SOURCE: “The Politics of Aloofness in Macbeth,” in English Literary Renaissance, Vol. 26, No. 3, Autumn, 1996, pp. 531-60.

[In the following essay, Baldo contrasts the styles of rule of Queen Elizabeth and King James and studies the way in which James's aloofness is reflected in Macbeth. Baldo explains that whereas Shakespeare's Elizabethan plays reflect Elizabeth's theatricality and interrupted succession, Macbeth is a reflection of James's aloof style of rule and of his emphasis on lineal succession.]

There is the same method through all the world in general. All things come to their height by degrees; there they stay the least of time; then they decline as they rose.

—Owen Feltham, Resolves, XLIX

The King our Soveraigne is lawfully and lineally descended … and that by so long a continued line of lawfull descent, as therein he exceedeth all the Kings that the world now knoweth.

—The Lord Chancellor, 1608

Jonathan Goldberg sums up the contrasting styles of Queen Elizabeth and King James as follows: in the pageants that were an important part of both monarchs' “symbolics of power,” “Elizabeth played at being a part,” whereas “James played at being apart, separate.”¹ Displaying “an unmovingness even as he moved through London,” James departed dramatically from the style of his predecessor, who “offered a show of love in her first display before the people in her procession through London in 1558/9,” and who generally “provided a mirror of the people's hopes and wishes in her attentiveness to the pageants, in pressing the English Bible to her bosom after kissing it, in seemingly spontaneous responses to the words said to her” (pp. 29-32). By contrast with the Queen who played according to script, as it were, “James stood aloof; for him to see was enough” (p. 31). In Macbeth James's elected style of aloofness, imitating “the style of gods,” is reflected in the disquieting quietude of Malcolm and in a multitude of other forms of aloofness. “Aloofness” is an exceptionally complex trope in the play, and it appears to be the winning style of kingship.

James's aloofness is intimately tied to his doctrine of legitimism. Succeeding a childless virgin and coming from Scotland, James emphasized lineage in his speech to his first Parliament,² a strategy, I shall argue, that produces “aloofness” in many forms. Claiming to trace his ancestry to the first king of Scotland, Fergus I of the 4th century B.C., James believed and caused others to believe that he held the throne of England by “birthright and lineal descent.” In his 1607 address to Parliament, James insisted that the “Kings descent [should be] mainteined, and the heritage of the succession and Monarchie, which hath bene a Kingdome, to which I am in descent, three hundred yeeres before CHRIST.”³ He also expressed the hope that his royal line would rule England “to the end of the world,” a wish echoed in Macbeth's glum response to the Show of Kings, “What, will the line stretch out to th' crack of doom?” (4.1.132).⁴

For Elizabeth it would have been impolitic to draw too much attention to lineal succession, one of the primary motifs of Macbeth, since a whiff of illegitimacy surrounded her reign from the beginning. Elizabeth cultivated a theatrical style of kingship, in which her legitimacy was continually reaffirmed not by aloofness but by her theatricality, her participation in shows of force and of love. As Goldberg, maintains, “The queen's legitimacy, the law that justifies her power, is the inheritance from Henry VIII of the show of force and the ability to display the actuality of power when the show failed to work” (p. 28). Shakespeare's Elizabethan history plays and tragedies echo her theatrical displays of power as well as the interrupted and distinctly unlineal successions characteristic of her family's history. By contrast, Macbeth shares James's trope of power, lineal succession, and the aloofness that was its natural issue. His aloofness is refracted and shown in several parts in Macbeth: those of Banquo, Macduff, the witches, and especially Malcolm. Not only does he succeed to the throne at the end of the play, but his eventual succession is mirrored by many other speeches and situations in which he appears in a general way sovereign over the successive. A mastery over succession from a position separate and apart from it takes many forms: to name just a few, Malcolm's embodiment of a stable, universal paradigm of kingship; the witches' foreknowledge of events; the symbolic exemption of Macduff, the man not born of woman, from biological succession; and in its most explicitly political form, Banquo's founding of a line of kings to which he does not properly belong. Malcolm's mastery over seriality of various kinds, analogous to that of his playwright as well as of the weird sisters, Banquo, and Macduff, sets him apart from Macbeth, who is a prisoner of interminable successions that have no exterior, no end, and therefore no meaning.⁵ A transcendence of sequential articulation is an essential part of the formula for political success in this play. Because it is independent of successions of various kinds, Malcolm's success seems infinitely repeatable, in a succession that stretches to infinity in the Show of Kings: seems, because linear, sequential order is challenged by the stuttering and cyclical progress of speech, action, and, in one of the play's visions of it, history itself.⁶

Although the line was James's favored image for the history of his house and of the countries he governed, it was not the dominant way of conceiving history in Elizabethan and Jacobean England. Partly as an inheritance from classical historians, cyclical conceptions of history predominated in the Tudor and early Stuart eras.⁷ The understanding of history as either a single cycle or a series of repeatable cycles received some competition from a degenerative model of history as a continuous and irreversible decline, a view that also had ample classical precedents. A third conception, according to which history marked a steady progress or upward movement, began to emerge later in the seventeenth century.⁸

The cyclical model of history, the dominant one for Renaissance England, was subject to a variety of interpretations. Thus, for Raleigh the cyclical pattern of rise and fall evident in all the great kingdoms was providentially ordained, the doleful evidence of “GODS judgments upon the greater and greatest.”⁹ For others, like Hakewill and Browne, the cyclical order of history was to be celebrated as evidence of the perfection of God, commonly described as a circle whose center is everywhere and circumference nowhere.¹⁰ A cyclical view of history was sometimes put forth to attack the competing idea of history as inevitable and universal decay. In short, in cyclical accounts of history the accent could fall on the inevitability of either degeneration or regeneration.

In spite of this inherent flexibility in the view of history as a cycle(s), such a view was potentially threatening to a monarch who wished his line to rule in England “to the end of the world.” It is telling that during the Interregnum, the republican James Harrington alluded to the cyclical view of history to explain the demise of the Stuart dynasty: “the dissolution of the late Monarchy was as natural as the death of a man.”¹¹ In addition, the history of Scotland, including the reigns of both Macbeth and Malcolm, seemed particularly well-suited to a cyclical interpretation, replete as it was with the pattern of coup and countercoup, seeming evidence of Fortune's wheel at work.¹² As Sir Christopher Piggot, an English member of Parliament, said in 1605, the Scots “have not suffered above two kings to die in their beds, these two hundred years.”¹³ The Scottish historiographical tradition was intensely disliked by James for its record of an elective element in the Scottish monarchy as well as its frequent advancement of the idea of limited monarchy, as David Norbrook has recently detailed.¹⁴ For those in Shakespeare's audience who knew that Malcolm turned tyrant and was subsequently deposed, following a familiar pattern in the history of the Scottish monarchy, the image of future Scottish and English history as an unbroken, peaceful, and infinite line of descent must have seemed a skewed prophecy indeed. To those spectators, the shape of history (including Stuart history) might have been better approximated not by the rigorously sequential Jacobean line,¹⁵ but by the grotesque antic rounds of the witches, like the one that follows on the heels of the Show, or the circularity of their order of speech. In addition, as a force for producing doubling and repetition, cyclicism in Macbeth becomes linked with things disruptive of political order: equivocation, duplicity, opposition, conflict, and the repeated, cyclical rise and fall of monarchs and dynasties. The Show of Kings, with its incorporation of that important instrument of doubling, the mirror, appears to subdue the potentially subversive sense of history as a series of repetitions and cyclical returns by incorporating them with the dominant figure of the line. What could easily be construed as an image of political instability and deterioration, cyclical form, is, in the Show of Kings, reinterpreted as a sign of political stability and thereby made to serve the interests of the absolute state wishing to perpetuate itself to the end of the world.

But the Show of Kings is not the play's last word on future Scottish and English history. It is succeeded by two ironizing commentaries, one visual and one verbal, both of which begin to let the image of the circle slip from the control of a lineal and successive order: the grotesquely mannered antic round of the witches following the Show, and Macbeth's “Tomorrow” speech, whose power as a critical gloss on the Show of Kings has been inadequately appreciated. Both revive the spectre of a predominantly cyclical and repetitive view of history, and prophesy that Malcolm's success, like the success of the Stuart dynasty as a whole, may be brief as a candle¹⁶: further, that the Jacobean formula for how to succeed in kingship—aloofness—is as replete with equivocation as anything in the play.

II

Malcolm's Jacobean aloofness has been readily apparent to readers and audiences alike, but certain rhetorical forms of aloofness are more distant, as it were, harder to tease out into the open. After being hailed King of Scotland, Malcolm proclaims,

We shall not spend a large expense of time,
Before we reckon with your several loves,
And make us even with you. My Thanes and kinsmen,
Henceforth be Earls; the first that ever Scotland
In such an honour nam'd. What's more to do,
Which would be planted newly with the time,—
As calling home our exil'd friends abroad,
That fled the snares of watchful tyranny;
Producing forth the cruel ministers
Of this dead butcher, and his fiend-like Queen,
Who, as 'tis thought, by self and violent hands
Took off her life;—this, and what needful else
That calls upon us, by the grace of Grace,
We will perform in measure, time, and place,
So thanks to all at once, and to each one,
Whom we invite to see us crown'd at Scone.

(5.9.26-41)

By the measure of Macbeth and other Shakespearean protagonists, it is certainly an understated, untheatrical first performance for this new monarch. The self-consciously epoch-making speech declares the first earls of Scotland, but its real mastery lies elsewhere. It establishes control over the domain that eludes Macbeth: the various successions of moments, events, stages of a life, and stages of a discourse. The speech begins with present business: the establishment of earls,¹⁷ what J. L. Austin would term a performative utterance which allows not so much as a gap between intention and action, or in other words the condition which a desperate Macbeth aims for when he says, “And even now, / To crown my thoughts with acts, be it thought and done” (4.1.148-49), of his intent to surprise Macduff's castle. It then proceeds in orderly and linear fashion to two pieces of specific and imminent future business, then to unspecified and more distantly future action (“And what needful else …”).

This orderly movement through three broad segments of time, propped up by the organicist metaphor “Which would be planted newly with the time,” opposes the spirit of Macbeth's speech by which he rejects all sense of the sequential and the consequential. In spite of his rejection of (con)sequence Macbeth makes a powerful bid for consequentiality, and threatens to make Malcolm's apparent command of sequence and consequence seem a squeaky postscript rather than a culmination.

She should have died hereafter:
There would have been a time for such a word.—
To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,
To the last syllable of recorded time;
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!
Life's but a walking shadow; a poor player,
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,
And then is heard no more: it is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.

(5.5.17-28)

Macbeth begins by noting an incongruity within the succession of events: something is out of sequence, namely the news of his wife's death.¹⁸ Furthermore, rather than conveying an orderly succession of three dimensions of time, Macbeth describes the collapse of three temporal dimensions into an idiot's stammer of one, repeated three times: “To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow.” His speech may actually reverse the natural sequence of yesterday, today, and tomorrow, if one allows that “day to day” may serve as an appropriately elusive reference to the most elusive dimension of time (“to day,” the present), separating those “to-morrows” from the last dimension of time to be mentioned, “all our yesterdays.” The speech features both a regressive, inverted sequence (“To-morrow … to day … yesterdays”), as well as a sequence collapsed into repetition.¹⁹ In two ways, therefore, Macbeth's speech subverts a linear order and succession of the kind captured in Malcolm's closing lines. Having lost all sense of the sequential, Macbeth has severed all ties with the consequential: all has become a stuttering tale told by an idiot. Macbeth's tacit wish for an identity of present and future, implied by his apparent need to act out every imagining that visits his mind, is ironically consummated in “To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow.”²⁰

In Malcolm's lines—“So thanks to all at once, and to each one, / Whom we invite to see us crown'd at Scone”—the highly repetitive thanking of “each one” of his loyal supporters in succession doesn't suggest an idiot's stammering. The fluid movement between simultaneity, “all at once,” and succession, “to each one,” suggests a mastery of the sequential, easily convertible to a nonsequential form. The difference between expressing thanks simultaneously, and thanking in succession—but also repetitively—suggests something like a reconciliation between sequence and repetition, not the collapse of sequence into sameness and repetition as in “To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow.” Such a reconciliation of sequence and repetition might also be signalled by the sudden intrusion of rhyme at the end of Malcolm's speech, which concludes with two couplets (rare in this play, except of course in the weird sisters' speeches). As if to cast a charm or spell to try to prevent the potentially demoralizing, not to mention lethal, effects of doubling and repetition by absorbing repetition into a sequence, the last four rhyming lines of Malcolm's concluding speech are a seal on the bond between sequence and repetition. Even the oddly repetitive phrase “by the grace of Grace” may signal such a truce, rather than echoing the return of the disturbing stammer of Macbeth's recent speech, where all sense of sequence disappears.

Precisely such a truce between repetition and sequence is implicit in the Show of Kings in Act 4, scene 1, presented as a rigorous line of descent from Banquo to the present King James. In that show Macbeth remarks on the likeness of the various kings to Banquo and to each other: “Thou other gold-bound brow, is like the first:—/ A third is like the former” (4.1.114-15). The last member of the line holds a glass or mirror displaying the line of Stuarts stretching infinitely into the future, in a reflection that presumably suggests both the doubling associated with mirrors and the rigorous sequentiality of the line Macbeth sees in the glass. If repetition were not so tamed or subdued by sequence, we might be tempted to read that Show in the spirit of Macbeth's later speech: as a demonstration of history as demoralizing and tedious repetition: “a Stuart, and a Stuart, and a Stuart.” The marriage of sequence and repetition that takes place at microscopic levels in Malcolm's closing speech is therefore an issue of very considerable political importance, and is a reenactment of sorts of a similar marriage in the Show of Kings.

This may seem an overly theorized reading of a speech that seems designed not to draw any close scrutiny at all. But Malcolm is presented, or presents himself, over and over again as the embodiment of a stable, archetypal pattern independent of all sequential articulation, and therefore in command of all forms of succession. In other words, something like the conjunction of “all at once” and “to each one” happens repeatedly whenever Malcolm is onstage. Take Malcolm's speech to Macduff, after he has tested the other's loyalty with a blackened self-portrait and decided to reveal his true character to him. Here it is the sequence of mental activities that lead up to, and finally issue in, action, over which Malcolm seems absolute sovereign: “What I believe, I'll wail; / What know, believe; and what I can redress, / As I shall find the time to friend, I will” (4.3.8-10). Malcolm presents the transition from knowledge to action in four successive stages: knowledge, belief, utterance, action. That he doesn't present the four stages successively, or in proper sequence, is itself telling. Rather, he begins with the two terms in the middle of the series—belief/utterance—then proceeds, architecturally, first to the anterior term (“What know, believe”), then to the consequent one (“and what I can redress”). The overall impression is of a stable paradigm, more spatial than sequential, to govern all vicissitudes of motive and action.

Malcolm's belief in a profound orderliness not only to the legitimate succession of kings but also to the mind's operations and the mind's governance of action find their foil in Macbeth, who in an aside following news of Macduff's flight to England, observes,

Time, thou anticipat'st my dread exploits:
The flighty purpose never is o'ertook,
Unless the deed go with it. From this moment,
The very firstlings of my heart shall be
The firstlings of my hand. And even now,
To crown my thoughts with acts, be it thought and done:
The castle of Macduff I will surprise;
Seize upon Fife; give to th'edge o'th'sword
His wife, his babies, and all unfortunate souls
That trace him in his line. No boasting like a fool;
This deed I'll do, before my purpose cool:

(4.1.144-54)

Macbeth both describes and enacts an annihilation of succession at three distinct levels: the destruction of Macduff's genealogical line; the collapse of the line of successive stages that, according to Malcolm's speech, all responsible action must take; and the purported revocation of temporal succession, of the difference between present intention and future act. The vow to make thought and action as nearly simultaneous as they can be—“even now, / … be it thought and done”—is a vow to cancel succession at the level of actions and events, echoing his desire to put an end to all future political successions.

Presenting an inverted image of himself as a means of testing his protector Macduff, he ventures, “The king-becoming graces, / As Justice, Verity, Temp'rance, Stableness, / Bounty, Perseverance, Mercy, Lowliness, / Devotion, Patience, Courage, Fortitude, / I have no relish of them” (4.3.91-95). Malcolm's self-presentation suggests not only that the kingly virtues peacefully coexist, but also that they exist in an order of simultaneity, not sequentiality. Macbeth suggests it is otherwise with a subject, in his protestation to Macduff justifying his murder of the chamberlains: “Who can be wise, amaz'd, temperate and furious, / Loyal and neutral, in a moment?” (2.3.106-07). The character of the subject can be adequately represented only in successive stages.²¹ Together the two speeches of Malcolm and Macbeth suggest that the character of the subject in Macbeth, unlike the character of the king, is bound to succession rather than master of it.

It is the sense of being shackled to a rigorous succession of consequences, of causes and effects, that galls Macbeth before he murders Duncan. In terms of the play's Jacobean line, Macbeth proves his unfitness for kingship by wishing to annul lineal succession, that most powerful agent of political legitimation for a hereditary monarchy:

If it were done, when 'tis done, then 'twere well
It were done quickly: if th'assassination
Could trammel up the consequence, and catch
With his surcease success; that but this blow
Might be the be-all and the end-all—here,
But here, upon this bank and shoal of time,
We'd jump the life to come. But in these cases
We still have judgement here, that we but teach
Bloody instructions, which being taught, return
To plague th'inventor. This even-handed justice
Commends th'ingredience of our poison'd chalice
To our own lips.

(1.7.1-12)

The unsuccessiveness of Macbeth's syntax in these lines, their tortuousness and their uncertain division of sentences or units of grammatical sense,²² obviously reflect his confusion before the murder. They also signal the unlineal succession of the crown once he wrenches it from Duncan's line. Macbeth's speech seems an assault on a more well-ordered syntax that would mirror a legitimate patrilineal line of succession to the throne. Furthermore, they may reflect Macbeth's impossible wish for a halt to all future consequences (the meaning of ll. 2-5). In other words, the unsuccessiveness of Macbeth's syntax is both a reflection of the crime he is actually about to commit and a rhetorical reflection of the conditions he would ideally have apply to his murder, a halting of the inevitable progress of causes and effects.²³

Before murdering Duncan, Macbeth fantasizes about an existence outside of succession, but it is Macbeth's enemies Malcolm, Banquo, and Macduff, the three human apparitions that haunt him, who represent such a seemingly impossible condition. The man not born of woman, untimely ripped from his mother's womb, Macduff is symbolically lifted outside of genealogical succession by his birth. Although his strange apparent indifference to the safety of his wife and son disturbs many viewers and readers, it reinforces his status as a being outside of succession. Macduff's counterpart in the political sphere is Banquo, who during the Show of Kings in Act 4, scene 1 appears at the end of the succession of eight kings all resembling Banquo. He is not properly a part of that succession of kings—he is never King of Scotland himself, and he appears at the end rather than the beginning of the procession of kings—although he is the origin of the line. Like King James in his pageants, he both is and is not a part of the procession or show.²⁴ Having an existence on its margins, like a playwright, and commanding or directing the procession from those margins, James's ancestor Banquo is therefore also the prototype of Malcolm, who is repeatedly represented as being independent of sequential articulation as well as being sovereign over all forms of the successive or sequential, including the successions of action and discourse.

III

Like Malcolm, the witches seem masterful at making the transition between orders of succession and of simultaneity. This is apparent not only in their ability to project a sequence of events from what appears to be a stationary position beyond succession, but also in the order of their speech. On the day of Macbeth's “success” (1.5.2) the witches speak in succession and of succession. They speak in a prescribed order—1. Witch, 2. Witch, 3. Witch—that is at once linear and circular, in which a repeated seriality periodically gives way to the simultaneity of a refrain.

Just as they announce the play's themes of success and succession in the order of their speech, so do most of their exchanges raise issues of succession at every opportunity. On the one hand, they seem to possess foreknowledge of the successive stages of Macbeth's career, the stages of his undoing, or the succession of Scottish kings. On the other hand, much of what they have to say seems designed to tease us out of succession. Their first refrain—the first time they do not speak in succession—articulates a coincidence of opposites that precludes narrative progress or development: “Fair is foul, and foul is fair: / Hover through the fog and filthy air” (1.1.11-12).²⁵ Declaring the unsuccess of our attempts to think Macbeth successively, the line suggests that attempts to think the plot of Macbeth, or any plot for that matter, foul or fair, tragic or comic, in terms of narrative succession is doomed to failure. The equivocating language of the play in general inhibits its own successiveness. The plot and language of Macbeth are therefore at odds with one another, if we accept that it is the most relentlessly successive of all Shakespeare's tragedies; the one most directly concerned with legitimizing political succession; and also the most riddling of all the tragedies. Riddles pose all sorts of challenges to the mind habituated to sequential forms of order.

In Macbeth as in Oedipus Rex,²⁶ another play with an unusually rigorous and sequential plot structure, the riddles of the play are riddles about succession: in Oedipus' case the three stages of a life; in Macbeth's, the three stages of his career. In both plays ternary patterns are linked to questions of sequence and of political succession.²⁷ The riddle of the sphinx lays out three stages that Oedipus makes simultaneous, through both his marriage to Jocasta and his playing several roles simultaneously, in chordal fashion, as when he acts the powerful king, helpless child, and decrepit man simultaneously in the final scene of the play. The crossroad at which the murder takes place is a visible manifestation of Oedipus' fate. It spatializes the number three, which appeared to be associated with succession in the Sphinx's riddle, but is now subdued to the simultaneous, captured within a spatial, nontemporal image—the crossroads—which is also the scene of a crime against temporality, leading to a further one against biological succession, in which the successive stages of a life are collapsed into an intolerable simultaneity.

In both plays a riddle issues in political success: Oedipus succeeds to the throne of Thebes (a succession leading directly to violations against the naturally successive stages of a life represented in the sphinx's riddle); Macbeth (more passively, to be sure, since unlike Oedipus he is never called upon to solve any riddle on pain of death) succeeds, in rapid succession, to the titles Thane of Glamis, Thane of Cawdor, King of Scotland. Both plays also yoke political succession to the question of the proper succession of thought and action. Kreon's line, “We need to know before we act,” suggests that Oedipus has violated natural orders of succession in other senses than the biological one. Like Macbeth, the rash Oedipus customarily tries to make thought as nearly simultaneous with action as he can, or else to invert the more natural sequence of thought leading to action; the patient Kreon represents a more natural succession of action from thought. For both Macbeth and Oedipus, once a course of action has been conceived (or proposed by someone else) it is already in progress or even accomplished. Macbeth also shares with the earlier play the riddle of one man being, in succession and perhaps also simultaneously, many men. Macbeth asks, “Who can be wise, amaz'd, temperate and furious, / Loyal and neutral, in a moment?” (2.3.106-07). And Oedipus says with confidence regarding the rumor that a band of men murdered King Laios, “One man is not the same as many men.” But of course the clarity of that distinction is challenged by the whole of the play, as well as by the sphinx's riddle, both of which suggest that “man” can be understood only in terms of the multiple, dispersed, fragmented, sequential, or syntagmatic.

Although the riddles about succession in both Oedipus the King and Macbeth issue in success for their protagonists, the very nature of riddles may be inimical to various kinds of sequential order. The answer to a riddle is usually achieved not by cautious and deliberate sequential reasoning but by sudden illumination. Johann Huizinga writes, “The answer to an enigmatic question is not found by reflection or logical reasoning. It comes quite literally as a sudden solution—a loosening of the tie by which the questioner holds you bound.”²⁸ And just as Oedipus inverts the ordinary stages of a human life (like his playwright, who tells his story backward), so do riddles invert the ordinary sequence of question and answer, as well as configurations of power that ordinarily hold between questioner and answerer.²⁹ Both the riddle about the successive stages of a life in Oedipus and the riddle about the successive stages of Macbeth's career hold out the promise of success(ion) in a form that in itself subverts succession. In both plays, the riddles' promises about succession are secretly retracted by the unsuccessiveness of riddles.

The witches do not finally come across as enemies to various kinds of successive order: they are as much the impartial overseers of succession, whether of events, causes and effects, or kings. They are the supernatural equivalents of Malcolm, Banquo, and Macduff, all of whom are stationed at once inside and outside various serial orders. The witches have a foreknowledge of the successive from a position that appears to be beyond succession. So does Malcolm oversee various orders of succession, like the sequence leading from knowledge to action, from a position outside them. The functional equivalence of Malcolm and the Witches is underscored by the last few lines of the play, which in their minutest details recall the opening. Malcolm's closing lines implicitly answer the question posed in the very first line of the play, “When shall we … meet again?” (Answer: At Scone, at my coronation.) The trebled syntactical pattern of “in measure, time, and place,” like many other such patterns in the play (including “To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow”), seems to faintly echo the inaugural instance of such trebling, “In thunder, lightning, or in rain?” The two closing couplets themselves echo the Witches' speaking in couplets. And finally, the penultimate line of the play, “So thanks to all at once, and to each one,” mimes the witches' speaking alternately “all at once,” in refrain, and “each one,” in (and usually of) succession. This echo of the opening lines by the closing is more than an aesthetic device to bring the play “full circle”: it casts the order of the play as a whole in a league with the witches,³⁰ who favor cyclical patterns in both speech and movement (their dances or “rounds”). These cyclical patterns may finally challenge the stability of the Jacobean “line.”

Macbeth wishes for Malcolm's easy commerce between stations inside and outside of succession when he dreams of an action without futurity and consequence: “if th'assassination / Could trammel up the consequence, and catch / With his surcease success; that but this blow / Might be the be-all and the end-all” (1.7.2-5). After the matter of succession is decided in his favor, the childless Macbeth becomes the inveterate enemy of succession, wishing to murder all tomorrows, all consequences, all successions to the throne, all futurity. With Macbeth's accession some forms of succession are revoked. Not only does the future come to seem a drearily repetitive series of tomorrows, but the ordinary succession of sleep and waking is disturbed, as it was in the witch's tale of the harassed sea captain.

Mac.
Methought, I heard a voice cry, ‘Sleep no more!
Macbeth does murther Sleep,’—the innocent Sleep;
Sleep, that knits up the ravell'd sleave of care,
The death of each day's life, sore labour's bath,
Balm of hurt minds, great Nature's second course,
Chief nourisher in life's feast;—
Lady M.
What do you mean?
Mac.
Still it cried, ‘Sleep no more!’ to all the house:
‘Glamis hath murther'd Sleep, and therefore Cawdor
Shall sleep no more, Macbeth shall sleep no more!’

(2.2.34-42)

The revocation of the natural sequence of waking and sleep (and of night and day both in Rosse's description in 2.4, and Lady Macbeth's line, 3.4.126) is reflected in a number of repetitive devices in this speech: the constant chiming of the word “sleep” and the phrase “sleep no more,” the extraordinary number of appositives, the linear-cyclical repetition-with-variation of Macbeth's name (Macbeth-Glamis-Cawdor-Macbeth), not to mention the haunting repetitions of sounds. A sequential order of thought is also denied Lady Macbeth, whose actions and speech become fiercely repetitive following her descent into madness: her line “To bed,” repeated two, then three, times (5.1.62-65), and her periodic washing of hands. Lady Macbeth describes her husband's interruption of the banquet (owing to Banquo's ghost) in terms that suggest a broken order of succession: “You have displac'd the mirth, broke the good meeting / With most admir'd disorder” (3.4.108-09). Whereas Malcolm will become the scene of a reconciliation of sequence and repetition, Macbeth and Lady Macbeth are the occasion of their polarization. Strenuously resisting sequentiality in so many forms, they appropriately descend into what the surface of the play implies may be the only alternative order, twin nightmares of pure repetition.

IV

And we fairies, that do run
          By the triple Hecate's team
From the presence of the sun,
          Following darkness like a dream

—Puck, MND (5.1.385-88)

As a number of critics have noted, ternary and binary patterns are everywhere in Macbeth.³¹ The numbers three and two would have already come to Shakespeare heavily encoded.³² The number three would have had direct associations with temporal sequence: Luisa Guj has argued for the relevance to Macbeth of the iconographic representation of time “in its tripartite sequence of past, present, and future” as a “frightful tricephalous monster revived from antiquity by Renaissance iconographers” (p. 76). Shakespeare greatly extended any association of ternary patterns with sequence, and employed binary patterns in the play to mark the stalling or blocking of sequential elaboration, whether of action (through doubling or repetition) or of meaning (in the form of “equivocation”). The play's elaborate interweaving of ternary and binary patterns seems a powerful ideological issue, as well as a formal or structural one. The “success” of the whole Stuart dynasty simultaneously recollected and prophesied in the witches' Show of Kings seems predicated on an alliance between the forms of sequence and repetition, or in terms of the Show, the line and the mirror: in numerical terms, two and three. By contrast with this Jacobean marriage of sequence and repetition, the ternary and binary, Macbeth counts two and three as rivals—until his “tomorrow” speech, in which the very difference between sequence and repetition, trebling and doubling collapses. The ultimate collapse of trebling into doubling is (pardon me) tr/oubling. Troubling especially for the Jacobean line on history, which is indirectly challenged by Macbeth's speech.

Since we tend to conceptualize succession—for instance, past, present, and future; yesterday, today, and tomorrow; youth, maturity, and age—in terms of threes, not twos, it should not be surprising that Macbeth's career should be expressed in terms of various triads. In his political career he passes through three successive stages on the way to the Scottish throne.³³ In his second career, as murderer, he commits three crimes, the murder of Duncan, the murder of Banquo, and the murder of Macduff's wife and son. Even the progressive interiorization of Macbeth's battles seems describable as a triad: according to M. J. B. Allen, “three stages of Macbeth's future career where combat with a manifest enemy is succeeded by the melee and carnage of the fight with the Norwegians, which is in turn succeeded by the hand-to-hand encounter with a warrior who is a psychological projection.” Like Macbeth's career, the play also passes through stages of threes, both at its opening and its close: “A triptych of battle episodes” constituting the finale of the play, and a “triptych of decriptions” of the battle at the beginning, “two by the Sergeant and one by Rosse.”³⁴ The First and Second of the Three Apparitions address Macbeth in the trebled form of “Macbeth! Macbeth! Macbeth!” (4.1.71, 77), as if in reference to the three political roles that have devolved to him in the course of the play. The triple address also suggests Hecate, the triune goddess. Macbeth, an adventurer in darkness, has become her male and human equivalent, Hecate's triune bridegroom. Responding to the Second Apparition, Macbeth provides a highly visual or apparitional testament to the distinction between two and three, the human/contestational and the supernatural/sequential: “Had I three ears, I'd hear thee” (4.1.78).

Beneath the supernatural level which has invaded and taken over Macbeth's sphere, implanting its series of sequential threes, we witness human beings struggling with their binary patterns suggestive of contestation and choice. Not only in the Second Witch's description, “When the battle's lost and won,” but throughout the description of the battles at the beginning of the play there recur certain motifs of doubling. Duncan's enemies seem to be grouped in doublets: manifest (Sweno) and secret (Macdonwald), foreign and domestic. Fraternal doubling occurs not only between the two actual brothers in the play, Malcolm and Donalbain, but also between the new Thane of Cawdor and the old Thane of Cawdor, the two generals Macbeth and Banquo, and the two initial enemies of the realm, Sweno of Norway and the rebel Macdonwald (who like Banquo's murderers extend their number to three, to include the Thane of Cawdor, a doubled figure within the series, since it embraces both the old and new Thane). Speaking of the conflict between the rebel Macdonwald and the King's armies, the bloody sergeant reports of Banquo and Macbeth's twin counterassaults, “they were / As cannons overcharg'd with double cracks; / So they / Doubly redoubled strokes upon the foe” (1.2.36-38).

Doubling takes place not only between characters but also within characters called upon to double parts, to play two roles to one another, with the result that characters in Macbeth tend to become living equivocations. So Macbeth speaks of Duncan, “He's here in double trust” (1.7.12)—as his monarch and as his guest. In the bloody Sergeant's description of Macbeth's combat, Macbeth's and Macdonwald's armies are painted as two exhausted swimmers clinging to one another, itself a double gesture of antagonism and support: “Doubtful it stood; / As two spent swimmers, that do cling together / And choke their art” (1.2.7-9). The equipoise suggested by this image of Macbeth and Macdonwald indicates the predominant association of doubled patterns in the play. Whereas ternary patterns are kinetic and almost always associated with questions of succession, binary configurations tend to be static. The meaning of binary configurations is perhaps best encapsulated in Lady Macbeth's doubled exclamation, “Hold, hold!” (1.5.54). All predominantly binary configurations may be said to put the play and its interpreter into a holding pattern, like Macbeth and Macdonwald locked in an embrace/grip of life/death.

The speeches of the three witches often dance in elaborate patterns around the number three, three to the second power, and three to the second power doubled. To cite just a few of many instances: [All.] “Thrice to thine, and thrice to mine, / And thrice again, to make up nine” (1.3.35-36); [1 Witch.] “Weary sev'n nights nine times nine” (1.3.22); and [1 Witch.] “Thrice the brinded cat hath mew'd.” [2 Witch.] “Thrice, and once the hedge-pig whin'd” (4.1.1-2). Hecate, Goddess of the Witches, was also called Trivia (tri- + via, three ways or roads), or Diana of the Crossways, presiding as she did over all places where three roads meet. Trivia is a triune goddess, called Luna as goddess of the moon, Diana as goddess of the earth, and Persephone or Hecate as goddess of the underworld, and it is possible that she is a less trivial character than is ordinarily assumed by critics, who have widely attributed her to Middleton rather than Shakespeare.³⁵

Establishing the relation of the Witches and their goddess with the number three early on, the play opens with an exchange whose very syntactical patterns suggest an association of the supernatural with the ternary, the human with the binary and (inevitably) oppositional or contestational:

1 Witch.
When shall we three meet again?
In thunder, lightning, or in rain?
2 Witch.
When the hurlyburly's done,
When the battle's lost and won.
3 Witch.
That will be ere the set of sun.

(1.1.1-5)

The trebled witches are reflected in the trebled alternatives, thunder, lightning, or rain. There are numerous other instances of trebled syntactic patterns, as in “And mounch'd, and mounch'd, and mounch'd” (1.3.5); “I'll do, I'll do, and I'll do” (1.3.10); the Second Apparition's urging Macbeth to “Be bloody, bold, and resolute” (4.1.79); Macbeth's “secret, black, and midnight hags” (4.1.48); Malcolm's “in measure, time, and place”; and that most troubled form of trebling in the play, “To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow.”

The speeches of the Second and Third Witches also set a pattern that will recur in many forms in the play: of two becoming three, and of a temporary stationing or suspension (associated with patterns of two) yielding to sequence (associated with three). The Second Witch's couplet is suffused with doublets of various kinds: “hurlyburly”; the alternatives that are apparently meaningless to the witches, “lost and won,” because they inhabit a sphere above alternatives, choice, suspense, and conflict, all aspects of the binary (and human); the repetition of “When … When”; and the rhymed couplet as a whole that sounds so much like a martial drumbeat. The Third Witch then stretches that pattern of two enunciated by the Second, making the couplet a tercet. It is telling that the third line of the tercet, converting two into three, returns us from the stationary pattern of “lost and won” to a sense of the serial or successive by referring to a moment in a recognizable sequence: “That will be ere the set of sun.”

The Porter Scene, where a sense of the supernatural yields to a sense of return to the familiarly human (as in the first two scenes of the play, where a similar trend from trebling to doubling obtains), provides a mirror image of the pattern of the opening speeches by the Second and Third Witches. Here the pattern of threes and twos is reversed, configurations of three now yielding to two. “Knock, knock, knock” alternates with “Knock, knock,” each series being voiced twice (2.3.1-21). Three imagined entrants at hell's gate (a farmer, a jesuit equivocator, and a tailor) reduce to the two who actually enter (Lennox and Macduff). It is three o'clock, as signalled by the “second cock.” The three things that drink provokes yields to two, the number associated with polarized alternatives and equivocation. The Porter is explaining to Macduff why he does “lie so late,” itself an equivocation or doubling of meaning.

Mac.
What three things does drink especially provoke?
Port.
Marry, sir, nose-painting, sleep, and urine. Lechery, sir, it provokes,
and unprovokes: it provokes the desire, but it takes away the performance.
Therefore much drink may be said to be an equivocator with lechery:
it makes him, and it mars him; it sets him on, and it takes him off; it persuades
him, and disheartens him; makes him stand to, and not stand to—in conclusion,
equivocates him in a sleep, and giving him the lie, leaves him.

(2.3.24-34)

In the course of this exchange the triadic pattern yields to a pattern of two, to binary syntactical patterns explicitly connected to equivocation or double entendre. The passage from threes to twos is accompanied by a stalling effect, the speaker's fixation on a single subject. He “holds” the conversation through a dilated series of binary pairs, linked by copulas. The to-and-fro motion of these pairs is not unlike that of both of the speech's principal subjects, copulation and equivocation. This “holding” of sequential elaboration is consistent with other associations in the play of the binary with stationing, the interruption of sequences.³⁶

Doubled syntactical patterns are often used to suggest hesitation or stalling before equivocation. In response to the news of a moving grove, Macbeth says, “I pull in resolution, and begin / To doubt th'equivocation of the fiend / That lies like truth” (5.6.42-44). Double-speak leads to a reining-in of resolution, and consequently to the interruption of success(ion). Similarly, in response to Lady Macduff's equivocating line, “Fathered he is, and yet he's fatherless” (4.2.27), Ross must break himself free from the staying power of that riddling line, its power to make him weep and the spell of interruption it, like so many of the play's acts of equivocation, seems to cast: “I am so much a fool, should I stay longer / It would be my disgrace, and your discomfort. / I take my leave at once” (4.2.28-30). Sequence yields to a staying of sorts when Duncan first hears news of Macbeth's “success” in battle: “The King hath happily received, Macbeth, / The news of thy success; and when he reads / Thy personal venture in the rebels' fight, / His wonders and his praises do contend / Which should be thine or his” (1.3.89-93). As the Oxford editor points out, these are “thoroughly confusing lines” (p. 105): in other words, lines that cause us to share the King's mental state as we try to unpack his confusing lines about his confusion. Our minds mime the staying of Duncan's precisely at the moment of greatest success(ion). Duncan's response to Macbeth's success also prefigures the “surcease” of the moment of success Macbeth himself will try to achieve. The words “stay” and “stayed” appear in the first encounter of Macbeth and Banquo with the witches, in response to the doublets, “So all hail Macbeth, and Banquo,” and “Banquo, and Macbeth, all hail” (1.3.68-69). Macbeth commands, “Stay, you imperfect speakers,” and subsequently, “Would they had stayed” (1.3.82). Like nearly all humans in the play, creatures of the oppositional and contestational, Banquo and Macbeth are experts at “staying.” Not so the witches, who appropriately do not stay, for they are creatures of the ternary and sequential. Like Ross, who must fight his desire to “stay” and weep, the play's riddling language causes us repeatedly to stay upon an equivocating utterance even as the action of this remarkably sequential play races ahead.

The Porter's transformation of patterns of three into patterns of two reverses the pattern established in the opening lines of the play, where a doubled syntax and rhyme yield to a trebling, a transformation which is ominous. It seems to presage, for instance, the murderers, who begin as two and subsequently, for mysterious reasons, expand to three. Or Lennox's lines to Macbeth, “'Tis two or three, my Lord, that bring you word, / Macduff is fled to England” (4.1.142-43). The Witches' couplet about doubling, “Double, double, toil and trouble; / Fire burn, and cauldron bubble,” with its hendiadys “toil and trouble” and syntactical groupings of two (“fire burn,” “cauldron bubble”), is repeated exactly three times at the beginning of Act 4. The many instances of two becoming three (of which these are but a few) mirror the play's signal instance of a failure of two to become three, the humanly sterile Macbeth and Lady Macbeth's failure to produce living issue, a failure of succession at the biological, political, and imaginative levels, since they have placed themselves in the position of not being able to envision or wish for a future that is anything but a desperate clinging to the present, a resistance to any further change once they possess the crown.

Lady Macbeth's pathetically trebled injunction in her madness, “To bed, to bed, to bed” (5.1.64-65), which follows on the heels of “To bed, to bed” (5.1.62), suggests the futility of the Macbeths' wishing for success or succession of any kind. The trebled “to bed,” pathetically echoing the witch's “I'll do, I'll do, and I'll do,” both suggesting the act that might have provided a successor and at some level relieved the Macbeths from the nightmare of unrelieved repetition, is appropriately couched in the trebled syntactical pattern associated with succession throughout the play. “To bed, to bed, to bed,” with its troubled and trebled repetition and threefold use of the preposition “to,” is Lady Macbeth's shorthand version of “To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow,” another series of three that fails to suggest any sense of sequence or succession, any living issue or issue to live for: in short, any “to-” or “toward-ness.”

Macbeth's “Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow” may represent a cancelling of the difference between three and two, sequence and repetition, which Macbeth plays off against what is a more positive embracing of two by three, of repetition by sequence, in the Show of Kings. “To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow” suggests that the difference between two and three has become arbitrary, since the vision of the future it evokes may be indifferently described as either a dreary desert of successiveness unrelieved by cyclical returns and renewal, or a pure repetitiveness unrelieved by succession or syntagmation. Among other things, it is narrative form that is denied by Macbeth's speech, as it was denied by the First Witch's tale in Act 1, scene 3. Narrative represents one kind of succession of the many that threaten Macbeth, this beneficiary of succession who becomes its enemy at the moment of his accession. Narratives in general, including the plot of Macbeth, may represent a marriage of three and two, if a narrative is understood as the distribution over a syntagm of an essentially binary pair: for example, high/low, an archetypal pair for the construction of tragedy. But Macbeth is framed by speeches—the witches' at one end and Macbeth's at the other—that challenge the very notion of narrative development, the seriality of narrative. In Macbeth's great speech, famous for its “staying power,” history itself is a shaggy dog story, and in that same speech a particular human life is so brief that it seems to lack a narrative or sequential dimension altogether. Both the individual life and the flow of history of which it is part are inimical to narration, Macbeth implies. But viewing a human life as a brief candle, necessarily unsuccessful because unsuccessive or devoid of a successive element, seems a final way of coping with a failure to succeed by one who, unlike the witches, remains prisoner of successions of various kinds. Macbeth's implication that all forms of successive order are specious appearances is a way of attempting to master the successive orders of events by erasing them, by subtracting the element of succession altogether.

Banquo's line in the Show of Kings, culminating in the present king, James I, represents a kind of successiveness that incorporates substitutive relationships usually associated in Shakespeare with binary pairs, but without collapsing the difference between doubling and trebling, repetition and sequence, as Macbeth's “Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow” does.³⁷ The three weird sisters have already suggested a reconciliation of trebling and doubling, lineal sequence and repetition, of the kind realized in the Show of Kings. The three are doubled by the appearance of a second triad of witches at the beginning of Act 4, scene 1.³⁸ Their most famous refrain about doubling is subjected to a threefold repetition. The circularity of their speech may also be counted among the signs of a welcome embrace of 2 by 3, of repetition by sequence, for it mirrors the repetitions or refrains within history, implied by the endless series of mirror reflections within the Show of Kings: a view of history, it is important to add, that has a darker reflection in Macbeth's vision of history as an idiotic stammer, a view that the play, finally, may not sufficiently differentiate from the official Jacobean version provided in the Show of Kings.

It is characteristic of Shakespearean tragedy to oppose (fraternal) doubling to (patrilineal) succession and transmission of power. The effort of Macbeth, perhaps Shakespeare's most cunning piece of propaganda, is to mediate them, though Macbeth's bewitching, creeping speech on all our yesterdays may hold the power to sever that carefully negotiated alliance.

V

In keeping with Macbeth's status as enemy to the successive—one who, following the murder of Duncan, wishes history to come to an end—the play often seems a stuttering series of “amens,” attempts to bring something to a close, which to Macbeth's horror turn out to be “omens,” or projections about the future and therefore about succession. Recounting to Lady Macbeth his effort to echo one of the groomsmen's “Amens” the night of Duncan's murder, Macbeth confides,

                    One cried, ‘God bless us!’ and ‘Amen,’
the other,
                    As they had seen me with these hangman's hands.
                    List'ning their fear, I could not say, ‘Amen,’
                    When they did say, ‘God bless us.’
Lady M.
Consider it not so deeply.
Mac.
                    But wherefore could not I pronounce ‘Amen’?
                    I had most need of blessing, and ‘Amen’
                    Stuck in my throat.

(2.2.26-32)

That “Amen,” a figure of endings as well as of blessing, is never successfully uttered by Macbeth is indicative of his failure in every attempt to halt succession. There are many forms of “amen” in this play, including sleep (“Sleep no more”); the sleep that follows “life's fitful fever” (3.2.23), which seems a blessed “Amen” to the mind stretched on the rack of “restless ecstasy” (3.2.19-22); Macbeth's premature “It is concluded” following the dispatch of Banquo's murderers to their deed; Macbeth's faux-apocalyptic speech when Duncan's murder is revealed (2.3.89-94), as well as the more urgent proclamations of doomsday to the witches (4.1.50-61) and to himself:

I'gin to be aweary of the sun,
And wish th'estate o'th'world were now undone.—
Ring the alarum bell!—Blow wind! come, wrack!
At least we'll die with harness on our back.

(5.5.49-52)

One of the most arresting forms of “Amen” is that word of arrest, “Hold!” We might even adopt it as a watchword for Macbeth's and Lady Macbeth's opposition to succession. Although Macbeth says to his opponent in battle Macduff, “damn'd be him that first cries, ‘Hold, enough!’” (5.8.34), Macbeth and Lady Macbeth have essentially been crying “Hold, hold!” (1.5.54) to succession from the moment of Duncan's murder.³⁹

Not only Macbeth but the play too tries to say “Amen”—and often, in the middle and later tragedies of Shakespeare, “Amen” sticks in the throat. The play Macbeth may only appear to be more successful than its namesake in dislodging “Amen.” For in spite of the apparent organic unity of the play, Macbeth's speech on all our tomorrows and yesterdays subverts the carefully contrived sense of an ending that will be delivered momentarily by Malcolm. “I could not say ‘Amen,’” one could easily imagine the plays Hamlet and King Lear uttering in unison with Macbeth. “Amen” is so elusive in Hamlet and Lear largely because, like Malcolm's fizzling finale, the concluding speeches of Horatio, Fortinbras, and Edgar fail to “trammel up” the meanings of those plays, fail to serve as hermeneutic benedictions. Hamlet is a play that looks like Macbeth's opposite in that causality, at least as it is perceived by characters, seems so loosely established.

Because the twin problems of succession and causality are worked out so differently in the two plays, the frequent apocalyptic pronouncements of their protagonists have completely different functions. Macbeth's end-stopped ways of thinking are a means of wishing an end to the endless, the successions of kings and tomorrows that will make his own success a qualified one. In Hamlet apocalyptic fantasies cannot serve as desperate attempts to apply the brakes to the train of causes and effects, for there is no rigorous sense of “cause” in any sense of the term in that play.⁴⁰ Since results (desired or otherwise) in Hamlet are never achieved by a linear, dynastic succession of causes and effects, apocalyptic thinking may be an attempt to reach by desperate means an endpoint which is so elusive and inaccessible by ordinary means (that is, through orderly chains of causes and effects, actions and consequences). Hamlet's desperate attempts to imagine a terminus—for example, “I say we will have no mo marriage” (3.1.149); or “To be, or not to be” (3.1.56), aspiring to be the farthest point of thought as well as a speech about ultimate things, things that come last in a series or progression—are also a way of positing a causality that cannot be understood in the present tense. Projecting oneself beyond an imaginary terminus promises to allow one to see like the “divinity that shapes our ends” (5.2.10). Like so much else in Hamlet, apocalyptic thinking is a way of going backward, a means of retroactively reading causality into what appeared to be chance. To put things somewhat differently, end-stopped ways of thinking promise to keep Macbeth very much in the present tense and world, but ones from which succession, sequence, and consequence have been banished. For Macbeth they are a means of holding onto a tense that is always in the process of vanishing. Furthermore, in Macbeth dreams of an End are tied to “jumping”—or risking—“the life to come” (1.7.7). By contrast, apocalyptic fantasies in Hamlet are a means of imaginatively inhabiting “the life to come” in order to clarify causality and succession in the present one.

Hamlet, wearing causality like a loose robe, and Macbeth, with its stuttering series of amens, exhibit quite different anxieties about causality, anxieties that inform the reigns of the respective monarchs under which the plays were written. The shadows of Elizabeth and James are cast over the length and breadth of both plays, as the interests and anxieties of each monarch's reign concerning succession are reflected in the plays at nearly every level. Hamlet, written in the final years of the reign of the aged Virgin Queen, when English anxieties about succession were high, enacts such anxieties at nearly every level, including those of action and discourse. The more rigorously successive Macbeth, written toward the beginning of a reign and of a new dynastic succession, seems to answer to the needs of a monarch who, in a way more like Macbeth than like Banquo, would like to see both the Stuart line (or the issue of succession) and the Jacobean “line” on history established “to the end of the world.”

Notes

1. Jonathan Goldberg, James I and the Politics of Literature (1983; rpt. Stanford, 1989), p. 31.

2. In his opening speech to his first English Parliament, James insisted that a king who inherits the throne through lawful succession could not be dispossessed. Parliament responded by declaring him “as being lineally, justly and lawfully, next and sole Heir of the Blood Royal of this Realm.” In The Trew Law of Free Monarchies he had written that the people owe allegiance not merely to the present king but to “his lawfull heires and posterity, the lineall succession of crowns being begun among the people of God, and happily continued in diuers christian common-wealths.”

3. Charles H. McIlwain, ed., The Political Works of James I (Cambridge, Mass., 1918), p. 300.

4. All citations from Macbeth refer to the recent Oxford Shakespeare edition, ed. Nicholas Brooke (Oxford, 1990).

5. Barbara Everett writes that Lady Macbeth sacrifices “to Macbeth's success his succession—their hope of children.” She usefully discusses shifts in the meaning of “success” as well, in Young Hamlet: Essays on Shakespeare's Tragedies (Oxford, 1989), pp. 96, 104.

6. See “Shakespeare's Art of Preparation,” in Wolfgang Clemen, Shakespeare's Dramatic Art (London, 1971), pp. 1-95.

7. See the valuable discussion by Achsah Guibbory, The Map of Time: Seventeenth-Century English Literature and Ideas of Pattern in History (Urbana, 1986). On the cyclical de casibus pattern in Tudor history writing, see F. J. Levy, Tudor Historical Thought (San Marino, Cal., 1967), pp. 15ff. On the cyclical form of most Stuart historical writing, see D. R. Woolf's recent The Idea of History in Early Stuart England (Toronto, 1990), pp. 3ff.

   Marjorie Garber has much to say about circular temporal patterns in “‘What Past is Prologue’: Temporality and Prophecy in Shakespeare's History Plays,” in Renaissance Genres: Essays on Theory, History, and Interpretation, ed. Barbara Lewalski, Harvard English Studies 14 (Cambridge, Mass., 1986), pp. 301-31. Sigurd Burckhardt discusses rings and circular form in The Merchant of Venice in Shakespearean Meanings (Princeton, 1968), pp. 210-11. Mark Rose discusses the “full circle technique” in Hamlet in his Shakespearean Design (Cambridge, Mass., 1972), pp. 58-60, 124. On the palindromic structure of Hamlet, see James R. Siemon's discussion in Shakespearean Iconoclasm (Berkeley, 1985).

8. See the discussion in Guibbory, pp. 5ff. James's preference seems to have been “none of the above.” Scottish conservatives like James tended to emphasize “the timeless order underlying all mutation and transience.” Arthur H. Williamson, Scottish National Consciousness in the Age of James VI (Edinburgh, 1979), p. 46. (Cited in David Norbrook, “Macbeth and the Politics of Historiography,” in The Politics of Discourse: The Literature and History of Seventeenth-Century England, ed. Kevin Sharpe and Steven Zwicker [Berkeley, 1987], p. 99.) What Shakespeare does with various kinds of circular movement in Macbeth, it seems to me, is to make them appear to support the absolutist faith in timeless order, although, like everything else in the play, they equivocate, and may also (or instead) suggest something like the opposite of an order immune from mutation and transience.

9. Sir Walter Raleigh, History of the World, sig. A2v.

10. See Guibbory, pp. 12ff.

11. Cited in Guibbory, p. 11.

12. In what must have seemed a subversive treatment of the Show of Kings, Sir Henry Beerbohm Tree “turned his figures on a giant wheel where, in visual metaphor, each rose to the highest before giving way to his successor” (Marvin Rosenberg, The Masks of Macbeth [Berkeley, 1978], p. 523), apparently giving the lie to the promise of an endless lineage promised by the Show, and substituting an endless series of cycles more in the spirit of Macbeth's “Tomorrow” speech. It is entirely possible that the visual impact of the Show of Kings as it was originally staged may have been predominantly cyclical. As Nicholas Brooke notes in his recent Oxford Shakespeare edition of the play (1990), “There is no need for eight actors if they move round backstage and re-enter with different emblems (depending on the structure of the theatre)” (p. 176).

13. Geoffrey Bullough, Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare (London, 1957-75), v. 7, pp. 428-29. Needless to say Piggot and James were not on the best of terms; in his 1607 speech to Parliament, James said of his native Scotland, “I know there are many Piggots amongst them, I meane a number of seditious and discontented particular persons, as must be in all Commonwealths” (McIlwain, p. 301).

14. See Norbrook, p. 92. Buchanan, whose well-known history James suppressed in Scotland and forbade to the published in England, argued that hereditary kingship produced instability, and preferred an elective system of kingship. James of course made precisely the reverse argument, attributing instability to elective monarchy. Buchanan's attack on primogeniture instanced a long span of Scottish history, including the reigns of Duncan, Macbeth, and Malcolm, “as illustrating the relative merits of elective and hereditary kingship” (Norbrook, p. 88).

15. The rigorous line of descent imagined for England and Scotland seems to me mirrored by the plot of Macbeth, in many ways seemingly the most rigorously successive or sequential of any of Shakespeare's tragedies. Seemingly, for the rigor of the play's causality is largely apparent. Reading reveals many fissures and inconsistencies in the play's sequences that viewing would not. See Brian Richardson, “‘Hours Dreadful and Things Strange’: Inversions of Chronology and Causality in Macbeth,” Philological Quarterly 68 (1989), 283-94, for a discussion of “unnatural arrangements of narrative time” and “distortions of causality” in the play. See Harry Berger, Jr., “Text Against Performance in Shakespeare: The Example of Macbeth,” Genre 15 (1982), 49-79, for a brilliant discussion of other ways in which the play as text functions as a critique of the play as performance. My reading as a whole is consistent with Berger's argument, insofar as the deficiencies of Malcolm's success(ion) are mostly revealed through reading, although not exclusively, given Malcolm's relatively weak theatrical presence. A performance of Macbeth might very well appear to tow the Jacobean line, while a reading of the play could seem highly subversive of it.

16. The predominant take on the politics of Macbeth has been, until recently, that the play in many ways flatters Shakespeare's monarch and patron. See Herbert N. Paul, The Royal Play of “Macbeth” (Cambridge, Mass., 1950); and, more recently, George Walton Williams “Macbeth: King James's Play,” South Atlantic Review, vol. 47, No. 2 (May, 1982), 12-21. More recently there has begun what may very well become a trend to read the play in opposition to the Jacobean line. See, in addition to the articles by Norbrook and Berger already cited, Michael Hawkins, “History, politics, and Macbeth,” in Focus on Macbeth, ed. John Russell Brown (London, 1982), pp. 155-88; and Alan Sinfield, “Macbeth: history, ideology and intellectuals,” Critical Quarterly, vol. 28, Nos. 1-2 (spring-summer, 1986), 63-77. Sinfield notes that the dominant tendency has been to read Macbeth in a Jamesian way as “attempting to render coherent and persuasive the ideology of the Absolutist State” (p. 66). Such readings, according to Sinfield, often proceed from the mistaken assumption that “other views of State ideology were impossible for Shakespeare and his contemporaries,” a view that Sinfield contests largely with the aid of George Buchanan's writings.

17. On ways in which the Scottish historiographical tradition was critical of Malcolm's establishing the first earls, thereby multiplying distinctions of rank where there had once been equality among the nobility, see Norbrook, pp. 78-116, especially p. 86. It is entirely possible that this climactic action of the play and inaugural act of Malcolm's realm would have been taken at least by some members of Shakespeare's audience as a sign of historical decline, not a revitalizing beginning. On Shakespeare's possible knowledge of Scottish history, see Elizabeth Nielsen, “Macbeth”: The Nemesis of the Post-Shakespearean Actor,” Shakespeare Quarterly 16 (1965), 193-99. For a skeptical response to Nielsen, see Michael Hawkins, “History, Politics, and Macbeth” in Focus on “Macbeth”, ed. John Russell Brown (London, 1981), n. 21.

18. Alternately, ll. 17-18 may be taken to signify that position within a sequence is arbitrary. “She should have died hereafter” may be taken to mean that if not now, she would have died sometime. Whenever reported, the news of her death would have been equally meaningless, and the placement of her death within a sequence of events is completely arbitrary.

19. Roland Barthes writes of sequence and repetition as the two principal ways of form—or structure-making. See “Introduction to the Structural Study of Narrative,” in Image-Music-Text, ed. and trans. Stephen Heath (New York, 1977), p. 124.

20. Cf. General Siward's speech at 5.4.16ff., which opens up a space between present and future, today and tomorrow, that Macbeth strives to collapse.

21. This is a premise, by the way, to which the later Shakespeare seems to subject his princes and sovereigns as well. The earlier Shakespeare, by contrast, tends to present tragic characters who do not need to be unfolded to us gradually. The integrity of a Romeo or a Brutus depends precisely on their resistance to change, on their remaining through a series of vicissitudes more or less exactly what they were at the beginning of the play. Macbeth is the Hamlet or Lear of this play; Malcolm, the Romeo or Brutus. Although Macbeth's lines are designed to cover up guilt and explain away the hasty dispatch of the dead king's chamberlains, they also express Macbeth's fear, which he expresses so forcefully just before the murder of Duncan, of imprisonment within an endless seriality of events and consequences, without exterior or end. The speech is similar in this respect to Macbeth's speech a few lines earlier, again designed to mask his guilt but also serving as omen of its speaker's imminent psychological state: “Had I but died an hour before this chance, / I had lived a blessèd time; for from this instant / There's nothing serious in mortality—/ All is but toys: renown and grace is dead, / The wine of life is drawn, and the mere lees / Is left this vault to brag of” (2.3.93-98).

22. Marjorie Garber discusses the syntax of 1.7.1-4 in Coming of Age in Shakespeare (London, 1981), p. 105. Nicholas Brooke has an interesting gloss on the syntax of ll. 5-7 in his recent Oxford Shakespeare edition of the play.

23. His lines about justice provide a further rationale for his tortuous syntax. They suggest that justice is habitually antimetabolic or chiasmic, reversing the order of cause and effect, perpetrator and crime, eventually presenting the agent's poison to his own lips. The working of Justice is already prefigured in Macbeth's convoluted syntax as well as the witches' “Fair is foul, and foul is fair.”

24. Text and stage direction are in conflict as to Banquo's position in the procession, whether first or last. See the discussion in Marvin Rosenberg, The Masks of Macbeth (Berkeley, 1978), p. 520.

25. Even the succession of the second line from the first is problematic. Is “hover” a command or a proposal (in either instance, with an anterior subject understood), or a predicate whose subject is to be found somewhere in the preceding line?

    As the antimetabolic line of the witches' riddling refrain, “Fair is foul, and foul is fair”—chiasmal, and spoken simultaneously by all three witches—suggests a breakdown of discursive succession at two distinct levels, the order of the speech and the order of the speakers, so does the 1st Witch tell a tale of impeded succession, just prior to their meeting on the heath with Macbeth and Banquo to speak of their imminent and future successes and successions. It is the closest the witches ever come to a “full-blown,” sequential narrative. Because a sailor's wife has refused to share her chestnuts, the 1st Witch harasses her sailor-husband. The witch apparently doesn't hold the power of life and death over the sea captain, so the story cannot reach any decisive conclusion: “Though his bark cannot be lost, / Yet it shall be tempest-tost” (1.3.25-26). The story is devoid of climax, although in a literal sense it is nearly all “climax.” All she can think to do is “to do,” that is, to repetitively drain the sailor sexually: “I'll drain him dry as hay” (1.3.19). This stuttering tale is also about lost succession of another kind: the ordinary sequence of waking and sleeping, together with the sense of temporal progression that the cycle of sleep and waking imparts. “Sleep shall neither night nor day / Hang upon his penthouse lid; / He shall live a man forbid” (1.3.20-22). The end result is no end result, a shaggy hag story reminiscent of the second witch's antinarrative description of the battle between the Scottish and Norwegian forces (“When the battle's lost and won”) and prophetic of Macbeth's “tomorrow” speech, in which he conceives lives and history itself as endlessly repetitive stories devoid of climax. All are stories deprived of an issue, like Macbeth and Lady Macbeth.

26. Rosenberg makes glancing reference to the similarity of Oedipus' and Macbeth's parallel entrapments by tantalizingly opaque and riddling oracles, but he goes on to detail the later play's relation to “closer classical precedents” (p. 518). He misses, I think, the extensive network of questions concerning succession that are linked to riddles in both plays.

27. Ternary patterns in Oedipus would have seemed a reflection of the ritual circumstances of that play's performance: performed as part of a competition over a period of three days, and within a grouping of three plays presented by a single playwright.

28. Johann Huizinga, Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play-Element in Culture (1950; rpt. Boston, 1955), p. 110.

29. In the case of the riddle, the questioner holds the answer prior to posing the question, precisely the reverse of the situation of most interrogatives; the respondent, who in the ordinary interrogative is presumed to possess more information than the questioner, is in the dark. And unlike the ordinary question, where the questioner is in some sense subservient to the addressee who is presumed to know or at least to represent the possibility of knowing, it is the riddler who is empowered by the question s/he poses, the riddlee disempowered (for instance, in the riddle contests so prevalent in the Norse sagas, in which failure to answer a riddle correctly could cost one's life).

30. Descriptions of the play tend to be drawn toward images of circularity. See, e.g., James Caldwerwood, “‘More Than What You Were’: Augmentation and Increase in Macbeth,” English Literary Renaissance 14 (1984), p. 80; and Donald W. Foster, “Macbeth's War on Time,” English Literary Renaissance 16 (1986), pp. 321-22, 328.

31. Among recent examples, see Anthony L. Johnson, “Number Symbolism in Macbeth,” Analysis: Quaderni di anglistica 4 (1986), 25-41; Calderwood, 70-82; Luisa Guj, “Macbeth and the Seeds of Time,” Shakespeare Studies 18 (1986), 175-88; Claudia Corti, ‘Macbeth’: la parola e l'immagine (Pisa, 1983); and John McRae, “‘The equivocation of the fiend that lies like truth.’ La regia di Macbeth,” in ‘Macbeth’: dal testo all scena, ed. Mariangela Tempera (Bologna, 1982), pp. 123-64. For Calderwood triplings in the play belong to a larger pattern of repetition emphasizing that what has “an appearance of fullness or abundance … is in fact mere redundancy” (p. 75). Johnson for the most part sees patterns of two and three as similarly “in opposition to the principle of unity” (p. 37), although he admits a positive meaning for patterns of three in the play as well: “Threes correspond to cooperation and complementarity in an enterprise” (p. 37). He misses, I think, the important links between various triplings and questions of success/succession.

32. On the importance of number symbolism to Renaissance culture, see Alastair Fowler, Triumphal Forms (Cambridge, 1970); and Edgar Wind, Pagan Mysteries in the Renaissance (London, 1958). The latter is especially helpful in its discussion of various triadic patterns. See pp. 36ff., 241ff.

33. The political life of the play in general seems to be under the aegis of three, for there are three Kings of Scotland in the play, Duncan, Macbeth, and Malcolm.

34. M. J. B. Allen, “Toys, Prologues, and the Great Amiss,” in Shakespearean Tragedy, ed. David Palmer and Malcolm Bradbury, Stratford-upon-Avon Studies 20 (London, 1984), p. 8.

35. Hecate's threefold nature and function, although it certainly falls into line with the extensive pattern of trebling in the play, to my mind doesn't necessarily controvert the widely held view that she is largely or entirely an interpolation by a hand other than Shakespeare's, although it does challenge it. On Hecate's threefold nature, see Rosenberg, pp. 492ff. Luisa Guj, pp. 183ff. provides interesting evidence to support the idea that Shakespeare “could in fact be the originator of the idea of a personal intervention by the goddess in the action of the play.” She relates the three-headed queen of darkness to other three-headed figures in the play.

36. Nevertheless, the number three, closely associated with the witches, continues to direct things from the wings. The speech takes place at three o'clock, and it ends with a triple equivocation. The phrase “giving him the lie” means “calling him a liar,” “forcing him to lie down,” and “making him urinate,” the word “lye” often being used to mean “urine.” (Brooke, Oxford edition, p. 132.)

37. The spectacle of eight Stuart kings within a mirror, an instrument of doubling, together with the bloody image of their fountainhead Banquo, suggests two series, one contained within the other: eight within nine, or two to the third power within three to the second power. The number of Stuart kings, arrived at by leaving out of the count James's mother, Mary, Queen of Scots, seems oddly but carefully calculated to be consistent with other numbers in the Show of Kings, particularly the investment of some of the kings in the Show with “two-fold balls and treble sceptres” (4.1.121), one sceptre and orb to signify the King of Scotland, and two sceptres and one orb to signify the King of England. A text “hath bubbles, as the water has, / And these are of them,” as Banquo says of the witches (1.3.79-80). I don't want to ask too much to rest on the continual bubbling of the numbers 2 and 3 to the surface of Macbeth, especially whenever the witches appear. It does seem worth reckoning, however, that the Show of Kings, with its inscription of 8 within 9—the play's most complex interweaving of 2 and 3—should take place within the context of a view of history and succession in which, unlike Macbeth's, the modes of trebling and doubling, lineal succession and repetition, are wedded. Among other things, the succession of Stuart kings symbolically incorporates and thereby defuses the potentially deadly and fratricidal effects of doubling, which Shakespeare explores most thoroughly in one of the least successive of his plays, Hamlet.

38. The authenticity of parts of this scene is doubtful, and if pressed I would be willing to drop this bit of numerical evidence. Macbeth plays the numbers so regularly that it isn't necessary to place bets on a second triad of witches in Act 4, scene 1. But as it fits a more general pattern of interconnecting doubling and trebling, there may be cause here for arguing that the second triad of witches is not necessarily an interpolation, regardless of what one may think about the authenticity of Hecuba's speeches.

39. Perhaps the bloodiest versions of “amen,” diabolical counterparts to that blessed word of ending or the arch-blessing that is the sense of an ending, are the first Witch's image of a parent cannibalizing her children in the context of a recipe for a potion that Macbeth must imbibe in order to see the apparitions—“Pour in sow's blood, that hath eaten / Her nine farrow” (4.1.64-5)—and Lady Macbeth's

    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.

    (1.7.54-59)

    Lady Macbeth's violent image is somehow appropriate to its subject, the fixity of a promise, for the destruction of the babe is an image of the abolishment of succession which in another way is also accomplished by swearing an oath. An oath is an attempt to freeze or fix the mind's operations, to prevent the ordinary succession of conflicting or simply different intentions, hesitations, or misgivings. Lady Macbeth's association with oaths, vows, and other forms of mental fixity shows her resistance to various orders of succession, similar to that of her husband, with his fantasy about “trammel[ing] up the consequence” of the assassination.

40. I develop this argument in “‘His form and cause conjoin'd’: Reflections on ‘Cause’ in Hamlet,” Renaissance Drama, ns 16 (1985), 75-94.