Macbeth #

A excellent portrayal of both Macbeth and Lady Macbeth:

https://iview.abc.net.au/video/ZX9234A002S00

We must remember that character creationis a construct; an artefact and central ones do not necessarily represent the author. Characters are either portrayed sympathetically or unsympathetically. The former are called protagonists, heroes or good guys while the latter are antagonists, villains or bad guys. Macbeth goes through a transformation; initially portrayed glowingly as brave and loyal, but then slowly degenerating into a despised evil tyrant.

He begins with noble traits, but after going on a killing spree ends up with traumatic numbness - not caring even when his wife kills herself.

Macbeth #

What do the following quotes tell us about the changing perspectives in the character of Macbeth? At the beginning of the play Macbeth is highly regarded by all, but by the end no one likes him. Shakespeare shows us the progression from undisputed hero to despised villain by how other characters describe him and through Macbeth’s internal struggles with his conscience.

When we first hear of him he is described in glowing terms as the man who has saved the day; almost single-handedly thwarted an attempt by the Thane (nobleman) of Cawdor with the aid of Norway to overthrow King Duncan of Scotland.

“brave Macbeth (well he deserves that name)” (The Sergeant)

“Till that Bellona’s bridegroom, lapp’d in proof (Ross)

Confronted him with self comparisons” (Mars)

“0 valiant cousin.’ worthy gentleman.’” (Duncan)

“noble Macbeth” (Duncan)

“noble partner” (Banquo)

My worthy Cawdor!* (DUNCAN)

True, worthy Banquo; he is full so valiant,
And in his commendations I am fed;
It is a banquet to me. Let’s after him,
Whose care is gone before to bid us welcome:
It is a peerless kinsman. (DUNCAN)

Almost unanimous and universal praise from all, yet he is painfully aware how fragile and fleeting such acclaim can be. At the banquet scene he has second thoughts and decided not to go through with his plans:

“I have bought (won) Golden opinions from all sorts of people” (Macbeth)

His wife knows him well and is a bit more realistic and down to earth and seeing his limitations reminds him of these:

“Thou wouldst be great,/Art not without ambition. .
“too full of the milk of human kindness.” (Lady Macbeth)

Macbeth in his heart and solitude recognises his own weakness.

“I have no spur To prick the sides of my intent,
but only Vaulting ambition . . .“ (Macbeth)

Almost immediately after murdering the king, Macbeth’s conscience goes to work and he feels the pangs of remorse and regret.

“I had most need of blessing, and ‘amen’ Stuck in my throat.”
“Wake Duncan with thy knocking
I would thou couldst.” (Macbeth)

“Better be with the dead
Than on the torture of the mind to lie in restless ecstasy.” (Macbeth)

To know my deed, ’twere best not know myself. (Macbeth)

Macbeth wants to be an omnipotent tyrant:

MACBETH

There’s not a one of them but in his house
I keep a servant fee’d.

MACBETH

The very firstlings of my heart shall be
The firstlings of my hand.

Modern tyrants war against their own people.

HECATE in her address to the three witches calls Macbeth:

a wayward son,
Spiteful and wrathful, who, as others do,
Loves for his own ends, not for you. III. 5. 20 - 23

Ross, explains to the soon to be murdered Lady Macduff:

But cruel are the times when we are traitors
And do not know ourselves; when we hold rumor
From what we fear, yet know not what we fear,
But float upon a wild and violent sea…

This could be applied to all these tragedies, in which fear itself cannot be defined or contained. The plays are wild and violent seas on which even the boundaries of terror cannot be charted. If you had to live in one of them, your best course would be to listen to what a messenger tells Lady Macduff:

“If you will take a homely man’s advice,
Be not found here; hence with your little ones.”

Lady Macduff’s young son is stabbed to death before our eyes by Macbeth’s thugs. We watch a child—perhaps the most intelligent, charming, and engaging child ever seen onstage—being slaughtered in front of his mother.

MALCOLM attempting to stir Macduff after he hears that his wife and children have been murdered by Macbeth:

Be comforted:
Let’s make us medicines of our great revenge,
To cure this deadly grief.

MACDUFF

He has no children. All my pretty ones?
Did you say all? O hell-kite! All?
What, all my pretty chickens and their dam
At one fell swoop?

MALCOLM

Dispute it like a man.

MACDUFF

I shall do so;
But I must also feel it as a man:
I cannot but remember such things were,
That were most precious to me. Did heaven look on,
And would not take their part? Sinful Macduff,
They were all struck for thee! naught that I am,
Not for their own demerits, but for mine,
Fell slaughter on their souls. Heaven rest them now!

Malcolm

This tyrant, whose sole name blisters our tongue.

Menteith: How does the tyrant?

Caithness: “Some say he’s mad; others that lesser hate him…do call it valiant fury”

Young Siward:

“The devil himself could not pronounce a title
More hateful to mine ear.”

Macduff: “Turn hell hound turn!

Macbeth:

“But get thee back, my soul is too much charg’d With blood of thine already,”

As Macbeth vacillates between abject despair and a false bravado, in a private moments he faces reality – his legacy; he must now face his reckoning and pay the price of his lack of principles:

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 honour, love, obedience, troops of friends,
I must not look to have; but, in their stead,
Curses, not loud but deep, mouth-honour, breath,
Which the poor heart would fain deny, and dare not.

Later, when he hears that his wife has killed herself, he comes up with his greatest speech illustrating his numbness and the futility of life:

MACBETH

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.

Malcolm gives us the final summation of his legacy:

This butcher and his fiend like queen.

Lady Macbeth #

In the beginning Macbeth and Lady Macbeth appear to share the deepest love. In Act one, they are a happy loving couple, sustained throughout the first two acts. This is indicated by the intimate letter he sends her sharing his day, his innermost thoughts and aspirations and their continued mutual loyalty. Lady Macbeth, however, is depicted as a ruthless, scheming, strong minded wife who goads him into achieving his ambition. Lady Macbeth becomes an anomalous construct of less than womanly heroic qualities - festering ambition and naked self-interest.

We first meet her reading a letter from her husband, revealing her doubts of him:

yet do I fear thy nature;
It is too full o’ the milk of human kindness
To catch the nearest way: thou wouldst be great;
Art not without ambition, but without
The illness should attend it: what thou wouldst highly,
That wouldst thou holily; wouldst not play false,
And yet wouldst wrongly win:

She admits her malign influence:

Hie thee hither,
That I may pour my spirits in thine ear;
And chastise with the valour of my tongue
All that impedes thee from the golden round,

She will take control.

When she hears that both Macbeth and King Duncan are coming she declares her interests:

LADY MACBETH

The raven himself is hoarse
That croaks the fatal entrance of Duncan
Under my battlements. 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 the access and passage to remorse,
That no compunctious visitings of nature
Shake my fell purpose,

When Macbeth tells her that the King will leave the next morrow she assumes full control:

LADY MACBETH

O, never
Shall sun that morrow see!
Your face, my thane, is as a book where men
May read strange matters. To beguile the time,
Look like the time; bear welcome in your eye,
Your hand, your tongue: look like the innocent flower,
But be the serpent under’t. He that’s coming
Must be provided for: and you shall put
This night’s great business into my dispatch;

He that’s coming/ Must be provided for has a double meaning, the figurative one as chilly as a mafia boss asking someone to be taken care of.

Fintan O’Toole’s take on her:

In the first act of Macbeth, Lady Macbeth is bold, vigorous, and supremely confident that she can “chastise with the valor of my tongue” a husband whom we already know to be a fearsome warrior. She makes herself “from the crown to the toe top-full/Of direst cruelty!”

While Macbeth carries out the actual murder of King Duncan, she has to take the daggers back and smear the guards with Duncan’s blood.

Her next active part is where she pretends to swoon while Macbeth is justifying his killing of the guards.

She considers her domain as “my battlements” and has supreme confidence in their untrammelled security;

“ What need we fear who knows it, when none can call our power to account?–

In the second act she takes charge while her husband is breaking down under the strain of Duncan’s murder—it is Lady Macbeth who returns the daggers to the chamber and smears the sleeping grooms with blood. In the third act she is still a commanding presence, able to deal with the disaster of the royal banquet and dismiss the courtiers when Macbeth is freaked out by Banquo’s ghost.

When Macbeth becomes king the relationship between this loving and passionate couple begins to change, because of the horrible thing they did and with greed and fear in which they live in, Lady Macbeth and Macbeth slowly drift apart.

When Macbeth decides to kill Banquo, he fails to tell her:

MACBETH

Be innocent of the knowledge, dearest chuck,
Till thou applaud the deed.

At the banquet scene, a place has been set for Banquo and when his ghost appears only to Macbeth, he suffers several fits of madness and Lady Macbeth has to disperse the guests before all is revealed.

LADY MACBETH

You lack the season of all natures, sleep.

MACBETH

Come, we’ll to sleep.

After this, they are never seen on stage together.

We then lose sight of her until the fifth act, when she is suddenly almost a ghost herself, a somnambulist reenacting in tormented sleep the moments after the murder. There is no transition, nothing to lead us gradually from the direly cruel and potent murderer to the fragile shell of a person, floating in “this slumbery agitation”—a phrase that almost cancels itself and thus captures her descent to nothingness.

Even as the action of the play continues to hurtle forward, we are thrown back into this gap between the dynamic woman we last saw and the strange creature she is now, in this liminal state between life and death. We have to try to fill that gap for ourselves, but we can’t quite do it because the stage is suddenly filled with drums and flags and Birnam Wood is about to come to Dunsinane and we have no time to think. Nor do we know quite what to feel—should we still despise her for her ruthless malice or give ourselves over to the poignancy of her mental dissolution?

But soon we see her sleep walking and talking revealing her break down:

Doctor

What is it she does now? Look, how she rubs her hands.

Gentlewoman

*It is an accustomed action with her, to seem thus
washing her hands: I have known her continue in
this a quarter of an hour.

LADY MACBETH

Yet here’s a spot.

Doctor

Hark! she speaks: I will set down what comes from/her, to satisfy my remembrance the more strongly.

LADY MACBETH

Out, damned spot! out, I say!–One: two: why,/then, ’tis time to do’t.–Hell is murky!–Fie, my lord, fie! a soldier, and afeard?

What need we fear who knows it, when none can call our power to account?

–Yet who would have thought the old man
to have had so much blood in him.

Other critics suggest that she represents the patriarchal fear of unsubordinated womanhood who threatens the stability of the world and order can only be restored by her removal. (Peter Stallybrass)

The relationship grows weaker and weaker as Macbeth lives in fear and hatred and his wife begins to suffer mental stress and anxiety about after the shameful murder of Duncan. She realises that even after becoming queen she isn’t happy but suffers guilt and remorse. As Macbeth doesn’t consult her or talk to her, she is alone and in grief that nothing or none will cure her.

At first she controls the action, however the turning point appears when he arranges the murder of Banquo and he advises her to

“Be innocent of the knowledge, dearest chuck,**/ Till thou applaud the deed”.

From this point on Macbeth appears the sole controller of events.

By Act 4 Lady Macbeth has become so agitated and suffers, from stress and psychic remorse. She has hallucinations and cannot sleep. This is the time that Macbeth and Lady Macbeth are not even a couple, Macbeth runs off as a violent, tyrant and bloodshed murderer who only cares about himself and the fear of people outside of the castle knowing the evil and unforgivable things he is responsible for. She is fragile and shattered in the mind now; because of the guilt that eventually kills her. She begins to see blood spots on her hands as she is imprisoned with her thought and disgraceful things. As she says “What, will these hands ne’er be clean”. During this time of triumph Macbeth realises that his wife is unwell and tells the doctor to cure her mind to be free from this burden she lives in, but the doctor can not cure her troubled mind.

By Act V, her fears erupt:

LADY MACBETH

Out, damned spot! out, I say!–One: two: why,
then, ’tis time to do’t.–Hell is murky!–Fie, my
lord, fie! a soldier, and afeard? What need we
fear who knows it, when none can call our power to
account?–Yet who would have thought the old man
to have had so much blood in him.

After Macbeth hears the news of his wife death he understands that he is alone , and that no one is beside him.

“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 dust death.
Out, out brief candle!
Life’s but a walking shadow,
a poor player that struts and frets his hours upon stage
and then is heard no more .

It is a tale told by an idiot,
full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4LDdyafsR7g

While this appears a genuine eulogy to his wife it lacks any specific or personal warmth, rather it is a general resigned acceptance of universal fate, his own as well.

Macbeth and Lady Macbeth began the play as a highly valued couple, honoured by King Duncan and respected by the other Thanes. By the end of the play MacDuff’s sums them up as

“This butcher and his fiend-like queen.”

We can conclude that those who choose to pursue their ambitious dreams through violent means will also meet a violent end.

All tyrants tend to self-destruct.

Fintan O’Toole is the Advising Editor at The New York Review and a columnist for The Irish Times.

Many other women have proven to be the main support behind powerful men. For examples see:

https://nebo-lit.com/women/women-and-power.html#women-behind-men