SOURCE: Ure, Peter. “Macbeth.” In Elizabethan and Jacobean Drama: Critical Essays by Peter Ure, edited by J. C. Maxwell, pp. 44-62. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1974.

[In the following essay, Ure follows the development of Macbeth's character throughout the play, suggesting that he is a tragic and sympathetic, rather than evil, figure.]

                                                  Who then shall blame
His pester'd senses to recoil and start,
When all that is within him does condemn
Itself, for being there?

Macbeth, v.ii.22-25

In the three previous tragedies the protagonists are faced with situations which are not, essentially, their own creation. Hamlet and Othello both seem to themselves to have dread commands imposed upon them, the one to avenge his murdered father, the other to punish his faithless wife; even Lear, although his conduct provides a kind of excuse, is placed at the mercy and ordering of others. All of them have to wrench their behaviour and force their souls into reinterpreting roles which they did not initiate. But Macbeth has to nerve himself to perform a task which he invented for himself in the first place; the seed, it appears, grew in his own mind and not anyone else's. Shakespeare shows us both the genesis and the fulfilment of what begins as a stretch, almost a sudden physical shudder, and then grows. Macbeth has an extra load to lift—everything must begin with him and must be shaped and created by him. The play is the most exhausting and violent of them all, and much of this exhaustion springs from the feeling that Macbeth has to create everything step by step as he goes along out of what is at first a mere chaos of revolt, obscure promises, and lost names. There is a kind of analogy between Macbeth's struggles and the struggles of the artist, the Michelangelesque hewing out of the perfected shape resident in the marble block, or Yeats's struggles with tenth-rate scrawls as he works toward the complete realization of the hidden image. Perhaps this is one reason why we feel Macbeth is, in H. S. Wilson's words, ‘a poetic person’.¹ Macbeth is poetical not only because of the poetry of his utterance, and not only because of ‘his power to grasp fully and concretely what is happening to himself’,² but also because he voluntarily puts his hand to the work of creating his own role and situation and seems constantly to be making claims, though of a blasphemous kind, to reorder Nature and Nature's germens into his own patterns. There are parts of the play in which Macbeth can be seen as evilly parodying the artist's entitlement to a creative function analogous to that of the Creator himself, just as Milton's Satan is a dark antithesis of the Almighty, establishing an infernal kingdom and begetting hideous angels.

The Witches rhyme powerfully upon his name in the first scene: it is the climax of their chant—‘There to meet with Macbeth’. But Macbeth begins the play by acquiring an additional name, ‘Thane of Cawdor’, and it is this circumstance, perhaps more than anything else, which starts Macbeth off imagining himself as a murderer—that long exercise of the imagination in which he tries to see himself in the role of murderer and tries to work himself up to it. The smallness and apparent insignificance of this germ contrasts with the lengthy and explicit imposition of his task upon Hamlet by the Ghost, with Iago's ‘evidence’, or with the total reversal of circumstance that forces Lear into unaccustomed self-examination and imaginative recreation of himself. Macbeth, beginning with this tiny speck, is observed accreting everything else around it. Duncan's rewarding Macbeth with this title is indeed the only event in the second scene of the play in the sense of being the only thing that that scene contributes to the forward movement of the plot. The scene itself is a curious combination of orderly calm and deliberation with wild, baroque disorder and gesture, like waves breaking at the foot of a monument. The antithesis of foul and fair, of discomfort swelling from comfort, which runs through the language and metaphor, is thus supported by the larger design of the scene. This, at any rate, is the impression that the scene gives on the stage; Duncan is confined to the spot, listening, mostly silent, yet central and in control as the news breaks upon him; the first speech of the bleeding Captain culminates in the first presentation of Macbeth as the man of blood who

Like Valour's minion, carv'd out his passage,
Till he fac'd the slave;
Which ne'er shook hands, nor bade farewell to him,
Till he unseam'd him from the nave to th' chops
And fix'd his head upon our battlements.

(i.ii.19-23)

Before the next wave of verbal and pictorial violence can be hurled against Duncan, the Captain collapses, and Ross, after a pause of intensifying suspense, carries it to a greater height than the first had reached. In the manner of speech of both Ross and the Captain there is a kind of dramatic, attention-calling excess and excitement which seems consciously to build up to the ‘happy’, victorious ending. The violence of the waves is not entirely real; they are waves in a story, in a Senecan messenger's speech. They express, like baroque art, a contrived disorder, and I do not therefore feel that we need take too seriously the image of Macbeth as the man of blood which is presented in them. Unseaming enemies from the nave to the chops is a violence which belongs to the descriptive facility of the messenger rather than very closely to Macbeth himself, and there is not really very much in this scene which leads us to qualify the epithets of ‘noble’ and ‘brave’ (somewhat neutral ones in the circumstances—it was the least they could say) which are applied to him in it. But the scene does of course present blood and disorder, even if it is firmly controlled and set in a frame. The act of order which emerges from it at the end, Duncan's

No more that Thane of Cawdor shall deceive
Our bosom interest.—Go pronounce his present death,
And with his former title greet Macbeth.

(i.ii.65-68)

concludes the episode, seals up the revolt as something over and done with; Macbeth, on behalf of Duncan's order, has suppressed the revolt, and Macbeth gets his reward, and that is the end of it.

Yet, with an irony which the imagery of this scene has already sufficiently introduced to us, from this comfortable return to normality swells the whole subsequent storm. When the Witches greet Macbeth with the equivocal titles, his ‘start’ and ‘fear’, on which Banquo comments, may be—and usually are—taken as an indication that something has been germinating in Macbeth's mind, and yet we cannot be really certain that Shakespeare intends us to understand this: it is perhaps a bit naïve of Banquo to suppose (as he seems to) that Macbeth ought to receive the incredible invocation with a beam of satisfaction—would not the most virtuous of men be somewhat taken aback, sense a threat or an evil joke, at being greeted in a fashion which ‘stands not within the prospect of belief’, at having his destiny sketched out in a way which seems so wildly unlike probability? The doubt at any rate, if at all valid, merely underlines Shakespeare's intention of showing us the ‘something’ in its most microscopic, its barely identifiable, germinal state and emphasizing how much the vision of himself as a murderer and a king, which he is shortly to start building up, is Macbeth's own imposition upon himself. Shakespeare shows us the building process from the very beginning when we only suspect, and cannot be certain, like Macbeth himself, that there is something there to be seen. For it is when the Witches keep one part of their word of promise to his ear that Macbeth really begins to face the possibility of nerving himself to his role, to labour with the unspeakable possibility. The new title of Thane of Cawdor comes up again, proudly borne in, as it were, by Ross and Angus, and Macbeth's response is unequivocal: he wants to be able to hope. The title now bears on its underside the hidden promise of the ‘greatest’ (for the name of Cawdor is growing in a sinister way since it left Duncan's hands in the previous scene), and such are the circumstances that Macbeth perhaps might be excused for coupling it with a yet greater title, were it not that Shakespeare has very strikingly contrasted Banquo's responses with Macbeth's and put into Banquo's mouth a direct warning to Macbeth that the two names must be kept separate (i.iii.120-6). Again we are returned to Macbeth's nature, to the fertile ground there. And then finally we have the first soliloquy, the first painful symptom of germination. His heart thumps, his skin crawls; the new name, so proudly and orderly handled by others, as it presses upon him (‘I am Thane of Cawdor’) confuses his sense of his own identity, and leaves him momentarily nameless and robbed of action, wholly intent upon something that exists only in his imagination. This soliloquy is as near as Shakespeare could get, within the limits imposed by the extreme articulacy of his form, to portraying the first surge of an idea in the moment of its birth. Beside it Brutus' soliloquy (Julius Caesar, ii.i.61-69), with which it naturally invites comparison, seems like a commentary upon it, rather than an actualization of even faintly comparable power. It is the birth of Macbeth's vision of himself as a murderer that we are watching; it is physically disorganizing, ‘against the use of nature’, ‘horrible’, because of its own essential horror or because it is being resisted; it is formless because it has not yet been properly born or because Macbeth cannot bear to look at it properly. In each case the second alternative points at a determinate, basic fact that Shakespeare wants us to know about Macbeth: that he is not a man to whom such a vision can be other than revolting, fit for instant rejection. Yet the internal events leading up to it have been revealed in such carefully calculated glimpses that we know that some element in Macbeth is alone responsible for what another element in him struggles to suppress. It seems the most desperately private moment anywhere in the plays, if we except the last soliloquy of Richard III; Macbeth, like Richard, is in communion with nothing but the struggling elements within himself, whereas Lear's or Othello's or even Hamlet's soliloquies tend to become invocations to outside powers (including the audience) or somewhat objectified versions of themselves. This is perhaps because we are taken further back into Macbeth's history than we are into that of any of the other characters, and this is because the role is created by the protagonist's own nature in a more fundamental sense than is the case with Hamlet and Othello or even with Lear. Such a condition cannot last long, and Macbeth falls away from it into a kind of Stoic apathy—‘Perhaps I don't need to do anything to make it happen’;

… chance may crown me,
                    Without my stir.

And his next remark is, in the context, an almost pointless aphorism:

                                                                                                    Come what come may,
Time and the hour runs through the roughest day.

Certainly nothing has been decided; Macbeth must of course dissemble his ‘rapt’ condition (i.iii.150-1); the speech to Banquo may be a feeler towards a sinister alliance, but Banquo (unless he has here momentarily become a relic of Holinshed's Banquo) doesn't recognize it as such.

As a potential murderer, in the next scenes Macbeth struggles to behave in what he considers an appropriate way, one suited to an idea of the role. This is an effort of the imagination, which endeavours to overlay conscience, which in Macbeth is itself imaginative. He composes passages about the role as though to verbalize the vision of himself as murderer were a means of countering that other impulse (and all the powerful reasons as well) which say that he ought not to undertake the role at all. We have the first of these passages just after Duncan has bestowed another of his fatal titles:

The Prince of Cumberland!—That is a step
On which I must fall down, or else o'erleap,
For in my way it lies. 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.

(i.iv.48-52)

This language of rhyming invocation is not Macbeth's usual style; these monosyllables move with an uneasy formality which half-suggests the stage villain shrouding his face melodramatically in his cloak. It is a gesture, the striking of an attitude, whose unreality is immediately emphasized by Lady Macbeth's intimate account of a much more complex Macbeth (i.v.15-30) who needs her inspiriting before he can genuinely feel himself in the role of murderer to which in this speech he is only pretending. Lady Macbeth's own invocation is quite different and carries instant conviction as having all her will and imagination poured into it. Her prayer to the demonic spirits signalizes her passionate wish to become an instrument wholly adapted to getting the murder done, for her nature to be transformed and become as cruel as the deed; there is to be complete consonance between performer and performance, an integrity so absolute as to make her the human equivalent of the murthering ministers themselves, who are evil by metaphysical device. Her prayer, as the play goes on to reveal, is not wholly answered; but it shows that she, unlike Macbeth, commits herself completely to the task, allowing the nature of the deed itself to determine her own nature; the role shall be her master, infusing her with its own life and driving out her own. Lady Macbeth does not attempt to excuse or justify the deed, or indeed to look at it at all; she simply allows its evil, which is clearly realized by her, to take charge. This is, as it were, the degree of commitment to which Lady Macbeth would like to pledge her husband as she looks forward to pouring her spirits into his ear and chastising him with the valour of her tongue. To effect it, she must remove the impediments which she has described in the soliloquy about his character, the essential human kindness, the ‘fear’ (perhaps more rightly to be called ‘scruple’—we must allow for her point of view), the ambition that won't be logical, all that essentially normal mixture of good and bad which earlier had allowed Macbeth to rest in

If Chance will have me King, why, Chance may crown me,
Without my stir.

And when Macbeth enters, for what in the play is his first meeting with her, we see that he is as uncommitted as ever, that he has scarcely moved a step by the end of the scene from his position at the end of the first scene with the Witches when he says to Banquo, as he now says to his wife, no more but ‘We will speak further’. In spite of her entirely specific references to ‘this night's great business’, he is remarkably reticent; but that he makes no gesture of repudiation also suggests that he sees in Lady Macbeth a figure of the Chance that may crown him ‘without his stir’: ‘Leave all the rest (apart from behaving with the smiling countenance of a host) to me’, she says; Macbeth has from the first felt that if he could just let it happen without having to commit himself to doing it, that would be a tolerable way.

There is not much evidence that Macbeth can play even the minor part of smiling host that Lady Macbeth has set down for him. She takes it on herself in i.vi, and Duncan remarks upon his absence with surprise. What is most surprising about the soliloquy in the next scene is the way in which it ‘jumps the life to come’, that is to say disregards the possibility of retribution and punishment for sin in another world. In facing the act of murder Macbeth considers its consequences, that it is hard to ‘get away with murder’, but the traditionally supreme sanctions are dismissed right at the beginning:

                                                            if th'assassination
Could trammel up the consequence, and catch
With his surcease success; that but this blow
Might be the be-all and the end-all—here,
But here, upon this bank and shoal of time,
We'd jump the life to come.

(i.vii.2-7)

The remark is strangely impersonal, as though it were the fruit of Macbeth's observation of what really motivates men: they are afraid to commit murder because it sets a bad example of which they themselves may in time become the victims. The thought of the deed itself no longer inspires the physical horror which it once aroused. It is rejected because it breaks a social bond which keeps the individual safe from others. Then Macbeth thinks of his obligations as kinsman, subject, and host—another series of social bonds, which argue to the same end. Then he turns from himself to think of Duncan and his virtues. The great image with which the passage ends is not an image of supernatural vengeance but of all humanity weeping with pity for Duncan. The soliloquy rises through prudential considerations to an overwhelming expression of Macbeth's social and moral sensibility. The idea of murder occupies his whole mind, is received there, and can be defined; and this shows how hugely the original minuscule seed of i.iii has grown. The idea of himself as murderer is no longer something ‘fantastical’, but real enough to be rejected, so that the soliloquy serves the double purpose of showing how his imagination has shaped what was once shapeless and how he cannot commit himself to what he now sees does really exist in his mind as an ‘intent’. Macbeth from now on is someone conscious of a task, even though he rejects it; he is in communication with his role as a living thing in his imagination. It is the paradoxical effect of this soliloquy, which so cogently expresses Macbeth's reasons against murder, to make us feel that he is nearer to enactment of it than he has ever been before. He is seeing murder, after all, as an act within the context of the life he participates in, the life of society, with its moral and kingly bonds, its logic of the bad example, and its human grief, and not as something unidentifiably shocking and nameless. It has changed from a ‘horrid image’ to ‘th' assassination’. If this is now the condition of Macbeth's sensibility, it is less surprising that his wife, in the ensuing passages, is able to commit him. He does not try to bring into his communion with her the broader aspects of his moral sensibility or ‘nature’ (although, if her soliloquy in i.v.16-25 is any evidence, she may be said to know about them and to calculate accordingly), but his refusal draws upon the area, his life and position in society, upon which his soliloquy was centred:

We will proceed no further in this business:
He hath honour'd me of late; and I have bought
Golden opinions from all sorts of people …

(i.vii.31-33)

In a sense, this makes it easier for her, for all she has to do is to replace Macbeth's image of himself as host, kinsman, and subject with another human image—the ‘man’ who dares, who takes what he wants, and is the more the ‘man’ because he does so. When Macbeth says,

I dare do all that may become a man;
Who dares do more is none,

it is man defined as he defined himself in the soliloquy that he is offering. But as she overwhelms him with her will and disposes of the practical objections, it is her definition of ‘man’ that he finally takes with complete acceptance when he cries:

                                                  Bring forth men-children only!
For thy undaunted mettle should compose
Nothing but males.

(i.vii.73-75)

The step from one definition to the other is not so very great (most societies, indeed, seem to be able to recognize both without notable difficulty, especially if they are, like Macbeth's, militarily inclined). By means of this trick Macbeth is committed to seeing himself in terms appropriate to the enactment of murder. His last words in the scene have that hollow and slightly melodramatic ring which characterized ‘Stars, hide your fires!’—they consciously override with a Senecan declamatory effect the more complex poetry of the Macbeth who conceived the ‘Pity’ image, of the Macbeth whom the audience knows can be described, in language which objects to this new, stiff bravado, as ‘too full of the milk of human kindness / To catch the nearest way …’:

Away, and mock the time with fairest show:
False face must hide what the false heart doth know.

(i.vii.82-83)

In the murder scenes Shakespeare specially exploits these varieties of speech.

Now that he has come to it, the Macbeth of the soliloquy about the dagger is the Macbeth to whom murder is a horrid image, born out of some atavistic place within himself in a context of lost identity and supernatural soliciting. It is obvious that this Macbeth, the one who sees ghosts and whose hair stirs with horror, has not been overridden by the ‘man’ in either of its senses. Yet it is against this Macbeth that Lady Macbeth's man screws up his courage, and the language of the speech passes insensibly into another mode. Macbeth works himself up into the mood of ‘I will be as wicked as I ought to be’ in words that are designed to have something of the inspiriting function of an alarm to battle, the cry before the charge.

                                                            Now o'er the one half-world
Nature seems dead, and wicked dreams abuse
The curtain'd sleep: Witchcraft celebrates
Pale Hecate's off'rings; and wither'd Murther,
Alarum'd by his sentinel, the wolf,
Whose howl's his watch, thus with his stealthy pace,
With Tarquin's ravishing strides, towards his design
Moves like a ghost.—Thou sure and firm-set earth,
Hear not my steps, which way they walk, for fear
Thy very stones prate of my where-about,
And take the present horror from the time,
Which now suits with it.—Whiles I threat, he lives:
Words to the heat of deeds too cold breath gives.

(ii.i.49-61)

This is the Macbeth who deliberately composes about himself, with, as he recognizes, ‘words’ consciously ordered, as though he were a kind of poet. The scene is carefully set and objectified and curiously distanced: the abstract ‘Murther’ is amplified in controlled parenthesis with his attendant wolf, who is, in a quite elaborate conceit, a sentinel whose watchword is his regular howl; and Murther is further illuminated with the rare, classical, poeticizing image of Tarquin, an image amplifying the idea of might, breathless silence, and striding evil. He invokes the earth, as formerly he had invoked the stars, and concludes his poem with an objective vision of himself in which he is assimilated to the figure of Murther playing his part in a scene which must uphold him by being appropriately set. Yet the poem is not entirely satisfactory to Macbeth, does not quite tip him over the edge, and he covers the moment by leaving the stage with another of those stretched, resounding declamations:

Hear it not, Duncan; for it is a knell
That summons thee to Heaven, or to Hell.

(ii.i.63-64)

It seems that this passage is Macbeth's method for making the task bearable to himself; he can just reach it, sufficiently narrow the gap between assumption and enactment of the role, adequately prick the sides of his intent, by using this spur and raising himself on these stilts of art. But it is a very precarious achievement recognized as such even in the moment of its attainment, while its artificiality, its conscious and deliberate formality and single vision, can be seen merely to put in abeyance, without abolishing, the Macbeth who is more complex, and much harder to satisfy.

This is the Macbeth we see after the murder, his artificially stimulated ‘strength’ unbended (ii.ii.44) and his ‘constancy’ (ii.ii.67) fled. The deed has become again a ‘horrid image’, but much worse than before because it is now completely projected and actualized; Macbeth's imagination of rejection works hard upon all its circumstances, which are raised in his mind to symbols of retributive alienation from the ordinary life of man, praying, or sleeping, or washing his hands. As he faces his deed in retrospect, there is a specially vivid intercommunion between his inward self and the part he has played, but it is not really different in kind, only in degree, from what obtained before, when he was contemplating the deed in prospect with the ‘nature’ of the true Macbeth, not the Macbeth who deliberately assimilated himself to Murther in order to get the deed done. That posing and attitudinizing Macbeth, a development of Lady Macbeth's ‘man’, falls away at a touch and leaves the Macbeth who, like Hamlet or Brutus continually ‘thinks’ before and after.

The murder of Duncan, of course, condemns Macbeth in realms that range beyond his characterological pattern. What to him is a horrid image is elsewhere a subversion of the natural order, which in time reasserts itself and brings his punishment. This awe-inspiring process is greater than Macbeth, but it is a process rather than a person, even though it expresses itself first through storms and maddened horses and finally through such equally functional personages as Malcolm and Macduff. It is vital to the total effect and memorability of the play and has been properly emphasized by the commentators. But Macbeth himself still strives to live as something more hopeful and vital than a condemned man awaiting the end; although everything he now is dwells, in the audience's knowledge, beneath that dark shadow, and colours our apprehension of him, he concentrates a special kind of attention by unfolding, in further story, the relationship between his inward self and his deeds.

The murder of Banquo, although the story of the episode in all its details is quite a different one, seems to show the same pattern of character in Macbeth as the murder of Duncan. The soliloquy (iii.i.47-71) counterparts the ‘If it were done …’ soliloquy. Macbeth weighs the deed responsively, considering the relation between himself and his victim; just as his thoughts were once concentrated on murder in relation to his social position as host and kinsman, so now they link it with his kingly position, particularly as the begetter of a royal line. Rejected, as it was formerly, or accepted, as it is here, murder is something that can be thought about in relation to the self as a course of conduct which may disadvantage or advance him, ensure his safety among men, or rob him of men's golden opinions. Both soliloquies are the words of a man who wants to keep what he has got: his safety (common to both), respect, royal position, an idea of himself as an integrity, a creature whose acts are meaningful, not self-cancelling. They give contrary answers to the same question: will murder achieve such ends? And yet both have a quality much less constricted than this description implies, which is peculiarly Macbeth's: it expresses itself in his free-hearted recognition of his victims' virtues and in the way in which each speech rises to a glimpse of religious myth (‘heaven's cherubim’, ‘mine eternal jewel / Given to the common enemy of man’). Because it entertains the thought of murder as a possible means to an end, Lady Macbeth, as we have seen, had not found it too difficult to replace the more fully human image of the self with her version of what it means to be a man. There is a similar transition here in the Banquo episode when Macbeth puts it to the Murderers: are they merely men, as the catalogue has it, or are they the kind of ‘man’ Macbeth wants, the kind that will strike secretly at their enemies? Yet Macbeth, as his conversation with Lady Macbeth (iii.ii) makes clear, is still the haunted victim, whose frame is shaken by terrible dreams and whose mind is full of scorpions; the definition of safety passes insensibly from being safe on his throne to being saved from horrid images. And again he covers this up by a formalization of imagined murder, composing with conscious art a passage about the murder of Banquo which has many resemblances in feeling and style to his ‘poem’ about the murder of Duncan:

Then be thou jocund. Ere the bat hath flown
His cloister'd flight; ere to black Hecate's summons
The shard-born beetle, with his drowsy hums,
Hath rung Night's yawning peal, there shall be done
A deed of dreadful note …
                                                            Come, seeling Night,
Scarf up the tender eye of pitiful Day,
And, with thy bloody and invisible hand,
Cancel, and tear to pieces, that great bond
Which keeps me pale!—Light thickens; and the crow
Makes wing to th' rooky wood;
Good things of Day begin to droop and drowse,
Whiles Night's black agents to their preys do rouse.
Thou marvell'st at my words: but hold thee still;
Things bad begun make strong themselves by ill.

(iii.ii.40-44, 46-55)

This is primarily an invocation to Night to aid the accomplishment of the murder, as he had previously conjured Earth to be silent during the murder of Duncan. But the invocation serves him by objectifying the moment and giving him control over his restless mind. Calling forth a dark enchanter's power, it sets the scene for an act which will, he hopes, assure his safety, and create an illusion that he stands at the centre and controls his fate. By formally signalizing his dedication to the murder of Banquo, it is meant less to chill our blood than to show us Macbeth freezing his doubt-ridden soul into an attitude of mastery, a fixed shape of gloomy terror that will dominate the event and make it run his way.

His experiences after Banquo's murder force Macbeth back into his old condition of stultified horror. The order ‘whole as the marble, founded as the rock’ that he has tried to create he continues to uphold in the banquet, struggling against the ‘saucy doubts and fears’ which the news of Fleance's escape have aroused. The banquet itself and Macbeth's toasts to Banquo are not the bravado of the villain, or even merely excitements of the spectators' sense of irony, so much as declarations that he can master events by imposing upon them a semblance or order with himself unchallengeably at the centre. But the ghost's appearance breaks through this from the world of the horrid image; it is as though Macbeth's instinctive rejection of murder has created ever more elaborate forms—the shuddering bewilderment of the first soliloquy developing through the nightmare visions before and after Duncan's murder into the completely uncontrollable phantasm of the murdered Banquo. All these seem to come from some deep place in Macbeth's own personality, the part that is at war both with the Macbeth who can rationally and morally consider murder as a means to an end and the Macbeth who endeavours to master both the inner and outer worlds with the strained and exalted language of his invocatory poems. Banquo's ghost is the most desperate of these creations of his heat-oppressed brain, and Lady Macbeth recognizes its provenance and kinship:

This is the very painting of your fear:
This is the air-drawn dagger, which, you said,
Led you to Duncan.

(iii.iv.61-63)

He is convinced that it has objective reality, and it confuses his sense of his own identity and of the nature of the world in which he lives. It is the moment where the drama of Macbeth's inner life actually takes the form of two personae: the haunted man and that which haunts him, so that we feel ourselves looking at a kind of allegorical embodiment of his relationship with his deeds. Banquo is not only the ghost of a murdered man, but a figure of ‘fantastical’ Murther itself:

Thy bones are marrowless, thy blood is cold;
Thou hast no speculation in those eyes,
Which thou dost glare with.

(iii.iv.93-95)

The ‘horrid image’ of the first soliloquy, the ‘wither'd Murther’, the ‘horrid deed’, ‘the terrible feat’, and the ‘deed of dreadful note’, the ‘dark hour’ have all risen up to appal Macbeth with an actualization of what he has so often named and used and thought about. His chosen role, the crime to which he gave birth, the special act which brands him, is now complete before him.

Macbeth breaks away from this repeated pattern of character in an excess of despairing vigour. Shakespeare closes up like a fan all that complex intercourse between character and deed, each shaping the other, which has presented Macbeth's life to us. This, it seems, happens quite suddenly in the play, and it is as easy to ascribe it to an authorial intervention as it is difficult to identify its cause in what is shown to us of the motives of the character. It is true that Macbeth's isolation has increased (in his refusal to share the secret of Banquo's murder with Lady Macbeth) and that he has partially at any rate learnt what he was not at all practised at previously, to make his face a vizard to his heart. These are signs of the hardening of his nature, but he certainly fails each time he tries to act a brazen part; after Duncan's murder, Malcolm, Donalbain, and, of course, Banquo are not really deceived, and Macbeth's failure to sustain his poise after Banquo's murder is his worst and most public. The Macbeth who is so continually on the rack up to the ending of iii.iv cannot be said to have grown as cruel as his deeds, although he darkens them deliberately with the persuasive trappings of Hecate, Night, Murther—trappings which may be described as deliberate attempts to make his inward self of the same nature as the deed that's done but which so completely fail to sustain him when he really sees the deed for what it is. If the new brutality and directness of Macbeth's resolution after iii.iv do not appear arbitrary or in any way diminish the play, it is because the spectators have already had the two murders directly brought home to them in their full horror: it is mediated to them, paradoxically enough, by Macbeth's own horror, which we share, but also by the direct evidence of Duncan's graciousness, Banquo's virtues (and the witnessed annihilation of them), the storms and portents of outraged nature, and the general sense of a movement of recoil amongst the gathering forces of restoration and retribution. Acts which so cogently persuade us of their evil character lead easily to the inference that the man who can do them must quickly come to the point of no return and become a creature like his deeds. He does so; but we are not shown the antecedents of his transformation. The murderer of Banquo, who is fundamentally the same sort of person as the murderer of Duncan, becomes the murderer of Lady Macduff without our really being forced to ask what has altered the pattern of his character, why the long adjustment to the deed and the horrid imagination breaking through after it are no longer there. A practical motive for his abridgement of the whole process can be sought for—the need to check the gathering revolt at once; or we can say that it is born out of sheer despair, a wild lashing-out at Fate. But these are inferences, too, and only refer us back to the larger inference, that the nature of the criminal must be hardened and narrowed into despair by unrepented crime. Macbeth suddenly discovers this hard nature and drives on with it. But he could—the potentiality is there up to iii.iv in his remorse, his heavy disliking of his task, the continual rebirth of the horrid image—just as easily, had Shakespeare's story permitted it, have turned to repentance—more easily, since it is the remorse and horror in his character that continually makes the toughness which he assumes give way before it. It is the fact that he has murdered rather than the way in which he has murdered which shuts off any escape route from him. This may be a very sound assumption about the nature of things, as it is certainly a true rendering of the rule that appears to apply in Macbeth's Scotland and Macbeth's cosmos, and it is plainly a good sort of deterrent against those intending murder from whatever motive. But it does not exactly offer the terms for explaining, in the light of what we already know about Macbeth's character, how he can suddenly alter that character and devise a new, more brutal—one could almost say ‘uncharacteristic’—approach to murder.

In future, then, Macbeth will ‘think’ no more:

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

(iii.iv.138-9)

The gap between ‘head’ and ‘hand’ is to be ferociously narrowed; scanned has the double sense of examined ‘by myself’ as well as discovered ‘by others’. Macbeth goes to the Witches in order to ‘know, / By the worst means, the worst’, in order to direct his course the more unswervingly, and his sense of how much this is the ‘worst’ means is mediated by his willingness to bring about ultimate destruction in order to have his path clear (iv.i.50-61). Yet he faces this, out of his frantic desire for the simultaneity of his thought with his doing, which is intensified by the news of Macduff's escape:

Time, thou anticipat'st 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.

(iv.i.144-9)

This conjunction of head/hand, heart/hand, thought/act leaves no space for the old Macbeth, whose characteristic vitality, interest, and appeal derived precisely from the complex and changeable inner life of head and heart called forth by his prospects and retrospects of the work of his hand. By eliminating all that area of Macbeth's activity Shakespeare has shown us not so much a change of character (for we never actually see the process of change—the area is not gradually but sharply shut off) as the result of such a change. A different Macbeth is revealed, and the interest and pathos that it has depends heavily upon the fact of our knowing that he was not always like this. Macbeth's character is like a portion of a spectrum in which the two colours are quite sharply distinguished from one another but are none the less harmoniously related in the sense that they form an aesthetically satisfying spectacle—but perhaps a morally less satisfying one.

How much of the life of the play resides in Macbeth's imaginative actualization of his own deeds is pretty clearly demonstrated by what may be called the Macduff episode (iv.ii,iii). The destruction of Macduff's family is the most pointless and horrible of Macbeth's crimes; but since Macbeth's feelings are not engaged in it (that, indeed, is the point, and what he has come to), it lacks a dimension which the murders of Duncan and Banquo possess. Even Bradley seems to have felt it to be unnecessary, except as having ‘a technical value in helping to give the last stage of the action the form of a conflict between Macbeth and Macduff’,³ but defended it on the grounds that it, and the scene of Macduff's grief, permits us to escape from ‘the oppression of huge sins and sufferings into the presence of the wholesome affections of unambitious hearts’.⁴ If this is so, the scenes, including the episode between Malcolm and Macduff, represent the order and values which Macbeth has violated, and which are now gathering head against him. Thus the primary element in the scenes, even though Macbeth is in the plot their cause, is something which flows against rather than from Macbeth, and has little relevance to the definition of his character in the sense in which it has been discussed in this chapter.

Macbeth's actions in the last phase of the play are shallow and short-breathed. They are harshly limited in being mostly reactions against the threats from outside (‘They have tied me to a stake’), and at the other end are ridden on the short, rotten rein of the Witches' prophecies. Both the defiance and the confidence fail to rise out of the personality from any depths in the man; they are animal-like; reflex actions to situations and stimuli whose originating agents lie outside Macbeth's control. That he can discover nothing in himself which will respond at any deeper level is shown by the passive, exhausted way in which he takes the news of Lady Macbeth's death. For to set against the confidence (which is sometimes near to hysteria) we have Macbeth's exhausted commentary on the failure of his whole enterprise and the meaningless play-acting of life. Like Richard III he sees life as a succession of parts to which no real self is dedicated, which do not communicate with anything in the mimic, for the mimic is a shadow without substance, ridiculously shortened by time. This other mood of Macbeth has no relation in the man himself—only that which the audience may infer—with the defiant Macbeth; the two states do not interpenetrate. Their separation shows what has happened to the complete man, the man whose pattern of experience gave at least evidence that the conflicting elements in him arose from a personality that was still a full circle, not two broken halves. Macbeth's last state is no worse—and no better—than this. It is the common experience: the need to keep on, the sense of the failure and pointlessness of it all. Macbeth cannot integrate the two even enough to bring him to the point of suicide (there perhaps Lady Macbeth has the advantage of him). Is this ‘Hell’, as some think? Surely not, if we expect Hell to be something more out of the common, more preternaturally defined. Macbeth's huge crimes, which rouse all Nature against him, are in ironic contrast to the ordinariness of his final state; that woods should march and prophecies be ironically confirmed seems an immense labour for the destruction of so unterrifying a thing. That master shape, that colossus brooding over a nightmare world—Macbeth even in his most determined imaginations never achieved so large a stature; he ends by merely hitting out, a child tragically armed with weapons that can destroy a country. The monster of evil that Macduff and Malcolm need to see, and that some of the commentators require also, is in the end simply not there; Macbeth never quite succeeded in imagining him.

Notes

1. On the Design of Shakespearian Tragedy (Toronto, 1957), p. 69.

2. V. Y. Kantak, in Shakespeare Survey 16 (Cambridge, 1964), p. 44.

3. Shakespearean Tragedy (London, 1904), p. 391.

4. Ibid., p. 392.