SOURCE: “Consciousness and Responsibility in Macbeth,” in Mosaic, Vol. 15, No. 2, June, 1982, pp. 17-32.

[In the following essay, Birenbaum studies the tragic consciousness—“the prolonged agony of awareness”—apparent in the moral decline of Macbeth.]

Some central Shakespearean characters such as Cleopatra, Richard II and Macbeth all violate, emphatically, ethical suppositions usual in our culture. It therefore is easy enough for reader-spectators, when they think about the plays, to deplore the excesses of these wicked protagonists and to try to distinguish their greatness or their potentiality from their faults. Richard, for one, reveals at John of Gaunt's death a callous flippancy which repels and angers us. We are repelled properly, by dramatic strategy, but we need neither chastise Richard nor forgive him. We are being led, rather, a degree deeper into the tragic complex of emotion. We sense a grotesqueness in the way things are, as we come to feel ourselves appalled by what is also fascinating. We find it more natural, of course, to deplore Macbeth's ambitions and his homicides than Cleopatra's irresponsibility, Richard's vanity and self-pity, or Lear's “folly.” But to stress the negatives in all these characters, to relate to them essentially through moral judgment, is to undercut the affects and the import of tragedy. It is to take life primarily as behavior rather than as experience, alienating us further from our selves rather than breaking down our alienation as true tragedy will do. Through experience of the plays we soften toward experience per se, because we imagine a Macbeth as a function of our own consciousness. It is more important that we establish the appropriate relation with a character than that we learn to describe or account for him. We cannot fully imagine Macbeth without the Macbeth image becoming our own projection, and this is especially true of him because his character is a continual process of consciousness, of imagining.

Typically, one says of Macbeth, in a moderately generous spirit, I can go with him so far but no further; I acknowledge that even I can imagine myself an assassin; I can see that my hunger is stronger than my gratitude, since the future presses harder upon me than the past, but the murder of Banquo, or the slaughter of Macduff's family, or the indescribable terrorization of Scotland, or the blind persistence in bloodshed to the end—somewhere I draw the line at which Macbeth and I part company. The tragic spirit does not desert this particular tyrant, however, and we ourselves do so to our own loss.

Macbeth develops a more and more painful responsibility for his life as he goes along, and to the extent that we take in the tragic implications of what is going on, we develop responsibility for him, under increasingly trying circumstances—or, to put it more accurately, we develop through our personal consciousness a sense of responsibility for the symbolic consciousness of the play, as though it were our own projection. In Kenneth Burke's words: “A tragedy is not profound unless the poet imagines the crime—and in thus imagining it, he symbolically commits it. Similarly, in so far as the audience participates in the imaginings, it also participates in the offense.”¹ The men of Scotland can know Macbeth only through his actions—after all, their friends and families are being slaughtered around them. But in the meantime, we, as tragic audience, become more aware of the tyrant's burden as we become involved in his turmoil. We are not simply excited by Shakespearean tragedy, stirred to tones of grandeur, warmed by goodness and indignant at outrage; we are troubled, mystified, hurt and frustrated, embarrassed and sometimes repelled. At the same time, however, we recognize that what we are seeing unfolds with inevitable rigor, and we are content to be dealt with honestly. Macbeth is, in fact, one of Shakespeare's most severe challenges to our powers of integrating hard truths, for Macbeth allows himself to be challenged most devastatingly.

The challenge to Macbeth is issued directly by his wife in a familiar speech:

Was the hope drunk,
Wherein you dress’d yourself? Hath it slept since?
And wakes it now, to look so green and pale
At what it did so freely? From this time
Such I account thy love. Art thou afeard
To be the same in thine own act and valour,
As thou art in desire? Would’st thou have that
Which thou esteem’st the ornament of life,
And live a coward in thine own esteem,
Letting “I dare not” wait upon “I would,”
Like the poor cat i’ th’adage?(2)

Analyzing the speech conventionally, one observes that Lady Macbeth is playing to her own advantage upon her husband's faltering sense of virility. She mocks his love, or threatens to mock it, holding out hope of renewed respect. She does not exactly call him a coward but predicts that he will consider himself a coward, out of his own good judgment, if he should happen to make the decision he says he already has made. She satirizes his hope as a passing intoxication that has now yielded to the remorse of hangover. Finally, of course, she leaves him a “poor cat”—a mysterious allusion but clearly a pathetic predicament. But one central sentence in the speech, I think, properly eludes such ironical analysis, although it usually gets it. Stark in its import, Jan Kott calls it “this Nietzschean question”³: “Art thou afeard / To be the same in thine own act and valour, / As thou art in desire?”

It is true that Lady Macbeth is being vicious. She is undermining her husband's self-respect. But the opposite truth is more important. She is issuing a fundamental tragic challenge to Macbeth's integrity which he himself recognizes as one of the serious problems of living. It is important that he is not merely tempted but challenged; he is obliged, that is, to take his own measurement. And the direct concern of the challenge is not his ambition. The challenge focuses him on the very basic relation between act and desire, behavior and experience, the inner, subjective reality by which we directly know ourselves and the deeds that issue from us and earn our images in others’ eyes. Which is the real man, the real self: what one feels privately or what one does publicly? All the ringing ironies in the first part of the play—the implied comparison (by prospect) between Macbeth and the rebels, Duncan's complete trust in his general, the inverted omen of the martlets, and so forth—all support the tragic sense of absolute discontinuity beneath a world of uneasy stability, and Duncan falls victim to a reality with which a mere king and a mere good man cannot cope.

Macbeth has said already that the thought of murder—the thought that he is capable of assassination—has shaken his “single state of man” (I, iii, 140). While he basks in the high regard of his fellows and of the very king he would kill, who indeed is he? Thus Lady Macbeth touches in him a level of integrity which is that mark of all Shakespeare's heroes: the insistence that life make sense feelingly, an insistence that there can be, in effect, actual intercourse with the world from within. When he yields to the challenge it is not with a lust for the kill but with a dreadful courage to be himself, to acknowledge his obsession come what may. Were the task to which he is called gratifying and noble, it would be no test. His king and his society have offered him enough such undertakings and the consequent rewards. This project will be telling because it is horrible. It requires the violation of all his sensibilities except his concern for this inner reality.

Macbeth's immediate reply to his wife is as ambiguous, or paradoxical, as the challenge: “Pr’ythee, peace, / I dare do all that may become a man; / Who dares do more, is none” (I, vii, 45-47). The conventional gloss, of course, is the moral one, approving Macbeth's hesitation: when Macbeth abandons this saving qualm, he proceeds to dehumanize himself, becoming less and less a man the more unbecoming his deeds. But human beings are capable of murder, and worse. The most unassuming of us harbors the most horrible dreams, and the mechanisms that proliferate Macbeth's atrocities—even the fear, rage and impotence that slaughter Lady Macduff and her children in one fell swoop—are also (tragically) all too human. In the tragic definition, a man is more than what it “becomes” him to be; he is fully as much as he dare suspect; he is whatever he is capable of “becoming.” The agony of tragedy is exactly the effort to face responsibility for what we ordinarily dare not recognize.

Although we will feel how unnatural Macbeth's murder of his king, kinsman, guest and (even) admirer is—the sunless sky and the cannibal horses attest as much—yet what is tragic is how natural it is to be “unnatural.” The image of Lady Macbeth's sleepwalking suggests the way the murder itself seems actually to have issued out of her and her husband, once the witches have awakened them to the possibility. Affirming that Macbeth is “the image of a normal mind,” A. P. Rossiter finds in his response to the witches no extraordinary criminal case but “the upthrust of the essentially guilty undertow of the human mind”; against the Nature which Banquo must fortify with prayer (II, i, 7-9), the witches “evoke the horror of that ‘underNature’ which is the compulsion in Macbeth.”⁴ It is a predicament of the psyche always potentially tragic that what is necessarily repressed will necessarily control us, whether in the daily minute choices of what we take to be our will or in the anguish we are left with when our defenses weaken. Horribly enough, we can easily add Macbeth to Clifford Leech's account of the tragic hero: “Orestes kills his mother, Oedipus marries his mother and kills his father, Medea kills her children: yet they are, in a sense, more fully themselves than men and women usually dare to be.”⁵ By becoming more themselves, by allowing themselves to be drawn each into his own abyss, by going all the way where angels fear to tread, they do become more clearly what we all are already, for as Leech later says, “The tragic hero … is ‘one of us.’ He is not necessarily virtuous, not necessarily free from profound guilt. What he is is a man who reminds us strongly of our own humanity, who can be accepted as standing for us” (p. 46).

Throughout Macbeth, a dramatic definition of man develops almost explicitly. Toward the end, in Rosse's account of the death of Young Siwarde, there is a moral counterpoint to the tragic definition:

Your son, 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.

(V, ix, 5-9)

Earlier, Macbeth had prodded the men who will murder Banquo with an echo of Lady Macbeth's challenge to him:

Do you find
Your patience so predominant in your nature,
That you can let this go? Are you so gospell’d,
To pray for this good man, and for his issue,
Whose heavy hand hath bow’d you to the grave,
And beggar’d yours for ever?

(III, i, 85-90)

One of them replies: “We are men, my Liege.” If in his challenge Macbeth soberly rejects New Testament values,⁶ he also stirs the men to an expression of self-respect as they soberly confirm their manhood. Chalenging them with the catalog of dogs, he takes the word “man” in his wife's vein, to mean “a man of mettle,” yet the generic meaning, which the murderers seem to intend, again remains more apt. They are men because they respond to hurt with feelings that seek issue. They are not saints or stoics but reactive creatures of flesh and blood, and the implications of that fact are as gruesome as heartening. The way Shakespeare dramatizes the two men, through the voices they present, gives them a degree of solemn dignity that makes us compromise any moral scruples we have about even a “justified” murder. In fact, they have a dignity in their desperation that Macbeth lacks in his at this moment, for theirs is the desperation of need and his of a monumental but obsessive fear. It is grotesque that they are drawn deliberately into an error, but there is a sincerity, for their part, in the error. Shakespeare gives us no indications that they should disbelieve what they hear from their king.

As his wife melts into the fears she cannot face, Macbeth proceeds to expand the limits of his dreadful manhood. Having killed one friend almost in a trance, he finds he can cause the murder of another by careful (if imperfect) planning. When the ghost of his new victim terrifies him before his guests and Lady Macbeth again asks, “Are you a man?” he insists that he does indeed know the extremity of human capacity: “What man dare, I dare … / Take any shape but that, and my firm nerves / Shall never tremble …” (III, iv, 98-102). The supernatural foe, surely, is more than a man can cope with—especially the ghost of one's own betrayed companion. But Macbeth, in his very fear, confronts the specter: “Hence, horrible shadow! / Unreal mock’ry hence!” And the ghost is gone: “Why, so;—being gone, / I am a man again” (ll. 105-07). The supernatural, benign or horrible, is only another measure of the human state. The ghosts that haunt us are all our own.

Having been sought out once by “supernatural solicitors,” Macbeth himself now seeks them out and claims their cooperation. Having seemed to receive it, he confirms his union of act and mind: “From this moment, / The very firstlings of my heart shall be / The firstlings of my hand” (IV, i, 146-48). In spite of all he has done, he apparently still needs to steel himself against his own sense of horror. With this resolve, he proceeds immediately—“even now, / To crown my thoughts with acts, be it thought and done” (ll. 148-49)—to what Shakespeare carefully dramatizes as his most appalling atrocity, the attack on Macduff's castle.

At almost every stage Macbeth feels that he has gone as far as a man can go, but always there is a new demand upon him. Each time, dreadfully, he meets the challenge. Having “supp’d full with horrors,” he cannot even be startled by news of his wife's death, but when he hears a moment later that the woods are able to move against him, there is new terror and rage, sound and fury. He cannot count now on the physical world remaining coherent. As the rage gives way—“I gin to be aweary of the sun, / And wish th’estate o’ th’ world were now undone”—the new impossibility is taken in stride: “Blow, wind! come, wrack! / At least we’ll die with harness on our back” (V, v, 49-52). Finally, Macbeth finds himself before the man “who is not of woman born,” and recoils once more: “Accursed be that tongue that tells me so, / For it hath cow’d my better part of man / … I’ll not fight with thee” (V, viii, 17-22). This unnerving symbolic danger is, in part, like the threat of incest in Oedipus: we feel we must know ourselves by the causal progressions of nature, with parents and children linked in coherent sequence. In the tragic disintegration, this clarity too dissolves.

When Macduff taunts him with the prospect of public humiliation, Macbeth preserves his integrity with a final dreadful step forward:

I will not yield,
To kiss the ground before young Malcolm's feet,
And to be baited with the rabble's curse.
Though Birnam wood be come to Dunsinane,
And thou oppos’d, being of no woman born,
Yet I will try the last: before my body
I throw my warlike shield: lay on, Macduff;
And damn’d be him that first cries, “Hold, enough!”

(ll. 27-34).

The tone tells all. It is poised and solid; though not by any means confident of victory, yet determined and strong. It is perhaps devoid of hope; it is perhaps beyond hope. Macbeth's only possibility is persistence in the course that he has undertaken as his own way, but it is a possibility, that, taken with the sound and fury and all, does make some kind of sense as his own truth. To the Christian moralist, Macbeth could take responsibility for his life only in contrition and atonement. As a tragic hero, however, Macbeth's sense of responsibility is of another order. It is an embracing of his own reality—even though he persists in his destructive efforts—and a clear-sighted acceptance of what may ensue.

I receive plenty of signals to indicate that a world actually exists—galaxies of worlds—independent of my preferences and passions. Therefore, I cannot but reflect: if this life outside does not conform with the world of my self, if it follows from other assumptions than my feelings and works by different rules, how can I myself relate to it with any honesty, with any confidence, with any sense of reality? My feelings, I realize, form a self-contained system, perpetuating their own fantasies. On the other hand, my powers of reason are suspect because they lead me into collusion with others, turning me against my own desires with a pride in abstraction and righteousness. But my hungers follow their own logic. They exist only to demand their own fulfillment, turning everything in the world into their objects. My rage and my yearning, my sense of tragedy itself, all the feelings through which I know the world, are only statements of my own vulnerability. When I fulfill one desire, I find myself with another that counts my world inadequate. My discontent requires enemies to feed upon in envy, heroes to venerate, lovers to adore. And yet the world exists outside my consciousness, eluding and tantalizing me, threatening me, destroying me, and I cannot get inside its million heads.

The split is tragic exactly at the point where total commitment to the richness of the self destroys the world the self must feed on. In Iago, a sense of self distorted by self-hate thrives upon defensive gratification. Like other “Machiavellian” villains, Iago protects himself from his own pain, his rankling jealousy, by transplanting it in others, then rejoicing in the illusion that it is no longer within while pleasantly destroying the other whom he has infected. In Othello, however, who lacks such clever defenses, the buoyant sensuousness of open feelings produces total vulnerability. In this sense, the tragedy of Othello rests more squarely upon the problem of dignity than that of jealousy, the dignity which is a pleasure in being oneself but which masks a capacity for rank humiliation. Othello is beautifully proud, and his pride is a rich human power to which he has an absolute right, yet it is mortal pride, pride in a conspicuously fallible creature. This dignity denotes even the flowering of a socially ideal personality, carrying authority with grace and character. Yet in this dignity, Othello stands totally vulnerable before an externalized manifestation of his own subterranean uncertainties. If he plays out Iago's unconscious, Iago plays out his. The inevitable result simply unfolds the implications of his situation, which is the normal (tragic) situation of man in society. Jealousy is hardly its cause or its essence but merely one dimension of it. Uneasy with our weakness, we will be jealous of the power others seem to have.

If jealousy is not the essential issue in Othello, so ambition is not the essential issue in Macbeth but only the vehicle to convey it. This play is primarily a devastating study of the split between the restless world within and the indifferent world without, for this is a tragedy of consciousness more clearly than any of the others—even more so than the obvious case of Hamlet. To experience the play is to be caught up not merely in a man's ambition but in the struggle between the spontaneous consciousness—the life that erupts of itself—and the reflective consciousness—the mind observing feelings, confounded by the eruptive energy driving against it, and aware finally how helpless it feels because it can see. Time and again through the play we are confronted violently not simply with acts or words but states of mind, and we are obliged not to observe but to taste them and to know their pungency thoroughly. From his first meeting with the witches, Macbeth's part is almost continual anagnorisis. Following him along, we are not expected to comment or to figure anything out but to know the feelings from within and realize their implications. From that point at which he finds “function … smother’d in surmise,” to the point at which he finds himself “tied to a stake” where he must “bearlike … fight the course,” he is man as victim of his nature (I, iii, 141; V, viii, 1-2). His nature, moreover, is to be the animal who finds himself to be, who is first of all driven and secondly aware of his drives, mocked by a consciousness that can see but not do, stricken with the grotesque pain of being his own victim. We find our attention fixed upon a discontinuity between awareness and will, that seems strange and natural at the same time.

From the start, the desire for power and supremacy is tangible to Macbeth and utterly persuasive in its reality. The prospect of overthrowing the King is possible in fantasy, though fantasy must overcome the resistance of guilt. But the actual activity of murder remains remote to Macbeth even while it is leading him on. We cannot say that he ever shows any lust for blood, only a passion to reach a state of fulfillment and a rage at the vulnerability that goes on and on—that worsens geometrically, in fact, in proportion to the rage against it. On the one hand, the ambition and the murder do have no relation to each other: one is a spontaneous feeling naturally there within oneself; the other is an activity one performs while seeing that it has various effects. On the other hand, of course, murder must be understood as one of the implications of ambition, whether it is literal murder or any other violence one does in seizing what one desires.

It is precisely in the discontinuity between these two senses of the situation, a terribly normal schizophrenia, that we feel the heart of Macbeth's tragedy. But the problem is still more subtle. We are forced to fathom the distinctions between the feeling and the fantasy, the fantasy and the act, the act and the consequences, the consequences for oneself and those for others: at every shift to a new level there is a chasm. Perhaps faith can bridge such splits. Certainly our daily needs require that we straddle them somehow or other. But tragedy insists first of all upon the integrity of despair:

Between the desire
And the spasm
Between the potency
And the existence
Between the essence
And the descent
Falls the Shadow(7)

Between the dreaded conception of murder and the mere act of forcing a knife into a body, between that act and the reality of another person's death (the reality of a consciousness entirely separate from one's own that one must now think of as extinct), between the nonexistence of someone else's life and the increased anguish of one's own, between the horror of blood and the simple factuality of it—all these chasms refer to the split between subjective and objective orders of reality and the variations on the theme: self and other, life and death, feeling and matter, present-time felt passing and other-time conceived.

Two haunting understatements in particular convey this feeling of a weird discovery in the familiar nature of reality. They are both peculiarly factual in a disorienting way. When Banquo's ghost has for a moment gone, Macbeth protests: “the time has been, / That, when the brains were out, the man would die, / And there an end …” (III, iv, 77-79). Time itself must be redefined.⁸ In the known world now utterly past, time was a succession of times, things were things, and the order of life was rational. Now the ordered world has dissolved because it was only wishful, and we must face what we cannot control: the timeless torrent of feelings that is released when we doubt the validity of control. Lady Macbeth sleepwalking—when what has been kept most private becomes, pathetically, completely open to strangers—utters a similar cry as she admits what a fact is: “What need we fear who knows it, when none can call our power to accompt? Yet who would have thought the old man to have had so much blood in him?” (V, i, 36-39). Determined not to fear, she yields finally to an expression of anguish and terror more naked than mere outcry. The mind cannot have thought there would be so much horror about its own desires.

Out of the keen alertness to discontinuity underlined in these two passages, almost a hypersensitivity, comes the depth of pathos in reflections of more ordinary psychology.

I have liv’d long enough: my way of life
Is fall’n into the sere, the yellow leaf;
And that which should accompany old age,
As honour, love, obedience, troops of friends,
I must not look to have; but in their stead,
Curses, not loud, but deep, mouth-honour, breath,
Which the poor heart would fain deny, and dare not.

(V, iii, 22-28)

The isolation is not merely from other people but from an entire process of organic normality, which should lead along his “way of life.” He has lived long enough because of what has happened during the time he has lived, yet he is not living at all. Macbeth is confronting a qualitative conception of time, such as Edgar implies in the otherwise meaningless last phrase of Lear: “The oldest hath borne the most: we that are young / Shall never see so much, nor live so long.”⁹ There is no logical reason that those now young will not live as long as Lear or Gloucester. “So long” must mean something like “so much” but with a sense of vast expanse. Though they were already old, those two lived lifetimes more before they died. Time lived so deeply is absolute; it cannot pass, it cannot be measured for comparison.

Hamlet also is trapped by the discontinuity between man's subjective state and his overt actions among others. Under the circumstances, he cannot act because, for one thing, action is irrelevant. Under the same circumstances, by contrast, Macbeth cannot but act. Claudius, discovering the predicament, cannot repent of the action he has taken, and this is true of Macbeth also. Oedipus, to make comparison outside Shakespeare, commits a pair of interdependent crimes that he did not desire nor intend but accepts responsibility for the whole sequence of action as a unitary process fully his.¹⁰ Macbeth feels a powerful motivation and clearly enough commits his crime, but it is only in facing death that he manages to grasp as one the desire and the deed, although he tries desperately all along to do so. He cannot fully manifest intention because it implies a seemingly impossible transition from the one level of reality to the other. The witches, in their existence between worlds, provide a mocking substitute for intention, and Lady Macbeth insists upon her own intentions too quickly without comprehending the nature of the deed to the extent that her husband does. To carry Kenneth Burke's notion of imaginative crime a step further, Macbeth commits his crime as a symbolic extension of imagining it. That is, imagining it, and knowing that he imagines it, he must enact it in order for his inner life to be real, to body forth. But this approach, which should be appropriate, cannot accommodate the practical reality of the deed in itself and the extraordinary range of its effects. His symbol is somebody else's life. It is the conjunction between these two perspectives that then comes to feel unnatural: that we must live subjectively and objectively at once. Because the reality which results is so ghastly, and because Macbeth must know that it is, life reveals itself to him, inevitably, as a tale told by an idiot. The given terms cannot work, not the way they are given, and it is the business of tragedy to carry them where they will lead simply as they are.

Whatever else Oedipus and Macbeth are “about,” they both focus centrally and firmly on the phenomenon of consequence: how events, feelings and predicaments relate to one another, how an experience is to be defined by implications that are not purely experiential. Both plays emphasize, however, not merely the phenomenon of consequence but the consciousness of consequence. Just as Othello is not essentially about jealousy or Macbeth about ambition, so Oedipus is not about committing parricide and incest but about discovering that one has committed them. In his more prolonged agony of awareness, Macbeth watches deeds flowing out of him and struggles to grasp the fact that they are his life and will be his death. What is clear to everyone logically, what he himself certainly has always known objectively—that what we do affects other people and what we do to others affects us too—is a new fact discovered for the first time with real meaning. And this is difficult to learn especially because it comes now hard upon the other subjective truth which has also been seen for the first time: there is no contact between crime and punishment (or, as Macbeth has discovered earlier, between achievement and reward) because crime is an action and punishment is meaningful only as a state of being. It is inevitable that the inner man resist the hostile order of external reality, which has nothing to do with his frustrations, achievements and fantasies. To this extent, we get the impression that Macbeth as well as Oedipus is appallingly innocent, a fact that helps to trap us into our tragic participation with both of them. They cannot really have done anything at all. Unlike Richard III and Iago, they are innocent most in the shock of confronting their guilt; the guilt does not seem to have anything, actually, to do with them. And of course, at the same time, they are utterly, hopelessly guilty and must know—as Jocasta and Lady Macbeth cannot bear to know—the full significance of the deeds they have performed.

Many factors contribute to the environment of consciousness in Macbeth. A rhetoric of question, exclamation and the subjunctive consolidates the sensation of a mind confronting its reality. Kenneth Muir has discussed a peculiar detachment in Macbeth's mentality: “Macbeth observes the functioning of his own organs with a strange objectivity: in particular, he speaks of his hand almost as though it had an independent existence of its own.”¹¹ But what is most important about this quality is an anxious or a startled tone, and the degree of pain:

What hands are here? Ha! they pluck out mine eyes.
Will all great Neptune's ocean wash this blood
Clean from my hand? No, this my hand will rather
The multitudinous seas incarnidine,
Making the green one red.

(II, ii, 58-62)

There is a recurrent motif, which John Holloway has pointed out, that develops the image of Macbeth as the “bloody man” who himself creates “strange images of death” (I, iii, 97),¹² so that a sense of imagistic reality proliferates in fantasies, apparitions and hallucinations of what is desired, dreaded, promised or doomed and of what has taken place beyond either expectation or the will. The mind must come to grips with what is beyond it through images of what is out there. Images of the world in the mind—how do they relate the mind to the world?—the daggers, the blood, the ghosts, the witches themselves, the dreams one must entertain, and even one's words spoken to others:

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.

(II, iii, 92-96)

Does the horror belong to the thing or to the mind? Lady Macbeth's rational theory, that blood is as material as water, will not work. Macbeth wades heavily through the deepening blood, as it were, but worse, he wades through images of blood. When Richard II loses his title, he loses his name, his face, his identity and his life. When Macbeth pursues “the deed without a name,” he enters uncharted territories. But this world of the demonic unconscious has a plutonic store of its own symbols, with its own logic to their coherence. A dream that disintegrates is a nightmare.

The play's obsession with sleep thickens the texture of consciousness with particularly intense overtones. The doom of sleeplessness, the desperation for sleep and the terror of it, the merger of the two finally in the image of sleepwalking, and constant reminders of the sleep of death, a sleep which one cannot stop dreaming about awake or asleep and which itself promises the worst of dreams—all keep the mind churning in the turmoil of its own nature.

The nightmare quality of the play, the waking nightmare of sleeplessness, has been described forcefully by Jan Kott. It is an environment constructed of the most demanding kind of logic:

Macbeth has killed the king, because he could not accept a Macbeth who would be afraid to kill a king. But Macbeth, who has killed, cannot accept the Macbeth who has killed. Macbeth has killed in order to get rid of a nightmare. But it is the necessity of murder that makes the nightmare. A nightmare is terrifying just because it has no end. … In a bad dream we are, and are not, ourselves, at the same time. We cannot accept ourselves, for to accept oneself would mean accepting nightmare for reality, to admit that there is nothing but nightmare, that night is not followed by day.

(pp. 74-75)

After the bitter-sweetness of yielding to oneself comes the horror that one's self can betray one's own ultimate interests: “The most dreadful thing about ‘Necessity’ is that we seem after all to have co-operated in its working” (Leech, p. 42). The nightmare is the realization that one desires it, but also the realization of what it is that one desires. Macbeth is a meaningful nightmare, in a sense that a real nightmare cannot be, because it confronts the capacity for atrocity, for making life horrible, as a very human phenomenon. It is profoundly disturbing because the trap it projects is the trap of human nature, not the eccentricity of a criminal psychopath but our necessity, our fascination, our continual potentiality.

Appreciating the nightmare quality of this play leads to two different kinds of implication. The first concerns character ontology and stylization; the second, the relation of tragedy to morality. Within the play, first of all, we witness Macbeth's nightmare, but the play itself is ours. It is useful to think of Macbeth metaphorically, as a man who has caught himself in a nightmare of his own projection, but it is also useful to see him as an image in the dream that we are projecting. As such, he is an image extending and capturing our individuated sense of self, while the other characters are images of the world of men that we become trapped in: “It is … the audience which dreams, while the artist oversees the conditions which determine this dream.”¹³ Even Lady Macbeth serves primarily to express her husband's state of mind. She is, like the witches, a variation on the femme fatale (taking the term quite literally), externalizing his tragic anxiety. Her notorious “I have given suck …” does not have to be fully tenable in terms of character psychology. It is properly as monstrous as the witches’ recipe and almost as lurid, not quite as bizarre.

Yet to call the play a nightmare is not to assume—as an experimental producer might like to pretend—that Shakespeare is managing to portray the actual nightmare within a man's mind. Shakespeare's stylized dramaturgy leads him to cultivate techniques and effects that are related to those of a nightmare because they come partly from the same source and do so partly for the same reasons. We do not really believe, of course, that we are having a nightmare; we know that we are having a play. But the life of it all and its thrust of significance come in that climate of sickening terror and heartache constructed necessarily out of the situation's own impossible but life-like logic. It is important that we are having a nightmare-like experience.

The nightmarish quality of Macbeth intensifies one aspect of the usual tragic emotion, but this point can be appreciated only if the nightmare is treated with due respect as a valid experience in its own terms. In a nightmare, we sense we are caught because there is a rightness to our being there. At no point is Macbeth's consciousness, however, a moral one in any ordinary sense of the word; nor does the ultimate consciousness of the play maintain the righteousness of morality, although it contains many characters who do. Our kind of identification with Macbeth has no ethical or political implications for us more dangerous than those of a dream.

Our experience of Macbeth's reality which provides the dominant perspective of the play, is entirely psychological, and only because it is so is it tragic. In this process of symbolic participation, as we imagine Macbeth's consciousness, we are led finally to integrate the subjective and the objective realms of truth. We do so through the self's expanding consciousness of its own capacities for atrocity. What is done in blood is known in pain. What we are left with is not remorse, exactly, a fact that must and should disturb the moralists; it is a regret beyond repentance because it is a regret, we can say, for the way things are. We can call it guilt only if we grant it a kind of inevitability. The trap Macbeth is caught in, the predicament of Claudius also and Angelo (in Measure for Measure) reveals a certain integrity that Shakespeare understood with extraordinary fairness. All three of these characters see objectively that they have fallen into chaos out of their own desires, yet they cannot free themselves by self-knowledge. Being conscious of their actions, they are all the more aware that their desires were genuine and, moreover, that they genuinely still persist. They remain with a consciousness that consciousness itself is impotent, even though it is the ultimate and the fundamental level of experience.

Thus it is irrelevant to suggest that it all could have been otherwise. And without alternatives, what morality? The witches alone protect the tragedy against such a reading. They are not merely prophets or disinterested minor deities; nor are they merely instigators of action. They are a dramatic and symbolic mechanism which both triggers and intensifies the process of the play by eliciting what is potential and bringing it into play—in other words, by helping to dramatize it. There is an obvious sinister air about them because they are designed for a tragic drama, to provoke and mirror tragic reality. As overture, as leitmotif, as chorus, and as characters too, the witches project a world in which malignancy has an absolute part to play. Their Wyrd is weird with magnetic grotesquerie, for like the oracle of Oedipus, their prophecy is naturally self-fulfilling, with an irony that penetrates the darker mysteries.¹⁴

The drive of a tragedy beyond itself is not toward one kind of action or another but toward an understanding that has to be valued for its own sake. Action may seem, as a result, easier, harder or irrelevant, but it is not tragedy's function to make choices for us. As far as we can speak discursively about this play's implications, we can propose that they concern, in part, the validity of self-control, noting that self-control is the basis not just for ethics but for civilization in the broadest sense, as the possibility of two or more people having anything to do with each other. Is control, at any rate, virtuous or expedient? We have assumed the first, we come to suspect the second, but we must move on to a third position that can be stated, perhaps, only by negation, in the dramatic manner, raising the usual alternatives and opposing them to each other so that they both can be dispelled.

When the mind is accustomed to control, the awakened rejection of control promises chaos. The unconscious mind is dangerously enlivening. On the other hand, therefore, we are likely to insist that control is not merely expedient, for we must all wish devoutly that life be honestly livable, with value if not perhaps with meaning, in ways that we can choose to have it and try to make it. Yet control is not exactly noble; it deceives us grossly into illusions about who we are, and it makes us righteous. Tragic consciousness implies an all-important conception of responsibility, but this is a factual acknowledgment of causes and effects, and it derives from emotions and a sense of natural human vulnerability rather than from moral categories. The continuity that has been invisible is discovered finally in anguish and death. There is no reward: what has to be understood can be seen only after the point is reached where understanding may be useless. If we wish to call the position we have reached tragic morality, we can do so now, if we remember that, as far as tragedy needs to go, there is a bitterness, as well as a regret, for the way things are. The term “morality” itself may be too much of a reward.

There is, to be sure, morality of the best conventional sort within Macbeth. The full structure of the play includes a tension between moral and tragic values, similar to the tension between chorus and hero that is common in Greek drama. As different as Macduff's and Malcolm's values are from Octavius Caesar’s, in terms of tragic structure they are parallel, rejecting the dangerous hubris of the heroes. In both instances, we are offered values that make life more clearly livable. In Antony and Cleopatra, the values are pragmatic and political, while in Macbeth they are humane. The Romans’ decency is insincere, a disgust with organic life; the Scotsmen's is genuinely social and compassionate. In both plays, however, these values are subsumed by a tragic truth through psychological processes that, being dramatic, provide the real lifeblood of the play.

Cawdor's death and that of Young Siwarde clearly call for contrast with Macbeth's as models of honorable manhood at the utterance, but it is not relevant to say, from outside the play, that their deaths are “better” than his. It can be relevant to the tragic organism only that theirs are not tragic deaths. The images of shrinkage, toward the end of the play, are said to emphasize Macbeth's complete moral deterioration:¹⁵ “now does he feel his title / Hang loose about him, like a giant's robe / Upon a dwarfish thief” (V, iii, 20-22). But it is too easy to moralize imagery. Such figures do not provide objective description so much as a subjective sense of devastation. They contribute to the nightmare quality and their effect is, paradoxically, colossal. We should not confuse feeling small with being small in character. Every tragic hero comes to a sense of his absolute impotence, and his dramatic stature depends partly upon the horror with which he perceives it.

The many good people in this play provide obvious background for the two figures who are isolated amidst them and thrashing about in the nightmare. In Hamlet most of the characters are at best middling honest, but Macbeth is the contrary of Hamlet, being in a sense Claudius’ play. Here, in fact, “the world” of other people functions collectively as an idyllic milieu, or as a poetic nuance to the main ordeal. They all extend Banquo's image of the nesting martlets into the wistful tragic if: if only life were that clear and simple in all. But because life is not that clear and simple (the tragic but …, they make up dramatically, as a group of characters, the weakest society in the great tragedies.¹⁶ We are very glad that these good people are there and that they really are good, but we are often impatient to be done with them. Whether they are helpless or triumphant there is an uncomfortable feeling of smallness about them. It is they who are diminished by the power of the ravaging tragedy. The political alternative they provide to the reign of Macbeth is overwhelmingly preferable, but we may still feel a slight anticlimax in their success. Some such let-down occurs, to a lesser degree, at the end of the other major tragedies too, in the return to “normal order” that is usually said to be so reassuring. Perhaps, while we sense that the world is made more substantial and meaningful by the hero's ordeal, there is a part of us that resents any one else getting benefit from his destruction. In Lear, Edgar makes the effect explicit with that final short speech.

The moral perspective resists tragedy and would control it, but it enters into the tragic complex of awareness in spite of itself. It is tragic that direct passion does not solve the problem of identity but it is tragic also that morality cannot solve it either. The way of feelings, which enlivens us in the present within our own skins, makes us both frail and monstrous, even if it also enables us to be loving and robust. The effort to make life decent avoids the complexities of human nature as a phenomenon that has to be known in process and in self-contradiction, even if it also bestows a cogent semblance of meaning and a hopeful sense of community. In tragedy, the only solution—or rather, resolution—can come through tragedy, through the quality of realization which accepts what is unpleasant about life without presuppositions and judgments, without effort and without defense, allowing fears to be fearful and problems to be problematic so that the image of the human state achieves the fullest, most stable, and, if understood, the most incontrovertible clarity. Both hopes and fears are laid aside, as the objective and the subjective become one.

Notes

1. Kenneth Burke, The Philosophy of Literary Form (New York, 1957), p. 41.

2. Macbeth (The Arden Shakespeare) ed. Kenneth Muir (Cambridge, Mass., 1957), I, vii, 35-45.

3. Jan Kott, Shakespeare Our Contemporary (London, 1967), p. 73.

4. A. P. Rossiter, Angel with Horns (London, 1971), pp. 214, 215, 221.

5. Clifford Leech, Tragedy (London, 1969), p. 33.

6. See Rossiter, pp. 233ff.

7. T.S. Eliot, “The Hollow Men,” in Collected Poems 1909-1935 (New York, 1952), p. 59.

8. See M. M. Mahood, Shakespeare's Wordplay (London, 1965) pp. 131-36.

9. King Lear (The Arden Shakespeare) ed. Kenneth Muir (Cambridge, Mass.,1959),I,iii, 323-26.

10. A point made by Hegel, distinguishing between the actual “deed” and the total “action.” See Walter Kaufman, Tragedy and Philosophy (New York, 1968), pp. 245ff.

11. Kenneth Muir, “Introduction” to the Arden Macbeth, p. xxxi.

12. John Holloway, The Story of the Night (London, 1961), p. 58.

13. Kenneth Burke, Counterstatement (Chicago, 1957), p. 36.

14. Puck provides the same paradox in a comic vein, proclaiming “what fools these mortals be” after he himself has caused their confusion. He elicits thereby a comic awareness of the natural absurdity of humans, especially where love is concerned.

15. See, for example, D.A. Traversi, An Approach to Shakespeare (New York, 1956), pp. 180ff., and Cleanth Brooks, “The Naked Babe and the Cloak of Manliness,” in The Well Wrought Urn (New York, 1947), especially p. 33.

16. Banquo is more interestingly problematic than the others, since he experiences some temptation and is troubled by it. But, of course, he is easily disposed of, proving most powerful as a ghost.