SOURCE: Low, Lisa. “Ridding Ourselves of Macbeth.” Massachusetts Review 24, no. 4 (winter 1983): 826-37.

[In the following essay, Low contends that Macbeth is sympathetic to audiences in his remorsefulness, and that he guides the drama toward a possible path of redemption.]

But where there is danger,
There grows also what saves.

Hölderlin

Unlike most tragic heroes, Macbeth is much less sinned against than sinning, which makes him a strange candidate for our affections.¹ He does not fall prey to infirmity like Lear, nor is he ignorant of what he does like Oedipus. He is not like Romeo, well-intentioned but too hasty; nor is he like Hamlet, Romeo's inverse, too cool. Too hot to stop, too cool to feel, Macbeth is no Romeo and no Hamlet. He is a fiend and a butcher. Standing before him, we cannot but be paralyzed with fear.

And yet, almost against our wills, we are drawn to Macbeth. We should not be, but we are. We are with him in his darkest hours and though we cannot especially hope for his success, we share with him the uncomfortable feeling that what must be done must be done and that what has been done cannot be undone. Banquo, who we come to feel is a threat to ourselves, however good, must be eliminated. So must Fleance, Macduff's wife and children, or anyone else who stands in the highway of our intense progress. Thinking that “to be thus is nothing, but to be safely thus,” and wishing with “barefaced power” to sweep him from our sights, we straddle the play repelled by, but irresistibly drawn to Macbeth.

We listen to Macbeth as we listen to the beatings of our hearts. Engaged in the play, we think our hands are up to the wrists in blood and we startle at the knockings at our doors. Watching Macbeth, we suspect the height and depth of our own evil, testing ourselves up to the waist in the waters of some bloody lake. Allowed to do that which we must not do, guaranteed that we shall suffer for it, we watch Macbeth by laying our ears up against the door where our own silent nightmares are proceeding. There we see ourselves projected, gone somehow suddenly wrong, participating in the unforgivable, pursued by the unforgiving, which is, most of all, ourselves.

Why should this be? Why are we so drawn to Macbeth by whom we must be at last repelled? Two reasons suggest themselves. First, we identify with Macbeth because identification is the condition of the theatre, especially in a nearly expressionistic play like Macbeth where the stage is the meeting ground between the hero's psyche and ours. Second, we pity Macbeth because, like us, he moves within breathing distance of innocence.

As moral obscurity is the world in which Macbeth stands at the beginning of his play, so it is the world in which we are seated watching the play, for the stage is both an extension of Macbeth's mind and the field of our imaginations. There in the domed, dimly lit theatre we watch like swaddled infants, this two hour's traffic, this our own strutting and fretting upon a bloody stage. Before us the Macbeths move like shadowy players, brief candles, little vaporous forms sliding behind a scrim. As if standing in Plato's cave, we see, but at one remove, we listen, but only to echoes, until we find ourselves fumbling along the corridors of our own dark psyches. There, supping on evil, dipped to the waist in blood, we watch the Macbeths go out at last in a clatter of sound, pursued by furies. The play over and the brief candles out, night flees, vapors vanish, and light is restored.

We identify with Macbeth because the theatre makes us suffer the illusion that we are Macbeth. We pity him because, like us, he stands next to innocence in a world in which evil is a prerequisite for being human. Macbeth is not motivelessly malicious like Richard III or Iago. He savors no sadistic pleasure in cruelty. Rather, set within reach of glory, he reaches and falls, and falling he is sick with remorse.

To have a clear conscience is to stand in the sun. To have a clouded conscience, one hovering between good and evil, between desire and restraint, is to stand where most of us stand, in that strange and obscure purgatory where the wind is pocketed with hot and cool trends, where the air is not nimble and sweet but fair and foul. This is the world of choice where thought and act and hand and eye are knit, but in a system of checks and balances.

Set within reach of triumph, who is not tempted to reach? And who, plucking one, will not compulsively and helplessly pluck every apple from the apple tree? For the line dividing self-preservation from ambition is often thin and we walk as if on a narrow cord above an abyss. We have constantly to choose, almost against our wills, for good, for as it is easier to fall than fly, so it is easier to be like Satan than God. We identify with Macbeth because we live in a dangerous world where a slip is likely to be a fall; but in the end, we must rip ourselves from him violently, as of a curse, as of an intolerable knowledge of ourselves. Through him we pay our chief debts to the unthinkable and are washed, when we wake, up onto the white shores of our own innocence. Macbeth is an ironic Christ who absorbs our sins that we may return “striding the blast.” Redeemed through him, we ourselves must become the redeemers.

II

I have said that our sympathy for Macbeth is provoked by at least two factors: 1) the obscurely lit stage which is the meeting ground of Macbeth's imagination and ours; and 2) the condition of evil above which most of us manage to stand, but only by hard choice. I would like in the second portion of this essay to say something more about Macbeth's function as a restorer of the redemptive imagination and to describe the condition of terror into which, for our sakes, Macbeth falls.

Macbeth's damnation comes of a willed failure of the imagination. He permits himself, in spite of conscience, to kill his King. His eyes “wink” at his hands and in that dark moment all cruelties become possible:

                                                                                          Stars, hide your fires;
Let not light see my black and deep desires.
The eye wink at the hand; yet let that be
Which the eye fears, when it is done, to see.

Conversely, our redemptive victory over Macbeth and over ourselves results from the strengthening of the empathetic imagination which our participation in Macbeth's fall affords. The play restores in us pity which

                    … like a naked new-born babe
Striding the blast, or heaven's cherubin horsed
Upon the sightless couriers of the air,
Shall blow the horrid deed in every eye
That tears shall drown the wind.

In short, we live and die by our imagination's willingness to comprehend and we comprehend with our eyes. The play is an acting out before our mind's eyes of ourselves participating in and then eschewing evil.

In Babi Yar, Andrei Kuznetsov writes that he did not hate the Nazis, it was only that they lacked imagination. Not feeling the sympathy which retards cruelty or the empathy which prevents it, the German soldiers at Babi Yar severed hand from eye and act from conscience in order to carry out daily rounds of slaughter. Day after day, Russian Jews were lined up along precipices and shot. Murder required only blankness of mind.

If sympathy retards cruelty, empathy prevents it. To be in someone else's skin is to startle at pain, to recoil with human pity from unkindness. Foolish enough to think it possible to commit black deeds and not to be held “to accompt” for it, Macbeth permits his imagination to fail. Considering himself outside his own human skin, Macbeth severs himself. He calls for darkness, commits evil, and is walled-in afterwards in the windowless dungeon of his imagination. A cord yanked from its socket, a chicken with its head cut off, Macbeth shrieks and jerks his way down the corridors of his maimed psyche into death's private cell.

Since cruelty depends upon the imagination's willingness not to see, it is best carried out in darkness. Night obscures witness, prevents the compassionate eye, the organ of pity, the cherub at the gate of sense, from mutinying against the hand. So Macbeth calls for night to cloak Duncan's murder with “Stars, hide your fires,” and so he prepares for Banquo's death with “Come, seeling night.” The world of the play is so black that light is a contradiction:

Thou seest the heavens, as troubled with man's act,
Threatens his bloody stage. By th' clock 'tis day,
And yet dark night strangles the travelling lamp.

The sun is no more than a “travelling lamp” for Macbeth's birth-strangled mind, travelling in self-willed darkness, troubles even the heavens. After flickering tapers, brief candles, and stars in heaven blown out, the “tomorrow” speech “memorize[s] another Golgotha,” finally confirming the bloody stage as a sunless habitation where by the light of lamps, by the light of his own dimming intelligence, Macbeth's crimes have occurred. Macbeth has stood titanic in the way of his own sun and ours.

Darkness has its consequences. Once commit yourself to darkness and you are no longer eligible for light's sanctuary. Macbeth calls on darkness to prevent witness to his crime; he wills his eyes to “wink” at his hands, but when he does so, he slits his own wrists and throat. He blacks out.

Shakespeare explores this slitting, this recession into darkness, with physiological metaphors. The cords Macbeth severs—the umbilical one that runs from himself to his kingdom—and the veins and arteries that connect his brain and soul to his body—are the ones which allow him to thrive. Having cut these Macbeth travels through the play as death-in-life—blind, suffocating, stiffening in rigor mortis—toward his actual decapitation. Cut off, running beheaded, Macbeth loses internal and external equilibrium. Circulation and communication stop; his body survives, but only briefly, as a body will survive on the impulse of shock, when it has been severed from its head.

Shock has two countermotions: wildness and paralysis. Macbeth's wild power decreases inversely as he seeks to increase it; the larger the sweep of his hand, the more cribbed and cabinned his soul; the greater the space about his feet, as a throned king, the less room his mind has to run about in. Macbeth's reason is pushed from its stool and his body is repelled by the mind that commands it. His mind, in a “restless ecstasy,” tries to hold onto the wooden mask it no longer fits and his body scrambles within clothes it cannot shape. Mind and form stand at odds as a crown tilts lopsidedly on a brow for which it was not meant. Time is pushed from its center and runs elliptically. Eye and hand, moving and fixed are jarred and confused by fits and starts until, “as two spent swimmers that do cling together / And choke their art,” spirit is wrenched from body and stutters from sublimity to silence.

Decapitation's “restless ecstasy” is succeeded by its counter motion rigor mortis, the gradual turning to stone. Because the dark plain Macbeth's mind rides is full of “strange images of death,” of “new Gorgon[s]” to destroy sight, Macbeth becomes himself a Gorgon. At the idea of murdering Duncan Macbeth's heart leaps, knocking at his ribs, and his hair stands on end:

                                        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?

This Medusa-like image of “unfixed hair” is repeated. Imagining Banquo has risen again with “twenty mortal murders on [his] crown [],” Macbeth gasps at the image he sees: “Thou canst not say I did it. Never shake / Thy gory locks at me.” Banquo's hacked hair stands up in the same snaky Medusa locks that Macbeth's hair had at the prospect of killing Duncan. We see the same head in the murdered Duncan. Announcing the King's death to the castle walls Macduff cries: “Approach the chamber and destroy your sight / With a new Gorgon.”

Were the person next to you in the theatre to knock your sleeve at this point and ask you the time, your eyes would be transfixed, comprehending nothing, as if you had been in another man's dream. Watching the play you are as the dead, for the eyes of the dead have no speculation, perhaps because they dream another dream. So Macbeth shrinks at his vision of Banquo:

Avaunt, and quit my sight! Let the earth hide thee!
Thy bones are marrowless, thy blood is cold;
Thou hast no speculation in those eyes
Which thou dost glare with!

More than any other feature the eyes connect us to this world. They are the windows to the soul and the soul's windows to the world. Speak to someone's eyes and you will know who you speak to. Macbeth's eyes are as if rolled up into his skull for, dreaming a vision no one in his kingdom can dream, he is far away. Intoxicated, mad, trapped, Macbeth gazes permanently into the bloody narcissus pool of his own mind.

So does Lady Macbeth. She who chided her husband by saying

                                                                                The sleeping and the dead
Are but as pictures. 'Tis the eye of childhood
That fears a painted devil.

becomes herself a painted devil. Sleepwalking, haunted by her crimes, her “eyes are open … but their sense are shut.” Like Macbeth's, her mind has closed down around itself, admitting no light, and she sees only the blood upon her hands which, for all her rubbing, for all her “out, damned spot[s],” will not rub away. A “little water” cannot clear her of her deeds, nor can she wash the “filthy witness” from her eyes. Instead, the very water with which she tries to rinse her hands free will turn red, proclaiming she is a murderer.

The Macbeths run fast but not far. Macbeth's, unlike Lear's, is an eye for an eye world where to kill a king is to commend “th-ingredience” of the “poisoned chalice” back to the lips of the murderer. Thus, Macbeth's own body revolts against him as he considers the image of a dead Duncan. He wills his eyes to “wink” at his hands; later he wills his hands to “pluck out” his eyes. The smiling babe that Lady Macbeth promises to yank from her milkless breast returns striding the apocalyptic blast. The dead are nature's enfants terribles, rising again to push Macbeth from his stool:

                                                                                                                                  The time has been
That, when the brains were out, the man would die,
And there an end. But now they rise again,
With twenty mortal murders on their crowns,
And push us from our stools.

The dead Banquo's face is mirrored in a prodigious series of child kings to come, and the trees at Birnam Wood, cut off at the root, walk toward Dunsinane to defeat Macbeth. The witches' riddles invert as Macduff strides not “of woman born” to behead the beheader. As the dead infant shrivels to a counterfeit, the screaming infant, hanging on its bloody root, the umbilical cord, becomes the world restorer.

III

I have said in Part One that we are drawn to Macbeth, almost against our wills, both because the theatre makes us dream we are Macbeth, and because, a villain against his will, he walks near innocence, anguished by remorse. In Part Two I have said that Macbeth is our ironic Christ who, absorbing our sins, allows us to be redeemed. In Part Two I have also described the conditions of darkness into which the damned Macbeth falls. I have described what it is like to commit terrible sins against the race and have hinted at the restorative powers of the redeeming imagination in a world where “blood will have blood.” It should be clear by now that Macbeth is a play which moves neither in the land of evil nor in the present, but rather in the land of good and in the future. In these last two brief sections I would like to describe the damned and the redeemed imagination, for we come to Macbeth and are entangled, but we leave Macbeth released, having learned not what we are, but what we must become.

The imagination is not bound by formal laws of nature. It can pass through walls, enter heaven, drive down into hell. It can make a villain of a hero, and a hero of a villain. When Macbeth stands at the beginning of his play in the fair and foul air of his private thoughts, he is standing between two such large ideas as heaven and hell. As it is heavenly to have new honors sitting upon the brow, so it is hell to stuff the mouth of praise with a dagger. It is hell, too, to be tied to the stake of one ambitious thought until flesh is hacked from bone.

Macbeth stands in the murky, chiaroscuro world of conscience and conscientiousness, between good and evil, a step toward heaven and a slip toward hell. There is but a thinly scratched line between right and wrong, between a sword smoking in a villain's blood and a villain smoking in the blood of a king. Here to “unseam” a man “from the nave to th' chops” may be either a moment of barbaric inhumanity or patriotic fervor. Here if death to the left is laudable, to the right it is enough to throw the self off balance, to push it from its stool and into the blackest abyss of hell. If Hamlet leans upon a question mark, Macbeth rides into an “if.” For this we empathize when we watch Macbeth “upon this bank and shoal of time … jump the life to come.” For this we feel pity as Macbeth does not “trammel up” but rather unravels “the sleave of care.”

Thoughts pass in the mind like crows to rooky woods. To catch at a thought, to snag it, to blow it up and become oppressed by it, is to subordinate the reason, the healthy remainder of the mind, to a static picture. It is to eat of “the insane root / That takes the reason prisoner.” Life stops. Instead of extirpating the “insane root” obsession, Macbeth cultivates it. Thereafter all else is choked out and the kingdom of his mind becomes not as it should be, a mass of impressions taken in from without, mingled with history and memory, but instead one single knotted mass. The mind's fundamental will, its overriding flexible complexity, cannot be so tethered and survive. The mind as a breathing organism in equilibrium with the world and with the social order stops. Or, infected with itself, it invents its own world.

Macbeth approaches the expressionism to which Shakespeare did not have access. Pressing up against the boundaries of its medium, the play explodes with the pressure of Macbeth's mind. Its language is clotted and heat-oppressed. As Macbeth's mind is “full of scorpions” so is the play's. As Buchner's Woyceck, Munch's The Scream, and Van Gogh's self-portraits present minds on the verge of madness, so does Macbeth. Shut off from the country of health Macbeth's brain, like a poison bag, distends and bursts, infecting its world. When Ross says,

But cruel are the times when we are traitors
And do not know ourselves; when we hold rumor
From what we fear, yet know not what we fear
But float upon a wild and violent sea
Each way and none

we recognize that the play occurs inside the upset equilibrium of Macbeth's panicking mind.

The mind is the deepest recess within the castle walls of the face; it is private, isolated, and vulnerable. We feel this play as we test electricity with one finger in water, or as if electric wires were tapping against the skull. Because we never feel, even for a moment, Macbeth's safety; because we hear him breathe in our ears his bloody imaginings, we watch the play, as we look at a late Van Gogh, as if we were studying a mind from inside out. In this Macbeth most moves and terrifies us. Watching the play, we voyage on “a wild and violent sea” of a mind made mad by its own cruelty. The terror of this passage:

What hands are here? Ha! they pluck out mine eyes.
Will all great Neptune's ocean wash this blood
Clean from my hand? No, this my hand will rather
The multitudinous seas incarnadine
Making the green one red

is immense because, for him, all is unredeemable. Macbeth, having shut his eyes to pity, having “rapt” himself in turbanned darkness, is condemned to a plain darkened by the red seas of his own guilt. The water with which he tries to rinse his hands clean will condemn him. Macbeth is a painted devil before a mirror and the play, until he is decapitated, is his self-portrait and ours.

IV

We come to the play and our imaginations are tethered to Macbeth as to our own guilt. We leave the play, after having ripped ourselves free of him, with imaginations redeemed. The play teaches us how to become what we can become, for we live, like Macduff, not ultimately within Macbeth's imagination, but within the greater imagination of God—within the greater will to goodness in ourselves. When the play is done, when vapors vanish and light is restored, Macbeth lies, titanically defeated, within the vast circumference of the audience's redeemed and redeeming imagination.

In this last section I would like to say something about the providential vision toward which Shakespeare is moving. The nature of his vision in this pivotal play is oddly Miltonic. That is, good wins because good is the life force, the elan vital. Evil, to the contrary, can only mimic good, feed off of its motifs parasitically. In the end, ripped free of good, evil withers at the root. The function of drama, of Macbeth, is to have evil painted upon a pole underscored as “the tyrant.” Through witnessing evil we are exorcised of it, becoming good. Ultimately we rise free not only of Macbeth, but of death, as if by our willing it, death itself could die.

If Macbeth's mind is earthly, a globe where fair and foul, welcome and unwelcome vapors are mixed, it is also limited. Macbeth's imagination stands within the greater imagination of miracle, the providential vision toward which, as O. B. Hardison and Emrys Jones have recently demonstrated, Shakespeare is moving. The play is acted out within the compressed and dark quarters of an earthly hell, but it moves finally toward the city of infinite good. Macbeth's Satanic mind, eyes, hands, and touch are contained within the supranatural forces of Macduff who was from his “mother's womb untimely ripped”; of Duncan, whose unearthly blood is like gold laced upon silver skin; and of Edward the Confessor, whose touch has “such sanctity” from heaven that he can heal victims of the bubonic plague. If there is a special poignance to Malcolm's dramatically ironic comment to Macduff, “He hath not touched you yet,” there is an ending to it and to the jurisdiction of the tyrant's grasp. For this play stands not in Macbeth's hand but in “the great hand of God.”

In Macbeth evil feeds off of good. Sin and death, here as in Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained, are not self-invented, but parasitic. Duncan enfolds, embraces, enriches and plants; he is the Christ-like incarnation of the Biblical blessing on human sexuality, “Be fruitful and multiply.” The Macbeths, conversely, are sterile. They can neither be fruitful, nor multiply; instead they can only shrink, melt down, as the witch does in The Wizard of Oz and as Satan does in Paradise Lost. Macbeth shrinks within his armor. By his end he is a clanging bell of doom, a great clatter upon the stairs, a suit of armor that has become an echo chamber because it is hollow. Thus Macduff knows Macbeth by his sound, “That way the noise is. Tyrant, show thy face!” and “There thou shouldst be: / By this great clatter one of greatest note / Seems bruited.”

As the “juggling fiends … palter” with Macbeth in a “double sense” so does time. Foul meets fair and evil good. Eyes without speculation, rolled up, shut as if eternally inside, roll down at the sound of the apocalypse:

                                                                                                    Awake, Awake!
Ring the alarum bell! Murder and treason!
Shake off this downy sleep, death's counterfeit,
And look on death itself. Up, up, and see
The great doom's image. Malcolm! Banquo!
As from your graves rise up and walk like sprites
To countenance this horror. Ring the bell!

The dead are avenged, raised from graves to bear witness to the eternal damnation of the damned. The good wake to see the bloody Macbeth, the birth-strangled babe, death itself.

When Macduff reveals himself to Macbeth as the man who not “of woman born” was from his “mother's womb untimely ripped” Macbeth knows what we already know, that though he will fight until his flesh is hacked from his bones, he will be defeated. As Macduff raises his sword he proclaims Macbeth's role for us as redeemer,

                                                            Then yield thee, coward,
And live to be the show and gaze o' the' time.
We'll have thee, as our rarer monsters are,
Painted upon a pole, and underwrit
‘Here may you see the tyrant.’

That Macbeth will be the “show … o' th' time” puns on the complex emotional effects which drama and visual art have upon us. Beheaded, gored, terrified, and terrifying, Macbeth shall “live” before an audience who shall know through him the true fruit of sin.

In a world of good where “stones … move and trees … speak” evil depends, for its lifeblood, upon good. The bloody babe from the womb, this play's Christ-like deus ex machina, makes of the birth-strangled babe a counterfeit. Because evil has of itself no godliness, because it cannot reproduce but only copy, borrowing for its temporary life blood and babes and roots, it can only be the inverse of live. Uprooted, severed, dependent, the bad is marrowless. If this is true, around random weeds the world will root itself, restore itself infinitely in an ecstasy of green, out of a bath of blood. Around the mask of evil the audience humankind will press, celebrating the exorcism of the devil from the self.

Because in the end “where there is danger, / There grows also what saves,” we rid ourselves of our Macbethness by necessity. Having merged ourselves with Macbeth in the private obscurity of the dimly lit stage, having said not, “This castle hath a pleasant seat,” but, “The raven himself is hoarse / That croaks the fatal entrance of Duncan / Under my battlements,” we have learned empathy; we have learned to bear the pain of others as if it were our own. In the end we rise naked and trumpeting above the gray trembling earth, shaking off “this downy sleep, death's counterfeit.” Lifted up bodily toward Malcolm and Macduff, we are within reach of Duncan. With trumpets to our lips and wings to support us, we stand like bloody generals for good and for God. Darkness and devils having been torn from us at last, the earth vanishes and we stand in eternity's light. For cruelty in us is a painted thing, life's counterfeit, a blight to be shaken off at the end of unredeemed time. These are the good “bloody instructions” of plays and players. Through Macbeth we learn what monsters are, what a monstrous thing it is to kill a king, God's infant man. When the play is done we shake off the “strange images of death” we have become to be the selves of our hereafter, seeing evil, even death, as Macbeth is: dominionless—a gored mask, a painted devil, a head of unfixed hair upon a post.

Note

1. All quotations from Macbeth are taken from Alfred Harbage's William Shakespeare: The Complete Works (Baltimore: Penguin Books, 1970). I would like to thank Normand Berlin for his enthusiastic support of this essay.