SOURCE: Liebler, Naomi Conn. “The Hobby-Horse Is Forgot: Tradition and Transition.” In Shakespeare's Festive Tragedy: The Ritual Foundations of Genre, pp. 173-223. London: Routledge, 1995.

[In the following excerpt, Liebler focuses on the violations of ceremony in King Lear and Macbeth.]

IN DOUBLE TRUST: STRUCTURES OF CIVILIZATION IN KING LEAR AND MACBETH

It is necessary to recall briefly the Aristotelian definition of tragic action as the violation of specific social bonds:

Now if an enemy does something to an enemy there is nothing piteous. … Nor … when the two are neither friends nor enemies. But … when killing or something else of this sort is either done or about to be done by brother to brother, son to father, mother to son, or son to mother, these the poet ought to seek.

(Else 1967: Poetics 1453b18-23)

For Aristotle, the essence of tragic action was the violation of kinship and thus of community.

A community is a dynamic organism; it grows and changes, and in this sense is subject to the same kinds of “rites of passage” and endures the same kind of agon we have come to associate with protagonists. Both Macbeth and King Lear present a society in a liminal moment, in transition from one type of structure to another. It is possible to forget, while engaged in Macbeth's treachery or Lear's suffering, that their respective communities are also in upheaval. At the beginning of Macbeth, the external threat posed by the Norwegian invasion is compounded by the interior treasons of Macdonwald and the Thane of Cawdor. Scotland's feudal government is transformed by the end of the play into a specifically English hierarchy when Malcolm constitutes his courtiers as “Earls, the first that ever Scotland / In such an honour nam'd” (V.ix.29-30). Similarly, from the division of the kingdom at the beginning to Albany's attempt to install Edgar and Kent in a dual kingship at the end—“Friends of my soul, you twain / Rule in this realm, and the gor'd state sustain” (V.iii.320-1)—King Lear enacts the rupture of Britain, for which Lear's disintegration throughout the play is a sustained personified emblem. In both plays, though differently in each, the structures Victor Turner labelled “hierarchy” and “communitas” are themselves made subjects; that is, both hierarchy and communitas per se are contested, not only in the sense of who occupies and instantiates their various strata, but as coordinates of structure altogether. Both plays interrogate the possibility, the viability, of ordered civilization: can it survive human interference? How much interference? Does its shape alter? If so, does its name change? Whereas Hamlet's Denmark and Coriolanus's Rome are absorbed by other recognized nations, Lear's Britain and Macbeth's Scotland (like Titus's Rome) change their identities by a kind of internal combustion. These later plays represent the subjectivity, the subjection, and through it, the precariousness of political/cultural identity.

In discussing the relation of social structure and discourse, Bruce Lincoln describes the 1917 débacle within the Society of Independent Artists in New York over Marcel Duchamp's Fountain (the famous inverted urinal), one of the more exquisite statements of “symbolic inversion” in modern art, which led to the defection from the society of both Duchamp and his patron Walter Arensberg. This event, says Lincoln, is generally understood by art historians as a turning point in the development of the New York avant-garde (1989: 143). Following Victor Turner, Lincoln argues that in such instances of profound cultural alteration, “a previously latent cleavage within the group was called into focus”; following failed attempts to resolve the resultant crisis, “schism followed along the lines of the preexisting cleavage. … What is of paramount interest … is that the initial violation was nothing other than an act of symbolic inversion” (1989: 144). Symbolic inversion is as powerful as, and sometimes more powerful than, active revolt in moving social change. When the symbols that signify important relations in culture are tampered with, ruptures occur along fault-lines whose integrities those symbols are meant to insure: “Any structure of ideas is vulnerable at its margins” (Douglas 1966: 121).

The vulnerability of identity at the margins, the boundaries of bonds, is a focal concern of King Lear and Macbeth. Both plays interrogate virtually every kind of human interrelatedness and definition of identity: feudal, familial, spousal, national. In Lear most obviously, the inquiry begins with a concrete objectified symbol of identity, boundaries, and margins, the map of Britain.

Elizabethan audiences had heard, perhaps with some amusement, the bickering for Britain among the rebels Hotspur, Glendower, and Mortimer in 1 Henry IV (III.i.71-139). Hotspur thinks he can move the boundary-river Trent as easily in reality as on a map—“a little charge will do it” (114)—but he is quickly diverted from his course in the debate by Glendower's shift to the topic of music, and finally gives up the game: “I do not care … / But in the way of bargain, mark you me, / I'll cavil on the ninth part of a hair” (135-8). Hotspur is a complicated representation, and it is difficult to know whether the debate over the map proves him mad or merely contentious. In the event, it had no serious consequence in the play, and the Trent flowed on undisturbed. Doubtless Jacobean audiences, some eight years later, heard Lear's map-altering command in a very different register, despite the similar language used in both plays: “Come, here's the map: shall we divide our right / According to our threefold order ta'en?” (1 Henry IV, III.i.69-70); “Give me the map there. Know that we have divided in three our kingdom” (King Lear, I.i.37-8). In the latter event, the consequences are a “gor'd state” and the rest of the tragedy.

A map is a symbol of both structure and communitas, replacing “the discontinuous, patchy space of practical paths by the homogeneous, continuous space of geometry” (Bourdieu 1977: 105); its lines inscribe fissures along which crisis occurs, and like Duchamp's urinal, its inversion interpellates other cultural definitions. Thus, in King Lear, when the fundamental inscription of known national identity is altered, the definitions of all relations are destabilized, including (as in Hamlet) the definition of “human.” At the spatial center of the play is the question of what that word means, and with it the definition and possibility of civilization. Lear's “unaccommodated man” is “a poor, bare, forked animal” (III.iv.106-8) who, as the Fool notes with relief, had “reserv'd a blanket, else we had all been sham'd” (III.iv.65). The nearly naked Edgar appears as liminal man, in transit from his animal origins; the shame from which “we all” are saved by his rags is that of confronting a beastly kinship. Lear looks through the “loop'd and window'd raggedness” to an undifferentiated communitas in the company of Edgar/Tom, Kent, Gloucester, and the Fool—statusless outcasts like himself, momentarily related in the liminal locus of the heath. Man is “no more than this,” and the tangled bestiary of the play's animal imagery—from dogs and tigers to pelicans and centaurs—implies the fragility of civilized veneers. Lear's cartographic gerrymandering makes Britain the object of a contest for ownership that contextualizes both Edmund's scheme (“Well then, / Legitimate Edgar, I must have your land” (I.ii.15-16)), and the proprietorship that allows Goneril and Regan to shut their doors against the king. It creates the statusless limbo of liminality which dissolves all the security of familiar social structures.

The world of King Lear is circumscribed by several kinds of boundaries, all of which are breached at the start of the play. Gloucester acknowledges the violations of his marriage vows and jokes about it; the king vivisects his kingdom and abdicates, while somehow hoping to “retain / The name and all th'addition to a king” (I.i.135-6), as if that were possible. Lear sets up the testy game between his daughters in order to give the “third more opulent” (I.i.86) part of Britain over to a foreigner, France or Burgundy, whoever marries Cordelia, as if Britain were Lear's personal estate, and not a nation. He disowns his loving daughter, while the other two compete for Gloucester's bastard son. Lear and Gloucester act as if social roles were unrelated to social contracts.

Marxist critics were perhaps the first to notice that the play repeatedly interrogates the strength of the bonds that linked the constitutive elements of feudal society, and that alterations in these bonds were the specific “forces of change at work in the kingdom” (Delany 1977: 432). Like Richard II, Lear and Gloucester “are addicted to precedent and ceremony” (Delany 1977: 433), and the old forms on which they rest are contested by a swelling bourgeois acquisitiveness and social functionalism, represented by Goneril, Regan, and Edmund (Delany 1977: 433; Selden 1987: 146-7). The battle between old and new (or old and young) is real enough in this play; but however repulsive and dangerous Edmund, Goneril, and Regan appear to be, Shakespeare makes it clear that the fathers broke the rules first by violating the same “traditional” bonds whose loss they come to regret: Gloucester broke his marriage vows in fathering Edmund, though he retained the tradition of endowing his legitimate elder son; Lear violates his royal obligation to protect the realm, and also the custom of primogeniture in promising the “third more opulent” portion of the land to his youngest, not his eldest, daughter. The encroachment of bourgeois “functionalism” is symptomatic of the play's variously represented violations, enabled by the gap in social processes created by the dysfunctional guardians of traditional feudal codes.

One problem that arises in Marxist readings of King Lear such as Delany's is the tendency to valorize the actions of Goneril, Regan, and Edmund for working against the economic and social inequities of the feudal system. That view leaves us with something of a moral problem, because however pragmatic and progressive their levelling efforts may seem, neither their actions nor their motives aim toward the common good, nor do they result in anything but the destruction of order. Delany acknowledges that they do not intend to replace the old order with a new egalitarian structure and that the outcome of the struggle is “too dark and bloody to be redeemed by the vapidly moralistic Edgar” (1977: 437). Others (Selden 1987; Patterson 1989) have read Lear's “poor naked wretches” speech (III.iv.28-36) as a kind of proto-Marxist self-criticism on Lear's part about the inequities of a feudal economy. Patterson's analysis particularly exemplifies a failure to distinguish the reader's reading from the text's explicit content. Finding a charitable message in the passage, she says:

the play as a whole does not remain faithful to that message, not, at least, at the deep structural level of socioeconomic analysis. For Lear recovers from his wisdom-as-madness, and takes nothing from it into his reconciliation with Cordelia that is not a purely domestic intelligence. …

Is this, then, to be construed as Shakespeare's … conclusion that the hope of changing places is, after all, a delusion from which we should recover? I doubt it. Such a conclusion is barely compatible with his most transgressive strategy so far, to make the king his own most powerful social critic. [The] play retreats finally into the domestic and familial, as a shelter from sociopolitical awareness …

(Patterson 1989: 116)

Patterson is not the first critic to locate a potential interpretive trajectory in a single line and then criticize the play's infidelity to that trajectory, or to find a thinly veiled “irony” in the play's “failure” to deliver the message that the critic would like to see delivered. The play “does not remain faithful to that message” because the message is not the play's but the critic's. Lear's reconstructed domesticity in Edgar/Tom's hovel does not constitute a retreat “from sociopolitical awareness” but the consequence of that awareness, an elliptical rather than a circular return to the focus of his original violations. As for the “poor naked wretches” who immediately elicit Lear's apparent transformation, as Jonathan Dollimore observes, the play offers us no view of the large population of Jacobean poor. The actual wretches Lear sees before him were, are, and remain members of the court: the King, his Fool, and an Earl, joined a few moments later by a Duke and then that Duke's legitimate son who survives at play's end to assume the king's throne.

In a world where … a king has to share the suffering of his subjects in order to “care”, the majority will remain poor, naked and wretched. The point of course is that princes only see the hovels of wretches during progresses (walkabouts?), in flight or in fairy tale. … So, far from transcending in the name of an essential humanity the gulf which separates the privileged from the deprived, the play insists on it.

(Dollimore 1989: 191-2)

Lacking accommodations, the hovel's refugees are the “unaccommodated man” Lear sees in Poor Tom. And they are the only ones he sees. None of them ever goes home again—even Edgar will presumably move to new, royal, quarters.¹

The play not only interrogates a moribund feudal-aristocratic system; it also exposes the structures of civilization per se as system, articulated in relationships that require careful, consistent protection by some structure of hierarchy and communitas. The feudal structures of King Lear are the particular instantiations of “system” in general. Cordelia loves Lear “according to [her] bond” (I.i.93); Kent persists throughout the play in the duty of serving his master; the Fool performs his professional role of tutoring the king; Edgar remains bound to his father. It is Edmund, whose “bonds” as he rightly says were severed by and under the conditions of his birth and who therefore stands outside both structure and communitas, who identifies the crux:

Thou, Nature, art my goddess, to thy law
My services are bound. Wherefore should I
Stand in the plague of custom, and permit
The curiosity of nations to deprive me … ?
                                                                                … Why brand they us
With base? with baseness? bastardy? base, base?
.....Our father's love is to the bastard Edmund
As to th'legitimate. Fine word, “legitimate”!

(I.ii.1-18)

Unlike Edgar, born “by order of law” (I.i.19), Edmund recognizes, as only one excluded by structure can do, that “legitimacy” is merely a matter of civil law, the “curiosity of nations.” Thus his bond is properly to Nature, as bastards are “natural” children; only by Nature's law is his existence recognized. Edmund's rejection of (and by) the “plague of custom” ironizes Edgar's later quip as lunatic Tom when mad Lear asks him about his “study”: “How to prevent the fiend and to kill vermin” (III.iv.159). For Edmund custom is a plague; for everyone else in the play, custom is plagued. King Lear pushes Hamlet's citation of ritual crisis to an extreme: here custom is not “More honor'd in the breach” (I.iv.16); it is entirely breached. As a new-made outcast, sharing to some extent Edmund's permanent condition, Edgar can identify what all of the play's principal characters neglect, and what I have argued throughout this book is the prophylactic and curative function of ritual.

The fissures that weaken structure can best be seen from the outside, and only Edmund begins from that position. Very quickly after the play begins, Lear's court is vacated and the principal characters move outside to the liminal heath, but instead of leaving behind the structure to which they subscribe and within which they are themselves inscribed, they remain in important ways bound to it. That is why, as Dollimore notes, the play “insists” on the gulf created by hierarchy.

In, boy, go first.—You houseless poverty—
Nay, get thee in; I'll pray, and then I'll sleep.
Poor naked wretches, wheresoe'er you are,
That bide the pelting of this pitiless storm,
How shall your houseless heads and unfed sides,
Your loop'd and window'd raggedness, defend you
From seasons such as these? O, I have ta'en
Too little care of this! Take physic, pomp,
Expose thyself to feel what wretches feel,
That thou mayst shake the superflux to them,
And show the heavens more just.

(III.iv.26-36)

Having expelled Cordelia and Kent, and then having been himself evicted by Goneril and Regan, Lear becomes the victim of his own diaspora. He is what Gaston Bachelard calls the “dispersed being” (1969: 7) without a stable point of reference, unable to re-cognize the once-familiar.

I fear I am not in my perfect mind.
Methinks I should know you, and know this man,
Yet I am doubtful: for I am mainly ignorant
What place this is, and all the skill I have
Remembers not these garments; nor I know not
Where I did lodge last night.

(IV.vii.62-7)

However, contested social structures do not necessarily provide the safety and security one seeks in them. Lear hesitates before Tom's hovel, ostensibly because he is distracted by what the thunder says, by recent memories of his displacement by his daughters, and by a paternal concern for the well-being of his Fool. A hovel is precisely not the kind of domicile Lear is accustomed to. A king's entry into such a structure entails the annihilation of his status as king, his deconstruction along with that of all that monarchic structure implies. It is precisely the action and the locus required in Turner's definition of liminality, and if this action were performed in the context of a properly ordered Swazi ritual (see above, chapter 4) instead of a Jacobean tragedy, the king's lesson in lowliness would assure his and his kingdom's renewal.

In order to take refuge in the hovel, Lear must first do battle with all the constructs of his courtly microworld. The larger universe, represented by the heath and its inhospitable weather, offers a space in which the hypocrisies and abuses familiar at court—those of the simp'ring dame, the rascal beadle, the corrupt judge—are exposed and challenged. “O, I have ta'en / Too little care of this” is a massive understatement. Simplistically read, Lear's “revelation” might result in a radical re-ordering of the play's social structures. But when we see what in fact happens, we see too that such a re-ordering does not occur, and indeed may not be possible. Wherever they go, people carry with them the positions they have occupied in the social structure; these are imprinted as “dispositions which are so many marks of social position and hence of the social distance between objective positions”; consequently, they are “reminders of this distance and of the conduct required in order to ‘keep one's distance’ … (by … ‘knowing one's place’ and staying there)” (Bourdieu 1977: 82).

Bourdieu's commentary helps to locate Lear's behavior before the hovel not as a demolition of hierarchy but as its perpetuation, and not because Lear wills it so but because of the conditions set by what Bourdieu calls “habitus,” the complex social principle in which individuals “wittingly or unwittingly” produce and reproduce social meaning: “[Each agent's] actions and works are the product of modus operandi of which he is not the producer and has no conscious mastery. … It is because subjects do not, strictly speaking, know what they are doing that what they do has more meaning than they know” (Bourdieu 1977: 79). The situation represented in Lear III.iv entails just such a misrecognition: among the band of refugees, two (Kent and Edgar) are disguised from the rest and from each other; when Gloucester first enters the scene, he does not recognize and is not recognized by the others. Moreover, the refuge itself is illusory: there is no lunatic's hovel because there is no lunatic, and the shelter of the hovel is in any case a one-night stand. Lear, the Fool, Kent, Gloucester, and Edgar are dispossessed of their habitual homes, which in each case was previously the court and its substructures.

By the operation of “habitus,” once he has installed himself, nested, in the hovel, Lear can only reconstruct himself regally, ordering “Come, unbutton here” (III.iv.109); two scenes later he establishes a moot court and arraigns his daughters in absentia.² Lear can no more jettison the hierarchic structures of his former life than Edgar can become Tom o' Bedlam. The Fool's earlier analogy of Lear and a snail was more than a witty criticism:

FOOL.
… I can tell why a snail has a house.
LEAR.
Why?
FOOL.
Why, to put's head in, not to give it away to his daughters, and leave his horns without a case.

(I.v.28-31)

Social man carries his house with him. Even the birdcage haven Lear imagines with Cordelia (V.iii.8-19) is a home for retired courtiers gossiping about their former domain; it would not be mistaken for a farmhouse or a hovel. It belongs to the same social structure as does Lear himself. To be wrenched out of one's home, displaced, dislocated, dispossessed by any agency whatsoever, even oneself as Lear is in the very first instance, constitutes a genuine and profound threat to identity, and therefore to social existence. As Lear says, “home” is not a matter of physical comfort or simple protection from elemental weather, but of “habitus,” the full set of relationships, hierarchies, and ordered activity that the word signals. Tormented by the loss of those relationships, he does not feel the weather's fury:

                                                                                          When the mind's free,
The body's delicate; this tempest in my mind
Doth from my senses take all feeling else,
Save what beats there—filial ingratitude!
Is it not as this mouth should tear this hand
For lifting food to't? But I will punish home.

(III.iv.11-16)

“Home” in this passage carries two meanings: “on target,” and the domain of all that is, or would be in a mundus rectus, socially constructive. It is a Foucaultian “heterotopia,” a “kind of effectively enacted utopia in which … all the other real sites that can be found within the culture, are simultaneously represented, contested, and inverted. Places of this kind are outside of all places, even though it may be possible to indicate their location in reality” (Foucault 1986: 24). Lear's “homes” in the hovel and the birdcage are in this sense “heterotopias,” where hypocrisy, though it prevails, is also arraigned; where poverty and misery are not relieved but are at least shared.

In this play, however, as in Macbeth and Hamlet, “real” homes, specifically castles, are sites of violations. In Lear's case these violations are mixed in with the political or stately issues of the division of the kingdom and the early retirement of the king.³ The subplot allows us to focus more particularly on the specifically domestic dissolutions. When Regan and Cornwall arrest Gloucester and blind him, the first point that penetrates his mind is the fact that this is occurring in his own house. He is more horrified by the violation of his role as host than by the denial of his authority:

What means your Graces? Good my friends, consider
You are my guests. Do me no foul play, friends.
.....                                                                                … I am your host,
With robber's hands my hospitable favors
You should not ruffle thus. What will you do?

(III.vii.30-41)

He invokes the same code that is perversely cited by Macbeth in his moment of conscience before Duncan's murder and by Lady Macbeth's false horror afterwards:

                                                                      He's here in double trust:
First, as I am his kinsman and his subject,
Strong both against the deed; then, as his host,
Who should against his murtherer shut the door,
Not bear the knife myself.

(I.vii.12-16)

LADY M.
Woe, alas!
What, in our house?

(II.i: 87-8)

The fact that Macbeth casts regicide in the language of inhospitable behavior signals the weight of that code for Shakespeare's audience. These concerns, however ironically voiced, are recognizable retentions from the Anglo-Saxon code of comitatus, the system in which the most prominent relationship was a lord's protection of his followers, and the most prominent locus for that relationship was the mead-hall, where all significant social operations were defined. As Bourdieu observes:

Inhabited space—and above all the house—is the principal locus for the objectification of the generative schemes; and, through the intermediary of the divisions and hierarchies it sets up between things, persons, and practices, this tangible classifying system continuously inculcates and reinforces the taxonomic principles underlying all the arbitrary provisions of this culture.

(1977: 89)

Comitatus was more than a matter of hospitality, or rather, hospitality meant in this context something more than it would mean today. The code itself persisted well through the late medieval period as well, although as social life became more centralized, the term comitatus gave way to the medieval familia; both terms specifically signalled the full complex of relations and obligations implicit and explicit in the word “hospitality.” It was not an optional manifestation of polite behavior, but an absolute requirement of aristocracy (Keen 1990: 169).

Noting that “Regan's neglect of hospitality is a fault which has at least as wide a significance as her want of filial respect” (1987: 148), Selden locates the “corruption of hospitality” (149) in the play by reviewing Elizabethan vagrancy statistics and legislative debates regarding the disposition of “rogues, vagabonds, and sturdy beggars” created by enclosures and other consequences of increasing urbanization (1987: 150-2; also Underdown 1985: 34-6). But he omits the Tudor legislation, and especially Elizabeth's Poor Relief Act of 1598 (reissued in 1601), that had made support of the poor a legal obligation of every parish. In regard to King Lear, the two most interesting stipulations of these acts are the one requiring “That the parents or children of every poor, old, blind, lame, and impotent person … shall at their own charges relieve and maintain every such poor person … upon pain that every one of them to forfeit 20s. for every month which they shall fail therein” (39 Eliz. c.3: VII, in Tanner 1940: 491), and the opening statement of the 1598 document: “Be it enacted by the authority of this present Parliament, That the Churchwardens of every parish, and four substantial householders there … who shall be nominated yearly in Easter week, … shall be called Overseers of the Poor of the same parish” to establish and administer provision of work, shelter, and cash donations (in Tanner 1940: 488-9; emphasis added).⁴ Two points thus emerge: the first is that Goneril's and Regan's behavior is not only a filial fault; it is also illegal; the second is that ordinary (albeit “substantial”) householders, not just the aristocracy, specifically were made responsible for maintaining the homeless. In view of these statutory provisions, the social violations performed by the various characters in King Lear are inflected not only against early modern “Christian” morality but also against established law. It is not only the aristocracy or the government who failed in their social obligations but persons of various social and economic strata, including even solvent parents or children of the poor. The legislations of 1598 and 1601 indicate at least a formal recognition of the “partnership” (an ideologically utopian heir to comitatus) required for a stable society, however much that recognition (then as now) was more honored in the breach than in the observance. Such a recognition began long before Elizabeth's reign, and long before the kind of entrepreneurial urbanization to which the critics I have noted attribute the social dissolution reflected in the play; in fact, legislation concerning beggars began in the mid-fourteenth century (Tanner 1940: 469) and by 1531, in a statute recognizing the difference between able-bodied (“sturdy”) poor prohibited from begging and “aged, poor, and impotent persons” permitted to do so, the population Lear categorizes as “houseless poverty” was officially recognized not as a social anomaly but as a demographic reality.

Selden's essay suggests that King Lear should be read as a reflection of the specific consequences of urbanization, enclosure, etc., none of which is mentioned in the play as a cause of homelessness or of anything else. Even Edgar/Tom's recitation of the causes of his “condition” (III.iv.85-98), aside from being entirely made up, is a litany of abuses committed by, not upon, him: whoring, gambling, drinking, pickpocketing, borrowing, and generally aspiring to live beyond his means. Moreover, before he launches his recitation, he counsels obedience to biblical commandments specifically in regard to family relations: “Obey thy parents, keep thy word's justice, swear not, commit not with man's sworn spouse, set not thy sweet heart on proud array. Tom's a-cold” (III.iv.80-3). Lear's born-again concern for “wretchedness” springs first from his insistence that no one could fall to Tom's condition unless he had “give[n] all to thy two daughters” (III.iv.49). Family relations, domestic relations, the relations of comitatus, appear to be the focus in these scenes. Anglo-Saxon elegies such as The Wanderer, The Husband's Message, The Wife's Lament, and The Seafarer remind us that homelessness existed long before capitalism. We follow Lear and his mini-court of vagrants, but we never learn what happens to his “hundred knights,”⁵ presumably also left homeless, who were “riotous” even under Goneril's roof, that is, before they were dismissed and dispersed. We can assume that they met a fate quite similar to the one recited by Tom. “The vagrant was the extreme case of that much-feared menace, the ‘masterless’ man or woman. A society held together by the cement of the household required that everyone have a parent or a master” (Underdown 1985: 36). If Shakespeare addressed contemporary developments in economic practices, as Selden and others suggest, he did so in the context of the breakdown in family relations and codes of loyalty and reciprocal responsibility.

The liminal heath, in King Lear as in Macbeth, stands as the antithesis of all that words like “home,” “court,” and “civilization” normally signify. Such marginal loci are distinct places contextually reserved in ritual for actions that cannot (properly) occur within the bounds of normal life. “Physical space helps to structure the events which take place in it” (P. Burke 1978: 108). Roberto Da Matta, an anthropologist investigating the Brazilian Carnival, writes at length about the social expectations and appropriations of open and closed spaces:

The category “street” indicates the world with its unpredictable events, its actions and passions. The category “house” pertains to a controlled universe, where things are in their proper places. …

The distinctive feature of the domain of the house seems to be control over social relations, which implies a greater intimacy and a lesser social distance than elsewhere … but the street implies a certain lack of control and a distancing between self and others. … It is an area of confusions and novelties, where robberies occur and where it is necessary to walk carefully, suspicious and alert. In sum the street, as a generic category in opposition to the house, is a public place, controlled by the government or by destiny—those impersonal forces over which we have minimal control.

In this sense the street is equivalent to the category scrub land (mato) or forest (floresta) of the rural world, or to the “nature” of the tribal world. In each case we are speaking of a partly unknown and only partly controlled domain peopled with dangerous figures. Thus it is in the street and in the forests that the deceivers, the criminals, and spirits live—those entities with whom one never has precise contractual relations.

(1984: 209-11)

Da Matta's distinctions illuminate Shakespeare's heath, which encompasses some of the same social operations as the Brazilian “street” (or scrub land or forest). It too is a place of uncertain social relations, imprecise contracts, dangerous figures. It is of course a symbolically liminal space, but symbolic terms do not adequately convey the real, physical, material dangers of social annihilation. In a society that recognizes the primacy of the house and of households, to be homeless is to be inhuman, even less than animal:

This night, wherein the cub-drawn bear would couch,
The lion and the belly-pinched wolf
Keep their fur dry, unbonneted he runs,
And bids what will take all.

(III.i.12-15)

Domesticity in this sense adumbrates a law of natural behavior that gives wild animals the sense to come in out of the rain. Against those forces that would thus annihilate them, Shakespeare's outcasts establish domesticity wherever they find themselves, even in a hovel on the heath. This kind of domesticity, it should be said, is in one sense quite distinct, and in another sense difficult to separate, from material issues of property, land, and the ways in which land is bound up in the operations of ideology. In King Lear those issues are most clearly articulated in the Gloucester-Edmund-Edgar constellation, though they are also present in Lear's focus on the enfranchisement of Goneril and Regan and disenfranchisement of Cordelia (Dollimore 1989: 199-201). The domestic and the ideological are in this context reciprocal interventions. Nevertheless a distinction can be made between land as commodity, with all the attributes of “power, property and inheritance” (Dollimore 1989: 197), and land as a site for the affective emotional operations of domestic life. Lear's imagined haven with Cordelia in a birdcage-prison does not seem so crazy when we realize that birdcages, like some asylums and some prisons, are meant to protect their inmates from predators.

The primacy of domestic structure as well as of such “feudal” customs as monogamy, intrafamilial obligations, and the reciprocal duties of monarchy were not immediately eradicated by the rise of an individual-centered bourgeois system. The multiple breaches of order in King Lear are rooted in the several failures by half of the central characters, and especially the ones invested with power, to guard any idea of interconnectedness. Those who retain and embody socially constructive values must do so by dissembling (Edgar, Kent, and in his own way the Fool) or in exile (Cordelia). In the face of such rivings and rivalries as we see in this play, no civilization can survive, let alone flourish.

Because the play attends at length to Lear's painful anagnorisis and Gloucester's and Kent's abiding loyalty, it permits a degree of sympathy toward “a sight most pitiful in the meanest wretch, / Past speaking of in a king” (IV.vi.204-5), and a degree of righteous satisfaction at Goneril's poisoning, Regan's suicide, and Edmund's relatively honorable death by duel. The play's characters assign a certain traditional logic to its fatalities: “This shows you are above, / You justicers, that these our nether crimes / So speedily can venge! But, O poor Gloucester” (Albany, IV.ii.78-80); “The gods are just, and of our pleasant vices / Make instruments to plague us” (Edgar, V.iii.171-2) and Kent's apocalyptic question about the “promis'd end” (V.iii.265) suggest that divine justice has been served. Even the cynical Edmund, whose goddess was “Nature,” dies acknowledging a tidy cosmology: “The wheel is come full circle, I am here” (V.iii.175). But there is something unconvincing, unsatisfying, about such lip-service to supernatural order near and at the end of a drama that repeatedly insists on human rather than divine interventions as the causes of disaster. Abstract and malleable concepts of justice, whether human or divine, have no practical consequence for a state “gor'd”—that is, covered with blood (from the Old English gor or filth, recalling Douglas's “matter out of place”) and also split, pierced, triangulated (from the Old English gara, a pointed triangular piece of land, and gar, spear). Kent is wise to reject Albany's suggestion that he and Edgar jointly “sustain” it, not only because, as a faithful feudal retainer, he will soon join his lord in death (V.iii.323), but also because a dual kingship replicates the division of the kingdom that constituted the play's initial rupture. The play's end implies no restoration or resurrection. The image of “sustaining” a “gor'd state” is that of holding together the edges of a gaping wound until time's sutures can reconstitute the flesh. Shakespearean tragedy consistently concludes with a wish that such a healing might occur extra-dramatically, in some unrepresented future time, and simultaneously represents that wish as impossible. The “promis'd end / Or image of that horror” is the total dissolution of both structure and communitas.

In Macbeth, a loyal thane violates the “double trust” of his kinsman/king and guest. Duncan more than once counted on the trust mandated by comitatus; before he placed it in Macbeth, he had similarly relied on Cawdor: “He was a gentleman on whom I built / An absolute trust” (I.iv.13-14). With the king's “most sacrilegious murther” (II.iii.67)—the violation of more than his trust—comes statuslessness, liminality, the negation of all structures and definitions; “nothing is / But what is not” (I.iii.141-2). Such moments are dangers against which the instantaneous succession in the formula “the king is dead; long live the king” is posed, and are to be avoided—except in drama, where they are explored in the safety of a hypothetical question: what if?

Macbeth moves by and is built around questions. The first four scenes and II.i all begin with interrogatives. The opening question, the Weird Sisters' “When shall we three meet again?” quickly establishes the perhaps surprising fact that a disciplined order governs their world: they will meet again, at a specific time and place, according to a plan. We see that same careful attention to detail in the list of the caldron's ingredients. The question Duncan asks in the first line of the second scene offers a disturbing contrast: “What bloody man is that?” The bloody sergeant appears as a man turned inside-out, an inversion that emblematizes the whole play. There will be a good deal more blood turned outward before the play ends. The grooms' faces will be smeared with blood; so will Macbeth's and his wife's hands. Macbeth tells Banquo's murderer: “There's blood upon thy face. … / 'Tis better thee without than he within” (III.iv.13-14). Lady Macbeth mutters as she sleepwalks, “Yet who would have thought the old man to have had so much blood in him?” (V.i.39-40). Indeed, how much blood is within is something we are never expected to know unless the body's boundaries are breached. “Blood” in this context (or out of its proper context) is Douglas's “dirt,” defilement, pollution, like the “gor'd state” that remains at the end of King Lear. The bloody sergeant instantiates a discourse of inversions that signal confusion and disturb rational clarity: the man turned inside-out is not a pretty sight. The image appears again when Macbeth sees Banquo's ghost: “the time has been, / That, when the brains were out, the man would die, / And there an end; but now they rise again” (III.iv.77-9).

Inversion is inextricable in this play from paradox and contradiction. The musical cadences of the Sisters' chant, “fair is foul and foul is fair” (I.i.11), contrast sharply with Macbeth's chilling citation of paradox in his first scene, after Duncan's envoy names him Cawdor and proves half of the Sisters' prophecy. His mind turns to kingship and the means of achieving it:

My thought, whose murther yet is but fantastical,
Shakes so my single state of man,
That function is smother'd in surmise,
And nothing is but what is not.

(I.iii.139-42)

Paradox signals the permeability and thus the contamination of logical boundaries and definitions: “To be King / Stands not within the prospect of belief, / No more than to be Cawdor” (I.iii.73-5). The impossible is the only truth.

It is in this context that the play represents Scotland's transformation to a structure modeled on English hierarchy, when Malcolm declares to his followers at the end of the play, “My thanes and kinsmen, / Henceforth be earls, the first that ever Scotland / In such an honor nam'd” (V.ix.28-30). Culture, too, is turned inside-out in Macbeth. Its structure is derived by way of human anatomy; the play's definition of culture, like Hamlet's and Lear's, waits upon its definition of “human,” which is predominantly, in this play, collapsed into definitions of (mostly masculine) gender. Macbeth claims that he “dare do all that may become a man; / Who dares do more is none”; his wife replies, “What beast was't then, / That made you break this enterprise to me?” (I.vii.46-8). Later, explaining why he killed Duncan's grooms, he says, “who can be wise, amaz'd, temperate and furious, / Loyal and neutral, in a moment? No man” (II.iii.108-9). To be human, he suggests, is to live in clarity, without contradictions, but that idealistic notion too is overturned in this play of paradoxes. It is interesting that the opposite of “loyal” here is “neutral,” not “treacherous”; there are some words Macbeth can not say. Still later, he reasons with the men he hires to kill Banquo, seeking their personal commitment to the murder; evidently he does not rely on mercenary contracts. He asks if they will submit to Banquo's suppression of their advancement; they reply, “We are men, my liege,” like the soldier in Lear, ordered by Edmund to hang Cordelia, who says, “I cannot draw a cart nor eat dried oats; / If it be man's work I'll do't” (V.iii.38-9); but, as Lear said, the distinction between human and animal is sometimes difficult to locate: “Man's life is cheap as beast's” (II.iv.267). Macbeth presses for further distinction, saying that there are men and men, as there are all kinds of dogs in the canine catalogue (III.i.91-100). The definition of “man” in these instances is derived by slight degrees of differentiation from an animal. Lady Macbeth thinks that manhood is fearlessness: “When you durst do it, then you were a man” (I.vii.49), but fearlessness or fierceness is the woman's part in this play, and in any event, the play's debate over gendered behavior is doubly interpellated by both the Weird Sisters' androgynous appearance and Macduff's insistence on his right to grieve for his dead wife and children: “I must also feel it as a man” (IV.iii.221). When Macbeth is frightened by Banquo's ghost at the banquet (III.iv), Lady Macbeth can easily mock her husband's manhood; the ghost does not, after all, appear to her. His defense is that he would not fear what he could fight: a Russian bear, a Hyrcanian tiger, an armed rhinocerous. Man to man or man to beast, “what man dare I dare” (III.iv.98-100). Human and animal are in very close relation here, and that relation is fundamentally combative. What may finally distinguish human from bestial, as in the case of Edgar as Poor Tom, is the fact that human beings wear clothes.

Simultaneously with even the most rudimentary forms of civilization, costume became a cultural artifact, the robe encoding the role. Costume is as central to ceremony and ritual, to all the forms of order that identify culture, as to the stage and the court. In the early modern period, dress not only signified role, but also was dictated by it; as Lisa Jardine has noted, Sumptuary Laws, beginning “within a year of Elizabeth I's accession,” and culminating in the elaborately detailed legislation of 1597, marked “the tension between the old, outgoing feudal order and the new mercantile order” (1983: 141-2); they were evidence of the acute anxiety produced by changing social structures. Stephen Orgel points out that when monarchs appeared in masques at court, they “were revealed in roles that expressed the strongest Renaissance beliefs about the nature of kingship” (1975: 38-9). In the masque, a theatrical form saturated with sumptuousness, the monarch's costume was even more sumptuous than the rest; Elizabeth reportedly had difficulty walking in her gowns, and their elaborate patterns iconographically told volumes' worth. Even in the earliest cultures, clothes made the man, and decoration was designation: hunters and priests put on the skins of their animal victims as a sign that they had absorbed and become fully identified with the power of the slain.

Early in the play Macbeth asks Ross, who has just hailed him as Thane of Cawdor, “Why do you dress me / In borrowed robes?” (I.iii.108-9). Lady Macbeth thus prods her husband to action: “Was the hope drunk / Wherein you dress'd yourself?” (I.vii.35-6). New regimes call for new uniforms, and the governed must wear them as well as they can, as Macduff cryptically warns when he announces Macbeth's accession: “Adieu, / Lest our old robes sit easier than our new” (II.iv.37-8). Macbeth's new robes fit worse than Macduff's: “Now does he feel his title / Hang loose about him, like a giant's robe / Upon a dwarfish thief” (V.ii.20-2). Shakespeare's frequent derision of courtly fondness for borrowed style is represented only once in this somber play by the Porter's remark about French hose (II.iii.14). In Lear, too, costume marks social differentiation: “If only to go warm were gorgeous, / Why, nature needs not what thou gorgeous wear'st” (II.iv.268-9). On the liminal heath, Lear's robes represent “superflux,” “lendings” he would tear off (III.iv.35,108). Distinctive clothing is an inscription of structure, and it is inextricably woven in with the ceremonies and rituals that bind the elements of particular cultures.

Those ceremonies and rituals are not neglected in Macbeth, but the attention given them reverses expectations. The formal ceremonies of court are quickly dispensed with; Duncan's burial is reported in three lines (II.iv.33-5), while Macbeth's coronation gets one and a half: “He is already nam'd, and gone to Scone / To be invested” (II.iv.31-2). These stately rituals are clearly not what the play examines. Far more attention is paid to the banquet in Macbeth's palace and to the Sisters' dance around their caldron. The formal banquet is a rite of confirmation, and marks—or should mark—the acceptance of Macbeth as king. It is therefore very important that formal procedures and rules of hospitality be observed. Early in the day set for the “solemn supper,” as Banquo enters the court, he is announced by the king as “our chief guest”; Lady Macbeth epitomizes the discourse of hospitality: “If he had been forgotten, / It had been as a gap in our great feast, / And all-thing unbecoming” (III.i.11-13). The code of hospitality protects the social order; its violation heralds anarchy. But as both Duncan and Banquo learn fatally, hospitality at the Macbeths' takes perverse forms. At the banquet itself, Lady Macbeth struggles to play the perfect hostess, cover Macbeth's lapses, and maintain the required order. The entire scene (III.iv) oscillates between the signs and processes of order and those of chaos. Macbeth calls his guests to the table: “You know your own degrees, sit down. … / Our hostess keeps her state; but in best time, / We will require her welcome” (1-6). Lady Macbeth speaks more truth than the guests realize: “to feed were best at home; / From thence, the sauce to meat is ceremony” (34-5); her husband adds, “Now good digestion wait on appetite, / And health on both” (37-8). Almost immediately the illusion of order is undone by Macbeth's vision of Banquo's gory locks.

Banquets began in civilization as the communal breaking of bread, bonding by feeding the body politic.⁶ They came to be formal, institutionalized rituals, processes of statecraft in which hierarchy was encoded in seating and food-distribution plans. Such a visible encoding of the social order not only celebrated, confirmed, and perpetuated the status quo but, by reifying it, also exposed it to possible contestation (Lincoln 1989: 81). Hierarchy thus informs and shapes hospitality, and hospitality, although it often looks like the instantiation of egalitarian communitas, ratifies structure: “You know your own degrees, sit down.”

From the start of his career, Shakespeare was interested in dining as a constitutive element in the ecology of social life: in The Comedy of Errors V.i.73-6, Aemilia meditates on the dangers of disrupted dining; in Titus Andronicus there is the perverse culinary intervention of a manic cook and a Thyestean pie. In Macbeth, the concern for peaceful eating (and sleeping) extends on all sides, and signals anxiety in regard to both personal and political health: a nameless lord tells Lennox that he hopes, with God's help and Macduff's, “we may again / Give to our tables meat, sleep to our nights, / Free from our feasts and banquets bloody knives, / … All which we pine for now” (III.vi.33-7). In an earlier scene, Macbeth would “let the frame of things disjoint, both the worlds suffer, / Ere we will eat our meal in fear, and sleep / In the affliction of these terrible dreams, / That shake us nightly” (III.ii.16-19). Dining and repose most famously intersect again in

                                                                                          … the innocent sleep,
Sleep that knits up the ravell'd sleave of care,
The death of each day's life, sore labor's bath,
Balm of hurt minds, great nature's second course,
Chief nourisher in life's feast.

(II.ii.33-7)

But in this play's discourse of inversion, where fair is foul, sleep provides the occasion for Duncan's and the grooms' murders; the hapless sailor whose wife insulted the Weird Sister is punished with eternal waking (I.iii.19-20); Macbeth will sleep no more, and Lady Macbeth sleeps walking.

The biological need for food and sleep was satisfied in early societies by appeal through ritual to divine powers (gods, spirits, demons, or totems); hunting and farming in particular were invested heavily with sacred functions.⁷ In modern societies where these needs are supplied by technology and commerce, secular and social rituals retain some of their vestigial meanings. Certainly the food supply was still a matter for concern in Shakespeare's day, when natural disasters such as drought and plague combined with human interventions such as war embargos, grain-hoarding, price manipulations, and speculation (see the Porter's line about the farmer “that hang'd himself on th' expectation of plenty” [II.iii.4]), and kept these commodities from being taken for granted.

Against that anxiety, the fullest image of plenitude in the play occurs in the ingredients list for the Sisters' caldron. Like Lear's band of refugees, these outcast, marginal women with beards set up housekeeping on a heath. Persistently demonized, the Weird Sisters ironically live the most ordinary and orderly of domestic lives. This is especially evident in comparison with the Macbeths, whose domesticity is a perversion, and the Macduffs, whose domesticity is shattered. The caldron (a uterine symbol?), the receptacle and vessel for their mysterious recipe, is the locus of their power; they are “the most fertile force in the play” (Eagleton 1986: 3). Who in the audience did not wonder—and who could ever admit to knowing—what that famous recipe produced? They are the first characters we meet as the play begins, where in an expression of absolute, even academic, order, they plan their next meeting and announce the play's dominant paradox: “Fair is foul and foul is fair” (I.i.11). We must wait until IV.i to see the women more intimately at their kettle.

Even the appearance of the Sisters is paradoxical and baffles Banquo: “you should be women / And yet your beards forbid me to interpret / That you are so” (I.iii.45-7). Old women with facial hair, the Sisters typify the mysterious folk in rural places who gather herbs and practice healing, and who are believed to be able to tell the future. In most of Celtic folklore, they did not curse or cause evil except in retaliation for harm or slander done to them, as they do to the hapless sailor whose inhospitable wife denied one chestnuts and called her a witch. The sailor's wife's remark is the play's only spoken instance of the epithet, although the Folio speech prefixes and stage directions, as well as much subsequent critical discussion, have literally demonized them. They are, as Kenneth Muir pointed out, “the kind of old women who, because of their appearance, get credited by the villagers with possessing supernatural powers—and if a cow dies or if a child falls sick they get the blame for it” (K. Muir 1962: 238). The seventeenth century's view of “witches” was by no means stable or consistent: while James I's belief in witchcraft was well known, it was not universally shared, and was countered by the sceptical positions of Reginald Scot's Discoverie of Witchcraft (1584), which James ordered burned, and Samuel Harsnett's Declaration of Egregious Popish Impostures (1603) (Monter 1983: 32). Simon Forman's description of the 1611 performance of the play refers only to “3 women feiries or Nimphes” (K. Muir 1962: xiv). Holinshed describes them as “three women in strange and wild apparell, resembling creatures of the elder world … either the weird sisters, that is … the goddesses of destinie, or else some nymphs or feiries, indued with knowledge of prophesie by their necromanticall science, bicause everie thing came to passe as they had spoken” (Bullough 1973: VII: 494-5). Travellers among the audience might have seen a resemblance to Italian benandanti, who were called witches and warlocks by Church inquisitors, but who saw themselves as “anti-witches,” procurers of good, practicing specifically agrarian fertility rites to insure and protect crops (Ginzburg 1983: 4, 22). Or the Sisters' appearance might have signalled to the more learned in the audience the hermaphrodite figure in alchemical iconology, which coincidentally represents perfect harmony and synthesis out of seeming paradox (Heninger 1977: 3, 188-90). Exotic (literally excluded, alien) power, like that of the pharmakon, works as both poison and cure; “it is an idea, before it is a phenomenon … [and] may include inversions of any of the positive values peculiar to a given society” (Larner 1981: 2). In any case, Larner argues, the European phenomena of witch-hunting and witch scares had abated by the end of the sixteenth and beginning of the seventeenth centuries, and did not take hold in Scotland and England until the 1620s (1981: 18). Moreover, variant Protestant (Lutheran, Anglican, and Puritan) distinctions of “witchcraft” from other forms of “magic” and “superstition” (Monter 1983: 28-32) radically problematize the Sisters' contemporary reception in Shakespeare's play. We cannot be sure what these women would have signalled to their audience. They are not accounted for in the play's conclusion; they simply disappear after IV.i.

What we do know about them is that in the dialogue they are called “Weird.” In the earliest, that is, the First Folio, printing, the word is spelled “weyard” (Acts III and IV) and “weyward” (Acts I and II). The OED defines it, even in the notable spelling, as: “having the power to control fate or destiny, or dealing with it, or partaking or suggesting of the supernatural.” But the Folio spelling for Acts I and II obviously suggests reading “weyward” as “wayward,” “by the wayside,” beyond the social pale; in other words, marginal and liminal. Thus the Sisters stand as foils to Lady Macbeth (Belsey 1985: 185), who begins within the social domain and willfully moves outside it. Their beards make their gender ambiguous, unknowable, and therefore dangerous, like Lady Macbeth whose famous wish to be unsexed is affirmed in her husband's “Bring forth men-children only! / For thy undaunted mettle should compose / Nothing but males” (I.vii.72-4). Women who subvert standard social definitions of the “feminine” tend to be demonized by those for whom alterity is otherwise unintelligible (Belsey 1985: 185; Larner 1981: 20).

In a play that gives a great deal of attention to domestic dysfunction, the Sisters paradoxically present the nearest thing we have to “normal” domesticity. The probably interpolated figure of Hecate provides a mistress for their household: she praises their management of the caldron (IV.i.39-43), and when they transgress, as they appear to have done in the first of her two scenes, she promptly scolds them as “saucy and overbold” (III.v.3). Thus chastened, they turn to their kettle and stir things up. The marginal liminal heath where the Sisters live is the appropriate locus for them, as it is for Macbeth in his transformation from loyal thane to murderer and tyrant. In the open, undomiciled space of the heath, again inversely, public becomes private and unbounded “waywardness” is domesticated.

Liminality does not force transformation; if it did, Banquo would have been similarly changed. But it is required when such changes are taking place; it provides the space between what was and what will be. In Hamlet, Lear, Richard II, and Coriolanus, the dramatic action begins at the center (the court, the city) and moves outward, respectively, to England, to the heath, to Wales, to the Volscian camp. In Macbeth, where all structure is inverted and fair is foul, two of the first three scenes take place on the heath and the other in “a camp near Forres.” We do not see the inside of a castle until the fourth scene. The action moves from marginal to central space, but in this play, the space inside structure is more dangerous than outside. There is no safety in castles. There is no reincorporation of the hero who is also the villain. There is no reintegration of Scotland, which instead is transformed to a version of English hierarchy. What that transformation registered for an audience whose monarch was a Scot turned English is a speculative matter: on the one hand, it looks like a confirmation of English political structure; on the other, it discloses the arbitrariness, the instability, of political/cultural definitions inscribed within the play's discourse of inversion.

The force of transformation—“the first that ever Scotland / In such an honor nam'd” (V.ix.29-30)—is the fiat of nomenclature, the ordering system of signifiers. The play's action moves through a lexical progression from things that cannot be named, as when Macbeth could or would not say “treacherous” as the opposite of “loyal,” to those that must. Lady Macbeth, early on, says, “Glamis thou art … and shalt be / What thou art promis'd” (I.v.15-16); she does not say what that is. Macbeth cannot say “Amen” (II.ii.26). Throughout most of the play, Duncan's murder is simply called “the deed,” especially after the fact; regicide is unspeakable. Macduff cannot say it either: “Tongue nor heart / Cannot conceive, nor name thee!” (II.iii.64-5). Macbeth asks the Sisters what they do; they reply, “A deed without a name” (IV.i.49). Malcolm refuses to say Macbeth's name; it blisters his tongue (IV.iii.12) until he links it with the word “treacherous” (18), the word Macbeth would not say. That word marks the turning point, after which names emerge steadily as ordering forms of differentiation. Ross calls Scotland not “our mother, but our grave” (IV.iii.166). Malcolm says that Macbeth smacks “of every sin / That has a name” (IV.iii.59-60). Finally, the naming comes to closure when, as noted above, Malcolm re-names his “thanes and kinsmen” as the first Scottish Earls, signifying with that naming the absorption of one cultural structure into another. Names are always signifiers, indicating identities and relationships when they are assigned. But when they are used, spoken, vocally inflected, they signal a range of possibilities, from affirmation to deception (Eagleton 1986: 6). Naming is magical invocation: after Marlowe's Faustus signs his contract, Mephistopheles is forbidden to name “who made the world” (II.ii.67-73). Inversely, in the parodic scenes, Faustus, Wagner, and even the clown Robin can invoke by naming major and minor demons at will. Traditional Judaism uses the Tetragrammaton to mask the true (and unspeakable) name of God; conversely, in Islam, “the ninety-nine names, or epithets, of God, comprising all the divine attributes, may be written on paper (or simply repeated) in order to produce far-reaching effects” (Goody and Watt 1968: 227). The study of cultures, from Freud (1950) to Lévi-Strauss (1966), Goody and Watt (1968), and Foucault (1970) is in large measure the study of names.

Macbeth as hero/villain remains one of the most vexing definition-defying constructs in Shakespearean tragedy. His status as villain, as “butcher,” poses no difficulty, but if he is not at the same time the tragic hero, then he is the only titular protagonist in Shakespearean tragedy (except perhaps for Julius Caesar) who is not. Derrida's model of the bivalent pharmakon, poison and cure, reconciles this interpretive dissonance. So too do Girard's early theories of mythic process and the “sacrificial crisis.” He notes the “conflictual aspects in the narrative elements at the beginning of many primitive myths [which] suggest violent disorder rather than a mere absence of order, primordial or otherwise. We often have a confused struggle between indistinguishable antagonists” (1978: 185). Eliminating one of the antagonists permits differentiation of character, which represents the differentiation of human thought, which, in turn, in Girard's view, is the birth of cultural order. Differentiation, i.e., separation, alienation, is served by scapegoating, for which a given myth provides the narrative context. Scapegoating requires motive; thus the goat is invested with “a truly fantastic and superhuman power to harm the community” (Girard 1978: 187). We have already seen how these distinctions apply to Bolingbroke and Richard in Richard II. They apply equally well to the Weird Sisters and the Macbeths. The malefactor/victim is presented as someone special, either alienated from the community from the start or one who moves outside it. The Sisters and Lady Macbeth may serve as the most obvious figures of separation and alienation, but ultimately it is Macbeth who is “sacrificed” as malefactor and victim. The difficulty of seeing Macbeth as victim, sacrificial or otherwise, except of a will to power, is offset by recognizing that as a constructed subject Macbeth embodies all that is feudal Scotland at the start of the play. Scotland is full of contradictions: its values of bravery and fealty are already threatened by the first Thane of Cawdor, the traitor whom Macbeth in every respect replaces. Its structure of monarchic succession is unclear until Duncan names his successor. Like Macbeth's, its “single state” is “shaken”; its function is “smother'd in surmise / And nothing is but what is not” (I.iii.140-2). “There's no art,” says Duncan, “To find the mind's construction in the face” (I.iv.11-12); it resides deeper. Macbeth is Scotland's “monstrous double”; he replicates its contradictions, its feudal values and the violence that sustains them. From loyal thane, “brave Macbeth,” “valiant cousin! worthy gentleman” (I.ii.16, 24), he is quickly turned around, or rather, like the bloody sergeant's appearance, turned inside-out. And he in turn is doubled and inverted by Malcolm.

Just before he announces his virginity to Macduff, Malcolm prepares himself for heroic function, in Girard's terms, by identifying himself completely with Macbeth. This long passage (IV.iii.50-100) is more than just a test of Macduff's loyalty to Scotland. Reciting a catalogue of extraordinary vices, Malcolm makes himself more dangerous to Scotland than Macbeth:

It is myself I mean; in whom I know
All the particulars of vice so grafted,
That, when they shall be open'd, black Macbeth
Will seem as pure as snow; and the poor State
Esteem him as a lamb, being compar'd
With my confineless harms.

(IV.iii.50-5)

In a complicated process of repeated inversions and identifications, Malcolm turns himself inside-out, “open'd,” exposing vices in comparison with which Macbeth appears as “a lamb,” the emblem of innocence and sacrifice. The ritual subject identifies with his opponent and becomes what must be destroyed, and then redifferentiates himself as he emerges newly forged, new born. The next coronation at Scone, Malcolm's, will doubtless be fully and properly attended, except, perhaps, for his brother Donalbain. Duncan's other son disappeared from the play after II.iii, even earlier than the Weird Sisters. His last ominous line, “the near in blood, / The nearer bloody” (140-1), suggests the possibility of another cycle of treachery and kin-killing.

The play ends with only an illusory order emerging out of paradox and contradiction. When Macbeth hears that “none of woman born / Shall harm” him (IV.i.80-1), he believes that there is no such thing and thus misrecognizes Macduff's threat. The symbolic contradiction entailed in the Sister's prophecy likewise appears to bring about, but in fact problematizes, Scotland's rescue by Macduff, not “born of woman” and left childless, and its restoration of “measure, time, and place” (V.ix.39) by Malcolm, “yet / Unknown to woman” (IV.iii.125-6). Like Marcus Andronicus's ironic promise to knit the “scatter'd corn” of a Rome imagistically left without women, Malcolm's and Macduff's combination of unusual birth, childlessness, and virginity suggest no potential for procreative renewal. The hope that “Things at the worst will cease, or else climb upward / To what they were before” (IV.ii.24-5) is shattered by the end of the play, when it is clear that “things” will not return “to what they were before.” Scotland will not be restored; it will be reconstructed in the image of its southern neighbor.

Arguing for Macbeth's status as tragic hero, Kenneth Muir wrote:

We cannot divide the world into potential murderers and those who are not. It consists of imperfect human beings. … If they commit evil it is because they hope thereby to avoid another evil, which seems to them for the moment to be worse, or obtain another good, which seems attractive if only because it is not in their possession.

(1962: lxix)

Once again, Tom o'Bedlam's formulation says this better: he studies “How to prevent the fiend, and to kill vermin” (Lear III.iv.159). Warding off spiritual harm and preventing disease are exactly the functions of ritual practice. Rites of passage specifically are defined as prophylactic rather than purgative. They clarify and decontaminate entrance to a new status, and they emphasize the permanence and value of all societal classifications (Douglas 1966: 56). In representing the processes of alienation, identification, and scapegoating, King Lear and Macbeth represent the basic processes of civilization-under-construction and the difficult and problematic birth of structure and hierarchy.

Writing about King Lear, Stephen Greenblatt notes the “intense and sustained struggle” at the juncture of Elizabethan and Jacobean England “to redefine the central values of society. … At the heart of this struggle … was the definition of the sacred, a definition that directly involved secular as well as religious institutions” (1985: 165-6). He concludes by saying that Lear's concerns are still ours:

Because the judicial torture and expulsion of evil have for centuries been bound up with the display of power at the center of society. Because we no longer believe in the magical ceremonies through which devils were once made to speak and were driven out of the bodies of the possessed. Because the play recuperates and intensifies our need for these ceremonies, even though we do not believe in them, and performs them, carefully marked out for us as frauds, for our continued consumption.

(1985: 183)

He thus reasserts the appeal to systems of order through ritual and ceremony. Nevertheless, the nihilistic images of their violations peep out from under these plays in performance, reminding us that cultural structure is always held in a delicate balance. “Double, double, toil and trouble.” Like Duncan approaching Macbeth's castle, we are always “here in double trust.”

Notes

1. The variant assignments of the play's closing lines in Quarto and Folio texts do not affect this supposition. Regardless of whether Albany or Edgar speaks “The weight of this sad time we must obey,” the penultimate lines, “Friends of my soul, you twain / Rule in this realm” are delivered to Edgar and Kent, the latter declining.

2. These “mock trial” lines occur in the Quarto version, but not in the Folio.

3. The commonplace Renaissance analogy of state and family is implicit here, of course, and has been thoroughly explored in recent critical texts, e.g., Selden 1987. Selden's argument, like that of his Jacobean textual citations, focuses on the “family” as a social unit, and not upon the physical structure it occupies.

4. The following stipulation of Section II of the 1598 document might have interested Shakespeare: among those specifically to be “taken, adjudged, and deemed rogues, vagabonds, and sturdy beggars, and [to] sustain such pain and punishment as by this Act is in that behalf appointed” were

   all persons calling themselves scholars going about begging, … all fencers, bearwards, common players of interludes, and minstrels wandering abroad (other than players of interludes belonging to any baron of this realm, or any other honourable personage of greater degree, to be authorised to play under the hand and seal of arms of such baron or personage) …

   (in Tanner 1940: 485)

5. An important subtext in Lear's insistence on retaining his hundred knights and his daughters' systematic reduction of that number to zero is indicated in Old Irish legal texts which specified how different ranks within nobility were distinguished; the size of the retinue they commanded was a visible encoding of status (Lincoln 1989: 78). Thus to dismantle Lear's retinue is not only to leave him unprotected but also to eradicate his status altogether.

6. This is, unsurprisingly, no idle metaphor. Lincoln reprints a composite of the hall plan from the Feast of Tara, the royal and ceremonial center of medieval Ireland, compiled from detailed descriptions in the twelfth-century Book of Leinster and the slightly later Yellow Book of Lecan. The plan indicates not only a complex seating hierarchy from the king and queen (the only female permitted at the banquet) down to the satirists, clowns, wall-makers, ditch-diggers, and royal doorkeepers, but also the portions of meat to be served to each rank. Carvers and butlers, seated nearest the kitchen, were served the head, the king a tenderloin, the queen a rump steak, and the royal doorkeepers the coccyx:

   [Given] the spatial contrast between the top of the diagram/head of the animal/kitchen area, on the one hand, and the bottom of the diagram/coccyx of the animal/doorway on the other, it does not seem too farfetched to suggest that a trip from one end of the hall to the other might well be associated to a similar (and not unrelated) passage through the alimentary canal.

   (Lincoln 1989: 80)

7. In an interesting and brief essay, Holland links the botanical imagery in the play with the cycles of legendary vegetation kings. The moving Birnam Wood, he says, visually suggests May Day or midsummer rites in which the celebrants were

   so decked out in sprigs and green branches that it seemed as though a whole forest came marching. The parade signifies defeat for … a hibernal giant whose rule comes to an end when the May festival begins. … Thus when Birnam Wood moves, Macbeth is killed and Malcolm turns to things “which would be newly planted with the time.” The vegetable qualities of the legendary year-king are grafted onto Macbeth's rise and fall.

   (Holland 1960: 37-8)

   The play abounds in images related to the processes of generation that Macbeth and his wife violate. Shakespeare undoubtedly knew (or knew of) the drawing of the “Banquo Tree,” the genealogical tree complete with flowers that accompanied Leslie's 1578 De Origine, Moribus, et Rebus Gestis Scotorum (Bullough 1973: VII: 516). Aligned with its iconography, Scotland under Macbeth is a “grave” where “good men's lives / Expire before the flowers in their cups” (IV.iii.166, 171-2) and his defeat figures a ritual cleansing of the Wasteland: the sterile old king is sacrificed and replaced by the virginal Malcolm whose fertility is yet to be verified while Scotland waits for Banquo's scion, James VI.

Bibliography

Unless otherwise indicated, quotations from Shakespeare are taken from the Riverside edition of the Complete Works, ed. G. B. Evans, Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1974.

Aristotle (1961) Poetics, trans. K. Telford, Chicago: H. Regnery.

Bachelard, G. (1969) The Poetics of Space, trans. M. Jolas, Boston: Beacon Press.

Belsey, C. (1985) The Subject of Tragedy: Identity and Difference in Renaissance Drama, London: Methuen.

Bourdieu, P. (1977) Outline of a Theory of Practice, trans. R. Nice, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Bullough, G. (1973) Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare, 8 vols, New York: Columbia University Press.

Burke, P. (1978) Popular Culture in Early Modern Europe, London: Temple Smith.

Da Matta, R. (1984) “Carnival in Multiple Planes,” in J. J. MacAloon (ed.) Rite, Drama, Festival, Spectacle: Rehearsals Toward a Theory of Cultural Performance, Philadelphia: Institute for the Study of Human Issues.

Delany, P. (1977) “King Lear and the Decline of Feudalism,” PMLA 92: 429-40.

Dollimore, J. (1989) Radical Tragedy: Religion, Ideology and Power in the Drama of Shakespeare and his Contemporaries, 2nd edition, Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf.

Douglas, M. (1966) Purity and Danger: An Analysis of the Concepts of Pollution and Taboo, London: ARK Paperbacks.

Eagleton, T. (1986) William Shakespeare, Oxford: Basil Blackwell.

Else, G. F. (1967) Aristotle's Poetics: The Argument, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.

Foucault, M. (1970) The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences, London: Tavistock.

Foucault, M. (1986) “Of Other Spaces,” trans. J. Miskowiec, Diacritics (Spring): 22-7.

Freud, S. (1950) Totem and Taboo, ed. J. Strachey, New York: Norton.

Ginzburg, C. (1983) The Night Battles: Witchcraft and Agrarian Cults in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries, trans. J. and A. Tedeschi, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.

Girard, R. (1978) “To Double Business Bound”: Essays on Literature, Mimesis, and Anthropology, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.

Goody, J. and Watt, I. (1968) “The Consequences of Literacy,” in J. Goody (ed.) Literacy in Traditional Societies, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Greenblatt, S. (1985) “Shakespeare and the Exorcists,” in P. Parker and G. Hartman (eds) Shakespeare and the Question of Theory, London: Methuen.

Heninger, S. K. (1977) The Cosmographical Glass: Renaissance Diagrams of the Universe, San Marino: Huntington Library.

Holland, N. (1960) “Macbeth as Hibernal Giant,” Literature and Psychology 10: 37-8.

Jardine, L. (1983) Still Harping on Daughters: Women and Drama in the Age of Shakespeare, Sussex: Harvester Press.

Larner, C. (1981) Enemies of God: The Witch-hunt in Scotland, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.

Lévi-Strauss, C. (1966) The Savage Mind, Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Lincoln, B. (1989) Discourse and the Construction of Society: Comparative Studies of Myth, Ritual, and Classification, New York: Oxford University Press.

Monter, W. (1983) Ritual, Myth and Magic in Early Modern Europe, Athens: Ohio University Press.

Muir, K. (ed.) (1962) William Shakespeare: Macbeth, Arden Shakespeare, London: Methuen.

Orgel, S. (1975) The Illusion of Power, Berkeley: University of California Press.

Patterson, A. (1989) Shakespeare and the Popular Voice, Cambridge: Basil Blackwell.

Selden, R. (1987) “King Lear and True Need,” Shakespeare Studies 19: 143-69.

Tanner, J. R. (ed.) (1940) Tudor Constitutional Documents a.d. 1485-1603, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Turner, V. (1969) The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure, Ithaca: Cornell University Press.

Underdown, D. (1985) Revel, Riot, and Rebellion: Popular Politics and Culture in England 1603-1660, Oxford: Oxford University Press.