A Pelican Book: This Is Shakespeare

by Emma Smith

  One way of thinking about Macbeth is that it asks similar organizational and causational questions. Burton’s overarching headings offer three major aetiological clusters. First, melancholy can proceed from the melancholic individual him- or herself, where in some cases it will be fixed or temperamental, and in others contingent and subject to remedy (by refraining from garlic or lustful thoughts, for instance). The melancholic individual is therefore in either a position of passive impotence or of agency: in some cases, his situation can be ameliorated; and in others, nothing can be done. Secondly, melancholia can be caused by the negative actions of other people. Laughing or scoffing at the sufferer, or inconsiderately dying and causing him grief, or not reciprocating his love, or putting him in prison: again, the melancholic can’t really do anything to affect this onslaught. And finally, there are causes that are supernatural or metaphysical in origin, a category that includes God, the devil, and their intermediaries, magicians and witches. Macbeth presents a similar convergence of models of causation and agency. Is this a story in which Macbeth, willingly or unwillingly, directs the action of his own play? Or is it better understood as a story in which he is acted upon by other people? Might we see him puppeted by supernatural forces beyond his control? Rather, as in Burton’s The Anatomy of Melancholy, these possible explanations coexist in Macbeth, a play that is more interested in exploring its own competing aetiologies than explaining them.

  We could think of this question in a different context. In May 2010 the Evening Standard newspaper carried, under the headline ‘Macbeth gets away with murder in all-star trial’, an article which began excitedly: ‘in a final twist that would make Shakespeare turn in his grave Macbeth and his wife have been found not guilty of murdering King Duncan and Banquo.’ The article described a mock trial at the Royal Courts of Justice, with celebrity actors playing the Shakespearean defendants, in which Macbeth’s successful defence was diminished responsibility, while Lady Macbeth claimed she was coerced by her manipulative and violent husband. The question of agency, as philosophers have pointed out, is also a question of responsibility and therefore of blame and punishment.

  Part of the vivid afterlife of Macbeth has been a genre of amateur investigations and celebrity show trials that are implicitly concerned with agency. Who is responsible for what has happened, or, more pointedly, can we get Macbeth acquitted? Often the best hope these legal-critical scenarios can propose for freeing Macbeth is to pin the blame on his wife, or otherwise to suggest that he was not in control of his actions – the grounds of diminished responsibility. A poised story by the American humorist James Thurber called ‘The Macbeth Murder Mystery’ also plays with this same trope, by reading Macbeth as a detective story, the genre in which the question of whodunnit is key. In Thurber’s story, an enthusiastic detective-fiction reader encounters the play:

  ‘Did you like it?’ I asked. ‘No, I did not,’ she said, decisively. ‘In the first place, I don’t think for a moment that Macbeth did it.’ I looked at her blankly. ‘Did what?’ I asked. ‘I don’t think for a moment that he killed the King,’ she said. ‘I don’t think the Macbeth woman was mixed up in it, either. You suspect them the most, of course, but those are the ones that are never guilty or shouldn’t be, anyway.’ … ‘Who do you suspect?’ I asked, suddenly. ‘Macduff,’ she said, promptly.

  The joke is that Macbeth is a story in which, contrary to the generic procedures of the whodunnit, there is no factual ambiguity about responsibility. We know how the murder of Duncan was committed and by whom: we are witnesses – perhaps even accessories – to its preparation and aftermath. Nevertheless, the play contrives, like Burton’s treatise, to anatomize, and thereby to equivocate, these apparently straightforward questions of responsibility and causation.

  The opening scenes of the play set out these questions in some provocative ways. Shakespeare begins with the witches, and their spooky speech rhythms and their thunder and lightning accompaniment. They seem already to know what is going to happen ‘When the hurly-burly’s done, / When the battle’s lost and won’ (1.1.3–4), and they arrange to ‘meet with Macbeth’ (1.1.7). Does that mean they know where to find him, or are they able to draw him to them? Is their power the power of prophecy, or of direction? Our first introduction to the imaginative world of the play is one in which supernatural agents hold some kind of sway. In the next scene we discover the aftermath of the battle: a bloodied soldier tells the king of the bravery of the valiant captains, Macbeth and Banquo, and the treachery of the Thane of Cawdor. This scene seems to establish a world of human agency: given the same situation – a battle – some men act bravely, and others are cowards, depending on individual temperament. There is further human agency in the response to the battle report. The king orders that treachery be punished (Cawdor is to be executed), and loyalty rewarded (Cawdor’s title is to be given to Macbeth). Rhyming couplets attempt to rebuild an ordered world from the moral and ethical debris of war (although the emphasis of the rhyme might seem somehow ominous): ‘Go pronounce his present death, / And with his former title greet Macbeth’ (1.2.64–5). The first two scenes of Macbeth, that’s to say, offer diametrically opposed views on the question of agency, as human or supernatural in original.

  In Act 1 scene 3 we return to the witches. Macbeth and Banquo enter, and encounter these ambiguous creatures, ‘So withered, and so wild in their attire, / That look not like th’inhabitants o’th’ earth’ (1.3.38–9). Does the fact that the soldiers find the witches, rather than vice versa, suggest that humans are in control, or have the witches set up the encounter as an ambush? The witches prophesy to Macbeth about his current and future greatness: Thane of Glamis, Thane of Cawdor, king hereafter. To Macbeth, the attribution Cawdor is impossible: ‘The Thane of Cawdor lives,/A prosperous gentleman’ (70–71). But we know, because of the scene we have just witnessed (and with it the dramatic irony so characteristic of Shakespeare), that the Thane of Cawdor has been stripped of his title and executed by the king as a traitor. So, on this point at least, the witches merely know something that we already know. Maybe that makes them seem less powerful – to the audience at least – whereas to Macbeth himself they seem creepily and immediately omnipotent, when, hard on their nomination of him as Thane of Cawdor and ultimately king, messengers from the king arrive to greet him ‘Thane of Cawdor’. To Macbeth this makes the gap between prophecy and enactment frighteningly slender, but to us the gap is rather that between command – the king’s words in Act 1 scene 2 – and fulfilment – the delivery of that message to Macbeth in the next scene. The witches seem to interpose in a chain of human actions, rather than to direct actions themselves. But on the other hand, we also know something else Macbeth doesn’t – that they had already arranged to meet him on this heath. So maybe they are in control after all. In these three opening scenes, then, Shakespeare has set up one major facet of the dilemma of agency the play goes on to explore. Is Macbeth in control of his actions or are the witches?

  As so often in Shakespeare’s work, what happens to dramatic characters often echoes reflexively some aspect of the craft of writing itself. So, we could refigure Macbeth’s dilemma in the early scenes as the question of who is writing this story, and as often, the story has its own prior ideas about where it wants to go. Shakespeare’s source for Macbeth is the compendium of historical sources collected by Raphael Holinshed as his Chronicles (1578) – this is the same source that Shakespeare turned to for his history plays. He has his work cut out to rewrite it as a tragedy. This tragedy is not, as we might expect from his earlier plays on English historical subjects, that of the king, but rather of his usurper: it’s the reverse of the story of Richard II. In part Shakespeare achieves this by sacralizing the sources from Scottish history. In Holinshed, Macbeth emerges from a violent, dog-eat-dog world of thanes jockeying for position and power: King Duncan had gained the throne through violence, and in turn grown weak; Macbeth’s rise, supported by Banquo, is figured as inevitable in a society that has no prin
ciple of rule other than strength (Holinshed’s Macbeth is also a good ruler for his term, until he, too, is superseded). A striking modern television adaptation called Macbeth on the Estate (directed by Penny Woolcock, 1997) began with an interpolated prologue introducing the ageing bruiser Duncan, the gangland boss of the tough estate: this version of the play is much closer to Holinshed than to the Shakespeare version, where Duncan is a holy king and Macbeth a damned regicide. In Shakespeare’s play, Macbeth’s own description of Duncan’s ‘silver skin laced with his golden blood’ as ‘a breach in nature’ (2.3.112–13) turns the murder into a crime against natural order. For all his fascination with regime change and weak kings, and the question of what makes a good ruler, Shakespeare is here the mouthpiece for Jacobean hereditary monarchy, for his new king James, and for the Stuart dynasty safely cushioned by two young princes. The sense of moral outrage and disturbance in Macbeth is Shakespeare’s invention, turning the brutal chaos of the sources into a story of rightful succession interrupted by the terrible ambitious agency of Macbeth.

  The residue of these violent origins, though, is still visible in Macbeth. The vivid description of Macbeth’s bravery at the beginning of the play is a telling example. Even before we have met him, the captain describes his capacity for extreme ruthlessness:

  For brave Macbeth – well he deserves that name! –

  Disdaining fortune, with his brandished steel

  Which smoked with bloody execution,

  Like valour’s minion

  Carved out his passage till he faced the slave,

  Which ne’er shook hands nor bade farewell to him

  Till he unseamed him from the nave to th’ chops,

  And fixed his head upon our battlements.

  (1.2.16–23)

  Quite what this signals, in terms of the rules of military engagement (would you actually expect these battle foes to shake hands or say goodbye?), is unclear, but the tone, that Macbeth is capable of breathtaking, spectacular ruthlessness, is evident. King Duncan’s reply, ‘O valiant cousin, worthy gentleman’ (1.2.24), makes clear his approval: at this point, Shakespeare’s Macbeth is, like his bloody avatar in Holinshed, a man who gains power and affirmation through extreme violence. What changes is not that he suddenly becomes violent, but that he turns that highly trained violence against his own sovereign.

  We might think that the witches are not necessary to this process of redirection. There are witches in Holinshed but they play a minor role, largely related to prophecy, and an illustration in the Chronicles shows them as elegantly dressed courtly ladies, rather than those warty pointy-hatted hags around their cauldron that has become the play’s most lasting image. Shakespeare has added to their role – and apparently their presence was so thrillingly enjoyable in stage terms that Thomas Middleton, who is believed to have added some material to the text of Macbeth, included more songs and an additional scene with Hecate, witch-in-chief. Perhaps these diverse influences on the presentation of the witches explain their internal contradictions. The cultural historian Diane Purkiss has written compellingly about how Shakespeare’s weird sisters draw on incompatible traditions and comprise ‘a low-budget, frankly exploitative collage of randomly chosen bits of witch-lore, selected not for thematic significance but for its sensation value’. It’s a blow to over-solemn interpretations of the play that assume stage witches were seriously deployed: then, as now, audiences can and do enjoy in fiction things they do not believe to be true.

  Even the witches themselves identify their powers as limited: punishing the husband of the ‘sailor’s wife’ (1.3.3) who refused to share chestnuts with them is not very nice, granted, but it seems on a rather smaller scale than full-blown intervention into national government. Strikingly, although the witches are prominent at the beginning of the play, they never return at the conclusion. There’s a long performance tradition that has felt that their disappearance from the play needs to be resolved – by reintroducing the witches in the final moments. Orson Welles’ film of 1948, for instance, pans back to the witches looking with satisfaction on their work and intoning ‘Peace, the charm’s wound up’; Roman Polanski’s film version of 1971 also brings them back, but with a foreboding sense that the whole violent cycle is about to begin again, as Donalbain – the younger brother of the new king – steps into the role of ambitious malcontent occupied by Macbeth at the opening. Both these film adaptations make much of the witches’ agency. By contrast, their absence at the end of Shakespeare’s play may suggest that there they are not in fact active agents but merely passive predictors of how things will turn out. That things do turn out in that way is conclusive enough of their roles in the play.

  Perhaps, we should not take the witches entirely literally either. It is often asserted that Shakespeare broke with earlier dramatic traditions. In particular, he is often credited with bringing to the stage complete and distinctively psychologized human beings, in place of the medieval plays in which abstracted qualities or personifications tussled with each other on a stage that represented the human psyche in toto. Sometimes that’s true – particularly when skilful actors make us believe in the distinctive humanity of their characters. But sometimes it’s less applicable, when characters seem flat or instrumental or mouthpieces. In fact, Shakespeare experiments with different ways of creating stage characters: through dialogue, through soliloquy, through foils and duplications and, perhaps, sometimes by splitting a single psychology between different individuals. Maybe we should think of Iago as the voice of self-destruction inside Othello’s head; maybe Ophelia’s madness is a projection of Hamlet’s torments; maybe the witches are part of Macbeth himself. They speak out his own ambition and make it audible to us, and perhaps we should think of them less as separate uncanny agents and more as estranged but internal voices which direct his actions.

  The attribution of agency in the play’s opening scenes is questioned and problematized, pulled between the incompatible but simultaneous realms of the human and the supernatural. All this Shakespeare lays out before he even introduces the character that most critical history has blamed for everything that happens in the play: Lady Macbeth.

  The idea that the ‘fiend-like queen’ (5.11.35) Lady Macbeth manipulates her husband into murder has been a compelling one, not least because it’s an argument with a long cultural pedigree drawing on fears about women’s power. It often brings criticism into apparently willing collusion with the play’s own misogyny. The outlines of the argument are so familiar that they are independent of the play itself. Lady Macbeth is the driving force behind her husband. More specifically, in calling on spirits to ‘unsex me here’ (1.5.40) when she reads Macbeth’s letter telling her about the witches, and in using highly charged metaphorical vocabulary about killing a suckling babe, and in demeaning Macbeth’s masculinity and taunting him about his manliness, and in coldly planning the murder so as to frame the grooms – in all this, Lady Macbeth is the prime culprit for the murder. She makes her conscience-stricken husband go through with a murderous act which is always against his better judgement, curdling in him that ‘milk of human kindness’ (1.5.16) that she herself recognizes.

  Certainly, there is a cluster of activity in the first half of the play which presents Lady Macbeth’s powerful agency, and it is striking the extent to which criticism has found this threatening and unnatural. If we find Macbeth a misogynistic play, deeply distrustful of powerful women, perhaps this is another aspect of Shakespeare’s direct address to the company’s new patron, King James. Like the play’s Scottish setting, the whitewashed recuperation of Banquo (from whom King James traced his own family tree), who Holinshed had as Macbeth’s accomplice, and the interest in witches for a king who had written a work called Daemonologie, misogyny is part of the play’s pitch for royal approval in the newly homosocial world of James’s court. In contrast to Elizabeth’s court, the Jacobean power base was exclusively male, powered by male patronage and allegiances and prioritizing male lineage and authority in a
n overtly anti-feminist culture.

  Perhaps, rather than blaming Lady Macbeth, we should recover the true synergy between the Macbeths, Shakespeare’s only sustained portrait of an operative, adult marriage in process. Separating out who is responsible for what may undo what Shakespeare is trying to present – a passionate folie à deux, perhaps, committed by a partnership. After all, unlike other powerful women in Shakespeare’s plays, Lady Macbeth never expresses personal ambition or avarice, and neither does she correspond to the standard denigration for transgressive women as sexual adulterers. She does not draw on the available theatrical shorthand for depicting wicked women. Lady Macbeth’s particular characterization, and her ongoing fascination for actors and for critics, suggest her active agency – but her marginalization both from Macbeth’s and from Shakespeare’s plotting later in the play erases that early significance. Malcolm’s judgement is of a ‘dead butcher’ and a ‘fiend-like queen’ (5.11.35), but like so many of the figures – think of Fortinbras or Octavius Caesar – who step onto the corpse-strewn stage of the end of a tragedy, his analysis is politicized, self-interested and anti-climactic. The question of Lady Macbeth’s agency in the play is asked, but Shakespeare doesn’t answer it. Like Macbeth himself, that’s to say, and like the witches, Lady Macbeth has a claim to be the answer to the question ‘Who makes the things that happen happen?’ – but the fact that there are so many claimants keeps the question, rather than its answers, at the forefront.

  That these questions might always have been part of the reception of the play is suggested in one intriguing and rare archival survival: a contemporary account of Macbeth in early modern performance. Thousands of people went to the theatre in early modern London every week, but almost no one ever wrote about what they saw there, which makes the visit of the astrologer and medicine man Simon Forman to the Globe in 1611 even more interesting. For Forman, the play’s most compelling scene was the banquet at which Banquo’s ghost appears. When Macbeth stood to toast Banquo, ‘the ghost of Banquo came and sat down in his chair behind him. And he, turning about to sit down again, saw the ghost of Banquo, which fronted him so, that he fell into a great passion of fear and fury, uttering many words about his murder, by which, when they heard that Banquo was murdered, they suspected Macbeth.’ Forman also takes a view on the question of agency. He suggests both that Macbeth is responsible for the killing of Duncan, and that Lady Macbeth is: ‘and Macbeth contrived to kill Duncan, and through the persuasion of his wife did that night murder the King in his own castle’. The description suggests this confusion of agency was always part of the play: the murder of Duncan becomes overdetermined, in that it has too many, rather than too few, causes and agents.