SOURCE: Turner, John. “Duncan.” In Open Guides to Literature: Macbeth, pp. 36-54. Buckingham: Open University Press, 1992.

[In the following essay, Turner studies the figure of Duncan in Macbeth, focusing particular attention on this character's status as a signifier of feudal ideology and on performance interpretations made by directors Trevor Nunn and Roman Polanski in their productions of the drama.]

During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries there was increasingly a ‘reinforcement of patriarchy’ in England and Scotland as the new Renaissance states struggled to secure legitimacy for themselves (Stone 1979: 109). By ‘patriarchy’ I mean a political system concentrating power in the hands of men, especially men within their families—power secured in the Renaissance by primogeniture and authorized by a network of mutually sustaining analogies between the powers of father, God and king. While the aristocracy of the middle ages had defined their power in terms of ‘dominance over kin and clientage’ (Stone 1979: 111), power under the new monarchies was increasingly celebrated as the prerogative of the father (the paterfamilias) within his own household and of the king (the pater patriae) within his own kingdom. This redefinition formed part of an ideological campaign designed to reduce aristocratic power and to reconstitute the kingdom as a constellation of small households turning upon its centre of the crown. Under James, the campaign was intensified still further; for, with continental theories and practice in mind, James idealized himself as the father of his people, demanding their absolute obedience and demonizing their dissent more than any of his predecessors had done. Increasingly under James, the great principles of patriarchy established the whole religious and political duty of mankind: to honour and obey one's father, one's king and one's God.

Two consequences of this increasing centralization and totalization of power concern me here. First, there was the severity of the punishment sanctioned against dissidence, especially in Scotland, where the witch-hunts illustrate the ferocity of patriarchy in defending its privileges and beliefs. Second, there was the evolution of a diffuse consciousness of times past when things were different. This consciousness took many literary forms: that of aristocratic romance, with its dreams of a larger, more spacious world; of satire, with its denunciation of a machiavellian present where reciprocity had been lost amid ‘the decay of the old social bonds’ (Thomas 1973: 672); and of history, with its gradually emergent recognition that there really had been a different world, a feudal world sustained by feudal law, in which the concept of reciprocity had been central. This feudal law, which codified the parcelling out of land by the monarch to his warlords in exchange for their promise of military aid, had been identified by Thomas Craig in his Jus Feudale, a book dedicated to James in 1603, as particularly the law of Scotland.

Let us turn now to Duncan in Macbeth. How important a character to the play is he, do you think? Often weakly cast in the theatre, and ignored in criticism, he may seem no more than a two-dimensional figure, a king cut out of cardboard only in order to be cut down: Macbeth's victim and no more. In Holinshed's Chronicles Duncane was ‘soft and gentle of nature’, ‘negligent … in punishing offendors’, with ‘too much of clemencie’ in him—a ruler whom the rebellious Makdowald could plausibly mock as ‘a faint-hearted milkesop, more meet to gouerne a sort of idle moonks in some cloister, than to haue the rule of such valiant and hardie men of warre as the Scots were’ (1587/1965: 265). You may feel that Shakespeare's Duncan too is excessively mild. Yet no one in the play makes this criticism: everyone, even the man who kills him, reveres him as a good man and a good king.

But what kind of goodness is it that Duncan embodies? Is he a model of the new Renaissance absolutism that James admired, or a figure from an imagined past, born out of Shakespeare's romantic idealization of vanished possibility, his satire upon a shrunken present, his historical curiosity about a kingship that today we should call early feudal? I want in this [essay] to discuss Duncan's kingship in the light of the social and political structures of the country that he rules, for I believe that his ideology and practice offer a model of feudal reciprocity with power to challenge the absolutist aspirations of James, whose writings show no more than the vestigial traces of such reciprocity.

I

Let us begin with I.ii. What is the nature of the crisis facing the Scotland over which Duncan rules?

DISCUSSION

As the play opens, Scotland is being attacked by the combined forces of an enemy without and an enemy within: a Norwegian invasion is being assisted by the rebellious uprising of two of its own most powerful subjects, Macdonwald and Cawdor. Duncan is thus involved at once in the two great duties of kingship that James identified in Basilikon Doron: ‘the sword is giuen you by God not onely to reuenge vpon your owne subiects, the wrongs committed amongst themselues; but further, to reuenge and free them of forraine iniuries done vnto them’ (1599/1965: 28).

Yet are not these two kinds of injury differently depicted in the text? Is not the external aggression of Norway described quite matter-of-factly beside the internal rebellion of Macdonwald and Cawdor? Foreign invasion is only to be expected in the competitive world of international politics, where kingly honour is won by conquest: it is only natural, we might say. But the rebellion of Macdonwald and Cawdor is described as something most unnatural—or, more accurately, as something natural in a quite different sense of the word. Cawdor is a ‘most disloyal traitor’ (I.ii.53) who deceived ‘our bosom interest’ (I.ii.66), while Macdonwald in pursuit of his ‘damned quarrel’ (I.ii.14) is considered ‘worthy to be a rebel, for to that / The multiplying villainies of nature / Do swarm upon him’ (I.ii.10-12). A snake in the bosom, a man infested as though with lice: Cawdor and Macdonwald are demonized, diseased, and the imagery that gathers around them—‘shipwracking storms and direful thunders’ (I.ii.26)—recalls the Weird Sisters, who similarly nurture the multiplying villainies of nature.

I.ii thus raises at once the central theme of the play—the theme of betrayal: betrayal by the enemy within, in those nearest relationships where men and women have placed their dearest trust. Such betrayal cuts so deep because, in part, it shows the insufficiency of the taboos controlling our social behaviour; it shows the naturalness of what we like to call the unnatural.

What is Duncan doing about the war and civil war raging in Scotland? In Polanski we see a grizzled king in late middle age riding with a troop of followers across the battlefield, stopping to receive the latest despatches from the front; in Nunn we see him old and infirm, praying and receiving the news upon his knees. Which is truer to your own vision of Duncan in this scene?

DISCUSSION

It is uncertain from the text whether Duncan has been fighting or not. What is certain, however, is that his survival depends upon the success of his two most powerful warlords, Macbeth and Banquo. He is at the mercy of both their prowess and their loyalty, and this dependence emphasizes equally the instability of his kingdom and the vulnerability of his own position within it. No matter whether he fights, prays or passively waits upon events, the scene declares his vulnerability; and the older and more venerable he appears in performance, the more vulnerable he becomes. The most powerful man in the country is also the weakest—a paradox that Shakespeare has emphasized by making his Duncan much older than the Duncane of the sources.

To put the same point in a more theoretical way, one of the chief structural weaknesses of feudalism is the position of the monarch. Although needed by his aristocracy as a centre of political authority, his authority—when challenged—is wholly reliant upon aristocratic military power for its effectiveness. In Perry Anderson's words, there was ‘an inbuilt contradiction within feudalism, between its own rigorous tendency to a decomposition of sovereignty and the absolute exigencies of a final centre of authority in which a practical recomposition could occur’ (1974: 152); and this contradiction is crucial to Macbeth. Duncan, with no national army to call on, is wholly reliant upon his warlords; and yet the warlords upon whom he relies are his greatest rivals for the crown. The taboo on usurpation suggests the temptation it holds for an aristocrat jealous for the honour of his family—a temptation fuelled by the king's dependency. As Harry Berger Jr says, ‘the more his subjects do for him, the more he must do for them; the more he does for them, feeding their ambition and their power, the less secure can he be of his mastery’ (1980: 24-5).

Production choices about Duncan's age and military involvement will therefore be governed in part by the importance attached to this paradox of the vulnerable king. But other dangers attend Duncan too, apart from foreign invasion and internal insurrection. Read the Captain's speeches (I.ii.7-43). In what style are they written? Would you agree with Coleridge (1836/1987: 305) when he described them as epic in manner? What further dangers to Duncan do they suggest?

DISCUSSION

Epic aims at a narrative style suitable to heroic deeds; and the Captain, in speaking of ‘cannons overcharged with double cracks’ and the desire to ‘memorize another Golgotha’, is striving for a language adequate to the apocalyptic nature of the action he has just witnessed. Notice, however, how his first two speeches are rhetorically patterned so as to keep the issue of the battle in doubt until the very last moment. He relishes his account of the fighting as much as the victory to which it leads, and, in recreating both the violence and the uncertainties of war, he alerts us to the dangers besetting a society whose peace depends upon the equivocal benefits of military power.

The violence of the Captain's speech is quite remarkable: a violence whose barbarousness gives us our first impressions of Macbeth. The strained, heroic manner of the Captain, together with his depersonalization of Macbeth as ‘Valour's minion’ and his iconic representation of him with brandished sword smoking in hand, all work to create a tragic hero who seems a terrible, almost inhuman, force—as capable of devastating friend and foe alike as he is of defending the realm. Macbeth, like Cawdor, has a ‘lavish spirit’ (I.ii.58)—and this phrase, signifying excesses that range from bountifulness and prodigality on the one hand to insolence and licentiousness on the other, indicates an important ambivalence at the heart of the aristocratic code. For such lavishness, such extravagance, characterizes the aristocratic idea of virtue, exciting admiration even in excess. Perhaps Rosse has a secret undertow of admiration for Cawdor at I.ii.58. Certainly he admires Macbeth, as does the Captain, for the extravagance, the sheer excess of his fighting, the way in which he doubly redoubles his blows. It does not take this anticipation of the Sisters, who in IV.i doubly redouble their blows against Scotland, to remind us that there is danger here. The danger is that the forces that should defend a country might also be the forces that destroy it. The military code of honour espoused by the feudal aristocracy and their king promoted values and energies as dangerous to the common weal as they were beneficial.

Thus the Duncan of I.ii alerts us to the dangers attending both his kingdom and his crown. His military dependence and his enviable status, together with the competitive culture of his warlords, threaten a recurrence of civil war as a natural probability, despite his best attempts to make it seem unnatural. Between internal unrest and external aggression, it seems unlikely that Scotland will enjoy much peace; and so indeed it proves.

Duncan's response to the Captain's first speech offers the actor an interesting challenge. ‘O valiant cousin! worthy gentleman!’ he exclaims (I.ii.24). How should this line be spoken? Is Duncan aware of the dangers of trying to build a peace upon the arts of war, do you think? or naïvely unaware? Is he a naïve and foolish king?

DISCUSSION

Duncan's gratitude is his response to the Captain's extraordinary description of Macbeth's refusal to shake hands or otherwise bid farewell to Macdonwald until he had ‘unseam'd’ him from the belly to the throat. Macdonwald might be no more than a suit of old clothes that the tailor has just ripped up. This juxtaposition of the civil and the savage is, as Brian Morris has noticed (1982: 52), deeply characteristic of Macbeth. But is Duncan aware of it? Does he sense the disjunction between the arts of war and peace, the styles of epic and civilized exchange? Does he see that his line might ring with grotesque comedy after the Captain's words: that it ‘jars oddly against the violence it approves’ (Mack 1973: 150)? How intelligent a ruler is he?

After Cawdor's death, the Duncan of Polanski's film enjoys a perpetual good humour, as though he were a friendly bank manager. Resolute in the business of kingship, relaxed after his triumph, he has no other distinguishing characteristics. And it is possible to act him in this way. But it is not the only way. Yes, we may underwrite his determination and goodness, as Polanski does. We may even ironize his naïvety by emphasizing his ignorance of the disjunction between the discourses of killing and courtesy: perhaps Polanski aims at such an irony by contrasting Duncan with the unsmiling and watchful Malcolm. But is there not another way of playing him too, in which he glimpses into the horrors of the society he rules before getting on with the job? Trevor Nunn's Duncan, old and infirm as he is, sees the horror, but seeks to bear it all upon his own back: ‘Mea culpa,’ he murmurs, like a saint or a scapegoat, a primitive king whose ritual sacrifice will purge the kingdom of its guilt. Almost too helpless to govern, his gratitude to Macbeth is spoken in the cracked voice of extreme old age. Yet it need not be so. May not his praise of Macbeth's valour and worthiness be offered in full knowledge of the threat he constitutes and in full determination to avert it? A pause before that difficult line above would do the trick and make it seem part of a policied way of dealing with threat.

Seen in this light, Duncan's attempt is to turn the soldier back into the gentleman. He is trying to reclaim the unceremonious energies of war for the ceremoniousness of peace, the equivocal values of the aristocratic code for the cause of civilization. Yet remember that it is a civilization in which he remains king. If all his behaviour in this scene, as he rewards ‘Bellona's bridegroom’ (I.ii.55) with the title of thane of Cawdor, may be seen as the expression of a virtuous gratitude, it may also be seen as a determined bid to stay on top in a highly competitive world. Trevor Nunn's Duncan lacks the competitive edge needed to survive in such a society. The king cannot determine who shall win or lose the battle—for that he is dependent upon his warlords—but, should he win, he can determine who shall win or lose honours. By such dispensation of honours the feudal monarch made good his lack of military power. Yet the irony of Duncan's unconscious echo of the Sisters in his closing line about things lost and won (I.ii.69) emphasizes the implausibility of his whole enterprise. The arts of peace cannot be served by the arts of war. Nor can they be served without them—and here is a contradiction crucial to the play.

Duncan, however, has more than the distribution of state honours to reinforce his authority: he has a fully articulated philosophy of kingship too. Let us turn now to I.iv to elucidate this philosophy, the official belief system of the Scotland which Shakespeare has imagined for his play.

II

Read I.iv. After his relative passivity in I.ii, Duncan now resumes his active kingly responsibilities. Polanski shows a king determined to be firm, Nunn a king too old to be so. Ask yourself what pieces of business Duncan has in hand, then how effectively he tackles them. What beliefs about the nature of kingship do his words and actions suggest?

DISCUSSION

There are three pieces of business that Duncan undertakes in I.iv: he receives the news of Cawdor's execution, he welcomes and rewards his thanes, and he settles the succession upon his son. Past, present and future must be seamlessly united, as Duncan grapples with the testing process of re-establishing social order after the turmoil of war. It is a dangerous time in the history of any society when the armies return home and the immunities of military life are surrendered to civic duty, and it is this transition that Duncan now has to negotiate. Surrounded by his court, he sets about restoring to currency the political ideology upon which his kingdom rests.

This ideology is feudal in a very pure form. We may approach it through the ‘compt’ rendered by Malcolm of Cawdor's death, which it is Duncan's first piece of business to hear (I.iv.1-14):

… very frankly he confess'd his treasons,
Implor'd your Highness' pardon, and set forth
A deep repentance. Nothing in his life
Became him like the leaving it: he died
As one that had been studied in his death,
To throw away the dearest thing he ow'd,
As 'twere a careless trifle.

(I.iv.5-11)

Here is aristocratic lavishness expended in an honourable cause. The traitor had set up his own will and his own view of the world against those of his sovereign, but now in his death he honours the God and king whom he had formerly disobeyed. A personal crime against the body of the king has been avenged upon the body of its perpetrator; frank confession has replaced covert ambition; and the seamless political harmony which Duncan cultivates, extending from God through king to subject, appears to have been secured as Cawdor finally renounces his rebellious desires—a harmony, however, soon to be shattered as, with an irony disclosing the inadequacies of Duncan's ideology, the same ‘black and deep desires’ resurface in Macbeth at I.iv.51.

Both the duties of the feudal bond and the contradictions which it conceals are beautifully encapsulated for us by the concept of ‘owing’ that Malcolm invokes; for, in the late feudal society of Shakespeare's Britain, the verb ‘to owe’ might mean either ‘to owe’ or ‘to own’. According to feudal ideology, all property and office was held as trust: the nobility held their lands of the king for his service, and the king held his throne—either of God or of his people—for their better protection. Thus, as Cawdor implicitly confesses at the last, the subject had no right to his own will, his own view of the world. He did not even own his own life, he owed it; and now the king is calling his debts in. Yet, of course, the other sense of ‘to owe’ as ‘to own’ was always ready to assert itself, generally in the interest of the individual family against the state. Kin might always be preferred to king, and it is to guard against this possibility that Duncan is busy. Although disappointed in the ‘absolute trust’ which he had placed in Cawdor (I.iv.14), he will nevertheless continue to strengthen the bond between himself and his subjects by fostering trust. For trust—a moral virtue grounded in the realities of property relations under feudalism—offers him one way of turning his military and political weaknesses into strength.

The question to be faced in production, of course, is that of Duncan's good sense in affirming trust in despite of treason. In Nunn he is too infirm to do otherwise: grieved by Cawdor but grateful towards Macbeth, the moral contradictions of his experience overwhelm his failing powers. In Polanski it is rather the political contradictions of his society that defeat him. Here the figure of Cawdor frames the scene, beginning with a confession whose tones are wholly ambiguous and ending with the swinging body of his corpse as Macbeth avows his own treacherous desires. In neither film is trust sufficient; but shall we blame the weakness of the king or the tragic contradictions of his situation?

Turn now to Duncan's second piece of business, the welcoming and rewarding of his thanes (I.iv.14-35). Here he discloses the full ambition of his ideology, as he tries to weave man, nature and God into harmonious unity. Let us take his relationship with each of these in turn. First, his attitude towards his fellow-countrymen. Read Duncan's opening address to Macbeth (I.iv.14-21) and ask yourself what it shows of Duncan's feudal ideology.

DISCUSSION

Duncan expresses his gratitude to Macbeth and Banquo by declaring his indebtedness to them; and it is in this way that he reaffirms his commitment to the politics of trust:

… Thou art so far before,
That swiftest wing of recompense is slow
To overtake thee: would thou hadst less deserv'd,
That the proportion both of thanks and payment
Might have been mine! only I have left to say,
More is thy due than more than all can pay.

(I.iv.14-21)

The relationship defined in these striking lines is not, as might first appear, primarily a financial one: Macbeth is no mercenary. His richest reward will lie in Duncan's increased sense of debt: payment will find its worth in thanks, not thanks in payment. Duncan declares his gratitude in open court, for he wants his relationship with his cousin to epitomize the principle of reciprocity upon which he would rule the whole country—a reciprocity in which debt can never be repaid but only deepened under the gentle discipline of gratitude. Therefore he entrusts himself to his most powerful subject at the moment of his greatest power; and therefore, fatefully, he determines to visit him at Inverness, indebting himself still further in his desire to ‘bind us further to you’ (I.iv.43).

Yet there is something else about these lines too, to which Harry Berger Jr (1980: 20) has drawn attention, and that is the competitiveness which they disclose between Duncan and Macbeth. The king humbles himself only in order that the subject should do the same: he is engaged upon a courtly game, a coercive ritual with whose requirements Macbeth is perfectly familiar, as the studied courtesy of his reply makes plain. They vie in self-effacement with one another; like two people who arrive at a door together and give way to one other, they defuse the fear of aggression by an elaborately patterned ceremony. ‘After you’: ‘No, after you.’ Macbeth has gone so far before, says Duncan, that he will never be able to catch him up. He has preceded him; and we shall appreciate the dangers of Duncan's strategy if we remember the importance of precedence to a hierarchical society. For Duncan is in effect, unconsciously, tempting Macbeth, his ‘peerless kinsman’ (I.iv.58), with the crown. His policy of trust—and I do not mean by this that he is insincere—may encourage the very treachery that he is trying to prevent. The social ritual in which he is engaged carries a high risk: the person who adopts a submissive posture may always get beaten up. Yet Duncan goes through with it: he dies true to his dangerous faith that Scotland might be ruled harmoniously as an extended family whose manners of deferential gratitude will defuse the malice of aggression.

Such a reading implies that Duncan is fully self-conscious about the strategies that he adopts, watchful (as perhaps all feudal monarchs were) of the power struggles threatening the courtly conversational rituals that evolved to contain them. Is Duncan watchful in this way, do you think, careful of his power? Or is he naïvely trustful? Or is the real point elsewhere, quite apart from Duncan's virtues or vices, in the perception that it lies tragically beyond the art of man, especially in a courtly world but maybe more generally too, ‘to find the mind's construction in the face’ (I.iv.12)?

Second, what do these same lines (I.iv.14-34) show of Duncan's attitude to nature? What do you learn from his metaphor describing the art of kingship in terms of farming (I.iv.28-9), and also from his metaphor at the start of I.vi, breathing life into the breeze before Macbeth's castle?

DISCUSSION

Nature, like the commonwealth, is also the field of human labour for Duncan, a site upon which the reciprocities of service and gratitude spin their soft webs of mutual indebtedness. When he says to Banquo that he has begun ‘to plant thee, and will labour / To make thee full of growing’ (I.iv.28-9), he is showing his faith in the complementarity of art and nature and the labour that binds them reciprocally together. King, thane and commoner alike, he implies, share the same ‘natural’ responsibility to tend the things in their trust in order to reap their promised reward.

But it is I.vi.1-3 that contain the loveliest illustration of Duncan's attitude to nature as, in ignorance of what lies within, he praises the beauty of Macbeth's castle:

This castle hath a pleasant seat; the air
Nimbly and sweetly recommends itself
Unto our gentle senses.

Can you recognize the metaphor by which Duncan identifies the breeze here? Does he not see it as a servant, whose courteous alacrity he rewards by his own grateful notice? The metaphor has a double effect: it naturalizes the social relationship, and this in turn familiarizes nature, so that we sense no discontinuity between the natural and the social worlds. Characteristically, Duncan speaks of the recommendations of the breeze, as earlier he spoke of the commendations of Macbeth (I.iv.55); and behind both words we hear the technical feudal term of commendatio, the act whereby a freeman offers service to a lord in exchange for protection. For it is a language of feudal reciprocity that Duncan uses, picked up by Banquo in his own way when he goes on to speak of the temple-haunting martlet as the guest of summer, wooed by the breeze to make its home amid lov'd mansionry (I.vi.3-10). The king sees patterns of service that confirm him in his status; the guest sees patterns of invitation that confirm him in his. The ‘multiplying villainies of nature’ seem quite forgotten here, although of course they remain the hidden text behind this public reading of nature as the register of human reciprocity.

Lastly, what can you find in I.iv and in I.vi to illustrate Duncan's attitude to God?

DISCUSSION

At the heart of Duncan's vision of harmony lies his faith in God. When he speaks to Macbeth of the sin of his ingratitude, he implies that the pattern of debt and gratitude which he is trying to replicate finds its ultimate validation in the nature of man's relationship to God. Many critics of Macbeth believe, with Brian Morris, that ‘it is a moral, though not a religious, play’ (1982: 41). But can so sharp a distinction be made?

The feudal society that Shakespeare has imagined for Macbeth, as for King Lear, is a world united in a shared understanding of social bonds—a word difficult for modern audiences to grasp, since it mediates between areas of experience that today we commonly keep apart: ideas of duty and affection, of natural and social law, of spontaneous love and traditional attachment. The Latin word pietas perhaps comes closest to the English bond of the Renaissance, signifying as it does that desirable conduct towards God and man in which duty and affection meet, each in confirmation of the other. When Duncan speaks of the sin of ingratitude, he is declaring his faith in a world whose ordinary everyday pieties are transfused with religious meaning. It is a sacramental vision, denying the distinction between morality and religion, committed to reading the worlds of nature and ‘human nature’ as Nature, the sacred text of God.

Turn again to I.vi, and puzzle out Duncan's words of welcome to Lady Macbeth, as she advances with perhaps an overeffusive smile of welcome on her lips:

The love that follows us sometime is our trouble,
Which still we thank as love. Herein I teach you,
How you shall bid God 'ild us for your pains,
And thank us for your trouble.

(I.vi.11-14)

In the difficult and elaborate courtesy of these lines, Duncan displays the laborious responsibility of kingship to find in every moment of life an example to instruct his subjects in the endless replication of debt and gratitude that alone has power to bond together in one society the Creator and the whole of his created world.

I have found some words of the anthropologist Marcel Mauss helpful in imagining the kind of society that Shakespeare has invented for Duncan's Scotland—a society where man, nature and God are built into a structure so perfect, and so frail, that the gentlest push might bring it down.

In these ‘early’ societies, social phenomena are not discrete; each phenomenon contains all the threads of which the social fabric is composed. In these total social phenomena, as we propose to call them, all kinds of institutions find simultaneous expression: religious, legal, moral and economic.

(Mauss 1966: 1)

In such a society, heavily tabooed and ritualized, each orderly action symbolizes and reproduces the order of the whole; and each disorderly action bodes its total destruction. As Mauss observes, ‘in these primitive and archaic societies there is no middle path. There is either complete trust or mistrust’ (1966: 79).

Let us now turn to Duncan's third piece of business in I.iv, the establishment of the succession on his son (I.iv.35-42). In Holinshed, the Scottish system of royal succession is a tanistic one, ‘whereby the succession to an estate or dignity was conferred by election upon the “eldest and worthiest” among the surviving kinsmen of the deceased lord’ (OED 1989). Such a system gave Mackbeth a legitimate hope for the throne and a legitimate grievance against Duncane for depriving him of it. But in Shakespeare this is not an issue: Duncan has power to nominate Malcolm his successor as the thanes have to nominate Macbeth after Malcolm absconds. Why then does he choose this moment to settle the succession upon his son? What effect does his decision have?

DISCUSSION

It is Duncan's timing in nominating his own son for the succession at this particular moment that raises most acutely the question of his wisdom or his folly as a ruler. Does he realize that he is facing powerful subjects at their most powerful, flushed with military success that might enkindle them unto the crown? And if he does know, is his announcement the ‘final misjudgment’ that Michael Hawkins thinks it (1982: 175), or the most prudent course of action to control those subjects and avert the danger of civil war? Is it perhaps yet another ritual to be defined by the risk that it runs?

These questions, although provisionally answered in every production of the play, are finally unanswerable. On the one hand, Duncan has been acted as childishly credulous, the victim of his own ‘almost incredible want of caution’ and ‘unguarded confidence’ (see Rosenberg 1978: 147). On the other hand, he has been acted as a canny ruler who stage-manages the distribution of honours in I.iv in order to practise the hoary art of dividing and ruling: by praising first Macbeth, then Banquo, then his own son above them both, he seeks both to exploit and to contain the competitiveness of court culture which is so dangerous to him (see Rosenberg 1978: 152-3). We may see something of these two extremes if we compare the Nunn and Polanski productions; for while Nunn's Duncan is almost childishly credulous, with a credulity which seems an aspect of his sanctity, as though he were a holy fool, in Polanski we see a determined ruler struggling to control a rivalrous court, and killed because his watchfulness does not extend to his own kinsman. Such interpretations clearly express an understanding of the play as a whole: the morality play of Nunn, with its weak but virtuous Duncan, highlights the villainy of Macbeth; while Polanski's more political film, with its stronger king, highlights instead the structural contradictions within the play's society.

In case Duncan's characterization seems to you unsatisfactorily vague, let me suggest finally that our ignorance serves a dramatic purpose: to remind us that, despite his commitment to the politics of trust and openness, Duncan's conduct in fact is ambiguous and reserved. Where there is power, there is mistrust: and the greatest mistrust of all surrounds the succession. As his verse ceremoniously exerts the discipline of place on those around him, restoring sons, kinsmen and thanes to their rightful order of precedence, it also confers a new pre-eminence upon his son. Is Duncan acting here for the good of the state or for the good of his own family? Is he serving the harmony of the whole or the interest of the part? These questions cut to the heart of Duncan's whole ideological enterprise, for they enable us to glimpse that ideology as a function of his power. They remind us that the religious harmony privileged by Duncan is one which privileges himself and his family too, and that this in turn breeds malice among his subjects. The structure of the scene makes the point for us: as Duncan reproduces the political order of the former world, he also reproduces in Macbeth those same ‘black and deep desires’ (I.iv.51) which have already led to civil war.

III

Turn again to I.vi. Duncan's last appearance in the play shows him upon the threshold of Macbeth's castle, greeted by Lady Macbeth. What meaning does this image hold for you?

DISCUSSION

When Duncan stands in courteous praise before the looming battlements of Macbeth's castle, it is a moment of dramatic irony typical of the whole of the play's first act: a dramatic irony betraying a deeper irony still, which we may trace to the moral nature of man or to the political structure of Scotland, or indeed to both together, but whose immediate material base is in the prestige and property relationships of feudalism—the irony that brings forth malice out of trust.

In Macbeth malice is given precedence over trust: it goes before, continuously creating dramatic ironies which disclose the implausibility of Duncan's hopes for peace. We met the Sisters in I.i before Duncan in I.ii, and here we meet the hostess in I.v before the guest in I.vi. Right from the start we see the paradox of the code by which Duncan lives: namely, that the mutual trust which he promotes is a powerful ideology when successful, but awesomely frail when it fails. There is no middle path, and its frailty seems all the greater when we remember the importance attached in feudal ceremony to who goes where to pay respect. For this is a more primitive, more dangerous, feudalism than that of Tudor and Jacobean England, where monarchs regularly progressed from stately home to stately home, both to honour and to exhaust the wealth of their wealthiest subjects. Here there is danger when the monarch comes to the subject, especially as a guest, putting himself in his host's protection. Duncan's praise of Macbeth's castle is the last time in the play that anyone will enjoy a relaxed relationship with the otherness of the external world, and Banquo's reply is the last time that a subject will be able to ‘do faithful homage, and receive free honours’ (III.vi.36) in exchange with his sovereign. After this, as Duncan makes his fatal entrance under the battlements, the light thickens and the atmosphere becomes claustrophobic, strained, hallucinatory.

Yet Duncan is true to his faith to the end. Perhaps something in him balks at the approach of Lady Macbeth; but heroically, or naïvely, he goes through with it. He turns his fatigue into a pattern of love, as we have seen, and then once more inverts traditional precedence in ritual self-submission. He had wanted to become her husband's ‘purveyor’, he says (I.vi.22), his servant, riding before him in order to prepare for his arrival. It is a benign inversion. What the Sisters do in malice, Duncan does to foster trust—or, in another language, to reproduce a symmetrical self-submission in his subjects. Notice the diamond which he gives to Lady Macbeth as he goes to bed (II.i.15): he dies as he lived, acting out his faith in the value of mutual indebtedness.

But Lady Macbeth is more than a match for him. In this dangerous society, where gestures of trust are ritualized in order to minimize misunderstanding and reduce risk, Lady Macbeth thrives upon the fact that the outward show of ritual may be simulated.

… All our service,
In every point twice done, and then done double,
Were poor and single business, to contend
Against those honours deep and broad, wherewith
Your Majesty loads our house:

(I.vi.14-18)

These lines show her awareness of the competition in service which maintains the status quo in feudal society, and her next lines show her alacrity to account her possessions as debts to the king (I.vi.25-8). But, behind the dance of her courtesy, a quite different competitive spirit is astir, leading to a quite different kind of reckoning. If Duncan is prudently seeking trust from a position of power, she is treacherously seeking power from a position of trust. Nunn shows her horrified by her own treachery and reluctant to touch Duncan as she welcomes him; but in Polanski she revels in it, dancing with Duncan and smiling with appalling frankness upon him. It is a horror that we shall understand more fully in retrospect when the redoubled toil and trouble of which she speaks (I.vi.15) declares its secret affinity with the work of the Sisters. For its heart is malice, the excited and exciting betrayal of trust; and it is the vulnerability of trust that we see in that ironic picture of Duncan before the castle of Macbeth.

IV

Trust and malice, Duncan and the Sisters: two sides of the same coin, fellow-contraries that perpetually reproduce one another within an ‘early’ society where the enviable status of king rests dangerously upon the military prowess of his warlords. The ideology of reciprocity by which Duncan rules is in fact a necessity of his political dependency, and it functions only by demonizing dissent. Shakespeare does not make the connection between the recent development of a centralized monarchy and the witch-hunts that we might make today. Instead, imagining a society more primitive than his own, he shows how Duncan's faith in reciprocity works to control the unstable competitive culture of which he is the head, how his gentleness works to occlude its violent hierarchy. It is the hidden violence of this hierarchy that Macbeth and Lady Macbeth will now disclose as they act out their desires between the poles of trust and malice upon which their kingdom turns.

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