SOURCE: Blits, Jan H. Introduction to The Insufficiency of Virtue: “Macbeth” and the Natural Order, pp. 1-7. Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield, 1996.

[In the following introduction, Blits studies Macbeth’s concern with the limits of virtue and the violation of human and natural order.]

Macbeth depicts the life and soul of a Christian warrior who first becomes his kingdom's savior, then its criminal king, and finally its bloody tyrant. Set in eleventh-century Scotland, the play portrays Macbeth within the context of a moral and political order rooted in a natural order that is established by God. Far from being merely a backdrop for the play (as is often suggested), this natural order decisively shapes both the characters and the action of the drama. Shakespeare shows that what a character thinks about the natural order affects how he understands the moral and political world, and hence himself and his life. It makes him who or what he is.

The natural order that we see in Macbeth is a distinctly medieval Christian cosmos. Characterized by God's providence, plentitude, and pervasive presence, it appears to be a hierarchical, harmonious unity in which all being and goodness flow from God and what everything in the world is depends on God and its place in his scheme of creation. Throughout the play, something's “place” is not merely its spatial location, but its fixed “degree” or “rank” in the established order of things. Place refers to hierarchical position as well as to whereabouts in space.¹ Likewise, God is generally thought not only to see everyone's every action and to know everyone's most secret thoughts (“Heaven knows what she has known” [5.1.46]), but to protect the innocent, punish the guilty, and, indeed, to feed the birds of the air and supply their other natural needs. Nothing escapes Heaven's notice or concern. Even Macbeth and Lady Macbeth fear that Heaven will see them murdering Duncan and act to stop or to avenge the deed.²

Further, as God not only sees but foresees all things, and as he, moreover, does nothing directly that can be done through intermediaries, the world in Macbeth is pervaded by a profusion of preternatural beings with the power to prophesy and to produce magical changes or effects in things. Nature is surrounded or suffused by the supernatural. Witches, angels, devils, saints, spirits, and other such beings permeate the world and, bridging the gulf between God and the human soul, are able to see what lies ahead and to transform what human power is unable to change.³

Finally, since God wills and orders all things and nothing happens outside his providence, many of the characters in Macbeth believe that chance or fortune has little or no role in human affairs. Not only does the traditionally pious Old Man trust that good always comes of evil (2.4.40-41), but Macbeth and Lady Macbeth, on the one side, and Macduff and Lady Macduff, on the other, show by their actions as well as by their words that they believe that virtue possesses the power to govern the world. Notwithstanding their deep and direct moral opposition in other critical respects, each of them sees the world as a morally consistent order in which the virtuous are always rewarded or protected and virtue alone determines one's fate.⁴

Shakespeare leads us, however, to examine the unity, harmony, and order of this medieval Christian cosmos. The medieval world—imbued with distinct and fixed ranks, the subordination and obedience of the lower to the higher, and a strong sense of plentitude, purpose, wholeness, and order in both the temporal and the spiritual realms—may set forth the natural order in high relief.⁵ But, in so doing, it also points up fundamental tensions that inhere not only within the medieval cosmos, but, by implication, within any unified, harmonious, natural order. In Macbeth we see two such tensions. One concerns the relation between two opposed forms of virtue; the other, the relation between virtue and life. The tensions themselves and the complex interaction between them, played out in the actions and the souls of the characters, form the essential core of the drama.

The first tension exists between the two contrasting forms of virtue esteemed in Macbeth's warrior, Christian Scotland: the manly virtue practiced by men like Macbeth (“brave Macbeth (well he deserves that name)” [1.2.16]) and honored so highly by his wife, and the Christian virtue evoked by the “most sainted king” Duncan (4.3.109) and devoutly revered by Macduff. Manly virtue honors bravery, boldness, and resolution (“Be bloody, bold, and resolute” [4.1.79]); Christian virtue exalts meekness, innocence, and trust (“Whether should I fly? / I have done no harm” [4.2.72-73]).⁶ The former emphasizes fear while honoring war; the latter emphasizes love while celebrating peace. Manly virtue speaks of courage, action, prowess, vengeance, and resistance. It demands action while disdaining fortune. Christian virtue speaks of pity, patience, guilt, forgiveness, and remorse. It demands innocence while trusting providence. What is fair in the light of one is foul in the light of the other.

In Macbeth, Christian and warrior virtue exist side by side not only in the same country, but often in the same individual.⁷ While Macbeth, for example, is “Bellona's bridegroom” (1.2.55) and is spurred to Duncan's murder by his wife's accusation of unmanliness (“When you durst do it, then you were a man” [1.7.49]), he nonetheless not only looks up to Duncan's meek, angel-like virtues,⁸ but, repulsed by his thoughts of murder and eventually tormented by his murderous deeds, he is finally destroyed by his own Christian conscience. Indeed, haunted by his guilty conscience, he tries to destroy it and, in so doing, ultimately destroys both his conscience and himself. If manly ambition leads Macbeth to his first crime, paradoxically it is Christian conscience that drives him to his last. Had he either listened to his Christian conscience in the beginning or never heard it at all, he would not have become a bloody tyrant in the end.

The most obvious example of these opposed virtues coexisting in the same person, each in an untempered form, is Macduff. Macduff is at once a manly warrior and a devout Christian. No one, not even Macbeth, speaks more often or more assuredly of his sword than he (“My voice is in my sword” [5.8.7]).⁹ Nor does anyone else, not even the pious Old Man in act 2, scene 4, describe Scotland's moral and political events in explicitly biblical, let alone apocalyptical, terms so frequently or so emphatically as Macduff repeatedly does.¹⁰ Macduff trusts his sword and the cross equally. Thus he flees to England to bring back an army to overthrow Macbeth (“Let us rather / Hold fast the mortal sword, and like good men / Bestride our downfall birthdom” [4.3.2-4]). But, while doing so, he leaves his wife and children undefended, trusting their protection to God. And then, upon hearing of their slaughter, he does not doubt divine providence, but blames his own sinfulness for their fate:

                                                                                                    Did Heaven look on,
And would not take their part? Sinful Macduff!
They were all struck for thee. Naught that I am,
Not for their own demerits, but for mine,
Fell slaughter on their souls.

(4.3.223-27)

Even while he believes that only the mortal sword can redeem Scotland's great wrongs, Macduff also believes in the existence of a moral order in which God guarantees the victory of goodness in the world and allows only sinners (or those they love) to suffer.

Similarly, Duncan, though completely lacking martial virtue, takes enormous delight in the bloody Captain's grisly account of the brave Macbeth. Disdaining fortune with his brandished sword, Macbeth carved his way through the rebels until he came face to face with their leader, whom he immediately ripped open from his navel to his jaw and whose head he then fixed upon the battlements. “O valiant cousin! worthy gentleman!” (1.2.24), the “most sainted king” exclaims. And the bloody Captain himself, epitomizing the confusion, declares that he “cannot tell” whether Macbeth and Banquo “meant to bathe in reeking wounds, / Or memorize another Golgotha” (1.2.42, 40-41). To this good and hardy Scottish soldier, a warrior's bloodbath seems indistinguishable from the Crucifixion.

The first tension, then, involves the unreconciled forms of virtue practiced and esteemed in Macbeth's Scotland and, ultimately, the different conceptions of human life underlying them. The second tension, though less apparent, is still deeper. It is the tension within nature between virtue or order, on the one side, and life, on the other. Where the first tension involves the coherence of virtue, the second involves the coherence of nature itself.

While the word nature occurs very frequently in Macbeth,¹¹ only twice (and both times with great ambiguity) could “nature” be understood as the source of moral evil. The Captain, mentioning the word for the first time, refers to the rebels swarming to Macdonwald as “The multiplying villainies of nature” (1.2.11): “villainies” might be either scoundrels or peasants, or both. And Lady Macbeth, wishing to unsex herself, offers prayers to murdering spirits who, she says, “wait on Nature's mischief” (1.5.50): the mischief may be done by or to nature. Apart from this pair of possible exceptions, nature is associated throughout Macbeth with two things: with order and with life. The moral order is seen as part of the natural order,¹² and the natural order is the source of, sustains, and, indeed, is characterized by, life.¹³ While in our day the prevailing view is that nature is essentially inanimate (inert matter in aimless motion) and freedom from nature, or even opposition to it, is the source of morality, in Macbeth's medieval Scotland, just the opposite seems the case. Nature is seen as embracing and sustaining both virtue and life. The source of the one, it is also the source of the other. It holds the moral and the biological realms together.

Thus, nature is often associated in Macbeth with gentleness (“the milk of human kindness” [1.5.17]), with pity and remorse (“the compunctious visitings of Nature” [1.5.45]), with nourishment (“great Nature's second course” [2.2.38]), with bountiful giving (“the gift [of] … bounteous Nature” [3.1.97]), and with a parent's love (“the natural touch” [4.2.9]). Its opposite is not so much convention or even the supernatural, both of which abound in Macbeth, as it is death or murder.¹⁴ “Death and Nature do contend about them,” says Lady Macbeth, “Whether they live, or die” (2.2.7-8).

Thus it is not surprising that the issue of children or of natural generation shapes much of the structure of the play. Both sets of the Witches' prophecies rest on it. First, Macbeth shall be king, but Banquo shall beget kings. The father will be happier, though lesser. Then, none of woman born shall harm Macbeth. Macbeth is invulnerable to anyone with maternal origins. And just as Macbeth tries to kill Banquo and his son so that his own son might succeed him on the throne, so his worst crime is the slaughter of Macduff's wife and children, for no reason other than that they are his wife and children—a crime for which Macduff, having been untimely ripped from his mother's womb, will kill Macbeth in return. Altogether, there are five father-son relationships in the play: Duncan's, Banquo's, Macduff's, Siward's, and Macbeth's own.¹⁵ Macbeth kills the first two fathers and the last two fathers' sons, while he himself, as Macduff pertinently notes, “has no children” (4.3.216).

And just as children and generation are crucial to the play, so, also, the central political issue in Macbeth concerns royal succession. Not only Macbeth but Duncan and Banquo as well seek to establish family dynasties—to “be the root and father / Of many kings” (3.1.5-6). Indeed, the last two, unlike Macbeth, eventually succeed. Their posterity become kings, while Macbeth, wearing “a fruitless crown” upon his head and holding “a barren sceptre in [his] gripe / Thence to be wrench'd with an unlineal hand,” dies without an heir, “No son of mine succeeding” (3.1.60, 61, 62, 63).

Now, it may seem obvious that there is a tension between life and at least one of the two forms of virtue. For Macbeth's warrior virtue aims not at sustaining life, but at wreaking death (“Nothing afeard of what thyself didst make, / Strange images of death” [1.3.96-97]) and accepting it courageously (“He only liv'd but till he was a man; … / [And] like a man he died” [5.9.6, 9]).¹⁶ It surely is no accident that Shakespeare rhymes Macbeth's name (which, ironically, in Gaelic means “the son of life”) with the play's first mention of death:

                                                            Go pronounce his present death,
And with his former title greet Macbeth.

(1.2.66-67)

Nor does it seem coincidental that the play's first description of Macbeth depicts “brave Macbeth” as cutting a man “from the nave to th' chops” (1.2.16, 22), from the sign of his birth to the jaws with which he eats.¹⁷ In a less obvious way, the same fundamental tension seems also to exist for Christian virtue. As Macduff approvingly reports, the “most sainted” Duncan's wife, a woman who was “Oft'ner upon her knees than on her feet,” “Died every day she liv'd” (4.3.109, 110-11). Her virtue made her dead to the world.¹⁸

Shakespeare also shows, however, that the tension within nature between order and life is not limited to virtue's aims or effects. While one aspect of the tension involves virtue's life-destroying consequences, another involves, even more fundamentally, the necessary conditions for a natural order in which virtue is sovereign or supreme and nothing is left to chance. Macduff is able to preserve the Witches' prophecy that “none of woman born / Shall harm Macbeth” (4.1.80-81), because he is “of no woman born”:

Macduff was from his mother's womb
Untimely ripp'd.

(5.8.15-16)

Macduff is not the child of a woman. Scotland is his “birthdom” (4.3.4); his country is his “mother” (4.3.166). Free from birth and hence from chance, he can believe that virtue—whether of the sword or the cross—is everything, and that fortune, which has such a large role in births, plays no part in human affairs. Whatever happens has moral significance, since only what comports with moral order is possible. The unborn Macduff thus literally embodies an impossible but necessary condition for a natural order in which virtue governs all. An incarnation of what Aristotle describes as “a probable impossibility,”¹⁹ Macduff illustrates the inherent tension between virtue and life by surpassing the intrinsic limits of a perfectly ordered natural whole. Malcolm, by contrast, a man who more than once owes his life to chance, believes strongly in the power of fortune and hence in the need to rule rather than be ruled by either Christian or manly virtue.

Macduff is not alone in believing in the sufficiency of virtue. As already suggested, both his wife and Lady Macbeth, as well as Macbeth, share his view. The two women are, of course, quite different from each other. Lady Macbeth, the voice of manly, warrior virtue in its wholly untempered form (1.7.49-51), fears that her husband is too full of the milk of human kindness. She wishes to unsex herself—to have murdering spirits come to her breasts and take her milk for gall—so that she would be cruel enough to kill Duncan. Indeed, she would rather murder her own son than forswear her promise to murder the king. In direct contrast, Lady Macduff, the voice of womanly, Christian virtue in its untempered form (4.2.72-78), fears her husband's lack of human kindness. Identified by Shakespeare only as “wife” and “mother,” she is all maternal love (4.2.8 ff.).²⁰ She even refuses to hear that any other of Macduff's loves could possibly compete with his love as a husband and father. One woman wishes that both she and her husband were all manly; the other seems to be all womanly and wishes her husband were more so. Yet, even though these two women—the only women of major importance in the play apart from the Witches—represent opposite sides of the tension within virtue, both believe in the sovereign power of virtue. Just as Macduff thinks that only sinners suffer, his wife thinks that innocence suffices for safety. Warned of approaching danger, she asks, “Whether should I fly? / I have done no harm” (4.2.72-73). Those who have done no harm to others need fear no harm to themselves. Only the “unsanctified” is unsafe (2.2.80). Similarly, Lady Macbeth, overcoming her husband's final resistance to murdering Duncan, suggests that courage guarantees success:

We fail?
But screw your courage to the sticking-place,
And we'll not fail.

(1.7.60-62)

Both women believe in the existence of a moral order in which chance plays no part and virtue, the only truly valuable thing, rules all. Both risk everything on this trust, and lose. And both denature themselves for their virtue. While Lady Macbeth, wanting to be entirely cruel, would unsex herself, Lady Macduff, fearing no harm, forgets that she lives “in this earthly world” (4.2.74). One would expunge her bodily maternal function to become all male; the other forgets her home on earth while being all female.

Nothing, however, better epitomizes the tension within nature between virtue and life than their husbands. Macduff, all virtue, proves in the end to stand outside and against nature in its most obvious aspect. If his lack of natural birth is a precondition for his virtue, his virtue, in turn, leads to the destruction of all his children. A child without a mother, he becomes a father without a child. His own motherlessness results, finally, in his childlessness. In the end, his virtue proves entirely incompatible with natural generation.

Macbeth, by contrast, is childless from the start. Yet in what is no doubt the strangest and most revealing twist in the play, the childless Macbeth kills so that his own sons can succeed him on the throne (3.1.47-71). In the Republic, Socrates banishes not only families but human birth from the just city: virtue, not fortune, rules.²¹ Macbeth, in his own way, does the same. Collapsing both major tensions within the natural order at once, he makes manliness everything and subjugates generation to it. For him, we will see, virtue ultimately replaces sex, death replaces birth, murder replaces generation. Nature is entirely subsumed by virtue: the two senses of “blood”—lifeblood and deathblood—converge. Manly virtue itself produces sons. “Bring forth men-children only! / For thy undaunted mettle should compose nothing but males,” Macbeth tells his wife after she persuades him to carry out Duncan's murder (1.7.73-75): manly men have sons. By murdering his rivals, the man called “Bellona's bridegroom” and “Valour's minion” (1.2.55, 19) aims to make his barren crown fruitful.²²

Notes

1. 1.4.35-36; 1.7.61-62; 2.4.11-13; 3.1.91-102; 3.4.1-8, 118-19; 5.9.39. References are to act, scene, and line. All references to Macbeth are to the Arden edition, ed. Kenneth Muir (1951; reprint, London: Methuen, 1984). Where the Arden text differs from the First Folio, I have sometimes emended the quotations, based on the New Variorum Edition, ed. Horace Howard Furness Jr. (1870; reprint, New York: Dover Publications, 1966.)

2. 1.5.53-54; 1.6.3-9; 1.7.21-25; 2.3.8-11; 2.4.4-10; 4.2.30-33, 72-78; 4.3.5-8, 141-59, 223-27.

3. E.g., 1.1.5; 1.3.8-10, 48 ff.; 1.5.1-16, 29-30, 40-50; 3.1.1-10; 3.4.122-25, 131-34; 3.5.2-33; 4.1.48 ff.; 4.3.141-59; 5.3.1-10; 5.5.42-46; 5.8.8-22.

4. E.g., 1.7.59-62; 3.1.56-63; 4.2.72-73; 4.3.223-27.

5. As Sir Thomas Elyot wrote (1531), “[T]he discrepancy of degrees, whereof proceeds order, … in things as well natural as supernatural has ever had such a preeminence, that thereby the incomprehensible majesty of God as it were by a bright leam of a torch or candle is declared to the blind inhabitants of the world.” Sir Thomas Elyot, The Boke Named the Gouernour, ed. Henry Herbert Stephen Croft, 2 vols. (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, 1883), 1:3. I have modernized the spelling.

6. For “Whether should I fly” rather than “Whither should I fly,” see note 27, Act Four.

7. The close juxtaposition of the two kinds of virtue leads some critics to suggest that Christianity is still vague and only newly emerging in Macbeth's Scotland (see, e.g., H. B. Charleton, Shakespearian Tragedy [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1971], 145 ff.; Paul Cantor, “Macbeth” und die Evangelisierung von Schottland [Munich: Carl Friedrich von Siemens Stiftung, 1993]). However, Scotland had been converted to Christianity by St. Columba nearly half a millennium earlier. Duncan is, in fact, the last, not the first, king to be buried on “Colme-kill” (Iona) (2.4.33-35; see also 1.2.63). Note also that Malcolm's name, in Gaelic, means “Follower of St. Columba.”

8. By contrast, in Holinshed's account, Shakespeare's principal source, Macbeth speaks disapprovingly, and perhaps even contemptuously, of Duncan's soft qualities. See Raphael Holinshed, The History of Scotland, vol. 5 of Chronicles of England, Scotland, and Ireland (1808; reprint, New York: AMS Press, 1965), 265. I have modernized Holinshed's spelling throughout.

9. Also 4.3.3, 87, 234; 5.7.19.

10. 2.3.62-63, 65-68, 74-79; 4.3.55-57, 108-11, 223-27, 231-35; 5.8.3, 14; see also 2.4.34-35; 4.3.5-8. Macbeth comes closest, in describing his own affairs; see 1.7.16-25; 4.1.117 and 5.5.21. Macduff's moral character is largely Shakespeare's invention. Holinshed gives no hint at all of his devout Christian piety. Nor does he depict him so confident of his sword as Shakespeare does. See Holinshed, Hist. Scot., 274-77.

11. Of all Shakespeare's plays, only Hamlet and King Lear, which are about twice as long as Macbeth, mention “nature” and its derivatives more often. Macbeth mentions them thirty-one times; Hamlet, thirty-nine times, and Lear, fifty times.

12. E.g., 1.5.40-50; 1.6.3-10; 2.1.8-9, 49-56; 2.2.34-42; 2.3.53-60; 2.4.1-20; 3.1.49-50, 85-107; 3.4.121-25; 4.2.9-14, 30-35; 4.3.66-67.

13. E.g., 1.7.68-71; 2.2.7-8, 34-39; 2.3.109-12; 3.4.25-27, 140; 4.1.58-60; 4.2.9-11; 5.1.9-10.

14. The word “nature” derives from the Latin word for “birth” (natura, from nascor, “to be born”) and from the Greek word it translates, physis (from phyo, “to generate, to cause to come into being”). The native English word for nature is “kind,” which has a similar derivation. Hence “the milk of human kindness.”

15. Marvin Rosenberg, The Masks of Macbeth (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1978), 124.

16. As the latter quotation contains the last mention of “man” in Macbeth, the first mention of the word is Duncan's question, “What bloody man is that?” (1.2.1). Duncan's question is also the first line spoken by a human being in the play.

17. For Macbeth's only reference to natural death, which, in context, he suggests is unnatural, see 4.1.99, 100, and note 11, Act Four.

18. See 1 Cor. 15.31 (RSV); all biblical references are to the Revised Standard Version. See also 1.2.40-42 and 4.2.72-78.

19. Aristotle Poetics 1460a27, 1461b11.

20. The now-common designation “Lady Macduff” is a modern editorial convenience. It is found in neither the First Folio's stage headings or stage directions nor in the play's dialogue.

21. Plato Republic 415d8; see also Plato Critias 110c6, and Aristotle Politics 1264a25 ff.

22. See also 1.7.38-39, 2.2.13.