SOURCE: “Macbeth and Hercules: The Hero Bewitched,” in Comparative Drama, Vol. 23, No. 4, Winter, 1989-90, pp. 359-76.

[In the following essay, Truax draws comparisons between Shakespeare's Macbeth and the mythological hero of Seneca's tragedy Hercules Furens.]

On 27 August 1605, James I was welcomed at the gates of Oxford by three Sibyls who greeted him as the fulfillment of a prophecy made to Banquo long ago and hailed him as King of Scotland, King of England, and King of Ireland.¹ Four years later, Macbeth, inspired perhaps by the Oxford playlet, was performed before the King at Hampton Court as an entertainment to please and flatter the monarch. Shakespeare's tragedy also serves to remind an audience of courtiers and commoners that the perils as well as the joys of history are linked to transitory and cyclical patterns of nature. In the course of history, great men rise to power through natural forces, by inheritance or election like James I, and often, like Hercules, they are called upon to make personal choices, whether for good or evil, that will affect generations to come. The witches, like the furies of classical myth, have come to meet with Macbeth, a hero of extraordinary stature like Hercules, and they plan to bewitch him by undermining his deepest moral convictions and bringing about a metamorphosis that will change the course of history.

The setting, characters, and dramatic concerns of Macbeth belong to Scottish history described in Raphael Holinshed's Chronicles of England, Scotland and Ireland (1587),² and the defeat of Macbeth, the general gone awry, prefigures James' triumphant ascent to the throne in 1603. The role played by the witches, however, is charged with ambiquity because they function in response to the imperative of time not only as sibyls who prophesy the future but also as mysterious agents sent from a subterranean hell to find lodgings in the human heart. In appearance the Weird Sisters, as they call themselves, do not resemble the courtly ladies dressed in Elizabethan finery, depicted in the woodcut in the first edition of The Chronicles (1577), which Dr. Matthew Gwinn used as his model for the Oxford dialogue. Shakespeare's mysterious women, following Holinshed's description in the edition of 1587, are withered and dressed in wild disarray. Even their gender is in doubt, for they wear beards.

To effect a wider sweep of history than the English Chronicles, Shakespeare evokes the sinister echoes of an underworld from which the furies, rather than well-meaning sibyls, come to vex a protagonist of extraordinary stature. Macbeth's encounter with the enigmatic witches has curious similarities with the experience of Hercules, described in Seneca's Hercules Furens, who on his return from the conquest of the Hades is met by demonic spirits and transformed into a bloody madman who commits acts of incalculable violence.³ The parallels between Hercules Furens, translated by Jasper Heywood (1561), and Macbeth—and, to a lesser degree, Hercules Oetaeus and Medea—are remarkable.⁴ Not only does Macbeth agree with Hercules Furens in mood, temper, and rhetoric, but also there are numerous correspondences in language, plot, and characterization as well.

For Shakespeare, the past is always mirrored in the events of the present. In Ovid's Metamorphoses, a poem which may have influenced Shakespeare more than any other, Pythagoras explains, “All things are in a state of flux, and everything is brought into being with a changing nature.”⁵ “Nothing retains its own form … [and] nothing perishes in the whole universe; it does but vary and renew its form” (XV.252-55). History, like nature, follows a continuing process of destruction and renewal. Winter storms precede the flowering of spring. Cities and farms, destroyed by bloody violence spawned from uncontrolled passions of villainous men, are rebuilt when valiant men affirm order and accord through strength and commitment to moral responsibility. Heroes are continually born and reborn, and, for Shakespeare, the greatest hero of all time is Hercules.

In response to a constantly changing world, Shakespeare, the dramatist and the poet, takes images from myth and history in literature and the visual arts and transforms them into new images of human experience. In Macbeth, Shakespeare uses the myth of Hercules, although the hero is never mentioned by name, as a vehicle to express the concept of history as a complex process involving the interaction between nature and human behavior. Extraordinary men like Macbeth interrupt nature's normal cycles of birth, maturation, and death either through wise and well-reasoned conduct or through rash and irresponsible actions which violate the natural order of succession. The conflict between reason and passion, between just action and personal greed is a universally human one; all men—including the demi-god Hercules—are subject to temptations, and few, if any, can maintain a perfect balance at all times.

Hercules, both demi-god and mortal man, served the Renaissance as a model of heroic virtu, of manly excellence, possessing moral and physical strength, which Macbeth, like many of Shakespeare's protagonists, attempts to emulate. Shakespeare formed his acquaintance with Hercules from Ovid's Metamorphoses IX as well as from other classical writers such as Seneca and from Renaissance mythologies and emblem books. Hercules' remarkable strength, his quick wit and discerning intelligence, were qualities admired in a Renaissance hero, and the exciting episodes in Hercules' life served as models of valor. Cesare Ripa affirms that Hercules represents the ideal of heroic endeavor for which all valiant men should strive, and a woodcut in the Iconologia shows Hercules posing as Virtu heroica with his club and the Nemean lion's skin and holding the apples of the Hesperides.⁶

According to classical myth, Hercules is the most indefatigable, the most persistent, the brawniest if not the brainiest of heroes. He was born of a mortal, Alcmena, but his father was the god Jupiter who intended him to have extraordinary powers. His feats of strength and valor, especially those of the twelve labors assigned to him by Eurystheus on orders from his jealous stepmother Juno, commanded no end of respect and admiration. But Hercules was not invincible; he was betrayed by his wife, Deianira who, fearing his disloyalty, sent him a cloak stained with poisoned blood which burned into his flesh. When Hercules died, so the story goes, Jupiter reached down to him from heaven, whereupon, transformed into a god, he became the only mortal to be enshrined at Olympus.⁷

Shakespeare's fascination with the mythic hero Hercules is evident again and again as the name is evoked repeatedly in his plays,⁸ often in comparison with human characters whose emulations of the demi-god are in some respects wanting. It is no coincidence that the entrance of the Globe playhouse boasted a decoration of Hercules carrying the globe, with the motto Totus mundus agit histrionem, a testament to the eternal verity, as Jaques points out in his commentary on the Ages of Man in As You Like It (II.vii.139-66), that all the world's a stage upon which we play our parts. The twelve labors of Hercules were a popular subject for Renaissance artists; pictures of Hercules carrying the globe can be found at the beginning of the ninth book of Ovid's Metamorphoses in European editions with allegorized commentaries by Raphael Regius and Andrea Dell'Anguillara.⁹

For his penultimate labor, Hercules offered to hold the globe while Atlas went in his place to secure the golden apples of the Hesperides that were guarded by a dragon. After Atlas obtained the apples, he was reluctant to resume his burden, but he was tricked by Hercules, who asked him to hold the globe for a moment while he adjusted a pad. Hamlet, recalling the episode, asks the Players if a rival company of boy actors “carry it away.” He is told, “Ay, that they do, my Lord—Hercules and his load too” (II.ii.360-62), a bit of irony which reinforces Hamlet's own sense of impotence. Once free of his burden, Hercules went his way to continue a career of marvelous adventures. This is the Hercules whom Shakespeare's protagonists attempt to imitate, but, like Hamlet, they often discover to their dismay that they lack the fortitude and moral integrity of the superhero.

The choice of Hercules, one of the many legends associated with the achievements of Hercules, provides a useful context from which to examine the decision-making process through which Hercules triumphs and the mortal hero fails. The contest is not between brawn and brain but between unbridled passion and right reason—between Vice and Virtue. The story, told in Xenophon's Memorabilia, was well known in the Renaissance and, like so many classical myths, had become incorporated with Christian values. Versions of the story were painted by Veronese (Frick, New York) and Raphael (National Gallery, London).

An emblem in Geoffrey Whitney's Choice of Emblemes (1586), entitled Biuim virtutis et vitij, is illustrated with a woodcut showing young Hercules, known as Alcides, at the crossroads of life.¹⁰ The young hero is greeted by Virtue, who is dressed like the warrior maiden goddess of wisdom, Pallas or Minerva. She is accompanied by Vice, often called Voluptas, represented by Venus, the goddess of Love, discreetly clad (not bare-breasted, as is usually the case in Renaissance iconography), and by naked Cupid. As the epigram explains, each of these goddesses seeks to convince Alcides to follow her. Vice offers a pleasant, easy life of roses; Virtue offers the gift of reason but promises a more difficult path leading to a richer reward. The young man hesitates, but ultimately he chooses to follow Virtue and climb “the steepe, and craggie hill” (l. 15) to achieve the crown of fame.

In Shakespeare's tragedies and comedies, two pictures of Hercules are presented simultaneously to us: the valiant, godlike hero and the lesser figure of fallible human being who is vulnerable to passion. What is interesting and significant about the comparison between Shakespeare's protagonists and Hercules is that no dramatic character who chooses to follow Virtue ever fulfills the requirements of a Herculean hero; everyone falls short in some important way. But then even Hercules, the demi-mortal, sometimes loses his way temporarily.

In Shakespeare's comedies, the parallels between Hercules and his on-stage counterpart are absurd and prompt laughter. As Moth points out in Love's Labor's Lost, Hercules was overcome by love (I.ii.66), and so are many of the young lovers in Shakespeare's romantic comedies. The dramatic situations, however, are presented on such a small scale that the outcome is certain to be felicitous. In Love's Labor's Lost, the page Moth is mocked as Hercules-in-little; in Much Ado About Nothing, Don Pedro vows he will “undertake one of Hercules' labors” to bring Beatrice and Benedick together as lovers (II.i.365); and, in The Taming of the Shrew, Petruchio, aspiring to accomplish Hercules' thirteenth labor, sets out to tame his Kate (I.ii.255-56).

On the other hand, the parallels between Hercules and Shakespeare's tragic heroes are often central to the dramatic action. These protagonists are brave and valiant, but they are not gifted with Hercules' godlike prowess and their failed efforts appear to be in ironic contrast with Hercules' splendid achievements. In Antony and Cleopatra, Antony is frequently associated with Hercules by other characters as if to imply superhuman stature, an analogy that Shakespeare had discovered in Plutarch.¹¹ Antony's human limitations, however, become apparent through his actions, and his debauching with Cleopatra tarnishes his herculean image. Coriolanus has a posture so powerful that, Menenius suggests, he could shake Rome “As Hercules / Did shake down mellow fruit,”¹² but he too is overwhelmed by the demands of a politically obsessed woman, his mother. Hamlet repeatedly laments his inadequacy as a heroic revenger, bemoaning the fact that his uncle Claudius, who is “no more like my father / Than I to Hercules,” has seduced his mother (I.ii.152-53).

What matters in Shakespeare's tragedies is that the protagonists must make difficult choices, like Hercules, espousing Virtue and rejecting Vice, and undertake whatever challenge confronts them, using all their strength and energy. Antony, Hamlet, and Coriolanus engage in a valiant struggle against immeasurable odds, but are defeated. Heroic affirmation, however, occurs iconographically upon the stage when their bodies are lifted up as if in an imitation of the apotheosis of Hercules, and the laurels of the hero become theirs at last. Horatio's eulogy of the dead Hamlet evokes a neoplatonic image of a heavenly transformation: “Good night, sweet prince, / And flights of angels sing thee to thy rest!” (V.ii.359-60). An engraving by Antonio Tempesta (1606), like woodcuts printed in numerous illustrated editions of the Metamorphoses, shows Hercules in a chariot, riding towards heaven where Jupiter reaches downward to greet him.¹³

In Macbeth, which parallels, yet departs in striking ways from Seneca's Hercules Furens, Shakespeare creates an image of a protagonist who undergoes a metamorphosis calculated to destroy him. In Hercules Furens, the furies have the absolute power of the gods, and Hercules is unable to resist them; in Macbeth, however, the power of the witches is limited, given the Christian world in which they operate, and they cannot prevail against Macbeth's free will. Macbeth retains the aura of the hero as long as he resists the evil forces that work against him. But when he falters and agrees to commit murder, his heroic stature shrinks, and an apotheosis is no longer possible. That Hercules is able to cope with the horror that he has caused and yet reaffirm his heroic image while Macbeth becomes a desperate victim of his own aims and desires—a ruthless murderer—is perhaps the measure by which Shakespeare separates the ideal hero from the human.

The metamorphosis of Hercules in Hercules Furens begins following the completion of the twelve labors. In a lengthy monologue, Juno bitterly rehearses her anger and frustration because a triumphant Hercules, accompanied by his cousin Theseus and the three-headed dog Cerberus whom he has conquered as his final labor, is returning from Hades. Impelled by a desire for revenge, Juno resolves to reach into the deepest abyss of Tartarus to call up spirits that will drive Hercules into a mad frenzy during which he will commit a heinous crime that, she hopes, will destroy him. In her evocation of the hellish furies Megaera, Tisiphone, and Alecto, who resemble Macbeth's weird sisters in number and in kind, Juno calls for them to bring “hateful Crime … and reckless Impiety, stained with kindred blood, Error, and Rage, armed ever against itself—this, this be the minister of my smarting wrath” (ll. 97-98).¹⁴

The furies as portrayed in woodcuts illustrating sixteenth-century editions of Ovid's Metamorphoses may have been models for Macbeth's witches. The iconography of these pictures, which summarize the stories in remarkable detail, is reputed to be the work of Bernard Salomon, a skilled artist whose minute, intricately executed designs influenced engravers like Antonio Tempesta. In a well-crafted woodcut for Metamorphoses IV by Virgil Solis (a reverse copy and slightly larger version of the Salomon woodcut), Juno is shown on another trip to Hades to ask the furies to destroy the house of Cadmus. The furies are thin, wild, and ugly with bare sagging breasts and snakelike hair (but no discernible beards).¹⁵ In Geoffrey Whitney's Woodcut for the emblem Inuidiae descriptio, another copy of a Salomon design, the fury Megaera (Envy) is especially ugly, a snake emerging from her mouth.¹⁶

The witches are waiting for Macbeth, as the furies waited for Hercules in Seneca's tragedy. Macbeth also returns homeward in triumph, not from Hades, but from the hellish field of battle where he has accomplished extraordinary feats of valor in the killing of Macdonwald, an act which his Sergeant describes to the King in glowing language. For his brave disdain of Fortune, Macbeth is called “Valor's minion” (I.ii.19) and “Bellona's bridegroom” (l. 54).

Clearly Macbeth is committed to virtue and to manly excellence like Hercules, but, in a re-enactment of the choice at the crossroads, he discovers that the lures of vice can be overwhelming. Although the three weird sisters may have origins in the folk figures of the English countryside, they have an air about them that reeks of Hades, and they are up to no good when they chant prophetically: “Fair is foul, and foul is fair, / Hover through the fog and filthy air” (I.i.11-12).¹⁷

Banquo, who accompanies Macbeth, as Theseus accompanied Hercules, instantly recognizes their otherworldiness:

                                                  What are these
So wither'd and so wild in their attire,
That look not like th' inhabitants o' th' earth,
And yet are on't?

(I.iii.39-42)

In his creation of the Weird Sisters, Shakespeare may also have been mindful of the words of James VI of Scotland in Daemonologie, written before he ascended the English throne as James I. The King describes witches as “detestable slaues of the Deuill” who can cause or cure human miseries.¹⁸ To resist their spell he advises, in phrases which echo the choice of Hercules, that we should not “restraine from vertue, that the way wherby we climbe thereunto be straight and perrilous” because witches have power over “those that are of infirme and weeke faith” (p. 49). In Macbeth, the witches' greetings establish the very temptation about which James warns and become the framework upon which the tragedy rests: the promise of power for Macbeth and future glory for Banquo.

For Macbeth, as for Hercules long before, the witches at the roadside offer the seductive lure of Vice. No lady Virtue stands nearby beckoning; she is the quality of virtu, of manly excellence, that lies in the hero's breast. These creatures, despite their sinister appearance, operate in the visible terrestrial world. Macbeth listens, “rapt” (I.iii.142), but he retains the ability to act as a morally responsible individual. Like Hercules, Macbeth's choice whether to accept or to reject the enticements they describe is one of his own making. And he must accept the consequences to his action. Macbeth, rejecting the first temptation, avows, “If chance will have me king, why, chance may crown me / Without my stir” (ll. 143-44).

The hellish witches vanish, and for a time Macbeth retains the image of the responsible, excellent warrior who, like Hercules, will follow Virtue. Macbeth's composure is shaken once again, however, when Duncan announces he will settle the succession on his son Malcolm. Macbeth recognizes immediately that his own ambitions are in jeopardy. Perhaps he sees the figure of Vice beckoning in the darker regions of his own heart, but he rejects her call a second time: “Stars, hide your fires, / Let not light see my black and deep desires” (I.iv.50-51).

The homes to which Hercules and Macbeth journey become a kind of hell where a reception is being prepared for both men that will determine their future action and impel them towards self-destruction. Nowhere will these men find the tranquillity and peace for which a soldier yearns after battle, but only the urgent requirement to kill again. Paradoxically, although the situations are similar in both plays, the value systems are reversed. Hercules is called upon to kill a tyrant and a seducer; Macbeth will kill a just and noble king.

In Seneca's tragedy, the home of the absent hero becomes a hellish place where the tyrant Lycus has killed the king, usurped the throne of Thebes, and now lusts for Hercules' wife, Megara. To advance his adulterous suit, Lycus attempts to denigrate Hercules' heroic stature with insinuations of cowardice and effeminacy associated with the time when Hercules was ruled by Omphale, Queen of Lydia, who dressed him in woman's clothing and forced him to sit with her maidens and to entertain them by playing a small percussion instrument (ll. 465-71). The insults are quickly denied by Amphitryon, who compares his son to the god Bacchus—a god not ashamed to wear richly furnished robes and sweet perfume because “After much toil, valor seeks relief” (l. 476). When Hercules enters, as yet unaware of Juno's plot, and learns about Lycus' advances against Megara, he immediately affirms his strength and courage by sending the villain to Dis. The killing of a usurper is an act of virtus, of just vengeance, and Hercules does not hesitate over his choice.

The Hades of Hercules Furens, described by Theseus while Hercules is off stage murdering Lycus, is a grim and awful place where “the sun in eclipse falls there and cheats the vision” and “sluggish Sleep clings to the overhanging yew” (ll. 669-70, 690). Lethe slides down into the abyss; everywhere the cries of vultures and owls shatter the silence. “The air hangs motionless and the black night broods over a sluggish world. All things are with grief dishevelled, and worse than death itself is the abode of death” (ll. 704-06). Theseus describes the familiar punishments of Tantalus, Ixion, and Sisyphus as well as the three-headed dog Cerberus, which are vividly portrayed in Virgil Solis' woodcut of Juno and the Furies.

The aura of Hades clings to Hercules when he returns after killing Lycus, and Amphitryon urges him to “purify thy hands, dripping with thy slaughtered foeman's blood” (ll. 918-19). Hercules agrees, knowing that the assassination of Lycus, like a sacrifice to the gods, represents a triumph of virtue over evil, and he need not fear judgment.

In the great hall of Macbeth's castle, Shakespeare's protagonists begin a charade that is reminiscent of Hercules' reception on his return, and they undergo a number of metamorphoses which are reminiscent of Seneca's characters yet in ironic contrast with them. When Macbeth arrives in the posture of Hercules, Lady Macbeth, like Hercules' father Amphitryon, greets the returning hero with his new titles: “Great Glamis! Worthy Cawdor!” (I.v.54). Then, like Megara who prayed for Hercules' swift return so that he can destroy the bloody tyrant Lycus (ll. 279ff), Lady Macbeth presses Macbeth with her command to commit murder: “He that's coming / Must be provided for” (I.v.66-67).

The roles which Lady Macbeth plays mirror a number of Senecan women. Like Megara, she is devotedly loyal to her husband, but, like Deianira and other important women in Hercules' life, she also seeks to dominate him. In a series of transformations, Lady Macbeth changes from an apparently devoted wife and mother to an enchantress. Like Juno, Hercules' greatest enemy, who is the instigator of Seneca's tragedy, Lady Macbeth calls upon unnamed and clearly malevolent spirits to aid her in her plot to overcome Macbeth's reluctance and to force him to kill Duncan. In so doing, she rejects her role as lover and nurturer and calls upon the furies to transform her into an instrument of death whose cruelty transcends the limitations of her sex and of her mortal nature: “Come, you spirits / That tend on mortal thoughts, unsex me here, / And fill me from the crown to the toe topful / Of direst cruelty!” (I.v.40-43).

The struggle between virtue and vice which follows becomes doubly powerful when Macbeth, meditating over his dilemma, uses language that parallels Hercules' argument for killing the tryant Lycus to justify his own situation.¹⁹ Macbeth recognizes that if he kills a just king, he faces divine judgment, but he acknowledges that his motive for the murder of Duncan is “Vaulting ambition, which o'erleaps itself” (vii.27). Once again Macbeth's moral strength prevails, and he rejects the temptation of Vice a third time, insisting to his determined wife. “We will proceed no further in this business” (l. 31). Undaunted, Lady Macbeth assumes the role of Vice masquerading as Virtue. She prods her husband to action by mocking his heroic stature with words that recall Lycus' insults against Hercules: “Was the hope drunk / Wherein you dress'd yourself?” (ll. 35-36).

Macbeth attempts to reaffirm his heroic stance; “Prithee peace! / I dare do all that may become a man” (ll. 45-46). In his hesitation to do his wife's bidding, Macbeth discovers, like Hercules with Omphale, that he is helpless before a woman's ridicule. Macbeth's capitulation to the charms of Vice is certain when he accepts Lady Macbeth's final insult: “When you durst do it, then you were a man” (l. 49).

Lady Macbeth's transformation into an instrument of evil is complete, and briefly she assumes the dominant role in the marriage. She becomes the witches themselves, the furies sent by Juno to effect her revenge. She is Omphale ordering Hercules to dress in woman's clothes and Medea ruthlessly plotting deaths to aid Jason in his quest for the golden fleece. And, like Medea, she would not hesitate to kill her own children if their deaths would further her purpose:²⁰

                                                  I have given suck, and know
How tender 'tis to love the babe that milks me;
I would, while it was smiling in my face,
Have pluck'd my nipple from his boneless gums,
And dash'd the brains out, had I so sworn as you
Have done to this.

(I.vii.54-59)

In Seneca's play, Juno's demonic spirits begin their spell as soon as Hercules completes his triumph over Lycus. Hercules is powerless to resist their magical charms, and he is suddenly transformed into a mindless madman, berserk in an earthly hell. Invisible shadows overcome him, and he is haunted by the image of the Nemean lion which he once slaughtered. Swollen with pride, a demented Hercules announces his victory over all adversaries on earth and in Hades. Reaching up to the heavens, he demands that Jove admit him. Jove, at Juno's urging, refuses. Then, deep in melancholy madness, Hercules loses all contact with reality. Seeing his own children, he mistakes them for the children of Lycus—and he kills them. Finally he kills his loyal wife, Megara, for he believes in his delusion that she is Juno, his harasser. Then, the horrid murder finished, Hercules falls asleep.

When Macbeth agrees to Lady Macbeth's demands, he surrenders to Vice and allows himself to be ruled by pride. He has not been transformed by a magical charm conjured up by the witches, like the god-sent furies who transformed Hercules into the murderer of his family. Nor has Lady Macbeth bewitched him; she retains her mortal form, and her powers are merely temporal. But Macbeth is indeed bewitched because Lady Macbeth's demands touch his deep-seated ambitions and unleash his licentious greed. Although Macbeth moves like a man caught up in a bloody nightmare, he alone is responsible for his action.

As Macbeth waits for the bell that will summon him to action—the bell which symbolizes Lady Macbeth's dominance over him—he contemplates the dagger which he sees before him as another image of his impotence. Gradually he seems to slip away from the world of real experience into a hellish world of fantasy. When the bell sounds at last, Macbeth, answering it, mutters starkly, “Hear it not, Duncan, for it is a knell / That summons thee to heaven or to hell” (II.i.63-64).

When Macbeth murders Duncan and his servants, the castle becomes a truly Senecan hell. Lady Macbeth complains twice that she hears “the owl that shriek'd, the fatal bellman” (II.ii.3-4, 14). The Porter complains that he stands guard at Hell Gate, and, affirming Hercules' choice, he determines no longer to “devil-porter” to those who “go the primrose way to th' everlasting bonfire” (II.iii.17-19).

Almost immediately, like Hercules furens, Macbeth is metamorphosed into a corrupt and melancholy madman, increasingly unable to control his own destiny²¹—a condition which King James links to possession by evil spirits (Daemonologie, p. 30). Macbeth will never sleep again in peace. There is no cure for this madness because, by choosing Vice, Macbeth loses his will, his freedom, and he becomes possessed by the malevolent spirits latent in human nature. He must travel deeper and deeper into that hell of his own making and move closer and closer to the judgment that awaits him.

For Hercules, ironically, sleep brings healing. When Hercules awakens from his therapeutic rest, he has been cured of his madness and changed back to his normal state. His clear sight is restored, and, to his horror, he discovers the bodies of his murdered loved ones. Agonized by grief, Hercules looks at his hands. What he sees is not the blood of just revenge shed when he killed the tyrant Lycus but the innocent blood of his own wife and children. And he wonders how he will be able to wash away the stain:

quis Tanais aut quis Nilus aut quis Persica
violentus unda Tigris aut Rhenus ferox
Tagusve Hibera turbidus gaza fluens
abluere dextram poterit?

(ll. 1323-26)

What Tanais, what Nile, what Tigris, raging with Persian torrents, what warlike Rhine, or Tagus, turbid with the golden sands of Spain, can cleanse this hand?

Hercules' speech has long been recognized as hauntingly similar to Macbeth's words when he first looks at his own hands stained with Duncan's innocent blood:

What hands are here? Hah! they pluck out mine eyes.
Will all great Neptune's ocean wash this blood
Clean from my hand?

(II.ii.56-58)

And the verbal parallels with Hercules Furens continue in Lady Macbeth's own mad soliloquy which comes near the end of the play:

What, will these hands ne'er be clean? …
Here's the smell of the blood still. All the perfumes of Arabia
will
not sweeten this little hand. O, O, O!

(V.i.43, 50-52)

Macbeth's guilty reveries are harshly interrupted by the knocking at the gate, and the awful presence of the real world is impressed upon the nightmare. Macbeth awakens to recognize the gulf that now separates him from the valiant hero he once was: “To know my deed, 'twere best not know myself. / Wake Duncan with thy knocking! I would thou couldst” (II.ii.70-71).

The curious similarities and differences between Macbeth and Seneca's tragedy continue as Shakespeare extends an elaborate design that contrasts the image of a mortal man who struggles against insurmountable odds and stumbles with that of a demi-god who possesses heroic virtu and triumphs. Hercules goes with Theseus to Athens, and under the protection of the goddess Athena, Lady Virtue, the stain will leave his hands. Macbeth, who has surrendered to Vice, cannot turn back, and thus he goes further and further into the depths of villainy. In additional passages which have frequently been compared to Seneca, Macbeth agonizes over his sleeplessness in a hellish nightmare that appears to contrast ironically with Hercules' long sleep.²² Macbeth assumes the role of Lycus, the tyrant, and the horrors deepen when he orders Macduff's castle stormed and his wife and children slaughtered—a chilling parallel to Hercules' deluded murder of his own wife and children.

The nightmare of violence destroys both Macbeth and his Lady. She, who seemed the stronger when she first adopted masculine guise, becomes the first to lose her way in the forests of Hell. Her sleep-walking functions in a curious manner as an awakening to the truth of her guilt, the guilt of blood. For Macbeth, on the other hand, recognition does not come so easily. His one calm, rational moment in the final scenes of the play comes when he learns of Lady Macbeth's death. For him, life has become futile, pointless and absurd, “a tale / Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, / Signifying nothing” (V.v.26-28).

Macbeth's impending fall can be viewed in terms of the medieval and Renaissance notion of tragedy as a fall of great men brought low by Fortune's wheel, exemplifying the mutability of life and illustrating Providence's retribution against the proud and sinful. However, as R. A. Foakes points out, Shakespeare's dramatization of the process by which Macbeth is overwhelmed by mixed emotions and motives adds a new dimension to the theme of the ambitious prince brought low.²³ The ghastly image of the fallen tyrant's head brought in upon a pike should remind us all of the consequences of villainy, but for a brief moment before that catastrophic conclusion, Macbeth resumes the stature that his mad violence has forfeited. Ironically, the herculean essence has been with Macbeth all along because, as we recognize, he has been placed against his will into circumstances which have undermined his decision-making ability.

Macbeth is not enchanted like Hercules, but, as a fallible mortal man, he has been unable to resist the combined force of the witches, representing his own covert desires, and Lady Macbeth's unyielding demands. He recognizes that his day of judgment is imminent, but at his death there is a moment of glory as he fights gloriously, valiantly for a lost cause. Heroic stuff still clings to Macbeth as, recognizing that he is trapped, he announces: “bear-like I must fight the course” (V.vii.2). And he vows not to yield:

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!”

(V.viii.32-34)

From history and myth (which foreshadows history), Shakespeare knows there are always lessons to be learned. When Macbeth visits the witches a second time (IV.i), they present a series of apparitions that advise him of his future. Huston Diehl regards enigmatic images like these in Macbeth as evidence of a frightening and uncertain world because they are linked to the downfall of political stability in Scotland.²⁴ The apparitions, however, anticipate a better future. Not only do they prophesy Macduff's triumph over villainy, Virtue over Vice, but they bring another message, derived from the emblematic literature and visual arts of the day, to an audience at either court or public theaters. An “armed Head” (l. 68sd), like the helmet in Geoffrey Whitney's emblem ex Bello, pax, celebrates the blessings of peace following war;²⁵ “a bloody Child” (l. 76sd), like pictures of deformed children found in German woodcuts and described in English broadside ballads which warn of the fragility of human life;²⁶ “a Child crowned, with a tree in his hand” (l. 86sd) reinforces Claude Paradin's Heroicall Devices in which a crown is used repeatedly as a device to demonstrate the power and divine authority of the monarch.²⁷ James I especially is honored and guided by the final apparition depicting a pageant of kings, resembling the portraits of kings and noblemen hanging in the long galleries of aristocratic homes and suggested perhaps by Virgil's pageant of the worthy Romans who will make Rome mistress of the world that the Sibyl shows to Aeneas (Aeneid, Book VI). Shakespeare may also have had in mind a picture of the Nine Worthies,²⁸ long celebrated as models for men to emulate. Hercules (not normally included) appears among the Worthies in Love's Labor's Lost.

The images created by the witches that dazzle Macbeth are not charms or enchantments intended to bewitch us. They serve as reminders for us all (as they may have reminded James I) of the transitory nature of history to which we are called to respond, like Hercules, by choosing Virtue and rejecting Venus' offer of the primrose path.²⁹

Notes

1. Vertumnus sive Annus recurrens, quoted in Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare, ed. Geoffrey Bullough (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1973), VII, 470-72. The title itself, which may be translated as The Seasons Return, might have suggested to Shakespeare the theme of perpetual change in Macbeth. The importance of this entertainment by Dr. Matthew Gwinn, Fellow at St. Johns, Oxford, to the aura of James as hereditary monarch is discussed by Henry N. Paul, The Royal Play of Macbeth (New York: Macmillan, 1950); Paul suggests that Shakespeare may have been present when the playlet was performed at Oxford as the King and his court entered the city (pp. 15-24).

2. See Narrative and Dramatic Sources, ed. Bullough, VII, 478-508. Shakespeare follows the text of the 1587 edition closely; the three women are described as dressed “in strange and wild apparell, resembling creatures of elder world” (pp. 494-95). In the 1577 edition, however, the garments of the women are described as “serly” (p. 243), which the OED defines as strange and wonderful. The woodcut from that early edition is reprinted by Bullough, p. 494.

3. Shakespeare may have read Seneca's tragedies directly in Latin or in Jasper Heywood's English translation, printed in a Latin-English edition (1561) and then reprinted in Seneca His Tenne Tragedies Translated into English (London: Thomas Marsh, 1581).

4. J. A. Thomson is convinced that in many respects Macbeth is Shakespeare's most classical, most Senecan play, and he points to Shakespeare's use of tragic irony, to similarities between Lady Macbeth and Medea, and to specific passages in Hercules furens that resemble lines in Macbeth (Shakespeare and the Classics [New York: Barnes and Noble, 1952], pp. 119-24). Bullough generally supports Thomson's argument (Narrative and Dramatic Sources, pp. 451-55), as do most scholars. Frederick Kiefer, however, finds no unanimity of opinion on the subject and argues that verbal similarities can often be dismissed as “coincidences”; see his “Seneca's Influence on Elizabethan Tragedy: An Annotated Bibliography,” Research Opportunities in Renaissance Drama, 21 (1978), 17. A detailed, highly informative review of scholarship on the influence of Seneca upon Renaissance tragedy follows, pp. 17-32. Gordon Braden also hesitates to affirm Seneca's direct influence on Shakespeare because only one complete edition of his tragedies was printed, and he suggests that the real case for Elizabethan Senecanism rests on generic feature (such as ghost scenes), technique, and mood and feeling (Renaissance Tragedy and the Senecan Tradition: Anger's Privilege [New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1985], p. 175).

5. Shakespeare read Arthur Golding's translation of the Metamorphoses (1567), but he may also have read the Metamorphoses in a Latin text. Citations here are for convenience from the Latin-English edition of the Loeb Classical Library, trans. Frank Justus Miller (London: William Heinemann, 1926), XV.179.

6. For convenience I have used the edition of 1644: Iconologie, trans. Jean Baudouin (Paris, 1644), ed. Stephen Orgel (New York: Garland, 1976), II, 83; for the description but not the woodcut, see Cesare Ripa, Iconologia (Rome, 1603), p. 507.

7. The story of Hercules, probably written in the first century a.d., is told in the Theogony and found in the Library of Apollodorus: Gods and Heroes of the Greeks: The Library of Apollodorus, trans. Michael Simpson (Amherst: Univ. of Massachusetts Press, 1976), pp. 91-137. Shakespeare's primary source for the life of Hercules was Metamorphoses IX, but, since the story of the madness is not included, he probably discovered it in Seneca. For interpretations of Hercules in Renaissance literature, see G. Karl Galinsky, The Herakles Theme (Totowa, N.J.: Rowman and Littlefield, 1972), pp. 125-202, and Eugene Waith, The Herculean Hero (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1962), pp. 16-40.

8. For discussion of Shakespeare's allusions to Hercules, see Robert Kilburn Root, Classical Mythology in Shakespeare (1903; rpt. New York: Gordian Press, 1965), pp. 71-74. In all, Shakespeare mentions Hercules forty-five times. All quotations from Shakespeare in my text will be taken from The Riverside Shakespeare, ed. G. Blakemore Evans (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1974).

9. See Metamorphoseon Libri XV Raphaelis Regii (Venice, 1586), p. 189; La Metamorfosi di Ovidio di ridotte da Gio. Andrea Dell'Anguillara (Venice, 1584), facing p. 169. Engravings of the labors of Hercules are listed in Adam Bartsch, Le Pentre Graveur (Leipzig, 1854-67), 21 vols., and F. W. H. Hollstein, Dutch and Flemish Etchings, Engravings and Woodcuts, 1450-1700 (Amsterdam, 1949-87), 31 vols.

10. Geoffrey Whitney, A Choice of Emblemes (Leyden: Christopher Plantin, 1586), p. 40. Although Shakespeare never alludes to the choice directly, scholars assume that he was familiar with it; see Richard Cody, The Landscape of the Mind: Pastoralism and Platonic Theory in Tasso's Aminta and Shakespeare's Early Comedies (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969), p. 105. The choice of Hercules is also illustrated in the popular Das Narrenschiff by Sebastian Brant, translated to English as The Ship of Fools by Alexander Barclay (London: Richard Pynson, 1509). Christianizing of classical mythology had been taking place since the twelfth century. In some accounts of Ovid moralized, Hercules is Christ; see Don Cameron Allen, Mysteriously Meant: The Rediscovery of Pagan Symbolism and Allegorical Interpretations in the Renaissance (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1970), pp. 166-73, and Rosemond Tuve, Allegorical Imagery (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1966), p. 295.

11. The Life of Marcus Antonius, in Plutarch's Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romans, Englished by Sir Thomas North (1579), ed. W. E. Henly (London: David Nutt, 1896), VI, 4.

12. While the story of the golden apples has many versions, most artists, including Shakespeare, prefer to report that Hercules himself came to battle the dragon and obtain the golden apples. The order of Hercules' labors also differs in various accounts.

13. For Antonio Tempesta's engraving, see Metamorphoseon … Ovidianarum (Amsterdam [1606]), ed. Stephen Orgel (New York: Garland, 1976), p. 85. Seneca dramatizes Hercules' death and apotheosis in Hercules Oetaeus.

14. Seneca's Tragedies, trans. Frank Justus Miller (London: William Heinemann, 1916), vol. I. Hereafter line citations to Seneca will be from this edition.

15. Salomon's woodcuts were published by Jean de Tournes in La Metamorphose d'Ovide figurée (Lyons, 1557) and were immediately copied by printers elsewhere. It should be noted, however, that in most cases Salomon simply followed Ovid's vivid descriptive language. For Solis's woodcut for Metamorphoses IV.421, see Johan Sprengium, Metamorphoses Ovidii (Frankfurt, 1563), p. 52. Salomon's contribution to art is evaluated by Robert Brun, Le Livre Français illustré de la Renaissance (Paris: A. et J. Picard, 1969), pp. 77-80.

16. Whitney, p. 94; this emblem's source is a plate in Omnia Andreae Alciati V. C. Emblemata (Antwerp: Christopher Plantin, 1577), p. 271.

17. For comment on the contribution of the classics to Elizabethan daemonology and the association of the Furies with witchcraft, see Arthur R. McGee, “Macbeth and the Furies,” Shakespeare Survey, 19 (1966), 55-67.

18. Daemonologie, in Forme of a Dialogue (Edinburgh: Robert Waldegrave, 1597), p. 2; reprinted in the Bodley Head Quartos, ed. G. B. Harrison (London: John Lane, 1924), p. xi. Subsequent page references to this edition will appear in parentheses in my text.

19. See lines 735-36: “What each has done, he suffers; upon its author the crime comes back, and the guilty soul is crushed by his own form of guilt.” Howard Jacobsen, “Macbeth I.vii.7-10,” Shakespeare Quarterly, 35 (1984), 321-22, identifies another group of lines in Seneca's Thyestes which reflect the same linguistic pattern and which he believes is even closer to Shakespeare.

20. For a comparison of two of Lady Macbeth's speeches to examples in Seneca's Medea, see Bullough, p. 451; additional sources for Shakespeare may have been Ovid's Metamorphoses VII and Heroides XII.

21. For a discussion of madness in several Elizabethan plays and the significance of Seneca's Hercules Furens, see Rolf Soellner, “The Madness of the Elizabethans,” Comparative Literature, 10 (1958), 309-24. Soellner finds Lady Macbeth's excuses for her husband's rapture when he sees Banquo, “being often thus” (III.iv.61-62), as evidence of an epilepsy (p. 313).

22. Thomson, p. 120, links allusions to sleep by the Chorus in Hercules Furens, ll. 1065ff, to similar passages in Macbeth. Additional sources for Shakespeare's imagery associated with sleep are Ovid's Metamorphoses XI.623ff; Sidney's Astrophil and Stella, Sonnet 39; and references to sleep in the dramatist's own plays such as Henry IV, Part II, III.i.5-31.

23. R. A. Foakes, “Images of Death: Ambition in Macbeth,” in Focus on Macbeth, ed. John Russell Brown (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1982), pp. 2-20. The damnation of Macbeth, his fall from divine grace, has long been a concern of scholars. Among those who discuss Macbeth in terms of Christian theology are Robert G. Hunter, Shakespeare and the Mystery of God's Judgment (Athens: Univ. of Georgia Press, 1976), pp. 159-82; Roland Mushat Frye, Shakespeare and Christian Doctrine (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1963), pp. 144-46; Robert H. West, Shakespeare and the Outer Mystery (Lexington: Univ. of Kentucky Press, 1986), pp. 21-22, 70-77.

24. Huston Diehl, “Horrid Image, Sorry Sight, Fatal Image: The Visual Rhetoric of Macbeth,” Shakespeare Studies, 16 (1988), 191-204. To Diehl, the play is full of acts of seeing and interpreting in an uncertain and invisible world. Members of the audience gain perspective on the limitation of human knowledge as they watch the downfall of Macbeth, his lady, and Duncan. All pictures, like the apparitions, are enigmas in a fallen world where ambiguous signs disturb and confuse the audience.

25. Whitney, p. 138; the plate is from Omnia Andrea Alciati, p. 177.

26. A Collection of 79 Black-Letter Ballads and Broadsides (1559-1597), ed. Joseph Lilly (London, 1867), pp. 27-31, and The German Single-Leaf Woodcut (1550-1600), ed. Walter L. Strauss (New York, 1975), II, 674, 850.

27. Devises Heroiques (Lyons: Jean de Tournes, 1557), p. 18. The woodcut, attributed to Bernard Salomon, shows a crown over a star. For other crown emblems, see ibid., pp. 23, 25. These devices were widely published, and a translation by P. S. with Plantin woodcuts was printed in London as The Heroicall Devices of M. Claudius Paradin (London, 1591).

28. The Nine Worthies were frequently illustrated and even used as wall decorations in upper middle class homes like the house on 61 High Street, Abersham, Bucks.; see Francis Reader, “Tudor Mural Paintings in Lesser Houses in Bucks.,” Archaeological Journal, 89 (1932), 166-72.

29. The Porter elects to eschew the primrose way to Hell, and Laertes warns Ophelia that Hamlet walks “the primrose path of dalliance” (I.iii.50). Roses are associated with Venus, and the pleasant way of Vice is called the path of roses. Clifford Davidson relates the devil imagery which I have linked with classical myth to a Christian view of damnation in The Primrose Way: A Study of Shakespeare's Macbeth (Conesville, Iowa: John Westburg, 1970).