SOURCE: Ferrucci, Franco. “Macbeth and the Imitation of Evil.” In The Poetics of Disguise: The Autobiography of the Work in Homer, Dante, and Shakespeare, translated by Ann Dunnigan, pp. 125-58. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1980.

[In the following excerpt, Ferrucci focuses on Act V, scenes i and ii—which involve Macduff, his family, and Malcolm—as they illustrate key elements essential to the thematic structure of Macbeth. The critic argues that in this drama of violent contradiction, Macduff shows himself to be a dissimulator rather than a benevolent foil to Macbeth's evil.]

Fair is foul, and foul is fair.

—i, i, 11

In the course of his lengthy conclave with the witches (Macbeth, iv, i), Macbeth learns that Macduff had fled to England after the murder of Duncan, leaving his castle unguarded, his wife and children defenseless. Macbeth resolves to seize the opportunity to annihilate “His wife, his babes, and all unfortunate souls / That trace him in his line” (ll. 151-152). In the following scene, Macduff's cousin Ross, after trying in vain to calm Lady Macduff's alarm at the news of her husband's flight, leaves her alone with her small son. The brief dialogue between the mother and child is cut short by the arrival of the murderers, who swiftly discharge Macbeth's order to do away with them.

This entire episode is dominated by images of birds and flight. In his use of the verb “to fly,” with its secondary meaning “to flee,” Shakespeare conveys all he intends to suggest. Used initially in the former sense, gradually the word begins to imply the latter. How can Macduff flee the land, his wife protests, leaving us here defenseless?

                                                                                                                        He loves us not,
He wants the natural touch. For the poor wren,
The most diminutive of birds, will fight,
Her young ones in her nest, against the owl.

[iv, ii, 8-11]

Unlike the male bird, Macduff has fled the nest, and it is as if he were dead to his loved ones. “Your father's dead,” the mother says to the child after Ross has gone. “And what will you do now? / How will you live?” And the son echoes the New Testament parable: “As birds do, mother. … With what I get.” Thinking of the pitfalls, of the lime and the net, the mother exclaims: “Poor bird!” (iv, ii, 31-34).

At the opening of the scene, Lady Macduff is certain that her husband's flight was irrational (“His flight was madness”) and that he has become a traitor as a result of fear.

                    When our actions do not,
Our fears do make us traitors.

[iv, ii, 3-4]

The words express the contempt reserved for the rash and the cowardly. Ross's unexpected reply is pregnant with meaning:

                                                                                                    You know not
Whether it was his wisdom or his fear.

[iv, ii, 4-5]

At this juncture, Lady Macduff's amazement is justified. What sort of wisdom or sagacity can possibly underlie Macduff's action? If such there be, she is unable to conceive of it; not even birds leave their nests unprotected. Her attack is so forceful, so explicit, that Ross is again compelled to come to his friend's defense, and in so doing leaves her in no doubt about her plight.

This episode has long been misinterpreted, mainly because it has been considered of secondary significance to Macbeth's great tragedy, whereas in fact it is one of the drama's focal points and decisive for an understanding of the work as a whole.

The essence of Ross's defense of Macduff is in the lines:

He is noble, wise, judicious, and best knows
The fits o' th' season.

But having gone thus far, Ross realizes that he cannot prove what he asserts without making a complete revelation, which is proscribed, and adds: “I dare not speak much further.” And why not speak? This is not the time to conceal the truth. Ross then makes a slight concession to Lady Macduff's perplexity by adding:

But cruel are the times, when we are traitors
And do not know ourselves.

The word “traitors” appears for the second time, here in a context fraught with ambiguity and with at least a partial admission: Macduff may be a traitor, and Ross too perhaps, either unwittingly or feigning lack of awareness. The latter seems more likely; indeed, the haste with which he leaves is, at the very least, suspect:

                                                            I take my leave of you.
Shall not be long but I'll be here again.

Then, with sinister prescience and foreboding, he declares:

Things at the worst will cease, or else climb upward
To what they were before.

[iv, ii, 16-25]

No one takes any action to protect the doomed victims, nor does anyone remain with them. Their fate has been decided; Lady Macduff realizes this at the end of Ross's discourse. If, in fact, Macduff was “judicious,” his heedless flight, leaving his castle and family unguarded, would have been unthinkable. “Fathered he is, and yet he's fatherless,” she says of her son, then bluntly says to him: “Your father's dead. / And what will you do now?” He will live “As the birds do,” he replies, afterward declaring that his father is not dead. The mother insists that he is, even though she knows he is not. Yet there is something more she wants to say, and sensing it the child inquires: “Was my father a traitor, mother?” (iv, ii, 31-44).

Again the word appears—the third time spoken without hesitation. “That he was,” replies the mother. “What is a traitor?” the boy wants to know. One who swears an oath and fails to keep it, and so must be hanged. And who hangs him? “Honest men.” The son declares, “Then the liars and swearers are fools, for there are liars and swearers enow to beat the honest men and hang up them” (iv, ii, 45-58).

These words of the “poor monkey,” as the mother fondly calls him, contain perhaps the most profound meaning of the tragedy of Macbeth, and it is not by chance that they are entrusted to the voice of innocence, for it is the innocent who judge the world for what it is: the theater of an impracticable justice and of the inevitable triumph of evil. When a messenger comes to warn them of the approaching murderers, the mother cries:

                                                                                Whither should I fly?
I have done no harm. But I remember now
I am in this earthly world, where to do harm
Is often laudable, to do good sometime
Accounted dangerous folly. Why then, alas,
Do I put up that womanly defense,
To say I have done no harm?

[iv, ii, 73-79]

Her words, though more impassioned, confirm those of the child. When the first murderer enters, the scene becomes paradoxical. “Young fry of treachery!” the murderer insults the boy even as he stabs him, and, ironically, he is right. Be that as it may, Macduff's real treason, the betrayal of his family, will go unpunished, as his wife intuitively knows. No one will brand it as treason.

This scene (iv, ii) and the following one, which presents the dialogue-confrontation between Macduff and Malcolm, are, in my opinion, two monumentally important passages in the autobiography of the work, comparable to no other scene in the Shakespearean universe but that of Hamlet's advice to the actors. In these few pages of Macbeth, the entire tragic edifice is shaken and all but shattered. The blow is violent and difficult to disguise, but Shakespeare succeeds in controlling its effects. It is my intention to show why and how he does this. If we recall first certain basic historical facts concerning the tragedy of Macbeth, they will help us to understand what takes place on the creative level.

In the summer of 1606, King Christian of Denmark paid a royal visit to England, and Shakespeare was commissioned by King James to write a tragedy in honor of the occasion. Written in haste, Macbeth betrays signs of its immediate purpose. First, the play is short: the royal guests must not be wearied, and the king's distaste for lengthy dramas disregarded. Second, the theme of darkness, rich in symbolic resonances, is amply developed; a gloomy setting is more easily produced at court than would have been feasible in a daylight performance at the Globe. Furthermore, several allusions link the spectators to the action of the drama: Duncan's visit to Macbeth's castle contrasts with Christian's reception by James; the English king's forebears (beginning with Banquo, who, in Holinshed's Chronicles is an indefensible traitor) are all portrayed as patently honorable men.

The drama may be an apology for the good king and his right to reign and an emphatic condemnation of the usurpation of power. Duncan represents the good king; he speaks exactly as a good king ought to speak, according to the Basilikon Doron, a tract on the nature of royal authority written by King James. The king had earlier concerned himself with the subject of witchcraft in a work entitled Demonology, and it is clear that at the time he believed in the malign influence of witches. By the year 1606, he may no longer have held these beliefs, as is suggested by H. N. Paul, but he did not make his views known. We understand the significance of the witches in Macbeth—they pose the problem and incite the protagonist to action; but what was Shakespeare's purpose in giving them such prominence in a tragedy designed primarily to be performed before the king and his court?

The answer is somewhat ambiguous. It seems to me that Macbeth is assailed by contrasting exigencies which at times intersect with violence, and only the extraordinary poetic power, perhaps unmatched in the whole of the Shakespearean theater, unites them. Contradictions and improbabilities are dissolved by a mystical force, and it requires a cold, objective effort on the part of the reader to bring them to light. Almost every phrase is an allusion, every verse an epigraph; as the long years of a reign are reduced to a maelstrom of bloody days and sleepless nights, the kind of argumentation that characterizes Hamlet's long delay becomes in Macbeth the expression of a frenzy of action that consumes itself. A spasmodic haste replaces the brooding idleness. Yet no sooner do we pause to reflect, as in our opening comments on the scene at Macduff's castle, than questions arise.

Macbeth is rich in references to contemporary events. Among the most important are the thwarted Gunpowder Plot, which occurred only a few months prior to the drafting of the play; the trial of the Jesuits who supported the “Machiavellian” doctrine of equivocation; the hurricane of 1606; and the witch trials. As any thoughtful reader knows, an aesthetic appreciation of a work like Macbeth is not dependent on this sort of information, but the awareness of being faced with a complex system does induce a certain desire for knowledge.

The laudatory allusions to King James are, for the most part, not hard to recognize; those to the traitors who conspired in the Gunpowder Plot are no less obvious. And the elements of the play designed to gratify the royal need for adulation show that Shakespeare, as a thorough professional, did not shirk an obligatory task. Clearly, Malcolm and Duncan are brought in as proof of the legitimacy of the Scottish king's succession to the English throne, but we are left in a quandary as to the witches. The subject unquestionably held a fascination for James. Shakespeare, following Holinshed, accomplished two aims with one stroke: he satisfied the emotional needs of the sovereign while giving him an opportunity to condemn the protagonist. The fact remains, however, that James had believed in the power of witches, as evidenced by his writings, so the supernatural aspect of the play would appear to be a rather dubious medium of felicitation for his changed attitude. Or does the author wish to convey something other than this, something that comes to him only in flashes of a disquieting intuition?

This supposition is magnified when one turns to another episode: the sleep-walking scene that precedes Lady Macbeth's death (v, i). This is the climax of the prolonged obession with insomnia that torments the protagonists. As has frequently been remarked, sleep, like food, has a fundamentally symbolic quality in Macbeth: to sleep and eat regularly and well is to be in harmony with nature and oneself. The banquet interrupted by the appearance of Banquo's ghost—the uneaten repast—portends a sleepless night. In the course of the play a curious exchange of roles is effected. In the beginning it is Macbeth who appears to be plagued by insomnia; after the murder of Duncan he hears a voice cry, “Sleep no more!” and later, after Banquo's murder and the appearance of his ghost, has to be led away by Lady Macbeth to seek tranquillity in repose. But the malady originally manifested in Macbeth is transmitted to his wife, and it is she who is stricken by an extreme and irremediable form of ravaged sleep. Various interpretations have been offered for this unexpected transformation in so cold and obdurate a woman. Nothing in the play has prepared us for her final breakdown, which might rather have been expected of her husband, who instead bears up and retains his lucidity even in the face of catastrophe.

The most ingenious of the explanations, advanced by Sigmund Freud among others, is of a critical-aesthetic nature, and suggests that Shakespeare strove for metaphorical rather than psychological consistency, sometimes shifting a quality from one character to another without great regard for verisimilitude. But such an explanation is hardly convincing here, and becomes even less so when one simple but well-documented fact is considered: King James himself suffered from insomnia and was very much interested in the phenomenon of somnambulism, in which he saw an element of magic that fascinated him. A knowledge of these traits clarifies the picture: once again Macbeth adumbrates a characteristic of the king, but at the point of carrying the similarity to its logical conclusion the author's discretion gains the upper hand. Let us not go too far, he seems to imply; if there must be insomnia, attribute it to Lady Macbeth rather than risk having the sovereign see himself in the protagonist. If true, this interpretation only serves to confirm the fact that Shakespeare was quite conscious of his allusions to James—allusions that could scarcely be termed benign by the reader, the cloak of ambiguous adulation notwithstanding.

All this would be of only relative importance were it not for the fact that it throws a new light on the intentions, and still more on the significance, of the tragedy. In this context it is useful to recall the climate in which the works belonging to the “great period”—from Hamlet to Timon of Athens—were born. According to Theodore Spencer, Hamlet represents a decisive development as far as the representation of human nature is concerned: the harmonious vision that had inspired the previous works is fractured, and there unfolds an irrevocable conflict that is rooted in the universe itself. In the progression to a more mature phase, Hamlet occupies a place of paramount importance, and I should like to add a few considerations to those already advanced by the many perceptive interpreters of this major drama.

Hamlet is the first Shakespearean tragic hero to doubt the legitimacy of his own role. His destiny is that of witnessing. Having witnessed his father's glorious reign, he is then witness to the corrupt rule of the fratricidal Claudius when he assumes the royal prerogatives. In the atmosphere of regal pomp, Hamlet affects the disquieting posture of the fool, without ceasing to be the court intellectual, poet, and subtle rhetorician, whose imaginative faculty surpasses that of his philosopher friend Horatio. Hamlet alone talks with his father's ghost; he alone is in contact with a world whose truths are revealed in hallucinations and lightning flashes, a world of unconscious certitudes prefigured in the form and raiment of the murdered king. Hamlet is the court artist. And the other artists are the itinerant players he will use to unmask Claudius. It is Hamlet's destiny to be present at the collapse of one dynasty and the beginning of a new order which he dimly senses is to be perfidious, and in order to expose it as such he needs proof. His reproaches to his mother are addressed to the very concept of the royal crown: Are you a whore, then, giving yourself to everyone, being passed from hand to hand?

Is it worth recalling that at the time of the writing of the great tragedies power was being transferred from the Tudors to the Stuarts, from Elizabeth to James. The fascination exercised upon her subjects by Elizabeth need not be emphasized. One has only to remark that the flourishing of the theater during that period would not have been possible without the sense of stability, security, and absolute legitimacy that her long reign had communicated to her subjects, to noblemen and artists alike. It cannot be mere chance that immediately after her death (and even immediately before, as can be seen in certain intimations in Hamlet and Julius Caesar), Shakespeare's work reflects a kind of inner agitation. By means of theatrical schemes already tested, his poetic force ends in endowing the problems that afflicted England during those years with a cosmic density. The unaccustomed insecurity, the sense of being present at the end of a halcyon era, the cumulative foreboding rumbling through a kingdom that felt itself divested of genuine protection—all these are deeply etched in the pages of Hamlet, Macbeth, and King Lear, the great dramas of power overthrown. Nature too becomes the stage of a universal drama. An apocalyptic air, as of the imminent end of the world, must have had political as well as personal motivations. Timon of Athens marks the point of perhaps the greatest pessimism in the entire Shakespeare oeuvre; the nature of power emerges in all its horror.

By the year 1606, the immediate repercussions to the succession lie in the past. The general discontent, however, has deepened, and with it a sense of having entered upon a period of irreparable decadence (one need only think of the evolution of a man like John Donne toward an increasingly desolate vision of life). In Shakespeare, too, beginning with Hamlet, one notes a pervasive climate of nostalgia: the land is now “a sterile promontory,” the kingdom “an unweeded garden.” Court festivals have deteriorated to drunken revels, and ceremonial to mere sham. The wisdom of Polonius is banal pedantry; Claudius and the Queen are an imitation of a happily married couple; and Laertes is an impersonation of spirited, valorous youth. In Hamlet's compulsion to unmask the lie, Ophelia, incapable of pretense, is reduced by him to genuine madness. From this point on, in Shakespeare's tragedies madness becomes the destiny of those who, like Ophelia and Lear, see things for what they are. Even Hamlet requires a fiction to “catch the conscience of the King,” and at the close of the tragedy, begs Horatio to “draw thy breath in pain, / To tell my story.”

It is Horatio who takes the situation in hand when Fortinbras arrives; Horatio announces that he will recount “How these things came about.” The tragedy of Hamlet seems about to begin again: “call the noblest to the audience,” cries Fortinbras; “Bear Hamlet, like a soldier, to the stage.” The audience includes the spectators as well, and the stage is also that of the theater. Among so many fictions, at least art survives.

But of what will this story speak?

Of carnal, bloody and unnatural acts,
Of accidental judgments, casual slaughters,
Of deaths put on by cunning and forc'd cause,
And, in this upshot, purposes mistook
Fall'n on th' inventors' heads.

[v, ii, 384-388]

We are now in the realm of the “poor player” later hypothesized by Macbeth; we are in the poetics proclaimed by the witches in the opening scene of Macbeth: “Fair is foul and foul is fair.” Through his perception of the incomprehensible tragedy of life, Hamlet is the first of Shakespeare's characters to challenge tragedy as a literary genre nourished by classical moral and intellectual lucidity. There begins a chapter of Shakespeare's work that reflects hopeless confusion and that will reach its climax in that “comedy of the grotesque” which will be King Lear. What G. Wilson Knight says of King Lear can be generalized to apply to Hamlet, Macbeth, and Othello as well: “The tragedy is most poignant in that it is purposeless, unreasonable. … It faces the very absence of tragic purpose.” (The Wheel of Fire, pp. 174-175).

When Shakespeare goes to the royal court to present Macbeth, he finds himself in a situation not unlike that of Hamlet in the third act: now Shakespeare's will be the play “to catch the conscience of the King.” But Shakespeare will have to be even more adroit than Hamlet; there must be no mistake; one false step will mean his ruin. Once again, necessity proves to be the mother of invention—even of genius. Macbeth emerges as a masterpiece of contradictory meanings unified by a violence that leaves the spectator no time to catch his breath. The expedients contrived to gratify the sovereign are undeniably obvious yet at the same time subtly venomous. Let us take the murdered King Duncan as one example. If he is meant to represent the “good king” (conforming to James's Basilikon Doron), his brief appearances, sketched in somewhat idyllic tints, seem almost a travesty in the atmosphere of the drama's violence. Rather than good, Duncan seems merely inept, not even a warrior king, since his battles are all won for him by others.

There is also the whole question of the legitimacy of power. Banquo emerges as somewhat better than his prototype in Holinshed, and it is quite clear why: he is the founder of the house that has put James on the throne. But quite apart from the fact that this Scottish king cannot possibly represent a legitimate English king to Shakespeare's contemporaries, there remains the fundamental question: How is this legitimacy to be proved? For instance, do those who rebel against Macbeth after he becomes king transgress the laws of loyalty? It is no easy matter to determine where treason begins and ends. Whereas Hamlet is haunted by a nightmare of legitimacy violated, Macbeth is animated by an unbridled will to violate a recognized hereditary right. If both are guided by specters and visions, it is because their reasoning is lost in a labyrinth of hypotheses. The will to act that animated both heroes is transmuted into ghosts and a chorus of witches that voice the precepts of the dramas.

This grotesque objectification is crucial. It seems clear to Hamlet that the principles of tragedy are rooted in the irrational, and this is why he, the sophistic intellectual and lover of hair-splitting wordplay, equivocates throughout the entire development of the work. Indeed, he has no great desire to enter into a drama as inconclusive as that enjoined by a ghost avid for revenge. This Hamlet who, through Shakespeare, had read Montaigne and can always find a reason for deferring the act of vengeance, only resolves to act after realizing that he is caught in a trap and may die before he has consummated what he wishes.

Macbeth also finds himself constrained to enter into a hopeless drama. The difference is that whereas any lack of logic is contrary to Hamlet's discriminating sensibility, the distraction and chaos of Macbeth's tragedy are largely of his own making. The famous monologue after Lady Macbeth's death is the quintessence of the play's central theme: once good and evil, fair and foul, have been conjoined, the direction of the action consigned to the witches, and Macbeth made the royal protagonist, what can be expected if not a chaotic, clamorous spectacle? It is this that Shakespeare presents to his audience: a drama “signifying nothing,” in which all in turn lament its absurdity. “Confusion now hath made his masterpiece,” says Macduff, on discovering Duncan's murder. And it is not only a question of moral chaos, of an ethical harmony destroyed, but of an aesthetic principle violated. We are immersed in the brew conjured by the witches according to their infernal recipe in Act iv. This too is an ars poetica, a jumble of everything thrown together in a weird, repellent mixture in which nothing relates to anything else.

The two protagonists of Macbeth anxiously set about trying to activate their drama from the outset. In vain does Lady Macbeth give her husband a lesson in dissimulation; in vain does she prescribe the very expression of his face. Macbeth is fated to betray himself, for, having entered upon the drama of life as actor-king, he wants to live it with passion, and therein lie the seeds of his failure. He stumbles onto the stage like a clown, assuming “borrowed robes,” “a fruitless crown,” “a barren sceptre.” The dialogue between the husband and wife while they prepare to execute their crime has the timbre of actors about to make an entrance on the stage. The wife even speaks of changing her sex—an oblique allusion to women's roles being played by boys in the Elizabethean theater.

The metaphor of the actor, which runs through all of Shakespeare's work, finds in the king (or aspiring king) its most apt and cogent use, for there was a general acceptance of the analogy between the two vocations. Macbeth's maladroit haste in donning the royal robes is a symptom of his unfitness to interpret the role of the protagonist. Like a second-rate actor, he is incapable of emerging from his assigned role (an insight that will also be found in Diderot's Paradoxe du comédien). Once embarked upon his bloody course, he cannot stop himself; the action of interpreting (to act means both to take action and to play) possesses him, giving him no respite. He commits murder almost blindly; he is the actor who cannot relinquish his persona. When, during her raving, Lady Macbeth tries to wipe out the blood spot on her hand, it is as if it were some sort of stage makeup resistant to removal; what had once been action and memory now becomes passion and remorse.

Furthermore, the time is “out of joint,” for everything happens at the wrong time in the famous drama “signifying nothing”: cues are picked up too early or too late; the actors' timing is off. In Lady Macbeth's words:

Thy letters have transported me beyond
This ignorant present, and I feel now
The future in the instant.

[i, v, 56-58]

And Macbeth himself, before the murder of Duncan, says:

If it were done, when 'tis done, then 'twere well
It were done quickly. 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, 1-7]

These lines show the two protagonists' chimerical sense of time, immured as they are in a visionary notion of its essence. In fact they are in search of absolute time, which can be attained only through hallucination, through a leap into a present beyond the future. The actual present coincides with the imbalance of the reeling action: when Macbeth asks, “What is the night?” his wife replies, “Almost at odds with the morning, which is which” (iii, iv, 126-127). And when the present is past it becomes irreparable; it is neither rectified nor made acceptable. The action becomes part of the past, but not of incontrovertible time. In the monologue after his wife's death, Macbeth describes life as divided into yesterdays and tomorrows, which transform the recurrent present into a chaos, “full of sound and fury.” This realization produces another visionary leap beyond the future: if his wife had died hereafter, “There would have been a time for such a word.” This time can be nothing less than unattainable time, beyond choice, beyond remorse. The mechanism of haste, in which this perception is expressed, is that of the guilty conscience.

Through reflection on the problem of power, nature itself is brought into question. Macbeth's speech to the murderers who are to kill Banquo is the focal point of this reinterpretation of man.

FIRST Murtherer:
We are men, my liege.
MACBETH:
Ay, in the catalogue ye go for men,
As hounds and greyhounds, mongrels, spaniels, curs,
Shoughs, waterrugs and demi-wolves, are clipt
All by the name of dogs. The valued file
Distinguishes the swift, the slow, the subtle,
The housekeeper, the hunter, every one
According to the gift which bounteous nature
Hath in him clos'd, whereby he does receive
Particular addition, from the bill
That writes them all alike; and so of men.

[iii, i, 92-102]

This nomenclature of distinguishing qualities within a species bears a striking resemblance to a passage in Niccolò Machiavelli's The Prince (Modern Library College Edition [New York: Random House, 1950] pp. 56-57).

I state that all men, and especially princes, who are placed at a greater height, are reputed for certain qualities which bring them either praise or blame. Thus one is considered liberal, another misero or miserly … ; one a free giver, another rapacious; one cruel, another merciful; one a breaker of his word, another trustworthy; one effeminate and pusillanimous, another fierce and high-spirited; one humane, another haughty; one lascivious, another chaste; one frank, another astute; one hard, another easy; one serious, another frivolous; one religious, another an unbeliever, and so on.

The philosophical kernel of both the above passages lies in the notion of man as an empty vessel that must be filled with qualifying attributes—attributes which all relate to an action. Man is nothing until he acts; indeed, only action renders definition possible. Action is the vital manifestation that defines a man while at the same time imprisoning him in a role, which may engender a metaphysical anxiety, as in the case of Hamlet, for whom the great enterprises he dreams of “lose the name of action.” Machiavelli's prince too is defined through his action, which is at the same time being and seeming, taking action and playing a role; which shows that Macbeth is deeply indebted to the Machiavellian philosophy of power.

Looking back, we can see in Shakespeare's plays the nature of the progression in this conception of power. The description of the kingdom as a well-cultivated garden, which is found in Richard II, represents a stage of optimism at which political harmony is adduced as a possible “imitation” of natural harmony; therefore the apologue is related as truth and accepted as such by the writer and the character. But this is certainly not true of the crisis in Hamlet. Ulysses' famous speech in Troilus and Cressida” (i, iii, 75ff.), frequently cited by critics as exemplifying Shakespeare's creed, is raddled with falseness and deceit; and it is not without reason that the author assigns it to Ulysses, the proverbial liar. The sun king at the center of the universe, a Ptolemaic vision, cannot appear to be simply naïve in Shakespeare's eyes. At the moment, the harmony and legitimacy of power are defensible only through the medium of the well-spoken lie, through a persuasive rhetoric that is inspired by the desecration of the farcical Trojan War, in which it seems strange that the only serious element should be Ulysses' discourse. The great tragedies take another forward step: power is viewed as substantial illegitimacy that is self-perpetuating, and as apparent legitimacy that is redeemed by success and guaranteed by the form in which it is presented to the world. When Lady Macbeth says to her husband, “look like the innocent flower, / But be the serpent underneath 't,” she is trying to give him a lesson both in acting and in imitating nature, as if nature were to act its own innocence. Here the evil within man seems to reproduce the evil of reality outside him. Falsity is natural, and to be a traitor is most normal.

The predicament of Macbeth and his wife is that, in contradistinction to the serpent, they are crushed by their guilt. They have “bad dreams,” as Hamlet would say, and these will bring them to their ruin. In fact they are not playing the roles of goodness at all, but rather those of evil. They feel from the outset that they are doing something profoundly unnatural, and even to themselves become images of nature outraged. Macbeth concludes his final speech in Act i with the words: “False face must hide what the false heart doth know.” Take note of this “false heart”; it is the weak link, the infirm pillar of the argument. A true Machiavellian might feel that he had a false face, but never a false heart; the heart is what it is. If both are felt to be false, a contradiction arises, and one enters the realm of bad acting—that is, of evil that aims at being discovered. The entire second act of Macbeth is an illustration of this destiny of failure. The success of the criminal enterprise is only an apparent success. In the scene that follows the assassination of Duncan (ii, ii), Macbeth and his wife are already assailed by so much remorse that they court punishment and damnation. Suspicion immediately falls upon them: Malcolm and Donalbain, after clearly hinting at treason, depart in haste, as do Macduff and Ross in the following scene. In that scene an old man appears and closes the act with words of proverbial wisdom:

God's benison go with you, and with those
That would make good of bad and friends of foes!

[ii, iv, 40-41]

“Make good of bad” is a highly ambiguous phrase. It can mean the actual transformation of evil into good, which would conform with the traditional interpretation of Macbeth as a tragedy of the formidable struggle between the forces of good and evil (the former “natural” and the latter “unnatural”). But it can also mean “Blessed are those who make good of evil, making it appear so by altering its face”—a new Machiavellian precept addressed to a Macduff who later will evoke the damning epithet of traitor from Lady Macduff.

Meanwhile Macbeth, impetuously and for no apparent reason, has Banquo murdered. He then falls prey to hallucinations; when, at the banquet, his victim's ghost appears, his reaction betrays his guilt, and everyone realizes that it was he who perpetrated the crime—a realization he subconsciously desires. Devastated by remorse, the husband and wife rush headlong to their ruin. They now resemble the serpent, though without the flower, and all their efforts to imitate nature notwithstanding, their actions end in becoming disimitation. To disimitate nature is to commit evil in such a way as to direct it against oneself. By the middle of the third act, Macbeth's days are numbered:

                                                                                          Better be with the dead,
Whom we, to gain our peace, have sent to peace,
Than on the torture of the mind to lie
In restless ecstasy.

[iii, ii, 19-22]

Machiavelli taught that the virtù of the leader is judged by the effect of his action: if he loses his kingdom, he becomes a negative person, and all his sins will be revealed, as on Judgment Day. But the reverse is equally true: if he becomes a person who is manifestly negative, he inevitably loses his kingdom. In Richard III, an earlier tragedy in which there prevails an essentially anti-Machiavellian climate of conflict between the forces of good and evil, it is precisely the villain, who displays his acting ability. Vaunting his Machiavellianism, Richard will be routed by those forces he is incapable of counterfeiting: goodness triumphs over evil as truth over a lie, for in contrast to vice, goodness cannot disguise itself. Even when skillfully wielded, the power of the wicked endures only for the length of the performance; its life span is ineluctably limited. In Hamlet, however, it is the good character who must simulate in order to rend the fiction of the evildoers, those who perform well but not well enough to last to the end—an intuition that is halfway between the insights of Richard III and those of Macbeth. In the last play the villain has become a synonym, not for the actor, but for the bad actor. What happens to the positive characters in Macbeth? Are they like Richard's vanquishers? Or do they in turn go through a metamorphosis? For if the conflict between an actor and his opposite is one between fiction and truth, the contrast between a bad actor and his opposite must manifest itself as the difference between a bad performance and a good one. We are then in a world composed entirely of actors, and if Macbeth is imperfect, who are those who manage with the skill of the accomplished actor?

Let us first consider Duncan. He does not appear to be taking part in a tragedy. Arriving at Macbeth's castle, he perceives it in an idyllic landscape (Banquo's observations on the delicate air and singing birds furnish an ironic commentary on Duncan's simplicity). The king is gentle and trusting, and it is his fate to let himself be killed. If the theme of the play were the struggle between good and evil, it would end at this point with the categorical victory of evil.

But now let us consider Malcolm, Duncan's son and claimant to the throne, and Macduff, a Scottish nobleman. In the roster of the drama's characters, these two are arrayed on the side of the just; when they meet (iv, iii), their animosity toward Macbeth is expressed in terms of harsh moral judgment. This scene immediately follows the massacre at Macduff's castle, and though the news has not yet reached them, it is in the air. Their dialogue is, in the main, taken from Holinshed, with Shakespeare adding certain allusive and strikingly ambiguous lines of his own. Not sure that he can trust Macduff, Malcolm repeatedly provokes him, and their exchanges become a skirmish in which the most dissimulated blows are the most decisive. Macduff's decision to flee, though he knows Macbeth's character and leaves his family defenseless, lacks all justification and can only be interpreted as either thoroughly unconscionable or deliberately criminal. I tend to accept the latter hypothesis, believing that the author himself had arrived at this conclusion in the course of writing the play.

Let us reconstruct this process of the play's composition: in the feverish haste with which Shakespeare composed the text—submerged as he was in the singular climate of the times and because of the personal and ideological crisis caused by his complex, contradictory feelings about the man who had commissioned the play—he followed Holinshed's plot for the first three acts, providing it with a fantastic and metaphorical form. The positive and negative characters were already prescribed, and there was no reason to alter their roles except for precautionary considerations about James, and then only in part. Meanwhile the play had acquired vertiginous contradictions in all of the established roles and a unique psychological penetration in the exploration of the nature of evil. When Malcolm and Macduff reappeared upon the scene in Act iv, it was difficult to present them as two new incarnations of “the power of good,” in the manner of Duncan, because Shakespeare now knew that this form of goodness is destined to fail, and knew too that the type of problem created by Macbeth's actions cannot be resolved by an antinomian counterpoising of black and white, chaos and rectitude, treason and legitimacy.

At this point Shakespeare must have been somewhat surprised by the Chronicle's description of the massacre at the castle, which furnished him with the only possible pretext for a reinterpretation of the character of Macduff. Shakespeare has made of this brief scene the center of an adamant problem which restates the question of life from the side of the good—that is, of the inevitable victims. This is done without parody, for Lady Macduff and her child are not trying to preserve any sort of power. They are genuinely and irrevocably betrayed, as Cordelia will be in King Lear; they are the truly good, the pure in heart spoken of in the Gospels, the foolish ones with neither hope nor reward in this world. As the child senses, an “honest” power cannot exist, and it is precisely the contradiction between honesty and power that the meeting of Malcolm and Macduff will help resolve.

Malcolm's first allusion to the question is in the following lines:

This tyrant, whose sole name blisters our tongues,
Was once thought honest; you have lov'd him well;
He hath not touch'd you yet. I am young; but something
You may discern of him through me.

[iv, iii, 12-15]

Thus the Waith edition, (The Yale Shakespeare) which follows the 1623 folio; but the majority of modern editors of Macbeth have substituted the word “deserve” for “discern” (among others, Kenneth Muir in the Arden Macbeth and J. Dover Wilson in the Cambridge edition). Even those who like Waith's rendition have been faithful to the folio, have entered into tortuous explanations of this passage, unable to accept the simplest implication of its meaning, which is: But you can see (recognize) in me (Malcolm) something of him (Macbeth). And if Macduff sees in Malcolm something he has in common with Macbeth, he will try to win his protection in the same way he would Macbeth's.

The text continues:

                                                                                                              and wisdom
To offer up a weak, poor, innocent lamb
T' appease an angry god.

[iv, iii, 15-17]

In the light of the previous semantic construction, the traditional interpretation of this passage too needs revision. What Malcolm implies is: You have long been in the service of Macbeth; now join me. But where is your credibility? Thus far, we know, he has not touched you, but what guarantee can you give me of your new fidelity—the lives of your dear ones perhaps? However involuted and ambiguous his expression, this, it seems to me, is his meaning. If the words “innocent lamb” refer to Macduff's family, then the “angry god” to be appeased is not Macbeth but rather Malcolm, who makes a show of defending himself while in fact attacking. Macduff grasps his meaning at once and retorts, “I am not treacherous” (l. 18). Malcolm now broadens the attack: That may well be true, but Macbeth is, and it is possible that you have been subjected to his malign influence; though you have a good and virtuous look, the brightest angels can come to ruin through sin. In short, I may conceivably trust you on the strength of your appearance. Malcolm is temporizing, inviting Macduff to reveal himself more fully but his interlocutor is a match for him. I have lost all hope, Macduff exclaims, taking refuge in a phrase that is intentionally vague. For Macduff is not in haste; he knows that soon there will be conclusive evidence of the hostility between him and Macbeth, and he will have no further need for words. Malcolm persists, however, seeking to anticipate him:

Perchance even there where I did find my doubts.
Why in that rawness left you wife and child,
Those precious motives, those strong knots of love,
Without leave-taking? I pray you,
Let not my jealousies be your dishonors,
But mine own safeties. You may be rightly just,
Whatever I shall think.

[iv, iii, 25-31]

This is a direct enough hit: Now you see that I know quite well what is going on—which still does not mean that I blame you. It all depends on what you have in mind. In his reply, Macduff guards against giving his reason for leaving his family unprotected, and instead, launches into a rhetorical apostrophe on the misfortunes of his country, after which he feigns a desire to leave: “I would not be the villain that thou think'st.” Which means, again translated into explicit terms: If you have grasped my meaning, I'll not let you say so openly. Detain me if you wish.

And Malcolm detains him (“Be not offended”) with a fresh and unexpected reversal. At this point in their confrontation a significant development is apparent: each knows that the other is aware of his performance. To refrain from committing an error in the presentation means to affirm the measure of one's stature, to be accepted for something beyond the words that are no more than the actor's disguise.

The power of this dialogue lies in its covert meaning; the two men are like chess players bent on settling a score, executing a series of brilliant tactical variations with false attacks and defensive retreats. The height of this exercise in skill is reached in Malcolm's famous profession of villainy. The episode is found in Holinshed, but Shakespeare, with unfailing mastery, places it before the disclosure of the massacre. Why do you wish me to be king? asks Malcolm. I am inordinately lustful; all your wives and daughters would not be enough to gratify my appetite. We can see to that, replies Macduff, still waiting to find out what he is driving at. I am excessively avaricious, continues Malcolm; I will possess myself of all your properties. A pernicious vice, responds Macduff, yet Scotland can satisfy it if you become king. After all, you have other merits. None, declares Malcolm; I am a sink of iniquity, a dunghill of depravity; nothing speaks in my favor. Then Macduff appears to abandon hope, delivers an eloquent monologue, and is on the point of parting from him for good when Malcolm confesses to having lied in order to test him.

When Holinshed's version of this episode is compared to Shakespeare's, several points of similarity are evident, but there is one decisive difference which seems not to have been remarked before. Holinshed's record of the dialogue gives credence to Macduff's good faith; both his alarm and his disillusionment are portrayed as sincere. In Shakespeare's play, however, they seem to me to be presented in a very different light. Here Malcolm is not trying to provoke Macduff's indignation, but to ascertain the degree to which he is capable of simulating indignation at a given moment. In short, he is testing him again, not as an upright man, but as an actor. Their dialogue, in a disguised form, echoes that between Richard and Buckingham in Richard III.

RICHARD:
Come, cousin, canst thou quake, and change thy colour,
Murther thy breath in middle of a word,
And then again begin, and stop again,
As if thou wert distraught and mad with terror?
BUCKINGHAM:
Tut! I can counterfeit the deep tragedian,
Speak and look back, and pry on every side,
Tremble and start at wagging of a straw,
Intending deep suspicion: ghastly looks
Are at my service, like enforced smiles.

[iii, v, 1-9]

Here Richard is the stronger and asks for a concrete demonstration of his ally's performing ability. The relation between the two characters has, in this instance, been explicitly defined, and the audience is not left in doubt. They are villains and must be revealed as such, whereas Malcolm and Macduff must continue to play their roles and can be understood only through the veil of words. Moreover, the audience—particularly that royal audience to which the author originally addressed the tragedy of Macbeth—must be reassured, and only one who so desires can penetrate the truth.

The essence of Malcolm's inquiry is: What will you do if I simulate such a monstrous character? And Macduff replies: For my part, I'll portray indignation. Malcolm is sufficiently satisfied with his response to launch into a monologue on his own virtues, which for the most part are of Shakespeare's devising. It is this speech that, in my opinion, offers conclusive proof of the author's transformation of the scene. In Holinshed, Malcolm is restricted to saying: “Be of good comfort Makduffe, for I haue none of these vices before remembered, but haue iested with thee in this manner, onelie to prooue thy mind.”

But Shakespeare's Malcolm says a good deal more:

                                                                                                                        I am yet
Unknown to woman, never was forsworn,
Scarcely have coveted what was mine own,
At no time broke my faith, would not betray
The devil to his fellow, and delight
No less in truth than life. My first false speaking
Was this upon myself.

[iv, iii, 125-131]

A similar and equally extravagant self-portrait, with many points in common but with opposite intent, is that of Boccaccio's Ceppelletto (Decameron, i, 1), the first ante-litteram Machiavellian figure of the Italian tradition and one unquestionably representative of diabolical dissimulation. The catalogue of virtues turns out to be no less incredible than that of vices. Needing to find a definition of himself, the future monarch resorts to the idealization of the prince sanctioned by a secular literature. It is the portrait of a new Duncan. But Malcolm is not Duncan and knows the difference—a distinction absolutely clear to Machiavelli—between being good and seeming to be good; the distinction is decisive when a kingdom is at stake. In short, the meeting between Malcolm and Macduff represents the passage from black to white magic, from diabolic witchcraft to holy sorcery. Even the episode of the king as healer (a bow to James) can be viewed in this perspective. He embodies qualities of power and of ambition masked by saintliness which were seen in Malcolm and Macduff. This is in direct contrast to the witches, who expose the weakness of Macbeth, the criminal who appears to be exactly what he is.

The shedding of Machiavellian light over the entire play cannot help but alter its meaning. The antiprince polemic in Richard III indicated a remarkable faith in the possibility of separating the worlds of darkness and light, the heaven of virtue and the realm of fallen angels. Gloucester, the future king, who has already proclaimed himself a disciple of Machiavelli in Henry VI, Part III, proceeds to show himself for what he is in the opening monologue of Richard III, thus establishing the premises of his inevitable downfall. His personality exudes evil, as is instantly apparent in the symbolic deformation of his body, which causes dogs to bark at him as he limps by, as though they have caught the scent of sulphur. The frenetic crescendo of his actions transforms him into a monstrous bloodstained puppet. Clearly, he wants to reveal himself; the sanctimonious mien that has won popular sympathy is so obvious to the audience that it will become apparent sooner or later to his enemies. His defeat is proof of how a professed Machiavellianism fails to work. Evil, like a started beast, is brought to bay. The villain never ceases to be the villain: this is his theatrical destiny; hence in Richard III the struggle is still between the just and the unjust, the legitimate and the illegitimate. Richard and Buckingham are not only evil; they are the buffoons of evil. There is a kind of cheerful professionalism about their performances, at the conclusion of which they seem to execute a graceful pirouette and exit into the darkness, there to reside among the other puppets of evil.

Hamlet has brought to a crux a similar situation by opposing a world falsely shaped to the measure of harmonious and legitimate men: the court of Claudius, which conceals the infamy of a Richard. Yet Hamlet preserves a trace of the ancient optimism: evil is finally exposed, even at the cost of bringing the good to their ruin. Claudius' mise en scène cannot withstand the blows dealt it by Hamlet's mise en scène, and in the revelation of this truth is inscribed the destiny that awaits the usurper. A king who proclaims his Machiavellianism (Richard) paves the way for his own downfall; a king whose Machiavellianism is exposed by others (Claudius) is on the brink of downfall. But a king who is genuinely Machiavellian—what is his image, his fate?

In the first place, his nature should not be perceptible either to the audience or to the other characters in the drama. The spectators and the actors form a system of communication within the theatrical experience: what is known to one group will be revealed to the other. An awareness by some of the characters cannot be withheld from the others except for a period of time in the course of the play's action. When Richard's wickedness is conveyed to the audience, it is only a matter of time before it is revealed to the characters in the play. As the protagonist of evil, Macbeth follows this same trajectory: the audience witnesses the evolution of his iniquity and confidently waits for its unmasking; were this not so, the tragedy would become a glorification of royal criminality, which is not Shakespeare's intention. With great circumspection and ambiguity, he ventures to represent, not the conflict between the forces of good and evil, but the conflict between evil well performed and evil poorly peformed. If Macbeth and his wife, the two characters representing evil, succeed in achieving their goal, their victory will be total, and the audience too will be caught in the trap of verisimilitude.

The true Machiavellian prince is not one who seems to have read the treatise of that name, but one who, if anything, will write the anti-Machiavellian work, one to whom the Florentine's pages do not seem to apply, for a true Machiavellian prince must always appear to be good. Therefore Macbeth and Lady Macbeth fail in performance on the battlefield of power. The genuine leader is distinguished by a want of feeling for the afflictions of mankind. Remorse, not guilt, is the undoing of this homicidal couple; it is passion that renders them clumsy and fanciful, quick to succumb as soon as they are confronted by an effective foe. Let us examine the double prediction of the witches (this too has its origin in Holinshed) that harm can come to Macbeth from “none of woman born,” and that he will meet defeat only when the surrounding wood shall come to Dunsinane. The second prophecy is, above all, a spectacular device: Malcolm's army, screened by leafy boughs, advancing on Dunsinane is a splendid coup de théâtre, a translation into images of a truth that has risen to the surface of Shakespeare's consciousness—to wit, that Macbeth's enemies will defeat him on the plane of simulation and disguise. As for “none of woman born,” Macbeth takes the witches' augury as a guarantee of his invincibility, since there can be no such man. Apart from the literal explanation (before killing him, Macduff will disclose to Macbeth that he “was from his mother's womb untimely ripp'd”), the phrase means that only he who is able to defeat Macbeth on the plane of his inhumanity will be able to defeat him politically and militarily.

Does Macduff conform to this qualification? This is the question that Malcolm has been trying to solve by means of his verbal maneuvers with Macduff. Malcolm does not attempt to elicit a confession, which would be of no use to him in any case, but rather to understand his future lieutenant. Finally, the two men reach an understanding without having compromised themselves. At this point, following a brief laudatory reference to Edward the Confessor, Ross—he who was in such haste to take his leave of Lady Macduff—arrives on the scene. Coming from Scotland, he first gives them news of the state of the kingdom; but here again the real dialogue lies beneath the surface. Ross has been informed of the massacre of Macduff's family and has come to report it; finding Macduff in conclave with Malcolm, and ignorant as to whether or not they have reached an accord, he delays his announcement. His conduct, even before the murder of Lady Macduff, makes it clear that he is cognizant of Macduff's intentions. The first question put to him by Macduff—“Stands Scotland where it did? (iv, iii, 164)—it is strange, to say the least, inasmuch as he himself has just left that country. Is he perhaps asking something of a more specific nature? Ross dares not reply, deterred by the presence of Malcolm, who asks, “What's the newest grief?” to which he gives a vague and circumspect reply: “Each minute teems a new one.” Whereupon Macduff intervenes and speaks plainly:

MACDUFF:
How does my wife?
ROSS:
Why, well.
MACDUFF:
And all my children?
ROSS:
Well too.

[iv, iii, 176-177]

These four lines of dialogue are rather extraordinary, however they are understood. According to the common interpretation, Ross has come in a state of extreme anguish at having to report the horrifying tragedy. If this were true, a more cruel and unfeeling response would be hard to imagine. To say to Macduff that all is well with his family, then to tell him a few minutes later that they have been murdered, can hardly be construed as a sign of friendship. Moreover, Ross gives no evidence of being overcome by confusion; having just made a fine speech reverberating with elaborate imagery on the state of Scotland, he now does no more than repeat the one word “well,” sounding more like a dispassionate messenger than an anguished friend. In short, it seems to me quite evident that the two cousins are endeavoring to convey certain information to each other and are hindered from doing so by the presence of Malcolm—to say nothing of the presence of the principal spectator, a Scottish king only recently crowned king of England, and an audience that has come to witness the cathartic rite of evil punished and virtue rewarded. How would such an audience react were Ross to announce that the cousins' scheme had succeeded, that Lady Macduff and her children were dead, and that nothing stood in the way of Macduff's being appointed Malcolm's lieutenant and the murderer of Macbeth? In the light of certain analogies, the scene becomes less ambiguous. Ross's reply chillingly echoes an earlier moment in the play when Macbeth asks of Banquo's murderer (iii, iv, 26-27), “But Banquo's safe?” and elicits a similar if more explicit and heinously ironic answer: “Ay, my good lord: safe in a ditch he bides.”

Macduff perseveres: “The tyrant has not battered at their peace?” So he expected it. Why then did he do nothing to prevent the crime? This is Lady Macduff's question and Malcolm's too, though phrased more circumspectly. Ross adroitly extricates himself by playing on the double meaning of the words “at peace”: “they were well at peace when I did leave 'em.” Macduff cuts short this circuitous method of communication and brusquely demands: “Be not niggard of your speech: how goes 't?” Before replying, Ross seeks Malcolm's intervention in the conversation by announcing that conditions in Scotland are such that the country is ripe for revolt against Macbeth, and Malcolm instantly concurs. Now that the situation is clear and the two men of one mind, Ross no longer hesitates to reveal what everyone already knows. There ensues a dolorous recital by Macduff with the appropriate rhetorical exhortations to revenge. Enunciated by true professionals, it is concise, decorous, and assured. One rather revealing allusion appears in Macduff's speech concerning the staging of the enterprise:

O, I could play the woman with mine eyes,
And braggart with my tongue.

[iv, iii, 230-232]

This has already been done, however, and now it is time to act, time for the final catastrophe. When Macbeth has at last been dispatched, Malcolm proclaims his plan of action, concluding with the words: “We will perform in measure, time, and place.” He has referred to the Aristotelian principles of tragedy—even using the word “perform.” Here is the actor-king triumphantly reinstated after the poor performance of Macbeth, which he himself acknowledged in the words: “Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player. …” The great performance of sovereignty reaffirms its right; yet the problem remains: Is this choreography only meant to deceive the ingenuous?

If our reading of the dialogue between Malcolm and Macduff is given credence, their restoration to legitimacy is the restoration of a “correct” imitation of natural processes in which an apparent order cloaks the chaos of violence; according to the vision Shakespeare is evolving, “the serpent” is under “the innocent flower.” Macbeth had succeeded in imitating only the serpent, not nature's conjunction of the two; in imitating evil, he disimitated nature, arriving at an incomplete and vulnerable evil, like a serpent coming out into the open and making itself vulnerable. Let us recall the series of betrayals in the play. First there is the betrayal by the thane of Cawdor—a betrayal known to all and punished at the outset of the drama; this is followed by Macbeth's betrayal, immediately made known to the audience, then gradually to the other characters, and destined (theatrically destined) to be punished; finally there is Macduff's betrayal, known only to the victims and to those directly or indirectly implicated in the crime. And if the betrayal is not clearly revealed to the audience, it will go unpunished.

Here we see why Shakespeare gives only hints and clues to Macduff's behavior: the mysterious words muttered by an old man, Lady Macduff's sudden realization of the truth, the confrontation of Macduff and Malcolm. I also believe that another advance signal has been posted: the Porter's scene (ii, iii). Critics have recognized the historical references in his monologue and the symbolic dimension of the character: doorkeeper of Macbeth's castle is equivalent to doorkeeper of hell. If this is true, whoever is knocking at the gates at that moment is probably a damned soul. The words “Remember the porter” at the end of the monologue would seem to be an exhortation to remember the symbolism of the scene—that men are knocking at the gate of hell, where Beelzebub awaits them. And who is knocking? None other than Macduff, the first to speak to the Porter. Who indeed should it be if not this future traitor, of whom it might be said, as of an equivocator, that he “committed treason enough for God's sake, yet could not equivocate to heaven.” It is no mere chance that Macduff's companion in this scene is another traitor, Lennox, who will convey the news to Macbeth that “Macduff is fled to England” (iv, i).

It is difficult to say when Shakespeare conceived the idea of including this scene in the play; the general opinion is that the Porter's monologue was a later addition, creating what amounts to a break in the action of the drama. One might venture a guess that these lines were composed when doubts about the character of Macduff arose in the mind of the author, and when the device of playing with allusion was woven into the texture of the play. Taken alone, any one of the episodes that I have analyzed would be inconclusive, but together they create a picture which does not correspond to the usual interpretation of Macduff as a positive hero. The new picture is rather appalling. The good are murdered (Duncan, Lady Macduff); the villains who kill them are themselves crushed (Macbeth and his wife); the archvillain lets the villain destroy the good, then destroys the villain and assumes the role of the good. All joust to win the leading roles in the cast of life.

In the course of their dialogue, the characters of Malcolm and Macduff acquire a new reflective consciousness; the action is momentarily interrupted as they take each other's measure. The masks and disguises handed down from the oldest theatrical tradition are now become flesh and blood, part of the characters' identity. The king is an actor. The extent to which this identification is linked to the transition of power in England is shown in Measure for Measure, which appeared in 1604, a year after the death of Queen Elizabeth. The play is interlaced with allusions to contemporary conditions, but sufficiently altered to avoid giving offense. The new leader, in the person of Angelo, appears to be nefarious, but the duke, who disguises himself as a monk and keeps watch from the shadows, returns to set everything right. This was perhaps what Shakespeare's contemporaries expected; but such hopes could be satisfied only in the realm of fable. Where does lost sovereignty end? On some remote island, and one must travel to the end of Prospero's world in The Tempest to rediscover it. The shipwreck, the terrifying opening scene, is the destruction of royal hopes; the tragedy is conveyed in a few lines, in a cry of horror and in silence. For the action to continue, the setting must be transposed to myth. This solution implies an altered awareness of sovereignty.

After the revelation of Macbeth, and Ulysses' speech in Troilus and Cressida, which we have defined as a well-spoken lie, there are two other decisive ideological moments in Shakespeare's theater. The first is Menenius Agrippa's apologue in Coriolanus. Near the beginning of the play, (i, i, 100ff.), Menenius, a reincarnation of Polonius, explains to the mutinous citizens the function of the senate-belly, inventing the famous tale of the body's members. He is listened to with understandable impatience; the speech is a parodic distortion of Ulysses' florid eloquence. Here the concept of social harmony is supported by a lie ill-spoken and is patently absurd. This speech is but a step to the second instance, represented by the rage in Timon of Athens. In the protagonist's desperate monologues, the social harmony that justifies power is ultimately revealed as substantial inharmony camouflaged by virtuous appearance: “for there is boundless theft / In limited professions.” Further, Timon says to the bandits:

                                                                                          Yet thanks I must you con
That you are thieves profess'd, that you work not
In holier shapes.

[iv, iii, 431-433]

Here, with unmistakable precision, is what Macduff's son had intuited. The universal social larceny is but a reflection of the natural cosmic inharmony. Timon says:

                                                            I'll example you with thievery:
The sun's a thief, and with his great attraction
Robs the vast sea: the moon's an arrant thief,
And her pale fire she snatches from the sun.
The sea's a thief, whose liquid surge resolves
The moon into salt tears: the earth's a thief,
That feeds and breeds by a composture stol'n
From general excrement: each thing's a thief:
The laws, your curb and whip, in their rough power
Has unchecked theft.

[iv, iii, 441-450]

Only in his late works does Shakespeare attempt to move beyond this extreme conception and toward an ideal of timeless harmony. This attempt involves a re-examination of the very concept of life, and is increasingly represented as an allegorical function of a mysterious justice which is cadenced by the “music of the spheres” announcing the happy ending of Pericles; by Ariel's song accompanying his prodigies as a sprite in The Tempest; by the secret music ending Cymbeline and Henry VIII; and by the music awaking Hermione from her statue-like sleep in The Winter's Tale. We are now well beyond Macbeth, on a horizon that calls for fresh explorations, new explorers.

As for Macbeth, with his mind “full of scorpions,” he is a lion incapable of transforming himself into a fox, and is propelled toward a death he accepts as a deliverance. His monologue after Lady Macbeth's death would not be accepted by his enemies: for the victors, the world regains meaning. Only in defeat is life seen for what it is; but the cry of anguish is proof of nothing but defeat itself. This is perhaps true of life as well as of art. Thus The Prince would appear to be an ars poetica helping to define a world where pure sentiments are annihilated like innocent victims, where excessive ambition is mere folly, and where artifice and cunning conquer, leaving their audiences bewitched. Is he who rules by the word perhaps he who has penetrated most deeply into reality? Are the words of Timon to be trusted?

                                                                                                              … all is oblique;
There's nothing level in our cursed natures
But direct villainy.

[iv, iii, 18-20]