The Imagination of A Poet: Macbeth

Go back to my previous essay on Macbeth and the lines I quoted from A. C. Bradley’s Shakespearean Tragedy (1904): “This bold ambitious man of action has  . . . the imagination of a poet . . . and through it come to him intimations of conscience and honor [which] instead of speaking to him in the overt language of moral ideas, commands, prohibitions, incorporates itself in images which alarm and horrify. His imagination is thus the best part of him, something usually deeper and higher than his conscious thoughts, and if he had obeyed it he would have been safe.” To use a phrase that seems to have only recently come into general use, Macbeth has a “moral imagination.”

This is a way of thinking about ‘the’ imagination—and using the word ‘imagination’—that would have surprised just about everyone until 1800, or thereabouts, when Coleridge and Wordsworth began to use the word as virtually synonymous with a kind of visionary power that we now refer to, rather weakly, as ‘creativity.’ Most people, before 1800, would have agreed with Theseus, in that most brilliantly imaginative play, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, when he says, in effect, that the poetic imagination, unlike “cool reason,” produces fables and fantasies (like this play play, perhaps?) which no rational person would ever confuse with a true account of how things are:

                         I never may believe 

These antique fables nor these fairy toys.

Lovers and madmen have such seething brains,

Such shaping fantasies, that apprehend

More than cool reason ever comprehends.

The lunatic, the lover, and the poet,

Are of imagination all compact....

The poet’s eye, in a fine frenzy rolling,

Doth glance from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven;

And, as imagination bodies forth

The forms of shapes unknown, the poet’s pen

Turns them to shapes, and gives to airy nothing

A local habitation and a name.

Such tricks hath strong imagination,

That, if it would but apprehend some joy,

It comprehends some bringer of that joy;

Or in the night, imagining some fear,

How easy is a bush suppose’d a bear. 5.1.2-22

A strong imagination may indeed play tricks on us—or even a weak one, for that matter—but not in this play: all the trickery is right out in the open where the audience can see it. When people are fooled  they are fooled by others—fairies—who though they are not quite human, have motives and methods which cool reason can easily comprehend. 

For most of us, most of the time, Theseus’ distinction between illusion and reality seems perfectly clear: what we imagine may or may not be real or grounded in reality, and if you are a rational person you know which is which, the trickster from the trick. That sounds simpler than it is; there is nothing simple about illusions, however, and that I think is a good thing: if illusions were simple, the world would be a lot safer, to be sure, but also duller and more boring than it is.

Consider the little play that Bottom and his friends put on to entertain the aristocratic wedding party at Theseus’ court. A play is a dramatic illusion—an imitation, as Aristotle says; but Bottom’s play including the casting and rehearsal is an imitation of an imitation; and vastly more (or more differently) entertaining as a play about dramatic illusion than it would be if we were seeing it straight. 

Now the idea of an illusion of an illusion is something that Theseus’ rational theory of the poetic imagination is unprepared for—a knot that cool reason cannot easily untie. And there’s something else that reason cannot easily explain, or not in a way that has ever seemed enitirely satisfactory: how does imagination do what Shakespeare (or Theseus) here is saying that it does?—body forth the forms of shapes unknown and make them known; invent things or ideas that have never been thought of before, and give them a local habitation and a name. How, in other words, does the imagination take something that it has merely apprehended, and give it a form that reason can comprehend?

A case in point, oddly, is Macbeth who is the victim of truly malignant—and motiveless— supernatual trickery, and whose imagination doesn’t even begin to follow Theseus’ (or anyone else’s) rules. That epic image of pity, for example, like a naked new-born infant, astride a hurricane or tornado, is not an illusion, exactly; it is not merely a figment of his imagination for it is telling him a truth. And in general, Macbeth’s imagination always gives him and us a truthful account of the state of his soul—it is, as Bardley says, the best part of him, and nowhere more poignantly or beautifully than when, at last he fully comprehends the blind alley that the will to power has led him into.

On The Art of The Novel: Lessons From Balzac AND Thackeray, by Henry James

James says that Balzac’s faults are faults of execution only; “they never come back to that fault in an artist, in the novelist, that amounts most particularly to a failure of dignity: the absence of saturation with his idea. When saturation fails no other presence really avails; as when, on the other hand, it operates, no failure of method fatally interferes. There is never in Balzac that damning interference which consists of the painter’s not seeing, not possessing his image. “Balzac aime sa Valerie,” says Taine; in his great essay—so much the finest thing ever written on our author [Balzac]—speaking of the way in which the awful little Madame Marneff of “Les Parents Pauvres” is drawn, and of the long rope, for her acting herself out, that her creator’s participation in her reality assures her. He has been contrasting her, as it happens, with Thackeray’s Becky Sharp or rather with Thackeray’s attitude toward Becky, and the marked jealosy of her freedom that Thackeray exhibits from the first.....

[The novelist’s love of his or her created characters], "the joy in their communicated and exhibited movement, in their standing on their feet and going of themselves and acting out their characters, was what rendered possible the 'saturation' I speak of.... It was by loving them—as the terms of his subject and the nugget of his mine—that he knew them; it was not by knowing them that he loved.

“He at all events robustly loved the sense of another explored, assumed, assimilated identity—enjoyed it as the hand enjoys the glove when the glove ideally fits. My image is loose; for what he [Balzac] liked was absolutely to get into the consitituted consciousness, into all the clothes, gloves, and whatever else, into the very skin and bones, of the habited, featured, colored, articulated form of life that he desired to present. How do we know given persons, for any purpose of demonstration, unless we know their situation for themselves, unless we see it from their point of vision, that is from their point of pressing consciousness or sensation?—without our allowing for which there is no appreciation. Balzac loved his Valérie then as Thackeray did not love his Becky, or his Blanche Amory in Pendennis. But his [Balzac’s] prompting was not to expose her; it could only be, on the contrary—intensely aware as he was of all the length she might go. . .to cover her up and protect her, in the interest of her special genius and freedom. All his impulse was... to give her all her value, just as Thackeray’s attitude was the opposite one, a desire positively to expose and desecrate poor Becky—to follow her up, catch her in the act and bring her to shame. . .

“It all comes back, in fine, to that respect for the liberty of the subject which I should be willing to name as the great sign of the [novelist] of the first order. Such a witness to the human comedy fairly holds his breath for fear of arresting or diverting that natural license; the witness who begins to breath so uneasily in the presence that his respiration not only warns off the little prowling or playing creature he is supposed to be studying, but drowns, for our ears, the ingenuous sounds of the animal as well as the general truthful hum of the human scene at large—this demonstrator has no sufficient warrant for his task. And if such an induction as this is largely the moral of our renewed glance at Balzac, there is a lesson of a more essential sort, I think, folded still deeper within—the lesson that there is no convincing art that is not ruinously expensive . . . Many of those who have followed him affect us as doing it on the cheap . . .”

Macbeth's Better Self

It is generally agreed that this play was written a year or so after

King Lear (1605). If so, it is striking that, having in the former play

stripped the world of its supernatural beings and forces, Shakespeare

restores them in Macbeth, the only one of Shakespeare’s tragedies in

which supernatural agencies have roles to play and words to speak.

But the witches are an integral part of the story of Macbeth as

Shakespeare found it in Holinshed’s Chronicles, and it has long been

well understood that Shakespeare chose this particular story as a

polite tribute to his new king, King James I, who claimed to be

descended from Banquo and had written a book about witches.

Since Shakespeare’s theater company was at least partly dependent

on royal patronage, he would have wanted to show off his abilities

as a playwright to the new monarch. He may also have thought that

the supernatural elements were the only thing that was likely to hold the

attention of a man who was known to dislike long plays.

It is harder to be clear about the role of the witches in Shakespeare’s

play. Though they are literally part of the foul atmosphere of the play

from the beginning and do much to set its ominous tone, what do they

actually do? Do they make things happen like the prophecies in

Oedipus Rex, or do they, like an evil chorus, merely urge Macbeth on

in a direction he is already taking? Or are these questions irrelevant?

All we know for sure about these spiteful creatures is that they can see

into the future but are powerless to change it. Thus they resemble the

chorus of Greek tragedy: nothing happens that would not have happened

had the witches not existed. Though, like poetry, they make nothing happen,

they give us the illusion of “sightless substances” out there not only waiting

on and delighting in “nature’s mischief,” but actually making it.

Lady Macbeth, intoxicated by their predictions, cares only about “sovereign

sway and masterdom” now; whether or not her children, if any, will inherit

the “golden round” she lusts after, doesn’t concern her in the slightest.

According to Lady Macbeth, she has had at least one child: “I have given suck,”

she says, “and know/ How tender ’tis to love the babe that milks me (1.7.54-5)

but we never hear another word about that unfortunate infant, who is only

referred to in these lines so that her husband—and of course the audience—

may be impressed by her heartlessly single-minded pursuit of power. And he is

impressed, so much so that it does not occur to him until after the murder

of Duncan, that his wife has missed the point: what’s the use of power if

you can’t hand it on to your children? (Notice that the rules of politics

these days make such dynastic scheming difficult, if not impossible.) It’s

 meaningless—and doubly so if there’s no chance you’ll ever have children.

Upon my head they [the witches] placed a fruitless crown

And put a barren sceptre in my gripe,

Thenced to be wrenched with an unlineal hand,

No son of mine succeeding. (3.1.61-4)

As soon as one begins to think about the Macbeths and children, babies,

children and images of babies and children start popping up all over

the place: the attempted murder of Banquo’s son, Macduff’s murdered

children, the spectral baby, covered with blood, who tells Macbeth to

fear no man born of woman; and then there’s the stunning image of

helplessness and power—of pity, like a naked newborn babe—that

comes from deep within his own mind and forces him to acknowledge

the true baseness of the crime he is contemplating, the triviality of his

motives:

pity, like a naked newborn babe,

Striding the blast, or heaven’s cherubin horsed

Upon the sightless couriers of the air,

Shall blow the horrid deed in every eye,

That tears shall drown the wind. I have no spur

To prick the sides of my intent, but only

Vaulting ambition . . . (1.7.21-7)

A.C. Bradley (Shakespearean Tragedy, 1904) said (and I quote at length from

this, one of the most penetrating essays ever written on this play) that Macbeth

 has “the imagination of a poet . . . . and through it come to him intimations

of conscience and honor. Macbeth’s better nature, instead of speaking

to him in the overt language of moral ideas, commands and prohibitions,

incorporates itself in images which alarm and horrify. His imagination is

thus the best of him, something usually deeper and higher than his conscious

thoughts; and if he had obeyed it he would have been safe. But his wife quite

misunderstands it, and he himself understands it only in part.The terrifying

images which deter him from crime and follow its commision, and which are

really the protest of his deepest self, seem to his wife the creations of mere

nervous fear, and are sometimes referred by himself to the dread of vengeance

or the restlessness of insecurity. His conscious or reflective mind, that is,

moves chiefly among considerations of outward success and failure, while his

inner being is convulsed by conscience. And his inability to understand

himself is repeated and exaggerated in the interpretations of actors and critics,

who represent him as a coward, cold-blooded, calculating and pitiless, who

shrinks from crime simply because it is dangerous, and suffers afterwards

simply because he is not safe. In reality his courage is frightful. He strides

from crime to crime, though his soul never ceases to bar his advance with

shapes of terror, or to clamor in his ears that he is murdering his peace

and casting away his ‘eternal jewel.’”

Macbeth has the imagination of a poet. What kind of poet? Not a classic or

neoclassic poet but a romantic poet—a poet like, let us say, William Blake,

who said that Milton was of the devil’s party [as he, Milton, was writing Paradise 

Lost] and didn’t know it—didn’t know, in other words what the voice of his

deepest self, the voice of his imagination, was trying to tell him about the

poem he was writing.

Blake’s own poetry is always informing us about the great divide, between

the world of conscious, rational, moralistic will—the industial world, with its

“dark satanic mills” and its churches—and the imaginative world of the spirit.

Blake was writing at the end of the 18th century and the beginning of the 19th.

The kind of romantic imagination that Bradley seems to take for granted as he

is attributing it to Macbeth at the beginning of the 20th, did not exist when the

play Macbeth was being written, almost 300 years earlier—or perhaps I should

say, the romantic idea of a deeper, imaginative self at odds with its more rational,

power-driven mind, didn’t exist at that time. This is not a criticism of Bradley: what

surprises me is  how unsurprised he is at finding the soul of a romantic poet in

this eleventh century warrior and murderer. Which is nothing to the surprise that

the actual Macbeth would have felt at such a discovery. But Shakespeare knew

what he was doing: almost every play, after about 1595, is a radically new thing. He

had created our first modern cynic when he invented Iago; in Macbeth he

developed a distinction, already implicit in Hamlet, between private and public selves:

between a superficial public, political self and a deeper, private self where the

important actions are going on and the ideas and images that drive that outer,

public self are mysteriously being created out of  . . .  nothing.

Bradley says that Macbeth only partially understands what those images are trying

to tell him; no voice, no images from Hamlet's inner self inform or disturb his conscious,

reflective mind: he knows as little about himself as we do. That's a point that the

play makes repeatedly—so often that, prodded by critics (beginning with Coleridge),

we have tried to fill this hole by constructing, on Hamlet's behalf, a substantial inner self.

If you want to see how the story would look and feel with an unimaginative hero,

read the nasty, brutish and fairly short accounts of Donwald and Macbeth in

Holinshed’s Chronicles,which are—or, at any rate, used to be—printed in the

Signet Classics edition of this play. Should you do so, you will find that the

witches and their carefully calibrated predictions are historical—that is to say,

you can read about them in the Chronicles, just as Shakespeare did—but you

won’t find a word about the extraordinary perturbations these predictions

cause in the minds—and marriage—of Lord and Lady Macbeth.

The differences between this husband and this wife become apparent

almost immediately. Macbeth, stunned at first by the witches’ salutations,

starts thinking hard when one of their prophecies is instantly

confirmed. Less cautious than Banquo, who is instinctively suspicious

of the witches’ motives, he is more cautious and more thoughtful than

his wife, who is so exhilarated by the idea that her dreams of “sovereign

sway and masterdom” are about to come true, that the only thing

she can think about is how to keep her husband from blowing their

big chance.

From her reflections, we can see that she doesn’t know her husband

very well. She thinks he is “too full of the milk of human kindness”

and too squeamish to do the things that have to be done in order to

attain a position of power in the real world. He’s the sort of person,

she thinks, who gladly accepts the results of someone else’s dirty-work,

but would rather not know how it was done, much less do it himself.

These opinions do not quite fit the troubled and somewhat sinister character

whom we have just heard telling the stars to

                                  hide [their] fires;

Let not light see my black and deep desires:

The eye wink at the hand; yet let that be

Which the eye fears, when it is done, to see. 1.4.53

He is also a man who has acquired a modicum of self-knowledge by

paying attention to what his body and his feelings are telling him. So, for

example, he knows the witches’ “supernatural soliciting” cannot be good

because of the “horrid image” that invades his mind, and the violent

and unwonted beating of his heart. His inability to resist that image

and the thought that comes with it, a thought which up to now he has

been able to dismiss as mere fantasy—for it seems that the murder of

Duncan is by means a new idea—now frightens, confuses and fascinates

him.

As long as this murder had been nothing but an improbable fantasy,

resistance had been easy. Now, all of a sudden, it no longer seems

“fantastical,” but possible. Looking within himself, like Conrad’s

megalomaniacal Kurtz, he finds nothing to hold him back: no will,

no passion, no principles. For a moment he clutches at the obvious,

common sense response to the witches’ prophecy: “If chance will

have me King,” as chance has made him Cawdor, “why, chance may

crown me, without my stir.” (1.3.144) Why get all excited? After all,

fatalism is best: what will be, will be. “Come what come may, time and

the hour runs through the roughest day.” But then the King

announces that he has settled the succession upon his son Malcolm,

and Macbeth thinks his hand is forced.

It is apparent that Macbeth is a good deal deeper than his wife supposes; she

is not deep at all. Desiring power —“sovereign sway and

masterdom”—with ruthless single-mindedness, she supresses any

feelings that might distract her from seizing this one great “ornament

of life” by the nearest way. Does something in her womanly nature

shrink from doing evil in order to get what she wants? Root it out, she

thinks; alter that womanly nature altogether. So she does her best to

dehumanize herself:

Come, you spirits

That tend on mortal thoughts, unsex me here,

And fill me, from the crown to the toe, top-full

Of direst cruelty! Make thick my blood,

Stop up th’ access and passage to remorse,

That no compunctious visitings of nature

Shake my fell purpose, nor keep peace between

Th’ effect and it! Come to my woman’s breasts,

And take my milk for gall, you murd’ring ministers,

Wherever in your sightless substances

You wait on nature’s mischief! Come thick night,

And pall thee in the dunnest smoke of hell,

That my keen knife see not the wound it makes,

Nor heaven peep through the blanket of the dark,

To cry “Hold, hold!” I.5.55

This is great poetry—Lady Macbeth also has the imagination of poet,

though she would hate anyone who dared to say so—

as well as a terrifying prayer to the “ministering” agents of strange and

terrible gods. A world entirely subject to the capricious ministry of

such gods or demons would not be fit for human habitation, but that

is the world that most people at that time thought they lived in. Satanic

agents were everywhere, waiting on “nature’s mischief” and listening

in “on mortal thoughts” in the hope of catching such a soul as Lady

Macbeth’s—a soul that is only too willing to be caught: if ever a woman

were out to sell her soul, it is she. But no one is listening, it seems.

Some of Shakespeare’s audiences must have noticed with interest

or surprise that this prayer goes unanswered. She is not filled

“top-full”—or not quite—“of direst cruelty.” Her milk of human kindness

is not entirely replaced by gall, for she is unable to murder the

defenseless Duncan in his sleep. “Had he not resembled my father as

he slept, I had done’t,” she tells herself, trying to find an excuse for

her last-minute weakness of will.

Neither of these two would have been able to commit this murder

alone, prophecy or no. No matter how tightly they screw up their

courage, it is not enough; Lady Macbeth, for all her steely will, is incapable

of killing a man in his sleep. Macbeth, on the other hand, can do just about

anything he wants; what he can’t do is control the images that come

crowding in upon his horrified mind as he thinks about the apocalyptic

crime they are about to commit. Notice that while human vengeance worries

 him, divine retribution is a possibility he virtually ignores.

Even Macbeth’s hired desperados seem to require reasons for the murder

of Banquo and his son; the money they will earn thereby is not enough.

Macbeth: Know

That it was he in the times past which held you

So under fortune, which you thought had been

Our innocent self. 3.1.80

Macbeth’s balderdash (and there is more, lots more, most of it insulting)

is not sufficient either; it falls flat, not because they don’t believe

it but because their lives have become so desperate that they are no

longer looking for anyone or anything to blame. Killing their enemy,

whoever it is, won’t make a bit of difference. No one person or policy

is responsible for their miseries; everyone and everything is to blame.

The world is their enemy. Macbeth, to them is just another self-serving

politician; religion, a pious subterfuge.

Second Murderer. I am one, my liege,

Whom the vile blows and buffets of the world

Hath so incensed that I am reckless what

I do to spite the world.

First Murderer. And I another

So weary with disasters, tugged with fortune,

That I would set my life on any chance,

To mend it or be rid on’t. 3.1.114

Their fellow murderers, Lord and Lady Macbeth, are trivial by comparison,

having no spur to prick the sides of [their] intent, but only

vaulting ambition. (I.7.25-7) That’s enough for Lady Macbeth, or so

she thinks, but not for her husband: he only agrees to go through

with their plan, at last, because she undermines his scruples and his

reason by questioning his manhood.

The murder of Duncan irreversibly alters the inner lives of the murderers

and totally rearranges their marriage. Though these facts are

not immediately apparent, the signs are there. Before the murder,

he can easily and powerfully imagine how this murder will affect others,

but he can’t imagine how it will affect him; he only feels the enormity

of his crime after he has done it. This point is made repeatedly in

II.2, as Macbeth emerges staring at his bloody hands. “This

is a sorry sight,” he says, to which his wife replies, contemptuously,

“A foolish thought, to say a sorry sight.” The scene continues:

Macbeth. 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 Macbeth. Consider it not so deeply.

Macbeth. But wherefore could not I pronounce “Amen”?

I had most need of blessing, and “Amen”

Stuck in my throat.

Lady Macbeth.  These deeds must not be thought

After these ways; so, it will make us mad.

Noticing that he is still holding the bloody daggers, she tells him to put

them back where they belong, in Duncan’s servants’ hands. This he is

unable to do: “I’ll go no more. I am afraid to think what I have done;

look on’t again I dare not.” At that she bustles off to do it herself with

a tart, “Infirm of purpose!” and a silly pun that sums up perfectly the

flatness and superficiality of what passes in her for moral imagination:

“If he do bleed, I’ll gild the faces of the grooms withal, for it must seem

their guilt.” Guilt for her is only skin deep, like paint or gold-leaf. “A

little water clears us of this deed,” she says cheerfully as she returns,

in stunning contrast with what Macbeth has been saying while she

was gone:

What hands are here? Ha! They pluck out mine eyes!

Will all great Neptune’s ocean wash this blood

Clean from my hand? No; this my hand will rather

The multitudinous seas incarnadine,

Making the green one red. 2.2.60

The superficiality of Lady Macbeth has to be understood in a particular

sense. She is not without depth of feeling nor does she lack moral

sense or imagination; she suppresses, quells, forces into the service of

her conscious self, or discards entirely, those inconvenient aspects of

her nature that hold her back from achieving her ambitions. Like

socially and politically ambitious people everywhere, she lives on the

surface of her being. She thinks she has managed to dry up her milk

of human kindness, or shut down the sources in her nature that produce

it, but she is wrong. There are people who can do that—her husband

for one—turning themselves thereby into monsters, but she is

not one of them. Though she is able to nerve herself up for her great

“quell” (I.7.72) or slaughter by suppressing her natural feelings, she

can’t get entirely rid of them, because they are still part of her even if

they can only operate out of sight, out of mind. The word she uses,

“quell,” is unconsciously revealing: it could mean ‘slaughter’ but it

could also refer to the process of hardening herself and suppressing

her feelings.

No sooner does she acquire her crown, the “golden round” that she

has hungered for, than it turns to ashes, a golden nothing, a zero. The

feelings she has quelled return to haunt her. She becomes anxious,

fearful, distraught:

Nought’s had, all’s spent,

Where our desire is got without content:

’Tis safer to be that which we destroy

Than by destruction dwell in doubtful joy.

Subtle changes are occurring in her husband, as well, who turns

increasingly dour and moody. Like her, he has not been getting much

sleep. Soon he is spending lots of time alone. She tries, feebly, to cheer

him up:

How now, my lord! Why do you keep alone,

Of sorriest fancies your companions making,

Using those thoughts which should indeed have died

With them they think on? Things without all remedy

Should be without regard: what’s done is done.

Which draws this ominous and audacious reply:

We have scorched the snake, not killed it:

She’ll close and be herself, whilst our poor malice

Remains in danger of her former tooth.

But let the frame of things disjoint, both the worlds suffer,

Ere we will eat our meals in fear, and sleep

In the affliction of these terrible dreams

That shake us nightly: better be with the dead,

Whom we, to gain our peace, have sent to peace,

Than on the torture of the mind to lie

In restless ecstasy. 2.2.5-22

This is not the man who had to invent a new verb, “incarnadine,” and

a new metaphor, in order to express his immeasurable guilt and woe,

and went off to bed and bad dreams, saying, “To know my deed,

’twere best not know myself.” (2.2.72)

Soon Macbeth will have decided that, since he has no choice but to

know his deed, he will just have to change the self that feels such

immeasurable guilt and woe and suffers nightly from terrible dreams.

If that means changing his own nature, that’s what he will do. And if

he can’t change his own nature without damaging the larger frame of

things that includes this world and the next, why he will take that on

too—anything, whatever it takes, just so long as he and his wife can

eat their meals, and sleep, in peace. Such bravado is strangely heroic,

such a motive strangely banal. ‘Strange’ because ‘heroic’ is not a term we

would ordinarily choose to describe Macbeth, the murderer and tyrant;

nor would we ordinarily call it ‘banal’ to prefer the destruction of the

cosmos to sleepless nights and unhappy meals. It is the same paradoxical

combination of the banal and heroic that we have already

noticed in Macbeth.

The Macbeths, possessed of a kind of deadly innocence, think they can

ignore or suppress the promptings of their own inner voices and

natures. They think that the moral and emotional ties that bind them

to others can be brushed aside. Or rather this is what the more superficial

Lady Macbeth thinks and her more cautious husband can be—

and is—shamed into thinking as well. They think that the only obstacles

to the fulfillment of their dreams of wealth and power are practical:

if someone is in the way, remove him. Simple. Macbeth knows it is not

so simple when the first voice he hears after he has murdered Duncan

is the voice of his own despair: “Sleep no more! Macbeth does murder sleep!”

“What do you mean?” asks his wife impatiently. Macbeth knows what it means,

and has been trying to tell her: “the innocent sleep,/Sleep that knits up the

raveled sleave of care...” But she will have to find out for herself. He,

for his part, will never hear that voice again. Nor do we, though occasionally

we hear echoes of his despair coming through the new, hard,

hypocritical self that he promptly constructs. What he says fulsomely

and hypocritically on first hearing the news of Duncan’s murder,

sounds oddly as if it might be coming from the heart—or somewhere

near it:

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. 2.3.98

This lament will be heard once more, near the end of the play:

I have lived long enough. My way of life

Is fall’n into the sear, the yellow leaf,

And that which should accompany old age,

As honor, love, obedience, troops of friends,

I must not look to have; but in their stead,

Curses not loud but deep, mouth-honor, breath,

Which the poor heart would fain deny, and dare not. 5.3.28

Such a grasp of the truth of the human condition—that it is above all

social and communal, built on and of reciprocal relations of honor,

love, obedience, friendship—does not come easily. The Macbeths take

it for granted that all one needs to have is power and money, and these

things will just naturally fall into place. They think they are completely

autonomous individuals, their lives theirs to do with as they please;

that if they have to hurt others to get what they want, why that’s just

the way of the world.

Lady Macbeth is not as tough as she thought, and pines away—

though she recovers just long enough to help her husband through a

particularly bad time, when the bloody ghost of Banquo appears at

their dinner party, terrifying Macbeth and ruining their evening. To

hear him talk, complaining bitterly at the injustice of it all, you’d think

you were listening to the aggrieved victim of some inconsiderate

prank:

The times has been

That, when the brains were out, the man would die,

And there an end; but now they rise again,

With twenty mortal murders on their crowns,

And push us from our stools. 3.2.83

Such indignation is funny—unintentionally of course, for Macbeth is

not a funny or humorous man.

Is Macbeth predestined to become a man of blood, and does foreknowledge

amount to divine “thrusting on” (as Edmund puts it)? Shakespeare leaves that

hopeless knot for the theologians and philosophers to cut or untie. It doesn’t

interest him. What does interest him, and what’s really interesting in the play,

is the process by which Macbeth, step by step, freely and actively reinvents

himself.

Though he can’t change Nature or “the frame of things,” he can

change his own nature. If there is something in him that is making

sleep impossible and ruining his appetite, he will root it out, destroy it.

The total reformation of her being that Lady Macbeth is unable to

accomplish, he can and will. The problem, he thinks, is a simple one:

a lack of experience, merely. He and his wife aren’t used to killing,

that’s all. “My strange and self-abuse,” he tells her after their disastrous

dinner party,

Is the initiate fear that wants hard use.

We are yet but young in deed. 3.4.145

He has Macduff’s wife, children and household slaughtered as much to complete

his education as to intimidate other would-be rebels.

Eventually his hard work pays off and nothing bothers him anymore:

I have almost forgot the taste of fears:

The time has been, my senses would have cooled

To hear a night-shriek, and my fell of hair

Would at a dismal treatise rouse and stir

As life were in’t. I have supped full with horrors.

Direness, familiar to my slaughterous thoughts,

Cannot once start me. 5.5.14

The news of his wife’s death is received with a shrug: “She should

have died hereafter.” Which could mean: ‘So what? She had to die

sometime, didn’t she?’ And/or: ‘I don’t have time to think about that

right now.’ He is right. Time is running out on him. He’s cornered in

a castle that he had foolishly believed to be impregnable, and he is

about to be killed by a man he had believed, even more foolishly, could

not exist. The spirits had told him to fear no man “born of woman,”

but what about a man not born exactly, but removed from the womb

by Caesarian section? Had he never learned to read the fine print on

the documents he signed? How could a man become as cruel and

treacherous as he without learning to suspect everyone and everything?

This man, who would not have hesitated to tear up any bond, treaty or

agreement, had he thought it was in his interest to do so, had in all innocence

trusted that the instruments of darkness would play fair.

Macbeth goes down, fighting gamely, determined to give as many

gashes as he gets. Before he exits, he steps back from his desperate

situation for just long enough to do what he has never done before:

take an objective look at his life and judge it. (Should you still be inclined

to doubt the idea that Macbeth has the imagination of a poet, these justly

famous lines just might convince you.)

Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow

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. 5.5.28

For a minute or two, the light of his miserable existence illuminates all

of human history and the sight fills him with contempt: all he can see

is his own story endlessly, tediously, meaninglessly repeated. It is not

of course the whole story, as he believes, just his own, and that of all

the others who have thought to catch the nearest way to power and

wealth and glory. Their name is legion; he is a sort of Everyman, and

he knows it. It is not a comforting thought, but a shameful one. How,

he wonders, could I have been so stupid as to take the bait just like all

the others, and go strutting out onto this great stage of fools? It is his

finest moment. And then the light goes out and he is still out on that

stage, fighting. For what? For nothing, because he is a soldier after

all—that was his proper role—and fighting is all he has left, all he

knows how to do.

Macbeth is killed, order restored, but no one could possibly think

that that is the end of the story. The Gunpowder Plot had only just misfired.

Evil is always lurking in the hearts of ambitious, greedy men,

women and ideologues. There’ll always be people like the Macbeths—

only less imaginative and less interesting. Even now, certain heretofore

unknown characters are waiting in the wings of a theater near you.