Macbeth, which in some literary circles has been superstitiously labeled “a Scottish Play,” is firstly an anomaly among Shakespeare’s tragedies: It is more than a thousand lines shorter than Othello and King Lear, but only slightly more than half as long as Hamlet. Its anomalous brevity has spawned suggestions among many critics that the received version we have may have been heavily cut.
That brevity critics also connect to the other unusual features of the play— “the fast pace of the first act, which seems to have been ‘stripped of action’” (like chicken stripped of some flesh!), the “other characters, other than Macbeth, are comparatively flat” (some good characters indeed need more development, and lacking so, they don’t fire our enthusiasm to listen), and furthermore, the displayed “oddness of Macbeth himself as compared to other Shakespearean tragic heroes” (compared with the characters of Romeo and Juliet, Macbeth could be considered a “villainous protagonist” if not an “antagonistic hero,” which makes it somewhat odd).
Enough reasons, of course, to make you suspicious that someone jealous of the great Shakespeare’s reputation must have been out to make hell of the play by sabotaging the manuscripts! But if we do not grant malice on the enemies of the bard, maybe ignorance we can impute on the perpetrator: He who admires the bard so much tries to salvage the manuscripts from their tattered state, not being so familiar with the parts, but at least wanting to save it for literary posterity’s sake.
Whatever may have been the reason (or reasons), the fact remains that we indeed do not have the real Macbeth manuscripts. This of course is a job for literary critics to do. It is enough that we mention the tragedy that must have befallen the original Macbeth. A Macbeth play that must have been made up from the tattered and scattered originals.
But more so, Macbeth as a play is a tragedy content-wise. A character named Duncan, king of Scotland, dies a victim of the unholy ambition and greed for power at the hands of his own kinsman, Macbeth. A character who suffers at the hands of the man whose bravery and fighting prowess in the fight against the invading allied forces of Norway and Ireland he as Scotland’s king has praised. Macbeth, the protagonist, the king’s relative (by what degree of consanguinity, it is not mentioned) is itself a conflict in character— in short a character with conflicting personalities. He is also a tragic hero, as in Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex, a good man turned bad. Later, as the play goes on, Macbeth too suffers for his mistakes.
The element of hamartia, found in Greek dramatic tragedies, is also employed by Shakespeare in the play Macbeth. It is this hamartia, the flaw, the defect present in the personality of the character that ultimately leads to his downfall. But shouldn’t he blame, firstly, the three Witches with their harmful prophecies or auguries of harmful things to come? They may have planted the motives. Macbeth yields to that motive, and more so in the face of another prophecy from the witches that has also come to be fulfilled. For another Thane (or feudal lord) named Ross comes with a message from King Duncan, informing Macbeth of his newly-bestowed title— as Thane of Cawdor, thus fulfilling the first prophecy of the Witches. Macbeth starts to entertain the ambitions of becoming king of Scotland. That ambition shows his character flaw.
Macbeth’s wife, knowing about the Witches’ prophecies, also starts to harbor ambition for her husband, but with bloody intent to fulfill it. This unholy ambition feeds the conflict in the play. And so Macbeth and Lady Macbeth see the chance to commit regicide when Duncan visits them at their castle at Inverness. Macbeth, being a virtuous character, of course, raises valid concerns about committing the crime (an example of a conflict between man and himself, and between man and his wife). But his wife eventually persuades him to commit the act.
And so Duncan dies. Macbeth’s conscience again bothers him, this time taking on the form of vision of daggers dancing before him (”Is this a dagger I see, its handle toward my hand?”). Vision of daggers is a prop to explain the conflict within the soul. The deed of regicide, though not seen by the audience, leaves Macbeth so shaken that Lady Macbeth (herself very jumpy) has to take charge. That is a lot of hubris to tell about the man who abuses kinship and power to overpower and murder the innocent; you will witness that as you go on with the play.
The hero does not rest here and correct himself. Duncan’s sleeping servants are implicated for the murder of their king, the couple planting their bloody daggers on the servants’ hands. This too is another conflict—between innocence and guilt.
Macduff, the loyal Thane of Fife, arrives and discovers Duncan’s body. In a show of fury—a sham of sorts—Macbeth kills the servants before they can make a protest for their innocence. Evil again triumphs as the ambitious Macbeth ceases to listen to his conscience.
There is another conflict shown in Macduff’s being suspicious of Macbeth, witnessing the death of the innocent servants at Macbeth’s hands, although he does not disclose that suspicion publicly.
Duncan’s sons flee for their lives—Malcolm to England and his brother Donalbain to Ireland. The sons’ flight from the crime scene makes them suspect. They let the evil Macbeth triumph. So the one who is not a rightful heir assumes the throne as the new King of Scotland.
But despite his success, Macbeth remains uneasy, as he refuses to lead himself to the path of goodness. This again is a show of hubris. He still remembers the witches’ prophecy that “Banquo would be the progenitor of kings.” So one crime leads to another. Macbeth invites Banquo to a royal banquet, and hires two men to kill him and his son Fleance.
While the assassins succeed in murdering Macbeth’s friend Banquo, Banquo’s son Fleance has escaped. Macbeth’s paranoia grows and his crimes weigh on his conscience. That night at the banquet, Banquo’s ghost enters and sits on Macbeth’s seat. Of course, only the conscience-stricken Macbeth can see the ghost; the guests panic as they see Macbeth raging at the empty chair. Lady Macbeth pleads with the guests to leave. Lady Macbeth too has a lot of hubris, one that will lead to her death later in the play.
The conscience-disturbed Macbeth again goes to the Witches. He has not learned his lessons, no, not yet! The witches conjure up three spirits with three further warnings and prophecies. Then Macbeth massacres everyone in Macduff’s castle, including Macduff’s wife and their young children.
Lady Macbeth now becomes racked with guilt. In one famous scene (a scene that has earned many Lady Macbeth character many plaudits), she sleepwalks while trying to wash imaginary bloodstains from her hands, all the while revealing to the audience the terrible things she knows—including a Doctor and a lady in waiting. The doctor should be a psychiatrist and the lady should be a psychologist to be afforded this much confession from a sleepwalking criminal. If I were watching the play today, this would be one scene I would give all ears to.
In England, Malcolm and Macduff make the plan of invading Scotland and put an end to the tyranny of Macbeth, many of whose followers are now defecting.
There is another scene meant to trouble Macbeth the more. This is another conflict but it is happening in the mind of the villainous protagonist. In Birnam Wood, soldiers cut down tree limbs and carry them to camouflage their numbers, fulfilling the Witches’ second prophecy about “a moving grove.” Seeing this grove, and upon learning of Lady Macbeth’s death, Macbeth delivers his famous nihilistic soliloquy (”Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow“). The cause of her death is not shown; Shakespeare makes us assume that Lady Macbeth commits suicide, as may be gleaned from Malcolm’s statement: “Tis thought, by self and violent hands/took off her life”).
Another conflict again, this time in the battle that ensues between Malcomb’s army of goodness and Macbeth’s army of evil. Macbeth’s men desert their evil leader, who is determined to hold fast. General MacDuff enters, and engages Macbeth to a fight. Macbeth decides to fight on in spite of MacDuff’s offer that he surrender and be subjected to being dragged through the countryside, “painted upon a pole, and underwrit, ‘Here may you see the tyrant.” In one last show of defiance, Macbeth declares, “Lay on MacDuff, and damned be him that cries, Hold, Enough!” But goodness must now triumph. Macduff beheads Macbeth off stage, thus fulfilling the last of the Witches’ prophecies. The good fortune of the man whose bravery and fighting prowess are known in the kingdom turns to misfortune, an element in Greek tragedy known as peripeteia.
If you ask me if there is amagnoresis (disclosure, discovery, recognition of error) in the play (amagnoresis being another element of tragedy), it is revealed throughout. The audience firstly knows it. The couple, Macbeth and his wife, knows it, but they refuse to recreate a change in their personality. Macbeth himself recognizes this when he says: “I am in blood; stepp’d insofar that, should I wade no more, returning were as tedious as to go o’er.” His wife kills herself; what can you make of that except to say she realizes her mistake too?
Malcolm is now crowned as the rightful King of Scotland. Peace now is restored to the kingdom. The witches’ prophecy concerning Banquo, “Thou shalt [be]get kings,” was known to be true by the audience of Shakespeare’s time: James I of England, who is also James VI of Scotland, now sits as King of Great Britain, being a descendant of Banquo, Macbeth’s friend whom he has murdered.
The theme of the play centers on Macbeth’s ambition, which is seen as a dominant trait defining the character himself. The good Macbeth esteemed for his military bravery becomes an evil Macbeth wholly reviled. Macbeth has waded through the blood of innocent people who are victims of his unholy ambition, and keeps on wading on it until he falls.
Macbeth as a good man, a virtuous man, does not have a predisposition to kill his kinsmen, innocent men, other good men. But he has an inordinate ambition that takes murder as an instrument to fulfill that ambition. This characterization of a tragic hero maybe a holdover from Senecan or medieval tradition; for in this view, you do not expect antagonists to be wholly bad, or protagonists to be wholly good, in the style of Seneca.
But more so, Shakespeare is influenced by the tragic drama of the Greeks. It is assumed that while writing his tragic plays, Shakespeare may have been reminded of, or may have been reading Sophocles and other tragic dramatists.
It has not been so easy to resolve the question of Macbeth’s motivation. Like the critic Robert Bridges, I perceive Macbeth to be a paradox—for a character who is able to express convincing horrors before and after murder would likely be incapable of committing the crime. Macbeth’s motivations in the first act appears vague and insufficient and therefore needs development. John Dover Wilson’s hypothesis may be correct: that Shakespeare’s original text must have had an extra scene or scenes in which husband and wife discuss their murder plans.
On the other hand, it has been suggested by the play, as the scene unfolds one after another, that Macbeth has already thought of killing Duncan before the play begins. Murder is a de-facto of sorts. This interpretation is not fully provable. But we recognize the motivating role of ambition for Macbeth. Evil actions prod his ambition. As a character he is trapped in a cycle of evil increasing evil, evil surpassing evil.
Perturbations in the political sphere are echoed in the Macbeth play. Macbeth’s generally accepted indebtedness to medieval tragedy is often seen as particularly significant in the play’s treatment of moral order. It was Howard Felperin who argued that Macbeth has a more complex attitude toward “orthodox Christian tragedy” than is often admitted, seeing the kinship between Macbeth as a play and the tyrant plays of the medieval liturgical dramatists.
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