I. Preliminary View of the Subject
Likely composed at some point between Julius Caesar and The Tempest, Shakespeare’s Macbeth (which Abraham Lincoln regarded as his best) is popularly held to be one of Shakespeare’s “most political plays.” In his essay on “the Scottish Play,” David Lowenthal seeks to dispel the myth that key events in the play are unintelligible, supernatural, and akin to a tale by an idiot. A simplistic interpretation of the play might tempt some to suggest Macbeth is a mere moral tale about a warrior and his wife, spurred on by the prophecy of witches, to murder a king only to discover that a tyrant’s is actually deeply unhappy and self-destructive. Lowenthal’s essay argues there is a “deeper philosophical subject” at work.
He points out that Macbeth is a play filled with mystery, like a puzzle in need of disentanglement, and aside from certain mysterious character reversals and an imposition by witches, Lowenthal poses the following questions that might have been missed by readers, and which are in need of further investigation: “to whom does Ross refer (toward the beginning) by the term ‘Bellona’s bridegroom?’ What makes Macbeth decide to slay sleeping guards when he goes up to see the dead Duncan (since it was not part of the plan)? To whom does Banquo travel the day of Macbeth’s banquet, and who is the third murderer involved in his slaying? Why does Ross turn up at Lady Macduff’s castle shortly before her murder, and who sends the messenger to warn her? What brings Ross to England?” (176). According to Lowenthal, these questions of fact and motivation are essential to the understanding of human life –of human affairs—and he encourages us to reject a superficial interpretation of the play by seeking a hidden intelligibility to the play’s action (remembering Macbeth’s claim that ‘life is a tale told by an idiot filled with sound and fury, signifying nothing’) rather than simply accepting the chaotic surface of things.
II. The Witches from Beginning to End
Lowenthal points out that it is “amazing” and “instructive” to examine how much of the play Shakespeare borrows from the Holinshed Chronicle where the details of Duncan’s murder are borrowed from Donwald’s earlier murder of King Duff. Most of Macbeth and Macduff are found in the source material, while characters like Lady Macbeth and Ross were mostly invented by Shakespeare out of a few short lines. And while there are various witches and wizards mentioned in the Chronicle, Shakespeare evidently pieces together the three witches himself. Defiantly anachronistic, Shakespeare also includes the classical figure Hecate in a scene with the witches in Act III. Here, the reader is intended to think seriously about these characters: What kind of beings are they? Are they real? What is their significance? Who is Hecate, and why is she needed? After closely examining the intelligibility of their speeches –the fact that they reference one another as sisters, that they count time numerically, that they require food, and appear to be corporeal—Lowenthal concludes that the witches are not Satanic beings in the Christian sense. Indeed, when Banquo first spots them, the witches appear to be withered and wild, bearded women who “hail” that Macbeth. They respond in partly coherent riddles to Macbeth. However, by Act III the witches are chastised by Hecate, who is angry at the three sisters for not including her in their recent machinations, which are curiously described as beneficent to Macbeth.
“Hecate is not Satan –she is very unlike Satan—but she affords Shakespeare something like a substitute for Satan through which he can raise, more guardedly, the questions that ought to be directed at Satan himself. Satan had to be brought into existence to help explain the persistence, gravity, and frequent success (short of domination) of evil in a universe completely created by a good God. Since he could not create himself, he must have been created by God, as a good being that somehow manages to derange itself, thus leaving God without responsibility for evil. Satan must, to oppose God completely, represent evil loved for itself. Hecate demonstrates the impossibility of this idea. Once one postulates beings that bring evil into the world, and contrive all harms, they do so for the sake of either harming or benefitting. But a being that wants only to harm must want to harm itself, and such a being contradicts the very notion of being. Every being must therefore want to benefit at least itself” (183).
And Shakespeare’s Hecate serves this role well, helping us to see her as a figure who hopes that “everyone shall share i’ the gains.” Hecate is, above all, an artisan or artist who must create all the necessary elements necessary for charming Macbeth. In this light, Shakespeare cleverly characterizes Hecate as “something like the love of human excellence –an excellence which in her eyes remains untarnished because harms, presumably, are a necessary part of the nature of things.” She serves as a parental figure over her childlike witches (who brew a repulsive stew of natural human distastes), and unlike Satan or God in the modern sense, Hecate possesses a mix of Good and Evil and seems to dwell at the pit of Acheron. The presence of Hecate allows us to distinguish these witches from any modern Christian notion of a witch, and her presence grants Shakespeare the artificial laboratory conditions to investigate the problem of evil in the universe –How is evil to be accounted for? Why are so many things in nature repellant to mankind? Why is evil so important a feature in all human affairs? What causes evil in people like Macbeth and Lady Macbeth?
III. Good Plan, Bad Plan
Next, we turn to “two bold plans” –one is the poorly planned and executed (but ultimately successful) murder of Duncan, as well as Duncan’s quiet, invisible (but unsuccessful) plan to frustrate Macbeth’s ambition. At the beginning of play, unlike King Lear, Duncan seems old, weak, impetuous, too trusting, and too eager to distrust. In the midst of a revolt and invasion, he relies on his warriors like Macbeth, and his thanes remain consistently supportive (only Cawdor has joined the rebel Macdonwald). The chief problem he faces is with succession –Scotland being feudal aristocracy and not a hereditary monarchy. Malcolm is too young and too weak of a military leader for this role (only a bleeding sergeant keeps him from capture). Only Macbeth’s unrivaled military prowess is shown to be the kingdom’s salvation against the rebels (and he threatens Duncan’s regime by their familial link, as evidenced when they greet each other as cousins). Duncan must dilute Macbeth’s power by naming both he and Banquo as co-captains in the war, and by naming Macbeth the new Thane of Cawdor while also investing Malcolm with the hereditary title of Prince of Cumberland (and thus next in line for the kingly succession). After all, Duncan did call for Cawdor’s death on the mere report of treason by Ross. At any rate, his plan is to grant Macbeth a thaneship, gift his wife a diamond, and then head unannounced to Macbeth’s castle at Inverness, protected by his grooms, while asking Macduff to call upon him early in the morning. “It is an excellent plan and would have worked, even in spite of the witches’ favorable prophecies, had it not been for the extraordinary ambition and persuasiveness of Lady Macbeth, coupled with her and her husband’s stupidity…” (189).
In his communications with his wife, Macbeth crucially leaves out two important points: the witches’ prophecy for Banquo, and Malcolm being named Prince of Cumberland. Had he done so, their usurpation would have looked a great more difficult. This is why they make no overt plan to kill Malcolm, or his younger brother Donalbain, though they both are at Inverness with their father. And it also serves as a reason for why Macbeth decides to orchestrate the murder of Banquo alone. The original plan, urged by Lady Macbeth, is to kill Duncan with impunity (though both she and her husband acknowledge it is an immoral act) by plying Duncan’s chamberlains with alcohol, and Macbeth adds that he will use the daggers of the chamberlains and smear them in the blood of Duncan to stage the scene. However, when it comes time to perform the act, Lady Macbeth only goes as far as drugging the guards and leaving their daggers ready for Macbeth, while Macbeth in terror at committing murder forgets to smear the bodies of the chamberlains, a task which must be completed by Lady Macbeth whose hands become covered in blood. And a final improvisation comes when Macbeth returns and murders the grooms (the real reason why Lady Macbeth faints when Macbeth later blurts out his account to those assembled in the castle). Lowenthal dissects the plan, both in concept and practice, and points out numerous flaws –why would chamberlains murder their king and then simply lie down drunk in his room?
“Why all this emphasis on plans? For one thing, it tells us something about Duncan and about the Macbeths –about their mental stature. It permits us further to distinguish between a tyrannical usurper like the duke of Gloucester (in Richard III) and the Macbeths, the latter being more superstitious, more moral, and a good deal less intelligent than the former. But there is a general purpose as well, for it refines the reader’s perception and understanding of human affairs generally, and moves him closer to being able to say whether life is a tale told by an idiot or not. To the extent that intelligent purpose, human or nonhuman, directs life, it is not such a tale –in fact it is the precise opposite of such a tale. In The Tempest we see the wise, premediated plan of its hero, Prospero, determine the action of practically the whole play. In Macbeth we learn how on serious bit of miscalculation or ignorance (of Lady Macbeth’s character by Duncan) can thwart an otherwise excellent plan, and how chance can make a very poor one succeed. These are important features of human life, but in neither case does life lose its causal intelligibility. In other words, we can see just what it is that makes the two plans develop and eventuate as they do, showing that no part of life is a tale told by an idiot. And the part of life least deserving that description is the perfectly designed work of art –the philosophical drama—which allows no part of itself to bear any but a necessary relationship to all other parts and the whole. The play Macbeth itself is an entirely sufficient proof that life is not unintelligible sound and fury!” (192).
IV. Macduff and Ross
Next we turn to Macduff and Ross, cousins who are unlike each other. Much of Macduff’s character can be drawn from the Holinshed Chronicle whereas Ross was mostly a creation of Shakespeare. We first see Ross riding in from Fife announcing that the traitorous Cawdor and the King of Norway have been defeated in battle by someone named “Bellona’s bridegroom.” Bellona was the goddess of war leading many modern scholars to simply interpret this name as a reference to Macbeth, however Lowenthal notes that Fife is actually located quite a great distance from Forres where Macbeth’s battle was taking place. Here, Lowenthal offers the notion that Ross is actually referring to the Thane of Fife, his cousin Macduff.
What do we know about Macduff? While he does not participate in the first battle in Forres, he does leave Fife and join Duncan at Macbeth’s castle. He is actually the first person to arrive upon the grisly scene of his murdered king, and he reacts by decrying “sacrilege” (he is clearly a pious man). He is courageous and, like Banquo, is immediately suspicious of Macbeth –especially after Macbeth erratically reveals that he killed the chamberlains. Macduff returns to his home castle in Fife rather than attend Macbeth’s coronation at Scone.
In Act III, Macbeth has Banquo murdered, and in Act IV, he does the same to Macduff’s family. In this dark turn of events, the play never discloses where exactly Banquo and Fleance were heading. In answering this mystery, Lowenthal offers the compelling theory that Banquo and Fleance were actually headed to Macduff’s castle, hoping to regroup with like-minded friends (assuming Macbeth is staying at his castle in either Scone of Dunsinane in Act III, this journey to Fife would be a mere twenty or thirty miles distance.
From here, Macduff departs for England and Macbeth makes the radical decision to murder Macduff’s wife and children. Curiously, we then see Ross speaking alone with Lady Macduff as she laments her husband’s sudden departure and his leaving their castle seemingly entirely undefended. What is Ross doing alone in Fife at Macduff’s castle? Instead of warning Lady Macduff simply departs, and he is followed by a messenger warning Lady Macduff, and then the murderers who kill her. The murderers have been sent by Macbeth, and the messenger has likely been sent by Lennox, who remains beside Macbeth despite being opposed to his various plots. However, the situation with Ross is more complex. He later reports to Macduff on his family’s situation, to which Macduff bemoans the “gentle heavens.” With this in mind, Lowenthal characterizes Macduff as a Christian moral figure, one who feels deeply guilty of his own concept of personal sin, and who accepts a divine being who doles out good punishments:
“The exaggeration in Macduff’s motivation must have some relation to the subject of the play as a whole, which is the extent to which human life, and the universe, are intelligible, reasonable, moral. Christianity represents one poly among the possible conceptions, for, whatever place it allows to evil and sin, it insists on the supremacy of good, and of good manifested more through love than through justice, though both must be combined in the ultimate divine dispensation and governance. The primacy Christianity gives to love, and thus to ‘gentleness’ (again, as in Macduff’s appeal to ‘gentle heaven’) is an element closer to the feminine than the masculine; it results in excessive trust, excessive confidence that a good God will come to our rescue, so that we need not make sure we ourselves are stronger than, and smarter than, the human forces of evil” (199).
Such is the unfortunate state of Macduff. Society requires religion; however, religion can make people insufficiently dependent upon on vague interpretations of divine signs, and less on themselves. Moral laws are thought to be absolute, and they are stated absolutely (even if unpolitically) by Christianity, but moral laws must still bow before a larger understanding of justice, looking to the real benefits and harms of society. While Macduff’s family is too steeped in theology to successfully harmonize this tension, thankfully the play offers Malcolm who, though young as he is, represents a certain degree of political wisdom in tempering both the excessively spirited as well as theological impulses.
V. Ross
Lowenthal turns our attention to Ross, “perhaps the most successful scoundrel in all of Shakespeare, and never, from beginning to end, does he suffer misfortune or defeat. Not only is he never discovered: at the very end he even reaps the rewards of the thanes who opposed the tyrant, being elevated, with them, to an earldom!” (202). Ross is described as a deceptive sort of fellow, and Lowenthal makes the surprising speculation that Ross may have made the noise that Macbeth hears while murdering Duncan (Ross has an intimate understanding of the castle), indicating some foreknowledge on Ross’s part, and he further speculates that Ross may have been the third unnamed murderer sent to kill Fleance and Banquo (the one that extinguishes the torch and allows Fleance to flee before arriving back at the castle first).
Ross also conveniently appears in England to persuade Macduff (and Malcolm by proxy) to invade Scotland and battle Macbeth. While he is absent from the field of battle, Ross suddenly appears at the end of the play, praising the victor:
“Ross is the consummate opportunist, always looking out for himself, content to remain in the shadow of great men, and completely unscrupulous in their service, willing to do anything, however foul, that they require of him, yet so good at appearing otherwise, and deceiving everybody, that he is never detected and never punished. Whatever the forces in human nature or the world at large that are working for justice, they are not so powerful as to prevent the coming into existence, and even flourishing, of men without a speck of justice in them. Ross is also important because he makes us even more aware of the hidden motive, the secret action in human affairs, linking together and making unintelligible a whole series of events. These events, stretching from the very beginning to the very end of the play, would have to be considered unintelligible mysteries were it not for the clues, carefully left by Shakespeare, pointing to a solution in the character and deeds of Ross. Thus understood, Ross is not a mere superfluity, or of merely marginal interest in the play, but an essential element, staking out one pole in human affairs that must never be forgotten, either by political practitioners –statesmen—or moral and political philosophers. As for the judgment to be placed on this apparently happy scoundrel, we would have to consider not only the evil done to others, so manifest in the play, but the state of his soul in itself, the full deformity of which Shakespeare was compelled to leave to the reader’s surmise. Alone, without friends, caring for no one, willing to kill anyone, never in open command of events, completely dependent on the rise and fall of the great, always calculating, never at ease, exulting only in the success of his machinations –here is not a whole man but a narrow part of a man, worked to a peak of efficiency within that narrow range, and sacrificing all else to it” (208-209).
VI. The Fate of the Macbeths
Lowenthal claims that “the central focus of the play is on Macbeth and his wife –not only on their words and actions, but on the state of soul from which these emanant” (209). How do Macbeth and Lady Macbeth transform from the start of the play to the end? As Freud notes, they both seem to interchange, or reverse their traits: “She becomes all remorse, he all defiance.” Lady Macbeth manages to overcome her husband’s reliance on religion and reason by appealing to his manliness and “vaulting ambition,” though this is further buttressed by the promise that they will not be detected. Like the invisibility afforded by the Ring of Gyges, they believe they will be able to act with impunity.
If there ever were any children in this union, they have not survived (or at least may reside at great distance) –and this poses a problem for Macbeth’s kingship. His ambition is wholly selfish and requires the destruction of those around them, namely Banquo and Macduff. “Being a child tended by parents, and tending children of one’s own, seem to strengthen the sense of moral limits or the natural conscience” (213). Without issue, Macbeth and his wife seemingly wish to simply step into Duncan’s shoes and continue his enfeebled rule, with no declared reforms or conquests on the horizon. They see kingship as a mere “role” in the modern sense, or perhaps even little more than power conferred without responsibility. Lady Macbeth seems to have assumed that she could simply relax and enjoy her sovereignty instead of protecting her regime, in spite of her immense ambition. Here, Lowenthal contrasts Lady Macbeth’s ambition with the gentleness of Virgilia in Coriolanus (the latter would never have spoken to her husband in the same manner as the former) however as the play moves forward, Macbeth and Lady Macbeth grow more distant in their marriage. Whereas Macbeth becomes obsessively insecure, fretting over the idea that someone can commit regicide without punishment, Lady Macbeth retreats inward. Macbeth tries to defy his given prophecy in murdering Banquo and Fleance, while Lady Macbeth descends into madness as they both start experiencing troubling visions. After Lady Macbeth’s suicide, Macbeth rather pathetically blames the world for his woes and now openly rejects any moral intelligible nature to the universe, “enthroning aimless idiocy as the ruling principle of universe.” And Macbeth delivers his famous nihilistic soliloquy before an amusingly named assistant, Seyton, who appears briefly in only two scenes in the play. Lowenthal makes the argument that Seyton is a character more closely akin to Hecate and the witches, than any modern notion of “Satan.”
Lady Macbeth is stricken with a diseased mind, she does not seem capable of having remorse, though her subconscious seems eager to wipe away any memory of this grave crime. While Macbeth grows increasingly hardened after each murder he commits, slowly coming to believe that there is no moral order to the universe if murderers can simply continue murdering with impunity. He briefly resigns himself to the universal idiocy of the world before becoming “defiant” again one last time when choosing to die in battle, knowing that he faces a forthcoming divine retribution.
VII. Macbeth’s Christianity
Lowenthal says, “It is disconcerting to realize that Macbeth’s Christian belief helps worsen his tyranny.” In the end, we see Macbeth believing himself bound for hell as he briefly resumes his religious belief in a moral order, while Macduff –a deeply Christian character—seeks concord, universal peace, and the unity of mankind. He is unable to entertain the lamenting thoughts of Malcolm, who then realizes this man’s simplistic mind and quickly walks back his ponderings about the ongoing vices in Scotland, and begins speaking in familiar language to Macduff –“healing benediction,” and “holy prayers,” and “grace,” and “sundry prayers.” However, words and action for Malcolm are very different in the play. He visits the English King not for holy benediction and sundry prayers, but rather to rouse an army to invade Scotland, and his healing of Macbeth’s “evil” does not rely on Christian prayers, love or miracles, but rather by outsmarting and overpowering the malignancy of Macbeth’s tyranny. “Just as it is absurd to purge military evils by medica drugs, so it is absurd to purge political evils by either medical drugs or religious rites. Politics may benefit from widespread religious belief, but only if that belief permits the political art to cope with political evils as part of the natural world in the broad sense of the term” (226).
Macduff is portrayed by Shakespeare as having false and dangerous confidence in God’s interventions, not unlike Malcolm’s mother, but Malcolm remains wary, distrustful, and sober. While he sees the political danger of Macduff’s piety, he is not above playing on that piety himself. He makes himself to be a wholehearted believer in the eyes of Macduff, while admirably refusing to kneel in the saintly fashion of his father and mother. Malcolm will be a smarter, less superstitious ruler than either Duncan or Macbeth. And perhaps his brother, Ross, will not escape unscathed as Malcolm ends the play by vowing revenge by “the grace of Grace” (not the grace of God) to hunt down all the parties involved in Macbeth’s tyranny.
Eleventh century Scotland contains two powerful and mutually antagonistic elements –a feudal aristocracy, devoted to the virtues of courage and manliness in warfare, and Christianity, with its absolute demand for love and peace. Without the latter, the thanes would likely be ceaselessly at war with themselves and would not regard their king as a vicar of God. Tragedy emerges in the play when either of these two opposing values rises as superior to the other (i.e. when either the view that life is war, ambition, and spiritedness triumphs, or the view that the world is a peaceful, harmonious, restful place sustained by a perfect being prevails). In both cases, all things in Macbeth are bound by nature. Even Hecate and the witches have a nature, and Lowenthal demonstrates why the play is in fact a defense of classical reasoning, rather than a praise of a tale told by an idiot. The fate of the Macbeths is entirely natural, stemming from the fixed nature of things, not from accident or external supernatural intervention of any sort, demonic or divine.
VIII. Good and Evil
“Despite the optimism associated with Malcolm’s final accession to the throne, the atmosphere of Macbeth is generally dark, repellent, threatening” (231). This is a foggy, dark, bloody, brooding play. Unlike the lush, green, growth-minded, surfeit character of the comedies, in Shakespeare’s tragedies we are given unnatural deprivation –murder, regicide, childlessness, “unsexing,” and folly masquerading as wisdom. It reminds us that a world composed only of things beneficial to mankind –only things producing health rather than disease—is to ask the impossible. It would lead to a bland world where humanity has no place, where both poets and philosophers would never be called upon (as Hecate says) “to show the glory of our art.” If the word were simple, the Macbeths could not have gotten away with their crimes in the first place. Some people perish by the evil of others, and some evil people are never punished for their evil. In Macbeth, some characters have conscience, others do not. Therefore evil –especially human evil—is a permanent feature of the human world.
In the case of the Macbeths, they are not purely evil. They commit murder not because they delight in slaughter, but rather they are willing to do something wrong in order to achieve what they perceive to be a higher good –to rule, be admired, and loved. Indeed, they are surprised when happiness does not spring forth from their regime.
Lowenthal concludes by reminding us of the intelligibility of the play, and therefore it is neither purely evil nor the raving incoherent ramble of a madman. Even for Hecate and the witches, there is nothing satanic about them, but instead Hecate’s motive seems to be her art or craft in itself, and paradoxically, her love of excellence that allows her to enjoy the contrivance of harm. The world is a complex place and people often simply mistakes in failing to successfully foresee the consequences. “Life is not a tale told by an idiot, but neither it is a parable told by a. perfectly good and all-powerful God. It is a dangerous place for men, who are subject not only to natural perils but to those deriving from themselves. All too readily tempted into distortions of their nature and harboring false or imperfect notions of good, they are the source of their own greatest misery. Political, religious, and social institutions can do much for them, but they may also do harm, and, like all other things, are subject to decay. Human happiness is therefore very difficult to achieve…” (234-235).
Shakespeare is not embittered by the darker side of life –Macbeth ends in a mixture of pessimism and optimism, showcasing Shakespeare’s unique ability to incorporate elements of both comedy and tragedy into his plays (a trait Socrates would have found praiseworthy as evidenced in the closing lines of Plato’s Symposium).
Lowenthal, David. Shakespeare and the Good Life. Rowan & Littlefield Publishers, Inc. Lanham, Maryland (1997).