Shakespearean Tragedy: Lectures on Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth
or the sound of a voice that cried 'Sleep no more' and would not be
silenced.[196] To these are added other, and constant, allusions to
sleep, man's strange half-conscious life; to the misery of its
withholding; to the terrible dreams of remorse; to the cursed thoughts
from which Banquo is free by day, but which tempt him in his sleep: and
again to abnormal disturbances of sleep; in the two men, of whom one
during the murder of Duncan laughed in his sleep, and the other raised a
cry of murder; and in Lady Macbeth, who rises to re-enact in
somnambulism those scenes the memory of which is pushing her on to
madness or suicide. All this has one effect, to excite supernatural
alarm and, even more, a dread of the presence of evil not only in its
recognised seat but all through and around our mysterious nature.
Perhaps there is no other work equal to _Macbeth_ in the production of
this effect.[197]
It is enhanced--to take a last point--by the use of a literary
expedient. Not even in _Richard III._, which in this, as in other
respects, has resemblances to _Macbeth_, is there so much of Irony. I do
not refer to irony in the ordinary sense; to speeches, for example,
where the speaker is intentionally ironical, like that of Lennox in III.
vi. I refer to irony on the part of the author himself, to ironical
juxtapositions of persons and events, and especially to the 'Sophoclean
irony' by which a speaker is made to use words bearing to the audience,
in addition to his own meaning, a further and ominous sense, hidden from
himself and, usually, from the other persons on the stage. The very
first words uttered by Macbeth,
So foul and fair a day I have not seen,
are an example to which attention has often been drawn; for they startle
the reader by recalling the words of the Witches in the first scene,
Fair is foul, and foul is fair.
When Macbeth, emerging from his murderous reverie, turns to the nobles
saying, 'Let us toward the King,' his words are innocent, but to the
reader have a double meaning. Duncan's comment on the treachery of
Cawdor,
There's no art
To find the mind's construction in the face:
He was a gentleman on whom I built
An absolute trust,
is interrupted[198] by the entrance of the traitor Macbeth, who is
greeted with effusive gratitude and a like 'absolute trust.' I have
already referred to the ironical effect of the beautiful lines in which
Duncan and Banquo describe the castle they are about to enter. To the
reader Lady Macbeth's light words,
A little water clears us of this deed:
How easy is it then,
summon up the picture of the sleep-walking scene. The idea of the
Porter's speech, in which he imagines himself the keeper of hell-gate,
shows the same irony. So does the contrast between the obvious and the
hidden meanings of the apparitions of the armed head, the bloody child,
and the child with the tree in his hand. It would be easy to add further
examples. Perhaps the most striking is the answer which Banquo, as he
rides away, never to return alive, gives to Macbeth's reminder, 'Fail
not our feast.' 'My lord, I will not,' he replies, and he keeps his
promise. It cannot be by accident that Shakespeare so frequently in this
play uses a device which contributes to excite the vague fear of hidden
forces operating on minds unconscious of their influence.[199]
2
But of course he had for this purpose an agency more potent than any yet
considered. It would be almost an impertinence to attempt to describe
anew the influence of the Witch-scenes on the imagination of the
reader.[200] Nor do I believe that among different readers this
influence differs greatly except in degree. But when critics begin to
analyse the imaginative effect, and still more when, going behind it,
they try to determine the truth which lay for Shakespeare or lies for us
in these creations, they too often offer us results which, either
through perversion or through inadequacy, fail to correspond with that
effect. This happens in opposite ways. On the one hand the Witches,
whose contribution to the 'atmosphere' of Macbeth can hardly be
exaggerated, are credited with far too great an influence upon the
action; sometimes they are described as goddesses, or even as fates,
whom Macbeth is powerless to resist. And this is perversion. On the
other hand, we are told that, great as is their influence on the action,
it is so because they are merely symbolic representations of the
unconscious or half-conscious guilt in Macbeth himself. And this is
inadequate. The few remarks I have to make may take the form of a
criticism on these views.
(1) As to the former, Shakespeare took, as material for his purposes,
the ideas about witch-craft that he found existing in people around him
and in books like Reginald Scot's _Discovery_ (1584). And he used these
ideas without changing their substance at all. He selected and improved,
avoiding the merely ridiculous, dismissing (unlike Middleton) the
sexually loathsome or stimulating, rehandling and heightening whatever
could touch the imagination with fear, horror, and mysterious
attraction. The Witches, that is to say, are not goddesses, or fates,
or, in any way whatever, supernatural beings. They are old women, poor
and ragged, skinny and hideous, full of vulgar spite, occupied in
killing their neighbours' swine or revenging themselves on sailors'
wives who have refused them chestnuts. If Banquo considers their beards
a proof that they are not women, that only shows his ignorance: Sir Hugh
Evans would have known better.[201] There is not a syllable in _Macbeth_
to imply that they are anything but women. But, again in accordance with
the popular ideas, they have received from evil spirits certain
supernatural powers. They can 'raise haile, tempests, and hurtfull
weather; as lightening, thunder etc.' They can 'passe from place to
place in the aire invisible.' They can 'keepe divels and spirits in the
likenesse of todes and cats,' Paddock or Graymalkin. They can
'transferre corne in the blade from one place to another.' They can
'manifest unto others things hidden and lost, and foreshew things to
come, and see them as though they were present.' The reader will apply
these phrases and sentences at once to passages in _Macbeth_. They are
all taken from Scot's first chapter, where he is retailing the current
superstitions of his time; and, in regard to the Witches, Shakespeare
mentions scarcely anything, if anything, that was not to be found, of
course in a more prosaic shape, either in Scot or in some other easily
accessible authority.[202] He read, to be sure, in Holinshed, his main
source for the story of Macbeth, that, according to the common opinion,
the 'women' who met Macbeth 'were eyther the weird sisters, that is (as
ye would say) ye Goddesses of destinee, or els some Nimphes or Feiries.'
But what does that matter? What he read in his authority was absolutely
nothing to his audience, and remains nothing to us, unless he _used_
what he read. And he did not use this idea. He used nothing but the
phrase 'weird sisters,'[203] which certainly no more suggested to a
London audience the Parcae of one mythology or the Norns of another than
it does to-day. His Witches owe all their power to the spirits; they are
'_instruments_ of darkness'; the spirits are their 'masters' (IV. i.
63). Fancy the fates having masters! Even if the passages where Hecate
appears are Shakespeare's,[204] that will not help the Witches; for they
are subject to Hecate, who is herself a goddess or superior devil, not a
fate.[205]
Next, while the influence of the Witches' prophecies on Macbeth is very
great, it is quite clearly shown to be an influence and nothing more.
There is no sign whatever in the play that Shakespeare meant the actions
of Macbeth to be forced on him by an external power, whether that of the
Witches, or of their 'masters,' or of Hecate. It is needless therefore
to insist that such a conception would be in contradiction with his
whole tragic practice. The prophecies of the Witches are presented
simply as dangerous circumstances with which Macbeth has to deal: they
are dramatically on the same level as the story of the Ghost in
_Hamlet_, or the falsehoods told by Iago to Othello. Macbeth is, in the
ordinary sense, perfectly free in regard to them: and if we speak of
degrees of freedom, he is even more free than Hamlet, who was crippled
by melancholy when the Ghost appeared to him. That the influence of the
first prophecies upon him came as much from himself as from them, is
made abundantly clear by the obviously intentional contrast between him
and Banquo. Banquo, ambitious but perfectly honest, is scarcely even
startled by them, and he remains throughout the scene indifferent to
them. But when Macbeth heard them he was not an innocent man. Precisely
how far his mind was guilty may be a question; but no innocent man would
have started, as he did, with a start of _fear_ at the mere prophecy of
a crown, or have conceived thereupon _immediately_ the thought of
murder. Either this thought was not new to him,[206] or he had cherished
at least some vaguer dishonourable dream, the instantaneous recurrence
of which, at the moment of his hearing the prophecy, revealed to him an
inward and terrifying guilt. In either case not only was he free to
accept or resist the temptation, but the temptation was already within
him. We are admitting too much, therefore, when we compare him with
Othello, for Othello's mind was perfectly free from suspicion when his
temptation came to him. And we are admitting, again, too much when we
use the word 'temptation' in reference to the first prophecies of the
Witches. Speaking strictly we must affirm that he was tempted only by
himself. _He_ speaks indeed of their 'supernatural soliciting'; but in
fact they did not solicit. They merely announced events: they hailed him
as Thane of Glamis, Thane of Cawdor, and King hereafter. No connection
of these announcements with any action of his was even hinted by them.
For all that appears, the natural death of an old man might have
fulfilled the prophecy any day.[207] In any case, the idea of fulfilling
it by murder was entirely his own.[208]
When Macbeth sees the Witches again, after the murders of Duncan and
Banquo, we observe, however, a striking change. They no longer need to
go and meet him; he seeks them out. He has committed himself to his
course of evil. Now accordingly they do 'solicit.' They prophesy, but
they also give advice: they bid him be bloody, bold, and secure. We have
no hope that he will reject their advice; but so far are they from
having, even now, any power to compel him to accept it, that they make
careful preparations to deceive him into doing so. And, almost as though
to intimate how entirely the responsibility for his deeds still lies
with Macbeth, Shakespeare makes his first act after this interview one
for which his tempters gave him not a hint--the slaughter of Macduff's
wife and children.
To all this we must add that Macbeth himself nowhere betrays a suspicion
that his action is, or has been, thrust on him by an external power. He
curses the Witches for deceiving him, but he never attempts to shift to
them the burden of his guilt. Neither has Shakespeare placed in the
mouth of any other character in this play such fatalistic expressions as
may be found in _King Lear_ and occasionally elsewhere. He appears
actually to have taken pains to make the natural psychological genesis
of Macbeth's crimes perfectly clear, and it was a most unfortunate
notion of Schlegel's that the Witches were required because natural
agencies would have seemed too weak to drive such a man as Macbeth to
his first murder.