[In the following excerpt, Sadowski asserts that the “masculine principle” is a crucial agent in Macbeth's progression from “statism,” wherein he is concerned with honor and conscience, to a state of “endodynamism,” wherein he becomes preoccupied with remorseless ambition and the consolidation of power.]

According to the working definition adopted in the previous chapter, tragedy as a literary mode describes events leading towards an irreversible disturbance of the protagonist's functional equilibrium, often realized in death, or at least to a permanent maladaptation in the form of his or her total alienation from social relations. The critic Bernard McElroy calls this maladaptation “the complete disorientation of the individual from his most basic assumptions about himself and the world around him.”¹ Literary plots of this type are most likely to be generated by situations characterized by excessive competitiveness and the accompanying violence—both masculine, endodynamic features, as distinct from acceptance and love—features usually associated with the feminine Eros as the principle of relatedness. Such an understanding of the tragic mode in terms of gender and dynamism of character is fully borne out by the nature of events in Shakespeare's Macbeth. Here the predominance and extremity of the masculine principle, both in relation to male and female characters, account for the strong dynamic imbalance, which leads to a complete disintegration of the social relations involving the main protagonists, and to a serious crisis of the socio-political system.

This darkest and most sinister of Shakespeare's tragedies begins ominously with the magic evocation of thunder, lightning, and rain, the awesome atmospheric phenomena traditionally associated with masculinity and with the power of male, uranic gods. Even the fact that the incantation is pronounced by the female witches takes nothing away from the masculine principle in its most gruesome and violent aspect. Ostensibly women, the witches talk of the “hurlyburly” of battle, of wordly power and its inevitable ruin, in their confused gender creating “a murky atmosphere of blurred distinctions, mingled opposites, equivocations, and reversals.”² The feminine principle signaled by their sex is entirely obliterated by the dark powers of masculine magic of violence, of confusion and chaos, where “fair is foul, and foul is fair,” and things “hover through the fog and filthy air” (1.1.11-12). Even the witches' physical appearance, wild and otherworldly (1.3.40-1), belies their female sex, causing confusion and apprehension in the manly Banquo: “you should be women, / And yet your beards forbid me to interpret / That you are so” (45-7). The witches' cauldron, this hell-broth betokening chaos and destruction, is an antithesis of the fertile female womb, producing poison and death instead of health and new life. In the opening scene therefore the feminine principle undergoes gender transformation into its opposite,³ setting the pattern, which culminates in the sinister figure of Lady Macbeth, of gender and moral inversion and confusion, where “nothing is, but what is not” (1.3.142).

Masculine violence materializes in all its gory terror in the second scene with a blunt question “What bloody man is that?” (1.2.1).⁴ The question is followed by a realistic if exaggerated report of the battle, full of upbeat military rhetoric of manly courage of the victors and the villainy of the traitors. It is in this context of unmitigated violence that the “brave Macbeth” is mentioned for the first time. He is highly regarded by fellow soldiers for his undaunted courage, fighting skills, and spectacular efficacy in battle, and is now publicly glorified in Homeric terms as an eagle, a lion, “Valor's minion” and “Bellona's bridegroom.” Valor in fighting for the just cause is a static virtue, and such is the opinion that the “valiant cousin” Macbeth enjoys in King Duncan's eyes. Macbeth's efficaciousness receives due praise because it helped to win the battle, but Macbeth's unceremonious killing of the traitor Macdonwald, with whom he “ne'er shook hands, nor bade farewell to him” (1.2.21), signals an endostatic character of someone prepared to break the accepted rules if necessary. Macbeth's potentially dangerous endostatism is still unsuspected by others, who regard him as a “worthy gentleman,” that is, a static man of honor. Macbeth's aspirations are further suggested by a comparison and by an unintentional identification with the traitorous Thane of Cawdor, whose title Macbeth now assumes as an immediate reward for his spectacular performance in battle (1.2.67-8). In dynamic terms, Macbeth's promotion from the Thane of Glamis to the Thane of Cawdor marks his transition from honest, honorable statism to potentially disloyal and self-serving endostatism.

The third and ultimate step in Macbeth's social advancement is announced in the witches' triple all-hails, which imply a natural progression from Glamis to Cawdor to King,⁵ and in dynamic terms supply the final, endodynamic phase in the evolution of Macbeth's masculine character. If the witches' prophesy reflects the development of Macbeth's character, their balanced, symmetrical equivocations also define the essentially static character of Banquo, whose fate is to be “lesser than Macbeth, and greater. / Not so happy, yet much happier” (1.3.65-66). The almost immediate confirmation of the middle element of the prophesy concerning Macbeth fixes Banquo's companion firmly in the role of the traitor (“I am Thane of Cawdor”), and defines his character as unequivocally endostatic. Macbeth's mental distance from the static and straightforward Banquo is marked by his absent-mindedness and the appearance of asides to hide his dark thoughts (“Glamis, and Thane of Cawdor: / The greatest is behind,” 115-16). While Banquo prudently dismisses the prophesy as a temptation to “win us to our harm” (123), Macbeth is unable to control the ever-swelling flow of ambitious thoughts, experiencing, for a time at least, an acute dilemma.

The particular nature of Macbeth's dilemma has occasioned a considerable debate in the critical history of the play, caused by what the critics perceived as an inconsistency in Shakespeare's characterization of the figure: how could a man fully aware of the horror of his deeds be able to commit them? The critics did not deny Macbeth his deep moral sense, noting at the same time his ability to overcome his scruples, to commit one atrocious deed after another, and to live with guilty conscience. A. C. Bradley found in the play “the most remarkable exhibition of the [psychological] development of a character to be found in Shakespeare's tragedies,”⁶ but later critics accepted the view that Shakespeare sacrificed psychological consistency to theatrical effect. For example, according to J. I. M. Stewart, “for the sake of theatrical excitement the gap between character and action has been widened beyond credibility,” and “there is something like a deliberate omitting of clear and sufficient motives for action, there is a lack of discernible correspondence between the man and his deed.”⁷ In his analysis Stewart talks in fact about two Macbeths: the criminal and the hero.⁸ Kenneth Muir too concluded that “Shakespeare was not so much concerned with the creation of real human beings, but with theatrical or poetical effect,” and that the playwright was “fascinated by the very difficulty of making the psychologically improbable … appear possible.”⁹ In his characterization of Macbeth, it has been argued, Shakespeare made the bold experiment of mixing mutually exclusive qualities—a brave warrior who is a moral coward, and a brutal murderer who is racked by feelings of guilt.¹⁰ I would argue, however, that rather than sacrificing psychological realism for artistic effect Shakespeare achieved both. What the critics perceived as an inconsistency is in fact a classic endostatic dilemma of a man whose “conscious or reflective mind … moves chiefly among considerations of outward success and failure, while his inner being is convulsed by conscience,” as was perceived intuitively by Bradley.¹¹

From the dynamic perspective, a state identified as dilemma occurs when an individual finds himself in a transitional state between two dynamic stages: between exodynamism and statism (exostatism), or between statism and endodynamism (endostatism). For example, the exostatic Hamlet is pulled in opposite directions by his exodynamic tendency to indulge his imagination, to play act, to brood and meditate, and by his static concern for justice, honor, and revenge. He is too much of an exodynamic to avoid thinking “too precisely on the event” and unpacking his heart with words, and at the same time he is too much of a static not to recriminate himself for neglecting his filial duty. The result is suspended decision, inaction, procrastination, and continuous self-reproaching. The endostatic Macbeth on the other hand is pulled in opposite directions by his static preoccupation with honor, conscience, and loyalty, and by his endodynamic tendency to act efficiently to achieve a profitable result, here to seize the crown. As Bernard McElroy put it: “the conscience-stricken criminals are in the agonizing position of being committed by their actions to one set of values while committed by their beliefs to quite another.”¹² The result for Macbeth is a short period of indecision and suspension between scruples and ambition, until his endodynamic wife sways him towards decisive action. On the other hand, just as transitional dynamic types (exostatics and endostatics) have dilemmas, so statics have crises, that is, situations of painful choice between two irreconcilable alternatives in which a static person equally believes. This is a situation of Othello, caught tragically between his love for Desdemona and a belief that she is unfaithful, or of Brutus, for whom the plan to assassinate Ceasar involves a painful choice between the sacrilege of regicide and the public interest of ridding the state of possible tyranny. Finally, the dynamic characters, that is, exodynamics and endodynamics, have neither dilemmas nor crises but problems of how to achieve what they want: pleasure in the case of exodynamics and power in the case of endodynamics.

The dilemma of being caught between static loyalty and endodynamic thirst for power is borne out by Macbeth's introspective asides and by his indecision, until Lady Macbeth tips the scales in favor of manly action. The progression of social success and power promised by the prophesy appealed to Macbeth's already existing endodynamic appetites, and as basically an endostatic man of action he cannot resist the challenge to reach for the highest reward. Especially now that the victorious battle brought him promotion and raised him nearer the king than he was ever before. Accordingly, his soliloquies from Act I mark a progression from the domination of static scruples over the possibilities which Macbeth is still afraid even to verbalize, to the disappearance of the voice of conscience after Macbeth's endostatic character suppresses the uncomfortable thoughts, for a time at least, under his wife's influence. The terrible possibility first enters Macbeth's consciousness only as a suggestion,

Whose horrid image doth unfix my hair,
And make my seated heart knock at my ribs,
Against the use of nature? Present fears
Are less than horrible imaginings.
My thought, whose murther is yet but fantastical,
Shakes to my single state of man,
That function is smother'd in surmise,
And nothing is, but what is not

(1.3.135-42)

At this stage the very “thought” of breaking the fundamental ethical laws can shake his moral sense profoundly, but it still stops him from acting upon the “horrible imaginings,” his “function” still “smother'd in surmise.” Macbeth's first soliloquy ends with a victory of static scruples over endodynamic ambition, and with a stoic resignation to leave the matter to fate: “If Chance will have me King, why, Chance may crown me, / Without my stir” (144-5). He is still addressed by Banquo as “worthy Macbeth,” and when he suggests to his companion that they “speak [their] free hearts each to other” (155-6), Macbeth means as yet no subterfuge.

But the full realization of Macbeth's endostatic tendency moves inexorably forward. By a stroke of dramatic irony, Macbeth's earlier identification with the traitorous Thane of Cawdor soon reveals a contrast between the two characters, to Macbeth's moral disadvantage. The report of the execution of “that most disloyal traitor” testifies in fact to the static character of Cawdor, who

very frankly … 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

(1.4.5-11)

First perceived as an endostatic traitor Cawdor thus turns out to be a misled static, while Macbeth, thought to be honest by the gullible Duncan, turns out to be a much more dangerous traitor, whose own ignoble death at the end of the play contrasts sharply with Cawdor's dignified departure. The static Duncan in turn is, like Othello, “trust incarnate,”¹³ whose main concern is the fair settlement of his accounts with the “worthiest cousin” to whom he owes victory in battle. Hence Duncan's genuinely apologetic rhetoric of “the sin of my ingratitude,” “recompense,” “the proportion both of thanks and payment,” “thy due,” and “pay.” This androgynous icon of regal dignity and justice, “the sacred embodiment of his country's life needing a reverent and tender protectiveness,”¹⁴ combines in himself the attributes of both father and mother. Duncan is the center of authority, the source of lineage and honor, but he is also the source of all nurturance, planting his children to his throne and making them grow. He also extends this “gardening” function to his cousin Macbeth: “I have begun to plant thee, and will labour / To make thee full of growing” (1.4.28-9). Tragically misled by appearances, he identifies Macbeth's castle as an idyllic place promising comfort and safety (“the air / Nimbly and sweetly recommends itself / Unto our gentle senses,” 1.6.1-3). This illusion is also shared by the unsuspecting Banquo, who finds the air “delicate” and compares the castle to the fertile “procreant cradle” where the birds “most breed and haunt” (8-9). As an androgynous nourishing father concerned with the well being of his large family, Duncan stands in symbolic opposition to the female characters: the witches with their poisonous cauldron and the childless and murderous Lady Macbeth, as well as to Macbeth's “barren scepter.”¹⁵

Every next event stirs more and more Macbeth's awakened ambition and the endostatic urge to act. Duncan's official appointment of the eldest son Malcolm as his successor causes Macbeth's resentment, and for the first time the “black and deep desires” give rise to the thought of the deed itself: “yet let that be, / Which the eye fears, when it is done, to see” (1.4.52-3). In this spirit Macbeth writes a letter to his wife about the witches' prophesy. It is not immediately clear why he should write to his wife at all, because the object of the letter is clearly not to inform her about the coming of Duncan to their castle,¹⁶ and Macbeth himself takes his early leave of the king to return to Inverness to make the necessary preparations. His ostensible reason is to let his “dearest partner of greatness” know about their good fortune as quickly as possible, so that she might not “lose the dues of rejoicing, by being ignorant of what greatness is promis'd” her. However, Macbeth's real albeit unconscious reason is to give his wife more time to strengthen her resolve on the right course of action, and to decide the matter for him. The almost child-like openness and frankness of the letter betrays a character who, notwithstanding his manliness, is still psychologically dependent on his wife. This would indicate a configuration of consecutive genders with its mixture of adoration and submission in the more feminine partner, and protection and domination in the more masculine partner, who in this case happens to be Lady Macbeth, the endodynamic masculine woman.

Her immediate resolve, so different from her husband's vacillation, resounds in the unshaken confidence with which she echoes the witches' prophesy, and confirms the progression of Macbeth's fortune as if it was already a fait accompli: “Glamis thou art, and Cawdor; and shalt be / What thou art promis'd” (1.5.15-6).¹⁷ Where the endostatic Macbeth experiences a paralyzing moral dilemma, for his endodynamic wife the choice does not even exist: the crown must be seized and the only problem is how to do it. “Macbeth has a divided mind about some of the most fundamental issues of existence; Lady Macbeth is the voice of one side of it.”¹⁸ In this sense the spouses complement and need each other: she is most self-assured and able to take a firm decision when Macbeth's nerve is failing, but only Macbeth is capable of carrying out the plan and of dealing the fatal stroke. As a more mature partner in dynamic terms Lady Macbeth regards her husband as psychologically dependent on her, not unlike a mother guiding her adolescent son: “Lady Macbeth has to guide, protect and mother her husband, whose voice sounds pitifully human and almost child-like.”¹⁹ Some critics interpret the relations between the Macbeths in terms of gender inversion, which is not accurate given Macbeth's decisively manly gender, consecutive but not opposite to his wife's masculinity. In his Jungian analysis H. R. Coursen argues that Macbeth and Lady Macbeth “exchange characteristics,” and represent “opposite developments,” in that “the woman does not correspond to the feminine stereotype, and Macbeth has ‘unmanly’ scruples.”²⁰ By extending the psychological distance between the characters beyond what the play can in fact support the couple is sharply polarized by the critic, for whom Lady Macbeth's “unconscious ‘maleness’ has forced Macbeth into the stereotypical role of yielding female.”²¹ Coppélia Kahn does not deny Macbeth his manliness, but at the same time she suggests that he “has not fully separated himself from the feminine source of his identity.”²² However, I would argue that if Macbeth depends on his wife in decision-making, it is his wife's masculinity, not her absent femininity that he depends on. The play provides enough cross-gender imagery to “unsex” Lady Macbeth and emphasize her “un-feminine character,”²³ in which the inversion of gender is not a “fiction”²⁴ but is at least as complete as in Regan and Goneril. In her famous evocation of evil spirits (1.5.38-54) Lady Macbeth suppresses all traces of femininity and motherhood (“take my milk for gall”), and acquires traits more characteristic of masculine sexual violence. She summons the Night and the smoke of Hell to hide her keen knife making the wound (51-2), while she transforms herself into a masculinized creature of “direst cruelty.”

Untouched by any scruples herself, Lady Macbeth correctly diagnoses her husband's nature as “too full o'th'milk of human kindness” (1.5.16-7), thus ascribing to him a feminine quality of gentleness deriving from the woman's nurturing function.²⁵ This does not make Macbeth automatically a woman in psychological terms, as some critics suggest, and his “milky” kindness is indeed confirmed nowhere in the play. Lady Macbeth's assessment of her husband's character does indicate, however, that on the gender scale his manliness is more feminine than her masculinity, and now Lady Macbeth deliberately exaggerates her husband's weakness to steel his heart to action. The kindness she talks about refers to Macbeth's static scruples, his reluctance to “catch the nearest way” and to “play false.” At the same time she is aware of her husband's endostatic ambition to achieve what he is afraid to achieve. Her analysis of Macbeth's character touches the essence of his dilemma:

Thou wouldst be great;
Art not without ambition, but without
The illness should attend it: what thou wouldst highly,
That wouldst thou holily; wouldst not play false,
And yet wouldst wrongly win; thou'dst have, great Glamis,
That which cries, ‘Thus thou must do,’ if thou have it;
And that which rather thou dost fear to do,
Than wishest should be undone

(1.5.18-25)

What she must do now is use all her psychological domination and power of persuasion (“that I may pour my spirits in thine ear”) to sway her husband towards action, by relieving him of the burden of taking an independent decision, which as an endostatic he is unable to do on his own. Macbeth unconsciously senses this psychological deficiency in himself, and this rather than the need to speed up preparations for the reception of Duncan is the real reason for sending the letter to his wife ahead of his arrival.

Lady Macbeth's onslaught on Macbeth is immediate. She greets him excitedly with the witches' prophesy and, full of elation, talks about the future as if it was already present (“I feel now / The future in the instant,” 1.5.57-8), unshaken in her conviction that Duncan will never leave their castle alive: “O! never / Shall sun that morrow see! (60-1). She instructs the novice in the political game in Machiavelian tactics: “To beguile the time, / Look like the time; bear welcome in your eye, / Your hand, your tongue: look like th'innocent flower, / But be the serpent under't” (63-6). As an endodynamic she has no problems in hiding her real motives and taking full advantage of her “innocent” womanly appearance, but Macbeth is still too much of a static to be able to hide his true intentions: his face is “as a book, where men / May read strange matters” (62-3). As Bernard McElroy put it: “Macbeth is constitutionally incapable of tolerating false appearances, especially evil masquerading as good,”²⁶ which explains his continual sense of self-loathing after committing the crime. Aware of her husband's static scruples, which she regards as an unnecessary hindrance in her plan, Lady Macbeth, her mind totally engrossed by the idea of “sovereign sway and masterdom,” takes full charge of the situation, reducing her husband to the position of an executor (and executioner) of her design: “Leave all the rest to me” (73).

The presence and vulnerability of Duncan lodging in Macbeth's castle provide the now-or-never opportunity, which the endodynamic Lady Macbeth cannot fail to seize, and which the endostatic Macbeth finds difficult to let slip, not so much as a means to achieve the aim as a challenge to prove his worth in action. The understatements and fearful equivocations of Macbeth's earlier soliloquies give way to the bluntness and directness of his monologue, as he uneuphemistically calls the deed by its proper name (“assassination,” “blow,” “bear the knife myself,” “the horrid deed”), and carefully weighs scruples against ambition for the last time. As an endostatic he is tantalized not so much by the ultimate material prize, but by the very possibility of doing that which is most expressly forbidden by all sacred and human laws. The absolute outrageousness and sacrilege of the deed committed in open violation of the most sacred feudal and familial bonds and of traditional hospitality, excite his boldness, his “vaulting ambition,” as the only motive for his action. Because his ambition is as ineradicable as his endostatic character from which it derives, Macbeth de facto cannot choose but act, not so much to become king as to become the man who dared to kill the king. The tragedy of Macbeth relies not only on his ultimate disappointment with what he has gained, on his isolation and his disgraceful death, but on the trap that the givens of the circumstances and of his character have arranged for him. He cannot abstain from action because he will loath himself for not daring to kill the king, and when he kills the king he loathes himself for having done it, no third option being available. The static and the endodynamic are battling in Macbeth's transitional character, and the crime marks a decisive shift of Macbeth's mind towards endodynamism. The critic Jan Kott phrased Macbeth's problem in terms of assertion of identity: “Macbeth has killed not only to become king, but to assert himself. He has chosen between Macbeth, who is afraid to kill, and Macbeth, who has killed. But Macbeth, who has killed, is a new Macbeth.”²⁷ The problem of identity Kott talks about has clearly to do with dynamism of character. Suspended between two definite dynamic categories and unable to embrace either, Macbeth remains in a limbo of indecision, unable to define himself except by negation: in Kott's words, “to himself he is not the one who is, but rather the one who is not.”²⁸

Still dependent on his wife to take responsibility for the decision, Macbeth provokes her persuasiveness by pretending to be more static than he is, as he did earlier by sending her a letter and giving her food for thought in advance of his arrival. With Duncan already under his “protection,” Macbeth admits greater resolve and ambition before himself than he does before his wife—precisely to provoke her strong, determined reaction to spur him to action. Almost contradicting his own ambitious thoughts, he tries to dissuade his wife from proceeding any further in “this business,” and mentions “honor” and “golden opinions from all sorts of people,” as if good reputation still mattered for him. This static pose is unconsciously calculated to provoke Lady Macbeth's vehement dismissal of Macbeth's remaining scruples as unmanly cowardice and a failure to act according to one's ambition: “Art thou afeard / To be the same in thine own act and valor, / As thou art in desire?” (1.7.39-41). As a woman more manly in character than her husband, she raises the standard of manliness above static concern for honor and reputation, and grades it on the endodynamic scale of ambition, competitiveness, and the ability to suppress “unmanly” scruples:

MAC.
I dare do all that may become a man;
Who dares do more, is none.
LADY M.
                                                                                                    What beast was't then,
That made you break this enterprise to me?
When you durst do it, then you were a man;
And, to be more than what you were, you would
Be so much more the man.

(1.7.46-51)

Her ultimate argument is to taunt her husband with effeminacy and embarrass his manliness by presenting herself, a woman, as more of a man than he is, which, considering the dynamisms of their characters, is in fact true. She “unsexes” herself psychologically through a powerful and cruel image of the mother killing her own infant (54-9), thereby showing that if a woman, traditionally a weaker and gentler sex, can banish all tenderness and act “unnaturally” by destroying the fruit of her own body, then a man should have no compunction in acting according to his violent nature. To spur her husband towards action Lady Macbeth cleverly plays on gender stereotypes. The image of an innocent and vulnerable infant sucking its mother's breast is calculated to contrast in Macbeth's mind Lady Macbeth's female sex with her present unblinking manly resolution, and to embarrass her husband by showing that a woman can be even more manly than a man, if she puts her mind to it. If Macbeth does not fully appreciate his wife's true gender, other characters can be forgiven for making a stereotypical mistake of identifying a womanly appearance with a womanly gender. The trusting Duncan unsuspectingly lays his life in the hands of a “fair and noble hostess” (1.6.24), and later the static Macduff naively assumes that the news of Duncan's murder will “kill” the “gentle lady” (2.3.82-3). Lady Macbeth can even pretend a fainting fit to uphold the men's perception of her “weak” sex (2.3.117, 123). As is evident in the play, a woman by sex Lady Macbeth is in fact masculine in her gender, and remorse after Duncan's murder is as alien to her character as tender motherhood. Any vestige of familial sympathy in her occurs not in the context of motherhood, whose very idea is hateful to her, not even in relation to her husband, whom she patronizes and treats with contempt, but in relation to her father, for whom she reserves the final commitment of love.²⁹ The cruel, masculine image of a mother plucking her nipple from the infant's boneless gum and dashing its brains out is thus calculated to make the right impression on the manly Macbeth, who will not be outdone in violence by a woman. The contrast between his wife's womanly appearance and her firm resolve does not fail to impress Macbeth, who acknowledges the manliness of her spirit and sees her “as a kind of man,”³⁰ a woman of “undaunted mettle” who should “bring forth men-children only” (1.7.73-5). Her unshaken resolution, determination, certitude, cold planning, calculation, and optimism in the success of the enterprise finally tip the scales of Macbeth's dilemma decisively in favor of action and away from static scruples; he is now “settled” and ready to “bend up / Each corporal agent to this terrible feat” (80-1).

With Duncan now practically at his mercy and with his mind now finally made up, the execution of “the terrible feat” is a matter of determinism beyond Macbeth's control. The vision of the dagger leading the murderer to Duncan's chamber betokens a mind no longer undecided, confused, or guilt-stricken, but clear of purpose and action-oriented. The visionary dagger embodying the murderous thoughts, “a dagger of the mind,” leads to the real dagger at Macbeth's side, now drawn for the murderous act, anticipated by drops of blood on the visionary dagger. “The bloody business” thus inexorably accomplishes itself in thought a moment before it is done in real action, as it now must be, all physical and psychological obstacles being removed: “I go, and it is done” (2.1.62). When the deed is done, its irrevocability confirms the tragic trap in which Macbeth has found himself after the revelation of the witches' prophesy. Just as the endostatic in him could not accept his failure to act, so his residual statism cannot now accept the crime and the violation of the most sacred laws that it represents. Since Macbeth was not interested in the profit of the crime to begin with; but rather in the challenge posed by the execution of an outrageous deed, the power gained as a result of the crime cannot outweigh the pressure of guilt caused by the crime. In other words, gone forever is the peace of mind, as indeed is perfectly clear to Macbeth, who has murdered his “innocent Sleep” together with the king. The earlier threefold progression of Macbeth's “good” fortune predicted by the witches, and echoed optimistically by Lady Macbeth, now reveals its true face to the guilt-ridden murderer: “Glamis hath murther'd Sleep, and therefore Cawdor / Shall sleep no more, Macbeth shall sleep no more!” (2.2.41-2), with “king” now appropriately replaced by “Macbeth.”

Where Macbeth is racked, for a time at least, by the sense of guilt, loses his nerve and almost botches up the murderous plan by bringing the blood-stained daggers with him from the scene of the crime, Lady Macbeth, entirely unmoved by the moral implications of the deed, displays perfect composure and self-control, upbraiding her husband for his infirmity of purpose and his “brainsickly” thoughts. While for the remorseful Macbeth “all great Neptune's ocean” will not wash the blood from his hand, for the remorseless Lady Macbeth the removal of blood from her hands has no moral or symbolic connotations, but is merely a practical problem, to remove the trace of implicating evidence: “A little water clears us of this deed” (66). For Macbeth no sooner is the deed committed than he wishes it undone, as he discovers, after it is too late, that it would have been easier to come to terms with the former Macbeth who was afraid to do a daring deed, than to accept the present Macbeth, the man who has dared to do it: “To know my deed, 'twere best not know myself” (72). The result is a terrible psychological self-injury that leaves Macbeth “a mutiliated human being,” a “shattered personality,” a victim as much as a villain who, according to E. A. J. Honigmann, deserves our sympathy as well as condemnation.³¹ Until the end Macbeth will feel painfully the loss of normal life, with the accompanying “honour, love, obedience, troops of friends” (5.3.25). But he has moved too far now from the static moral mean to even contemplate the need for reparation or penance, the privilege afforded the static Cawdor who atoned for his treachery by accepting his death with dignity. Macbeth's existential and moral limbo will only lead to philosophic nihilism, already signaled in his seemingly hypocritical public lament after Duncan's death, but which expresses, intentionally or unintentionally, his profoundest feelings:

Had I but died an hour before this chance,
I had liv'd a blessed time; for, from this instant,
There's nothing serious in mortality;
All is but toys: renown, and grace, is dead;
The wine of life is drawn, and the mere lees
Is left this vault to brag of

(2.3.89-94)

The sudden escape of Duncan's sons, Malcolm and Donalbain, after their father's death is readily and unambiguously interpreted by the credulous and straightforward statics Macduff and Rosse as a proof of their involvement in the murder. The first to suspect foul play in Macbeth is Banquo, the only character apart from Macbeth and his wife privy to the witches' prophesy. The behavior of Banquo has puzzled critics, who at times have implicated him in the evil that the witches and the Macbeths have unleashed. Bradley found Banquo as a character “not very interesting,” a man who instead of playing the part of an honest man “has yielded to evil” by acquiescing in Macbeth's accession.³² G. Wilson Knight went further in his condemnation, speaking of “the evil in Banquo” and of “a bond of evil between him and Macbeth,” rather inexplicably ascribing “blood-lust” and “unprecedented ferocity” to the character (cf. 1.2.40).³³ Nicholas Grene takes a more sensible approach by regarding Banquo as “a norm of approved orthodoxy,” which he represents in his calm, authoritative speech after Duncan's murder (2.3.124-30), and as a man whose “part is to wait upon events in a wise passiveness.”³⁴ Basically, the opinions vary between regarding Banquo as another endostatic (Bradley, Knight), or as a static (Grene). The play seems to support the reading of Banquo as a static character, seen in his lack of “impulse towards transgression which drives on Macbeth,” and in his patience to watch and understand “without trying to resist what is felt to be an irresistible current of events.”³⁵ Banquo is indeed Macbeth's accomplice in the chronicles (Holinshed), but he is exonerated by Shakespeare who tactfully did not want to show the legendary ancestor of King James I as a party to regicide. Besides, for purely dramatic reasons it was desirable to contrast Macbeth and Banquo, and give Macbeth and his wife no accomplices. It also makes greater dramatic sense to introduce another innocent static character suffering at the hands of the endodynamic villain, than to turn Macbeth's former soldier-friend into an active rival in the competition to “help” realize their fortunes as foretold by the witches.

Banquo's initial role is to provide a positive, heroic foil for his companion and to illustrate the sort of honor and good name that Macbeth has forfeited by moving away from the mean of static honesty. Their performance in the battle with the Norwegians is still equally impressive and courageous. They are both compared to eagles and lions for their ferocity (1.2.35), and are equally acknowledged for their valor by Duncan: “Noble Banquo, / That hast no less deserv'd, nor must be known / No less to have done so,” (1.4.29-31). Banquo and Macbeth are of course treated differently by the witches, but their predicted fortunes are equivalent in the long term, even to Banquo's advantage, as is borne out by the witches' equivocal, paradoxical but balanced pronouncements:

Lesser than Macbeth, and greater.
Not so happy, yet much happier.
Thou shalt get kings, though thou be none:
So all hail, Macbeth and Banquo!
Banquo and Macbeth, all hail!

(1.3.65-9)

Where Macbeth and Banquo differ is in their individual reactions to the prophesies, and these reflect their endostatic and static characters respectively. Macbeth “starts” and seems to “fear” at the fortune that leaves him “rapt withal,” while Banquo is calmly skeptical, treats the witches as a hallucination (“have we eaten on the insane root,” 84), and is the first to include them among the Devil's party (107). The partial confirmation of the prophesy is for the eager and ambitious Macbeth a proof of its veracity, but for the prudent and cautious Banquo it is a warning of the Devil's trap: “oftentimes, to win us to our harm, / The instruments of Darkness tell us truths; / Win us with honest trifles, to betray's / In deepest consequence” (123-26). After the entire prophesy concerning Macbeth has been fulfilled, Banquo no longer talks about the Devil and accepts the oracle as genuine truth, but stoically resigns himself to fate, refraining from any action with regard to his part of the prophesy (“But, hush; no more,” 3.1.10). Sententious and straightforward, Banquo believes in Providence and natural order, but he is also dull as a character in a play, and his pint-size rightness and decency are completely overshadowed by Macbeth's agonizing inner struggle and mammoth crime. To Macbeth's ambiguous proposal to Banquo to “cleave to [his] consent” and support Macbeth's claim to the crown in the event of Duncan's natural death, Banquo reasserts his loyalty (“allegiance clear”) to the present king, and intends to remain free from guilt (“keep / My bosom franchis'd,” 2.1.25-8). Banquo thus makes clear his commitment to honorable means in advancing his fortune, thereby disassociating himself forever from his former companion.

An ambiguous moment comes when Banquo begins to suspect Macbeth's foul play and neither does nor says anything to expose him, a circumstance that proved for Bradley that Banquo was accessory to the murder and now keeps silent out of ambition.³⁶ But Banquo's private and unproven suspicion (“I fear, / Thou play'dst most foully for't,” 3.1.2-3), offers no grounds for open accusation, made even less likely now that Macbeth enjoys royal immunity and is, in the absence of Duncan's sons, a legitimate ruler. Kenneth Muir argues that Banquo “ought to have behaved loyally to Macbeth until Malcolm had set foot on Scottish soil,” because James I's theory of government condemned rebellion even against manifest tyrants.³⁷ But professing loyalty to the ruler suspected of sacrilegious crime would not have been consistent with Banquo's static, honest character, and would have required an opportunistic, time-serving endostatic disposition which Banquo simply did not possess. Having his doubts and being unable to openly accuse or oppose Macbeth, all that Banquo as an honest person can do is to remove himself from the royal presence without appearing ostentatious or discourteous. This is precisely what he does by politely excusing himself from the banquet, and riding away with Fleance in an unspecified direction.³⁸

But Banquo is trapped, firstly because of his knowledge of the Weird Sisters' prophesy, which makes him a menace to Macbeth, and secondly because of the promise that his descendants would inherit the throne, which makes him a political rival that Macbeth would not tolerate. These are the main practical reasons (for the now endodynamic Macbeth at any rate) why Banquo must be eliminated, rather than Macbeth's private resentment about Banquo's noble character, “his royalty of nature,” “dauntless temper of his mind,” his “wisdom,” and “valor” (3.1.49, 51-3), as Kenneth Muir rather naively suggests.³⁹ Macbeth probably wouldn't care less about Banquo's character at this moment, and his sole concern is his personal safety and the future of his reign. Banquo's praises appear rather to exonerate once and for all King James I's reputed ancestor from all blame, and in the more immediate dramatic context they serve to contrast the victim's noble character with the murderer's cold-blooded callousness, as Macbeth calls Banquo his chief guest at the banquet after already arranging for his assassination.

Banquo's murder marks another step in Macbeth's development away from the early statism towards the endodynamic extreme of the dynamic spectrum. First as a static Glamis Macbeth was able to win his noble reputation by courageously risking his own life in a face-to-face battle. Later as an endostatic traitor Cawdor he still took a risk by murdering Duncan with his own hands. Now as an endodynamic king he no longer risks his own safety but hires assassins and gives orders to have his victims killed. With every crime Macbeth is more and more psychologically removed from his victims, has less and less scruples, and his motivation becomes less personal and more political. In Duncan he kills, not without remorse, his lord, his kinsman, and his guest. By hiring assassins to murder Banquo he kills a friend whom he envies and fears. And when he decides to destroy the house of Macduff he is motivated less by revenge but more by a desire to forestall the menace of future loss of power,⁴⁰ and in doing so he causes the deaths of people he has probably never even seen.

The dynamic progression of Macbeth's character also affects the relationship with his wife. The characterization of Lady Macbeth does not evolve in the same way as Macbeth's, and while she is an endodynamic to begin with, he is becoming one in the course of the play. If the identification of Macbeth as king with endodynamism is correct, then by Act III he has psychologically “caught up” with his wife by attaining the same extreme masculine gender. This means that at this stage he is no longer dependent on his wife in decision-making, and in fact does not need her psychologically or emotionally or otherwise, which is indeed reflected from Act III onwards. The identical gender accounts for relations based on mutual understanding and solidarity in the pursuit of common goals, but it removes the element of psychological difference and dependence between the two characters, which gives so much dramatic tension in the first two acts of the play. Since the later acts focus primarily on Macbeth, his wife moves more and more to the background, at first reduced to being Macbeth's spouse and companion but no longer his support, and later disappearing from the plot altogether. The last opportunity for Lady Macbeth to exercise her earlier domination occurs when Macbeth loses his nerve at the sight of Banquo's Ghost, giving his wife an occasion to question his manliness (“Are you a man?” 3.4.57). But just as earlier on she was correct in ascribing Macbeth's scruples to his static nature, she is wrong now in attributing his fit to womanly fearfulness (62-5): now a hardened endodynamic, he is not afraid of ghosts (58-9) but of losing power. It is characteristic that while Lady Macbeth's domination and determination were crucial in convincing Macbeth to commit the first crime, he does not even consult her, let alone seek her decision or approval, in arranging for the next murders. The decision to assassinate Banquo is clearly Macbeth's own initiative, as is fully explained in the soliloquy (3.1.47-71), and confirmed in Lady Macbeth's uncharacteristically helpless “What's to be done?” (3.2.44), answered with her husband's confident and almost patronizing “Be innocent of the knowledge, dearest chuck, / Till thou applaud the deed” (45-6). It is now Macbeth who does all the reasoning and who independently takes all the murderous decisions, and the main thing that connects him now with his wife is the mutually shared and almost paranoid sense of fear and insecurity, so typical for endodynamics holding power. They eat their meals in fear, and their sleep is afflicted with terrible dreams (3.2.17-9). The most powerful man in the kingdom regards his power as nothing, unless it gives him safety and freedom from fear which he evidently lacks: “To be thus [i.e. the king] is nothing, but to be safely thus” (3.1.47). The sentiment is echoed by Lady Macbeth for whom likewise power is empty unless it gives security:

                                                            Nought's had, all's spent,
Where our desire is got without content:
'Tis safer to be that which we destroy,
Than by destruction dwell in doubtful joy

(3.2.4-7)

In his constant fear Macbeth is obsessively preoccupied with real and imagined dangers, and all his actions are designed as preemptive strikes to forestall possible threats: “We have scorch'd the snake, not kill'd it: / She'll close, and be herself; whilst our poor malice / Remains in danger of her former tooth” (3.2.13-5). Also gone are the last remnants of static scruples and a sense of guilt, and if Duncan's name is recalled it is because Macbeth envies the murdered king his peace, not because he regrets murdering him:

                                                  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. Duncan is in his grave;
After life's fitful fever he sleeps well;
Treason has done his worst: nor steel, nor poison,
Malice domestic, foreign levy, nothing
Can touch him further!

(3.2.19-26)

The voice of static conscience, still strong in Act I, now vanishes without a trace, giving way entirely to endodynamic cruelty and unscrupulousness (“full of scorpions is my mind,” 36), which grow bigger and bigger: “Things bad begun make strong themselves by ill” (55). Even the Ghost of Banquo is not a projection of Macbeth's guilt, as is sometimes supposed,⁴¹ but of his paranoid fear and insecurity. During the banquet the Ghost sits in Macbeth's seat, replacing him as king, as was prophesied, a visible proof of the futility of Macbeth's efforts to dispose of his political rival, who now returns to push the usurper from his stool (3.4.81). While there was still a concrete, “rational” reason to assassinate Banquo, there is none in Macbeth's plan to pursue Macduff except the pretext of the latter's avoidance of Macbeth. State terror, as in Stalinist Russia, now gets out of control, becoming all-pervading, random, indiscriminate, and inescapable, motivated solely by the tyrant's insecurity and paranoid fear rather than by any pragmatic reasons. Macbeth has entered an insane, irrational phase of extreme endodynamism, in which he has severed all positive social ties and has completely alienated himself from all humanity, trapped in the ever-intensifying compulsion to commit more and more violence:

                                                            I am in blood
Stepp'd in so far, that, should I wade no more,
Returning were as tedious as go o'er.
Strange things I have in head, that will to hand,
Which must be acted, ere they may be scann'd

(3.4.135-39)

Even the visions induced by the witches confirm Macbeth's present sole obsession with security, power, and violence. The apparition of an armed head confirms his fear of Macduff, while the apparition of a bloody child strengthens his determination to “be bloody, bold, and resolute” (4.1.79), and verbalizes his wish to be invulnerable (“none of woman born / Shall harm Macbeth”). The apparition of a crowned child again tells him to “be lion-mettled” and “proud,” and reiterates his irrational desire to remain untouchable (“until / Great Birnam wood …”), while the final show of eight kings confirms his fear concerning Banquo's predicted fortune. In this sense Macbeth learns hardly anything new during his second visit to the Weird Sisters. Understandably, neither his character not his actions change in any way: he was “yet but young in deed” (3.4.143) before consulting the witches, and now too “the very firstlings of [his] heart shall be / The firstlings of [his] hand” (4.1.147-8).

With the shift of Macbeth's character decisively towards endodynamism, his wife's dramatic role ends effectively in the scene with Banquo's Ghost (3.4), in which she has the last chance to rebuke her husband for his alleged lack of manliness. Unlike in King Lear, whose masculine women play an active dramatic role by fighting remorselessly with Cordelia's army and treacherously between themselves to the very end, from Act III onwards Lady Macbeth has really nothing more to do in the play in terms of plot development. In his portrayal of these “nightmarish” women Shakespeare appears to have taken poetic license by making their characters look more masculine and endodynamic than is probably psychologically possible. As shown in the graph of gender types …, the extreme masculine gender is reserved for men, while individual women can only attain manly, endostatic character. This probably explains why the behavior of Regan, Goneril, and Lady Macbeth is frequently described in the plays as “unnatural”: their cruelty, thirst for power, and complete lack of remorse and conscience can realistically be found in individual men but not in women. There seems to be no doubt that the Lady Macbeth of the first two acts is an endodynamic character, psychologically more masculine than her endostatic, manly husband. This rules out the possibility of her being ever moved by the voice of conscience, still felt by Macbeth before the murder of Duncan and later suppressed upon his attainment of the endodynamic character. In the light of these characterological configurations Lady Macbeth's famous sleep-walking scene presents something of a problem, because instead of hardened mercilessness, or insanity and paranoia, realistically expected in extreme endodynamics, we have the disintegration of personality caused by what looks like a long-stifled voice of conscience and pity.

With the sleep-walking scene in mind it was possible for Coleridge to read back into the early scenes of the play Lady Macbeth's repressed conscience: “she endeavors to stifle its voice, and keep down its struggles, by inflated and soaring fancies, and appeals to spiritual agency.”⁴² The apparent lack of consistency in the characterization of Lady Macbeth across the play has indeed baffled critics. G. Wilson Knight for example called her on the one hand a woman “possessed of evil passion,” “inhuman,” an embodiment of “evil absolute and extreme,” and on the other hand “a pure woman, with a woman's frailty.”⁴³ It is as if the critics had difficulty accepting a literary female character of utter depravity, and were trying if not to exonerate her then at least to qualify her wickedness. There is a tradition of blaming not Lady Macbeth's conscious will but her demoniacal possession for the evil she commits, and even of sentimentalizing her as the loving wife with an affectionate and gentle disposition, a maternal figure, a sensual woman, and a neurotic.⁴⁴ Without the sleep-walking scene Lady Macbeth's character would be as consistent (or even more so) than her husband's, but as it is the critics are faced with a paradoxical situation, whereby a visibly depraved, endodynamic character has to be denied its depravity. In the words of Kenneth Muir, “although it is true that Lady Macbeth is not naturally depraved or conscienceless … she deliberately chooses evil.”⁴⁵

Despite its apparent characterological inconsistency, the sleep-walking scene on its own remains dramatically powerful and poignant. Lady Macbeth's somnambulism offers a version of complete alienation from life and human relations to which her complicity in Macbeth's crimes has led her. The Doctor describes her state as “a great perturbation in nature,” the oxymoronic “slumbery agitation,” a sort of living death in which she receives “at once the benefit of sleep, and … the effects of watching” (5.1.9-11). The paradox of being awake, active, able to speak, and at the same time unconscious and absent-minded provides a moving tableau of isolation and alienation. But it is difficult to interpret most of what Lady Macbeth says or does in her sleep-walking as an expression of her guilty conscience, and Bradley was probably right in saying that “in Lady Macbeth's misery there is no trace of contrition.”⁴⁶ The letter she writes has been variously interpreted as a confession, a warning for Lady Macduff, or a message to Macbeth indicating that she still wishes to control him,⁴⁷ but it could indeed be anything. For example, Lady Macbeth may be writing a reply to her husband's early letter informing her about the witches's prophesy (1.5.1-14), in which case she may be either dissuading him from taking any steps (the static variant) or, to the contrary, telling him to go ahead, the way she did (the endodynamic variant). The famous gesture of washing the hands, linked with Lady Macbeth's direct implication in Duncan's murder (2.2.66), can again be interpreted as a sign of belated remorse but also as a desire to escape detection: “Out, damned spot! Out, I say!” (5.1.33). The line such as “What need we fear who knows it, when none can call our power to accompt?” (35-7) repeats the same cynical confidence in their invulnerability with which Lady Macbeth answered her husband's earlier fear of being found out (1.7.75-80). The only moment that can be interpreted as betraying Lady Macbeth's pity and regret is a “feminine” reference to the perfumes of Arabia unable to “sweeten this little hand” (48). It is linked back to Macbeth's regretful realization that “all great Neptune's ocean” will not wash the blood from his hand (2.2.59-60), and in Lady Macbeth's case the reference is indeed interpreted by the Doctor as an indication of a heart “sorely charg'd.” The poignancy of this scene lies therefore not so much in the alleged feelings of pity⁴⁸ in the guilt-stricken Lady Macbeth, as in the reenactment of her past crimes and her present helplessness and isolation as indications of the ultimate pointlessness and futility of these crimes. In her loss of power and self-control, in her alienation even from her husband, and in her desperate suicidal death announced by “the cry of women” (5.5.8), Lady Macbeth appears to be womanized at the end of the play. This can be interpreted as another characterological inconsistency, which perhaps restores gender balance and psychological realism, disturbed earlier in the play by the poetic license of presenting a female character with a mind more masculine than the most manly man. According to Kenneth Muir, the seeming inconsistency in the characterization of Lady Macbeth “may reflect an ambiguity in Shakespeare's mind, which he cultivated for dramatic reasons,” but “the audience could take it either way.”⁴⁹

The apparent indifference with which Macbeth greets the news of his wife's death (“She should have died hereafter,” 5.5.17) signals the next step in his own alienation from life, and in particular from Eros as the feminine principle of relatedness. With Lady Macbeth's death the last positive link with a fellow human being has been severed, the fact that occasions Macbeth's famous nihilistic reflection on the meaninglessness of existence (5.5.19-28). If masculinity as the opposite of femininity is to be pushed to an absolute extreme, then even a remotest relation with the feminine principle would have to be denied, including a man's dependence on his mother who brought him into this world. This denial becomes manifest in Macbeth's unconscious desire to place himself outside the natural scheme of things, and to achieve a quasi-divine immortality and invulnerability—the ultimate dream of an endodynamic individual who cannot tolerate any loss of power, here, the physiological power that sustains his life. It has always been some small consolation to the victims of tyranny that the tyrants, for all their formidable sociological power, could not compensate for the loss of their own physiological power indefinitely, and eventually had to die, like their victims. This explains the despots' irrational obsession with longevity and with all sorts of elixirs of immortality, with which they wanted to escape natural laws. Hence also Macbeth's illusion that he can practically live for ever, embodied in the vision of a bloody child reassuring Macbeth that no man born of a woman can harm him (4.1.80-1). The critic Madelon Gohlke⁵⁰ reads Macbeth's nihilism, his childlessness, indifference to his wife's death, and rejection of all feminine values of trust and hospitality as a systematic attempt by the masculine hero to deny an awareness of dependence on women in general, including the mother with her procreative role. Similarly, Janet Adelman interprets Macbeth's desire to be invulnerable as a masculine “fantasy of escape from the maternal matrix,” and as an attempt to be exempt from the universal human condition of being “born of woman.”⁵¹ But even in this last illusion Macbeth is disappointed, as his dream of immortality is shattered by a last-minute revelation that Macduff, his principal personal foe, “was from his mother's womb / Untimely ripp'd” (5.8.15-6), a circumstance that for some reason predestines Macduff to be, metaphorically, the medicine to purge the country's “sickly weal” (5.2.27-9).

In folklore, the child born through what later became called the Caesarian section was said to possess great strength, the power to find hidden treasure and to see spirits. In any case, the unusual circumstances of birth denoted an unusual character, a person singled out from others to perform some exceptional deed. In Shakespeare's play the special status of Macduff counterbalances and in fact cancels Macbeth's illusion of his special status as a man immune to injury and death, but there are more elements that place these two figures at opposite dramatic poles and set them on a collision course. The two names even sound similar, and although this fact is purely coincidental in the chronicles, it does acquire a special dramatic significance in Shakespeare's play, in which it links and contrasts the two characters. The static Macduff makes his first dramatic entry even before he appears in person in Macbeth's castle on the night of Duncan's murder, by famously knocking at the gates as many as ten times, while the Macbeths are washing their hands from Duncan's blood (2.2.56, 64, 68, 72; 2.3.1, 3, 7, 12, 15, 20).⁵² With his static insistence on punctuality Macduff was determined to be on time to wake the king, as he had been commanded to do, and one cannot help thinking that he narrowly missed preventing Duncan's murder, had he knocked at the gate a moment sooner: “he did command me to call timely on him: / I have almost slipp'd the hour” (2.3.45-6). The ultimate avenger of Duncan, he is the first to discover the murder and raise the clamor after entering the King's chamber, the first to do so after Macbeth, again because he was so commanded: “”I'll make so bold to call, / For 'tis my limited service” (50-1). It is also the role of “the good Macduff” to voice public outcry at the sacrilegious murder of “the Lord's anointed Temple” (2.3.67). A straightforward static, Macduff accepts without suspicion the official version that the King's sons committed the murder. Interestingly, however, unlike all the other Scottish nobles, including the already suspicious Banquo, Macduff does not attend Macbeth's coronation (2.4.36)—a dramatic device designed to remove him from the plot for some time, and especially from Macbeth's presence. Macduff's snubbing absence and his escape to England (3.4.127-8; 3.6.21-3, 29-31, 40; 4.2.142), combined with the witches' warning against the Thane of Fife (4.1.71-2), indeed provide the tyrant with an excuse to invade his castle and massacre his family, in an act of political revenge as much as of personal spite against Macduff's happy family life. Childless himself, Macbeth resentfully puts “to th'edge o'th'sword / [Macduff's] wife, his babes, and all unfortunate souls / That trace him in his line” (4.1.151-3).

Macduff's absence is dramatically necessary, but it still has to be justified psychologically. To leave his family at the mercy of a vindictive tyrant looks unwise to say the least, but the decision was motivated by a noble desire to organize political support in England and Northumbria to free Scotland from Macbeth's oppression. It would appear therefore that Macduff's actions result from a choice between familial obligations and patriotic duties, a typical situation for a static, and once Macduff has chosen to serve the political cause all qualms about abandoning his family became suppressed.⁵³ On the other hand the spirited, outspoken, and static Lady Macduff does not understand the political reasons of her husband's departure, and interprets it as a betrayal of his familial duties and as his lack of love (“He loves us not,” 4.2.8). G. Wilson Knight goes even further in his disapproval of Macduff, and makes his a person “involved in evil,” as seen in his “cruel desertion of his family.”⁵⁴ Rosse, all too familiar with the grim realities of Macbeth's regime (“cruel are the times”), and with his own delay in deserting the tyrannous king, is nearer the mark when he praises Macduff for being “noble, wise, judicious,” one who “best knows / The fits o'th'season” (4.2.16-7). Unlike other time-servers like Rosse or Lenox, Macduff had the courage, if not the wisdom, to be the first to leave Scotland and organize opposition around Malcolm, before he was joined by other lords.

The long conversation between Malcolm and Macduff (4.3) stands out from the rest of the play for being perhaps too long, almost tedious, but in E. A J. Honigmann's view its deliberately slow tempo has a dramatic quality of arresting the play's onward-rushing momentum just before Lady Macbeth's sleep-walking, where time stands still.⁵⁵ As a “choric commentary”⁵⁶ the scene draws closer attention to the figures whose political importance, one as the avenger of Duncan and the other as Duncan's legitimate successor, has not yet been acknowledged by due dramatic prominence, given almost entirely to the tyrannous Macbeth. It is interesting to note that Malcolm, Macbeth's main political opponent, is also the latter's opposite in a dramatic and psychological sense; that is, in terms of gender type and dynamism of character Malcolm appears to be an exostatic, womanly man. During the initial battle with the Norwegians, in which Macbeth displayed such feats of heroic valor and efficiency, Duncan's eldest son was taken prisoner and had to be rescued (1.2.4-5), a circumstance suggesting lack of manhood and valor expected from an heir to the throne in a heroic society. Still it is the inept Malcolm who is officially announced as Duncan's successor, the fact naturally resented by the manly Macbeth, whose political ambitions have been whetted by his military victory (1.4.48-50). During the night of Duncan's murder the two royal sons, Malcolm and Donalbain, staying in the room next to their father's, are awaken from their sleep by a nightmarish dream of murder.⁵⁷ However, instead of resolutely getting up and checking if everything is all right, they give in to unmanly fear, say their prayers, comfort each other, and fall back to sleep. When the murder is discovered, the royal sons are the last to arrive at the scene, they have practically nothing to say, nor are they consulted on anything, and their immediate reaction is to flee: “where we are, / There's daggers in men's smiles: the near in blood, / The nearer bloody” (2.3.137-9). Their cowardly escape puts the blame for the murder on them and removes the last obstacle in Macbeth's ascent to the throne. In this way, by shirking his responsibility as the appointed royal successor, the unmanly Malcolm has in fact contributed to the national calamity that was Macbeth's reign.

In the context of his early immaturity the long conversation with Macduff illustrates Malcolm's coming of age, as he gradually prepares himself for the assumption of his duties as the future King of Scotland. He has now enough statism of character to appreciate the seriousness of his task, but he is still too much of an exostatic to cope with the task effectively on his own. Malcolm is determined to save his country from tyranny, but he can only do so by enlisting a foreign power to his aid and by using Macduff as a personal avenger. Malcolm is now mature enough to initially mistrust Macduff's good intentions and to test his loyalty, but he arranges his test in the form of a spectacle, a bit like Hamlet, another exostatic figure, by pretending to be worse than he actually is. He openly talks of his “vices” that would make “black Macbeth … seem as pure as snow” (4.3.52-3), describing at great length his lust, avarice, and falsehood. His simulation of tyranny, however, is so theatrical that only someone as straightforward, not to say dull, as Macduff could take it literally. (A person possessing these vices would have an endodynamic character, in which case he or she would not be talking so frankly about them.) In this almost comic scene Malcolm's exostatic play-acting succeeds as a test of Macduff's integrity, whereupon the virgin boy-king hails the manly Macduff as the true champion of Scotland,⁵⁸ leaving the latter quite confused at Malcolm's contradictory confession: “Such welcome and unwelcome things at once, / 'Tis hard to reconcile” (4.3.138-9). With the support of England and Macduff, Malcolm is now firmly in charge, more and more confident in his role as Scotland's savior and future king, as evidenced in his upbeat, commanding tone at the end of Act IV:

                                                            This tune goes manly.
Come, go we to the King: our power is ready;
Our lack is nothing but our leave. Macbeth
Is ripe for shaking, and the Powers above
Put on their instruments. Receive what cheer you may;
The night is long that never finds the day

(4.3.235-40)

It is also Malcolm's idea to hide the number of his army under the branches cut from the Birnam wood, a clever endostatic trick not fully consistent with his exostatic character displayed so far. Dramatically, however, the association of Malcolm with the Birnam wood links him, together with Macduff, with the witches' threefold warning to Macbeth, and places him, indirectly at least, in the context of revenge for Duncan's death.

Macbeth and Macduff as the ultimate opponents are brought together at last in what looks like a fair, face-to-face combat, but while the static Macduff risks his life to fight his cause and avenge his family, the endodynamic Macbeth enters the fight additionally protected, as he thinks, by the spell of invulnerability. In his view therefore Macbeth is not risking anything, and can still inflict death on others, as he does by killing the young Siward. As said before, the deceptive magical protection is the ultimate expression of Macbeth's extreme masculinity, through which he wants to remain independent from the feminine principle of relatedness, even in owing his birth to a woman. But by a master stroke of Shakespeare's dramatic irony Macbeth turns out to be more vulnerable in his masculinity than is Macduff in his static androgyny. Bound up with femininity as a family man and as a person capable of feeling profound grief (4.3.221-30), through the unusual circumstances of his birth Macduff turns out to be less dependent on the feminine principle, and is consequently more manly than the self-deluding Macbeth. Indeed, the revelation of Macduff's extraordinary birth has an immediate emasculating effect on Macbeth: “Accursed be that tongue that tells me so, / For it hath cow'd my better part of man” (5.8.17-8), and for the first time he feels fear (“I'll not fight with thee,” 22). Deprived of the confidence afforded him by the magical spell, Macbeth now fights with Macduff on equal terms, and in his death proves to be less manly in his rejection of femininity than is Macduff in his more feminine personality and in his family feelings.

After the static champion kills the endodynamic tyrant, the exostatic young king safely takes his father's throne without having to fight for it. Even the young Siward, without any personal grudge against Macbeth, showed greater valor by dying a heroic death in direct combat, than Malcolm with the murder of his father to avenge:

Your son [young Siward], my Lord, has paid a soldier's debt:
He only liv'd but till he was a man;
The which no sooner had his prowess confirm'd,
In the unshrinking station where he fought,
But like a man he died

(5.9.5-9)

The arrival of Macduff carrying Macbeth's head to hail Malcolm as the King of Scotland provides a telling tableau of the latter's ineffectuality and dependence on his executive branch, so to speak, and emphasizes the nominality of Malcolm's office. Having cowardly fled the country after Duncan's murder, he has returned on the shoulders of stronger and more efficient allies to take the office, and the last words of the play belong, ironically, to him. Now secure on the throne due to no credit of his own, Malcolm promptly adopts the royal plural, graciously promotes the thanes to earls, condemns “this dead butcher, and his fiend-like Queen” (35), officially invites the émigrés to return home, and promises, “by the grace of Grace,” a just reign, in which everything will be performed “in measure, time, and place” (39). If Malcom is his father's son, his present exostatism will evolve eventually into statism, with all the accompanying virtues of “Justice, Verity, Temp'rance, Stableness, / Bounty, Perseverence, Mercy, Lowliness, / Devotion, Patience, Courage, Fortitude” (4.3.92-4), and other “king-becoming graces” that no doubt characterized Duncan, and in this way the circle will close. In Roman Polanski's film version of Macbeth (1971), the last scene shows Donalbain, Malcolm's younger brother and successor to the throne, riding alone on a misty moor at the spot where Macbeth and Banquo had met the three witches for the first time …

Notes

1. Bernard McElroy, Shakespeare's Mature Tragedies (Princeton, 1973), 242.

2. Coppélia Kahn, Man's Estate: Male Identity in Shakespeare (Los Angeles, 1981), 176.

3. Cf. Janet Adelman, “‘Born of Woman’: Fantasies of Maternal Power in Macbeth,” in Shakespearian Tragedy and Gender, eds. S. N. Garner and M. Sprengnether, 111.

4. It has been observed (note on page 5 in the Arden Macbeth) on a number of occasions that the word “bloody” is mentioned over a hundred times in the course of the play. All quotations throughout are from the Arden Edition of William Shakespeare, Macbeth, ed. Kenneth Muir (Walton-on-Thames, 1997 [1951]).

5. Nicholas Grene, Shakespeare's Tragic Imagination (London, 1996 [1992]), 196. For Brents Stirling the triple prophesy reflects the progression of Macbeth's character marked by the growth of his pragmatic awareness (Unity in Shakespearian Tragedy: The Interplay of Theme and Character [New York, 1956], 155).

6. A. C. Bradley, Shakespearean Tragedy: Lectures on Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth (London, 1991 [1904]), 330.

7. J. I. M. Stewart, Character and Motive in Shakespeare: Some Recent Appraisals Examined (London, 1949), 87.

8. Stewart, Character and Motive, 90-91.

9. Kenneth Muir, Introduction, xlvii.

10. Muir, Introduction, xlvii.

11. Bradley, Shakespearean Tragedy, 324.

12. McElroy, Shakespeare's Mature Tragedies, 206.

13. Grene, Shakespeare's Tragic Imagination, 195.

14. Grene, Shakespeare's Tragic Imagination, 195.

15. Cf. Janet Adelman, “‘Born of Woman,’” 108.

16. We are not given the whole of Macbeth's letter to his wife, but her surprise at the news about the king's arrival at Inverness delivered by a messenger after she has read the letter clearly indicates that the fact was not mentioned in the letter itself. Consequently, Macbeth had sent his letter before Duncan announced that he would stay in Macbeth's castle, for he surely would not have failed to mention this important fact to his wife. Upon his arrival home Macbeth brings the news about the king again, uncertain whether she knew about it (1.5.58).

17. Lady Macbeth repeats the prophesy again when greeting her husband (1.5.54-5).

18. McElroy, Shakespeare's Mature Tragedies, 223.

19. E. A. J. Honigmann, Shakespeare: Seven Tragedies. The Dramatist's Manipulation of Response (London, 1976), 117.

20. H. R. Coursen, “A Jungian Approach to Characterization: Macbeth,” in Shakespeare's “Rough Magic”: Renaissance Essays in Honor of C. L. Barber, eds. P. Erickson and C. Kahn, 240.

21. Coursen, “A Jungian Approach to Characterization: Macbeth,” 241.

22. Kahn, Man's Estate, 173.

23. Marianne Novy, Love's Argument: Gender Relations in Shakespeare (Chapel Hill, 1984), 196.

24. Juliet Dusinberre talks about Lady Macbeth's “fiction of masculinity,” arguing that ultimately her “sense of self is rooted in a traditional pattern of femininity—mother, wife, helpmeet” (Shakespeare and the Nature of Women (London, 1996 [1975], 284).

25. Linda Woodbridge, Women and the English Renaissance: Literature and the Nature of Womankind, 1540-1620 (Brighton, 1984), 39 discusses the image of woman's milk as a symbol of gentle, nurturing qualities as a commonplace in the Renaissance.

26. McElroy, Shakespeare's Mature Tragedies, 231.

27. Jan Kott, Shakespeare Our Contemporary (London, 1991 [1964]), 73.

28. Kott, Shakespeare Our Contemporary, 74.

29. Lady Macbeth would have killed Duncan herself, “had he not resembled [her] father as he slept” (2.2.12-13). On the theme of Lady Macbeth's filial dependence on her father see Marjorie Garber, Coming of Age in Shakespeare (London, 1981), 47.

30. Kahn, Man's Estate, 173.

31. Honigmann, Shakespeare: Seven Tragedies, 128, 129 ff, 135.

32. Bradley, Shakespearean Tragedy, 353, 355.

33. G. Wilson Knight, The Wheel of Fire: Interpretations of Shakespearian Tragedy (London, 1993 [1930]), 141, 151.

34. Grene, Shakespeare's Tragic Imagination, 209, 210.

35. Grene, Shakespeare's Tragic Imagination, 210.

36. Bradley, Shakespearean Tragedy, 384-5.

37. Muir, Introduction, lvi-ii.

38. The purposelessness of Banquo's journey is made clear by his evasive answer to Macbeth's ominous, direct question concerning the destination: “Is't far you ride?” to which Banquo replies: “As far, my Lord, as will fill up the time / 'Twixt this and supper” (3.1.23-5). Given Banquo's suspicion of Macbeth the vagueness of his answer is also motivated by fear for his safety—the feeling promptly and tragically confirmed for Banquo.

39. Muir, Introduction, lv-lvi.

40. Grene, Shakespeare's Tragic Imagination, 212. Honigmann notices a similar progression in Macbeth's character: “We observe a steady decline as he becomes hardened to murder … He struggles desperately against the killing of Duncan; he proceeds to the murder of Banquo without the same agonizing preliminaries … whereas Macduff's death means nothing at all to him … And he decides to massacre Macduff's family after even less preliminary hesitation, as a mere act of revenge” (Shakespeare: Seven Tragedies, 136).

41. Macbeth, note 49, page 91.

42. Coleridge on Shakespeare, ed. T. Hawkes (1969), 218, quoted in Muir, Introduction, lviii.

43. Knight, The Wheel of Fire, 152.

44. Discussed by Muir, Introduction, lviii-lx.

45. Muir, Introduction, lviii.

46. Bradley, Shakespearean Tragedy, 378.

47. Macbeth, note 6 on page 137.

48. “we need not deny her (what Shakespeare must have given her) pity,” Muir, Introduction, lx.

49. Muir, Introduction, Macbeth, lx.

50. Madelon Gohlke, “‘I wooed thee with my sword’: Shakespeare's Tragic Paradigms,” in Representing Shakespeare: New Psychoanalytic Essays, eds. M. M. Schwartz and C. Kahn, 176-7.

51. Adelman, “‘Born of Woman,’” 117.

52. To emphasize the effect of knocking, interpreted by the Porter as knocking at Hell Gate (2.3.2), the word “knock” is repeated as many as sixteen times.

53. Characteristically, when Ross announces bad news before Macduff, the latter's first thought is of the country, and only the second about his personal situation: “What concern they? / The general cause? Or is it a fee-grief, / Due to some single breast?” (4.3.195-7).

54. Knight, The Wheel of Fire, 151.

55. Honigmann, Shakespeare: Seven Tragedies, 141,

56. L. C. Knights, Hamlet and Other Shakespearean Essays (Cambridge, 1979), 297.

57. Rather curiously, of the two royal brothers “one did laugh in's sleep, and one cried, ‘Murther!’” (2.2.22), but it is not clear which did what.

58. Cf. Grene, Shakespeare's Tragic Imagination, 214, 216.

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