At the end of the play Macbeth himself comes ‘To doubt th’equivocation of the fiend,/That lies like truth’ (5.5.43–4). Indeed, with the Weird Sisters’ chant ‘Fair is foul, and foul is fair’ the normal referential properties of language are inverted so that meanings are the opposite of what we might expect. In this way, Macbeth encounters a Birnam Wood that is not Birnam Wood, and he finally dies at the hand of an adversary who was not, albeit only in a technical sense, ‘of woman born’.
Temptation and conscience
The myth of Adam and Eve’s sin is also not far away in this play. Macbeth is encouraged to undertake his treacherous murder by Lady Macbeth, who is charged with sexual power. What she says about ripping the suckling child from her breast and dashing its brains out (1.7.54–9), in her determination that her husband should secure power through murder, is a powerful image of the destruction of innocence. The crime of the mother killing her child is presented as being as ‘unnatural’ as the subject killing the monarch. Yet it goes beyond it, since monarchs lose their innocence but babies cannot. So maybe we have here a further reading of Lady Macbeth’s image in the overall narrative context of the play. This is the power of the Shakespearean text: the rich ambiguity of possibility (which is not to be confused with ‘equivocation’) at its heart, which invites a variety of responses.
Macbeth and the Weird Sisters
Macbeth is given a conscience, which emerges in the illusions he sees – the dagger before him (2.1.33f.) and the ghost of Banquo (3.4.44–73). Throughout the play there is a dark inevitability suggested about his curiosity in an underworld where he cannot tell whether the phantoms before him, the Weird Sisters, are male or female, and whether they speak the truth or not. Is what they say true or false? Ironically it is both, as they prove their credibility in pointing to the future to the very end. Because of their grotesque appearance, the strange rituals in which they engage and their gruesome pot of broth, the audience is exposed to a palpable form of evil but we should remember that Shakespeare creates them as symptoms and not the cause of the evil into which Macbeth descends.
All that the Weird Sisters predict actually happens but does what they say make it happen? To ask that question is to demonstrate that Shakespeare has drawn us into the play. We are uncertain in our response because of the ways in which the play unsettles the stability of language. It is the dramatist who makes the play happen; his dramatic characters are vehicles that carry the action forward to its conclusion. But we, the audience, ask such questions and respond accordingly. In the soliloquy at 1.3.127f. Macbeth balances probabilities against realities, imaginings against conclusions, with the equivocal tautology, ‘And nothing is, but what is not’ (142). In this way Macbeth draws attention to the process of equivocation as well as to the temptation that it seems to offer him. The Christian man is being drawn to heinous sin, to what in the world he desires, but along with the desire comes a consideration of its consequences – a ‘conscience’, in other words – that recognizes the sinfulness of the temptation even as Macbeth succumbs to its attractions. His is a more intense version of Claudius’s more perfunctory stirrings of conscience in Hamlet (3.4.36f.). Here Macbeth says:
…Present fears
Are less than horrible imaginings.
My thought, whose murther yet is but fantastical,
Shakes so my single state of man,
That function is smother’d in surmise,
(Macbeth, 1.3.137–41)
Shakespeare has Macbeth say in the same speech that the ‘horrid image’ of the deed he imagines ‘doth unfix my hair’. The portrayal is of energy and an excitement for what, at this stage, is nothing more than a fantasy encapsulating a desire to do the almost unthinkable, by living what is imagined. It is a strange voyeurism of one’s own thoughts, a submission to what Christianity terms ‘temptation’. Dramatically, these temptations are spurred on by the embodiment of the Weird Sisters’ evil. Yet the consequences that occur are not postponed to the afterlife but follow immediately on from the deed itself, as surely as did the arrest and death, mostly by executions, of the Gunpowder plotters upon the ‘stage’ of the scaffold.
The soliloquy ‘Is this a dagger, which I see before me,…A dagger of the mind, a false creation,/Proceeding from the heat-oppressed brain?’ (2.1.33, 38–9) appears similarly to be the product of temptation, a pre-vision of the deed and its danger but also a luxuriating in it, an enjoyment of its process. These reflections are not specifically about right or wrong but about the process of a deed that in the context of the play is clearly being portrayed as wrong. Even Macbeth’s statement to his wife that ‘We will proceed no further in this business’ (1.7.31) can be interpreted as a request for further confirmation of the resolution to realize in action a dangerous fantasy.
‘Unsex me here’
Lady Macbeth’s invitation to the ‘Spirits/That tend on mortal thoughts, unsex me here’ (1.5.37–8), comes in the second part of her great soliloquy (1.5.14f.), which must rank as an example of Shakespeare’s darkest, most intense writing. In her determination to be ‘unsexed’, Lady Macbeth deploys a stringent sexual imagery that aligns, but in a sadomasochistic manner, sexual union with personal gratification. The negative wish invokes the positive enjoyment of the self-cursing: ‘make thick my blood,/Stop up th’access and passage to remorse’(42–3); ‘Come to my woman’s breasts,/And take my milk for gall’ (46–7), ‘Come, thick Night,/And pall thee in the dunnest smoke of Hell’(49–50). This is a sexual union that comes close to an association with the darkness of death itself. At the end of the soliloquy Shakespeare depicts Lady Macbeth as changing sex, in crying that her phallic ‘keen knife see not the wound it makes,/Nor Heaven peep through the blanket of the dark,/To cry, “Hold, Hold!”’ (51–3). Here, under the ‘blanket’ of the night, as in a bed, is the sexual climax of the deed: the spirits that she invokes at the start of the passage all point to her enjoyment of the act. It is a speech of impressive sexual power exposing a disturbed imagination. Lady Macbeth has become one with the darkness that accompanies her desire, and it is a path that Macbeth himself will shortly follow.
Consequences
With the deed done, and with the hands of both Macbeth and Lady Macbeth physically covered in blood (2.2.58f.), Shakespeare starts to move us from the world of temptation and diseased imagination into the world of consequences. Macbeth deludes himself, as Lady Macbeth has done, that he has the power to see ‘the future in the instant’ and that he can, therefore, control events. However, even though in the stages leading up to the regicide he is fully aware of the moral implications of the act, in the wake of the deed itself he becomes paranoid as the future begins to slip away from him. Believing in the accuracy of the Weird Sisters’ prediction that it is Banquo’s lineage that will succeed to the throne of Scotland, Macbeth muses that ‘To be thus is nothing, but to be safely thus’ (3.1.47). To secure his own future he must kill Banquo but, no matter what he does, there is always something – in this case, Banquo’s son Fleance – that escapes his grasp.
‘In Macbeth, Shakespeare brings an audience to recognize the power of language and performance to create their own versions of reality, to manipulate and shape the ways we understand and respond to events. Outside the play, either as a private citizen or a head of state, Macbeth would be what Malcolm judges him: a butcher. But in it, for all the ways his evil is made clear and his poetry is undercut, he can still retain the sympathy of an audience even after his death. In the end, the play leaves audiences (and critics) trying to reconcile two contradictory impulses: the impulse to condemn Macbeth as evil and the impulse to mourn and celebrate his courage and perverse magnificence.’
Collins, M. J. (1989: 94–5), ‘Macbeth and Its Audience’ in Dotterer, R. (ed.) (1989), Shakespeare, Text, Subtext, and Content. London and Toronto: Associated University Presses
The fantastical imaginings of the aspiring protagonist and his ambitious spouse, once converted into actions, return to torment the perpetrato
rs. The rich and vivid imagery of the play invites us to experience vicariously the act of murder: Macbeth hears a voice crying, ‘“Sleep no more!/Macbeth does murther Sleep,”’ (2.2.34–5), and later Lady Macbeth is seen sleepwalking, which is described by the Doctor as ‘A great perturbation in nature, to receive at once the benefit of sleep, and do the effects of watching!’ (5.1.9–11). In washing her hands in her sleep, ‘Out, damned spot! out, I say!’ (5.1.36), she contradicts her statement following the murder, when she claimed ‘A little water clears us of this deed’ (2.2.66). On the whole, the horrifying consequences of their deeds far exceed even the imaginations of the protagonist and his wife, to the point where, as Lady Macbeth laments, they have fulfilled their desire but unwittingly sacrificed their ‘content’: ‘Nought’s had, all’s spent,/Where our desire is got without content’ (3.2.4–5).
Macbeth’s earlier question, ‘Will all great Neptune’s ocean wash this blood/Clean from my hand?’ (2.2.59–60), is answered through the process of the play in the negative. Textually, it might remind us of an opposing statement in Richard II, ‘Not all the water in the rough rude sea/Can wash the balm off from an anointed King;’ (3.2.54–5). In the same speech Richard draws a comparison between darkness and light, when the sun rises, ‘And darts his light through every guilty hole’, exposing ‘murthers, treasons, and detested sins’ (43–4), making his treacherous cousin Bolingbroke ‘tremble at his sin’ (3.2.53). To secure the crown, Macbeth has spilt the ‘sacred’ blood of an anointed king and will, like Claudius in Hamlet, assume the role of a ‘player king’ himself, when ‘invested’ at Scone.
Whether balm or blood, the realities appear to depend on political pragmatism. The guilt-ridden Macbeth is destroyed by political strategy – a union between Scotland and England, with Malcolm appealing to the English King for support (4.3.43–4) – and the nature of kingship in this union is articulated by means of the vocabulary of saintliness. Macduff refers to Malcolm’s father as ‘a most sainted King’ and the Queen as one who ‘Died every day she liv’d’ (4.3.109, 111). The King of England, Edward the Confessor, is endowed with divine power and he can solicit heaven to cure people of sickness: ‘sundry blessings hang about his throne,/That speak him full of grace’ (4.3.158–9). This utilizes the language of the traditional Catholic prayer to the Virgin Mary (‘Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee’), but is here associated with the King who may have been watching the play, full of the hypocrisy of his own ‘holiness’.
Shakespeare may appear to be flattering King James, but at the same time he may also be teasing out some of the moral issues surrounding the power of monarchy that inform the play. We might wonder, for example, in Act 4, Scene 1, whether Macbeth’s words ‘Horrible sight’ elicited by the witches’ vision of one of Banquo’s successors carrying the ‘twin balls’ and ‘triple sceptres’ of the monarch of a united Scotland and England under James, elicited the same response in the King watching the play at a royal performance as it might have done in a possible ‘closet’ dissenter in the audience? The whole issue of the Union of England and Scotland was, historically, one in which James was being frustrated. Of course, images are received in different ways and words can be understood in different contexts by different people.
Signifying nothing
Equivocation, as we have seen, is established as a language for the play from its opening, when the Weird Sisters comment that ‘Fair is foul, and foul is fair’ (1.1.11). It sets the scene and paves the way for further prophecies, for Macbeth’s journey and arrival. It leads ultimately to that final recognition of the futility of his actions when he hears of the death of Lady Macbeth:
…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.
(5.5.23–8)
Lady Macbeth has left the stage, the light of life has gone out like a burnt candle, and all is darkness. Without the natural rhythms of life and the institutions that are designed to support them, all life, including royalty, is without substance and devoid of meaning. Macbeth’s ‘nothing’, however, may go deeper, reflecting the variety of discourses that feed into the play’s demonstration of the consequences of equivocation. As Malcolm Evans points out, ‘The “nothing” signified is not merely an absence but a delirious plentitude of selves and meanings, always prior to, and in excess of, the self-naturalizing signs and subjects of the discourses it calls perpetually to account’ (1986: 117).
Key idea
In that ‘nothing’ we may find not only, therefore, the fate of the protagonist but also the enigma of the play’s progress. It both flatters and questions divine kingship and authority by placing a focus on events such as war, murder, executions, treachery and loyalty, and exposes in the process royal succession, the emerging instability of language and the equivocation that lies at the heart of both power and dissent.
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Critical perspectives 5: Searching for and interpreting the text
It is difficult to find an absolutely original text of a Shakespearean play, since play texts even after first and subsequent publication change according to the dynamics of performance. Early texts may be versions designed for particular performances, and those texts that emerged to be published in the first collected edition of his works may have been altered for performances over time. Textual critics have to make choices to publish a modern text and directors and performance companies have to decide which text to use and how they may wish to change it to suit their interpretations.
‘Good’ and ‘bad’ quartos and the First Folio
Where do we find the original text of a Shakespearean play? It is not as easy as some imagine. Let us begin with Hamlet as an example. Hamlet first appeared in print in 1603 in a quarto-sized edition known now as Q1 and often referred to as the ‘bad Quarto’. It was published again in a 1604 quarto edition, known as Q2 or sometimes as the ‘good Quarto’. It was later published after Shakespeare’s death by two of his fellow actors, John Heminges and Henry Condell, in the first collected edition of his plays, the First Folio, in 1623.
Why is there a ‘bad’ Quarto and a ‘good’ Quarto? There were no copyright laws in Shakespeare’s time, and consequently his company, the Lord Chamberlain’s Men, which later became the King’s Men, did not rush to publish plays in performance since they may not have wanted rival companies to steal them and make money from them. Actors might move from one company to another, having memorized major parts of a popular play. Members of the audience or rival company actors may have tried to memorize, albeit sometimes inaccurately, particular parts of the play. The result would not only be a rival production but also the publication of an unauthorized and sometimes garbled version of the play. This is what may have happened with the 1603 version of Hamlet.
In 1592 Shakespeare himself, as noted earlier, was accused by a fellow writer of ‘stealing’ plays and ideas. As a dramatist he used many sources for his plays, including Hamlet. An earlier play of the same title had probably been performed in 1594 by the Lord Chamberlain’s Men and the Lord Admiral’s Men in a joint production. The text of this early Hamlet, which is sometimes referred to as the ur-Hamlet, is now lost. It is likely that it was never printed and it may not have been a particularly good play. As G. R. Hibbard notes in his introduction to The Oxford Shakespeare: Hamlet (1987: 13), ‘one aspect of Shakespeare’s genius was his ability to take an old-fashioned drama and utterly transform it’. The following example gives an indication of Q1 in relation to the Folio. In Q1, the ‘bad Quarto’, Hamlet’s most famous soliloquy begins:
To be, or not to be, I there’s the point,
To Die, to sleepe, is that all? I all:
No, to sleepe, to dreame, I mary there it goes…
(The Tragicall Historie of Hamlet Prince of Denmarke [1603], Edinburgh:
Edinburgh University Press [1966: 28])
Compare this Q1 version with the more familiar version taken from the ‘good’ 1605 Quarto and the First Folio:
To be, or not to be, that is the question:
Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,
Or to take arms against a sea of troubles
And by opposing end them. To die – to sleep,
No more;
…
To die, to sleep;
To sleep, perchance to dream – ay, there’s the rub:
(3.1.56–61, 64–5)
The texts of Shakespeare’s plays, including Hamlet, that we read or produce today are interpretative texts, compiled by modern editors who make choices between readings from the quarto editions and the First Folio, although sometimes they produce an edition based on the Folio text or what they consider to be the most authoritative of the quartos.
As we saw in Chapter 1, the terms ‘quarto’ and ‘folio’ refer to the book size. While single editions were published in quarto, the first Complete Works was published in folio. There appears to be an ‘authorized’ text of Hamlet, the Quarto of 1605 that purports to be ‘Newly imprinted and enlarged to almost as much again as it was, according to the true and perfect Coppie’ but there are certain differences between it and the Folio edition. Each of the three early texts we have give a number of interesting clues about early performances as well as providing stimulus for modern interpretations. The ‘bad’ Quarto of 1603 may reflect aspects of the first performance of Shakespeare’s play or it may be influenced by one or more earlier lost plays. The 1605 Quarto is probably a response by the Lord Chamberlain’s Men designed to reassert ownership of a popular play in their repertoire. The First Folio edition, published 18 years later, may reflect changes made to the play during its many performances over the years since 1605. The modern editor has to make decisions. Take, for example, Hamlet’s first soliloquy, that is, the first speech he makes when alone on the stage. In the RSC Complete Works, based on the Folio edition, the speech that appears in Act 1, Scene 2 (129f.) begins:
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