o'er, to which he is now a slave. Even in the naturalistic framework of modern psychology, the disorganized personality cannot by its own unaided efforts handle chaotic feelings, whose pressure must generally be relieved by therapy before the mind can assume normal control. As construed within this play the human person, like the human society, cannot function effectively without sharing in the supernatural energy which is grace; and Macbeth, for whom “renown and grace is dead”, is accordingly unable to use his mind for the urgent task of restoring himself to working order. The self-inflicted hardening of his nature has raised a deliberate obstacle to grace, so that the understanding is darkened and the affections frozen, and the man feeds upon himself. It is this failure to alter perverted feeling and turn back in the right direction, as defined by Macduff's attitude and by Macbeth's own awareness, that makes the tragedy inevitable.

The inability to overcome the surrender to evil and to cope with its consequences is the fundamental tragic pattern of Macbeth, as I think it to be, in varying ways, in Shakespearian tragedy generally. The evil he chooses and its consequences are outside Macbeth's control to the extent that his reason is darkened and his affections hardened by the choice. The course of evil is likewise beyond the capacity of good men to control, except as they are enlightened and strengthened by the powers above, in whom Malcolm and Macduff place their faith, thus resolving the problem of evil with the traditional Christian answer. Evil, consisting as it does of the non-reasonable, is incalculable both to the evil-doer and to his victims, and cannot be dealt with by purely reasonable means—as those of us who recall Hitler's mad reign know full well. Macbeth makes his spirit inaccessible to the light of grace, as do practically all of Shakespeare's tragic heroes, in their various ways. If they had not done so, they would not finally be tragic, and the plays would not be tragedies, but would belong rather with the group often called romances—Winter's Tale, Cymbeline, The Tempest—in which the threatened catastrophe is forestalled by the working of grace in potentially tragic circumstances and by the consequent ordering of otherwise destructive events to a peaceful resolution. Such a comparison suggests that a helpful distinction might be drawn between Shakespearian comedy and tragedy in terms of the effective operation of grace as one method of organizing the happy ending and its rejection or delay as a formative principle of the tragic ending. Although several critics have observed the themes of forgiveness and mercy at work in the romances, very little attention, to my knowledge, has been paid to their implication for our understanding of the significance of tragic and comic form in Shakespeare's work.

The hardening of the heart against itself that covers Macbeth with irrevocable loss, is, I should judge, a formative element in Shakespearian tragedy generally; and it is so at least in the sense that a perversion of human faculties accompanies, in one way or another, the irrational action which sets the tragic events in motion, and makes them progressively less subject to peaceful resolution. Although I should not, of course, argue that Claudius' inability to repent accounts for the tragic outcome of Hamlet, still his decision not to alter his course makes it all but impossible for the hero to set things right. There are explicit comments on the steadily increasing helplessness of Lear and Othello to control the deepening disorders which their mistaken choices have inaugurated, and which they renounce too late to avoid the tragic results. And, finally, there is an important resemblance between the tragic pattern of Antony and Cleopatra and Shakespeare's use of the psychology of the hardened heart in Macbeth. Unless one accepts the distorted modern view of the play as a sermon on the glories of a noble love transcending everything in this world and the next,⁹ one sees that Antony and Cleopatra are presented as being so accustomed to the worship of sensual love as an absolute that they are unable to change this obviously fatal allegiance, that, in fact, they would rather lose everything than change their ways. The tragic outcome of Antony and Cleopatra is as firmly shaped as that of Macbeth by the failure to alter misguided affections and destructive choices. Both plays end in tragedy because the heroes and the heroine give their hearts completely to those things (worldly glory, worldly love) which, however attractive, are defined in the plays as unworthy of such ultimate allegiance and as destructive of the proper state of man, and because they fail to turn back their loyalties to that which is considered worthy of being loved by human beings.

Notes

1. On the functions of the passions in the traditional process of moral choice, see Richard Hooker, Ecclesiastical Polity, I. vii. 3-6; Thomas Wright, The Passions of the Mind (1604), Ch. III; W. Jewel, The Golden Cabinet of true Treasure (1612), sigs. R2-4.

2. On the concept of natural order in Macbeth, see W. C. Curry, Shakespeare's Philosophical Patterns, 2nd ed. (Louisiana State Univ. Press, 1959), pp. 123ff.

3. Etienne Gilson, The Spirit of Medieval Philosophy (Scribner's, 1940), p. 296.

4. Cf. G. R. Elliott, Dramatic Providence in Macbeth (Princeton Univ. Press, 1958), pp. 142-143, et passim. Professor Elliott's argument that the possibility of repentance is a major source of dramatic suspense seems to overlook the dramatically established point that Macbeth is able to view the possibility only remotely; his inability to consider repentance seriously would serve therefore to intensify the tragic movement of the action rather than to raise doubts as to the outcome.

5. The Conversion of a Sinner (G. Cawood, 1580), sig. F3; Arthur Dent, A Sermon of repentaunce (John Harrison, 1583), sig. D5v. Among numerous discussions of the psychology of custom which repeat these Puritan statements, see George Gascoigne. The Dromme of Doomes Day (1576), Works, II, 316 (considered by some to reflect a Puritan viewpoint); Bishop John Fisher, Treatise concernynge the sayings of David (1555), sig. C4; Richard Hooker, EP [Etudes Philosophiques], I. vii. 7.

6. Apart from Marlowe's Dr. Faustus and such imitations as A Knacke to Knowe a Knave (1594) and The Merry Devil of Edmonton (1598), interesting examples of tragic impenitence are to be found in Nathaniell Woodes, The Conflict of Conscience (1581) and in Barnabe Barnes, The Divil's Charter (1607).

7. From In Cant. Cant., 82, 5; as translated by E. Gilson, p. 295.

8. For a discussion of Banquo's function as normative contrast to Macbeth in this scene, see Virgil K. Whitaker, Shakespeare's Use of Learning (The Huntington Library, 1953), pp. 289ff.

9. In an essay on “The Characterization of Shakespeare's Cleopatra” (Shakespeare Quarterly, Winter, 1955), I interpret the final act as being shaped by Cleopatra's unsuccessful—hence tragic—attempt to change to a better way of life. The three comments which have appeared in later issues of the journal (Winter of 1956, Summer of 1957, Summer of 1958) treat the Christian ethos as if it were only a simple-minded list of commandments, and Shakespeare's play as if it were only a narrow glorification of romantic love. Two recent books encourage the hope that this fashionable modern view of the play may receive a needed examination: Franklin M. Dickey's Not Wisely But Too Well (The Huntington Library, 1957), Chs. X-XIII, presents historical evidence for the interpretation of Antony and Cleopatra as a tragedy of irrational desire; and Brents Stirling, Unity in Shakespearean Tragedy (Columbia Univ. Press, 1956), Ch. X, discusses the play as a combination of satire and tragedy.